Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  Every move a Jew made was monitored by the Nazis, sharp-eyed and self-important, who arrived in larger numbers every day. All had Lugers, rifles, and whips , and they were quick to use them on anyone who resisted or moved too slowly after an order was issued.

  Sometimes the soldiers relied on other implements if the timing or the circumstance seemed right.

  Moshe had a favorite cousin, Chayale, a smart, sensitive girl with a gentle nature. The two had shared a special connection since toddlerhood, when they had learned to walk together, giggling and bobbling and pulling each other up after one or the other rocked off balance and sent both to the ground.

  Chayale had grown into a heart-stopping beauty with long, thick hair the color of a raven’s wing, ivory skin that seemed to glow, and a trim body that had started to bud into full womanhood. At just sixteen, she had very little awareness of the attention she drew, too young, really, to pay much mind to such things, too humble to believe it if it was ever mentioned. But the Jewish boys had long noticed her.

  Moshe’s friend David had recently declared his heart stolen. “It’s as if a sculptor created her,” he said in hushed, reverential tones. He vowed that when they were both old enough he would take her as his wife.

  One afternoon, two SS, barely out of their teens themselves, watched Chayale pass by. They fell in behind her, matching her step for step. She walked faster, and then she ran. When she bolted through her doorway, yanking it closed and throwing her body against it, they kicked their way in.

  She cried and screamed and begged them to go, to leave her. They shoved her into the bedroom and ordered her to strip and lie on the bed, leering, touching her in places she had never been touched. Nazi law forbade Germans to have intercourse with Jews, and these were obedient men. They raped her with a broomstick again and again, shouting, grunting, calling her vile names, stirred into a frenzy, shoving their fists into her mouth to still her screaming.

  Chayale’s twelve-year-old brother, hiding in the closet, as all children had been instructed to do if Nazis appeared, heard it all, his sister’s cries growing weaker.

  Finally, the girl struggled no more. The two men strode off.

  Beautiful Chayale, in a bloody nest of bedding, was as pale as cold ashes, still as a stone in the field. The broom, sticky with her blood, lay at her side.

  Word of her murder spread in minutes. Moshe insisted upon going to her, even though he knew the scene would be horrible. He owed her a final good-bye.

  Everything in Krasnik had changed. Jewish shopkeepers had closed their doors; the Germans had requisitioned everything of value. Work at the Edelman mill halted completely when the few farmers they had managed to keep turned elsewhere in fear. Jews began running out of basic necessities and set up, at great peril, underground bartering networks.

  A moment of joy rose from all the darkness when the eldest Edelman son, Zalmen, returned home safely from the army. He had been taken prisoner and held in a stalag after German forces had overrun his unit. Although thin and worn, he was alive, and he had all his limbs.

  As autumn lurched into the winter of 1939–40, cold stiffened the air, and the snow was much heavier than usual. Every morning, one hundred or more young Jews, Moshe and Yankel among them, were herded from the town square to shovel shin-high snow from the two-lane road leading to the railroad station two miles away. During especially vicious snowfalls, when a storm dumped so much so fast the shovelers couldn’t keep up, they were whipped. Their feet ached from the cold and then went numb. Many men lost toes that winter. Some days when they shoveled, savage winds roared across the fields, forcing the snow into crusty drifts along their route, and their hands and wrists throbbed from the effort of breaking through them. Their trouser bottoms froze into stiff sheets. Cold and exhausted, they were released at six each night so they could walk home and be off the streets by curfew.

  One evening in early January, when Moshe and Yankel stamped their way into the house after shoveling detail, Sarah was frantically rolling clothing into bundles and making small piles of valuables.

  “By the day after tomorrow, we must be gone from this house,” she said, her voice sharp. “The Germans arrived at the door this morning and said the commandant of the city has ordered us to leave the house in forty-eight hours. We must find a place in the ghetto to live. They are taking over our home.”

  They managed to secure housing: a drafty, three-room apartment without plumbing in a rickety building they would share with nine other people from two families. Sarah arranged for friends in the country to keep the few items of value they still had, mostly jewelry, some silver, and her cherished cut-crystal seder glass, which had been in her family for generations.

  On a wretchedly cold morning, gray as steel, they loaded a few pieces of clothing, bedding, and some utensils into a cart to make the long walk to the ghetto. Sarah refused to look back at the house in which she had spent her entire life. She did not cry. She dipped her head against the biting wind and plunged forward.

  Conditions in the ghetto rapidly grew dire. Scarce food, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions invited sickness and disease. Medicine proved almost impossible to obtain, no one had soap, and the town’s one doctor had donned a swastika as soon as the Germans arrived and refused to treat Jews. The number of funerals conducted each day grew so large that people lost track of who, among the families they had known since childhood, was still living and who had died.

  Sarah took ill, and the family knew, as all families in the ghetto did when anyone became extremely sick, that she would die from lack of treatment.

  When Zalmen, who had married and settled fifteen miles away in Zaklikow, received word of his mother’s condition, he pulled off his yellow star and made his way through back roads during the night. In Krasnik he located a man willing to transport them by horse and sleigh overnight to Lublin, where a hospital was still accepting Jews. It was a last-gasp attempt, this journey, as Jews were no longer allowed to travel anywhere outside their own towns.

  “If we’re captured, Mother and I will probably be killed,” Zalmen acknowledged. “If she stays here, she will certainly die. We’ll try to avoid being seen, and perhaps she will live.”

  As their brother and mother set out into the frigid night, Moshe and Yankel cried quietly, certain they would never see either of them again. Abraham prayed that night and for many days and nights, rarely sleeping, pleading with God to return, if He saw fit, this woman to her family.

  A week later, against all odds, Zalmen returned his much-improved mother to Krasnik and slipped back in the night to Zaklikow.

  Soon after Sarah’s recovery, food ran out completely. While her sons were away on work detail, she disguised herself as a peasant and made her way to the home of the Polish friend who was holding her valuables for safekeeping. Hours later, Sarah returned, having exchanged her silver, crystal, and jewelry for a sack of potatoes, some flour, and a loaf of bread.

  “A warning she gives me as soon as I arrive,” Sarah told Abraham that night. “I am never to go back there again. Her neighbor is a Nazi sympathizer, and if he finds out she was selling food to a Jew he will turn her over to the Gestapo.”

  For a time, at least, they had food again.

  The small apartment shared by thirteen people was always tense and always cold, and it offered no privacy of any sort. But the insistence of biology commands attention when a young man comes of age, even when he is scared, starving, and exhausted. Moshe became captivated by Hadassah, the daughter of the apartment owner. She wasn’t a beautiful girl, but she was smart, she had a sweet, helpful nature, and the geography of their living arrangements as well as the circumstances of their narrowed lives had set into motion an urgent drifting together.

  Drenched in the all-consuming longing that emerges when people are stripped of all but the barest of emotion and denied any opportunity to act upon the f
eelings that survive, they fell quickly and deeply in love.

  Keeping hidden what was ripening between them was vital. Abraham, they knew, would order an instant halt to the relationship if he learned of it. He would not abide romantic dalliances from his sons, and the seriousness of Moshe’s feelings wouldn’t impress him. Abraham Edelman believed in the kind of carefully arranged marriage that he had experienced in his own life, one that brought him a large family and allowed him to devote nearly all of his time to prayer and study.

  The young couple had taken every precaution to avoid detection, they were sure, and they began whispering of a future together.

  One evening Sarah asked Moshe to help clean the supper dishes, an unusual request. As they set about the task, Sarah said in a voice that no one else could hear: “Hadassah is a lovely girl.” She didn’t look at her son when she spoke, and she gave no special weight or emphasis to the words. But with that one sentence she let him know that she was aware of what was going on and did not disapprove.

  Surprised, Moshe realized he was also relieved, and he unloosed a whispered confession he hadn’t expected to make. “When this madness ends I want to marry her.”

  Sarah pulled her son close. “You have my blessing.”

  Pleased that her son had managed to scrape some pleasure from the walls of this cauldron of gloom, Sarah said she would protect his secret and share in his hope.

  Moshe believed this wasn’t merely a first-love crush born of circumstance and availability. It was true and real. It was so intense that even decades later, as an old man, he would remember Hadassah, wondering how his life might have differed with her at his side, and include her when he spoke kaddish (the mourner’s prayer).

  Winter began to loosen its grip, and talk in the ghetto held that, once summer arrived, the Germans would move on to places more enticing. The death rate in the ghetto would slow, they hoped, and food would become more available.

  Moshe was recalling that prediction one night in early May as he was preparing for bed, thinking about how he and Hadassah might be able to use the softer temperatures that were moving in to their advantage.

  Suddenly, the door to their apartment flew open. Two Nazi officers stomped in and swung their rifles in an arc, eyeing the movements of each person. One of them fixed his gaze on Moshe and Yankel.

  “Get dressed now, and get out,” he ordered.

  There had been similar roundups during daylight hours, when Jews not assigned to a work crew had been released to go home and then were gathered at gunpoint when someone somewhere discovered a task that required five Jews, or fifty. But this was different. A night roundup was unprecedented.

  Moshe and Yankel made no motion to resist. The ghetto had buzzed for months with tales of the few unwise men who had resisted. They had been immediately gunned down, followed instantly by the killing of several additional family members or random Jews to deter future acts of defiance.

  The two brothers, barely breathing, slid into their shoes, grabbed their jackets, and, without a look at their parents, the others in the apartment, or each other, walked outside. A group of men and boys was already gathered, and all forged through the ghetto as directed, collecting more and more until there were three hundred of them.

  They were brought to a halt near several parked trucks, tailgates down, ready to accept their cargo.

  Quickly the young men were loaded aboard, jammed against each other tightly, their arms pinioned straight against their rib cages like staves in a barrel. The engines growled to life, and under a cold, starless night they lurched off into the dark.

  Three

  Four trucks packed with young men bumped and pitched along country roads through the night, passing mile after mile of flat fields not yet sprouting crops. They were heading east, that much the passengers could tell, but toward what and for how many miles they had no idea.

  The air was raw, as it often is between dusk and dawn when spring has not yet decided to dependably clothe the countryside with dark-hours warmth, and the short jackets Moshe and Yankel had thrown on were insufficient. The heat created when too many people are crammed into too little space dissipated instantly into the night, but the men were so afraid that most of them barely noticed how cold they were.

  A silent, malevolent-looking guard with a rifle and a sidearm was positioned at the rear of the truck, and every once in a while the barrel of his rifle clanked against the truck, the metal against metal sounding too loud even against the engine’s roar.

  The seventy-five men stood shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, Moshe and Yankel next to each other, a whisper’s distance apart, and no one spoke a word. Asking questions of each other or speculating about what the events of this night might mean would accomplish nothing, they knew, and this was not a time to further arouse the current of anxiety thrumming among them into something that could no longer be contained. Another factor was contributing equally to the silence. Each of the young men had, for many years, been subjected often to situations they were not permitted to question or challenge, and this one, while more ominous because of their number and the distance they were traveling, was not so very different. Remaining mute, experience had shown them, was always safest.

  Quiet prayers, barely audible, cleaved the silence every now and then, and as the hours grew longer, more such murmurings spilled forth. Moshe wondered if they were being hauled off to the woods to dig their own graves. Such a thing was not unheard of. If they were being transported for another reason, when would they be returned to their families? He had rarely left Krasnik, where he had been born in one of the bedrooms of Sarah’s plain clapboard house, and soon they had passed far beyond the greatest distance he had ever ventured.

  Moshe had not said good-bye to his parents or so much as glanced at Hadassah when he was pulled from the apartment, and an awful ache of dread about the manner of his departure worsened with each mile. The idea of leaping from the truck and making a frantic dash across the fields entered his head. But that would only result in a bullet to the back, and then the guards would undoubtedly shoot several other men to demonstrate that escape attempts would not be tolerated. They all knew that, every one of the men. So they sat, unmoving, dry-mouthed, as black skies flowed to gray and fields became forests.

  It was well into the next day, when the trucks finally ground to a stop and the men were ordered out. They were deep in the country, they could see, but nothing else indicated exactly where, or why. Only a warehouse-like building surrounded by barbed wire and a narrow river interrupted the endless stretch of fields and trees.

  Inside the building, rough platforms extended from the walls, and the men understood immediately that these would serve as their beds. They would be in this place for some time, they now knew. No blankets; no pillows. With only about seventy-five platforms to accommodate three hundred people, the quick-thinking among them calculated that they would have to line up four men to each four-foot-wide platform.

  They had gone without food or water for nearly twenty-four hours, without sleep for thirty-six or more, and the adrenaline that had braced them through the night had long ago sputtered to nothing. Many dropped wearily onto the planks, unable to generate enough energy to join the nervous conversations sprouting up here and there. Sometime in the evening they each received a tin of watery soup and a cup of water, but no information.

  At dawn the next day they were awakened to begin the job they had been brought here to do. The area, they came to understand, sometimes flooded when the rains or the winter snowmelt were especially heavy, so they were ordered to hand-dredge and shore up the river to prevent future flooding. It was unclear why the river overflowing its banks posed a problem here—an area with no population or structures as far as the eye could see—but that was the work, and they were the laborers. They took the shovels and picks and did it.

  They learned that they wer
e on the outskirts of Ruda, a tiny bump on the side of the road about ninety miles from Krasnik. And for more than six months they worked there in water up to their knees, twelve hours a day, digging the riverbed deeper. Then they spread loads of trucked-in gravel high and flat like a barrier fence on both sides of the river.

  The guards for this operation were not German Nazis, as they had been in Krasnik. These overseers were Poles of German descent, far worse than any the men had previously experienced, much quicker to slash at backs with bullwhips and much more energetic when bashing rifle butts into hunched-over shoulders, necks, and heads. Their enthusiasm for brutality may have stemmed, as some of the men believed, from wanting to prove to the Germans that they could be every bit as vicious as the Germans themselves were. But many, the ones they feared most, seemed simply to derive pleasure from inflicting pain; if they didn’t thrash someone every few minutes, they grew glum or, worse, edgy. No one ever pretended that a guard needed a reason to slam his rifle into a man or slice open his back with a whip; it was just part of the experience.

  The three hundred prisoners—it was now obvious that this is what they were, so this was how they regarded themselves—ached, nearly every one, in almost constant pain from beatings or whippings. And as summer loped in with a muggy vengeance, their necks and arms and faces grew raw from blisters atop sunburns that never cooled or healed.

  But it wasn’t the flock of bruises or the seeping sores that caused the most misery. It was the hunger, grinding and constant. Hunger made them light-headed and flimsy. Their stomachs cramped and thundered, indignant and desperate. The men found it impossible to think of anything but the ache in their guts.

  They received potato soup, thin and pale, twice a day, a small metal container of it ladled from a huge, battered vat. And at every meal they silently asked themselves the same question: Will my soup be nothing but water, or will it contain a few pieces of potato?