The Train to Warsaw (11 page)

From our apartment we could see over to the Other Side. At least in the beginning until they boarded up the windows. I used to watch them walking down the street on The Other Side. It was another world. As far away as the moon. One day I saw a mother and a father with their little girl. She wore a red coat and ate a sweet roll, scattering crumbs as she walked. Once I had been like that little girl. Now I no longer had the right to walk on the street. I no longer had the right to live.

Lilka held out her glass. I told Edward I wouldn't translate any more of those. They called her the Polish Anne Frank. Irena Kaminer. And they gave me a prize for the translation. You were in a bad mood the whole ­evening, said Lilka. Yes, because I found the handwringing and mawkishness of the proceedings absolutely disgusting, replied Jascha. I invited you to Venice on my prize money, she said. You didn't mind that. We got lost in the fog. Do you remember? We were wandering around for hours. We're going to end up back in the ghetto, you said. Only we're a few centuries too late for this one. Not like ours. Let's have another drink, she suggested. To give you strength for the reading. I'm not going, he said, and he lay down on the bed and piled the pillows up beneath his head. Why should I? Make merry with the Poles? What for?

The whole ghetto was a gauntlet, said Lilka. Squeezing through the narrow streets, people were beaten by Them on all sides. You were lucky to get through with your eyes and arms and head intact. On the days when the German we called “Frankenstein” was on duty, the number of people brought to the hospital was five or six times higher. How tireless he was, beating and shooting and whipping. If only we had had a gun.

She held out her glass. How exhausted I feel. Come to bed, he said. We'll forget the reading and everything else. We'll order up dinner and have it in bed. How about it, darling? Four courses and a dessert. But the reading, she said. Why else did we come?

He leaned over and filled their glasses. It was July 1942.
Es wird schon was kommen,
said Horowitz the Gestapo informer. Something is going to happen. You can say that again. Something was certainly going to happen. Only we didn't yet know what. And then the posters began to appear all over the ghetto. All Jews to be resettled in the East . . .

The heat was suffocating. The
Grosse Aktion
had begun. German, Polish, Jewish policemen smashed open doors and kicked the Jews out into the street. They needed 10,000 Jews a day driven to the
Umschlagplatz
for the trip to Treblinka. Guarded on every side, they pressed through the streets, carrying their bundles and suitcases, pillowcases swollen with their few remaining possessions. When the Jews had passed by, the streets were filled with pieces of broken furniture, cupboards, tables, chairs, abandoned pots and pans, discarded clothes. And everywhere the feathers that had escaped from pillows and eiderdowns. The ghetto was like a ghost town. Half the apartments deserted, their doors gaping open. A terrible heat hung over the ghetto. They were hosing down the cobblestones.

That summer, said Jascha, the city of Warsaw was not so big and it was getting smaller and smaller. The ghetto boundaries were shrinking, the apartments were emptying out. As soon as the Jews left with their bedding, in moved the Poles with new bedding. One morning a woman could no longer bear the tiny hole in which she was lodged. She climbed out on the roof with her pillow, lying flat so she couldn't be seen.

But somehow she fell asleep and began to roll. A shot rang out. The feathers of her pillow flew up into the air in a flurry of white feathers, a temporary snowfall above the city of Warsaw. And the woman rolled off the roof and fell in a tangle of limbs on the street. Who paid any attention? Another corpse? Was that anything new? The streets were full of them. We didn't see them anymore. No one even bothered to cover them with newspaper anymore. Cover me, said Jascha. I feel cold.

Why do you talk about this? asked Lilka and she pulled the eiderdown over him. Why indeed? he replied. Give me a cigarette. He left the cigarette in his mouth and inhaled. Jascha, she cried, you're holding it right next to the eiderdown. You're going to set the place on fire.

By midsummer of '42, he said, the deportations were at their height. The panic was indescribable. The Jews were trying everything imaginable to avoid the trains. The Accountant had people coming at all hours, desperate to escape, or buy their way out. Anyone not working in a German shop was to be deported. Anyone found hiding was killed on the spot. The ghetto was in chaos. Stores shut down, bakeries stopped functioning, and for the first time, smuggling stopped abruptly. Food was unattainable. The Accountant no longer slept. Get some rest, I told him. Do you think you can save every Jew in the ghetto?

Have you forgotten I was there? asked Lilka. As thousands of Jews were pressed into the walled square, we threw down white hospital gowns from the windows of the hospital that overlooked the
Umschlagplatz
. They rained down like parachutes, floating and twisting on the way. If you grabbed one and disguised yourself as a medical worker, you had a chance to get out. Nurses were running down to try to get out a parent, a brother, an aunt, a school friend. Later even a white uniform couldn't save you. Everyone was to be deported.

It was at that time, said Jascha, that a terrible error occurred. He pressed at the pillows behind his head. The Accountant kept on his payroll a hospital worker who stood at the entrance to the
Umschlagplatz
. It was his job to help out if the Accountant wanted someone pulled out at the last moment. And to report on any friends of the Accountant's who were seen coming through.

But this particular afternoon the man was called away on a medical errand. During the fifteen minutes he was away, the Accountant's wife and twin daughters passed through the gates to the
Umschlagplatz
. They had been caught up in one of the afternoon roundups. But they were not seen. And the Accountant was not informed. The man who knew every movement in the ghetto and then, at the moment when his family is taken away to die, his impeccable system of information fails. Who can understand?

People often sat there for days without food or drink, waiting to be shoved on the trains. But this time as luck would have it, it was late in the afternoon. Once the train was loaded, it left. The Accountant was informed at last and he, who never left his underground lair except to go home to his wife and daughters, ran to the
Umschlagplatz
. He had the cash. A fabulous sum. 300,000 zlotys—100,000 zlotys each, the price of buying a Jew out of the
Umschlagplatz
in the summer of 1942. But he was just too late. The train had already picked up speed. He was out of his head; he was raving. He was ready to get on a train himself. But we got him away.

For four days and nights the Accountant lay on a cot without eating or drinking. No one had ever seen him in such a state. And then, when he was left alone for a moment, he swallowed a cyanide capsule. The same capsules he sold at such high prices to those convinced that the next world was a far better place than this one.

Jascha smoked, pressing out smoke rings. And with that, he said, my smuggling career came to an end. For weeks the Accountant had been telling me to get out. What will you do without me? I asked him. We now know, he said, if we didn't before, that there is no longer any hope. As a present he handed me expensive forged identity papers in the name of Jan Kroll. The day after he died, I came out on The Other Side. Jascha drank back another glass of vodka. I owe him everything.

While the Jews were breathing their last, I pulled off my armband and came out through a tunnel to The Other Side. I was Jan Kroll now. The Accountant's former maid Tosia was waiting for me. I wore a cap pulled down low to hide my dark curls but when she saw me, she groaned. How could I hide my eyes? She took me to a room and instructed me to spend the night there. Don't show your face, she told me. Someone will come in the morning and take you to the countryside.

And who came? A peasant with a wagon who told me to get under the load of hay. There I lay in the heat, inhaling bits of straw and God knows what. The peasant stopped along the way to get something to eat and drink. I lay there for who knows how long while he drank back his vodka and slurped back his groats. Or whatever he was eating. He certainly took his time. When at last he stood beside the wagon, he murmured: are you still breathing?
Zaledwie,
I told him. Barely.

At last the wagon started up again. After what seemed like forty days and forty nights, the creaking of the wagon stopped and he told me to get out. We were in the countryside. Around us were mown fields and green hillsides. I thought I had gone blind. As though I had passed into another world. Here was silence and green and wide open space. An old peasant woman stood there smiling at me. I felt I was dreaming. Handsome boy, she said. A little dark, but never mind. She took me inside and fed me. My husband and son are gone, she said. You'll look after the cows. And milk them in the evening. Around here, she informed me, most of them have gone to Germany to work.

To her I was Marek Landowski. I know you're not Marek Landowski, she said to me, but never mind. If you pay me, you can stay. At night I played cards with the old peasant and showed her some of my magic tricks. But one day, I felt sure, the old woman would tire of all this and turn me in. I studied her pale watery eyes and wondered how long it would take.

In the morning I would lead the cows out to pasture. There I would lie on my back all day beneath the pale blue vault of the sky. The birds were singing, the clouds floated above me. They at least were not at war. I slept, I dreamed, I composed my book. The cows listened to my words with patience and understanding. I had the feeling they liked my turn of phrase. Sometimes one of them pressed her large warm face against mine. I'm the last Jew on earth, I informed her.

Lying there in that new world of sunlight and green grass, I summoned up every word, every thought, every desire, every memory. I wanted to set down all that had happened behind those Walls. I could disappear from one moment to the next, I told myself. And I wanted them to know I carried a universe in my head. Before they shot it off.

One day, I told myself, I will be a famous author. And I will tell them how I lay on a peaceful hillside composing my book, while the city of Warsaw was in ruins and the Jews were breathing their last. I left the Jews to die, he said. You mustn't say that, she murmured. While they were mounting the trains, packed in until they couldn't breathe, I was lying on a green hillside on my own. And as far as I could see, not one of Them to bash my head in.

I was the worst milker in the world. The old lady showed me how to do it. But I couldn't pull the way she did. And I never got the rhythm right. You'll never make a farmer, she informed me. Once, as I sat milking on a small three-legged stool, the cow stomped on my foot. As though to say can't you get it right? God forgive me, he said. I left the Jews to die.

He pressed out his cigarette. My mother, he said, spoke Polish with an accent. I tried to help her get rid of it, but she couldn't. It was too late. She had been a Jew too long. Her hair was as dark as mine. And curly like mine. Her dark eyes lay in shadow. She used to bring fresh milk home in a can. And pour it out for me into a cup. Drink, my little boy, she would say. May you grow big and strong. She would buy a chicken, twist its neck, and cook a long simmering stew with carrots and onions. And we would sit together at the wooden table bent over our bowls. Mama, I would say. I have a new magic trick to show you.

One day just before she went away, she baked a cake. She wore an old apron and her hair was dusted with flour. She brought my favorite chocolate cake warm from the oven and cut me a thick slice. But I didn't want it. I wasn't hungry. Bring me an ashtray, he told Lilka. All through the war I felt guilty about it. This was before the ghetto. Even so, it wasn't easy to find chocolate powder and sugar. She had worked hard to make that cake for me. And I had refused to eat it. Sometimes late at night, as I lay in wait for the sacks to come flying over the ghetto wall, I apologized over and over again to my mother, who went away and never came back. Why hadn't I eaten that cake when I had the chance?

How happy she would be that I became a successful writer. When I was little I told her I would be a famous magician. And sitting at the kitchen table, I showed her my magic tricks. Later I told her I would be a famous writer. Already I was composing stories about chickens and rabbits and wolves and foxes in little lined notebooks. And she would indulge me by putting her hands to her cheeks and pretending to be frightened when the fox was about to eat the hen. I have never, before or since, he said, had such a good audience for my work. Lilka stared at him. As long as I've known you, this is the first time I've ever heard you talk about your mother, she said.

My mother liked my magic tricks, he said. Like the one with the egg that I would suddenly pull out from my sleeve. But when it broke she wasn't happy. There was no money to replace it. She was as modest and shy as a schoolgirl. But she found a way to feed us. And to get the little notebooks in which I jotted down all my important boyish thoughts. They shot her in the street, he said. Long before the ghetto walls went up. At home the stew she had asked me to watch till she got back was still simmering . . .

Lilka sat down beside him and took his hand. She pulled the eiderdown over his shoulders. Do you think you can comfort me? he asked. We can none of us be comforted, she replied.

Locked up behind those Walls, he said, how I longed to go back to my side of Warsaw, back to my own house. I saw it in my dreams: the coal box, the kitchen table, my parents' beds with the carved wooden headboards, my room which looked out on the courtyard. I could have walked there in ten minutes. But I didn't dare. It had become the other side of the moon. Everything is danger, darling, the whole world is danger. Even you with your soft skin and wide smile are dangerous. Mankind is a plague. I cannot read tonight, he said. Call and tell them we're not coming.