Читать книгу The Memories We Keep - Walter Zacharius - Страница 12

My father’s dream of going to Warsaw did not happen. We were forced to move to the Baluty, a large industrial area the Germans created so we Jews could help the Nazi war machine. My assignment was to sew buttons on German uniforms six days a week, ten hours a day. (In an “act of friendship,” the authorities let us have the Sabbath off.) We worked in a hot, airless room on the second floor of a warehouse. In the summer it became so oppressive many of the girls fainted. I was able to withstand the heat, but my skin turned a dull yellow.

The Baluty was cold, dirty, and disease ridden. It had been a slum even before the Germans came. The buildings were old and crumbling; many of the streets had never been paved. As fall approached, the Nazis cut off our water supply and stopped all refuse collection. The result was a typhus epidemic, which cut our population nearly in half. We were hungry all the time. Hungry people get angry easily, and we fought over trifles. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday by having an apple all to myself.

In November, fuel was rationed, and when there was nothing left to burn a mob demolished a wooden shed on Brzezinska Street for firewood. An old woman was crushed to death in an attempt to collect some of it.

Nate Kolleck, Jozef’s schoolmate who, like him, had made his way back to Lodz, said we were becoming like the legendary golem: the soulless walking dead. I despised the comparison, but it was obvious he was right. I knew I could look forward to my sallow skin turning corpse-gray.

Nate lived in our tenement. I knew him from Lodz. He wasn’t much older than I, although he always seemed so much more mature. Maybe it was because he was so thin and had lost some of his hair. He was always interested in people, and I thought that someday he would become a psychologist.

Each family was allotted one room, no matter how many members there were. Nate was “lucky,” for he lived alone, even though it was in a closet. He had no brothers or sisters, and his father, David, had been beaten to death at the Café Astoria on the first day of the occupation for attempting to stop the rape of a waitress. His mother had later leapt out of her third-story window rather than watch the Volksdeutscher take her home. The Jewish Ministry of Finance seized all their valuables.

Nate, like the rest of us, was reimbursed in “rumkes,” currency engraved with “King Chaim” Rumkowski’s profile. Rumkes were the only legal tender in the Baluty and useless outside of it. Marks, zlotys, even American dollars, all had to be surrendered. The smuggling trade died overnight, and with it our contact with the outside world.

And then the rumkes became useless as well. Eventually there was nothing left to buy. In Chaim’s ghetto the rule was “work or starve.” Every man, woman, and child was harnessed to a factory as part of Rumkowski’s plan to make us indispensable to the new masters.

From his apartment in the Summer Palace Fronic just inside the far walls of the Baluty, Chaim ordered the diversion of the railroad tracks of Litzmannstadt onto a special line, which terminated inside the ghetto. There, raw materials—scrap leather, confiscated furs, quilts, down comforters, and pillows—were off-loaded at the Umschlagplatz, where a transport picked up reconditioned winter uniforms and reclaimed steel and aluminum from our salvage plants. There was work to do, and the inhabitants of the Baluty were grateful.

But when the German war effort started to bog down, life in the Baluty also began to collapse. Work and starve was what we ultimately did. Rations for bread, meat, and dairy products were cut in half, then halved again. Whether one’s share was a pound a week or a ton, it mattered little. There was no meat to buy. Even those on double rations—the Judenrat families, members of the Jewish police, doctors, those who collected human refuse in the pushcarts—all were slowly starving together.

Mama and Papa fell into a torpor that made me feel I was living with mechanical toy robots. Listlessly, my mother cooked the meager meals and my father tended an ever-growing list of patients with similar complaints: dysentery, rickets, anemia—starvation. Jozef, now that he had recovered from his injuries, was in a perpetual rage, inveighing against the gods and the Germans with an energy that seemed boundless, as though he were the sea crashing endlessly on an unyielding shore.

As for me, I disappeared into a world of fantasies lit by chandeliers from L’Opéra, where I starred as Sophie or Suzanna, depending on whether I was in the mood for Strauss or Mozart. Jean-Phillipe attended every performance, always picking me up backstage after the performance and taking me to Maxim’s, where we would get dizzy on wine before going back to his flat or mine to make languorous love amid a landscape of pillows. These visions sustained me. When, because of a scream, a collision, a fight, an accident, I was forced to open my eyes to reality, I would cry until the music in my brain would once again bring comfort.

Thousands of Jews died of starvation during the winter of 1940, and the survivors quickly began to succumb to typhus, doubling my father’s already inhuman workload. Even as the epidemic spread, however, the Baluty’s factories continued running nonstop. Work crews kept improving the roadways and installing new trolley lines, and we developed a halfhearted respect for Rumkowski: at least he was keeping us busy in jobs that held some hope for the future of our enclave. Working for him, Jozef said, was better than being sent to the camps.

When a worker was needed for a special job, Nate Kolleck volunteered. For each job, summer or winter, he would arrive wearing a heavy wool coat, which concealed his ancient Rolleiflex camera. With it he recorded every atrocity he saw on film he’d been hoarding for months before the ghetto was established. Old men with long sideburns and beards, their black wool coats dragging in the mud; women with screaming babies trying to suckle milkless nipples; swaggering young Jewish militiamen stalking the ghetto; corpses poking out from beneath newspapers as they lay in the gutter awaiting the refuse collectors. In the corners, in doorways, the living also waited, their legs swollen, their stomachs distended, too sick to move.

Every night Nate developed his negatives with chemicals he’d hidden away. The film was carefully sealed in tin cans and hidden behind the bricks of the converted closet where he slept. Sometimes I walked the streets with him after sunset. Once we saw two naked children shoveling handfuls of offal into their mouths. I turned away. Nate grabbed me roughly by the arm.

“No, Mia, you must look,” he urged, pressing the shutter lever. Click. The children’s image was preserved.

Next a sanitation cart rolled up the unpaved street, pulled by human horses with stringy sinews bulging from their skeletal frames. It moved along the twisting alley; even the naked boys ran from its stench. People darted in and out of their doorways to empty their bedpans and chamber pots into its bed. A few clicks, and everything was recorded.

Nate looked satisfied as he concealed his camera under his coat. It infuriated me. “How can you bear it?” I asked. “It’s as if you enjoy watching their misery.”

He shrugged. “I’m not the cause of it.”

“But it’s wrong to take their pictures. You could let them hide their shame instead of documenting every bedpan and bloated belly in this hellhole.”

“Someone has to do it,” he said urgently.

“Why?”

“Because we’re sealed off. With the smugglers gone, nothing enters from the outside and we are kept in. If we have no idea of what’s beyond the barriers, what do you think they know about us? Take a look. Tens of thousands of people are walking around like they’re already dead. Skulls are crushed over a piece of bread, families live twenty to a room, children eat shit. Now tell me, without photographs who would ever believe what the Germans have done to us?”

I shook my head.

“Do you remember how I used to devote my time to painting?” he asked.

“Of course. Jozef said you had tremendous talent.”

“Will that talent get me a piece of beef fat to throw into the ditch water they serve us for soup in the factories? No. The paintbrush made me too romantic. The camera keeps me honest, even if I’m the only one to see the pictures.”

It wasn’t that simple, I thought. It couldn’t be. Once a person gave up romance, beauty, music, color, and light, his soul atrophied and he might as well be dead. I started to tell this to Nate but held my tongue. The changes the ghetto had forged in him made him unapproachable, though I believed he wanted to be approached by me. I think he might even have been a little in love with me. If photographs of the demonic allowed him to escape the demons, so be it. But he frightened me.

“Listen to your father,” Mama begged, staring into Jozef’s rage-filled eyes.

He shrugged off her hand. “I’m fine without a lecture.”

“You’ll listen,” she said sternly. “You’re physically well at last, which means you’ve got to be all the more careful. That temper of yours isn’t healthy. Especially with the militia patrolling the streets. And the informers—your friends and neighbors.”

Jozef blazed like a flare. “Who wouldn’t be angry, with Führer Rumkowski marching around his Summer Palace in jackboots? And his announcements—in Polish, yet—‘my Jews’ this and ‘my Jews’ that. The bastard’s a disgrace to the Jewish race.”

“There’s no such thing as the Jewish race,” Papa said wearily. “There are only Jewish people, and we have real problems here. People are dying every day. The Mieckiewicz State Hospital is overflowing. We need doctors, disinfectant, drugs.”

“And you expect to get that from King Chaim?”

“He’s our only hope.”

“He’s an ignorant swine. It’s the dregs of humanity like him who give the rest of us a bad name.”

“No more!” Papa thundered, and I was glad to see he had passion left. “Don’t you understand? If the Jews weren’t brothers before, the Master Race has made us indistinguishable. Do you think only the uneducated starve, or that typhus will spare you just because you’re gifted?”

“Don’t tell me that I have anything to do with the rabble over on Miehlstrasse. They’re animals! Half of them can barely speak Polish, let alone German. And even their Yiddish—”

“That’s precisely why I’m going to the Summer Palace to see Chaim alone,” Papa interrupted.

“Why? So he can walk all over you? Show how much he hates educated Jews?”

“To ask him to save his fellow Jews in this rotten ghetto. I’ll kiss his feet. Get down on my knees and beg, dance naked through the streets if I have to. One life saved on the Miehlstrasse is worth more than all the pride in the universe.”

Jozef applauded. “Bravo. In the meantime, I’ll go and commune with my fellow Jews at the button factory, where I’ll listen to their ignorant prattle for six hours, then stand in line and pray for some carrot leaves or a bit of mealy potato to flavor my soup. Give my regards to the Summer Palace.”

But Jozef’s words were wasted. I watched Papa leave, back straight with a new resolve, and prayed he would succeed.

A depressed and discouraged man returned. For a long time, he sat slumped at the kitchen table, head resting on his folded arms, saying nothing; I could not tell if he was weeping. At last Mama persuaded him to take a glass of tea, and its warmth seemed to revive him, for he was able to look at us now, shame and sorrow in his expression, and tell us what had happened.

“They made me wait a long time in the outer office,” he said. “I could hear him yelling about a postage stamp. Seems Berlin had refused to issue one in his honor—said no Jewish face could be pasted next to an Aryan one—and he was furious, even though the stamp would only be issued in the Baluty. It would have been farcical, only I worried that he’d take out his bad mood on me.

“Finally, I was allowed in. Chaim was standing at the window, his back to me, muttering to himself. There was a massive desk in his office cluttered with papers, and at the side of the room a table on which lay a bowl of fruit—apples, pears, oranges. My darlings, how I wanted to ask for that fruit! To be able to bring it home to you, to let us share for even one day God’s bounty—”

He clutched his stomach and his eyes filled with tears. “Go on,” I said softly, knowing that I could offer no comfort.

“Chaim turned and greeted me. He’s grown fat—fat, while the rest of us starve! His chins hung over his collar like udders, and it was hard to see his eyes above his cheeks. I told him he was looking well, and he told me he exercised every day—yes, I thought, by chewing. ‘Can you imagine,’ he told me, ‘yesterday a bum on the street tried to attack me.’ I sympathized. ‘It’s always the Bundists, the rabble. Hiding like rabbits. Thinking I don’t know where their lairs are and who’s sneaking out at night to scrawl on our factory walls: OPEN THE GATES. KILL CHAIM. But I know everything that goes on with my Jews. These thankless ones—the labor camps are too good for them. Instead of working, they spread rumors, lies. Don’t they realize what I’m doing for them? The new trolley lines, the road improvements, a brand-new railroad depot. Do they think these things are easy for the Eldest? Don’t they realize I’m keeping them alive?’

“I coughed, otherwise he’d have gone on for another five minutes. ‘Ah yes, Levy. What’s so urgent that it necessitates a personal interview?’”

It was a wicked imitation, and I laughed. My mother glared at me, as though I had made a joke in temple.

“‘It’s the typhus, Eldest,’ I said. ‘We are facing an epidemic.’

“‘Don’t you doctors have a treatment?’ he snarled.

“‘Yes, but we can only do so much without medicine. Sanitation has to be improved. The dead have to be buried immediately. We need more supplies. And staff. A handful of doctors and nurses can’t stop the disease from reaching overwhelming proportions.’

“Every word I said infuriated him. He walked up to me and put his face not a foot from mine. I could smell his garlic breath. ‘What do you expect me to do?’ he shouted. ‘Do you imagine your Eldest is a magician? That he can pass his hands over a top hat and produce supplies? Our community is spared from catastrophe only because I’ve made us indispensable to the war effort. How can you ask me to divert doctors and nurses from that? Or medicine? It would be insane, like signing a death warrant.’

“‘What about the work crews?’ I pleaded. ‘Do you suppose we need modernized streets more than clean water, or trolley lines transporting workers for a few lousy blocks, when the men are needed to pick up the dead?’

“This produced a tirade. ‘Do you presume to question the judgment of the Eldest of the Jews?’ he screamed. ‘You who know nothing of the inner working of Berlin? I’m sick and tired of you sniveling Polish Jews. Think you’re smart and know nothing.’

“He raised his fist and I was sure he would hit me. God pity me, I became just the sniveling Jew he had described. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I meant no offense. I only wanted to help you save the Jews.’

“Chaim lowered his fist and now looked at me with what I can only call disgust. Evidently, I was too much a toad for him to scrape his knuckles on. I knew I had failed, that there was no way to change this monster’s heart. I turned to go—then froze. On the corner of Chaim’s desk lay a hand-lettered map of the Baluty. I missed it when I came in because I was so concentrated on the fruit. On it, the transport to the Umschlagplatz, the valves for shutting off the water supply, and the ghetto power plant were clearly marked. Around the perimeter, spirals indicated existing barbed wire around the walls, and places where a second ring would be installed. The main streets had been renamed: Getto Nord Strasse Eins, Getto Nord Strasse Zwei. It was obvious what all this meant. The Germans were going to seal us in, let us all die, and then use the Baluty as their own transportation center. Chaim hadn’t improved the roads or put in the trolley lines to help us. He was doing it for the Germans! He was perfectly willing to let his fellow Jews die if it meant saving his own skin.”

All Papa’s energy seemed to seep away. He laid his head back down on the table and remained motionless, though his shoulders seemed to relax beneath Mama’s consoling touch. I watched the scene like an outsider; theirs was an intimacy I could only dream about, and it seemed that for me, that was all it would ever be. A dream.

Then, with a shake of his body like a bear coming out of hibernation, my father roused himself and rushed to the little room he used as an office. From there he returned, carrying a box full of medical instruments—scalpels with wooden handles, stethoscopes, devices I had never seen and did not know the purpose of. He laid them out on the table with great pride, a magician about to perform his greatest trick, and with a flourish unscrewed the tops and turned them upside down over the table.

Mama gasped. Jozef was shocked. And I simply stared at the cascade of diamonds that fell to the table—there must have been ten in all—and glittered at us like friendly eyes.

“There is an administrator at the hospital,” Papa said solemnly. “A non-Jew, sent by the government to make sure we doctors behave. He’s a good man, horrified by our condition, and over the months I have come to trust him.” He sighed. “I told him about the diamonds. He says if I give them to him, he will be able to get us on a train, get us documents. They’ll allow us to travel, even though”—he spat the words in imitation of his German masters—“we’re Jews. And there are more diamonds, hidden in the basement of our old house, ones he doesn’t know about. Once the war is over, we’ll reclaim them and have enough to start a new life.”

Mama covered her mouth to stifle a cry. “But he can just take these diamonds and never come back.”

“True.”

“Then don’t do it!” Jozef said.

My father waved his hand to indicate our room, our street, our ghetto, our life. “What choice do we have?”