East of Time (22 page)

Yonas was blessed with a wife and seven sons.

In his free time — that is, when he was not studying — he walked about the streets exhorting people, Jews and Gentiles alike, to be virtuous. ‘Please, please,' he would urge, ‘for your own and our world's sake, do good deeds, and keep your tongue from speaking evil.' At the start of our ghetto life, Yonas was a ray of hope; he saw God's hand in everything. ‘Don't despair,' he pleaded with his fellow Jews. ‘It is all from Him! Bless your troubles, praise the Almighty, and you will hasten the coming of the Messiah.'

But when our enemies did to him what the Babylonians had done to Zedekiah, the last king of Judah — forced Yonas to witness the murder of his sons, having bludgeoned him with the butt-ends of their rifles for asking to be killed first — he became totally disillusioned with his Master's goodness and wisdom. He abandoned the pages of his once-adored scriptures, stopped speaking to people, and went about his slaughtered world with a cadaverous look in his eyes.

One night, while reciting a tearful
Kaddish
after his sons, he glanced up and saw the obscene grin of a solitary cloud. He felt a light touch on his shoulder. It was Madness, quietly entering the darkened chambers of Yonas's heart.

God
, it told him,
has passed on to you your father's and your father's fathers' misfortunes, a holy inheritance. And so it should be, from father to son, from son to son. To be chosen remains your destiny; it is attested by your children being put to death.

‘So what am I to do?' asked Yonas Lerer. ‘How am I to live now?'

You are a fortunate man
, Madness replied.
You have three choices — not everyone is given three choices.

‘What are these three choices?'

The first, my friend, is to forget everything, and exist like a lantern without a light. The second is to remember everything, and convert your heart into a graveyard.

‘And the third?'

The third is, in my opinion, the best of all. Bind the first two choices into one, and walk for the rest of your days like me, in the guise of a man.

 

 
Pantomime
 

Frederick the Great, enlightened ruler of Prussia and a disciple of Voltaire, confronts his costly clergy. ‘If you won't show me proof that there is a God,' he says, ‘no more money will be forthcoming into your already fat coffers.' One of the churchmen steps forward. ‘The Jews!' he exclaims. ‘Look at everything we've done to them through the ages, and yet they're still around. That, surely, is unequivocal evidence that there is a God.'

Well, some two centuries later, the madman to the west who controlled our world — and who, at moments of violent exultation, believed there was nothing in all creation as splendid as himself — decided, with the acquiescence (for the time being) of his ephemeral partner to the east, to prove the cleric wrong.

The first step was the old device of declaring the potential victim to be vermin, a premise which most of his followers enthusiastically embraced — for it is much easier to squash a bug than another man. The next was to have the victims concentrated in one spot, so that extermination might proceed in
an orderly manner. Order, of course, was very much at the heart of the madman's design. None the less, to furnish the process of ‘in-gathering' with especial zest, he went out of his way to invert God's system.
Let there be chaos!
he shrilled, and there was chaos. On 7 and 8 March 1940, in our city of the waterless river, a horde of his savage heroes embarked on a murderous spree which cost hundreds of Jews their lives. On 1 May the ghetto was sealed off.

One evening, as mother placed our ‘dinner' before each of us — a steaming dish of water where a lonely potato struggled in vain to avoid its fate — father remarked, mostly to himself: ‘One tries to get to the bottom of things, but it's all just a running around in circles. History is absurd, events escape the control of reason. Time to withdraw into our own little world if we can.'

Shortly afterwards Ruven Rosen, a pious friend of ours with a glass eye (a memento of his fight for Polish independence in 1918), paid us a visit. He was barely recognizable. The Germans had ripped off his beard with a kitchen knife — the same indignity suffered the previous year by our neighbour Zilberszac, and an increasingly common occurrence in the streets of our town. Ruven was in dire need of consoling, for he sought some confirmation that what was happening was God's will. Father refused to accommodate such a notion. ‘A God who is not a good God,' he declared, ‘is no God at all. If He created man in His own image, why did we turn out so utterly debased?'

As if from a house on fire, Rosen ran out of our room, heartbroken. ‘Blasphemer!' he screamed as he went. ‘Desecrator!' Father dashed out after him and, full of remorse, escorted him back. ‘Reb Rosen, please,' he pleaded. ‘I didn't mean to offend you. I'm just bitter, like any other Jew these days. But if God willed this, then I cannot and will not forgive.'

Our neighbour fell into an inconsolable stupor. I inspected him out of the corner of my eye. He was clearly in pain, but it also struck me that without his beard he resembled a featherless chook. Father's razor gaze froze my smile.

That night a gang of thugs torched our synagogue.

 

 
Puppet State
 

A mad state in a mad world, hemmed in between timber boards and barbed wire, like a chicken-coop, and guarded by killers. Though it behoves me to say, that while one might still outwit the latter abominations, one could never conquer the unnavigable sea of hate which the local populace had so deftly dug out around us.

Little Shmulik, our local jester, who while still a boy would be sent to meet his Maker, once asked my father — whom everybody in our yard except myself considered a sage — why his former school friend Jurek, who lived across the fence, refused to respond to his greetings. ‘Well,' father told him, ‘he wants to be an exemplary member of his stock, so he must above all demonstrate his hatred for Jews; anything less would be suspect.' I don't know whether Shmulik understood this answer, but he nevertheless thanked my dad and walked off.

For those of us inside the fence, understanding had come quickly enough. The appointed Jewish ‘king' of the ghetto, our puppeteer, was Chaim Rumkowski. Industrious, cunning, alert, a man with an arresting appearance who in other times might have been certified for the things he said and did, he could definitely not be regarded as a disappointment to his bosses. For not only did he successfully establish the order desired by his masters in the city of the waterless river; in the process, and much to the liking of his illustrious superiors, he ingeniously
mimicked their own state. Chaim even resorted to their own obscene didacticism in embracing the proposition that orderly removal of unproductive elements was conducive to the future of our communal life.

From the very inception of the Jewish ghetto police, his commissars, sergeants and privates, even his fire-brigade, wore special uniforms complete with polished jackboots that imitated the Germans' terrible footfall. To deepen the dichotomy between themselves and the ordinary ghetto Jew, these scoundrels, mostly former high-school students, would not speak Yiddish but only the Polish tongue. Consequently they considered themselves not just a people apart, but the true aristocracy of Chaim's cobweb empire — and with good reason. They and their families were generally exempted from the expulsions from their homes; moreover, they lived well, never going hungry in a city that was starving, going instead on recreation leave within the enclave that was our twilight zone.

On one occasion, during an official function for the privileged ghetto elite, as the night reached its intoxicating climax, the regal Chaim — around his neck a silver chain bearing a Star of David — called out to his festive gathering: ‘Gentlemen, I am bound to share with you some important news. The war will soon come to an end, but let me assure you: the Ghetto will continue as before. Of course, at the rate we're going now,' he added, ‘there will be a shortage of workers, and as you know, work is our golden passport to life. But I've been told that new Jews will be brought in, Jews from all the corners of Europe. And I, my dear friends, with God's help, will continue to take care of all the citizens of the ghetto, and to protect you all, as I have always done...'

The only defence of the average ghetto-dweller against Chaim and his henchmen's vulgarity, the one defence of the starving impoverished workers who spat out their lungs over
the sewing or textile machines or in the carpentry workshops, was the sarcastic verses and aphorisms which the poet's lacerated heart sang into posterity.

Behind the wires, by cosy fires,

The scum are singing, united in crime:

‘Let's drink L'Chaim to our sovereign Chaim,

To juicy roast and a red French wine.'

As daylight betrayed the day, and dusk squeezed its grey smirk against the pane of our workroom, Efraim the Chassid (so called because of his deep religiosity), presser in our tailoring unit, would shake his head. ‘My God, how is it that our common fate has not transcended our differences?' And then, paraphrasing the opening lines of the Lamentations, he would chant:

How lonely sits the city

of the waterless river.

She that was once great with people

has become like a widow.

She that was a princess among the cities

has become a vassal.

Bitterly we weep in the night ...

 

 
Missed Curfew