East of Time (27 page)

But it would be an extreme miscarriage of justice against Nazi ingenuity if one were not to include their seminal guiding principle —
Order
. Chaos had to be avoided at all costs, and the terminology must follow suit. This doctrine was perfectly exemplified by the ultimate directive: Distribute a towel and a piece of soap to each
figure
before the final entrance to the
showers
.

Once the doors were sealed, an official of the master race, notebook and pencil in hand, would ascend to the roof of this intricate invention, where the aspiring professor of linguistics could pin his blue eyes to the observation window, so as to record for posterity his academy's crowning achievement — the agony of dying children...

Guilt was not frequent among these peculiar devil-creators. They looked upon what they produced as a normal endeavour, an accepted industry within the system of their dream. The dream had spawned its own language, and the language nourished the dream.

 

 
Suicide
 

Like a wet smear, a rumour ran through the ghetto. A fearful and tangible murmur.

The Hunt.

The Germans, employing the Jewish police as their sniffer dogs, were about to strike at the very essence of our being. Nobody knew when; we knew only that all ghetto children under the age of ten and all adults over sixty-five would be taken, to be ‘resettled'. We were accustomed to confronting death on a daily basis, but this latest perfidy caused the ghetto, that surreal asylum, to go berserk. Between 5 August and 5 September 1942, a plague of suicides — a spit in the face of creation — swept through our community.

Among these suicides was 27-year-old Kuna Leska, known after she married as Kuna Rotsztajn, who lived with her infant daughter Rifkele and her brother Gedaliah in a one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a nearby block. Like many others, Kuna had become acutely aware that her life was dangling from a cobweb's thread over a dark, bottomless abyss. She was alone:
in 1940 the Germans had conscripted her husband Michael to forced labour; a year later she was notified that he had ‘died' in the course of his ‘work'. Kuna was devastated; no doubt the blow nourished her psyche with murky solutions. And so, on that defeated sunny afternoon of 19 August, she jumped from her window into the liberating arms of death. Why she left her child behind is a question to which no one should seek an answer. Nothing will become clearer through explanation, and for the sake of a survivor's sanity it is dangerous even to ask.

Within a few minutes the paramedics (whose children, like those of the sniffer dogs, were exempt from the Hunt) arrived on the scene. Kuna's eyes were still open. The older of the two men gave her one glance, struck a match, sheltering the cigarette in the shell of his hands, and said: ‘As good as gone. Take her away.'

The Hunt began on the morning of 5 September. As the huge high-sided truck rolled into the yard of 22 Łagiewnicka Street to collect the petrified little children, Gedaliah grabbed his niece, ran up to the roof, and roped her to the chimney in such a way that, for the duration of the search of their yard, she would appear as one with that structure. (He didn't have to warn the three-year-old fugitive not to cry.) Then Gedaliah turned his face to the sky: ‘Almighty Lord,' he prayed, ‘grant this child at least seven days of what my people granted You for all eternity — make her invisible!'

And He, may His name be forever blessed, did.

By the twelfth day of the month, the Hunt had come to a temporary pause. Gedaliah was just nineteen, his sister was dead, his parents in some nowhere, and he with a little girl to shelter, feed and protect. He decided to seek the help of his sister's sister-in-law, Dora Blatt. But as he entered her flat, holding Rifkele's thin hand in his, the woman and her husband Israel — a man who, once known for his composure, now
resembled an asylum escapee — crumpled before him. ‘Oh, Gedaliah, Gedaliah,' cried Dora. ‘They took away
our
two children too, they've slaughtered us! We are dead!'

The young man understood the situation and left.

A few hours later, as the night was closing in, Dora unexpectedly appeared on Gedaliah's doorstep. She was dishevelled and her face bled from self-inflicted scratches. ‘How will I sleep, Gedaliah? How
can
I sleep?' she wailed, taking the bewildered Rifkele by the hand and hugging her tightly to her breast. ‘Maybe someone out there will have mercy on
my
children. After all, God is great...'

The little one, white as a ghost and trembling all over, as if suffering from an attack of malaria, could not contain herself any longer. ‘Mummy!' she screamed. ‘Mummy,
where are you, Mummy
?'

Her heart-wrenching plea would reverberate in her uncle's soul for the rest of his life.

So it was that, thanks to a distraught woman's nobility — and to Gedaliah's food-ration card, which he left with Dora — the good Lord endowed Rifkele with two more years of life and dread.

 

 
Give Me Your Children!
 

They reversed Leviticus. You shall steal. You shall deal falsely and deceitfully with one another. You shall commit robbery, defraud your neighbour. You shall withhold the wages of the labourer. You shall insult the deaf, place stumbling-blocks before the blind. You shall render unjust decisions, favour the rich, show no deference to the poor. You shall judge your kinsman unfairly, deal basely with your countryman, profit by the blood of your fellow. Keep these laws and do not fear God.

On 4 September 1942, in the third year of my barbed-wire existence, I heard our reigning puppeteer speak to the multitude. ‘Mothers! Give me your children!' he pleaded.

Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than twenty thousand Jews out of the ghetto; if not,
We will do it for you!
So the question became, ‘Should we take it upon ourselves, do it ourselves, or leave it to others to do?' Well, we — that is, I and my closest associates — had to think first not ‘How many will perish?' but ‘How many is it possible to save?' And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we must take the implementation of this decree into our own hands. I must perform this difficult and bloody operation — I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take children because, if not, others will be taken as well, God forbid...

I wasn't a parent at the time, and perhaps I couldn't grasp fully the meaning of what I was witnessing. Yet more than six decades later, I still keep wondering what sort of a man can bring himself to utter such words.

Meanwhile, the ‘resettling' commission — Rumkowski's appointees, whose children were not to be affected — sent out emissaries to weave stories and reassurances. All resettled youngsters would be placed in beautiful sunny kindergartens, while the sick and elderly would be under the care of famous German doctors. Do you really think, they argued vehemently, that people who walked with Mozart, Goethe and Beethoven could be capable of murdering babies?

My thirty-year-old friend Izzy Dajczman, with whom I worked at the factory at 13
Å»
abia Street, spoke little; when he did say something, you could hardly see his lips move. At the outbreak of war he had escaped to Russia with his wife Miriam
and their little son Arele. He soon came back to occupied Poland, so as not to be late for his rendezvous with fate. ‘To learn from one's mistakes is almost superhuman,' Izzy would whisper. At this time he and his family lived in a long, dark, one-window apartment which I often frequented. Miriam was a gentle soul and always greeted me with a smile.

The night of 5 to 6 September was a gruesome one for ghetto parents. At daybreak the Germans were to begin taking their children away, and there was nothing they could do. ‘Let's hide,' Miriam pleaded. ‘Let's hide no matter what.' But Izzy shook his head. ‘If they catch us, we're
all
dead,' he said. ‘So what? I'd rather be dead than give up my child!' ‘What about the kindergartens? — maybe it's true...'

Mid-morning on 6 September. A Jewish policeman opens their door, enters, and lifts up Arele. The little fellow, white with fear, cannot understand why his mother is howling, why his father is shedding tears while reassuring her, ‘Everything will turn out for the best, you'll see.' Arele is dressed in the new navy-blue woollen coat that his father made for his fifth birthday. On a wire around his thin neck hangs a piece of white linen with the boy's name and address: ARELE DAJCZMAN, KALLENBACH 6. ‘Don't forget, Arele,' says Izzy as he walks him to the door, ‘to tell your new teachers that you know both the Hebrew and the Latin alphabet, and that you already know numbers.'

Outside, a uniformed German grabs Arele by the collar and heaves him like a bundle of rags into a large waiting truck. Its open platform is walled in by several rows of timber planks, to crush any hope of escape for dangerous offenders like Arele Dajczman.

A few days later, on our way home from work, Izzy begs me to drop in for a minute, if only for Miriam's sake. ‘She's down, so frightfully down,' he tells me. We climb the stairs and open
the door to their room. A faint beam of light plays on Miriam, who is lying in bed with her face to the wall. As we draw nearer, we notice the pool of blood at her throat.

I spend a sleepless night in Izzy's flat. At the first spark of daylight I boil the kettle and we sit at the table, mourning in silence. At last I encourage him to eat a slice of bread. He obeys, and a few minutes later we go off to work together.

 

 
The Pyramid