Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow,’ was all she said as she left the flat. She walked down the stairs with Leo shouting after her. ‘If you’d only be honest with me I could help you, Hannah. I could love you. I could show you . . . if you’d let me. But you wouldn’t dare, would you.’ Leo kicked the wall.

  Hannah was gone. It was some time before he saw her again.

  17

  I WAS STRANGELY EXCITED TO HAVE BEEN CAPTURED; MY LETTERS to Lotte at the time were full of hope. It may seem odd, Fischel, but capture actually improved my chances of survival no end. For the first time since the war had begun I felt confident that I might come home alive. There were rules governing prisoners of war. We had to be fed, housed and treated humanely. I wanted Lotte to know that I would be safer behind enemy lines than at the front, so all we had to do now was wait until the war ended and we would be wed.

  Thank goodness I spoke Russian so well, because it bought me respect and I was often used as a translator. A Russian officer told me to keep hold of my letters until I arrived at my final destination. From there normal POW mailing procedures would apply.

  Those early feelings of jubilation were soon dashed. The Russians were overwhelmed by our numbers. They simply couldn’t provide for us in the combat zone nor could they transport us quickly to the rear. We were clogging up their supply roads and using up precious resources, so they hastily frog-marched us back through Galicia and gave us a miserly twenty-five kopeks a day to buy our own food from the villagers we passed on the way. It was barely enough to survive on.

  It took twelve days to get to Lemberg and I was followed every step of the way by Király. We were no longer obliged by company rules to march together and yet he shadowed me like a stray dog. At first I found his presence irritating, but the daily tedium wore down my resistance to him and we began to talk. Király was a man who needed a wall to kick against, he needed to hear himself shout and complain to know that he was alive. Put Király on a beach with a beer and a cigarette and he would still moan. This was his way; he was happiest when most provocative. He would push and push until he got you riled, and then he would laugh in pleasure at his victory. I learnt to humour him and even enjoy his offensive outbursts. If I reasoned with him he would weary of me, but if I insulted him he would rub his hands together and show me his crooked teeth in a twisted smile. I disliked everything he stood for, and he despised me for what he called my ‘pathetic romantic inclinations’. So a friendship grew, borne of mutual hatred.

  In Lemberg there was a rail connection to Kiev and we were shifted by the trainload to a huge POW holding station on the outskirts of the city where the Czechs, Slovaks and Southern Slavs were separated and transported to nearby camps. The rest of us were herded into freight wagons and sent further east. These teplushka, as they were known, had been fitted with a few wooden bunks, a stove and a solitary latrine bucket. There were forty of us to a car, wounded and non-wounded alike. We were on this train for weeks, cooped up like chickens, stewing in the stench of our own waste. Every foul, biting, crawling and flying insect in Russia seemed to sniff its way into our teplushka. The walls were a parade of cockroaches and fleas. There were lice, mites, and great flies that would swoop in and out of the latrine bucket and spread invisible particles of excrement all over us, causing sickness and disease. My body covered over in sores and mysterious rashes and as usual I was the first to come down with diarrhoea and vomiting, which of course made our intimate hell more intolerable. I thought of Lotte’s letter in which she had written of the need to keep one’s dignity. In the teplushka the most dignified thing a man could do was maintain his humour and morale for the sake of the others. So we sang, told jokes and swapped anecdotes of our disasters in the field. These last were often recounted with a light-heartedness that masked the horror of the events.

  Sometimes we spent days stuck on sidings with nothing to eat, wondering whether we had been left to die. Then without any warning the doors would open, a guard would throw in some black bread, we would roll out a corpse or two in exchange, empty our festering bucket, and the train would lurch forward again. The journey east was broken up by various stopovers where we would be put up in some converted brewery or theatre, while petty Russian bureaucrats agonized over what to do with us. Inevitably after a month or so we found ourselves back on the trans-Siberian railway. One day in November the train came to a definitive screeching halt, I could hear voices yelling down the platform. The doors rolled open, a blast of cold air rushed in and we stumbled out once more into the unfamiliar daylight.

  ‘Where are we? Have we arrived?’ we asked each other. I looked about me and saw the name Sretensk written in Cyrillic on a station signpost. I had never heard of it but I was sure we were somewhere in Siberia. It was several days before we realized we were in the triangle where North-Eastern Mongolia, China and Russia meet in the Chita province some seven thousand kilometres east of Moscow. I was a world away from Lotte.

  Sretensk POW camp was an out-of-use summer camp designed for a few hundred soldiers but soon to be the home of ten thousand Austro-Hungarians. There were two parts to the camp: a military barracks in the town itself and a collection of decrepit wooden and brick buildings on the opposite bank of the Shilka River. I was taken to the latter, and what was so startling about our arrival there was that the place was empty. We were the first arrivals, and by the look of the dusty, unswept floor no one had stayed there for quite some time. Nor was there much by way of facilities: the kitchens were under-equipped and there was not nearly enough bed space for all of us. The only water supply was from the frozen river to which one had to descend a slippery steep bank with a hammer and bucket. The toilet situation was no better than the train. It appeared no preparations had been made for us whatsoever; even our guards did not know their way around the place.

  The sleeping quarters consisted of two long wooden platforms one above the other running along the walls. These platforms were our beds, the occasional ladder giving access to the top bunks. Our dormitory was also our dining room and parlour. I bedded down with Király on the bottom bunk, and the space was so cramped that we all had to sleep on our sides like spoons in a drawer, with our knees tucked up under the next man’s bottom. We were terribly thirsty that first evening after our long trek, but with no water some bright spark had the idea of breaking off ice from the windows, so we sat there licking water lollies like overgrown children and there was much merriment and song. But reality soon hit and the grit of daily survival robbed us of humour.

  Occasionally we were ordered to carry water up from the river or to cut logs, both of which were gruelling in sub-zero conditions. Otherwise we hung around with little to do other than smoke or crush the lice that crept into our clothes and flick them on the floor. The vile stench of buckwheat porridge, stale tobacco, damp laundry and filthy men was all-pervading. But when I opened the window to clear the air, a blast of icy Siberian wind rushed through the barracks and immediately condensed into a misty vapour which settled over our bedclothes and made them wet. The men were furious with me and the window was never opened again, and so we mulched in our own rancid juices throughout the winter.

  I expected at the very least to be able to keep clean but the bathhouse was run by a little Russian guard called Spansky who would not let anyone bathe unless they tipped him on entry. Some soldiers, especially the NCOs, could afford to pay each day, but most of us went very sparingly and some never went at all. When I was desperate I would pour tea on to a flannel and wipe myself down with it.

  Corruption and bribery was a way of life in Russia and the camp was no different. If you had the money you could even buy butter or sugar from one of the guards. It cost me half my weekly stipend to bribe the postman to do his job and post a letter for me. I wrote more letters than I could afford to post. At least when I was writing those wasted letters I felt connected to my loved ones, even if this was in reality a fiction. Each month I selected one letter to post and kept the others in case the opport
unity came to send them later. Even the bribe could not guarantee delivery; the mail service was notoriously bad and all letters were censored. Incoming packages always arrived open with half their contents missing. In all my time in Sretensk I received only one letter, and it came from my parents. They said that life under the Russians had been very difficult, and that the old Jews who stayed were treated as spies and often lynched. That Polish peasants from the countryside had moved into vacated Jewish properties and that even when the Austrians retook Galicia and the Jews returned, these peasants had refused to move out. That there were legal actions pending but now an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility was tearing the community apart. Accusations of treachery and theft were flying in all directions. The worst part of all was that during the occupation the Steinberg mansion had become a billet for Russian officers, and in May they had set fire to it before retreating. The Steinbergs had returned to find their house in ruins and all their possessions gone. They were now living in their factory while Mr Steinberg tried to build his business again. My parents said they no longer felt safe, but they did have some good news to report, and that was that all my brothers and sisters were safe in Berlin. They said they had sent me some warm clothes and some Sarotti bonbons but they must have been stolen en route because the package was empty.

  Time slowed to a crawl and I sank deeper and deeper into depression. Day and night merged into one endless cycle of tedium. There was nothing to distinguish one day from the next. I began to doubt that I would ever see Lotte again. Ulanow might well have been back in Austrian hands but there were no signs of surrender. My mind latched on to Lotte as a drowning man clings to a raft. I relived every moment that I had spent with her, retraced every step of every walk along the San, replayed every conversation again and again until my head ached and the memories streamed into each other. I clung on to her letters and read and reread them, digging deeper and deeper into every word to see what lay beneath them. I tried to imagine where she was sitting when she wrote those words, the position of her legs, the curve of her body, the angle of her hands to the paper, the fall of her hair. I lived her letters to the final full stop. I packed her bags with her and loaded the cart when she left Ulanow, and I trudged through the mud at her side worrying about her when she lost her footing. I laughed with her when her father was selling furs from his cart. I lay with her under the bear hide and sank into her sweet-smelling skin. She permeated my dreams.

  Then I began to suffer strange physical side effects. I found it increasingly difficult to swallow. My stomach distended and I couldn’t defecate. Soon I began to splutter and overheat. I stopped getting out of bed in the morning. When finally I woke up with my torso covered in red spots I knew I had typhus. It was my great fortune that, as usual, I was one of the first to be struck by the epidemic, for at least I was given a proper bed. Those who caught it later were not so lucky. I found myself in the hospital building. I don’t know how I got there, because by then I was delirious and obsessive. Lotte was flying and spinning before me. Sometimes she was inside me, sometimes she was dead; now she was eating my innards like a rabid dog, now she was caressing me. I had the odd flow of lucidity in which I saw other patients lying on the floor or leaning against the wall next to my bed waiting for me to die, for indeed I was slowly ebbing away. One night a fire raged inside me and I saw Lotte in flames, a tremendous heat burned through me, and my lungs clogged up with smoke. I could hardly breathe; I had to escape. My every pore craved water and cold. I must have rolled out of bed and crawled to the door gasping for an icy Siberian wind to cool me, for in a flash I realized that I was at the entrance of the building and the hospital was on fire. An orderly found me and carried me to safety. There was great clamour and shouting and the camp woke from its slumber. The water supply was all used up fighting the fire but it was not sufficient to extinguish it. The men ran down to the river and smashed through the ice layer that had formed overnight. They hauled out water by the bucket-load and passed it along human chains up towards the hospital. But by the time they had got it there our hospital had been razed to the ground. It was never rebuilt.

  The following day I was put in a makeshift infirmary that had been set up in a few rooms. My new bed was by a window overlooking the hill behind the camp. I saw a man pulling a sledge towards a small wooden outhouse halfway up. It was difficult at first to make out exactly what was on the sledge because the ice lay so thick on the window that it made everything blurry, but when the man arrived at the door he leant down and with great effort dragged his charge across the snow and rolled it into the outhouse. By its weight and shape I realized that it was a body. Further up the hill, a fire burnt day and night. The next day more sledges arrived at the little house and more bodies were piled up inside. The traffic steadily increased, and then after a week or so a work party of men carrying spades marched up the hill to where the fire still burnt. The frozen ground had thawed enough for them to turn their spades in the soil. So they put out the fire, dug a mass grave and, without ceremony, emptied in the now-rigid corpses from the house.

  I was so close to death that the orderlies had already been through my pockets to see what was worth stealing and Király came to pay his last respects. This was a foolhardy thing to do – no one in their right mind would visit the typhus ward for fear of catching it themselves – so Király’s appearance was particularly touching. For the first time ever he addressed me by my first name.

  ‘Moritz, you stupid arse,’ he said, ‘I curse the miserable day I had the misfortune of meeting you. You were always a useless piece of shit and now you’re going to be a dead piece of shit. They’re going to chuck you in that cesspit on the hill with the rest of your gut-rotting compatriots and I won’t be sorry to see you go. No, Moritz, I won’t miss you for a minute. Anyway I’ve come to say goodbye and fuck off . . . Well haven’t you got anything to say for yourself, you bastard, or are you just going to slide off without a word?’

  I was shivering uncontrollably and something that felt like a knife pressed into my kidneys. I could not speak but I was able to raise my hand and give him the finger. Király was delighted. ‘That’s the spirit, Moritz!’ he roared, and he left the ward laughing . . . Oh dear . . . talking about it is bringing back the symptoms . . . Fischel, please hold out the spittoon for me . . . thank you, my boy . . . urgh . . . look away . . . I’m sorry. Perhaps you could fetch me a bucket and a cloth. I’m in a sweat, I need to cool down . . . thank you . . . Oh, and Fischel, could you bring Dovid and Isaac in? I would like to see them.

  18

  AH, MY THREE BOYS, I’M GLAD YOU ARE ALL HERE. COME, Fisch, pass Izzy to me. There you go, little one. Lie there. Always asleep, so quickly asleep. Lucky boy . . . Dovid, you can play with your train in the corner if you like. You two little ones will understand nothing of all this other than that you are loved, but you, Fischel, must take note and explain it to your brothers when they are older and, in time, to your own children. So where was I? I can’t remember. Ah yes, Sretensk. As I lay on that bed in Sretensk I had never been further from Lotte and I had never been so close to death. The corpses were piling up outside my window, there were dying men on the floor next to my bed, even under my bed, waiting for me to be thrown on the heap so they could have one last feel of a mattress before joining me. The war still raged with no end in sight. There were many who thought it would not end in their lifetime and that they would spend the rest of their lives in Siberia. I was staring into the tunnel of death and it did not look unattractive. The pain I felt was so acute that I was ready to give my life to make it stop. I slipped into a strange state of unconsciousness that was neither coma nor sleep. I felt myself rising upwards through space, the pain was gone and I could see myself lying on the bed as if from above. Ahead of me was a bright light, indeed so bright it was impossible to look at. I felt as if I was accelerating up towards it, leaving my body far behind.

  Now, I have heard from people who came close to death that they saw their whole life
pass before them, but for me it was different. I saw children, dozens of them. They were naked, their eyes were as clear as mountain water and their beauty was indescribable. At first I thought they were the angels and cherubs of heaven, but then they started calling me ‘Daddy, Grandpa, Great-grandpa’, and I understood that these children were my children and my grandchildren and my grandchildren’s children. They did not look as I now know you to be, but there was a Fischel, a Dovid and an Isaac amongst them. These children – you – were my future and I knew that you needed me. I tried to reach out to you and hug you, but though I was moving towards you and you were standing still I could not touch you. I realized that I would never reach you this way. I had to go back. I had to live.

  Sometimes the future visits us and tells us what we should be. We think that we are in control of our destiny, that we are walking towards it. We think we are following our ambition, but perhaps it is the other way round and our future is hauling us in like fish on the end of a rod. Certainly that is how it felt to me, and I thank you for it. When I came to my senses there was no doubt in my mind that I would survive. I had turned the corner and there was fire in my belly. I would not wait for the war to end; I would escape and find my way home. I would go as soon as I had my strength.