Exile: a novel (9 page)

Harold surely knew his daughter, David thought. Fondly, he regarded the man, two years ago a stranger, who had become so central to his life.

At seventy-six, Harold Shorr had a high forehead, receding iron-gray hair, a full mouth and strong chin, and deep-set brown eyes beneath eye-brows that arched to punctuate his remarks. He was stocky but not fat, with shoulders that seemed hunched to bear weight, or resist pressure. On his face, watchful and expressive, often played a faint smile that, to David, betrayed a hint of melancholy.

There was also a shyness that, David thought, bespoke a deeper reticence. Part was a lack of education mixed with an immigrant’s sense that his speech was halting and inelegant—even though Harold’s vocabulary was apt and his command of American vernacular keen and flavored with humor. Far deeper was his fear of calling too much attention to himself, imprinted a time long ago, when to be invisible might be to live another day. That Harold had raised so accomplished and confident a daughter was, to him, a constant source of pride and wonder.

So the Shorrs’ smiles conveyed that they were part of each other’s journey in a way few families could grasp. Watching, David was aware of a bond that belonged to them alone. Its depth came from something within Harold that he had never expressed to David—in this particular, as in others, Carole had spoken for her father, fulfilling her imperative that David comprehend them both.

Carole was four, she had told David, when she had first recited the numbers on his wrist.

They were sitting at the breakfast table.
Eight,
she said with a child’s precocity and pride,
three, five, seven, one.
Encouragingly, Harold recited the numbers with her.

Her mother had turned away.

Though she did not know why, from early childhood Carole sensed that the numbers held a mystical power.

Her parents never spoke of this. But she knew that the adults who gathered in their home often wore such numbers, and no one else did. Perhaps, Carole reasoned, only people not born in America had numbers. But those same people sometimes switched from English to Yiddish when Carole was present, speaking in somber voices about something they did not wish her to know. When she saw her classmates’ grandparents, she realized that there was no one old in the lives of those with numbers. Then a family friend
carelessly left an album in her parents’ living room—opening it, Carole found the photograph of a bearded man hanging from a gallows in a public square, surrounded by men in uniforms who gazed up at him, indifferent or even satisfied. And she began to wonder what the absence of grandparents had to do with speaking Yiddish, and why her parents never spoke of being children.

These questions came more swiftly. After temple one day, walking her to the corner store for candy, her father shrank back from a neighbor’s tethered dog; though he tried to laugh about it, Carole realized that Harold, who admitted no fear, feared dogs in a way she did not grasp. Then came the unseasonably warm day when her father decided to take Carole and her friend to Baker Beach.

She had never seen her father in a swimsuit. When he peeled off the running suit and exposed his torso, Carole saw to her horror that his chest and arms and legs were crosshatched with raised white scars. Though her friend Arlene seemed not to notice, Carole was bewildered and ashamed.

That night Carole pointed to the tattooed numbers. “Can you take them off?” she asked.

Harold’s expression combined melancholy and faint reproach. “And make another scar?” he asked gently. “As you saw today, I already have scars enough.”

Now Carole was quite certain—something terrible had happened that her father would not tell her.

It was Carole’s mother who broke the silence.

Rachel Shorr was not like other mothers. It was more than just her accent. It was the way Carole’s father looked after Rachel; the way she feared leaving the house without him; the way she avoided speaking to mothers who were not Jewish. To know that the world frightened her own mother troubled Carole still more.

One night when she was seven, Carole and her parents went shopping just before Hanukkah. They walked through Union Square; though Carole knew little about Christmas, the bright lights strung on trees and lamp-posts entranced her. Turning to her mother, she saw Rachel’s lips trembling, heard her speaking to Harold in Yiddish.

Harold put his arm around her shoulder. “We’ll go,” he told her quietly.

Her father drove them home; her mother would not drive. From the back seat Carole asked, “What’s wrong?”

She did not expect an answer. To her surprise, her mother almost whispered, “It was the Nazis.”

The word seemed to carry the totemic power of the numbers. “We still were in the Warsaw ghetto,” Rachel continued softly. “My older cousin Lillian and I sneaked out of our old neighborhood, scavenging for food to fill our stomachs. But the streets were too bright—it was all the lights from the gentiles’ Christmas parties, the lights on their trees. When we ran away, the Nazis caught Lillian in an alley.

“The day before was her eleventh birthday. I never saw her again.”

In the darkness of the back seat, Carole understood that the Nazis had killed her mother’s cousin. And then her mother said, “If Israel ceases to exist, Jews will perish.”

That night Carole could not sleep.

She knew that Israel was the homeland of the Jews. She remembered the teacher at Hebrew school collecting money so they could plant a tree in Israel. She envisioned the Israel she’d seen in pictures, a place of blossoming deserts, purposeful men and women. But she had not known that Israel was linked to her own fate.

If Israel ceases to exist,
her mother had said,
Jews will perish.
At some point during that long, sleepless night, Carole decided that she must not let this happen.

When she was twelve, Carole got her teacher’s permission to write a report on the Holocaust.

After dinner she told her father. “Will you help me?” Carole pled.

Harold shook his head. “Why?” he asked. “You know how to use the library. You read faster and better than I can. You’re much too old for such help.”

The answer was so unlike him that Carole fought back tears.

Harold looked down, shame-faced. “I know what you’re asking,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Perhaps, someday, I will learn to write it down for you.”

A few weeks later, Harold enrolled at San Francisco State, to take a course in writing.

One night, Harold began writing in his study. Carole saw him emerge gripping a spiral notebook, his face pale and abstracted. He barely seemed to notice her, said nothing about this new pursuit. Only later did she hear him sobbing in the bedroom he shared with her mother.

Still Harold kept on writing.

On the first day he let Carole read what he had written, the door closed to her own room, she wept for all of them.

David Wolfe was the only other person who had read it.

Even a half century after the events Harold Shorr had described, so simply that their horror spoke for itself, David found them as difficult to imagine as to read.

Harold was eleven years old when the German army came to the Polish village of his birth. For many Poles, it hardly seemed an invasion. Sometimes Harold could barely distinguish between the soldiers and his Polish neighbors—both were in the cheering, laughing audience the night the soldiers rounded up the Jews for a “comedy show,” forcing the rabbi to slaughter a pig, his wife and children to canter and neigh like horses. Yet when a half-mad teenager, wild-eyed and famished, sought refuge with their neighbors, Harold’s father would not believe his story about the Germans forcing him to bury his parents alive.

On Yom Kippur in 1942, three soldiers from the SS broke into their home. In front of his terrified wife and children, the Germans held a gun to their father’s head. Then they herded the family to the cobblestoned square at the center of the village. More angry then frightened, Harold wondered what sport would highlight the latest “comedy show,” and what role the Nazis had reserved for Isaac Shorr.

At the center of the square was a gallows.

The man whose picture you saw in the album,
Harold wrote,
was your grandfather. No one dared cut him down.

They packed Harold in a cattle car with his mother, brother, and sisters. His sister Miriam was forced to shit in a bucket, weeping with shame, as others turned their faces. But by the time they stopped for good, the stench that stayed in Harold’s nostrils came from their rabbi, dead of a heart attack.

Huddled with his family and their neighbors beside the tracks, Harold blinked in the sunlight.

A German officer with a death’s-head insignia on his visored cap directed each Jew into one of two lines, left or right. Looking about him, Harold saw at once that, though hungry, he and eleven-year-old Yakov were sturdier than many. Languidly appraising them, the officer pointed his mother and sisters to the left, Harold and Yakov to a section called “Quarantine.” There, as Harold flinched with pain, a smirking corporal tattooed a number on his wrist.

Comparing their tattoos in a daze, Harold and Yakov found themselves standing outside in a barbed-wire compound with other men and boys, some of whom had been there longer. “If we’re to be with our mother and sisters,” Yakov murmured, “why do they separate us?”

Nearby, a prisoner laughed harshly, then pointed to a distant section of the camp, where black smoke issued from the chimney of a nondescript building.

“See that smoke?” the man said. “That’s your mother and sisters. In time, the Jewish people will be nothing but smoke and ash, until there is no one left to say prayers for our dead.”

Harold was too stunned to pray, or even to weep. Mute, he held Yakov in his arms.

They put us in the coal mines,
his diary continued.
In the mines I learned the names of men who died, and then the men who came after, and died after that—like generations of the dead whose lifespan was measured in nine months. But Yakov and I lived on.

There was only one reason: I had a second job at night, cleaning the kitchen for the Germans. From this place I stole bread, for Yakov and for me.

I did not share it with the others. The shame still burns inside me. I watched as others died in our miserable barracks, stacked with corpses-in-waiting.

One night the living ate the dead.

It was several days before David continued reading.

You wonder why I fear dogs,
Harold had written.
Let me explain.

I tried not to steal too much bread. I was too afraid the Germans would notice, and that Yakov and I would die in the mines. So I stole just enough to keep us living one month more, then another.

But Yakov was dying as I watched. His eyes sunk in his head, his body bent like an old man’s. One day in the mines he fell to his knees, sobbing. I pulled him up before the Germans saw this, and felt how light he was.

I loved Yakov. I loved him for himself—sweet-natured and unquestioning—a boy who followed his older brother like a puppy. And I loved him because he was all I had of my father, mother, and sisters, the only sign outside myself to say that they were real. I could not let him die.

The Germans caught me stealing an entire loaf of bread.

It was night. They took us out in the prison yard—Yakov and me. Then they made a circle of soldiers with their snarling dogs on leashes, and turned the flashlights on us.

It was cold, and Yakov was trembling worse than I was, sobbing like the frightened child he still was. The Germans saw the spots of pee on the pants of his uniform and started laughing at him.

One of the guards spoke in German and then the dogs came for us.

I jumped on top of Yakov, to protect him. But there were too many dogs. Their teeth ripped through our ragged uniforms and tore at my chest and
arms and legs. While I fought them, I could hear Yakov screaming beneath the pack of dogs, which were tearing him apart.

The soldiers saved me so I could watch my brother die. I can never forget Yakov screaming until he was a carcass without a face, and they made me clean him up.

After that, death was all I had to wish for.

Instead, the Germans ran away.

Harold was too weary to wonder why. He did not know what year it was; he knew nothing about the war. He knew only that his tormentors had fled.

The surviving Jews huddled in the camp. One man with a will to live led them into the woods. When the Americans found them, Harold was delirious.

The Spam they fed him gave him diarrhea. He could no longer eat normal food; in the hospital they forced him to wear diapers. For days he could not speak.

When Harold awakened from his long twilight, he was put in a camp for displaced persons. He could never return to Poland. He had no family, no country, no past to resurrect or future he could imagine. His only identity was a number, his inner landscape a gift from Adolf Hitler. He had seen the worst that men could do.