The Woman from Hamburg (6 page)

Sources:
Dubno, Sefer zikaron
(Tel Aviv, 1966); Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy,
Hrabina Cosel
(Warsaw, 1975);
Encyclopedia Judaica
(Jerusalem, 1971);
Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia
(Petersburg, 1906–1914; translated into Polish by J. Pomianowska, Warsaw, 1990);
Akta Procesu Norymberskiego
, dokument 2992-PS; Finker, Kurt,
Stauffenberg i zamach na Hitlera
, translated into Polish by A. Kaska (Warsaw, 1979); Morawska, Anna,
Chrześcijanin w Trzeciej Rzeszy
(Warsaw, 1970);
Göttinger Universitäts-Zeitung
(Gottingen, 1947); von Weizsaecker, Richard,
Historia Niemiec toczy się dalej
, translated into Polish by Iwona Burszta-Kubiak (Warsaw, 1989); the author’s conversation with Richard von Weizsaecker May 15, 1991, in Bad Godesberg; letters of Anna Netyksza from Warsaw and Antonina Hribowska from Czechoslovakia.

We set out early in the morning.

We were driving east.

Blatt had to be certain that he had returned to the scene of Marcin B.’s crime.

A long time ago Marcin B. had ordered the murder of three people. One of them lies buried in Marcin B.’s barn. Another lies in Marcin B.’s woods. (The barn and the woods are in the village of Przylesie.) The third, who was supposed to die, is Blatt. The bullet intended for him has been lodged in his jaw for fifty years.

Blatt travels here from California. He has returned to Poland over thirty times. Every time he came back, he drove east to the village of Przylesie. He would check to see if Marcin B. was there. Marcin B. never was there and so Blatt would return to California.

He always had to drive those same fifty kilometers, so he would either borrow a car or buy a used one. Afterward, it might be stolen; sometimes he smashed it up, or else he left it as a gift. It was usually one of those tiny Fiats. Blatt didn’t like to call attention to himself.

(“You can call me Tomek,” he said the first day. “Or Tojwełe, as I was called when I was a child. Or Thomas, as it says in my American passport.” I continued to think of him as Blatt, despite so many possibilities.)

We were driving east.

The sun was shining in through the windshield. In the brilliant light Blatt’s temples were completely gray, even though he had dark-red hair on his head. I asked him if he dyed his hair. He explained that it’s not a dye, but a special liquid. In the morning, while combing his hair, he pours a few drops on the comb.

“American,” I guessed. He nodded; the latest invention.

Blatt was not tall, but he was thickset and strong. It was easy to imagine him in front of a mirror: a short neck, broad torso, an undershirt and a bottle of the latest American anti-graying liquid. But this image should not evoke an ironic smile. Blatt’s strength today is the same as the strength that commanded him to survive. Blatt’s strength should be treated seriously. Just like his love affairs, all of them with blondes. His Jewish postwar love had to be a blonde. Only an Aryan woman with light blond hair could personify a refined and safe world.

Blatt’s cousin, Dawid Klein, lived in Berlin before the war. He survived Auschwitz and returned to Berlin. He found new tenants living in his apartment.

“There’s no need to get upset,” they said. “Everything is where you left it.”

Indeed, he found absolutely everything exactly where he had left it before the war.

He married their blond daughter. She was the war widow of an SS officer. Blatt’s cousin raised their son. When his wife fell in love with a younger man, Blatt’s cousin died of a heart attack. (I phoned their daughter in Berlin. Her husband picked up the phone. I said that I wanted to talk about Dawid Klein, who was an Auschwitz survivor. I heard him call out to Dawid Klein’s daughter, “Was your father an Auschwitz survivor?”)

Staszek Szmajzner, a jeweler from Sobibor, emigrated to Rio. True, he did not marry an Aryan woman; instead,
he married a Miss Brazil. They got divorced. Staszek went to the jungle and wrote a book about Sobibor. When he finished it, he died of a heart attack.

Hersz Cukierman, the son of a cook from Sobibor, went to Germany. His Aryan wife left him and Cukierman hanged himself.

And so forth.

Blatt is still writing his book.

We were traveling east.

Blatt wanted to ascertain if Marcin B. had returned to the village of Przylesie.

We passed former Jewish towns: Garwolin, Łopiennik, Krasnystaw, Izbica. The stucco on them was yellowed, with dirty streaks. The wooden, one-story bungalows were sinking into the ground. We wondered if anyone lived in them. Probably yes, because there were pots of pelargonia in the windows, wrapped in crimped white tissue paper. Wads of cotton were spread out on some of the windowsills. Silvery “angel hair,” left there, no doubt, since Christmas, sparkled on the cotton. Men wearing gray quilted jackets were drinking beer outside the entryway. Apparently there were no unoccupied seats inside. Chunks of wall stuck up in empty lots among the houses. Grass was growing out of the smashed bricks. The little towns had flabby faces;
they were deprived of muscle, deformed—either by exhaustion or by fear.

In Izbica, Blatt wanted to show me a couple of things. We began with Stokowa Street. Generations of Blatts had lived there, including Aunt Marie Rojtensztajn, who heard everything through the wall. “Tojwełe,” she would say, “admit it, your father gives you nonkosher food to eat. You’ll go to hell, Tojwełe.”

He was so terrified of hell that he ran a fever.

“You’re only eight years old,” his aunt comforted him. “After you are bar mitzvah, God will forgive you everything.”

He calculated that he could sin for five more years. Unfortunately, the war began before his bar mitzvah; God forgave him nothing.

We looked around the market square. Idełe used to stand in the center, banging on a drum. He read out the declarations that the authorities posted. He banged his drum for the last time in September 1939, and announced that they were to cover their windows to protect them from bombs. He died in Bełżec.

Itinerant musicians used to play in the market square; they sold the words to the latest hit songs for five groschen. Tojwełe bought “Madagascar”—“Hey, Madagascar, steamy land, black, Africa …”

The fanciest house on the market square belonged to Juda Pomp, a dealer in sheet metal. He installed a flush toilet in his home, the first in Izbica. Everyone came to check it out; an inside toilet, and it doesn’t stink!

We finally finished with the market square and moved on to the side streets. We came upon the house of crazy Ryfka “What Time Is It?” “Ryfka, what time is it?” the children called out to her. She would answer precisely and she never made a mistake. An old Jew, ugly and rich, arrived from America. He looked Ryfka over. He learned that she was the daughter of a deceased rabbi. He told her to comb her hair and they got married. The inhabitants of Izbica had to admit that after the wedding Ryfka turned out to be a nice-looking woman without a trace of madness. She bore a child. They all died in Sobibor.

Nearby lived a Captain Dr. Lind. What was his first name? What brand of car he owned is known: an Opel. But then, it was the only car in Izbica. On the first of September 1939 the doctor’s wife cleaned the house, changed the linens and—what Tojwełe’s mother, Fajga Blatt, admired even more—placed a clean tablecloth on the table. Then the doctor donned his uniform and they got into the Opel. The doctor died at Katyń; where his wife died is not known.

Flajszman the tailor sewed clothes for Tojwełe and his brother. The Flajszmans had a single room and nine children. They knocked together boards to make a bed large enough for all of them. A sewing machine stood under the window and a table stood in the middle of the room. But they ate at the table only on Shabbos; on weekdays, it served as an ironing board. The Flajszmans and their nine children died in Bełżec.

Shochet Wajnsztajn, the ritual slaughterer. He studied Talmud all day long, and Mrs. Wajnsztajn supported their household with ice cream and soda water. She made the ice cream in a wooden barrel placed inside a container filled with salt. The sanitarian did not permit the use of cheap, unwashed salt in food preparation, and Mrs. Wajnsztajn could not afford the more expensive salt, so her sons Symcha and Jankiel kept a lookout at the door for the police. They died in Bełżec.

The house of Mrs. Bunszpan; her surname has to be changed for obvious reasons. She had a hardware store. She had a fair-skinned daughter and a dark little boy. She told him to stay inside the house while she and her daughter went to the train station. The boy ran after them. He tried to get on the train with his mother, but Mrs. Bunszpan pushed him away.

“Go away,” she said, “Be a good boy.” He was a good boy. He died in Bełżec. Mrs. Bunszpan and her daughter survived the war.

“I have learned,” said Blatt, “that no one knows himself thoroughly.”

Rojza Nasybirska’s brewery. She ran away from a transport. She entered the first house she came to. There were people sitting at the table, reading the Bible. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They decided that Rojza was a sign sent by God Himself. They gave her a Bible and told her to convert others. She waited out the end of the war in peace. It never entered anyone’s mind that it was a Jewish
woman who was walking from village to village, converting people. After the war, she wanted to keep on converting people out of gratitude, but her cousin came and took her to the States.

Hersz Goldberg’s lumberyard. Cut lumber was stacked neatly everywhere. When the first star appeared in the sky on Saturday and Shabbos came to an end, people drank wine from a common goblet and said to each other, “
Git vokh
, have a good week.” That was a signal for the young folk; the boys would head out with their girlfriends to Goldberg’s lumber. Their younger siblings followed them to see what went on in the evenings on top of the lumber. Hersz Goldberg died in Bełżec.

A shack near the Jewish cemetery. Jankiel Blatt, Tojwełe’s father’s brother, lived there. He had two children and no job; he was a communist. When the Russians took over in September 1939, Uncle Jankiel greeted them enthusiastically. “Now there will be jobs,” he kept repeating, “now there will be justice.”

The communists put on red armbands and showed the Russians who the Polish and Jewish bourgeoisie were, and also pointed out the soldiers returning from the September campaign. Among those arrested was Juda Pomp, the sheet metal merchant and owner of the house with the toilet. Tojwełe’s father, a former Legionnaire, threw Uncle Jankiel out of the house, shouting that he wasn’t to show himself to him ever again. Two weeks later the Russians
withdrew. The Germans occupied the town. The communist Jankiel Blatt died and so did Juda Pomp, the class enemy. He would have had a much better chance in Siberia than in Sobibor, but the Russians, alas, hadn’t had enough time to send the Izbica bourgeoisie to the gulag.

Blatt talked and talked. Izbica had had three thousand Jews, and he was still on the first hundred. Now he was getting ready to visit Małka Lerner, the butcher’s daughter; we were passing their house. Małka—erect, tall, dark, first among the well-to-do girls—opened the door wearing a sky-blue bathrobe. Offering him cake, she bent over slightly, revealing her décolleté. Not by accident, and not with embarrassment, but with obvious pride. She was twelve years old and she already had breasts. The cakes were sprinkled with poppy seed. Such cakes were carried around to one’s neighbors for Purim, on a plate covered with a white, hem-stitched napkin. Małka carried them round to the wealthy girls, and Estera, who was shorter, petite, with blond hair, took them to the poor girls. She wasn’t strikingly beautiful, but she would have been better looking in old age than Małka, Blatt admitted somewhat reluctantly. He seemed to be pondering whether he was being disloyal to Małka. Estera would have been thinner and with a better figure, but she did not grow old. Józek Bressler, the dentist’s son, told him in the camp that he had traveled in the same freight car with Estera and Małka. “Look,” Małka had said, “I’m fifteen, I’ve never made love
to a boy and now I’ll never know what that’s like.” They both died. Józek Bressler ran away with everyone, but he was blown apart by a land mine.

Finally, the last house, Grandma Chana Sura’s; she was a Klein by birth, the aunt of the Berlin cousin. She wore a wig. She didn’t visit the Blatts because Tojwełe’s father, Leon Blatt, who had been given a concession to sell vodka and wines as a reward for his service in the Polish Legion, ate nonkosher food, did not observe the Sabbath, and had been excommunicated by the rabbi. Kurt Engels, the Gestapo chief, personally placed a crown of thorns made from barbed wire on his head and hung a sign around his neck: “I am Christ. Izbica is the new capital of the Jews.” He roared with laughter as Leon Blatt walked through Izbica wearing his crown. Grandma Chana Sura, Leon Blatt, his wife Fajga, and Herszel, Tojwełe’s younger brother, died in Sobibor.

And now it’s really the last house. The remains of a house, with remnants of a wall—Mosze Blank’s tannery. After the first deportation people took shelter in it. They felt safe; they said, come what may, the Germans will always need skins. They died in Sobibor. The owner’s sons survived. The older one, Jankiel, was a student at the famous Lublin yeshiva before the war. He had his Talmud in his hiding place near Kurów and continued his studies by the light of a kerosene lamp. He barely noticed when the war ended. The younger boy, Hersz, went into business
after the war. He was murdered in Lublin, by unknown assailants, on Kowalska Street.

We turned to the southeast.

The rebellion in Sobibor, the largest uprising in the concentration camps, took place on October 14, 1943. It was led by Aleksander Peczerski, a Red Army officer and a prisoner of war. Following the uprising, the Germans liquidated the camp.