The Last Witness (6 page)

“You said something about a ghetto?” she said.

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“What do you mean what was it?”

“What was it? The ghetto.”

“What was it? It was where we lived and they kept you like a prisoner. All the Jews were kept in a small section of the city.”

“What city was that again?”

“Lodz.”

“Ladhz?”

“No not like that.
Lawdge
.”

“Loj.”

“That’s better. You almost sound Polish now.”

“Is that what you were? Polish?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your identity. You were a Jew but you were also Polish.”

“A Jew was a Jew.”

“But you were born in Poland. That makes you Polish, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t understand. The Poles were Poles and the Jews were Jews. They were different. Look, my name was Jacob. You would pronounce it like that. Jacob. But in Jewish or Yiddish it was
Ya-koov
. That’s what my parents called me.
Ya-koov
. But when I was on the Aryan side … the Polish side … I had to change my name to the Polish
Jacub
. It was different.”

“Your name was Jacob? Not Jack?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Look, when I was a boy I spoke Polish and a little Yiddish but I also spoke German because you had to speak German. The Germans controlled everything and you weren’t allowed to speak anything else. But we were still Jews.”

“So that was your identity? A Jew?”

He laughed, but then was it really a laugh? She couldn’t tell.

“Let me explain something to you, Christine. When they make you wear a Star of David, when they don’t let you stay out after a certain hour, when they take away your business and your job and they don’t let you ride the bus and they let you eat only so many calories a day … and it’s all because you’re a Jew … what else are you?”

“You remember all those things?”

“Of course. Everyone had to wear the star. It marked you as a Jew and you could never leave the ghetto. It was our prison and it was small.”

“How small?”

“A few blocks in the old part of the city. You had maybe a hundred thousand people … maybe more … living in just a few streets.”

“What do you remember about it?”

“What do I remember? Nothing and everything. You have to understand I was a little boy … three … four years old. Memories are sketchy when you’re that small but powerful things they stay with you.”

“Like what?”

“I remember it was always crowded. There was no space. I remember people being sick and dying from disease. All the time. I remember never having enough food to eat. We were always hungry. And there were broken windows everywhere. Another thing sticks out too.”

“What’s that?”

“Everyone seemed angry.”

“You were angry?”

“I was too little to be angry. I didn’t know anything else. But I remember the police … the Polish police … they were always angry. The Gestapo were always angry. I think it was in their DNA. Even the Jewish police were angry.”

“There were Jewish police?”

“The only man I don’t remember being angry was my father. I think he was too tired to be angry. You see, he had a business … he was a tailor … and they took it away from him. He had his own home and then he had to leave it. He had food and then there wasn’t much food. When I think about it now …”

“What?”

“Maybe that’s why he was so tired. There was no fight left in him. How can you fight when they take everything away from you?”

“What else do you remember?”

“I remember all the Jews had to wear the star over their chest. It was a big star and it marked you as different. And the German police … the Gestapo … the soldiers … they were different too because they all had uniforms and they had the
swastika
on their arm. Right here.” Jack touched his arm just above the elbow. “It was big. To me it looked like a spider and I remember thinking it was a strong spider. Jews with the stars were weak and Germans with the
spiders were strong. Even a little boy can see those things.” He stopped talking, but his mind kept racing.

“Go on,” Christine said.

“There was a lot of sickness and anger and death. All the time. Every day. A lot of death. It was everywhere.” He looked out into space. Staring at nothing. “I grew up with death. Death was part of my life. It’s always been part of my life.”

He took a deep breath.

“Well, those are the earliest things I can remember. It meant you had to think for yourself and do things for yourself or you wouldn’t survive. I was just a boy but I was very independent. Quick on my feet. Enterprising. I had to be. I would steal things. For my family.”

“Steal things? Like what?”

“Anything I could get my hands on. Food mostly.”

Christine put her arm around his shoulder and took his hand. “I’m glad you’re telling me this, Jack. I never want you to keep secrets from me again. Never. I’m your great-granddaughter, remember? Your little Christine. Who’s now fifteen.”

He gave her a smile.

“What is it?” she said.

“You just made a poem.”

The Lodz Ghetto, 1944

9

A pile of newspapers was in the middle of the lane behind the two-storey building on Bazarowa Street, and something was underneath it. There was a bulge. The little boy brushed away the newspapers on top and saw a button and what looked like an overcoat. A
kaftan
? He threw off more papers and found a man sleeping with his eyes open. The boy poked him once, twice. Nothing. He wondered what to do, but it didn’t take him long to decide. It was a cold day and the building had no heat. He quickly undid all the buttons.

The man was more than twice his size and rolling him onto the side was difficult, but with some twisting and tugging the boy got an arm out. Then he pushed with all his strength to roll him onto the other side and got the second arm out, but even then he couldn’t remove the coat. With both his hands on the man’s back, he pushed and pushed until the man rolled onto his front. Finally, the coat came free.

After covering him up with the newspapers, the boy put on the coat. It was old and heavy and much too long, but when he fastened the buttons it kept his back and shoulders warm. It was the first thing Jacob Klukowsky ever took that didn’t belong to him. He stole a glance at the sky and felt the soft breeze touch his face before sneaking back into the flat. When he got there his mother took one look at him and asked about the coat. He told her a man covered in newspapers was sleeping in the lane and didn’t seem to mind.

“Mashugga!”
she cried and went into a frenzy.

Jacob knew he shouldn’t be going outside, but he only wanted to taste the air. She told him again what would happen if they saw him. She said they would whisk him off to the hospital
and take his blood for their soldiers at the front until there was none left. That was what the Germans did with Jewish children, she said. It was the same for his cousins Zivia and Romek. They were the children of his Aunt Gerda, his mother’s sister, and lived in another room down the hall. Like Jacob, they were hidden children. Zivia was ten and Romek was seven. Jacob at four and a half was the youngest. Gerda’s husband Israel had died from TB – a disease, one of many in the ghetto – but Jacob had no memories of him. The only thing he ever knew about Uncle Israel was that he was dead. He had always been dead.

Jacob slept inside an old armoire with the drawer open at night, but the air was stale. That was why he went out. His mother wouldn’t say another word to him until his father Samuel came home. He, too, had seen the man in the laneway.

“Bela,” he said to his wife. He looked up and told her that Shmuel Zelinsky was dead.

“A mentsh on glik is a toyter mensh,”
she said.

An unlucky person is a dead person.

She said there was nothing anyone could do and they will come for him. Later, Jacob watched through the window as two men picked up the body and flung it onto an open wagon that was full of others just like him. They came twice a day like that. He asked his father if all those people were sleeping.

“They are sleeping,” Samuel said.

“They aren’t sleeping,” Bela replied. “They’re dead. All of them are dead.”

Jacob couldn’t remember the last time his parents smiled. His mother was pregnant and when they found out about it there were no smiles then either. The three of them shared a room of two square meters in the basement of a run-down, tenement building on Bazarowa Street in the
old section of Lodz, the ghetto, but it wasn’t Bazarowa Street anymore. Now it had a German name.
Basargasse
.

“Jacob, if you ever go outside again and the Gestapo don’t catch you …”

His mother glared at him, her eyes hostile and still. He was her only child. She told him again that he can never be seen or the Germans will snatch him. She said they would take his blood and throw what’s left to the dogs. Jacob had seen the dogs and they were big. It had been like this for two years, ever since the
Kinderaktion
, the roundup of all Jewish children under the age of ten.

“Did you shake out that coat?” she asked before grabbing it and going out the door where she beat it with a broom. She did this for a long time and when she came back she was out of breath, but she had to get rid of the lice.

That night he overheard his parents talking about there not being enough food. The Germans had just reduced their rations again. They talked about the baby that was coming and how they would feed it. Jacob knew that Josef Karasik, who was twelve and not hidden, helped his family by sneaking into the Aryan section to smuggle food. Jacob was always told that smuggling and stealing were bad, but if Shmuel Zelinsky was dead and got carted away on the wagon, then he had no more need for that coat, so that wasn’t really stealing. Besides, Josef once said that taking food from the rich
machers
who lived outside the ghetto was the right thing to do. He said what he took wasn’t much anyway. Just
bobkes
.

The next day Josef came to their flat and Jacob told him he wanted to go with him into the Aryan section. Josef knew that Jacob with his blue eyes could pass for an Aryan boy. Then Josef emptied his pockets and showed his cigarettes. Jacob asked him if he smoked and he said no. He explained how he went about his business. Josef said he took some of his mother’s forks and
spoons – she had plenty of them – and sold them on the street for cheap cigarettes. He said he had lots of cigarettes. Then he would sneak into the Aryan section and sell the cigarettes to farmers, who were busy manning their stalls in the market. They all smoked, but could never leave their stalls.

“You sell a hundred cigarettes and make enough money to buy a loaf of bread,” Josef said. “You could get through the wall. You’re small.” He called him a
pisher
.

Jacob was short and slight, the ghetto was the only thing he had ever known, and food was something there was never enough of. There was never enough of anything his family wanted. Never enough food, never enough water, and never enough clothes, especially in winter when the air was so cold it crawled down your back and legs before turning your blood to ice. He didn’t know what was worse – taking a crap in the outhouse in summer when the smell was so bad that it parked in your nostrils or taking one in winter when you just froze to death.

“I’m hungry,” Jacob said to his parents. It was his first thought in the morning and his last thought at night. Every day was the same.

Josef was right about the wall and the hole. Jacob climbed through it easily, and when the Polish police and German guards filled it in, the boys just made another one by chipping away at the bricks with the knives and forks they got from Josef’s mother. Or they went over the top of the wall by scaling the brick, but had to be careful because of the crushed glass that was ground into the cement along the top, so they laid out rags to protect their hands and knees. Then they would jump down to ply their trade. They were good at it. The stores were closed on the Aryan side on Sunday and Saturday was the Sabbath, so they couldn’t work then, but all other days were fair game. The first day that they went out they came back with bread and sauerkraut wrapped in pillow cases. Jacob’s mother was furious.

“Got in himmel!”
she cried in despair.

But Jacob told her that he looked like an Aryan boy and spoke good Polish. No one on the other side knew he was Jewish. His parents talked long into the night, but his mother was dead set against his sneaking across the wall. If he was taken for a Jew, even once, they would never see him again, she said. His father didn’t say much, but his eyes told Jacob that the family couldn’t exist on the meager rations they got from the Germans, so the boys went out again and again, and with each venture they grew more confident.

“Why bother with cigarettes and smuggling food when we can just steal?” Josef said.

The next time they went to the farmers’ market, they didn’t bring cigarettes. Jacob did as he was told. He leaned against a cart that was filled with apples until the legs of the cart gave way and the apples flew everywhere. In the commotion that followed, the men working the stalls helped him to his feet, but they weren’t ready for a second boy. Josef. He stuffed the apples into his pockets – and down his pants and down his shirt – and ran off. Later, the boys did the same thing at another stall, only this time it was pears. When they got back to the ghetto, they had two pillow cases filled with fruit under their arms. It was more fruit than their families had seen in a long time.

One day things didn’t go as planned. The boys were at another market, further from the wall than they had ever been before. After they played out their routine, one of the stall keepers wrung his arm around Josef’s neck so he couldn’t get away. Jacob did, but not Josef. Jacob didn’t see his friend until the next day and his face was covered in bruises. The farmer had turned him over to a Polish policeman, who beat him with his rubber truncheon. All the Polish police carried these things. Jacob decided then that he could work better alone.