City of God (21 page)

Alone with Pem at our dinner following, I said I thought the two of them were beginning to look like they belonged together. “Really?” he said. “Really? Tell me what you see, how you can tell!” His face became more florid than usual. I couldn't have said anything to make him happier. Then after another glass or two of wine, the gloom set in. “She'll never have me,” he said. “The boys don't take to me.”

“How do you know?”

“I bring them games, toys, I play with them, I get down on the floor. They see me for what I am—not their father.”

“I didn't know things had gone so far.”

“What is ‘so far'? She had to take Angelina down to the INS about something. So I sat with them. What is ‘so far'? You ever been cut by kids? Getting down on the floor like an idiot while they watch television as if you're not there? I thought I had lived through all the possible humiliations. I thought maybe delivering a sermon to three people was as low as it got.”

—You asked about this and asked and asked all through the years of your growing up, and I never wanted to tell you, first because you were too young, and I always wanted you to have your own life, and for it not to be a haunted life, however foolish that father's desire might have been. . . and, second, in recent years for an entirely different reason, which is that I wanted to reclaim the diary, Mr. Barbanel's archive, I wanted to find it and let it speak for me.

But plans give way to life. And here I am saying what I can, after all.. . . There came a time when nothing in particular had changed but our spirits had inexplicably darkened and a foreboding of total disaster drifted through our ghetto. A weariness had come over us, a weakening of our belief that we would survive. Our creed—to outlast, to prevail—seemed somehow less tenable. The suspense of the Germans' impassive treachery was more acute, because they were now on their way to losing their war. I know that sounds paradoxical. But the eastern front was collapsing, moving back in our direction, and they no longer had license to do their murdering with impunity. Work details had been assigned to the fort. We were not supposed to know what was going on, but we learned that the graves were being dug up and the remains were being burned. Sometimes when the wind came from the west, I thought I could smell what was happening. And of course the workers assigned to the fort were never seen again.

The freedom we had been living for, surviving for, now itself seemed a dangerous prospect. If the dead were evidence of their criminality, were not the living?

Then, one night, we received a clandestine visit from a delegation of Jewish partisans. The meeting took place in a cabin used to store paint supplies, sand bins, carpentry tools, and so on. It was not even one block from the perimeter. Somehow I had learned of the meeting, and Barbanel thought it would be safer if I was present, as a way of using the solemnity of the occasion to seal my lips. We sat and waited and then finally in the stillness of early morning, after I had nodded off several times, there came the signal, the soft taps, once, and then again. A desk was moved, and from a trapdoor underneath they rose into the room, bringing the cold and the darkness they had come from: three of them, two men and a woman. It was like birth, I had seen a baby born some weeks before and it was like that, first the head, then the shoulders. But then the rifle.

They waved off any assistance, by turns hoisting themselves into sitting position on the floor and then standing and facing us. Their faces and hands were blackened with dirt. Their rifles were like the ones the guards on the bridge carried, and this was thrilling to me, because I knew each rifle had to have been taken from a German. At the same time, I was frightened. These were the people who looked for help from no one, who prayed to no one. Every gesture was disdainful. Their eyes were cold, impatient, even the woman's.

They were children, the partisans. If I could perceive that at all at my age, then possibly I saw our connection insofar as the woman was such a slight, slim creature, with eyes past all grief. When she caught sight of me, I read in her face the compassion of an older sister, a momentary betrayal of her hardened mien, perhaps the unwitting disclosure of worry for a child, in this place, under the direction of old men. For it was a generational matter after all, the two men with her couldn't have been more than twenty or twenty-one, adults in my eyes, men with height and strength and dark beards, though of the scraggly young man's type, and thick black hair, and the one, the leader, with round-rimmed glasses that gave him, incongruously, a yeshiva bocher's appearance, and the other with a broad Slavic face and wide shoulders, the sort of oaf I would have stayed away from in the old days at school.

Without precisely knowing why from my impression of them, they were not as I had expected, they were not like my parents, their spirit was of a different order, and as I watched and listened, I understood
what I of course had always known, that my mother and father had never been among them.

Nobody knew these three except Dr. Koenig, whose practice before the war had taken him everywhere in the district. Possibly he had delivered at least one of them, the young man who spoke for them, Benno, on whose eyeglasses the candles shone when he averted his head and allowed the doctor to grasp his shoulders in greeting. “Look, how strong!” Dr. Koenig whispered, in the first and last of the amenities of the evening.

The other two had taken up positions by the windows, where they peeked through the drawn sack curtains before turning to face the room. The one called Benno sat on a table and, holding his rifle loosely across his knees, he addressed us in a hushed, fluent Yiddish, a sound to me like a brook running over rocks. The Russian army was within a hundred twenty miles. As the front moves west, he said, your ghetto will be dismantled and you with it, he said. You will dig the graves you will lie in. It is just a matter of time.

Perhaps that is so. But already they are trying to destroy evidence of their murders, Dr. Koenig said. They are frightened of criminal prosecution after the war.

You are deluding yourself. If they don't slaughter you here, they will move you somewhere else and slaughter you.

The partisans were proposing to take people out—as many who wanted to come. They could move thirty or forty a night, Benno said. Three partisan units, one Jewish, two Russian, held militarily secure areas behind German lines. His group consisted of a hundred and fifty armed Jewish men and women and another two hundred people whom they took care of.

The third council member who was present was Rabbi Pomeranz, a very thin, slight, middle-aged man who wore an old battered homburg and whose beard had turned white. He sat in a chair against the wall and held a siddur closed on his lap, but with his finger keeping the place. And he was silently davening while attending to the matters at hand, his head nodding and his lips moving as he uttered to himself the prayers he knew without the book, but his eyes on the partisan who spoke.

The rabbi said: Perhaps the partisans didn't know the German policy regarding escape—people were executed who were caught trying.

Well, Rabbi, Benno said, look at me, we're here talking to you, aren't we? Do you suppose we just might know what we're doing?

Benno's partisans camped in the forests. For food, they requisitioned livestock and produce from the farms. In the villages with German garrisons, they attacked and destroyed them and then paid the tradesmen for sugar, flour, and other necessities from the German cashboxes. They could move about freely in the countryside because of their reputation, which they had earned by taking revenge on those people who reported them to the Germans, coming back and executing them and burning down their homes and barns, so that now that didn't happen anymore. Their attack squads performed acts of sabotage, blowing up railroad tracks, cutting phone lines. They ambushed the military who came out to undo the damage.

All well and good and may God grant that your work continue, the rabbi said. But the winter was coming. Could older people stand that life, under such hardship, living in the open?

If they can't, they will at least die free, Benno said.

Dr. Koenig said he was concerned about what would happen to those who chose to remain—once the Germans began to miss their workers they would retaliate, in their fashion, by taking hostages and executing them.

Benno answered that they would do that anyway as the Jewish resistance moved closer to the city and the garrison here began to feel its sting.

This is not an easy decision, Koenig told them. Many of these people are from the city. They would not know what to do out there with you. Here they get their few calories and survive another day.

You think we're just giving you problems, don't you, Benno said. You've lived as slaves so long you don't know anything else.

Barbanel, who had not said a word before this, jumped up and grabbed the young man by the collar. That is contemptible, he said. Show some respect. We have fought as hard as you. You don't know shit about us.

Benno shook off his hand and signaled the others. Their message had been delivered. They prepared to leave.

Regardless of what you think, the young woman said to Barbanel, you have the moral duty to inform people that we will lead them out. You cannot choose for them. Even this boy here. We have children
with us now who are capable of firing weapons. People must choose for themselves. But if you impose your authority in this matter, you are as bad as the Nazis.

Oh my Sarah, I remember these words as if they were uttered yesterday. They opened the trapdoor. The thickset one who had said nothing and the woman descended and disappeared. Before following them, Benno took Dr. Koenig aside and, I assume, instructed him on how to make further contact. And before lowering himself through the trapdoor he addressed Rabbi Pomeranz: Since your prayers are so effective and have already done so much good, you, I expect, will choose to remain and pray to the Lord your God to save your people.

When he had gone and the desk was back in place, the rabbi stood and set his battered homburg firmly on his head as he prepared to go out. That's not why I pray to the Lord, blessed be His name, he said to no one in particular. I pray to bring Him into being.

Of course once the council met in full, it decided it had no other choice than to inform people there was now a means of escape from the ghetto. But the news could be disseminated only in the most secure manner, not only because of the obvious danger of the Germans themselves, but because of the spies the Germans installed among us, pretend Jews, or simple betrayers, as some of the ghetto police had become. So the procedure was painstaking, one by one, beginning with the people the council members knew personally. It was characteristic. Perhaps if it had not been so painstaking, more people could have been freed. But I had this new assignment, the star runner in his garrison cap finding the selected people at the hours they were available and summoning them, in secrecy, to the council offices. And in due course the underground railroad, if I may call it that, was put into place. The partisans had very easily infiltrated the city. As that Benno fellow had said, they really knew what they were doing. It was surprisingly effective. I'm not sure how it was done, what the actual means of escape was. Perhaps it changed from night to night. I think as many as two hundred fifty people got out before it all ended.

The council had given priority to those most fit to endure the difficulties of living in the open. And when people left, their registration and work cards were bestowed upon people of the same age and gender who didn't have them. In this way, it hoped to keep the Germans from realizing that our numbers were decreasing.

Barbanel spoke one night to all of us boys in our dormitory. Neither I nor anyone else can tell you what to do, he said. To stay here or to go. We don't know which is better or which is worse. All I can tell you is to decide for yourself. Circumstances have turned you into adults while you are still children. You have the responsibility finally for your own life.

As it turned out, of the six boys only two chose to go to the forest with the partisans. I would assume they guessed right. For myself, I realized that on all my secret trips into the city, it had never once occurred to me not to return to the ghetto. I could probably have hidden away, perhaps with the help of that priest, found some family that would take me in and spare me the fate of a Jewish child. Never had I entertained this idea. I noted too that Dr. Koenig himself could not go, for obvious reasons. This was true of course for Barbanel as well. The council had to stay in place and keep the ghetto running. And just as they could not consider leaving, neither would Greta Margolin. She would not leave Barbanel, to say nothing of the little children. The really small ones, she could not trust to the partisan wilds. And I, ambitious as I was to learn to fire a rifle, to kill Germans, to be like the partisan heroes. . . would not leave the lingering sense of my dead mother's sweet nature, something like Miss Margolin's as well as I could remember, or the fleeting sensations of my dead father, who, I decided, had something of the rough, exuberant courage for life of Josef Barbanel.