The Clarinet Polka (40 page)

There was a short time when things seemed, you know, not half bad in Krajne Podlaski under the Russians. They got some education classes up and going—for the ordinary folks—and they were having musical concerts and plays and dances in the People's Square. And remembering all that, Janice's parents were shaking their heads over what a sweet girl Rachela was, a real dreamer, always looking on the bright side of things, and how sad that was—what with the way everything turned out. Rachela kept saying that when the war was over, the Russians would go home, and the progressive Jews and Poles would build a new life in Krajne Podlaski, and everyone would be educated, and the dark age of fear and prejudice and ignorance would vanish forever.

They remembered one of those dances, and that night was like a soap bubble, Janice's mom said, beautiful and fragile. “What do you remember?” Janice asked them. Well, the sky was full of stars and they looked so close you could maybe reach up and take a handful home with you, and the square was lit with paper lanterns, and it was like time had stopped. The best Polish and Jewish musicians were in the orchestra, and music never sounded better, and it'd never sound that sweet again.

Everybody danced with everybody—the Polish kids danced with the Jewish kids, and Czesław danced with Rachela and she danced with Czesław's little brother Jan, and Marysia danced with Heniek and Icchak Kestin, and every few dances, Czesław and Marysia found each other so they could dance together again because they were so in love. It was strange, they said, how you could remember a single night thirty years later and it would seem so sad and beautiful. The kids were standing around at the edge of the dance floor, and Rachela made a big gesture that included everyone there—all the young people in Krajne Podlaski were at that dance that night—and she said, “You see,” and she used a phrase in Yiddish. It means, “We're wound together and knotted.”

Then just a few weeks later most of the Markowskis got deported. They left Marysia's father alone, and he didn't know why—maybe the Russians figured that the one thing they really didn't want to screw up was the distillery—but all the other Markowskis were deported that spring, three whole families of them.

The way you get deported goes like this. The NKVD comes knocking on your door in the wee small hours of the morning just before dawn. And it's not like you're being arrested or charged with anything, and even if you're stupid enough to ask, nobody's going to tell you what you did. Because it doesn't matter what you did, or even if maybe you didn't do it, because if you weren't guilty, your name wouldn't be on the list. Usually they're not real mean about it, but they do want you to hurry up or you'll miss your train, and they can't allow that to happen. Food? Oh, don't worry, that's all taken care of. Clothes? Don't worry about that either. Where are you going? Well, you're going to work on a farm for a while, and everything you need will be supplied in due course.

They give you maybe twenty minutes to pack, and then they truck you to the railroad station and shove you in a freight car. Not a whole hell of a lot of food or water, and if you want to relieve yourself—well, there's a hole cut in the floor for that, or maybe a bucket. And away you go, the trains roaring along as fast as they can get them cranked up. If some old folks or some babies die, well, tough, but the train's got to keep on rolling. Maybe half a million Poles got to take the big train ride.

The Markowskis went to Kazakhstan. Nobody in their right mind would want to go to Kazakhstan. There's not an awful lot to eat there, and nobody lives there but the Kazakhs, and they're not real happy to see a bunch of strange Polaks showing up—you know, more mouths to feed. The train finally stops, and they open the doors, and everybody climbs out of the freight car and stands by the tracks looking at this weird empty land under an endless sky. It looks like it goes on forever, and it's true, it does go on forever. Nobody's going to walk out of Kazakhstan. Hi, comrades, welcome to your new home. You think this is bad, just be glad it's not Siberia.

No message ever came back to Krajne Podlaski from Kazakhstan. If you asked the Russians, they said, “They all arrived safely. They're working on a collective farm. They're well and happy and send their regards.” Marysia knew better than to believe that. She felt bad for all the Markowskis but especially for Krystyna, who was her favorite cousin. Krystyna had always been pampered and spoiled, and getting deported to Kazakhstan was probably hell on earth for her, and for days afterward Marysia cried whenever she thought of poor Krystyna.

But meanwhile, life in Krajne Podlaski kept rolling right along in its own crazy way. On the surface everything seemed just dandy. Czesław was teaching some peasants the basic principles of bookkeeping. He hadn't known a damn thing about bookkeeping before, but when Comrade So-and-so asks you to teach something, you're sure not going to tell him that you're not checked out on it. And Czesław was still doing his black-market number with the Kestin boys and doing his secret stuff with the Polish resistance. But he was thinking real hard about Siberia. If they deport you to Siberia, they give you some good honest work to do—like digging tunnels through mountains with your fingertips in a place that's slightly colder than the planet Pluto while you get to see how long you can live on a little watery soup—and Czesław knew if the NKVD picked him up, Siberia was where he was headed.

He and Marysia vowed that they would love each other forever—in this life and on into the next one. “Only God knows what's going to happen,” Czesław told her, “but whatever happens, if we get separated, I swear on everything sacred—if I'm alive, I'll find you.”

Then Hitler turned on his great friend Stalin—one devil betraying another the way devils always do—and invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army retreated. By the time they got done, they'd retreated all the way to Moscow. The first anyone in Krajne Podlaski knew about it was when they heard artillery firing in the night. And so the Germans came back to Krajne Podlaski.

*   *   *

Well, Janice's parents didn't much enjoy telling their kids what the Germans did, and Janice didn't much enjoy telling it to me, and I'm not going to much enjoy telling it to you. Pretty soon after they started talking about the Germans coming back, Janice didn't want to hear all the little details of life anymore and she stopped asking. She kept getting this awful nauseous feeling, and she'd think, I've got to get out of here, I can't listen to any more of this. But she stayed and listened because she had to—because she'd always wanted to know, and because she thought it was her duty to know.

The German occupation, Czesław said, was like being ruled by the Antichrist—you were rewarded for doing evil and punished for doing good. The Russians left you a little room to maneuver—until you ran out of room—but the Germans didn't leave you anything at all.

The Germans put up a loudspeaker in the town square, and they drove around town with loudspeakers mounted on trucks, and they announced in both German and Polish that Poles caught assisting the Jews in any way would be killed along with their entire families. It was something I hadn't known—and Janice hadn't known it either—but Poland was the only country where the Germans were that harsh. The Nazi occupation of Poland made what they did in places like France or Denmark look like a Sunday school picnic.

Well, Rachela's dad had a pretty good idea what was coming down, so the whole Kestin family slipped away at the last possible minute and hid out with some nice peasants outside of town. They were staying in a barn, and the Kestin boys figured that their parents would have a better chance if there weren't quite so many of them crammed in there, so what they ought to do was take off into the woods and try to make contact with the Home Army, or anyhow with some partisan group—you know, some friendly dudes with guns. They begged Rachela to come with them, but she wouldn't leave their parents.

Meanwhile, Czesław and his brother Jan had run off just as soon as the coast was clear. It was one of those times, Czesław said, when if you hesitated even half a second, you'd be dead. They hid out with some peasants for a while, and then, when they were sure the Red Army was long gone, they escaped into the forest where he and Heniek Kestin had stashed their supplies. And guess what? They ran right smack into the Kestin boys, who were doing the same thing, and they teamed up together and went off looking for the Home Army, and eventually they found it. So the story of what happened in Krajne Podlaski after that, Janice and her brothers heard from their mother.

Several hundred Jews fled, but most of them stayed where they were because they didn't know what else to do. The Germans made a ghetto in part of the Jewish quarter and forced all the Jews into it, put up a fence around it and patrolled it with dogs, and no one was allowed in or out. Then they rounded up anyone who'd ever served in any official way under the Russians—Jews and Poles—and shot them.

There were a few Poles—those slime called
szmalcowniki
—who collaborated with the Germans, and the Polish resistance executed them whenever they got a chance. “We got a lot of them by the end,” Czesław said, “but some of them slipped through our fingers and are probably still alive to this very day.” And in a few places the local Poles turned against the Jews and got into killing and looting and all that. And then there were even a few Jews who helped Germans catch other Jews, if you can believe that—the Germans told them they'd protect them and their families, but like Czesław said, the devil always lies.

The Germans were royally pissed off at all the Jews who'd got away, and the Germans were, you know, real efficient. They went through public records to account for everybody, so they pretty much knew the exact number of Jews that were missing, and they began to search for them.

When the Gestapo found out that Dr. Dłuwiecki had two sons who'd run away, they figured that the boys had probably joined the Polish partisans—which was true—so they tortured Czesław's father for a few days to find out what he knew. They kept him in a cell filled with water up to his waist so if he fell asleep, he'd drown. Every night they'd take him out and beat the crap out of him, and then they'd throw him back in there. Well, eventually he must have told them something—everybody always told them
something
—but Czesław figured that it probably had just a few true things here and there to make it sound good, and most of it must have been lies, because the Germans never found any of the partisans. Then the Germans hanged Dr. Dłuwiecki in front of his own clinic, and nobody was allowed to take his body down for twenty-four hours because they wanted to make an example of him.

Well, Rachela and her parents were doing okay living in that peasant family's barn, but some bastard ratted on them. When they heard the Germans coming, Rachela's father whispered to her, “Run,” and she ran. She got into the forest and hid there. She kept trying to find her brothers, but she wasn't checked out on the forest, and it just scared her. The Germans took her parents to the compound where they were keeping the Jews they'd caught. The peasant family that had been hiding them got shot—every single one of them right down to the little kids.

It's the middle of the night, and Marysia hears a tap on her window. Her heart jumps right into her mouth. She raises the drapes like an inch and peeks out and it's Rachela.

Rachela was like a sleepwalker. She didn't cry. She didn't show any emotion at all. She was, their mom said, in some kind of deep shock. “I didn't know where else to go,” she said. “I can go back into the forest if you want.”

Marysia said, “We're wound together and knotted. Shut up and get in here.”

Marysia woke her father, and he thought about what to do. Well, his political position was that Poland would be better off if the Jews lived somewhere else, but all of a sudden here was this Jewish girl in his house. Just by being there, she was putting the life of his whole family in danger. “But my father was a Christian and a Pole,” Marysia said, “and he knew what he had to do.”

“You are Krystyna Markowska,” he told Rachela. “You escaped from the Russian transport at the last minute, and we've been hiding you ever since.”

When the Germans thought they'd caught all the Jews they were going to catch—about three hundred of them—they marched them off into the woods. They'd brought in some Ukrainians, and some Poles from a slave labor camp, and they made them dig a deep wide pit. Several of these Polish men survived the war, so there were witnesses.

The whole area was surrounded by the SS, but the Germans that did the dirty work were from one of those special units they brought in. The Jews had to take all their clothes off, and then the Poles had to separate the clothes into different piles—you know, shoes here and coats there and like that. They had to be real careful to get all the rings and jewelry.

The Jews were marched up in a single line—naked, you know—and they had to kneel down along the edge of the pit, and the special-unit guys shot them in the back of the head at point-blank range. Blood and brains were getting splattered everywhere, and the special-unit guys weren't having a real good time. One of them had to walk away for a few minutes, but he threw up and pulled himself together and came back and got on with his work.

Some Poles had to come along behind the Germans and push the bodies into the pit. There were other Poles in the pit who had to look in the dead Jews' mouths for gold teeth and pull them out with pliers, and then they had to arrange the bodies real neat so they could cram in as many as possible.

Some of the Jews were screaming and crying. A few of them tried to run—just, you know, in a blind panic—and the SS shot them down. Some of them were crawling at the feet of the Germans and begging for their lives. Others just stood there and waited for their turn. One of the women was begging for the life of her baby, and a German soldier ripped the baby out of her arms, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it.