One midnight, in the Tatra mountains, at a summer camp in the village of Bundówki near Zakopane, I was privileged to stand guard with her. The night was cold, so we kept each other warm talking about socialism and free love. Karinka was sweet and evasive, but as the moonlight fell on her face she appeared to me like a teasing Madonna. Languishing in the dark, I asked her: ‘Why do you break so many hearts?’ ‘To make them complete,’ she said. Then she placed her warm lips to my eager ear and murmured:
‘The grass was wet with dew,
The well stood deep in thought;
He made love to me,
I loved, and loved him not.’
At that moment we heard footsteps — a change of guard. We parted and walked off to our respective lodgings. At morning roll-call, my Karinka gave me a strange look, as if to ask: Who are you, boy? Have we ever met?
On the train journey home we travelled, not by accident, in the same compartment. I sat by the window and she stretched herself out on the seat, placing her beautiful head on my lap. It was night and most of the others were fast asleep. She allowed me to kiss her lips, slide my hand behind her bra, fondle her paradise apples, fresh from the very tree of life.
In that autumn of 1937, Karinka became a student in a girls’ high school, and I became a furrier’s apprentice. This situation placed us on two different planets. But three years later, at the beginning of the end, I ran into her again. She was carrying two buckets of water and seemed distraught. I wanted to help but she pushed me away. ‘Don’t you dare come near me,’ she cried.
I discovered later that poverty, hunger and loneliness had forced her to marry a smallish man twenty years her senior. Apparently he was high up in the service of our inverted ghettostate. It was rumoured that he had previously been employed in a girls’ high school as an instructor in moral behaviour.
My heart pined for Karinka but there was nothing I could do — except dream that she had agreed to run away with me, though there would have been nowhere to run. So my mighthave-been beloved vanished from my horizon like the wistful smoke from a passing steamer. But to this day, it hasn’t stopped hovering before my dimming eyes.
The Climb
The summer camp we set up in 1937 at Bundówki was within view of Giewont, the highest mountain in the land of our birth. Our leaders were Miss Muster, Niemele Libeskind and Juda Kersh, assisted by the tall willowy silverbirch-pale Nono Goldman, the brave Geniek Boczkowski — much respected because at sixteen he was already shaving his chin — and the incorruptible Bono Winer, my underground cell leader in those days without years.
At morning roll-call we hoisted our Red Falcons flag, and with songs dedicated to universal brotherhood we began our daily activities. Not far from us, the ND — the xenophobic National Democrats — had established their own camp headquarters. Apparently, songs of eternal brotherhood were not much to their taste, and in response to our efforts they strung up on their flagpole the effigy of a Jew, with a big red sign that read: THIS IS OUR ANSWER TO THE PROVOCATIONS OF THE JEWISH COLONY.
For days we enthusiastically prepared ourselves for our excursion up the famous Kasprowy Wierch. We knew this was a rather dangerous undertaking, since the ascent of the mountain up to the plateau at the summit was precipitous, the traffic was strictly one-way, and the climb was possible only with the aid of iron hooks and chains.
When we reached the foot of the mountain, Bono and his inseparable friend Nono assumed leadership of the climb. The rear was covered by the aforementioned Geniek. The hot, humid day made our task arduous, yet we continued undeterred; even the ten-year-olds among us kept up the pace.
As our forward detachment came into sight of the plateau, we were signalled to stop. A reception committee of three ND thugs was up ahead, blocking our progress! The heat by this time was unbearable; the sun’s rays, like burning lances, pierced our bodies — which hung perilously in the air. Our boys at the top pleaded, ‘Please, there are young kids amongst us, you may cause casualties.’ ‘We don’t care,’ they retorted. ‘Who wants you here, anyway!’ Just as the standoff was becoming critical, a woman who happened to be walking up on the plateau noticed our predicament. ‘You let those people through,’ she shouted, ‘or I’ll call the police.’
Two hours later, as we entered the Valley of Five Lakes, we spotted our three friends once again, and approached them. ‘We want a word with you,’ Bono Winer said. ‘What about?’ asked the oldest among them, an expression of lazy boredom on his face. ‘About your nastiness, pal,’ came the reply — and Bono hurled his fist into the hoodlum’s face. It sent them all packing.
Intent on vengeance, they visited us later, in the middle of the night. Much to their unpleasant surprise, however, we expected them and were ready, waiting.
The following morning, right after breakfast, Juda Kersh deftly took the stand at our timber-constructed ‘radio station’ and began his broadcast. ‘Hallo hallo,’ he announced. ‘This is the free voice of the Eleventh Socialist Children’s Republic in the district of Zakopane. Greetings to all people of goodwill on our planet Earth!’
Antisemitism, he announced, was a dying weed with many ugly roots, but we, the Jewish people, together with all mankind, would uproot this monstrous chimera. Arm in arm, we were marching, marching towards a new dawn...
Unfortunately, dear Juda, those days without years proved your prophecy a little premature.
Chessgame
The life of Dr Igor Alekseyevich, who befriended my father, reads like an outlandish piece of fiction. His own father had been conscripted into the Tsar’s army at the age of ten, and celebrated his twentieth birthday in 1877, while marching under the leadership of Duke Nikolai against the Turks. After a fierce battle, for which he was later decorated, Igor’s father was taken prisoner; he escaped, but was quickly caught and condemned to be shot. Standing blindfolded before the firingsquad, begging God for a miracle, he suddenly heard the gallop of hoofs. It was said that a beautiful maiden named Emilia, of the noble Sephardic lineage of Gracia Nasi, arrived on a white horse, freed the condemned man for a pot of gold, and became his wife and Igor’s mother.
At the time of his barmitzvah Igor’s family emigrated to Germany, where the boy completed his medical studies with great distinction and (having become a Bismarckian true believer) was quickly catapulted to the pinnacle of his profession, with the highest circles seeking his services. However, as the 1930s advanced — a time when God’s bank went into voluntary receivership and all promissory notes lost their validity — Igor found himself prohibited from practising, and eventually was dispatched with thousands of other Jews to the muddy Polish border town of Zbąszyn. Soon afterwards he turned up in the city of the waterless river.
Every Sunday afternoon at exactly four o’clock, Dr Igor would appear with Germanic punctuality at our doorstep, to play a game of chess with my father and talk about Judaism, which to him meant ‘Die Bibel’. Igor could not accept father’s premise that we Jews were a nation: ‘This, Herr Gershon,’ he would say, ‘ist ein grosser Irrtum, a great mistake. We are no more than a religious community, that’s all.’
‘Well,’ father would counter, making his next move on the chessboard between them, ‘the Bible will resolutely disagree with you.’
If the doctor was taken aback he was not inclined to contradict father, who had studied for years in a yeshiva. But after a tactical sip of the fresh tea that mother served, he responded at last. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that may be so. But how then do you explain Lev Tolstoy’s dictum that the Jew — not the Jewish nation! — is “that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world”?’
‘I don’t know, Igor, I haven’t come across Tolstoy’s dictum,’ father replied. ‘But maybe what this great thinker meant was that our father Abraham was the first to proclaim the idea of Achad, the One, the harmony of our universe. This became the fundamental principle of all the sciences, both known and as yet unknown — and of all
art, literature, and sane theology.’
‘And what may be the essence of your sane theology, Herr Gershon?’
‘Perhaps,’ said father with a spark in his eye, ‘that this world of ours will have a meaning, and a secure future, only when all people learn to be in love with Achad. When that day comes, the practice of religion will be regarded as an offence...’
And concluding his next move with a flourish of his wrist, father announced: ‘By the way, Herr Doctor, it’s checkmate.’
A Scandal
After leaving school and spending a few unsatisfactory months with a furrier, I was apprenticed to a tailor, a certain Mr Henry Brawerbaum. He was a stocky, droop-shouldered man in his early fifties, with long arms that appeared to hang limp at his sides, and in his sallow face rested a pair of eyes like two razor slits. Yet Henry — who could easily have played the role of Hugo’s famous hunchback, Quasimodo — was a noble human being who enjoyed a reputation as one of the best tailors in town.
His wife, Marieta, was a small blonde, possibly in her late thirties. She had broad hips and a high bosom, incessantly pursed her painted lips, and sauntered about the house like a French perfumery. Needless to say, she was Henry’s icon, though why she had married him was an enigma.
They lived in the better part of our city of the waterless river, in a two-bedroom apartment. There was also a kitchen, its walls tiled in green and white and its ceiling painted beige, and it was here that Henry had set up his workroom. His senior employee, Sasha, who knew the outcome of all things in advance and finished every sentence with ‘I told you so’, had come from a little township with his young wife. He was an excellent tailor and a good-looking man, with a mulatto’s complexion, wavy hair and black eyes that brimmed with wonder — a wonder which Marieta was determined to investigate. The third workman in the atelier was the ever-silent and inconspicuous presser, Felek.
On the first day of my employment, Mr Brawerbaum took me aside. ‘Young man,’ he stated rather solemnly, ‘one of your duties as an apprentice will be to assist the lady of the house with domestic chores, if she should need you.’ I was of course delighted with such a prospect and immediately began to fantasize.
On Mondays our boss would leave the house right after breakfast. It was the day he had reserved for buying materials and trimmings, and for enjoying a lunch with his colleagues in the trade. On one such Monday soon after I began there, I noticed Marieta winking Sasha over (I wished it could have been me) into the adjoining bedroom. Overcome with curiosity, I edged closer to the wooden stud wall.
‘Please, darling,’ I heard her address him in Polish, ‘don’t torment me.’
‘Stop it, Marieta!’ Sasha adored the good-hearted Quasimodo, and he sounded frightened. ‘You have a husband, a gentleman, who loves you dearly, and you want to betray him?’
‘Oh, you silly boy,’ Marieta retorted. ‘To love is much, much mightier than to be loved!’
‘No, Marieta!’ Sasha declared firmly. ‘And don’t speak to me in Polish.’
‘Oh, Sasha, sweetie. Yiddish is so unromantic!’
But Sasha turned on his heel, banged the bedroom door behind him and came through into the workroom. He was pale and sweating, and clearly agitated. The presser Felek gave him a dirty look. At that instant I heard Marieta call my name.
‘Don’t go in there!’ Sasha hissed.
I stopped, then remembered Henry’s injunction that I should respond if his wife called on me. I opened the bedroom door and paused just beyond the threshold, paralysed. Marieta stood there like Eve before her enlightenment by the snake. As if by magic, the door slid shut behind me.
‘What are you waiting for, you fool!’ she screamed. ‘Can’t you see I have a sore hand? Help me — I can’t reach around behind my back!’ And she hurled her bra furiously in my face. Just then the bedroom door flew open, and there was Mr Brawerbaum.
‘What’s this!’ my boss shouted. ‘What’s going on here?’
Marieta didn’t skip a beat as she explained, with a giggle, the reason for my presence.
‘Wait outside,’ her husband commanded curtly.
I obeyed, and while waiting I heard more giggles from Marieta, along with Quasimodo’s heart-wrenching pleas and entreaties. After a few minutes he quietly re-emerged, gave me my unearned pay for the rest of the month, and, almost in a whisper, said: ‘Please go. Go into the workroom, take your things, and never come back again.’
As I collected my few belongings I heard Sasha murmur, ‘I told you so.’
Three weeks later I unexpectedly met up with Sasha — on a new job. I was astounded. ‘Sasha!’ I cried. ‘What happened?’
‘That woman was Potiphar’s wife incarnate,’ he replied. ‘And I, unfortunately, lacked the strength of Joseph.’
On the Slope
Time had embarked on a precipitous, irreversible journey, roller-coasting along the brink of a fathomless abyss. A smouldering breeze from the west brought evil tidings. Newspapers, radio and the politicians screamed: War is imminent! Yet the government in the land of my birth was more concerned with devoting all its energies to the Jewish question.
One million Jews must go! — to Madagascar, Palestine, Uganda. Janina Prystorowa, a reactionary member of the Sejm (the Polish parliament), in conjunction with her colleague, Father Stanisław Trzeciak, proposed in 1936 that shechitah, the ritual kosher slaughter of cattle, contradicted Christian ethics and should be prohibited on the grounds of cruelty.
If this bill became law, argued our city’s Kehila, the Jewish council on which the anti-religious Bund held a majority at the time, it would not only infringe on the religious beliefs of the Jewish communities, but threaten their very livelihood. Clearly, as in all such cases, the whole thing was just another ploy of the antisemites, a smokescreen for their devilish intentions. After some deliberations a national strike was proclaimed, a strike that would bring all industry, commerce and education in our country to a total standstill.
I vividly recall the day of the general strike, 17 September 1937. The Jewish quarters were galvanized, and the foreboding whisper of an unbelievable daring, fraught with great danger, hovered in the air. Groups of Bundist militia waited concealed in nooks and shadows, prepared to respond to any provocation, while the mounted police, their presence visible and their bayonets fixed, patrolled the streets, ready to protect the local hooligans.
But as the day negotiated its last traces of light, and evening dropped like an impatient drape, and the slanting dimness of the forest of puffed-out factory chimneys resumed its cheerless eternal vigil, my heart sank. I watched the Bundist militia leave their stations for home, watched the mounted police disperse, and my disappointment was complete. I, the fifteen-year-old revolutionary, felt cheated. The general strike that I had hoped would lead our people to the barricades had fizzled out like a punctured balloon.
Dejected, I made my way home; but on turning a corner I came face to face with a small procession of people carrying a tall wooden cross and shouting slogans into the air. I stopped to watch, and as the cross passed by, one of the zealous marchers ripped off my woollen school cap and screamed: ‘We’ll do to the Jews what they do to our cattle!’ He was joined by the others, and they all chanted in unison. ‘We’ll do to the Jews what they do to our cattle! We’ll do to the Jews what they do to our cattle! So help us God!’
And they did.
Hotza-tza
Little Itzik, whom we called the Barber of Bałuty, was an aggressive leader and the acknowledged poet of the young Communists. He was constantly at loggerheads with his neighbour Bainisz, a Bundist and mechanic whom he both respected and hated. ‘I respect you, Bainisz,’ he said, ‘for your brave stand against the antisemites... And hate you,’ he screamed, poking a finger into his neighbour’s face, ‘for your counter-revolutionary activities. Just wait, you Social Fascist,’ Itzik boiled. ‘After our revolution, we will deal with your kind.’
The last municipal election here was like a war, albeit one
in which nobody was actually killed. There were fights, to be sure, crude fights; but most of the confrontations were verbal. I recall little Itzik standing like a featherless rooster in front of Zombkowski’s pharmacy on Limanowskiego Street, his Adam’s apple jumping nervily up and down in his scraggy throat. The night before, he had engaged in another vitriolic exchange with his neighbour, who had dared to brand his beloved Stalin as Ivan the Terrible Incarnate; now Itzik was paying him back:
My Bundist neighbour has a scheme
Hotza-tza, hotza-tza
To go into partnership with Berlin
Hotza-tza, hotza-tza.
Now he spreads his toxic lore
Hotza-tza, tza hotza-tza
My neighbour is a hopeless bore
Hotza-tza, tza hotza-tza.
Sadly, it was not Bainisz’s but rather Itzik’s comrades who went into partnership with Berlin. A week after the real war broke out, the city of the waterless river was invaded. Next day Itzik, a small suitcase dangling from his hand, appeared on his neghbour’s threshold. ‘I am prepared to forgive you, Bainisz,’ he announced. ‘Let’s go, we have no time to lose.’
‘Where to, Itzik, where to?’
‘To the land of the Volga, of course — to the land of freedom and brotherhood. Remember what even your own Social Fascist newspaper, the Naye Folkstsaytung, once wrote? Bertrand Russell was visiting Moscow and asked an ordinary worker “Why don’t you take your holidays abroad?” “Because,” the man replied, “I don’t want to lose even a week of living in our glorious country!”’
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