Authors: Jason Fields
The woman’s defiance was brittle and shattered as Aaron gave a final little push.
“I don’t know him very well,” she said meekly. Then with more strength, “Who are you? Why do you want to know about Lev?”
It was a good question. Aaron had thought about what he would say when people asked. Announcing that he was working for the Judenrat was not the way to gain people’s trust. And telling them that he was investigating Berson’s death was hardly the best way to keep it a secret.
In the end, he said, “I arrived from Serca about a week ago, and Lev Berson is the only name I know in the city. I figured that since he works for the Judenrat, he might be able to help me get set up here.”
Serca was a village not far from Miasto that had once had a thriving Jewish community. Aaron had met several men from there who had been forced into the Miasto ghetto at literal gunpoint. The village also wasn’t far from where Berson had grown up.
“Well, I don’t know how much help he can be. He hasn’t done very well for himself.”
The woman moved back from the door and picked up the toddler who had never stopped clawing at her worn and modest dress.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you have eyes. You have a nose. He lives here.”
She punctuated her words with a roll of her eyes and a dismissive sniff.
Aaron sniffed, too, in sympathy, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The miasma was composed of all the stinks of the ghetto brought together in a single lungful. There was the rot of old food, the rot of unwashed bodies living on top of each other, the rot of illness and the loose shit that comes with it.
The woman saw his expression and her answering look shouted, “I told you so,” with a wicked gleam.
“I get your point, but I’d still like to talk to him,” Aaron said. “I haven’t been able to find him and they’re so disorganized at the Judenrat that the only thing they could give me was this address.”
“Well, I certainly don’t know where he is, or what he does with his time,” the woman said.
The toddler was now nibbling on some hair he’d been able to work free of his mother’s tight bun.
“Does he have roommates?” Aaron asked as he tried to maneuver himself around the woman.
“Who’s so rich that they don’t have roommates? My baby and I live with two other families. It used to be my apartment. And it was small then,” the woman said bitterly. “Lev’s apartment is on the fifth floor. Do what you want.”
Her voice was flat. She had no more time for Aaron.
“One more question: Does he get along with the people here?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“Anybody have a problem with what he does for a living, let’s say?”
“People do what they have to. Who can judge anyone else these days?”
She turned away from Aaron, and with her child at her hip, sorted through a pile of cloth lying nearby, looking, it seemed, for something to use as a diaper.
His way cleared, Aaron moved further into the building. From behind one door he heard the sound of prayers. From behind another, the sound of a husband and wife arguing about whatever married people argue about. Loudly.
Children were using the stairwell to play with marbles. Men perched above them and watched, some making wagers. They called down hints and suggestions that sometimes sounded like orders. No one moved aside as Aaron worked his way up the staircase.
Wash lines were strung from the bannisters and the array of clothing and rags that hung from them was colorful if pitiful. Circumstances left no room for modesty concerning ladies’ undergarments.
On the third floor landing a kind of tent was set up, made from ropes and blankets. The blankets billowed gently and small sounds of hushed lovemaking filled Aaron’s ears, turning his cheeks crimson. He quieted his steps and continued upward.
There were more tents set up in the fifth-floor hallway by people looking for the pretense of privacy. Aaron decided to start his inquiry with the floor’s original apartments, complete with solid walls and doors.
He started on the right side of the hall. A knock on the first door brought him nothing but a groan. Aaron then pounded more loudly, but with the same result. He decided to move on. He could always come back if he had to, he figured.
The next door opened at the first tap, and a young, somewhat elegant young man peered out.
“I’m looking for Lev Berson,” Aaron said by way of introduction.
“Well, he lives here, but he’s not here at the moment,” the young man said. “May I ask who you are?”
Aaron saw no reason not to be friendly. He put his hand out.
“Aaron Kaminski. Damn. I could really use his help.”
“How so?” the man asked. “I’m Manny Cohen, by the way.”
“Do you mind if I come in?”
Cohen started a sweeping gesture of welcome, but stopped half way through, obviously thinking twice about his impulse toward hospitality. In the end though, politeness won out.
“Please do, though I have nothing to offer you, I’m afraid.”
“Well, a place to sit will be much appreciated,” Aaron said, as Cohen moved aside to let him into the room.
And that’s all it was, a single room, a squarish box really, with one window and a radiator that looked as if it would clank brutally if there were any steam coming up through the pipes.
Little fear of that
, Aaron thought to himself.
There were no beds, per se. Seven cots took up what space there was. Some were neatly made, others had bedclothes tussled together with other personal objects all in a stew. There were no closets, no armoire, no dresser or shelves. Apart from the radiator, the room would have made a perfect closet. The only amenity that Aaron could see was an electric hotplate resting on top of the radiator. A slice of bread sat on the hotplate, which appeared to be on, surprisingly.
Cohen shrugged apologetically and pointed to one of the neat bunks in an invitation for Aaron to sit.
“I know it doesn’t make much of a chair, but at least I can promise that it’s clean,” he said. “It’s mine.”
Cohen wrinkled his nose as he looked around at the other cots.
Aaron sat.
“I’m happy to get off my feet, actually, so thank you.” Aaron was doing his best to mimic the Cohen’s smooth and educated tone. Clearly, it would not do to appear a savage in front of this young man.
“So, how can I help you?” Cohen asked.
“Well, I was hoping you might be able to give me an idea of where I to find Lev when he’s not at work,” Aaron said truthfully. “The Judenrat and the Jewish Police weren’t any help, really.”
“Oh, I know! When the Germans took my family’s home — it was outside the ghetto, unfortunately — the best the Judenrat said they could do for me was to put me up here, in this rat hole,” Cohen said, his voice bleak. “The Germans wouldn’t let me take anything from the old place. All the furniture, my mother’s jewelry, my father’s paintings … ”
Cohen stopped himself, with an effort.
“I mean, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve certainly seen many people who have it worse.”
“I’m in much the same situation,” Aaron said, nodding. “I was forced here from Serca. Lev’s family knew mine. It’s not easy getting along here, and I figured a friend with hooked into the authorities could only help.”
“You can probably tell that Lev doesn’t have much sway,” Cohen said, looking around. “You’re catching me at a rare moment. There’s almost always someone else here. There are seven men assigned to this tiny little space.”
The smell of burning bread began to fill the room.
“Oh God!”
Cohen rushed to turn off the hotplate, grabbing up the bread and bouncing it from hand to hand to avoid getting scorched. Finally, the toast was cool enough for him to hold. He gave a slight smile.
“Well, not too badly singed,” Cohen said and lifted it to take a bite. Again, his better angels intervened. “Would you like some?” he offered with a certain noblesse oblige.
Aaron returned the smile and said thank you, adding one of the polite lies commonly told in the ghetto, “I’ve already eaten.”
No one had ever eaten enough.
The words were barely out of Aaron’s mouth before the toast was gone. Cohen then turned his attention to his fingers, looking for crumbs.
“How do you all get along, cramped in a place like this?” Aaron asked.
“Well, people have things to do that take them outside,” Cohen said. “I know that a couple of the other men work in the shops. Of course, I’m still looking for work myself.”
“How do people get along with Lev, do you think?”
“He’s not here very much. That makes any roommate more attractive,” Cohen said. “He doesn’t snore, he doesn’t smell — more than the rest of us anyway. Other than with religion, he’s quite private.”
“Religion?”
“He’s always trying to get us to come with him to that synagogue of his.” Cohen looked annoyed.
“Which synagogue is that?”
Cohen looked toward another neat cot.
“Actually, I think he might have some sort of flyers here. He has fits of giving them out.”
“Do you mind if I check?” Aaron asked.
“I probably should, but frankly, there’s so little privacy in here anyway, I’m not sure what difference it could make.”
Under Berson’s cot, Aaron found a small stack of prayer cards and nothing else. The paper the cards were printed on was so thin that a breath of wind would carry them to Moscow.
“I have to tell you, the stack used to be larger,” Cohen said. “But everyone takes a few with them when they go down the hall.”
Aaron quirked his eyebrows.
“You know. To use the facilities? It’s impossible to get tissue paper, you know.”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Aaron said with a smile, making Cohen laugh out loud.
“I’d thought that myself,” he said.
Aaron looked at the sheet he was holding. He had expected some tout or overt plea for money. Instead, what he saw was in Hebrew, not Yiddish or Polish. As he slowly worked his way through the words — it had been years since his bar mitzvah and he wasn’t a religious person — he began to see that it was the Shema, the fundamental words of Jewish faith.
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohainu, Adonai Ehad!
“Hear, O Israel! Adonai is our God! Adonai is One!”
Below the poorly printed words was an address. Nothing else.
“Do you mind if I keep this?” Aaron asked.
Cohen laughed again.
“I think I can say with complete assurance that Lev would very much want you to have it.”
Aaron thanked the young man, said his good-byes and did what he could to prepare for the cold that waited for him outside.
A
aron could see the light fading through the windows of the stairwell, so he picked up his pace. Curfew was coming and he didn’t have much time to get where he was going.
He smelled boiled cabbage as he swept down the stairs to the fourth floor. It reminded him immediately of his mother’s best dish, stuffed cabbage, which he’d enjoyed regularly as a kid. The sauce had been both sour and sweet, and the aroma filled the house for the entire afternoon, as it was prepared.
Most of the ingredients for that homely meal were either absent entirely from Miasto, or were well beyond the means of a middle-class family, such as Aaron’s had been. Aaron was hardly a good enough smuggler to assemble the whole recipe.
The third floor’s stench held no pleasant memories. The pleasure tent that he had noticed on his way up was still and quiet now, its occupants sated or elsewhere. Below that, he passed through the men who gambled and shouted over the marble game on the ground floor, then out to the sidewalk and fresh, cold air.
Snow had begun to fall, but it was a pretty drift of flakes rather than a blizzard. Aaron was glad to see it and hoped that it would get worse, keeping German night patrols gathered by heaters rather than looking for Jews who might have missed curfew.
He was headed for a building that was only a few streets away, but he could now see that he’d misjudged the sun in the overcast. He had very little time. Again he pulled up his collar, buried his face in it and tried to walk quickly, though not conspicuously.
But it’s hard to be in a subtle hurry.
Even as he kept his head down, he heard a voice calling to him from the curb.
“I hope you’re close to home. Otherwise there’s no way you’re going to make it,” a black-haired man in a gray uniform said. “Actually, I don’t hope that. I hope you’ve got a long way ahead of you. Shall we, perhaps, walk together, untermenschen?”
Aaron didn’t understand every word. His German wasn’t very strong, leaving him to translate it into Yiddish in his head. But he gathered that he had not actually been stopped, since he had not heard the word “Halt!”
So, he made a mistake. He kept his eyes down and continued to walk, saying nothing
“Halt!”
There was no choice. Aaron stopped and waited as the German caught up the few steps he’d fallen behind.
“Do you not speak German or are you just stupid?” the scharfuhrer,
troop leader
, asked.
Aaron could understand that.
“I speak only a little German,” he replied. His accent held a world of Yiddish inflection.
“Well, I’m sure you know what curfew means,” the SS man said.
Aaron nodded.
“I’ll put this in small words. When it is dark, I will shoot you. You understand that, right?”
Aaron nodded again.
“Say it out loud. It’s very funny when you people try to talk.”
“Ja.”
“No, no. You forgot to say ‘sir.’ We can’t allow that, can we? Let’s try again.” There was a delighted malice in the man’s eyes and a hint of alcohol on his breath. “Say, ‘I understand that when it is dark, you will shoot me, sir.’”
Aaron was easily insulted. He’d been in many fights because of it. He liked fighting. He suspected that if the urge to fight hadn’t been born into him, his life would have followed a very different path. Perhaps he would have studied the Torah and God’s laws, or been a baker or a bureaucrat. But he hadn’t and he wasn’t.
He was a Jew, however, and had spent enough time in shul to know that life was sacred above all. The scholars agreed that virtually all of God’s laws to could be put aside if a life was at stake. A man can set aside the rules of kashrut if starvation is the other choice. A man must not steal, unless not stealing would mean death.