The Woman from Hamburg Read online

  Maybe in other countries, in West European countries, one GOES to Israel.

  An East European Jew does not simply GO, just like that.

  HE PREPARES TO LEAVE—and that must go on and on.

  The bearded man from Targowa Street, the last Polish shochet, has been preparing to leave for Israel for thirty years.

  6

  A middle-aged Jew came to visit the last shochet. Also an East European Jew, but from Wola.

  His father had a tailor’s shop on the corner of Redutowa and Wolska Streets, opposite the well.

  Water was carried in buckets on yokes.

  The well pump was red.

  His father made suits.

  The wife of factory-owner Krygier paid him 115 zlotys to sew her a woolen suit.

  His father bought a wringer for five zlotys, a washtub for fifteen, and gambled away the rest at cards.

  This happened right before the Passover holiday. His mother sent the children to the rabbi. The rabbi also lived on Wolska Street, across from the cheder. All five of the children went there, he and his sisters Krajndł, Frendł, Fajge, and Hania. The rabbi gave them four dozen eggs and a packet of fat from the Central Agricultural Co-op.

  He watched his father carefully, looking at how he played and how he lost, and he drew a conclusion: in all card games, it is possible to give fate a helping hand.

  His parents were deaf mutes. They spoke to each other in Yiddish, using sign language. Thanks to that circumstance he did not have a Jewish accent and after the liquidation of the ghetto he was able to pose as an Aryan kid without much difficulty.

  He was a street singer, a shoeshine boy, a cigarette seller, a cowherd, and a railway workers’ assistant. He lived at the West Station, on platform four, in the comptroller’s booth. German troop trains passed through the station carrying soldiers on leave from the Eastern front. People bought champagne and sardines from the soldiers on the trains and sold them flashlights, batteries, and fountain pens. He traded at night; first thing each morning he turned the goods into cash at Hala Mirowska, and during the day he walked around with a hammer and checked the rails, wheels, and brakes.

  He married a Polish woman. She bore him sons who did not want to be Jews.

  He doesn’t like to brag, but there is no better player than he in the Marriott Hotel or the Rio Grande Club, nor in the Różycki bazaar. He plays poker, roulette, and sixty-six. He wouldn’t want to brag, but there is no better gambler in all Warsaw.

  And it all comes from the fact that his father gambled away his earnings from the suit he’d made for the wife of Krygier the factory owner.

  The last gambler came to see the last shochet about a delicate matter.

  He has a woman, Tośka. She is easygoing, with a large bosom and kind, blue eyes. His wish is that Tośka should turn out to be Jewish.

  Once, she was telling him about how her father would kill a rooster: “ ‘Slash …,’ and he’d make a smooth motion across his throat, and then the rooster was dead.”

  A sudden hope dawned in the gambler.

  He and Tośka went to see the last shochet.

  They put him in their car.

  They drove to the countryside.

  They bought a rooster.

  The last shochet plucked a few feathers from the rooster’s neck. He removed his ritual knife—slender and sharp, with no nicks in it—from its linen sheath. He checked with his finger to be sure the blade was smooth. With a single motion he drew it across the throat: “Slash …”

  They looked at Tośka.

  “Is that how your father did it?”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Then he was a Jew,” the last gambler rejoiced. “Maybe he was even a butcher?”

  “Did he check the gullet?” the last shochet asked anxiously, carefully examining the killed bird. “There cannot be even a grain of feed remaining in the gullet; a bird with feed is unclean.”

  Tośka could not remember if her father used to check the gullet, but the last gambler was not interested in details.

  “Your father was a Jew, you are a Jew, at last your life’s pathways are straightened out, and it’s all thanks to me.”

  He took her to the synagogue, sent her to the women’s balcony, stood beside the Torah and prayed, as he did every Saturday, for the souls of his four sisters: Krajndł, Frendł, Fajge, and Hania.

  7

  The last cantor, Dawid B., and his wife, Zysla, decided to emigrate for the sake of their son.

  The son had passed his high school graduation exam; he earned 5’s in all his science exams and he wanted to study electronics.

  Dawid and Zysla yearned for him to graduate from college, to find a Jewish girl, and for the girl to bear him nice children. They yearned for a peaceful, happy old age spent near their children and grandchildren.

  Everything was prepared for their emigration.

  They had the down comforter restored. (The proprietress of the workshop on Wileńska Street had never seen such down, so they explained to her that it was from pigeons. Miriam, Zysla’s mother, had sent the comforter to them in Łuck literally at the last minute and it was the only thing that they had not exchanged for flour and potatoes. Thanks to the comforter they survived the wartime freezing weather in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and in Akmolińska oblast.)

  They placed the comforter in a chest along with a clock that chimed every quarter hour. It was an unusual clock. Dawid B. had replaced the numbers of the beautiful, old clockface with Hebrew letters. Now, instead of 1 there was aleph, instead of 2, beys, instead of 3, gimel, and so on. (His father taught him singing and his love of clocks. He was the owner of a clock-maker’s shop in the center of Kielce, and also the cantor in a small synagogue on Nowowarszawska Street.)

  They packed up their pictures. A certain Shevchenko, a Ukrainian, had painted them. Everyone ordered paintings before leaving. They represented women standing above the Sabbath candles, men studying Torah, and Jews as eternal wanderers. They liked the scenes with the Torah because the synagogue reminded them of the one in Kielce, on Nowowarszawska Street, but they had reservations about the wandering Jew. He was sitting there exhausted, barefoot, beside a road that ran through a field, with the Holy Book in one hand, a walking stick in the other, his shoes slung over his shoulders. Maybe they were too tight; maybe he didn’t want to wear them out. That was it: there was a serious mistake in those shoes—they were old, dirty, and they touched the book. (Zysla pointed this out. She knew the prohibitions and commandments perfectly, because she had been taught religion by the wife of the Powiśle rabbi. The rabbi lived on the corner of Chełmska Street and Zysla lived on Czerniakowska; there was a mikva across the street and a prayer house. After the rabbi’s death his son-in-law, a follower of the Piaseczno tzaddik, inherited the position. He had a medical diploma, and in addition he was the very own brother-in-law of the Kozienice tzaddik. When Zysla was in the hospital, the rabbi gave her mother medicine and uttered three words: Got zol trefn, God will help. And God did help; the next day, her fever broke.)

  They gave away their furniture.

  They sold the piano.

  They packed up their clothing.

  Zysla tidied up the apartment and went downstairs to take out the garbage.

  When she returned the window was wide open. Someone was screaming in the courtyard, horrendous screams.

  The cantor’s wife wants to believe in an unhappy accident. The women in the synagogue believe in an unhappy love.

  The photograph on the headstone, in the Jewish cemetery, portrays a good-looking boy with serious, dark eyes.

  The pictures on the apartment walls portray women praying over Sabbath candles, men studying Torah, and the wandering Jew.

  On the bed there’s a comforter made of pigeon down.

  The clock strikes every quarter hour.

  Two large suitcases stand in the main room. In them is the son’s clothing, packed for the journey. They haven’t opened the suitcases in tw
enty-five years. Every day they dust them and cover them again with a white, crocheted tablecloth.

  The last cantor boards the trolley at Zamoyski Street.

  He attends synagogue only on Saturdays.

  He sings only once a year, on Yom Kippur.

  He sings El mole rachamim, God full of mercy.

  All year he gathers his strength for that day and that song.

  All the Jews in the synagogue are waiting for it.

  From his frail, old man’s body emerges a voice that is clear, powerful, overflowing with love and despair.

  No one sings the El mole rachamim anymore like the last Warsaw cantor does.

  8

  It is time for a question: What is meant by “East Europeans,” and where does the East begin?

  For Bohumil Hrabal it begins where “the Austrian, empire-style railroad stations end.” That is not clear. The empire style was dominant in architecture when there were no railroads or railroad stations. Perhaps he was thinking about the later white Austrian buildings bordered with green tiles. In that case, Eastern Europe would begin east of the stations in Leżajsk, Sarzyna, and Nisko—starting only in Stalowa Wola.

  For Agnieszka and Henryk Samsonowicz the East begins immediately beyond the Vistula River. On the road to Dzbądz we passed the Śląsko-Dąbrowski bridge, drove into Targowa, and Agnieszka said, “Oho, the East.”

  But at the corner of Kawęczyńska and Radzymińska Streets, a good five kilometers from there, in a private lending library, they had all of Proust throughout the grim 1950s. The prewar, gray-haired proprietress took the prewar volumes down from the shelf, each wrapped in packing paper, and said, “This you should read.”

  Andrzej Czajkowski, the pianist, brought Proust back from Paris. But I brought it back from a lending library on Kawęczyńska Street.

  Should Eastern Europe, then, have begun in front of the lending library with all of Proust?

  For Abraham J. Heschel, philosopher and theologian, the borders of the East were unimportant, because East European Jews lived in time more than in space. And if they lived in space, then it was between the abysses and heaven.3

  According to Jewish legend, “Poland” derives from the Hebrew words po-lin, “reside here.” Jews fleeing pogroms and the plague in Germany discovered these words written on a piece of paper. The paper came from heaven. It was lying under a tree. In the branches of the tree wandering souls were hidden. Only a pious Jew reciting the evening prayer could help them. If, therefore, there exists a boundary point for Eastern Europe, it is the tree under which that piece of paper was lying.

  1. Bergman, Eleonora. “Okrągła synagoga na rogu Szerokiej i Jagiellońskiej.” Typescript.

  2. Weksler-Waszkinel, Romuald J. “Antysemityzm? Refleksja nad testamentem Bergsona.” Typescript.

  3. In his essay “Pańska jest ziemia. Świat duchowy Żydów Europy Wschodniej” [The earth is the Lord’s: The spiritual world of the Jews of Eastern Europe], Abraham J. Heschel wrote about the colorfulness of the world that the East European Jews created. They had a language and literature, they had their own tzaddiks and bankers, learned men and artisans, socialists and Hasids, their own dishes, melodies, jokes, costumes, sighs, gestures, and manner of holding their head. They had “a touching charm” that derived from a mixture of “intellectualism and mysticism.”

  That world is gone. The few survivors give no suggestion of this. They bring to mind an orchestra that I once heard in Russia. It was made up of musicians who had participated in a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The composition was born in besieged Leningrad; it was played for the first time during the war. The musicians who had not perished at the front, who had not frozen to death, had not died of hunger and of old age, came together many years later and performed the symphony one more time. The conductor signaled to the orchestra and the surviving instruments responded. Sometimes only silence responded. Sometimes a lone, absurd sound could be heard. The East European Jews sound today like that crippled symphony orchestra.

  Salvation

  Dawid, the Lelów tzaddik, taught that “whosoever, whether man or nation, has not achieved awareness of his own errors, will not achieve salvation. We can be saved to the extent that we are aware of our own selves.”

  He had a son who also became a rabbi in Lelów. That Lelów rabbi had a son and a grandson, the rabbis of Szczekociny. The Szczekociny rabbi had a daughter named Rywka, a granddaughter named Chana, whom they called Andzia, and a great-granddaughter named Lina.

  One hot July day in 1942, Chana, known as Andzia, the tzaddik’s granddaughter in the sixth generation, and her daughter, seven-year-old Lina, were riding through the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Umschlagplatz. A few minutes earlier they had been led out of their home on Twarda Street and loaded onto a one-horse rack wagon. Two Jewish policemen were seated in it; one urged the horse on and the other watched over the people. They were old people who asked for nothing, did not pray, and did not try to run away.

  The wagon turned onto Ciepła Street. The policemen were conversing in hushed tones, consulting each other. They could do one of two things: surround the next house and drive everyone out, or close off the street and conduct a lightning-fast roundup. The one who was whipping the horse was in favor of surrounding the house; the one who was in charge of the people urged him to agree to a roundup.

  A man who was sitting in the wagon disrupted their consultation.

  “Let them go,” he said. He was thinking of Lina and her mother, Andzia.

  The policemen didn’t want to respond to absurd requests, but several women joined the old man.

  “Let them go, they’re young; let them live a little longer.”

  “Don’t you know that I have a quota?” said the policeman who was driving the horse. “I have to deliver ten Jews to the square. The two of us together have to deliver twenty Jews. Are you going to give us someone instead of them? If you do, we’ll free them.”

  The old folks stopped asking; the policeman’s demand was as inappropriate as their request.

  The wagon rolled along very slowly. People say of a horse that moves one leg after the other that it is moving at a walk, but in the ghetto such words are not used. In the meantime, the horse moved one leg after another, although it could have hurried, because there were few pedestrians on the streets.

  “Everything,” Andzia and Lina recalled, “was happening in silence and without haste.”

  “Well?” The policeman addressed them directly. “Who is going to go to the Umschlagplatz in your place? Do you have someone?”

  They were approaching the spot where Ciepła Street intersected Grzybowska Street at an angle.

  They drove along for a few more meters and spotted a woman. She was walking along Grzybowska. She had no intention of running away. On the contrary. She was approaching their wagon at a calm, deliberate pace. They met up with her alongside No. 36. Lina remembered this because her preschool teacher, Pani Eda, lived at No. 36.

  The woman leaned her arm on the wooden shaft and said, not quite asking a question or affirming an obvious fact, “You don’t want to go to the Umschlagplatz, ma’am, right?”

  She was speaking to Andzia.

  Andzia, taken aback, was silent.

  “She doesn’t want to go,” someone called out, and then the woman addressed Andzia again.

  “Please get down; I’ll go instead of you.”

  Andzia and Lina still sat there, even though people were beginning to yell at them.

  “What are you waiting for? Get down!”

  “Get down,” the policeman seated on the coachman’s box echoed what the people were saying, and only then did Andzia lower her daughter to the roadway and jump down herself.

  The woman clambered onto the wagon.

  Both policemen were silent.

  “Please give her something,” someone called out to Andzia, probably the same man who was the first to ask the policeman to let her go.

  Andzia quic
kly took off her ring and gave it to the woman.

  The woman slipped the ring onto her finger. She didn’t look at Andzia any more. She looked straight ahead.

  Andzia and Lina returned home. Grandma Rywka was sitting there erect, stiff, holding her clasped hands on her knees. They told her about the woman. Grandma Rywka opened her hand. They saw a small vial with gray powder. “If you hadn’t returned …,” she said. They were astounded. Grandma Rywka, the fifth-generation granddaughter of the Lelów tzaddik, was a pious woman. She wore a wig. When her wig was taken to the hairdresser’s on Friday morning to be combed for the Sabbath, she would put on a kerchief so that no one should see her shaved head, and now she was clutching a vial of poison kept ready for a sinful, suicidal death. She was taken to the Umschlagplatz a few days later, with her grandsons and her daughter-in-law. Andzia and her daughter made it to the Aryan side and survived the war.

  2

  “What did that woman look like?” Lina’s mother was asked whenever she told the story of the rack wagon, and she told it throughout her life.

  “She was tall. She was wearing a suit. A nice, well-tailored suit made of dark-gray flannel. She had on boots, so-called officer shoes, that were popular in Warsaw during the war. I don’t remember her hairdo; I think it was combed in a roll. Women used to wind their hair at the time on long wires that were turned either down or up on both sides of the face. In a word, she was an elegant woman,” Lina’s mother would emphasize invariably.

  “Even those boots looked as if she had put them on not out of necessity, but only to look elegant.”

  “Maybe she knew she was going to die and so she got dressed for death?” one of the women listening to the story suggested. “People put a lot of weight on their final costume.”

  “She didn’t look like a madwoman?” people would ask.

  “No. She behaved calmly.”

  “Maybe she had lost someone and nothing mattered to her?”

  “She didn’t look as if she was in despair.”