Beach Music (85 page)

“Though we do not know this, my Sonia is pregnant with our third child when we arrive in Kironittska. But the child does not know the world it is coming into and continues to grow inside her. Though we are sick with worry about our loved ones in Poland, we are thankful that we have escaped. My third son, Jonathan, is born in June. If I could have seen the future, I would have beaten Jonathan’s brains out on a rock beside the river. I would have fed rat poison to my twins, to Sonia, then myself.

“In June 1941, the Germans declare war on the Soviet Union. On June 22, there is the first massive air strike on the civilian population of Kironittska. Three weeks later, after being occupied by Hungarian troops for a brief period, I hear spoken in the streets the four most fearful words I ever heard: the Germans are here.

“The Germans are here. At this very instant, things change for the Jews. Because the Soviet Union is an ally of Germany we have relaxed our guard and consider ourselves safe. Rumors have come to us from Warsaw and then parts of Poland about the fate of Jews, but we discount them. After all, the Germans are human as we are. That
year, I begin to go to the synagogue for morning prayers. And then one day the Germans burn the synagogue to the ground, with one hundred Jews inside it. If Sonia had not been sick that morning, I would have perished along with the rest. I consider those Jews that burned to death that morning to be the lucky ones.

“And then the Gestapo comes, inhuman, but handsome in a way that makes your blood run cold. The genius of the Gestapo is in their pride that they have graduated far beyond mercy. You cannot appeal to them on a human level because they are superhuman. A Ukrainian businessman owns the largest mansion in the city and this house is taken over by the Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Krüger for his headquarters. Kuzak is the name of the businessman and he protests that his family is one of the most distinguished in the Ukraine and that he demands the respect the name Kuzak merits in the city. Krüger obliges and hangs poor Kuzak from a timber protruding from his own house. The body is allowed to hang there for weeks as a sign to the citizens of Kironittska. Not until it begins to smell does Krüger order it cut down and thrown into a sewer.

“Of course, the Germans incur many unfortunate and necessary expenses in their war against the Jews. They are forced to levy heavy taxes on the Jewish population. They enlist the help of the Ukrainians in this. If the Ukrainians ever live down this ugly chapter of their history, then it means that God was asleep for the whole war. Instead of wearing the usual yellow armband, the Jews of Kironittska are required to wear a white one with a blue Jewish star that measures ten centimeters wide. Those Jews deliver all gold and silver articles to the offices of the Judenrat. My wedding ring and Sonia’s are lost in this order. All electrical appliances and shoe leather are gathered up. All German books are confiscated. We are in the hands of criminals, murderers, and thieves. God’s chosen people.

“Some poor misguided Jews hear that if they convert to Christianity they will be spared the horrible fate of their compatriots. One Friday there is a mass baptism where twenty entire Jewish families, with but a few exceptions among older members, are baptized. The Gestapo has a baptismal present ready and waiting for these new Gentiles. They are marched into the Christian cemetery and gunned down with machine gun fire. Children and women no exception.
Later a member of the Judenrat, when he had gotten to know Krüger somewhat better, asks him why. Krüger makes it a joke. He says, ‘If you take a pig inside a cathedral, you still have ham and bacon and the cathedral has not changed at all.’ That member of the Judenrat is me.

“Judenrat. You do not know the word, Jack. It is my shame that I live with it. I have never admitted to anyone that I held such a position until this night when I tell you everything.

“Krüger selects a committee of Jews to administrate the Jewish affairs of this new ghetto. Failure to join means swift and certain death. By joining, it means I get to collaborate with the Germans in the torture and destruction of my own people. When the Germans need a work brigade to repair a bridge, a list of Jews is turned over to Krüger by the Judenrat. Whenever the Germans decide to reduce the size of the ghetto during an
Aktion
, we decide which Jews will be rounded up in the ghetto’s main plaza, loaded on trucks, and driven away never to be seen again. By doing this, I think I am saving the lives of Sonia and my boys. And I am. But saving them for what?

“The leader of the Judenrat is a surgeon named Isaac Weinberger. He is a contemplative, patient man who assumes that the Nazis can be reasoned with like all other men. He is the one who insists that my father-in-law, Saul Youngerman, be in the Judenrat. Immediately, Saul sees all the dangers inherent in such a position, but also sees the wisdom in serving with such a group for the sake of his family. It is Saul who insists on my participation. Very early he scares me by telling me in confidence that the Nazis plan to kill every Jew on the face of the earth. I laugh when he tells me this. I tell him that wartime brings out in each man the capacity for the grossest exaggeration. Taking off his glasses and wiping them, Saul tells me that he has always admired my genius, but that it does not protect me from thinking like a fool. We are in our quarters in the ghetto, my children are playing around us and my wife and mother-in-law are gossiping at the stove while fixing dinner. ‘They are all corpses,’ Saul Youngerman whispers to me. ‘They are all corpses.’

“On 30 August, the Judenrat is required to provide the Germans with a list of all the Jewish intellectuals. In this list are 270 teachers,
34 pharmacists, 126 physicians, 35 engineers. I am also included in this list as a musician. The next day, one hundred men are selected from this list. They assemble together at daybreak, mount trucks, wave good-bye to their weeping families, and disappear from the face of the earth. Except for one man.

“His name is Lauber and he is one of the thirty-four pharmacists on the list. He comes back to the ghetto, at night, sneaking in as though this is deliverance. What he longs for is the comforting arms of his wife and the sounds of his children’s voices. This he finds. He tells his story to the other wives whose husbands left in those trucks. They are driven fifty kilometers to a bean field where they are given shovels and ordered to dig. They dig a great hole, then strip naked, and kneel beside their handiwork. Then the machine guns of the Nazis relieve them of the burdens of this war. The chosen people return to the God who chose them.

“No one believes this man Lauber. The Gestapo discovers him. They take him, his wife, his children, his parents, and two other families in his house to the Jewish cemetery where all of them are shot. Only then does poor Lauber not look like a liar. Lauber’s wife dies screaming at him that he should not have come back.

“Hauptsturmführer Krüger is a cruel Philistine and a pig who tries to assume airs of breeding and sophistication that he has not earned. To Dr. Weinberger he talks of his love of Wagner, yet cannot name one of the arias he loves to whistle. Weinberger tells him about me and I am ordered to play the piano for a group of a German war staff who are on their way forward to the front lines. While they eat I play and I listen to the Germans talk about the war effort and their many successes on the Russian front. They talk like normal men until they get drunk when they begin to talk like Nazi soldiers. At this feast, they consume more meat than the Jews of the ghetto have seen since the walls of the ghetto went up. Then they go to the library for cigars and cognac. All except one officer, who comes beside the piano and listens to me play. ‘You still play like an angel. Even in times like this.’ I look up and see my friend Heinrich Baumann. He sits down beside me on the bench and we take turns playing music for each other. He plays Mozart and I answer him with Chopin. As we play, Baumann asks about my situation and that
of my family. He tells me that I have much to worry about because I am a Jew. After that dinner, he drives me to my house in the ghetto in his jeep. Soldiers salute him. He is a fighting man, not SS. At my home, he comes in and meets Sonia and kisses my children in their sleep. He bows when he meets Saul Youngerman and my mother-in-law. In a sack, he leaves a wonderful supply of flour and cans of meat and sacks of cornmeal. When he leaves, Herr Baumann kisses me and apologizes for the entire German nation. We are still part of the brotherhood of music, he tells me. He is killed leading his men against the Soviet troops at Stalingrad.

“A good German? No. Herr Baumann fought for Hitler’s armies. At best, he was a member of the Judenrat like me. There are few Germans who could not forgive my participation in the Judenrat. They know me. I am one of them in some profound way that ties us together in all our sad humanity. We dance with the enemy and let him lead.

“Do you think you could throw your daughter Leah into a crematorium, Jack? Of course you do not. Your love for her is too great, correct? Let me starve you for a year. Let me beat you into submission. Let me kill everyone you love around you and work you until you drop. Let me humiliate you and fill your hair with lice and your bread with maggots. Let me test you to the limit and find out where civilization ends and depravity begins along the edges of your soul. Here’s what they did to me, Jack. At the end of the war, I could have thrown the Messiah himself into the fires of the crematorium and I would have done it for an extra cup of soup. I could throw Ruth, Shyla, Martha, Sonia, my sons, Leah, and everyone else into those fires and never think of it again. Here is the trick, Jack. You have to break a man down completely and then you own him. Let me break you like they broke me and I promise you would throw Leah into a fire, hang her by her neck, see her raped by a hundred men, then have her throat cut, and her bodily parts thrown to starving dogs in the street. I upset you. I am sorry. I tell you what I know. But know this: it is possible for you to kill Leah with your own hands because the world has come apart and God has hidden his face in his hands and you will think, by killing her, you are proving your love of Leah like never before. I would kill Leah,
myself, tonight, before I would let her go through what I did, Jack. And I love your daughter more than I love any person on this earth.

“No, she does not remind me of the sons I mourn. Nor does she remind me of Shyla. She is much calmer and more composed than Shyla ever was. No, your Leah strikes me in a place I thought was dead. She reminds me of Sonia, my sweet, lost wife.

“Krüger seems to grow fond of me and it agrees with his pretensions about himself and his culture to have me play the piano while he dines. He gets drunk easily and he cries. His only son, Wilhelm, comes back from the Russian front to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. Both father and son get drunk and they make me play German folk songs over and over. Then they chase me out when two Ukrainian whores arrive for their appointment. The next day, ten Jewish young men are selected and driven fifteen kilometers to a field leading to a river. These Jews are told they can make a run for the river and if they reach the water they will be free men. Krüger and his son are in the middle of the field fifty meters away with high-powered hunting rifles. As the Jews run, father and son take turns shooting down the running Jews. They are excellent marksmen. No matter how they dodge or how fast they run, no Jew makes it to the river. Krüger tells me the story later one evening when he demands that I play nothing but Haydn.

“An old Orthodox rabbi named Nebenstall is caught praying and is publicly humiliated by the Gestapo. They make him spit on the sacred Torah until he can no longer spit. Then they make him urinate on the Torah. Then they want him to shit on the Torah, which he cannot do because he has not eaten. They bring him bread. Loaf after loaf, they stuff down his throat. But they are too vigorous in making him eat bread and they strangle him on the bread and leave him in the street. Jews fight over the bread they leave sticking out of the mouth of the dead rabbi. Another rabbi retrieves the defiled Torah and buries it with great solemnity and secrecy in the Jewish cemetery.

“In October the Judenrat is required by Krüger to make another selection, this time of one thousand Jews. The ghetto is shrinking still again. We choose the lowest Jews among us, the poorest and the most despised; the sick and the hungry are easy targets, and so are
the very old who have produced no families of distinction. We protect our families and those of our friends. Each time we waltz with the enemy, we cheapen and degrade ourselves. After the selection is over and the trucks depart, the Nazis give us extra food for our families. For a loaf of extra bread, we sell the children of Israel into something far worse than slavery.

“My father-in-law takes me almost by force to his factory one day. The head of his clothing factory has followed the Russians out of the city and Saul has to take over its operation. It is a clothing factory that the Germans turn into an operation for the making of winter coats for the military. Saul puts me next to a master tailor and orders the man to teach me to sew a coat. I am furious and scream at him that I am a pianist and that this is a place where peasants work. Saul grabs me and shakes me. He is old but strong. Learn how to sew, he screams at me. Learn how to do something the Germans can use. That they need. So the master tailor shows me how to sew along a seam. He makes me do it until I do it right. There is a whole different set of things to know about zippers and collars. Saul comes by to check on me and we argue again. But he makes me come each day. I sew when I should be practicing scales. I sew when I should be mastering the great composers. I sew and I hate my father-in-law. I tell you now, over forty years later, that this man I hate, Saul Youngerman, wants to save my life by teaching me to be a tailor. The Nazis would have sent Beethoven himself to the gas chamber, unless he could have sewn a shirt for a soldier on the Eastern Front. He made me a musician
and
a tailor.

“A young Gestapo man named Schmidt causes great fear among the Jews. He has a habit of slapping down Jewish men in the street when he passes them by. Schmidt loves it because some of the older men begin falling to their knees at the sight of him. Once, I see this with my own eyes. Schmidt is walking down a street in the ghetto and every man is kneeling before him. I am one of those men.