CHAPTER 11
Blood Will Have Blood
IN AN INSTANT THE THREE OF US are down the stairs and out on the sidewalk, darting through terrible shouts and hundreds of people running. I see a woman fall heavily and two men behind tread along her back. A couple races along with a line of many children behind them, the youngest hollering pitifully. A terrified girl with a baby in her arms turns in the middle of this raving human stream calling, “Jakob, where are you, Jakob?”
A wiry old man overtakes us. I see him sweating and crying hoarsely. He drops down on a stoop and begs his two sons to leave him there. They obey without protest. We hurtle past a boy’s bloody form face down in a shop doorway, his head pillowed on his left arm. Behind the glass of the door, a woman gawks back at us but ignores him.
I glance back down the street at the immense torrent of people behind us; rapid gunfire overhead swerves their direction blindly. Several tanks and military jeeps with mounted machine guns pursue them. They lumber dinosaur-like, followed by marching rows of Polish police and heavily armed soldiers, driving the terrified herd ever forward to the Ghetto’s main gate. We halt to a hurried walk in the thick of the mass.
“Manek, where to now?” Hanka yells.
“The Wegierska Street sewer! We have to get out of this crowd,” my brother orders.
We break for it and dash into the entrance of a building connecting to a spacious courtyard where people have left in such haste I see, through the open windows of a kitchen, chairs overturned, and a table set for lunch intact with steam still rising from a bowl of potatoes. An abandoned dog by the stove cowers away from us in sorrow. We exit back into the clamoring streets and run frantically for several blocks only to hear the tanks getting closer. My legs feel boneless. I can’t keep up. My brother and sister are twin engines of speed; they lift my heels off the ground in their towing.
An alley leads us to the junction of Josefinska and Wegierska where Szymon Weintraub, a close friend of my brother, beckons and waits above an open manhole in the sidewalk, its metal ladder visible. Hanka descends it at once; Manek lowers me down into her arms. He and Syzmon follow, hauling the heavy metal cover into place with Manek’s crowbar. My legs ache, my eyes are salted and stinging. The rumble of the tanks thunder overhead and the shouts eventually grow distant.
We are in total darkness, a blackness made denser by dripping water and the horrendous stench of human waste. Far away, I hear the tidal swish of the river.
“You must move everyone further in,” says Szymon to Manek.
My brother rustles around in the rations bag, “First we need to light the way.”
A match flares, candles are lit and he hands one to each of us.
“Where are we going, Manek?” I ask him. He grins and ruffles my hair.
“To hunt for alligators,” he replies.
“It stinks in here!” I complain.
“It’s a luxury compared to up top,” says Hanka softly. “Romek, I’m sorry I slapped you. Let’s be friends, huh? We’re going to be down here awhile.”
She puts her arm around my shoulder and we all start inching forward along a narrow brick track just above the foul rivulet.
“About three hundred meters in,” advises Syzmon, “will take you to where the conduit branches off in two directions. Use neither. There’s a sort of corner bank there where you can sit down. Don’t wander about. You never know who else is camped down here. Stay away from the storm drains. Limpet mines are hidden by the grilles and gunboats wait on the river for anyone who survives the big bang. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”
The two men shake hands and we watch as Szymon’s candle flame shrinks down into the gloom and his footsteps fade away.
It takes us a while to reach the sewer’s junction. There is just enough room on the tiled walkway for Manek and Hanka to sit with me huddled against my sister’s knee. From the opposite bank of the sewage flow, I hear a faint rustle, like the sweep of a woman’s long dress crossing a carpet, an unpleasant sibilance that comes and goes.
“Are there really alligators in the water?” I nervously ask my brother.
I press into him because there are odd motions in the gloom. A splash hits the sewage, then another. Hanka raises her candle and I see the water-slicked heads of several huge rats swimming like Olympians against the stinking surge. We both cry out, aghast, as her light shockingly reveals hundreds of their tribe, parading along the water pipes directly above us! They are swift and everywhere at once, their eyes glinting with malicious intent. Manek takes the crowbar from underneath his jacket and strikes it repeatedly on the bricks. The noise resonates down the tunnels and the rodent squadron turns as one squeaking body and take off into the shadows.
Hanka’s candle shakes but her voice is firm. “Romek, remember when we break out the food, you cannot spill crumbs anywhere.”
“It’s OK, I’m not hungry,” I assure her.
On the stage of mayhem above us, members of the Jewish Police in my family are all being called to active duty, my Uncle Arnold among them. He is forced to give block-by-block residency reports to Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) Walther Mueller (a mercurial protégé of Wilhelm Kunde, Commandant of the SS Special Units) on how many Jews could be arrested from each street while still leaving enough to maintain the labor force. (My uncle had previously prepared for him a detailed survey of the number of skilled workers in the Ghetto.)
However, this day’s roundups mean that Arnold had to work directly with Mueller’s unit and keep a count on the arrests and eliminations. As my uncle explained later to my father, he was able to access the schedule for the time our building was going to be searched. It was a hunt in which Arnold was compelled to make a big noise in the arrest of neighbors while leaving my parents and the Horowitz family undisturbed in the attic crawl space.
Mueller deploys over a hundred and fifty men in an assault line that ran laterally across the Ghetto from Gates Two, Three and Four. The troops search the streets in the immense forward drive toward Gate One, to either shoot or round up any escapees and stragglers who had avoided the first sweep. Feigel Birkner brings the Captain information that some eighteen families are hidden in the cellar of a house on Lwowska Street.
“Shall I march them out, Sir?” offers Feigel.
Mueller ignores him and orders his ordnance team to come forward. Why waste time? Clusters of model 24 stick grenades placed all along the lobby gets the job done. In a volcanic flash, the façade of the building drops away in a cloud of yellow brick dust to reveal all the rooms to the street, like a large open doll’s house. A fiery column from the ignited gas supply finally explodes the house skyward. No cries are to be heard from beneath the burning stones.
The river waters soften the boom from Lwowska and I come awake at the terse murmur of the after-blast vibrating through the sewer walls. Then there’s just the lap and swirl of the fetid stream. The network of slimed corridors is considerable; one could walk the sewer for several kilometers and traverse the entire underbelly of Podgorze. I find the place full of ghostly sounds, solitary footsteps far away, and the faint drift of indiscernible voices. Manek says those in concealment down here try to avoid each other in case the face they meet in the gloom is that of a collaborator. He stirs at every noise, his awareness at the simmer. We have to limit our conversations to whispered necessities, Syzmon had advised, because, although the Germans were never keen to enter these arteries of waste for fear of disease, they would sometimes lower a listening device down the vertical wells to track fugitives.
Hanka pulls out a small writing pad from her jacket and from the time we sit down to rest, we pass notes back and forth in the candlelight. My clumsy scrawl repeats the question, “Talk now?”
Hanka’s written reply, “Not until we say so or I’ll feed you to the rats!”
Before he blows out the candles, Manek writes a single command, “Sleep!” I’m wide-awake and stare up into the darkness, guessing at what’s buried in the twenty-five meters of brick and rock over me: old shells, dog and fish bones, sunken boat hulls, lost rings, coins, and washed-down garbage. I wonder if the sewer runs under our apartment house and imagine the three of us coming home up through the cellar drains.
As Uncle Arnold would later describe him to us, Captain Walther Mueller, young in his promotion (twenty-eight), was a farmer’s son from upper Bavaria, whose earnest Catholic mother earmarked him for the priesthood. Although drawn to the rituals of the mass and the luminous mysteries of devotion, it was rumored by his gossipy adjutant that he had crept reluctantly through his few years as a temporarily professed in the Benedictine monastery of Andech.
Chafing under the rule of silence and the enforced celibacy, he abandoned his monk’s cell to enlist in a brigade of the Waffen-SS (a militia known for their hellish ranks of former criminals, ex-Einsatzgruppen and Russian prisoners of war). Removed from the refined air of the monastic life and the gentle guidance of his confessor, Mueller buried beneath his military ferocity a key principle of Benedict’s rule: that the daily choices one makes become the lodestar of a destiny.
I pull the thin blanket up to my chin and, despite the hard bricks beneath us; it seems I’m floating in this lavatory darkness. From the layers of earth and stone above us, I pick up the random vibration of what must be many vehicles. Manek whispers that, according to Syzmon’s estimate, the numbers being held captive in the yard of the Optima factory must have reached four thousand. By now, my parents and all the Horowitz’s should be face down on the attic boards, and in our apartment the carved box with my beautiful telescope lay well hidden behind the pipes under the sink, beneath the plumbing territory of the cockroaches.
In their forced entry, the soldiers would often feel deflated finding nobody home. “Bloody wily Jews, got out ahead of us, like vapors in the night.” Uncle Arnold and the Polish police sergeant would argue about the dismal report they’d have to make, “No pick-up was possible at this address, the building is empty. We ripped out the wainscoting, broke down the closets. Could be a whole village behind the wallpaper, or more likely silver plate and hidden rations. We took whatever was of value, a little compensation for the unit’s disappointment.”
Above us on Czarnieskiego Street, Mueller’s platoon score over fifty wayward Jews, many of them battered and disoriented from being hurled bodily down the stairs of their tenements. The Captain rails at Feigel Birkner and does the very thing German military edicts forbid. He puts a gun in the hand of a Jew and orders the OD and two of his Waffen sharpshooters to get busy!
Feigel, skilled at such eliminations, is all rote obedience. He walks down the line of unfortunates, putting the handgun to his neighbor’s heads, including his own uncle and cousin. Just before the last bodies fall, a woman turns and faces her executioners to demand, “I want to look at the ugly shit that’s going to have my life! I want to take that face to hell with me, so which one of you pricks is it going to be?”
Her superb insolence fells a dazzling blow on Feigel’s efficiency and momentarily unnerves him. This is not how it’s supposed to go. Her words loose a flood of defiance in her sisters who grab her by the hand and the five women take off down the street. Mueller himself gives chase, shooting them in the back but is amazed when the sassy girl rises up, gushing red from her wounds. She manages to stand for thirty seconds to say, “You!” before the pavement claims her.
At one point in the blackness of the sewer, I panic to see over the arc of Hanka’s elbow a cluster of red dots, like dancing red eyes across the foul stream, the fig odor of cigarette smoke following on. A match is struck and quickly extinguished but in the few seconds of the flame, I glimpse a line of dark figures moving along the opposite bank of the cesspool. I hear the clatter of a rifle butt hit against the tiles. These human steps have a light military beat to them but these striders are not Germans. Manek’s palm finds my mouth and covers it hard; its urgent press signals that we are to remain as still as the dead.
Up top, the gates of the Optima factory are so congested with the delivery of hundreds of captives that the line to enter stretches all the way down the street. A cordon of soldiers urges them along. The people shuffle forward eagerly, thinking that safety awaits them inside. If normalcy had been the order of the day, the queue would have appeared to any unsuspecting onlooker as citizens patiently waiting for an outdoor festival to commence.
Mueller and his hounds ride by in open jeeps. It occurs to the fallen novice that the subdued orderly column is ripe for the picking. Save the Reich’s budget on ferrying Jews to all points under heaven. The vehicles halt and many of the families drop flat to the sidewalk because the Captain and his machine guns are busy trimming away a hundred or more people from the end of the line.
Uncle Arnold is at the factory gates with his lists and is astonished at the gunplay. The duty guards are equally flummoxed, having received orders to arrest but not to shoot. A senior Gestapo officer in the guardhouse is utterly incensed and shouts a protest. He comes roaring along the gutter, by the fractured prone mass, in the sidecar of a motorcycle, weaving among and over the wounded, yelling at Mueller to call off his firepower immediately because he has to report the total number of prisoners to the SS General of Transports. “How dare you screw around with my quota, you crazy G-d-damned bandit!” The officer kicks hard at a dying man and screeches, “Do you think I can put rotting meat aboard the trains? Take that excrement you call a detail and bring me back live bodies to make up the shipment or I’ll be seeing you in Kunde’s office!”
It’s been several hours since we entered this chamber of cess. Manek and Hanka wake up and, although we can burn a candle for a short while, we still have to write notes to each other and maintain silence. I hand a dispatch to Manek that I have to pee badly. He scribes back that I’ve come to the right place. Hanka walks me a little way down the brick path and I make against the wall. I turn my back to her when she needs to go. As I wait for her to finish, I see a candle beam moving way down at the far end of the junction. The light tremors for a moment, a dark figure turns, and then is gone.
Riding the surface of our refuge, Captain Mueller and his men roll down Limanowskiego Street still shooting stray Jews as they run. Uncle Arnold, riding in the open truck behind them, pulls his cap over his eyes to avoid the sight, numb with shame. The radio in the Captain’s jeep crackles with news from his forward search team. “Yes, there are more of them, Sir. Multitudes like lice, like ants. We’ve emptied attics and cellars for over five hundred square meters. We have about four hundred and fifty prisoners lined up by the Judenrat office. What’s the order, Captain, Sir?”
Mueller curses the dolt subordinate over the erratic frequency. “What did you have in mind, Sergeant, taking them on a bloody picnic?”
“We can’t shoot them all, Sir? Cause too much bedlam; they might make a run for it. There’s just me and a dozen others left to cover them. The rest of our unit is investigating the storm drains along the perimeter. Permission to wait until the rest of the platoon gets here, Sir?”
Mueller angrily snaps off the radio and orders his adjutant to halt the jeep. His aide asks him if he’d like a fresh uniform to be fetched from the barracks. His blood-soaked outfit might give the enemy the idea that he’s wounded. The Captain calls him a prissy old tart, afraid of his own shadow. “Do you see any Jewish warriors here? This is a street-cleaning operation, not a battlefield.”
He strides off, intent on wiping out the infestation at the Judenrat and to stock up on live replacements for that whining whore of an officer looking to fill his transport quotas.
We have been under streets now for almost seven hours. I try to eat a cheese sandwich with one eye watching out for the rodent swimmers but the rank odor of the place seeps into the bread on my tongue. I can taste the disgusting essence, my stomach spasms and I suddenly vomit all over the blankets we’re sitting on. Manek whispers to me hastily that it’s OK. He wipes my chin and pours some cold sweet tea down my throat. The malodorous jailing dark, the weird unseen presences, the marauding rats that threaten to bite, the drenching toilet stink that I’ll never be free of, and now my wet soiled shirt, all cause me to erupt into a deafening squall of tears.
“I want to go home!” I wail. “Can’t we get out of here, please?”
Hanka shushes me, dabs at my tears, kisses my wet cheeks and writes on her pad, “Not yet, Romek, just a little while longer. Please, you must stay quiet.”
But I will not be comforted! I sob and howl louder than any professional mourner. My cries are duplicated as the echoed chorus of a hundred miserable kids down the winding tiled corridors, with enough piercing high notes to have attracted the attention of every collaborator from here to Warsaw. What stops my blubbering cold is the distant breaking-glass shriek of a woman’s voice, “Shut that brat up or drown him in the shit because there are respectable people down here trying to get some sleep!”
Now, I’m ashamed and more wretched than ever. Hanka hugs me close and Manek decides to speak. “Come on and walk with me, Romeczku,” he coaxes, “I’ll tell you a story while Hanka watches out for the rats. We’ll do some exploring, run a few ghosts off the premises.”
The aide to Captain Mueller signals to Uncle Arnold in the truck that his master is taking a short cut through an alley toward the Judenrat not far from Gate One. The Captain orders his men to fan out and he enters the alley alone. A barefoot child, no more than seven years old, emerges from a doorway directly across his path, dressed in a ragged man’s jacket that comes down to its ankles. Beneath it, a filthy once-white shift, the sleeves of the coat hang foolishly, well below the kid’s skinny arms. The young one is of an indeterminate gender, but possesses a challenging beauty, the face of a little magistrate framed in red curls. The child stands before him and eyes Walther Mueller quizzically, without any fear at all.
The Captain is amused at first, but the calm interrogatory gaze soon begins to nag at his bravado. He reasons to himself maybe the goblin before me is a mental deficient? There is so much tribal madness among these Semites, reaching back to their exile in the desert. It occurs to Mueller that the child is giving off a quiet aura of indifference to being killed, that destroying this small body would be even less grief to its nature than stealing its raiment from a coat hook.
“Who…are you, kinder?” asks the soldier.
The child doesn’t answer but takes a step toward him, a small dirty hand extended. Mueller quickly retreats a few meters back. He is startled by a sudden prick of fear. The idea that the child might actually touch him is repellent. For the Captain asserts he is surrounded by practitioners of the blood libel, brewers of the occult, Rabbis who can draw diabolical offspring into existence from an ancient tree of words, from the darkness of the unmanifested. The young one and the man survey each other silently. It’s this map of stains on my uniform, he thinks, that’s so fascinating to this young one. This small golem is tracing their outline, how many names in every blotch. Can such things be measured? Whose lives do I wear today?
The child stares at him imperiously, fixed, resolute.
“What are you?” orders Mueller, reassuming his iron authority, irritated to be faced down by such a ludicrous opponent. The question causes his eyes to drift to the target sight of the freckled forehead. He unholsters his side pistol. The child does not run, nor flinch, nor plead for anything. Its stone gaze is too much, a weapon unto itself. There is nothing else to be done but shoot the immovable thing. Mueller fires once. The young one falls lightly as a sheet loosed from a clothesline by an easy wind. Out on the street, my uncle would later relate that he and the surprised German adjutant exchanged questioning glances and quickly pursued the bullet’s clap.
The alley’s walls enfold the Captain, who doesn’t hear their concern if he’s wounded or not. The three men freeze in an unearthly stillness. Mueller waits some lengthy minutes, unable to leave but doesn’t know why, confounded and too uneasy now to step over the small corpse. Arnold and the adjutant see an alley that is empty except for the three of them and a laundered sheet lying crumpled in the gutter. Mueller shakes his head and backs away from them. He exits the lane from its southern end. Arnold marks his diffident hallucinatory gaze as he staggered to rejoin his men. They suddenly stopped their casual conversations of body counts at his look of stark surprise, at the mark of some internal fissure arising within and without him. “We’re almost to the end of it, Sir. You need to take it easy.”
He doesn’t hear them because some wayward tide is coming in fast, flooding the narrow strictures of his soul, busily unbraiding his solidified might, opening a fearful softening in him—the likes of which he has never known.
Mueller and his platoon finally rest their killing weariness on the steps of St. Joseph’s Church. Uncle Arnold reports with his lists naming who is now gone from the world and the numbers of thousands who are corralled, still breathing, in the Optima courtyard. The data is critical to Kunde’s office. The adjutant asks Arnold to report his figures later but to stand by while he hands Mueller a glass of cognac and asks if he requires a medic. The Captain seems emptied out, an unanchored husk, afloat in some morass. Mueller waves the aide away.
In what would be his final letter home the day before, he had written, “Dear Mother, all we do is shoot Jews, day and night, as we might target crows bothering the corn, we bring them down. This is not work for a soldier.”
He opens his uniform to find that their blood has soaked through his shirt to his skin. His chest is totally painted with them, a union of his own making. The alcohol stings as he tries to wash himself clean with it. His head throbs from the bark of the guns, his arms sore from raising the weapon he stills swings in his right hand. The bells of the church ring the evening Angelus, their threshing bellowing through his lungs. The Captain dare not go inside the place. He fears the Child will be there.
My uncle recalled that he and the soldiers waited patiently for their next orders, hesitant to approach him. Mueller stares beyond them and walks away to seek solitude in the tattered garden of the rectory, where even the marble saints are not bullet-free. Although he is on sanctified ground, he feels hollow, amazed that the habit of prayer has been completely excised from him. He can no longer detect his former reflex for it within the splintering disarray he has become. He slides his hand inside his stained shirt and is surprised to find the beat of his life is still allowed. It seems to him now such a wasted generosity.
There is a rustle in the overgrown shrubs. Mueller turns and sees nothing but senses the ardor of the One who waits. The sky teeters and the dried-up patchy lawn starts a slow spin beneath him. He hears the trees roar as they bend beneath the request. What are you? What…are…you? He finally becomes the question; it is his naming although he will never be able to withstand its relentless prosecution. There is a short mercy from the metal shaft of the pistol in his mouth and an unknowable deliverance in its firing.
Down in our dungeon of evil odors, Manek strolls with me along the slippery bank. I grin up at him through my swollen eyes, my hand in his, much comforted in my brother’s unending talent for transforming any misery of mine into delight. We come to a halt because Hanka is gently calling to us. We turn back to see Syzmon by candlelight, smiling by her side and beckoning. The surface time is here! I start to run to them but Manek grabs me by my shirt, saying, “Slow down, little horse, before you take the crap bath.”
Baby rodents skitter over my shoes. I don’t mind them now. I’m going home to our apartment, to my parents, to Tadek and my prized telescope. We clamber up to the streets, to their resounding soaked-up losses, to the sweeping emptiness of the avenues with their cordite air, and the distant clamor from the church tower on the Rynek Podgorski announcing the night coming down.
We ride home hidden in the back of a towed farm wagon balanced on bus tires, a shuddering makeshift vehicle hooked-up to the battered car of Zigo Kousevetski, who had waited out the volatile predations in the streets to deliver a load of turnips to the rations depot. Uncle Arnold rides with us in the wagon too. Some rogue captain, he says, had been on the rant all day, hell-bent on filling up the burial carts. Manek looks nervous but Arnold tells him not to worry. The captain has been removed from his duties permanently.
There are hardly any street lamps operating along the main avenue, but I can see by the few that are lit through the slats of the turnip cart the faces of the public dead illuminated for a few seconds. They crowd the sidewalks. We pass by them in the gutters, along pavements, and in doorways, some with their eyes skyward in surprise at their lives so quickly slammed shut, others hunched in recoil against their wounds. Five girls lie face down, all their hands linked together. A passing wind flutters their hair. I glimpse a group of twenty or more by the closed shoe store on Benedykta Street, all stacked up neatly like cut timber, head to toe, the top logs composed of several kids about my age, the line of their small white hands palms out. My sister pulls me away gently, saying, “Romek, give them the respect of not looking.”
Uncle Arnold ushers us into our building triumphantly, shouting “Malia, Leon! Your treasures are home and safe but they smell like a pigsty!”
My parents are standing at the top of the staircase to greet us, wreathed in smiles of relief and welcome. Our uncle declares his nerves are frayed from the day and he needs a drink. Papa urges him inside and to go open the bottle on the kitchen table. My mother is wearing a rubber apron and carrying armfuls of old painter’s drop cloths that had once belonged to the decorating business of my grandfather, Arye Ferber. She pinches her nose in disgust, hurls the covers down the stairs, and orders us to strip off, make ourselves decent with them, and throw everything we were wearing into the basement. She and Luisia will soak our clothes later in a tub of carbolic soap.
“I’ll kiss you all for returning after,” she says warmly, and blows us kisses anyway. “You boys can sit there while Hanka comes in to bathe, then it’s the two of you for the tub.”
“You are a joy to my eyes and your smell is exquisite!” says my father in delight. He came hurrying down the stairs to hug Manek and me fiercely, rubbing our hair, laughing and kissing our faces and saying we were rose gardens of men, fragrant and blooming, and far blessed beyond our poor neighbors now lying in the streets with the life blown out of them. He tells how he and Mama are prepared for the marathon bathing about to commence in the kitchen, using every pot and basin in the place to boil hot water on the stove. My sister is already under the stairwell, struggling out of her filthy clothes.
She reappears, her dark hair loose, classically draped like statue in the paint-spattered sheet. My father strokes her cheek and says how pretty she looks in casual grime. He takes her arm and she goes flapping up the stairs, vents of sewer gas drifting after her. Manek and I strip off, cover our nakedness and wait on the landing outside the apartment.
Tadek sticks his grinning head through the door to stare at us. “Is it true that you took a canoe and went rowing through crap, through rats as big as dogs?” he asks.
Manek laughs and dares him to come outside to sit in our mists. Maybe he’d like a perfumed embrace?
The only washtub in our crowded apartment was a sturdy wooden rain barrel that served for cleaning both laundry and people. (Manek and my father had carried it home weeks ago from outside a disused tavern.) The item was leak-proof and wonderfully deep. Mama, my clean sister and all the Horowitz women had retired to our room to kibitz when my brother and I take turns in the barrel. The kitchen is now a jovial men-only space. Tadek is allowed to offer cigarettes to the adults. Israel Horowitz, my brother, Uncle Arnold and my father are all yammering on about the upheaval we’d just survived and blowing blue smoke for dramatic emphasis.
I’m cocooned in the tub of hot sudsy water, refusing to come out because the cleansing warmth around me feels like such a paradise and dissolves the terrors of the day. Tadek floats our shared wooden horse across the foam, and I sense that he’s happy to please me because we are safely back together again. I make a mental note to inflate our adventures beneath the streets when I would frighten the pants off my good friend with elastic tales of the haunted sewer and red-eyed demons.
Papa rolls up his sleeves and sponges me off gently, lecturing that if this were the Mikvah, he would be rinsing my limbs with the crystal flow from some icy spring. “It’s essential, Romek, to immerse oneself in the mayim chaim, in the restoring grace that arises from living waters, that brings a person to a state of tahor, of purity.”
My father’s face is grave as he explains, “This is especially true of these past hours, because one should not handle the Torah or enter the holy places if exposed to the presence of the dead. You know, little Romek, in centuries past when people only washed once a year and their skin was a corrupt shell of dirt and vermin, it was the Jews who lived through the Black Death epidemics because of the Mikvah.”
He goes on to say that what was harder to survive were the subsequent accusations of the goyim that the Rabbis provoked such plagues through their connivance with the malignant angels of the Shedim. These demonic seraphim, the Christian priests claimed, hovered above the beds of good Catholics to bring them harm and sickness in the night.
“Are the Germans Shedim, Papa?” I ask him as he rinses my hair with a pitcher of cold water.
My father wipes my face and smiles at me, “Not all Germans,” he says. “Just the ones we have to put up with. But, let me tell you something, sweet boy. Any day now, they are going to have their tuchas kicked out of Krakow, on the end of an American boot! Wait until the Yanks invade, the Krauts will be wetting themselves to get back to Germany. You’ll see all those brave Marines marching down Florianska, and so many of them will be fine Yeshiva boys from New York and Brooklyn, with Polish grandfathers of blessed memory who once prayed in every synagogue in Krakow.”
“Your father, Romek,” comments Israel, not unkindly, “has America mania and Roosevelt is his new Moses.”
“I’m telling you, Izzy,” answers my father, sending soapsuds flying through the air. “The days of this occupation are numbered. Hitler will never hold it together against the Yanks. We can’t just surrender to the idea that nothing will change. It takes the promise out of any future, and I won’t let the man in Berlin rob my children of that.”
My father puts on his stoic face, determined to protect his cherished reed of hope. Tadek is shaping cones out of the sinking foam of my bath in a distracted fashion. The water is now uncomfortably cold and I want to get out but have an odd feeling of not wishing to be naked before the men on the edge of any rising pessimism. Luckily, my mother comes striding in from the other room at that moment and immediately asks, “Why isn’t that boy dried off and in his nightshirt?”
Pinkoza Ladner is a distant cousin of Israel Horowitz, a man everyone knows in the Ghetto by the impossible nickname of Pinie Koza (Pinie the Goat). He is an affable unassuming soul who, my father would say, was guaranteed to be among the favored of heaven because of his quiet devotion to clearing the streets of the dead. Pinie got help from another of my OD uncles, Samek Weiner, who has sent him Yankel Gorowski from the Judenrat office and two dimwitted boys in their late teens who needed some legitimate employment to avoid the transports. Yankel has to be cautioned against pilfering the pockets of the deceased and the other two from gawking at the nakedness of any dead females they might handle.
For a man with any conscience, the work of an OD is a daily poison alleviated only by the most subversive fictions. My uncles make daring lists of the dead, matching their names up with equivalent forged ID cards. Rarely do the Germans check to see if the face moldering on the sidewalk matched the photo staring out from the newly manufactured Blauschein. This leaves a number of recycled cards with new photographs to be issued to the living that otherwise would have been allocated to the selection lists.
Pinie Koza surveys his unlikely morgue crew and complains to my uncle that “This wasn’t much to work with, Samek, this is no upstanding Hevrah Kadisha (burial society) we’ve got here. Wouldn’t you rather be sent to the grave by the devil?”
My uncle pats his shoulder kindly and advises, “Just give them a spade, my friend, and make them good Shomrim (watchers over the deceased), we need to clear the streets before these citizens bloat up and fester their gases over the living. If there’s one thing that puts the fear of G-d up these Germans, it’s the first whiff of typhus.”
The burying man takes my uncle’s words to heart and instructs his feckless team as they sit behind him on the former lumber cart pulled by two sturdy chestnut drays. “This work is a grace,” he lectures, “remember it as such, especially in these times. The dead one is addressed with all politeness as “the Met”, and, if we were doing this properly, we would ask their forgiveness for any indignity we might inflict upon their lifeless form.”
Yankel is hardly impressed with Pinie’s reasoning and complains loudly. “Forget the nice white gown, the fancy psalms, cutting the tallit fringe, and don’t try to soothe these lost with petitions for their eternal rest. What’s to rest? Who will repay their taken days? Believe me, Goat Boss; they’ll be pounding against their tomb lids for justice for generations to come.”
The horse-drawn cart trolls the Ghetto for the next two days, hauling the dead to the cemeteries of Jerozolimska and Miodowa Streets. Wherever the cadavers congregated in number, both Ghetto residents and the German military were diverted to other routes. The Judenrat have sent more workers to drape the swollen corpses with old sheets soaked in bleach and vinegar and to recover their clothing for delousing and recycling. When the sheets run out, the maggoty remnants of the “Mets” are doused with lye, wrapped in layers of paper and bound with string. Such shrouding gave the streets at night the bizarre appearance of an ancient Egyptian excavation.
Pinie Koza and his men tie scarves around their faces and continue to clear the avenues. With each body lifted into the cart, Yankel Gorowski persists in his random and cursing rage on behalf of the departed that the Goat Man comes to understand it as an unpolished tribute, a rough and wart-ridden holiness in and of itself. So, thinks Pinie Koza, it’s not the Kaddish but we’ll take it, because grace has the peculiar wearing properties of water on stone, and Yankel the schnorrer is smoothing out very nicely.
From the deep culvert that runs beneath the closed bathhouse on Josefinska Street, they bring out the body of Rabbi Avraham Bronstein, who’d left this world from a single bullet to the ear earned by arguing with Mueller’s men. Next to him, they discover the thin form of a woman garbed in a summer dress, on which no wounds could be found, (who had actually expired in the damp channel from a swift and merciful stroke). Pinie Koza notes the woman is not young but still attractive, and even in her terminal state gives off a reserved scholarly air. A pair of starched white cotton gloves hung from her side pocket, a lady-like gesture on a hot afternoon when one must hasten into exile. She had the tapered muscular fingers of a former pianist, the slender and learned hands of my teacher, Ester Rosenfeld.
Manek tells us that the selected sat in the Optima courtyard for two days, a peculiar marketplace of the whispered bribe, the light-handed betrayal overlaid with apprehension and the wooden frozen state that the waiting induced in all the detainees. No one was allowed any luggage or change of clothing and no food but a little water. They were guarded mainly by personnel from Symche Spira’s political section, a new breed of OD spawned by shifting SS policies; men heady with the freedom to extort, to defame, ready to kill their own on a whim, who sought to become the perfected mirror of their masters.
Down the lines of prisoners they walked, the ODs Forster, Spira, Susser, Wertal and Pacanower, their manner rather like bookies at a racetrack, betting with those who carried anything valuable that freedom could be had for the right price. Spouses, parents and grown children, the new identity cards in hand, stood anxiously at the gates of this people depository, also with money or jewelry to see if they could purchase their relatives. And so went the bargaining.
My name is Riva Fishbein; I have two thousand zlotys for my husband, Mattius Fishbein. He is a skilled stonemason and valuable to the Reich. Please can you find it in your heart to release him? Here is his new Blauschein. Mattius is allowed a brief minute with Riva and is freed to be assigned to building more barracks just down the road at the new labor camp of Plaszow now under construction.
A fine-faced boy of eighteen steps forward. My parents are Dr. Emmanuel Widowski and Dr. Gutka Widowksi, both are dentists; as such they can maintain the health of workers needed for the war effort and will treat the teeth of any German military if permitted. I can offer you a collection of my grandfather’s gold coins. He was Professor Henryk Neumann, a renowned numismatist of ancient Roman currency.
Spira sees the leather case open with the gilt of the coins shining as offered by the Widowski’s guileless son, Berek. The OD severely questions what is a Jew doing with such treasures when the decrees of long ago ordered that such precious things be surrendered? Please, Sir, they were on loan at the time to the Department of Archeology at the Jagellonian University. The coins’ documents of provenance and a letter with the University’s logo prove the boy’s truth and save him from being put against the wall. Spira, much enriched, sends him home, walking earnestly hand in hand with both parents who were blessing the day they conceived him.
Fourteen-year old Yehudith Blatt sits with her widowed mother, Lyuba, and her only parent’s boyfriend, Herman, a parasitic lover, a leech, a complainer, who is always first to eat more than his share of their meager rations. He secretly pimps the pretty adolescent to the Ukrainian guards in exchange for his freedom alone, claiming she is a troubled child and well seasoned as a whore.
A corporal drags the sullen Yehudith to a worker’s outhouse north of the gates. His shift is over in fifteen minutes, he barks in bad Polish for her to wait and to be surely naked when he returns to unlock the door. The girl, nervy and full of vitriol, doffs not one garment. She stands high on the toilet seat, spits on her palms and quietly levers the slates off the lavatory roof to climb up and slide snake-like out in the bright sunlight across the roof’s beam, above the waiting faces far below, and in through the factory window to surprise an elderly machinist in his repair duties. The man, without a word, hides her beneath the turbines until it’s all over.
Herman suffers mightily with a thrashing from the disappointed guard who has to lie to his sergeant about the escaped kid, while Lyuba comforts herself that matters are righted in some way and, while realizing she may never see her daughter again, that Yehudith will certainly live to see this time dissolved.
The Pharmacist Pankiewicz, with Manek’s help, sends over food and medicines to comfort the elderly and the hospital patients who had been dragged from their beds, still fevered, sutured, infected, and those rising to health.
Manek unknowingly hands salts of cyanide to eighty-year-olds, Maurice and Jana Binder, the toxin hidden in a box of chocolates given to my brother by their oldest son, Lukacz, who came by it through his labors at the Wachs lamp factory on Lwowska Street. The Binders thanked my brother graciously, called him sweet deliverer, wished him a thousand years of joy, but were sure not to offer him any of the ganache truffles. Jana combed her hair, put on her lipstick and her best shawl, Maurice his silk bow tie. They ingested the chocolates after making their whispered prayers and sharing a final kiss. They will be found later, thought to be sleeping, clutching each other tightly against the south wall of the yard. Pinie Koza and Yankel will have to lift them in the burial cart as a one body to save breaking the frail bones of their embrace.
On June eighth, shouts announce the order for the deportees to move out. The Optima gates open and the mass of prisoners are marched to the waiting boxcars standing at the station in Prokocim. The thousands of travelers packed into the wagons start an unraveling in the weft of a vital tapestry, part of the once-breathing fabric of our community, in and beyond the Ghetto. Among its brightest threads were:
Mordechai Gebirtig, composer of Jewish folk songs,
Abraham Heinemann, artist and painter,
Clara Rossen, architect,
Alfred Gutmacher, violinist and Klezmer exponent,
Bianka Gutmacher, soprano,
Gumpel Singer, goldsmith and engraver,
Menisha Kohn, embroiderer of Torah mantles, parochets and kittels,
Shulem Spitzglas, diamond cutter,
Haskiel Kops, stonemason,
Moishe Beck, bookbinder,
Rabbi Izydor Teitelbaum, historian and theologian,
Leiba Blume, midwife,
Genia Klein, schoolteacher,
Avram Hadel, typesetter,
Amelia Werfel, playwright
Oren Hadel, printer,
and Viviana Eckstein, poet.
A wiry old man overtakes us. I see him sweating and crying hoarsely. He drops down on a stoop and begs his two sons to leave him there. They obey without protest. We hurtle past a boy’s bloody form face down in a shop doorway, his head pillowed on his left arm. Behind the glass of the door, a woman gawks back at us but ignores him.
I glance back down the street at the immense torrent of people behind us; rapid gunfire overhead swerves their direction blindly. Several tanks and military jeeps with mounted machine guns pursue them. They lumber dinosaur-like, followed by marching rows of Polish police and heavily armed soldiers, driving the terrified herd ever forward to the Ghetto’s main gate. We halt to a hurried walk in the thick of the mass.
“Manek, where to now?” Hanka yells.
“The Wegierska Street sewer! We have to get out of this crowd,” my brother orders.
We break for it and dash into the entrance of a building connecting to a spacious courtyard where people have left in such haste I see, through the open windows of a kitchen, chairs overturned, and a table set for lunch intact with steam still rising from a bowl of potatoes. An abandoned dog by the stove cowers away from us in sorrow. We exit back into the clamoring streets and run frantically for several blocks only to hear the tanks getting closer. My legs feel boneless. I can’t keep up. My brother and sister are twin engines of speed; they lift my heels off the ground in their towing.
An alley leads us to the junction of Josefinska and Wegierska where Szymon Weintraub, a close friend of my brother, beckons and waits above an open manhole in the sidewalk, its metal ladder visible. Hanka descends it at once; Manek lowers me down into her arms. He and Syzmon follow, hauling the heavy metal cover into place with Manek’s crowbar. My legs ache, my eyes are salted and stinging. The rumble of the tanks thunder overhead and the shouts eventually grow distant.
We are in total darkness, a blackness made denser by dripping water and the horrendous stench of human waste. Far away, I hear the tidal swish of the river.
“You must move everyone further in,” says Szymon to Manek.
My brother rustles around in the rations bag, “First we need to light the way.”
A match flares, candles are lit and he hands one to each of us.
“Where are we going, Manek?” I ask him. He grins and ruffles my hair.
“To hunt for alligators,” he replies.
“It stinks in here!” I complain.
“It’s a luxury compared to up top,” says Hanka softly. “Romek, I’m sorry I slapped you. Let’s be friends, huh? We’re going to be down here awhile.”
She puts her arm around my shoulder and we all start inching forward along a narrow brick track just above the foul rivulet.
“About three hundred meters in,” advises Syzmon, “will take you to where the conduit branches off in two directions. Use neither. There’s a sort of corner bank there where you can sit down. Don’t wander about. You never know who else is camped down here. Stay away from the storm drains. Limpet mines are hidden by the grilles and gunboats wait on the river for anyone who survives the big bang. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”
The two men shake hands and we watch as Szymon’s candle flame shrinks down into the gloom and his footsteps fade away.
It takes us a while to reach the sewer’s junction. There is just enough room on the tiled walkway for Manek and Hanka to sit with me huddled against my sister’s knee. From the opposite bank of the sewage flow, I hear a faint rustle, like the sweep of a woman’s long dress crossing a carpet, an unpleasant sibilance that comes and goes.
“Are there really alligators in the water?” I nervously ask my brother.
I press into him because there are odd motions in the gloom. A splash hits the sewage, then another. Hanka raises her candle and I see the water-slicked heads of several huge rats swimming like Olympians against the stinking surge. We both cry out, aghast, as her light shockingly reveals hundreds of their tribe, parading along the water pipes directly above us! They are swift and everywhere at once, their eyes glinting with malicious intent. Manek takes the crowbar from underneath his jacket and strikes it repeatedly on the bricks. The noise resonates down the tunnels and the rodent squadron turns as one squeaking body and take off into the shadows.
Hanka’s candle shakes but her voice is firm. “Romek, remember when we break out the food, you cannot spill crumbs anywhere.”
“It’s OK, I’m not hungry,” I assure her.
On the stage of mayhem above us, members of the Jewish Police in my family are all being called to active duty, my Uncle Arnold among them. He is forced to give block-by-block residency reports to Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) Walther Mueller (a mercurial protégé of Wilhelm Kunde, Commandant of the SS Special Units) on how many Jews could be arrested from each street while still leaving enough to maintain the labor force. (My uncle had previously prepared for him a detailed survey of the number of skilled workers in the Ghetto.)
However, this day’s roundups mean that Arnold had to work directly with Mueller’s unit and keep a count on the arrests and eliminations. As my uncle explained later to my father, he was able to access the schedule for the time our building was going to be searched. It was a hunt in which Arnold was compelled to make a big noise in the arrest of neighbors while leaving my parents and the Horowitz family undisturbed in the attic crawl space.
Mueller deploys over a hundred and fifty men in an assault line that ran laterally across the Ghetto from Gates Two, Three and Four. The troops search the streets in the immense forward drive toward Gate One, to either shoot or round up any escapees and stragglers who had avoided the first sweep. Feigel Birkner brings the Captain information that some eighteen families are hidden in the cellar of a house on Lwowska Street.
“Shall I march them out, Sir?” offers Feigel.
Mueller ignores him and orders his ordnance team to come forward. Why waste time? Clusters of model 24 stick grenades placed all along the lobby gets the job done. In a volcanic flash, the façade of the building drops away in a cloud of yellow brick dust to reveal all the rooms to the street, like a large open doll’s house. A fiery column from the ignited gas supply finally explodes the house skyward. No cries are to be heard from beneath the burning stones.
The river waters soften the boom from Lwowska and I come awake at the terse murmur of the after-blast vibrating through the sewer walls. Then there’s just the lap and swirl of the fetid stream. The network of slimed corridors is considerable; one could walk the sewer for several kilometers and traverse the entire underbelly of Podgorze. I find the place full of ghostly sounds, solitary footsteps far away, and the faint drift of indiscernible voices. Manek says those in concealment down here try to avoid each other in case the face they meet in the gloom is that of a collaborator. He stirs at every noise, his awareness at the simmer. We have to limit our conversations to whispered necessities, Syzmon had advised, because, although the Germans were never keen to enter these arteries of waste for fear of disease, they would sometimes lower a listening device down the vertical wells to track fugitives.
Hanka pulls out a small writing pad from her jacket and from the time we sit down to rest, we pass notes back and forth in the candlelight. My clumsy scrawl repeats the question, “Talk now?”
Hanka’s written reply, “Not until we say so or I’ll feed you to the rats!”
Before he blows out the candles, Manek writes a single command, “Sleep!” I’m wide-awake and stare up into the darkness, guessing at what’s buried in the twenty-five meters of brick and rock over me: old shells, dog and fish bones, sunken boat hulls, lost rings, coins, and washed-down garbage. I wonder if the sewer runs under our apartment house and imagine the three of us coming home up through the cellar drains.
As Uncle Arnold would later describe him to us, Captain Walther Mueller, young in his promotion (twenty-eight), was a farmer’s son from upper Bavaria, whose earnest Catholic mother earmarked him for the priesthood. Although drawn to the rituals of the mass and the luminous mysteries of devotion, it was rumored by his gossipy adjutant that he had crept reluctantly through his few years as a temporarily professed in the Benedictine monastery of Andech.
Chafing under the rule of silence and the enforced celibacy, he abandoned his monk’s cell to enlist in a brigade of the Waffen-SS (a militia known for their hellish ranks of former criminals, ex-Einsatzgruppen and Russian prisoners of war). Removed from the refined air of the monastic life and the gentle guidance of his confessor, Mueller buried beneath his military ferocity a key principle of Benedict’s rule: that the daily choices one makes become the lodestar of a destiny.
I pull the thin blanket up to my chin and, despite the hard bricks beneath us; it seems I’m floating in this lavatory darkness. From the layers of earth and stone above us, I pick up the random vibration of what must be many vehicles. Manek whispers that, according to Syzmon’s estimate, the numbers being held captive in the yard of the Optima factory must have reached four thousand. By now, my parents and all the Horowitz’s should be face down on the attic boards, and in our apartment the carved box with my beautiful telescope lay well hidden behind the pipes under the sink, beneath the plumbing territory of the cockroaches.
In their forced entry, the soldiers would often feel deflated finding nobody home. “Bloody wily Jews, got out ahead of us, like vapors in the night.” Uncle Arnold and the Polish police sergeant would argue about the dismal report they’d have to make, “No pick-up was possible at this address, the building is empty. We ripped out the wainscoting, broke down the closets. Could be a whole village behind the wallpaper, or more likely silver plate and hidden rations. We took whatever was of value, a little compensation for the unit’s disappointment.”
Above us on Czarnieskiego Street, Mueller’s platoon score over fifty wayward Jews, many of them battered and disoriented from being hurled bodily down the stairs of their tenements. The Captain rails at Feigel Birkner and does the very thing German military edicts forbid. He puts a gun in the hand of a Jew and orders the OD and two of his Waffen sharpshooters to get busy!
Feigel, skilled at such eliminations, is all rote obedience. He walks down the line of unfortunates, putting the handgun to his neighbor’s heads, including his own uncle and cousin. Just before the last bodies fall, a woman turns and faces her executioners to demand, “I want to look at the ugly shit that’s going to have my life! I want to take that face to hell with me, so which one of you pricks is it going to be?”
Her superb insolence fells a dazzling blow on Feigel’s efficiency and momentarily unnerves him. This is not how it’s supposed to go. Her words loose a flood of defiance in her sisters who grab her by the hand and the five women take off down the street. Mueller himself gives chase, shooting them in the back but is amazed when the sassy girl rises up, gushing red from her wounds. She manages to stand for thirty seconds to say, “You!” before the pavement claims her.
At one point in the blackness of the sewer, I panic to see over the arc of Hanka’s elbow a cluster of red dots, like dancing red eyes across the foul stream, the fig odor of cigarette smoke following on. A match is struck and quickly extinguished but in the few seconds of the flame, I glimpse a line of dark figures moving along the opposite bank of the cesspool. I hear the clatter of a rifle butt hit against the tiles. These human steps have a light military beat to them but these striders are not Germans. Manek’s palm finds my mouth and covers it hard; its urgent press signals that we are to remain as still as the dead.
Up top, the gates of the Optima factory are so congested with the delivery of hundreds of captives that the line to enter stretches all the way down the street. A cordon of soldiers urges them along. The people shuffle forward eagerly, thinking that safety awaits them inside. If normalcy had been the order of the day, the queue would have appeared to any unsuspecting onlooker as citizens patiently waiting for an outdoor festival to commence.
Mueller and his hounds ride by in open jeeps. It occurs to the fallen novice that the subdued orderly column is ripe for the picking. Save the Reich’s budget on ferrying Jews to all points under heaven. The vehicles halt and many of the families drop flat to the sidewalk because the Captain and his machine guns are busy trimming away a hundred or more people from the end of the line.
Uncle Arnold is at the factory gates with his lists and is astonished at the gunplay. The duty guards are equally flummoxed, having received orders to arrest but not to shoot. A senior Gestapo officer in the guardhouse is utterly incensed and shouts a protest. He comes roaring along the gutter, by the fractured prone mass, in the sidecar of a motorcycle, weaving among and over the wounded, yelling at Mueller to call off his firepower immediately because he has to report the total number of prisoners to the SS General of Transports. “How dare you screw around with my quota, you crazy G-d-damned bandit!” The officer kicks hard at a dying man and screeches, “Do you think I can put rotting meat aboard the trains? Take that excrement you call a detail and bring me back live bodies to make up the shipment or I’ll be seeing you in Kunde’s office!”
It’s been several hours since we entered this chamber of cess. Manek and Hanka wake up and, although we can burn a candle for a short while, we still have to write notes to each other and maintain silence. I hand a dispatch to Manek that I have to pee badly. He scribes back that I’ve come to the right place. Hanka walks me a little way down the brick path and I make against the wall. I turn my back to her when she needs to go. As I wait for her to finish, I see a candle beam moving way down at the far end of the junction. The light tremors for a moment, a dark figure turns, and then is gone.
Riding the surface of our refuge, Captain Mueller and his men roll down Limanowskiego Street still shooting stray Jews as they run. Uncle Arnold, riding in the open truck behind them, pulls his cap over his eyes to avoid the sight, numb with shame. The radio in the Captain’s jeep crackles with news from his forward search team. “Yes, there are more of them, Sir. Multitudes like lice, like ants. We’ve emptied attics and cellars for over five hundred square meters. We have about four hundred and fifty prisoners lined up by the Judenrat office. What’s the order, Captain, Sir?”
Mueller curses the dolt subordinate over the erratic frequency. “What did you have in mind, Sergeant, taking them on a bloody picnic?”
“We can’t shoot them all, Sir? Cause too much bedlam; they might make a run for it. There’s just me and a dozen others left to cover them. The rest of our unit is investigating the storm drains along the perimeter. Permission to wait until the rest of the platoon gets here, Sir?”
Mueller angrily snaps off the radio and orders his adjutant to halt the jeep. His aide asks him if he’d like a fresh uniform to be fetched from the barracks. His blood-soaked outfit might give the enemy the idea that he’s wounded. The Captain calls him a prissy old tart, afraid of his own shadow. “Do you see any Jewish warriors here? This is a street-cleaning operation, not a battlefield.”
He strides off, intent on wiping out the infestation at the Judenrat and to stock up on live replacements for that whining whore of an officer looking to fill his transport quotas.
We have been under streets now for almost seven hours. I try to eat a cheese sandwich with one eye watching out for the rodent swimmers but the rank odor of the place seeps into the bread on my tongue. I can taste the disgusting essence, my stomach spasms and I suddenly vomit all over the blankets we’re sitting on. Manek whispers to me hastily that it’s OK. He wipes my chin and pours some cold sweet tea down my throat. The malodorous jailing dark, the weird unseen presences, the marauding rats that threaten to bite, the drenching toilet stink that I’ll never be free of, and now my wet soiled shirt, all cause me to erupt into a deafening squall of tears.
“I want to go home!” I wail. “Can’t we get out of here, please?”
Hanka shushes me, dabs at my tears, kisses my wet cheeks and writes on her pad, “Not yet, Romek, just a little while longer. Please, you must stay quiet.”
But I will not be comforted! I sob and howl louder than any professional mourner. My cries are duplicated as the echoed chorus of a hundred miserable kids down the winding tiled corridors, with enough piercing high notes to have attracted the attention of every collaborator from here to Warsaw. What stops my blubbering cold is the distant breaking-glass shriek of a woman’s voice, “Shut that brat up or drown him in the shit because there are respectable people down here trying to get some sleep!”
Now, I’m ashamed and more wretched than ever. Hanka hugs me close and Manek decides to speak. “Come on and walk with me, Romeczku,” he coaxes, “I’ll tell you a story while Hanka watches out for the rats. We’ll do some exploring, run a few ghosts off the premises.”
The aide to Captain Mueller signals to Uncle Arnold in the truck that his master is taking a short cut through an alley toward the Judenrat not far from Gate One. The Captain orders his men to fan out and he enters the alley alone. A barefoot child, no more than seven years old, emerges from a doorway directly across his path, dressed in a ragged man’s jacket that comes down to its ankles. Beneath it, a filthy once-white shift, the sleeves of the coat hang foolishly, well below the kid’s skinny arms. The young one is of an indeterminate gender, but possesses a challenging beauty, the face of a little magistrate framed in red curls. The child stands before him and eyes Walther Mueller quizzically, without any fear at all.
The Captain is amused at first, but the calm interrogatory gaze soon begins to nag at his bravado. He reasons to himself maybe the goblin before me is a mental deficient? There is so much tribal madness among these Semites, reaching back to their exile in the desert. It occurs to Mueller that the child is giving off a quiet aura of indifference to being killed, that destroying this small body would be even less grief to its nature than stealing its raiment from a coat hook.
“Who…are you, kinder?” asks the soldier.
The child doesn’t answer but takes a step toward him, a small dirty hand extended. Mueller quickly retreats a few meters back. He is startled by a sudden prick of fear. The idea that the child might actually touch him is repellent. For the Captain asserts he is surrounded by practitioners of the blood libel, brewers of the occult, Rabbis who can draw diabolical offspring into existence from an ancient tree of words, from the darkness of the unmanifested. The young one and the man survey each other silently. It’s this map of stains on my uniform, he thinks, that’s so fascinating to this young one. This small golem is tracing their outline, how many names in every blotch. Can such things be measured? Whose lives do I wear today?
The child stares at him imperiously, fixed, resolute.
“What are you?” orders Mueller, reassuming his iron authority, irritated to be faced down by such a ludicrous opponent. The question causes his eyes to drift to the target sight of the freckled forehead. He unholsters his side pistol. The child does not run, nor flinch, nor plead for anything. Its stone gaze is too much, a weapon unto itself. There is nothing else to be done but shoot the immovable thing. Mueller fires once. The young one falls lightly as a sheet loosed from a clothesline by an easy wind. Out on the street, my uncle would later relate that he and the surprised German adjutant exchanged questioning glances and quickly pursued the bullet’s clap.
The alley’s walls enfold the Captain, who doesn’t hear their concern if he’s wounded or not. The three men freeze in an unearthly stillness. Mueller waits some lengthy minutes, unable to leave but doesn’t know why, confounded and too uneasy now to step over the small corpse. Arnold and the adjutant see an alley that is empty except for the three of them and a laundered sheet lying crumpled in the gutter. Mueller shakes his head and backs away from them. He exits the lane from its southern end. Arnold marks his diffident hallucinatory gaze as he staggered to rejoin his men. They suddenly stopped their casual conversations of body counts at his look of stark surprise, at the mark of some internal fissure arising within and without him. “We’re almost to the end of it, Sir. You need to take it easy.”
He doesn’t hear them because some wayward tide is coming in fast, flooding the narrow strictures of his soul, busily unbraiding his solidified might, opening a fearful softening in him—the likes of which he has never known.
Mueller and his platoon finally rest their killing weariness on the steps of St. Joseph’s Church. Uncle Arnold reports with his lists naming who is now gone from the world and the numbers of thousands who are corralled, still breathing, in the Optima courtyard. The data is critical to Kunde’s office. The adjutant asks Arnold to report his figures later but to stand by while he hands Mueller a glass of cognac and asks if he requires a medic. The Captain seems emptied out, an unanchored husk, afloat in some morass. Mueller waves the aide away.
In what would be his final letter home the day before, he had written, “Dear Mother, all we do is shoot Jews, day and night, as we might target crows bothering the corn, we bring them down. This is not work for a soldier.”
He opens his uniform to find that their blood has soaked through his shirt to his skin. His chest is totally painted with them, a union of his own making. The alcohol stings as he tries to wash himself clean with it. His head throbs from the bark of the guns, his arms sore from raising the weapon he stills swings in his right hand. The bells of the church ring the evening Angelus, their threshing bellowing through his lungs. The Captain dare not go inside the place. He fears the Child will be there.
My uncle recalled that he and the soldiers waited patiently for their next orders, hesitant to approach him. Mueller stares beyond them and walks away to seek solitude in the tattered garden of the rectory, where even the marble saints are not bullet-free. Although he is on sanctified ground, he feels hollow, amazed that the habit of prayer has been completely excised from him. He can no longer detect his former reflex for it within the splintering disarray he has become. He slides his hand inside his stained shirt and is surprised to find the beat of his life is still allowed. It seems to him now such a wasted generosity.
There is a rustle in the overgrown shrubs. Mueller turns and sees nothing but senses the ardor of the One who waits. The sky teeters and the dried-up patchy lawn starts a slow spin beneath him. He hears the trees roar as they bend beneath the request. What are you? What…are…you? He finally becomes the question; it is his naming although he will never be able to withstand its relentless prosecution. There is a short mercy from the metal shaft of the pistol in his mouth and an unknowable deliverance in its firing.
Down in our dungeon of evil odors, Manek strolls with me along the slippery bank. I grin up at him through my swollen eyes, my hand in his, much comforted in my brother’s unending talent for transforming any misery of mine into delight. We come to a halt because Hanka is gently calling to us. We turn back to see Syzmon by candlelight, smiling by her side and beckoning. The surface time is here! I start to run to them but Manek grabs me by my shirt, saying, “Slow down, little horse, before you take the crap bath.”
Baby rodents skitter over my shoes. I don’t mind them now. I’m going home to our apartment, to my parents, to Tadek and my prized telescope. We clamber up to the streets, to their resounding soaked-up losses, to the sweeping emptiness of the avenues with their cordite air, and the distant clamor from the church tower on the Rynek Podgorski announcing the night coming down.
We ride home hidden in the back of a towed farm wagon balanced on bus tires, a shuddering makeshift vehicle hooked-up to the battered car of Zigo Kousevetski, who had waited out the volatile predations in the streets to deliver a load of turnips to the rations depot. Uncle Arnold rides with us in the wagon too. Some rogue captain, he says, had been on the rant all day, hell-bent on filling up the burial carts. Manek looks nervous but Arnold tells him not to worry. The captain has been removed from his duties permanently.
There are hardly any street lamps operating along the main avenue, but I can see by the few that are lit through the slats of the turnip cart the faces of the public dead illuminated for a few seconds. They crowd the sidewalks. We pass by them in the gutters, along pavements, and in doorways, some with their eyes skyward in surprise at their lives so quickly slammed shut, others hunched in recoil against their wounds. Five girls lie face down, all their hands linked together. A passing wind flutters their hair. I glimpse a group of twenty or more by the closed shoe store on Benedykta Street, all stacked up neatly like cut timber, head to toe, the top logs composed of several kids about my age, the line of their small white hands palms out. My sister pulls me away gently, saying, “Romek, give them the respect of not looking.”
Uncle Arnold ushers us into our building triumphantly, shouting “Malia, Leon! Your treasures are home and safe but they smell like a pigsty!”
My parents are standing at the top of the staircase to greet us, wreathed in smiles of relief and welcome. Our uncle declares his nerves are frayed from the day and he needs a drink. Papa urges him inside and to go open the bottle on the kitchen table. My mother is wearing a rubber apron and carrying armfuls of old painter’s drop cloths that had once belonged to the decorating business of my grandfather, Arye Ferber. She pinches her nose in disgust, hurls the covers down the stairs, and orders us to strip off, make ourselves decent with them, and throw everything we were wearing into the basement. She and Luisia will soak our clothes later in a tub of carbolic soap.
“I’ll kiss you all for returning after,” she says warmly, and blows us kisses anyway. “You boys can sit there while Hanka comes in to bathe, then it’s the two of you for the tub.”
“You are a joy to my eyes and your smell is exquisite!” says my father in delight. He came hurrying down the stairs to hug Manek and me fiercely, rubbing our hair, laughing and kissing our faces and saying we were rose gardens of men, fragrant and blooming, and far blessed beyond our poor neighbors now lying in the streets with the life blown out of them. He tells how he and Mama are prepared for the marathon bathing about to commence in the kitchen, using every pot and basin in the place to boil hot water on the stove. My sister is already under the stairwell, struggling out of her filthy clothes.
She reappears, her dark hair loose, classically draped like statue in the paint-spattered sheet. My father strokes her cheek and says how pretty she looks in casual grime. He takes her arm and she goes flapping up the stairs, vents of sewer gas drifting after her. Manek and I strip off, cover our nakedness and wait on the landing outside the apartment.
Tadek sticks his grinning head through the door to stare at us. “Is it true that you took a canoe and went rowing through crap, through rats as big as dogs?” he asks.
Manek laughs and dares him to come outside to sit in our mists. Maybe he’d like a perfumed embrace?
The only washtub in our crowded apartment was a sturdy wooden rain barrel that served for cleaning both laundry and people. (Manek and my father had carried it home weeks ago from outside a disused tavern.) The item was leak-proof and wonderfully deep. Mama, my clean sister and all the Horowitz women had retired to our room to kibitz when my brother and I take turns in the barrel. The kitchen is now a jovial men-only space. Tadek is allowed to offer cigarettes to the adults. Israel Horowitz, my brother, Uncle Arnold and my father are all yammering on about the upheaval we’d just survived and blowing blue smoke for dramatic emphasis.
I’m cocooned in the tub of hot sudsy water, refusing to come out because the cleansing warmth around me feels like such a paradise and dissolves the terrors of the day. Tadek floats our shared wooden horse across the foam, and I sense that he’s happy to please me because we are safely back together again. I make a mental note to inflate our adventures beneath the streets when I would frighten the pants off my good friend with elastic tales of the haunted sewer and red-eyed demons.
Papa rolls up his sleeves and sponges me off gently, lecturing that if this were the Mikvah, he would be rinsing my limbs with the crystal flow from some icy spring. “It’s essential, Romek, to immerse oneself in the mayim chaim, in the restoring grace that arises from living waters, that brings a person to a state of tahor, of purity.”
My father’s face is grave as he explains, “This is especially true of these past hours, because one should not handle the Torah or enter the holy places if exposed to the presence of the dead. You know, little Romek, in centuries past when people only washed once a year and their skin was a corrupt shell of dirt and vermin, it was the Jews who lived through the Black Death epidemics because of the Mikvah.”
He goes on to say that what was harder to survive were the subsequent accusations of the goyim that the Rabbis provoked such plagues through their connivance with the malignant angels of the Shedim. These demonic seraphim, the Christian priests claimed, hovered above the beds of good Catholics to bring them harm and sickness in the night.
“Are the Germans Shedim, Papa?” I ask him as he rinses my hair with a pitcher of cold water.
My father wipes my face and smiles at me, “Not all Germans,” he says. “Just the ones we have to put up with. But, let me tell you something, sweet boy. Any day now, they are going to have their tuchas kicked out of Krakow, on the end of an American boot! Wait until the Yanks invade, the Krauts will be wetting themselves to get back to Germany. You’ll see all those brave Marines marching down Florianska, and so many of them will be fine Yeshiva boys from New York and Brooklyn, with Polish grandfathers of blessed memory who once prayed in every synagogue in Krakow.”
“Your father, Romek,” comments Israel, not unkindly, “has America mania and Roosevelt is his new Moses.”
“I’m telling you, Izzy,” answers my father, sending soapsuds flying through the air. “The days of this occupation are numbered. Hitler will never hold it together against the Yanks. We can’t just surrender to the idea that nothing will change. It takes the promise out of any future, and I won’t let the man in Berlin rob my children of that.”
My father puts on his stoic face, determined to protect his cherished reed of hope. Tadek is shaping cones out of the sinking foam of my bath in a distracted fashion. The water is now uncomfortably cold and I want to get out but have an odd feeling of not wishing to be naked before the men on the edge of any rising pessimism. Luckily, my mother comes striding in from the other room at that moment and immediately asks, “Why isn’t that boy dried off and in his nightshirt?”
Pinkoza Ladner is a distant cousin of Israel Horowitz, a man everyone knows in the Ghetto by the impossible nickname of Pinie Koza (Pinie the Goat). He is an affable unassuming soul who, my father would say, was guaranteed to be among the favored of heaven because of his quiet devotion to clearing the streets of the dead. Pinie got help from another of my OD uncles, Samek Weiner, who has sent him Yankel Gorowski from the Judenrat office and two dimwitted boys in their late teens who needed some legitimate employment to avoid the transports. Yankel has to be cautioned against pilfering the pockets of the deceased and the other two from gawking at the nakedness of any dead females they might handle.
For a man with any conscience, the work of an OD is a daily poison alleviated only by the most subversive fictions. My uncles make daring lists of the dead, matching their names up with equivalent forged ID cards. Rarely do the Germans check to see if the face moldering on the sidewalk matched the photo staring out from the newly manufactured Blauschein. This leaves a number of recycled cards with new photographs to be issued to the living that otherwise would have been allocated to the selection lists.
Pinie Koza surveys his unlikely morgue crew and complains to my uncle that “This wasn’t much to work with, Samek, this is no upstanding Hevrah Kadisha (burial society) we’ve got here. Wouldn’t you rather be sent to the grave by the devil?”
My uncle pats his shoulder kindly and advises, “Just give them a spade, my friend, and make them good Shomrim (watchers over the deceased), we need to clear the streets before these citizens bloat up and fester their gases over the living. If there’s one thing that puts the fear of G-d up these Germans, it’s the first whiff of typhus.”
The burying man takes my uncle’s words to heart and instructs his feckless team as they sit behind him on the former lumber cart pulled by two sturdy chestnut drays. “This work is a grace,” he lectures, “remember it as such, especially in these times. The dead one is addressed with all politeness as “the Met”, and, if we were doing this properly, we would ask their forgiveness for any indignity we might inflict upon their lifeless form.”
Yankel is hardly impressed with Pinie’s reasoning and complains loudly. “Forget the nice white gown, the fancy psalms, cutting the tallit fringe, and don’t try to soothe these lost with petitions for their eternal rest. What’s to rest? Who will repay their taken days? Believe me, Goat Boss; they’ll be pounding against their tomb lids for justice for generations to come.”
The horse-drawn cart trolls the Ghetto for the next two days, hauling the dead to the cemeteries of Jerozolimska and Miodowa Streets. Wherever the cadavers congregated in number, both Ghetto residents and the German military were diverted to other routes. The Judenrat have sent more workers to drape the swollen corpses with old sheets soaked in bleach and vinegar and to recover their clothing for delousing and recycling. When the sheets run out, the maggoty remnants of the “Mets” are doused with lye, wrapped in layers of paper and bound with string. Such shrouding gave the streets at night the bizarre appearance of an ancient Egyptian excavation.
Pinie Koza and his men tie scarves around their faces and continue to clear the avenues. With each body lifted into the cart, Yankel Gorowski persists in his random and cursing rage on behalf of the departed that the Goat Man comes to understand it as an unpolished tribute, a rough and wart-ridden holiness in and of itself. So, thinks Pinie Koza, it’s not the Kaddish but we’ll take it, because grace has the peculiar wearing properties of water on stone, and Yankel the schnorrer is smoothing out very nicely.
From the deep culvert that runs beneath the closed bathhouse on Josefinska Street, they bring out the body of Rabbi Avraham Bronstein, who’d left this world from a single bullet to the ear earned by arguing with Mueller’s men. Next to him, they discover the thin form of a woman garbed in a summer dress, on which no wounds could be found, (who had actually expired in the damp channel from a swift and merciful stroke). Pinie Koza notes the woman is not young but still attractive, and even in her terminal state gives off a reserved scholarly air. A pair of starched white cotton gloves hung from her side pocket, a lady-like gesture on a hot afternoon when one must hasten into exile. She had the tapered muscular fingers of a former pianist, the slender and learned hands of my teacher, Ester Rosenfeld.
Manek tells us that the selected sat in the Optima courtyard for two days, a peculiar marketplace of the whispered bribe, the light-handed betrayal overlaid with apprehension and the wooden frozen state that the waiting induced in all the detainees. No one was allowed any luggage or change of clothing and no food but a little water. They were guarded mainly by personnel from Symche Spira’s political section, a new breed of OD spawned by shifting SS policies; men heady with the freedom to extort, to defame, ready to kill their own on a whim, who sought to become the perfected mirror of their masters.
Down the lines of prisoners they walked, the ODs Forster, Spira, Susser, Wertal and Pacanower, their manner rather like bookies at a racetrack, betting with those who carried anything valuable that freedom could be had for the right price. Spouses, parents and grown children, the new identity cards in hand, stood anxiously at the gates of this people depository, also with money or jewelry to see if they could purchase their relatives. And so went the bargaining.
My name is Riva Fishbein; I have two thousand zlotys for my husband, Mattius Fishbein. He is a skilled stonemason and valuable to the Reich. Please can you find it in your heart to release him? Here is his new Blauschein. Mattius is allowed a brief minute with Riva and is freed to be assigned to building more barracks just down the road at the new labor camp of Plaszow now under construction.
A fine-faced boy of eighteen steps forward. My parents are Dr. Emmanuel Widowski and Dr. Gutka Widowksi, both are dentists; as such they can maintain the health of workers needed for the war effort and will treat the teeth of any German military if permitted. I can offer you a collection of my grandfather’s gold coins. He was Professor Henryk Neumann, a renowned numismatist of ancient Roman currency.
Spira sees the leather case open with the gilt of the coins shining as offered by the Widowski’s guileless son, Berek. The OD severely questions what is a Jew doing with such treasures when the decrees of long ago ordered that such precious things be surrendered? Please, Sir, they were on loan at the time to the Department of Archeology at the Jagellonian University. The coins’ documents of provenance and a letter with the University’s logo prove the boy’s truth and save him from being put against the wall. Spira, much enriched, sends him home, walking earnestly hand in hand with both parents who were blessing the day they conceived him.
Fourteen-year old Yehudith Blatt sits with her widowed mother, Lyuba, and her only parent’s boyfriend, Herman, a parasitic lover, a leech, a complainer, who is always first to eat more than his share of their meager rations. He secretly pimps the pretty adolescent to the Ukrainian guards in exchange for his freedom alone, claiming she is a troubled child and well seasoned as a whore.
A corporal drags the sullen Yehudith to a worker’s outhouse north of the gates. His shift is over in fifteen minutes, he barks in bad Polish for her to wait and to be surely naked when he returns to unlock the door. The girl, nervy and full of vitriol, doffs not one garment. She stands high on the toilet seat, spits on her palms and quietly levers the slates off the lavatory roof to climb up and slide snake-like out in the bright sunlight across the roof’s beam, above the waiting faces far below, and in through the factory window to surprise an elderly machinist in his repair duties. The man, without a word, hides her beneath the turbines until it’s all over.
Herman suffers mightily with a thrashing from the disappointed guard who has to lie to his sergeant about the escaped kid, while Lyuba comforts herself that matters are righted in some way and, while realizing she may never see her daughter again, that Yehudith will certainly live to see this time dissolved.
The Pharmacist Pankiewicz, with Manek’s help, sends over food and medicines to comfort the elderly and the hospital patients who had been dragged from their beds, still fevered, sutured, infected, and those rising to health.
Manek unknowingly hands salts of cyanide to eighty-year-olds, Maurice and Jana Binder, the toxin hidden in a box of chocolates given to my brother by their oldest son, Lukacz, who came by it through his labors at the Wachs lamp factory on Lwowska Street. The Binders thanked my brother graciously, called him sweet deliverer, wished him a thousand years of joy, but were sure not to offer him any of the ganache truffles. Jana combed her hair, put on her lipstick and her best shawl, Maurice his silk bow tie. They ingested the chocolates after making their whispered prayers and sharing a final kiss. They will be found later, thought to be sleeping, clutching each other tightly against the south wall of the yard. Pinie Koza and Yankel will have to lift them in the burial cart as a one body to save breaking the frail bones of their embrace.
On June eighth, shouts announce the order for the deportees to move out. The Optima gates open and the mass of prisoners are marched to the waiting boxcars standing at the station in Prokocim. The thousands of travelers packed into the wagons start an unraveling in the weft of a vital tapestry, part of the once-breathing fabric of our community, in and beyond the Ghetto. Among its brightest threads were:
Mordechai Gebirtig, composer of Jewish folk songs,
Abraham Heinemann, artist and painter,
Clara Rossen, architect,
Alfred Gutmacher, violinist and Klezmer exponent,
Bianka Gutmacher, soprano,
Gumpel Singer, goldsmith and engraver,
Menisha Kohn, embroiderer of Torah mantles, parochets and kittels,
Shulem Spitzglas, diamond cutter,
Haskiel Kops, stonemason,
Moishe Beck, bookbinder,
Rabbi Izydor Teitelbaum, historian and theologian,
Leiba Blume, midwife,
Genia Klein, schoolteacher,
Avram Hadel, typesetter,
Amelia Werfel, playwright
Oren Hadel, printer,
and Viviana Eckstein, poet.
