The Street Sweeper (51 page)

In the middle of all of this, Emanuel Ringelblum had set up an underground organisation, a group that numbered variously between fifty and sixty people chosen from the ranks of historians, teachers, journalists, economists and other intellectuals, business people, political activists of various hues, administrators, and leaders of youth groups. He chose them carefully and vetted them over time on their quality and aptitude for the work. Their task was to collect, document and preserve a record of what was happening to the Jews of Warsaw and of Poland generally. He had begun recording his observations when the war started but by 1940 he had realised that the scope of the task he envisaged was way beyond that which any one person, no matter how dedicated, could hope to achieve on his own and that was why he had established his
Oneg Shabbas
, a group dedicated to recording the torment of a once-bustling civilisation that had existed precariously there within another civilisation for a thousand years. When, on his own, he had first begun recording the life of Jewish Warsaw under Nazi occupation his aim had been to spread word of what was happening in the hope of persuading the outside world to intervene. But now it was 1942 and it had long been apparent to Emanuel Ringleblum that no historian had ever undertaken a more futile task. The community he knew, the people he saw, the once dynamic, vibrant, seemingly inexhaustible world he was trying to record and save, was vanishing. Any day now it would be completely gone and there would be nobody left to save. He knew that. All he could still try to do, against all odds, was to save their memory.

Some members of his clandestine
Oneg Shabbas
group were charged with interviewing people; people from the streets, the shops and the work details. They interviewed nurses, housewives, smugglers who risked their lives to bring food from outside the ghetto walls, undertakers, artisans reduced to begging, former factory workers, the people who ran the soup kitchens and the people from within the hungry tens and tens of thousands who patronised them, everybody. Other members, better known from before the war for their writing skills, were to write their own accounts of what they saw, what they heard, what they had been told and what they felt. Some
Oneg Shabbas
members were dedicated solely to
the transcription and copying of documents. At a meeting of the group’s Executive Committee Emanuel Ringelblum asked who knew about the previous night’s massacre outside the brush-maker’s shop.

‘Cecilya, tomorrow you should go and talk to Czerniakow.’

‘Emanuel, he’ll tell me –’

‘I know he’ll tell you that he’s the Chairman of the Jewish Council and that among many other things he’s trying to organise soup for over 100,000 people, many of whom will die that day if they don’t get it. He’ll tell you this and your problem will be that it’s completely true. You can’t argue with that. But when they die, there will be no way of telling the world they had even existed if we don’t bother him.’

‘But Emanuel –’

‘Cecilya, don’t be afraid of him.’

‘But Emanuel –’

‘Cecilya, he
will
be annoyed at first. Be ready for that. But you will very quickly have him eating out of your hand. Listen, I saw something yesterday that’s remarkable even for here. It involves Czerniakow and when you raise it with him I guarantee that he will stop what he’s doing and tell you about it.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Last night I saw him walking a way ahead of me on Grzybowska Street back towards his office. He must have forgotten something. When he got to the doorway of the building he stepped over something without giving it much thought. Perhaps, unconsciously, he registered the obstacle in the pavement as a corpse but one gets so accustomed to stepping over nameless corpses on the street … anyway, perhaps his mind was elsewhere. He definitely stepped
over
the obstruction, not
on
it, but his mind must’ve been somewhere else because he didn’t really examine what it was. He just stepped over it. I saw this myself. He stood outside the building for a moment fumbling in his coat pocket for something when suddenly the pile of broken wooden crating at his feet burst open and in the half-light of the street a small boy, perhaps eight years old, stood up. The boy, clearly starving, was completely naked. Czerniakow was startled. He lost his composure and he screamed in shock. It must have seemed like some kind of apparition to him.

‘The boy kicked at the crating beside him with one foot and another boy, about the same age and also completely naked, got out of it and stood up. Both small boys then started to remonstrate with Czerniakow, albeit addressing him respectfully, as Mr Czerniakow. They knew he was the Chairman of the
Judenrat
, but they weren’t at all fazed by that. They’d been waiting for him and were complaining about the food rations. They were orphans. They said they were the last of their families and they tugged on Czerniakow’s coat. ‘We’ve been waiting for you! Are you going to let us die also, Mr Czerniakow?’

‘What did he do?’

‘They were covered in dirt and excrement and God knows what else but Czerniakow knelt down to look at them, to look them in the eye. He took these two skeletons in his arms. He said something I wasn’t able to hear and then he began to sob quite uncontrollably. Really, Czerniakow … I saw this. Then he took them into the building. Go there tomorrow and ask him about it. You can tell him it was me that saw it. Tell him I sent you there. I don’t care. If he won’t write his own account of this for you then get him to dictate it. I’ll bet you two things: no matter how busy he is, he will quickly become acquiescent when you tell him what you know of this. He knows what we’re doing here.’

‘What’s the other thing?’ Cecilya Slepak asked.

‘The wood those boys had used to hide themselves, even if you leave for Grzybowska Street right now, it won’t be there when you get there.’

‘Who’s covering the soup kitchen?’ Eliyahu Gutkowski asked. But before anyone could answer there was a knock at the door. Nobody said anything as Emanuel Ringelblum stood up and walked to the door. He opened it partially to see the young watchman, Nahum Grzywacz, standing next to Rosa Rabinowicz, the deserted wife of Henry Border.

‘She told me to knock,’ the boy, instantly ashamed for blaming her, blurted out by way of explanation. He liked Rosa and would normally have cut many corners for her. He had stolen for her, delivered smuggled food to her and had even fantasised about her but to interrupt the meeting might have been going too far.

‘It’s all right, Nahum. Rosa, you don’t need to knock. Just come in.’

She was out of breath. ‘I’m sorry I’m late but –’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes but –’

‘Then just come in.’

‘No, before I do I need to tell you something that I wasn’t sure I should say in public, I mean not even in front of the Executive Committee.’

‘Rosa, can’t it wait?’

‘Please forgive me if it can, but I’m not sure it can.’

‘Nahum, go inside and tell them everything is all right but that I need a couple of minutes to attend to something. Then wait inside for me to come back in,’ Ringelblum told him.

Once they were alone Rosa proceeded to tell her story. ‘A smuggler brought a man into the ghetto just now.’

‘Somebody wanted to get
into
the ghetto! What kind of man could
he
be?’

‘He’s a Jew,’ said Rosa, still out of breath. ‘He says his name is Jacob Grojanowski from the shtetl of Izbica. He said it’s near Lublin. But he hasn’t come from there now. He says he’s escaped from a camp where he was working as a grave digger.’

‘Rosa, I have to get back inside. You can take down his story but … Surely this can wait.’

‘No, no, it can’t. He’s in hiding now with some people who know me and they stopped me on my way to the meeting. They told me his story. I don’t know why they chose me to tell. I swear I haven’t mentioned a thing about our work here but … Anyway this man, Grojanowski … He wants to see Czerniakow but when I heard his story … well, I thought you should know everything as soon as possible. Even before Czerniakow.

‘He says that at the camp he was in the Germans aren’t working the Jews at all. Instead they take them in groups of sixty or so and they put them in hermetically sealed trucks. Then they drive the trucks into the forest. The exhaust from the trucks is channelled back into the sealed part and the Jews are gassed.’

‘They’re gassed?’

‘That’s what he said. He was working there as a grave digger. He saw everything.’

‘What’s the name of this camp?’

‘Chelmno.’

Emmanuel Ringelblum cut short that evening’s
Oneg Shabbas
Executive Committee meeting and that night, with the assistance of Rosa Rabinowicz, he learned from a witness that, when taken away from the various ghettoes around Poland, the Jews were not being resettled and sent to labour details but were being gassed. At least, this was what was happening at a camp called Chelmno. Immediately a document was prepared in various languages and smuggled out of the ghetto so that the world might know what he and Rosa and then the Executive Committee now knew.

Sometime in early August 1942 a member of Emanuel Ringelblum’s
Oneg Shabbas
group, a man called Israel Lichtenstein, summoned two of its youngest members, the young man, Nahum Grzywacz, who had kept watch the night the Executive Committee had learned of the gassings at Chelmno, and another young man, the nineteen-year-old David Graber. Ringelblum had entrusted no one but Lichtenstein with the task of burying the
Oneg Shabbas
archives and the older man took the two younger men to Number 68 Nowolipki Street. There in the height of summer the three of them dug and dug as far into the earth as their strength, their tools and their courage permitted, fuelled by the belief that they had in their safekeeping the last, most comprehensive record of the soon-to-be entirely obliterated Jews of Europe. There at Number 68 Nowolipki Street, a building that had once been a school, they buried the two giant milk cans and several tin boxes whose contents comprised the first part of the
Oneg Shabbas
archives of the historian Emanuel Ringelblum.

It took them two days, and before they had finished, before they had filled in the hole, a tomb for the last words in the thousand-year history of the Jews of Poland, they each added a brief personal autobiographical note. The last to finish his note was Nahum Grzywacz who apologised to the future reader for the poor quality of his handwriting, explaining that his family was poor so he hadn’t had much education. He wrote furiously not merely because they were all in a hurry to accomplish their task but because he had recently heard that both of his parents had just been
taken away and he needed to get back to check on the veracity of the report. This was the scene on 3 August 1942 on Nowolipki Street inside the Warsaw ghetto. By then Rosa Rabinowicz, mother of Elise Border of Chicago, had not been seen by any of the few remaining members of the Executive Committee for some time. Since her body had not been found in any of the places she used to frequent, it was suspected by some of those remaining who knew her that perhaps she had left the ghetto. But in that place at that time dead bodies went missing too. So perhaps she had died after all. Who could be sure? And who could be sure to remember to give it any thought?

Young Nahum Grzywacz, who had always thought she was pretty and had many times taken comfort from her kindnesses, liked her very much and had often thought of her when he was alone in the corner of a room he shared with his parents, sisters and two other families. But even he had not thought of her in a while and was not thinking of her at all as, at 68 Nowolipki Street, within earshot of a man pleading then screaming amid a blur of bullets, in a shaky hand he wrote his last sentence for a reader he would never meet. And then along with the leavings of a people’s thousand-year history, he buried it. The earth weighed heavy on all the words, including this young man’s plea to the reader: ‘Remember, my name is Nahum Grzywacz.’

*

The secretary, receptionist, personal assistant or whatever she was to Charles McCray had gone to the bathroom leaving Charles’ father, William, alone and unguarded. Seeing that the gatekeeper was not there and that neither was his son, William McCray took the liberty of going into his son’s office uninvited. He looked around, picked up some journals, flicked through them but could not get interested. His mind would not be calmed. He was too upset. He sat down in a chair opposite his son’s desk chair and waited.

The day before, someone had left a noose hanging on the door of a black professor from Columbia University’s Teachers College. The professor, a woman who hailed from a disadvantaged southern background,
now a professor of psychology and education, was known for her particular interest in the psychological effects of racism on victims. Now she was a victim of it herself. The targeting of this woman in particular, with her professional interest, and in multicultural, liberal, ethnically diverse New York, at Columbia University of all places, in William’s own neighbourhood, filled him with a mixture of fury and sadness, impotence, fear and despair at what he was tempted to see as the futility of his life’s work. He hadn’t been able to sleep since he had read about the incident in the
Times;
in fact, it had been all he had been able to think about. Startled by his son when he got back to his office, it never occurred to William how affected Charles might be by the incident, how hard it had been for him not to rage at people around campus for what he felt was their collective failure to learn anything from history.

‘This isn’t Money, Mississippi, in the fifties! This is New York in the twenty-first century. This is a university. This is Columbia University. What the hell is happening here? One moment you got Jim Gilchrist and the Minutemen coming out here stirring up hate against illegal immigrants, that is until your students restore order with a riot. Then Bollinger invites Ahmadinejad to come up here and say the Holocaust didn’t happen but it’s okay, there’s no need to panic ‘cause he’s going to make his own Holocaust for the Jews in the twenty-first century. Then your good President Bollinger thinks he can redeem himself by getting up on stage and publicly ridiculing Ahmadinejad in order to be everyone’s new favourite superhero. How pathetic. How shamefully pathetic. Then I saw you got some good old-fashioned anti-Semitism going on over in Lewisohn Hall. Someone’s gone over there and drawn a swastika next to a caricature of a Jew in a yarmulke and now, yesterday I read about this. A noose is found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office over at the Teachers College. I’ve seen a lot in my time, you know I have. But when it comes out of the blue in a place like
this
 … This is
your
university. This is where you work. What in God’s name is going on here?’