Jewels and Ashes Read online

  The faces that still come to father with such startling clarity are now a blur. I cannot make them out among the twenty-five thousand who huddle on Pietrasze field. I can merely describe their collective fate second-hand, in vague outline, as I pursue them into their final days. They are surrounded by heavily armed guards who scream abuse in drunken stupors under a scorching sun. The captives are driven to and fro, fleeing from beatings and bullets fired at random. Many are trampled as they run. Rings are ripped from their fingers; watches torn from their wrists. Parents smear children’s lips with urine to ease their thirst. Many buckle under in despair and give way to the mud, to be released from their ordeal.

  On the second day the selections begin. SS men stalk the assembled mass, hooking the U-shaped handles of their canes around those deemed fit for slave labour. Any who refuse to leave wife and children are dragged away. The elderly and ill are hurled into carts and taken back to Zabia Square, where pits have been prepared. Gustav Friedl drives by in an auto, leaps out, fires the first shots, and directs his murder squads to finish the job.

  On the third day the captives are lined up five-abreast and marched to Bialystok station. The stronger are prodded with cattle prongs into the forward wagons. The remainder are herded to the rear wagons. They are unhinged when the train arrives in Malkin station, and attached to a second locomotive which disappears into a forest — destination Treblinka. The forward carriages continue on to Lublin, where the prisoners are distributed among the work camps of Blyzin, Paniatowa, and Majdanek. On arrival in Paniatowa the newcomers are greeted by camp commandant Tumin, astride a white horse. He surveys them and shoots, on a whim, anyone whose appearance annoys him.

  As he travelled west, across Poland, father’s disorientation persisted. He had been thrown into a vacuum in which all around him — passengers, gliding landscapes, country stations — remained distant, remote, while within him flashed scenes of a Bialystok he would never see again. These were precious moments, he tells me, in which he could reflect, take stock, weigh the good against the bad. There was the poverty he was glad to be leaving, the narrow streets of childhood that had cramped his expansive dreams; the constant undertow of menace that had always permeated his life; and the growing threat of renewed pogroms he was relieved to have escaped. And there were the regrets, he reminds me, the moments he could have done this or that differently, been more considerate, said something softer to Bishke, to Sheine, a brother or sister.

  Yet the Bialystok he was leaving had also been imbued with communal warmth, a sense of unity and purpose: ‘We grew up as chaverim’, father emphasizes. ‘We were mirrors in which we reflected our shared aspirations. There were many who emerged from poverty as loving companions who were happiest when they served the needs of others. The essence of the Bund ethos to which I was drawn was our chavershaft, our loyal friendship. Our lives become possessed by a form of magic, an indelible bond, a common song. We sang it as we walked through lanes and alleys, and effortlessly beyond, along country paths, until abruptly all was still. And from that stillness there arose the humming of more primitive worlds: swamps, lakes and rivers, untamed, forbidding, yet studded with jewels; slim white beryoskes, chestnuts in silver bloom, and warm nights ablaze with stars hovering over a luminous dream we called Bialystok.’

  Ten thousand remain within the ghetto, in hiding. Search squads in groups of ten return day after day. Suspected hideouts are dynamited, listening devices installed, ferocious bloodhounds urged on, buildings torn apart: one by one, family by family, bunker by bunker, the quarry is hunted down. Once detected there are only two alternatives — an immediate death by bullet or the journey by cattle wagon to Treblinka.

  When father arrived in Gdynia he saw the sea for the first time in his life. Yet, despite the exhilaration, his sense of regret remained. It pursued him as he set sail for New Zealand. What he had left behind continued to hold sway over what was to come. The open ocean was an awesome universe that surpassed his wildest imaginings. As the earth dropped beneath the horizon it seemed as though the foundations had been torn from under his feet. The boat cut through the water like a plough, and reflected in its wake were elusive images of Bialystok, of those he had so recently farewelled. And it was during these early days of the voyage, from Old World to New, that the dreams had begun, disturbing visions that have persisted to this day.

  They come to him often, Bishke and Sheine. They stand by the bed and ask him how he is, while father asks them, ‘Where are you now?’ And in the mornings his sense of disorientation is overwhelming. ‘This is why I must deny my dreams’, father insists. ‘Otherwise I would suffocate. A father. A mother. Bathed in blood. A beloved city. A community of friends caught in an ocean of flames. And I was so far away.’

  A need for workers to cart and bury the dead, and to load factory equipment for transfer to Lublin, enables a stay of execution for several hundred porters, mechanics, and Judenrat officials. They are issued with special passes as a number of buildings are cordoned off and ringed with barbed wire to create an inner ghetto. Efraim Barasz is warned not to permit intruders. Random inspections are carried out every few hours to check passes. The Nazis are intent on leaving nothing to chance as they pursue their mission to make Bialystok Judenrein.

  From the moment I first entered Poland, across the Soviet border, I was struck by one overriding thought: this landscape is Judenrein. I had never before been so contronted with the enormity of this fact. I became remote from the other passengers, my eyes riveted on the countryside. Here my ancestors had lived in a vast network of settlements which teemed with a way of life that had evolved for a millennium; they had created a kingdom within kingdoms, a universe pulsating to its own inner rhythms. Then it had vanished. Wiped clean from the earth. Judenrein. My journey took on a shape of its own, an inner logic, a relentlessness which has propelled it forward, regardless. Facts and stories have arisen of their own accord, demanding recognition, no matter how disturbing. And even now, as I near the final days of liquidation, this inner momentum drives my chronicle towards a completeness, to the remnants now roaming the forests as partisans, to the dwindling bands of fugitives holding out within the ghetto ruins, to the last pockets of resistance. One larger group of seventy-two fighters hides in an extensive bunker with well-concealed entrances — one through a disused well, the other in a cottage on Chmielna Lane. At noon, on August 19, the bunker is suddenly surrounded. The entrances are blown apart by grenades, the prisoners led away to the corner of Kupietzka and Jurowietzka. From a distance, in hiding, Raphael Raizner hears the defiant singing of revolutionary songs abruptly silenced by bullets as the fighters are executed.

  Trains criss-cross the Bialystoku province. I gaze through the windows, absorbing every scene, sucking the marrow from Judenrein landscapes as if hidden truths lie buried within them. We were born in the wake of Annihilation. We were children of dreams and shadows, yet raised in the vast spaces of the New World. We roamed the streets of our migrant neighbourhoods freely. We lived on coastlines and played under open horizons. Our world was far removed from the sinister events that had engulfed our elders. Yet there had always been undercurrents that could sweep us back to the echoes of childhood, to the sudden torrents of rage and sorrow that could, at any time, disturb the surface calm: ‘You cannot imagine what it was like’, our elders insisted. ‘You were not there.’ Their messages were always ambiguous, tinged with menace, double-edged: ‘You cannot understand, yet you must. You should not delve too deeply, yet you should. But even if you do, my child, you will never understand. You were not there.’

  Inevitably, we were drawn into their universe — the regrets, the nagging grief, the wariness and suspicion, and the many ghosts they fought to keep at bay as they struggled to rebuild their lives. And given the tale I seem compelled to tell to the end, could we have expected it to be otherwise?

  The last major battles are fought on August 20. The Fabryczna Street cell retreats to the grounds of the ghetto hospital. Doctor
s, nurses, and patients join them in a desperate attempt to defend the courtyard. Squads of SS men break into the wards and, in a fury bordering on hysteria, they hurl patients — newborn babies and elderly alike — onto footpaths and into carts bound for pits in Zabia Square.

  Tennenbaum and Moscowitz retreat to their headquarters on Ciepla Lane. Surrounded on all sides, with ammunition running out, they set fire to the cottage. Legend has it that the two leaders took their own lives rather than fall into the hands of the enemy.

  Mother and father fight to keep their ghosts at bay in radically different ways. They are opposites, and have been for as long as I can remember. For mother, especially in the years of her ageing, it is the silence that predominates, broken occasionally by a quiet humming, a snatch of ancient melody which evaporates back into silence. Sitting with her, for hours on end, by the kitchen table, I have come to understand the variations of that silence. At times it resonates with defiance; at others it suggests an irredeemable loss. Sometimes it is softer, a surrender, a letting-go. Yet the anger and rage I knew in her as a child can flare up, without warning: ‘What did you dream about last night?’, I ask. ‘Nothing’, she replies. ‘And besides, is dreaming going to bring them back to life?’

  By early September, all machinery and merchandise have been removed from the factories. The inmates of the inner ghetto are led to Bialystok station. In the front row walks Efraim Barasz, suitcase in hand, neatly dressed, proud in bearing, silver hair glowing in the sunlight. Behind him stretch long columns of Judenrat officials, communal leaders, Jewish police, factory managers. Their footsteps echo on the cobblestones. They move in silence through a shattered ghetto, their faces set, resigned, beyond hope, beyond tears.

  A passenger train transports them to Paniatowa work camp. On November 3rd, along with thousands of fellow Bialystoker, they are slaughtered into mass graves while a camp orchestra plays the waltzes of Johann Strauss.

  Father avoids silences. He resorts to his first and most enduring love: words. Through words he strives to make sense of the world. When a dream of Bishke and Sheine recurs, or a vision of a former friend suddenly invades his being, he fights ferociously to regain control by overwhelming them with words. The words mount, become more strident, more insistent, as he talks his way to survival.

  We sit together on a park bench, in Curtain Square, our favourite meeting-place, on a Saturday morning, eating father’s most recent variation on Sheine’s latkes; and there is little for me to do but to be a spectator of his inner drama, to absorb his barrage of words, and to wonder why I have become so obsessed with pursuing the past, and why I have pressed so hard to extract the dreams he has so effectively suppressed. Or is it rather that the camouflage has always been transparent and that, within both parents, I have always known a simmering sorrow, despite their efforts to disguise it?

  On September 16, the Bialystok Aktion was officially declared at an end. A squad of older Nazis remained to root out the few Jews left in hiding. They maintained daily patrols and marched their captives to Krashevski Street prison. When about fifty had been assembled, they would be driven beyond the city to be shot. Others were retained as slaves. They were led out daily to exhume corpses from communal graves in the forests. The bodies were thrown onto pyres and incinerated. As the eastern front edged closer, the Nazi mania for obliterating the traces of their crimes spiralled.

  In October, a German firm arrived in Bialystok to transfer Jewish belongings from the ghetto. Everything of value was declared to be property of the Reich and was shipped back to the Fatherland. Nothing was to be wasted. Houses were stripped down to their skeletons. The entire ghetto area was looted.

  When their work drew to an end the slaves were led out to be shot. As they approached the pits, they made a sudden break for the forests. Nine of them survived the gauntlet of bullets. Jewish Bialystock, five hundred years of vigorous effort and communal prayer, lay behind them, effectively Judenrein.

  Hitler’s shadow extends from the grave and darkens lives far removed. It reaches around the globe into a home where a child sees in his father’s eyes, beyond the veil, an ocean of regret and bewilderment; and in his mother’s eyes, a distant stare of non-recognition. She is a prisoner of inner voices screaming, ‘Raus! Rous! Juden raus!’ And just as she skirts the edges of madness, she reasserts herself, yet again, with relentless work and melodies. She sings for hour upon hour, as she cooks, scrubs, sews, and fights to keep the household afloat, her sanity intact. Her songs are in Yiddish, her repertoire vast, sung in a soprano trained by renowned choirmasters of Bialystok. There are lullabies that speak of white goats setting out on miraculous journeys; ballads about folk heroes and rebels on barricades. She sings worksongs of cobblers and weavers, tales of wonder rabbis and Hasidim on pilgrimage. She sings of families gathered by the Sabbath table and of gypsies gathered in forest clearings:

  Play gypsy, play me a song,

  On the fiddle all night long.

  On the fiddle, green leaves fall.

  What once was is beyond recall.

  What once was and what will be,

  Red is blood and red is wine.

  A star falls and then another,

  And our hearts reach out to each other.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘FROM MOSES UNTO MOSES there had never been such a Moses’, the epitaph proclaims. ‘Light of the West, greatest of the generation’s wise men’: words inscribed on the tomb of Moses Isserles, sixteenth-century scholar and preacher, renowned Rabbi of Krakow. It remains standing to this day in the Rema cemetery, within the grounds of the oldest living synagogue in Poland; and to this day the congregation continues to assemble here. They are arriving now, Shabbes eve, for the service. One stumbles through the gate with the aid of a walking stick; others are wheeled in. They approach singly or in pairs, the heirs of Moses, through the streets of Kazimierz, their childhood playing grounds. Shoulders stooped, frail, they walk slowly, berets perched upon their heads, thick overcoats wrapped around to protect them from the autumn chill.

  At the entrance to a crumbling tenement a fat bubka sits on a wooden stool and knits. She gazes at me intently as I pass by, and mutters: ‘Yiddish? Ich ken etleche vertex Yiddish.’ Yes, as it turns out, she does know a few words of Yiddish; five lines, in fact, which she had picked up in childhood from the Jewish neighbours who had lived within these tenements one generation ago. As I wander the streets of Kazimierz the bubka follows me, reciting her well-rehearsed Yiddish lines as one would intone a verse from the scriptures:

  I am not afraid

  I have no money

  I have no compliments to offer

  Kiss me on the behind

  Go away you black devil

  Bubka’s face is circular, and the frames of her spectacles are similarly shaped; two moons within the larger moon. Her eyes glint with a hint of mirth, as if on the verge of cascading into uncontrolled laughter. Moon lady has, it seems, become my self-appointed escort. She follows me through Szeroka Square, muttering her Yiddish lines as we approach the Rema. For over four hundred years it has stood, this inconspicuous greystone building. Weeping willows droop over its walls. Moon lady stops at the arched gate, beyond which she does not venture. Her Yiddish verse trails after me while I enter the courtyard: ‘Go away you black devil’. The words hover in the stillness as Moon lady disappears.

  It is cool and quiet in the walled courtyard, protected from the winds. We sit on benches awaiting the Sabbath. One by one they pass beneath the arched entrance, the minyan gradually assembling in the waning light. ‘You come from Australia?’, an old man sitting beside me asks. ‘So why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you tell the world what was happening?’

  ‘How could I do anything?’, I reply. ‘I was not even alive at the time.’ But my words do not seem to have registered. ‘Why didn’t you do anything? Eh? Why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you let the world know what was happening to us?’ Only when we have entered the prayer-hall does he cease,
for a while, to pursue his obsession.

  There is no longer a rabbi in Krakow, and no cantor to lead the prayers. Members of the kehilla take turns at the pulpit. Of the fifteen assembled, several sit in the back row reading newspapers, others hold whispered conversations, while half a dozen or so concentrate on the prayers. Yet a sense of intimacy pervades the hall, and from time to time we unite in a common chorus of amens.

  Some way into the service a young man enters the hall. He is tall, lean, his physique sharp and angular, his face pale and tense. He reaches into a pocket for a black skull cap, and hovers behind the back row of lacquered pews, scanning the congregation. He observes the proceedings from the fringes, like a stranger who wants to come out of the cold and close to the fire.

  After the service the narrow foyer inside the entrance of the shul is thick with the din and hubbub of quick introductions, cries of ‘Shabbat Shalom’, and rapid-fire exchanges of the latest communal gossip. The young man remains on the perimeter hesitantly, as if looking for an opening, a polite way of entering the animated circle of well-wishers.

  When I approach and introduce myself he is visibly relieved at having made some contact. We converse in English, although it is not his mother tongue. He seems reluctant to reveal where he is from, and constantly deflects the conversation away from the issue. He is in Krakow for a quick visit, he informs me. He has arrived today from nearby Auschwitz. He will return on Monday to continue work as a volunteer in the camp museum. There is a small group who do so every year, for several weeks at a time. They sift through archival material, help assemble exhibits, clean and dust, and do whatever is needed. The facilities are undermanned. Workers are urgently required to maintain the camp for the many thousands who come on pilgrimage from all parts of the globe.