Jewels and Ashes (24 page)

The underground is forced to change its tactics. It must move with the masses, smuggle weapons across bridges. Tennenbaum and Moscowitz set up headquarters at Ciepla 13, a cottage within the enclave. Young fighters stand on street corners urging revolt, one last stand, a dash for the forest. An eleven-year-old girl, Bura Shurak, leads a band of teenagers, pasting posters that cry out for revenge: ‘Blood for blood! Death for death! The road leads to Treblinka. There is nothing left to lose!'

‘Raus! Raus! Juden raus!'
Resistance cells move into position. Explosions mark the beginning of the revolt. Factories erupt into flames. Haystacks are set alight. Cottages catch fire. Smoke billows towards summer skies. Horses rear in panic. As one fighter falls, her comracks charge forward hurling primitive grenades. The Nazis counter attack. Mothers clutch their children as they dive to the ground. Ghetto inmates crouch in the gardens, caught between shrapnel and fire. The earth burns underfoot. The sun blazes in mid heaven. The Nazi charge mounts. Bullets spit from windows and balconies. Tanks barge through the streets. Planes swoop low to strafe trapped masses. Resisters hurl themselves at the fences, but are beaten back by cordons of troops. Cornered and isolated, their ammunition running out, they take to axes and crowbars in a rage fuelled by futility and a bitter thirst for vengeance.

By mid-afternoon the initial battle is over. Five thousand lie dead. Columns of inmates are being herded through Jurowietzka gate. They are driven by truncheons towards Pietrasze field. Those that try to escape are shot as they run. Raphael Raizner, in hiding with his family in a cottage on Chmielna Lane, looks out upon a scene of utter devastation. The Judenrat gardens are littered with corpses and abandoned packs. The wounded are crying out for water. Children crouch beside dead mothers. Their moans rise up in a discordant chorus of terror. The bridge over the Biale, beneath Kupietzka 38, is crammed with bodies. As darkness falls, a sudden downpour floods the ghetto, smothering the cries of the wounded.

‘Do not dwell upon the past', father warns. Yet the past intrudes regardless. ‘It can happen any time', he tells me, as if finally pushed into the admission by my incessant probing, my persistent questions, my urge to penetrate his inner world. Gradually at first, and then with increasing rapidity, the floodgates are prised open and, yes, he confesses, it can erupt without notice, a sudden flash, a stab of regret, a glimpse of a face — a Bishke, a Sheine, a Zundel Mandelbroit, tangible, three dimensional, their eyes startled, confused. He can be working in the garden, immersed in daily chores, strolling in streets or neighbourhood parks, any time, anywhere. As soon as they appear a battle ensues: between tears and desire for life, between chaos and a longing for light.

The tears began a long time ago, on the very first day in fact, at the time of departure. March 5, 1936. Father stood on a platform at Bialystok station, a small man in a large overcoat, clutching a suitcase in each hand as he entered the train. He looked back towards the faces of Bishke, Sheine, and intimate friends, hovering by the windows. Then they were gone, and everything he had known had vanished beneath the horizon. And in that moment he knew he would never see them again.

The faces that still come to father with such startling clarity are now a blur. I cannot make them out among the twenty-five thousand who huddle on Pietrasze field. I can merely describe their collective fate second-hand, in vague outline, as I pursue them into their final days. They are surrounded by heavily armed guards who scream abuse in drunken stupors under a scorching sun. The captives are driven to and fro, fleeing from beatings and bullets fired at random. Many are trampled as they run. Rings are ripped from their fingers; watches torn from their wrists. Parents smear children's lips with urine to ease their thirst. Many buckle under in despair and give way to the mud, to be released from their ordeal.

On the second day the selections begin. SS men stalk the assembled mass, hooking the U-shaped handles of their canes around those deemed fit for slave labour. Any who refuse to leave wife and children are dragged away. The elderly and ill are hurled into carts and taken back to Zabia Square, where pits have been prepared. Gustav Friedl drives by in an auto, leaps out, fires the first shots, and directs his murder squads to finish the job.

On the third day the captives are lined up five-abreast and marched to Bialystok station. The stronger are prodded with cattle prongs into the forward wagons. The remainder are herded to the rear wagons. They are unhinged when the train arrives in Malkin station, and attached to a second locomotive which disappears into a forest — destination Treblinka. The forward carriages continue on to Lublin, where the prisoners are distributed among the work camps of Blyzin, Paniatowa, and Majdanek. On arrival in Paniatowa the newcomers are greeted by camp commandant Tumin, astride a white horse. He surveys them and shoots, on a whim, anyone whose appearance annoys him.

As he travelled west, across Poland, father's disorientation persisted. He had been thrown into a vacuum in which all around him — passengers, gliding landscapes, country stations — remained distant, remote, while within him flashed scenes of a Bialystok he would never see again. These were precious moments, he tells me, in which he could reflect, take stock, weigh the good against the bad. There was the poverty he was glad to be leaving, the narrow streets of childhood that had cramped his expansive dreams; the constant undertow of menace that had always permeated his life; and the growing threat of renewed pogroms he was relieved to have escaped. And there were the regrets, he reminds me, the moments he could have done this or that differently, been more considerate, said something softer to Bishke, to Sheine, a brother or sister.

Yet the Bialystok he was leaving had also been imbued with communal warmth, a sense of unity and purpose: ‘We grew up as chaverim', father emphasizes. ‘We were mirrors in which we reflected our shared aspirations. There were many who emerged from poverty as loving companions who were happiest when they served the needs of others. The essence of the Bund ethos to which I was drawn was our chavershaft, our loyal friendship. Our lives become possessed by a form of magic, an indelible bond, a common song. We sang it as we walked through lanes and alleys, and effortlessly beyond, along country paths, until abruptly all was still. And from that stillness there arose the humming of more primitive worlds: swamps, lakes and rivers, untamed, forbidding, yet studded with jewels; slim white beryoskes, chestnuts in silver bloom, and warm nights ablaze with stars hovering over a luminous dream we called Bialystok.'

Ten thousand remain within the ghetto, in hiding. Search squads in groups of ten return day after day. Suspected hideouts are dynamited, listening devices installed, ferocious bloodhounds urged on, buildings torn apart: one by one, family by family, bunker by bunker, the quarry is hunted down. Once detected there are only two alternatives — an immediate death by bullet or the journey by cattle wagon to Treblinka.

When father arrived in Gdynia he saw the sea for the first time in his life. Yet, despite the exhilaration, his sense of regret remained. It pursued him as he set sail for New Zealand. What he had left behind continued to hold sway over what was to come. The open ocean was an awesome universe that surpassed his wildest imaginings. As the earth dropped beneath the horizon it seemed as though the foundations had been torn from under his feet. The boat cut through the water like a plough, and reflected in its wake were elusive images of Bialystok, of those he had so recently farewelled. And it was during these early days of the voyage, from Old World to New, that the dreams had begun, disturbing visions that have persisted to this day.

They come to him often, Bishke and Sheine. They stand by the bed and ask him how he is, while father asks them, ‘Where are you now?' And in the mornings his sense of disorientation is overwhelming. ‘This is why I must deny my dreams', father insists. ‘Otherwise I would suffocate. A father. A mother. Bathed in blood. A beloved city. A community of friends caught in an ocean of flames. And I was so far away.'

A need for workers to cart and bury the dead, and to load factory equipment for transfer to Lublin, enables a stay of execution for several hundred porters, mechanics, and Judenrat officials. They are issued with special passes as a number of buildings are cordoned off and ringed with barbed wire to create an inner ghetto. Efraim Barasz is warned not to permit intruders. Random inspections are carried out every few hours to check passes. The Nazis are intent on leaving nothing to chance as they pursue their mission to make Bialystok Judenrein.

From the moment I first entered Poland, across the Soviet border, I was struck by one overriding thought:
this landscape is Judenrein
. I had never before been so contronted with the enormity of this fact. I became remote from the other passengers, my eyes riveted on the countryside. Here my ancestors had lived in a vast network of settlements which teemed with a way of life that had evolved for a millennium; they had created a kingdom within kingdoms, a universe pulsating to its own inner rhythms. Then it had vanished. Wiped clean from the earth. Judenrein. My journey took on a shape of its own, an inner logic, a relentlessness which has propelled it forward, regardless. Facts and stories have arisen of their own accord, demanding recognition, no matter how disturbing. And even now, as I near the final days of liquidation, this inner momentum drives my chronicle towards a completeness, to the remnants now roaming the forests as partisans, to the dwindling bands of fugitives holding out within the ghetto ruins, to the last pockets of resistance. One larger group of seventy-two fighters hides in an extensive bunker with well-concealed entrances — one through a disused well, the other in a cottage on Chmielna Lane. At noon, on August 19, the bunker is suddenly surrounded. The entrances are blown apart by grenades, the prisoners led away to the corner of Kupietzka and Jurowietzka. From a distance, in hiding, Raphael Raizner hears the defiant singing of revolutionary songs abruptly silenced by bullets as the fighters are executed.

Trains criss-cross the Bialystoku province. I gaze through the windows, absorbing every scene, sucking the marrow from Judenrein landscapes as if hidden truths lie buried within them. We were born in the wake of Annihilation. We were children of dreams and shadows, yet raised in the vast spaces of the New World. We roamed the streets of our migrant neighbourhoods freely. We lived on coastlines and played under open horizons. Our world was far removed from the sinister events that had engulfed our elders. Yet there had always been undercurrents that could sweep us back to the echoes of childhood, to the sudden torrents of rage and sorrow that could, at any time, disturb the surface calm: ‘You cannot imagine what it was like', our elders insisted. ‘You were not there.' Their messages were always ambiguous, tinged with menace, double-edged: ‘You cannot understand, yet you must. You should not delve too deeply, yet you should. But even if you do, my child, you will never understand. You were not there.'

Inevitably, we were drawn into their universe — the regrets, the nagging grief, the wariness and suspicion, and the many ghosts they fought to keep at bay as they struggled to rebuild their lives. And given the tale I seem compelled to tell to the end, could we have expected it to be otherwise?

The last major battles are fought on August 20. The Fabryczna Street cell retreats to the grounds of the ghetto hospital. Doctors, nurses, and patients join them in a desperate attempt to defend the courtyard. Squads of SS men break into the wards and, in a fury bordering on hysteria, they hurl patients — newborn babies and elderly alike — onto footpaths and into carts bound for pits in Zabia Square.

Tennenbaum and Moscowitz retreat to their headquarters on Ciepla Lane. Surrounded on all sides, with ammunition running out, they set fire to the cottage. Legend has it that the two leaders took their own lives rather than fall into the hands of the enemy.

Mother and father fight to keep their ghosts at bay in radically different ways. They are opposites, and have been for as long as I can remember. For mother, especially in the years of her ageing, it is the silence that predominates, broken occasionally by a quiet humming, a snatch of ancient melody which evaporates back into silence. Sitting with her, for hours on end, by the kitchen table, I have come to understand the variations of that silence. At times it resonates with defiance; at others it suggests an irredeemable loss. Sometimes it is softer, a surrender, a letting-go. Yet the anger and rage I knew in her as a child can flare up, without warning: ‘What did you dream about last night?', I ask. ‘Nothing', she replies. ‘And besides, is dreaming going to bring them back to life?'

By early September, all machinery and merchandise have been removed from the factories. The inmates of the inner ghetto are led to Bialystok station. In the front row walks Efraim Barasz, suitcase in hand, neatly dressed, proud in bearing, silver hair glowing in the sunlight. Behind him stretch long columns of Judenrat officials, communal leaders, Jewish police, factory managers. Their footsteps echo on the cobblestones. They move in silence through a shattered ghetto, their faces set, resigned, beyond hope, beyond tears.

A passenger train transports them to Paniatowa work camp. On November 3rd, along with thousands of fellow Bialystoker, they are slaughtered into mass graves while a camp orchestra plays the waltzes of Johann Strauss.

Father avoids silences. He resorts to his first and most enduring love: words. Through words he strives to make sense of the world. When a dream of Bishke and Sheine recurs, or a vision of a former friend suddenly invades his being, he fights ferociously to regain control by overwhelming them with words. The words mount, become more strident, more insistent, as he talks his way to survival.

We sit together on a park bench, in Curtain Square, our favourite meeting-place, on a Saturday morning, eating father's most recent variation on Sheine's latkes; and there is little for me to do but to be a spectator of his inner drama, to absorb his barrage of words, and to wonder why I have become so obsessed with pursuing the past, and why I have pressed so hard to extract the dreams he has so effectively suppressed. Or is it rather that the camouflage has always been transparent and that, within both parents, I have always known a simmering sorrow, despite their efforts to disguise it?