I shook my head. ‘He wasn’t really a friend.’
‘Don’t worry, I don’t feel bad about you, Steponas. Anyway the fucker got his deserts.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some Lithuanian thugs picked him off the street. They recognised him from the time he was hanging out in the bars with the Russian officers. You know where they took him?’
‘Where?’
He grinned. His clean smile was broken by missing teeth. ‘To the same place they took me!’ He laughed. ‘Beat the miserable little creep to a pulp that even his own mama wouldn’t be able to identify.’
The Nazi swastika hung from the building recently vacated by the fleeing Soviet army. The dark cells continued to be put to good use.
‘Many have taken refuge in the forest,’ Ira continued. ‘I talk to Rachael about this, but every time I mention the forests she shivers and refuses. Not the forest, she says, just not the forest. And in truth the forest is not a good place for baby. What to do? We keep our heads low and hope that it will pass. It will pass. It has to. There are good times and bad times, it has always been so, the good times give way to bad and then the bad give way to good. Just to keep the head down and weather the storm. After all, they can’t kill us all!’ His grin was curiously chilling.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘They can’t kill everybody.’
Before the month had ended Einsatzkommando 9, the special action squad, had moved into Vilnius on the heel of the German tanks, and conducted their first Aktion. Five thousand Jewish men were rounded up from the poorer quarter of the city centre, not far from where Jerzy and I were lodging. Jerzy, who had ventured out into the warm sun, came back ranting.
‘Why are they not fighting?’ he yelled, slamming the table top with his weak fist.
‘With what are they going to fight?’ I asked. ‘The Polish army was steam-rollered, the Russians have retreated, but a group of unarmed Jewish men are going to take on the Wehrmacht?’
‘Still!’
Jerzy paced about the untidy room wringing his hands. I sat at the table working on a play, a project Marcin Lunski had suggested about the rout of the German crusaders at Zalgiris – Grunwald – by the intractable Samogitian forces.
The Germans claimed the Jews had been taken to labour camps but within days other rumours began to circulate in the city. There were stories of survivors of a massacre. A young man who had crawled naked from the mountain of corpses in the forest glade just outside the city. Tales whispered in the candlelight. Nightmares perhaps. Perhaps only rumours and nightmares.
In early September more Jewish families were dragged from their homes. With pitiful bundles they were loaded onto trucks and driven away down the avenue of maples, tremulous with autumn’s first breath. From imprisonment in Lukiszki they were taken somewhere else. This time the talk of deaths was more open, reprisal for the killing of Germans, the Nazis reported. And the name Polar began to haunt the lips of young and old. The beautiful thick woods six kilometres beyond the city.
The thinking behind the removal of the poor families from their cramped apartments soon became clear. Two ghettos were established. Around each of the small areas wooden fences were erected to cut them off from the general population of the city. The two ghettos were divided by German Street – Niemiecka. The entrances of the houses facing out were blocked off. There was only one entrance to each of the ghettos. These gates were placed on-opposite sides of the ghetto so that it was impossible for the residents of one ghetto to communicate casually with the residents of the other. Though only metres apart they could have been separated by kilometres. At the large wooden gates of the ghetto signs were erected reading, ‘Attention! Jewish area. Danger of infection. Non-Jews Keep Out!’
As the narrow streets resounded to the work of the Ger mans, officials with wads of lists worked door to door. Finding ourselves within the limits of the planned ghetto area Jerzy and I were politely informed we would have to move.
‘You are not to worry,’ the plump, red-faced Nazi official assured us. ‘It is an inconvenience, I know, but heavens, better than living here like rats, heh?’ He laughed nervously, flicking through his papers. ‘You will be ,allocated with property vacated by the Jews outside the ghetto area. You will I am sure be pleased.’ He was sweating in his uniform which seemed slightly too tight and he looked weary. He clicked his heels smartly when he left, throwing us a respectful salute. Jerzy, however, did not move.
I gathered some boxes and rented a small pony and cart from a friend of Rita’s. When I returned with them to our apartment in Rudnicka, Jerzy had disappeared. I swore angrily and began to gather our meagre possessions. I was most concerned to prevent our books and papers from being damaged. As I was carefully packing Jerzy’s old typewriter into a small wooden box the door burst open. Jankowski stood in the open doorway ashen faced.
‘Alexei! Where the fuck has Jerzy got to?’
‘Come and see,’ Jankowski said, almost inaudibly.
I followed him out into the dark stairwell. Boxes and packages of belongings were piled deep on the landing and up the stairs; residents coming and going following Nazi orders. Jankowski kept two paces ahead and would not turn when I called. The pony I had hired stood patiently tethered to the old maple. In the low afternoon light I noticed a commotion down the street, sliced by a sharp shaft of heavy afternoon sunlight.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Jankowski, hurrying to catch up. He stared ahead, pacing quickly down the uneven cobbles.
On the edge of the crowd Rita was stood in a cold slab of shadow. Her face was white and she covered her mouth with her two delicate painter’s hands. Lunski stood beside her.
‘Rita? What is going on?’ I asked, fear knocking heavily from within my chest. She shook her head and Jankowski took my arm and thrust me through the crowd.
The onlookers circled an old tree. An oak. Its leaves had begun to fall and lay golden on the grey cobbles. The tree was gnarled and twisted with age. From its stubby trunk it threw out one particularly impressive limb. The branch reached out across the street, dappling the cobbles in the summer, providing shade for the tired walker. From the sturdy limb Jerzy’s emaciated body hung. The body swung in small, slow circles. His hollow eyes gazed down vacantly at the earth. His feet dangled. His poet’s fingers curled like claws.
Chapter 52
‘Two young German soldiers stopped a mother in the street. An argument started. Jerzy wanted to step forward and intervene then. He was boiling. I held him back. You will cause more trouble than good, I told him. I managed to cool him. And then one of the soldiers grabbed the young mother by her hair and dragged her to the ground.’ Marcin Lunski demonstrated, grabbing the air in his fist, twisting and pulling it down. He wiped his eyes. ‘As she fell, the baby dropped from her grasp. It was swaddled and bounced on the pavement. Rolled. The young girl let out a scream that stopped my heart. She leapt forward to grab it, but the soldier yanked her back by the hair while the other soldier kicked the bundled baby out of reach of her fingertips.’ He paused again. ‘They laughed.’
‘They laughed?’
‘At that moment Jerzy let out such a shriek! Like an animal. Like something non-human. It sent a shiver down my spine. He lunged forward and I was not able to stop him. Before I knew what was happening he was on the soldiers like a wild animal. A tiger. He ripped at their flesh and bit into one of the soldier’s necks. They were terrified.’
Lunski paused. I did not turn from the window where I was stood. Outside darkness had fallen. The night was crisp, dear. From the street came the sound of cartwheels scraping on the cobbles, the breath of the horses, occasionally a phrase; low, nervous Yiddish. They made their way quietly to the ghettos.
‘More soldiers appeared instantly. They pulled him off kicking and screaming. When they had secured him they took the young woman and stood her against the wall. Right there in the street, beside the doorway. Look, they said, she is not worth fighting for. She is Jewish. She is verm
in. They have diseases. Like rats they must be exterminated. A soldier raised his rifle and shot her. She crumpled against the wall. One shot.’
‘And the baby?
‘It was dead already. The kick had killed it. They lobbed it over a wall. The soldiers.’
‘And then they hung him.’
‘I couldn’t watch. I buried my face in my hands. A soldier came by and hit me in the ribs with the butt of his gun. Watch, he said. Watch and learn what happens to those who try to defend Jewish scum. I uncovered my eyes, but I did not watch.’
Fear settled on the city like a freezing fog. There was no nook or crevice into which it did not reach its icy fingers. It settled and it did not shift. We lived in the knowledge that it was scraping its broken fingernails against the panes of our windows. Sucking the warmth from our hearths. Bleeding the strength from our limbs.
I moved into the new apartment Jerzy and I had been allocated, but without him I felt lost. I sat alone in the room, a blanket wrapped tight around me, the door locked and bolted. Lunski had suggested I stay with him but I could not. There I would talk and we would drink, we would drink and laugh and then I would turn and Jerzy would not be there. I unpacked his books and poems and placed them neatly on the desk. Alongside them I set his typewriter. Closing my eyes I pressed the keys, listening to its clack as if it was his voice whispering to me, late into the night. When sleep ambushed me I dreamt of him swinging, hollow-eyed, the wind catching the curls of his hair. A pounding on the door woke me. Rita called to me through the keyhole. I did not get up and after a while she left.
Ghetto number one was designated for craftsmen. Ghetto number two was for everyone else. Those with work permits were required to move into Ghetto number one, whilst the elderly, the sick, and orphaned children moved to Ghetto number two. They began the long walk between the two ghettos late in the day on I5 September. Of three thousand sick and elderly, only six hundred walked through the wooden gates. The rest were lost in the night. In the fog that had descended upon the city.
I returned to the hospital, numbing my pain with work. I avoided Lunski and Jankowski and saw little of Rita, who immersed herself in her painting in her small studio. I hid the play I had been working on with Lunski beneath the rug in the flat I had moved into. One night I woke with a start. The fog buffeted the window in the darkness. Scrambling out of bed I gathered the sheets from beneath the rug. One by one I burned them in the flame of a candle.
In February 1942 I heard that Ira had escaped the ghetto. He had joined the FPO, the United ·Partisans Organisation. Making their way through the sewer system they had taken to the forests to continue the fight from there. A sister in the hospital gave this news to me. She was a Dominican nun and I was aware that their convent was sheltering partisans. Despite the conditions a theatre had been established in the ghetto. Concerts were performed to packed audiences and a lending library, even, had been organised. All this the sister told me. I listened but I did not ask.
Sometimes, in the early evening, despite the debilitating fog, I once again wandered the streets. Here I had first seen her.
Here we had talked. Here I had followed her. Here I saw her, radiant, her curls bursting out from the kerchief, her belly bulging slightly, giving away the reason for her joy. We had stopped by the old birch tree, a lifetime before. It shone silver. At the point where Old Mendle’s path forked off the road. Her breath was ragged. We stumbled. Our faces met, in the pale light. Almost lip to lip. Almost.
The sun shone. Day followed night. Winter thawed and spring blossomed. The summer was warm. Autumn turned the leaves and winter froze them on the cobbles beneath my feet as I walked to the hospital tired. Always tired. The hospital overflowed with the sick and wounded. The smell of death filled my nostrils. Having been raised on a farm I was used to the death of our livestock. As a child my grandmother had taken me to sit with the bodies of dead neighbours, in the days before burial, but that was a normal part of the routines of village life. This death I now confronted in the hospital, with its dark corridors, plastered green walls, tiled floors and stench of disinfectant, was coldly industrious. Care of the sick and the dying was a chore and the bodies were removed hastily to make room for others. A typhus epidemic assailed the city population exhausted by war.
One evening Sister Martha found me crouched in a corner with my hands clasped tight over my ears, blocking out the sound of the suffering we could do little to control. She knelt beside me and stroked my forehead softly with the back of her hand.
‘How can you stand it?’ I asked her.
‘If we don’t, who will?’ she said, simply.
She took me by the hand and lifted me from the floor. I followed her back out into the corridor where the sick sat on narrow benches, waiting for the dead to make room for them in the more comfortable beds.
*
From December 1941 to early 1943 the city achieved a kind of peace. Nervous peace. Fearful peace. But the fog never entirely dissipated.
The peace lasted until July of 1943 when the Germans captured Wittenberg, head of the FPO. The partisan groups responded immediately, launching a fierce attack on the police station where he was being held, and freed him. Wittenberg went into hiding. The partisans had been carrying out small-scale attacks on the Germans around the city, blowing up rail tracks, murdering smaller isolated groups of German soldiers and stealing supplies. When I arrived at the hospital on the morning of the sixteenth Sister Martha, my Dominican companion, was distraught.
‘The Nazis have threatened to liquidate the whole ghetto if they do not hand Wittenberg over,’ she told me.
As the hours trickled on towards the deadline, our hands worked and our bodies continued their tasks; our minds, however, gnawed at the news of the ghetto. Ira had, I knew, escaped to the forest and joined the partisans, but Rachael was still inside the walls of the ghetto with her young child. Sister Martha had been a nun for ten years. She was young and good-looking. Her hands were always steady and I never saw her flinch from the most difficult tasks; but when she lit a cigarette, later, in the semi-darkness it shook in her fingers.
We smoked the cigarettes sparingly; they had come from a former factory owner, a patient wanting a little better treatment.
‘You puzzle me,’ she said, passing the cigarette across to me.
‘I do?’
She nodded, waiting for me to draw on the cigarette and hand it back to her before she continued.
She hesitated a moment before she said, ‘There is something strange about the way you behave. You’re reserved and you say very little. You are interested in what is going on in the ghetto, though you pretend not be. But you are not with the partisans.’
‘You think I’m a Nazi informer?’ I said dryly.
‘No, but I was wondering whether you had Jewish blood?’
‘Jewish? No,’ I said quickly, flushing.
She gazed at me fixedly, inhaling the smoke deep into her lungs. ‘So?’
For some moments I said nothing. A small window high in the wall let in a sliver of grey light. Sister Martha had deep black rings around her eyes. Her sharp eyes did not leave my own, I felt them searching me. Perspiration beaded my forehead. I felt a sudden overwhelming need to confess to her, to tell her all. The agony of silence broke within me and I felt it rise in my throat, a painful lump. I coughed back a sob. For a moment I could not speak. She reached out a hand and let it rest gently on my knee. It was the first kind touch I had felt in months. I could not hold back my tears then. I wept bitterly. I told her about Rachael. I told her everything from beginning to end while we slowly smoked our precious cigarettes. She did not interrupt me. After the long silence words tumbled out. When I had finished she leant forward and wrapped her arms around me.
A young boy arrived later that evening and asked for Sister Martha. I ran to find her. Martha was weeping when she returned to the ward.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Wittenberg has given himself up to spare
the ghetto,’ she told me.
Just over a month later the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto anyway. When we heard the news we rushed into the streets. I do not know what we thought that we could do. Sister Martha left me to find one of her contacts to see if anything could be done. The streets were full of soldiers. I hurried to the ghetto.
Chapter 53
The closer I walked to the ghetto gates the more soldiers there were. Tanks loomed at corners. The soldiers were tense; their guns held at the ready. A large fair-haired young soldier approached me.
‘Ja? What you want?’ he asked in heavily accented Russian.
‘I live that way,’ I said, indicating past the ghetto gates.
‘Go!’ he said. His hand pushed against my chest. Pushing me back down the street away from the large wooden gates. ‘Get out of here!’
A sweat broke out on my forehead and my hand began to tremble. ‘But I must get home,’ I said, aware that he could ask for my papers and check my address.
‘Fuck off!’ he said aggressively. He was joined by another soldier, slimmer, thin-lipped. He pointed his gun at my chest.
‘You heard him,’ the second soldier said. ‘Get out of here.’
I retreated down the street. The gates to the ghetto had swung open. Soldiers swarmed around a couple of green army trucks. In the distance I could hear shouting. Orders barked. Impotently I stood in the shadows at the corner, looking down the cobbled street to the ghetto gates. They would take her through there. She would be loaded onto a truck. They would take her. My heart thumped and a thin fog appeared before my eyes. Where would they take her? Ponar? I pushed down the images, the pictures that had filled our nightmares. Bodies in ditches. The crack of gunfire startling the birds in the forest. Bloodied, lonely survivors, lying in stupefied silence beneath the corpses of their friends, families, waiting for darkness to creep away. Rachael oh Rachael, I breathed. Oh God help.
So intent was my attention on the flurry of activity at the gates of the ghetto, I did not hear the quiet footsteps on the cobbles behind me. A hand grabbed my arm and I had to stifle a scream. I wheeled around. Sister Martha held me, indicated for me to be quiet, to follow her.
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