Judenstaat (8 page)

Prosecute Bundist Assassins

Shaindel gave it a glance. “Oh, that's for outsiders. We already know that.”

Judit had to keep herself from taking the note out of her pocket for a direct comparison. She said, carefully, “Do you learn to write in German at school?”

“Of course,” Shaindel said. This line of reasoning seemed to try her patience. She urged Judit forward. “You have to go first, or he won't open the door.”

Then they were in the dark, climbing flight after flight of stairs, and each landing was punctuated by activity, a child shrieking, someone hammering a nail into the wall, the rhythmic throbbing of a washing machine on spin-cycle. Somewhere in there, Shaindel produced a plastic flashlight.

“I got it for my birthday,” Shaindel said. “I always keep it for emergencies. Like in a thunderstorm, or when I go into the sewer.”

“Sewer?” The conversation felt as improbable as the circumstances.

“You find money there,” she said. She kept the faint light just ahead of them as she directed Judit to a battered door with a card wedged into the nameplate. In Latin characters, badly formed, too careful:

Moses Kravitz, Importer

Same lettering. She didn't even have to check it against the note. She heard herself say, “This isn't the right place,” all the while fighting back whatever was rising in her. Hans could be behind that door. But what if he were someone she couldn't even recognize?

“Knock,” Shaindel said.

Before Judit could turn around or lift her hand, the door was opened by a short man in a skull-cap with a wild red beard. He wore a caftan that looked as though he'd slept in it. In Yiddish: “
You've got the wrong apartment.
”

He wasn't the man who left the note. The voice was an octave lower and the shape was all wrong. He looked like an angry dwarf. It was hard for Judit to justify remaining now, but Shaindel made escape more complicated, so she asked, “
Do you sell films here?
”

“
You speak Yiddish like a German,
” he said, and like the man in the junk shop, he kept his eyes averted, but he opened the door a little wider. Then he caught sight of Shaindel. “
Up to your mischief again?
”

Shaindel said, “
Uncle Moishe, would it hurt this lady to take a look? She came all the way here. And she's not going to be all sexy.
”

“
Who taught you to talk like that, Shaindel?
” Moses Kravitz said. He gazed at some middle distance, and with a small wave, motioned them inside. He closed and latched the door. “
I'm overloaded, lady. Every day new shipments. You want, you take.
”

The kitchen table was littered with bright slipcases of videos, some German, some French, most American. Judit knew just enough English to decipher a few titles:
Top Gun, An Officer and a Gentleman.
Some of the cases still held videos, and some were empty and propped up to display their lurid, shabby covers. Through the door, Judit could see a bathroom stacked floor-to-ceiling with loose, black tapes, tapes in the bathtub, tapes piled on the toilet and leaning against the wall.

Now that the door was closed, Kravitz seemed more inclined to engage Judit in conversation, and his tiny eyes flashed up like needles. “
I get plenty of men here but never ladies. Maybe you want a little something for your husband. Maybe he sent you. Or maybe,
” he said, “
you have your own little collection.
”

Shaindel said, “She wants to see the room where that man was.”

Judit was speechless. Moses Kravitz frowned and shook his head. Judit could tell that he was reassessing her. She wasn't Stasi. He'd met those types before. She wasn't a prostitute. No prostitute would wear that coat. What was she then? Judit watched him flick through those limited categories and wondered if he'd come to a conclusion that would make him take out a gun. He probably owned one.

Shaindel tugged at Judit's sleeve, and said, in clear German: “Isn't that what you want? To see the room? He's gone now.”

“
Good riddance,
” Kravitz said. “
He drove away my other customers.
”

“Was he a bad man?”
Shaindel asked.

“
He was like all men,
” Kravitz said. “
He wasn't good, he wasn't bad. When he first came here, he was scared of his own shadow. An outsider.
”

Shaindel added, “He would watch movies all the time. That's all he did. The sexy movies.”

Judit asked, carefully, “Where is he now?”

Kravitz shrugged and answered in Yiddish. “
What's he to you? He owes me money. You want to pay his bills?
”

Now she felt she had little choice, and hadn't come prepared. In her wallet she had maybe thirty Judenmarks, a twenty and assorted singles. She took the money out. She knew that Kravitz wouldn't touch her hand, so she laid it on a pile of videotapes. He twisted his mouth into that full red beard, and put the money in his pocket.

Shaindel watched this exchange with fascination and horror, and she broke in: “
Uncle Moishe, can't you tell she's a pauper? Look at the way she's dressed. No one with money wears clothes like that.
”

Kravitz ignored her, and said to Judit, “
I can show you his whole collection. It's right here.
” He pointed to a box in plain sight, an overwhelming assortment of reels and videos, some in cases, some loose and clearly broken, and because she wasn't sure what else to do, Judit sorted through the pile. Old habit overcame her, and by examining even the loose material she could estimate the age and country of origin: French, Soviet, American, and a few Bundist standards.

Then she pulled out a canister that was clearly marked. She held it in her hand for a little too long.

Shaindel peered at the label. “What's that?”

“
Shaindel, that's not for you!
” Kravitz said. “
You shouldn't see that kind of movie.”

“
Is it dirty?
” Shaindel asked.

“
The gentleman in question, well, let's just say it must have been his favorite. He looked at it all the time.
” Then, to Judit, “
You want me to set up the projector?
”

“I can run the film myself,” Judit said. She'd spoken German, but Kravitz had no trouble understanding her. He backed off, and studied her again.

“
Experienced at this, lady? What's your business, anyhow?
”

The film was
Monument.
Judit had conducted the interview and edited the footage in 1980, four years before Hans died. It was a documentary about the Churban.

 

5

[Firebombing of Dresden by British and American forces as seen from the air. White flame pouring from collapsed dome of the Cathedral, ash and fire and blackened stone, then empty roads, strewn with rubble. A woman's voice:]

You begin with nothing. When I saw the bombs fall from the sky, it was like looking at the face of God.

[A woman appears, standing underneath an awning, as rain falls on either side of her. She is past middle age, well dressed, with animated features and a nervous smile, a lot of gray in her curly brown hair.]

No. It was more like looking at myself, like I was flattened. All that confusion behind us, during those days when we were marched, half-naked, starving, marched for miles through the snow in Poland, with liberation at our backs—the Soviet gunfire we heard everywhere—and then packed into that railroad car that took me, took me, of all places, took me back home.

[Speaker identified. Caption: “Leahla Abramowitz.” She gestures towards the door.]

This was my house in Dresden. My parents came here from Lodz after the Great War, and my father had a little optical business in the center of the Altstadt. I knew this neighborhood.

[Photograph of a young girl holding a parasol in front of that same entrance, her face almost crazed with that same enthusiastic animation. Cut to the same old woman, holding an umbrella as she leads us down that same street where rain continues to fall.]

This was the way I walked to school. It was just around the corner.

[Building appears, blurred by rain, not in good condition, ramps extending from both sides, the windows dark. She approaches, and hesitantly opens the door. There's a little wan sunlight spreading across the black and white tiles.]

I think it's a hospital or a nursing home now, but it was a Jewish school back in the '20s and '30s. I remember everything. And back across the railroad tracks—

[Abramowitz makes a sweeping gesture.]

That's where we had our club. The Bundist club, where we met every afternoon.

[Amateur footage with a hand-held camera, children banging pots and pans and wearing paper hats, as a young man, wearing a sandwich board with Yiddish writing, steps forward and recites something forcefully. A series of still photographs of exteriors, in grainy black and white, identifying structures as Abramowitz speaks.]

Of course there were dozens of those clubs. The sports club, the craftsmen's club, a nursing home, a burial society, and the Mendelssohn club too. That one they wouldn't let us in, because we were Easterners. They also had no use for us at the fancy synagogue by the Cathedral. No, my father would pray in a little room in somebody's basement.

[Abramowitz continues to walk down a busy street, umbrella furled now, and pauses before a gate flecked with rain and obscured by passing pedestrians. She makes an effort to clear space, assisted by a visible cameraman, and points to a grille in the shape of a Star of David.]

There's what they used to call the New Jewish Cemetery. It was already full by the time we came to Dresden. So was the old Jewish Cemetery. My dead, they're buried somewhere else. The Germans deported all the Polish Jews in 1938.

[Slow montage of images, exhumed pits from the Chelmno death camp, with the earth still clinging to the dead, pit after pit, and lingering on a tangle of bones and half-decomposed flesh. During this sequence, Leahla Abramowitz's voice continues:]

I remember the restaurant in the Neustadt where we had to wait before they took us by train back to Poland, across the border. You can still eat in that restaurant. We waited there for the truck to take us to the station. Maybe even then, my father, my mother, my two brothers, maybe we knew where we were really going.

[Back to Abramowitz, who stands beside the tracks at the Neustadt station, staring right at the camera.]

But we didn't know how it would end. See, I know now. After the ghetto, the camp, after I marched in rags, in broken shoes, to a train that was supposed to take me to another camp so the Russians wouldn't find us, I found myself back where I started. In my Dresden. I found myself there the day God rained down fire. What could I do?

[She smiles.]

I stayed.

[Contemporary footage of Dolzchen forest on Dresden's outskirts, villas, evergreens, a sandy path covered with pinecones. Abramowitz walks away from the camera, gesturing towards a clearing.]

In the confusion, in the chaos after the bombs fell, many girls escaped from the factories where we did forced labor, where we made fuses. There were four of us who found each other.

We knew pretty quickly that we'd have to get out of the city center. We'd steal clothing from laundry lines and potatoes from gardens, and the first month—in the cold—when we couldn't find any other shelter, we dug ourselves a trench and tried to keep a fire going. We hung on to each other—a Polish girl named Maria and two Jews like me, Beryl, Gitel.

And then one morning—it was April, yes, maybe late April. We were in that trench, the fire was long out, and we were all of us in a tangle, dressed in what clothing we could steal, and that was the first time I heard it. Russian. And they were taking photographs.

[Photographs]: barely clad women, naked legs across each other's backs, focus on a hand around a shoulder, a filthy cheek, a bare buttock. Then the camera pans to show the tangle of them.]

Then I just kept still. My heart jumped inside me because I couldn't believe they were here. And they were standing right over us taking those photographs as evidence because they thought that we were dead.

[Abramowitz speaks to the camera, still surrounded by shadowy pines.]

Now I couldn't speak Russian, but somehow I knew—I knew what they were saying and I was the first to stir and get myself to my feet. My God—I was so ashamed and weak—and I told them not to take my picture, and I was speaking German, and the soldiers looked at me in such a way— I was afraid. But something made me say: “We're Jews.” And then, their officer—

[Photograph of Soviet officer, full face, cocked cap, crisp uniform.]

He speaks and says, yes—he speaks in Yiddish to me—“
All of you, Jews?”
And when I hear that Yiddish, I know this officer—he's one of us. And what could I say? I spoke in Yiddish also and I told a little lie because I loved Maria. “
We are all of us Jews
.”

[Photograph of Leahla wearing officer's coat, standing in the forest. She looks at the camera with terrified, wide eyes. The coat comes down to her knees.]

And then he said, he was still speaking Yiddish, “
You are free, all of you. Go where your hearts desire.
” How can I describe? This man, this officer, a fellow Jew, he was riding, no joke, a white horse. And I said to him, “I came from here, from Dresden. I can show you—I remember everything.”

[Wedding photograph. That officer still in uniform, and a plump, fully recovered Leahla in a dark suit, with both her arms around his waist. Caption: “Leahla and Dmitri Abramowitz, 1948.”]

Well, it took a while. I had typhus, of course, and around five other things as it turns out, but Dmitri kept saying, I want that tour of Dresden, you promised to show me Dresden, and what could I do? Of course, we had to go where he was stationed. Here we are, in Rathen. That's after our two sons were born.