The Warsaw Anagrams (35 page)

We stayed with Liza from March all the way to early July. After a few weeks, we were glad not to have to leave, though we knew we would set off as soon as Jaśmin gave us the go-ahead – if for no other reason than to stop putting Liza at risk.

Izzy and I stayed close to the farmhouse at all times; we dared not go near the nearest village for fear of being spotted and denounced. Still, sometimes at dawn, before anyone was up, we’d take her dog, Noc, for walks through the fields.

Noc had an extensive Polish vocabulary, and Izzy and I taught him Yiddish, as well.

Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik!
Izzy would yell at the beautiful mongrel when he was barking too heartily at some rabbit or squirrel he’d chased into the underbrush. Amazingly, the dog would go all quiet and sit on his haunches, looking back and forth between us with his deep brown eyes full of remorse. Given his luxurious black coat, we joked that he was the reincarnation of a Jewish furrier and had been waiting all this time to learn his true language.

*

A few days after our arrival, Liza purchased insecticide at a local apothecary, and Izzy and I dusted ourselves with the white powder from top to bottom, turning ourselves into foul-smelling snowmen.

Izzy submerged in our bathtub first. When he was done, I stepped into the scalding water, sat down and closed my eyes. And entered paradise. I could not have been happier had I been five years old and embraced by my mother.

I hadn’t been aware of how tense and constrained my body had been – as if I’d been tangled in vines. Away with the lice went months of grime.

Still, I sobbed alone that night, hidden in Liza’s cellar.

Izzy and I wrote just a single letter to our children, fearing that our correspondence might cause trouble for Liza. I told Liesel I’d contact her again when we reached the Soviet Ukraine.

I’d get up every morning to watch the sunrise, grateful for the boundless pink and russet sky, for all that blessed light falling over the earth, for the warm breezes of spring and the butterflies fluttering over the flowers, for eagles and hawks and magpies and all that could fly beyond the control of the Nazis. Grateful, too, for a red fox that I saw late one afternoon, and who stopped to watch me as if I had descended to the earth from out of
his
sunrise.

The sound of my whispering with Izzy as we fell asleep was like protective netting. We covered ourselves with our voices every night.

He and I fired a few of our lopsided cups and vases in the kiln over those first weeks of refuge. One day, however, Liza decided she would teach me to centre a pot or die trying. She put her hands over mine and moved them through the luxurious wet clay, while that wheel of creation spun round and round between us like a
dreidl
that would never stop proclaiming the miracle of our escape. If she and I had been younger, maybe we’d have had a chance at another life. But one passes a gate without knowing it, and then there is no point in turning round and starting over. We both knew that and ended up laughing.

Still, it was good to be able to learn a new trade at my age.

Izzy and I were occasionally at each other’s throats over the most meaningless trifles, but we never forgot we were riding on the same raft at the centre of an angry sea, and that made all the difference. We were careful to give Liza enough time for herself and often stayed in our room – teaching Noc the subtleties of Yiddish grammar or tossing him his leather ball – when we would have preferred to be with her.

Imagine having to care for two elderly good-for-nothings. God, what we put that woman through!

It was a small life we had, but anything bigger would have put us at risk. Besides, we were exhausted. We hadn’t realized how depleted we were till we were off our island.

I slept twelve hours a night over those first weeks. And once my stomach adapted to wholesome food again, I made Liza’s dinner plates shine at every opportunity.

My hunger may have been obsessive at times, but Izzy’s nose hadn’t been dulled – like mine – by fifty years of pipe-smoking, and once his sensitive sniffer picked up the scent of good food again, it turned him into a slavering wolf; for a month or so he was unable to hold a conversation if there were even just a few grains of kasha or a smidgen of creamed sorrel still available. He would eye any crumbs Liza and I left over as if they had been stolen from him while he was reaching for the butter or pepper, and you could hear him counting the seconds he regarded as requisite – given our
turn-of
-the-century notions of etiquette – before he could make a headfirst dive for our plates.

When he was on one of his binges, cannibalism seemed a real possibility. Liza and I kept our distance and advised Noc to do the same.

His scurvy proved no match for his boundless appetite.

In the silence of the forest protecting our farm, I began to believe that as long as there were women like Liza in the world, Jewish history could never come to an end – not here or anywhere else. And that sooner or later, the world would come to its senses.

Liza sold her bowls, mugs and vases at two shops in Puławy. The owners came once a month to pick out the merchandise they wanted. Jerzy, one of them, selected a Japanese-looking bowl of Izzy’s one day – blue, with calligraphic black strokes near the rim. His first sale. We celebrated with wine that evening.

At night, in bed, Izzy and I would talk about the friends we’d left back in Warsaw. It always seemed strange to us how geography can determine everything during a war. I wondered if I would ever see the city again. And if I’d want to.

In the early hours of the morning, I’d sometimes hear my name being called, as though from downstairs, and I’d try to get out of bed, certain that Liza was in trouble, but I’d find – to my horror – that I was unable to move. My arms and legs were paralysed. Never had I known such helplessness. And then I’d see Izzy’s face lit with crescents of light and dark by the white candle in his hand, and hear him whisper my name, and I’d realize he was waking me again from the nightmare that was being sent to me by all that I’d failed to do.

Twice a week, a stocky labourer and his teenaged son came from Niecierz to work Liza’s land; she had an agreement with them that allowed her to keep half of her fruit and grain. Izzy and I would hide in the cellar whenever we heard their donkey cart rambling down the potholed dirt road that skirted our farmhouse, reading by candlelight until Liza sounded the all-clear, which was a high whistle that would make Noc race up the staircase and bound into her arms.

I started fishing in the early evening in late May, on a quiet bend in the River Wisłoka guarded by dense, leafy woodland – mostly paper-barked birches and tall, broad oaks, but also
cu
rlicue-branched 
hazel bushes near the water. Noc would tag along, his tail twirling. He’d try in vain to catch dragonflies in his snapping jaws and watch the dark water around my line as if expecting a river sprite to surface at any moment.

On two occasions, I caught trout big enough to eat.

Izzy and Liza planted a kitchen garden, so that by early June we were able to begin harvesting fresh vegetables. The sweet, earthy smell of our beets carried me back to the days of my childhood when I’d go marketing with my mother. Liza, on sniffing at our perfumed trellis of pink and blue sweet-pea blossoms, would always fake a swoon, like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel overcome by love.

Food had never tasted so good as the meals we ate on Liza’s small patio, listening to the Polish trees and fields speaking in the language of wind from the Ukraine. But no matter how much I ate, crabs of hunger would still sometimes scuttle through my belly during the night. I’d light a candle and creak down the stairs into the kitchen. Often, Izzy would accompany me. We’d sit in our underwear at the kitchen table – little kids gorging on cheese and pastry while their parents lay sleeping.

One warm dawn in late June, I took off all my clothes and lay next to Noc in a potato field. The ground seemed solid below me – incapable of giving way – for the first time in a year.

Izzy and I were in the cellar on 7 July, helping Liza stack her freshly fired pottery on her shelves, when we heard two cars approaching. By now, we knew the routine. We crept behind the kiln, out of view. She rushed upstairs and closed the cellar door behind her. Two men soon entered through the front door, and Liza began talking German, but we couldn’t make out her words.

After a few seconds, she shouted, ‘Get out of my house!’

I listened for a gunshot. Instead, a German yelled, ‘Where are you hiding him?’

Him
… I understood the significance of that right away;
whoever
had denounced us to the Nazis had only spotted one of us.

When Liza screamed, I jumped up.

‘Stay here!’ I whispered to Izzy.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, gripping my arm.

There was no time to explain. I leaned down. ‘Go to Louis when you get out of here.’

When I kissed him on the lips, he held me for a startled moment, then kissed me back.

‘Erik, no!’ he whispered desperately as I stepped away.

I meant to say with my eyes that our time was over, and I meant my smile to mean that I had no other choice. Did he understand?

When the cellar door opened, I started up the stairs with my hands extended high over my head.

‘I’m coming up!’ I called out in German. I didn’t dare glance at Izzy, because I was sure that his darkly shadowed eyes – and everything in them that I wanted to live for – might steal my courage, though I wished I could have reassured him that I’d be all right.

Three SS officers had come to the farm. Though I put up no resistance, the two younger ones knocked me down and kicked me. Liza stood by, shouting curses at them, until the one in command – forty-ish, with greying hair around his temples and black eyebrows – grabbed her and threw her to the ground.

‘I didn’t tell them!’ she shouted to me as I was dragged away. ‘I swear!’

The Germans shoved me into the back seat of their car.

Before I was able to holler out the window that I knew she could never betray us, the older Nazi raised his gun and fired. Liza fell over with a guttural cry, clutching her arm.

I shoved open my door and got out. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at him. ‘She only hid me to make money!’

He never even turned to me. He put the barrel of the gun up to Liza’s ear.

She showed him a bewildered look.

I can still hear the explosion of the bullet; it’s the sound of all the best people I ever knew being murdered.

The German in command got in the back seat beside me, demanding to know my name and where I was from. He slapped me across the face when I made no reply. Struggling for breath, I told him my name was Izydor Nowak and that I was a clockmaker from Warsaw; I appropriated my old friend’s identity because he’d be able to disappear more completely if the Nazis believed that they had captured him already.

I also told him that he had murdered a wonderful woman who had not deserved to die.

I next remember entering Puławy, where my captors made me stand in a town square with a group of about fifty other Jewish men for the rest of that day and all through the night. The Christian residents – thousands of them, it seemed to me – passed us on their way home from work, but none of them offered us a crust of bread or a cup of water. The Germans wanted to prove to us, I think, that we were nothing – less important to our Polish neighbours than dogshit on the sidewalk. And it was true.

By the time morning came, I was unable to escape my misery even for a moment. My throat felt as though it had been blasted with sand, and I was having trouble breathing. I had no more tears left.

Polish and German soldiers soon marched us off. To where, we had no idea. My good fortune was that exhaustion and dehydration made me delirious. Puławy was substituted by Warsaw, and I was rushing down Leszno Street. The dome of the Great Synagogue was rising into a sunlit sky just ahead, imposing, but like a grandfather only pretending to be stern, and summer rain had begun to fall, and its hammering against the dome was a good sound, the sound of life being born …

I stayed in Warsaw until a gunshot tugged me back to myself. A man in front of me had collapsed and been executed. Flies were already feeding at the wound in his head. We were walking down the platform of a small train station.

‘Keep going!’ someone yelled at me in German.

Stepping over the man, I knew that our blood would never be completely erased from the streets of every Polish city and town – not even if it rained every day for a thousand years. And I was thinking:
The Poles who survive this war will hate us for ever, because the bloodstained cobblestones of their cities and towns will remind them of their guilt.

On the train, inside an oven-hot cattle car, I dropped down and curled into a ball to keep from being crushed. I wanted water so badly that I’d have opened a vein had I carried anything sharp on me.

I must have passed out. When I awoke, soldiers were jabbing us with their rifle butts, their Alsatians straining for a chance to taste Jewish flesh. They marched us forward. My head was heavy and cumbersome, as though it might fall off from its own weight, and my dry, useless tongue was a dead lizard inside my mouth.

We arrived at a large camp of wooden barracks and were marched through the front gate up to a desk where two prisoners were ladling water into tin cups. The liquid tasted of metal, but I gulped it down as fast as I could. I didn’t have enough saliva yet to eat, or even an appetite, but I grabbed my crust of bread as if it were Hannah’s hand.

I slept that night on a wooden floor surrounded by other recent arrivals.

The next morning, after roll call, one of the head prisoners called out Izzy’s name, and when I answered, he led me into a barracks that had become a workshop for tailors and escorted me to the back, where three skeletal men were seated tightly together, hunched over a table piled with hundreds of watches. ‘Enjoy your new office,’ he told me, and just like that he walked away.