I Am Juden Read online

  The new year brought nothing but bad news from Cracow, and none of it from my sister or mother. The Nazi invaders of Poland continued systematically identifying, tagging and trapping the Jewish people with bureaucracy. Between January and March, all Jews were required to register their homes. After the SS raids of December 3rd, I no longer believed German assurances that Jewish property rights would be protected. The lie became apparent two months after the registration deadline closed. In May, Hans Frank announced that Cracow was to be the ‘racially cleanest’ city in the Generalgouvernment. An enormous deportation programme was scheduled. Of the 68,000 Jews left in their ‘protected’ property, only 15,000 essential workers were now given leave to stay. Greengrocers were not on the list. While my mother (and hopefully sisters) were penned in on Izaaka Street, there remained a slim chance of bringing them to safety. Once they were resettled in the rural areas of the Generalgouvernment, they would be lost for the duration. All I could do was wait and hope and make shoes, although not for Mr. Donelaitis, who had moved away to live with his niece after his wife’s death. I opened a small workshop in the Pilies Street basement.

  After seven months of Lithuanian independence, the Soviet Union made a proposition to Wilno on midnight of June 15th, 1940, demanding that an unspecified amount of soldiers be allowed to enter our territory, and that a new pro-Soviet government be formed, to be known as - of course - The People’s Government. What else could Lithuania do but agree? The process of dividing Eastern Europe into German and Russian spheres of influence that had begun with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was now complete. Lithuania joined Latvia and Estonia in the Russian sphere.

  Almost immediately, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, scheduled their own enormous deportation programme. 21,000 political and social elites including many Jews, were sent to Siberia, where Radion Siegler had last been destined. Thousands more were shot in NKVD prisons. The Soviet regime outlawed Zionism in all its forms, closing down Jewish organisations and political parties and taking over Jewish schools and cultural institutions, decree by decree. With Akiva now illegal, the House of Cracow on Pilies Street was forced to disband, along with the others. I scooped up a trio of lost souls who’d found themselves homeless and we moved into a one room apartment on a steep hill behind the train station. Herman Glik joined Vitka Kempner and Abba Kovner in what was left of Hashomer Hatzair, now an underground organisation rocked by the Soviet’s ultimate betrayal. Anti-Semites to the east, anti-Semites to the west. The saviours of the Jews hated them almost as much as the Nazis.

  On the second Tuesday of the Russian invasion, a minor miracle occurred: the Red Cross office received a letter from Shoshana. She had managed to find a friendly farm outside Cracow in Novy Sacz where our mother was safe. She would not divulge details, but was hard at work on a plan to secure our transit north to cross the border into Lithuania, near Punsk, where we had taken the orphans last May, and found our Baltic Jerusalem. They were coming to Wilno soon. All being well, we would once again seek an escape to Palestine. Shoshana didn’t expect to get her old bedroom back, but she couldn’t wait to see Pilies Street again. The letter was dated June 13th. I wrote back with news of the Soviet deportations.

  Six weeks later, I was still awaiting her reply. Towards the end of July, the Soviet authorities ordered all foreign embassies to leave Kaunas. But news started reaching Wilno that two consuls had received twenty-day extensions. Far more wondrously, the Dutch consul had reportedly once again been granting visas. Not to Holland this time, which along with the rest of the free world had barred Jewish immigration, but to two Dutch colonial islands in the pacific, Curacao and Dutch Guiana, via Japan, assisted by the only other foreign consul left behind, a Samurai diplomat called Sempo Sugihara. The story sounded absurd, but I could not discount it before visiting Kaunas in person. I was not alone.

  At Kaunas train station I joined a steady stream of Polish Jewish refugees who were making their way through the cobble-stone alleys of the Old Town to the Japanese consulate. But despite the promise of sanctuary, the mood was fearful. Rumour was rampant of a supposed atrocity that had taken place in Kovno only last night. A group of Jews had been seized in the street and dragged into a garage, where their mouth were stuffed with high-pressure hoses. When the water was turned on, Jews stomachs were said to have burst like balloons.

  The crowd outside the consulate was already in the thousands when I arrived. A desperate group of youths climbed over the compound walls and were met – not with armed guards – but by Mr. Sugihara’s wife bearing platters of sandwiches. Everything I had heard was true. Mr. Sugihara was working night and day to help as many people as he possibly could. I left my place in the queue and ran to the nearest Red Cross office where I mailed instructions to Shoshana to come immediately, although my previous letters had gone unanswered.

  For the entire month of August, Sempo and Yukiko Sugihara sat writing visas by hand, hour after hour, day after day. They were issuing over 300 travel permits a day, which was normally one month’s work. Every morning I gave up my place in line to check for a reply from Shoshana, and every time I came back empty-handed, with a few more hundred people lined up before me.

  The Sugiharas stayed in Kaunas well past their 20-day extension, and when they were eventually escorted out by Russian soldiers on September 1st, they carried on signing visas through their train window until the moment the carriage left the station, but it was still not enough.

  There were no more letters from Poland awaiting when I returned to Wilno, and no more to come.

  A year passed. One fine summer morning thirteen months after the Soviet army invaded Lithuania, I returned on bicycle to the green lakes of Verkiai. There was no Shoshana by my side anymore– I even found myself missing Herman Glik – but I was pleased to leave the increasingly hostile city behind, if only for a couple of hours.

  My solitude was disturbed by a small crowd that gathered around a young couple’s portable transistor radio a little further along the lake shore. I joined them to listen to the reports. Earlier that morning, Foreign Minister Molotov had announced to the Russian people that the German army had attacked north-western Lithuania. Within an hour, V1 rockets would be falling on Wilno. It was June 22nd, 1941.

  The speed of Hitler’s offensive took everybody by surprise. That morning, the city enjoyed a beautiful summer’s day. After lunch, we were a city at war. German-Soviet tensions had been escalating all year, but the Lithuanians made few contingencies. When the warning sirens sawed through the blue air that afternoon, I recognized the finality of its announcement: the life we’d known was over. Jerusalem had fallen.

  I cycled back from the lakes through empty streets. Our tenement behind the railway station was lucky enough to be equipped with a usable cellar. The cool subterranean atmosphere doubled as an over-flow kitchen ice-box during the summer. Now it would be our air-raid shelter. Our tiny ball of a janitor, Mrs. Ormandyova, ushered me in, gave me a tin-hat and directed me through the maze of chairs, blankets and limbs. Each apartment was assigned a section of wall for food storage, some industrious families having furnished theirs with cupboards and doors. A few even had padlocks.

  Except for a bottle of milk and a dish of butter, our shelves had nothing. My house-mates were slumped on the floor against the wall, in various states of withdrawal and, in Benno’s case, near-catatonia. I soothed them as much as I was able, until the German planes began to grind overheard, and the heavy bombs started dropping.

  Boom, crump, crump, crump.

  Boom, crump, crump, crump.

  The planes were far enough away to ensure our safety, for the time being. The train station was a likely target, but it was the north of the city sustaining most of the damage, the historical Jewish Quarter that the Soviets had already decimated by decree.

  After a couple of hours of relentless bombardment, my house-mates became drowsy with boredom and I was able to pick a path through the huddled masses towards the exit. As I stepped out the front
of the building onto Pelesos Street, I was overwhelmed by a sense of excitement that contained neither dread nor panic, but pure awe.

  From the top of my hill, the city resembled the ruins of an alien civilisation: Wilno pierced with great flames, rocked by explosions, its dark expanses along the banks of the Neris to the west glittering with a constellation of fires, all of it trapped beneath a pink dome of rocket flare and the fierce pounding of Luftwaffe engines. For all the demented savagery, I am ashamed to admit I had never felt more alive. I drifted down the hill, into the rising smoke.

  A new wave of planes flew over when I reached the bottom, and proceeded to repeat the manoeuvre every five minutes, motors clanking furiously like a blacksmith’s forge. The first time I saw a batch of incendiary bombs tumble from their Iron Cross bellies, I felt the thrill of witnessing a birth. Thirty shells dropped within seconds. They radiated the streets like forked lightning, and left behind clusters of bright pin-points that spiked into yellow flames. Soon the whole of Old Town would be consumed.

  I headed north along Didziogi Street, flanked by Konstantino Park to my right, and crossed onto old Pilies. The greatest of all the fires was directly ahead of me, beyond the University Square. Enormous flames tore into the sky from a balloon of bright smoke and out of this haze there gradually emerged the formidable arch of the Roman Catholic Basilica. The Cathedral stood grand and imperious, its contours slowly growing more defined, the way a skyline solidifies at dawn. At the flames’ zenith the sky was molten red, but directly overhead, making a halo in the heavens, was a cloud of smoke all in pink. Through a rip in that delicate veil there shone a bewildered point of light, a lone star of the age-old celestial variety.

  As I drew closer to the Old Town, I was joined by other shadows who’d ventured out from their shelters. With neckties wrapped around their mouths, they resembled a troop of sand-blasted cowboys stumbling through the desert. I recognized some faces from Akiva meetings, but all I could see were eyes and noses. Nobody talked. Silently, as if our words would alert the thundering planes, we spread out across the road.

  The old house I had shared with Shoshana and Herman and Moishe and Baruch was untouched but at the far end of Pilies Street, bombs had fallen on a number of premises near Mr. Donelaitis’s old shop, blowing four of them to pieces. Not a shelf or saleable item remained, only piles of earth, bricks and beams of timber. Rescue workers were sifting through the rubble, clawing into the ruins where people were still buried. Seven dead had already been recovered. Four long bodies and three short ones placed in a row along the curb like alternating piano keys.

  When I signalled our readiness to join in the search, the workers waved us on.

  We floated clockwise on broad and empty avenues round the flaming ghost-ship of the Cathedral, turning right on tree-lined Gedimino into the devastated heart of the city.

  There were so many buildings burning all around that firemen had given up trying to put them out. Instead they nursed the victims, occasionally stopping to extinguish their lamps as another flight of bombers passed overhead. I watched one of them bundle a man to the ground as a screaming rocket tore across the sky, then immediately leave him to smother a woman who was on fire across the street. The fireman rolled her on the ground to put out the flames.

  We stopped at the left bank of the Neris, joining another team of rescuers who were pointing at a land-mine suspended from the Green Bridge like a chandelier, its parachute caught on the railing. While we lifted a wooden bench from the promenade to block the entrance, a woman in white appeared from nowhere on the other side of the bridge. She wore a bridal gown with a red ribbon across her chest that turned out to be a bloody gash. Utterly oblivious to our shouts, she began to totter across the river, hands outstretched as if walking a tightrope.

  She made it all the way past the landmine to our side but her mind was already gone. From what we were able to piece together, she’d been riding to church with her father when the first bombs fell. We scanned the right bank of the river, but the twin spires of St Raphael the Archangel could no longer be seen.

  On the corner with Gedimino and Orzesko were the remains of a house I’d observed yesterday flying the Lithuanian flag, a banned symbol under the Russians. An aerial torpedo had fallen on a stand of trees between the properties, reducing trunks to splinters and caving in the roof where the flag had fluttered. The rest of the house was collapsed beneath.

  I stopped at the shattered trees, stooping to pick up a corner of poster that had been pinned to the bark. Proclamations like these had been appearing across the city all year, produced by the far-right Lithuanian Activist Front, whose leader was the country’s Ambassador to Germany, Kazys Skirpa. The nationalists blamed the Bolsheviks for ruining ‘the fabric’ of their country, for the brutality and the mass deportations. In the crude typography of the poster, ‘Bolshevik = Jew’. The LAF advocated German intervention but the fragment I held in my hand went a step further, stating that:

  ‘1. The old rights of sanctuary granted to the Jews in Lithuania by Vytautas the Great are abolished forever and without reservation.

  2. Hereby all Jews, without any exception, are strictly ordered to immediately leave Lithuania.

  3. Should it become known that Jews guilty of grave crimes, manage to escape in secret, the duty of all honest Lithuanians is to take measures on their own initiative to stop such Jews and, if necessary, punish them -’

  While I was reading, one of the men from my team cried out. A small white hand had managed to push its way up through the rubble of the roof.

  I crumpled the paper in my fist, tossed it into the wreckage and carefully clambered up the mountain of brick and timber towards the roof’s gable. The weight of the blast had fetched the attic, bedsteads, wardrobes and all, right down from the top of the houses to the ground floor.

  We laboured until our hands bled, removing debris piece by piece around the boy’s groping fingers. Slowly we discovered the miracle that had saved him from being crushed: the explosion had blown his bedroom door off its hinges across the room, where it had fallen over his bed, resting on the top and bottom frames, creating a protective wedge.

  For the moment, he was safe. But the closer we got to him, the more the roof began to crack and groan under our boots. It could fall at any moment. Using lengths of broken floorboards, I fashioned a crude scaffold around the boy’s head while the rest of the team cleared the wreckage from below.

  Several hours later, we pulled him out, quite naked, as grey with dust as we were and bleeding freely from flying glass and scratches of jagged wood. His collarbone was cracked.

  The boy’s parents lay beneath the son’s room, entombed in their bed, the father’s arm shielding his face.

  With dawn the bombing grew less regular and then stopped altogether. The emergency services were out in number. As wordlessly as we had come together, our team dispersed towards a dozen different destinations.

  When I reached my tenement at the top of Pelesos Street, Mrs. Ormandyova came rolling out of the cleaning cupboard that doubled as her office, buzzing with indignant concern.

  ‘Look at you! Dusted like a bow-tie pastry! Where have you been all night?’

  ‘No need to worry about me, aunty,’ I said, taking her fingers in my ashen palm. ‘I was safe the whole time.’

  ‘But what have you been doing?’

  ‘There were lots of us out there and we all looked after each other.’ This did not satisfy her; she pulled my hand towards her apron. ‘The damage to the Old Town is unbelievable. You’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘And what happens now? Will they be back tonight?’

  ‘I would think so. If not before. But what about you, aunty. Do you have everything you need?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she scoffed, returning my hand with a theatrical pluck. ‘What do I need.’

  ‘And everybody else is well?’

  Wagging her finger, she said, ‘Everybody else stayed put in the cellar.’


  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take a bath.’

  ‘No hot water. They hit the gas works.’

  I found Selig poking around the kitchen, up to his usual tricks while the city burnt. The shelves looked suspiciously full, as if he’d been shopping. He banged the cupboard door shut as soon as I entered. Dimly regarding the layer of ash settled on my shoulders, he said, ‘I wish you told me you’d be spending the night out there.’

  ‘No need to fuss about me,’ I chuckled at the sink, soothing my fingers under cold water. ‘There’s lots of people who needed help.’

  ‘Not what I meant. If I’d known you weren’t coming back, I’d have got forty winks in your bed.’

  ‘You’re welcome to it anytime, you know that.’

  As he nodded and walked out, a dried bratwurst fell from his jacket sleeve. ‘I was looking for that,’ he said and scooped it up.

  Inside my bedroom, I closed the door, leaned back against the wood and sighed. Under my sheets, a torso jumped, and a greasy mane of black hair poked out.

  ‘I keep saying my room’s too light to sleep in,’ Wolf groaned. ‘Are you going to be long?’

  ‘Just picking up some clean clothes.’

  ‘Do I have to leave?’

  I thought about throwing Wolf out, but I’d already made my mind up. He would have detested his time in the shelter, and probably spent the night working himself into a silent rage. Besides, there was too much for me to do to sleep.

  ‘You rest up,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to need it.’