East of Time (21 page)

The road grew weary, our footfall heavy, and daylight longed for a rest. As we pushed the cart onwards I experienced something rather strange: I thought I could hear voices coming from among the books! The fatigue must have really got to me, for I was sure I could even hear them arguing and conversing together...

The Roszes were allotted a little hut in the yard of a tenement block. It was cramped and cold, and its roof was in need of repair, yet they were grateful. I helped them to unload their fine furniture, stacking some items on top of others, and left them to settle in. Over the months that followed I became a frequent visitor. On many an occasion I assisted Michael in chopping up the once-treasured pieces of his household to feed his sooty black stove.

The end of the year brought another sharp winter. The temperature fell to 18 below zero. Michael was bedridden, there was snow everywhere, but no bread and nothing left for the cold black monster, which hadn't been lit for weeks. Michael's desperate wife kept eyeing the books. ‘Don't,' the sick man pleaded. ‘Don't. A Jew who burns books might as well burn himself.'

‘But some of them are damaged.'

‘Books are living things,' Michael insisted. ‘When they are injured they must be cared for. If they're beyond help, they
have to be given a proper burial. Cremation is out of the question.'

Before long the Roszes received their ‘wedding card', or resettlement notice. I went to say goodbye. Although Chaim Rumkowski, the ghetto Eldest, assured them that they would be better off where they were headed, Mrs Rosz wept bitterly. Overnight their hut had become a palace. But there was nothing they could do, their fate was sealed. As we embraced, Michael whispered, ‘If you can, please take care of my books.'

I was never to see the Rosz family again.

A few days later, after dusk, I revisited their sad-looking hut. It seemed alive with an eerie emptiness. The books were strewn all over the dirty floor, some of them with pages torn out. I sat down amid the wreckage of my friend's precious library, and I must have dozed off, for I fell into a vivid dream.

Out of a battered volume of Sholem Aleichem, a heartbroken Tevye emerged. Throwing his arms apart, he shouted: ‘We are burning, burning!... The flames!' At that moment I knew precisely what had happened to Michael, his wife and their three children.

I awoke with a jolt. It was almost midnight. ‘Time to go,' I said to myself.

But as I touched the door, I imagined I could still hear Michael's torn-up Tevye, calling from the floor:
Take me with you, please, take my song. Sing it to those who don't see, sing it to those who won't know...

 

 
To Immortalize a Beggar
 

Our neighbourhood was a fascinating gallery of characters, but if asked on whom I would bestow my first prize for sheer originality, I would choose the learned and pious beggar whom
we called Shulem the Prince. Shulem was a rich man who became a pauper overnight. If you enquired how, he would respond, with an almost hidden grain of bitterness, that it was Satan's doing. ‘And yet I am much better off than Job,' he would continue. ‘I still have six hungry children at home, and a little wife standing next to her frozen stove, awaiting a miracle.'

Since he had no profession, Shulem took it upon himself to become a beggar. He quickly turned into the most respected beggar in our city. For one thing, he never begged on Mondays and Thursdays; on those two days, like most pious Jews, he fasted — because Monday was the day when Moses had ascended Sinai, and Thursday the day when he had come back down.

Since he was a particularly methodical man, Shulem's professional itineraries were well mapped out. He never visited the same home twice in the one week, and he knew exactly how much to expect from each household — so planning his expenditure was a breeze. The first twenty groshen he received he always put aside for
tzedakah
(charity), in aid of a school for disadvantaged boys. To Shulem, charity was of paramount importance in life. Without charity, he declared, the whole world would, God forbid, come to an end.

Well, it did. And as our homely thugs, on the orders of the ghetto authorities, and in the company of hundreds of other Jews, escorted his thirty-year-old wife and their six children (the oldest only nine) towards eternity, Shulem ran out from the crowd. ‘God!' he screamed into the rooftops. ‘Why?... Tell me why!'

Shulem immediately suffered a fit, collapsed, and died on the spot. Early next morning, a man who claimed to be a seer swore that he had heard, in the middle of the night, the voice of an embodied Tzedakah wailing, ‘I am a widow, a widow, a widow!' Of course nobody believed him. But as the day showed
itself, and the growing light revealed bizarre footprints on the otherwise untouched blanket of snow, our whole backyard fell under the spell of a deep and awesome foreboding.

 

 
The Yellow Sniper
 

Fatek was a born loser. He was a miserable-looking specimen, thin as a swamp reed, with insipid blue eyes and sloppy shoulders, a nose violet from drinking, cheeks as red as hot cinders, and a falsetto voice. His straw-coloured hair had earned him the nickname ‘Yellow'.

Prior to the war, Fatek had spent most of his days in dimly-lit gaming joints, playing poker and assisting novices to master the art, in which he considered himself an expert. At night Yellow would walk about on rubber-soled shoes, like any other noiseless ‘locksmith'. Needless to say, his professional skills made him the local jail's favourite and most frequent guest.

His lucky break was the war. Not long after the steel helmets marched into our city of the waterless river, Yellow Fatek, in common with many of his hue, conveniently discovered that, at least on his mother's side, he was one of
them
. He was accepted as such, and was soon promoted to the role of helping to guard the Jews of the ghetto that had become our prison. Since he had often been arrested for stealing from these Jews, Fatek welcomed the opportunity to show them his brand of payback.

Stationed opposite 40 Zgierska Street — a huge grey building inhabited by dozens of families, and located not far from the footbridge which crossed that street — Fatek positioned himself strategically behind his red-and-white sentry box. From here the skilled thief could pick off his targets carefully, mainly young people who happened to lean out of windows, at
a self-imposed quota of six a day. After operating in this fashion for a while, he was summoned to appear before his superiors. Fatek was terrified; he was convinced that he would be punished. ‘Perhaps I overstepped the mark,' he thought. But instead, to his pleasant surprise, he was rewarded (as rumour had it) with a gilded medal and an increase in pay. ‘Oh my God,' he murmured to himself. ‘What a wonderful war!'

To avoid being confronted with the brutal reality of a childhood world that existed no more, I never went back to revisit the wasteland our town became. Of Fatek's fate I learnt much later, from an old neighbour I ran into on the other side of the world. Once the war ended, this man told me, Fatek had gone into hiding. He emerged towards the end of 1945. One night, drunk and disconsolate, he was heard screaming through his open window: ‘Filthy Jews! First you killed the Son of God, and then you killed my war!' Shortly afterwards a single gunshot rang out — the last shot that Yellow Fatek ever heard.

 

 
Yonas Lerer
 

If someone in our neighbourhood had enquired about Yonas Lerer, he would have been met with a shrug of the shoulders or a blank stare. But if that someone had asked even the smallest child, ‘Where can I find Yonas Shreiber?' the searcher would immediately have been led to the man who, from his boyhood, had established his home among the pages of the
Tanach
.

Yonas Shreiber (‘Scribe'), an honoured disciple of the Alexanderer Rebbe, Isaac Menachem (who was gassed in Treblinka in 1943), had a white ghostlike face decorated with a pair of curly
pitch-black sidelocks. He was always dressed in a black silk frockcoat and, in accordance with tradition, tied a braided cord around his waist, to divide the upper spiritual part of his body from its lower profane counterpart. Like most devotees, he wore his black trousers tucked into white woollen socks.