The Woman from Hamburg (3 page)

Well then, the Dubno merchant traveled to Leipzig in Saxony and, as we know from Kraszewski, Jewish merchants were frequent guests in the Saxon castle of Stolpen. They brought goods, newspapers, books; once, they even attempted to help the countess escape from the tower. She succeeded in descending a rope ladder, but the castle guard caught her before she was able to get away.

This happened, this escape attempt supported by Jews,
in 1728. This is what Józef Ignacy Kraszewski wrote in his novel,
Countess Cosel
.

And in that same year of 1728 the merchant Herszel Izaak came from Dubno to the Leipzig Fair. That is what is written down in the history of the city, in the memorial book,
Sefer Zikaron
, published in Tel Aviv. So, could it have been he, Herszel Izaak, with his inseparable servant Michał Szmuel, who organized the headlong escape down a rope ladder?

It doesn’t really matter if it was a merchant or a rabbi. What is important is that Axel von dem B. must come from Dubno. Since the Great Scriptwriter arranges and intertwines all these mysterious threads, he knows their future endings, too. For Dubno and for Axel von dem B. as well. So He could not have neglected to provide a common prologue for their eventual common history.

Dubno is located in Volhynia, one hundred and ninety meters above sea level, on the Ikwa River, which flows into the Styr. “It looks beautiful from a distance, situated on a hill surrounded by the Ikwa marshes,” an old guidebook says. It was a Polish-Jewish town from the beginning. Poles and Jews had to be equally concerned about the condition of the bridges and roads. Jews could bathe in the city bath house on Thursdays and Fridays, and Christians on
Wednesdays and Saturdays. Jewish shops had to be closed on important Christian holy days, but on less important ones they could be open for the poor and for travelers. In 1716 two women were put on trial in Dubno—a young unmarried woman and a widow accused of having converted to the Jewish faith. The young woman was brought before the court straight from her wedding ceremony, along with her Jewish fiancé, the rabbi, and the clerk who wrote out the marriage contract. After sixty blows, the young woman still professed the Jewish religion; after forty more, she returned to Christianity. Both women were sentenced to be burned to death, and the Jews were sentenced to be flogged and to pay a fine in the form of wax for candles for the monasteries, churches, and castle. In 1794 a synagogue was built in Dubno. The lord of the town, Michał Lubomirski, contributed bricks, lime, sand, and his peasant serfs’ labor for its construction. During the celebration of the laying of the foundation stone he drank vodka and ate honey cakes with the Jews, after which he expressed the formal wish: “May you pray successfully to the God who created heaven and earth, and in whose hands rests every living being.”

Dubno belonged to the Lubomirskis for five generations. Michał, the Lubomirski who helped build the synagogue, was a general and a Mason, and he played the violin. He founded a Masonic lodge in Dubno—the Lodge of the Perfect Mystery of the East. Every year during the annual trade fair he hosted sumptuous balls attended by up to three hundred people a day. Józef, his son, was a card
player and a miser. (“He made not a single repair in Dubno because of his miserliness,” wrote a chronicler.) Marceli, his grandson, also played cards, but he always lost. Abandoning his home, he went abroad with a French actress. He befriended the Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, participants in the Hungarian uprising, and French socialists. His discarded wife warned the Russian tsar about a coup attempt that she learned about in a dream. His out-of-wedlock son became an actor in the Paris Odeon. The last owner of Dubno was Józef Lubomirski. He played cards just as passionately as his father and grandfather. He fell into debt. He married a millionairess who was ten years older than him, the widow of a perfume factory owner whom he met through a marriage bureau. Thanks to his marriage he stopped having a dream that had tormented him for thirty years—a dream in which he could not escape from a hotel room because he had no money to pay his bill. He died without issue in 1911. Before he died, he sold Dubno to a Russian princess.

During the two decades between the world wars, Dubno was the provincial capital of Volhynia. It had a population of twelve thousand, the majority of whom were Jews.

Axel von dem B. was born on Easter Sunday of 1919. His family home stood on the northern slopes of the Hartz
mountains. It had two stories and two wings, and was surrounded by a garden; one hundred meters from the front entrance flowed the Bode River. The locals called it a castle. The family called it a house. They abandoned it in two hours in November 1945, taking only hand luggage. He returned to it for the first time with his daughter and grandsons right before the reunification of Germany. The castle was used as a school of Marxism-Leninism. The director wanted to call the police, because they had driven into the garden through a gate that was actually no longer there. During their second visit, after reunification, the police were not called and they were allowed to go inside.

“Do you still teach Marxism-Leninism?” they asked the director.

“We’ve switched to English-language classes,” the director replied. “But do you know what, Baron? When you’ve gotten everything back, I’ll be glad to lease it from you and convert it into a hotel. What do you say to that?”

His father had managed the estate and studied Far Eastern cultures. He had traveled to Japan and China, and was also interested in the history of civilization. They had had an old gardener, young maids, a faithful valet, a timid governess—all as befits a castle.

Axel von dem B.’s favorite memory was of his governess’s conversations with the old valet. Every morning, punctually at eight o’clock, they met on the stairs; the governess was going up to the children, and the valet was going downstairs to Axel’s father. The valet was not accustomed
to being the first to greet a young lady, so they would pass each other without a word, after which he would stop, turn his head, and say, “Miss Kuntze. Did you say good morning to me, or did you only think that you ought to say it?” This dialogue was repeated day after day, punctually at eight o’clock, for eight or ten years.

Later, Axel and his brother went away to
gymnasium
. Still later, they went to Potsdam to join the army. And then the Second World War erupted, 1939 to 1945.

“A corner of Dubno, four synagogues, Friday evening, Jewish men and women by the ruined stones—all fixed in memory. Then evening, herring, I’m sad …,” wrote Isaac Babel, who was in Dubno in 1920 with Budenny’s army. “… pasture, plowed fields, the setting sun. The synagogues are ancient buildings, squat, green and blue.”
¹

There were a lot of trees, especially near the Ikwa. People went down to the river for evening strolls. In the summer they went for boat rides outside the city. In the winter ice was chopped out of the river; it lasted until autumn. All year round, water was drawn from the river and carried through the town in horse-drawn water carts. Gas lamps
were lit at dusk. On market days dust and the smell of horse droppings filled the air.

The scribe Josł had the loveliest penmanship in Jewish Dubno. Young Pinhasowicz wasn’t bad either, but Josł was more popular and people brought petitions only to him.

Doctor Abram Grincwajg (“electric-light healing”), who had come straight from Vienna, received patients on Cisowski Street, telephone number 30.

Photographer R. Cukier’s business was called “Decadence.”

Lejb Silsker had a horse and wagon. He drove to the railroad station, delivered and brought back the mail.

Knives were sharpened by Reb Mejer. He specialized in butcher knives for ritual slaughtering.

The cantor in the great synagogue was Ruben Cypring. He sang beautifully, and also played the clarinet in a wedding band. Eli Striner played the violin, and Mendek Kaczka, formerly a soloist in the Łuck military band in the tsarist army, played the trumpet. Mendek Kaczka’s piety was so great that during the four years he served in the army he didn’t touch any cooked food, because it wasn’t kosher. The Dubno band played throughout the entire region at Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian weddings.

The amateur theater presented Goldfaden’s play about Bar Kochba, the leader of the Jewish uprising against the Romans. Bar Kochba was played by Wolff, the fiancé of Miss Brandla, a seamstress. He was handsome and had a
pleasant baritone. The father of Dina, his beloved, was Lajzer, the proprietor of a metal workshop near the well.

Dubno was known for its excellent matzoh, which was thin and exceptionally crisp. In December, right after Hanukkah, they began baking matzoh for sale. Only in the spring, after Purim, did they start baking the matzoh for their own use.

The great merchants traded in hops and timber; hops were sold to Austria, and pine, oak, and fir to Germany.

There were many poor people. Every Friday money was collected for them so that they would not be without fish and challah for the Sabbath.

“A quiet evening in the synagogue, that always has an irresistible effect on me, four synagogues in a row,” wrote Babel. “There are no adornments in the building, everything is white and plain to the point of asceticism, everything is fleshless, bloodless, to a grotesque degree, you have to have the soul of a Jew to sense what it means.… Can it be that ours is the century in which they perish?”
²

Axel von dem B. crossed the border into Poland on the first day of the war, right behind General Guderian’s tanks. On the second day, his friend Heinrich died. That was in
Bory Tucholskie. The sun had already set, it was growing dark, and in the darkness he caught sight of the soldiers from Heinrich’s platoon running away. They shouted, “The lieutenant’s been killed!” and kept on running. The Poles were firing from above, tied by their belts to the crowns of trees. It was not pleasant. They spent the night in the woods.

Axel von dem B. was sitting with his back against a tree; “young Quandt,” wounded in the same skirmish, was resting his head on Axel von dem B.’s knees. He was referred to as “young Quandt” to distinguish him from his father, old Quandt, an owner of large textile plants. Young Quandt’s mother had died when he was a child, and his father had married a girl named Magda. They hired a private tutor for the summer vacation, a man whose name was Józef Goebbels. When the vacation came to an end, the teacher disappeared together with Magda. For this and perhaps other reasons, young Quandt was not a fan of the Nazis.

Lying with his head on Axel von dem B.’s knees, young Quandt said that he was dying and that those Nazis are all criminals.

“You’re not in such bad shape,” Axel von dem B. tried to comfort him, but Quandt knew that it was bad and kept repeating that all those Nazi criminals ought to die just like him. “And the sooner the better. The later they die, the more awful will be their end.”

Quandt died toward morning, and Axel von dem B. made sure he got a second revolver. He was twenty years
old, he had come through his first battle, and he had lost two friends. When they moved on, he held a revolver in each hand and felt quite jaunty.

The commander of his regiment noticed him. “We,” he said, “in our family, do not have to give proof of our courage. We
are
courageous,” and he took away the revolver that Axel von dem B. was holding in his left hand.

“In our family” meant that Axel von dem B. and the commander of the regiment, von und zu Gilsa, were members of the same family—the great German aristocracy.

Axel von dem B. went through the entire Polish campaign and part of the Russian campaign with this commander. They spent the winter of 1940 in Włocławek. One day, they were informed that the civil administration had designated a quarter into which all the city’s Jews would be resettled; the Jews had the right to bring with them only hand baggage.

“What a scandal!” The commander was indignant. “What sort of cretin thinks up such things! First thing tomorrow morning I am going to see Frank in Kraków and tell him everything.” (He knew Frank from the Berlin Olympics, when he’d been the commandant of the Olympics village.)

A car was ready for him in the morning, but a moment before his departure his adjutant said, “And what if it wasn’t a cretin? What if this is … German policy?”

“Do you think it might be?” Von und zu Gilsa hesitated, and then ordered the car returned to the garage. (Later he
was named commandant of Dresden. The morning after the Allies’ memorable bombardment of the city, he was found dead; his daughter assured people that it was not a suicide.)

They were in Włocławek until spring; in the spring they set out toward the East, and in June 1941, on the morning of the twenty-second, at 3:15 a.m., Axel von dem B. crossed the border into Russia.

He knew that Russia was ruled by Bolsheviks. He knew that there were camps there and that Stalin was a murderer. In a word, he knew that they were fighting against communism and that everything was as it should be.

(Everything was as it should be in connection with Poland, too, especially after Gliwice. No one imagined that the incident in Gliwice had been a German provocation. It was believed that the Poles had lost their nerve; they began it, and it was necessary to respond; everything was as it should be.)

The Russians greeted them with bread and flowers. They, too, believed that the Germans were bringing liberation. Soon, they would be disenchanted; the foreign sonofabitch turned out to be even worse than their homegrown sonofabitch.

That is exactly what Axel von dem B. said during a lecture in Washington, at the Rotary Club, soon after the war. Then one of those present stood up and demonstratively left the hall. Axel von dem B. assumed that this expressed disapproval of his views, but it turned out that it was a
protest against his use of the word “sonofabitch.” They were among the most refined Washingtonian company, and it was not customary to use such words there.

He marched through Smolensk and as far as Desna; he was wounded six times—in an arm, a leg, and his lungs; each time, he returned to the front from the hospital. In the autumn of 1942 he was in the Ukraine. It was west of the Dniepr, near a river whose name he does not remember, but which flowed into another river, which he also does not remember.