“Allow me to tell any of your subordinates that these women are permitted to stay on premises in case they inquire on whose orders?”
Willy’s pleading gaze promised all the best goods in the entire Occupied Eastern territory he could only get his hands on, to Sturmbannführer Bröger for his generosity. Bröger moved his shoulder – a monarch granting a life. “Tell them. Only don’t tell them that it’s because I have a soft spot for your company that I permitted this. Or we’ll both be heading to the front the next day, Schultz and I won’t forgive you that, trust me.”
“I swear, Sturmbannführer. I’m a grave.”
“You look like one.” Bröger gave Willy a once-over. “Go take a shower and change for Christ’s sake. My men, who’ve been working all night, don’t look half as miserable as you do.”
Willy obliged him with a crooked grin. Bröger could abuse him for an entire day for all he cared, as long as his brigade was safe.
“I’m serious, Schultz. Go put yourself in order and I’ll be waiting for you for lunch in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You’d better. And bring that Hennessy, if you still have it and the sardines. We’re celebrating today.”
Willy nodded his compliance. He’d bring him the cognac. He’d bring him everything he had, his soul if needed, just to atone for what he had chosen to ignore, just to save a couple of hundred out of hundreds of thousands that were already dead.
Chapter Nineteen
The ghetto had been sealed, by the SS, for four days. For four days, the brigade slept in the cellar – this time, though, with Bröger’s permission. On the fifth day, he made a personal appearance and, red-faced and jolly, announced that since the brigade was allowed to live, the SS would have to get something “for their trouble.”
“No gardening for you today,” he said. “March to the ghetto and clean up the mess there. Off you go!”
Willy was absent that morning. He’d been summoned to the airbase on an urgent matter and left me behind to watch the brigade.
The SS men were already counting the women as they lined up, obedient and meek, in the usual rows of five, on the street. I threw a glance at the building. I didn’t have to go with the brigade; I knew that, even though Willy’s office had been closed, any of his comrades from the same floor would let me stay with them until he returned. They had all been familiar with me by now and called me “our Ilse.” Even Liza gave me a sign to stay put where I was – who knew if the SS received another order to do away with the working brigades as well and where best to do that, if not in the ghetto itself. I contemplated the entrance, then the brigade in front of me.
“You don’t have to join them, Fräulein Stein.” Bröger looked at me in surprise as I slipped into the last row of women. “You’ll only bring typhus back.”
“She won’t. Our people dispatched the entire hospital.” His adjutant tried to conceal his chuckling by coughing but the wry, mocking smirk still sat, ugly and crooked, on his young, clean-shaven face.
“You really can stay,” Bröger repeated, ignoring him. I began wondering how much exactly had Willy paid him for him to express such concern for my well-being.
“Thank you, but it’s all right, Herr Sturmbannführer. I’d like to go with my sisters.”
“As you wish.” Bröger raised a brow and snorted with amusement before setting off.
It was early morning, yet the heat was rising from the asphalt as we marched on. New shoes, still tight and unbroken, pinched my feet. I looked ridiculous among them in my attire and I felt it. I hadn’t the faintest idea why Willy had insisted on dressing me up in all these ridiculous outfits from the German department stores. First, that suit; then shoes, underwear, stockings – the best of the items for a corpse who would soon be buried. But after all, wasn’t that how the tradition had it? Only the best for the dead, even though they may be still living. Still, he dressed me with some obstinate obsession, as though all of these clothes, shoved into an endless black hole of hatred from which time was leaking out, corroding everything on its way, would be enough to stop its relentless, inevitable course.
Near the gates of the ghetto, a bored sentry looked on from his watchtower as we were being counted before being admitted inside. As soon as he took his attention elsewhere – no doubt, to two sharply dressed Wehrmacht Helferinnen walking past with their Alsatian on a tight leash, on their low heels, in their ironed skirts, with their beautiful hair put under the caps in fashionable rolls – one of the men from another working brigade inched his way toward ours and slipped something into Liza’s hand.
Her eyes lit up at once as she recognized the handwriting. With a beaming smile, she hid the note in her pocket. The man from the neighboring brigade had already rejoined his ranks and thoroughly pretended to be immersed in reading the only sign that “graced” the gates of the ghetto and which we all knew by heart: Warnung, Bei Durchklettern des Zaunes wird geschossen. Warning, people who climb through the fence will be shot.
“What is it, Liza?” I guessed what it was but was too afraid to jinx it.
“Nahum has managed to escape,” her reply came in a hushed, excited whisper. “He’s alive. He’s with the partisans already. He writes he’ll get us out as soon as possible but until then, he says not to talk to anyone and not to trust anyone except Sergei.” She stole another grateful glance in the man’s direction. He was still perusing the sign with what appeared to be the utmost interest. “They left only collaborators in charge. Sergei, he’s a good comrade, a longtime friend. We worked together at the same power plant before the war – I know him quite well. He could have run too but he stayed to keep the connection between the ghetto and the partisans.”
I regarded the inconspicuous man with newfound respect. To purposely remain in this purgatory, that took more than most of us had in us.
“I’ve never met him before,” I confessed.
“You’ve never met many of them before and that’s the way it should have been from the very beginning,” she replied. “It’s because everyone knew everyone in the fall that already in the spring the Gestapo killed Rivka, Styopka-Kaznachey, Zyama, Eli; through them got to the City Committee, then hanged Efim and almost all of his fellow printers and almost caught Boris himself.”
“That’s what I say.”
I swung around and came face to face with Lore, my baby sister with a wise, grown woman’s eyes who didn’t even try to conceal the fact that she was listening to our hushed conversation the entire time.
“Discretion should be our utmost priority,” she uttered again.
My brow clouded at that “our” of hers; she had never severed her ties with the printers or whoever she was in contact now – she wouldn’t tell me that just like Liza preferred to keep quiet on some people’s account, not because they distrusted me but solely because it was the only sensible thing to do. The less one knows, the less one will reveal under torture and who can tell how well they can tolerate the pain when they make an actual acquaintance with the Gestapo? I never told them about Otto Weizmann’s communist inclinations and his defection plans he kept contemplating along with Willy; neither did I speak of any of that with Lily, my elder sister. Life had taught us all too well how to keep quiet.
“With Sergei’s help, Nahum will get us out. You’ll see how fast he will,” Liza whispered again. “Nothing is lost yet, Ilsechka. Nothing is lost.”
How I hope for you to be right, my dear Liza!
Our bright mood didn’t last long. As soon as we stepped through the gates, the overpowering stench of blood assaulted our senses, metallic and instantly recognizable, even more pronounced on this hot summer day. As we were marched to our assigned sector, we stepped in it; it was inevitable since it was everywhere – in dried-out puddles and brownish streams, splattered against the walls and running down from the windows, from which half of a torso was hanging – shot during an attempt to escape, it was officially called in their reports.
Lo
re stared ahead, grim yet perfectly collected. She looked as though she was committing the entire grisly picture to her young mind. She was, most likely, to report the carnage to her cell members who would print it out and shower the city of Minsk with it, the villages around it; perhaps, dispatch it to Moscow even. Unlike my youngest brave girl, my poor pale-faced Lily was swaying slightly on her feet. My eldest sister couldn’t bear the sight of blood and the streets around us had turned into a veritable charnel house which turned even my stomach with dread and I had never complained about the weakness of my nerves. I could only sympathize with her plight and offer her my elbow for support. I had the most profound conviction she would have fainted had I not gathered her into my arms in time.
“Start with the roofs and top floors.” Our SS supervisor was all efficiency; they all were. “Assemble all the bodies on the ground along the sidewalk. The trucks will arrive by twelve to collect them.”
A shadow passed over his face as he had fixed his gaze on us, regarding us closely for the first time. “Why are you not wearing your stars?”
“We’re Leutnant Schultz’s special brigade,” I explained quickly and offered him my Ausweis for perusal. “Sturmbannführer Bröger said it was all right. We’re German Jews; we aren’t considered a flight risk.”
He gave my papers a cursory perusal, nodded with a measure of respect at Bröger’s signature and suddenly grinned brightly. “Well, you’re the only ones left. There’s no more Sonderghetto. I hope you won’t mind too much, your future living arrangements together with the Ostjuden.”
“I suppose you won’t make us suffer too long.” I don’t know what bug bit me to say it; much too my relief, he only laughed again.
“No, we won’t.”
That was evident without his morbid confirmation. From our vantage point on one of the roofs a few minutes later, we watched as the men from the working brigades were tearing down the barbed wire which formerly served as a border to the Hamburg ghetto while the other unit was already erecting a new wall, much closer to the Cemetery. Our SS supervisors explained that this was where we were going to live from that point on, in squat little houses with typical Russian windows, framed in carved, painted white wood.
“Good neighbors. Quiet,” Liza commented in a flat tone, motioning her head in the Jewish Cemetery’s direction.
Someone snorted next to us. I did too, in spite of myself. Soon, our entire little clean-up Kommando was laughing hysterically while tears streamed down our faces. We laughed at our own approaching death.
After a few hours, we learned to recognize when the person that we carried was killed. The most recent ones were stiff as boards; their arms and legs were impossible to maneuver into any sort of normal position and we carried them the way they fell, rigid and unyielding, to the blistering outside. Their skin was cold and clammy; we soon learned to hold them by the parts where their clothes covered them so they wouldn’t slip from our grip.
The ones from the first two days of the massacre were bloated caricatures of their former selves, insects already crawling inside their mouths open in silent pleas. Each time we lifted them, the gasses inside their poor broken bodies made soft, sighing sounds, as though the dead were apologizing for causing us to look at their discolored faces and suppress retching at the stench they were emitting.
We lined them all up along the road regardless – the stiff and the bloated, the young and the elderly, the men and the women, until the streets were full of them. There were more dead in the ghetto that day than the living.
In the evening, after scrubbing the blood off the floors of our new lodgings, we washed our hands and headed to the Labor Exchange to receive our meager rations distributed by exhausted men who didn’t look any better than us. After exchanging our ration coupons for some bread and soup, we brought the food back to the house. There were very few of us occupying it – we had been allowed even to choose our own quarters; that’s how many wooden huts now stood empty and silent, with their windows staring at the street like the glazed-over eyes of the dead. We decided to wash them as well the next day; there was no blood on them but still, we wished them to be clean, just on general grounds.
In the evening, an hour before the curfew, Liza and I walked to the Cemetery and sat on the ground, still warm from the day. The burial brigade was still digging in the distance, dying sunset bleeding its last rays onto their uncovered heads.
“How many of us are left?” Liza wondered out loud.
“I don’t know. A few thousand?” I squinted against the sunset.
“There were over two hundred thousand of us just last June. How is it possible? They killed almost two hundred thousand people in a little over a year. Just here, in Minsk. How many similar ghettos are out there, in Europe, do you think?”
I didn’t say anything. It was inconceivable just to imagine the number. I didn’t want to imagine anything today. I saw far too much for my much-too-short life to imagine things in addition to what I already seen. My head would explode if I began counting the dead that I didn’t carry today.
The cuckoo bird started her mocking counting somewhere among the headstones. Liza, looking strangely concentrated, began counting along with it.
“What are you counting, you silly thing?” I nudged her with my elbow. “It’s a Jewish cuckoo bird.”
“Seven,” she counted out loud. “Is there a difference between Jewish cuckoo birds and Gentile ones? Ten. Eleven…”
“There is; a big one. A Jewish cuckoo bird doesn’t predict the years to live as the Gentile one does. The Jewish ones count the days until we die.”
“Fifteen… I’ll still take it. Two more weeks to live. Sixteen…”
“You’re a silly old bat!” I barked at her, rising to my feet.
She didn’t say anything, only chuckled and kept counting. Outbursts like mine were nothing new and she herself was prone to them. We were long past the days when it would offend us.
The next day, I was back in Willy’s quarters. Upon returning from the base, he wasn’t himself, wandering around with a lost look about him. I wrote it off to working matters and let him be, busying myself with all the lists and reports he had brought along.
I felt his eyes on me as I typed, miserable as they get. He rose to his feet, paced around the room like a caged animal, moved the curtain away, restless and searching for something he couldn’t quite find.
“Leave it.” He touched my shoulder gently at last. “Leave that paper; it’s not important now. Let’s go for a walk instead. The weather is beautiful and we don’t have many summer days left.”
I was grateful for that “summer” which he tactfully included in the sentence.
Outside, the air smelled of lilacs. Soft clouds drifted languidly across the sky, entangling themselves sometimes in crowns of the trees and turning into flowers of cotton. Willy bent down and twirled a leaf he’d picked up in his fingers, scowling at it with dissatisfaction.
“The first yellow one already?” I took it from him.
“The autumn will be here soon. It’s good for the brigade. The heating season…” His thoughts were far from the brigade; I sensed it well enough.
“Out with it.” I stopped and made him look at me. “What is it?”
“What is what?” he smiled weakly, pleadingly.
“You’ve been walking around with the face of a professional mourner ever since you returned. What is it? A new order of some sort you’ve learned about? Don’t try to spare my feelings; it’s worse this way. Just say it, so I’m prepared for whatever is coming.”
He stole a glance around, took my hand and pressed it slightly before I pulled my palm out of his, giving him a certain look. No need to risk it; those soldiers are much too close, and one of them wears a Feldgendarmerie Gorget around his neck, I can see it gleaming in the sun from here. Let them clamber onto their motorcycle first and drive away, the further, the better.
“Walk with me some more, Ilse.”
We strolled for
ward, circling the building. Near the intersection, the Field Police caught up with us on their motorcycle and sped ahead, ignoring the red light with astounding arrogance about them. An elderly peasant, who was carrying a heavy sack on his back, had barely managed to drop his precious cargo and leap off their path for they showed no inclination to slow down. Accompanied by their laughter and the roaring of their powerful engine that was now growing fainter in the distance, the elderly man dropped to his knees to gather as many potatoes as he could before the light would turn green and the staff cars would smash them to a pulp. The light changed and the horns blared their warning but the man positively refused to get away from the busy road. This pitiful sack was perhaps the entire harvest which he and his wife (if she were still alive that is) managed to grow this year and at this point getting hit by a car seemed much more preferable to him than slowly watch her die from starvation, or starving himself, all alone, for that matter. Tears streamed down his heavily-lined, leathery face as he continued to work at his task with stubborn determination. All else simply ceased to exist around him.
Willy was already running toward him and signing for the cars to halt. With his usual efficiency, he summoned some teenagers who were loitering on the corner and, waving a pack of German cigarettes as a powerful incentive, motioned for them to help the old peasant. I collected whatever I could as well and deposited all of the potatoes into his sack, which he held open with trembling hands. When the last item was packed, Willy led him away by his elbow and, after handing the grinning youths their promised payment, inquired if the old man was hurt. The latter only grinned with his thin, toothless mouth which kept twisting into a tearful grimace despite all of his visible efforts to keep it straight. Fearful of offending, yet overpowered with the desire to demonstrate his gratitude, the peasant reached out with his crooked, arthritic fingers and patted Willy’s sleeve ever so slightly.
No Woman's Land: a Holocaust novel based on a true story (Women and the Holocaust Book 2) Page 18
