East of Time (28 page)

In common with all hierarchies, our ghetto's social and functional organization — and its pecking order — was constituted in the shape of a pyramid. As the old saying goes, the deeper the foundations, the securer the structure.

The bedrock of the ghetto pyramid in the city of the waterless river consisted of tailors, cobblers, carpenters, weavers, hatters, plumbers, toolmakers, housepainters, barbers, and many others with less specialized hands. What was remarkable about the members of all these occupations is that, although they hated their masters, they loved to work — to mend, to make, repair, restore. Life was hard for the bedrock people, the load they carried on their meagre shoulders was heavy; yet many were the times when one would hear from the mouths of these starving toilers a tune hummed, a melody recalled, bringing back bygone days of humble happiness and family joy.

Szymon Berger was my foreman in the clothing factory, a smallish, upright, pedantic man, a tailor of some renown and an important stone in the pyramid's foundations. He taught me that happiness was an elusive commodity, difficult to trap. He had a twelve-year-old boy who was sick, and I observed in the factory how Szymon would never touch his soup; while the other workers ate heartily, he closed his eyes so as not to be
tempted, and after work he would carry his meal, like a holy talisman of life, home to his sick son. Thinking back now, it reminds me of a disturbing story I once read, about a tigress that kept her cubs alive by feeding them with bits of meat ripped from her own body.

The next layer of the pyramid comprised an insipid host of inspectors, accountants, record-keepers, pen-pushers, notaries, and assorted squealers; inventors of ‘evidence' who spent their days in whispers, beneath a barrage of lies.

Not far away, in fact on the layer just above them, were the cooks, the managers of public kitchens, the ladies with the lucky ladles, and the drab obtuse Jewish ghetto police. Next came the special units of the ghetto police, the dreaded Sonderkommando, responsible to the Germans and recruited mainly from among high-school students; perhaps because they were unable to shake off their feelings of inferiority, they terrorized those lower levels of the pyramid on which their very existence depended.

On the level before the pyramid's apex dwelt Rumkowski's trusted elite, who between them dreamt up an illusory inertia whereby the ghetto would remain just as it was, a nonexistent reality in which they refused to define themselves as victims.

At the top of the pyramid, then, was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, our king — whose eyes were like crows locked behind two thick-rimmed glass cages, and whose face appeared (at least to me) like a closed fist. He walked about the ghetto as if he owned it, but wore his sixty-odd years with a certain dignity. Although he had his trusted insiders to assist him, the ultimate decisions, the decisions of life and death — who would be resettled and who would stay behind — rested primarily on his shoulders. But where is the man who can state with conviction whether Rumkowski's decisions were a product of bravery or of cowardice? His lot was lonely, to be sure, and very
far from easy. Did he have a choice? Perhaps he did, and perhaps he didn't. Our lives, after all, are determined by unknown chemistries, and governed by mysterious trajectories.

And in the end, who knows how many times, during sleepless nights, this man who projected such strength and confidence shrank back in horror at the echo of his own fateful words: ‘Mothers, give me your children!'?

 

 
Mercy
 

There was a kind of unreality about my parents' friend, the tailor Fishl Binko. He seemed to be driven by a gregarious solitude, the simultaneous need to be in a crowd and to be alone. Fishl was also a great teller of fables — what a pity he never wrote any of them down. I can still remember a few.

A mountain-climber seeking shelter from the winds enters a little hut. The hut is filled with books, and its sole inhabitant, a philosopher sated with the years, welcomes him. ‘Who are you, stranger?' he asks the climber. ‘A wanderer, sir,' the other replies. ‘Have you read any books, my young wanderer, have you any schooling?' ‘No, sir.' ‘Then please,' begs the old philosopher, ‘tarry a little. I am in dire need of an honest teacher.'

Fishl was large and imposing of stature, with an olive complexion, and beneath his pitch-black bushy brows, his brown fathomless eyes and his sagging lips, he wore an expression of disenchantment. He had once been a great believer in justice and human decency, but the war, the ghetto, Europe's betrayal of his people, and awareness of our lives' permanent ephemerality — of which he didn't dare to speak, even to his closest, for fear of the very words — had transformed him into a fierce sceptic.

His wife Frumet, whom he had married in 1928, was a willowy woman from a traditional home, and four years his junior. She had an elongated face and rosy but slightly fallen cheeks. Her shiny dark-blond hair parted in the middle made her resemble, I thought, the image of a suffering Madonna, and not without reason. Like the biblical Hannah, Frumet had been plagued with barrenness; like Hannah, she had implored God in her wretchedness to open her womb. It took eight long and tearful years before the Almighty in His mercy finally answered her prayers.

Mirka was a beautiful, chubby child; thanks to her parents, even that starving ghetto of ours could not deprive her cheeks of their sweet dimples. As for Frumet, she was content with a few spoons of watery soup; her bread, to its last crumb, was put aside to nourish her growing Mirka, who by the autumn of 1942 was six years old.

When it was proclaimed early in September that all children under the age of ten were to be ‘resettled', the whole family went into hiding. On the morning of the 7th, the Jewish police raided the Binkos' apartment. Satisfied with its deadly emptiness, they were about to leave when Mirka, who had been hidden under several layers of blankets, gave a little cough. Within seconds she was dragged from under the bedding. Fishl jumped to her rescue from his hiding-place but was swiftly knocked out. Then Frumet emerged, pounding away with both fists at the policemen's faces, screaming, ‘My baby! My baby!'

Shortly afterwards the distraught, demented mother stood like a black hole in time before the ghetto fence. She had no more tears to cry, no voice left to scream with. Just beyond, on the outside, a little girl with a knapsack, holding on to her mother's hand, was walking to school; a boy was riding a bicycle; lovers were strolling, smiling, laughing... Of course, all this was an illusion. The only reality was the barbed-wire fence,
and the guard. ‘Take pity, merciful soldier, please,' she implored. ‘Pull your trigger. Shoot me. Here, right here — right in my miserable heart!'

The guard duly obliged.

At night Fishl, like a sack emptied of its contents, sat on a low stool in the darkness, with ash on his head. Over and over, he was reciting a passage from the Bible:

Perish the day on which I was born,

And the night it was announced

'A male has been conceived!'

May that day be darkness;

May God above pay no heed to it;

May no light shine upon it;

May darkness and deep gloom reclaim it;

May a pall lie over it;

May what blackens the day terrify it.

May obscurity carry off that night;

May it not be counted among the days of the year...

So Fishl cursed the day of his birth, his life, his very being. But ghetto legend has it — and most of our legends are so rooted in reality that sometimes it's hard to tell which is which — that one night an angel paid him a visit. ‘Fishl,' he said. ‘God admits that he sinned against you. He is about to give you a new wife, and
three
Mirkas. Remember Job?'

‘No, no!' the stricken man answered. ‘Go back to God and tell Him that Fishl Binko is overburdened with His mercies.'

‘What do you intend to do?' asked the angel, growing uneasy.

‘Hang myself.'

‘That would be to defy the Master?'

‘So be it.'

‘But Fishl, all those who committed suicide in the ghetto are walking around in Hell.'

‘That may be true. But their faces are shining.'

 

 
History Lesson
 

At the height of their victories the Germans stood at the gates of Moscow, while we Jews, a multitude of emaciated shadows, were incarcerated in a twilight crevice awaiting the end of our days. Father, albeit the eternal pessimist, said: ‘Yes, they may enter Moscow, even push beyond, but they will lose the war.'

‘What makes you say that?' asked my mother, surprised. ‘Look at them, Gershon! Look at their mobility, their armour, their tanks and guns. Each of them is like a god of war. Who is there to match their power? In no time, they have become masters of Europe.'

‘You're right,' father replied, his grey eyes like two eagles in flight on his knotted parchment face. ‘But there is an anecdote from history that throws a strong light on the present situation. During his pursuit of the cunning Kutuzov, Napoleon spotted through his spyglass a Russian ulan softening his stale bread in his stallion's urine. He lowered his glass, turned to one of his generals, and said, “We've lost the war!” You see, these Russians can trade misery for machines, space for speed, and what the invaders have forgotten is that Berlin's pleasant tradition of afternoon
Kaffee und Küchen
is not upheld that far to the east — especially when the thermometer tells them, “Gentlemen, put your noses in your pockets, it's 50 degrees below zero.”

We smiled but father was just warming up. ‘And yet,' he continued, ‘the Führer's press chief, Otto Dietrich, summoned the foreign press in October last year to announce
officially that, for all practical purposes, the war was won! On account of such a glorious victory, Reichsidiot Adolf Schicklgruber dismissed nineteen of his most able generals and appointed himself commander-in-chief of the army. You see, Masha, this evil fool obviously believes that military strategy and street-brawling, at which he was once an expert, are one and the same thing.