Too Many Men (25 page)

The Swiss did not care where the gold came from.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel sick?” Ruth said.

“No,” said Edek. “It is just facts.”

“Well, it makes me feel sick,” she said.

“The Swiss did lend money to the Nazis to build the factories near the concentration camp. Like the Buna factory in Auschwitz where I did work.”

“You worked in that rubber factory?” said Ruth.

“It was not a real rubber,” Edek said.

“It was synthetic rubber,” said Ruth. “I didn’t know you worked there.”

“Many prisoners from Birkenau did work there,” Edek said. “The Swiss did say they did not know that they were financing slave labor.”

“Of course, they knew nothing,” Ruth said. “Like everyone else.”

Buna, which was the size of a small city, was often called Auschwitz III.

T O O M A N Y M E N

[
1 5 3
]

The gray concrete town with its carbide tower was an arrangement between I. G. Farben and the Nazis. I. G. Farben would build the plant.

The Nazis would supply I. G. Farben with as many prisoners as they needed for their workforce. Both parties knew that the supply of workers from Auschwitz would never dry up. Buna would never have to suffer a shortage of labor.

The plan was to produce synthetic rubber. The arrangement between I. G. Farben and the Nazis was perfect. The Nazis had a glut of slave labor, and I. G. Farben had to pay very little for these half-dead men. When the workers dropped dead, in the plant, it was no problem. Replacements were rushed in. In Buna, the machines were more alive than the men. The men came from everywhere. Over twenty languages were spoken across those noisy machines. Buna was not a spectacular success. Over four years it failed to produce one pound of synthetic rubber.

Ruth felt her face. She was flushed and hot, despite the cold.

“I don’t think you should bother going through all of this with a lawyer,” said Ruth. “We don’t want to grovel and try to prove what we owned, to anyone. We don’t need their money.”

“It is not their money,” Edek said. “It is our money.”

“I don’t want it,” she said.

They were close to Kamedulska Street, now. Ruth recognized a small grocery store she had bought some water in when she had first come here.

“The lawyer did tell me,” Edek said, “that all these dealings with the Swiss did allow the war to be two years longer. If the Swiss did not do this business with the Nazis, the war would have finished by 1943. It is the Americans who did make this calculation.”

“Your mother and father would still have been alive, wouldn’t they?”

Ruth said.

“And your mum’s mother and father, and her brothers and sisters,” said Edek. “And your mum would not have gone to Auschwitz.”

“I know,” said Ruth. “You were in the last transport out of the Lódz ghetto, in 1944.” Edek was quiet. Ruth felt like crying. “Nobody cared about the Jews,” she said. “Turkey sold chromite ore to the Germans. The Germans needed the ore to continue the war. Turkey said it was not a neu-tral country, but it was ‘nonbelligerent.’ ”

“I did not know this,” Edek said.

[
1 5 4
]

L I L Y B R E T T

“Spain sold wolfram ore to the Germans,” Ruth said. “Wolfram ore was used to make tungsten, a particularly hard metal that was crucial to the Germans’ war effort.”

“Oy, oy, oy,”
said Edek. “I did not know this.”

“Nobody in that part of the world was innocent,” Ruth said. “The Swedes let German troops cross Sweden to join in the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Swedes let two hundred and fifty thousand German troops use the Swedish railway system.”

“It is hard to believe,” said Edek.

“The Swedish navy provided an escort service for German military supply ships,” Ruth said. “These countries were all busy making a profit from the murder of Jews. After the war, the Allies, England, America, and France, asked Spain, Sweden, Portugal, and Turkey to return the gold, looted from Jews, that Germany had paid them with. They didn’t want to.

They hung on to the gold. And the Allies didn’t even ask them to give back gold that had been transferred through Switzerland by the Germans.

Nobody wanted to give up anything.” She paused. “You can see why I don’t want their money,” she said, “can’t you?”

“Maybe,” Edek said.

“No one was punished except the Jews,” Ruth said. “Alfred Krupp, the main manufacturer of German artillery, armor plate, submarines, and war-ships for Hitler, was never punished. The directors of I. G. Farben, who ran the factories at Auschwitz, were all acquitted of war crimes like using slave labor. Apparently they were all acquitted for lack of evidence.”

“I could have given them this evidence,” said Edek.

“Of course,” said Ruth. “But nobody asked you.”

They walked in silence. Ruth hoped that she hadn’t depressed Edek. It was depressing to think about how many people were pleased to benefit from the murder of Jews. And here, in this Catholic country, with barely a Jew left, anti-Semitism was still evident. Maybe the Poles didn’t know that, earlier this year, their Pope, the Polish Pope John Paul II, had made a historic move. The Pope had apologized for the Catholic Church’s silence during the Holocaust. In Vienna, in June, he had given a speech in which he said, “Unspeakable suffering was inflicted on the Jewish people, in Europe. Reconciliation with the Jews,” he added, “is one of the most fun-T O O M A N Y M E N

[
1 5 5
]

damental duties of Christians in Europe.” Maybe the Poles had missed out on that speech?

Edek and Ruth were on Kamedulska Street. They stopped outside number 23. Ruth felt suddenly frightened. She shouldn’t have forced her father to come to Poland.

“Did I force you to come to Poland?” she said to Edek. He didn’t seem to hear her. He was staring at the building. He looked dazed.

“This is it,” he said.

“I know,” she said. She wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t think of anything to say.

“This is it,” Edek said again.

Ruth looked at the concrete and brick apartment block. It looked shabbier than she remembered. She remembered walking into this building fifteen years ago. She remembered how difficult it had been for her to breathe. As though the inhabitants who no longer inhabited the apartment block took up all the breathing space. She could feel their presence. She had thought that she could feel their movements. The movement of children, cousins, mothers, grandmothers. On the first floor, Ruth had thought she could hear laughter and bustle. When she had knocked at one of the apartment doors, an old lady had emerged and told her that no one else was at home during the day, on that floor.

“Tadek and Moniek did have apartments in this building, too,” Edek said. “They did live here with their families.” So there were children, Ruth thought. There were mothers and cousins and grandmothers in this building.

“Your brothers Tadek and Moniek?” She said.

“Of course,” Edek said, “which other Tadek and which other Moniek should I mean?” Edek looked cold. He had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched.

“Shall we go inside, Dad?” she said. “It’s cold out here.”

“Maybe we do not need to go inside?” Edek said. “There is nothing more to see inside. You can see everything what there is to see from here.

Come on, Ruthie, let us go back to the hotel.”

“Can we just look around the courtyard, out the back, then?” she said.

“What is there to see?” he said. “Nothing.” She tried not to look disappointed.

[
1 5 6
]

L I L Y B R E T T

“I’ll just have a look around the courtyard,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“I will come with you,” said Edek. He followed her into the hallway.

“Look how many apartments they did make on every floor,” he said. He had stopped at an old intercom system just inside the hallway, and was counting the buzzers. “It looks like they did make three apartments from my parents’ apartment,” Edek said. “Look, see here, on the second floor. It used to be our apartment, and the apartment of the Zukers and the apartment of the Bermans. Now, it is one, two, three, four, five, six apartments.

The Zukers’ apartment and the Bermans’ apartments was not big apartments. They must have made the extra ones from our apartment.”

It was very quiet, in the building. There was no sign of life. Either the occupants were very old, or out at work. Edek had walked toward the staircase. He was touching the banister. What was he thinking about? Ruth wondered. What was he remembering? Ruth kept very quiet. She didn’t want to disturb him.

Ruth looked at the crumbling plaster in the hallway. She had remembered this hallway as tiled. Tiled with smooth, cream tiles. Cream tiles with a patterned border. How could she have replaced the patchy plaster with Italian tiles? She couldn’t believe she could have had such a distorted vision.

“Was this hallway ever tiled?” she said to her father.

“No,” he said. She looked at the staircase she had held on to fifteen years ago. The staircase whose banister she had gripped to keep a grip on herself. She remembered it as marble. It was not marble. It was made of wood. A wooden staircase. It didn’t curve and sweep in a broad semi-circle. The staircase had a gentle curve, and it was quite wide. But it was not ornate and it was not marble. How could she have turned the creaky timber stairs into marble steps? Sheer force of will, she thought. She must have needed them to be marble. She must have not wanted to see any decay, any disintegration. The marble must have represented the life and the shine that must have been there, once. The life that she was looking for.

Ruth was shocked. She had a clear recollection of touching the tiled wall with her cheek. How clear could recollections be? They couldn’t be that clear. There were no tiles, no marble, no shine, no life. There was just T O O M A N Y M E N

[
1 5 7
]

a run-down building, at 23 Kamedulska Street. She wiped away her tears.

She didn’t want to make Edek feel bad. He must be feeling bad enough.

Edek started to walk up the stairs. Ruth followed him. He stopped at the landing on the first floor.

“Here lived Tadek,” he said to Ruth. Edek’s voice was quite firm, but his eyes and face and mouth looked shaken. “And here lived Moniek,” he said. “I did like his two children very much.”

“Moniek and Tadek lived next door to each other?” Ruth said. She knew it was a stupid comment. The doors to the two apartments were side by side. But she didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t want to ask about Moniek’s children. She didn’t want to ask whether they were boys or girls, or one of each? Or what age they were. Or what happened to them. She knew that they were all dead. But how did they die? And when? In all probability Edek didn’t know.

“Here lived Mr. and Mrs. Bader,” Edek said, pointing to another door.

“They was a very nice couple. She could not have any children and she did give me always a piece of
lekekh,
a piece of spunch cake, when she did bake on Fridays.”

“How nice,” Ruth said.

“She did bake a very good spunch cake,” Edek said. Ruth loved the way Edek pronounced sponge. She had always adored this pronunciation. As a teenager she had taken it up herself. She had looked for opportunities to bring spunch cakes into conversations.

“I could smell Mrs. Bader’s spunch from my bedroom,” Edek said. The placing of “smell” and “spunch” so close to the word “bedroom,” in the one, small sentence, added a dimension to the word “spunch” that Ruth had never noticed. Smell, and spunch, sounded distinctly sexual when linked to a bedroom.

What was she doing playing around with words and their connotations, now? Ruth thought. This was not the moment to go off on some word-association fantasy. She had to stay connected to the present at the moment.

“You lived on the next floor up,” she said to Edek.

“I lived on the next floor,” he said. “The second floor.”

“Let’s go up,” Ruth said.

Edek looked at her. “We had, downstairs, in the back, a place where a man did come with a cow,” he said.

[
1 5 8
]

L I L Y B R E T T

“You had a cow out the back?” said Ruth.

“The cow did not belong to us,” said Edek. “The cow did belong to the man what came to us with the cow. He came with the cow and a big bucket.

He did milk the cow and did put the milk from his bucket into the buckets of the people what lived in this building. He did come a few times a week.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ruth said.

“There is a lot that you do not know,” said Edek.

“I know,” she said.

“The milk did come straight, fresh, out of the cow,” said Edek. “It did taste very good.”

“You wouldn’t be able to drink milk like that now,” said Ruth.

“Why?” said Edek.

“Because cows are fed hormones and antibiotics,” she said. “The antibiotics go into the milk. Raw milk is a perfect place for a variety of bacteria to multiply in.”

“Really?” said Edek. “I did not know this.”

“Today milk is pumped directly from the cows’ udders, by milking machines, to steel tanks, and from there to refrigerated trucks,” Ruth said.

“You did see this?” said Edek.

“I went to a dairy farm, once,” she said. “Two years ago. They told me two hundred and eighty million glasses of milk are consumed by Americans every day.”

“Two hundred and eighty million?” said Edek.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a lot of milk.”

Ruth stopped talking. Why was she talking about milk? She thought that this was possibly the most complicated conversation about milk that had ever taken place on this spot of the landing, on the first floor of 23

Kamedulska Street.

“You want to see where the man did milk his cow?” Edek said. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He started to walk downstairs.

“Dad,” she said. “Let’s see if we can see into your old apartment first?

Then we can go and look around the back.”

“You do not want to see where I got my milk?” Edek said.

“I do,” she said. “But later.” Edek walked back up to her. They went up the stairs to the second floor.