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Warsaw, Poland, November 1937
I was either supremely self-confident, supremely stupid, or—more likely—a healthy combination of both., Why? Because I managed to carry on an intelligent conversation with Danuta even after inadvertently exposing myself to her—after my humiliation at the hands of the Cro-Magnons.
I’d been accosted before by bullies, though never to such an extreme. The streets of Warsaw were no longer safe for Jews to wander alone, at any time of the day. President Pilsudski had truly seemed immortal and invincible, but turned out to be neither. Since his death, not only had the economy gone downhill, but our personal safety, too.
Being beaten scars the soul, and there is really no shutting it out. Of course, there are those who would say that the aggressors’ souls are equally, if not more, scarred by such violence. Of them I would ask, “How many apex predators do you know who are currently undergoing psychoanalysis?” Bullies and evil people everywhere kill because they can, because no one stops them. Evil does no damage to the souls of evildoers simply because they lack them entirely.
This might have explained the resilience I displayed in my interaction with this magnificent creature who had—now for the first time—come to my rescue. After I’d returned all parts of myself to their rightful places, during which time Danuta demurely and tactfully looked away, I turned back to her and mustered a smile, even as the heat began to fade from my cheeks.
“By all rights, if our acquaintance is to begin on equal footing, I should know something intimate of you.” I looked straight in her eyes as I said this, softening the audacity of my words with a kind smile.
I tried to ignore her intoxicating yet obstinately casual beauty. Hers was the glow of someone who knew of her beauty, yet regularly discounted her physical attributes. It was a rare external beauty because it was equally mirrored within, as I was already learning.
She was shorter than me, which certainly made her no Nordic god in stature. What she lacked in height she more than compensated for in proportion. Perfect leather-shod feet eased upward via narrow ankles to light-muscled calves, the perfection of which disappeared into a heavy wool skirt, only to emerge into a firmly rounded posterior that I admired surreptitiously and at length the moment she turned to leave.
Moving up, everything was so marvelously apportioned that the adolescent in me couldn’t help but rise to the occasion. I shifted uncomfortably, unobtrusively pulling my jacket to cover my erection.
Whether she noticed this, I was not yet sure. In any case, she seemed unfazed by my audacity as she clutched her small stack of notebooks to her chest and turned away. “Perhaps you shall know nothing of me at all, young Samuel Katz.”
She flounced away across the foyer, taking my breath with her as she went. She got as far as the door and then—blessedly—turned her head just enough for me to see one eye and a perfect profile. “That is, unless you are to buy me a hot chocolate in the student commons. If you feel you’ll be able to sit comfortably with that... you know.”
I couldn’t get the silly smile off my face for the next hour.
***
Pechora River, Soviet Union, February 1941
I learned what despair smelled like: the sharp fetidity of suppuration. It smelled like the slow agony of flesh that rotted while still attached to the living body. I smelled it on every frostbitten work detail to which we shuffled, knowing each time that some would not return. Mostly, I saw it... in the eyes of the ones the guards called chleno rubi.
The work was impossible. All day we moved iron rails, two men to a rail, from a mountain-like pile next to the end of the rail line, to another pile 200 meters away. None of the guards explained why this was necessary, and none of us prisoners asked. The fact that the rails were frozen solid to each other in their massive pile, the result of freezing rain, complicated the work. We had to break them free by sledgehammer before we could lift them.
At minus 42 degrees, the steel of the rails became carnivorous, devouring the ungloved flesh of our hands. It predatorily sought the warmer parts of our palms and fingertips, keenly calculated the temperature differential, and quietly latched on to these parts only. We didn’t realize we were stuck until we dropped the rail, and small strips of flesh tore off our already chilled and sensitive hands. These small wounds accumulated over the course of weeks, until all of our hands looked like so much ground meat.
The chleno rubi didn’t have these problems. “There are three stages of life, as I see it,” Oleg said, as he released his end of the rail. He had again forgotten to warn me before he did this, and it narrowly missed my foot as it crashed to the frozen ground.
I tracked the rail’s slow-motion downward progress dumbly, and noticed that the rags wrapped around the tatters of what I loosely called my shoe had again come undone. I stooped to arrange them as Oleg droned on.
“Birth, pain, death. Nothing more to it. But the chleno rubi have added a new stage, or at least a sub-stage, which falls somewhere under pain. They added ‘rest.’ I’m telling you, Zhid, they’re onto something.”
I nodded in agreement, as I always did when Oleg spoke. He was my protector, the head of the Ukri. Thus, I agreed with anything he said, as a rule. This made our conversations rather tedious, but I quickly learned that ‘yes’ was always the best answer when chatting casually to a sociopath. In any case, I didn’t bite the hand that quite literally fed me. I remained alive only because I was the Ukrainians’ pet Jew. We got the best of the meager rations the Soviets provided. If I had to suffer some poor conversation, it was a small sacrifice.
Ironically, this time I agreed with Oleg. The chleno rubi really were onto something. They had become limb-hewers, self-mutilators. The smell of their despair struck even before they purposefully positioned a finger under a rail, the millisecond before it slammed down against another, or before a well-aimed hatchet separated a steaming, filthy toe from its foot after a guard turned his back.
The truth be told, self-mutilation was an excellent strategy for staying alive, especially in the camp-which-was-not-yet-a-camp. Until we completed the rail line, which would facilitate transport of materials for our bunkhouses, we slept outside, heaped in shallow trenches we chiseled into the frozen ground. At night, so desperate for warmth, all set aside their self-consciousness. I huddled with my face pressed to a backside, a stomach, a groin—it was of no concern, as long as it radiated heat.
The merciful Soviets would grant the chleno rubi two weeks recovery in the lice-infested “hospital ward” back in the main camp. Two weeks of sleep under a roof. Two precious weeks that enabled the body, and not just the stump of the missing appendage, to recover a little. Of course, the Soviets added an extra month to each self-mutilator’s sentence for inflicting grave damage on state property. Nonetheless, while we prisoners slept knowing with certainty that not all of us would wake, the chleno rubi could rest assured that they, for the time being, would. Was this not worth the price of a finger or two?
Such misery inevitably caused me to recall Danuta’s first touch. It was a touch that never ended. Because throughout this taste of hell, deep beneath the accumulated grime of the ship and the work camp, below the frostbite, above the hunger and mortal fear, that first touch continued to tingle. It continued to resonate to the core of all that I was. It remained within, in a deep place where I alone could reach it, feel it, be rescued by it—even if only for a moment.
***
Warsaw, Poland, November 1937
Had I been a typical bookworm, I’d have said my fondest and oldest memory was when I first put two letters together and was touched by the Hand of God—a personal Creation of Adam moment. Yet I was not a typical bookworm. I didn’t even remember putting C-A-T together for the first time, nor did it carry any relevance to what I had become.
Words were vehicles for stories, nothing more. Individually, they carried meaning, but only as the cup contained the water—only as the vehicle. What moved a thirsty man to raise the cup to his lips was the thought of drinking, the remembrance of past satiation. For me, the words were water—but the story was the long, cool drink.
Only when words coalesced into a story did they come alive.
My story with Danuta began that day, with the steam of her hot chocolate repeatedly fogging the lenses of her round-rimmed glasses. Each time, she would absentmindedly remove them and smear at the fog with the hem of her dress. The din in the bustling student lounge forced us to lean in close to hear each other. With a smile, I challenged her to name her closest confidante.
She shouted her response intimately over the background noise. “Adrianna, my cousin from my mother’s side. She lives in Vilnius. She’s my best friend, and I share everything with her. Perhaps I shall write her this very evening.”
I fired back, mentally kicking myself even as the words left my mouth. “I should very much like to be a fly on the wall above your desk during that writing.”
She smiled at me and blushed, and I realized with a surge of joy that she was not aloof, as I had first worried. She, the Catholic girl with the angelic face, the body of Aphrodite, and the beautiful soul whose murky depths I longed to plumb, felt shy around me. Realizing this, I backpedaled rapidly.
“I didn’t mean to be bold. That is, your private correspondence is certainly your business. I just—”
“Someday, perhaps you shall know.” Then she reached out to touch the back of my hand, which was resting on the wood tabletop, lightly with her fingertips. She never let go.
***
From that day in the commons, Danuta and I spent most of our time together.
She loved that I made her laugh. She loved my hair, my long fingers, the tickle of my light stubble against her cheek. She loved that I could look at the darkening skies closing in on Poland and find humor. She would laugh aloud as she corrected the typos in drafts of my now weekly articles for Glos Gminy Zydowskiej. I had turned the column into a satirical faux-advice column titled In the Land of the Blind.... In it, I posited possible Jewish responses to the growing anti-Semitism we all suffered, and created an alternate, Jewish-centric reality.
“I’m not sure,” Danuta said, “that hoarding Christian children and reselling them on the black market would be the best move for a Jewish businessman, darling.” She chuckled and kissed the top of my head as she leaned over my desk. “And neither will instituting a numerus clausus quota for Christians buying from Jewish tailors. Frankly, I’m not sure whom that would harm more—the Jews that would go hungry, or the Gentiles who would end up sockless. And must you look down my blouse every time I lean over you?”
I wrote with a young man’s audacity, cynicism, and utter lack of concern for consequences. I wrote with the passion of the damned and the ferocity of the caged. Not all accepted my humor with good grace. I received outraged letters and blatant threats. Yet we were all staring into the empty-eyed face of imminent, unnamed horror. The angst, though unspoken, remained omnipresent. I believed that my descriptions of a ridiculous upside-down world, wherein Jews arbitrarily ruled, brought a measure of comfort and amusement to my readers.
Then a letter arrived from Warsaw University, cowing me into silence. Even with the looming threat, it was the darkest day I could recall.
Danuta stood fast and firm. “Listen to me. They do not define your worth. They do not define your being. You are a person. I am a person. It’s Samuel the person I love, not Samuel the student, not Samuel the writer, and certainly not Samuel the Jew. Do you love Danuta the Catholic, Danuta the student, or just me?”
She demanded this of me as I limply clutched the notice informing me that I could no longer continue my studies. As if in direct response to my editorial taunting, Warsaw University had revived the traditional numerus clausus quota, which limited the percentage of Jews in Polish universities. From that day, in addition to being friend, lover, confidante, compatriot, and editor, Danuta became my professor, too.
Every afternoon thereafter, she or Jacek—sometimes both together—would come to my parents’ recently purchased fifth-floor flat at the corner of Wybrzeze Szczecinskie and Klopotowskiego. The new building, one of the first in the Praga district, had an elevator. We would sit by the large window in the living room, watching the Vistula and Warsaw’s Old Town above the riverbank greenery.
I loved the view from that window. In the mornings, seagulls whirled over the Vistula, asking unanswerable questions and not bothering to wait for replies. The slow-moving current kissed the banks in a constant farewell. Beyond, towards Old Town, building-block houses climbed the hill via steep and winding staircases, their massive curving stone foundations reaching deep into the cobblestone-faced earth, as if announcing their refusal to budge. The red-tiled roofs of Warsaw University, directly across the river and now mockingly out of reach, laughed at me.
Jacek or Danuta would relate each lecture from memory, consulting their notes, while I listened and absorbed. I kept up with reading during the day, in vain hope that the madness would somehow blow over and I’d soon be able to continue my studies.
Of course, having Danuta around was not always entirely conducive to contemplation of matters of the higher mind.
Jacek huffed. “Hey, malpeczko, you want to get your mind back on Kant, and out of the gutter? The drool is so deep in here that my fucking socks are getting wet!”
He enjoyed catching me when my glazed eyes strayed from his recounting of a lecture to, for example, the magnificent whiteness of Danuta’s knee peeking from her skirt as she sat, cat-like, with legs tucked under her.
We made an unlikely couple in the context of that time—impossible would be a better word. The repulsive anti-miscegenation laws of the neighboring Third Reich had not yet reached Poland, although many there would have welcomed them. Poland’s response to “the Jewish problem” was already blossoming from propaganda into violence, from discriminatory practice into overtly anti-Semitic legislation. Association with Jews became first socially unpopular, then unwise, then dangerous. To the best of our knowledge, Danuta’s parents knew nothing of our romance. My parents were aware of the connection for obvious reasons—Danuta was inevitably at our house—and were not against it in principle. Their acceptance, however, grew progressively more conditional: they first urged prudence, then counseled caution, and ultimately demanded absolute secrecy.
Amazingly, no one ever caught us in our many “illicit” liaisons. No one ever publicly accosted us as we walked together—always after dark and always keeping to unlit side streets. No one ever called Danuta a whore, or cursed me for ruining a Catholic girl. We kept to ourselves, insular in my living room, longing for the moment when my mother would leave for the market, at which time we would be drawn together with electromagnetic force, silently and insatiably groping and grinding on the sofa. All the while, one of my ears would listen intently for the sound of my mother’s key in the lock, while the other was gloriously filled with Danuta’s urgent breathing.
It was wonderful. It was horrible. I wanted it to last forever.
