I Am Juden Read online

  Like us, Herman Glik had left behind loved ones in Cracow. Although he was a tough, sinewy specimen, the heart that beat inside Herman’s chest was as broken as my own. I thought long and hard about his rebuke, but could find no bitterness towards the man. He was one of life’s natural protectors - especially of my sister, to whom he’d taken quite a shine, another factor in our tussles - and saw me as a weak link in his new family unit.

  Perhaps I was. But it wasn’t cowardice that compelled the actions Herman found so disreputable.

  When I was first presented with the list of available Akiva houses, I didn’t know the geography of the Jewish Quarter. I chose Pilies because I had initially misread it as Polis Street, and my mind then equated it as a place of safety for the youths in our care. This was several months before I realised the truth of security in Wilno, that more often than not policemen would join in the beating of Jewish riot victims rather than trying to make peace.

  As for my work and friendship with Mr. Donelaitis, I had nothing to apologise for. He was a kindly man who paid well, far more than the wood-cutters earned, and as my wages went into the same common pot as everybody else’s, the whole of the House of Cracow prospered from my employment. As Shoshana said, I did enjoy looking after young children. But our own street-fighting Akiva youths now looked more to my sister and Vitka Kempner than they did to me. Meanwhile, as Mrs. Donelaitis’ elephantiasis advanced, her family came to depend increasingly on my support, both in the shop and their apartment outback, and I was glad to help. The poor woman was bed-bound on a permanent basis, the swelling having spread from her legs to her arms, which were as purple as bruises. Dr. Todras visited twice a week to lance the fluid from her limbs, which was the sum total of her treatment.

  As a result of Herman’s words, I doubled my efforts to stay in contact with mother on Izaaka Street. For a brief spell during Lithuania’s independence, we could still send letters to the Generalgouvernment. Mother was able to reply through the Red Cross. The news was not encouraging. Under the German regime, Jews and Poles had been prohibited from keeping foreign currency, and before long jewellery and gold were added to the list of illegal items. I found some solace in Shoshana’s phrasing, that it was ‘Jews and Poles’ who were equally affected. The discrimination was not being pursued along racial lines, as Abba and others were warning.

  But then at the end of November, Hans Frank announced that ‘all Jews and Jewesses over the age of nine must wear a four-inch armband in white, marked with the star of Zion on the right sleeve of their inner and outer clothing.’ Transgressors, Frank warned, ‘would be punished with imprisonment’.

  On Monday December 4th, five weeks after meeting Vitka Kempner and Abba Kovner, Mrs. Donelaitis died in her bedroom from satellite tumours which had grown beneath her swollen skin. Although the illness had been a protracted one, her death came as an enormous blow and the shop remained closed after the weekend.

  I spent the day with the grieving father and children and after they were put to bed, offered to stay to allow Mr. Donelaitis and friends to drown their sorrows in the city. What I did not find out until I got back to the House of Cracow early Tuesday morning, was that Moishe and Baruch had also been drinking in the Tapa D’Orro, letting off steam after an IJDF training session with Vitka.

  My two house-mates had been in a typically raucous mood and were out-doing each other with a string of ribald jokes. ‘If your wife keeps coming out of the kitchen to nag at you, what have you done wrong?’ Moishe asked. ‘You made her chain too long.’

  After much pounding of the table, Baruch countered. ‘How do you turn a fox into an

  elephant?’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘Marry it!’

  It was as this point that one of Mr. Donelaitis’ friends approached the pair, whose noise had already emptied one end of the bar. ‘Look, we’re just out trying to have a quiet drink tonight,’ he explained. ‘Would you mind keeping your voices down a little?’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ Baruch said.

  ‘No thanks to the likes of you,’ Mr. Donelaitis’ friend said. ‘I’ll have you thrown out on your ear if that’s what you prefer.’

  ‘Why don’t you guys leave?’ Moishe asked. ‘We’re not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ Baruch said, still engaged in a battle of one-upmanship with his peers. ‘Go home, old man, to your elephant wife.’

  The friend winced when he saw Mr. Donelaitis face drop, then laced his finger’s behind the back of Baruch’s head and drove his face into the brass-rimmed edge of the bar, snapping his nose. Before he could repeat the move, Moishe swung his tankard into the side of the man’s forehead, and a localised riot erupted.

  Mr. Donelaitis said nothing of the encounter when he returned that night, but he was so drunk he could barely speak. He fell across the sofa and I let myself out.

  When I got back to Pilies Street after midnight, Herman and Moishe were sipping pear brandy at the kitchen table, Moishe’s arm in a sling, one eye squeezed shut under a glistening purple contusion. Shoshana was tending to Baruch upstairs. He had taken a far worse beating.

  ‘Who did this?’ I demanded.

  ‘Your precious shoe-maker and friends,’ Herman said. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘At the cinema,’ I said, too embarrassed to tell the truth.

  ‘Well I hope you enjoyed yourself.’

  ‘Mr. Donelaitis’ wife died this morning,’ I said. ‘His friends were taking him out for a drink....’

  ‘This is exactly what I’d warned you about - ’It wasn’t, but before he could continue, the front door resounded with a barrage of knocks. ‘God damn it, what now?’

  ‘I’ll go.’ If there was any chance Mr. Donelaitis’ friends had found out where Moishe and Baruch lived, I wanted mine to be the first face they saw.

  But it the imposing figure of our Akiva Secretariat I saw through the peephole. A stern, bespectacled Joziek Rudashevski stared back, a frown of grim determination darkening the brow beneath his fedora. Rudashevski was so overwhelmed with refugees these days, he rarely left Subocz Street. The attack on my young house-mates was appalling, but it was tame in comparison with recent assaults, and hardly warranted a personal house-call from our leader. When I opened the door and saw the little boy standing before him, I realised that Rudashevski hadn’t come about Moishe and Baruch at all.

  ‘Mr. Secretariat,’ I said. ‘Please come - ’

  That was as far as I got before my sister sprang up at my side, a wooden bat raised over her shoulder. ‘If those bastards think they’ve come to apologise…’

  I stopped Shoshana before she could bludgeon our leader unconscious. The little boy just stood there on the doorstep, not even a flinch.

  ‘Two of our lads have run into trouble in town tonight,’ I said by way of apology. ‘Tempers are running rather high.’

  The Secretariat nodded, placing his hat over the still-raised end of Shoshana’s bat like a mute over a trumpet. He ushered the boy inside our hallway but when the child moved, it was with a stealth and stillness that seemed designed to render him invisible from adult eyes. ‘My young friend Jacob has just arrived from Cracow,’ Rudashevski said. ‘A glass of hot milk would seem in order.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Please come through.’

  Our house was already full, and the wrong age group for little Jacob. All our charges were at least ten years older. Perhaps the other Akiva properties had already taken their quota of new arrivals, and we were next on the list.

  Whatever the boy’s fortunes, the sight of Moishe’s purple swollen face at the kitchen table could not have been the welcome for which Secretariat Rudashevski had been hoping – to say nothing of the rearing cobra of my sister at the front door – but again, the boy’s face betrayed no emotion. I wondered what those heavy-lidded eyes had already seen.

  Herman helped Moishe to his feet and took him by the arm to bed, while Rudashevski and Jacob sat in their places and Shoshana and I
prepared five hot milks. When our guests left thirty minutes later, none of the milk had been touched.

  Jacob Schmiel was ten years old, but looked like more like a grandfather in his black suit and lime green shirt fastened at the collar. He wore a thick mop of brown hair long over ears that stuck out like Peter Pan’s and his face was divided by two large brown eyes, darker than the eyebrows barely distinguishable from his skin. A long thin nose opened out like a tea-spoon above a pair of lips that looked sewn together from mismatched mouths, the upper lip thin and still as any British soldier, the lower one as fit to burst as a ripe tomato.

  The last few days had been cold in Cracow, and on Sunday morning Jacob had been caught in the street by German soldiers and forced with many others to clear snow from the railroad tracks. Their job was to keep the trains running. The Nazis had started using cattle-wagons to round up Jews from the countryside. Yes, cattle-wagons. On any other night, that fact alone would have been the most shocking part of Jacob’s story. When he returned to Josefa Street, two blocks away from my family’s apartment, he learned that his mother Sara and older sister Leah had been killed.

  Three months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, December 3rd was ordained as the first Aktion against the Jews of Kazimierz. It was nothing more than a glorified raiding party. The first anybody knew of it was the declaration of a daytime curfew. Anybody showing themselves in the streets or on balconies would be shot on sight, which seemed an absurd threat, until the residents saw what happened next.

  The SS stormed into their buildings, rammed open apartment doors, flung mattresses from beds, slashed cushions and upholstery, hauled out the contents of cupboard, smashed open desk drawers, blew up safes, tore rings from fingers and necklaces from throats. One of Jacob’s friends had pleaded to keep his school-satchel. The SS broke his arm. When they asked Sara and Leah for jewellery and furs, Jacob’s mother said she had none. They shot her daughter first, forcing Sara to watch. The mother met her death without witness: her ten year old son Jacob was shoveling snow to keep the cattle-wagons running.

  When the boy finished talking, we noticed that Herman had returned from Moishe’s room and was standing in the doorway, hands clutching his jaw like a vice.

  ‘Izaaka Street?’ Shoshana gasped.

  ‘Josefa and Izaaka,’ Jacob said. ‘Also some of the bigger apartments closest to Kazimierz.’

  ‘We have family there,’ I said. ‘Elena Siegler, our mother.’

  Jacob understood what he was being asked. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So what are we supposed to do?’ Shoshana cried, looking from Rudashevksi to the boy and back again. ‘Send a letter to the bloody Red Cross?’

  Herman staggered stagily over to the table and crouched down to hold my sister, but Shoshana brushed up and ran from the room. We heard a series of thuds up the staircase and then the slam of her bedroom door.

  ‘Go to her,’ Herman told me.

  I made my apologies to Secretariat Rudashevski, kissed the top of Jacob’s mop and left to comfort my sister.

  She lay facing her windowless bedroom wall, sobbing softly. I crossed the carpet to her bed, stooping to pick up the discarded eye-patch. The elastic strap had snapped as she’d ripped it from her face. I folded the black fabric and slipped it into my back pocket to repair in the morning. She wouldn’t be needing it tonight.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and turned round to face her, pressing a tentative palm against the mattress next to her pillow. When she didn’t flinch at my presence, I lifted my hand and held it to her hot forehead. Like a cat, she shrugged her neck, sending my fingers back to brush her hair. Eventually she groped a hand over her shoulder, found mine and tugged it down to her chest. The rest of me slowly followed, lying down against her back. We stayed like two spoons in a drawer until the sobbing stopped and her breath evened out. I heard Herman say goodbye to our two callers. The front door clicked shut. It was one o’clock in the morning.

  Shoshana wriggled around from the wall to face me, our noses touching. I waited to hear Herman climb the stairs, but his foot-falls never came.

  ‘Hello, big bird,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, little…’ I was uncertain how to continue the metaphor. We hadn’t been this intimate since childhood, and even then I didn’t recall pet-names. ‘Little worm?’

  As she snorted, a little green bubble popped at the end of her nose. ‘Worm?’

  ‘Lovely, warm, wriggly little worm.’

  ‘Oh, that makes me feel so much better.’ She pressed her knees against mine to let me know it wasn’t true. ‘The world’s an awful mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘If it isn’t, it’ll do until the mess gets here.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘The Red Cross will help, you know they well. They got mother’s letters here and they’ll do it again.’

  ‘Letters? It’s a bit late for words.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘We don’t know anything. That’s the problem.’

  ‘We know she’s already handed over their foreign currency, that’s what the SS were looking for. As long as she does what’s asked, she’ll be alright.’

  Shoshana massaged a crick in her neck, shifting away until the back of her head knocked against the wall.

  ‘What happened was sheer madness,’ I continued, sensing that more than a stiff muscle had come between us. ‘But the SS are just throwing their weight around, showing who’s boss. They won’t keep that level of violence up for long. They can’t. They’re fighting the Red Army, not us.’

  ‘I think they’re more than capable of doing both.’ She rolled round to face the wall.

  ‘Then we’ll just have to double our efforts.’

  ‘Even if we had an Akiva for every Aktion, it wouldn’t be enough. Vitka was telling me about the Sicarii, in Jerusalem.’

  ‘Palestinians?’

  ‘Jews.’ Her voice was muffled against the plaster. ‘Fighting the Roman occupation of Judea, seventy years after they killed Jesus. Judas Iscariot was a Sicarius, it’s where his name comes from.’

  ‘And the Sicarii?’

  ‘The world’s first assassination-squad, and they were Jews. Those guys could show the SS a thing or two about terror.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sicarii means ‘dagger-men’. They went around with small knives hidden in their robes – they were the original cloak-and-dagger. Women, too. They’d wait for public gatherings, the bigger the better, then pull out their blades, stab as many Romans as they could and disappear into the crowd.’

  ‘You think that’s what your Jewish Defence Force should be doing?’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  ‘Roman centurions didn’t have submachine guns,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine what the SS would do if the Sicarii tried that in Cracow?’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘What we came here to do last year. Get as many of our people to safety as we can. I agree that Palestine is the answer, but the Palestine of today, not fifteen-hundred years ago. There are good people in Kaunas trying to help. We go back there and we try again.’

  ‘Last year the SS weren’t breaking down doors on Izaaka Street. How can we stay here while that’s happening?’

  ‘Because to help anybody, we need to stay out of prison. Lithuania is safe. We’ve got thousands of Jews flooding out of Poland every day. You and Vitka Kempner are going to head back in? I know how useless you feel. But you have to listen to me.’

  ‘Useless?’

  ‘I know how useless you feel, because I feel it too. But I got you this far, didn’t I?

  ‘I didn’t realise I was such a dead weight.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said. ‘Right now the only person I can keep safe is you, and that’s what I have to do.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You have absolutely nothing to apologise for.’

  ‘Good. You may have realised it’s not my strong point.’


  ‘I wouldn’t want you any other way.’

  ‘We’re stuck with each other then. Look, I need to try and get some sleep. Hopefully things will make more sense tomorrow morning. Night, Big Bird.’

  I kissed her neck before rolling off the bed onto my feet.

  ‘Goodnight, lovely Little Worm.’

  I found Herman Glik at the kitchen table, slumped behind an almost empty bottle of pear brandy. It turned out that Secretariat Rudashevski had one more piece of intelligence to deliver. After seeing Shoshana’s reaction to the first part, he’d decided to spare us and tell Herman in our absence. Tongue loosened by the brandy, Herman now relayed the story to me.

  While the regular SS were brutalising the apartments of Kazimierz, a small detachment of elite Einsatzgruppe men, Special Duty Groups, had been dispatched to our local synagogue, the Stara Boznica. The Einsatz rounded up the devout at prayer, and drove in a group of small-time Jewish gangsters who’d been drinking across the road. As if this wasn’t sacrilegious enough, the Einsatz broke open the temple’s Arc, removed the scroll of Torah and placed it on the floor before ordering the entire congregation at gun-point to file past and spit at the parchment. Everybody complied, apart from a Jewish gangster called Max Redlicht, who refused. The Einsatz shot Max Redlicht for his disobedience, then shot everybody else and left the synagogue in flames.

  I didn’t sleep much that night.

  Knowing Shoshana to be an early-riser, I dressed at dawn and crossed the corridor to her bedroom to tell her that I was wrong. The world made even less sense than it had last night. I was all out of hope. Shoshana and Herman and Vitka and Abba were right all along: if the Nazis got their way, Europe was to be the burial pit for an entire race.

  I knocked on Shoshana’s door, but there was no answer. When I stepped across the threshold, I saw that I was too late. My sister’s wardrobe was open, the rail bare, and her bed made with fresh sheets, ready for the new occupant.

  My little Sicarii sister had gone.

  2

  Every Tuesday after Shoshana disappeared, I trekked across Wilno to the Red Cross office, but no letters arrived. On my first visit, I pulled my identification card from my back pocket and a small black square fell out onto the floorboards. Shoshana’s broken eye-patch. She didn’t have another. Together with Herman Glik, we mourned my sister’s departure, both blaming ourselves, as if a stern word could have stopped her. I had tried that, in my clumsy way.