East of Time

by Jacob Rosenberg

  O lead us, flaming red flags —

  into a new dawn we stream;

  towards those men and women,

  our fighting comrades of Wien...

  To our great dismay, a few years later some of our Viennese comrades, the very ones for whom we had been ready to lay down our lives, would volunteer to become guards patrolling the ghetto perimeter — to reassure themselves that none of their Jewish friends would escape its fate. Yet even then, our ghetto Bundists, those incredible believers, continued to commemorate Lassalle, Sacco, Vanzetti, the fall of the Bastille — while the French did their dirty work in Drancy. May Day, the day of hope, of international brotherhood, retained a special place in the hearts of these starving, betrayed Jewish workers, and despite repeated setbacks and adversities they never failed to uphold its significance.

  By this time I was employed as a machinist in a clothing factory at 13 Żabia Street, which had once housed a primary school. The building was situated almost directly across from the border with the forbidden outside world. My unit consisted of twenty men (tailors) and three women (finishers). May Day had to be celebrated in great secrecy, since our factory commissar, a man in his mid-twenties and an officer in the Jewish police — with a face resembling an elderly sheep and the voice of a young rooster — was a noted squealer. On the festive day, we arrived at the entrance earlier than ever. I was greeted by my daring friend, Blumenfeld, our oldest and most respected tradesman. He presented me with a piece of red thread, to be wound around the little finger, and before we knew it someone had coined the idea of a ‘Day of the Red Threads’ — a day of tension, sabotage and revolt.

  In the course of the working day, however, our rebellious mood fizzled out. We left work at dusk. Walking out the gate, we were immediately confronted by the border fence, and beyond it the other side of life. I happened to look up. Through the dusty pane of a lit window, a carefree little girl was waving sweetly to us. Perhaps it was this that, without warning, provoked one of the younger members of our team to brave the treacherous silence:

  So comrades, come rally

  And the last fight let us face;

  The Internationale

  Unites the human race...

  Abruptly, someone grabbed the child from behind and quickly doused the light, and darkness shrouded the dusty window once more.

  Anna

  We met in 1940, in the late autumn, at night, on a narrow unlit winding staircase. The stairs were not wide enough for two, so we had to struggle to squeeze past. Although we could hardly see each other’s face, the momentary contact between our bodies was electrifying, and the repetition of the experience — which became decreasingly ‘accidental’ — eventually brought us together. Before coming to the ghetto, Anna had been a mathematics teacher at a high school. At thirty, she was twelve years my senior, and married, but her husband was missing in the war. ‘I live by myself,’ she told me. ‘It’s not easy.’ And so, after several more staircase encounters, most of which I cunningly arranged, she invited me to her room.

  ‘What do you do with yourself,’ she asked me, ‘on these long and tedious ghetto nights?’ Anna was a plain-spoken, strong-headed woman, physically and intellectually superior to me, not to mention a head taller. Her hair was a dark shade of blond, and she had deeply-set eyes, blood-red lips, and whitish skin which firmly enveloped a nimble figure. She was beautiful, if not particularly pretty.

  ‘When there’s peace,’ I replied, meaning the times between murder and murder when we hallucinated respite, ‘I read and write.’

  ‘Are you a writer?’

  ‘I hope to be.’

  ‘And what do you write about?’

  ‘Life, people, love and hate.’

  ‘Would you write a story about me?’ She raised a mischievous eyebrow.

  ‘Certainly...’

  ‘You know that most writers long to go to bed with their heroines, if only in their imagination. But nothing can replace the real thing — it’s an act that reveals one’s true character.’

  What a great opening for a story, I thought.

  A story opening wasn’t the only thing on my mind.

  The next evening I went straight from work to Anna’s room. I had the impression that she had been expecting me, though she seemed unusually nervous. Turning away, she began to unbutton her white cotton blouse. I watched mesmerized as her little breasts played hide-and-seek. A moment later she let her navy-blue skirt fall to the floor. She wore no underpants. I stared at her snow-white buttocks, and, when she finally turned towards me, at her long red nipples, which seemed disproportionately large for her small thinlyveined breasts. My body and my mind were on fire, my blood was pounding. I tore off my own clothes, and before I knew it the thing was done. Anna was visibly disappointed, even angry.

  ‘You express yourself so fluently when we speak,’ she remarked, not without sarcasm, ‘yet in the language of sex you’re still a beginner.’

  I tried to apologize.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Lovemaking is not about being apologetic, but more about being... apocalyptic. Union between a man and a woman embraces the whole universe. Each encounter is a new act of destructive restoration.’

  I was growing extremely uneasy; in fact, I was sinking into a deep distress. What was worse, Anna felt sorry for me. She was clearly looking for a way to revoke what, just minutes before, had appeared so irrevocable.

  Then I heard her redeeming whisper. ‘It’s not entirely your fault,’ she was telling me. ‘I underestimated your fierce spontaneity — that is something a woman should never do. I promise you, next time it will be better.’

  And so it was. And after a few weeks of diligent practice we achieved what I thought must be the highest level of carnal harmony.

  It was too good to last. Because the day came when I knocked on Anna’s door and, to my horror, was answered by a man’s gruff voice. ‘Who’s there?’ it demanded.

  I was shattered. Like a thief I sneaked away on tiptoe. Hoping desperately that she wasn’t home from work yet, I waited near the foot of the stairs for Anna’s return.

  She greeted me with a strange smile. ‘My husband came back,’ she said.

  It was as I had feared. ‘So... what about us?’ I muttered.

  ‘Us? Don’t even dare to ask.’

  ‘You’re cruel Anna, very cruel,’ I heard myself tell her.

  ‘So is life,’ she snapped, and coldly squeezed past, abandoning me on the narrow bottom landing of our dark and winding staircase.

  Across the Wire

  My school friend and party comrade Sol Lichtensztajn, carried away by the tide of events, was forever in the thick of things. He lived with his mother, his one-legged father and his two little sisters in a one-room apartment on Dolna Street; in pre-ghetto days his parents had owned a tobacconist’s kiosk nearby. Sol’s father had excelled himself in the 1920 battle known in Polish history as Cud nad Wisłą (Miracle on the Vistula), where he lost his right leg and, for his bravery, was rewarded with a licence to sell cigarettes, an activity over which the government held a monopoly.

  The war brought severe hunger to the Lichtensztajn household. In no time, tuberculosis took care of one of Sol’s sisters, a suspicious cough confined his mother to bed, and the daylong nervous thud-thud of his father’s wooden leg drove my friend to the brink. Sol had jesting blue eyes, a thick blond mane over his forehead, and a strong wiry body; he resembled a Polish country lad far more than a city-dwelling Jew.

  At the end of September 1940, early on a crisp Sunday morning when God was still resting, Sol crept quietly out of his home, determined to procure some food for his dying mother. He walked up and down Dolna Street, and when he thought the sentry on guard duty was looking the other way, he leapt with the swiftness of a cheetah across the barbed-wire fence that separated this part of the ghetto from the rest of the city. But he wasn’t quite swift enough, for as he leapt he was struck by a bullet from the rifle of the Schupo, as members of the Schutzpol
izei, the German police, were known. His body was left dangling across the fence-wire.

  When my underground circle met, towards dusk that day, we greeted each other with great sadness. It was not that we weren’t accustomed to death — after all, the killing of Jews had become a daily occurrence. But we thought of ourselves as family, and it’s different when one of your own is murdered. For a good while we sat together in silence. Then, because we knew that the deed had been committed by a young Austrian, who before the war might easily have been a fellow socialist, we began to recall the 1934 uprising in Vienna, and some names of leaders that were dear to us: men such as Koloman Wallisch, Julius Deutsch, and of course Franz Munichreiter, chief of the fire-brigade, whom, because of a stomach wound he sustained in the failed rebellion, the Fascists brought to the gallows on a stretcher...

  ‘How passionately we were involved in their fight,’ one of us remarked, ‘sending our meagre earnings to help the starving children of Karl Marx Hof.’

  ‘It wasn’t just their fight, but also ours,’ Bono, our cell leader, reminded us. ‘And it still is. This war was not started by our comrades but by a madman, a megalomaniac who craves immortality. Well, his end will come, I can assure you.’ He nodded his head portentously, staring into the distance.

  ‘According to an ancient legend,’ he resumed a few moments later, ‘there was once a holy temple in Athens, constructed of light, hope and peace. One night, a deranged, talentless man who hungered after renown set the temple aflame; when it lay in ashes he ran into the marketplace and, to the astonishment of its peaceful citizens, screamed, “I put the temple to the torch! I put the temple to the torch!” For this, the sages of Athens proclaimed a heavy punishment: that no one should ever speak to the malefactor, no one should offer him shelter, no one should provide him with food; and that upon his death he should be left in the gutter to rot, until his corpse would turn the stomachs of vultures... Today, the same fate awaits that infamous arsonist in Berlin!’

  I think Sol’s was the last party interment in the ghetto. About twenty of us, bareheaded in the late-afternoon breeze, stood around the grave. Someone threw a red handkerchief into the open pit, and as the soil was tossed in and the makeshift coffin of our dear murdered comrade was covered by a sad and growing mound of fresh earth, Bono uttered a few valedictory words. Then, to the rhythm of the not-too-distant steps of the guard patrolling nearby, we began to murmur a familiar tune:

  There is no might that can bar our way

  or hinder with fear our hands;

  we will transform into sunshine the night

  with workers of all other lands...

  The day took on a nondescript greyness. At curfew we dispersed, cautious as shadows. Our mood was sombre, yet somehow the incandescent light that our parents, our school and our party had implanted within us, the light we believed capable of transforming night into sunshine, helped us now. It would continue to guide us through a world grown so utterly forlorn.

  The Chosen

  One can be wise and yet quite naive; one can be stupid yet extremely cunning. I would say that Schicklgruber, our nemesis to the west, was rather the latter. Like his partner Dzhugashvili in the east, he had the craftiness to pick, from among thousands, the right man for the right job. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what credentials they were after, his thugs began their search for a suitable servant-tyrant. Chaim Rumkowski happened to be in the right place at the right time. His face was beaming with acceptance. He didn’t realize what he was taking on...

  (‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?’ pleaded Moses, God’s lawgiver. ‘I am not a man of words.’ Nonentities, on the other hand, are forever eager to rule.)

  Chaim — a man in his mid-sixties, uneducated, with restless eyes and a questionable past, grey-headed like a Greek philosopher and imbued with Herodian dreams — proved the perfect choice. Initially he had a council of thirty-one to help him execute the master regime’s agenda. But on 7 November 1940, all but two of them were murdered. Meanwhile, up to 168,000 Jews were crammed into an area of just over four square kilometres, among them numerous people with small children, or with sick or lame parents. Some were desperate for shelter but shelter was hard to come by; we were among the lucky ones, old legitimate citizens of the squalor known as Bałuty, where the inverted state was set up.

  Jews are forever carrying on a love-affair with hope — if there were an Olympiad of hoping, my people would invariably take out all the gold. Consequently we quickly became accustomed to our permanently ephemeral existence.

  To show his Top Dog that he was worthy of the paper crown, Chaim the puppeteer established, almost overnight, a viable industry that churned out the finest product. For this our little Machiavelli was paid in food, which he distributed primarily amongst his chosen associates, along with their families and friends.

  As hunger continued to whittle away at the ghetto population, and the cemetery blossomed with unburied corpses, and people had to enter in the middle of the night to locate and identify their dear ones, a storm of discontent shook Chaim’s town. On 24 August 1940 a broadsheet appeared on ghetto walls:

  All the starving throughout the Ghetto will assemble on Sunday, August 25, at 9.00 a.m., at 13 Lutomierska Street.

  Brothers and Sisters!

  Let us turn out en masse to eradicate once and for all, in unison and by concerted force, the terrible poverty and the barbarian conduct of community representatives toward the miserable, exhausted, famished populace. Let every man do his humane duty to his kin and carry the cry:

  Bread for All!

  Enlist in the war against the accursed community parasite.

  We demand that soup kitchens be opened in the blocks.

  Next morning, Lutomierska Street was awash with vexation. Speaker after speaker incited the starving multitude to revolt. Suddenly, amid the turbulent throng, my dear friend Shmulik emerged from the crowd and, without hesitation, hopped on the roof of a nearby shed and sang a ditty composed on the spot:

  Our Chairman Chaim

  is an old mad hatter,

  Ghetto Jews are starving,

  he grows fatter and fatter.

  When all these tidings reached Chaim, he was furious. ‘Is this what I get for sacrificing my whole life for them?’ he screamed. Swiftly he summoned his leader’s henchmen. After all, law and order was under serious threat. They came, fired their rifles into the air, and went. That night, over a roast duck for supper, Chaim grumbled: ‘My whole ghetto is at stake, my dreams, and all they can think of is bread!’

  Herman Hecht

  On a bright morning in the autumn of 1941, a black limousine whose occupants included two uniformed members of the Gestapo drove into our street. Without a word, they handed over to the Sonderkommando, the special unit of the Jewish ghetto police, a large, tall, outlandish-looking man dressed in a navy-blue suit, white shirt, red tie with matching breastpocket kerchief, and polished black shoes. In his right hand he carried a brown leather suitcase of a kind never seen in our neighbourhood, and across his left arm was draped a beigecoloured trenchcoat.

  Our first meeting took place when the new arrival, plagued by a nagging hunger (to which we seasoned ghetto-dwellers were quite accustomed), asked for advice about how to exchange his trenchcoat for bread. He found it difficult to fathom the pushy locals, their skill at queuing up for food, their corrupted German tongue, their unrelenting Sisyphean struggle for life. When I tried to explain to Herman, who was twice my age, a few facts about ghetto life and ghetto people, he cut me short. ‘There is nothing to defend,’ he said. Well, there was; but he — the once debonair gentleman, with an air suited to his former standing in society, forced unexpectedly to dwell in a dim room with a leaky roof, who hung about the public kitchens or walked around like a lunatic, in vain searching the gutters for a forgotten potato-peel — he could not or would not understand.

  About a year later, the black limousine once again drove into our street, picked up a resigned, sallow-fa
ced Herman without ceremony, and drove off. This event coincided with the ongoing process of ‘resettlement’, so we assumed that the proud citizen of the great capital to the west would go the way all Jews were condemned to go. But to my pleasant surprise, just days later Herman was chauffeured back into our street. That evening I found him weeping on his bed. He was delirious — perhaps he thought he was dying. After a while he settled down, his Germanic Yiddish grew clearer; as I listened, a picture of the man’s past was coming to life.

  ‘I was born in 1900, into wealth,’ he began. ‘My father, a respected international merchant, decorated with the Iron Cross for his valour during the Great War, was a man of great benevolence and built many hospitals all over Germany. My mother was a well-known doctor. We lived in a palace, I was sent to the best schools, our library was one of the finest in Berlin, I loved reading and writing. We considered ourselves Germans, without asking our neighbours what they thought of us. At the age of twenty-two I married the most beautiful Aryan woman in the land; my two daughters — born, in accordance with my wife’s wishes, in Spain — are fine young ladies, they haven’t stopped lobbying for my release from this place. They are all so beautiful, so amazingly beautiful,’ and he pulled out a tattered photograph. ‘No, my loyal wife hasn’t forgotten her husband, nor my children their father; last month they saw the Spanish ambassador — after all, my daughters were born in Spain, so an audience was granted. But when they saw me, my dear wife fainted and the girls couldn’t stop howling. They kissed the boots of the guards to let me go. The guards told them, “You’re behaving like Jews!” but they couldn’t stop crying, my heart was shattered into little pieces. No, friend, I don’t want to live, not any more. It’s all so stupid,’ he whispered, ‘so incredibly stupid.’