Jewels and Ashes Read online

  Several years later, Sheindl was engaged to a Bialystoker called Laizer. On the eve of his departure for Chile they married. Sheindl sent a photo of the occasion to her sisters in Melbourne and Wellington. Laizer is appropriately handsome, exuding confidence, a man of the world. He wears a pin-striped suit, a black shirt, an embroidered silk tie. He is looking away from the camera at some distant point, while Sheindl, as usual, gazes directly at the lens. Yes, she reminds me of a film star of the times, but I am not quite sure who. Perhaps it is that she embodies the look of the era: she is of the future, rather than the past, far removed from the shtetl outlook of her parents, and unafraid of her beauty.

  She had always been strong willed, mother has told me. She was the sister who fought the fiercest of the battles against Aron Yankev and his strict orthodox ways. He had tried to forbid her from associating with the bohemians, freethinkers, and visionaries who had captured the longings of Bialystok youth. Sheindl drifted in cafes and dance halls about town. On one occasion she had brought home a statuette of a naked woman, sculpted by a friend. ‘I will smash it’, raged Reb Aron. ‘Smash it and I will set fire to your holy books and never return’, retorted Sheindl.

  She had her way. The statuette remained standing on top of the living room cupboard, and Reb Aron withdrew one step further from his daughters. Yet, in the final days, he was to be reunited with Sheindl in a fashion far more potent than formal religious bonds, and Sheindl was to prove a source of loyal support in the darkest of times.

  The photo of Laizer and Sheindl is dated February 6, 1939. By the time Laizer had organized a visa, in Chile, it was too late.

  He called him simply Probutski. He could not recall his first name. He was aware that he had been a master weaver in Bialystok, and that he was Chaimke’s and Itke’s father. But it was not until after many conversations between us that the Partisan mentioned that uncle Joshua had been one of the tenants in Potapoffke 33. It was as if in Pruzhany he had become a nonentity, unrecognizable as the spirited Joshua of Zalman’s reminiscences. I have to press hard for information. ‘What can I say’, the Partisan replies. ‘He had become a shadow, always standing to the side. His sunken eyes gazed only at his children, as if afraid for their every move. That is all I remember.’

  Yet usually the Partisan can recall the most minute of details. ‘There are incidents that took place yesterday I forget’, he tells me. ‘After all, I am almost eighty years old. But of the ghetto and the forests, my memories are so clear. For instance, I am standing in the kitchen of my White Russian boss, a man I worked for in Pruzhany. He ran a factory in which wooden kegs were assembled. Sometimes I would be directed to work on his house. There was a pan of peas, frying in pig fat. It smelt so inviting. I was very hungry. In the ghetto there was a severe shortage of food, and the boss didn’t feed us well. For a moment I was left in the room alone. Mmm! I couldn’t resist it. I approached the stove and grabbed some peas from the pan. Of course, instead of getting a tasty morsel of food, I burnt my fingers.’ As he tells the story, the Partisan winces and blows on his hand, as if he had grasped the food a mere moment ago.

  The winter of 1942 was approaching. The earth lay buried under snow and ice. ‘Jude! Jude!’, the Wehrmacht officer ordered. ‘Take this wood to the third floor!’ The Partisan hauled the heavy load up three flights of stairs to the officer’s quarters.

  The order had been barked in typically abusive tones. Yet when the Partisan entered the apartment and stacked the wood, the officer thanked him. He had to maintain appearances in front of the others, he claimed, and apologised for having nothing to offer except some biscuits sent to him from Germany.

  The Partisan gave the biscuits to seven-year-old Itke on his next visit to Potapoffke 33. Her radiant joy on receiving them he can picture vividly to this day. Again the Partisan laughs, this time fully and spontaneously; and it is obvious that when one lives in Gehenna a spark of joy is a revelation, a flash far brighter than the snows that covered the earth in the winter of 1942.

  In the cottage at Potapoffke 33 the Partisan and his comrades discussed reports from the Russian front, and worked out ways of obtaining arms. The Partisan chuckles as he recalls one of their smuggling ventures. ‘I built a concealed deck into a sled. One of us had obtained a pass to bring firewood into the ghetto. We stole arms from a nearby barracks where some of us worked, and hid them in the false deck under a pile of wood. When we reached the ghetto gates we asked a Nazi guard to accompany us. We convinced him it was his duty to ensure safe delivery of our load. He was flattered. Instead of searching the sled, he rode with us, seated upon the wood, drawn by horses across the snow, the proud protector of Wehrmacht property.’

  The underground in Pruzhany was divided over whether to move to the forests or remain within the ghetto to foster an uprising. The debates were fierce. Those with family tended to favour a final stand within. Others insisted that effective resistance could only be waged beyond the fences that kept them trapped and encircled. ‘At times we came to blows, and even worse’, mutters the Partisan, and lets it go at that. After all’, he adds, ‘either way we were confronted by a ruthless enemy determined to destroy us.’

  Yanek Lerner and six comrades left for the forests in December. The Partisan was to steal out later with a second group. Yanek had asked Sheindl to accompany him. There was no future in the ghetto, he argued. There were rumours the end was imminent; sooner or later the camp would be liquidated. But she could not be persuaded. She would not desert her aged parents and family. Perhaps she would join him later; but not just yet. She was needed at Potapoffke 33.

  After they crept out of the ghetto, Yanek’s group raided the barracks, obtained arms and a typewriter, and disappeared into the forests. ‘You will never understand such things’, says the Partisan, allowing himself a smile at the thought of a typewriter being lugged into a forest.

  On January 27, 1943, two partisans stole into the ghetto and approached the Judenrat offices to discuss Resistance matters. As they entered they unexpectedly encountered the Gestapo commandant. Upon seeing he was confronted by armed fighters, the commandant turned and ran. Fearing reprisals if they shot him, the fighters held fire. ‘In such situations’, asserts the Partisan, ‘we acted from instinct, seeking above all to survive. As I see it, most of us become brave only when it can no longer be avoided; and our heroism conceals an immense terror.’

  The Judenrat was accused of aiding the Resistance. Next day the deportations began. ‘Some claim they were in direct response to the events of the previous day’, the Partisan says. ‘I am more inclined to believe that the trains were already waiting. Besides, what difference does it make? One way or another, this was the fate they had planned for us all.’

  All the next day the Partisan hid in a bunker with a group of about forty. The warmth generated as they crowded against each other caused a vapour to rise into the rooms above. This could have given them away, since outside the Nazis were beginning their roundup of the ghetto inmates.

  That night the Partisan and his companions crept towards the ghetto cemetery, where they had hidden their arsenal of weapons. Within metres of the fence there stood a carpentry workshop. The Partisan entered to make last-minute repairs to some of the guns. The noise almost alerted German guards. ‘I still don’t know how I had the nerve’, he tells me, yet again.

  The electric wires were cut with insulated pliers. After scaling the fence they moved away beneath white sheets, a camouflage against the snow. For hours they walked without any sense of direction. At dawn they realised they had wandered to the edge of a Nazi airstrip. Falling snow had wiped out their footprints, and they were not discovered.

  They lay under the sheets until evening in groups of three, beneath trees merely metres from a road. Military vehicles flew by. Peasants whipped horses to draw their sleds faster. On the second night they waded into swamps and through water that rose up to their shoulders until, at last, they reached the forests. They now faced a life of scavenging and
hunger in bitter conditions, in snow and in blizzards. Yet it offered, at least, a means of survival.

  Four days it took, from January 28 until January 31, at 2 500 inmates per day, to clear the entire ghetto. The Probutskis were ordered out of Potapoffke 33 to assemble in the central square. Lists of names were barked out interminably as the ghetto inmates were loaded into horse-drawn wagons driven by local peasants.

  ‘Between Pruzhany and Linowe station was a distance of perhaps fourteen kilometres’, the Partisan tells me. Snow and sleet drifted in a veil of mists. The convoy stretched for miles, a procession of phantoms enveloped in ghostly white. Occasionally someone jumped off and made a run for the forests through a gauntlet of bullets.

  At Linowe station the trains were drawn up by the platform, waiting. The time-tabling was precise, the organisation efficient. The doors of the cattle wagons slid to a close on entire families, crammed together, robbed of light, air, and hope. Soon after they were on the move: a journey of several hundred kilometres southwest, across the breadth of Poland, to a town called Auschwitz.

  Yanek Lerner and the Partisan established separate bases. They constructed zemlankes, earth huts, one sizeable room dug underground. The floors were cushioned with pine needles; the roofs covered by branches and twigs, topped by a camouflage of dirt and grass. In some of the hideouts, primitive stoves provided a semblance of warmth.

  Various groups roamed the forests. ‘There were Ukrainians, White Russians, Poles, and Jews; even the occasional German deserter’, the Partisan explains. Alliances were formed; others remained determinedly separate to emphasize their national allegiance. And there were gangs of bandits, intent on survival at any cost.

  Within days of taking to the forests, the Partisan heard shots echoing nearby. On investigating, he came across Yanek and his comrades lying in a well near their zemlanke. They had been shot by bandits who had masqueraded as friends. The bandits had made off with guns and boots, grenades and food. ‘Boots were our most prized possessions, especially during winter’, says the Partisan. ‘One of Yanek’s comrades survived and gave an account of the attack. He lives today in the United States. Just a few years ago I visited him.’

  Our fate is so fragile. A mere straw on a breeze. What shall we do? Stay in Poland or leave? And when the doors are sealed, the New World cut off: which way shall we go? To the trains or the forests? And at the end of the journey, at the gates of Auschwitz, Doctor Mengele waits, white gloves on his hands, as he points left or right, the ovens or slave labour. As it turned out, Yanek Lerner and Sheindl Probutski perished at about the same time — Yanek with his comrades in the forests, Sheindl with her family in the ovens of Auschwitz. Children of the Annihilation, we know it well: life is so fragile. A mere straw on a breeze.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ABOVE ALL, FATHER RECALLS the seasons. Take, for instance, the first winter snows; the remembrance remains clearer than the most recent of dreams. Mother Sheine is singing him to sleep. Lullabies fade to darkness and, as if no time has passed, he awakens to the sight of ice clinging to window panes above the bed. The morning light silhouettes fantastic shapes of ghostly figures, wild images painted by overnight frosts, while outside the first snows are falling.

  When Bishke came home from work during the winter months, he would bring the ice with him. It clung to his beard, clothes, and bundles of unsold newspapers. He would arrive fresh, cold: an iceman returning to the family, to be greeted by a simmering samovar and the heavenly warmth of that first cup of tea.

  Snow caressed the earth as far as the eye could see. It filled the streets, permeated the forests, froze over lakes and rivers. From its softness, father and his playmates built babushkas, only to smash them soon after. They hurled snowballs at each other, while on the iced surface of the Biale they raced sleds down inclines in a whirl of whiteness. And in the many decades since, father’s memories of the harsher aspects of winter, of its biting winds and relentless chills, have softened. What has been retained, with increasing lucidity, is the surface white, the purity of Bialystok covered in snow.

  In the winter of 1942-43 the fate of Bialystok careered like a drunkard on thin ice. Letters flew between Nazi headquarters, in Berlin and Koenigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, where Erich Koch, one of Hitler’s most trusted cronies, ruled over his little patch of the Reich. SS and Gestapo factions, local bureaucrats and commandants, debated whether the ghetto was to be liquidated or allowed to survive, for the time being, because of the productivity of its skilled slaves. With the destruction of all provincial Jewish settlements in the early days of November — among them my ancestral shtetlech, Bielsk and Bransk, Orla and Grodek — Bialystok had become an oasis, an island of refuge towards which escapees from the death trains made their way. Yet all the while the gas ovens and crematoria were working overtime to fulfil Hitler’s vision of a Europe rid of Jews, the ‘Final Solution’ to an age-old curse.

  Still, Bialystoker hoped. Perhaps they would yet be spared. Judenrat chairman Efraim Barasz berated them: Work! Attain your quotas. Produce furniture and coats, chemicals and suits, uniforms and boots for your overlords. He dashed about in the Judenrat carriage as if possessed, galloping to Gestapo headquarters on Sienkiewicza Avenue, and along the wide pathways that led to the Nazi administration in Branitski palace. In these offices of the Reich he pleaded for concessions and stays of execution.

  Within the ghetto, beggars huddled against wind and frosts. Makeshift stoves belched smoke into crowded rooms and apartments. Inmates shivered in the dawn light as they shuffled to work; and, for the fortieth year in succession, Bishke Zabludowski ran the streets, the disseminator of news, the distributor of Judenrat posters with the latest Nazi ordinances and demands. He pasted sheets on walls and fences, within courtyards and against buildings, in alleys and lanes, day in and day out, bound to his lifelong vocation like a man in a trance. In a collection of documents, unearthed and published after the War, I have been able to trace the last poster that grandfather conveyed: number three hundred and eighty-six, dated January 29, winter 1943.

  Bishke first took to the streets as a vendor of news in the winter of 1903. In January 1913 communal leaders, editors, writers and journalists, printers, and friends gathered in his apartment to celebrate his tenth anniversary. It was the great event of father’s childhood. Tables were crammed with delicacies: herring and caviar, chopped liver and chicken pieces, salamis and strudels. The guests sat at tables playing cards, talking politics and gossiping, sipping liqueurs and spirits. A phonograph whirled with waltzes, polkas, cantatorial chants and the latest hits from the Yiddish theatre. The Zabludowski children dashed between guests, crawled under tables, listened in on conversations and resisted attempts to put them to bed. Father refused to sleep unless he was given a glass of cognac Whatever drink Sheine brought him, the seven-year-old would grimace and exclaim: ‘That’s not cognac! I want only genuine cognac!’ How could cognac be just a bitter drink? It had to be something extraordinary, exotic, comparable to the wild stallions that reared from the labels.

  One quarter of a century later, in the winter of 1938, prominent Bialystok Jews gathered in Rabinowitz’s A La Minute restaurant to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary. The banquet was reported in all the Yiddish dailies, and father learned of the event from cuttings sent to him in New Zealand. Editors and agents had delivered glowing tributes. ‘Who in Bialystok doesn’t know Bishke?’, they had declared. ‘He is a city landmark — a short, lively, energetic Yiddele, running with bundles of newspapers tucked under his arms, his tongue always on the move, his voice at full pitch from dawn to dusk, proclaiming the latest news, our Bishke, an artist in his trade. In his hands newspapers realise their full potential. When he announces the headlines, they come alive; and when there is an event of particular significance — a disaster, an assassination, a declaration of war — Bishke takes flight. Crowds gather, electrified, carried along in his wake as he hurtles through the streets, trumpeting the event as if it were the coming
of the Messiah, no less.’

  While we discuss these articles of praise, father recalls Armistice Day 1918. Bishke had flown through the streets with special extras, screaming: ‘Cease fire! Cease fire!’ People had burst out of their homes and apartments, broken off their prayers, emerged from alleys and lanes, charged out of shops and factories, to tear after him. Newspapers spiralled through the air, passing from hand to hand. The crowd jostled like a congregation of excited Hasidim straining to gain a glimpse of their Tzaddik. The news erupted and spread through the city, while in the centre of the commotion stood Bishke, the town crier, the messenger, the medium through which news flowed and dispersed in all directions until every home, every yeshiva boy, housewife, rabbi, and priest was informed. After all, a war had ended. A catastrophe was over. ‘No more wars!’ was the catch cry of the times. ‘Peace! Bread! Liberation!’ was the expectation of a war-weary Europe. And for a moment, at least, caught up in the throng, even pessimists were drawn along by the cry of Bishke on Armistice Day 1918.

  In January 1943, disturbing rumours circulated throughout the ghetto. Cooks, cleaners, and secretaries working in Gestapo offices told their resistance comrades of plans for mass deportations. A German factory manager warned his workers of imminent disaster. When denounced by ghetto informer Judkowski, he was thrown out of Bialystok and five of his workers were tortured and executed.

  At the beginning of February, Sturmbahnfuhrer Ginter, an envoy of Heinrich Himmler, arrived in Bialystok with a squad of SS men experienced in mass murder. Efraim Barasz was ordered to compile lists of 17 000 inmates for ‘resettlement’. In frantic negotiations with Gestapo bosses the numbers were whittled down to 6 300 — liquidation on the instalment plan.