The cattle-wagon was full of workers from different co-operatives, girls at teacher-training college, teachers from a school for trade unionists; there was a radio technician, an engineer who worked at a canned-food factory, a livestock expert, and a girl who worked as a vet. Previously, such professions had been unheard of in the shtetl. But then Sofya herself was still the same small girl who had been afraid of her father and grandmother – she hadn’t changed. Perhaps, at heart, this world remained equally unchanged. But what did it matter? Changed, or unchanged, the world of the shtetl was poised on the brink of the abyss.
‘Today’s Germans are just savages,’ she heard a young woman say. ‘They haven’t even heard of Heinrich Heine.’
A man’s voice from another corner said mockingly:
‘What help’s this Heine of yours been to us? The savages are rounding us up like cattle.’
People plied Sofya with questions about the position on the different fronts. Nothing she said was very encouraging and she was promptly told she had been misinformed; she realized that this wagon had its own strategy, a strategy founded on a passionate hunger to remain alive.
‘Surely you must have heard that an ultimatum has been sent to Hitler demanding the immediate release of all Jews?’
Yes, of course. What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror – what saves people then is the opium of optimism.
They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner – with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless . . .
She was also surprised how upset everyone still got over trivia, how quick they were to quarrel with one another. One middle-aged woman turned to her and said: ‘Look at that grande dame over there! She sits there beside that chink in the wall as though no one except her son has a right to any fresh air.’
The train stopped twice during the night. They listened to the squeaking boots of the guards, occasionally making out odd phrases of both German and Russian. The language of Goethe sounded quite appalling in the middle of the night at a Russian wayside halt, but the Russian spoken by the collaborators was still more sinister.
Like everyone else, Sofya began to suffer from hunger and thirst. Even her dreams had something pathetic about them; she dreamed of a squashed tin with a few drops of warm liquid at the very bottom. She scratched herself with the quick, jerky movements of a dog scratching itself for fleas.
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
It began to rain; a few drops came in through the barred window. Sofya tore a strip from the hem of her shirt, made her way towards the wall and pushed the material through a small chink. She waited for it to absorb the rainwater, pulled it away and began to suck; it was cool and damp. Soon, the other people sitting by the wall were following her example. Sofya felt quite proud of herself; she was the one who had thought up a way of catching the rainwater.
The little boy she had bumped into during the night was still sitting nearby; he was watching everyone squeeze their shreds of material into the chinks. The dim light was enough for her to make out his thin face and sharp nose. He must have been about six years old. Sofya realized that he hadn’t moved or said a word while she had been there; nor had anyone else said a word to him. She held out her wet rag and said: ‘Here you are, son.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Go on. It’s for you.’
Hesitantly, the boy stretched out his hand.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘David,’ he answered quietly.
Sofya’s neighbour, Musya Borisovna, told her that David was from Moscow. He had come to stay with his grandmother and had been cut off by the outbreak of war. The grandmother had died in the ghetto and he had been left with another relative, Rebekka Bukhman; her husband had fallen ill and she wouldn’t let the boy sit beside her in the wagon.
By evening Sofya had had her fill of conversations, stories and arguments; she was even talking and arguing herself. She often began with the words: ‘Brider yidn,fn1 what I think . . .’
Many of the people in the wagon were looking forward to the end of the journey; they thought they were being taken to camps where each person would be given work in his own field and the sick would receive special care. They talked about this incessantly. But, deep down, their souls were still gripped by a silent horror.
Sofya learned that there were many things in human beings that were far from human. She heard about a paralysed woman who had been frozen to death by her sister; she had been put in a tub and dragged out onto the street on a winter’s night. She heard about mothers who had killed their own children; there was one in this very wagon. She heard about people who had lived in sewers for months on end, eating filth like rats, ready to endure anything if only they could stay alive.
The conditions the Jews lived in were terrible; and they were neither saints nor villains, they were human beings.
Sofya’s pity for these people grew particularly intense when she looked at little David. Most of the time he just sat there without saying a word; sometimes he took a crumpled matchbox out of his pocket, looked inside, and hid it away again.
For several days now Sofya hadn’t wanted to sleep. She sat there, wide awake, in the stinking darkness. ‘I wonder where Zhenya Shaposhnikova is now,’ she thought suddenly. As she listened to people’s cries and mutterings, she realized that their heads were filled with painfully vivid images that no words could ever convey. How could these images be preserved, how could they be fixed – in case men remained alive on earth and wanted to find out what had happened?
‘Golda! Golda!’ cried a man’s voice, racked with sobs.
Footnotes
fn1 Fellow Jews.
44
. . . The brain of the forty-year-old accountant, Naum Rozenberg, was still engaged in its usual work. He was walking down the road and counting: 110 the day before yesterday, 61 yesterday, 612 during the five days before – altogether that made 783 . . . A pity he hadn’t kept separate totals for men, women and children . . . Women burn more easily. An experienced brenner arranges the bodies so that the bony old men who make a lot of ash are lying next to the women. Any minute now they’d be ordered to turn off the road; these people – the people they’d been digging up from pits and dragging out with great hooks on the end of ropes – had received the same order only a year ago. An experienced brenner could look at a mound and immediately estimate how many bodies there were inside – 50, 100, 200, 600, 1000 . . . Scharführer Elf insisted that the bodies should be referred to as items – 100 items, 200 items – but Rozenberg called them people: a man who had been killed, a child who had been put to death, an old man who had been put to death. He used these words only to himself – otherwise the Scharführer would have emptied nine grams of metal into him – but he continued obstinately muttering: ‘So now you’re coming out of the grave, old chap . . . There’s no need to clutch your mother like that, my child, you won’t be separated from her now . . .’ ‘What are you muttering about over there? Me? Nothing. You must have imagined it.’ And he carried on muttering; that was his little struggle . . . The day before yesterday there had been a pit with only eight men in it. The Scharführer had spluttered: ‘It’s ridiculous; how can you have twenty brenners burning eight items?’ The Scharführer was right, but what could you do if there were only two Jewish families in a whole village? Orders were orders – all graves were to be dug up and all bodies burnt . . . Now they had turned off the road, they were walking along the grass – and ther
e, for the hundred and fifteenth time, was the grey mound of a grave in the middle of a clearing. Eight men dug; four men felled oak trees and sawed them into logs the length of a human body; two men split these logs with axes and wedges; two men went back to the road to fetch old dry planks, kindling and petrol cans; four prepared the bonfire site and dug a ditch for the ash-pit – yes, they’d have to work out which way the wind was blowing.
The smell of damp and mould immediately vanished; the guards began laughing, cursing and holding their noses; the Scharführer walked off to the edge of the clearing. The brenners threw down their spades, tied old rags round their mouths and noses and picked up their hooks again . . . ‘Good day, grandad! So you’re seeing the sun again! My! You are heavy . . . !’ A mother who who had been killed with her three children – two boys, one of them already at school, and a girl born in 1939 who’d had rickets, but never mind, she’s cured of that now . . . ‘Don’t clutch your mother like that, my child, she won’t leave you now . . .’ ‘How many items?’ shouted the Scharführer from the edge of the clearing. ‘Nineteen,’ – and then, very quietly, to himself – ‘dead people.’ Everyone cursed; they’d wasted half the day. But then last week they’d dug up a grave with two hundred young women in it. When they’d taken off the top layer of earth, a cloud of grey steam had risen from the grave. The guards had laughed: ‘These women really are hot stuff!’
First they laid dry wood over the ventilation-ditches, then a layer of oak logs – they burned well – then women who’d been killed, then more wood, then men who’d been killed, then more wood, then the bits of human bodies that were left over, then a can of petrol, and then, right in the middle, an incendiary bomb. Then the Scharführer gave the order; the guards were already smiling as the brenners shouted out: ‘It’s alight!’ Finally, the ash was shovelled back into the grave. And it was quiet again. It had been quiet before and it was quiet again.
Then they had been taken further into the forest. This time there was no mound in the middle of the green clearing and the Scharführer ordered them to dig a pit four metres long by three metres wide. They had understood at once: they had completed their task . . . 89 villages, 18 shtetl, 4 settlements, 2 district towns, 3 State farms – 2 arable and one dairy. Altogether that was 116 localities, 116 mounds they had dug . . . Rozenberg the accountant was still counting as he helped dig the pit for himself and the other brenners: 783 last week, and 4,826 during the thirty days before – that made 5,609 bodies they had cremated. He counted and counted and time slipped imperceptibly by; he was working out the average number of items – no, human bodies – in each grave: 5,609 divided by 116, the number of graves – that made 48.35 bodies in each communal grave, 48 in round numbers. If 20 brenners had been working for 37 days, then each brenner . . . ‘Fall in!’ shouted the chief guard. ‘In die Grube marsch!’ bellowed the Scharführer.
But he didn’t want to be buried. He started to run, he fell down, he started running again. He ran slowly – he didn’t know how to – but they didn’t get him. Now he was lying down on the grass, surrounded by the silence of the forest. He wasn’t thinking about the sky above, nor was he thinking about Golda who had been killed in her sixth month of pregnancy; he was counting, trying to finish the calculations he had been doing in the pit: 20 brenners, 37 days . . . So, first, the total of brenner days; second, how much wood per man; third, how many hours each item took to burn, how many . . .
A week later he’d been caught by the police and taken to the ghetto.
And here he was in the cattle-wagon, still muttering away, counting, dividing, multiplying. The accounts for the year! He would have to hand them in to Bukhman, the chief accountant at the State Bank. And then suddenly, while he was dreaming, his tears had come gushing out, burning him, breaking through the crust that had formed over his brain and his heart.
‘Golda! Golda!’ he cried out.
45
The window of her room looked out onto the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the ghetto. Musya Borisovna the librarian woke up during the night, lifted the hem of the curtain and saw two soldiers dragging a machine-gun. There were blue patches on its polished body and the spectacles of the officer walking in front were glittering in the moonlight. She heard the quiet hum of motors. Cars and lorries with dimmed headlights were approaching the ghetto. The heavy, silvery dust swirled around their wheels; they were like gods floating through the clouds.
Musya Borisovna watched as sub-units of the SS and SD, detachments of Ukrainian police, auxiliary units and a column of cars belonging to the Gestapo drew up at the gates of the sleeping ghetto. In these few minutes of moonlight she took the measure of the history of our age.
The moonlight, the slow majestic movement of the armoured units, the powerful black trucks, the timid ticking of the pendulum clock on the wall, the stockings, bra and blouse that seemed to have frozen on the chair – everything most incongruous had fused together.
46
Natasha, the daughter of Karasik, an old doctor who had been arrested and executed in 1937, tried now and then to sing in the cattle-wagon. No one seemed to mind even when she began singing during the night.
She was very shy. She always looked down at the ground when she spoke and her voice was barely audible. She had never visited anyone except her close relatives and she was astonished at the boldness of girls who danced at parties.
She had not been included in the small number of craftsmen and doctors whose lives were considered useful enough to be preserved . . . A policeman had pushed her towards a dusty mound in the marketplace where three drunken men were standing. She had known one of these men before the war: he had been in charge of some railway depot; now he was the Chief of Police. Before she had even understood that these three men were the arbiters of life and death, the policeman had given her another shove; she had joined the buzzing crowd of men, women and children who had been pronounced useless.
Then they had walked towards the airfield in the stifling heat of their last August day. As they walked past the dusty apple trees by the roadside, they had prayed, torn their clothes and uttered their last piercing cries. Natasha herself had remained quite silent.
She would never have thought that blood could be so strikingly red. When there was a momentary silence amid the shooting, screaming and groaning, she heard the murmur of flowing blood; it was like a stream, flowing over white bodies instead of white stones.
The quiet crackle of machine-gun fire and the gentle, exhausted face of the executioner – he had waited patiently as she walked timidly to the edge of the pit – had hardly seemed frightening at all . . . Later, during the night, she had wrung out her wet shirt and walked back to the town. The dead don’t rise from the grave – so she must have been alive.
When she made her way back to the ghetto, through the small alleys and yards, she had found people dancing and singing on the main square. A band was playing a sad, dreamy waltz that had always been one of her favourites. Couples were whirling round in the wan light of the moon and the streetlamps; the shuffling of soldiers’ boots and girls’ shoes merged with the music. At that moment this young, drooping girl had felt joyful and self-assured. Quietly, under her breath, she began singing in anticipation of some future happiness. From time to time, when no one was watching, she had even tried to waltz.
47
David could only very dimly remember what had happened since the beginning of the war. There was one night, though, when a little of what he had just lived through came back to him.
It was dark and his grandmother was taking him to the Bukhmans. The sky was full of stars and the horizon was quite light, almost lemon-green. Burdock leaves brushed against his cheeks like cold, moist hands.
Everyone was sitting in a hiding-place in the attic, behind a false wall. In the sun the black sheets of corrugated-iron roofing gave off a fierce heat. Sometimes the smell of burning penetrated their hiding-place. The ghetto was on fire. During the day they had to lie absolutely stil
l. The Bukhman’s daughter, Svetlanochka, kept up a monotonous crying. Bukhman himself had a weak heart and in the daytime he looked as though he were dead. During the night he ate some food and quarrelled with his wife.
Suddenly they heard dogs barking. And words in a foreign language: ‘Asta! Asta! Wo sind die Juden?’ There was a growing rumble over their heads: the Germans had climbed out of the dormer-window onto the roof.
Then the thundering in the black tin sky died down. Through the walls they heard quiet, sly blows – someone was testing for echoes.
The hiding-place became silent. It was a terrible silence, a silence of tensed shoulders and necks, of bared teeth, of eyes bulging out of their sockets.
Then little Svetlana began her wordless lament. Her cries broke off very abruptly. David looked round and met the frenzied eyes of her mother, Rebekka Bukhman.
Once or twice since then he had glimpsed those eyes . . . And the head of the little girl – thrown right back like the head of a rag-doll.
He could remember everything that had happened before the war. Those memories came back to him all the time. He had become like an old man – living on his past, loving it and cherishing it.
48
On David’s birthday, 12 December, his mother had bought him a picture book.
A small grey goat was standing in a clearing; the darkness of the forest seemed particularly sinister. Among the dark-brown tree-trunks, the toadstools and the fly-agarics, you could see the wolf’s green eyes and his red jaw with its bared teeth.
Only David knew about the now inevitable murder. He banged his fist on the table, he screened the goat with the palm of his hand – but he knew there was no way he could save it.