East of Time

by Jacob Rosenberg

  Within a few minutes the paramedics (whose children, like those of the sniffer dogs, were exempt from the Hunt) arrived on the scene. Kuna’s eyes were still open. The older of the two men gave her one glance, struck a match, sheltering the cigarette in the shell of his hands, and said: ‘As good as gone. Take her away.’

  The Hunt began on the morning of 5 September. As the huge high-sided truck rolled into the yard of 22 Łagiewnicka Street to collect the petrified little children, Gedaliah grabbed his niece, ran up to the roof, and roped her to the chimney in such a way that, for the duration of the search of their yard, she would appear as one with that structure. (He didn’t have to warn the three-year-old fugitive not to cry.) Then Gedaliah turned his face to the sky: ‘Almighty Lord,’ he prayed, ‘grant this child at least seven days of what my people granted You for all eternity — make her invisible!’

  And He, may His name be forever blessed, did.

  By the twelfth day of the month, the Hunt had come to a temporary pause. Gedaliah was just nineteen, his sister was dead, his parents in some nowhere, and he with a little girl to shelter, feed and protect. He decided to seek the help of his sister’s sister-in-law, Dora Blatt. But as he entered her flat, holding Rifkele’s thin hand in his, the woman and her husband Israel — a man who, once known for his composure, now resembled an asylum escapee — crumpled before him. ‘Oh, Gedaliah, Gedaliah,’ cried Dora. ‘They took away our two children too, they’ve slaughtered us! We are dead!’

  The young man understood the situation and left.

  A few hours later, as the night was closing in, Dora unexpectedly appeared on Gedaliah’s doorstep. She was dishevelled and her face bled from self-inflicted scratches. ‘How will I sleep, Gedaliah? How can I sleep?’ she wailed, taking the bewildered Rifkele by the hand and hugging her tightly to her breast. ‘Maybe someone out there will have mercy on my children. After all, God is great...’

  The little one, white as a ghost and trembling all over, as if suffering from an attack of malaria, could not contain herself any longer. ‘Mummy!’ she screamed. ‘Mummy, where are you, Mummy?’

  Her heart-wrenching plea would reverberate in her uncle’s soul for the rest of his life.

  So it was that, thanks to a distraught woman’s nobility — and to Gedaliah’s food-ration card, which he left with Dora — the good Lord endowed Rifkele with two more years of life and dread.

  Give Me Your Children!

  They reversed Leviticus. You shall steal. You shall deal falsely and deceitfully with one another. You shall commit robbery, defraud your neighbour. You shall withhold the wages of the labourer. You shall insult the deaf, place stumbling-blocks before the blind. You shall render unjust decisions, favour the rich, show no deference to the poor. You shall judge your kinsman unfairly, deal basely with your countryman, profit by the blood of your fellow. Keep these laws and do not fear God.

  On 4 September 1942, in the third year of my barbed-wire existence, I heard our reigning puppeteer speak to the multitude. ‘Mothers! Give me your children!’ he pleaded.

  Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than twenty thousand Jews out of the ghetto; if not, We will do it for you! So the question became, ‘Should we take it upon ourselves, do it ourselves, or leave it to others to do?’ Well, we — that is, I and my closest associates — had to think first not ‘How many will perish?’ but ‘How many is it possible to save?’ And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we must take the implementation of this decree into our own hands. I must perform this difficult and bloody operation — I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take children because, if not, others will be taken as well, God forbid...

  I wasn’t a parent at the time, and perhaps I couldn’t grasp fully the meaning of what I was witnessing. Yet more than six decades later, I still keep wondering what sort of a man can bring himself to utter such words.

  Meanwhile, the ‘resettling’ commission — Rumkowski’s appointees, whose children were not to be affected — sent out emissaries to weave stories and reassurances. All resettled youngsters would be placed in beautiful sunny kindergartens, while the sick and elderly would be under the care of famous German doctors. Do you really think, they argued vehemently, that people who walked with Mozart, Goethe and Beethoven could be capable of murdering babies?

  My thirty-year-old friend Izzy Dajczman, with whom I worked at the factory at 13 Żabia Street, spoke little; when he did say something, you could hardly see his lips move. At the outbreak of war he had escaped to Russia with his wife Miriam and their little son Arele. He soon came back to occupied Poland, so as not to be late for his rendezvous with fate. ‘To learn from one’s mistakes is almost superhuman,’ Izzy would whisper. At this time he and his family lived in a long, dark, one-window apartment which I often frequented. Miriam was a gentle soul and always greeted me with a smile.

  The night of 5 to 6 September was a gruesome one for ghetto parents. At daybreak the Germans were to begin taking their children away, and there was nothing they could do. ‘Let’s hide,’ Miriam pleaded. ‘Let’s hide no matter what.’ But Izzy shook his head. ‘If they catch us, we’re all dead,’ he said. ‘So what? I’d rather be dead than give up my child!’ ‘What about the kindergartens? — maybe it’s true...’

  Mid-morning on 6 September. A Jewish policeman opens their door, enters, and lifts up Arele. The little fellow, white with fear, cannot understand why his mother is howling, why his father is shedding tears while reassuring her, ‘Everything will turn out for the best, you’ll see.’ Arele is dressed in the new navy-blue woollen coat that his father made for his fifth birthday. On a wire around his thin neck hangs a piece of white linen with the boy’s name and address: ARELE DAJCZMAN, KALLENBACH 6. ‘Don’t forget, Arele,’ says Izzy as he walks him to the door, ‘to tell your new teachers that you know both the Hebrew and the Latin alphabet, and that you already know numbers.’

  Outside, a uniformed German grabs Arele by the collar and heaves him like a bundle of rags into a large waiting truck. Its open platform is walled in by several rows of timber planks, to crush any hope of escape for dangerous offenders like Arele Dajczman.

  A few days later, on our way home from work, Izzy begs me to drop in for a minute, if only for Miriam’s sake. ‘She’s down, so frightfully down,’ he tells me. We climb the stairs and open the door to their room. A faint beam of light plays on Miriam, who is lying in bed with her face to the wall. As we draw nearer, we notice the pool of blood at her throat.

  I spend a sleepless night in Izzy’s flat. At the first spark of daylight I boil the kettle and we sit at the table, mourning in silence. At last I encourage him to eat a slice of bread. He obeys, and a few minutes later we go off to work together.

  The Pyramid

  In common with all hierarchies, our ghetto’s social and functional organization — and its pecking order — was constituted in the shape of a pyramid. As the old saying goes, the deeper the foundations, the securer the structure.

  The bedrock of the ghetto pyramid in the city of the waterless river consisted of tailors, cobblers, carpenters, weavers, hatters, plumbers, toolmakers, housepainters, barbers, and many others with less specialized hands. What was remarkable about the members of all these occupations is that, although they hated their masters, they loved to work — to mend, to make, repair, restore. Life was hard for the bedrock people, the load they carried on their meagre shoulders was heavy; yet many were the times when one would hear from the mouths of these starving toilers a tune hummed, a melody recalled, bringing back bygone days of humble happiness and family joy.

  Szymon Berger was my foreman in the clothing factory, a smallish, upright, pedantic man, a tailor of some renown and an important stone in the pyramid’s foundations. He taught me that happiness was an elusive commodity, difficult to trap. He had a twelve-year-old boy who was sick, and I observed in the factory how Szymon would never touch his soup; while the other workers ate heartily,
he closed his eyes so as not to be tempted, and after work he would carry his meal, like a holy talisman of life, home to his sick son. Thinking back now, it reminds me of a disturbing story I once read, about a tigress that kept her cubs alive by feeding them with bits of meat ripped from her own body.

  The next layer of the pyramid comprised an insipid host of inspectors, accountants, record-keepers, pen-pushers, notaries, and assorted squealers; inventors of ‘evidence’ who spent their days in whispers, beneath a barrage of lies.

  Not far away, in fact on the layer just above them, were the cooks, the managers of public kitchens, the ladies with the lucky ladles, and the drab obtuse Jewish ghetto police. Next came the special units of the ghetto police, the dreaded Sonderkommando, responsible to the Germans and recruited mainly from among high-school students; perhaps because they were unable to shake off their feelings of inferiority, they terrorized those lower levels of the pyramid on which their very existence depended.

  On the level before the pyramid’s apex dwelt Rumkowski’s trusted elite, who between them dreamt up an illusory inertia whereby the ghetto would remain just as it was, a nonexistent reality in which they refused to define themselves as victims.

  At the top of the pyramid, then, was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, our king — whose eyes were like crows locked behind two thick-rimmed glass cages, and whose face appeared (at least to me) like a closed fist. He walked about the ghetto as if he owned it, but wore his sixty-odd years with a certain dignity. Although he had his trusted insiders to assist him, the ultimate decisions, the decisions of life and death — who would be resettled and who would stay behind — rested primarily on his shoulders. But where is the man who can state with conviction whether Rumkowski’s decisions were a product of bravery or of cowardice? His lot was lonely, to be sure, and very far from easy. Did he have a choice? Perhaps he did, and perhaps he didn’t. Our lives, after all, are determined by unknown chemistries, and governed by mysterious trajectories.

  And in the end, who knows how many times, during sleepless nights, this man who projected such strength and confidence shrank back in horror at the echo of his own fateful words: ‘Mothers, give me your children!’?

  Mercy

  There was a kind of unreality about my parents’ friend, the tailor Fishl Binko. He seemed to be driven by a gregarious solitude, the simultaneous need to be in a crowd and to be alone. Fishl was also a great teller of fables — what a pity he never wrote any of them down. I can still remember a few.

  A mountain-climber seeking shelter from the winds enters a little hut. The hut is filled with books, and its sole inhabitant, a philosopher sated with the years, welcomes him. ‘Who are you, stranger?’ he asks the climber. ‘A wanderer, sir,’ the other replies. ‘Have you read any books, my young wanderer, have you any schooling?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Then please,’ begs the old philosopher, ‘tarry a little. I am in dire need of an honest teacher.’

  Fishl was large and imposing of stature, with an olive complexion, and beneath his pitch-black bushy brows, his brown fathomless eyes and his sagging lips, he wore an expression of disenchantment. He had once been a great believer in justice and human decency, but the war, the ghetto, Europe’s betrayal of his people, and awareness of our lives’ permanent ephemerality — of which he didn’t dare to speak, even to his closest, for fear of the very words — had transformed him into a fierce sceptic.

  His wife Frumet, whom he had married in 1928, was a willowy woman from a traditional home, and four years his junior. She had an elongated face and rosy but slightly fallen cheeks. Her shiny dark-blond hair parted in the middle made her resemble, I thought, the image of a suffering Madonna, and not without reason. Like the biblical Hannah, Frumet had been plagued with barrenness; like Hannah, she had implored God in her wretchedness to open her womb. It took eight long and tearful years before the Almighty in His mercy finally answered her prayers.

  Mirka was a beautiful, chubby child; thanks to her parents, even that starving ghetto of ours could not deprive her cheeks of their sweet dimples. As for Frumet, she was content with a few spoons of watery soup; her bread, to its last crumb, was put aside to nourish her growing Mirka, who by the autumn of 1942 was six years old.

  When it was proclaimed early in September that all children under the age of ten were to be ‘resettled’, the whole family went into hiding. On the morning of the 7th, the Jewish police raided the Binkos’ apartment. Satisfied with its deadly emptiness, they were about to leave when Mirka, who had been hidden under several layers of blankets, gave a little cough. Within seconds she was dragged from under the bedding. Fishl jumped to her rescue from his hiding-place but was swiftly knocked out. Then Frumet emerged, pounding away with both fists at the policemen’s faces, screaming, ‘My baby! My baby!’

  Shortly afterwards the distraught, demented mother stood like a black hole in time before the ghetto fence. She had no more tears to cry, no voice left to scream with. Just beyond, on the outside, a little girl with a knapsack, holding on to her mother’s hand, was walking to school; a boy was riding a bicycle; lovers were strolling, smiling, laughing... Of course, all this was an illusion. The only reality was the barbed-wire fence, and the guard. ‘Take pity, merciful soldier, please,’ she implored. ‘Pull your trigger. Shoot me. Here, right here — right in my miserable heart!’

  The guard duly obliged.

  At night Fishl, like a sack emptied of its contents, sat on a low stool in the darkness, with ash on his head. Over and over, he was reciting a passage from the Bible:

  Perish the day on which I was born,

  And the night it was announced

  ’A male has been conceived!’

  May that day be darkness;

  May God above pay no heed to it;

  May no light shine upon it;

  May darkness and deep gloom reclaim it;

  May a pall lie over it;

  May what blackens the day terrify it.

  May obscurity carry off that night;

  May it not be counted among the days of the year...

  So Fishl cursed the day of his birth, his life, his very being. But ghetto legend has it — and most of our legends are so rooted in reality that sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which — that one night an angel paid him a visit. ‘Fishl,’ he said. ‘God admits that he sinned against you. He is about to give you a new wife, and three Mirkas. Remember Job?’

  ‘No, no!’ the stricken man answered. ‘Go back to God and tell Him that Fishl Binko is overburdened with His mercies.’

  ‘What do you intend to do?’ asked the angel, growing uneasy.

  ‘Hang myself.’

  ‘That would be to defy the Master?’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘But Fishl, all those who committed suicide in the ghetto are walking around in Hell.’

  ‘That may be true. But their faces are shining.’

  History Lesson

  At the height of their victories the Germans stood at the gates of Moscow, while we Jews, a multitude of emaciated shadows, were incarcerated in a twilight crevice awaiting the end of our days. Father, albeit the eternal pessimist, said: ‘Yes, they may enter Moscow, even push beyond, but they will lose the war.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked my mother, surprised. ‘Look at them, Gershon! Look at their mobility, their armour, their tanks and guns. Each of them is like a god of war. Who is there to match their power? In no time, they have become masters of Europe.’

  ‘You’re right,’ father replied, his grey eyes like two eagles in flight on his knotted parchment face. ‘But there is an anecdote from history that throws a strong light on the present situation. During his pursuit of the cunning Kutuzov, Napoleon spotted through his spyglass a Russian ulan softening his stale bread in his stallion’s urine. He lowered his glass, turned to one of his generals, and said, “We’ve lost the war!” You see, these Russians can trade misery for machines, space for speed, and what the invaders have forgotten is that Berlin’s pleasant
tradition of afternoon Kaffee und Küchen is not upheld that far to the east — especially when the thermometer tells them, “Gentlemen, put your noses in your pockets, it’s 50 degrees below zero.”

  We smiled but father was just warming up. ‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘the Führer’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, summoned the foreign press in October last year to announce officially that, for all practical purposes, the war was won! On account of such a glorious victory, Reichsidiot Adolf Schicklgruber dismissed nineteen of his most able generals and appointed himself commander-in-chief of the army. You see, Masha, this evil fool obviously believes that military strategy and street-brawling, at which he was once an expert, are one and the same thing.

  ‘No, the Germans will definitely lose the war,’ my everdoubting father repeated unequivocally, ‘and those who live to witness humanity’s triumph will also witness the way these once-pompous and arrogant Teutons will run like frightened rats to the seven corners of the world.’

  ‘What then?’ I spoke up at last. ‘After everything that has happened, will mankind quietly return to the same old way of thinking — complete with all their ideologies, dogmas, beliefs?’

  ‘Yes. And do you know why? Because Sancho Panza cannot live without Don Quixote. Because one illusive beacon in a hopeless night is worth a thousand daylight suns.’

  The late afternoon was bending toward dusk, our room darkened. Mother lit the kerosene lamp; she knew how father loved its smoky flame. It reminded him of his childhood home, his mother Perl Gittel, his strict religious father, the melamed Yeruchim, who would sit day and night studying the scriptures. For a good while, dad stood before the flame like one in prayer, and as his lean shadow began to sway on our green wall, I heard him take up a soft chant.