“I have no child, no daughter.”
“You and Blume weren’t ‘in love’ at all, were you. You raped her, you threatened to tell the communists her parents were partisans but that was a lie to get her to sleep with you. You blackmailed her and she had your child and then you tried to kill the baby. Were you part of the mob that killed Blume too? Did you kill Baruch and Symma? Look at me, you piece of filth.”
Kuczynski kept his head down.
“Is lies, all lies, why you come to persecute old man?” he whined.
“I have spoken to Zofia.”
Now Kuczynski raised his head. He looked at Russell in amazement. Then after a pause his expression became calculating.
“Ach, she’s bitter. Her boyfriend was partisan shot by Soviets. She blamed me, vy I don’t know. She’s not right in head. She make up stories. She should be in home.” He made a circular movement at his temple with his finger.
“I saw her. I went to America and met her. There’s nothing wrong with her mind. Her memory is very good. She told me you stole the Ajzensztejns’ valuables and looked for the baby to kill her. Then you hit Zofia.”
“I was given waluables for safe keeping. There was no baby.” His voice rose and he smacked the arm of his chair.
“You were in the square that day. You told me you made the Jews tear down the statue. Then you helped club them to death.”
“We were made to do it, the Nazis would kill us otherwise, you don’t know…They were communists. That was justice.”
Well which was it then, he thought, intimidation or justice? Russell smelled weakness. Kuczsynski was beginning to lose coherence.
“They were Jews in that square. You killed them because they were Jews.”
“Why you care so much?” said Kuczynski in a sudden passion. “All of a sudden you care? Is because you are communist also. Vy you persecuting me? You hate Jews. Yes, you. I hear this. You love Palestinians. Palestinians, they hate Jews. In the vor, we knew the Arabs in Palestine were vorking with Hitler. Now they say Israelis drink Palestinian children’s blood. You don’t say nothing against that, only against me, Polish patriot. Palestinians say Israelis are Nazis, they committing genocide. You also, you think Israelis Nazis. So Nazis not so bad after all, no? Ve all do bad things as well as good, no one has monopoly of virtue, yes? I heard you say it with my own ears. So vy you care so much? Suddenly you think you make money from book, so you become Jew!”
Russell gasped.
“I am a Jew! My family was murdered in Europe by your friends because they were Jews! I am anti-Nazi! I am anti-racist! I am against fascism, against antisemitism! I am against everything that you are!”
The charge was ludicrous, obscene. Only right-wingers were antisemitic. Only right-wingers were Nazi supporters like Kuczynski. The idea that the Palestinians were Nazis! They couldn’t be; they were the victims of Western imperialism and Jewish nationalism. Left-wingers like himself simply couldn’t be antisemitic. Anti-racism was in their very DNA. Kuczynsi’s thinking was utterly twisted.
So why did he feel so threatened? He glanced at Damia. She seemed to be fiddling with something inside her bag.
“You sent Zofia the book. I saw it. I finished the translation.”
Kuczynski seemed physically to recoil, as if he had been hit. He tried not to look as if he was desperate to know. But he started to tremble.
Now Russell leaned forward and dropped his voice. He had a weapon and he was going to make damned sure it hit its target.
“You wanted to know the secret of the book, the secret of the Jews, why God loves them so much they survive everything that’s been thrown at them. Well I found it, the secret of the Jews.”
Kuczynski was so still he seemed to have stopped breathing.
“The secret is that there’s no secret. The Jews don’t have some hidden path to God’s heart. The book says their God abandoned them. So why have they survived and prospered more than any other people? Because there have always been people like you to make sure they remember who they are. They have been persecuted, tortured, exterminated by people like you. No other people has ever suffered such malice. You singled them out for unique treatment and so the result was they knew they were unique. They can never ever forget what they are, because people like you have made sure they can never forget. That’s why with every attack, every pogrom, every attempt to exterminate them they grow stronger than before.
“There’s no comfort for you in that book. On the contrary: it shows you are cursed to have caused the Jews to grow ever more powerful. It says that you and others like you are condemned to a living hell where what you tried to exterminate only grows in strength. That book damns you for all time.”
Kuczynski rose from his chair, shaking. His face was contorted with fury. “Get out!” he screamed as he advanced upon Russell. “Get out! Get out!”
Russell and Damia fled.
38
HE WAS BEYOND exhausted. He felt as if he’d been run over by a truck. “Perhaps I’m coming down with something,” he said weakly.
Damia said it was just reaction. She took him back to her flat, poured him a whisky, gently undressed him and ushered him firmly into bed. He slept deeply and dreamlessly.
In the morning he felt better. He couldn’t stop turning over in his mind, though, what Kuczynski had said to him.
“He said I hated Jews.”
“What does it matter what he said, a man like that? It’s obviously absurd.”
Of course it was. Yet he thought of Waxman, and his “evidence” of the Palestinians’ Nazi imagery and their role during the war as Hitler’s Middle East legion. He had dismissed it all as Zionist propaganda. He thought of all those people, just like him, who wanted to defend the oppressed and make a better world and for whom supporting the Palestinian cause was what defined them as decent and good. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they? They couldn’t all be supporting genocidal Nazi Jew-haters, could they? Impossible!
Yet he couldn’t dismiss Kuczynski as easily as he could dismiss Waxman. For Kuczynski was not a Zionist. Kuczynski wasn’t trying to blacken anyone in order to promote the Jewish cause. Kuczynski hated Jews. Yet Kuczynski had said pretty well what Waxman had said. And Kuczynski had better cause than most to know.
“Is it possible to be a good person and yet believe bad things?” he asked.
Damia pondered this as she buttered another slice of toast. “Yes,” she said finally, “but only if you don’t know they’re bad. Once you know, you have to stop believing them.”
But what if you choose not to find out? he wondered.
“You realize,” said Damia, “that you’ve now got a great story to tell.”
He looked at her. He didn’t get it. “I can’t tell Eliachim’s story anymore,” he said, baffled.
“Forget the book. Kuczynski! He’s the story now. The inside track of a war criminal! You can tell how he was first of all anti-Soviet and then a Soviet informer and then took part in the massacres and stole from the Jews and then hid in England for all these years.”
“But…but what about Haia? I gave my word…”
“You don’t have to say Kuczynski was her father. Just talk about how he betrayed the Ajzensztejns, and how he thought all Jews were communists. It’ll coincide with the trial verdict, and it will be sensational!”
It was true; he had the recording of Zofia detailing Kuczynski’s role in the massacre at Jedwabne. He had given her his word that he would hand it over to the police, which he had duly done. But there was nothing to stop him from publishing her testimony.
He could contrast Kuczynski’s self-serving excuses to him with Zofia’s chilling denunciation of her brother. He would reveal that this was the testimony that had brought the British police to Kuczynski’s door. He would be taking the reader inside a mind made monstrous by the twin evils of Nazis and
Soviet communism. The program would be hailed as an original contribution to the study of the two great totalitarian systems of the 20th century.
He would be fêted as the sleuth who had brought back to the British police the testimony that finally ran a Nazi war criminal to ground. And he would also feel that finally, he had done something of which his father would have been proud. More than that: he would feel he had avenged his father’s memory.
Of course, Eliachim’s story would have to remain hidden. But burning Jews alive in 1941 probably needed no further embellishment. And anyway, the major selling point, the aspect which would hook viewers, was Zofia’s heroic rescue of the infant Haia from otherwise certain slaughter. And there was a ready-made story for that which obscured Kuczynski’s parentage. Russell would repeat the lie that Haia herself believed—that both her parents had been slaughtered as Jews.
On that basis, he might even be able persuade Zofia to appear on the daytime TV chat shows that would undoubtedly be beating a path to his door.
He felt excited again. Things were now going to be fine. He didn’t need Eliachim’s story after all.
His phone buzzed on the kitchen table. He was busy making coffee so he put it on speakerphone. It was Ian Avery, the war crimes officer from Scotland Yard. He was just ringing to thank Russell so much for the audio of Zofia’s testimony about her brother, absolutely invaluable and so it was obviously a pity it had been overtaken by events.
“What events?” said Russell, after a small pause.
“Haven’t you heard?” said Avery. “It’s been on the news: Kuczynski hanged himself last night. Relief for us, frankly; gets everyone off the hook of having to prosecute a poor old man, yada yada yada, and frees up us chaps to catch the villains that matter.”
“He hanged himself?” repeated Russell faintly. “Last night?”
“Yeah, seems his wife had left him, house in a terrible state, it all must have got to him. Interesting isn’t it how even war criminals do apparently feel shame, maybe even guilt; who knows what goes on inside a mind like that.”
Russell did know. It wasn’t shame or guilt. It had been a verdict more devastating than anything a court could hand down.
But now his main protagonist was dead. There was no longer any opportunity to put him on the record. For the second time, Russell faced the collapse of a story because he himself had made the principal evidence unavailable.
“What now,” he said to Damia helplessly.
She looked at him impishly for a moment. Then she got up from the table and brought over her own phone. She laid it on the table between them and clicked the play button. Kuczynski’s voice, alternately whining, petulant and angry, filled the room.
“We were made to do it, the Nazis would kill us otherwise, you don’t know…They were communists. That was justice.”
“On we go,” said Damia.
Yes, Russell would indeed go on in the life he was leading because there was no alternative. But he was different nevertheless. He could no longer deny it.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what Kuczynski had said to him. Those venomous words kept reverberating in his head. They had stung him badly because, try as he might, he could not escape the fact that they were true.
Appalling as it was, Kuczynski had hit home when he had accused Russell of siding with the people who hated Jews. Worse than that, hadn’t he hated the Jewish part of himself?
It was unbearable to be bracketed with the likes of Kuczynski. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Yet when he looked back, he couldn’t deny there was something in it. He thought of Yael, of her bitter accusation that he was somehow responsible for her father’s murder. More than something.
But that was what he had been like in the past. He was a different person now. Indeed, when he looked back to before it had all happened, he felt as if he had stepped out of his own skin.
Had it started with Eliachim of York? Or had it all begun earlier, at the moment he saw his father lowered into the ground? He had been angry and confused when Jack had died. Now, though, he recognized that his passing was also a form of release. Maybe his father’s death had permitted him to be open to what Eliachim was telling him. Or had Eliachim performed some ghostly alchemy that had allowed him finally to separate from his father in peace?
Whatever way round it was, Eliachim had somehow pried open a crack in his heart; and other stuff, surprising stuff, had flowed in. The hard, bitter edge of him had softened. What once had so threatened to overwhelm him that he shut it all out for fear he would disappear beneath it no longer terrified him. He saw now it was possible not to hate what he had come from but to accept it, and also to see what people could love in it. Indeed, he had come close to loving it himself.
And Russell knew that he had been changed forever. Yet he also knew that the world he inhabited would not allow him the space to make such a change. He understood that his tolerant world would only tolerate him on condition that he was like everyone else in this one crucial respect—that he did not make them feel he had something they wanted, even if they had no idea what that something might be. He understood, finally, that the emotion lurking beneath the veneer of comradeship was not fear or contempt or disdain, but jealousy.
So now he was stranded between two worlds. Strangely, that somehow felt appropriate. Had he actually become, he wondered wryly, the rootless cosmopolitan of anti-Jewish caricature?
The change in him didn’t mean he had turned into Waxman. He saw that now. He still believed in all his old ideals. None of that had altered; it didn’t need to. The world, he realized with relief, wasn’t binary. There was good and bad everywhere.
This was new to him. He perceived that he had been living under a constant fear: the terror that any deviation in how he thought, however small and insignificant, would inescapably consign him to isolation and worse on the opposite side to virtue, a bad person to himself as well as to others.
Now, though, he knew he was an outsider and would always be so. In the world he had assumed was his own, he would merely be tolerated on certain conditions. Well stuff that, he thought. It no longer mattered that he might not fit in. He no longer wanted to fit in amongst people with such objectionable attitudes. Attitudes, moreover, that went against every principle they were supposed to stand for. Principles he still stood for. He had thought they were all on the same side. That had been his profound mistake.
Yet he also knew that he was now in danger. If he let on at all, if he started exposing the Jewish part of himself then his colleagues, his friends, those who controlled his livelihood would all close ranks against him. He could not afford to let them see any change in him at all. So he would go under their radar. Outwardly he would be the same: liberal, worldly, cynical. But inside he would be a different person. Inside, he would be exploring and developing a part of himself that had been suppressed for too long.
He looked across the table at Damia, humming as she licked marmalade off her fingers. There was nothing hidden about her, he thought wonderingly. She was exactly as she seemed; and she believed others were too, unless they showed otherwise. He loved that innocence about her. And she accepted him as he was, without any conditions.
Only now did he realize how shattered he had been when Alice had left him. Now he felt as if he wasn’t worthless after all; he really could be loved by someone for what he actually was. He thought of Rosa with a pang. Only if you feel you are truly loved, he thought, can you then yourself love in turn.
“Did you mean what you said to Kuczynski?” Damia asked suddenly.
“Said what?”
“That the Jews only continue to exist because of what people like him have done to them?”
She was looking steadily at him.
“I used to think that. I don’t think it anymore.”
“Good,” she said. “It didn’t sound very nice. And you still haven’t told me…”
First, though, he had to find out for himself. Where Eliachim had pointed, where Rosa was pointing, that’s where he wanted to go too. But now he wasn’t alone. There was someone who would come on the journey with him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself,” said Damia softly.
He rested his elbow on the table and raised his hand. She leaned over and rested her palm on his. He smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK IS a work of fiction crafted around two events that actually happened: the massacre of English Jews at Clifford’s Tower, York, in 1190 and the atrocity committed against the Jews of Jedwabne, Poland, in 1941.
Although my characters are fictional, I have tried to reproduce as faithfully as possible the details of these actual events. Accordingly, I drew widely upon a number of sources.
Principal among these are the two pioneering books about the Jedwabne atrocity by Jan Gross, Neighbors and Golden Harvest.
I also drew upon an interview with Anna Bikont by David Mikics, published in Tablet magazine on 25 October 2015 as The Day We Burned Our Neighbors Alive.
For details about the York massacre, the Crusades and the Jews of medieval England, I consulted among other works the following:
•The Medieval Source Book:
•Ephraim of Bonn: The York Massacre 1189-90
•Albert of Aix and Ekkehard of Aura: Emico and the Slaughter of the Rhineland Jews
•Soloman bar Samson: The Crusaders in Mainz, May 27, 1096
•Jewish Perspectives during the Crusades
•A History of the Jews in England, by Cecil Roth.
For information about the Polish partisans, I consulted The Last Rising in the Eastern Borderlands: The Ejszyszki Epilogue in its Historical Context, by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and My Childhood Story by Krystyna Balut (née Martusewicz).
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