The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (4 page)

Months later no proper graves remained: instead the dead were left outside at night on the streets and collected each day, carried away on overflowing carts then thrown into a deep hole. There they would lie, nameless, in a mass grave, tangled up with everyone who had died on that same day.

I
spent the days following Grandfather’s death alone with the coat and its secrets. I lived in his tailored masterpiece, breathed its strong aroma, let it smother and hold me. I felt Grandfather’s presence in its heavy and rough embrace and sat hidden in it for hours, the muffled world outside ceasing to exist. Mama let me be and I was grateful. She grieved in her own silent way.

But eventually my stomach rumbled and tightened. I hated myself for it, but a definite sharp pang of hunger gripped me, and so I explored the coat’s pockets, hoping to find something edible without having to leave its protection. And as my hands searched their way through the pockets’ labyrinth, many treasures slipped through my fingers: a wooden pipe, a pair of spectacles, a small book of poetry. I never knew Grandfather cared for such things. Pebbles, sticky sweets, a fountain pen and objects I could not make sense of, like a piece of fur, scraps of colourful fabric, a paper flower.

Suddenly my fingers touched a cool, curved surface with wire strings attached. I pulled it from the depth of the seams and through the tunnel of the sleeve. It was a perfectly formed little violin. I had never heard my grandfather play but here I held a miniature, built as if for a dwarf or as a child’s precious toy. I carefully picked it up, pinched the strings and searched the coat for a bow. I found the bow in another small pocket, this time a slim vertical one, behind the row of buttons.

I spread the coat on the floor, sat down in the middle of it and tried my very first scratchings with the little bow. I imagined Grandfather’s hands holding the tiny violin like a newborn, but the sounds I produced were far removed from music.

Later that afternoon I discovered another pocket around the height of the kidneys. Inside it were some letters. A small bundle, neatly tied with a light blue, silky ribbon. They were fragile and pale, as if written by a ghost, someone barely of this world. The ink had faded and the handwriting was barely legible. Slowly I pulled the ribbon, and the letters fell into my lap like moths.

That night, burning a precious candle, bent over the pages, I learned things that transformed everything I thought I had known about my grandfather and father. Grandfather not only had an aptitude for mathematics, but also for language – he wrote beautiful poetry. These were letters to his wife, the grandmother I had never met, written during the first big war. He poured his love and the pain of separation into images and metaphors, and although he hardly mentioned the war, the thin crumpled paper streaked with mud spoke of the horror and hardship of the trenches. He had filled the paper right to the edges with tiny scribbled words, aware of the same scarcity of paper we now experienced in the ghetto.

Grandmother in turn wrote sturdy prose, mainly about her boy, my father: disrupted school days, a knee cut open, and my father’s insatiable thirst for adventure stories.

I read wide eyed, hungry to learn everything I could about my father. When the dark gave way to grey morning, I wrapped the letters up and hid them once more in the depths of the coat. Exhausted, I sneaked back to bed.

For weeks I left the house as little as possible and the coat became my second home, my cave, my quiet companion. Meanwhile the world outside grew increasingly desperate and hostile. The days when I played with Bolek and Henryk in our streets or in Krasinski Park had become a distant memory. The boy’s life I had once lived lay shattered. I had no friends to fool around with and whenever Mother sent me for errands, to barter for something or to join a queue when a rumour sprang up about some fresh vegetables, I saw how terrible things had become: the stench, overcrowding and an overwhelming greyness threatened to swallow us whole.

From within the coat I observed the ghetto as if in a dream: who were these hordes of humans, dressed in dirty, torn rags, always running, pushing, shoving through crowds as if trying to reach the last train home? A grey mass of people mixed with rickshaws, the shouting drivers navigating their way through the chaos, and the occasional small horse-drawn carriage. The one overcrowded tram that still moved back and forth through the ghetto, a sad reminder of the past, carried troves of people hanging on to its sides like refugees on a boat. Instead of a number at the front the tram displayed the Star of David. It was the only line left for us to use.

In those early days everyone was flogging something: ragged street children sold the dreaded white armbands; women vendors squatted over tiny potatoes, carefully displayed in groups of four as if they were precious stones, competing with men who sold coarse brushes or other treasures; a bundle of shirts here, a coat, a precious pair of boots there. A young man guarded a baby carriage filled with books, while others sat on the ground selling whatever they could spare – a pot, a dress, tableware – hoping to bring home a few
zlotys
for bread, for some stinking dried fish or shrivelled vegetables.

Some shops were still open in the ghetto and the black market thrived. In fact, if you did have money you could still buy everything. There was even a sweet shop to taunt us. Beggars, thin as skeletons, squatted outside bakeries and grocers, stretching out their fragile arms, while inside the shop window displayed white bread, or even cakes. What had happened to us, to our beautiful city? People were starving right in front of our eyes, living corpses leaned against walls or simply sprawled on the ground, while passers-by tried to ignore their fate.

Some beggars played music, with a violin or small pipes. Old Marek, a man as huge as a bear with a wild grey beard, dragged around a whole little orchestra in a baby carriage. He always drew a small crowd, but very few
zlotys
.

Worst were the hordes of orphaned children sitting on the pavements, staring with their too-big eyes. They had even given up trying to steal anything. I tried not to look at them.

Then Mama started to build her gardens. After they locked us in, small ghetto gardens began to spring up everywhere. Defiant gardens, we should have called them, spaces where people grew flowers against all the odds, vegetables against despair.

You couldn’t see them at first in the overwhelming greyness, but then they appeared everywhere: little patches of carefully tended earth, small cleared pieces of land, protected like babies. People traded seedlings and planted, watered, sheltered, even prayed over them. The ‘Toporoal Society’ encouraged agriculture and the little gardens managed to keep people alive that bit longer: a cabbage could feed a whole family for days and a few beets would keep you breathing for a while. At one point the former Skra sports stadium was transformed into one big field of cabbages – what use was sport now when we were all starving?

Mother insisted we create some window boxes. Grieving for Grandfather, she needed the earth more than anything to comfort her, to reassure her that life would continue. Slowly against the backdrop of the ghetto’s greyness, beautiful flowers emerged. How did she manage to get those seedlings?

‘I packed some seeds in October, when we had to decide what to take into the ghetto. Weren’t they just as important as pots and pans?’ she said when I asked.

After the window boxes Mother built a little garden on our balcony. I laughed at her: a garden on a balcony on the third floor? But she carried up bucket after bucket of soil from the back yard, slowly covering the stone floor with a nice thick bed of earth. And I didn’t laugh a few months later when we had green salad and small red radishes to eat.

Word of my grandfather’s death and of his pocket-coat spread fast, and soon many requests for alterations found their way to Nathan. He had brought his sewing machine into the ghetto, and night after night he worked in his tiny room in the next street, fitting the inside of coats, shirts and trousers with secret pockets to hold people’s most precious things, the tokens of their lives.

One day as I was searching my way around the coat, fingering its secret passages, I grasped something unfamiliar and strange: hard, light and almost round, it sat nicely in my palm. Carefully I pulled it out and found myself staring into a face. A small head moulded from papier-mâché, boldly painted with huge eyes, red lips and flaxen hair. It looked so alive I wanted to kiss it.

My heart skipped a beat: of course, the storeroom! The tiny larder Grandfather never allowed me in. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? That same morning I had found a small key in a tiny pocket near the seam of the coat. I grabbed the head, fumbled for the key and ran to the little room. The key fitted perfectly and with barely a sound the door sprung open. When I switched on the light I gasped: an army of little people was staring back at me.

The tiny room was filled with puppets of all shapes, sizes and stages of completion: there was a king, a girl, a fool and many animals – a crocodile with half-painted teeth, a monkey, and a horse without a tail. Some puppets looked as if they were ready to jump off the shelf; others had limbs missing or no clothes at all. A string spanned the room, pegged with tiny legs and dangling arms, waiting to find the right owner.

Tiny clothes in the making lay spread on a small table, carefully sewn from scraps of fabric. I recognised my mother’s apron fashioned into a girl’s dress and one of our napkins transformed into a little shirt. The dusty room smelled sharply of varnish. A wooden shelf held small pots of paint and some dried-out brushes in a glass, and right at the back I glimpsed a painted stage, complete with velvet curtains.

And there, perched on a shelf, sat a prince. Wrapped in a crimson cloak, adorned with a piece of rabbit fur.

So, this had been Grandfather’s secret. These little people, puppets of his own making, keeping him company. But why had he never shown them to me? Had he been preparing all this time for something special, an elaborate performance? And why had he put just this one unfinished puppet into his pocket?

The memory of a special afternoon with my grandfather only two months before, in May 1941, flooded back to me – the day of my fifteenth birthday when Grandfather took me out for a birthday treat. It was a warm sunny day, so welcome after a winter that had taken thousands of lives with its fierce cold claws, and we strolled along Leszno Street, called jokingly ‘the Broadway of the ghetto’. It was not a glamorous street, but many places here still offered some entertainment, cafés spilling out piano music, a few small theatres, a cabaret and even a cinema. Posters plastered the walls everywhere, advertising concerts and shows in bold letters. Not only did the adverts paint some colour on the grey walls, but they also promised to take our minds off our terrible situation, if only for one afternoon.

Leszno Street offered a welcome respite from the overwhelming poverty all around us. You could see smiles on people’s faces and the fast pace of passers-by stemmed for once from the anticipation of getting to a concert rather than from being chased by police or a race to be first in line when there was a delivery of vegetables. Of course, such amusement wasn’t available to everyone, but some people still had money and better clothes; and although the white armband branded us all in the same way, the superior coats, hats and shoes of the rich gave away the distinctions that had always existed among us.

Mother had stayed at home so that Grandfather could take me on my treat. I soaked up the atmosphere and for a moment I forgot the emaciated bodies we had passed on the way that had become such a familiar sight all over the ghetto.

‘I know exactly the thing for you Mika, come.’ With this Grandfather led me into a café. I wanted to protest, had he not promised me a show? Then I saw at the far end of the room a poster announcing ‘The Thief of Baghdad – a puppet play’.

Grandfather approached the woman behind the counter and to my embarrassment announced, ‘This is my grandson, Mika. Please, the best tickets in the house for his birthday treat.
Mazel Tov!
’ He smiled first at the woman and then at me.

‘Of course. The play starts in one hour upstairs, I am sure he will enjoy it. Happy Birthday, Mika!’

I wasn’t sure about this, was such a thing not meant for small children? After all, I was fifteen now, shouldn’t he have taken me to a serious play? Grandfather and I sat next to each other in the café waiting, and although the lemonade we sipped tasted lovely I sighed with relief when the woman announced with the sharp sound of a bell that the performance would start in five minutes.

We ventured up the steep, narrow staircase with the small crowd that had gathered, and entered a tiny room with an even smaller stage. Every seat was filled. We sat as if in a living room, but with people we didn’t know and no distractions other than the gold-rimmed, luxurious stage. The lights dimmed and the curtains opened to reveal the exotic world of Baghdad, an elaborately painted backdrop of mosques with crescent moons and colourful houses stretching out in front of a mountain range.

Then the puppets appeared: marionettes, moving swiftly and as if by magic, held on invisible strings by a puppeteer-master we could only imagine. The thief’s world swept me away and I forgot all my reservations. I glanced at Grandfather and saw the sweetest of smiles on his face – for this short time all the terror and fear had left us. Grandfather laughed and sighed, clapped and bit his lip, as if he were the child on a birthday trip, absorbed by the magic unfolding in the tiny room above a café in Leszno Street, in the Warsaw ghetto, in Poland, in the spring of 1941. It was our last outing together.

Something in the corner of the workshop caught my eye, tearing me from my memories. On a table lay a piece of red velvet cut neatly into two pieces, the same fabric from which the splendid prince’s cloak had been made. A tiny dress, with needle and thread still attached, as if Grandfather would return any minute, take up the needle and finish it.