Death in Twilight (7 page)

The German didn’t move past.

“What did you say?”

Aaron had spoken in Polish without thought.

“I’m very sorry, mein herr,” Aaron said in bad German.

“I’m sure you are,” the Gestapo man growled. “Look at me.”

Aaron looked. He saw eyes the pale blue of an Arctic dawn. Behind them was nothing.

“What’s your name, and where do you live?”

Aaron began to pull his official papers out of his pocket.

“I have no time for that, or for you! Just give me your name.”

Aaron considered giving a false name, but if the Gestapo officer changed his mind, Aaron’s papers would betray him.

“Kaminski,” he said. “Aaron Kaminski.”

“Kaminski. Good.”

The Gestapo man turned to the clerk behind him. “Make a note.”

Then he was gone.

He left behind mere anarchy.

There was nothing for it. Aaron burrowed through a mass of people who were running in no obvious direction. It was as if they hoped that motion would save their lives.

The hospital director was at the center of the chaos. He was trying to give orders to a staff that was looking for direction. Instead, everything was confusion. The man tried to shout but his voice couldn’t cut through the competition.

A woman who also wore a stethoscope began to shout for him. Her voice would have cut through the hull of a tank far more effectively than the Polish artillery had the year before. She began to bring order to the crowd.

“Zeitel, take charge of the people on the third floor … Maurice, the second floor … ” She turned to one of the nurses. “Do what you can to help the patients from the medical wing. Use crutches, wheelchairs, roll them out on beds … Whatever you can think of.”

The nurse apparently demurred because the next thing Aaron heard was, “Do you think they’ll be better off staying here? Didn’t you hear the Gestapo man? What do you think he means by a ‘visit?’”

The hospital personnel began moving off in the required directions. The female doctor was speaking more softly to people nearer by, trying to organize the evacuation of the main floor. Aaron walked briskly into the circle surrounding her, using his elbows to make progress.

“Lekarska, doctor … ” was all he had time to say.

“What the fuck do you want?” she said, barely glancing at him.

“I’m looking for a policeman who was hurt and was taken here. His name is Martin Gersh.” Aaron kept his gaze level and his tone was calm.

“So look for him. But I suggest you make it quick. There’ll be no one here in an hour, one way or another.”

She turned away.

Aaron tried again.

“Where are emergency cases treated?”

“What other kind of cases do you think we have here? Go!”

The doctor gathered some of her people and was gone.

All that left for Aaron was a dash down fetid hallways throwing open doors. After only a few meters he realized his task was impossible. A deluge of people was beginning to flow against him. Some hobbled, swathed in blood-soaked bandages. Others were being wheeled out by attendants. Some were so emaciated Aaron had a hard time believing he wasn’t seeing the animated dead. Many of those patients were doubled over with dysentery, wearing shit-stained robes or blankets.

“Martin Gersh!” Aaron shouted into the din. He wouldn’t give up. “Martin Gersh!”

All that got him was a few stares. Many of those who passed and pushed him were beyond answering, anyway.

A few in the crowd were surprisingly well dressed. A woman in what must have been her own wheelchair — it was made of burnished wood — had a fur draped over her. The man attending her may have been her own, as well. He brutally blazed a path for her. But Aaron saw that she hadn’t been able to buy what she needed most from the hospital — her health. She was as pale and thin as any of the others.

“Martin Gersh!”

Men, women, a few children. Thank God not many, Aaron thought. There was a separate facility for them. He hoped it was nothing like this.

As he found himself herded further into the main hall where the staircases converged, Aaron began to see the hospital’s other type of patient. Telltale signs of retardation on faces, limbs that had never grown right, uncomprehending moans. Shaking and rocking; incomprehensible shouting and screaming. It was an immovable wall of madness being struck by an unstoppable force of desperate suffering.

“Martin Gersh!”

There was no answer but the noise of the crowd.

Aaron found himself battered by an endless stream of shoulders crashing into his own — left, right, left, right, sometimes both at once — pushing him closer to the door.

“Martin Gersh?”

“Here!” called a voice.

At first Aaron was unable to spot its owner in the crowd, but after a minute, the speaker became resolved into a bearded man in his forties wearing nearly rimless spectacles. He was neat and smooth. He was reasonably well fed. Aaron was surprised that he hadn’t noticed the man on that basis alone.

And there was another factor — Aaron knew him, though not by the name Martin Gersh.

Under the name Tamislaw Jaruzelski, he was a Pole in the import-export business. The importing was made up of trafficking potatoes and other necessities and frills though the walls of the ghetto, working from the Polish side. The exporting came in the form of the people who were occasionally smuggled out either in the hope of escape or just for an afternoon’s work. Those who worked hoped to bring home enough zloty to add an extra bit of bread to a meal of thin soup.

The two men eyed each other for a second before Aaron forced himself into a quick decision.

“Martin!” he called out, as if greeting a long-lost friend. Then more quietly, “We need to talk.”

“I guess we do,” the other man replied heavily.

Aaron took him by the arm and began pulling him against the crowd, knowing that they would have no trouble finding an empty room as everyone else tried to flee. Aaron quickly realized that as he dragged “Gersh,” the man himself was dragging a leg twisted and covered in bandages soaked through with blood. “Gersh” was leaning on what could only be called a crutch in charity. It looked more like a bent piece of plumbing.

Now was not the time for mercy, though, and frankly, Aaron didn’t care much about the other man’s pain. He pushed on, through the crowd, which began to thin after only a few steps. In a minute it was possible to see the institutionally dirty white walls again, and finally an office. The two men stumbled inside and Aaron closed the door behind them. The office had a window and a draft came through it. The fog of their breath began to fill the room.

The man with at least two names propped himself on the desk, trying to find some comfort for his leg, or at least prevent further damage by taking his weight off it. The bluff confidence he had always projected as Jaruzelski was replaced by a twitchiness that was near panic. There was still something central to the man that Aaron had been able to spot in the crowd, but now, “Gersh” looked like a Gersh, not a Jaruzelski. He was Semitic in a way that his alter ego hadn’t been on the other side of the wall. It was a striking transformation.

“You’re Berson’s partner?” Aaron asked.

“I wouldn’t say partner, but we did work together,” the man replied.

“As Gersh or Jaruzelski?”

“It doesn’t have to be one or the other, you know.”

“What should I call you today?”

“Well, Gersh would make more sense here, I think,” Gersh said.

“All right. Let’s try it,” Aaron said, reaching for his second cigarette of the day. He offered one to Gersh who looked down at the package, trying to catch a glimpse of the label.

“What are these? They’re not the ones I sold you,” Gersh said, taking one with a hint of suspicion. “Those were Pall Mall, weren’t they?”

“I’m glad to say you’re not my only supplier. Otherwise I think I’d be in a little trouble now, what with you nursing that leg,” Aaron said. “And on the wrong side of the wall, too.”

“Was that why you were looking for me? For a little business?” Gersh asked. “But of course not, you weren’t even looking for me. Or at least you weren’t expecting to find me when you found Gersh.

“So what is it you do want? I think we may be a little pressed for time here.”

Aaron acknowledged the point with a nod.

“Lev Berson is dead,” he said.

Gersh did not look shocked at the news. In fact, other than a tightening of his perpetual squint, it was hard to see much of a change at all.

“All right,” was all he said.

“I’m looking for whoever killed him, and I’ve been told that you were supposed to be with him last night,” Aaron continued.

“Who told you that?”

“Your commander, Blaustein,” Aaron said with a certain amount of irony. “Who does he think you are, by the way?”

Gersh ignored the question, instead asking one of his own.

“Why are you here, asking about Berson? I wouldn’t have thought a dead Jewish police officer would be high on your priority list,” Gersh said. “Don’t you have anything else to do? Or is business just that bad?”

“We can talk about my motives some other time.”

The noise in the hall was starting to fade. The evacuation was nearing completion.

“Not much time left, so smoke up and just tell me what you can about last night.”

Gersh squinted and took a deep drag on the thick, black smoke, and in a gesture as Gallic as his counterfeit cigarette was supposed to be, he gave a shrug of surrender.

“Last night we were supposed to be patrolling over by Morawica Street. There’s a new hole that’s been dug through the wall. A hundred kilos of potatoes were scheduled to be coming through,” Gersh said. “Not a lot, but worth the usual risk.”

They heard shouts in the hallway. Orders in German as well as Polish.

“Especially if you’re employed on both sides of the deal,” Aaron pointed out.

“Just so.”

“But Berson wasn’t found on Morawica Street,” Aaron said.

“No reason he should have been. The deal went fine, and it was done by 9 p.m.,” Gersh said. “After that, the boys were off with the goods. Berson and I went our separate ways.

Aaron heard banging on doors and the sounds of a struggle nearby.

Aaron pointed to Gersh’s leg. The bloody bandages had been soaking through as they spoke. Red splotches began to appear on the floor.

“So where did that come from?”

“This? An unhappy customer in another part of town,” Gersh said wryly. “Not your business. Not Berson’s either, for that matter.”

“What else was Berson involved in? I’d never heard of him before today,” Aaron said. That was neither surprising nor unsurprising. Smuggling was a major employer in the Miasto ghetto and it would be impossible to know everyone involved.

“Funnily enough, he was a very religious man,” Gersh said. It was clear from the way he said it that Gersh had very little use for God, himself.

“What does that mean? So are at least 75 percent of the people trapped in here.”

“In his case, it was a bit more than that … ” Gersh said. “He seemed particularly devoted to his congregation, and he’d gotten himself deeper and deeper in debt with me to get supplies for them.”

“You were fronting him the money?”

“Some of it anyway. Which, may I point out, gives me a very good motive for not killing him,” Gersh said.

“Maybe,” Aaron said. “But you’d hardly be the first partners to have a falling out.”

Gersh’s mouth opened but Aaron never got to hear his reply. Something or someone smashed into the office door from the outside.

“Raus! Raus!”

The door shook in its frame.

Aaron quickly turned from Gersh and grabbed the handle, opening the door just as a soldier with lightning bolts on his collar lifted the butt of his rifle to slam the door again. The Nazi saw no reason to stop his swing. Only the target changed. Aaron gasped and nearly fell to the ground as the breath rushed out of him. Thanks to his thick coat and the half dozen other layers he was wearing, the blow was cushioned substantially.

“Raus! Schnell!” the German shouted again.
Out! Move it!

There was no more time for questions. Gersh immediately started hobbling out the door. Aaron gathered himself and followed, quickly overtaking the wounded man.

They joined a thin trickle of others exiting the front door out onto Breslaw Street. A German officer glanced at each person as they exited the building and motioned them toward one of two piles of Jews. Aaron was sent to the right. When Gersh limped out the door, his foot pointing at an unnatural angle, he was sent left.

It soon became obvious to people in both groups how they had been divided.

On the left were the injured, sick, deranged or mentally incompetent. Some lay on the ground in stretchers, having been borne out by orderlies. Others were holding their wounds, were obviously feverish or, more commonly, had their own shit covering their gowns because of dysentery. No one was dressed for the cold, though a few had managed to grab the soiled blankets off their beds.

The other group — a much smaller gathering — was somewhat better off, though they hadn’t been given much time to grab warm clothes, either. All of the people in Aaron’s group were relatively healthy, if emaciated, with no outward signs of mental defect or insanity. No obvious wounds or disease. Mainly they seemed to be doctors and visitors rather than patients or inmates.