East of Time (19 page)

 

 
The Sun in My Mother's Song
 

Like most of my school friends I was brought up in a socialist spirit, in the belief that socialism would free our working-class parents from the drudgeries of life; that socialism — and, in the view of some of our people, Communism — would bring bread into our hungry homes. At the age of twelve, not one of us had yet read
Das Kapital
, Max Beer's
History of Socialism
, or other books dealing with that subject. Our educational literature consisted mainly of poetry and songs; every word in these songs and poems we took for gospel, since they spoke to us with an ingenious and trusting credibility. Mother had a beautiful voice, and after a day of hard work, in order to lull her wrenching pain to sleep, she loved to sing of the glory of the coming revolution.

I was quite convinced that the prophecies in my mother's songs would soon, very soon, be fulfilled. But history, like nature, is full of bizarre twists. So it was that on 23 August 1939 two mortal foes, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, embraced each other in friendship, thereby making our time the victim of an abominable trick.

Shortly afterwards my sister Pola's friend, an ardent Stalinist, ran breathlessly into our flat. ‘There are circumstances,' she shouted out of the blue at my father, whom she knew to be a confirmed anti-Communist, ‘in which language cannot express the magnitude of a historic event... It's impossible,' she continued, her voice subsiding, ‘to define the genius of Stalin's dialectic!'

My dad smiled hesitantly. Then, with a disconsolate gesture of refusal, he repeated the lines he had pencilled after the infamous Moscow trials:

From Warsaw to Paris,

From London to Iraq,

Has Moscow dispatched

Her bloody axe.

The woman stood there, an incredulous look on her face. ‘Fascist!' she exclaimed, and brusquely walked out the door.

Nine days later, on 1 September 1939, as the dawn awoke from a nervous night dark with anticipation, and Molotov– Ribbentrop cocktails began to rain on our heads from the German bombers swarming overhead, I watched as the sun in my mother's song died on her lips.

 

 
Initiation
 

Friday morning, 8 September 1939, in the city of the waterless river. I happened to be standing on the corner of Lutomierska and Zgierska, facing the Church of St Mary and her tall, sad spires. The arms on the clock froze at a quarter to ten; they were not to budge for five years.

White flags of defeat fluttered obsequiously from every window, and high above, up in the unreachable sky, a solitary plane swam like a grey shark. Fear cannot always be seen, but one can be frightfully aware of its presence. In the foreboding stillness I picked up the poignant murmur of the cobblestones. For a split second I experienced the illusion that I was here alone, all alone; but before long, as if in a black-magic play, the street had come to life with throngs of blue-eyed, hefty-bosomed maidens carrying flowers in their naked arms, screaming
Heil! Heil! Heil!
at the oncoming invaders as they rolled through our town.

When I got home I found my father arguing with our religious neighbour, the widower Zilberszac. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early sixties whose beard, pencilled with fine silvery strands that tumbled from his chin like a black waterfall, might have been the envy of the rabbinical world.

‘No, Panie Gershon,' he was asserting, ‘it won't be as bad as people are saying. Remember the Germans in the last war? Their incredible politeness, friendliness even, the business we used to do with them? Panie Gershon, my son the history teacher told me a remarkable thing. He told me that one should not forget Heinrich Grätz, who, after completing his
History of the Jews
, wrote to his grandfather that he had concluded the work with a joyful feeling — knowing, he said, that the Jews had at last not only found a just freedom in civilized lands, but had also gained a certain recognition.'

‘Grätz was not the first or the last naive sage,' mother replied.

Mother's comment would come to seem like the prophecy of a Cassandra, because a week later, on the morning of the Sabbath, a distraught and bloodied Zilberszac, his face resembling a badly harvested field, fell into our room. The scene has hung in my memory like an exhibit suspended in a gallery that refused to close. My little mother, with wet towels, is bending over Zilberszac's bulky form; father runs to and fro with buckets of water; while the victim tries to explain what happened. ‘I walked out through the gate quite early, the street was still sleeping... Out of the blue two young soldiers sprang at me... They forced me to kneel... One of them said, “I'm a master
Razierer
,” and took out his pocket-knife!... I begged for mercy but he took no notice...'

All day long Zilberszac sat in our room like a silent tombstone in a forgotten cemetery. But as the evening wind began to blow out the waning daylight, and a grey cloud like a dishevelled witch appeared on our windowpane, he quietly stood up, walked to the door and, turning his face towards mother, said ‘Thanks.'

Then, as if to himself, he added: ‘Dusk is always the harbinger of night.'

 

 
Beginning
 

And the black magician said, ‘Let there be darkness,' and there was darkness, and he saw that the darkness was good. And he separated the darkness from the light. He called the light night, and the darkness he called day. And there was morning and there was evening, the first day of his creation.

And on the second day he decreed that no Jew be allowed to walk on the footpath, or in the middle of the road. No Jew should be permitted to have a dog, cat, bird, money, gold, fur coat, piano, violin, mandolin, guitar, gramophone, or to breathe Aryan air. All Yiddish books and all writers who wrote in Yiddish were to be burned, their alphabet ground to dust, for one must not forget that it was a Jewish secret code, and that in each of its letters there dwelt a hidden flame that would destroy the holy darkness. One needed to watch the Jews closely, for they had an art of dreaming up dangerous schemes, their very presence and movements could modify the world.

And then he said, ‘Let all the Jews be herded into one precinct,' and they were herded in, and he saw that the herding was good. And there was morning and there was evening, the third day of his genius.

At dusk, just past the curfew, we discussed our new situation. ‘What is there to do?' someone asked. ‘We are on a road that leads to no other roads.' Another replied, ‘They may want to kill us, but we'll live through that as well. History is awash with butchers, yet we outlived them all.'

I listened to what father had to say — and would not have believed that this incurable doubter was able to utter such words. ‘There is a certain freedom even in prison,' he declared, ‘and we have to make the most of that.' Then he related a parable, which went something like this:

A prominent scientist once predicted the coming of a great catastrophe, a second flood that would destroy all humanity. The clergy, forever ideologically divided despite a common vested interest in the Almighty, quickly called an international conference. They advised each delegate to bring along his own God, in the hope that such a manifestation of religious fidelity might sway heaven to rescind so cruel a punishment.
But as the members of the gathering were about to commence their deliberations, they were horrified to notice the absence of a single representative of the Jews. Messengers darted to and fro, but the tidings were gloomy: the Jews were not coming, and they remained unmoved. One emissary reported that, first of all, they were too busy studying how to live underwater. Secondly, they had been astonished to have been asked to bring their God — it had never occurred to them that one could carry ubiquity.

 

 
Snow in the Window