“Your loved ones aren’t far away, I guarantee it. They’re working, like everyone, but they’re well.”
Could I believe him? I tried to convince myself that he was my protector, that he cared about me. Why would he lie? But deep down, I mistrusted him, though of course I never showed it for fear of arousing his anger.
The count was such a good liar. One day, with my heart in my mouth, I asked him, “You say my family is well and not far from here. But what about my mother? How is she? She has intestinal problems. She was going to be operated on.”
“Oh yes, she was very sick. But she recovered. I’m positive; I got it straight from her physician. The one who operated on her. In fact, if you want, you could write her a little note; I’ll give it to her when I next visit her camp.”
Naturally, I quickly composed a letter, expressing in Yiddish all my nostalgia, sorrow, loneliness and love. The count tried to read it but gave up; he remarked that he didn’t know my language, which seemed to him a vulgar corruption of German, but that he trusted me. My note would be given to her within a week.
One week later, he was beaming.
“Mission accomplished. Your mother cried when she read your letter. She showed it to everyone. It was a good idea you had, a generous idea, my boy. Now that contact has been established, things will go better.”
He was such a good liar. Was it because everything was like chess to him? Aren’t we liars or actors, to a lesser or greater extent, when we play chess? Tricking the opponent’s vigilance, isn’t that a lie?
In my subterranean hideaway, I was worried. As I had no contact with the world outside, I was ignorant of what was happening to the Jews under the enemy’s yoke.
My father, I learned later, suffered through illness and despair in Auschwitz. Most of his relatives and friends had died long before; in fact, some of them, including my grandmother, died the very night they arrived in Birkenau.
Miraculously, Arele and my father survived. To the bitter end of the war, they worked together in Auschwitz, providing support for each other.
As the weeks and months went by in the summer of 1944, everyone understood that the evacuation of the ghetto meant that the war, and therefore the occupation, the apotheosis of evil, was coming to an end. The count knew full well that the Red Army was approaching Kolomea; often, in the evening, we could hear the artillery in the distance.
The count was preoccupied about what would happen “afterward.” What would he do when the retreat order was given? he asked himself out loud. Would he be transferred to the front, to the rear? For how long?
And I had anxious thoughts too: If he leaves, what will become of me?
One evening, he came down the stairs to the hideaway, where I was reading by candlelight. I assumed he wanted to play chess and I started to put out the board.
“No,” he said. “No need to anymore. It’s over. I have to leave the city. I wouldn’t like to fall into the hands of the Russians.”
He paused for a moment before continuing.
“The city is almost entirely surrounded. The battle won’t last long. Our defenses are too weak and we’re going to set up a well-organized retreat. I think that the day after tomorrow, you’ll be able to go upstairs. Dorothea is staying here. She’ll take care of you. But …”
Another pause.
“No doubt you’ll be questioned about me. Remember the fact that you’re still alive and more or less free. You owe it to me.”
I thought to myself: No, he’s wrong. That’s not true. I owe the fact that I’m still alive to his and my passion for an ancient, constantly reinvented game. Fearful as I was, I kept silent. Why annoy the count by contradicting him? As long as he was still around, he was dangerous, all-powerful.
He smiled ambiguously, melancholically or pusillanimously—I couldn’t tell—and shook my hand before leaving.
• • •
A few hours later, the Red Army’s heavy artillery shelled Davarowsk. As a result, I was no longer the only person to breathe the underground dust. All of the city’s inhabitants congregated in the antiaircraft shelters. There was not a single Jew among them. They had all been swept into a tempest of fire and hatred. The sensation was strange: I was the only young descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the last disciple of Moses and Rabbi Akiba, in a dark, condemned world, about to reawaken on the ruins of its memory and hope.
Contrary to what the count had said, Dorothea was nowhere to be seen. Had she followed her master? Returned to Germany perhaps? Or had she taken refuge at the house of relatives, or civilians, far from the front? Was she afraid of the inevitable reprisals of the population who had had to serve the Germans for so long? Other pro-Nazi collaborators had fled for the same reason. It was predictable, crystal clear: The hour of the dispensers of justice and avengers had finally arrived.
How many more days and nights was I going to stay all alone, without help and without food, in this hideaway where fear was my only faithful companion?
I tried to pass the time by resuming a game I had started with the count. But my brain wasn’t working very well anymore. More and more anguished, I couldn’t concentrate. The black and white pieces seemed perturbed and disoriented on the chessboard, reflecting my mood. The pieces seemed to move of their own free will following an ever-changing strategy. Indifferent to propriety, the bishop laughed, the knight danced, the queen cried and the king, motionless and impassive, bit his lips as he waited for the near and distant future.
The count had seen things accurately. The nightmare ended two days after his departure.
Noisily busting the door open, an electric flashlight in one hand, a cocked machine gun in the other, a bearded giant, as big as a mountain bear, stepped in slowly and cautiously. He wore a padded winter jacket and a fur hat. On the hat was a five-pointed star. Suddenly he jumped near me and cried out orders in Russian, which I understood thanks to my Slavic acquaintances.
“Are there any Germans here? Answer quickly.”
“No,” I answered, “I’m all alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m all alone.”
He searched the shadowy corners with his flashlight and settled on my frightened face.
“You’re shaking with fear. What or who are you afraid of now that the Germans are gone? Don’t you see I’m your liberator?”
“Yes, I do.”
He noticed the chessboard.
“You play chess?”
“Yes.”
“With who?”
“All alone.”
He examined the positions and said, “The black knight is clever. If I had time, I’d prove it to you, but the Red Army has other things in store for me. We’re on our way to Berlin. Hitler is kaput, even if his stupid soldiers don’t know it yet.”
I smiled faintly.
“You’re Jewish?” the Russian soldier asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s why you’re hiding?”
“Yes.”
“And what about your family? Where are they?”
“I don’t know. They’ve all left me.”
He handed me a piece of bread. “I’m Jewish too. My name is Piotr. What’s yours?”
“Shalti.”
“My Jewish name is Peretz. What’s yours?”
“Shaltiel.”
“Okay, my friend Shalti. You’re alive—that’s all that counts. Do you hear the shooting? They’re fighting in the nearby streets. Every building is being searched. They’ve already caught a German solider in civilian dress. No doubt there are others. It will all be over by tonight or tomorrow morning. You’ll be able to go home. I have to leave you now. But I’ll be back. I promise. But …” He cut himself short, surprised by his own ignorance. “Where’s home?”
I burst out crying. “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I’m waiting for them, all of them. My parents … I don’t know where they are now or what happened to them. But I’m waiting for them.”
The soldie
r put down his flashlight and patted me on the shoulder. “Okay, my little Jewish brother. I understand you. You don’t want to go back to an empty house. So wait here, upstairs. Do you want to?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then good-bye, Shaltiel.”
“Good-bye, Peretz.”
He hesitated a minute, then added, “Be careful, my friend. When I’m with others, it’s best to forget my Jewish name. Call me Piotr.”
He left, and I started sobbing again.
Upstairs, I found the governess straightening up the place. Miraculously, the building had remained intact. I was more surprised than she. Without a word, she handed me a bowl of warm tea. I asked her if she had any news from the count. She hesitated before answering. I felt that my question made her ill at ease and irritated her.
“No news. He left with the army and won’t be back. What about you? What are you going to do? Where are you going to live? Who will take care of you?”
I had never seen her so talkative.
“I think I’ll be going home soon,” I said. “But not right away. I’m waiting for someone who promised he’d come back to see me.”
“Who’s that?”
“His name is Piotr.”
Her eyes fluttered nervously, and she shuddered when she heard the name. I wondered what she was so frightened of?
“Who is he?” she whispered in a hoarse voice.
“A soldier.”
“A soldier!” she cried out, her hand over her mouth.
“A Russian officer.” And after a pause. “He’s Jewish … like me.”
Panic-stricken, she left me brusquely and went into the kitchen.
• • •
Piotr reappeared two days later. I was waiting for him in the street. He brought me shirts and winter clothes, food and coal.
“Gifts from German citizens,” he said, laughing noisily. “They led the good life here. Now it’s your turn.”
The governess wasn’t at home.
Piotr helped me settle into the living room, which I wasn’t familiar with. He left me a piece of paper with his address in Kiev for after the war.
“That way, you’ll have someone to look up when you’re over there.”
I told him we already had someone over there. “My older brother. A Communist to the bone.”
Seeing his stupefaction, I told him the story of my brother, a devoted admirer of Stalin, who had left the family and gone to the Soviet Union.
“And where is he?”
“I have no idea. He may have joined a relative of ours who lives in Moscow, apparently. At home, they used to say that he worked for a very important person.”
“What’s his name?”
“Leon. Leon Meirovitch.”
“What! Repeat what you just said.”
“Leon Meirovitch.”
“You’re pulling my leg, Shalti?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
The soldier rose from his seat and started clapping his hands excitedly. “The great, illustrious, one and only Leon Meirovitch is his brother’s boss, a member of his family, and he tells me this as though he were your ordinary corner grocer!”
He sat down again and took my hands. “Listen closely, child. I have to leave for the front again. I’ll do my best to return. I want to make sure I can find you again.”
“But I don’t think I’ll be living here.”
“Where would you live?”
“Home. I’ll wait for my relatives to return. Some of them may have died, but not all of them. At least, that’s what I hope.”
Piotr thought for a moment, then tore a sheet out of his notebook (which he had taken from a German). “Give me your old address.”
I wrote it down and handed it to him.
We embraced. As I watched him leave, I wondered: Who will I see first, him or my family? To whom will I tell the story of how I survived?
A few days later, I “moved home,” as they say, with a bundle of belongings packed by the governess. Except it wasn’t our home anymore. A family of strangers had moved in, an emaciated, surly man, a sad-looking woman and two unruly children. I told them who I was, and they looked at me uncomprehendingly at first, then with hostility.
“Go away!” yelled the man. “We live here; it’s our house. Go back to where you came from. Otherwise …”
He took out of his pocket a certifying document with official stamps.
Why argue with him? As he was on the verge of pushing me out the door, I left and went to the police. An indifferent police chief explained to me that hundreds of apartments and houses vacated during the occupation by their Jewish residents had been assigned to the homeless people from the neighboring cities and towns who had been bombed out and lost everything they owned. “We had to put them up somewhere, didn’t we?”
I asked him where I should go. He shrugged his shoulders. I wanted to explain to him that if I didn’t live at home, my parents, when they returned, wouldn’t know where to find me.
He snickered. “There must be orphanages for kids like you.”
“But I’m not an orphan! My parents are going to return!”
He dismissed me with an impatient gesture.
Back in the street, under a blazing sun, I couldn’t hold back my tears. I walked aimlessly, for how long I don’t know, until I was stopped by a Russian soldier who was coming out of a commandeered building. He asked me why I was crying. I told him that I didn’t know where to go, that I no longer had a place to live, and especially that I was afraid of being permanently separated from my family. The Germans had taken them away …
“What’s your name?” the soldier asked me.
I told him.
“Are you Jewish?”
“Yes.”
Another stroke of luck: The man I stood in front of, Mendel, was Jewish.
“Come with me,” he said.
Everything happened very quickly. The police chief had to apologize to me; he almost had to get on his knees. Then he walked us back to my house. The tall, skinny man who had chased me away was told that the house, as well as the furniture and the objects, had to be returned to me, and thoroughly cleaned and spotless from top to bottom, within twenty-four hours.
“But the official document,” the man stammered.
The policeman looked at the Russian soldier, took the document, tore it up and threw it on the ground.
“We’ll be back tomorrow morning,” said the soldier. “If we find you here, you’ll be sorry. You don’t mess with the Red Army, you filthy anti-Semites!”
I thought of my Communist brother who had been gone for so long: If all the Soviets were like these soldiers, I could understand his passion for world revolution.
How was I to adapt to this new life?
This war wasn’t like the others. In the past, death struck down adults at the front, but children and old people were protected. In this war, that wasn’t true.
Little by little, the survivors started returning to Davarowsk. Most of them were young people. There were no children or old people. A small community was forming to help the lost and the needy. A rabbi officiated at a study and prayer house, and I went there. Like my father, I liked to pray with others.
It was there in that shrine, weeks after the Germans had left, that one Sabbath day a miracle befell me. As tradition required, the rabbi was reading the weekly passage of the Torah, when the door opened. My father and Arele appeared. I rushed to them, breathless. And all the faithful turned to look at us, as well as the rabbi, who quickly interrupted his reading.
Three Jews embraced one another as they wept.
My father and Arele were returning from the kingdom of darkness where humanity had been brought down, crushed, almost annihilated beyond recall.
Auschwitz.
I asked about Mama.
They shook their heads.
She had been trampled on, wounded, humiliated, suffocated and burned on the very night of her arrival. A member of the Sonderko
mmandos had confirmed it.
My opponent, the count, that bastard, I thought. My German protector had lied to me, misled me, betrayed me. How could I forgive that?
We spent days and nights holding hands in our house, looking tenderly at one another, exchanging our recollections and experiences with inadequate words, and our silences, especially our silences—there were some things we couldn’t say.
One day when we were talking about the war, Father said, “I survived thanks to Arele. He was my support.”
“And you, mine,” said Arele.
“I survived thanks to chess,” I said, “and a German officer.” My father nodded.
“Where is he? What became of him?” Arele asked.
“I was hoping to see him again and tell him what I think of him. I have a score to settle, questions to ask. He should be tried and sentenced, punished. He was an officer of the Sicherheitsdienst, it turns out, not without influence. He could have prevented the hanging of the Jewish boy, Mama’s deportation and yours. He made a fool of me, of all of us. The only thing that interested him in life was chess. The power to defeat his opponent, to win. Human lives didn’t count for him. He trampled us Jews as if we were scum.”
“I wonder where Pinhas is,” my father said.
“It was such a long time ago. We were so miserable when he left, but he did well to leave.”
“Maybe we’ll know one day,” I said, thinking of the first Jewish Red Army soldier who rescued me at that tragic moment in my life.
“How?”
A spark of joy lit up inside me. It chased away shadows and ghosts and revealed a brother, an older brother in full force.
I told them about my meeting with Piotr.
“He wanted to know everything about me. It seems that Pavel is a very important person over there. He works for …”
“Leon Meirovitch? Our relative?” my father asked.
“Yes. In fact, Piotr promised to come back to see me. I gave him our address.”
“Who knows what happened to him?” Arele wondered. “The war isn’t over yet. Everything is still chaotic.”
“He’ll keep his promise,” I said in an obstinate tone of voice.
Given history’s convulsions, we had every reason not to hold out much hope. Yet my father remarked, “And the fact that we’re here—true, not all of us, but some of us—in our own house, among ourselves, reunited, and the fact that there are still Jews in Europe, isn’t that the sign that miracles can still happen?”