Emil Draitser – ‘Arrow Piercing Throat’

 

 “I don’t understand why, why they meekly went to their deaths!” 

         These words surfaced in my memory for the first time recently, five years ago. In 2018, the Polish government decided to prosecute those who mentioned the participation of Poles in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. Official speeches carried the reproach that the Jews themselves were to blame for such an enormous number of victims because they did not offer proper resistance…

I was about thirteen or fourteen when Aunt Dunya, my mother’s cousin, asked me this question. Her name was Dvojra, but my mother called her by the closest-sounding Russian name, Dunya, in public for the same reason she called my father Abram in no other way than Arkady. It was in the early fifties; Stalin was still alive. The campaign against the “rootless cosmopolitans” was in full swing. The case of the “Kremlin murderous doctors in white coats” was looming. “Capitalist”, “exploiter”, “bloodsucker”, “robber” and “Zionist” were synonymous words.

It was then when I developed a conditioned reflex: I shuddered inwardly at the mere sight of the Star of David. The way the six-pointed star was displayed in public made it seem a mockery of the five-pointed star, the Red Army star, which had not yet been erased from my childhood memory of the war. The five-pointed star was connected in children’s consciousness with victory, with rescue from German bombs. The six-pointed star appeared in the cartoons of the satirical magazine Crocodile. On the hats of men smoking long cigars with fat noses and enormous bellies… Often Soviet newspapers did not hesitate to place “Stars of David” next to the shiver-inducing swastika.

Childhood reflexes are hard-wired into the consciousness for a long time, often for life. I came to America as an adult, but I caught myself that the “Star of David” remained for me emotionally colored by the fear that I, a Jew by birth, would be identified and handed over… The very word “synagogue” still felt dangerous for a long time. At best, in the Soviet press, it was condescending.

Yes, I still feel uneasy that, somewhere deep in my subconscious, there is a fear of anti-Semites. Yes, I still shudder inwardly when I see a Star of David on a quite innocent background – on the pediment of a library, synagogue, etc. The very word “synagogue” is still tinged with Russian contemptuous condescension.

            So, the very question my aunt asked me then, in my adolescence, did not surprise me. In Odessa, Ukraine, where I was born and grew up, all the Jews I knew walked with their heads pulled back into their shoulders.

I do not remember where my aunt got this picture of Jews going to slaughter blithely. Neither during Stalin’s time nor until the end of Soviet rule was the word “Holocaust” even in circulation. A picture of prisoners behind barbed wire flashed in a newspaper. But it was stated that they were Soviet citizens, fighters against fascism. I remember how my aunt, angry and slightly grassing from excitement, said with passion, fixing her angry gaze on me, a teenager who was visiting her son Yankel, my peer:

“I don’t understand why you had to go to your death obediently. Like cattle! I mean, you are all about to die, anyway! Why not throw yourself at your executioners and try to tear them apart?”

     Her eyes narrowed, her lips stretched in a mixture of anger and resentment. Her hands tensed to mimic animal paws with claws out, ready to pounce on her enemy. 

Teenager, I was perplexed. Why was her anger directed at me? What did I have to do with it?

The aunt’s question was, of course, rhetorical. And it was addressed not to me, but to her tribe members, who had already been swept off the face of the earth. She was angry, of course, at herself as well, at the fear that had been driven into her subconscious, which, although the war was over, still hung in the air. In Odessa queues, one could still hear a drunken cry, “Hitler didn’t finish his business!”

My personal connection to the Holocaust then, in my adolescence, was vague to me. Those who perished were those whom I had never seen in my youth. My grandmother Sara, who moved from Minsk, Belarus, to live with us in Odessa, Ukraine, with her son, my father, often recalled her daughter Judith and her grandchildren – sixteen-year-old Misha and two-year-old twins, Yasha and Fima, who were swept into the “Pit,” as the Minsk ghetto was nicknamed in the city. In the kindergarten, a direct bomb hit took the lives of Essie’s and Tanya’s children – three-year-old Dina and two-year-old Raya.

My grandma remembered them often. She shook her head, her hands trembling with the bitterness of the loss. Her dark blue, veined lips curved in restrained weeping. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief clenched in her fist, trying to hide her grief.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Wolf, would not leave for the evacuation with his children, my mother, and my aunt, no matter how much they begged him. He was married by the second marriage, and, deeply religious, he believed not that he was too old to endure the journey in a freight train, but that it would not be endured by his sick second wife, with whom he had joined his life after my grandmother’s death.

And, as it became known to me after the war, my grandfather Uri from my father’s side did not even try to escape when the German paratroopers landed near Minsk, where he lived with his family. He was already an old man and thought he would be left alone. At his age, to whom was he a threat? Having been a prisoner of war during the First World War, he found the Germans as sensible as anyone else he knew. When, along with other men on a suburban road they tried to arrest him, he lashed out, shouting, “Are you crazy?!” Surviving witnesses recounted he was stabbed to death with bayonets.

In my youth, I did not know, nor could I have known the answer to my aunt’s question why the Jews did not fight back against the Nazis. To be a Jew in the postwar Soviet Union meant to accept one’s fate without complaint. And later, throughout my Soviet life – I emigrated at the end of 1974 – the history of the people to whom I belonged by birth was thoroughly concealed.

I do not know about my aunt who grew up in a religious family before the war – her father was the treasurer of the Odessa synagogue – but I, a teenager, knew nothing that could nourish my spirit. Neither about the selflessness of the defenders of the ancient Mossad, nor about other Jewish heroes – Maccabeus, Bar Kochba, the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, Jewish partisan associations during the Second World War, Jews in the French Resistance, and many others. I learned about all this only a quarter of a century later, after leaving the Soviet Union forever: on my way to America, in Rome, in the library of the Jewish Foundation.

The answer to my aunt’s old rhetorical question came to me almost six decades later, in the spring of 2008. Taking advantage of the opportunity – the Polish publishing house Midrash was issuing a collection of my stories titled Wesele v Braiton Beach [A Wedding in Brighton Beach] and invited me to take part in the “Week of Jewish Culture” in Warsaw – I visited Auschwitz.

I must admit that, when the invitation came, I was surprised. What kind of Jewish culture can we talk about in Poland if there were only a handful of Jews in the country after the Holocaust and the expulsion of survivors in 1968 under the rule of Wladyslaw Gomulka, who accused “Zionists” of an anti-Polish conspiracy? When I shared my thoughts on this subject with my colleague, a Polish professor at my college, she responded with a reproach that surprised me.

 “What are you talking about?” she says. “Jews are part of our history! They have lived in Poland for over ten centuries.” 

I remembered her words as I made my way from Warsaw by train to Krakow, the ancient Polish capital, forty minutes away by bus from where Auschwitz was located.

When I arrived in Krakow, I was in no hurry to visit the death camp. I gave myself some time to gather my courage for what was to come. I took a bus tour of the city. In the Kazimierz district, where, according to the guidebook, there was a “Jewish Quarter,” remembering the words of my college colleague, I familiarized myself with it.

The central part of the neighborhood looked like a movie set. The fake windows and doors were painted as if they had faded in the sun and turned gray from rain and time. In theatrical letters – signs on the shops, “Haim Kogan. Retail Warehouse” … “Benjamin Holzer. Carpenter” … “Stanislav Novak. Grocery store“… “Aron Weinberg. Haberdasheries” … “Abram Rattner. Merchant“…

The entrance to the shops is closed as if not that their owners were taken out of town and burned in the ovens. It is just that it is Saturday — it is a sin to work…

The props have a commercial purpose. Kazimierz has been turned into a Potemkin village where, at every step, you are reminded that you are in a Jewish neighborhood. The Klezmer Hotel and Restaurant… Not far away is Ariel. If you still have not realized that this is not the name of a Disney character, but of a biblical one, there is a Hebrew inscription on your right hand. And, if you have not figured out what kind of food is served in the restaurant “Noah’s Ark,” next to the sign – free translation – “Restaurant ‘Jewish Style.”

Tourists here are mostly from America, from those who have had Polish murdered forebears in the second, or even the third generation… The chords of “Tum-Balalaika” were heard from the restaurant’s windows. (The popularity of Romani music in old Russia in the descriptions of Russian classics came to my mind.)

The whole thing was sad. Is the entire memory of fellow Jews captured in the kitsch form? A thousand years they lived alongside, shoulder to shoulder – and all that remains as a memory of them is the restaurant schlager “Tum-Balalaika”? 

After spending a few hours on the streets of Krakow, just as in a work of fiction, there is a foreshadowing of what must eventually happen, so this wandering around the city prepared me for a visit to Auschwitz, located nearby.

There was another, much sadder omen, besides the props and restaurants. Close to the center of Kazimierz, I came upon a small deserted square monument. There were a dozen to a dozen and a half massive iron chairs placed at a great distance from each other. They rested on cast-iron slabs embedded in the paving. The chairs are figures of paralipsis. In architecture, as in literature, it is an amplifying device. Empty chairs tell a lot. They are a memory of those who sat on them, who are long gone. This is all that is left of our centuries-old neighbors – Polish Jews. 

Going to Auschwitz. I catch myself in a humiliating thought, consoling myself with the fact that the Nazis set up death camps far away from populated areas so that the local population would not know what was going on in the camps. So, even they realized that what they were about to do was not the natural course of things, but a crime against humanity. Even the ill-wishers among the locals would consider the extermination of innocent people an act of inhumanity. So, not everyone approved of the crimes. So, I – as a Jew – am not completely alone against the world…

After examining the museum’s exhibits and listening to the guide’s comments, I finally understood where the impression that the Jews brought to the camp were going to their deaths meekly came from.

The organizers had thought of everything down to the smallest detail. As you know, Jews from all over Europe were brought here. So, they said, so and so, the Third Reich believes that for your Jewish benefit, it is best if you live together, in a neighborhood where we, the Goyim, the infidels, will not be a nuisance to you. Here we, in the Reich, thought and thought about how to help you and. We found a place not somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but here in Europe where everything will be provided for your continued sustainability. It was not a question of deportation to a faraway place, but a simple resettlement to the place where many Jews settled – Poland. Those who were well-off were persuaded to buy land and a house in the new place. They were given to sign a bill of sale, drawn up according to all regulations. They issued deeds for real property, observing all the rules.

People took with them all their most valuable possessions – whatever they had. They sold everything they could sell and turned it into jewelry that could be exported, say, by putting a diamond in a lady’s heel. They took everything they needed to continue living a normal life upon arrival – pots, pans, kettles, vintage kerosene heaters, and children’s toys, including dolls with dolls’ cradles.

When you arrive at the destination, you will have tea and, before walking down the local avenue – there must be a decent place to stroll! – to shine your shoes. Well, you cannot walk in dusty shoes! Thus, the Auschwitz Museum has a collection of jars of shoe polish from all over Europe…

They traveled as families and tried to stay together. A trauma occurred when, upon arrival, husbands were separated from their wives and children on the platform in Auschwitz. Men are the labor force. They should help to build houses for the newly arrived. At first, they even tried to use women as a labor force, but at the first attempt, they came to their senses. Mothers and children started screaming and clawing at each other. It was a real hassle.

They requested to leave the suitcases on the platform – we care about the passengers.

Do not worry, we will deliver them back to you later. Do not forget to mark the suitcases with your names! That is why in museum showcases – where with chalk, where with paint – the owner’s name is written on the suitcases. In case of a coincidence – there are many Rabinoviches or Abramoviches in the world! – also please mark the year of your birth and the city where you came from. Private property is private property, and its sanctity for us Germans, as everyone knows, is the law. And for us Germans, the law is above all!

Of course, few people bought into the Nazis’ resettlement tales. There were rumors they were taking them to their deaths. But such is human nature that hope dies a second before the person oneself. So, they hoped…

Of course, some suspected terrible things. They thought they were alarmists, that Germans were a cultured nation, and that Hitler was crazy, but not to that extent.

Although the word “Auschwitz” in Russian (Osventsim) has the sound of lead (svinets) in it, the bullet was rare here. (It was in the Soviet Union, in the first period of the war, that the Holocaust was done by bullets, as the French priest, Father Patrick Desbois, called his book of investigations.).

Instead, there was a shower room. The newly arrived spent several days in cattle cars. They wanted to wash off the road grime as soon as possible. So, they stood in line for the shower room, shuffling from foot to foot. There is a photograph of a woman with a boy who tormented his mother about being hungry, and, to calm him down, she gave him a sandwich at the very door to the shower room.

The shower was a genius invention. It allowed you to be robbed of everything – literally. Even one’s hair. Especially women. Their hair made strong ropes.

In the anteroom, everyone was politely asked to memorize where they left their clothes and shoes so that it would be easier to find them after showering. The primary task of the miscreants was to avoid panic at all costs.

So, the Jews went to the shower room quietly, without breaking out. And if someone in the queue had a bad feeling and disturbed the crowd, they were immediately snatched out of the line, taken not far away, behind the nearest wall, and, pacify them forever, shot in the back of the head with a small-caliber rifle, a method the SS had learned in the NKVD schools. A small-caliber one, so as not to make a big noise. Just a pop, like opening a champagne bottle. Nothing more than that.

           Alas, there is no one to tell you what the first thought of those who entered the shower room was. It is too big for a normal shower room. But those who designed it knew that for those who had already entered it and had the door shut behind them, it was too late to question the purpose of the room. The maximum capacity has been calculated. The hall is almost three hundred feet long. Apparently, to ensure that the arrivals do not have to wait too long to clean up… And there were no shower heads in the ceiling. There were strange, square little windows that looked up into the sky. And it was not water splashed through them, but some white crystals sprinkled…

When I returned from Auschwitz to Krakow, I could not recover from what I had seen for some time. I did not want to go back to my hotel in Warsaw, to be alone with my thoughts and feelings. I wandered around the city center, its Main Market Square, and, like many tourists, stopped at one of the major attractions of Krakow–Saint Mary’s Basilica (in Polish, Kościół Mariacki), a brick Gothic church. The facade of the cathedral consists of two towers. The higher one was an observation tower in the Middle Ages. From it, in case of fire or enemy attack, a trumpet signal was sounded. In the crowd of tourists, they glanced at the watches. Every hour the so-called “Heynal” [“Wake-up,” in Hungarian], a traditional (since the fourteenth century!) bugle call was sounded from the tower, and the radio broadcast it all over Poland.

“Mariacki Heynal” is a simple melody of five basic notes in the key of F major, majestic yet easy to remember. “The Heynal is inextricably linked to Polish history, which is why the sounds of the trumpet blowing over Kraków’s famous square strike a sentimental chord in the hearts of many Poles.

People gather here not so much for a simple musical roulade as to watch the trumpeter who appears in one window of the tower. The trumpeter himself is of little interest, but what feeds our imagination and is connected to the history we are partial to is much more appealing. According to a medieval legend, in the thirteenth century, during the Tatar-Mongol invasion, a guard, noticing the approach of enemy cavalry, sounded the alarm when an arrow pierced his throat. The citizens of Krakow heard the signal in time and, according to a tourist brochure, could rally in time to repel the attackers.

Simple logic suggests that this legend, to put it mildly, does not hold water. The arrow that pierced the throat was hardly launched from a great distance, i.e., the attackers were already in the center of the city. In commemoration of the guard’s heroic death, the trumpet roulade ends on a sad note.

I, who had just returned from Auschwitz, wanted to think that the arrow that pierced the throat was a Holocaust arrow. It was not the bugle but the shofar, the Jewish ritual ram’s horn, which produced the sad roulade. That it called to the memory of not one, but three million fellow citizens who had lived side by side with Poles for a millennium.

Then, standing at the ruins of the Auschwitz shower house, I realized for the first time that those who had survived that hell on earth, whom no European government had been willing to shelter, had fled to the ancient land of Israel, determined to live not in a foreign land, but to make it their home, once and for all. No more year after year – for so many centuries now! – only to conclude their prayers with the lamentation, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

        Today, as in the Middle Ages, the alarming sound of the shofar again announces, “The enemy is at the gates of Europe!”

__________

Professor Emeritus of Russian at Hunter College in NYC, Emil Draitser has published seventeen books of artistic and scholarly prose. His work has also appeared in the Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, Prizm International, and elsewhere.Laureate of the Mark Aldanov International Literary Prize, he is three-time recipient of prestigious fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. (For more information, visit www.emildraitser.com)