The Street Sweeper (61 page)

‘It ends in a few days, maybe a few hours,’ the old man whispered. ‘I will tell you the end.’

‘No, Mr Mandelbrot, you should save your strength.’

‘What should I save it for?’

‘For your family?’

‘They were here. Already they came. You see that? Bring it here.’

Lamont went over to a shelf on the opposite wall where a vase full of red and yellow roses sat beside a silver
menorah
, a nine-branched candelabrum and, as requested, he brought the
menorah
over to the bedside.

‘Do you know what this is, Mr Lamont?’

‘It’s a candleholder, a Jewish candleholder. For Christmas, you use it at Christmas, right?’

‘You know about the Maccabees? Probably not.’

‘No, I don’t –’

‘If I live long enough I’ll tell you about them, but it’s more important I finish about what happened to me.’

‘You want me to put this back on the shelf?’

‘Not yet. It’s silver.’

‘It’s very nice.’

‘My son and daughter-in-law brought it here. I’m glad now they did.’

‘Sure.’

‘When I die I want you to take it.’

‘No, Mr Mandelbrot, I –’

‘You have to remember what I’ve –’

‘Mr Mandelbrot, I don’t need this to remember you.’

‘It’s not me, it’s
all
of them, all what I told you. This is your responsibility now. Do you understand this?’

‘But I don’t need this to remember –’

‘But how will I know you remember? You take it and I’ll know.’

‘Mr Mandelbrot, I can’t take it. It’s yours.’

‘Yes, it’s mine so if I want to give it to someone I can.’

‘But Mr Mandelbrot, I can’t.’

‘You keep saying that. Do you remember the first day I met you? You brought me up from the street where they were all smoking. Do you remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘You said the same thing that day too.’

‘What?’

‘ “I can’t.” But you did. If you hadn’t done that we wouldn’t be here now talking like this. Like two old friends.’

‘Like two old friends,’ Lamont Williams repeated quietly.

‘Old people don’t make many new friends, Mr Lamont. Think about it. So a friend can give another friend a gift, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Of course right. Look, I haven’t come all this way …’ The old man swallowed and, as though talking for his life, he took Lamont’s hand in both of his before continuing.

‘You think I’m joking, Mr Lamont? They’ll put it in a cupboard as soon as they get home from the funeral. And don’t ever have grandchildren. Your death will only interrupt them. Their whole life is a party. They don’t listen to me when I’m
alive
. They understand suffering like they understand … like … like they understand Chinese. You’re a quiet man, Mr Lamont, but you … 
you
understand Chinese. You understand? You’ll take it home and put it somewhere where you can see it, maybe every day. When you look at it you’ll know I’ll be asking you, “Did you tell someone?” It won’t be easy. At first they won’t listen, and if they do listen, they won’t believe you, but you’ll keep going and you’ll tell them what they did to your friend and his people. It’s my gift.’

*

The tide of events outside Auschwitz-Birkenau often affected what went on inside the camp. In July 1944 the Hungarian Head of State, Admiral Horthy, in response to international pressure halted the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. More than 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already perished in the gas chambers there and although the deportations were to continue elsewhere after a German-backed putsch later that year, by October the transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz had ceased. No group of prisoners was better placed to realise this than the
Sonderkommando
. In September some 200 members of the
Sonderkommando
were murdered by the SS without the knowledge of the remaining members. Tricked into believing they were being transferred to a subcamp at nearby Gleiwitz, they were instead taken to the gas chambers normally used for disinfecting clothes at
Kanada
. But it was impossible to keep this from the
Kanada Kommando
whose members included a young woman in the resistance, Rosa Rabinowicz. The remaining
Sonderkommando
would have learned the fate of their colleagues within days had they not learned of it even sooner.

For the only time ever in the history of the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS ordered a lockdown of the
Sonderkommando
that day and took it upon themselves to perform the usual tasks of the
Sonderkommando
on the pretext that it was the bodies of the civilian casualties of an air raid that were being burned. The pretext for the lockdown made no sense since the
Sonderkommando
had always been forced to work no matter who it was that was being burned. When the lockdown was over, men on the next shift were able to confirm the worst fears of the
Sonderkommando
men. Being inexperienced at the burning of corpses, the SS had done a poor job. When Zalman Gradowski started work he found the incompletely burned bodies the SS had left behind. In horror Gradowski opened the oven door to find the charred body of a
Sonderkommando
member he recognised. It was a Greek Jew only recently dragooned into the
Sonderkommando
, one of the 200 men Gradowski knew had been selected ostensibly to be rehoused at Gleiwitz. Other stokers too were able to recognise their colleagues from the partially charred remains they found and within hours of the beginning of the very next shift after the lockdown the news had spread.
The SS were exterminating the
Sonderkommando
and before the end of the very next shift everybody knew it.

On learning of the murder of these 200
Sonderkommando
men, the two Zalmans, Gradowski and Lewental, each buried the record they had been keeping of the precise nature of the mass killing operation they had been forced to participate in, so certain were they that, since fewer of them were going to be needed, more if not most of the
Sonderkommando
were in danger of imminent liquidation. Gradowski, Lewental and the others within the
Sonderkommando
resistance yet again urged the camp’s combined resistance groups, or, as they called themselves, the joint Auschwitz Military Council, to start a general uprising of the kind they had been talking about for months. When faced with the usual response, namely that the time was still not right, the
Sonderkommando
resistance sent two emissaries to plead personally and with the greatest urgency with representatives of the joint Auschwitz Military Council one more time.

Chaim Neuhof and Henryk Mandelbrot were dispatched to argue the case for the
Sonderkommando
. They were in effect pleading not merely for a chance to save their own lives but also for a chance to put a spoke in the wheels of the killing machinery. Each day a cart would go around the camp collecting the corpses of the slave-labour prisoners who had died in the previous twenty-four hours. On this day Neuhof and Mandelbrot were designated by the
Sonderkommando
resistance to be in charge of the cart. This was how they managed to secure a secret meeting with three delegates of the Auschwitz Military Council, a man known only as ‘Rot’ and two other men, Dürmayer and Kazuba. When the cart was sufficiently full of corpses, Rot, Dürmayer and Kazuba approached it carrying a corpse of their own. They had found a convenient pretext to be in contact with the
Sonderkommando
men.

‘You are Rot?’ Neuhof asked, looking at Dürmayer.

‘No, he is,’ Dürmayer explained, pointing with his head.

‘What’s all this about?’ Rot asked.

‘You know what this is about. We’ve been sent to urge you once more to start the action now.’

‘What do you mean “now”?’ Rot asked.

‘Now! As soon as possible. You let us know when you’re ready and we’ll –’

‘To have any chance of success we need support from outside. We’ve explained that to you people countless times.’

‘Whether that’s true or not –’

‘Trust me, it’s true,’ Rot interrupted.

‘Trust you!’ Henryk Mandelbrot said under his breath. Whether they heard or not, all three of them ignored the comment. He seemed the junior of the two
Sonderkommando
men after all. They had never seen or heard of him before.

‘We hear the rumours too. The Russians can’t be very far away,’ Mandelbrot said.

‘No, they’re not so far away. But they’re not so close either,’ said Dürmayer.

‘I don’t know how many times we have to tell you. For this to work we’re going to need all arms of the operation to be functioning,’ Kazuba said.

‘What does that mean, “all arms”?’ Henryk Mandelbrot asked.

‘It means that the Russians must be almost here before our people on the outside will work with our people on the inside and the internationals.’

‘What do you mean, “our people”?’ Mandelbrot asked.

‘Who brought this Jew?’ Rot asked.

‘He means the Polish Home Army,’ said Neuhof.

‘What about us?’ Mandelbrot asked.

‘Of course this will be the time for you people to join in too.’

‘We can’t wait for everything to be right with you!’ countered Mandelbrot, at which point Kazuba noticed an SS man coming towards them and he alerted the others with a facial gesture.

‘This is one we bribe,’ said Rot quietly.

‘Well, we’re about to see if it’s enough,’ said Chaim Neuhof.

‘You men. Wait there.’ The guard was now level with the cart of corpses. ‘What are you doing?’

‘This man died during the night and we’re getting rid of his corpse before he causes disease among the other prisoners … so they can keep working,’ answered Dürmayer.

The guard looked carefully at all five of them. ‘Why does it take five of you for this?’ he asked.

‘I saw these men bring him over to the cart and … well, I knew this man, sir –’

‘So you’ve come to say goodbye. He might be dead but the uniform is still useful.’

‘The Jews save the uniform before they cremate him.’

‘Be sure you do,’ he said. Turning to leave, he struck Mandelbrot to the ground with the butt of his rifle and walked off. Neuhof and Dürmayer helped Mandelbrot to his feet. He was bleeding from the side of the head. When they were sure the SS man had gone they continued their meeting.

‘We can’t wait,’ said Neuhof.

‘They’ll run out of transports soon and then they’ll liquidate us,’ said Mandelbrot, wiping the blood from the side of his head.

‘Liquidate who?’

‘The
Sonderkommando
, and we’re the only ones who can tell what really happened here, how they killed twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Look,’ said Kazuba, ‘the longer we wait the more support we’ll have from outside. The Germans still control the area surrounding the camp. As long as this situation prevails the prisoners are safer
in
the camp than they are on the run
outside
it.’

‘Not all of them.’

‘You mean not the Jews.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘I can’t risk the whole operation only for the Jews.’

‘But we’re the only ones who can’t wait.’

‘Exactly, as you say, the only ones. I accept that the Jews are in a special position. You’re unlike anybody else here. I’m sorry. I didn’t put you in this situation. This is what happens when you live in someone else’s country.’

‘In someone else’s country? I’m a Polish Jew. We’ve been here a thousand years!’ countered Neuhof.

‘From Poland, Greece, Belgium, France, Italy, from all over Europe,’ Kazuba continued almost in a whisper, ‘they collect you people, put the
yellow stars on you. Have you noticed – they place you together, not with others from Poland, Greece, Belgium, France and Italy? They put you together with each other. Wherever it is you’re from, you’re Jews. That’s why your position here is different from everyone else’s.’

The SS man had noticed now that the five of them were still together and that the cart laden with corpses had not moved. The guard had been bribed but he was coming back, his annoyance evident in his every step. As he got closer Rot made a point of shifting the corpse further towards the back of the heaped pile as though he were finalising the task. Then still looking at the oncoming SS man, but with the distracted air of a nineteenth-century nobleman at rest who suddenly signals to his carriage driver, he gave the side of the cart two swift raps of his knuckles and said, ‘Gentlemen, time’s up.’

*

Memory is a wilful dog. It won’t be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule of its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or it can liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Sometimes it’s funny what you remember.

It was 3.23 am in the Morningside Heights apartment Adam and Diana used to share. Adam was awake again. There was a tap dripping in the bathroom. He heard it but for a while did nothing about it. Perhaps he could kid himself into thinking he wasn’t really awake. It didn’t work. He found himself calculating something, nothing complicated, but it was enough to put paid to all pretence at sleep. Thoughts about his mother, about her childhood, about her ill-fated attempts to meet someone after her divorce from Jake Zignelik, attempts that Adam had tried but failed to shield himself from seeing, had segued into a trivial middle-of-the-night calculation. Almost exactly fourteen years to the day separated Henry Border’s trip to the DP camps of Europe and the visit to Australia of the renowned African American historian and civil rights activist, John Hope Franklin. He had come to Australia to give a series of
lectures at the invitation of Professor Zelman Cowen, the then Dean of Law at the University of Melbourne.

It was six years after the US Supreme Court decision in
Brown versus Board of Education
, a case Franklin had worked on with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and despite having heard negative reports about Australia’s de facto immigration policy, often referred to as the ‘White Australia Policy’, and despite what he knew about the history of Australia’s treatment of its indigenous population, he was amazed to find himself treated like a celebrity everywhere he went. Hotel porters, academics, journalists, they seemed to recognise him and everywhere he went he was treated with a reverence almost approaching awe. No Australian held the historian in higher regard than a young woman, a law student who came to all his Melbourne University lectures and then followed him to Sydney in order to hear him lecture further and to talk with him more. The young woman, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, even struck up a correspondence with him when he returned to the US. It was this that eventually led her to the NAACP–LDF office in New York. There she would meet another civil rights lawyer, Jake Zignelik, and later give birth to his only child, Adam, who, still unable to sleep, speculated that had John Hope Franklin declined Zelman Cowen’s invitation that summer he, Adam, would never have been born. Would the earth have spun any differently? he asked himself in his bed in the glare of an uncaring clock radio.