Chapter 10 – Samuel: Lost

I believed in second chances. My brother Aron did not. He seemed to cognitively recognize the frailty of human fallibility. Yet it seemed that each expression of it—when it affected him directly—indelibly and painfully scratched his soul. I spent much of my life trying to buff one scratch, only to find myself the cause of another. I could never please him. Each of my wrongs was a grain of sand that imperceptibly tipped his invisible scale away from me, added to a load that could never be offset, no matter how I tried.

I lost my older brother when I was thirteen, and I’d never been able to shake the feeling—irrational though it may have been—that it was partly due to the insufferable burden of my imperfection. Then again, he too lost me—once when he left for Palestine in 1931, and once before in the summer of 1927.

I was nine, and Aron was fourteen. The twin wooden pyramids that topped the concession stand at the Kozlowski Brothers’ beach bore the brunt of the sweltering July sun, high above us. I watched, sweating, as Aron carefully paid the attendant 5 groszy. This left us 15 groszy of the 20 Mother had given us to spend on candy, I calculated out loud with pride.

Aron either did not hear me over the din, or—more likely—he simply ignored me. He was angry, and I knew why.

“You can go, if you take Samuel,” Mother had called from her workroom as she caught up on home accounts and TOZ correspondence. She was the head of the Praga district chapter of the Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population in Poland—more palatably referred to by its Polish initials, “TOZ.” She frequently spent her evenings and Saturdays, not to mention numerous days during the week, “TOZing,” as she called it.

I was proud of her, of course, just as I was of my father’s important position at the bank. Everyone knew someone who had been treated at a TOZ emergency clinic, just as everyone—it seemed—knew my father. Only later would I learn to regret the frequent absences from home life that accompanied my parents’ professional success. At age nine, dinner served by the cook, alone with my brother in the kitchen, seemed the most natural thing in the world.

I was pleased and proud to be in my older brother’s company, however the accompaniment had come about. Even in the heavy silence he maintained during the entire walk along the dirt path by the river’s edge, on our way to the beach, I felt confident, protected, and secure in his presence.

Our 5 groszy entitled us to access the fine sand of the wildly popular riverside beach. All of Praga seemed to have congregated on the Vistula that summer Saturday morning. From hidden loudspeakers, Al Jolson sang Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye—a song I knew well, since Aron listened to it over and over on our Victrola that summer, ever since he’d seen The Jazz Singer at the Era Cinema. I gaped from the stairs of the concession stand at the sea of bathers spread out before me: some lounged in wooden-framed cloth beach chairs, some splashed safely in the tepid river backflow, some braved a swim in the slow moving, chilly eddies of the Vistula itself.

I was still squinting in the bright sunlight at the throngs of white-skinned shirtless men and chubby-legged, shorts-clad women when I noticed I was alone. The reluctant clasp of Aron’s hand had vanished. As the crowd closed around me, Aron’s blue-and-white striped bathing trunks were nowhere to be seen. The friendly, inviting, and festive atmosphere began to subtly turn hostile and foreign. The world yawed enormous around me, threatening to sweep me into its vastness without the anchor of my brother’s hand.

It could have been five hours or five minutes until the kindly lady with the straw hat bent down and asked me in a strange singsong language if I was lost. She repeated herself, this time haltingly in a language I could understand, and offered her hand. She led me to the concession stand, and spoke briefly to the man in charge.

I could hear only snatches of their conversation: “lost boy... doesn’t speak Yiddish... I don’t know who he is... your responsibility, no?”

The lady bent to me again, smiled, and explained in her clumsy Polish that the man would help me, that I just needed to tell him my name.

Henryk Gold’s Orchestra played Foxtrot Ali Baba, another song I knew from Aron’s never-ending home Victrola concerts. From the loudspeakers high above, the rip of needle parting from vinyl echoed, and on came the lost child announcement that mentioned my name. Hundreds of heads turned silently in my direction, yet no one responded. I heard my name echo again across the beach—reaching, I imagined, out over the Vistula and into the heart of the city itself on the far banks. Then again.

Finally, thousands of eyes turned to follow Aron’s blue-and-white clad form, as he picked his way through the crowd toward me.

The world spun more slowly, and I cried again, this time with relief. Aron reached me, his face red with what I took to be shame and worry. I snuffled and explained that I was fine, that he needn’t be so concerned.

He apologized and thanked the man who made the announcement, then gripped my hand tightly. Henryk Gold's Orchestra resumed its song, and Aron led me out of the crowd, to a secluded corner near the exit.

I looked up gratefully at my brother, seeking reassurance after my ordeal, but his face remained beet-red with fury and shame. His slap came before I knew it, followed by a yank on my hand that nearly dislocated my shoulder. Through the ringing of my ear and the stinging of my cheek, I heard his muttered words, thrown haphazardly at me over his shoulder, as we passed through the turnstile and onto the sidewalk outside the beach. The words were, I would come to believe, the glue that kept this memory stuck so firmly in my brain, even to this day.

He lost me that day, literally and figuratively. I understood then, even if my still-youthful powers of expression could not yet give my understanding voice, my true place in his consciousness. I was a burden to be borne, and when possible avoided—nothing more. In any case, the modicum of trust that I still held in my older brother would be violently swept away several years later, by the same waters of the Vistula. Then he left for Palestine, and his presence—malevolent, indulgent, or otherwise—became irrelevant.

Aron had left his own indelible scratch on my soul, yet I still believe in second chances. Perhaps this was good, because in my own irrefutable hubris, I literally lost my best friend in Chelyabinsk.

Three months had passed since I arrived in Chelyabinsk, and I could feel my literary talent slipping away from me. I was doomed to a twisted version of playwright purgatory wherein all on-stage dialogue sounded like my twice daily—morning and evening—dose of titillating brotherly colloquy:

Igor: “Where are my socks? You took them!”

Viktor: “Did not, dick eater!”

Igor: “Did too, toilet face!”

Me: “Shut up!”

Viktor: “Yeah, shut up, fart breath!”

Igor: “No, you shut up, pimple butt!”

If writing memos in Zaltzman’s office day in and day out had dealt my literary senses a vicious kick to the groin, living and interacting with Viktor and Igor had proven the knockout uppercut. My words, I felt, were escaping me.

I tried to keep them alive in my frequent letters to Danuta, which I now sent regularly care of Aron in Tel Aviv. Her regular replies were oxygen in the emotional hyperbaric chamber called Chelyabinsk. I tried to resuscitate my words in cleverly worded inter-departmental memos, until Zaltzman told me with little sentimentality that I should keep my literary aspirations to myself, and just get the goddamn tank treads delivered already, unless I wanted to go back to working on the goddamn assembly line.

Zaltzman was Major General Isaak Moiseevich Zaltzman, personally appointed by Josef Stalin to oversee production of the Kliment Voroshilov tanks so desperately needed by the Red Army. He was one of the most powerful men in Chelyabinsk at that time, and a fellow Jew. He’d pulled me from the assembly line almost randomly. One day, as I tried to force my numb fingers to screw on and tighten nut number 45,324—I kept track to alleviate boredom—a voice rose above the screech of the assembly line conveyor belt.

Unhesitant, like a weary pilgrim answering a suddenly revealed savior, I called out, “I can!”

Zaltzman needed someone to help correspond with suppliers in Soviet-controlled Poland, and for the price of a heated work environment and the daily hot lunch that his office staff received at a nearby pub, I was all too happy to oblige.

I was on my way back from one such lunch on a Wednesday, licking my fingers clean from Ludmilla’s Pelmeni with Smetana and trying not to think about the possibly canine origin of the dumplings’ allegedly beef filling. I sauntered past a line of grey and hunched figures in ragged clothing, who were being led along the frigid street by two high-booted NKVD guards.

Admittedly, these had been good days for me in Chelyabinsk. Hundreds of thousands flowed into the city, only to find no work, no services, and even less sympathy. Whereas I had a roof, at least one hot meal a day, a little money in my pocket, and access to the highest levels of decision-making. Like some beggar triumphantly brandishing a hard-won scrap of bread, only to have it snatched from him by a bigger and stronger beggar, I was guilty of the sin of overestimated self-importance.

A group of prisoners in the streets of Chelyabinsk was a common sight. In the city, now a major transit point for NKVD prisoners bound for the Siberian gulags, I saw such groups almost daily. The year in Pechora remained fresh in my memory, and I’d established a personal custom whenever I encountered such a line of misery incarnate.

Walking quickly, I would pass the group until the crowd closed in behind me. Then, clutching at a pocket as if I’d forgotten something, I’d turn on my heel just in time to collide with the lead NKVD guard. After apologizing, I would continue walking back the way I’d come. The guard I ran into would inevitably turn to his colleague and have a joint chuckle about the clumsiness and stupidity of the locals. Thus, with both guards momentarily distracted, I could press, one by one, whatever coins I had in my pocket into the randomly outstretched hands of the prisoners passing nearest me.

This practice was not only ultimately ineffectual, but also outright dangerous were I to be caught. Yet my sense of justice, I believed—ignoring the glimmer of inner glee I still felt at not being one of these wretches—drove me onward. I reviled the gulag system, and everything it stood for. This was my small way of rebelling.

In this group, several prisoners mumbled their thanks. Most just pocketed the coins, and continued to shuffle along, the constraints of politeness having long ago been stamped out by hunger, cold, and fear. One man, however, looked up as our hands touched and the coin slid from my palm. He met my eyes with an inquisitive look, clearly surprised by the unfamiliar gesture of kindness. He had dirt-streaked, gaunt cheeks, and sunken eyes hidden deep beneath a heavy brow. As he looked up at me, a lock of greasy dark hair fell from the depths of his ragged cap to partially obscure his eyes. He reached unconsciously to push it away, and lowered his head, having apparently discovered no explanation for the kindness.

I gasped at the familiar gesture, struck by sudden realization, and stopped dead in the street as he continued past me.

Astounded, I trotted to catch up with the slowly moving line. Five seconds later, I hugged the filthy and thin frame of my best friend, Jacek. It was an embrace that lasted the length of my desperate longing for home—forever and fleeting. Ten seconds later, the NKVD guards pulled me roughly away from him, and one threatened me with his truncheon. The line marched on, pushing Jacek farther and farther from me.

“I’ll find you! I’ll help you!” I called in his direction with a desperate loneliness I hadn’t realized I felt until that moment. He represented the temporary embodiment of all that I’d lost—home, family, Danuta. I could not allow him to slip away just like that.

I found Jacek in short order, thanks to the ready access to all personnel files that working in Zalzman’s office afforded me. They’d assigned him to work in the munitions factory, pending his transfer to whatever gulag was next available. There being at this time far more prisoners than camps, prisoners often spent months in Chelyabinsk. And the Soviet state had proven expert at extracting compensation for the courtesy of feeding and housing its wards.

In March, temperatures had started rising above zero during the day. Spring was now a hope less distant, no longer utterly clouded by winter’s grey veil. They’d set Jacek to priming 122 mm artillery shells—a job that should not have logically existed. Priming shells was traditionally done in the field, since transporting primed ammunition was far more dangerous. Yet some nameless bureaucrat had dictated this practice in the name of wartime expediency. They reserved priming, the most dangerous job in a notoriously dangerous factory, for the lowest of the low on the scale of importance to the State. I had watched these Primers in action, from afar, on my occasional working visits to the munitions factory. Each Primer sat separately, his workspace shielded by sandbags to minimize the collateral damage from accidents, which were frequent owing to the rushed nature of the assembly and the low quality of the propellant used in the shells. Luckily, for production quotas, the factory suffered no shortage of replacements following these accidents. After a quick cleanup of whatever remained of the victim in the sandbagged emplacement, work resumed with a fresh—and still intact—set of trembling hands.

The moment I learned of Jacek’s assignment, I began forming a plan to help him escape. I had two trump cards: Igor and Viktor, both of whom worked in the same section of the munitions factory. They were responsible for delivering the huge and crushingly heavy wooden crates of unprimed shells to the Primers, and removing the crates containing the primed, and sometimes dangerously unstable, shells. Each crate held eight shells, each weighing around 25 kilograms. Most importantly, given the significant amount of packing material surrounding the primed shells, each crate was large enough to hold a man.

The idea was beautiful in its simplicity. The NKVD didn’t care about names, only bodies. A prisoner was relevant only in so far as they could account for him—alive or dead. When a Primer got blown to bits, the NKVD officer in charge would check a number off his list, and bring in another prisoner. End of story.

I presented the idea to Igor and Viktor that evening, in the quiet chill of our doghouse. Shifting to raise myself on one elbow, I told them about my encounter with Jacek. They nodded with empathy as I told them the story of our long acquaintance, then listened intently while I explained my plan to save him.

When I finished, the brothers consulted in initially hushed yet increasingly belligerent tones. I feared I would need to break up another name-calling session, but in the end, Viktor pushed his brother gently back onto his own bunk, and turned to speak to me.

“I swore to our mother that I would take care of Igor. This plan could easily get us all killed, or worse.”

Viktor held up a hand. “I can’t let Igor be a part of this. I’m sorry. But I will help you, by myself. I hope one of us will be sufficient?”

Obviously, I had no intention of killing Jacek, but in order to free him, the NKVD needed a body, preferably an unidentifiable one in poor repair following a propellant explosion and fire. Luckily—for us, in any case—in Chelyabinsk in the spring of 1942, bodies were not in short supply. Authorities carried the numerous dead out of makeshift medical huts, or work details picked them up from the streets, and dumped them unceremoniously into pits on the outskirts of town.

On a clear night, as the March moon shone starkly in a cloudless sky, Igor stayed behind in the doghouse, and I wore his heavy coat over my own. Viktor and I staggered, feigning drunkenness, and sang loudly as we walked the empty streets towards the burial pits. Minutes after we left the town’s last building, and our off-key songs, behind us, the unguarded open pits came into view.

I was not a callous man. Until the Pechora River transport ship, I’d never even seen, let alone touched, a corpse. In my soft urban upbringing, death had been detached from the living, separated by the lacy veil of society. Others handled the dead. We mourned lost loved ones, but remained physically distanced from the messy reality of human mortality. In Chelyabinsk, and indeed during all the months that preceded and followed, death had become an immediate and a day-to-day companion. In my daily comings and goings, I routinely looked past corpses on the street, concentrating on whatever task was at hand. Thus, the tens of bodies facing Viktor and I as we stood on the edge of the open pit held for me none of the abject horror they once would have. Rather, they represented simply a means to a just end.

We chose a fairly fresh gentleman, only partially frozen, and disentangled him with some difficulty from the top of the pile. After we pulled him free, Viktor bent over to get a better look at his face. Unlike many of the others, this face was not contorted, but looked almost placid—as if the man had died peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones, rather than on the street of a wartime industrial nightmare. Viktor’s forehead wrinkled and his brow furrowed in concentration as he tipped his large head to look at the man’s face from either side.

Viktor dressed Sasha in Igor’s coat, and managed to wrench both of his arms free of their rigor mortis-induced rigidity to allow us to support him—as our drunken comrade—between us. In this pose, with Sasha’s freezing fingers simultaneously tickling and chilling the nape of my neck, we headed back into town.

As we passed the first outbuildings, we again staggered noticeably and sang loudly, continuing right up to the doorstep of our doghouse.

Getting Sasha in the low door required a few well-placed kicks on Viktor’s part. The muted sound of cracking bones resounded in the midnight silence, and several more cracks echoed as the twins fitted Sasha into the ammunition crate they’d filched. They pounded several discrete holes in the sides of the crate to enable Jacek to breathe, then nailed the lid closed and shoved the crate out the door. Sasha would likely not mind the accommodations, we joked, and would wait patiently for the morning.

With a gentle rain falling the next morning, we found Sasha’s crate covered in a thin layer of ice that sparkled dimly in the grey morning light. Hefting the slippery box, Viktor returned it to the factory with the pretext of having borrowed it the previous evening to transport some supplies—not entirely false. Careful to keep Sasha’s crate separate, he began his workday, lifting the first of countless 200-kilo crates and lugging each to the next Primer in line.

When it was Jacek’s turn, Viktor took Sasha’s crate, pretending to stagger under a heavy load. “This is a present from Samuel Katz,” Viktor told an astounded Jacek, as he pried open the crate to reveal not eight shiny shells ready for priming, but rather a grossly contorted corpse folded inside. “If you want to live, do exactly as I say, and quickly.”

The explosion that rocked Jacek’s emplacement sent the other workers scurrying out of the building, leaving tools and unprimed shells behind. Fire crews grabbed pre-filled buckets of water and dirt and sprang into action.

He unobtrusively worked his way toward the far end of the factory compound, heading for the vast warehouse, with Jacek’s crate balanced on one massive shoulder. The warehouse was partially full of identical crates.

Viktor whispered to the crate as he gently lowered it in an empty and darkened corner. “I’m going to leave you here until my shift is over, then I’ll come get you and take you to Samuel. He’s already arranged fake papers, and the NKVD won’t even be looking for you. Keep quiet and still. Okay?”

Viktor turned and rushed to help fight the fire which had now scorched Jacek’s emplacement, and more importantly Sasha, beyond any hope of recognition. He smiled to himself, as Jacek had been successfully killed.

The cleanup from the fire proceeded quickly, and work resumed at its normal backbreaking pace. Darkness had descended by the time the factory bell rang to signal the end of the day shift, And the temperature had already dropped well below zero, and would drop far lower owing to the now-clear night skies.

Viktor nodded to Igor, and worked his way casually to the warehouse to “borrow” Jacek’s crate for the evening. He pulled his heavy coat tighter around him, shutting out the evening cold. His footsteps echoed in the empty hall as he turned a corner to the warehouse door.

What had previously been a nearly empty warehouse was now filled to bursting with tens of thousands of ammunition crates, all completely identical to Jacek’s. They were stacked high to the ceiling, and spilled out the doors into the hall.

“A whole trainload of shells were returned,” explained a passing worker whom Viktor urgently accosted. The man shook himself free from the giant’s vice-like grip. “Get off of me! Something about defective propellant. We need to take them all apart—it could take weeks.”

Following Viktor’s urging and throwing caution to the wind, I made it to the warehouse in just minutes, to see with my own eyes. He was right; it was utterly futile. Even if we could somehow move the tens of thousands of crates, each—except for Jacek’s—weighing 200 kilos, how could we explain this activity to the NKVD? And could we complete it in time to save Jacek from freezing to death, or suffocating in the densely-packed piles?

We could do absolutely nothing, except wait for someone to find Jacek’s body in the coming weeks, if ever. The NKVD had accounted for all their prisoners, and Jacek would raise a passing eyebrow if found, but nothing more. There was no chance his body could be linked to us, no chance for any repercussions whatsoever for my folly.

I am an admitted misanthrope. I trust and care for a select few people, and to these I am devoted to a fault. I am occasionally surprised and pleased when a spark of brilliance or altruism flies from a fellow human’s sphere of self-interest and lands, as if scorching, on my own. Yet most of humanity I find predictable, petty, boring, and consistently disappointing.

Jacek was among my select few. I still carry him with me, and will never forget the lesson of humility his death taught me. This is the second chance I give myself. This is second chance I’m still not convinced I deserve.