The Woman from Hamburg (17 page)

Dawid, the Lelów
tzaddik
, taught that “whosoever, whether man or nation, has not achieved awareness of his own errors, will not achieve salvation. We can be saved to the extent that we are aware of our own selves.”

He had a son who also became a rabbi in Lelów. That Lelów rabbi had a son and a grandson, the rabbis of Szczekociny. The Szczekociny rabbi had a daughter named Rywka, a granddaughter named Chana, whom they called Andzia, and a great-granddaughter named Lina.

One hot July day in 1942, Chana, known as Andzia, the
tzaddik
’s granddaughter in the sixth generation, and her daughter, seven-year-old Lina, were riding through the
streets of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Umschlagplatz. A few minutes earlier they had been led out of their home on Twarda Street and loaded onto a one-horse rack wagon. Two Jewish policemen were seated in it; one urged the horse on and the other watched over the people. They were old people who asked for nothing, did not pray, and did not try to run away.

The wagon turned onto Ciepła Street. The policemen were conversing in hushed tones, consulting each other. They could do one of two things: surround the next house and drive everyone out, or close off the street and conduct a lightning-fast roundup. The one who was whipping the horse was in favor of surrounding the house; the one who was in charge of the people urged him to agree to a roundup.

A man who was sitting in the wagon disrupted their consultation.

“Let them go,” he said. He was thinking of Lina and her mother, Andzia.

The policemen didn’t want to respond to absurd requests, but several women joined the old man.

“Let them go, they’re young; let them live a little longer.”

“Don’t you know that I have a quota?” said the policeman who was driving the horse. “I have to deliver ten Jews to the square. The two of us together have to deliver twenty Jews. Are you going to give us someone instead of them? If you do, we’ll free them.”

The old folks stopped asking; the policeman’s demand was as inappropriate as their request.

The wagon rolled along very slowly. People say of a horse that moves one leg after the other that it is moving at a walk, but in the ghetto such words are not used. In the meantime, the horse moved one leg after another, although it could have hurried, because there were few pedestrians on the streets.

“Everything,” Andzia and Lina recalled, “was happening in silence and without haste.”

“Well?” The policeman addressed them directly. “Who is going to go to the Umschlagplatz in your place? Do you have someone?”

They were approaching the spot where Ciepła Street intersected Grzybowska Street at an angle.

They drove along for a few more meters and spotted a woman. She was walking along Grzybowska. She had no intention of running away. On the contrary. She was approaching their wagon at a calm, deliberate pace. They met up with her alongside No. 36. Lina remembered this because her preschool teacher, Pani Eda, lived at No. 36.

The woman leaned her arm on the wooden shaft and said, not quite asking a question or affirming an obvious fact, “You don’t want to go to the Umschlagplatz, ma’am, right?”

She was speaking to Andzia.

Andzia, taken aback, was silent.

“She doesn’t want to go,” someone called out, and then the woman addressed Andzia again.

“Please get down; I’ll go instead of you.”

Andzia and Lina still sat there, even though people were beginning to yell at them.

“What are you waiting for? Get down!”

“Get down,” the policeman seated on the coachman’s box echoed what the people were saying, and only then did Andzia lower her daughter to the roadway and jump down herself.

The woman clambered onto the wagon.

Both policemen were silent.

“Please give her something,” someone called out to Andzia, probably the same man who was the first to ask the policeman to let her go.

Andzia quickly took off her ring and gave it to the woman.

The woman slipped the ring onto her finger. She didn’t look at Andzia any more. She looked straight ahead.

Andzia and Lina returned home. Grandma Rywka was sitting there erect, stiff, holding her clasped hands on her knees. They told her about the woman. Grandma Rywka opened her hand. They saw a small vial with gray powder. “If you hadn’t returned …,” she said. They were astounded. Grandma Rywka, the fifth-generation granddaughter of the Lelów
tzaddik
, was a pious woman. She wore a wig. When her wig was taken to the hairdresser’s on Friday morning to be combed for the Sabbath, she
would put on a kerchief so that no one should see her shaved head, and now she was clutching a vial of poison kept ready for a sinful, suicidal death. She was taken to the Umschlagplatz a few days later, with her grandsons and her daughter-in-law. Andzia and her daughter made it to the Aryan side and survived the war.

“What did that woman look like?” Lina’s mother was asked whenever she told the story of the rack wagon, and she told it throughout her life.

“She was tall. She was wearing a suit. A nice, well-tailored suit made of dark-gray flannel. She had on boots, so-called officer shoes, that were popular in Warsaw during the war. I don’t remember her hairdo; I think it was combed in a roll. Women used to wind their hair at the time on long wires that were turned either down or up on both sides of the face. In a word, she was an elegant woman,” Lina’s mother would emphasize invariably.

“Even those boots looked as if she had put them on not out of necessity, but only to look elegant.”

“Maybe she knew she was going to die and so she got dressed for death?” one of the women listening to the story suggested. “People put a lot of weight on their final costume.”

“She didn’t look like a madwoman?” people would ask.

“No. She behaved calmly.”

“Maybe she had lost someone and nothing mattered to her?”

“She didn’t look as if she was in despair.”

“The mess kit …,” Lina would prompt.

“Right. She was holding an empty mess kit.”

“How do you know it was empty?”

“Because she was dangling it without any effort.”

“That could have been Miriam,” I said when Lina and her husband, Władek, told me about the woman. They didn’t understand.

“Miriam. The one whom the Christians later referred to as Mary.”

This possibility hadn’t occurred to them yet; rather, they had assumed it was the
tzaddiks
who had intervened.

Władek was reminded of a wartime joke, a witticism that was repeated in the ghetto. When the Germans drove people out of the church for Jewish converts one man remained in the church—the last Jew, the one on the cross. He descended from the cross and beckoned to his Mother, “
Mame, kim
 …” which in Yiddish means, “Mama, come …” And so she went to the Umschlagplatz. But wearing a suit? Not likely, because she appeared in her robe from the church images and with a halo. With an empty mess kit? There was food in it before, but she asked someone, “Is it true that you are hungry?” She fed them and went to Ciepła Street and the rack wagon.

My work as a reporter has taught me that logical stories, without riddles and holes in them, in which everything is obvious, tend to be untrue. And things that cannot be explained in any fashion really do happen. In the end, life on earth is also true, but it cannot be logically explained.

Dawid of Lelów’s remains were buried one hundred eighty years ago in the local cemetery. The cemetery is gone, but recently the
tzaddik
’s grave was restored. Chaim Środa, the son of Josef the glazier, pointed out the spot. Dawid was resting in the community co-operative’s store, in the hardware section. (After the war a warehouse and two stores—a grocery and an agricultural implements store—were built on the Jewish cemetery.) A rabbi from Jerusalem asked the director of the store to move the hardware, and Hasidim who were followers of Dawid started digging. After a couple of hours they uncovered the foundation. They found a skull, the tibias, and individual bones of the
tzaddik
’s hands. They laid down their shovels, lit candles, and said Kaddish. The rabbi arranged the remains and covered them with dirt. A couple of months later a tomb was constructed and a wall was erected to separate it from the rest of the store. On the anniversary of the
tzaddik
’s death
his pupils came from around the world and left letters with requests as they used to do in former times.

Chaim Środa was born in Lelów, near the Białka River. He went to work with his father. On his back he carried frames holding panes of glass secured with belts of woven linen; in one hand, he held a can of putty, and in the other hand, a sack filled with tools. They glazed windows in Sokolniki, Nakło, and Turzyn. Every day they walked up to fifteen kilometers; they charged one zloty for each window they installed.

The Lelów Jews sold their goods at markets. In Pilica on Tuesdays, in Szczekociny on Wednesdays, in Żarki on Thursdays, but on Fridays they went only to nearby villages in order to make it back home in time for the Sabbath. On Friday mornings they carried essential items in the baskets: hair ribbons; sugar in paper sacks, each packet weighing ten dekagrams because there weren’t any peasants who could afford a whole kilogram; dye for linens; and starch, also in sacks, but weighing less than the sugar. They would come back at dusk. In their baskets they now had eggs, white cheese, and bottles of milk. They washed up, changed clothes, and went to the synagogue. After the prayers they ate challah and fish. Of the eight hundred Lelów Jews, eight survived the war; one of them lives in Poland—Chaim Środa. His father, Josef the glazier, was shot in Częstochowa. His mother, Małka, née Potasz, his three brothers, Hirsz, Dawid, and Aron, and his three sisters, Ałta, Sara, and Jochwed, were sent to Treblinka.
Chaim escaped from the camp. He hid in sixteen different houses, houses in which he had installed windows before the war.

Over the grave of Dawid of Lelów, the great-great-great-grandfather of Andzia, the same conversation takes place every year.

“Our
tzaddik
taught: you will not achieve salvation if you do not recognize yourself and your errors,” says the rabbi from Jerusalem, the leader of the Lelów Hasidim. “But remember, it is never too late to turn to God, blessed be His name.”

“Here, there was no salvation, rabbi. Here, there was no room for any God,” invariably retorts the son of Josef, the Lelów glazier—Chaim Środa.

We don’t know each other.

I saw you once, a long time ago, from a great distance. You were seated at the piano, in the Philharmonic, your right profile turned toward me.

The people I used to write about I knew personally; I knew how they laughed, perspired, drummed their fingers, whom they emulated, and with whom they shared a drink. You, I have looked at in photographs. Once again you were seated at the piano, invariably displaying your right profile.

Małgorzata B. found a photograph
en face
in the archives. It had been glued onto a card with these words inscribed on it: Department of Protective Services for Orphaned Children. A Mrs. Slosberg from the city of Kimberley in South Africa sent you, an orphaned child, parcels and money. In the first quarter, three thousand zlotys, in the second another three, in the third four and a half thousand.
Not bad. An acquaintance of mine used to get that much for managing the literature department at the Czytelnik publishing house.

You were eleven years old at the time.

You had a part on the right side and big, serious eyes. A white collar was placed on your blue-black shirt, dark as soot, and a patterned handkerchief, batiste, it appears, had been tucked into your pocket.

I know those postwar photos and postwar serious eyes. An acquaintance of mine who is also a writer says that eyes like that are not the privilege of Jewish boys. Little Greek boys have almost identical eyes. A man asks them about something in a language they have never heard. They look at the man with knowing eyes and lead him, unerringly, to a shop where they can put cars on a lift to work on them.

A stupid comparison. Little Jewish boys with serious eyes indicate how to reach God, not a service station.

It is time to explain why I am writing.

Because of the case of Halina S. The woman with whom you want to have a son named Gaspard.

She sent me a letter:

“Andrzej appeared to me in a dream. He said, ‘Die already, die; I am bored here without you.’ I interpreted the word ‘here’ as interplanetary space. I imagined that the Spirit of Andrzej is circling there like an astronaut for whom there is no return to earth.

“He appeared in my dreams for the last time before my heart attack. The doctor came every day and asked me,
‘Why are you getting weaker by the day?’ I scrawled my will on a sheet of graph paper. I left Andrzej’s letters and papers to you, Hania.

“I felt I was doing exactly what he wanted. Because although he didn’t know you, you were close to him, closer perhaps than I. He read your
Shielding the Flame
.
¹
That was important; it was precisely because of that book that he didn’t destroy his notes.