Kaputt (14 page)

Jewish policemen stood in pairs at the street crossings with the star of David stamped in red on their yellow armlets,- they stood motionless and impassive amid the incessant traffic of sledges pulled by troikas of boys, baby carriages, hand carts loaded with furniture, heaps of rags, old iron, and all sorts of miserable junk. From time to time groups of people gathered at street corners, stamped their feet on the frozen snow and clapped their open hands on their shoulders,- they stood close with their arms round one another—ten, twenty, thirty of them, in order to give each other a little warmth. The squalid little Nalewki, Przyrynek, and Zakroczymska street cafés were crowded with old, bearded men, standing pressed together, silent, perhaps like animals giving each other warmth and courage. When we appeared on the threshold those who were near the door drew back in fear; I heard some frightened screams, some groans; then silence fell again, broken only by panting breaths, the silence of animals already resigned to death. All gazed at the Black Guard who followed me. All gazed at his angel's face, a face that all recognized, that all had seen a hundred times shining amid the olive trees near the gates of Jericho, of Sodom, of Jerusalem. The face of an angel announcing God's wrath. Then I smiled, I said,
"Prosze pana
—I beg your pardon," and I was aware that those words to them were a wonderful present. I said
prosze pana
smiling, and all around me I saw smiles of wonder, of joy and of gratitude, coming to life on those faces the color of soiled paper. I said
prosze pana
and I smiled.

Squads of young men went through the streets picking up the dead bodies; they went into the halls, climbed the stairs and found their way into the rooms. They were young gravediggers, mostly, students from Berlin, Munich and Vienna, some deported from Belgium, Holland, France and Romania. Many of them had once been rich and happy,- they had lived in beautiful homes,- they had grown up amid fine furniture, old pictures, books, musical instruments, valuable silver and delicate china,- and now, their clothes in tatters, they laboriously dragged feet wrapped in rags through the slush. They spoke French, Czech, Romanian and the mellow Viennese German; they were cultured young men trained in the best universities of Europe—ragged, hungry, devoured by vermin, still sore from the blows, the insults and the suffering that they had endured in concentration camps and during the awful trek from Vienna, from Berlin, from Munich, from Paris, from Prague, from Bucharest to the ghetto of Warsaw. But there was a wonderful light in their faces, a youthful determination to help one another, to relieve the measureless misery of their people; there was gentle and resolute challenge in their gaze. I lingered to watch them during their work of mercy, and in a low voice I said in French: "
Un jour vous serez libres, vous serez heureux et libres
—Some day you will be free, some day you will be happy and free," and the young gravediggers lifted their faces and looked at me smiling. Then they turned their eyes slowly on the Black Guard who followed me like a shadow; they gazed fixedly upon the cruel-faced and handsome Angel, the death-warning Angel of the Scriptures, and they bent over the dead bodies stretched out on the sidewalks—they bent over, bringing their own happy smiles close to the bluish faces of the dead. They lifted the dead gently as if they were lifting wooden statues, and they placed them on carts drawn by teams of ragged and wan youths,- the outlines of the corpses remained in the snow with those horrible and mysterious yellowish stains that corpses leave on everything that comes into contact with them. Packs of bony dogs ran sniffing after these funeral processions,- and flocks of ragged boys, their faces marked with hunger, lack of sleep and fear, scoured the snow picking up rags, pieces of paper, empty tins, potato peelings—all that precious refuse that is always left by hunger, poverty and death.

Sometimes I heard within the houses soft singing and monotonous wailing that broke off as soon as I appeared on the threshold. An indescribable stench of filth, wet clothing and dead flesh filled the air in the squalid rooms in which pitiful throngs of old people, women and children lived heaped like prisoners in a crowded jail, some sitting on the floor, some leaning against the walls, some stretched out on bundles of straw and paper. On the beds lay the sick, the dying and the dead. Everyone suddenly became silent, staring at me, staring at the Angel who followed me. A few went on silently chewing some miserable morsel. Others, mostly young people with wan faces, with blank eyes that the lenses of spectacles made larger, were gathered around the window, reading. That too was a means of cheating the debasing expectancy of death. Occasionally, when we appeared, someone would rise from the ground, turn away from the wall or leave a group of his companions and come to meet us slowly, saying softly in German: "Let's go."

As in the ghetto in Czestochowa, a few days before, when I had appeared at the threshold of a house, a young man who had been sitting on the floor near the window came forward; he had a mysteriously happy air as if he had lived for that day in an anguish of waiting, and as if he thought that the moment had come at last, and he welcomed as a liberation that moment that he had hitherto feared. Everyone stared silently at him; not a word came from those lips, not a groan, not a cry, not even when I gently pushed the youth back and smiling told him that I had not come for that reason, that I was not a Gestapo officer, that I was not even a German. I perceived disappointment slowly coloring his face, and that same anguish returning from which my sudden appearance had freed him for a few moments.

Also, in Cracow one day I had gone to the ghetto. When I looked into the door of one of those houses, I saw a lean youth— with a sweaty face and all wrapped up in a filthy shawl—reading a book in a corner of the room. He rose as I entered. When I asked him what he was reading, he showed me the title page; it was a volume of Engels' letters. Meanwhile he was getting ready to leave. He buttoned his shoes, arranged the dirty rags he wore as socks, and rummaged about under the lapels of his coat for the collar of his tattered shirt. He coughed shielding his mouth with his puny hand. He turned to nod his farewell to the people gathered in the room and everybody stared at him, silently,- suddenly, when he had already reached the door he turned, removed his shawl and with tender hands arranged it around an old woman seated on a couch; then he came back to me on the landing, and though I smiled and told him to go back I could not make him understand my words.

Later, recollecting that before coming out to me he had taken off his shawl, there came into my mind a picture of the two completely naked Jews I had met one morning in the ghetto. They were walking between two SS guards. One was an old, bearded man; the other was still a boy; he could not have been more than sixteen. When I mentioned that meeting to Wächter, the Governor of Cracow, he gently replied that many Jews when the Gestapo went to fetch them, stripped and distributed their clothing among relatives and friends, no longer having any use for them. They walked naked through the snow on an icy winter morning, slashed by the knives of a frosty thirty-degrees-below.

I turned to the Black Guard, saying, "Let's go." I walked along the sidewalk in silence beside the Black Guard whose face was beautiful, whose gaze was clear and cruel, whose brow was hooded by the steel helmet; it seemed to me that I walked by the side of Jehovah's Angel, and I expected him to stop at any moment and say to me, "We are there." I thought of Jacob and of his struggle with the Angel. An icy wind was blowing, the color of a dead child's face. Night was falling, the day was dying along the walls like a sick dog.

As we walked down Nalewki Street toward the exit from the "forbidden city," we fell in with a small, silent crowd on the corner of a street. In the middle of the crowd two girls were fighting, silently tearing at each other's hair and clawing each other's faces. When we suddenly appeared the crowd melted away, the two girls separated; one of them picked up something from the ground; it was a raw potato, and she went off drying with the back of her hand the blood that smeared her face. The other stood there looking at us. She was arranging her hair, roughly setting aright her torn and disordered clothes. She was a poor girl, pale, fleshless and hollow-chested; her eyes were filled with hunger, modesty and shame. Suddenly she smiled at me.

I blushed. I had nothing to give her. I wanted to help her, to give her something, but I had only a little money with me, and the mere thought of offering her money filled me with shame. I did not know what to do, I stood there facing her smile, and I did not know what to do or what to say. Suddenly I made up my mind, stretched out my hand and offered her ten
zloti
notes, but the girl grew pale, stopped my hand, and said smiling,
"Dziekuje bardzo
—Many thanks." Slowly pushing away my hand, she gazed into my eyes and smiled; then she turned and smoothing her hair walked away.

At that moment I remembered that I had a cigar in my pocket, a fine Havana cigar given to me by Doctor Egen, Lieutenant-Governor of Radom; I ran, caught up with her and offered her the cigar. The girl gazed uncertainly at me, blushed, took the cigar, and I understood that she was only accepting it to please me. She said nothing, not even thanks; she walked away slowly without turning, holding the cigar in her hand, bringing it close to her face from time to time to inhale its scent, as if I had given her a flower.

"Have you been to see the ghetto, my dear Malaparte?" inquired Frank smiling ironically.

"Yes," I replied coldly.

"It's very interesting, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, very interesting," I answered.

"I don't like going into the ghetto," said Frau Wächter, "it is very sad."

"Very sad, why?" asked Governor Fischer.

"So
schmutzig
—So dirty," said Frau Brigitte Frank.

"Ja, so schmutzig
—Yes, so dirty," said Frau Fischer.

"The ghetto of Warsaw is undoubtedly the best in all of Poland, the best organized," said Frank, "a real model. Governor Fischer has a happy touch in matters of this kind."

The Governor of Warsaw blushed with pleasure: "It's a pity," he said with an air of modesty, "that I had so little space. If more space had been available, I might have arranged things much better."

"Oh, yes, it is a pity!" I said.

"Just think!" went on Fischer. "More than one and a half million Jews are now living in the same space where three hundred thousand people lived before the war. It's not my fault if they have to be squeezed."

"Jews like to live like that," said Emil Gassner laughing.

"On the other hand," said Frank, "we cannot force them to live differently."

"It would be contrary to the law of nations," I remarked smiling.

Frank gave me an ironical glance. "Nevertheless," he said, "the Jews complain. They charge us with not respecting their wishes."

"I trust you do not take their protests seriously," I said.

"On the contrary," said Frank, "we all do our best to anticipate their protests."

"Ja, natürlich
—Yes, of course," said Fischer.

"As for the filth," went on Frank, "it cannot be denied that they live under deplorable conditions. A German would never tolerate living like that, not even as a joke." And he repeated with loud laughter, "Ha, ha, ha! not even as a joke!"

"It would be an amusing joke," I remarked.

"A German would not be able to live under such conditions," said Wächter.

"The German people are a civilized people," I said.

"
Ja, natürlich
,"
said Fischer
.

"It must be admitted that it is not altogether the fault of the Jews," said Frank. "The space in which they are herded is rather small for a population that size. But, basically, the Jews like to live in filth. Filth is their natural habitat. Perhaps it is because they are all sick, and the sick, as a last resort, tend to take refuge in filth. It is sad that they die like rats."

"They do not appear to appreciate very much the honor of living," I said. "I mean to say the honor of living like rats."

"I don't mean to criticize them in any way," countered Frank, "when I say that they die like rats. It is merely a statement of fact."

"One ought to bear in mind that under the conditions in which they are living it is very difficult to prevent them from dying," said Emil Gassner.

"Much has been done," suggested Baron Wolsegger in a prudent voice, "to lower the death rate in the ghettos, but..."

"In the ghetto of Cracow," said Wächter, "I have ordered the relatives of the dead to defray the expenses of the burial. And I have obtained good results."

"I feel sure," I said ironically, "that the death rate dropped overnight."

"You've guessed right; it has dropped," said Wächter laughing. Everyone laughed and looked at me.

"You should deal with them as with rats," I said. "Give them rat poison. It would be simpler."

"It's not worth the trouble to poison them," said Fischer. "They die at an incredible rate. Last month forty-two thousand died in the Warsaw ghetto."

"It's rather a high rate," I said. "If they go on like this in a couple of years the ghetto will be empty."

"It's impossible to foretell as far as Jews are concerned," said Frank. "All the estimates of our experts have proved wrong. The faster they die, the faster their number increases."

"The Jews persist in having children," I said. "It is all the fault of the children."

"Ach, die kinder!
—Ah, the children!" said Frau Brigitte Frank.

"Ja, so schmutzig
—Yes, so dirty," said Frau Fischer.

"Ah, did you notice the children in the ghetto?" asked Frank. "They are horrible! They are dirty and diseased; they are covered with scabs and prey for vermin; they would be pitiful if they were not so loathsome. They look like skeletons. The child death rate is very high in the ghettos. What's the children's death rate in the Warsaw ghetto?" he asked turning to Governor Fischer.

"Fifty-four per cent," replied Fischer.