TOWARDS THE END OF WINTER, frozen lakes and rivers would crack apart and release fast-flowing ice that swept downstream. Cool breezes fanned the countryside and, on the river banks, hunchbacked willows swayed reflections in rejuvenated waters. The landscape around Bialystok seemed spellbound, poised between seasons, about to break beyond its winter dreaming.
When the nights became moderate, father would be invited by the Polish shoemakers for whom he kept books to go fishing overnight, on the outskirts of Bialystok. While they walked in the darkness owls moaned, and fireflies streaked by in showers of gold. The shoemakers fished until dawn and, as they trekked back to the city, they would meet peasants leading their oxen and horses to work. All was renewed energy, enthuses father, and he clenches his fist to stress the power of spring: a sharpened plough, a team of horses, a dew dissolving, the sun ascending, the earth ripped open to receive a scattering of seeds.
Soon after, the first herons would appear, winging their way from southern retreats, majestic in the skies, but awkward when they stumbled on their ungainly feet. To father they appeared ghostly, their claws sharp and threatening. Yet they still remind him of the scent of lilac, or ‘bird’s milk’ as it was called in Yiddish. It would be gathered clinging to twigs, and taken home to permeate the evening with its fragrance. As for the chestnut tree of Zwierziniec, the memory of its massive canopy in silver bloom remains startling. It hovered over a forest floor studded with wild flowers, within a resounding silence in which everything seemed slenderly balanced, imminent, about to cut loose.
On the banks of the Biale by Kupietzka bridge, within sight of the window where father once stood on Rosh Hashonah nights, the corpses of three informers hung from gallows erected by enraged mobs. They roamed the streets in search of those who had saved their own skins by leading Nazis to hideouts. When a cry of ‘traitor’ was heard, crowds rushed to the scene. They would tear and claw at the suspect, and lynch him on the spot. In the ghetto hospital on Fabryczna lay the crippled and maimed. Many had lost limbs through frost-bite and exposure. A bitter thirst for vengeance mingled with despair in those first days after the February Aktion. Ghetto inmates moved about in a daze, a community bewitched by a collective fate that seemed endlessly and inevitably to be leading to oblivion.
Then slowly, with the lengthening of days, the faintest of hopes began to stir. Clandestine radios hidden in cellars transmitted the grim optimism of London and Moscow. The Reich had retreated from Stalingrad and suffered defeats in North Africa. The Red Army was advancing. Divided factions of the underground met to analyse their February shortcomings. Bitter schisms that had lingered since pre-war years were dissolved. A united front was established, led by the Zionist-inclined Mordechai Tennenbaum, with the veteran communist Daniel Moscowitz his deputy. The Judenrat expanded it factories. Thousands clamoured for jobs. The ghetto gardens came to life with spring planting and experiments to improve yields. Ghetto kitchens were restored, furtive prayer meetings held and, on April 19th, Bunim Farbstein organised a communal seder in Shmuel Cytron’s house of study. Rabbis recited the Haggadah; and while Bunim spoke of freedom as the symbol of Passover, guests wept over the loss of loved ones and their desperate sense of isolation.
Some time towards the end of May 1943, Shapiro hurried to my parents’ Wellington flat. Ashen-faced and trembling, he clutched Yiddish journals he had just received by mail from New York. The Warsaw ghetto was burning. A revolt had erupted on April 19th, the first night of Passover. The journals also reported the suicide of Shmuel Artur Zygelboim, in London, on May 11th. As Bund representative of the Polish government-in-exile, he had become aware, via couriers and underground contacts, of the fate of his people. European Jewry was on the brink of annihilation. Every day they were being railed en masse to death factories. He had tried to convince British media and politicians. He had contacted the Foreign Office. He had met with US envoys. Bomb Auschwitz, he had pleaded. Save the remnants, he had begged. But the tale he told seemed too incredible. And those who believed him claimed that little could be done; their aircraft and personnel were required elsewhere. As a last resort, Zygelboim had taken his own life and left a note with his grim tidings. Perhaps with his death, he concluded, he would be able to arouse the ‘conscience of humanity’.
He was soon forgotten, except by the likes of Shapiro, who now stood in a Wellington flat, anxiously reading aloud Zygelboim’s last testament. As he listened, father was overcome by a sense of dread. What had been but a vague apprehension could no longer be denied. ‘Over there’, in the world he had left behind, his dearest friends and kin were dying; while here, under southern skies, he moved free as a bird. Every day, to and from work, his bus emerged from rolling hills into sudden views of sparkling seas. As Shapiro read, one thought echoed within father: I am of the living, while they, Bishke and Sheine, once devoted to my every need, are in Gehenna, and all that I once knew is on fire.
Shmuel Artur Zygelboim had been an integral part of my childhood folklore, a principal actor in a world of rebels, fighters and defiant souls who hurled themselves against the enemy with audacious abandon. The refugees who became my storytellers brought with them a universe of fire. Figures darted through the flames. One grabbed a grenade in mid-air and hurled it back at his executioner; another blocked the entrance of a bunker and was riddled with bullets. Children smuggled arms through sewers. Women jumped from collapsing buildings, screaming last words of defiance. I listened wide-eyed. The tales entered my dreams. They were enshrined in song. We sang them in choirs, at memorial services, at summer camps, at Yiddish school concerts:
Birds are coming, close your eyes my child,
They circle your cot in a world gone wild.
God has locked the doors and everywhere is night,
It awaits my child, in terror and fright.
Father draws distinctions between the dreams which emerge at night and what he calls ‘living dreams’. Such dreams, he explains, are sparked when fully awake. They are memories triggered in the present to form something new — a poem, an insight, an original idea. Take his latkes, for example. The recipe had come from his mother, Sheine. She would beat together grated potatoes and eggs, shredded onions and flour. Father follows the same formula, to which he adds raisins, perhaps almonds, something of his own imagining. The latkes thereby become a ‘living dream’, a live reflection of the past. As such they transcend mere nostalgia, he is at pains to stress.
In Bialystok, Sheine’s latkes had been very popular among his friends. They ate them with great relish on their many picnics in local meadows and forest clearings. To this day there are in Melbourne former Bialystoker, survivors, who mention Sheine’s latkes and find themselves dreaming of summers in Bialystok. The streets burned and melted underfoot. Heat waves could persist for days on end. The air was thick, the earth perspiring with heat. ‘We longed for a drink’, recalls father. Every well was an oasis, and he came to know the location of obscure springs in the forests.
Father has always preferred the immediate reward, the moment of heaven on earth, however brief, to the promise of an afterlife. So he took to the forests whenever he had the chance; after work he would often stroll from the city to the family dacha in Zwierziniec. He walked as night descended. The air was vibrant with the chatter of insects and bats. He glimpsed the stars between trees and, as he describes the scene, he suddenly pauses. Ah yes, he recalls, there was a Yiddish poet who in the 1930s travelled the Australian deserts and observed that the new moon rose in a reverse crescent to its counterpart in northern skies. Now that is a perfect example of a ‘living dream’, adds father, beaming with the pure delight of a child; and again he stresses, this is not a mere wallowing in the past, but a poetic jewel, an original image, a new moon rising over ancient worlds.
Lag ba-Omer is celebrated on the thirty-third day after Passover. Legend has it that in the first century of the common era, while in revolt against the Roman occupation, 24 000 disciples of Rabbi Akiva died of plague because they did not sufficiently honour one another. On Lag ba-Omer the plague ceased. The period of mourning was over. Music and marriage were again permitted. And on Lag ba-Omer 1943, in accordance with custom, over thirty couples were married in the Bialystok ghetto.
Perhaps the fate of Bialystok has become my ‘living dream’. The more I delve, the further I travel across Polish landscapes and into the tales of my elders, the more I seem to be moving in an hallucination, a warp in time and space, a netherworld in which slaves scurry about, clinging to life as the summer heat beats down upon them. And within that heat I catch dazzling glimpses of resilience. In the summer of 1943 there are love affairs in the ghetto, women daring to be pregnant. The underground operates with increasing audacity. Experiments are carried out in munitions workshops hidden in cellars and bunkers. Guns are smuggled in loaves of bread, under dresses and coats, or hurled over ghetto fences at pre-arranged locations. Resistance cells are formed to defend factories and streets. Partisans steal out to set up forest bases. Young women powder their faces, rouge their lips, disguise themselves as gentiles, and rent rooms on the Aryan side. With forged papers they obtain menial jobs in Nazi homes and offices, while acting as secret couriers between ghetto and forest. Underground radios report the fall of Mussolini. Children march around the courtyards proclaiming the news. Ghetto gardens are in bloom, tomatoes growing fat. Factory orders are flowing in from Berlin and Koenigsberg. The ghetto inmates are producing, preparing, sharpening their survival skills as the eastern front edges closer.
In back alleys, drooping over walls, bunches of red cherries glistened like rubies in the summer sun. Street boys would steal by to snatch their fill. For relief they took to the forests and strung up hammocks between trees. Father sways with the memory of the hammocks and the redness of dawns and dusks. Red permeated everything. It covered fields of corn and shoots of grain. It streaked through windows and doorways, seeped into courtyards and lanes.
And it occurs to father that, no matter how hot it became, Bishke remained outside, between dawn and dusk, pausing only when he noticed one of his sons approaching. In an instant he would forget the business, his livelihood, the heat. He would open a newspaper and point excitedly to an article: ‘Have a look! Read this! It’s written just for you!’ He loved finding something of relevance for them to read. Even on Sabbath afternoons, during his hours of rest, he would read aloud to Sheine the latest episodes of serialised novels — ‘soap operas for the masses’, father calls them. And he confides that, to this day, he regrets his former tendency to look critically upon his Bishke, the news vendor, the eccentric, the small Yidl who dashed through the streets like a man possessed. It was only much later, well after he had left, that he came to realise Bishke plied his trade simply because he was trying to provide for his family, to make ends meet. ‘So explain’, says father, ‘why did he and so many like him, have to come to such an end? Why do people have so much hatred for those they don’t even know?’
In July, Gestapo commissions inspected the ghetto with alarming frequency. The fate of Bialystok was again being debated in Reich headquarters. Odilo Globocnik, SS commandant of Lublin, a ruthless pioneer and advocate of the Final Solution, arrived to co-ordinate plans. Secret meetings were held in Branitski palace. The February Aktions and the Warsaw uprising were analysed to learn from past errors.
By August the signs were ominous. German clients collected unrepaired watches from ghetto jewellers. Factory orders were being cancelled. Gestapo bosses Friedl, Dibus, and Klein were seen checking ghetto fences. Unfamiliar troops and detachments of SS men roamed the city streets.
Wehrmacht officers and Judenrat leaders tried to assure nervous workers that there was nothing to fear. On Sunday, August 15, the ghetto was quiet. That evening many of its 40 000 inmates went to bed with a glimmer of hope. Perhaps the rumours of impending Aktions were unfounded.
Who remains in the ghetto on August 15th? Uncle Isaac? Aunt Etel? Uncles Motl and Hershl? A Probutski? A Zabludowski? A Liberman? A Malamud? I have been sucked into the hunt. I scour lists of names, devour eye-witness accounts, sit in libraries, sift through archives, rummage through cupboards. And however scant, there are revelations. Take, for instance, a board of three-ply, two feet square — a still life. It had always been in the house, but I had never seen it. Perhaps it had been hidden, or neglected. Or kept out of sight. Perhaps I had glimpsed it in a dark corner and taken no notice. It was father who eventually brought it to me. He had received it in 1936, when he left Bialystok. It was a present he was to deliver to his wife, in New Zealand, painted by her youngest brother Hershl.
The three-ply has cracked in the sunlight. The board is warped. Yet the oils have held fast. I adjust it on my desk, exposed. The fruit are fully ripened; the colours remain strong. Against a backdrop of pale emerald stands a straw basket with apples, a pear, a bunch of dark grapes. Beside the basket lie three plums, a pineapple, green leaves. Rising above, behind the basket, is a slim crimson vase. The flowers are chrysanthemums: white, yellow, pink. The brushstrokes are bold. The fruit is thick to the touch; painted when Hershl was about twenty-one.
What can mother tell me about Hershl? ‘He was talented’, she replies, and falls silent. She too has become a still life. The kitchen clock ticks. She clutches a shawl around her shoulders. She nods her head gently, backwards and forwards. Her lips loosen. She begins to smile: ‘He used to sleep in late. So we had to rouse him from his dreams, my sisters and I.’
I want to know more. ‘What more is there to tell?’, replies mother. ‘He was a quiet boy. Became a house painter. Gave his wages to the family. Spent many hours drawing. Did no one any harm.’ She lapses back into stillness. Yet he must have been special. He gained a namesake. Of the three brothers, the eldest is named after Bishke, I after Aron Yankev, and the third after Hershl. ‘Why Hershl?’, I ask mother. Her answer is simple. Matter-of-fact. Obvious. ‘Because he was the youngest. And he did no one any harm.’
August 15, 1986. Zabia Square, site of the ghetto cemetery, is deserted, except for old men who sit on park benches under a mild afternoon sun. Dogs sniff about the stone monument that stands in the square. A van with loud speakers comes to a halt nearby. A bus arrives conveying former Bialystoker who live in Warsaw. People now outnumber dogs. The local Party boss and mayor of Bialystok alight from chauffer-driven cars. Their bodyguards remain by them throughout the ceremony, motionless, their eyes cold and impassive. Short speeches are made. Words evaporate in the stillness. A queue forms in front of the monument. One by one we come forward to lay wreaths. Chrysanthemums, marigolds, and ferns predominate. A small crowd of bystanders looks on, caught in passing, neutral observers of a subdued ritual. It is all over within an hour, a pantomime performed by survivors locked into remembrances of the day the ghetto began to burn.
On Sunday, August 15, 1943, a full moon rose over Bialystok on a warm summer night. Soon after midnight the ghetto was encircled. An inner cordon armed with light automatic weapons stood close to the fence. A second cordon with machine guns formed behind them. An outer circle of cavalry and artillery completed the three-pincer movement. The Judenrat offices were commandeered as campaign headquarters. Electric wires were strewn through the streets, and field telephones installed. Couriers on motorcycles stood by to circulate orders. All escape routes had been blocked, the operation meticulously planned.
At 2 a.m. residents near the ghetto fences were awoken by the tread of Nazi boots. The news spread quickly. Thousands emerged from sleep into a world gripped by fear. Neighbours milled in the darkness, frantically asking each other: ‘Is this the end’?
By 4 a.m., SS posters plastered the walls. In the red light of dawn the message was clear: All were to assemble by nine o’clock, in Ulitza Jurowietzka and the Judenrat gardens. They were to bring hand luggage. From there they would be transported, with all factory equipment, by train to Lublin. Those who disobeyed would be shot immediately. Move quickly. Do not resist.
‘Do not dwell upon the past’, father warns. He rebels against nostalgia, against dreams and even sleep itself. ‘A waste of time’, he declares. When his energy begins to sag he reminds himself: focus on your daily tasks. Adhere to routine. Use everything in your power to keep moving — even that terrifying refrain, so familiar to loved ones in their final hours: ‘Raus! Raus! Juden raus!’ He imagines it deliberately, sometimes, in the early mornings, as he lies in bed, trying to emerge from strange dreams and temporary paralysis. ‘Raus! Raus! Juden raus!’ He brings to mind the infamous words, to drive himself into another day of existence. Even such a dreaded command can be put to use, father insists, and transformed into a tool for survival.
‘Raus! Raus! Juden raus!’ In a swarming mass they move, through corridors and courtyards, clutching pillows, eiderdowns, coats and furs, their last treasured possessions, weighed down by blankets and packs, stumbling and struggling to arrive on time, to avoid being beaten; they surge over bridges, across the Biale, like a herd of cattle, towards an enclave of narrow streets and lanes, unpaved and lined with wooden cottages, vacant blocks and vegetable gardens. The Nazi plan is simple, effective: to have the residents out in the open, far removed from the protection of solid factories and tenements.
The underground is forced to change its tactics. It must move with the masses, smuggle weapons across bridges. Tennenbaum and Moscowitz set up headquarters at Ciepla 13, a cottage within the enclave. Young fighters stand on street corners urging revolt, one last stand, a dash for the forest. An eleven-year-old girl, Bura Shurak, leads a band of teenagers, pasting posters that cry out for revenge: ‘Blood for blood! Death for death! The road leads to Treblinka. There is nothing left to lose!’
‘Raus! Raus! Juden raus!’ Resistance cells move into position. Explosions mark the beginning of the revolt. Factories erupt into flames. Haystacks are set alight. Cottages catch fire. Smoke billows towards summer skies. Horses rear in panic. As one fighter falls, her comracks charge forward hurling primitive grenades. The Nazis counter attack. Mothers clutch their children as they dive to the ground. Ghetto inmates crouch in the gardens, caught between shrapnel and fire. The earth burns underfoot. The sun blazes in mid heaven. The Nazi charge mounts. Bullets spit from windows and balconies. Tanks barge through the streets. Planes swoop low to strafe trapped masses. Resisters hurl themselves at the fences, but are beaten back by cordons of troops. Cornered and isolated, their ammunition running out, they take to axes and crowbars in a rage fuelled by futility and a bitter thirst for vengeance.
By mid-afternoon the initial battle is over. Five thousand lie dead. Columns of inmates are being herded through Jurowietzka gate. They are driven by truncheons towards Pietrasze field. Those that try to escape are shot as they run. Raphael Raizner, in hiding with his family in a cottage on Chmielna Lane, looks out upon a scene of utter devastation. The Judenrat gardens are littered with corpses and abandoned packs. The wounded are crying out for water. Children crouch beside dead mothers. Their moans rise up in a discordant chorus of terror. The bridge over the Biale, beneath Kupietzka 38, is crammed with bodies. As darkness falls, a sudden downpour floods the ghetto, smothering the cries of the wounded.
‘Do not dwell upon the past’, father warns. Yet the past intrudes regardless. ‘It can happen any time’, he tells me, as if finally pushed into the admission by my incessant probing, my persistent questions, my urge to penetrate his inner world. Gradually at first, and then with increasing rapidity, the floodgates are prised open and, yes, he confesses, it can erupt without notice, a sudden flash, a stab of regret, a glimpse of a face — a Bishke, a Sheine, a Zundel Mandelbroit, tangible, three dimensional, their eyes startled, confused. He can be working in the garden, immersed in daily chores, strolling in streets or neighbourhood parks, any time, anywhere. As soon as they appear a battle ensues: between tears and desire for life, between chaos and a longing for light.
The tears began a long time ago, on the very first day in fact, at the time of departure. March 5, 1936. Father stood on a platform at Bialystok station, a small man in a large overcoat, clutching a suitcase in each hand as he entered the train. He looked back towards the faces of Bishke, Sheine, and intimate friends, hovering by the windows. Then they were gone, and everything he had known had vanished beneath the horizon. And in that moment he knew he would never see them again.
The faces that still come to father with such startling clarity are now a blur. I cannot make them out among the twenty-five thousand who huddle on Pietrasze field. I can merely describe their collective fate second-hand, in vague outline, as I pursue them into their final days. They are surrounded by heavily armed guards who scream abuse in drunken stupors under a scorching sun. The captives are driven to and fro, fleeing from beatings and bullets fired at random. Many are trampled as they run. Rings are ripped from their fingers; watches torn from their wrists. Parents smear children’s lips with urine to ease their thirst. Many buckle under in despair and give way to the mud, to be released from their ordeal.
On the second day the selections begin. SS men stalk the assembled mass, hooking the U-shaped handles of their canes around those deemed fit for slave labour. Any who refuse to leave wife and children are dragged away. The elderly and ill are hurled into carts and taken back to Zabia Square, where pits have been prepared. Gustav Friedl drives by in an auto, leaps out, fires the first shots, and directs his murder squads to finish the job.
On the third day the captives are lined up five-abreast and marched to Bialystok station. The stronger are prodded with cattle prongs into the forward wagons. The remainder are herded to the rear wagons. They are unhinged when the train arrives in Malkin station, and attached to a second locomotive which disappears into a forest — destination Treblinka. The forward carriages continue on to Lublin, where the prisoners are distributed among the work camps of Blyzin, Paniatowa, and Majdanek. On arrival in Paniatowa the newcomers are greeted by camp commandant Tumin, astride a white horse. He surveys them and shoots, on a whim, anyone whose appearance annoys him.
As he travelled west, across Poland, father’s disorientation persisted. He had been thrown into a vacuum in which all around him — passengers, gliding landscapes, country stations — remained distant, remote, while within him flashed scenes of a Bialystok he would never see again. These were precious moments, he tells me, in which he could reflect, take stock, weigh the good against the bad. There was the poverty he was glad to be leaving, the narrow streets of childhood that had cramped his expansive dreams; the constant undertow of menace that had always permeated his life; and the growing threat of renewed pogroms he was relieved to have escaped. And there were the regrets, he reminds me, the moments he could have done this or that differently, been more considerate, said something softer to Bishke, to Sheine, a brother or sister.
Yet the Bialystok he was leaving had also been imbued with communal warmth, a sense of unity and purpose: ‘We grew up as chaverim’, father emphasizes. ‘We were mirrors in which we reflected our shared aspirations. There were many who emerged from poverty as loving companions who were happiest when they served the needs of others. The essence of the Bund ethos to which I was drawn was our chavershaft, our loyal friendship. Our lives become possessed by a form of magic, an indelible bond, a common song. We sang it as we walked through lanes and alleys, and effortlessly beyond, along country paths, until abruptly all was still. And from that stillness there arose the humming of more primitive worlds: swamps, lakes and rivers, untamed, forbidding, yet studded with jewels; slim white beryoskes, chestnuts in silver bloom, and warm nights ablaze with stars hovering over a luminous dream we called Bialystok.’
Ten thousand remain within the ghetto, in hiding. Search squads in groups of ten return day after day. Suspected hideouts are dynamited, listening devices installed, ferocious bloodhounds urged on, buildings torn apart: one by one, family by family, bunker by bunker, the quarry is hunted down. Once detected there are only two alternatives — an immediate death by bullet or the journey by cattle wagon to Treblinka.
When father arrived in Gdynia he saw the sea for the first time in his life. Yet, despite the exhilaration, his sense of regret remained. It pursued him as he set sail for New Zealand. What he had left behind continued to hold sway over what was to come. The open ocean was an awesome universe that surpassed his wildest imaginings. As the earth dropped beneath the horizon it seemed as though the foundations had been torn from under his feet. The boat cut through the water like a plough, and reflected in its wake were elusive images of Bialystok, of those he had so recently farewelled. And it was during these early days of the voyage, from Old World to New, that the dreams had begun, disturbing visions that have persisted to this day.
They come to him often, Bishke and Sheine. They stand by the bed and ask him how he is, while father asks them, ‘Where are you now?’ And in the mornings his sense of disorientation is overwhelming. ‘This is why I must deny my dreams’, father insists. ‘Otherwise I would suffocate. A father. A mother. Bathed in blood. A beloved city. A community of friends caught in an ocean of flames. And I was so far away.’
A need for workers to cart and bury the dead, and to load factory equipment for transfer to Lublin, enables a stay of execution for several hundred porters, mechanics, and Judenrat officials. They are issued with special passes as a number of buildings are cordoned off and ringed with barbed wire to create an inner ghetto. Efraim Barasz is warned not to permit intruders. Random inspections are carried out every few hours to check passes. The Nazis are intent on leaving nothing to chance as they pursue their mission to make Bialystok Judenrein.
From the moment I first entered Poland, across the Soviet border, I was struck by one overriding thought: this landscape is Judenrein. I had never before been so contronted with the enormity of this fact. I became remote from the other passengers, my eyes riveted on the countryside. Here my ancestors had lived in a vast network of settlements which teemed with a way of life that had evolved for a millennium; they had created a kingdom within kingdoms, a universe pulsating to its own inner rhythms. Then it had vanished. Wiped clean from the earth. Judenrein. My journey took on a shape of its own, an inner logic, a relentlessness which has propelled it forward, regardless. Facts and stories have arisen of their own accord, demanding recognition, no matter how disturbing. And even now, as I near the final days of liquidation, this inner momentum drives my chronicle towards a completeness, to the remnants now roaming the forests as partisans, to the dwindling bands of fugitives holding out within the ghetto ruins, to the last pockets of resistance. One larger group of seventy-two fighters hides in an extensive bunker with well-concealed entrances — one through a disused well, the other in a cottage on Chmielna Lane. At noon, on August 19, the bunker is suddenly surrounded. The entrances are blown apart by grenades, the prisoners led away to the corner of Kupietzka and Jurowietzka. From a distance, in hiding, Raphael Raizner hears the defiant singing of revolutionary songs abruptly silenced by bullets as the fighters are executed.
Trains criss-cross the Bialystoku province. I gaze through the windows, absorbing every scene, sucking the marrow from Judenrein landscapes as if hidden truths lie buried within them. We were born in the wake of Annihilation. We were children of dreams and shadows, yet raised in the vast spaces of the New World. We roamed the streets of our migrant neighbourhoods freely. We lived on coastlines and played under open horizons. Our world was far removed from the sinister events that had engulfed our elders. Yet there had always been undercurrents that could sweep us back to the echoes of childhood, to the sudden torrents of rage and sorrow that could, at any time, disturb the surface calm: ‘You cannot imagine what it was like’, our elders insisted. ‘You were not there.’ Their messages were always ambiguous, tinged with menace, double-edged: ‘You cannot understand, yet you must. You should not delve too deeply, yet you should. But even if you do, my child, you will never understand. You were not there.’
Inevitably, we were drawn into their universe — the regrets, the nagging grief, the wariness and suspicion, and the many ghosts they fought to keep at bay as they struggled to rebuild their lives. And given the tale I seem compelled to tell to the end, could we have expected it to be otherwise?
The last major battles are fought on August 20. The Fabryczna Street cell retreats to the grounds of the ghetto hospital. Doctors, nurses, and patients join them in a desperate attempt to defend the courtyard. Squads of SS men break into the wards and, in a fury bordering on hysteria, they hurl patients — newborn babies and elderly alike — onto footpaths and into carts bound for pits in Zabia Square.
Tennenbaum and Moscowitz retreat to their headquarters on Ciepla Lane. Surrounded on all sides, with ammunition running out, they set fire to the cottage. Legend has it that the two leaders took their own lives rather than fall into the hands of the enemy.
Mother and father fight to keep their ghosts at bay in radically different ways. They are opposites, and have been for as long as I can remember. For mother, especially in the years of her ageing, it is the silence that predominates, broken occasionally by a quiet humming, a snatch of ancient melody which evaporates back into silence. Sitting with her, for hours on end, by the kitchen table, I have come to understand the variations of that silence. At times it resonates with defiance; at others it suggests an irredeemable loss. Sometimes it is softer, a surrender, a letting-go. Yet the anger and rage I knew in her as a child can flare up, without warning: ‘What did you dream about last night?’, I ask. ‘Nothing’, she replies. ‘And besides, is dreaming going to bring them back to life?’
By early September, all machinery and merchandise have been removed from the factories. The inmates of the inner ghetto are led to Bialystok station. In the front row walks Efraim Barasz, suitcase in hand, neatly dressed, proud in bearing, silver hair glowing in the sunlight. Behind him stretch long columns of Judenrat officials, communal leaders, Jewish police, factory managers. Their footsteps echo on the cobblestones. They move in silence through a shattered ghetto, their faces set, resigned, beyond hope, beyond tears.
A passenger train transports them to Paniatowa work camp. On November 3rd, along with thousands of fellow Bialystoker, they are slaughtered into mass graves while a camp orchestra plays the waltzes of Johann Strauss.
Father avoids silences. He resorts to his first and most enduring love: words. Through words he strives to make sense of the world. When a dream of Bishke and Sheine recurs, or a vision of a former friend suddenly invades his being, he fights ferociously to regain control by overwhelming them with words. The words mount, become more strident, more insistent, as he talks his way to survival.
We sit together on a park bench, in Curtain Square, our favourite meeting-place, on a Saturday morning, eating father’s most recent variation on Sheine’s latkes; and there is little for me to do but to be a spectator of his inner drama, to absorb his barrage of words, and to wonder why I have become so obsessed with pursuing the past, and why I have pressed so hard to extract the dreams he has so effectively suppressed. Or is it rather that the camouflage has always been transparent and that, within both parents, I have always known a simmering sorrow, despite their efforts to disguise it?
On September 16, the Bialystok Aktion was officially declared at an end. A squad of older Nazis remained to root out the few Jews left in hiding. They maintained daily patrols and marched their captives to Krashevski Street prison. When about fifty had been assembled, they would be driven beyond the city to be shot. Others were retained as slaves. They were led out daily to exhume corpses from communal graves in the forests. The bodies were thrown onto pyres and incinerated. As the eastern front edged closer, the Nazi mania for obliterating the traces of their crimes spiralled.
In October, a German firm arrived in Bialystok to transfer Jewish belongings from the ghetto. Everything of value was declared to be property of the Reich and was shipped back to the Fatherland. Nothing was to be wasted. Houses were stripped down to their skeletons. The entire ghetto area was looted.
When their work drew to an end the slaves were led out to be shot. As they approached the pits, they made a sudden break for the forests. Nine of them survived the gauntlet of bullets. Jewish Bialystock, five hundred years of vigorous effort and communal prayer, lay behind them, effectively Judenrein.
Hitler’s shadow extends from the grave and darkens lives far removed. It reaches around the globe into a home where a child sees in his father’s eyes, beyond the veil, an ocean of regret and bewilderment; and in his mother’s eyes, a distant stare of non-recognition. She is a prisoner of inner voices screaming, ‘Raus! Rous! Juden raus!’ And just as she skirts the edges of madness, she reasserts herself, yet again, with relentless work and melodies. She sings for hour upon hour, as she cooks, scrubs, sews, and fights to keep the household afloat, her sanity intact. Her songs are in Yiddish, her repertoire vast, sung in a soprano trained by renowned choirmasters of Bialystok. There are lullabies that speak of white goats setting out on miraculous journeys; ballads about folk heroes and rebels on barricades. She sings worksongs of cobblers and weavers, tales of wonder rabbis and Hasidim on pilgrimage. She sings of families gathered by the Sabbath table and of gypsies gathered in forest clearings:
Play gypsy, play me a song,
On the fiddle all night long.
On the fiddle, green leaves fall.
What once was is beyond recall.
What once was and what will be,
Red is blood and red is wine.
A star falls and then another,
And our hearts reach out to each other.