I Am Juden Read online

  AUTHOR NOTE

  In the annals of World War Two heroism, the name Haim Michael Klar deserves to be as widely known as Oskar Schindler. Although Haim may not have saved lives on Schindler’s scale (the truth is we cannot know; the facts are few and far between), his individual sacrifice was almost beyond comprehension. During the final years of the war, Haim impersonated an SS officer at Auschwitz and helped ease the suffering of prisoners, who regarded him as their ‘Guardian Angel’. When we consider that Haim was also Jewish, his courage in walking that most precarious of tightropes is astonishing.

  I first chanced upon fragments of Haim’s biography several years ago, in a series of Holocaust testimonials to the Association of Descendants of The Shoah, based in Illinois, USA. To my knowledge, it is the sole record of his endeavours.

  Haim’s extraordinary double-life was like nothing I had encountered in years of Holocaust research. I had become accustomed to stories such as Oskar Schindler, ‘the good German’, but stories of Jewish resistance are very few and far between. Nechama Tec has written about the Bielski Partisans in Defiance, and Leon Uris documented the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Mila 18, but I don’t know of many others.

  My original intention was to expand upon the brief details of Haim’s life, with a view to writing a biography. Unfortunately, my attempts at contacting the Illinois organisation proved fruitless. Out of respect, I decided not to pursue the matter any further. But the story had its hooks in me, and would not let go.

  I felt I had no choice but to write an account, lightly fictionalised in nature since there were so many gaps in his life story. And so the novel I Am Juden was born. All I knew was that my protagonist, Jozef Siegler, arrived at Auschwitz late in the war as a Nazi. I started there, at the end, and worked back in time, imagining how a resourceful Jew had ended up in an SS uniform. I don’t know for sure if the real Haim ever met Amon Goethe or Gusta Dawidson Draenger, leader of the Krakow Ghetto resistance, but since he was active at the same time and at same place, it would seem a reasonable assumption.

  My only wish was to bring this extraordinary story into the open before it faded away for ever. I hope I have done it justice.

  To Haim – to life.

  Stephen Uzzell

  Brighton, UK, 2019.

  Part One

  1

  When our mother Elena was one year old, rioters drove her family out of their home village. The Russian government blamed the Jews themselves for exploiting the masses, who were now - quite justifiably - fighting back. In 1900, Jews were officially forbidden from settling in any rural areas, or from buying property.

  When Elena Shapiro was three, thousands of illegal Jews were rounded up by the police and expelled. One morning the six year old Elena found herself excluded first from her own school, and then, after she had calmly marched herself three miles to the next, and seven miles to the next, she found she’d been excluded from all schools in the area. They’d exceeded their Jew quota.

  Three years later, Elena’s father found himself disqualified from voting in local elections. As an impetuous thirteen year old, his daughter was forbidden by the authorities to change her name to a non-Jewish one, and her pass was stamped indelibly with the three letter word.

  In 1899, Elena’s nineteen year old former classmate was charged with murdering a Christian lady in order to bake Matsoh bread from her blood.

  The first years of the new century saw the worst pogroms yet.

  Two thousand Jews estimated to have been killed between 1903 and 1906, including my grandparents, Elena’s mother and father. Countless more were wounded. In Odessa, in Yekaterinoslav, in Kiev…

  In Vichob, in the heart of the Pale of Settlement, on Friday September 11th 1903, my father’s Heroes of Zion were ready. Radion Siegler had assembled a street of blacksmiths as the first defence against the mob, the other blocks organised into similar occupational lines. But the fight broke out behind them, in the marketplace, between the Jewish peddler of a six-ruble barrel of herring and a watchman willing to pay no more than one ruble fifty copecks. The fight became a brawl; the brawl became a race riot that lasted the weekend and drew in crowds of drunks from nearby villages.

  On Monday September 14th, Radion’s battered blacksmiths tried to prevent a gathering of a hundred railway employees from plundering the Ghetto while soldiers and police looked on. Eventually the soldiers opened fire, killing forty-two Jews, Radion’s mother, father and young brother amongst them. Radion and thirty-five of his League were indicted for bearing arms against Russian citizens.

  It was around this time that Elena Shapiro’s first boyfriend Jeremiah was called up to fight for the Glorious Mother Russia against the Japanese, along with a disproportionately high number of his Jewish peers. As Jeremiah told Elena, with little sense of his own gift for prophecy, it was the only war where you stood as good a chance as being shot by your own troops as you did the enemy. With Jeremiah gone, Elena took to the train tracks to sell whatever she could find along the way, riding from shtetl to shtetl for her daily crust.

  Meanwhile, since Radion Siegler was to stand bogus trial for attacking Christians, he felt entirely justified in attacking one more, with an extricated bench slat. He lured the fat guard to his cell, rammed the wooden board into his jowled throat, pulled his tunic to the bars, ripped the keys from his belt and opened the cage. The Heroes scattered in separate directions, to further their chances of escape. With no family or home to return to, Radion took the one course of action he’d spent his life avoiding. He fled.

  He would emigrate, to the land that was on everybody’s lips: the melting-pot of New York City, where Germans and Frenchmen simmered contentedly side by side, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians. All that stood in Radion’s way was the matter of five hundred rubles for a third-class ticket across the Atlantic, five hundred more rubles than he’d ever glimpsed. But an enterprising Jew with a box of polish and a brush could earn his fortune on the trains, so he’d heard. So Radion lit out on the Odessa line.

  The story of how Elena Shapiro met her stubborn shoe-shiner of a future husband at a quarter-past three on the afternoon of Sunday 8th November 1903 would become the central myth on which the Siegler family was founded. The 2.00PM train arrived over an hour late in Odessa, to the usual fanfare of pandemonium, the pushing and the pulling of suitcases and packages and bundles of bed-clothes.

  Elena was in a hurry to board the carriage and set down her basket of braided rolls and eggs; the shoe-shiner would not get off until he was good and ready. And the racket, the yabbering, clacking racket! When it comes to queuing orderly on platforms and allowing existing passengers to disembark, it is well known that Jews consider themselves exempt. But this autumn morning, standing at the edge of the platform in the wind and the rain, Elena decided she was going to hold her ground. She gripped the basket to her chest, for ballast. Inside the train, crouching in fact right beneath the door, the shoe-shiner was finishing his work, not content to leave until he could see the reflection of his own face. Neither was the shinee willing to end the transaction prematurely, to the impetuous anger of the crowds on either side of the door, on the train and on the platform, where Elena Shapiro was doing her best to hold back the tide. If there was one thing Elena hated more than being slowed down, it was being jostled to speed up. But the laws of gravity and physics were as against her as they had been King Canute. There was only one other force of stillness in the whole tapestry: a bearded writer seated behind the shoe-shiner, scribbling in his green book.

  Elena could see the disaster unfolding in slow motion. The crush on either side, the shoe-shiner in the middle and Elena and her basket inching ever closer. If he didn’t stand up soon, she’d be pushed over the shoe-shiner’s skinny rump, and two hundred
people would collapse on top of them like mah-jong tiles. The authorities would be digging through luggage for a month.

  The final cruel shove came right between Elena’s shoulder blades, propelling her boots over the threshold of the carriage and her shins into the shiner’s buttocks, causing Elena to topple… at which point - goodness me, he moved so quickly - the shiner deftly pirouetted to his feet and caught Elena in his arms, spilling not even one of her hard-boiled eggs. ‘I had you covered all along, Miss,’ he said.

  ‘You had me covered?’ Elena retorted, thereby commencing the dialectical dynamic of a marriage that would endure two children, one world war and almost provoke a second, according to the complaints of their sleepless, harried neighbours.

  *

  The boy was born with his boots on, that’s what Radion always said about me. Not standing up, Elena would chip in, but mid-stride!

  Plop-plop, snip-snip, now you’re off, that’s it, one foot in front of the other.

  I supposed my parents must have carried me for the first few months, but it wasn’t long before I was standing on my own. The earliest memory I have is of stumbling onto a train with only a staff in my hand for support, a pint-sized Jacob of the shtetls. In my next memory I am carrying a curious sister-sized bundle called Shoshana.

  Mama and papa were always loaded down with baskets of braided rolls, hard-boiled eggs, oranges and bottled seltzer water. As the Siegler clan grew in size and number, so did the baskets. Mouths to feed, mouths to feed. Before long, Elena and Radion were an ambulatory grocers shop, and I was the under-boss.

  And then one spring morning in 1910, the walking stopped. We had been migrating south-east through the Ukraine and Mouldova, leaving the rails behind to trek over the Carpathian Mountains. When we finally emerged on the Promised Land of the Romanian side, all I could see was wilderness.

  ‘This is it,’ mama said, setting down her bags of black cherries and green grapes. ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘But it’s exactly the same as the last place we saw,’ papa began, and then noticed his wife’s eyes. ‘Which is to say, Yes, it’s perfect.’

  He kissed her brow and flung out his arms to the flock: ‘Children : this is your new home!’

  Which was odd, to say the least. When I had previously pictured a ‘home’, I’d imagined a house with curtains and a garden path, not this swampy meadow on the edge of a forest. And yet, here we were, stopped and apparently settled, the strange word blowing from Shoshana’s lips like a chain of dandelion puffs.

  Home-home-home-home-home-home-home!

  We sat in a circle and broke bread to consecrate the ground. The only thing standing were the pine trees spearing the sky, but papa soon made short work of them.

  By dusk, father and son had cut and dragged enough wood to build not only a home but a shop underneath it. In a matter of weeks we were selling timber to the Jews who started emerging over the mountain in their droves. When the new families had built their own houses along the track that now divided the meadow, papa started cutting the timber into cupboards and shelves and tables. When the houses were furnished, Radion Siegler became the village greengrocer.

  In 1914, when I was ten years of age, papa sat us all down before bedtime and explained there were other Jews in Siberia much less fortunate than we were. The Siegler family had a strapping son to look after them, and the Siberian Jews had nobody.

  When we woke up the next morning, papa was gone.

  2

  A dozen Sundays later, mama was sewing in the upstairs bedroom with the older girls. I was meant to be overseeing little Shoshana’s homework while failing to complete my own at the shop-counter. Copying by rote was no education, even a ten year old knew that. Mainly I was remembering papa’s stories about the long struggle to oppose the Russians in the Pale. No letters had yet arrived from his new adventure in Siberia. But I had memories enough of Radion Siegler’s Heroes of Zion for now.

  Papa used to get angry that it had taken the so-called intelligentsia of Vichob ten years to take up arms against their oppressors. He’d bang his fist and shout as he recalled how his own Hebrew professor had counselled against self-defence. Papa would mimic the professor’s wheezing voice: The violence perpetrated against our people represents the first stirring of the Russian proletariat. It will do us Jews no good to side with the police against the people.

  That was all very well and good, papa countered, but it was Russian officers were the ones supervising the slaughter in the first place.

  At first, the professors accused papa of making up wild stories to bolster his view. Gradually news trickled in from across the Settlement that proved Radion had fabricated nothing. State-sponsored pogroms were inconceivable to an older generation raised on notions of tolerance and honour. Yet the violence was becoming a fact of daily life. In Odessa, in Yekaterinoslav, in Kiev…

  The stillness of the shop was punctuated that Sunday afternoon by the machine gun rat-a-tat of mama’s sewing contraption on the boards above. Even though I knew the noise was coming, I still jerked on my stool, slashing the open page of my exercise book with my pen-nib. Shoshana jumped, too, and then found it all hysterical. The day was almost done and a certain weariness had over-taken my spirits, until the shuddering blast of the Singer revived me.

  Shoshana was as bored as I was, slumped at the counter under a tumble of red hair, her page of sums only half complete. It had been hours since the shop-bell had last rung, and yet there remained another thirty-minutes or so until the afternoon’s shadows claimed the floor and I could close up and eat supper and help put the girls to bed and finally enjoy a little time to myself, reading something more edifying than the twelve-times table. Tonight I would enjoy a Sherlock Holmes adventure, if I could keep my eyes open for long enough.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you ready for bed. We’ll do the last sums in the morning.’

  ‘But the magic bell! Somebody might come!’

  ‘Not tonight.’ I packed our school-books away in the drawer underneath the till.

  ‘It’s still early!’

  ‘Shoshana: it’s almost five o’clock.’

  I looked out the window to satisfy myself of the lateness of the hour, but there was indeed somebody scurrying along the side of the street towards the shop: Boiberik the bullying butcher, head down, beard tucked into his shirt collar.

  I slowly tapped my fingertips along the desk until I felt the end of cotton taped to the brass counter edge. Before he left, my father had rigged up a Radion Siegler Jewish Self-Defence Special, the cotton thread attached to a wooden matchstick and lump of sodium in a petrol can beneath the windowsill. My eyes tried to follow the cotton line across the shop but the grey threads was invisible.

  The butcher strode right past the shop door, crossed over and hurried into Mrs. Dvossi’s house opposite.

  ‘It’s late,’ I told Shosana, ‘and there’s a storm coming. Look.’

  I swung the counter open and led my sister onto the shop-floor so she could see through the window for herself. The street was deserted.

  ‘The Mendl’s have already got their shutters closed,’ I said. ‘You want to be tucked up in bed before the thunder comes, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shoshana said, her voice wavering.

  ‘Good.’ I stepped over to the door and pulled down the blind. ‘Me too.’ I turned and smiled, and then jumped when a fist pounded the glass. The fist was attached to the bony wrist of Podhotzur, our drunk policeman.

  Shoshana giggled, then said, ‘A customer!’

  Podhotzur pounded again, the urgency unmistakable.

  ‘Go up to see mama right now,’ I said. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  ‘But the Magic Bell hasn’t rung yet!’

  ‘Shoshana!’

  I didn’t raise my voice often. Once was usually enough.

  When Shoshana disappeared back behind the counter, I turned to disable the bell and unlatch the door. Podhotzur fell in, a skinny youth with tiny
round eyes like a bird and very small teeth.

  ‘Mr. Podhotzur, are you alright?’

  ‘Soldiers coming. They were in Bystrica earlier.’

  ‘Germans?’

  ‘Worse.’ He coughed. ‘Bavarians. The usual trouble. You should get up stairs, turn off the lights.’

  ‘I can’t leave while we’re still open.’

  ‘So close early,’ Podhotzur said.‘If the place looks empty, you might get away with only a looting.’

  ‘If I don’t protect the shop, who will?’

  Not the policeman, evidently. Podhotzur ducked out the doorway with a shrug and scurried on home. I returned to my position behind the till and practised running my finger along the edge of the counter to the taped threads, flicking back and forth between the two.

  I tried to visualise the merry havoc the Bavarians would wreak on our shop displays. The skinned rabbit hanging from the window became a boxing trainer’s spring-loaded ball under their fists. That neat pyramid of coffee cans was an invitation to any soldier’s boot. The wicker baskets would crumple under a punch and spill potatoes through their splinters. But it was the egg boxes stacked so provocatively next to the front door that I was rueing when a tumble of red curls rose up from behind them as if on the end of fishing line.

  ‘Shoshana!’ Sure enough, the rest of the girl followed. ‘I told you to get to bed!’

  ‘But the Magic Bell didn’t ring. Is it broken?’

  ‘Quick. Come here.’

  Somewhere up the street a stone broke through a pane of glass and three soldiers in green tunics lurched into view in front of the shop, two big men grinning through our window and a shorter one gesturing at the door. ‘Open up, Little Grocer!’

  Shosana darted back behind the stack of eggs and would remain hidden, as long as she didn’t give herself away.