Cafe Scheherazade Page 13

  ‘Many parents were driven to insanity that night,’ Avram whispers. ‘We thought we were immune to tragedy. We were prepared for the worst. But not for this. It was impossible to understand. It can never be understood. Those parents who survived this Aktion would never forgive themselves.

  ‘And the worst thing,’ adds Avram, ‘was that the perpetrators of these crimes seemed to enjoy it.’

  They can come in any season. Mostly they appear in early spring, days of gale-force winds. They rise in the south, partnered by clouds borne upon sudden gusts. The bay bursts from its confines. The spray whips the eyes. The city vanishes under low-flung skies. High seas lash the pier. Boats in the marina tear at their chains. The palms on the foreshore sway, as if about to snap.

  It is invigorating, this southern rage. It clears my mind. It penetrates my bones. My face feels cold and alive, my eyes clear and alert. I scan the unkempt sea, the cloud-black skies. I notice, for the first time, that there are trees, permanently bent away from the sea, beaten back, over the years, by countless southern storms. Crows and gulls spiral against the wind. Squalls hurl water onto the foreshore. The beaches are strewn with kelp flung against the retaining walls.

  Never before have I so enjoyed the ferocity of a storm. It is a relief to be outside, to cling to the bay, and wander the streets. And it is a relief to be free for a while of that story-drenched cafe so burdened by the past.

  But now that we have begun, we must see it through. I return, and Avram resumes his tale. Fifteen thousand inmates remain in the first ghetto. The Third Reich is in need of slaves. Avram works in an electricity plant. He leaves the ghetto at dawn, and returns from the factory at night.

  The incarcerated slaves regroup. They set up schools, a kindergarten, a wall bulletin, a bookstore. A resistance movement is formed in the early days of 1942. Yitzkhak Wittenberg is elected leader. The two battalions are broken down into chapters. Each chapter is divided into cells. Avram becomes chairman of the ghetto youth club. The club produces exhibitions and plays. They smuggle in weapons and secretly train.

  Houses of worship are relocated underground. Avram's sister, Basia, teaches music to ghetto children. She is one of many inmates who continue to give of their hearts and skills. Cabarets and choirs, a theatre, an orchestra, soften the despair. Writers pour their suffering into laments and dirges. Haunting melodies rise from the ashes. A poet roams the ghetto alleys in a vain search for his vanished lover:

  Springtime, take away my sadness,

  Restore my dear one to me again.

  Oh springtime, take away my sadness,

  Convey my sweetheart back to me again.

  His name is Shmerl Katcherginsky. Or Shmerke as he is affectionately known. His songs mirror the feelings of his people, his fellow inmates. They recite his poems, they whisper his songs and, for a brief moment, they are comforted:

  Hush, be silent, remain silent,

  Corpses are growing here.

  They were sown by men of evil,

  Raised from seeds of fear.

  There are paths to Ponary,

  But none that lead away.

  Oh, our father has been lost,

  Our loved ones wrapped in clay.

  Hush my child, weep not my love,

  Our cry will not be heard;

  Quiet my child, sleep my treasure

  Your tears, they fall in vain.

  Only when our freedom returns

  Will its light wash away your pain.

  The end looms in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, yet there are those who bear children, a crime punishable by death. Basia gives birth to her second child in a concealed room within the ghetto hospital. She names her Nehamiah, the Hebrew word for ‘hope’. She retreats to the windowless room in which she lives with Etta and Avram, her husband Uri, and little Shmulek.

  Nehamiah is not yet four months old when, on 5 July 1943, Yitzkhak Wittenberg is arrested. As he is being led from the ghetto, those guarding him are attacked and killed. The Gestapo issues an ultimatum: if Wittenberg does not surrender by morning, the ghetto will be liquidated.

  After an agonising night, Wittenberg complies. Several units of ghetto fighters decide to make a run for the forest. They are ambushed en route. Many die in the subsequent battle. In reprisal the Nazis murder the families and workmates of the escapees.

  On 1 September 1943, the ghetto is sealed off. In the following weeks thousands are herded towards the Vilna station. Those still capable of work are transported to labour camps: the men to Estonia, the women to Latvia. The old, the sick, the lame, the remaining women and children, all those deemed not fit for slave labour, are trucked out to be shot in Ponary, or entrained to the gas chambers of Majdanek. The final liquidation of Vilna ghetto has begun.

  Avram and his comrades retreat to a courtyard beside the ghetto library on Strashuna Street. Its precious collection of books is torn from the shelves and thrown onto the barricades, alongside pieces of metal, furniture, bedding and bricks. After the initial shoot-out the Nazis retreat; but the deportations continue.

  The decision is finally made by the partisan command. The ghetto fighters are to steal out to the forests. An uprising within the ghetto walls would be of no avail. Better to continue the resistance underground.

  In the early hours of 23 September, Avram and his comrades leave the library, and descend into Strashuna Street. At first light Avram comes across his mother, by chance. He has not seen her for six weeks. She is hurrying by with Basia who holds baby Nehamiah in her arms. Little Shmulek clutches her other hand.

  ‘She knew it was the end,’ says Avram. ‘I gave her some bread and milk for the baby, and she gave me the scarf she was wearing. She wanted me to be warm. “Take care of yourself in the forest,” she told me. Those were her final words.’

  It would remain the most indelible image, the sight of his family vanishing through the smoke and rubble, in the first light of day. It continues to haunt Avram, this final glimpse of Basia, Shmulek, baby Nehamiah, and his mother, the lifelong revolutionary, moving away to certain death. His mother's words still pursue him. The memory will follow him to the grave.

  Avram leans back against his chair. His coffee has turned cold. His feet are drawn up to the side. His face is tense, the colour drained. He is like a child cowering, withdrawing into himself. ‘Have I told you this story?’ he asks.

  ‘In the ghetto there was a yeshiva for young boys. The head of the yeshiva was a cabbalist, a student of Jewish mysticism, a numerologist who believed that the universe had a mathematical perfection. He had an uncanny ability to use his knowledge of numbers to make accurate predictions. Even in the ghetto, he would immerse himself in the Zohar, the Book of Radiance, the great text of the cabbalists. He loved his God and worshipped him day and night; and he loved his boys as much as he loved his God.

  ‘In the final days of the liquidation the boys were flushed from the cellar in which they were hiding, and driven out to Ponary. When he discovered his students’ fate, the rosh yeshiva lost his mind. He ran through the streets of the ghetto screaming: “Yidn, there is no God. Do not believe it. No God would allow this to happen. Yidn, it is a lie. There cannot be a God!”

  ‘We could hear his screams from our barricades. “Yidn, they have murdered my boys. Yidn, there is no God. No God would allow this to happen!” For hours he ran, screaming the same words, like a man possessed; he did not stop screaming until he too was shot.’

  Avram pauses. His knees are bent back, held tight. He leans to the side and clutches his chair. His face is white, his body contorted. Around us the hum of conversation continues. It is as if our table has been cordoned off.

  When Avram's voice returns, it arises as a whisper. Like a child awoken from a disturbing dream, he asks, ‘Now tell me, how can anyone emerge from such a place without rage? Tell me, how could anyone emerge from all this and remain sane?’

  The city is burning. The ancient walls are crumbling. The air is rent with the barking of dogs, the moans of
the wounded. Avram and his comrades enter the sewers. He clutches a 14mm Colt revolver and four bullets, his ration of firepower. Urine drips from the walls. The tunnels narrow to half a metre in width. A comrade faints at the smell of stale air and shit.

  From the distance can be heard the sound of shots. The tunnel reverberates with the aftershock. Five partisans who had preceded them have been discovered. They are dragged out and hanged in Subosz Square, in front of a crowd of ghetto inmates.

  Among the executed are Avram's close friends, Abraham Cwornik and Ashia Bik. That morning Avram had come across them making love on the floor of the barricaded library. They lay on a bed of books, and sought to enter each other, oblivious to their surroundings. He was in his forties. She was twenty-one. They made love in the morning, and they were hanged in the afternoon, side by side.

  Avram and his comrades emerged from the sewers at night. They were met by contacts who guided them to a fur factory. Two days later they were transferred from the factory to Gestapo headquarters on Slovacki Street.

  It was an audacious move. The Lithuanian concierge hid them in the attic. They remained there for three nights, awaiting their contacts in the forests. Below them they heard the voices and movements of Gestapo officers. They were in the belly of the beast.

  ‘Fear is a feeling one has when there are choices,’ says Avram. ‘We had no choice. We wanted to survive. Perhaps this is what is called the preservation instinct. Fear is paralysing.

  ‘Only years later did I feel it again, here, in Melbourne, when my son contracted polio. Until then I had remained immune to fear. All I felt was the desire for revenge, fuelled by a rage I found impossible to tame. But when I had children, a family of my own, and I saw the agony of my own son, I began to feel afraid. I wanted him to be well. I did not want to see him suffer.’

  As he talks I see in him the nineteen-year-old youth, emerging from the sewers, hiding in Gestapo headquarters, stealing out to the forests. I see the ghetto fighter. I sense the residual anger. And I am struck by the contrast: between Avram's tales, and the setting in which he tells them; between the images of old Vilna, disintegrating into dust, and the intimacy of Scheherazade on a cold spring night.

  ‘Sholem Aleichem.’

  ‘Aleichem Sholem.’

  ‘Here. Take a seat. What do you wish to order? A glass of borscht? Some barley soup?

  ‘You speak a word of Yiddish? Mamme loschen? A little Russian? Maybe Polish? What do you want for the main course? A plate of latkes? A chicken schnitzel or vegetable stew?

  ‘And where are you from? Warsaw? Budapest? Crakow? Lublin? Perhaps Vienna? Maybe Berlin? And what would you like for dessert? An apple compote? A plate of cheese? A cup of coffee? A lemon tea?’

  ‘This is how it started to become the Scheherazade we know today,’ Masha tells me.

  ‘We could not foresee what it would become,’ says Avram.

  ‘We had no experience,’ adds Masha. ‘We had never been restaurateurs, chefs, business people, when we took over O'Shea's milk bar.’

  ‘Then the single men began to come, men who had lost their entire families in the Annihilation, some of whom had never remarried,’ says Avram. ‘Men who lived in one-bedroom flats, boarding houses, single rooms. And we responded to their tastes.’

  The word spread. The men gathered. Scheherazade answered their needs. Their numbers grew like a sprouting of seeds. They came in search of a Yiddish word, a familiar smile. This is what the survivors craved: a mother's touch, a friend's embrace.

  Their longings determined Masha's cuisine. Slowly it returned, her recall of recipes, the ingredients she had helped her mother prepare on a wood-fuelled fire in a Siberian camp.

  It began with simple dishes: a chicken broth, a Sabbath stew. The menu expanded. The clientele grew. Masha dashed between tables. She ran upstairs to tend to her three children. She ran downstairs to tend to her family of solitary men. Avram settled accounts, paid bills, dashed to communal meetings, and rushed back in time to serve supper, sweep the floors, lower the shutters and bolt the doors.

  Masha had wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to pursue the future she had envisaged on her walks to a village school through the dust-clogged alleys of Merke. Avram had wanted to teach, to seek answers, to record his precious tales; but when they arrived in Melbourne, they had to begin anew. They laboured in clothing factories. They advanced from a stint in a laundry and an abattoir, to late-night piecework and assembly lines; until they laid their eyes upon O'Shea's.

  The milk bar became a coffee shop, the coffee shop a restaurant, the restaurant a meeting place, a refuge from the cold. In Scheherazade survivors were regrouping, old worlds were being recreated, and festering wounds were being healed. Yet it would take the proprietors years to see the poetry of their venture.

  Avram and his comrades retreated to the forests. They moved to an island in the Rudnicki swamps. They dug zemlankes, underground rooms, camouflaged with branches and leaves.

  The shelters expanded. Avram and his comrades added a kitchen, a bakery and a sauna: a row of stones fuelled by burning wood. The steam provided relief from armies of lice, and drove them from their breeding grounds in shirts and matted hair. The partisans drew water from underground springs. The hot stones heated the water into warm baths.

  They assembled an arsenal, and a radio by which they received orders from central command. They waded through the swamps, on makeshift walkways, made out of branches and sand. They moved to enemy lines in small bands along forest tracks. They laid mines. They blew up railway tracks. They cut down telegraph poles. They raided farmhouses, stole food and interrogated peasants. They became hardened fighters, men and women with their childhood barely behind them.

  Avram recalls his initiation, the first assignment. They waded out of the swamps in the pre-dawn darkness, in the winter of 1943, a band of partisans fifteen strong, led by Rushke Markowitz. She was twenty-two years old. They made their way to a rail siding. German guards spotted them as they moved across the tracks. Rushke and a comrade diverted the guards with their fire. The rest of the band retreated as Rushke and her partner were killed.

  In time, they became ruthless. There was a village of oxen and geese, and fowls squawking in the dust; with thatched cottages, wooden stables and horse-drawn carts. Its children played in windswept lanes. Its women tended their homes; its menfolk farmed. And stored arms which they used against both the German occupiers and Soviet-led partisans. The village stood on the edge of the forest. Partisans often passed nearby, to and from their raids. When they strayed too close, they were attacked, and some were killed.

  The order came from Moscow. The villagers were to be taught a lesson. A combined force of partisans was assembled, comprised of Russians and Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. They ringed the entire village. They blocked all escape routes.

  They attacked at midnight. They set fire to the houses, the wagons, the fences and stables. The howl of burning animals rose above the crackle of bullets and flames. Horses, with manes ablaze, hurtled towards watering holes. The madness was contagious. The hunted had become the hunter.

  Placid family men became indiscriminate killers. Once pious scholars bellowed for revenge. Boys screamed out the names of loved ones as they beat their captives to death. Partisan women became oblivious to the cries of children in the glow of lingering flames. Long before the darkness had given way to the dawn, not one village man, woman or child remained alive.

  Again I hear the steel in Avram's voice. I see the young man of the swamps, smeared with mud and sweat. I hear the tale, and I cannot move. All I can do is listen at the table in the back room, and allow the story to be told.

  There were moments, however few, of respite. They would sit by a fire, and inhale the conifer-scented night. ‘After three years of powerlessness, we could decide our own fate,’ says Avram. ‘We were no longer helpless. We faced death with every step, but we had a measure of control over our lives.

  ‘And there were the hours by
the fire, after a successful raid. We baked potatoes. We gazed at the glowing embers and flames. We sang Russian and Yiddish songs. We recalled fragments of our past lives and, to this day, when we meet, those who survived, those of us who settled in Melbourne or New York, in Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Mexico City or Montreal, in cities scattered throughout the world, we feel a bond of love; and the scent of the past returns.

  ‘In the swamps and forests we were kings. We lived by our instincts and wits. When the Luftwaffe planes circled overhead we would hide in the mud. They were too frightened to come by land. We could remain invisible in the swamps for hours on end. We ate the grass and drank our own urine to ease our thirst. We learnt that everything can be turned to an advantage. When the planes dropped their bombs, they would get stuck in the mud. We would creep up, defuse them, take out the explosives, and use them in our mines.’

  As Avram speaks I see a radiance, born of freedom, of being able to defend oneself. I see him with his companions, seated on forest floors knotted with pine needles and cones. I hear the notes of a mouth organ, the chorus of a partisan song. I inhale the aroma of birches grazed with smoke. And I sense the ambiguities, the interplay of shadow and light.

  As if he has intuited my thoughts, Avram adds, ‘In the forests we were like eagles. There were times when we could soar. But like eagles, to survive, we had to descend back to the mud, to the smell of death, and learn to stalk our prey. We had no option but to lower ourselves in the dirt in order to regain our wings.’

  Yet it could steal upon them any time: an aching sense of loss. During a raid, or as they went about their daily work, such emotions had to be suppressed. They could cause a lapse in judgment, a miscalculation at a vital moment. They could cost a comrade's life. This longing would steal upon them, nevertheless. Even as they slept, it would enter their dreams in the form of a loved one: a mother, father, husband, wife, a lover or child.

  So intense were these images the dreamers did not want to wake. They reached out to touch the mirage, but found themselves back in their underground shelters, buried beneath the earth. And there were those times late at night by a dying fire, when they allowed themselves to summon a loved one's face in the glow of the embers. Or their image would be conjured up by a song: