Nothing could be further from the truth, because after a half-hour’s eager anticipation, we were still standing there when two furious SS bosses stormed in and with an abruptness unsuitable to his rank handed over a written order to our completely confused commandant. Hurt to the bottom of his sensitive soul, Oberlieutenant Brückner, with a hollow voice, ordered us to count ourselves and after we did, the two cocky SS men passed quickly by the lines and harshly pulled out every tenth man to stand in front of the row.
You’ll die laughing, but one of the tenths happened to be me—as they say, if Yahweh, glory to His name, has given orders for you to get into trouble, there’s no way you can avoid it.
The whole business was about some big boss of theirs who’d been shot in the streets of Warsaw, and now they were looking for a hundred Poles as hostages. You know how it goes: if the assassins do not surrender themselves by this or that date, this or that time, on the dot, the hundred Poles will be shot in legal and fully understandable retribution. Now, I ask you, in view of the existing situation, which was better—to remain a Pole or admit I was a Jew? The question hardly has an answer, because in the one case, as well as in the other, I’d end up, as the saying goes, pushing up daisies, but I personally preferred to be a Polish Jew—a sweeper in the New York subway. My boss, Oberlieutenant Immanuel-Johannes Brückner, to his credit, tried to get me out with the reasoning that he needed me in the office and other things like that, but nothing helped, and New York, unfortunately, was a pure adolescent dream, too far away from the dim reality of Oranienburg.
In this way a hundred of us turned up squeezed like match-sticks into the already overcrowded common cells of some prison—a sinister building of unpainted brick somewhere in Berlin. In it there were Jews and Gypsies, some Montenegrins quietly singing sad songs, some homosexuals, and other beings harmful to the Reich.
Since we were a hundred Poles, and the kitchen hadn’t planned for those who had poured right out of the blue onto the heads of the prison management, they forgot to feed us, maybe with the hope that it wouldn’t be necessary. And I, exhausted from the hard, worry-filled day, tortured by the journey in the trucks, in which we were packed so tightly that we couldn’t even sit down, soon fell asleep folded up on the floor—there weren’t even any cots, let alone that blessed iron bed in the office.
And here’s what happened, my dear brother: I dreamed I was in my hometown Kolodetz, at a Jewish wedding. I was playing the violin, and the rabbi Shmuel Ben-David was circumcising giggling Jewish boys. We were all happy and singing Jewish songs, our good neighbors, dressed in caftans tailored by my father, were clapping their hands in rhythm, and in the middle of the circle of people the old postman Avramchik and Esther Katz were dancing the cracowviak, stomping with heavy shoes.
It turned out that the stomping wasn’t from the shoes, but from guards who were loudly banging their keys against the opening cell doors and shouting “Juden raus!” which means “Jews out!” And I, the idiot of all idiots, still sleepy and confused, completely forgot that I was the Polish pan Heinrich Bjegalski, a doorman at the Lvov ophthalmology clinic, and dazed by the merry Galician wedding, went out with the other Jews. Along the endless corridor, lit up by naked electric bulbs, sleepy and frightened people crowded together from the neighboring cells, and I was maybe the only one without a yellow cloth star on my breast. Later I figured out what was happening and wanted to explain the apparent misunderstanding, and even showed the identification papers proving me a legitimate Pole, but the doors were closing, let’s go, let’s go, don’t dawdle! In such cases no documents help, I had admitted to being a Jew by merely going out of the cell, and the guards apparently shared the Soviet state accuser Vishinksi’s view that admitting guilt—in any circumstances, even under pressure—is the queen of evidence.
It was useless to resist, because it has been said and seven times seven proven: to be a Jew is a life sentence without the right of appeal!
Again crammed into the horse wagon, this time I learned that they were deporting us to the camp Flossenbürg, Oberpfalz, where a typhoid epidemic was raging, and where we were going to be asked to take care of our dead brothers, very touching! At least this is how the problem was explained to us by the transportation boss, some Gmppenstumführer, so there wouldn’t be panic and attempts to escape. In other words, we were on our way to certain death in the typhoid apocalypse of Flossenbürg and there was no doubt about it.
And now, brother, let me remind you again that the human being is a helpless little ant in the powerful and irreversible games of fortune and to it—the ant—it’s not given to judge if the trouble afflicting him is God’s punishment or His secret caress. Because that same night the remaining ninety-nine Polish hostages, brought from Special Site A-27, were shot dead, as I learned after the war. The hundredth of them, according to the diligently compiled list, remained unfound, and this was me, Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, at that moment traveling to distant Oberpfalz.
SIX
A completely dazed, exhausted crowd, surrounded by soldiers with dogs—this is what we were, when we went through the camp gate, framed by two square brick towers, while above our heads hung the arch-shaped metallic sign with the sacred words: “TO EACH HIS OWN.”
And now, please, save me from the memory, heavy as a hundred-ton cast-iron mold, and allow me not to describe to you the hell in which we ended up! Many people before me have done it, and truly much better, too, than I would do it. The times of the first shattering discoveries have passed, those waves of horror have died down that, like a tsunami, flooded the world’s conscience after the war. Millions of meters of film and photo reels have been rotated, mountains of court files and memories have been accumulated, in which everyone could see his piece of the truth through the keyhole of his own experience. It became a profession to put systematically in drawers the self-admitted guilt of the repentant and the ambiguous blather of unrepentant butchers; filed away and numbered in protocols and shorthand records was the subdued weeping of the survivors, and from it, from this crying, some people erected an impressive and invisible pantheon of the Holocaust, while others built for themselves also impressive, but quite real, villas with swimming pools and two satellite dishes. Words like “Zyklon-B,” “gas chamber,” or “Final Solution” gradually lost their original demonic unreality and became a daily ingredient of indifferent newspaper articles dedicated to commemorations and the like. In short, save me, please, because of the requirement for the completeness of the plot, as we were instructed during our creative writing classes by Eliezer Pinkus, may his soul rest in peace, from repeating to you things that are already painfully familiar, and that you are already maybe even fed up with.
Suffice it for me to say that typhoid had flared up to the scale of a pandemic and that the camp management was faced with a nightmare, because Flossenbürg was not technologically prepared to deal with so many dead, being far from the perfection of the big death factories in Poland. This had necessitated the building of pyres of human bodies whose size would have won the envy of the Holy Inquisition from the most glorious period of its existence. Gasoline, mixed with used motor oil, finished the job, as huge columns of sooty smoke rose up to worlds beyond, so they could also learn how far in its evolution this amphibian had reached, who once upon a time crawled up into the cave and from there, already a two-legged creature, sneaked out again in order to paint the portrait of Mona Lisa and create the Ninth Symphony. The incompletely burnt remnants were shoveled away with bulldozers into huge ditches, the sandy soil discreetly and forever locking within itself destinies, laughter, ambitions, lumbago, I love you, what grade did you get in geography, or to whom is Aunt Bertha writing. Farewell, brothers, and rest in peace!
Together with three Jews from Zagreb, I pushed a wheelbarrow full of corpses, which were in almost skeletal condition, loosely piled every which way. From the wooden partitions of the wheelbarrow legs and arms stuck out like broken branches. The mo
st horrifying thing was that I soon turned into a thick-witted drudge, who stopped feeling terror and got used to his work in the same way as my former fellow campmates from Special Site A-17 got used to pushing wagons with the cast-iron molds.
And still, my soul probably wasn’t completely dead, because there amid the hellish congregation of the sick, the dying, and the dead, amid the moans and the foul stench, I met—and I swear this is exactly what happened—my dear rabbi Shmuel Ben-David and the last seed of emotion, surviving by a miracle in the folds of my desert indifference, bloomed like a peony. The rabbi was playing the role of physician, helpless to heal anyone but capable of alleviating the suffering with either a good word, or a moist compress, or a good old prayer. And so among the doomed, and we ourselves were doomed, we could see each other briefly, and I don’t know if these momentary encounters of ours brought me more joy or sorrow. Such disasters the rabbi had survived, that if I were a writer, to describe them I would have to put them in a separate novel. He’d sneaked into our occupied Kolodetz, to find out that all, literally all our close ones had been deported or shot dead there on the spot, in that ravine above the river which I loved so much. What had happened to Sarah and the children he didn’t know and he couldn’t know, because instead of fleeing east to save himself, he’d made his way to Warsaw, where he tried to steal into the Muranov neighborhood, surrounded and fighting to the death, or in other words the Warsaw ghetto, when he got arrested. What saved him was having a fake ID as a Polish doctor, head intern, and as such he’d ended up here, in order to help those who were dying in his hands.
From Rabbi Ben-David, who was himself nothing but skin and bones, I received strength or, as he used to say, two handfuls of hope like spring water. From him I learned that the Allies were already in Europe, and Soviet troops had crossed the Oder and were following our sometime road that was to lead us to the heart of the thousand-year Third Reich.
“Vengeance,” the rabbi once said, cradling someone who had just died in his arms, “is foreign to faith in goodness and has to be uprooted from the heart of humanity, even though now its unavoidable hour will strike. May God give seven days to our souls, just seven days, so that both the living and the dead will be at peace. Seven terrible days, seven flaming horsemen of retribution, and to each—his own! And I will pray to God to bless and forgive all those who will want an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, life for a life, and death for a death! But seven days! And then—let ashes cover everything and let grass grow over the ashes. Because children will have to be born again in goodness and peace, and sowers will have to sow fresh seeds for the bread of the people. But before that let that which has been said come true—and to each his own. Amen!”
Thus spoke the former chairman of the Atheists’ Club in Kolodetz by Drogobych, Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, and his good eyes had opened wide and become fierce and evil. In his arms something that resembled a human being lay dead, and these words were maybe a curse and maybe a prayer for the peace of his soul.
SEVEN
The world is full of surprises and if only they were pleasant, the making of it would have been a magnificent and deservingly praised whim of God. But, unfortunately, it’s not always like this, and our world—may the Creator not take offense—has too many lumps and cracks, even though neither Poles nor Russians took part in casting it. One unpleasant surprise, like a small bump in the perfection of creation, manifested itself in the moment when, pushing the two-wheeled cart crammed with the dead, we heard a voice shouting behind our backs in German: “Hey, you there, wait!”
The three fellows from Zagreb and I instantly nailed ourselves to the spot, blind obedience to any kind of order pronounced by anyone in German being an indisputable law in the camp. And one more rule, to which we had long ago been accustomed so that it had become second nature, in a way like the unwashable black spider’s web on senior-master Stakhovich’s hands, was to look at the bosses’ boots and never in their eyes—a human privilege we were denied because of some suspicion on the part of the scientist-anthropologists about our racial adequacy, or even about the chances of our belonging to the species Homo sapiens at all.
“You!” said the boots. “Look at me!”
All four of us obeyed the order. In front of us stood a stout, rather round Sturmführer not in the prime of youth, who pointed his finger at me. “You! Come this way, but don’t come close! The three of you, keep moving. Go, go, go!”
I came up closer, to a safe, so to speak, sterile distance, the three others pushed their burden away with difficulty, and I, with my cattle eyes fixed at the tip of the polished boots, indifferently waited for the next blow of destiny, for which I’d long ago stopped being anything other than a punching bag.
“Where do I know you from?” asked the Sturmführer.
I looked at him again but he didn’t seem familiar. I shrugged my shoulders. “I really don’t know, Mister Sturmführer, sir.”
He thought for a while, knitted his eyebrows, and then his face brightened. “Of course, I know! When someone from the unit is imprinted in my memory, it’s forever. Weren’t you that nasty Jewish bastard who was playing tricks on me during the First World War, spreading around some little leaflets? Do you remember Lieutenant Schauer? And your sergeant major? Look me in the eye!”
Oh, my God, Zukerl! How could I recognize him after so many years, when, moreover, he had shaved his mighty-like-the-Austro-Hungarian-Empire sideburns à la Franz-Joseph and gone and stuck on his upper lip just a small hairy patch from the “Mein Führer” fashion line?! Now, on top of all my troubles, I was overwhelmed by this one too, because, if you remember, I was the emotional focus, so to say—the epicenter of his malice, which was related to his completely groundless suspicion that I personally had signed the capitulation of our unconquerable armies at the Compiègne forest, in the same lonely and historic railroad car-become-museum piece, in which during the present war the French had shat their pants, despite unequivocal instructions that such things were to be done only when the train was in motion. On the other hand, if you remember, I had no direct involvement with Esther Katz’s leaflets, even the police bosses had indisputably acknowledged my innocence, but apparently Zukerl was right in saying that when something stuck to the folds of his brain, it was forever.
Probably by the sparkle that glistened in my eyes, he understood that I’d remembered who he was, because, risking his life, my former sergeant major stretched his arm and pinched that thin-as-parchment little skin of mine still remaining on my cheek. “Oooh, but you’re so sweet! Come with me!”
He gave this order with an icy and evil look, waved his hand and turned around abruptly without even checking if I was following him—this was taken for granted. I dragged my feet after him, wearing tattered shoes already for a long time lacking laces but with tongues sticking out, gray duck clothes—remnants of those stellar moments in the Radish’s office—that had turned into rags and were wrapped around some places, to the disgrace of the tailoring shop Mode Parisienne, with bits of string, other places with wire, and on my breast the obligatory yellow cloth star, which I had torn out of the clothes of a diseased corpse, myself almost a diseased corpse who couldn’t remember the last time they’d given us the thin sour swill of rotten potatoes and cabbage.
I took a long time dragging myself after my former sergeant major, who was striding ahead with a broad and swaggering step, for I had a clear consciousness that for me this was the final section of the road called Life. Zukerl stopped in front of a long one-story building with multiple doors and started digging in his pants pockets until he found the key that he needed. Only then did he look at me with the same evil look and give me a silent sign with his head to follow him inside.
No, this wasn’t the cooler or the gas chamber, as you’re probably thinking, but a most ordinary office. Zukerl sat down behind a desk crammed with papers under the Führer’s portrait, and I remained standing, waiting indifferen
tly. The office was ascetic in a military fashion, lacking any trace of the Radish’s abundance, like, for example, the iron bed or the little library with novels that filled up my Anglo-American vigils. But as far as having any memory of my former sergeant major, I don’t think he needed any novels, because his literary interests were completely satisfied by the contents of the Military Field Manual, and the Internal Regulations Manual, and the little book Mein Kampf leaning against the window like an ornament—he’d probably leafed through as much of it as most Christians through the Gospels and Marxists through Kapital.
Zukerl was looking at me intently, and after contemplating me for a long time, during which he was probably trying to awake sleeping memories, as it goes in an old tango, he said, “And you, the Jews, what are you thinking, that you’ve already won the war? It’s not going to happen. Is that clear? I’m asking you—is it clear?”
“That’s correct, Mister Sergeant Major…”
“Sturmführer!”
“That’s correct, Mister Sturmführer, it’s clear, it won’t happen.”
“Have you heard of the Führer’s new secret weapon?”
“Not at all, Mister Sturmführer.”
“You will.”
He opened his holster, but didn’t produce any secret weapon from there, just a simple “Walter” revolver. This is it, I thought indifferently—this is the end. But it wasn’t. Because Zukerl took the gun by the muzzle and broke a walnut with its handle and noisily started chewing the meat, observing me. And altogether unexpectedly he said with an almost tender voice, “If I was hard on you, it was because I wanted you to become a man. Because you come as cattle to the army, but you should go out as men. Isn’t that so?”
I was of a slightly different opinion, but the Flossenbürg camp wasn’t a forum for such discussions and I sheepishly confirmed: “Quite right, Mister Sturmführer.”
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