I Am Juden Read online

  Wolf groaned again and flattened a pillow over his head.

  I scrubbed myself in the bathroom, toweled, dressed, and went back out to the streets.

  While teams of Jews were out combing through the wreckage, the Lithuanian Activist Front were going door to door, to buildings that still had doors, hunting for bearded Bolsheviks and executing them in the street, their gun-shots drowned out by German shelling. When the Nazi troops rolled in that afternoon, Lithuanians welcomed them with garlands of wildflowers.

  There was an immediate exodus of three thousand able-bodied Jews east into Soviet territories, leaving behind the old, the infirm and in some cases, the very young. When I returned home that evening, Selig, Benno and Wolf had fled, together with half the building. Running never once crossed my mind, which was odd, because despite my size, in all areas of life I had previously considered myself a coward. There just wasn’t a choice that I could see. However bad things were for me, there were thousands of people in far worse situations, most of whom had nobody at all to which they could turn.

  The Germans didn’t form their own civil administration August 5th, but there was no reprieve. The Provisional LAF Government lasted for forty-three days and on every single one of them, a new anti-Jewish directive was published. The public murder, raping, robbing and humiliation of that first night were to be avoided because they distressed Lithuanian women and children. But 100 new orders were issued in the brief life of the interim government, perpetrated by Lithuanians, against their former neighbours and employees. General policy was of course dictated from Berlin, but it was the relish that the Lithuanians displayed in implementing the strategies that was so distressing.

  When the executions ceased, the daylight snatching of Jews for hard labour began. 300 were initially taken, on the understanding that the smallest insubordination would result in more prisoners, brothers and friends. The authorities of course needed no such pretext. Men unfit to work were also taken, told to bring along a towel and soap. But they were never seen again. All Jewish establishments were closed down immediately, including prayer houses. Jews were dismissed from gainful employment. Jews were forbidden to use sidewalks, forced into the middle of the road with the horse and carts. On many main and side streets, Jews were prohibited from even walking on the road, and had to make city-wide detours in order to complete the shortest journey. Jews were officially identified as ‘Jude’, and then a few days later reclassified as ‘Jud’, as if the ‘e’ was a waste of a perfectly good Aryan letter. In July, all Jews over ten had to wear the star on their arms. Jews first lost the right to rent property, and then to own. Jews were ordered to move from our apartments into single rooms shared with other families. All property deeds had to be handed over. Bank accounts, radios, jewellery and furs.

  Days passed in a fever dream of déjà vu. Every abuse that had been inflicted upon my family in Cracow and the Russian Pale was now being visited upon the Jews of Wilno. So well-oiled was the machinery that it took the Nazis three months from invading Poland to their first raiding party in Kazimierz, while the hired hands of the LAF needed only six weeks to drive us to the same precipice of fear.

  If they’d wanted to, they could have massacred us wholesale that first night and the Lithuanian women and children wouldn’t have lost too much sleep. But where was the sport in that? The steady, incremental process of the daily orders was designed to inflict maximum psychological torture, for every Jew knew what was coming. Every Jew had family or friends who’d fled Poland with nothing but horror stories, like little Jacob Schmiel. And the LAF and the Nazis knew that we knew, and they reveled in the knowledge.

  3

  Every evening before curfew that sweltering summer, a long line of Jews formed behind the choking fumes of the bus station newly decked with swastikas. Peasants flocked to the city to trade spoiled produce too wretched for pigs to eat. We queued to hand over the last of our belongings, the watches, clothes, pots and pans that the authorities had not yet seized. Jews were banned from all shops. The food market was open to Aryans from six in the morning, and Jews were still permitted to arrive after eleven, when the stalls were bare. An underground economy had started to flourish, which the Germans were permitting, providing they received their cut.

  Two soldiers were sniffing around the peasants’ stalls, trying to work out if a box of mouldy cabbages was worth breaking into a sweat. There were a couple of dozen people in front of me, and only three peasants left with anything to trade. I had a bag of Mrs. Ormandyova’s aprons and baking trays to barter, and strict instructions not to return home empty-handed. No square meals had been served in our building since the weekend. There were reported sightings of a bunch of rogue carrots on the third floor, but intelligence had so far been unable to confirm their existence.

  After we shuffled up a few yards closer to the meagre display, the man in front of me turned to his friend and said, ‘Crazy but I remember when we used to come here to catch buses.’

  ‘What I want to know,’ his friend said, ‘is what they’ll take when we run out of pots and pans.’

  ‘Sod the pots and pans,’ the other man said. ‘What happens when they run out of Jews?’

  At the front of the queue, the two soldiers had spotted something of interest in the last transaction. They started following an elderly couple tottering arm in arm away from the buses, allowing them to leave the station-yard before the shorter snub-nosed soldier ordered them to halt in the middle of the road. As I looked on with a blooming sickness, a smartly-dressed lady commuter with a briefcase stopped at my side, raised a hand over her mouth and pretended to fix her hair.

  ‘Watch that one,’ she said, with a flick of her chin to the shorter German. ‘I saw him near the Green Bridge, up to no good.’

  I hadn’t seen the soldier before but I did recognize the smartly-dressed woman as a University librarian, from the old days of about ten minutes ago when Jews were allowed to sit in the Rare Book Reading Room. She was a middle-aged matronly type who still wore her hair in the plaits and buns of her youth.

  ‘On Ukmerges Stree, outside the bus repair shop,’ she said. ‘He must have a thing for buses, this one. Maybe he still plays with his toys at the barracks. A young Jewish girl walked by with a bag in her hand. Inside was a loaf of bread, a radish and some butter and cheese. The German poked around, left the radish and bread but took the butter and cheese for himself. The girl cried that the butter and cheese were for her sick little brother, that she’d worked very hard for the food. Tears rolled down her face, but the soldier took no notice.’

  Now he was shouting at the elderly couple, who clearly did not understand German. The old woman was offering her recently-purchased marrow in apology, but the taller of the soldiers knocked it out of her hands with his baton and stepped on it, bursting the green skin under his boot heel. The old man took off his cap and held it between his hands like a boy before the headmaster’s desk. He was asking in Yiddish what they had done wrong. In answer, the snub-nosed German brought his baton down on top of the man’s bald head. His wife shrieked. When the old man tried to raise a hand in defence, the other soldier grabbed both arms and twisted them behind his back. The German struck him again and again until blood poured from his scalp down over his eyes. I could watch no longer

  I gave Mrs Ormandyova’s bag to the two men in front of me and asked them to take any food to our tenement behind the railway station. The librarian bent down and put her briefcase at the men’s feet and said, ‘I’m coming with you.’

  She could not be dissuaded. With our hands above our heads, we stepped out of the line and walked to the head of the queue, past the peasant’s stalls and out the bus-yard into the road.

  Struggling to keep my voice under control, I called out to the soldiers in German. ‘The old fool only speaks Yiddish. Let me translate for you. I’ll get whatever it is you’re looking for.’

  ‘Single file only, you filthy Jewish swine,’ the taller one roared when he let go of the man
and span round. ‘Don’t you know the rules?’

  The old man collapsed to his knees, but the blows kept coming.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ the librarian said. ‘I told the Jew to walk with me. My name is Ona Simaite and I work at the University. My identity papers are in my purse.’

  ‘What are you doing with this Jewish pig? Are you both Communist traitors?’

  ‘I don’t speak Yiddish,’ she said. ‘I’m a Lithuanian, I speak German.’ She pointed disdainfully at the old man on the ground. ‘This sort of thing isn’t good for anybody. How about we try to keep it off the streets?’

  Amazingly, the short German stopped hitting the man. ‘You’re right,’ he said.

  I started reassuring the man in Yiddish that he would be safe when his assailant drew the pistol from his belt and calmly fired into the side of the old man’s bald head. He crumpled to the ground and his wife went down of her own volition a second later.

  The snub-nosed German turned his gun on us.

  ‘At least one of you is coming with me.’ He grinned at Mrs. Simaite. ‘Your choice, Mrs. Librarian.’

  Before she could answer, I said, ‘Go back for our bags.’ Adrenaline tasted like a copper penny on my tongue. ‘Mrs. Ormandyova, remember, Pelesos Street. Whatever you can take her.’

  The soldier let the librarian comfort the sobbing woman and signalled for me to start walking, but my feet didn’t get the memorandum. A felled tree, I swayed a little in the breeze. I stared down at my shoes and willed them to move before the rest of me could come crashing down. The miraculous happened: I twitched my right foot in front of my left like a cured cripple. Shifting my weight from one leg to the other, I jerked forward. Not exactly walking, but it would do.

  There’d been rumours of summary executions, but nothing had prepared me for what I’d seen. My mind replayed the scene like a nightmare caught in a loop. The frenzy of that first night of LAF killings was supposed to have stopped. Being executed for not walking in single file? Such punishment belonged to the realm of fantasists like H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley, not the world I thought I knew. It seemed inconceivable that the German army would allow such behaviour to continue unchecked. The librarian was sure to report the soldier for this, his second abuse of power. Taking a young girl’s cheese and butter was one thing, but cold-blooded murder…

  And now I was the one being led away. Presumably the snub-nosed soldier wasn’t going to kill me, or he’d have done it by now. But the unalterable fact remained that I had been captured by Nazis. One didn’t meet many Jews who’d lived to tell that particular tale.

  What about the people I was leaving behind, Mrs. Ormandyova and the other old ladies of the block? I trusted the librarian to do what she could today, but who would look after my building tomorrow, and the next day? I managed to persuade myself they’d be better off without me. It wasn’t hard to do. My intervention had just got an innocent man shot in the head. In this fashion, I was able to persuade myself to keep moving forward.

  The urge to make a break for freedom lessened with every corner we turned, the Germans shouting directions at my back, Turn, turn, turn. I was their obedient little doggie who walked without a leash. I didn’t need to feel a weighty chain around my neck to know it was there.

  Without an old man to batter, the two soldiers sounded much more like reasonable young adults, their conversation not that different from the likes of Moishe and Baruch. When they weren’t barking orders at me, they bickered with each other about football teams and attractive young actresses and generally gave no indication of where we were heading. I tried to read clues in the city’s twisting topography. But the further we travelled from the centre, the less familiar the streets became, and the more worried I grew.

  From the position of the setting sun, I knew we were going east, in the direction of the great forest of Verkiai. But I was not eager to return to the lake shores with my current companions. And then, without any fanfare, we took a right turn and I recognized my surroundings: I was back where it had all started. Subocz Street, the site of the old Akiva headquarters where Shoshana and I were taken upon arrival. The house had been re-appropriated last year under the Russians, but I wondered if my captors knew of my connection. If they had identified me as a former Zionist activist, my goose was well and truly cooked. But the soldiers made no announcement as we neared the old house, and when I first caught sight of it, I forbid my body from betraying any shimmers of recognition. It was merely a coincidence, not one of Herman Gilk’s meaningful synchronicities.

  The house was freshly whitewashed and a new fence now enclosed the front garden. Mother and father weeded the flower-bed on their knees while a baby squirmed behind them on a red blanket, surrounded by a cache of soft toy guns. The father stood as we passed and raised his trowel in salute at the soldiers.

  Half a mile away, I could see two long, low brick apartment buildings, one in front of the other like draught pieces. These were known as the Cheap Houses, where the more left-wing members of Hashomer Hatzair had lived when they first arrived in the city, the likes of Vita Kempner and Abba Krovner. Unlike the more homely Akiva HQ up the street, the Cheap Houses had limited resale value to a good Aryan, and had not yet been reassigned. Many of the windows were broken or boarded up. These Houses also had a new wooden fence built around the perimeter, but it wasn’t to stop a young child toddling out into the road. The fence reached as high as the third floor windows, and was strung with barbed wire.

  When we reached the entrance, it was locked but unguarded. The taller soldier produced a long key from a latch in his tunic, and secured the gate again after we’d entered. I was ordered left and followed the fence along the shadows between the two Cheap Houses to a newly constructed garage workshop. Terror seized me as I recalled the story from Kovno of Jews being forced to swallow hoses, and their stomachs bursting. But this looked like a place of labour, not death. There was a single olive drab Kubelwagon outside, and a random collection of Lithuanian vehicles lined up outside the garage doors. Coal lorries, furniture vans, tippers, just about every type of transport apart from a funeral hearse.

  We walked to the front of the line and into the workshop, a hive of industry at seven on a summer evening. The first thing I noticed was that none of the mechanics wore overalls. Secondly, none of them were mechanics. About a dozen strong Jewish men toiled miserably on a miscellaneous cross-section of trucks and vans. Civilians like myself, snatched from the streets and put to work as slaves.

  Guarding the workshop, a portly soldier slumped on a chair against the wall with a rifle across the mound of his lap. Behind him was a large-windowed corner office where my two captors had retreated, joining three more soldiers playing cards at a cluttered table, none of them older than university undergraduates. The prisoners were all ages, from a fair-haired teenager hosing down a milk-float to a tanned and wiry man in his sixties called Dusan who offered me a cigarette. Dusan was a rarity in the garage: an ethnic Lithuanian and a proper mechanic.

  The vehicles, he explained through crooked yellow teeth, were like us. Requisitioned. Taken in by the police to be used by the German army while superior machinery was assembled. The territory of the Reich was expanding quicker than its factories. We had been brought here to test the automobiles’ road-worthiness, lest their brakes fail and injure good Nazi soldiers, and generally bring the vehicles up to military specification. Anything that wasn’t safe got bumped down the line to be repaired. Those that were in good shape had to have a certificate issued before they were resprayed and camouflaged. The current batch had to be in Kaunas by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. That was the extent of my induction.

  The work alternated between the toxic and the excruciating. Dusan assigned me to the team converting petrol and diesel oil powered vehicles into natural gas powered ones, Hitler’s latest pet-project. I was the new ‘Sucker’. Nobody told me what had happened to my predecessor. My job was to siphon out the fuel-tanks into enormous barrels, and then drag them outsi
de while the engines were being replaced. Through a process of trial and error, I worked out how hard I needed to draw on the greasy tubes, but not before it had cost me two separated ribs from coughing up all the petrol I’d swallowed. Pulling the full barrels outside was hard enough, but with one hand keeping my rib-cage together, it became an endurance of Herculean proportions. There were five engines to convert inside the workshop, thirteen more lined up beyond the doors. If the Germans saw that I was incapacitated, I didn’t fancy my chances. The job didn’t strike me as coming with much of a medical benefits package.

  But compared to some, I had it easy. The fair-haired teenager with the hose-pipe was picking up some particularly unsavoury attention from the portly guard. All evening he’d been haranguing the boy for not washing the vehicles with enough ‘elbow grease’. This devolved into a slew of increasingly odd questions about the boy’s physique. Eventually, unhindered by either the other prisoners or his fellow soldiers inside the gambling den, from where he’d been banished, the guard roused himself, strolled over to the boy and demanded to see his muscles. Before the boy could respond, the soldier’s hands were all over his arms, pushing up his t-shirt and fondling his biceps. When the soldier returned smirking and sated to his seat, an erection was proudly tenting his trousers beneath his sagging stomach.

  But the most distressed person I saw that evening was not a prisoner. After nightfall, our labour was interrupted by a jaunty horn blast from outside. The soldiers weren’t expecting visitors, and came out their card den with guns drawn. Dusan and I were pushed out first, as a human shield. Climbing down from his mud-splattered Horch 108 was a lean and rangy SS officer with slick hair pushed back over his ears and a thin moustache. While his uniform was immaculate, the body inside was in a state of some disrepair: wild-eyed and drunk, he lurched across the courtyard, his athletic body a jangle of leaden limbs. Dusan and I were quickly pushed back inside, but we’d already seen the extent of the man’s dissolution. There followed much hearty hailing and war talk before the SS man was brought into the workshop. When he saw the wretched prisoners sweating over the vehicles, his face drained of all colour. He collapsed. The soldiers hefted him to his feet and hustled the man into the office, but we had all seen the impossible: those cold SS eyes brimming with tears.