East of Time (31 page)

My friend Kuba Litmanowicz, a toolmaker by trade, was a man of enormous physical strength, great loyalty, few words, and deep, shining thoughts. He was also a lover of the sun. His build and his olive skin always reminded me of the Yiddish verses of Moyshe Kulbak:

Young men of bronze

impelled by a will

to appease the anger

of years that have flown —

Come, let us go,

let us leave the weaklings behind...

But now Kuba was dying. Ghetto hunger had brought on tuberculosis. He knew it was the end, yet here he was, pleading:
‘Tell me a lie. Please tell me they are losing the war, it will make it so much easier to die.'

‘There's no need to lie,' I reassured him. A few of us were standing around his bed. ‘They
are
losing the war, and you'll live to see it.'

‘Thanks, friend,' he smiled. ‘I still have the talent to surrender to fantasies, to be utterly deceived by dreams. You know I was always a free-thinker, but now, with this body becoming a battleground of life and death, I've come to understand that there is nothing stronger within us, nothing mightier, than that mysterious force of which we know nothing...'

For a good minute he kept his eyes closed. I felt a stab in my heart, fearing that they had closed for the last time. But suddenly they opened again, alive, larger and wider than ever, gleaming blue-gold, like the bright flames of two dwindling candles.

‘I read once,' he said, in a voice that was almost unearthly, ‘a poem written by a Hungarian poet whose name I've forgotten. A mother is speaking to her son, who has been condemned to death. “I have been granted an audience with our young king,” she tells him. “I'll bow my grey head before him, kiss his feet, and beg for your life, my only one. When you climb the steps up to the gallows, turn your eyes towards our balcony. I'll be standing there, and if you see a black scarf around my neck, you will know, my son, that your mother failed you; but if the scarf is white, as I am sure it will be, you'll know, my son, that mercy has been granted.”

‘And so, at dawn the next morning, the young man walks towards the gallows, the bleak sea of his life raging about him, rising and falling between
to be
and
not to be
. As he climbs the final step, where the treacherous noose hangs ready to cradle his head, he cautiously turns to the balcony where his mother stands, waving her hand. And there, about her neck — Oh God, the scarf of life!

‘He pauses for a moment, then radiantly steps up to the rope, where shortly he will swing with a smile on his youthful lips.'

 

 
My Aunt's Candlesticks
 

My mother's sister, Esther Hinda, was renowned for her piety, but she had a bitter life. Her husband, my uncle Shlomo, who kept a shoe shop at Nowomiejska 28, was a chain-smoker and an incorrigible scoffer at religion. According to the beadle at our local synagogue, Shlomo paid the price: in 1935 he contracted cancer and the following year he was off to face his Maker. His departure was excruciating, but my uncle was also stubborn and stoical, and refused to complain. His doctor, Herszkowicz, a man with murderous grey eyes, and hands that looked as though they were forever soaked in soapy water, begged him: ‘Please, Shlomo; moan, cry, scream — it'll be easier.' But the patient wouldn't hear of it. ‘No, doctor. Dying is not an art, but to die like a man
is
.'

After my uncle's death Hinda and her five daughters inherited the shoe shop, but none of them had any idea about the business so things went from bad to worse. As luck would have it, soon after the Germans seized our city of the waterless river they assigned the shop to a prominent and meticulous compatriot, who quickly relieved the family of its services, then secretly placed my aunt's name on a list of the city's well-to-do.

On Ko
ś
cielna Street, amid leafy trees behind St Mary's Church, there stood a two-storey redbrick house occupied by the criminal police, known as the ‘Kripo'. Jews who had the misfortune to be interrogated in that bastion of justice seldom came out in one piece. On a wintry Monday, just after reciting
her morning prayers, Esther Hinda received an invitation to the aforesaid house to declare her wealth.

‘Apart from my engagement ring,' the frightened woman stuttered, ‘my earrings, and five silver coins with the image of Józef Piłsudski, I have nothing to declare.' Two hefty slaps on the face and a blow to her belly from Sutter, the man in charge, made Hinda spit out her dentures, which contained a number of teeth capped with gold. ‘Aha!' said the master interrogator, who spoke Yiddish as capably as any Jew. ‘If you open your mouth voluntarily, you'll get off lightly. Aren't you aware that we know everything about you? Of course I'll accept your jewellery without qualms,
and
your Piłsudski coins, but to hold back from us your famous candlesticks would be nothing short of sheer
chutzpah
.' Sutter smiled meaningfully. ‘Now strip!' he shouted, knocking off her wig.

Standing naked in the freezing windowless room, her small hands covering her private parts, Hinda looked like a frightened, emaciated boy. One nod from Sutter and his gang of three bullies began rhythmically to punch her tiny body. But she would sooner have parted with her life than with the Sabbath candlesticks which her forefathers had saved from the fires of Lisbon, and her foremothers had carried, like babes enveloped in prayer-shawls, through Venice, Paris and Amsterdam, until they brought them to this land of her birth.

Every Friday in the ghetto, after her children had escaped to Russia at the outbreak of war, Hinda would cautiously descend through the trapdoor under her bed into a dark musty basement. She would spread a white cloth over an empty wooden crate, pull the candlesticks from their hiding-place and light two candles, covering her eyes with her hands as tears rolled down her sunken cheeks. She would chant: ‘
Blessed art thou, Lord out God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights
.'

How she must have longed for the peace and solitude of that basement as, over three long days, Hinda was kicked, bludgeoned and whipped by Sutter and his cronies; but she would not give in. On the fourth day, lying naked on the floor, bleeding from her ears, nose and mouth, as Sutter yet again brought his booted foot against her thin neck, she heard the voice of her father, Aba Bresler:
Esther Hinda, daughter mine, for God's sake remember
Pikuach nefesh
— life above everything
.

That was when my aunt finally relented.

Sutter had the candlesticks promptly retrieved and brought to him. He studied the inscription engraved under the base of each of the ancient pieces: ‘
Porto Israel, Lisboa 1457
,' he read out. ‘I knew your family wouldn't collect any junk.' Excitedly he called out to his henchmen to join the ceremony. What happened then we know only from an account given by a Jewish charlady who witnessed the scene through a door left slightly ajar.

Hinda, naked and in pain, was forced to put a burning match to two candles that had been placed in the candlesticks. According to the distraught witness, the moment she did this, two enormous black tongues of flame burst from the sacred objects. My aunt's face turned ash-pale, and she started to chant not the blessing for light but the mourner's prayer: ‘
Magnified and sanctified be His great name...
' She stopped abruptly, hit the floor, and never got up.

 

 
Surreal
 

Today, Herszke Goldstern, a 41-year-old worker, hanged himself in his apartment at 16 Wróbla Street. Adolf Epstein, aged 42, resettled here from Sudetenland, also hanged himself in his apartment at 35 Zawiszy Street. The mother, 43, of Fajga
Paciorek, a school friend of mine, jumped from a third-storey window at 63 Lutomierska Street. And Julius Borhard, in his mid-seventies, slashed his veins and leapt from the window of the old people's home.

A major arrest was made. A plainclothes policeman discovered a secret workshop producing pancakes from rotten vegetables and potatoes retrieved from garbage. The two families involved, residing at 13 Lwowska Street, were preparing this delicacy most probably for profit; both families were arrested by order of the public prosecutor. In the course of the investigation the prisoners denied that they had engaged in the sale of the pancakes, but one of their children spilled the beans. ‘We employed a salesman,' the little boy innocently revealed.

Last night, at the House of Culture, the concert conducted by David Bajgelman played to a capacity audience. Chairman Rumkowski, flanked by his faithful entourage, sat in the front row. The orchestra accompanied a singer in her rendition of some Yiddish songs, then presented several works from the classical repertoire. The climax was a rousing performance of a Beethoven piano concerto.

At the conclusion of the program a delighted chairman made a fine speech appropriate to the occasion. Afterwards, Rumkowski took aside one of his trusted assistants, Szaja Stanisław Jakobson, and asked him to summon the soloist.

‘
Di host shain geshpielt
,' he told the young man in Yiddish. ‘You played well. But why do you look so pale?'

‘I lost my wife, sir, to typhus, just two weeks ago,' the pianist answered nervously. ‘I lost her,' he repeated.

‘I know how it feels,' said the chairman. ‘I also lost my beautiful wife, in the prime of her life. She used to sing the Yiddish songs I heard here tonight.' Rumkowski had tears in his eyes. Briskly he turned to his assistant. ‘Szaja,' he shouted, ‘see that
the
muzykant
gets a double portion of soup for the next two weeks. And make sure the doctor gives him a script for a weekly ration of potato-peels, but from the police kitchen — don't forget, Szaja, it must only be from the police kitchen.'

The night outside was windy and drizzly when the chairman left the concert hall. I happened to be standing nearby. In his dark coat, and with thick black-rimmed spectacles perched on his Roman nose, Rumkowski appeared to me like a lonely owl. Despite his sixty-odd years, he climbed quite nimbly into his
droshka
. He signalled to the coachman and the brown old nag took off. I don't know why, but the rhythmic clatter of its hoofs made me think of a wagon rumbling towards an ever-hungry guillotine.