If I Should Die Before I Wake (11 page)

"Look, okay, Ruby. I'm sorry. I ain't out to cause no trouble, really. I just came here to have a word with Hil. In private. Then I'll leave, okay?"

"You can talk, but I'm not leaving. You're too jumpy. I don't like it."

"Hey, listen, Ruby..."

 

"Speak, thus says the Lord:
The dead bodies of men shall fall
like dung upon the open field,
like sheaves after the reaper,
and none shall gather them."

 

"What's that crap?"

"It's the truth, Brad."

Yes, Mother, it's the truth. My truth.

"It's crap!"

Grandma, I'm tired. My mind, I feel it slipping, I can't hold on. I can't focus. I want to stay with Brad. Why doesn't my mother just go away? Why does she have to stay? If she wants me to die, why does she stay?

Grandma, you're changing. You're like a rainbow. Your hair is blue, and green, and yellow. Your face is red.

I see such pretty colors spinning past me.

I'm spinning, Grandma, spinning away. And the colors, so pretty, so gay...

GAY COLORS CONTINUED
to pass before my eyes as my consciousness spun off into this other world. As things began to settle and my eyes began once again to focus, I saw that the colors were from the quilt Mama was tearing. It had belonged to the Krengiels, the only one they had brought with them from Russia. In another time, what Mama was doing would have been a desecration, but these were desperate times, and tearing the quilt so only part of it could be used as a shroud for Mrs. Krengiels body while the rest was used to keep us warm, that was now just good common sense.

It had been raining, the ground turning to mud, the day Mrs. Krengiel did not go to the straw factory to make the plaits for the inside of the Nazis' army boots. Instead, she dove headfirst out our second-story window, broke her neck, and died. Quiet Mrs. Krengiel Nondescript Mrs. Krengiel, living with us all those months, never sharing her thoughts, never letting her despair show on her face.

I wanted to care about her, about her life, but I was tired of caring. Hers was just one of many bodies found in heaps below second- and third-story windows, or in puddles of blood next to the barbed wire, or in gray, decomposing piles waiting to be buried. I feared that if I cared I would be joining them. A soft heart was deadly here in the ghetto.

I saw each day pass much the same as the last: hunger, death, new rules, new jokes, less food, and hot summer nights spent outside in the yard, gathered around the well, talking until dawn. Nothing surprised me anymore, nothing scared me, except deportation orders. Where were they sending those people they rounded up by the hundreds, even thousands, and shipped off on the trains? Everyone had their guess, their story to tell, but no one knew for sure. In earlier days the Germans told us that families were being sent to work camps, where the living conditions were better. There was more food and less-crowded living space. Postcards even came back from nearby cities, but they all sounded the same and nothing like the friends and relations who sent them.

As time went on, such pretenses were discarded and the Jewish Police would enter homes at night to grab up people who had been selected for deportation and send them off to the central prison. There they would wait a few torturous days wondering about their fate before being sent off to the trains. Then they were no longer in the hands of the Jewish Police but of the German
Krippo,
who would make them hand over their food, their blankets and backpacks, wedding rings and watches. If they weren't fast enough, they got the whip.

These things we discussed on those moist summer nights in the yard, leaning against the walls of the buildings, against the well, heads turned upward, watching the stars come out. We'd talk and we'd wonder. Where could a body go without his belongings, without his wedding ring and watch? How could these stars and that moon be the same as those that shone elsewhere in the world, and if we were indeed God's
Am S'gulo,
His chosen people, for what exactly had we been chosen?

During the day we would trudge to work (I now worked at the straw factory), and we would watch with dread, our breath held, as the letter carrier passed out his summonses. Would it be our family today? It didn't matter; if it wasn't for us it would surely be for our neighbors or friends.

All this worry and speculation, though, was but a preamble to the nightmare that began on the third anniversary of the war.

I awoke that first morning of September with the sun already burning hot on my face. I sat up, my body feeling beaten from sleeping on the pavement where I had eventually drifted off last night. Anya and her best friend, Hala, still slept soundly beside me. We were used to sleeping outside now, the bedbugs and heat being unbearable inside. Looking beyond the yard I could see Jakub hurrying along, headed this way, and I remembered that not only had he not come home last night, but neither had Bubbe. I searched for Mama in the crowd of bodies propped up against the well and found her slumped against Mrs. Hurwitz, asleep. I ran over to her and shook her awake.

"Mama, Jakub's coming. He looks upset. Maybe it is Bubbe."

Mama and Mrs. Hurwitz sat up, both squinting up at me like sleepy cats. Others stirred around them, shifting their bundles under their heads, trying to find a more comfortable position.

"It is Jakub, see?" I pointed toward him, and Mama, seeing him, rose slowly to her feet, her head wobbling on her neck as though he had delivered a blow to her face.

Jakub stopped a few feet away from her. Panic was in his face, his eyes wide and unblinking.

"Military trucks are pulling up outside the hospital," he said. "They are loading all the sick onto them, tossing them like
treyf,
like unkosher meat, as if they were already dead!"

People jumped up and gathered around him and began asking questions. Had he seen their brother, or father, or aunt? Where were the people going? What was to be done with them?

Jakub just stared. He couldn't answer them, and he didn't need to. By then, we already knew what was going to happen, where the sick were going. People who had recently entered the ghetto from the provinces had spread the news: Jews shipped out were shipped to their death.

Everywhere was pandemonium as people scooped up their belongings and ran toward the hospital, dropping their sacred soup bowls that went everywhere with them, and not stopping to pick them up. It seemed that in an instant everyone in the ghetto had heard the news. People clogged the streets, rushing to friends or relatives in the hopes of rescuing them, or better, with the hope that perhaps there had been some mistake, that the trucks were just moving them to another building.

I ran with Anya tagging behind me, both of us crying, both of us remembering friends—Mr. Hurwitz, Mrs. Liebman, playmates, workmates—who were in the hospital, but we couldn't get to them. A barricade of Jewish Police blocked off all the streets around the hospital. I could hear shouts and cries and could see patients jumping from windows, trying to escape, but there was nowhere to go.

The next day was more of the same; only, doctors and nurses, the Jewish Police, and even firemen were going to people's houses now. They were examining the elderly and the sick who had tried to hide. Then they were dragging these screaming, pleading people off to packed buildings to wait for more trucks.

We saw little of Bubbe. She not only had to be present during these examinations, but she made it a point to go around to people's homes afterward and comfort those left behind. Even she couldn't comfort us, however, when Jakub came home and announced that the plan was to make the city of Lodz
judenrein
—"Jew clean"—the way they had done in Pabianice.

"All of us? We are all to die?" I asked, falling to my knees.

Jakub knelt down next to me, and then Mama and Anya. Together our small family wept and prayed.

I was late for work that day, but it didn't matter. No one was working. We were all talking, tossing around rumors, and scrambling to find jobs for those who had no jobs. Surely they wouldn't take us if we were still of use in the war effort, we reasoned. They needed us. Where else would the Germans get such cheap skilled labor? Mama even went to the school office to register Anya for a real job, waiting in the long lines, baking under the hot summer sun, only to find out that by lunchtime all registrations had become void.

Our workshop closed down at 2:00 that afternoon, and as I walked back toward our home with my friends, I saw men slapping notices on the walls of the buildings. We ran up to one and read that the Chairman was going to speak about the deportation situation in Fireman's Square later that afternoon.

I left my friends and ran home to find my mother, but she wasn't there. All the rooms in our building were deserted. I ran back out into the street and saw that people were already on their way to the square. What else could we do? We could think of nothing else, speak of nothing else, and yet such talk was getting us nowhere. No one had the truth, not even Jakub, and so we waited for hours, crowded in the square, under the boiling sun.

This was our judgment day. It wasn't to take place in the heavens. The good weren't to be saved and the bad banished to hell. Good and bad, sinners and nonsinners—it didn't matter who you were on this judgment day, just how old.

The crowd, which had been restless and hot, pushing over to the left side of the yard, trying to find shade, grew silent as the Chairman stepped onto the stage. Chairman Rumkowski. I had seen him many times in the past three years, had listened to many speeches, but never had I seen him look like this, a shriveled-up old man, shoulders slumped, feet dragging—one of us. No good news could come from a man who looked like this.

"A grievous blow has struck the ghetto," he began, his voice trembling. "They are asking us to give up the best we possess—the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I've lived and breathed with children. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!"

He went on and on, but who could hear? All children up to the age of ten were to be simply handed over, surrendered, calmly, orderly—the Germans didn't want any bloodshed. But how could we do it? How could they expect it of us? Did they think because we lived like animals—scavengers in the street, no longer seeing the filth, the blood, the rats—that we'd let them just cart our loved ones off like a loaded barrel of excrement and dump them, dead, somewhere? That was
their
way—the Germans', not ours. They were the heartless beasts, in their fine woolen coats and leather boots made by our hands. We toiled daily in our workshops, starving by their hands, dying, to keep these Germans clothed against the cold. We, the Jews, were the war effort. We were helping them defeat their enemy, and yet their enemy's victory was our only chance for salvation. Could the rest of the world not see the irony? Did they even know? How hard had their hearts become? And God's?

I stood in the square crowded with moaning, whimpering people, people falling to their knees, people fainting, the Chairman's voice pleading, explaining to his microphone, and never had I felt so alone. Where were my mother and grandmother, Jakub and Anya? Where were my friends? Where was God? Couldn't He see that now was the time to save us, before my innocent, my beloved Anya was taken away?

Through the night we listened to the screaming and sobbing of our neighbors. We heard air-raid alarms and bombs dropping, and we whispered prayers for the
Moshiah
to come and save us.

By the next day, most of the moaning and crying had stopped. Now the sounds were muffled and distant, as though someone had tossed a thick woolen blanket over the ghetto.

We spent most of that day out in the streets, restless, wandering, waiting—in silence. The cries and screams went inward, where it was safe,
where we could scream and scream and never stop.

When I spoke, I was surprised to hear my voice. It sounded so calm, so normal. Mama's and Bubbe's, too. All of us had gathered together around our table with the two shortened legs, calmly discussing our future as though we were discussing what dress to put on, or how to arrange our hair.

"It is best that we do as the Chairman says and go calmly, Anya and I," Mama said to the rest of us. "If we put up a fight we would only have the
Krippo
knocking us down and shooting us in the back. We have seen how they operate."

Jakub scowled, but even he spoke calmly. "I can hide Anya, Mama. I have places they would never find and the Jewish Police never search thoroughly. Anya is brave, she could wait this thing out, and I could stay with her."

Bubbe took his hand. "Jakub, I have gone the rounds with the doctors, watched them select the elderly for deportation; they have a quota they have to fill. If they do not get who they are after, the police will just put someone else in her place."

"So, that is good. Anya will be safe," Jakub replied.

Bubbe squeezed his hand. He looked down at the table, pressing his finger on a hardened crumb of bread he had spotted and touching it to his tongue.

Mrs. Hurwitz, who had spent the past two days making futile efforts to get her husband out of the group already selected for deportation, had joined us. We were her only family now. She looked around at all of us and then pulled Anya up onto her lap. "I will go with Anya, or even instead of Anya, if we can figure out how. Maybe I can be with my husband then." She kissed the back of Anya's head.

"I know a place where we can all hide," I said, remembering those peaceful afternoons I spent listening to the orchestra from the hole in the ceiling of the House of Culture. I explained it to them. How there was enough room for everyone, how we could hide there for days if we had to.