The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  However valid or even however significant this hypothesis might or might not be, Adam had little difficulty imagining the psychologist Henry Border taking it seriously. This was, after all, Adam reasoned, the sort of research a psychologist might well undertake. Border, it seemed, even had some of his students look into the subject with him as part of the work on which they were assessed. But there were plenty of ‘distressed’ people in the US, in Chicago, even right there on the south side of Chicago where the Illinois Institute of Technology was situated, without his needing to go to all the trouble and expense of trying to get to Europe to find them.

  From the numerous drafts of unsuccessful grant applications seeking financial assistance to get him to Europe and the fact that the 1947 IIT newsletter contained an article by Border himself in which he tells of having eventually managed to get himself there, it was clear that this trip was by then the most important professional goal he had set himself. Adam found no record of Border having done any work on what had previously been his big project, the psychological museum, after early May 1945 and from May onward the only references to the psychological museum were in work Border had already done.

  Clearly, Border’s plan to travel to Europe had hatched with the final defeat of Germany in very early May 1945. After that, at least professionally, there was no matter more important to him than getting to Europe to conduct field research on people in ‘distress’. These people were thick on the ground; there were literally millions of them. Indeed, it would have been hard to find people in Europe not in some kind of distress. By the early summer of 1945, as a consequence of the most brutal war in history, there were something of the order of seven million civilians in Western Europe, travelling or temporarily housed somewhere other than where they wanted to be. Swelling the roads or the makeshift under-resourced camps dotted throughout Western Europe there were Poles, Germans, Russians, Slovaks, Jews, Slovenians, Italians, Frenchmen, Belgians, Greeks, Ukrainian Cossacks, Croatians, White Russians and many more besides. Were they all using adjectives and verbs in the same ratio? It wasn’t enough for Border to seek answers with respect to his ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ from ‘distressed’ people right there on the south side of Chicago. For some reason he had to go to Europe.

  The article Border had written for the IIT newsletter explained that when he had got to Europe he had gone to ‘Displaced Persons’ or ‘DP’ camps, as they were called. There was a reference to a book Border had written based on his research there. Adam thought there was a good chance that at least one of the libraries at IIT would have the book. His knees in pain from squatting there in the basement of the Galvin Library, Adam stood up for a moment and kneaded the muscles around them and around his thighs with his thumbs and fingers before sitting back down on the ground, this time with his legs stretched out in front of him. To better effect this position he fanned out his arms with the intention of resting his palms on the floor for balance. But in the process, his right palm inadvertently hit the bottom bookshelf, tipping over a cardboard box that was next to where Border’s documents had been before Adam had removed them and spilling some of the contents onto the floor. Before returning the loosely bound documents to their box, he stretched, yawned and picked one of them up and glanced at it without thinking, almost as a matter of course.

  In the half-light of the library basement the words on the cover of the document formed tiny black islands of printed meaning that lay one on top of another amid a sea of grey that had once been white. It was a sea Adam Zignelik’s eyes were too tired to swim, especially when there was no apparent reason to, and he was about to put the loosely bound document back in its box with the others when his eyes stumbled upon and then fixed on the name ‘Henry S. Border’. No one had directed Adam to the box he had knocked over, the box beside the Border piles, but Adam found this box also contained documents relevant to Border. The document in Adam’s hand was headed ‘Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People, recorded verbatim in Displaced Persons Camps, with a psychological and anthropological analysis, by Henry S. Border, PhD’.

  Adam opened it at random and began reading.

  ‘Then they took us to Oranienburg.’

  ‘What was Oranienburg?’

  ‘It was a Konzentrationslager.’

  ‘Where was it, exactly?’

  ‘Near Berlin. This was Sachsenhausen.’

  ‘What do you mean it was Sachsenhausen?’

  ‘Oranienburg was what they called later Sachsenhausen.’

  ‘And Sachsenhausen … Oranienburg … was a … a concentration camp?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why were you there?’

  ‘They took us there.’

  ‘Who took you there?’

  ‘The SS took us there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was just after Kristalnacht in November 1938 and –’

  ‘1938?’

  ‘Yes, of course. There were about 2000 of us there, Jews, and the SS took us to Oranienburg. It was night, completely dark, you see, and because there was a sharp … a steep slope there, the people at the front stumbled and tripped. They fell and the people behind them could barely see them, and the people behind these people couldn’t see the people at the front at all. Those people, the ones at the front, those of the ones at the front who could not get up fast enough, they were crushed. They were completely crushed. We did it. We crushed them. The SS forced us to run down the ravine in the dark. It was chaos and we crushed some of them. We were not expecting this, not expecting anything like this. They forced us with guns and dogs in the dark … faster and faster and … We crushed them ourselves immediately on arrival there and they died just like that. In the dark you heard the sound of the screams, human screams in your ears and the crushing of people, the crushing of bones under foot. You heard it but it was too late. You were being pushed and you had to keep moving and not fall. There were people behind us, pushing, and people behind them pushing those people.

  The SS left the corpses lying there in the ditch waiting for us to see them when it got light. Then we had to clean up the mess made by the corpses. We had to clean up the corpses. We had to drag the corpses away. But they had just before been people and we knew these people. Some knew them well. For some of us these corpses were colleagues, our friends, old friends and sometimes family. Sometimes they were family. These were our first corpses … I had never before seen a dead person.’

  ‘It was 1938, yes, before the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jacob, we need to go back to the beginning.’

  ‘The beginning of what? I’m telling you what happened –’

  ‘I need to ask you certain basic questions like your full name and where you were born.’

  ‘But I’ve barely started and now you … I want to take you much past Oranienburg. You said –’

  ‘And I want you to. Jacob, I want to hear everything, but we need to start at the beginning.’

  These had to have been the transcripts. Adam thought that in the box he had knocked over he had found the transcripts of the interviews Border had conducted with the ‘distressed’ people in the Displaced Persons camps from Border’s visit to Europe in 1946. Keeping the loosely bound folder on his lap, Adam picked up another one, opened it at random and started reading.

  ‘We had built a bunker. It was deep, very deep, completely underground with no windows. In fact, it had no ventilation at all. We weren’t able to build it with any ventilation because we had to build it in secret. We weren’t builders.’

  ‘Even in the ghetto it had to be a secret?’

  ‘Yes. Now at that time, this must have been about the middle of January –’

  ‘Nineteen forty-three?’

  ‘Yes. At that time all the workshops were gone.’

  ‘What do you mean they were gone?’

  ‘They were closed.’

  ‘You mean they had been shut down?’

  ‘Yes, the Nazis had shut them all excep
t for one. Schultz’s was still operating.’

  ‘What did Schultz’s do?’

  ‘If you were skilled in shoemaking or maybe if you were a furrier, maybe you could get work, but of course everybody was saying that they and their children and their mothers and their grandmothers, everyone was a shoemaker. I remember someone said to me … it was a sort of sick joke in a way … every last Jew in Warsaw is a shoemaker.’

  ‘A joke?’

  ‘Yes. Of course it wasn’t true but to have some chance at surviving in the ghetto at this time it helped either to be a shoemaker or to say that you were a shoemaker. It didn’t really help much at all actually. The joke helped more, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘You mean that even dark humour helped people cope with the conditions?’

  ‘Yes. Anyway, everybody knew it was only a matter of time till even this last workshop –’

  ‘Schultz’s?’

  ‘Yes, even Schultz’s would be closed down and because we felt this had to happen and could happen at any time we moved underground to the bunker.’

  ‘How many people went to the bunker?’

  ‘I would say about thirty. Nobody in the ghetto who was still alive and wasn’t already mad, nobody who hadn’t completely lost his mind from hunger or disease or the loss of their family, could think that the Nazis had any other plan.’

  ‘Other plan than what?’

  ‘Than they wanted … they wanted Warsaw completely Jew-free.

  ‘Then they led us all to be registered. They knew what was going to happen and they did a better job than the Germans. They knew and they were happy.’

  ‘Who do you mean when you say “they”?’

  ‘The local police. They were happy, everyone was happy that they were going to be rid of the Jews. People were already going into our homes and taking whatever they wanted.’

  ‘Who, the police?’

  ‘No, just ordinary people, some of them we knew. Some were our neighbours. They said they would live off all the Jewish possessions they’d heard about and they … they just …’

  ‘Your neighbours looted your homes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This was the third of three of Border’s transcribed interviews of ‘distressed’ DPs perused at random by Adam. All the interviewees so far had been Jews. Where were the other nationalities? Where were the Poles, the Germans, Russians, Slovaks, Slovenians, Italians, Frenchmen, Belgians, Greeks, Ukrainians, Croatians and White Russians? Had Adam’s spilling of the contents of the box resulted in him reading a biased sample? What exactly had Border brought back from Europe in the summer of 1946? Adam closed the transcript he was reading but didn’t put it back. He kept it out of the box and placed it in his lap with the first two transcripts he’d read. He estimated there might have been fifty or sixty of them, maybe more. Perhaps this was the Jewish section, he wondered. Perhaps all those years ago they had been placed in the box according to ethnicity and Adam had by chance taken out the transcripts of Jewish DPs. Maybe Border’s hands had been the last to hold the transcripts until now. Adam took another of the loosely bound manuscripts, this one from the far end of the box, the opposite end from where the first three manuscripts had come.

  ‘We didn’t know but when the train finally stopped and they opened the door we were in Auschwitz.’

  ‘Now where exactly is Auschwitz?’

  ‘It’s in Poland, in Upper Silesia.’

  ‘Upper Silesia. And that’s where you got the number on your arm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now tell me, what exactly was Auschwitz? What happened there in this camp in Upper Silesia?’

  Adam tried to imagine this American, the Chicagoan, Henry Border, in a DP camp hearing all this somewhere in the hot and sunny exhausted bloody mess that was Europe in the summer of 1946. The pages resting in Adam’s hands in the dimly lit basement of the Galvin Library at IIT quarantined the time when Border had captured before the ink on the ribbon on his typewriter ran out. Border had gone to Europe to record and measure the verbal consequences of distress and it was beads of distress that rolled down Adam’s cheeks with each adjective, with the verbs, and all the silences held between the words that Border had included. What had Border known about Auschwitz, before then? Here in Adam Zignelik’s hands one could see an American professor of psychology learning about this place for the very first time from someone who had been there months before. How many people really knew about Auschwitz back in 1946? How many knew precisely what went on there and the scale of it?

  ‘By this time I was in Grimma, near Leipzig. I had walked twenty-five kilometres to get to where the Americans were. The Germans had blown up the bridge over the Rhine but the Americans had put up ladders on it so it was still possible to use the bridge to get across. That’s when I saw my first American soldier and I went up to him and I spoke to him in English. I could speak English from before the war. Like everybody else at that time, I wanted to get across to the American side.’

  ‘What did you say to the American soldier?’

  ‘I asked him if I could get across to the American side.’

  ‘And what did the soldier say?’

  ‘He asked first if I was a member of any military unit of any country.’

  ‘You were not.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t so I said no. So then he said that I wasn’t a prisoner of war and that he had orders only concerning prisoners of war. Prisoners of war could be let through but he didn’t have orders to let other people through. So I tried to explain my situation.’

  ‘What was your situation?’

  ‘I had no papers, no food, no money and my leg was quite badly injured. I didn’t know what to do. He seemed sympathetic when I said this and he asked again whether I had been in an Allied army or an Axis army. Well, I’d been in Drancy and Auschwitz and then I was in Ravensbrück but I was never in any army. So the American soldier asked me what I was.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I explained that I was a … I said I was … a political prisoner.’

  ‘A political prisoner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he said he was very sorry, he didn’t have any orders about political prisoners. He could try to get some orders but he wouldn’t have an answer until the next day at the earliest.’

  The woman Border was talking to was a Holocaust survivor before such a category existed within any language on earth. Of all the languages the world has given birth to since time began, not one of them had a word to describe what this woman was or what she had just experienced. Not one of these languages had ever before needed such a word. It had only just happened and there were no words for it yet, so, as she spoke to the American soldier, she had to come up with something on the spot. She had just lived through the Holocaust but couldn’t possibly have had a word for it. Even if she had had a word for it, the American soldier wouldn’t have known what it meant.

  Adam placed the box of transcripts back where it had been before he had caused it to tip over but he kept hold of the few transcripts he’d already partially read, taking them with him as he went to look for the Dean of Libraries, Sahera Shukri. He wanted to tell her what he thought he’d discovered. In the stacks, on the bottom shelf in the basement of the Galvin Library, he thought he’d found at least a few, but possibly fifty or sixty, of the earliest ever systematic, at-length, in-depth interviews conducted with survivors of the Holocaust. Whatever their significance to psychology or to the history of psychology, they gave every appearance of being of remarkable, irreplaceable significance to twentieth-century political history. IIT was the custodian, if not the owner, of a collection of transcripts of tremendous historical value. The transcripts would need to be specially housed and protected. They would need to be delicately copied with the utmost care. If this was what it appeared to be, scholars from all over the world would be clamouring to see it.

  Adam was told by the librarian at the front desk that Sahera Shukri was away from her of
fice but was due back at any time. Unable to hide his excitement at the potential significance of the find, Adam explained to the librarian on duty precisely what it was he thought the library had in its basement. This was, he said, a ‘once in a career’ find. The librarian asked if he wanted to wait there or in the basement for Ms Shukri but Adam explained that the very next thing he wanted to do was to try to track down Henry Border’s book. This wasn’t difficult. The library had a copy, one copy, of Border’s book and, fortunately, it was exactly where it was meant to be, unread, perhaps untouched for half a century. Its cover was tattered. This was a first edition. Perhaps there was only ever a first edition, Adam speculated. Published in 1949, a copy now rested in the hands of Adam Zignelik. Adam, now for the first time, registered the title of the book: I Did Not Interview the Dead.

  *

  Lamont Williams’ grandmother sat across the kitchen table from her grandson in her Co-op City apartment while they had their dinner. He had the usual serving of macaroni and cheese but the serving she’d given herself was tiny. She denied she was feeling unwell when he asked her but he didn’t seem to believe her. He had known she’d been out that afternoon, even known that she’d been to the city. What he hadn’t known was that his cousin Michelle had taken her out to lunch to a steak restaurant off Union Square, a place with particular family significance.

  He went over to his grandmother and put his hand to her forehead because he’d found her protestations of perfect health unconvincing. She was weighing up telling him the truth, telling him that she wasn’t hungry because she was still full from the steak she’d had with Michelle. If she told him, she reasoned, it would explain why she wasn’t hungry and allay his concern for her health but it would raise all sorts of other issues and memories that were so likely to distress her grandson, even if he said nothing about them, that she had wanted to get through the day without mentioning the true nature of her excursion downtown.