Beach Music (86 page)

“Schmidt looks like an albino and is a notorious rapist. He would rape Ukrainian or Polish girls as soon as he would rape Jewish ones. There is only one difference. The Jewish girls he defiles as their parents listen in the next room, and then he shoots them. Some
of them are no more than children. Jews hide their daughters when word spreads that Schmidt is approaching the ghetto.

“Soon, you know that a Jewish life is worth less than nothing. This is the only sure thing in the ghetto. Starvation becomes the daily lot. The search for food becomes a desperate thing. The fourteen entrances of the ghetto are all guarded by Ukrainian police. Some of the Ukrainians are kind and they suffer the same horrors as the fate of the Jews they try to help. Low-life Jewish informers testify about the kindness of the Ukrainians and they are removed from these barriers, never to be seen again. The Ordnungsdienst wear a military-like uniform designed by their own members. They are Jewish police and they earn favors by acting as informants to the Gestapo. They are stooges of the Gestapo. But I must tell you they are no worse than I am. The ghetto is an abattoir and all of us are beasts marked for slaughter. The only way a Jew can prove his innocence in such a nightmare is to turn up dead. People begin to die of starvation and their bodies are stacked like firewood outside of apartment buildings. Envy of the dead is common.

“There are Jews worse off than other Jews. I watch the men in charge of removing fecal matter to the river. These are starved, horrible-looking men who pull the wagons as though they are broken-down horses. The work is degrading, agonizing. A smell hangs over them. Yet their work saves us all from epidemic. Most of them end up dying of typhus.

“Gisela is the name of Sonia’s mother. She is sweet and kind and beloved. But her husband, Saul Youngerman, drives her crazy by taking terrible chances. Saul bribes the Ukrainians and Jewish police. He finds ways to bribe even the Gestapo. He organizes a smuggling ring to bring food inside the ghetto. Even though he knows the consequences of his foolish acts, Saul Youngerman makes secret contact with the partisans who skirmish with German patrols in the countryside. A Jewish informant, a criminal by the name of Feldman, reports to the Gestapo that Saul has smuggled a gun into the ghetto. This is not true, but it is a death warrant for Saul Youngerman. His wife, Gisela, is taken to Gestapo Headquarters with him. Sonia and my sons would have been taken in also, but
they are out in the streets with Sonia looking for extra milk. I find them after a frantic search through the ghetto—standing in the sewers hiding.

“That same night I play the piano at Krüger’s house for dinner. He gives no sign that he knows my father-in-law is in his hands. Before I can summon up the words or the courage to ask about them, he dismisses me for the night. When Sonia discovers I have not even asked him about the fate of her parents, she turns her face from me. Again and again, she turns away as I try to explain myself.

“Other members of the Judenrat come to see me about the fate of Saul and Gisela. We agree to go as one body to the office of Krüger to find out where they are so that at least we will have strength in numbers. Dr. Isaac Weinberger leads our delegation as the head of the Judenrat. Even the Nazis respect him because he treats and cures some members of the Gestapo when they break some bones after their truck goes into a ditch. When we see Krüger in his office, he strikes Weinberger with a swagger stick and beats the poor man while the others plead with him. Screaming, he tells us that there will be a special
Aktion
for the Judenrat and our Jew families if we do not learn to respect his position. Then he comes up to me and screams that he knows I am behind this visit. So, he says, you wish to see your father-in-law? I do not speak because fear renders me mute. But I nod my head. He tells me that he knows what to do with swine, that his grandfather raises swine, and that swine always end up the same way. Then he takes me to the slaughterhouse outside the ghetto and takes me inside. Here is where the Gestapo have set up their jail and interrogation center. I hear people screaming and moaning, but I see no one. Krüger walks fast and I follow him. The smell of blood and offal is everywhere, but I cannot tell if it is human or animal. We come to a guard at the door. Are the Youngermans
up
for a visit? he asks the German guard in colloquial German that he thinks I cannot understand. The guard smirks and says yes, they are
up
for a visit from anyone. I walk into the darkness and Krüger lights a lamp. They have hung Saul Youngerman on a meat hook. The spike has pierced him through the shoulder blades. I do not recognize his face because it has been beaten so badly. But he is still alive and his swollen eyes are fixed on something across the
room. Following his eyes, I see Gisela hanging by her feet, naked, and eviscerated with a long slit from her throat to her pubic area. Her intestines hang out of her almost obscuring her face. Krüger walks out as I watch. I hear him vomit in the passageway.

“That night he has me play Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons
for him at dinner.

“Even though she asks over and over, I never tell Sonia what I have seen at the slaughterhouse. I tell her that her parents have been taken away on a convoy. Nor do I tell the other members of the Judenrat. I do not feel that I should add any more to the common fear. By then, all of us know that we are at the mercy of lunatics and butchers. Sonia tries to hearten herself by thinking that her parents have been sent to work camps. I encourage this kind of thinking. Despair is a daily bread and there is plenty enough to go around.

“In July, one more
Aktion
and another five hundred Jews are taken out to the slaughter. The Jewish fire brigade is brought out in the countryside and forced to dig a mass grave. Then the poor Jews have to strip naked so their clothes can be used to make uniforms for the Reich. One young Jewish man named Wolinski lunges at a Gestapo guard as he stands in line ready to face the machine guns. He has hidden a six-inch knife taped to his thigh. The knife goes into the throat of the Gestapo man, who, strangling on his own blood, runs after Wolinski and stabs him with a bayonet. It does not take long. Wolinski is half dead when he plays his own special rendition of ‘Taps’ for the Nazis. To honor Wolinski, the Germans round up another five hundred Jews the next day for annihilation. I know. Along with other members of the Judenrat, I stay up all night to see which Jewish names are placed on the list. Always, we choose the poorest and most helpless Jews among us. Always, we choose the Jews we do not know or who are not related to us.

“All my life I have been a fanatic about cleanliness. But forget about hygiene in the ghetto. Like any other Jew, I have to survive in a landscape of utter filth. At night, the rats are emperors of the dark and we hear them rattling the pots and pans and desperately looking for scraps of food. The best place for rats is by the cemetery where they can grow fat on what meat they find on the bones of starved Jews. The bedbugs are so bad and so numerous that often we must
rouse our children and go sleep out in the streets beneath the stars. In winter, we have no choice but to do war with the bedbugs, the roaches, and the lice. Water is precious. Even filthy it is precious. One night, an old Jew takes time to close his eyes and bless the piece of bread he is about to eat, when a rat leaps out of a closet and snatches the bread from the old Jew’s hands. The Jew goes berserk and kills the rat with his shoe, butchers it, and cooks it over an open fire, then devours it ravenously. A rabbi comes to him, not to chastise the old Jew for eating unkosher food, but to find out how the animal tastes. Such is the desperation of the Jews of Kironittska.

“A criminal named Berger is put in charge of the Ordnungsdienst after its first boss is shot down in the street by the Oberscharführer for not carrying out an order quickly enough. This Berger is built strong as a bull and is a common laborer carrying freight at the railroad station. He is a drunkard, a lout, and dumb as a goy, Jack, if you will excuse the expression. Jews like this Berger are sickening to other Jews, but they are circumcised according to the covenant so what is one to do? The Nazis don’t care if it’s an Einstein or a Horowitz once they find the mezuzah on the doorpost and the foreskin cut. Berger is armed with a club and a uniform and he loves to beat educated Jews into submission. Some fear him more than they fear the average German soldier.

“Some Jewish girls become whores for the Nazis or for anyone else who can feed them. If a German soldier sleeps with a Jewish girl, it is death for both of them because of the racial laws. But men will be men and women, women, and for food, one will do anything. Because I am a member of the Judenrat, we have more food than the others, so I do not worry as much.

“One day in the main street of the ghetto I am walking home from the factory after a day of reconditioning fur coats into warm uniforms for German soldiers on the Eastern Front. I am exhausted by the work and so little hope. I am walking slowly home, head down, trying to attract the attention of no one, which is the best method of survival always. A commotion is suddenly around me like a storm. Many shouts, people yelling and crying. I look up and two members of the Gestapo have caught two young Jewish boys smuggling food into the ghetto. One boy is ten and the other is nine.
They are brothers and they are crying as the soldiers slap their faces hard again and again. It is a square where they take these boys and there are nooses hanging from a scaffold where they hang Jews and Poles and Ukrainians who displease the Nazis. The Nazis love to hang people to make examples to others. Krüger drives up at this very moment in a jeep.

“Both boys are crying hard as they are forced toward the scaffold, but since they are obviously just boys I think that they will be all right. They have been trying to smuggle tins of fish and a bottle of vodka into the ghetto, things that now fetch an unbelievable price. Like a charade, the boys are lifted up on stools and their hands are tied behind their backs and nooses are put around their necks. The scene is so ghastly and I hear Jews moaning because they know it will do no good to lift their voices in protest. I myself feel like I am walking through some unimaginable landscape that would make sense only if I am in a nightmare. I cannot take my eyes off the boys, who under ordinary circumstances would be playing soccer in some school yard. Then I hear my name being called and it is Krüger who sees me and orders me to come out of the crowd that has gathered. They are only boys I say with my head bowed and he strikes me with a riding crop on the face and I taste blood in my mouth. Then there is another outbreak of noise and a man fights his way to the front of the crowd. It is Berger, the pompous ruffian who leads the Ordnungsdienst. He cries out, ‘These are my sons. The sons of your obedient servant Berger, who will punish these sons within an inch of their lives. I so swear to my Maker.’

“ ‘These are not boys or sons,’ Krüger says to the crowd. ‘These are enemies of the Reich who must be punished by the harshest measures.’ Krüger reaches up and he makes sure that the nooses are tight. Both boys begin screaming for their father, who tries to fight his way to them but is felled by a blow to the back of the head from a rifle butt. But Berger is oxlike and maddened with fear and the screams of his sons bring him staggering to his feet as he calls out to his boys not to worry. In Yiddish, he keeps telling his sons that Yahweh will protect them. But Yahweh is taking a long vacation, far away from his chosen people in those years. He was not in Eastern Europe, Jack, of that I am certain.

“Again, I hear my name called out by Krüger. He says it softly, in an almost friendly way, so the crowd does not hear. ‘You are a member of the Judenrat, a leader of your people,’ he whispers to me. ‘Let me see you make the hard decisions, perform the action that wartime requires of all the servants of the Reich. For so long Jews have been parasites and leeches. You perform an act that will help rid the Reich of such vermin. You hang those two pieces of shit, piano player.’

“Berger begins pleading for his children’s lives and I hear German soldiers trying to beat him into silence, but he is strong and like an animal. He is clawing his way forward until restrained by three members of the Gestapo who appear from nowhere. Then Krüger says to me—and these are the words that change something in me, Jack—he says, ‘If you do not hang them now, I will hang your pretty Sonia and all your pretty children on these same gallows tomorrow.’ With these words, I do not hesitate to act for a second. I walk up to those boys and with their father watching me in hatred I kick those stools from under those boys. Krüger holds my neck as I try to turn away. He makes me watch the boys twitch and struggle and die in agony. It takes much longer for the younger boy to die than it does for the older one.

“Berger howls out in pain and I think I have never heard pain like that. It is so pure. They drag him off and I later hear that they take him to Gestapo Headquarters. Only the whores come back from there alive. When I get home, I tell my Sonia what I have done and she holds me tightly and kisses my face again and again. She tells me not to worry or to suffer, that we are being tested as Jews, and we will survive as Jews, and that we will show them all that we come from people who have been persecuted for three thousand years. They can do anything to our bodies, she tells me, kissing me, holding me tight to her breast, they can starve us and torture us and slaughter us by the tens of thousands, but our souls remain our own. ‘They cannot rob us, my husband, of who we truly are.’ Sonia was right about herself. She was wrong about George Fox.

“That night Krüger asks me to play something by Haydn and I play something instead by Telemann and the poor idiot has no idea of my deception. It is no sin not to have culture. It is a sin to
pretend. That night as I play Telemann I pretend that I am playing before a royal audience in London and that I play so brilliantly that even the taciturn British rise to give me a standing ovation. I even pretend that on this day I have not participated in the hanging of two innocent Jewish boys. Their blood is on my hands as I play Telemann.