I MAKE MY WAY at dawn to the Palatz station, so called because here once stood the summer palace of Count Branitski. It overlooked the Bialowieza settlement, and became a hunting retreat for a succession of kings and czars. They would ride into the forest on horseback, accompanied by large retinues of cavalry and soldiers, with hunting dogs scurrying about their feet. Palaces loomed large in the Yiddish novels I consumed as a child. They would be situated on hills overlooking a shtetl in which life revolved around a synagogue, a marketplace, and a ritual bath-house. At least, this is how father describes it. ‘Take these three ingredients’, he tells me, ‘and you have a shtetl: a place to pray, a place to trade, and a place to bathe; while above, stood the world of Polish and Russian aristocracy — remote and inaccessible.’
It was a fragile romance, my dream of the shtetl. And it was vague. I skimmed the many books father had brought with him from Poland. They exuded a scent of decay and a comforting feeling of warmth and solidity. Occasionally I came across flowers my father had pressed between pages. The Yiddish texts, in Hebraic script, revealed their meaning only in fleeting glimpses. I did not have mastery over the language. English had submerged the mother tongue; and as a child I was not seeking detail. I was content with the skimming, as a skier is more than content with a landscape that whirls past in a brilliant flash of colour.
The romance can be felt on this cool dawn as I wait for a train back to Bialystok. On the station roof two herons perch in a nest, outlined against a pale blue sky. The moon is still visible, descending towards the upper reaches of the forest. Throughout the Bialystoku region, mists are rising and, in provincial stations, groups of peasants sit upon their luggage as sleepy station-masters signal the arrival of the first train.
When Dorota received a blue dress on her fourth birthday, she recalled the blue hat she had recently noticed in a shop window. She crept into her mother’s bedroom, removed some money from a handbag, and ran back to the shop to purchase the blue hat. Her mother’s anger was softened by pride in Dorota’s sense of good taste. She chided her about the stolen money, but was more than pleased to allow her to keep the hat.
Several days later, Dorota wore the blue dress for the first time. Her mother pinned a pink flower to the hat. They walked together: mother, father, two sisters, under a clear blue sky; blue upon blue with shades of pink on an autumnal landscape in a town somewhere in the vicinity of Bialystok.
Dorota tells me the story forty-seven years later in a chance encounter, on a train travelling between Palatz station and Bialystok. There are countless such stories lying dormant in remote Polish towns and hamlets, always about to be told yet again, variations on a common theme, memories which refuse to fade.
They were on the way to church. She was overjoyed with the new dress, the hat, the presence of her parents and sister. Life was an infinity of blue in which there hovered a ball of gold; and as Dorota gazed up at this expanse she noticed that, from the halo surrounding the golden ball, a silver streak had materialised and was diving towards her. The first bomb was falling; the girl was being pushed by her parents, screaming frantic instructions: ‘Run! Jump! Stay down!’ The infinity of blue was now blotted by a swarm of machines spitting fire, and Dorota’s blue dress was stained by mud as she lay on the ground in a town consumed by flames: September 1, 1939. Another war had begun. Never again would the family be together.
Father isn’t sure when he received his last letter from Bialystok. Despite the many hours he has spent sorting out journals and letters from a past life, there never seems to be an end to it. ‘At first I lose a valued document’, he explains. ‘Then I find it again, unexpectedly, when looking for something else. So 1 put it in a new place, which I am sure I can easily locate. But then I forget where it is and I have to start searching again.’ It is as if the past refuses to allow itself to be put in order, and is always intruding into the present with disturbing hints of a world of irredeemable chaos, forever spinning out of control.
Yet, as usual, when I press him hard enough, something seems to turn up, and father finds a letter from his brother, Isaac, dated August 1938. ‘Isaac was down to earth’, says father, ‘family oriented, ready to lend a helping hand in the toughest of times.’ He had joined Bishke as a partner in the family business, making deliveries to local subscribers. Eventually he branched out on his own, to work as an administrator in the offices of Yiddish newspapers.
Isaac writes of family matters and confesses to having become a simple ‘Yidl’, preoccupied with his son’s teething problems and bowel movements, immersed in ‘my little corner of existence where all yesterdays are the same as tomorrows’. His infant son is a rascal, a cheeky boy who leaves behind him a train of torn and broken objects. ‘But when he gazes at you with his wide-open eyes it is impossible to get angry, no matter how much damage he has caused.’
Father’s eyes light up as he reads me Isaac’s letter, and is reminded of friends he has not seen for over fifty years. Each one referred to by Isaac he expands upon, with eccentric accounts of their various deeds as young men about town.
‘Ran into Godel Perelstein the other day’, writes Isaac. ‘He carries your last letter around with him as if it were a precious treasure and apologises for not having replied. He claims he can only compose letters when he is in an appropriate mood.’
‘Godel was a great reciter of Yiddish poetry’, father adds. ‘He would perform in front of packed audiences in the Palace theatre, declaiming the works of my favourite writers.’
‘Moishe Poznanski sends his regards’, reports Isaac ‘He was a handsome man’, says father. ‘A leather-worker by trade. For many years we dreamed of setting up our own business with the name “Everlasting Shoes”. When at last we managed to scrape together the money, the business lasted for about a month before our creditors realised how hopeless we were and dismantled our fantasies.’
As for Zundel Mandelbroit, father needs little prompting. He was his best friend. ‘We used to go out into the fields on summer nights and camp under the stars. We wanted to penetrate the mysteries of the night. But if even a few mosquitoes attacked, we quickly forgot our resolve, broke off our philosophising, and ran back home.’
And as he reminisces father recalls that, yes, there had been another letter after Isaac’s, written by Zundel, sometime towards the end of 1939. It had disappeared. ‘Perhaps it is lying somewhere around the house’, father speculates. ‘But what he wrote I can never forget. “Help us get out”, he had pleaded. “We need visas, permits, a means of escape. The ground is beginning to burn beneath our feet! Help us get out!”‘
He moves fast. Time is slipping through his clutches. Yet he holds on. He often breaks into a run, a little trot, as he careers around the house. He paints the peeling kitchen walls in pinks and blues, bright colours. But only in patches. Father is far too impatient to remain still for long. His spritely body scampers up and down ladders.
‘You’re a growing boy’, I tell him when he reaches the top rung.
Never at a loss for words, he replies: ‘Yes, growing down into the ground, towards the everlasting, a meal for the worms.’
He trips through the ninth decade of his life, a joke here, a comment there, forever rushing, as if pursued by ghosts that have never quite caught up with him. And I begin to suspect that, for him also, the ground is burning beneath his feet, and has been for many years. As for mother, she has become increasingly withdrawn, her arms folded hard against her chest, her glance directed elsewhere, far removed. She sits still, resigned, hunched within herself, allowing the ghostly dance of memory to have its way.
Chaimke, Uncle Joshua Probutski’s first child, seems to have been everyone’s favourite. When he was a baby the six Probutski sisters would argue over who would have him sleeping next to them. He was the first of their nephews, their first opportunity for mothering.
Mother last saw Chaimke in December 1932, on the day she left Bialystok to join her sister Feigl in Melbourne. A third sister, Chaie, left soon after for Argentina where she was reunited with her husband. Liebe, Sheindl, and Tzivie remained in Bialystok, and Chaimke continued to enjoy the devoted attention of just three aunts.
In contrast to father, mother spends little time sorting out old documents. Instead she has selected the few she seems to regard as essentials, and assembled them in one compact bundle held together by a rubber band. Included are several photos taken in happier prewar New Zealand days; letters she had received from her three sons during their various journeys abroad; and a postcard I had sent from Milan after attending a concert in the renowned La Scala opera house. Of all the cards I have written over the years, this is the one she has retained — touched, it appears, by my references to her as a singer.
The postcard lies wedged between a number of letters, extracted from the many sent by her husband between 1932 and 1936, during their three-and-a-half years of enforced separation. As a child I had often come across the letters, tied neatly together, in a dining room cupboard which I would explore when mother and father were both out at work. Father scolded me for tampering with such important documents; but he had allowed us, the three brothers, to remove stamps from the envelopes. They became the pride of our collection. Not one of our friends had seen such ancient Polish stamps, and they were worth a fortune in exchanges.
The few letters that mother has retained appear to have been chosen with some deliberation. Within one of them, among father’s usual ten pages or more of Bialystok gossip and poetic declarations of love, he had included a note written by Chaimke. It is short and to the point:
My dear Aunty Hoddes,
I am going up to fifth grade. At the moment we are on holidays. We’ve already had two months and only two weeks remain. Now I’ll tell you how I spend my day. I wash myself, eat and pray. Then I go out into the street. Now I want to tell you that I’m collecting stamps. You always send me a yellow and a green one. Send me other colours also. I’m ending my letter. I give my regards to everyone. Goodnight. I am going to sleep.
Sometime towards mid 1939, mother received a letter from Bialystok written by her sister Sheindl. ‘Is it possible to obtain visas for our parents?’, she had asked. ‘Or for a brother? A sister? And if not, at least for Chaimke? Forgive us for asking, but things are looking bleak.’
Whenever mother talks about Chaimke, as she often has over the years, she lapses into a voice tinged with weariness and regret. She had tried to obtain a visa for him. She had hounded immigration officials in Wellington, knocked on doors, pleaded on Chaimke’s behalf, turned this way and that — all to no avail. Doors to the New World were not easily prised open. Mother had to make do with sending money; and she was never to find out whether the family received it or not.
Through provincial stations westwards, from the Bialowieza forest via Bielsk, before turning north, the train conveys me back towards Bialystok. Although it is barely a month since I entered Poland, Bialystok has become a home of sorts, a focal point around which the journey revolves. Yet 1 continue to approach it with wariness. Faint traces of forgotten dreams are reawakened by the hypnotic pulse of trains moving across Polish landscapes; and no matter how evocative the scenery, I invariably turn to a more compelling inner world, churning with fragments that for a moment seem accessible, alight with magic and promise, before they fade into a disturbing sense of suffocation and dread.
One dream in particular, which had threaded through my childhood, resurfaces as a conscious memory. I am on a picnic with mother and father. Holding my elder brother’s hand, I begin to stray into a nearby forest. Our parents’ faces fade behind us; their comforting presence vanishes. We are alone, lost, wandering. Trees and bushes seem like shadowy creatures. In the distance a light appears. It draws us to the edge of a clearing where a massive fire is blazing. We remain hidden among bushes, and gaze upon figures darting with bodies which they hurl into the flames. As I turn to look at my brother, I realise he is clearly visible in the firelight. We are both fully exposed. There is no hope of escape. The figures are advancing towards us. I force myself to awake and, as always, I come out of the dream choking.
Friday, September 15, 1939. The second day of Rosh Hashonah. Midmorning. In crowded synagogues and houses of prayer, the New Year is being ushered in when townsfolk dash by, waving their arms in alarm, their voices straining with terror as they shout: ‘The Nazis are on the outskirts of Bialystok. Loift! Untloift! Farbalt zich!’ — the age-old cry which precedes a pogrom. ‘Run! Flee! Hide yourselves!’
At noon the first Wehrmacht divisions appear on the deserted streets, firing flame-throwers through windows into homes and stores. Hundreds are wounded or killed in the assault. Raids, robberies, and arbitrary beatings become the order of the day. Women are shot for not giving up the rings on their fingers. The populace cowers indoors, sustained by one desperate hope fuelled by broadcasts on Moscow radio: Red Army troops have crossed the eastern borders and are heading in the direction of Bialystok.
On Thursday, September 21, three planes swoop in low to release pamphlets proclaiming the imminent arrival of Soviet forces. On Friday, Yom Kippur eve, German soldiers can be seen packing and taking to roads bound for Warsaw and the East Prussian border. The last retreating divisions are pelted with rocks hurled by embittered youths.
Towards evening the Red Army marches into a city decorated with red flags. Communal delegations greet them with flowers and speeches of welcome. Thousands of elated Bialystoker throng the streets. Jewish youths embrace Russian soldiers with great enthusiasm. On this, the holiest of nights, the culmination of the Days of Awe, orthodox Jews pack the synagogues and pray with renewed fervour. It is as if a miracle has taken place. Bialystok had been granted a reprieve.
On the Day of Atonement the town clock is reset to Moscow time. My grandfather, Bishke Zabludowski, stands again on the streets below, now selling the Soviet-backed Yiddish newspaper, the Bialystoker Shtern. The Nazi-Soviet pact, signed before the outbreak of war, has enabled the two empires to repartition Poland after a mere twenty-one years of independence. History has again turned full circle before Bishke’s eyes, while he seems to have remained the one constant, the observer of yet another spin in Bialystok’s fluctuating fortunes.
To this day, when Bialystoker refer to the winter of 1939-40, they shake their heads and exclaim: ‘You have no idea! Such frosts! So relentlessly cold! We were buried in snow. Water froze in the pipes. Field rats abandoned the countryside and sought shelter in the city. They scurried about our houses in hordes and fought over crumbs. Long queues would form soon after midnight as we vied for a meagre ration of bread. By the time the shops were within reach, the shelves were often already empty.’
But a haven it was, nevertheless, for refugees who stole across the nearby border, in flight from Nazi-occupied Poland. Within months the population had doubled to over two hundred thousand. The community responded with an open heart. Public kitchens were opened. Accommodation was provided in houses of study and private homes. And in Melbourne a decade later, a newly arrived immigrant, Pinchas Albert, told my father that he had been one of the many Warsaw Jews who had found temporary refuge in Bialystok, and that Bishke Zabludowski would regularly send him a loaf of bread, fresh from his daughter Etel’s bakery. That bread became the key to Pinchas’ survival. He had retained an image of it in the ensuing years — for there came a time when even the memory of a slice of bread was like manna from heaven.
Thereafter, whenever Pinchas saw father, he would remind him of Bishke’s deed; while for father, this occasional reminder became one of the last treasured fragments of information about his own father.
In the ‘Red Paradise’ as the town wags called it, there evolved an active and frantic night life. Yiddish and Russian drama ensembles, bolstered by actors and writers who had fled Hitler’s pogroms, played to packed audiences in the Palace theatre. Eddie Rosner’s renowned Warsaw jazz band had also shifted base to Bialystok. Guest singers, musicians, and the Yiddish vaudeville company of Zhigan and Schumacher toured the provinces. Cinemas were refurbished and their seating capacity increased in response to enthusiastic demand. The black market thrived, and illicit gambling houses found eager patrons in a city moving towards a degree of prosperity. Soviet occupation had opened up markets to the east. The textile industry was rejuvenated, and grandfather Reb Aron Yankev could again make his way to a factory job, soon after dawn, as the familiar wail of sirens signalled the start of another working day in Bialystok.
Reb Aron Yankev never allowed himself to be photographed. Not a single portrait exists. He regarded the camera as an ‘evil eye’, an instrument of the devil. It could rob a man of his soul, erode him of the divine presence. So I picture him trudging to work, as my mother has described him, a small Yidl, averting his eyes from worldly distractions, locked tightly in a private dream of God and his Tzaddik, the Slonimer Rabbi. Reb Aron lived for his brother Hasidim, and for the lean wooden shtibl, the Slonimer prayer-house, where they would gather on Shabbes and holy days. It always seemed, says mother, that he was never quite in the world of the living, except when he was with his beloved Hasidim.
As a child, mother would sometimes deliver Reb Aron Yankev’s lunch, and she had noticed that he often stood apart from the other workers. He ate alone, since they were unbelievers. He wrapped himself in a cocoon which thickened as he became older. By then his own children had become unbelievers, or as good as such in his eyes, since they flirted with modernity, shunned arranged marriages, joined leftist political groups, or had left Bialystok altogether to move thousands of miles to the ends of the earth, where they lived, surely, among pagans and apostates.
We can merely speculate about Reb Aron Yankev’s thoughts in the factories of the Red Paradise, for he never wrote to his three daughters in the New World; besides, we have reached that point where mother cuts her stories short. Her eyes are lowered, her head slowly nodding. It is as if, so many years later, long after the Event, she still cannot understand how it could have taken place.
Despite the renewed prosperity, the night life, and the large Soviet department stores, all was not well in the Red Paradise. In the shadows there glided the keepers of the city. It was a time for compiling files — intelligence records about suspect ideas and the individuals who held them. The New Order thrived on denunciations, stool pigeons, and informers. Many an old score was settled by a discreet visit to the offices of the secret police.
There are Bialystoker, survivors, who still recall precise details of the first raid, the sound of banging on doors at 3.30 a.m. in mid-April 1940, and the order: ‘You have half-an-hour to be ready!’ Factory owners and merchants, rabbis and priests, refugees and Polish officers, an assortment of souls labelled as ‘untrustworthy elements’ were led to the Bialystok station and crammed into freight wagons. ‘On the sides of the wagon was written “capacity eight horses”. Or was it twelve?’ Memory is slippery at such a distance in the living rooms of suburban Melbourne. But there is agreement that about sixty people were conveyed in each wagon and that, many days later, after a suffocating journey across mountain ranges and through vast tracts of forest, they arrived in ‘The Land of the White Bears’: Siberia.
After subsequent raids many more men were jailed in Bialystok prisons, and their wives and children banished to the Soviet interior. Yet, for all this, Bialystok remained a place of refuge, and the populace was fully aware of it. Despite the news censorship, the refugee grapevine had kept them informed of the terror raging on the other side of the border. The Jews of Bialystok clung to their reprieve.
The air is pungent, the streets dancing with afternoon light. It rebounds from pavements and reflects a golden glow on the windows of ageing tenements. I make my way from the station towards Witold’s flat, my Bialystok address. From Kosciuszki Square, the cobblestoned heart of the city, past the clock-tower, I skirt the city gardens before turning, like a homing pigeon, into the narrow streets of the Chanaykes.
Weekend delirium permeates alleys and lanes. Children clamber over an abandoned car and stomp on the roof in a frenzy. Dogs leap excitedly at their feet, yelping and howling. Factories are at rest. The week’s work is over. Shabbes is approaching. And in the fading light I can imagine them, as they stream from the Great Synagogue and smaller houses of worship.
Among them walks Reb Aron Yankev, from the Slonimer shtibl towards the Chanaykes. Even though mother had strayed from the ways of her elders, she refers to Shabbes in Bialystok as the most magic of times, and she has always maintained the ritual of blessing the Shabbes-licht. Every Friday evening, throughout my childhood, she would place two candlesticks upon a newly washed white cloth over the kitchen table, and light the candles as it grew dark.
The candles have burnt low. Wax pours down the sides and swells in a heap at the base. Reb Aron sits by the table after the meal, overcome by fatigue. His entire body is enveloped in warmth. He surrenders to dreams, his face resting upon his arms. The Queen of Shabbes now reigns supreme.
He awakens several hours later, stretches, runs cold water over his face, wraps himself in a white satin coat, and descends into Ulitza Kievska. He makes his way to the Slonimer shtibl, which stands in a lane not so far from the shadows of the clock-tower. As he enters he is greeted with enthusiasm. ‘Reb Aron, give us a tune!’, they exclaim.
Flasks of brandy stoke the fire. Arms linked, shoulder to shoulder, they dance in short measured steps that move slowly at first, and then quicken to the pace of the melody. Eyes are closed, faces tilted upwards. Heads sway from side to side. The circle closes, and an ancient fear evaporates. They are the heirs of the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name, who had appeared not so many years ago, in a village not so many miles away, after the people had emerged from a great calamity. And he had proclaimed that to sink into gloom is to invite the presence of the Evil One. Counter him with ecstatic prayer, he had counselled. Oppose fear with dance, he had advised. Find your way back to the Creator, he had urged.
Another sip of brandy and Reb Aron is spinning. All faces have dissolved into one face, ascending between earth and heaven, beyond conflict and struggle, beyond a scarcity of bread and tedious hours of work; beyond drunken peasants on a rampage; beyond rival armies and contending empires; beyond history’s abrupt twists and shifts; and beyond an incessant undertow of fear and suspicion, until merged, within each other, in a whirling circle of light.
In the pre-dawn darkness Reb Aron wanders the silent streets of the Chanaykes, his feet pounding the cobblestones, his head soaring above the roofs, somewhere in the higher heavens. And, as she tells the story, mother’s eyes shift upwards, as if fixed upon a waning mirage called Bialystok.
Yet again the fate of Bialystok is heralded from the skies. Before dawn an unsuspecting populace is suddenly awoken by the sound of shattering glass and the shrill scream of Luftwaffe fighters engaged in aerial battles with Soviet planes. Columns of smoke billow towards the heavens as bombs fall upon a military base and civilian suburbs; and one of them explodes upon the home of Reuben Zak, his wife Feigele, and his daughter Liebele.
Feigele, father’s youngest sister, was the very same Feigele who had gone missing on the day the Zabludowski household was hit by bomb fragments at the outset of the first War. She had been one of the first and youngest of the wounded. This time she was one of the first to be killed. Reuben, his wife, and child were wiped out in that very first raid, in the early hours of Sunday, June 22, 1941.
An aunt, uncle, and cousin accounted for. A fragment falls into place. The mosaic is taking shape. This is a tale of fragments. There is no other way to tell it. This is my inheritance: shreds of family fate seeking recognition. It can only be pieced together.
Those with transmitters heard the news on Berlin radio: at four a.m. the Nazis had crossed the western borders and had launched an invasion of the Red Empire. The Soviet-Nazi pact was in tatters. The Jews of Bialystok were overcome by a chilling fear. They ran to each other’s homes seeking reassurance. They clung to the hope that the Reds would repel the attack. At noon they heard the Soviet foreign minister, speaking on Moscow Radio, remark that Hitler had invaded in the same month as had Napoleon. An even darker fate awaited Hitler, he predicted.
His words were of little comfort to a Bialystok under siege. It was soon evident the Red Army was in complete disarray. Officers and commissars were seen loading their wives and children into military vehicles. Grabbing their most precious possessions, they fled east. The panic spread quickly. Trains were choked with passengers. The highway to Minsk overflowed with thousands on the run, clutching packs and sacks, driven by one thought: to escape as fast as possible from the plague about to infest Bialystok. Everything was reduced to a cold sweat, or so I imagine it, from a childhood experience, when a neighbourhood bully gone berserk took after me with a knife — houses seemed to sway and recede out of focus; the ground beneath my feet appeared unsteady.
And so it may have been as they ran on that Sunday, and throughout Monday, their numbers swelling, pursued by planes swooping low to rake them with bullets. The roads were littered with burnt-out tanks, maimed horses, crushed bicycles, overturned wagons and autos. The dead and wounded lay on country paths and in fields of corn. The living dug holes in which to shelter during the night. German soldiers were parachuted in behind the retreating Soviets. East and west were ablaze. Burning trees buckled like bodies in fierce heat. There was nowhere to run.
A city in a vacuum. Days of anarchy and chaos. Red Army guards desert their posts at the Bialystok prison. The building is set alight, and its inmates charge into the streets ransacking stores. They grab crates of liquor, food, clothing, tobacco. For three days the looting continues. An abandoned populace wanders about like animals detecting the scent of an approaching calamity. By Thursday 26 June, a deathly silence has settled over Bialystok. And somewhere within this brooding city there waits Reb Aron Yankev and Chane Esther Probutski, Bishke and Sheine Zabludowski, with their families and friends — their restless dreams coloured by a terrible foreboding.