Death in Twilight (32 page)

Though he wanted to reach his next stop before dark, he couldn’t help walking over to the pyre and flicking at singed spines and random pages. The majority of what he saw was in Yiddish, books that had never been published in runs of more than one hundred, often far fewer. Libraries had burned all over Europe. It was possible that Aaron was seeing the last physical evidence of an entire stream of Jewish thought. The legacy of a thousand years — more — desecrated.

Aaron stood for a moment in silence.

Another moment.

He chose a single page at random, carefully folding it into his coat. He headed toward the far side of the room. There he found another staircase. This one led to the lower stacks.

Aaron was again forced to feel his way in the dark. He was seeking a fire exit, surely unused during the great burning upstairs. He felt along shelves, finding them empty for the most part, though touching the occasional volume that had been missed. He regretted that he could take none of them along.

If I can, I’ll come back
, he promised himself.

Aaron found no hazards to his shins in this passage, though he nearly slipped several times on loose pieces of paper. In five minutes, he reached the door he wanted. The arrangement for opening it was the same as on the Aryan side. Aaron pushed the door gently, slowly, and saw the chain with its false lock.

He reached his hands through, hoping that no one would be watching his magician’s trick. The chain rattled and Aaron paused, fearful of the noise. It had sounded like thunder to him. He began again and slid the chain carefully through his hands until he could feel the lock. He jerked down on it, expecting to hear a click. All he heard was the rattling of the chain, louder this time.

Shit
.

He tried again, this time twisting the padlock in both hands to wrench it. The effort was quieter, but no more effective. He decided he needed leverage to pry the hinge open. Perhaps it had rusted, or worse, been replaced. He couldn’t tell. It was hard to see clearly through the narrow opening, so he worked by feel.

Aaron turned his back on the door and began searching for a metal bar of some kind. He touched everything around him, hoping to find something he could pull loose. Ten more minutes passed in the dark as Aaron was lapped by waves of frustration and worry. He could go back the way he’d come and find another route into the ghetto, he supposed, but that would mean delay and danger. He kept searching.

After twenty minutes, his hands felt a tiny pipe running up the wall, perhaps for electrical wires or gas. It was too small for steam. He estimated it was narrow enough to fit into the hasp of the lock, so he pulled, putting all of his strength into the effort. First the pipe moved an inch, then a second inch. Eventually, Aaron was able to pry a two-foot stretch away from the wall. He took a firm grip and began to twist, hoping to unscrew a single a section.

The metal began to turn, but Aaron could feel his strength ebbing.

Come on, you piece of shit!

When the pipe came loose, Aaron fell back against a shelf that tipped, but not far enough to fall. He stood stunned for a second, gathered himself and headed back to the door. No gas smell followed him.

The pipe fit into the hasp. Aaron pried and twisted. With a flake of rust, the lock fell to the ground. Aaron cringed at the metallic clang it made.

He peered cautiously out the door and saw that there’d been no one around to hear it. The exit he emerged from was in a narrow alley. Today it was empty of vagrants.

Aaron reached the corner, turning to look both left and right before he took another step. He saw no one. The guard post at the entrance to the ghetto looked small and far away. He decided he might as well chance exiting the alley.

Neither the Germans, nor the Poles, nor the Jews noticed as he walked away from them and down the street, sticking close to the buildings that lined it.

It was more than a block before Aaron began to see what was obvious all around him. Stores appeared open, but no one was in them. No one was selling anything on the streets, not bread, not sweets, not used clothing. There were no knots of men gossiping, pretending that they were speaking of important things. He could see no children begging. He saw neither the religious nor the profane.

What he did see were signs of life interrupted. There were carts lying on their sides, though their spilled contents were nowhere to be seen. The shutters of some shop windows were partially drawn, as if caught in the act of opening to welcome the day’s customers. A child’s stuffed toy, the worse for its wear, stared up mournfully from the paving.

All Aaron could hear was a biting wind and a rustle of random objects caught up in it: a newspaper page, scraps of wrappers, leaves that should have flown away long before.

And his own footsteps. His heels rudely struck the cobbles and startled the near silence. He walked on, but more softly, as if the ground had suddenly been sanctified.

From an unknown distance, a child’s laugh broke through. Aaron’s neck nearly snapped as he tried to pinpoint the sound, which was followed immediately by an adult’s shushing.

He wasn’t entirely alone. It only made sense if the gate was still manned and carts were still making deliveries. Still, he saw nothing as he passed through one block and then another.

On reaching the ghetto’s main boulevard, Aaron faced a choice. He could carry out his original mission or check in with his father at the Judenrat. The old man would be able to explain what had happened.

Aaron turned left. He should have thought to check in with his father, anyway. The narrow scope of his bloody ambition had blinded him to everything else.

Several times along his walk, Aaron was convinced he glimpsed a small, ragged figure that ducked out of sight as quickly as a mouse diving for a hole.

Sparrow?

Whoever it was — if anyone was following him at all — they never came within clear sight, let alone reach.

The sunlight on the boulevard was winter sharp; the air possessed a fragile crispness. The buildings were bas reliefs carved out of the world’s stone heart.

The Judenrat itself, though, was still a dump. It showed its age and an institutional lack of care. It was here that Aaron saw the first person that he could be sure of, a poorly uniformed member of the Jewish Police. The man was so thin that, with his cap on, he resembled nothing more than a hat rack. For all the attention he paid as Aaron walked past him, he might as well have been one.

The lobby, which had been so heated by bodies that it was the warmest place in the ghetto, was now as cold as a tomb. There were no clerks and nobody looking for them. The desks, where little had been done for people in great need of much, were entirely lifeless. No one begged and no one denied. If he’d been asked a month before, Aaron might have said the current situation would be an improvement.

It wasn’t. Not in any way.

Aaron called out and heard his voice return to him, followed by an anticipatory silence. He called again and this time there was a slurred, angry reply from behind the door that separated the Jewish Police’s offices from the rest of the building.

The door wouldn’t budge at first, but Aaron pulled it open on his second try. The corridor behind it was, as always, dim and uninviting. Only important business would draw someone in.

Blaustein — grand chief of the Jewish Police — had his door open. From inside, Aaron could hear a buzzing. Another few steps revealed the buzzing to be an attempt at humming by the office’s occupant. Blaustein was, without any doubt, truly, deeply, nearly catatonically drunk.

He managed to look up when Aaron walked in, his eyes visible through only the narrowest of slits. They widened slightly when the man behind them recognized his visitor.

“Catthh ur mudrerer, aasssole?”

Aaron spoke the language of drunks and was able to make meaning from the mangled words. He didn’t answer, though.

“What happened here?” Aaron asked instead, his voice gravel. “Where the fuck are all the people? Where’s my father?”

Blaustein blinked, but his eyes didn’t reopen. Slowly, his head slipped toward the table. Aaron struck fast, slapping Blaustein across the face with such force that the man’s head nearly spun around entirely. Blaustein’s eyes flew open in shock, though not yet in pain.

“Where the FUCK IS EVERYBODY?”

“Another drink,” Blaustein slurred. “Just one more … ”

The second slap was even harder. Aaron then reached down, yanked Blaustein up and punched him hard enough in the stomach to begin the detoxification process. The commandant vomited on his own shoes, barely missing Aaron’s in the process.

“Can you hear me, Blaustein?” Aaron asked. He was shaking, but less so than the policeman. Aaron pinned Blaustein upright, hands on the man’s shoulders. “What the fuck happened here?

“The Germans!” Blaustein blurted, with a little more clarity. “The fucking Germans!”

“Who the fuck else could it have been?” Aaron roared. “What. Did. They. Do?”

“They came for everyone. Fucking everyone. Loaded them onto trains, shot them in the streets.” Blaustein exploded into tears of drunken self-pity and pure self-horror. “And we helped them do it. I helped them!”

“Not everyone. It couldn’t be everyone,” Aaron said. “There must have been sixty thousand people here! Sixty thousand at least.”

Aaron dropped Blaustein, turned away from him. The police captain fell back in his chair, but not into sleep. He continued to cry, trying to explain what had happened in between sobs.

“The Germans came to me about two weeks ago, shortly after you and I met. They gave me no choice!”

Blaustein’s story was this.

The Germans said the Jews would be removed from the ghetto. Some would go to factories. Some, if they were strong enough, to labor camps. Everyone would be much better fed when they were working and supporting the Nazi war effort. The police would keep their role and would be rewarded for their loyalty. They would have new positions of authority outside the ghetto.

“I knew that part wasn’t true,” Blaustein said.

“Only that part?”

Blaustein shrugged, then reached for his drawer. Aaron caught his wrist, stopping him.

“Just getting a cigarette,” Blaustein begged. From his childish tone, Aaron realized Blaustein must still be drunk.

Aaron knocked Blaustein’s hand out of the way. He didn’t think there would be a gun in the drawer, but he couldn’t be sure. Aaron reached in himself and came out with a bottle, a partially crumpled pack of cigarettes and a small box of matches.

Tenderly, Aaron reached into the pack. They were American cigarettes. Pall Malls. Even on his best days as a smuggler, Aaron couldn’t have come up with them. The white cylinder he removed was dented and dinged, but still whole. To Aaron’s eyes it was perfect. For a moment he saw nothing else.

Aaron ran the tube under his nose. The tobacco was slightly stale, but still incomparably better than any Aaron had smoked since the war started. He put it to his lips, drew a match from the little box, struck it with a thumb, touched it to the cigarette’s tip and drew the resulting smoke deep into his lungs.

He held it in for one second, two, three. He exhaled heavily and with great satisfaction. Then he coughed … and coughed … and coughed, nearly doubling over.

Oh, it felt good.

Aaron picked a few flecks of tobacco from his tongue and turned back to Blaustein who stared knives at him.

“So, what happened next?”

The Germans had come in hundreds, maybe thousands. All of them armed with pistols and machine guns. The Gestapo, the SS and the Wehrmacht were all represented. Jews were ordered out of their tenements or grand apartments, it didn’t matter which. People were pulled from their businesses or places of work, and once on the street they were corralled. Children and the elderly were separated from the rest. Shortly, Blaustein found out why.

They were taken into blind alleys by the hundreds and shot where they stood. Blaustein witnessed this, but had done nothing. Jewish policemen had participated in gathering the children up, taking them from their parents. None of the policemen had participated in the shooting, but then they weren’t trusted enough to be given guns.

In the end, Blaustein saw that anyone not able to work had been killed. With few exceptions, it was only the fittest that were put on the trains or trucks and taken God knew where.

The culling and sorting had taken days. Blaustein wasn’t sure how many. There was little sleep and much screaming in the nights. Blaustein had spent most of the time drunk. The alcohol and a few packs of cigarettes were all he had to show for his smuggling empire and bloodguilt. That, and a stash of pointless Nazi scrip.

After the Germans had searched the obvious places, they moved on to basements and secret hiding spots that were sometimes revealed by neighbors. They searched public buildings and even the Judenrat itself. The clerks were taken — yes, Aaron’s father included — but Blaustein and Zimmerman had been left behind.

Many, many of the Jewish Police who had helped organize the killings and deportations found themselves on those last trucks out, all signs of rank stripped from them. Those who objected were shot just like all the rest.

Then one day it was over. The transportations and executions stopped.

It made no sense. There were still people in the ghetto. They had hidden in the cracks and survived. Some people were still alive because they had been in one room but the Germans had only checked another. Others lived by hiding on roofs for days, despite snow and the cold. Some had died that way.

Some the Germans hadn’t taken, for reasons that Blaustein seemed not to understand.

The high officers of the Judenrat were spared. Their families, for the most part, were not. Like Blaustein, many of them sat in purposeless offices now, offering up justifications and self-pity, though there was no one to listen.

“You’re sure about my father?” Aaron asked.

Blaustein was very sure and increasingly sober.

The enormity of what had happened temporarily took away Aaron’s ability to grieve for his own family and friends. For anyone.