by Pat Conroy
“In our house in Warsaw, my mother was the center of the universe, and she wanted her children to have everything in the world. I was her only son and she worshiped me as few children have ever been worshiped. Her smile was like the sun to me. She was my first piano teacher. From the beginning, she told me I would be a master. She had no enemies. Except, of course, the entire Christian world, but I did not know this as a boy.
“At eighteen, I won an important competition for young pianists in Paris. My main competition was from a Dutchman by the name of Shoemaker. He was a true artist, but did not love the spotlight. Another pianist was Jeffrey Stoppard of London. Very strong. He had beautiful touch, but no sense of drama. The critics said I moved like the Prince of Darkness when I approached the piano. They nicknamed me Le Loup Noir, ‘the Black Wolf.’
“There was a German pianist I remember best. His name was Heinrich Baumann and he was of the second tier in ability. He was passionate about music, but lacked the true gift, which he knew, even then. For years we wrote each other letters, discussing music, careers, everything. The night after the competition, we walked through Paris all night, and we were sitting on the steps of Sacré-Coeur when the sun rose over the city and turned the old buildings rose-colored and breathtaking. A city looks more beautiful after you have won a competition. Heinrich had finished third, his best finish ever. His letters stopped in 1938. Then it had become dangerous to write to a Jew. Even the Black Wolf.
“Single-mindedness is something I was born with. It is a necessary ingredient of all the great musicians. The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life. In the morning, I would work on my scales. I am a great believer in the scales. Master the grammar of scales and the secrets of the best composers will reveal themselves to you in slow increments. My gift made harsh requirements of me. It made me aloof to all courtesies. I was neither kind nor cordial and dreamed only of black notes pouring off a scale like water over rocks. When I turned to new symphonies, I felt as happy as those astronauts who first stepped on the moon.
“But why do I waste my time telling you this story, Jack? You could not play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano with the great Horowitz holding your hand. One of Shyla’s most unforgivable betrayals was marrying a man who was an ignoramus when it came to music.
“I had a first wife, Jack. I also had three sons. You did not know I had a wife before Ruth?”
“No.”
“You did not know I had children before Shyla and Martha?”
“No.”
“It makes no difference. There is nothing in it to talk about the dead. Do you agree?”
“No.”
“You do not know what it is like to lose a wife.”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
“Sonia and I were destined to meet. She was beautiful, as beautiful as the music I played to praise her. She, too, played the piano uncommonly well, especially for a woman of that time and place. I played in Warsaw soon after my triumph in Paris. The concert was sold out weeks in advance. My name was on the lips of every aficionado in Poland. That night was my coming out in my own birthplace. I tell you I was utterly brilliant that night. Flawless. I closed the performance with the Third Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt because it is showy and crowd-pleasing. Sonia sat in the second row and I saw her when I walked onto the stage to begin my performance. She was like a pure flame burning out of control in that theater. Now, at this moment, I can close my eyes and see her as though time could not manage to extricate itself from that distinguished moment. She was the kind of woman accustomed to being noticed and she saw me see her, saw the exact moment of my surrender and her conquest, when I let myself be stolen away by her. I lost myself forever in that first glance. Though I played before an audience of over five hundred that night, I actually played only for her. When I rose to acknowledge the standing ovation, I noticed that she alone had refused to stand. Later, when I met her, I asked her why she had remained seated. She told me, ‘Because I wanted to make sure you would seek me out to ask that very question.’
“Our marriage was one of the largest and most jubilant ever among the Jews of Warsaw. Both of our families were rich and cultured and hers was even famous for producing a line of distinguished rabbis on her mother’s side that could be traced back to the eighteenth century. We took our wedding trip to Paris where we stayed at the Hôtel George V and we wandered hand in hand through all the streets of Paris. In France we spoke to each other only in French. We made love whispering French to each other and I lost my shyness with her when I whispered French into her ear at night. Later, she would claim I made her pregnant on our first night together. Our bodies burned when we were together. I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. I could not satisfy myself with her or get enough of the endless feast her body provided. You get to love like that but once.
“Sonia knew music almost as well as I knew it. She would sit in the room as I practiced and I played for her approval. Never have I had an audience as spontaneous and knowledgeable as Sonia was. Her pregnancy was a source of great joy to us both and I poured out my soul at the keyboard so my sleeping, developing child could hear the most beautiful music in the world as it grew bones and lived in the womb of its mother. At that time, I had moments when I was sentimental as the next man, but you have not known this side of me. Long ago I buried that part of me. I never looked back upon it or sang kaddish or offered it a word of praise.
“Sonia loved it more than I did. My twin boys, Joseph and Aram, were born on your July 4. I played a song I wrote for that occasion all during Sonia’s labor, because that was the wish of my Sonia.
“So, Jack.
“Not so many years pass, but it was a time that now seems like perfect happiness. Beneath the approving gaze of pretty Sonia and the sound of my growing boys in the nursery, I began to outreach even the talent I was born with. I reached that point where I could make the piano mourn or cry out or exult by laying my fingers just so.
“But the Nazi beast was growing. As a Jew, one felt hunted in the great cities as the voice of Hitler poisoned the airways. As a musician, I thought I was immune to the fury of armies and the faith of my fathers made little difference when I sat down before the music sheets and interpreted those passionate notes that Brahms, Chopin, Schumann—that all the great ones had left the world. Hitler meant nothing to me because of music and Sonia and my beautiful twin boys. When the newspapers disturbed me, I simply stopped reading the newspaper. When rumors flew wildly in the streets, I stayed indoors and commanded that Sonia do the same. When the radio made Sonia weep with fear, I turned off the radio and forbade its use. I refused to listen to the baying of the Nazi hound. Politics sickened and bored me.
“Then I heard scratching at my door, unprepared and in innocence, and saw the Nazi beast. So I played my music to calm the blood lust of the Nazi beast. This beast loved my music, came to my concerts, called for encores, threw roses on the stages, and bellowed out my name. It loved music so much, Jack, that I almost did not see the moment that it wiped the blood of my family from its fangs and claws. Jew-hating Poland was attacked by Jew-hating Germany. It was not until later that I learned that World War II had begun and I and my family were in the middle of it all.
“I learned in the first days of the war that I was not a man of action. How is a musician supposed to respond to dive-bombers? I found myself paralyzed with fright and I remained at the piano during the first bombing raid because I discovered I could not move. The piano seemed safer to me, friendlier than the basement where my wife and neighbors had fled. I heard the approach of the planes and the air raid sirens go off and I knew what I should do, but I could not make myself run. Instead, I found myself playing from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111. The very last movement of his last sonata of the complete set of thirty-two.
“You ha
ve never been in a country invaded. You cannot understand the chaos, the despair, the panic in the streets. I think it is why modern music and modern art are so ugly. My wife, Sonia, found me, after the bombers had returned to their bases, sitting on the piano bench, still playing, as though possessed. I had urinated in my pants. Such was my fear during that first raid. I think I thought my music would save me, form a protective barrier that would hover over me like some impregnable umbrella. Sonia was very kind and gentle with me. ‘It is all right, my husband. Here, let me help you. Let me assist you. Please lean against me.’ I do not remember having a single thought about Sonia or my sons during the bombing. Not one. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I was a coward of the most despicable kind. Now, even Sonia knew it.
“Sonia’s father, Saul Youngerman, was a man of action. He could think clearly under pressure. Already, he had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and had watched his rise in Germany with a distrustful eye. He was a rich manufacturer who possessed fortunes in four countries and he told us he knew what Hitler had in mind. He commanded that we run east as fast as we could, keeping well ahead of the German Army. His two sons, Marek and Stefan, refused to leave Warsaw because their wives were city girls, born and bred to expect the comforts of Warsaw life. They had school-age children and even if the Germans won, they could not prevent their children from going to school. It is easy to mock their stupidity now, but remember, this was a time when the words Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen had no meaning to the world. Not a single member of Sonia’s family who stayed in Warsaw survived the war. Not one.
“With all the madness in the streets, with Warsaw itself wounded and bleeding, Saul Youngerman arranged for us to leave by boat, down the Vistula by barge, and then by oxen and wagons, which drove us twenty kilometers to a farm where two touring cars were waiting with uniformed chauffeurs. It was not the fact that Sonia’s father was rich that made the difference. Many were the rich men who perished from starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was that he had formed a plan in his head if something happened and he was not bashful in putting it into effect. By daytime we slept, and by night we moved. When we came to a border after the fourth night of very hard travel we crossed into a territory controlled by the Red Army. Saul figured that his family would be safe there since Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. His wife’s brother runs a factory there and knows we are coming. On 5 September, we are taken in by the family Spiegel. We are put up in a beautiful house with a very fine piano that had recently been tuned in preparation for my arrival. The city that offers us deliverance is in the Ukraine. It is called Kironittska.
“The wheel of fate comes round to touch you unawares. This is the place from which your Great Jew, Max Rusoff, and his wife, Esther, are from. But fate reveals itself only slowly and in its own good time. So, we are there and every day I play the piano and crowds of people gather outside on the street to listen to my music. Everything is good for us in Kironittska from the beginning. Many people there are Jews, some twenty thousand, so we are well taken care of. News from Warsaw is worse each day, but we know this only from the radio. On 17 September, the Soviet Union attacks Poland from the east.
“I take on music students and some of them are very good, but it is not the life I would choose. My father-in-law takes several trips fraught with terrible danger back to Warsaw. He takes food and medicine to our family, then sneaks back after terrifying adventures to Kironittska. I have never known a braver man. The stories he brought back from Warsaw were each worse than the time before. By November, the main Jewish areas are enclosed in barbed wire. Jews are ordered to wear the Star of David. Saul Youngerman cannot be persuaded from still another trip back to Poland. He considers himself a Polish patriot, more than a Jew.
“Though we do not know this, my Sonia is pregnant with our third child when we arrive in Kironittska. But the child does not know the world it is coming into and continues to grow inside her. Though we are sick with worry about our loved ones in Poland, we are thankful that we have escaped. My third son, Jonathan, is born in June. If I could have seen the future, I would have beaten Jonathan’s brains out on a rock beside the river. I would have fed rat poison to my twins, to Sonia, then myself.
“In June 1941, the Germans declare war on the Soviet Union. On June 22, there is the first massive air strike on the civilian population of Kironittska. Three weeks later, after being occupied by Hungarian troops for a brief period, I hear spoken in the streets the four most fearful words I ever heard: the Germans are here.
“The Germans are here. At this very instant, things change for the Jews. Because the Soviet Union is an ally of Germany we have relaxed our guard and consider ourselves safe. Rumors have come to us from Warsaw and then parts of Poland about the fate of Jews, but we discount them. After all, the Germans are human as we are. That year, I begin to go to the synagogue for morning prayers. And then one day the Germans burn the synagogue to the ground, with one hundred Jews inside it. If Sonia had not been sick that morning, I would have perished along with the rest. I consider those Jews that burned to death that morning to be the lucky ones.
“And then the Gestapo comes, inhuman, but handsome in a way that makes your blood run cold. The genius of the Gestapo is in their pride that they have graduated far beyond mercy. You cannot appeal to them on a human level because they are superhuman. A Ukrainian businessman owns the largest mansion in the city and this house is taken over by the Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Krüger for his headquarters. Kuzak is the name of the businessman and he protests that his family is one of the most distinguished in the Ukraine and that he demands the respect the name Kuzak merits in the city. Krüger obliges and hangs poor Kuzak from a timber protruding from his own house. The body is allowed to hang there for weeks as a sign to the citizens of Kironittska. Not until it begins to smell does Krüger order it cut down and thrown into a sewer.
“Of course, the Germans incur many unfortunate and necessary expenses in their war against the Jews. They are forced to levy heavy taxes on the Jewish population. They enlist the help of the Ukrainians in this. If the Ukrainians ever live down this ugly chapter of their history, then it means that God was asleep for the whole war. Instead of wearing the usual yellow armband, the Jews of Kironittska are required to wear a white one with a blue Jewish star that measures ten centimeters wide. Those Jews deliver all gold and silver articles to the offices of the Judenrat. My wedding ring and Sonia’s are lost in this order. All electrical appliances and shoe leather are gathered up. All German books are confiscated. We are in the hands of criminals, murderers, and thieves. God’s chosen people.
“Some poor misguided Jews hear that if they convert to Christianity they will be spared the horrible fate of their compatriots. One Friday there is a mass baptism where twenty entire Jewish families, with but a few exceptions among older members, are baptized. The Gestapo has a baptismal present ready and waiting for these new Gentiles. They are marched into the Christian cemetery and gunned down with machine gun fire. Children and women no exception. Later a member of the Judenrat, when he had gotten to know Krüger somewhat better, asks him why. Krüger makes it a joke. He says, ‘If you take a pig inside a cathedral, you still have ham and bacon and the cathedral has not changed at all.’ That member of the Judenrat is me.
“Judenrat. You do not know the word, Jack. It is my shame that I live with it. I have never admitted to anyone that I held such a position until this night when I tell you everything.
“Krüger selects a committee of Jews to administrate the Jewish affairs of this new ghetto. Failure to join means swift and certain death. By joining, it means I get to collaborate with the Germans in the torture and destruction of my own people. When the Germans need a work brigade to repair a bridge, a list of Jews is turned over to Krüger by the Judenrat. Whenever the Germans decide to reduce the size of the ghetto during an Aktion, we decide which Jews will be rounded up in the ghetto’s main plaza, loaded on trucks, and dr
iven away never to be seen again. By doing this, I think I am saving the lives of Sonia and my boys. And I am. But saving them for what?
“The leader of the Judenrat is a surgeon named Isaac Weinberger. He is a contemplative, patient man who assumes that the Nazis can be reasoned with like all other men. He is the one who insists that my father-in-law, Saul Youngerman, be in the Judenrat. Immediately, Saul sees all the dangers inherent in such a position, but also sees the wisdom in serving with such a group for the sake of his family. It is Saul who insists on my participation. Very early he scares me by telling me in confidence that the Nazis plan to kill every Jew on the face of the earth. I laugh when he tells me this. I tell him that wartime brings out in each man the capacity for the grossest exaggeration. Taking off his glasses and wiping them, Saul tells me that he has always admired my genius, but that it does not protect me from thinking like a fool. We are in our quarters in the ghetto, my children are playing around us and my wife and mother-in-law are gossiping at the stove while fixing dinner. ‘They are all corpses,’ Saul Youngerman whispers to me. ‘They are all corpses.’
“On 30 August, the Judenrat is required to provide the Germans with a list of all the Jewish intellectuals. In this list are 270 teachers, 34 pharmacists, 126 physicians, 35 engineers. I am also included in this list as a musician. The next day, one hundred men are selected from this list. They assemble together at daybreak, mount trucks, wave good-bye to their weeping families, and disappear from the face of the earth. Except for one man.
“His name is Lauber and he is one of the thirty-four pharmacists on the list. He comes back to the ghetto, at night, sneaking in as though this is deliverance. What he longs for is the comforting arms of his wife and the sounds of his children’s voices. This he finds. He tells his story to the other wives whose husbands left in those trucks. They are driven fifty kilometers to a bean field where they are given shovels and ordered to dig. They dig a great hole, then strip naked, and kneel beside their handiwork. Then the machine guns of the Nazis relieve them of the burdens of this war. The chosen people return to the God who chose them.
