East of Time

by Jacob Rosenberg

  With a small hammer I freed the little body from the solid matter, and as I took out the goldfish Miss Fela burst into uncontrollable weeping. Rebecca was the only living thing she had. But there was nothing we could do, there is no antidote to death. Lucky little Rebecca — at least she died in her own bed. What a great privilege, in those surreal days, to outwit the ashes.

  I kissed my teacher and left, just as the first star appeared and lit up heaven’s callousness.

  Perhaps three days later there was a knock on our door. Miss Fela had come to say goodbye. ‘I finally received my wedding card,’ she said, showing us her resettlement notice. ‘At last I’ll be the bride for once. Rumkowski has told me I’ll be working in a kindergarten. Forgive me, good people, I must hurry. My children are waiting...’

  Sparks in the Dark

  Spring 1943. Europe’s socialism was sinking into an abyss of iniquity, with the German and Austrian socialist parties fully integrated into the Nazi movement. Yet we Bundists in the ghetto of the waterless river had not begun to question our beliefs, not even when to our horror we learnt that the waterside workers in faraway New Zealand had gone on strike, refusing (after their government had rejected their demands for a pay rise) to load some armour destined for the war effort against the Axis. We were hurt but did not judge — nothing could shake our belief that the solidarity of the free world would in the end prevail.

  On May Day, I arrived at work earlier than usual and secretly (so I thought) chalked a big zero on the daily production-target board. I was denounced and summoned to the office of the factory director, Kohen. ‘Saboteur, saboteur!’ he yelled, shaking his fist into my face. ‘I’ll teach you!’ Although Kohen was also an officer in the ghetto police, he had recently been warned by my co-workers that if he didn’t control his cruel excesses he would be taken care of. Kohen was a known funk. I’ve heard somewhere that the rattlesnake is essentially a coward, its rattle acting as a cover for its dread.

  A day or so later, at around midnight, there was an alarming knock on our door, followed by the sound of a familiar voice. It belonged to Motele Hoizer, my party’s secret messenger. ‘Hurry,’ he urged, ‘there’s no time to lose, they’re coming to get you. Your parents must hide too; they’re taking hostages.’

  Mother looked distraught. As we dressed, father remarked to Motele: ‘To find a hiding-place in a prison is like finding sanity in an asylum, and we live in both.’

  ‘Please,’ Motele replied, ‘there’s no time for philosophy. It’s only for one night. We have received reliable information that this is the last transport, for the time being.’ And almost at once he was off into the dark again, to return to his own home.

  Adjacent to our room lived a quiet eighteen-year-old student, Zev. His parents had been killed four years ago in an airraid, and his sick sister had been thrown out of a hospital window into a waiting German truck for dispatch to the gas chambers of Chelmno. Zev lived alone. We told him we would hide in the disused attic on the top floor of the building. ‘Fine, just go!’ he hissed. ‘Run for your lives.’

  Shortly afterwards we heard, from our attic hideout, the impudent clatter of police boots — and Zev’s screams. ‘I don’t know where they are!’ he cried. ‘I don’t know anything, and I’m not going, I’m not going!’ The policemen gave him a merciless beating, but Zev stood his ground and they left empty-handed. A few minutes later he stumbled up the stairs and found us. He was bleeding all over. ‘Don’t come back yet,’ he whispered. ‘You don’t know how cunning they are.’

  For a while the four of us stood there together in the dark, hugging each other. Mother kissed Zev, and he cried. I don’t think it was because of the beating. Zev was alone: he had no one to kiss him.

  Next evening Motele brought news that the Russian armies on the eastern front were pressing their former ally hard, in Africa the Germans were in retreat, and there was serious talk about a second front in the west. The war was surely drawing to an end, yet this seemed to make little impression on the behaviour of the Kohens and their ilk — ‘patricians of our circus state’, as father put it, who still looked upon our puppet chairman with an air of reverence and admiration.

  On the other hand, although our ghetto continued to be emptied of its Jews, we Bundists never lost faith in socialism — and in Schiller.

  The Merchant in Ghetto

  Kalman, the man I had befriended in the queue while waiting for our daily bread allocation, had come from a different town. He told me about the lively cultural life of his home ghetto, which had a small underground library, several reading circles and a semi-legal theatre condoned by the authorities. A particular event he related to me during one of our meetings has all the elements of legend, and maybe a legend is what it is. Yet there are few nobilities or cruelties in fiction that can equal the realities of my time. Here is Kalman’s account, more or less as I remember it.

  One dull Monday morning a black Mercedes made its way through the practically deserted ghetto streets, and pulled up softly in front of the theatre. The chauffeur jumped out smartly, swung open the rear door with gusto, and stood to attention as his superior, a man in his mid-fifties wearing a trim green-grey uniform, emerged from the car.

  He was welcomed on the pavement by Moish Kawa, the stage director, who reverently bowed his head and led the German censor, Hans Hoffmann, to his tiny office. Depositing a parcel of food on the manuscript-cluttered desk, Hans, who was well aware of Moish’s erudition, and of the irony of the bow, remarked: ‘I like you, Moish. You are a compulsive communicator, like all good artists.’

  ‘Thanks, Herr Hoffmann, but you give me too much credit,’ the other replied. ‘An artist-poet, more than any other person, has a responsibility to reflect justice and decency, and above all to oppose evil.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘One of my teachers, the poet Broderzon, once delivered a lecture based on an old tale. A simple man was strolling with the prophet Elijah when he noticed in the distance a group of Jews passionately engrossed in prayer. “Tell me, Elijah,” he asked, “will these men have a share in the world to come?” “No,” the prophet replied. Further on, they spotted two strange figures with top-hats and colourful canes. “These two,” said Elijah, “will be entitled to a share in the world to come — they are comedians, actors, entertainers. As such, they are bringers of hope, joy and laughter to a downcast humanity.” That, my teacher concluded, is the ideal of true theatrical art.’

  Hoffmann was smiling. ‘You were blessed with a fine teacher, Moish. I agree wholeheartedly with his philosophy.’

  ‘If that’s the case,’ said the director to the censor, who took an interest in Moish’s family life, regularly bringing food and medicine for his family; ‘if that’s the case — and you know there is nothing personal in my question — then tell me, good sir, why are your people, who are so soaked in culture, in great theatre and poetry and sublime music, doing such unspeakable things to us?’

  Hoffmann nodded sadly, then answered in a whisper, lest the very walls hear and betray him. ‘Obedience is inherent in my people’s makeup — obedience to authority, which one must not dare to question. And according to the teaching of that authority, your crime is your birth. Luther drummed it into our psyche. It is written in the sixteenth chapter of John, verse 6: If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and withers; and men gather the branches, and throw them into the fire, and they are burned.’

  ‘I’m impressed. But how do you feel about that, Herr Hoffmann?’

  ‘I think it’s wrong, though I’m a devoted Christian... But I did not come today, my friend, to discuss religion. I’ve brought you a strict order from my superior, a playwright who thinks of himself as an artist of the first rank. He wants you to stage his version of Der Kaufmann in Venedig. He plans to invite many high dignitaries and military officials to the opening. You see, our playwright is convinced that the Jews bribed “that shopkeeper Shakespeare”, as he puts it (our Führer says the English are a
nation of shopkeepers), to insert a Jewish speech into the play. In order to right this wrong, he has rewritten some of Shylock’s lines.’ Hoffmann pulled a manuscript from his briefcase and quickly located the relevant page. ‘Here we are.’

  Moish read through the proposed changes to Shylock’s celebrated speech (‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’) in the third act. After a prolonged silence, he said: ‘My dear Herr Hoffmann, to do this would be a betrayal of my lifelong belief in theatre, and of the philosophy you so wholeheartedly endorsed just now.’

  The German fell back in his chair. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? Your refusal could spell your end. And for me... well, to fail at my age is not a very good affidavit for one’s future. Think what you are doing by refusing.’

  But the director remained steadfast. Hoffmann left, never to be seen again, and The Merchant was never staged in that ghetto. Yet Moish Kawa, with his perceptive Semitic eyes, miraculously made it through the war. He spent many years searching for his benefactor, who was reputed to have once been a superb Horatio in Max Reinhardt’s Hamlet, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1909. But all his searching came to naught. Finally, it dawned on him that Hans Hoffmann was possibly none other than one of those strange figures in Broderzon’s tale, who, for carrying a spark of light during a season of darkest despair, had doubtless been promoted to the domain of the world to come.

  Vestibule

  In the shadow of death, some people dream of bread while others argue metaphysics.

  Aron Wolman, one of my mentors in the ghetto, was a man in his early forties, tiny of stature but deep of voice, with a penetrating gaze. ‘There are many ways of reading, of interpreting our scripture, of musing upon our folklore,’ he remarked one day, closing those gleaming eyes of his, perhaps to protect some inner vision. ‘It is told that Abram smashed his father’s clay idols to pieces, then placed the stick he had used into the hands of the oldest god. When asked by his angry father, Terah, “What have you done?”, Abram answered: “It wasn’t me, father — your chief god did this.”’

  Aron smiled, though hunger was reverberating in his stomach. (He ate only once a day, just a morsel of bread; the rest, whatever there was, he gave to his young teenage daughter, who was dying of tuberculosis.) ‘Abram’s deed,’ he went on, ‘can be seen as the first human rebellion against paganism, the first proclamation of the one and only invisible God... Invisibility!’ his deep voice rang out emphatically. ‘What a mighty contribution to a loftier monotheism—’

  There was a sharp whistle, followed by shots, cries, a scream. ‘Raus, raus, alle Juden!’ Abruptly, Aron’s face was drained of all colour. But without losing his composure he switched off the light, walked towards the door and attached to it a note with a single word printed in red ink: TYPHUS. Then he came quietly back to his seat.

  ‘What do I mean by “loftier monotheism”?’ he resumed, as if the outside world was of no concern to him. ‘One’s inner freedom, one’s inward sense of justice, one’s total rejection of barbarism.’ Moulding his words like a sculptor shapes his clay, Aron endowed each phrase with an almost physical presence. ‘As I see it, such monotheism,’ he concluded, ‘is quintessentially anti-religious! It rejects not only all forms of xenophobia, but widens the boundaries of one’s intellect, and one’s spirituality.’

  These words I heard more than sixty years ago, while enveloped in total darkness but for the searchlights journeying over our blind windowpane. I heard them from a weak man of steel, in death’s vestibule, who ate metaphysics instead of bread.

  Mythology

  ‘Psychoanalysis,’ said Aron Wolman, ‘believes that the key to any individual’s character lies in the story of his or her childhood.’ He had just begun his lecture, held in the home of one of my friends, where we seven poets met once a fortnight.

  To lend our meetings a festive hue, each of us would bring a slice of bread taken from our weekly ration — for as it is written, Ein kemach, ein Torah (without bread, no Torah). On this occasion, the contribution of our host’s mother was a hot pot of chicory, plus a small dish of salt to dip the bread in. Having prepared this sumptuous feast, she removed herself from the premises, so as not to be tempted to appease with even a solitary crumb her own hunger-racked stomach.

  ‘Accordingly,’ Wolman continued, ‘the roots of the present atrocities have their origins in the perpetrators’ very mythology. In the beginning, their legends tell us, was the giant Ymir. He was the progenitor of all the terrible races that were to make the world ring with bloody battles. At times these races were threatened by their own gods, who intended to exterminate them but only saw them rise again, more numerous and stronger than ever. The first god was Buri. Buri fathered Bor. One night, when the moon did not permit Bor’s offspring to sleep, they got up and slaughtered their great-grandfather.

  ‘But the gods were not content to have slain the giant — obviously there was no respect for the dead. From Ymir’s blood they made the oceans, his flesh became the solid earth, his bones the mountains and his teeth shingle. With his skull they created the vault of heaven, with his brains the clouds, and with his hair the trees.’ Wolman paused. ‘As you can see, my friends,’ he stated with some emphasis, ‘the marriage between murder and economy is not an accident, but rather the ancient principle of an everlasting mythological longing.’

  At this point one of our group spoke up. ‘Given our daily experience, it might appear that your argument from psychoanalysis is valid. But Aron, is it not true that our own mythology is also intertwined with murder, incest, fratricide, and many other brutalities?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aron replied. ‘And yet, the mere fact that after four years of anguish, fear, starvation and hopelessness, hardly any murders have been committed in the ghetto, must tell us something.’

  ‘And what is that?’ asked a bushy-haired youth with a gleam in his eye.

  ‘Perhaps something to do with our being in exile...’

  ‘But all people are in exile, one way or another.’

  ‘True, but the majority are not aware of it.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that if we lost our awareness of exile, we would be capable of doing what they are doing?’

  ‘Some things are the more powerful for being beyond simple explanations,’ Aron retorted. Then, betraying an agitation that bordered on anger, he sank his teeth into the last sliver of bread, threw his worn-out coat over his scrawny shoulders, and departed.

  Why We Didn’t Rise

  The last confrontation I had with my party leader, Israel Binenberg, took place a world ago, yet every detail of that encounter, even the most trifling, is still vividly alive in the chamber of my memories.

  We met in his flat and sat facing each other across his table, I the member of an unarmed cell of the ghetto underground, and he my political instructor. Israel was a small, stocky, well-built man, a carpenter by trade, with a moon face and foxy, mocking eyes. Although he had a rather nasal voice, he could colour it with both severity and irony, and he could galvanize a crowd like few others. Sitting opposite me now, clad in a blue shirt whose rolled-back sleeves nearly covered his strong arms, he kept adjusting the table-lamp with his short fingers, the better to scrutinize my face from the shadows in which he had securely planted himself.

  ‘What on earth has become of us,’ I asked, ‘that we, the heirs of a great revolutionary tradition, should take all this lying down?’

  Israel surveyed me impassively before replying in a voice wooden with gravity: ‘And with what arms, my great revolutionary, would you propose to stage our rebellion? Do you know that in our armoury, which is guarded by our faithful comrade Kusznierski, there sleeps peacefully one solitary gun, no better than a toy? And have you forgotten that not only are we encircled by barbed wire, but also, beyond, by an ocean of hostility?’

  If I was taken aback, it did not prevent me from pressing ahead. ‘Well, you’re the leader,’ I retorted, my audacity mounting. ‘Wasn’t it your responsibility to think of this when there w
as still time?’

  ‘Hold it, hold it, brave Jacobin!’ Israel’s voice was suddenly alive with authority and reproach. ‘We are living in an age when no leadership is answerable to its followers. We do what we think is right, for the whole community. The same rule governs the Zionists in ghetto, and even the ever-volatile Communists’ activities.’ He was arguing with incontestable clarity.

  But I was bent on a different logic. ‘Look, our youth is ready to fight, and we will fight. We have a plan. First of all, at a time to be determined, groups of five will attack sentries throughout the ghetto and quickly deprive them of their weapons. We calculate that within ten minutes we may have as many as fifty guns in our hands...’

  Israel was now visibly alarmed. Indignantly he lit a cigarette and, fanning the smoke away with his short arm, burst forth with a vehemence I had never before witnessed. ‘Don’t you dare!’ he exclaimed. ‘We will expel all mad hotheads from the party.’ Then, withdrawing even deeper into the shadows, so that I could hear but not see him, he changed his tactic. He stretched his hand towards a drawer and opened it. For the first time after all the years of my ghetto life, I saw a whole loaf of bread and a sizeable hunk of juicy white cheese. Miracles like this appeared only in homes closely connected with the higher echelons of the pyramid.

  Israel motioned for me to help myself. ‘You know,’ he said, calm and reflective now, while I cut a thin slice of bread, broke off a small lump of cheese and sat back to savour this unexpected bounty, ‘I’ve coined a new maxim; it might just help our people more than guns. Live and outlive — I mean, of course, outlive them, our oppressors.’