East of Time (18 page)

One of the most colourful personalities in our microcosm was the mystic seer, Ezro the Spaniard. I had a great regard for the man's exuberant fancy. I loved to listen to his buoyant, often arcane stories, and to his claim of being a direct descendant of Abraham Ibn Ezra, that marvellous twelfth-century scholar, traveller and hero of many a legendary tale.

Our own Ezro's outlandish approach to life obliged him to live outside the cultural perimeter of our community. People
could not accept the fact that he called his old shack ‘Andalusia', that he wore his long black hair in a ponytail, and that he sported a gold ring in his right earlobe. Then there was his needle-thin moustache, his sideboards like two meticulously shaped sickles that ran almost into the corners of his mouth, and, on top of that, his habit of going about, even on the hottest days, in a black woollen ankle-length coat adorned with a brown fur collar.

At the beginning of 1939, on a day that had already shed its afternoon, Ezro my fanciful friend waved me over. ‘Psst, hey, young fellow, would you care to step into Andalusia for a moment or two?' Ezro looked unusually secretive. After a tense pause he announced resolutely: ‘I'm going away at daybreak.'

I was stunned. ‘Why?' I almost shouted.

‘Ezro is a restless man,' he replied, ‘and must leave his tent and rejoin the road from time to time, perhaps for his own wellbeing.'

‘Sir, I don't understand.'

‘You soon will...'

‘But where will you go?' I persisted.

‘I don't know.'

‘You mean you're going to... nowhere?'

‘No,' Ezro shook his head. ‘A man who
has
nowhere in his heart cannot
go
there. How can he be in something, when that very something is in him?'

By now I was utterly confused.

‘Existence,' he went on, ‘is but a passing phenomenon. Ours is only the present, of which we comprehend nothing. Our future may well be an illusion, and our past is in love with oblivion, which enables us to repeat our follies with a smile.'

I nodded absently, but he had well and truly lost me.

‘I once heard of a prophet,' Ezro continued, ‘the homeliest of all prophets. Yet his life was an eternal rendezvous with
legend, and likewise with dreams — one without the other would make no sense, this prophet said. As for me, I love exile, because in exile I can hear God's cry. He cries over his worshippers' stupidity: they don't realize that their foolishness is their own worst enemy.'

He stopped to take a breath, then began to pack his belongings. ‘The road is longing for my footfall,' he declared.

Bewildered, I looked up into his face.

‘Well,' said the mystic, pointing at the skyline. ‘You will see how our vistas are consumed in flames. Soon there will be only ashes left...' A profound sadness had entered his eyes, and seemed to colour his deep voice. ‘It's time for me to go, my friend,' he announced, and his meaning was clear again. I shook my head, but Ezro merely smiled.

‘Time to go,' he repeated, ‘in search of the thing which does not exist.'

 
The Last Summer
 

Early on the morning of 12 August 1939, as the mist cleared — though a few patches still lingered, making our street more distant and unreal — mother called out: ‘Quickly, go to the village where Pola and Frumetl are staying.' My sister and little niece were on a summer break in the nearby countryside. ‘Help them pack up their belongings. Hurry! There's no time to lose, we're on the brink of war!'

As if to himself, father murmured: ‘You spend a lifetime spinning dreams, and in the end you have to face a crude reality. Mankind,' he added quite audibly, ‘can't control its own destiny. We are forever the cause, the tool, and the tragic casualty.'

The village was only an hour's tram-ride out of town, and from there the walk to the hamlet took a good thirty minutes.
I made my way through a dense forest of rustling pines, over green clearings sprinkled with yellow wildflowers, across fields of rippling corn. I advanced amid a stillness, except for the cornstalks' dreaded whisper of a premature harvest, of a life prickly as thistles.

I arrived just before noon. My sister was already packing, assisted by her host, the old German, Kling. A clever, kindhearted man with an unsteady gait, Herr Kling was a wealthy farmer, owner of miles and miles of fertile land, hundreds of cattle and countless fowl. In the centre of his yard, besieged by random archipelagos of moss, stood a circular whitewashed well. I remember its freezing water, even on the hottest days, and the wooden bucket humming on its rusty iron chain.

As we finished packing I heard Kling remark: ‘War is stupid, Herr Hitler is a madman.' But the farmer's son Ludwig, who each evening after a hefty meal would sit under the linden tree and play
Für Elise
on his trumpet, disagreed. ‘Father,' he argued, ‘you don't understand our brothers in the west, their lack of
Lebensraum
. The Führer's intention to annex the east, and thereby bring to fruition Germany's historical dreams, is a very wise one.'

The next day, sitting for dinner around our table with Pola and Frumetl, I repeated to my father the conversation I had overheard at farmer Kling's. ‘What a grotesque absurdity!' he exclaimed. ‘What pathetic, juvenile arrogance! A leader might have an idea of how and where a war begins, but never how and where it will end.'

Late at night we all went next door and congregated around our neighbour's Telefunken. ‘This is Radio Berlin,' the loudspeaker crackled. ‘
Guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren
. We are repeating excerpts from our Führer's daily address.' Then the hated, distinctive voice. ‘
Die Juden
,' it thundered, and it was the hollow barking of a mad dog.
‘Die Juden werden nicht mehr
lachen!
...' When the speaker made some arrogant reference to Polish territory, I observed father's reaction: his face had turned grey. ‘We are facing difficult times,' he said.

‘Reb Gershon,' replied our deeply religious neighbour, Zilberszac, ‘keep in mind that, since the beginning of time, Jews and hope have been interchangeable. Keep in mind our mighty God, and His Messiah. In days like these, even a Jew who does not believe in an Anointed One is not absolved from nevertheless believing that he is on his way.'

Father smiled, not just because he could not share our neighbour's faith, but because he loved this Talmudic twist. And out of respect to Zilberszac's opinion, naive though he regarded it, he preferred to end the exchange by shrugging his shoulders and remaining silent, rather than arguing and trying to disprove the other's abstractions.

A few days later, on a morning brimming with light and hope, I watched with pride as the intrepid Polish cavalry rode through our street. And I, a boy of seventeen, thought: Is there any power in the world that can measure up to this? Never!... Little could I know that the brilliant morning light was already infested with darkness, hope was already riddled with despair, and fate had propelled us on a journey of no return.

 

 
Patch of Light
 

Isaiah, son of Amoz, come down from your azure throne and see how the city of the waterless river celebrates, on this scorching August day, your beautiful vision. See how Poles and Jews, with spades and pickaxes in their hands, march shoulder to shoulder, singing songs, digging defensive trenches together against the oncoming common enemy. See how the little babushkas run from post to post with buckets of fresh water,
quenching the thirst of Jews; see how pious chassids in traditional black garb, with resolute curly sidelocks, and their women in solemn wigs and with Sabbath blessings on their lips, wipe the sweat off the brows of Polish men with crucifixes dangling over hairy chests. Oh, how can one forget that patch of light, that moment of brotherhood, of those unforgettable summer days in August 1939?

I was digging near my school friend, Josef Wiesenfeld, enthused by this human panorama, this rare unity of resolve. Out of the blue, Josef climbed up on a hillock of soil and, with his heart burning and his body swirling about like a living flame, began to recite his own version of ‘Brothers', a poem by the great Yiddish poet I. L. Peretz, inspired in turn by Schiller's ode,
To Joy
:

W
hite and black and brown and yellow,

Mix together all the colours —

Jew or Pole or Turk or Arab,

People everywhere are brothers!...

But before long, on the first of September, German planes darkened our skies. And a week later, a scaffold appeared in Bałucki Rynek, our marketplace. Three men were hanging from it, strung up as if to give us a taste of what we were in for; they had white signs pinned to their lapels, bearing the words
JUDE SCHWINDLER
scrawled in large black letters. And as, to my dismay, I heard the tumultuous crowd argue over the correctness of these executions, I knew that Isaiah's utopia had been bitterly betrayed once more.

Moving away from the black spectacle, I bumped into my friend Josef. His face was grey, and he seemed ten years older than the last time I had seen him, three weeks earlier. And Josef — who even after the catastrophe of these years would
not relinquish his belief in universal brotherhood; who never stopped repeating ‘A
mensch
is a
mensch'
, that all people are equal — Josef turned to me and said: ‘All of this is just a temporary darkness that we'll overcome.'

No doubt he expected me to agree. After all, we were both Bundists, the idea of brotherhood was fundamental to our ideology. And he was still basking in that remarkable display of common endeavour of just a few weeks ago.

‘My friend,' he continued without waiting for my response. ‘Roses blossom only briefly, yet no one will deny their beauty.' And then, this incorrigible romantic added: ‘One drop of radiant hope may help humanity cross over an ocean of despair.'

‘That's all very well,' I told him as we parted, ‘and it might even be true. But for the time being, Josef, we'd best observe the curfew...'