Holocaust (20 page)

“Where’d you get the rifle?” he asked Helena. He saw that it was of Italian make, an old bolt-action weapon.

“I stole it,” I said.

Helena, who spoke excellent Russian, cautioned me to be quiet. She’d do the talking. I’m not sure what she told the Russian officer, but he seemed unimpressed.
She turned to me helplessly. “The same story,” she said. “He says they have no argument with the Germans. Don’t we know Stalin and Hitler signed a treaty, and that they’re good friends?”

“Tell him about the German tanks and trucks.”

Helena did. He seemed even less impressed. He got up, a gangly, red-faced man in a sloppy, stained uniform. Men lolled about, kicked a soccer ball. At a field kitchen, the odors of stew drifted toward us. They were absolutely certain the Germans meant them no harm.

Helena spoke some more—flirting, lying, touching his arm. She told him we were Czechs who feared the Germans. Why? he asked. Oh, we were good party members, she lied. Yes, we had gone to the Marx-Lenin Academy (no such school existed) in Prague, and there was a price on our heads.

Then I saw the captain wink at the soldier who had brought us in and say,
“Zhidn.”

I knew what that meant—Jews, kikes, Yids.

“Yes, Comrade Officer,” Helena said. “We are Jews, but we are also devoted Marxists and we praise the peace-loving Soviet Union and its wonderful people.”

A debate followed—some junior officer sticking his two kopecks in, demanding we be sent back across the border—and Helena’s red-faced captain finally deciding we could stay, but not at his camp.

“We have no fight with the Germans,” the junior officer said.

“You will,” I blurted out. “Helena—tell him again.”

She did.

“Bah. Maneuvers.” The captain was utterly indifferent. The last thing the Germans needed was a two-front war. He gave Helena a small lecture on foreign policy. England would surrender, and then Russia and Germany would divide up the world.

“Please, Comrade Captain, let us stay,” Helena begged. “My father was a founder of the Communist Party in Prague.” (A bald lie, but she carried it off; her father had been a Zionist for years.)

“Kiss the bastard if you have to,” I said.

Helena threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. Even though she was tanned, her skin coarsened, her hair undone, she was still a beautiful, vivacious girl. She simply could not be resisted—not by Czech police, nor by Red Army officers.

Finally, he agreed to send us on to the big Ukrainian city of Kiev. There was a refugee center of some kind there, and we would be duly registered, perhaps jailed, or interrogated, or given jobs, if we could prove our loyalty to the USSR. It was all terribly confused and uncertain. I gathered, from what Helena told me, that the officer wanted to be rid of us. It was less paperwork for him.

She kissed him again. “For Marx, and Lenin, and Stalin, and for you, Comrade Captain.”

He patted her behind once and sent us off to a truck loaded with other odds and ends of people who had slipped into the Soviet Union—Hungarians, Slovaks, all claiming to be political refugees from the Germans.

Soon we were underway on a dusty road. The truck bounced unmercifully, and we were bruised and choked by clouds of dust. An old Jew, crouched next to me, kept praying, bending back and forward, muttering Hebrew prayers. I understood enough Yiddish to gather he’d been visiting relatives near the border and was now going home to Kiev.

“What kind of a city is it, Grandpa?” I asked.

“Beautiful. Big. Cinemas. And many Jews, with our own synagogues and stores.”

I put an arm around Helena. The old man asked if she were my wife, and I said yes. But I was reluctant to talk too much.

A half-hour later, jouncing along the rutted road to Kiev, we heard guns booming. They sounded like big guns, heavy artillery.

A workman in filthy clothes cupped an ear, listened, and said something to Helena.

“What is it?” I asked.

“He says its the Red Army. There’s an artillery range near here.”

Muller had lied to Inga. He made no effort to get Karl off the quarry detail. How my brother survived those months I don’t know.

Finally, Inga, sensing she was being lied to—she brought a letter every month and got one in return, paying Muller’s price—demanded that Karl be given the artist’s job he had been promised. Hints in Karl’s letter told Inga he was still hacking at rocks, at the mercy of the SS guards with their whips and clubs and dogs.

In any event, Muller enjoyed taunting him. Weinberg, who was on the rockpile with him, recalled the day Karl was finally transferred. He remembered because it was the day the SS guards shot two gypsies.

The gypsies, Weinberg said, infuriated the SS. They would refuse to work, and when they grudgingly went out to the quarry or the “garden,” they were ingenious at finding ways to goldbrick. Moreover, with what seemed either outrageous bravery or foolhardiness, they often pretended not to hear the guards. They suffered for this.

It was a hot day. Weinberg recalled, and two of the gypsies in Karl’s detail had lit cigarette butts. When the guard ordered them to stop smoking, one gypsy insolently blew smoke in the guard’s direction.

A kapo was sent to beat them, and he got the worst of the fight. Karl, Weinberg and the others in the quarry—half-starved, battered men, who barely survived each dreadful day—watched as the gypsies, with some miraculous hoard of strength, wrested the baton from the kapo, and laughing, resumed their smoking.

Without any warning, the SS guard opened fire with his machine pistol, and the two gypsies tumbled into the rock quarry, heaps of bloodied clothing. They seemed, Weinberg said, to have died almost joyfully.

“Poor bastards,” Karl said. “Braver than a lot of us.”

“But foolish,” Weinberg said.

My brother and Weinberg were ordered by the SS to drag the corpses up the steep incline. “There’ll be
the same for you two Yids if you don’t move,” the SS man shouted.

Karl and his friend waded into the filthy waters in the sump and retrieved one corpse.

“Get the other one,” the SS guard said. “And take them to the crematorium.”

Muller, who had been watching—it was nothing unusual for prisoners to be shot dead for a slight infraction—halted Karl at the edge of the quarry. He spoke to the guard who had killed the gypsies.

“I want Weiss,” he said.

Another prisoner was ordered to get the second gypsy, and Muller took my brother aside. They halted at the shed where the quarry tools were stored.

“Your wife is a faithful correspondent,” Muller said.

“Was she here today?”

“On schedule. The monthly visit.”

“For God’s sake, Muller, let me see her. Once, at least.”

“Oh, she’s gone already. It’s dangerous having her hang around. For all concerned.”

“Will you take a letter out for me?”

“Of course. Here’s yours. Go on, read it.”

“Later. When I’m alone.”

Muller was smiling at him—an odd, possessive smile. “Miss her, don’t you?”

Karl nodded. “Muller, can’t you get me out? You know Inga’s family. Forget about me, but why must Inga have to suffer?”

There was a pause. “Don’t be so sure she’s suffering.”

“What do you mean?” Karl asked.

“Women manage.”

“What … what the hell are you smiling about? Did she tell you anything?”

Muller’s smile was a grin. “This is a business, Weiss, a
business
. Jews should understand business. You think I risk my neck playing mailman without getting paid?”

It dawned on Karl what Muller was telling him. “You’re lying.”

“Why do you think she comes here herself, in the flesh? She could mail me the letters.”

“Good God … you … you make her …”

“No money changes hands. And I don’t force her to do anything. She’s more than willing, Weiss.”

Karl clenched his fist; he told Weinberg later he would die the way the gypsies did, defiant, fighting, protesting. But my brother was no fighter. He had never been. And he was convinced he would someday be free again.

Muller shook his head. “You people always want something for nothing. No wonder the whole world hates you.”

“I don’t Want her letters. Don’t bring them any more.”

“Oh no, my boy. It can get tougher for you if you refuse.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“Of course you do. You won’t be in jail forever. Someday the Führer will decide you Jews have paid your fines,’ and you’ll get out.” He leered at Karl. “You won’t even notice the difference in her.”

Karl tried to walk away, back to his work. Muller grabbed his arm. “Be smart, Weiss. Play along with me.”

“Let me go.”

“You’ll write her a nice letter, telling her how she is to keep coming here. I’ll read it to make sure.”

“Goddam you, I don’t want to write to her, or see her again.”

“You want to end up like those gypsies?”

“Maybe I should.”

Muller gestured at Engelmann, the guard who had murdered the gypsies. He was a fat, bullet-headed man, a notorious homosexual who took his pick of the younger prisoners. “Or maybe you’d like to end up one of Engelmann’s little friends. On the other hand, you may be too old and stringy for his tastes.”

“Enough, Muller.”

“I’m about to do you a favor. Tomorrow, I’ll put
through your transfer to the art studio. Easy job. Indoors. But you must keep writing to Inga.”

“No.”

“I think you’ll change your mind after a night with Engelmann.”

Karl saw Weinberg and the others sliding into the quarry for the other gypsy—his body seemed to have vanished in the slimy waters—and he caved in. But he did not respond to Muller.

Muller walked up to Engelmann. “Go easy on my friend Weiss. He’s being requisitioned for the artist’s studio. Sensitive fellow. Wasted out here on the rocks.”

“That’s tomorrow, Weiss,” Engelmann said. “Today, you’re still breaking rocks.”

Muller winked at Engelmann. “And the Jew doesn’t even thank me.”

My parents, in typical fashion, were doing their best to make life bearable for the imprisoned Jews of the ghetto.

My mother volunteered to teach music and literature. Amazingly, amid the illness and hunger and degradation, Jews still insisted that their children attend school. There were both secular schools (in which my mother taught) and religious classes.

Parents made an effort to send their kids off to school neat and clean, although clothing was in short supply. Scholars argued over Biblical texts. There was actually a nightclub cafe, where variety acts were performed, a theater group, concerts. All of this in the face of appalling overcrowding, lack of sanitation, diets of bread and potatoes, and a kind of growing defeatism, a sense that they were doomed, now that the wall locked them in, away from the “Aryan” section of the city.

One of my mother’s problem students was a boy named Aaron Feldman, a pale jug-eared kid of thirteen, who was regarded as the king of the boy smugglers. Smuggling kept the ghetto alive in many respects. Anyone who could find his way out of the wall, through a tunnel or a hole, or by some ruse, and had money
or goods to trade (or was brave enough to steal), helped feed and supply the Jews.

Aaron often came flying in late, his voluminous, ragged coat hiding a few eggs, or a can of jam, or sometimes even a chicken. My mother knew of this, but she did not have the heart to reprimand him—even if he was late for the rehearsal of a medley of ghetto folk songs.

I mention Aaron here because he seems the kind of kid I would have admired. Later, when the ghetto rose to fight the Nazis, he was in the thick of it. His smuggling did more good for the Jews than any conference, concordat, parley.

My father, working long hours at the Jewish Hospital and serving with the Judenrat, even came to the school one day to warn Aaron he must stop. Ghetto policemen had seen Aaron emerging from holes in the pavement, vanishing into gaps in the wall. Thus far they had looked the other way, but, my father warned the boy, the next time he would be arrested.

“They won’t arrest me,” Aaron said. “I give them eggs.”

“Eggs may satisfy them, but they won’t satisfy the Germans when they crack down on smugglers. You are not afraid?”

“Sure. But I’ll do it anyway. They won’t make me starve.”

My father laughed. Perhaps he saw some of me in this cocky kid, who refused to sit back and be treated like a slave.

Eva recalls seeing my father looking into the classroom to which he returned my mother’s delinquent student, and tears rimming his eyes, as she sat at the piano and led them in song.

And in the corridors, Eva recalls, there were colorful drawings by the children showing what the “new ghetto after the war” would look like—trees, parks, playgrounds, mothers pushing prams, bicycles. My father and the others who visited the school would often stop to look at the children’s drawings and wonder if they would ever see such a day, such a place.

Shortly after trying to convince Aaron to mend his ways, my father attended a meeting of the Warsaw Jewish Council. The shortages of food were now a serious immediate problem. Dr. Kohn, the council chairman, wanted to concentrate on the healthy and productive. Skeletal, half-dead people in rags roamed the streets, begging, or simply surrendering, lying down in the gutter or against a building, waiting to die.

“We must try to feed everyone,” my father said.

Zalman, the union leader, was distressed. “The smugglers kept us going for a long time. But the Nazis are shooting smugglers.”

“Yes,” Kohn added. “And an additional twenty Jews every time they catch one.”

My father, having just seen the courage in Aaron Feldman’s eyes, lost his temper—a rarity for him. He pounded the desk. “Those boys who crawl through sewers may be our salvation.”

“Nonsense,” Kohn said. “They’ll get us all killed.”

At this point, a slender young man of unremarkable appearance but with a calm and strangely commanding manner rose in the rear of the room. Like Zalman, he appeared to be a workman of some kind, in plain clothing and a workman’s cap.

This man looked calmly at Dr. Kohn and said, “We will all be killed anyway.”