East of Time (24 page)

Then I heard her redeeming whisper. ‘It's not entirely your fault,' she was telling me. ‘I underestimated your fierce spontaneity — that is something a woman should never do. I promise you, next time it will be better.'

And so it was. And after a few weeks of diligent practice we achieved what I thought must be the highest level of carnal harmony.

It was too good to last. Because the day came when I knocked on Anna's door and, to my horror, was answered by a man's gruff voice. ‘Who's there?' it demanded.

I was shattered. Like a thief I sneaked away on tiptoe. Hoping desperately that she wasn't home from work yet, I waited near the foot of the stairs for Anna's return.

She greeted me with a strange smile. ‘My husband came back,' she said.

It was as I had feared. ‘So... what about us?' I muttered.

‘
Us
? Don't even dare to ask.'

‘You're cruel Anna, very cruel,' I heard myself tell her.

‘So is life,' she snapped, and coldly squeezed past, abandoning me on the narrow bottom landing of our dark and winding staircase.

 

 
Across the Wire
 

My school friend and party comrade Sol Lichtensztajn, carried away by the tide of events, was forever in the thick of things. He lived with his mother, his one-legged father and his two little sisters in a one-room apartment on Dolna Street; in pre-ghetto days his parents had owned a tobacconist's kiosk nearby. Sol's father had excelled himself in the 1920 battle known in Polish history as
Cud nad Wisł
ą
(Miracle on the Vistula), where he lost his right leg and, for his bravery, was rewarded with a licence to
sell cigarettes, an activity over which the government held a monopoly.

The war brought severe hunger to the Lichtensztajn household. In no time, tuberculosis took care of one of Sol's sisters, a suspicious cough confined his mother to bed, and the daylong nervous
thud-thud
of his father's wooden leg drove my friend to the brink. Sol had jesting blue eyes, a thick blond mane over his forehead, and a strong wiry body; he resembled a Polish country lad far more than a city-dwelling Jew.

At the end of September 1940, early on a crisp Sunday morning when God was still resting, Sol crept quietly out of his home, determined to procure some food for his dying mother. He walked up and down Dolna Street, and when he thought the sentry on guard duty was looking the other way, he leapt with the swiftness of a cheetah across the barbed-wire fence that separated this part of the ghetto from the rest of the city. But he wasn't quite swift enough, for as he leapt he was struck by a bullet from the rifle of the
Schupo
, as members of the Schutzpolizei, the German police, were known. His body was left dangling across the fence-wire.

When my underground circle met, towards dusk that day, we greeted each other with great sadness. It was not that we weren't accustomed to death — after all, the killing of Jews had become a daily occurrence. But we thought of ourselves as family, and it's different when one of your own is murdered. For a good while we sat together in silence. Then, because we knew that the deed had been committed by a young Austrian, who before the war might easily have been a fellow socialist, we began to recall the 1934 uprising in Vienna, and some names of leaders that were dear to us: men such as Koloman Wallisch, Julius Deutsch, and of course Franz Munichreiter, chief of the fire-brigade, whom, because of a stomach wound he sustained in the failed rebellion, the Fascists brought to the gallows on a stretcher...

‘How passionately we were involved in their fight,' one of us remarked, ‘sending our meagre earnings to help the starving children of Karl Marx Hof.'

‘It wasn't just
their
fight, but also ours,' Bono, our cell leader, reminded us. ‘And it still is. This war was not started by our comrades but by a madman, a megalomaniac who craves immortality. Well, his end will come, I can assure you.' He nodded his head portentously, staring into the distance.

‘According to an ancient legend,' he resumed a few moments later, ‘there was once a holy temple in Athens, constructed of light, hope and peace. One night, a deranged, talentless man who hungered after renown set the temple aflame; when it lay in ashes he ran into the marketplace and, to the astonishment of its peaceful citizens, screamed, “I put the temple to the torch! I put the temple to the torch!” For this, the sages of Athens proclaimed a heavy punishment: that no one should ever speak to the malefactor, no one should offer him shelter, no one should provide him with food; and that upon his death he should be left in the gutter to rot, until his corpse would turn the stomachs of vultures... Today, the same fate awaits that infamous arsonist in Berlin!'

I think Sol's was the last party interment in the ghetto. About twenty of us, bareheaded in the late-afternoon breeze, stood around the grave. Someone threw a red handkerchief into the open pit, and as the soil was tossed in and the makeshift coffin of our dear murdered comrade was covered by a sad and growing mound of fresh earth, Bono uttered a few valedictory words. Then, to the rhythm of the not-too-distant steps of the guard patrolling nearby, we began to murmur a familiar tune:

There is no might that can bar our way

or hinder with fear our hands;

we will transform into sunshine the night

with workers of all other lands...

The day took on a nondescript greyness. At curfew we dispersed, cautious as shadows. Our mood was sombre, yet somehow the incandescent light that our parents, our school and our party had implanted within us, the light we believed capable of transforming night into sunshine, helped us now. It would continue to guide us through a world grown so utterly forlorn.

 

 
The Chosen
 

One can be wise and yet quite naive; one can be stupid yet extremely cunning. I would say that Schicklgruber, our nemesis to the west, was rather the latter. Like his partner Dzhugashvili in the east, he had the craftiness to pick, from among thousands, the right man for the right job. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what credentials they were after, his thugs began their search for a suitable servant-tyrant. Chaim Rumkowski happened to be in the right place at the right time. His face was beaming with acceptance. He didn't realize what he was taking on...

(‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?' pleaded Moses, God's lawgiver. ‘I am not a man of words.' Nonentities, on the other hand, are forever eager to rule.)

Chaim — a man in his mid-sixties, uneducated, with restless eyes and a questionable past, grey-headed like a Greek philosopher and imbued with Herodian dreams — proved the perfect choice. Initially he had a council of thirty-one to help him execute the master regime's agenda. But on 7 November 1940, all but two of them were murdered. Meanwhile, up to 168,000 Jews
were crammed into an area of just over four square kilometres, among them numerous people with small children, or with sick or lame parents. Some were desperate for shelter but shelter was hard to come by; we were among the lucky ones, old legitimate citizens of the squalor known as Bałuty, where the inverted state was set up.

Jews are forever carrying on a love-affair with hope — if there were an Olympiad of hoping, my people would invariably take out all the gold. Consequently we quickly became accustomed to our permanently ephemeral existence.

To show his Top Dog that he was worthy of the paper crown, Chaim the puppeteer established, almost overnight, a viable industry that churned out the finest product. For this our little Machiavelli was paid in food, which he distributed primarily amongst his chosen associates, along with their families and friends.

As hunger continued to whittle away at the ghetto population, and the cemetery blossomed with unburied corpses, and people had to enter in the middle of the night to locate and identify their dear ones, a storm of discontent shook Chaim's town. On 24 August 1940 a broadsheet appeared on ghetto walls:

All the starving throughout the Ghetto will assemble on Sunday, August 25, at 9.00 a.m., at 13 Lutomierska Street.

Brothers and Sisters!

Let us turn out en masse to eradicate once and for all, in unison and by concerted force, the terrible poverty and the barbarian conduct of community representatives toward the miserable, exhausted, famished populace. Let every man do his humane duty to his kin and carry the cry:

Bread for All!

Enlist in the war against the accursed community parasite.

We demand that soup kitchens be opened in the blocks.

Next morning, Lutomierska Street was awash with vexation. Speaker after speaker incited the starving multitude to revolt. Suddenly, amid the turbulent throng, my dear friend Shmulik emerged from the crowd and, without hesitation, hopped on the roof of a nearby shed and sang a ditty composed on the spot:

Our Chairman Chaim

is an old mad hatter,

Ghetto Jews are starving,

he grows fatter and fatter.

When all these tidings reached Chaim, he was furious. ‘Is this what I get for sacrificing my whole life for them?' he screamed. Swiftly he summoned his leader's henchmen. After all, law and order was under serious threat. They came, fired their rifles into the air, and went. That night, over a roast duck for supper, Chaim grumbled: ‘My whole ghetto is at stake, my dreams, and all they can think of is bread!'

 

 
Herman Hecht