Jewels and Ashes Read online

  ‘It was as if we were moving on a common stream’, father tells me. ‘One couple among thousands, bound to a common fate. And then I heard your mother’s voice as though from afar, from another realm: “Would you join me if I left for a new life in Australia? My sister Feigl can arrange a permit.”‘

  ‘In that instant’, says father, ‘we were jolted from the crowd. We became a couple detached, thrust in another direction. We saw vast oceans opening up before us and new worlds hovering on distant horizons. The strollers on Sienkiewicza Avenue receded. I saw them as marionettes activated by strings from which we had broken free. We had become exempt from their common fate and hurled into an unknown but alluring future. At least, that is how it appeared then.’

  By 1941 my parents had lost touch with Bialystok. At best they were able to obtain snippets of information from Wellington newspapers: the occasional paragraph on a minor page, unconfirmed reports of massive pogroms. Yet so long as they were reported as rumour, there remained a degree of hope.

  Some time in 1942, father cannot recall exactly when, there arrived in Wellington the first eye-witness, a refugee by the name of Shapiro. He had been in Warsaw during the Nazi invasion and had lived through the early weeks of occupation. A frequent guest of my parents, he would stay late into the night, recounting fantastic tales of his escape, while glancing from time to time at photos of the wife and daughter he had left behind. He had fled east, across the length of the Red Empire, and beyond, through Siberia into Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Wherever he went he was pursued by war. The world had gone mad, or so it seemed, until he made his way by boat via Shanghai to New Zealand, to the quiet haven he had come to believe no longer existed upon the earth.

  But refuge had been exacted at a high price, for within its silence Shapiro had time to brood over the fate of his wife and child. He had left them with the hope of rejoining him when he found asylum. Day and night he was haunted by their faces. He talked about them incessantly. Had he abandoned them?, he asked himself. Should he have stayed with them?, he agonised. As father describes Shapiro’s obsession, it becomes apparent that to my parents he had seemed like a spectre, an apparition from a lost world, an uneasy reminder to those in the world of the free that they had become helpless, far removed from their loved ones in their moment of greatest need.

  This sense of unease was to increase, and become deeply embedded, as the full impact of the Annihilation was gradually revealed; and in time it would become clear that, despite their voyage to the ends of the earth, they had not truly broken free.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I HAD KNOWN HIM in early childhood as ‘the Partisan’. He was a regular visitor. He would come on weekends, especially during the summer, as I recall it, dressed in shorts and sleeveless cotton shirts. He seemed large to me then, far bigger than father. I remember him as a man of muscle and bulk leaning back on a sofa, legs sprawled out in front, body sagging into cushions, while he spoke in a light tenor that highlighted the melodic flow of Bialystoker Yiddish.

  His stories wove in and out of forests, hamlets, and glistening swamps, leaving in their wake a fantastic ‘other’ realm: bands of partisans roaming the countryside; thefts of arms and raids on enemy bases; miraculous escapes from barns surrounded by soldiers; and battles that left bullet scars in arms and legs. His anecdotes were told with a slight smile, a sense of irony, and dark humour. The irony was lost on me then, of course, but my glimpses into that other realm remained, always recalled against the clutter of endless cups of tea. It is part of my picture of him: a modest man, balancing a cup of tea on a saucer as he sank into the sofa, the cup rattling as he changed position. I also recall frequent references to a place called Pruzhany, although it would be many years before I came to know why it had been so important to my mother and the fate of the family she had left behind.

  September 1941. The Gestapo orders the evacuation of 12 000 ghetto inmates. They are to be transferred, it is claimed, from Bialystok to Pruzhany, a townlet one hundred and fifty kilometres southeast, not far from the Bialowieza forests. The order provokes widespread panic. There have been rumours of death squads, tales of massacres in Vilna, the Ukraine, White Russia. Surely Pruzhany is a ploy, a pretext, a fiction.

  The Judenrat, the Jewish councils imposed by the Nazis to carry out their demands, is instructed to make the selection. Debates rage for hours over who is to go. It is the devil’s calculus they have been forced to engage in. Councillors agonise. Arguments erupt. And, as the deadline draws near, criteria are drawn up: retain the able bodied, the skilled, those thousands who trudge to work every morning, to factories controlled by German industrialists, both within and outside the ghetto. Provide slave labour, pay the arbitrary fines, keep the ghetto productive, and we can buy time, argues Judenrat chairman Efraim Barasz. He emerges as the dominant figure. His views are persuasive: what choice have we but to select from the poor, the unemployed, the widows and their children, and from families crowded in the most squalid of quarters?

  On the eve of Rosh Hashonah the first notices are delivered: tomorrow you are to assemble at five in the morning by the gate on Ulitza Fabryczna. Among those whose names are on the dreaded lists are Reb Aron Yankev, Chane Esther, my Aunts Liebe, Sheindl, and Tzivie, and Uncle Joshua with his two children Chaimke and Itke.

  Five a.m. Darkness. On the streets a heavy frost, a steady drift of snow. Only hand-luggage and shoulder packs are allowed. Furniture, mementos, heirlooms are left behind. Reb Aron parts with his holy books, Chane Esther with mortars and pestles, Aunt Sheindl with some of her many dresses; and like shadows they move through the streets, feet slipping in mud and snow, shoulders bent and hunched under packs and sorrow.

  By Fabryczna gate, the lists are checked. There are last-minute attempts to plead for exemption, to flash forged work-passes, to bribe Judenrat police. Occasionally someone makes a dash for a side-street. Fate flits softly, a mere straw on a breeze. The crowd huddles in the cold, against the mute falling of snow, the muffled screams of Nazi guards, the quiet crying of a child.

  A fleet of trucks moves through the gates. The evacuees are herded aboard. Packs are lost in the confusion. The convoy lurches off over ice-glazed roads. Many hours later it comes to a halt by a cottage on the outskirts of Pruzhany. The prisoners are ordered in, one at a time, to be stripped naked and searched. Lining is ripped apart for hidden gems and currency. Possessions lie scattered over the floors. Those caught concealing valuables are beaten. For hours the evacuees wait outside, exposed to the frosts.

  Pruzhany looms across a field of snow: an oasis, a relief, an unexpected welcome. Jewish doctors wait to treat the bruised and frostbitten. Hot meals are served by the ghetto Judenrat, and the evacuees are escorted to their new homes: cramped timber cottages confined within electrified fences.

  And so it was, as accurately as I have been able to recreate it from scant information, that eight Probutskis from mother’s family and, over a period of weeks, an estimated 5 000 Jews of Bialystok made the journey to Pruzhany ghetto in the winter of 1941.

  The Partisan made his way to Pruzhany under very different circumstances. It is years since I last spoke to him; but apart from areas of private pain that are clearly off limits, he recounts his experiences quite willingly. He appears considerably smaller than I had imagined, his shoulders now hunching. Yet traces of a once powerful build are still evident; and, as he speaks, that half-smile dimly recalled from childhood encounters hovers upon his face. I am never quite sure which way the smile is going — towards a grimace that conceals an inner torment, or towards genuine laughter. In time I realise that his smile contains both possibilities, constantly at play. The events he describes are at once so bizarre and menacing that his mild demeanor and humour act as a counterpoint, a means of containing the absurd within the bounds of normality. The Partisan brings the voice of the ordinary to events of the extraordinary.

  ‘You have no idea. How can you? You were not there’, he emphasizes, echoing a refrain I hav
e heard from many survivors. At times he pauses in the middle of a story as if he himself finds it difficult to believe that he had actually been ‘there’. ‘It is impossible to understand. Somehow I survived. I always seemed to make the right move. Or was it that fate always favoured me?’, he muses, and shakes his head in disbelief.

  In the early days of August 1941, soon after the Bialystok ghetto was established, he was approached by a Judenrat member, escorted outside the ghetto to a timber yard, and introduced to the German manager. ‘He had been mobilised to build roads. He needed someone to build garages. I said, “Okay. I can do it. But I need workers”. “How many?”, he asked. “Six. Perhaps eight”, I replied. “Choose whoever you want”, said the boss. I returned to the ghetto. People were desperate for work. Many clamoured around me, pleading for a job. I chose some friends, acquaintances. What could I do? I was the only true carpenter among them.’

  I have come to enquire about Pruzhany and my relatives, but the Partisan jumps from story to story, following a thread of his own; and he draws me in, increasingly spellbound, into a web of tales, ‘a thousand-and-one nights’, he calls them, and again shakes his head in disbelief.

  ‘He was a fine man, the boss. He called me “Herr Goldman”. Do you understand what that means? At a time when his fellow countrymen were calling us worms, vermin, the lowest form of life, he would greet me as “Herr Goldman”. He fed us well: bread and liverwurst, a rare piece of meat. One day he called me over and held up a bucket of jam. “Chief”, I asked, “how much should I pay?” “Dummkopf” he replied, “this is a present!” He even agreed to help me smuggle it into the ghetto. As we approached the gates, he saluted the guard: “Heil Hitler!” A few steps beyond the entrance, he spat on the ground and cursed: “Scheisse Hitler’”

  And Pruzhany? How did the Partisan meet up with my family? ‘There is a lot to tell’, he says. ‘Until this day I still cannot believe I had the chutzpah to do the things I did. One morning, as I arrived for work, I saw Gestapo officers approaching the shed. I quickly realised that they suspected some of us were involved in underground activity. Actually, we had only just begun to talk and to scheme. There was a Polish mechanic in our group, a Russian, and several Jews. When I saw the Gestapo coming I acted quickly, on impulse. I jumped through a window and hurried back to the ghetto. On the way I met one of the members of our group, “Shloime the Geler”, the fair-haired one, and I warned him not to come to work. He lives today in Germany. We correspond from time to time. A clever man. Resourceful. He even survived Treblinka, where he became one of the barbers who cut the hair of those condemned to the ovens. Aron! You have no idea! A thousand-and-one nights, and many more!’

  That evening the Partisan stole over the ghetto fence and made his way to the city square. Two Jewish workers were loading a truck. They had been ordered to transport wool to Pruzhany, where it was to be used in lining boots for the Wehrmacht. ‘At first they refused to take me. So 1 held up something that looked like a pistol. It was nothing. Merely a bluff. A piece from a dead grenade. But it was enough to persuade them’, the Partisan tells me with a grin.

  ‘I hid in the back, under the wool. Late at night, as we passed through Bielsk, we were stopped by a Nazi patrol. They probed and prodded. I crouched in a corner. Just as I was about to be detected, they gave up the search.’

  ‘Pruzhany was a Yiddishe shtetl, a small crowded ghetto, far more intimate than Bialystok. It was possible to endure.’ The Partisan speaks matter-of-factly about the struggle to survive. There was a certain point at which one lost the will to live. Over one-third of Pruzhany inmates did die: of hunger, disease, despair, especially in the early months. But those who weathered the initial onslaught toughened, adjusted. They were able to smuggle in food. White Russian peasants were willing to trade. In the spring of 1942, it was even possible to bake matzos for Passover.

  Nevertheless, Reb Aron Yankev refused to eat it. He preferred to go without, rather than eat suspect food. What could be kosher under the rule of the devil, he argued. He would rather stick to a meagre diet of tea and potatoes. In Pruzhany Reb Aron appears to have turned away from the absurdity called life, to retreat inwards, to the refuge that had sustained him through previous crises. A ‘black plague’ on a world that had fallen victim to the ‘evil impulse’. The past was repeating itself. As he had during the first war, Reb Aron withdrew to his dream of God and Tzaddik, while Chane Esther, the matriarch, remained firmly rooted in matters of daily survival. ‘She was old, worn out, embittered’, observes the Partisan. ‘But she was also tenacious, persistent, a fighter.’

  The Partisan came to know her well. He was a frequent visitor in the Probutski household, for it had become a meeting-place for a cell of the Resistance. During their secret gatherings, on her own initiative, Chane Esther would tie a kerchief over her head, stroll nonchalantly outside, and stand lookout by the fence which ran close to the house.

  Potapoffke 33. The Partisan recalls the exact address. Every detail is welcome, every little aside that throws light on an aunt, a cousin, anything that elevates them above a welter of facts, statistics, and collective destiny. Potapoffke 33. A peasant’s cottage. Of timber. A small garden. A kitchen and one large room in which lived Reb Aron Yankev, Chane Esther, Liebe, Sheindl, Tzivie, Joshua, Chaimke, and Itke; and, in addition, two young men. One was a goldsmith who made rings on order, for German clients. He would hand over the meagre profits to comrades in the underground. ‘His hair was grey’, recalls the Partisan. He still marvels that one so young could look so old.

  The second boarder was Yanek Lerner. He was a key member of the Resistance. The Partisan had known him for years. A tall man, with blond hair, he spoke the earthy dialect of a peasant. In Bialystok he had dealt in dairy products and livestock. The Partisan laughs as he pictures him walking through the streets of Bialystok driving gaggles of geese. He was a regular guy, a reliable comrade; and in Pruzhany he had become Sheindl’s lover.

  ‘Your Aunt Sheindl was beautiful’, claims the Partisan. ‘A true krasavetse.’ Whereas the youngest sister, Tzivie, appeared fearful, a haunted soul afraid to venture out into the streets, and Liebe had become bent with labour and resignation, Sheindl remained proud and defiant. She ran the household, provided spine to the family, infused everyone around her with energy; and at night she lay with Yanek Lerner. ‘This is how it was’, says the Partisan. ‘One could be fearful, another defiant. No better, no worse. Merely different. After all, who are we to judge them?’

  Sheindl was such a beauty. They all say it: mother, father, Aunt Feigl, Uncle Zalman. 1 had not visited Uncle Zalman for many years. A distant uncle, related through in-laws of Feigl’s, he had left Poland in the late 1930s to settle in Melbourne. He greets me enthusiastically, and remarks: ‘You are a true Probutski. I can see it in your eyes: a grandson of Reb Aron Yankev, a nephew of my best friend Joshua.’

  He is in his eighties, a frail man with Parkinson’s disease. It is eating into him at the edges. Yet there is a gentleness, the poignant dignity of an elderly man struggling to keep his faculties intact. Zalman’s vision of things around him is blurred, constantly disintegrating. But when he focusses on the past he moves into clear waters, and within this transparency he regains sight of a city and of friends he has not seen for fifty years.

  Zalman had grown up in the Chanaykes, next door to the Probutskis. His friendship with Joshua had persisted beyond childhood; as young men they had often sung together in the renowned Chor Shul. ‘Joshua was a tenor. He had a voice that could fly’, claims Zalman. ‘And your Aunt Sheindl was very beautiful. I had my eye on her for many years but, alas, she never wanted me. She was a true krasavetse. She looked like a famous film star of those times, but I can’t quite remember who. And Joshua, he was my best friend’, he repeats with tears in his eyes.

  ‘When he cries, it’s a sign he feels well’, Zalman’s wife assures me. She is a no-nonsense woman who fusses around him, wipes the saliva from his mouth, attends to his every need.r />
  ‘Bialystok was a city with a heart’, mutters Zalman.

  And you went barefoot and hungry’, interjects the practical one. She brings us cups of tea and continues to fill them to the brim.

  The table is overflowing with drinks, strudel, honey cakes, apple compote, and albums featuring family parties and picnics, bar mitzvahs and weddings, children, grandchildren, a recently born great-grandchild; and pasted between them, in stark contrast, are obituaries to relatives who have died in recent years. All of them Bialystoker’, points out Zalman. ‘Those who managed to get out in time.’

  ‘The doctor says he shouldn’t talk so much about the past’, interrupts the prudent one, forever observant of every fluctuation in Zalman’s moods. But increasingly time loses meaning as we sit around the kitchen table, flipping through family albums in which past and present, celebration and obituary, seem to dissolve into one shared moment of silence. Suddenly Zalman glances up and remarks, ‘You look exactly like Pushkin, the Russian writer’; and he begins to recite one of his poems. But he stops abruptly, mid sentence and, like a cheeky child, he grins and announces: ‘I know a verse far more profound than any written by the great poets. We used to stand on the streets of Bialystok, your uncle Joshua and I, and recite it as we gazed up at the stars:

  A Jew looks up at the sky.

  Is he looking for God?

  No — he’s just scratching his beard.’

  Fate is not a grand design. It is made up of slight twists and feints, impulsive decisions, hesitations, unexpected detours. Sheindl had many admirers and boyfriends. In one photo she is pictured with her first fiance, Chilek, in 1930. She is wearing a black dress with white frills on the sleeves. Chilek is dark complexioned, curly haired, his face lean and tense. He migrated to Palestine, and in mother’s album there is a postcard in which his portrait is circled and linked with Sheindl’s, above a montage of Tel Aviv scenes. He was organising a visa for her, he wrote. Soon after, letters ceased. He had found someone else.