City of God (11 page)

One night I was awakened by what I thought was the wind whistling through the cracks in the attic boards. But it wasn't the wind, it was screaming. Not from nearby, not from my house—I heard my parents in the room below, the urgent tones of their voices when they thought I couldn't hear them. I knelt at my window: The sky was alight. My street was quiet, the houses dark, but the sky beyond seemed to be flying upward. I saw the color of flame reflected on my nightshirt and called to my parents. Fire, fire! In moments my mother was with me, leading me back to bed. Shh, she said, it's all right, we are not on fire, you are safe, go back to sleep. I wrapped myself in the safety of my covers, I folded the pillow over my ears and hummed to myself so as not to hear those screams. It was a terrible sound, though distant, of many screaming voices. I watched the firelight fade on the inside of my eyelids. I fell asleep imagining the screams turning back into the wind, as if drawn up by God, rising to heaven.

In the morning the word came that the Germans had burned down the hospital. When I say the hospital, you must not imagine the sort of modern high-rise facility we have here. It was a cluster of houses that had been refashioned by opening walls and tying the buildings together with lumber so as to provide three wards of bunk beds, one
for men, one for women, one for children, as well as some examining rooms, a small ill-equipped operating room, and a dispensary. The Germans surrounded the hospital, boarded up the doors and windows and, with over sixty-five people inside, including twenty-three children, set the place on fire. These are numbers indelible in my mind. Sixty-five. Twenty-three. Some of the patients had been ill with typhus and they feared the contagion, the decimation of the labor supply. So this was their solution, to burn everyone alive, including the staff. All the next day smoke rose over the town. The sky was overcast, the weather unnaturally warm. The smoke lingered like fog. My eyes smarted, I coughed to expel the smoke. I imagined I'd inhaled the smoke of the dead, and perhaps I had. At dawn, everyone had to go off to work as usual. In the evening, after the workers returned, though it was illegal to gather in numbers, several men slipped into the rabbi's house next door to say Kaddish for the murdered souls.

This was not the first of the so-called actions by the Germans. There were and would be others, sudden, unannounced sweeps of the houses, when they trucked people to the old fort on the river west of the city to be murdered. They had these bouts of efficiency. But with this particular horror, my father resigned from his role with the council. He had found his complicity in a life of helpless subjugation no longer endurable. There was a secret meeting of the council the next night after the fire, and when he came back, I was upstairs supposedly asleep but as awake and alert as I could be. A silence while my mother put the bread and soup before him. He pushed the dish away.

“Tomorrow is the monthly meeting with the Germans,” he told her. “The council will make a formal protest. It would apply moral suasion to these ungovernable forces of terror.” His voice was uncharacteristically leaden, toneless.

“What would you have it do?” my mother asked. She spoke softly. I could hardly hear her.

“Above and beyond the fact of our systematic slavery, they like to surprise us,” my father said. His voice grew louder, angrier. “They like to amuse themselves. Schmitz, that jackal who runs things”—this was the chief S.S. officer—“how can the council bear to look at him, speak with him, as if he is human? This ritual pretense of a common humanity to which we have to subscribe if we hope to outlast them! As if we are the caretakers of madmen who must never be told they are
mad. Schmitz and the others will be laughing to themselves while affecting civilized conversation. They will say it is wartime and things that are regrettable are nonetheless unavoidable. They will go on to discuss the flour and potato allocations as the next order of business.”

“Ari, shah,” my mother said. “You'll wake him.”

“I can no longer endure this!”

That cry of despair I will never forget, not only for the clenching of my boy's heart that my father was, truly and in fact, without the resources to protect us, but for the piercing illumination it brought to me of my physical self as game for a predator. He went on about this effect of our history: that we had lived among them, the Christians, for generation upon generation, only to see ourselves bent and twisted to the shape of their hatred. We had been turned into Jews so that they could be Christians.

Now exactly what happened after this I cannot tell you. It was perhaps two or three months after the fire, emotions had become numb. The shock had worn off in the routine of work, secret meetings, secret prayers on the part of the religious. The return once more to the hope of outlasting them, to hanging on until liberation came. There had been rumors of the defeat of the Nazi armies in Africa. It was in this period that my parents failed to return home from their labor. To this day I don't know the circumstances. One morning at dawn, as usual, he helped her with her coat, she turned up his collar against the cold, they both kissed their son. They gave me the usual instructions for the day. And they opened the door into the dark morning and closed the door behind them and I never saw them again.

I do know that around this time a notice was posted in the ghetto—the Germans were calling for a hundred intelligentsia for special work as curators and catalogers in the city archives. Mama and Papa discussed this. She was against volunteering, arguing that the Germans could not be trusted. Papa's view was that it was a reasonable risk to take and that he should sign on. He believed if he had such a job he would see people he knew and could make contact with the Resistance. My mother said she wanted us to survive. My father said while any decision they made could be the last, of one thing he was certain, and that was how it would end for everyone who remained in the ghetto.

Well of course my mother was right, it was another of the Germans'
murderous deceptions: The intelligentsia who had given their credentials for archival work were trucked out of the city to the old fort by the river and shot to death. But if my father was among them, what about my mother, who would not have volunteered? Or had she after all? But that would have been too reckless, both of them taking a chance with their lives and leaving a small boy behind. Perhaps if he had volunteered, she had been implicated in some way and taken off too before she could flee. Perhaps they had been murdered for other reasons having nothing to do with this question. I didn't know.

But there was another possibility—that they were still alive, that they had managed to escape and join the partisans. It was Rabbi Grynspan from next door who told me this on the very evening my parents didn't return. “Come quickly, you must not stay here,” he said. “You are technically an orphan, though of course your parents are alive in the forest and will come back for you, may the Lord, Blessed be He, show them the way.”

“They went with the Resistance?”

“Yes.” This after a moment's hesitation.

“Well why couldn't they take me with them?”

“They thought you would be safer here. Quickly, no more talk. Unattended children the Nazis do not tolerate. You will be provided, never mind books, take your sweater, these shirts, wrap these things in your coat and come with me.”

Thereafter, I lived knowing Mama and Papa were dead but at the same time waiting for them to come rescue me. I knew they were dead because they wouldn't have thought I'd be safer alone in the ghetto than with them. But I thought they were alive, because the rabbi had confirmed what my father had said, that he wanted to make contact with the Resistance. I lived in this irresolute state of mind for a considerable time, knowing in my heart they were dead, but always looking up from what I was doing to see if they had come for me. It was a long time before I stopped thinking of them altogether.

—If Albert is right, there is consolation to be derived from the planets. For example, that they're all spheroid, that none of them are shaped
like dice or the cardboards laundered shirts come folded on. And thinking about their formation—how, from amorphous furious swirls of cosmic dust and gas, everything spins out and cools and organizes itself into a gravitationally operating solar system.. . . And that this has apparently happened elsewhere, that there are billions of galaxies with stars beyond number, so that even if a fraction of stars have orbiting planets with moons in orbit around them. . . a few planets, at least, may have the water necessary for the intelligent life that could be suffering the same metaphysical crisis that deranges us. So we have that to feel good about.

—Sarah Blumenthal's Conversation with Her Father

The rabbi took me to the council offices. Several children were there. Some were crying. I sat among them on the floor and leaned back against the wall and watched and listened. The council staff were begging everyone to be quiet. One man at a desk was typing. He had a typewriter because it was the council. I liked the clear, precise clack of the typewriter keys. I fell asleep for a while. When I awoke the other children were gone, the room was quiet, and a woman was kneeling before me. “You have a new name now,” she said, smiling. “A nice name, too. Yehoshua. Go ahead, say it.”

“Yehoshua.”

“That's right. Yehoshua Mendelssohn. That is you from now on. It is the name you must answer to, and this is your registration that says you are now him that you will carry always in your pocket, all right? In case anyone asks? You live in Demokratu Street. I will take you there. It is pretty, it looks onto the vegetable garden.”

The woman took my bundle and held my hand as if I were a baby and walked with me through the ghetto. Her palm was damp with fear, but she would not let go. She stopped in front of the door of a small house. “You have a grandfather,” she told me, and then she knocked at the door.

The so-called grandfather was a tailor named Srebnitsky, a thin illtempered man, somewhat stooped, with gray hair curling from under his cap and with narrow shoulders over which a shirt and vest hung
loosely. A musty smell came from him which I thought of as grandfather smell. He had pale blue eyes that glimmered with water. But the most powerful impression he made on me was that he was a stranger.

His house consisted of two rooms, a front and a back, and a small alcove that served for a kitchen. I was to sleep on a daybed in the front room, where the tailor maintained his business.

“So, I have a grandson,” he said, not smiling. “Thus God in His wisdom provides. May I hope He will give me a daughter and son-in-law as well? And why not a wife as long as He's at it?” He spoke not to me but seemingly to the work in his hands, or perhaps to the hands themselves, which were long, smooth, and nimble and therefore fascinating, because they seemed so much younger than the rest of him. The needle flew through the cloth, in and out, and perfectly straight lines of stitches grew with amazing speed.

As the weeks passed I took on the duty of sweeping the floor of the bits of thread and shreds of rags that accumulated there. But nothing could be thrown out, everything went back in the rag bin. The garments brought to the tailor were threadbare coats, dresses, trousers that he would mend or tear down and reconstruct, somehow, with his bits of thread and rags from his rag bin, so that they could be worn again, at least for a little while. There was no money exchanged with the customers, there was scrip. More often there was barter. The Germans couldn't police that very well. A carpenter whose jacket he mended fixed a shutter so that it would close properly. A woman whose coat he lined left some soup.

The only book in the house was a Bible, so I took to reading it closely. I found some of it puzzling. Assuming the old man was pious, I began to ask questions of him. Gleams of triumph came to Srebnitsky's watery eyes. With relish he pointed out the contradictions and absurdities of the biblical text. “Look closely at what you're reading,” he said. “The dates tell you. When this happened, when that happened. Samuel could not have written Samuel any more than Moses could have written Moses. How could they themselves know when they had died? Stories, nonsense, all of it. Pious fraud. And in the beginning? In the beginning—what? Who is talking, who is being addressed? Who was there? Where is the voucher? The people who made up these stories knew even less than we do. You want God? Don't look
at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with.”