Читать книгу Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors - Shlomit Editor Kriger - Страница 15

Samuel Bak

It was in the late summer of 1941. In June of that year, the German army had occupied Vilna. Mother, our Russian housekeeper, Xenia, and I were left in the large apartment that suddenly looked empty and haunted. The celebration of my eighth birthday in August had been postponed for an indefinite date. Our reserves of food were exhausted. It was dangerous for Jews to go out into the streets.

Luckily, Xenia was able to be of help. She had her resources, and although finding comestibles had become increasingly difficult, we managed. Getting news was another problem. Radios were forbidden. A few Jewish neighbours in our building were the only people we saw. They went on spreading various rumours, in which they hardly believed. We were on the receiving end. We did not know what the others did. The telephones of all Jewish households had been disconnected, and Xenia was our only go-between. It was difficult to have complete trust in her, given the complex history of our relations. She was often absent for long stretches of time, and this made us question her reliability. But we had no choice. We could not protest; we were totally dependent on her goodwill.

Not many days remained until our transfer to the ghetto. One morning, Xenia left early and came back after a few hours accompanied by a rugged man, who was carrying a heavy sack of patched-up burlap. The man smelled of straw and well-fertilized soil. Stiff flaxen hair partly covered his weather-beaten face. His worn jacket, heavy boots, and the sack were all shedding sawdust-like dirt. With an awakening feeling of joy I realized that the sack might contain potatoes and that soon we would be able to appease our gnawing hunger. Xenia gave Mother a quick sign with her eyes and directed the farmer to the dining room with a signal of her hand.

“Please take a seat,” said the housekeeper in an unusually polite voice, of a sort that she had never used for addressing persons of his kind. With a quick and agile movement he let the sack fall to the floor, and it landed on the large Persian carpet in the center of the room. The sack came to a quick halt and remained standing there, slightly leaning to the side as if it was about to burst open and send the potatoes rolling under the table. A halo of thin soil surrounded it. More of the dirt was being shed with each of the man’s steps. With an unusual gesture of self-confidence, he grabbed the back of Father’s chair and sat down.

A tremor like a quickly passing wave of some mysterious explosion passed through my body. Never before had I seen anybody but Father sit in that chair. Why didn’t they warn him that this was the master’s chair and no other living person in the whole world had the right to sit on it? Few objects had such unquestionable sanctity in my eyes. I tried to interrogate Mother with a staring look. All I got back from her was a light shaking of her head that told me to be quiet.

The maid murmured something into Mother’s ear. These must have been the pre-agreed conditions of exchange, which would give us the right to the potatoes. Early on that day, Xenia had taken it upon herself to go to one of the roads that led to the central market with the intention of stopping one of the few carts that were carrying comestible goods from the neighbouring villages. The adventuresome peasants, who preferred to leave their horses well hidden from the German authorities, pushed or dragged the carts into the city with the sheer force of their muscles and offered a limited choice of precious products. Vilna was hungry, and those providers who passed the various military roadblocks with their merchandise and managed to save them from confiscation expected a very lucrative barter.

When Mother reentered the room, she carried a well-upholstered hanger from which dangled Father’s tuxedo, in all its glory of bygone days. If the satin lapels had mouths that could speak, they would have told many stories, some of them quite unfit for a child’s ear. However, I knew that they had a life of their own. On certain evenings, being carefully hung with the rest of the garments on the back of one of my parents’ bedroom chairs and facing my direction, the elegant lapels gave me the feeling that they observed me. I used to admire their delicate shine. There was a buttonhole that fascinated me, because it had no corresponding button and served uniquely for the purpose of displaying a white carnation.

I loved to prolong the evening hours before going to bed by assisting my parents’ preparations for their festive outings. True, I felt proud to be able to contribute to the various stages of their dressing up, but the main reason for my desire to be with them in those moments was the sheer pleasure of admiring their star-like glory. Crawling on all fours I used to search for the special buttons that had to be inserted by Father’s expert hands into his white shirt’s over-starched plastron. They had the bad habit of popping out and getting lost under the bed. I loved to watch him struggle and get angry. My small hands returned to him the innocent objects, and their final insertion into the stiff material had the power to calm his rage. Father’s Russian words of magic, very similar to the exclamations of the janitor who used to clean our staircase, helped him. Mother would tell him that he had a dirty mouth and that the little one was around. But I knew that she was wrong.

Father looked resplendent and absolutely clean, with no trace of dirt on his lips. His curly dark hair that had been pomaded and pulled for an hour with a special brush was perfectly smooth and shone as if it had been lacquered. His face, freshly shaved and sprinkled with a special powder, had an opaque marble beauty. The last move before putting on the jacket was the removal of any excess perfumed dust in order to save the marvelous lapels from invasion by the soothing after-shave powder.

Those glamorous days seemed far away. At present, I couldn’t take my eyes off the dirty burlap sack and the mess on the precious carpet. My thoughts were elsewhere: “How does my Father look now?” I knew that he was in a labour camp cutting turf. I saw him once for a few minutes when an extraordinary chance permitted him to visit us for a whole 15 minutes. Father looked gray and smelled of earth. His clothes were encrusted with brown clay, and huge chunks of it seemed to be glued to his shoes. He appeared unshaved, as rough and as rugged as the peasant who was now claiming his throne. Yet, my parents, in that fleeting moment of reunion, were overjoyed. To me they seemed much happier with each other than they had on those magical evenings when they often used to complain and grumble while transforming themselves little by little from ordinary parents into royalty.

The scene of the potatoes’ acquisition continued as if it were a silent film. The peasant gave a faint smile to the black garment. With dirty fingers he grabbed the satin lapels, which did not react with the contempt I had expected from them. With another hand he reached for a large piece of burlap that hung from one of his jacket’s pockets, quickly wrapped it around the crumpled tuxedo, and turned the whole suit into a miserable bundle. He tucked it under his arm and was gone. I couldn’t help myself. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.

I should have known better. I had already listened to many frightening stories. More than once I had been cautioned about the way times were changing. I was also told that in spite of the troubling nature of events, I was to be informed of everything as if I were a young adult. It was dangerous to remain a child. I had to grow up quickly. I tried my best, but the mind of an eight-year-old boy had its limitations.

Perhaps it was the potato-man’s passage through our home that finally made these things clear to me. It was the first time I fully understood that nothing was going to be the way it had been. When I reflect about it today, I realize that must have been the moment during which I started to say goodbye to Father.

Two years later, it was again a burlap sack that entered mine and Father’s lives and severed them forever. My last memory of Father is the image of his hands, once perfectly manicured but now rough from labour, holding open a large patched-up sack full of sawdust so I could step into it and be smuggled on his strong and loving back out of the labour camp from which there was to be no escape for him. This was, indeed, our final farewell. But I did not cry. I was 10 years old, and I was an adult.