A MIND CONSTANTLY ALERT, hands weaving as he talks, ideas bouncing erratically, curiosity expanding with age, body and soul channelled into single-minded attention on his rambling monologues — my father. A survivor. A philosopher.
Of all the seasons, he says, autumn is the philosopher. He had been born in winter: ethereal, snow-veiled, but forbidding and threatening. His basic pessimism had been tempered by spring’s naive and buoyant innocence. The summers had, he admits, been satisfying, at times even joyful. But the heat could also bloat the mind and dull the senses.
So it is autumn, after all, he has come to prefer. Autumn is the present stage in his life. A softer melody. A potential harmony. A song of fruition. A thanksgiving. Autumn is contemplative’, father stresses. ‘The season of afterthoughts, when leaves fall with a quiet language of their own.’ In the Old World it had been a season of colours, permeated with a copper glow, bronze and blessed.
And it is colour that greets me as I return to Bialystok after one month’s absence. The city parks are coated in ochres and lemons, auburns and pale emeralds. Buildings cast stark shadows to the movement of a sun low on the southern horizon. One day it rains incessantly, the next the sun re-emerges radiant and warm. Yet just as unexpectedly, temperatures plunge towards zero, frosts cover the countryside, and sharp winds bite into the skin.
Buklinski and Bunim are waiting as arranged. They sit in the gloom of Buklinski’s apartment, late afternoon, subdued, rugged up in gabardine overcoats. After a schnapps we descend the stairs into Zabia Square. An evening chill has settled upon the city. The two men clutch at their scarves and coats as if protecting themselves not only against the chill, but also against sinister forces they sense lurking around them. As we wait in line for a taxi they shuffle nervously. Out in the open, on the streets of Bialystok, my two companions are revealed as frail and vulnerable men on an alien landscape.
On July 27, 1944 the Red Army liberated Bialystok. In mid August Srolke Kott approached the outskirts of the city. He saw peasants in the fields gathering hay. Others stood chatting in front of their homes. A bizarre normality. An autumn harvest. As if nothing had happened. Srolke oscillated between fleeting moments of hope, and a brooding sense of dread and foreboding. Perhaps, yes, there would be some trace of home, a familiar face, a former neighbour.
I have never met Srolke Kott. For many years he has lived in Buenos Aires. Father knew his family as neighbours in Bialystok; but he remembers little of Srolke, since he was considerably younger than father. Mother had known his elder sister and had sung with her in choirs over sixty years ago. In a world of shadows, such connections can be as strong as blood ties. Soon after the war, Srolke wrote of his experiences as a partisan in the forests of White Russia. Father was particularly drawn to Srolke’s descriptions of his return to Bialystok. He absorbed them so fully, he could recount them as if they were his own. The ballad of Srolke Kott, the song of his homecoming, became the song of father’s imagined homecoming.
As Srolke drew nearer he hastened his steps. The first sight of the city confirmed his worst fears. The railway station was a burnt-out shell. The bridges were shattered. Whole streets had been reduced to rubble, and rows of houses to chimney stacks, a single wall, a skeleton.
Srolke approached the street in which he had grown up. Cobblestones which had once been smooth from the constant tread of footsteps were now overgrown with weeds. Holy books lay scattered about, their pages rotting. Wherever he looked there were broken chairs, doorless wardrobes, fractured beds. Feathers from ripped pillows and quilts mingled with photographs of people who had once lived there — images of men with beards and sidelocks, women with fashionable hairstyles, a child in her mother’s arms, a boy seated on a horse, another wrapped in a prayer shawl on the day of his bar mitzvah — the album of a lost people.
All that remained of his family’s house were foundation stones and half a chimney. The rest was covered in sand and patches of grass. There were not even the remains of a wall on which he could find support. Srolke tried to visualise where his parents’ wedding photo had hung. For the children this photo had been the measure of their growing-up, while their mother would point to it as a reminder of how young she had once been.
Srolke was overcome by confusion. The legs that had supported him through many kilometres of forest and swamp gave way beneath him. The air he breathed seemed choked with the fumes of Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz. All his loved ones, all that had given meaning to his life, had vanished. One question echoed constantly within him: how could man commit such crimes upon his fellow man?
For a long time Srolke sat on the foundations, unable to remain still; yet at the same time, unable to flee. Nearby stood a fragment of barbed-wire fence, a remnant of the ghetto wall. In front of him Srolke noticed a hole in the earth, and recalled that this must have been the hideout he had built for his sister and parents. He bent over and stared at the opening. Inside it was dark, and he was seized by an urge to begin digging. Perhaps he would be confronted by corpses. It would be as if he had entered his own tomb. And in that moment Srolke was overwhelmed by that thought which was to haunt many survivors in years to come: why had he lived whilst his dear ones had been torn from life? How was he to deal with the fear of his own thoughts? How could he answer for himself? Is this what it meant to be liberated?
On the fringes of Bialystok, where the city thins and becomes forest, stands the house of Yankel, the shoemaker. The taxi draws up to his weatherboard cottage. Yankel guides us through the front garden. Sunflowers glow like lanterns in the darkness. A pair of candles light up a living-room table covered in a white cloth. Yankel’s wife, the Queen of Shabbes, greets us. She unravels our scarves, helps us off with our coats, and shows us to our seats. ‘Help yourselves’, she tells us. Buklinski needs little coaxing. He opens a bottle of vodka. ‘Time for a schnapps!’, he exclaims. ‘Time to forget!’
It was well after midnight when Srolke finally moved away from the ruins. The streets were deserted. In the distance, like a shadow, he saw a solitary figure flitting between houses. Srolke hurried after him, drew alongside and asked, in Polish: ‘Where can I find Jews?’ The stranger stared at him as if confronted by a lunatic ‘I have seen no Jews at all’, he replied. ‘There are none here.’
Srolke remained stranded, confused, unable to determine his next move. He noticed a light nearby, and was drawn towards a house in which he knew Jews had once lived. A Polish woman sat by the kitchen table. Srolke greeted her and asked if she knew of any Jews living in Bialystok. After a long pause she replied that she had heard there were several staying in Kupietzka 24; but she could not be sure.
As he neared the building Srolke saw that it was severely damaged. The windows were shattered, the foyer strewn with rubbish. He climbed the stairs and entered a darkened room where he could just make out an emaciated woman sitting by a table. ‘Yes’, she replied in a barely audible voice, ‘there are Yidn living here’, and she resumed her indifferent stare.
Srolke and the woman sat silently, lost to each other in private thought, unable to converse. Soon after, her husband entered: a bare skeleton of a man. He was hungry for information. Who was still alive? Did Srolke know the fate of this or that person? Did they have mutual friends? The same questions were asked by other figures who darted into the room from time to time, back from a day of scavenging. They were all shabbily dressed, barefoot, tired and, despite their many questions, reluctant to talk, as if afraid of hearing the sound of their own voices recalling the recent past. They quickly selected a portion of floor to sleep on, covered themselves with papers, and placed their clenched fists behind their heads as pillows.
By the time Srolke awoke the next morning, they had all left on their daily search for food and familiar faces.
‘He’s going to cry! Bunim is going to cry!’, exclaims Buklinski as he dances around the table, stopping by each guest to pour another glass. Bunim’s crimson complexion darkens with each successive schnapps. Yankel’s wife serves course after course of chicken — chicken soup, roast chicken, boiled chicken, chicken pieces — a universe of chicken. ‘A Polish wife with a Yiddishe heart’, whispers Buklinski, while Yankel sits at the head of the table like a benign patriarch surrounded by an extended family.
Bunim lifts his head and gazes at the ceiling as if about to address the Creator. His voice is cracked, almost broken, but his once rich tenor has retained at least some of its former glory. He hums snatches of Yiddish melodies. ‘Bialystok was a city with a Yiddish soul’, he muses. ‘No longer any rabbis, no longer talmudic scholars, no longer a Yiddishe city’, he laments.
‘And no longer Zlatke, queen of the whores! No longer pimps, thieves, and brothels on the Chanaykes!’, interjects Buklinski, as he continues his vodka-inspired waltz around the table.
A sudden tap on the window: Buklinski’s Polish mistress has arrived. She sits on his lap while he sings Yiddish love-songs with the cracked voice of a street entertainer. Buklinski’s blood pressure is soaring. His uncontrollable energy, his manic zest for life, propel him back into wild monologues and refrains from the lanes of the Chanaykes, where his insatiable longing was first kindled, and where existence had become an eternal pursuit of touch, vodka, and love. Many years later this voracious drive to live had intensified, rather than diminished — even more so after his sojourn in Auschwitz.
‘How did I survive those times?’, he muses. ‘I was sharp. I knew where to be and where not to be. I sidestepped, stayed alert, made myself useful, and remained silent:
I dreamt of you, my dear one,
I dreamt of you day and night.
I dreamt of your dark black eyes,
And awoke in sickness and fright.
Oh little bird, my dear heart,
Please be for a moment still.
Tend to the fire in my heart,
And do with me what you will.
October 1944. The twisted dome of the Great Synagogue lies charred in a field of rubble. Bialystok is a liberated zone behind the Soviet front. To the west the dying embers of a protracted war continue to flicker as the Allied armies close in on a crumbling Third Reich. Srolke Kott and his companions spend their nights in an abandoned building, Kupietzka 29, huddled against the elements. Cold winds find easy access through broken windows. A wick stuffed into a bottle of oil glows within a dim light. For hours on end they reminisce: fellow survivors keeping each other warm with endless tales of the other life they had known.
On Yom Kippur eve, one of them suggests they attend a Kol Nidre service he has heard is being held in a house on Ulitza Mlynowa. After all there is nothing else to do, nowhere else to go; and the way is easy, direct. Instead of the maze of alleys around which they would have had to wind in former times, there are empty spaces and vacant lots between the houses still standing.
Mlynowa 157. A small room. By the eastern wall stands a table laden with blazing candles. The room is packed with up to forty people, of whom only half a dozen or so are women. There are no children or elderly men. No one is wearing prayer shawls or white kitlech as basic ritual requires. Many are dressed in worn and weathered clothes. The men are unshaven, dishevelled. Among those present are Red Army officers, soldiers of the New Polish Army, and some who have travelled to the service from outlying villages.
A cantor conducts the prayers, but very few appear to be listening. Most seem locked in their private grief. A senior Red Army officer stands sobbing, a prayer-book clutched to a chest lined with medals. Srolke observes a man with a large moustache, leaning on a cane, a crucifix dangling around his neck — in appearance a Pole. He joins the rest of the makeshift congregation in their occasional cries of amen.
The room is swaying in a dream, a mirage in which reason has been turned on its head. Those present are not here to pray for forgiveness, as is the custom, but to conduct intimate conversations with themselves and a God that many had come to believe had abandoned them. One question haunts them all: can the Almighty explain? How was it possible?
Kol Nidre, Bialystok, autumn 1944. The bare remnants of a community grieve together; and in each other’s presence they find, perhaps, a moment of solace.
Everyone is talking of Bialystok: Bunim, Buklinski, Yankel, inundating me with anecdotes, so that at journey’s end the writer will record them, tales of the city I am on the eve of leaving, the Bialystok I had dreamed of for so many years; the city my parents had never ceased dreaming of, even as they had wanted to forget.
I have now more than an inkling of what they felt on the eve of their departures, and why it was so hard for them to wrench themselves free, despite the constant threat and undertow of menace. Bialystok was their siren’s song, a spell that had bewitched generation after generation, an enticing melody which forever hinted at deliverance; and even when all that remained was a wasteland of rubble, survivors had still returned with the faint hope that they would rediscover their ancient vision, their lost dream.
And to this day the very last heirs cling to their dream, served by loyal Polish wives and mistresses, at a Sabbath table laden with vodka and chicken, entranced, despite all, by Bialystok’s lingering presence, the remembrance of their youth, the protective blanket of their dwindling community, the last trace of a mother’s embrace. They lament as they celebrate a receding past that has swept by them with the force of a hurricane, leaving in its wake merely a song of longing which they sing repeatedly, obsessively; until, one by one, the Sabbath meal at an end, they depart into the cool autumn air, the last Jews of Bialystok.