Jewels and Ashes Read online

  In the pre-dawn darkness Reb Aron wanders the silent streets of the Chanaykes, his feet pounding the cobblestones, his head soaring above the roofs, somewhere in the higher heavens. And, as she tells the story, mother’s eyes shift upwards, as if fixed upon a waning mirage called Bialystok.

  Yet again the fate of Bialystok is heralded from the skies. Before dawn an unsuspecting populace is suddenly awoken by the sound of shattering glass and the shrill scream of Luftwaffe fighters engaged in aerial battles with Soviet planes. Columns of smoke billow towards the heavens as bombs fall upon a military base and civilian suburbs; and one of them explodes upon the home of Reuben Zak, his wife Feigele, and his daughter Liebele.

  Feigele, father’s youngest sister, was the very same Feigele who had gone missing on the day the Zabludowski household was hit by bomb fragments at the outset of the first War. She had been one of the first and youngest of the wounded. This time she was one of the first to be killed. Reuben, his wife, and child were wiped out in that very first raid, in the early hours of Sunday, June 22, 1941.

  An aunt, uncle, and cousin accounted for. A fragment falls into place. The mosaic is taking shape. This is a tale of fragments. There is no other way to tell it. This is my inheritance: shreds of family fate seeking recognition. It can only be pieced together.

  Those with transmitters heard the news on Berlin radio: at four a.m. the Nazis had crossed the western borders and had launched an invasion of the Red Empire. The Soviet-Nazi pact was in tatters. The Jews of Bialystok were overcome by a chilling fear. They ran to each other’s homes seeking reassurance. They clung to the hope that the Reds would repel the attack. At noon they heard the Soviet foreign minister, speaking on Moscow Radio, remark that Hitler had invaded in the same month as had Napoleon. An even darker fate awaited Hitler, he predicted.

  His words were of little comfort to a Bialystok under siege. It was soon evident the Red Army was in complete disarray. Officers and commissars were seen loading their wives and children into military vehicles. Grabbing their most precious possessions, they fled east. The panic spread quickly. Trains were choked with passengers. The highway to Minsk overflowed with thousands on the run, clutching packs and sacks, driven by one thought: to escape as fast as possible from the plague about to infest Bialystok. Everything was reduced to a cold sweat, or so I imagine it, from a childhood experience, when a neighbourhood bully gone berserk took after me with a knife — houses seemed to sway and recede out of focus; the ground beneath my feet appeared unsteady.

  And so it may have been as they ran on that Sunday, and throughout Monday, their numbers swelling, pursued by planes swooping low to rake them with bullets. The roads were littered with burnt-out tanks, maimed horses, crushed bicycles, overturned wagons and autos. The dead and wounded lay on country paths and in fields of corn. The living dug holes in which to shelter during the night. German soldiers were parachuted in behind the retreating Soviets. East and west were ablaze. Burning trees buckled like bodies in fierce heat. There was nowhere to run.

  A city in a vacuum. Days of anarchy and chaos. Red Army guards desert their posts at the Bialystok prison. The building is set alight, and its inmates charge into the streets ransacking stores. They grab crates of liquor, food, clothing, tobacco. For three days the looting continues. An abandoned populace wanders about like animals detecting the scent of an approaching calamity. By Thursday 26 June, a deathly silence has settled over Bialystok. And somewhere within this brooding city there waits Reb Aron Yankev and Chane Esther Probutski, Bishke and Sheine Zabludowski, with their families and friends — their restless dreams coloured by a terrible foreboding.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AS A CHILD, father had been afraid of the Great Synagogue. He would detour on the way home from cheder to avoid the shadows that loomed from its towering walls. At nights, it was claimed, spirits of the dead came here to pray. They would swarm inside draped in white shrouds. Anything white — a coat, a hat, a cat flashing by — would make the child hasten his steps home. He would glance over a shoulder to see if he were being chased by an imp, an ogre, a mischief-maker from the netherworlds.

  ‘Tales of demons and dybbuks wove through our folklore’, father muses. ‘They lived in chimneys and crept in under doors. Perhaps we enjoyed the thrill. Or perhaps they embodied the real fear that lurked in our lives. After all, at the outset of the first war, the synagogue was damaged by bombs. I came across the smouldering ruins as I roamed the streets next day. But at least, after that assault, the synagogue had been restored, and the phantoms had resumed their nightly gatherings.’

  It had always been the centre, the heart of Jewish Bialystok. A succession of prayer-houses had stood there since the days of Count Branitski. The area became known as the Shulhoif, the courtyard district. Compact neighbourhoods radiated from the prayer-house as if clinging to it for protection. The original wooden shul had been destroyed by fire. Its replacement had fallen into disrepair. Cobwebs clung to corners and could not be removed. They were regarded as sacred. When the progressive Abraham Blumenthal became the sexton, he got rid of the cobwebs, despite the objections of town elders. The Great Synagogue replaced the shul to meet the needs of an expanding city. ‘Its tin-plated dome could be seen from afar’, father recalls. ‘The building seemed vast, with high ceilings, stone steps and arched entrances. But the Shulhoif remained a jumble of wooden cottages and artisans’ workshops, the domain of shoemakers, tinsmiths and impoverished tailors. Their dwellings mingled with fish markets, stables, and study houses. Here stood Reb Aron Yankev’s Slonimer shtibl and the Talmud Torah I attended as a boy.’

  Mother had also known the Shulhoif intimately. She had been employed as a seamstress in the workshop of master tailor Israel Milander. The workshop was a cramped room attached to Milander’s cottage. It was cluttered with wooden sofas and work benches. Fox furs hung from the ceilings. Leather skins lay piled in the corners. From the open doorway could be seen the dome of the Great Synagogue.

  At night the workshop was converted into living space. When mother arrived for work in the early mornings she would find some of Milander’s seven children asleep on makeshift beds. All day clients filed in to be fitted. Peasant women dragged in reluctant husbands to order suits. Gossip mingled with the growl of sewing machines. Alter Chalele, the well known wedding jester, lived directly opposite, and would often come by for a cup of tea. Mother describes him as a plump man with a jovial face; a permanent laugh had engraved itself upon his features. He made his living entertaining at bar mitzvahs, engagements, and circumcisions. Even in Milander’s workshop he continued his familiar patter of quips and old wives’ tales.

  As in so many of mother’s anecdotes, there are sudden flashes of harshness; and, when she comes across them, her smile of reminiscence fades. The workshop sweltered in summer and froze in winter. Work began very early and finished well after dark. The pay was low and irregular and, although she had become a member of the Seamstresses’ Union to agitate for improved conditions, she finally left to find a better life elsewhere.

  Mother’s mood lightens as she recalls the leather coat Milander had designed for her as a going-away present. The coat still hangs in my parents’ wardrobe. As a teenager I had wanted to remodel it for my own use. But the pattern was set too tight, the shoulders cut too narrow — shaped to fit the slim build of a young woman about to travel to the New World. ‘Milander was an honest man’, mother emphasizes. ‘He made clothes that would last. In those days artisans made things to endure.’ And the rare animation in her voice betrays a regret that will never be extinguished.

  June 27, 1941. Morning. Nine o’clock. Silence. Deserted streets. An outburst of gunfire. The first Nazi divisions break into Bialystok. The resistance put up by remnants of the Red Army is quickly suppressed with a barrage of incendiary bombs. The victors make their way into residential quarters hurling grenades. Jewish men are hauled out and shot in front of their wives and children. Nine-year-old Witold wanders the streets. He see
s men and boys dragged into the Great Synagogue. The building is set alight. In the smoke and confusion the Polish watchman Batoshko manages to open a side door; a mere handful escape. Flames leap through nearby homes. The timber cottages are quickly consumed. Milander’s workshop is reduced to a heap of ashes. Alter Chalele, the wedding jester, is among the many hundreds who perish in the synagogue. One third of Jewish homes in Bialystok have been razed. The forest can now be seen directly from the town square. All in a day’s work. The first day. In years to come, June 27, 1941 will be remembered and mourned as ‘Red Friday’.

  Witold drives me to the outskirts of Bialystok. It never takes long to move through a city that has not quite severed itself from field and forest. I am reminded of how primitive Bialystok remains despite its urban facade. Within easy reach are pastures flecked with haystacks. Teams of peasants are burning grasslands. Flames give way to veils of smoke pierced by shafts of afternoon sun.

  A path veers off the road into Pietrasze forest. Witold, a forester by profession, loses his quiet reserve as soon as we are among trees. He stops the car occasionally to point out various features: clumps of bilberries, resin oozing from the trunks of conifers, mounds of earth teeming with ants.

  The path conveys us to a large clearing. A notice indicates that this was a site of execution. The trees here are seventy, perhaps eighty years old, Witold tells me. And I too can share information about this site, despite coming from an entirely different part of the globe. I have traced it in memorial books, and intimate histories written soon after the war for survivors and former Bialystoker who, like father, would scour them for a familiar name, the fate of a family, or at least a hint, a possibility of knowing.

  Father had underlined the crucial passages in red biro: names of friends, streets, and events of personal significance. In accounts of ‘Martyr’s Thursday’, for instance, it is Ulitza Kupietzka which is underlined, the street in which the Zabludowski family had lived for many years. Kupietzka was one of several streets the Nazis cordoned off on July 3, 1941. A thousand men aged between sixteen and sixty were lined up for ‘selection’. Workmen and artisans with callouses on their hands were freed. The physically weak — those deemed unfit for slave labour — were detained, tortured by drunken Gestapo officers, loaded onto trucks, driven to this site, and machine-gunned into pits. Nine days later, on a Saturday, five thousand Jewish men were dragged from their homes, ordered to march and sing as they were beaten, and ferried to an unknown destination. All day long the trucks kept returning, empty, in readiness for the next load. Some time later, peasants living on the outskirts of Bialystok told of massacres they had witnessed on that day. Yet again the murders had taken place here, within the Pietrasze forest.

  ‘Red Friday’, ‘Martyr’s Thursday’, ‘Black Sabbath’. Dates inscribed in memorial calendars. Within weeks of the initial onslaught a grim folklore was emerging, an epitaph for each day of the week, dates for future generations to absorb and be condemned to remember, and mass graves that would one day draw grandchildren to them to clarify their confused dreams.

  Witold moves quickly, closing the gaps for introspection. We drive from Pietrasze onto country roads. The grassfires glow crimson now, and merge with mists that bring on the night. Villages flash by in a whirl of cottages snuggling against each other for company. They disappear moments after we first sight them, consumed by a voracious darkness. With similar abruptness the streets of Tykocin are upon us.

  We come to a halt by a cottage and are greeted by friends of Witold. They are young, the oldest perhaps no more than thirty. I am welcomed as a guest to a gathering of their local history society.

  After supper the lights are dimmed. Hasidic melodies play on a gramophone as we watch slides of former Jewish settlements on the Bialystoku flatlands. Roses and sunflowers blaze in country lanes. Whitewashed farmhouses glow amidst luscious gardens. Bearded rabbis sway in ecstatic prayer. A water-carrier balances buckets on a pole slung over his shoulders. Windmills whir against sullen skies. Furriers and cobblers, their spectacles fallen low over their noses, cut cloths and skins. Lost worlds are resurrected to skim across living room walls, idylls of Jewish life culled by young Poles from books and archives, images which radiate the intensity of those who once lived on the edge of extinction — or so it appears in the obscure light of hindsight.

  My hosts glance at me as if seeking approval. I discern in them a flicker of unease, an incompleteness, a gap of which they too are acutely aware. The presence of a vanished tribe lurks all around them. Who were these strange people who once lived among us?

  Out on the streets, we walk towards a white phantom which hovers in the night until it clarifies into the shape of a synagogue. Tykocin is the source, my young hosts impress upon me. It predates Bialystok as a Jewish settlement, and centuries ago held jurisdiction over its community. They are enthusiastic about their knowledge, anxious to please. ‘The synagogue was completed in 1642. We have restored it. We are preserving it.’ One of them hurries before us so that, by the time I enter, I am greeted by the voice of a cantor, soaring above the chant of massed choirs.

  The chant emanates from a tape deck. The synagogue of Tykocin is a museum. Chandeliers cast speckled shadows on the upper reaches of walls on which are painted fragments of psalms in Hebraic script. Encased in glass booths are embroidered skull caps, brittle parchments illustrated with biblical scenes, and rams’ horns that were blown to herald the New Years of many centuries.

  My hosts seem anxious to show me every corner, every restored detail. They guide me up a spiral staircase to a garret. It is small and rounded, a dome in which a table stands fully prepared for the Passover seder. The plates, the soup bowls, the ritual containers are of fine porcelain. Carved wooden chairs await the family. Two candles stand ready to be lit and blessed. A seventeenth-century Haggadah is open, ready for the patriarch to commence the ceremony. Elijah the prophet’s silver goblet glitters with polish. Everything is exact, perfect; a still life. We dare not touch. We dare not disturb. We descend into the night, shivering.

  Mid summer 1941. The final days of July. The streets of Bialystok are overflowing with men, women, and children: a community uprooted, dragging suitcases, heaving makeshift sacks, pushing carts laden with belongings, lifetimes of effort, generations of heirlooms, intimacies exposed in broad daylight like raw wounds; a people flushed out of their homes and driven towards an enclave cordoned off near the heart of the city. Here they have been forced to erect a wooden fence, three metres in height, under Gestapo supervision and the threat of deadlines that drive them to work furiously well into the night, constructing their own prison, a disease-prone isolated jail for over fifty thousand dispossessed Bialystoker Jews.

  It is a time for vultures, easy pickings, hit-and-run thefts. Hooligans attack and rob the defenceless. Polish peasants exact jewellery, furniture, currency, in return for assistance. For soldiers of the Third Reich it is a time for celebration, an occasion for photos to be taken and sent home to family and friends depicting the great triumph of the ‘Master Race’. Years later these photos will resurface in memorial books; and as a child I will gaze at them, mesmerised by ethereal figures drifting through a ghostly dream, stars of David sewn on their upper garments. When I look closely at individuals within the crowd, I catch glimpses of that inconsolable panic which erupts when a prisoner realises with finality that he is about to be locked in, the key turned, a destiny sealed.

  August 1, 1941. The ghetto fence has been completed and crowned with barbed wire. For the Jews of Bialystok, the outside world recedes and becomes a distant apparition.

  One dream barely evaporates and we are speeding towards the next. The moon has broken free of the mists and hangs in the mid heavens, an orange ball, just days before its fullness. Witold’s eyes are fastened on the rapidly curving roads as he grips the steering wheel, the sight of the synagogue ablaze on ‘Red Friday’ permanently creased on his forehead. And more than ever I feel it — this land is possessed. Eve
rywhere, it seems, there are lost souls seeking refuge. See how we once lived, they seem to whisper. See how we huddled against each other, clutching at our houses of worship, yet forever exposed, never knowing when warring tribes would return to stalk our cobbled streets. Yet on nights like this we were entranced. Moonlight pierced our windows. We lay in bed with visions of redemption. Messiahs and ancient prophets visited our dreams. Besides, it was not so easy to escape. So we stayed, and awaited the end of days.

  Witold and I cannot let go of the night. We leave the car parked outside his flat and stroll through the Chanaykes against a distant backdrop of modern flats. At night the dwellings seem more askew, at acute angles which glove the contours of winding streets. They lean precariously, as if thrown together at random and told to fend for themselves. Perhaps this disorder is their curious appeal. They emanate an intimacy, and it is easy to imagine mother and her friends, walking arm in arm on the way home from a Bundist gathering, a choir rehearsal, a concert, seduced by the stillness of the night and the warmth of each other’s company.

  The streets of the Chanaykes unwind into the broad thoroughfares of a more affluent Bialystok. Mother and father are strolling, on a Saturday evening in the summer of 1932, along treelined Sienkiewicza Avenue. The city hums with weekend revelry. Queues are forming at the Apollo cinema. The dance halls are shaking to fox-trots and waltzes. In the Café de Luxe ladies sip coffee while in the back rooms young men play billiards and chess. Shops in the Macedonian quarter are doing a brisk trade in halva and Turkish delight. Kondruchuk, the White Russian, sells ice cream from a two-wheeled cart. Horse-drawn carriages dash by, conveying merrymakers to parties, and from the distance can be heard the faint sound of an orchestra in the city gardens.