ABOVE ALL, FATHER RECALLS the seasons. Take, for instance, the first winter snows; the remembrance remains clearer than the most recent of dreams. Mother Sheine is singing him to sleep. Lullabies fade to darkness and, as if no time has passed, he awakens to the sight of ice clinging to window panes above the bed. The morning light silhouettes fantastic shapes of ghostly figures, wild images painted by overnight frosts, while outside the first snows are falling.
When Bishke came home from work during the winter months, he would bring the ice with him. It clung to his beard, clothes, and bundles of unsold newspapers. He would arrive fresh, cold: an iceman returning to the family, to be greeted by a simmering samovar and the heavenly warmth of that first cup of tea.
Snow caressed the earth as far as the eye could see. It filled the streets, permeated the forests, froze over lakes and rivers. From its softness, father and his playmates built babushkas, only to smash them soon after. They hurled snowballs at each other, while on the iced surface of the Biale they raced sleds down inclines in a whirl of whiteness. And in the many decades since, father’s memories of the harsher aspects of winter, of its biting winds and relentless chills, have softened. What has been retained, with increasing lucidity, is the surface white, the purity of Bialystok covered in snow.
In the winter of 1942-43 the fate of Bialystok careered like a drunkard on thin ice. Letters flew between Nazi headquarters, in Berlin and Koenigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, where Erich Koch, one of Hitler’s most trusted cronies, ruled over his little patch of the Reich. SS and Gestapo factions, local bureaucrats and commandants, debated whether the ghetto was to be liquidated or allowed to survive, for the time being, because of the productivity of its skilled slaves. With the destruction of all provincial Jewish settlements in the early days of November — among them my ancestral shtetlech, Bielsk and Bransk, Orla and Grodek — Bialystok had become an oasis, an island of refuge towards which escapees from the death trains made their way. Yet all the while the gas ovens and crematoria were working overtime to fulfil Hitler’s vision of a Europe rid of Jews, the ‘Final Solution’ to an age-old curse.
Still, Bialystoker hoped. Perhaps they would yet be spared. Judenrat chairman Efraim Barasz berated them: Work! Attain your quotas. Produce furniture and coats, chemicals and suits, uniforms and boots for your overlords. He dashed about in the Judenrat carriage as if possessed, galloping to Gestapo headquarters on Sienkiewicza Avenue, and along the wide pathways that led to the Nazi administration in Branitski palace. In these offices of the Reich he pleaded for concessions and stays of execution.
Within the ghetto, beggars huddled against wind and frosts. Makeshift stoves belched smoke into crowded rooms and apartments. Inmates shivered in the dawn light as they shuffled to work; and, for the fortieth year in succession, Bishke Zabludowski ran the streets, the disseminator of news, the distributor of Judenrat posters with the latest Nazi ordinances and demands. He pasted sheets on walls and fences, within courtyards and against buildings, in alleys and lanes, day in and day out, bound to his lifelong vocation like a man in a trance. In a collection of documents, unearthed and published after the War, I have been able to trace the last poster that grandfather conveyed: number three hundred and eighty-six, dated January 29, winter 1943.
Bishke first took to the streets as a vendor of news in the winter of 1903. In January 1913 communal leaders, editors, writers and journalists, printers, and friends gathered in his apartment to celebrate his tenth anniversary. It was the great event of father’s childhood. Tables were crammed with delicacies: herring and caviar, chopped liver and chicken pieces, salamis and strudels. The guests sat at tables playing cards, talking politics and gossiping, sipping liqueurs and spirits. A phonograph whirled with waltzes, polkas, cantatorial chants and the latest hits from the Yiddish theatre. The Zabludowski children dashed between guests, crawled under tables, listened in on conversations and resisted attempts to put them to bed. Father refused to sleep unless he was given a glass of cognac Whatever drink Sheine brought him, the seven-year-old would grimace and exclaim: ‘That’s not cognac! I want only genuine cognac!’ How could cognac be just a bitter drink? It had to be something extraordinary, exotic, comparable to the wild stallions that reared from the labels.
One quarter of a century later, in the winter of 1938, prominent Bialystok Jews gathered in Rabinowitz’s A La Minute restaurant to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary. The banquet was reported in all the Yiddish dailies, and father learned of the event from cuttings sent to him in New Zealand. Editors and agents had delivered glowing tributes. ‘Who in Bialystok doesn’t know Bishke?’, they had declared. ‘He is a city landmark — a short, lively, energetic Yiddele, running with bundles of newspapers tucked under his arms, his tongue always on the move, his voice at full pitch from dawn to dusk, proclaiming the latest news, our Bishke, an artist in his trade. In his hands newspapers realise their full potential. When he announces the headlines, they come alive; and when there is an event of particular significance — a disaster, an assassination, a declaration of war — Bishke takes flight. Crowds gather, electrified, carried along in his wake as he hurtles through the streets, trumpeting the event as if it were the coming of the Messiah, no less.’
While we discuss these articles of praise, father recalls Armistice Day 1918. Bishke had flown through the streets with special extras, screaming: ‘Cease fire! Cease fire!’ People had burst out of their homes and apartments, broken off their prayers, emerged from alleys and lanes, charged out of shops and factories, to tear after him. Newspapers spiralled through the air, passing from hand to hand. The crowd jostled like a congregation of excited Hasidim straining to gain a glimpse of their Tzaddik. The news erupted and spread through the city, while in the centre of the commotion stood Bishke, the town crier, the messenger, the medium through which news flowed and dispersed in all directions until every home, every yeshiva boy, housewife, rabbi, and priest was informed. After all, a war had ended. A catastrophe was over. ‘No more wars!’ was the catch cry of the times. ‘Peace! Bread! Liberation!’ was the expectation of a war-weary Europe. And for a moment, at least, caught up in the throng, even pessimists were drawn along by the cry of Bishke on Armistice Day 1918.
In January 1943, disturbing rumours circulated throughout the ghetto. Cooks, cleaners, and secretaries working in Gestapo offices told their resistance comrades of plans for mass deportations. A German factory manager warned his workers of imminent disaster. When denounced by ghetto informer Judkowski, he was thrown out of Bialystok and five of his workers were tortured and executed.
At the beginning of February, Sturmbahnfuhrer Ginter, an envoy of Heinrich Himmler, arrived in Bialystok with a squad of SS men experienced in mass murder. Efraim Barasz was ordered to compile lists of 17 000 inmates for ‘resettlement’. In frantic negotiations with Gestapo bosses the numbers were whittled down to 6 300 — liquidation on the instalment plan.
On February 2nd, Gestapo officers inspected the fences. All escape routes were sealed. On February 4th, the passes of those who worked outside the ghetto were confiscated. A Gestapo delegation toured the factories to assure workers that nothing out of the ordinary was about to take place. Mass murder requires a certain degree of psychology. The Nazis prided themselves on it. A minimum of panic would ensure a maximum of efficiency. Go quietly. This is merely a transfer to greener fields.
Nevertheless, on the night of February 4th, the ghetto inmates were restless, nervous, ready to take to the hideouts they had been preparing within false walls and chimneys, in garrets and under floorboards, in cellars and bunkers — a secret city of burrows and tunnels to which they feverishly added last-minute extensions, water outlets, electricity connections, stockpiles of food — while cells of the Resistance surveyed their limited arsenals of primitive weapons, and waited.
Raphael Raizner was a printer by trade; and, like so many Bialystoker connected to the newspaper business, he had been a friend and admirer of Bishke Zabludowski. It was Raizner who first informed father of the events that had taken place on February 5, 1943.
Both father and Raizner had arrived in Melbourne in the late 1940s — one as an immigrant from New Zealand, wanting to live in a city where there was a strong community of former Bialystoker, the other, as a refugee from the displaced persons’ camps of Eastern Europe.
In Melbourne they lived just a few blocks apart, in the same neighbourhood, since this was a suburb where many Jewish migrants first settled on arrival. When introduced to each other, there had been an uneasiness, a hesitancy, an avoidance of eye contact. ‘Don’t ask. Don’t think about it. You shouldn’t dig too deeply’, Raizner had said. ‘It doesn’t bear telling.’ And father admits that he too had been anxious, reluctant to pursue the details, in fear of the renewed sorrow they would cause. But Raizner had been a witness, an inmate of Gehenna. He had no choice, it appears, but to pass on what he had seen.
Raizner talked for many hours during their first encounter, describing in particular the events of February 5. Yet they never discussed the incident again, despite the many times they visited each other before Raizner passed away some five years later.
At 2 a.m., on Thursday February 5, a convoy of trucks carrying Gestapo and SS men, security police, and Ginter’s evacuation squads entered the ghetto and approached the Judenrat offices at Kupietzka 32. Gestapo boss Gustav Friedl directed Efraim Barasz and the Judenrat police to accompany him with their lists of deportees. Several blocks were surrounded and raked with machine-gun fire. Nazi commandants screamed instructions; Judenrat police pounded on shutters; residents were ordered into the streets. But no one emerged.
When Friedl’s men broke into the apartments they found them empty. Enraged at having been foiled, he tore up the lists and ordered random attacks. Those who resisted were immediately shot. As news of the Aktion flashed through the ghetto, many of its inhabitants vanished into hiding.
At about 4 a.m. evacuation squads made their way into Ulitza Kupietzka to continue their onslaught on the crowded apartments that lined both sides of the street.
Kupietzka 38. I first saw this address on the backs of envelopes containing letters father sent to his wife in Wellington during their three-and-a-half years of separation. The Zabludowskis lived on the second floor. There were two bedrooms, one of which father shared with Bishke and Sheine; a large kitchen where Sheine and her eldest daughter Etel ruled supreme; and a dining room in which stood a book cabinet, a sofa, and six chairs around a table covered with a waterproof cloth. On the walls there hung portraits of the renowned philanthropist Moses Montefiore, and a group photo of Yiddish writers. Among them stood Mendele, the ‘grandfather’ of Yiddish literature, and the popular humorist Sholem Aleichem. The others father cannot recall, but he thinks they were on the deck of a boat, sailing on the River Dnieper … or was it the Black Sea?
Father has always preferred rooms with a view, exteriors to interiors. To this day, when he enters a building for the first time he is drawn immediately to the windows to gaze at wide vistas and their intimations of what lies beyond. The window fronting Ulitza Kupietzka overlooked a tangle of rooftops and squares, courtyards and lanes. In the distance, Ulitza Jurowietzka stretched towards the international section of Bialystok station. Once a day, the Moscow-Paris express would draw up by its platforms. Children ran beside the rails as it slowed down. They waved at faces peering through the windows and dreamed of jumping aboard to travel far beyond the confines of their landlocked lives.
The window to the left overlooked the inner courtyard. It was a world in itself, a miniature village stirring with constant activity. Within it stood a bakery, a dyer’s workshop and the Polish caretaker’s hut. He was an irritable man who worked hardest on Saturdays, as the ‘Shabbes Goy’, attending to odd jobs and manual work — thereby enabling the Orthodox to observe their day of rest. The dyer spread furs and leather on the cobblestones to dry, and their acrid smell permeated the neighbourhood. Wagons entered by an arched gateway with supplies of flour and pelts. Peasants hawked potatoes and firewood, their wives delivered dairy products, and their children played between horses, merchants, and drying skins.
The window to the right was father’s favourite. It overlooked the Biale which meandered just metres away. A strip of wild grass and shrubs threaded between the building and the river. Nearby there was a field in which stonemasons shaped tombstones from blocks of granite. Ulitza Kupietzka continued on over the river across a bridge, supported by columns between which birds often congregated. As he stood by the window father would sometimes hear the notes of a piano drifting from a nearby apartment. The pianist was the daughter of a wealthy balabos, the proud owner of factories and property. She had once been in love with father’s eldest brother, Zachariah, but he had ignored her. Besides, he had long since disappeared in the Red empire with the theatrical troupe Sniegov and Dubrolov, and the girl next door had become a spinster who harboured romantic illusions of a pure love that would rescue her from loneliness and boredom.
Every year, on the first day of Rosh Hashonah, late in the afternoon, a crowd of Hasidim would gather by the banks of the Biale. They would stand in the field facing the river, between slabs of granite and half-completed tombstones, fringed shawls draped over their heads and shoulders. Chanting and swaying, they cast their sins into the Biale waters. Throughout the 1920s and well into the next decade, father would observe this ritual from the window, and he would remain long after, until the new moon rose towards its zenith and cast a thin glow over the rooftops of Kupietzka.
Itzchok Malamud has been described as reserved, a quiet man, somewhat withdrawn. When the February Aktions began, he was living with his wife and child at Kupietzka 29. During the previous year he had fled the town of Slonim, a witness to the murder of his parents in massacres that had wiped out thousands of Slonimer Jews. After hiding in the forests he had smuggled himself into Bialystok ghetto. He obtained work in one of its factories and had become a brooding participant in the early-morning meetings conducted there by resistance leaders. When the February Aktions drew near, he had obtained bottles of sulphuric acid distributed by members of the factory cells.
In the early hours of February 5, Nazi police rushed into the corridors of Kupietzka 29 and ordered the residents outside. Malamud responded by hurling acid into the eyes of one of the officers. Severely burnt and blinded, the officer fired into the crowd and succeeded in killing one of his cohorts.
The body was carried to the Judenrat offices and placed on Efraim Barasz’s desk. After conferring with Gestapo boss Heimbach and SS envoy Ginter, Gustav Friedl ordered the Judenrat to deliver Malamud or face severe reprisals.
Father remembers Prager’s garden as a vacant block, with gnarled fruit trees, weeds and ivies — formerly the walled grounds of a wealthy merchant. Nearby stood the Neivelt house of prayer. Father had attended cheder with the son of the cantor, and they often played together in the neighbourhood.
Soon after the ghetto was erected, Prager’s garden became the site of a market. Residents gathered to barter: an overcoat for bread, a bar of soap for butter. Children would steal over the ghetto fences to smuggle in whatever they could to augment their parents’ meagre stocks. When Nazi patrols happened to be in the area the dealers would scatter, leaving behind their paltry goods, their sole means of survival.
At two in the afternoon of February 5, over one hundred hostages were herded from the courtyard at Kupietzka 29, marched to Prager’s garden, lined up against the wall of the Neivelt prayer-house and shot, in reprisal for Malamud’s deed.
Father recalls the exact moment when Raizner described the shooting. Raizner had paused and faltered, unable to continue his account. His face had paled; and, when at last he resumed, his voice had fallen to a whisper. On the evening of February 5, 1943, Raizner had seen the shallow graves, the protruding hands and feet, the arms stretching upwards — the last movements of those who were still alive. Among those murdered in Prager’s garden were my grandparents Bishke and Sheine.
‘Do not dwell too much upon the past’, father warns. He blots out disturbing dreams and prefers that which he can touch and see while wide awake. A fractured past and muddled dreams are synonymous’, he claims. ‘Obliterate the crippled visions that emerge from the darkness’, he stresses. When father awakens, he deliberately breaks free of the night and reminds himself: The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and life goes on.
For eight days, except Sunday, the Aktion continued unabated, with relentless punctuality: at six in the morning the sudden roar of trucks, the gleam of steel helmets, the heavy tread of Nazi boots entering the ghetto to resume the hunt. Cramped in their hideouts, the inmates waited in terror — stifling every cough, a baby’s cry, the slightest sign of life. Floorboards were ripped out, false walls smashed in, and bunkers dynamited. Jewish police were forced to go first into suspected hideouts, to act as shields against potential resisters. On the second floor of Kupietzka 10, Jews fought with iron bars, axes, and knives, before being shot and hurled through the windows. A family poured boiling water on their assailants and were executed. Feingold the madman laughed and cursed as he was beaten to death. Mothers clutched their dead babies long after they had suffocated. Many suicided before they could be taken. Others spat and swore in their captors’ faces. The ghetto was engulfed by mayhem and rage.
Raphael Raizner surveyed the scene from an attic on the third storey of a garment factory. The floors were crowded with workers’ families exempted from the transports. Frost and biting winds slipped through gaps in the walls. In the streets below, huddles of women and children, old men and bent grandmothers, whole families clutching each other for support, staggered by. Those who could no longer keep moving were shot on the spot, their bodies left lying in the mud. Occasionally someone would attempt to escape, only to be gunned down as he ran. Two women broke away and hurled their children through factory windows. Soldiers dashed in, retrieved the children, and dragged them back to their mothers. A woman begged to be shot and an SS man obliged. A dog scampered towards him. He picked it up, patted its back, and asked sympathetically: ‘Haven’t you eaten today?’
At six the troops would retire and march from the ghetto. Some made for Kupietzka 32, the Judenrat offices, to drink and celebrate until the early hours of the morning; while outside, in the darkness, figures emerged from their hideouts. Like trembling shadows they darted about to scavenge for food, exchange information, and prepare for the next day of terror. As they searched for their loved ones they could hear in the distance the whistle of the last train fading into the night, hound for Treblinka.
I probe, press for details, seek out witnesses, scan documents. It becomes an obsession; and always at the core hover mother and father. What did they feel at the moment of revelation? Father recalls Raizner’s eyes, unfocussed, remote.
‘His pauses were frequent’, father tells me, ‘his silences prolonged; and within them I saw Bishke being dragged to Prager’s garden, to the shrill commands of his captors. They pushed and prodded, bayonets at his shoulders. Bishke stumbled and ran, not knowing why or for what. His cheeks were hollow, his face gaunt, the eyes vague and haunted. Then I saw them at Bialystok station, on the day I left Poland. It was the first time in my life that I had kissed Bishke. Who kisses a father with a beard that itches and a face beaten hard by wind and rain? Beside him stood Sheine, wearing a blue silk dress, with a white bow over the bodice. It had been a present from my youngest sister Feigl and her husband Reuben Zak. They loved her very much, and no wonder, for in the days of their courtship she had encouraged their romance and allowed them to be free.
‘When Sheine wore the dress for the first time they had taken her out to the theatre. She looked radiant. The dress matched her blue eyes. My blue eyes come from her, as does my great love for life. She was good natured; she believed in people. Until I was ten I would sleep next to her. I was permeated by the scent of her being and awoke to her blue eyes.
‘Raizner talked. Bialystok raged. Bishke and Sheine had to dig their own graves. I saw it clearly. Then I said, enough. Pain is a luxury; sentimentality an indulgence; the lure of life far more powerful. I had to shut out the remembrance, my visions and dreams. Otherwise I would have succumbed to grief and shame.’
A reward of 25 000 marks was offered for the head of Itzchok Malamud. The Gestapo threatened to shoot thousands if he were not found within twenty-four hours. Malamud gave himself up, although there are some who claim he was betrayed by an informer.
On the morning of February 8 a gallows was erected outside Kupietzka 29. Detachments of SS men and police lined up before the execution site. Gestapo boss Heimbach pronounced the sentence, and Malamud was led to the gallows. As the rope was placed around his neck he spat in his executioner’s face and screamed: ‘Criminals, you will pay! Your end is near!’ His words are said to have echoed throughout the length of the street.
Malamud remained hanging for forty-eight hours. In Bialystok today a small plaque indicates where the execution took place, and Kupietzka has been renamed Ulitza Malmeda.
On the morning of Saturday February 13, shocked and bewildered inmates began to emerge from hiding. Bodies lay scattered about the streets. Cows and horses stalked through the rubble. Grief-stricken men and women wandered in search of kin. Staring wildly in disbelief, mothers clung to their dead children. Work brigades collected the dead from courtyards and cellars. Winter frosts had fused the corpses. The bodies in Prager’s garden were exhumed and carted to the ghetto cemetery in Zabia Square to be buried in mass graves, men and women separately, Bishke and Sheine apart.
In the afternoon rain fell and washed away the blood Zabia Square became a quagmire of churned mud and ice; and years later, when I came across poster three hundred and eighty-six, I noted the postscript that had been added: ‘February 5th to the 12th. An Aktion. 900 shot within. 10 000 sent to Treblinka’. Short. To the point. The first item of news disseminated in Bialystok after the death of Bishke, the newspaper man.