The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (3 page)

Weeks passed after we received those directives that lay like a noose around our necks. We held our breath. But just as we began to absorb the shock of our limited world, more orders followed: the Germans wanted us clearly marked and labelled. All Jews had to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David, not less than six centimetres across, on our right sleeve. It had to be sewn on, clearly visible, and of course we had to produce the armbands ourselves. From now on it would always be like that: the Germans created laws, then forced us to make our own ropes to be hanged with. Sure enough, within days sellers waved the hateful armbands from every street corner.

Soon after that we had to register for ‘Kennkarten’, identity cards, stamped with a large J. J for JEW. How a single letter could change everything. We needed those cards to get our ration books, but our rations were meagre, a tiny fraction of those of the non-Jewish population. Two loaves for the German, one loaf for the Pole, a slice for the Jew. Mother’s soups grew more watery by the day. We could not get milk or eggs and never any meat. Clearly the German master plan was to starve us, kilogram by kilogram.

To escape the biting hunger, many tried to get hold of Aryan Kennkarten, but if caught they would be dragged to the Pawiak prison. The rumours of torture and murder surrounding this monstrous fortress gave me such nightmares I’d wake up covered in sweat.

Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, in October 1940 they gave us two weeks’ notice to leave our flats, and most of our belongings, and move into a tiny part of the city that the Germans called the
Jüdische Wohnbezirk
, the Jewish Residential District. The word ‘ghetto’ was taboo, but whispers ran like wildfire through our neighbourhood and we knew it was nothing more than a huge prison.

Imagine our panic and despair. You could smell fear everywhere, creeping like fog into our homes, hanging thick and sticky over us like a thunderstorm about to break. How could we all fit into this tiny area? There were nearly four hundred thousand of us – an ocean of people trying to fit into a pond, surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall, topped by barbed wire and broken glass.

On 31 October the Germans herded us into this small segment of the Warsaw map, its northernmost corner, bordered to the west by Okopowa Street and our old Jewish cemetery. It had always been a densely populated part of the city, and although many of the houses were proud three-storey buildings adorned with iron balconies, most of the streets were narrow and dark. The Germans had forced all non-Jews to leave the area to make space for us, and as we moved into the ghetto we were greeted by an eerie quietness.

Mama took a long time to sort out what to bring with us. I can still see her in our old flat, picking up this candleholder or that book, forced to choose between a pot and a picture frame. In the end she chose the most precious and the most practical things: a photo album, some books, the silver candleholders that had been a wedding present, two pots, clothes and bedding. She bundled them together and then we joined the march. Our little unit, our tiny family: Mama, Tatus and me.

We marched in silence, carrying our remaining possessions in battered suitcases and makeshift rucksacks on our back. People pulled carts or pushed prams filled with boxes, duvets, cushions and pots, some balancing their precious things on their heads. The streets were lined with Christian Poles, watching our exodus with curiosity or pity, and some with that particular grin the Germans call
Schadenfreude
: joy at the expense of others, less fortunate souls like ourselves. We Jews had so long been made into scapegoats, and the anti-Jewish propaganda with ugly bright posters that compared us to typhoid-bearing lice did the rest.

Most in our sad march kept their heads down. But why? I wanted to face those onlookers squarely even if my look of defiance and hatred was the only thing I could shoot at those who stood ready to take our flats and our belongings. I kept a lookout for Bolek and Henryk. They had not come to our apartment since I’d been expelled from school and now I couldn’t see them anywhere. How could they turn against me, believe we were second-class citizens? Cowards. I balled my fists, but the memory of Bolek with his missing front tooth and crooked smile stabbed at my heart.

As we entered the ghetto from the eastern side at Nalewski Street I took a last look back. I was being forced not only to leave behind my friends and my school, but also memories of
chlopek
, hopscotch,
zoska
and the many other games we played, our picnics in Krasinski Park, outings to the lakes with Mama and Tatus, and our lovely apartment. As I entered the ghetto through the gate, I was stripped of my childhood and all I had held dear.

And yet, in a twisted way, we turned out to be much luckier than many. A former colleague of my grandfather was a member of the
Judenrat
, the Jewish Council, and he had found us an apartment that was halfway decent: a little flat on the first floor in Gęsia Street, the street of the goose. Number 19 – I tried to take it as a good sign as 19 May was my birthday.

While we settled into a flat with two bedrooms, many big families had only one room, or worse still, had to remain on the streets until a tiny space could be found for them. Sometimes there were nine people to a single room. We knew we were lucky, but shouldn’t a big family have our space?

By 16 November the Germans had completed the wall and sealed the ghetto.

I was fourteen years old.

That’s when the coat changed. Grandfather, who was not only an intelligent but also a very practical man, decided that if he were ever to be taken somewhere else – because to flee Warsaw was now out of the question – he would need his most precious belongings close to him. Pockets were a great solution: small, large, tiny, hidden in the depths of his coat. The first was a small pocket on the left side, level with his heart. A slit more than a visible pocket, but a pocket nevertheless – for his gold watch, the only thing he had left of his father’s. Over time he added more and more pockets: a very deep one on the inside, over his liver, for photographs: my father as a boy and the ones of him proudly holding his baby, me, my mother’s face glowing with the broadest smile. Pictures I asked to see again and again.

I missed my father badly, especially in those dark, biting winter nights during that first ghetto year. A toddler, only three years old, I didn’t remember my father’s death. Mama said I played with my toys while he was dying in the next room from pneumonia, falsely diagnosed.

‘The doctor thought your father had a cold and a bladder infection,’ she once told me when I asked her many years ago. ‘He died within a few days, burnt up like cinders.’

I know she never forgave the doctor, nor herself.

‘He would have lived if we’d taken him to the hospital. After he died you stopped talking and clung to your battered red toy train day and night,’ she said. The train had been his last gift to me.

By now memories of my father had faded and all that remained were traces of smells and sound: a sharp-smelling soap, sweat, tobacco and what I later recognised as a whiff of alcohol mixed with a deep, gentle voice that quieted me to sleep, ‘my good boy, sleep now’, a faint memory hidden in my body that I tried to visit as often as I could. I longed for my father’s presence, the safety of those embracing smells. By the time I inherited the coat, nothing felt safe any more.

Grandfather added pocket after pocket to his grand coat and one day he thought of creating tiny pockets within the pockets. Then, even if one pocket was searched, they wouldn’t find those extra layers. Slowly his coat became a huge labyrinth: this pocket connected to that, but not this one; here was a dead end and this one led from left to right.

While people risked their lives for false passports or dug tunnels between the ghetto and other parts of the city, Grandfather found increasingly clever ways to put more pockets in his coat, until only he knew his way around. He selected his favourite books and added them to the seams. An extra pair of underwear tucked underneath the right side. A second pair of glasses, cufflinks and handkerchiefs on the left.

He wore his coat with pride, and as time passed and the situation grew worse around us, when the weight dropped off us because of our meagre diet, I sometimes thought the coat was the only thing that still held him together.

He spent more and more time in his little workshop, which he kept private from Mother and me. It was really only the apartment’s walk-in larder and not much bigger than a large cupboard, but he called it his ‘refuge’. I asked him many times what he was up to in there, but he simply smiled, and said nothing.

The coat and Grandfather were inseparable, a hand and a glove. Then in July 1941, two days before his seventy-third birthday, everything changed.

When I arrived on the street outside our house he was still alive. A neighbour had run up the stairs to fetch us, breathless and pale, her voice full of panic.

‘They shot him, come, quick, quick!’ Fear grabbed me like a steel vice. I remember a pause, a lingering nothingness in which I couldn’t move. The neighbour could hardly get the words out, her chest heaving.

‘He couldn’t keep his mouth shut, it was that girl again. He couldn’t take it, come quick.’

As gentle and private as he was, Grandfather couldn’t remain quiet in the face of all the brutality surrounding us: people being kicked and spat at, hit, taunted, or worse – shot like dogs on the spot, as if it were a game. He refused to get used to the occupiers, to the daily unpredictable violence. That morning soldiers had again tormented the young woman in the house opposite ours. They had dragged her outside, held her at gunpoint and told her to strip. Grandfather was walking up to her, opening his coat, ready to wrap it around her to protect her, when they shot him. Just like that, at close range. My Tatus, the kindest man I knew.

The girl was gone by the time I arrived. Only later did I hear that she had screamed, scrambled for her clothes and then ran off. When I reached Grandfather and bent down his eyes opened slightly.

‘Take care of the coat, Mika, my boy . . .’ Barely a whisper. His eyelids sagged and his head fell sideways into my lap.

‘Take him away,’ one of the soldiers barked. He took another look at Grandfather and hesitated.

‘Wait, that’s a good coat, get that man out of his coat. Give it to me, boy.’

Then Mother moved. She had stood next to me, frozen like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt, holding my hand tightly. Suddenly she let go and started to wail and scream, throwing her hands up in the air and pounding them on her chest again and again. And as she did so, she inched away from Grandfather towards the other houses.

‘
Halt’s Maul
. Shut up, woman. Quiet,’ the soldier shouted. She knocked at the first door.

‘Stop that, you whore, or we’ll shoot you!’ She did not turn.

In the confusion and with help from the neighbours we eased Grandfather out of his coat. More people gathered. A group of men picked Tatus up and carried him towards the house, and then through the crowd I saw Nathan. I had no idea where he had appeared from, but the old tailor’s bony hands quickly helped take the coat and put it on me. I felt stiff and lifeless, like one of Nathan’s wooden dummies as I let him drape the coat around me.

It was the first time I had put on that coat. I had asked Grandfather before, but he had refused, saying, ‘It brings bad luck, Mika, it is not your time yet.’

The coat’s weight was incredible; I could hardly breathe with the weight of my grandfather’s possessions around me, the weight of his life. But I needed to hurry, to run – to honour his last wish. The coat engulfed me like a warm, heavy being, and as if the coat had given me a surge of energy, I stumbled out of the soldier’s sight and ran upstairs to our small apartment.

I collapsed among our brave neighbours, who risked everything by sheltering me. I was terrified for Mama and for a long time sat frozen and quiet in the kitchen, listening for shouts and heavy boots pounding up the stairs, for the dreaded gunshots, but there was only silence.

Mother came home much later, white as a sheet, dishevelled, supported by Anna, our neighbour. I ran up to her and hugged her fiercely, but her face didn’t change. She stared at me from behind an empty, expressionless mask, gently pushing me away. She did not speak, but sat at the kitchen table for the rest of the afternoon, gazing at her trembling hands as if she wondered to whom they belonged. Anna sat with her and encouraged her to drink some tea; hot water with just a few tea leaves, already brewed for a second time. I had seen Mother out there in the street, heard the soldiers call her names, but to me she was a heroine.

Only later would I understand the nature of shame, the terrible things it can do to you. I left Mother sitting at the table and buried my fierce love for her and my grandfather deep inside the coat. I spread it out on the bed and lay down on top, searching for my grandfather’s smell, for any trace of his life. But all I could feel were my tears and the rough wool against my cheeks.

That night I felt like a child and, at the same time, an old man.

We couldn’t give Grandfather a funeral as we would have in the past, but I suppose we were lucky as Grandfather still got a small grave. Despite the fear that grabbed us when we gathered in public in the Jewish cemetery, quite a few people turned up to bid him farewell. I carried the simple coffin with Nathan the tailor, a neighbour and two of Grandfather’s former colleagues from the university who had also been sent to the ghetto. The sun burnt down on us on that July day but I insisted on wearing Grandfather’s coat and sweat ran down my neck as we carried the coffin to the old cemetery on Okopowa Street. The men from Hevra Kadisha, the burial society, had wrapped Grandfather in a white shroud and he was buried with his old prayer shawl.

It all happened so quickly – forty-eight hours is so little time to say goodbye. As the rabbi said prayers I stood stock still like the knotted trees in the cemetery, looking at the open grave as if through a veil or a sheet of smoky glass. A few people threw a shovelful of earth on my dearest Tatus’s coffin, but when it was my turn it broke me. Mama put her arms around me but I trembled and sobbed, inconsolable.