Trusting Calvin (4 page)

“If we're captured, Mother and I will probably be killed,” Zalmen acknowledged. “If she stays here, she will certainly die. We'll try to avoid being seen, and perhaps she will live.”

As their brother and mother set out into the frigid night, Moshe and Yankel cried quietly, certain they would never see either of them again. Abraham prayed that night and for many days and nights, rarely sleeping, pleading with God to return, if He saw fit, this woman to her family.

A week later, against all odds, Zalmen returned his much-improved mother to Krasnik and slipped back in the night to Zaklikow.

Soon after Sarah's recovery, food ran out completely. While her sons were away on work detail, she disguised herself as a peasant and made her way to the home of the Polish friend who was holding her valuables for safekeeping. Hours later, Sarah returned, having exchanged her silver, crystal, and jewelry for a sack of potatoes, some flour, and a loaf of bread.

“A warning she gives me as soon as I arrive,” Sarah told Abraham that night. “I am never to go back there again. Her neighbor is a Nazi sympathizer, and if he finds out she was selling food to a Jew he will turn her over to the Gestapo.”

For a time, at least, they had food again.

The small apartment shared by thirteen people was always tense and always cold, and it offered no privacy of any sort. But the insistence of biology commands attention when a young man comes of age, even when he is scared, starving, and exhausted. Moshe became captivated by Hadassah, the daughter of the apartment owner. She wasn't a beautiful girl, but she was smart, she had a sweet, helpful nature, and the geography of their living arrangements as well as the circumstances of their narrowed lives had set into motion an urgent drifting together.

Drenched in the all-consuming longing that emerges when people are stripped of all but the barest of emotion and denied any opportunity to act upon the feelings that survive, they fell quickly and deeply in love.

Keeping hidden what was ripening between them was vital. Abraham, they knew, would order an instant halt to the relationship if he learned of it. He would not abide romantic dalliances from his sons, and the seriousness of Moshe's feelings wouldn't impress him. Abraham Edelman believed in the kind of carefully arranged marriage that he had experienced in his own life, one that brought him a large family and allowed him to devote nearly all of his time to prayer and study.

The young couple had taken every precaution to avoid detection, they were sure, and they began whispering of a future together.

One evening Sarah asked Moshe to help clean the supper dishes, an unusual request. As they set about the task, Sarah said in a voice that no one else could hear: “Hadassah is a lovely girl.” She didn't look at her son when she spoke, and she gave no special weight or emphasis to the words. But with that one sentence she let him know that she was aware of what was going on and did not disapprove.

Surprised, Moshe realized he was also relieved, and he unloosed a whispered confession he hadn't expected to make. “When this madness ends I want to marry her.”

Sarah pulled her son close. “You have my blessing.”

Pleased that her son had managed to scrape some pleasure from the walls of this cauldron of gloom, Sarah said she would protect his secret and share in his hope.

Moshe believed this wasn't merely a first-love crush born of circumstance and availability. It was true and real. It was so intense that even decades later, as an old man, he would remember Hadassah, wondering how his life might have differed with her at his side, and include her when he spoke
kaddish
(the mourner's prayer).

Winter began to loosen its grip, and talk in the ghetto held that, once summer arrived, the Germans would move on to places more enticing. The death rate in the ghetto would slow, they hoped, and food would become more available.

Moshe was recalling that prediction one night in early May as he was preparing for bed, thinking about how he and Hadassah might be able to use the softer temperatures that were moving in to their advantage.

Suddenly, the door to their apartment flew open. Two Nazi officers stomped in and swung their rifles in an arc, eyeing the movements of each person. One of them fixed his gaze on Moshe and Yankel.

“Get dressed now, and get out,” he ordered.

There had been similar roundups during daylight hours, when Jews not assigned to a work crew had been released to go home and then were gathered at gunpoint when someone somewhere discovered a task that required five Jews, or fifty. But this was different. A night roundup was unprecedented.

Moshe and Yankel made no motion to resist. The ghetto had buzzed for months with tales of the few unwise men who had resisted. They had been immediately gunned down, followed instantly by the killing of several additional family members or random Jews to deter future acts of defiance.

The two brothers, barely breathing, slid into their shoes, grabbed their jackets, and, without a look at their parents, the others in the apartment, or each other, walked outside. A group of men and boys was already gathered, and all forged through the ghetto as directed, collecting more and more until there were three hundred of them.

They were brought to a halt near several parked trucks, tailgates down, ready to accept their cargo.

Quickly the young men were loaded aboard, jammed against each other tightly, their arms pinioned straight against their rib cages like staves in a barrel. The engines growled to life, and under a cold, starless night they lurched off into the dark.

Three

Four trucks packed with young men bumped and pitched along country roads through the night, passing mile after mile of flat fields not yet sprouting crops. They were heading east, that much the passengers could tell, but toward what and for how many miles they had no idea.

The air was raw, as it often is between dusk and dawn when spring has not yet decided to dependably clothe the countryside with dark-hours warmth, and the short jackets Moshe and Yankel had thrown on were insufficient. The heat created when too many people are crammed into too little space dissipated instantly into the night, but the men were so afraid that most of them barely noticed how cold they were.

A silent, malevolent-looking guard with a rifle and a sidearm was positioned at the rear of the truck, and every once in a while the barrel of his rifle clanked against the truck, the metal against metal sounding too loud even against the engine's roar.

The seventy-five men stood shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, Moshe and Yankel next to each other, a whisper's distance apart, and no one spoke a word. Asking questions of each other or speculating about what the events of this night might mean would accomplish nothing, they knew, and this was not a time to further arouse the current of anxiety thrumming among them into something that could no longer be contained. Another factor was contributing equally to the silence. Each of the young men had, for many years, been subjected often to situations they were not permitted to question or challenge, and this one, while more ominous because of their number and the distance they were traveling, was not so very different. Remaining mute, experience had shown them, was always safest.

Quiet prayers, barely audible, cleaved the silence every now and then, and as the hours grew longer, more such murmurings spilled forth. Moshe wondered if they were being hauled off to the woods to dig their own graves. Such a thing was not unheard of. If they were being transported for another reason, when would they be returned to their families? He had rarely left Krasnik, where he had been born in one of the bedrooms of Sarah's plain clapboard house, and soon they had passed far beyond the greatest distance he had ever ventured.

Moshe had not said good-bye to his parents or so much as glanced at Hadassah when he was pulled from the apartment, and an awful ache of dread about the manner of his departure worsened with each mile. The idea of leaping from the truck and making a frantic dash across the fields entered his head. But that would only result in a bullet to the back, and then the guards would undoubtedly shoot several other men to demonstrate that escape attempts would not be tolerated. They all knew that, every one of the men. So they sat, unmoving, dry-mouthed, as black skies flowed to gray and fields became forests.

It was well into the next day, when the trucks finally ground to a stop and the men were ordered out. They were deep in the country, they could see, but nothing else indicated exactly where, or why. Only a warehouse-like building surrounded by barbed wire and a narrow river interrupted the endless stretch of fields and trees.

Inside the building, rough platforms extended from the walls, and the men understood immediately that these would serve as their beds. They would be in this place for some time, they now knew. No blankets; no pillows. With only about seventy-five platforms to accommodate three hundred people, the quick-thinking among them calculated that they would have to line up four men to each four-foot-wide platform.

They had gone without food or water for nearly twenty-four hours, without sleep for thirty-six or more, and the adrenaline that had braced them through the night had long ago sputtered to nothing. Many dropped wearily onto the planks, unable to generate enough energy to join the nervous conversations sprouting up here and there. Sometime in the evening they each received a tin of watery soup and a cup of water, but no information.

At dawn the next day they were awakened to begin the job they had been brought here to do. The area, they came to understand, sometimes flooded when the rains or the winter snowmelt were especially heavy, so they were ordered to hand-dredge and shore up the river to prevent future flooding. It was unclear why the river overflowing its banks posed a problem here—an area with no population or structures as far as the eye could see—but that was the work, and they were the laborers. They took the shovels and picks and did it.

They learned that they were on the outskirts of Ruda, a tiny bump on the side of the road about ninety miles from Krasnik. And for more than six months they worked there in water up to their knees, twelve hours a day, digging the riverbed deeper. Then they spread loads of trucked-in gravel high and flat like a barrier fence on both sides of the river.

The guards for this operation were not German Nazis, as they had been in Krasnik. These overseers were Poles of German descent, far worse than any the men had previously experienced, much quicker to slash at backs with bullwhips and much more energetic when bashing rifle butts into hunched-over shoulders, necks, and heads. Their enthusiasm for brutality may have stemmed, as some of the men believed, from wanting to prove to the Germans that they could be every bit as vicious as the Germans themselves were. But many, the ones they feared most, seemed simply to derive pleasure from inflicting pain; if they didn't thrash someone every few minutes, they grew glum or, worse, edgy. No one ever pretended that a guard needed a reason to slam his rifle into a man or slice open his back with a whip; it was just part of the experience.

The three hundred prisoners—it was now obvious that this is what they were, so this was how they regarded themselves—ached, nearly every one, in almost constant pain from beatings or whippings. And as summer loped in with a muggy vengeance, their necks and arms and faces grew raw from blisters atop sunburns that never cooled or healed.

But it wasn't the flock of bruises or the seeping sores that caused the most misery. It was the hunger, grinding and constant. Hunger made them light-headed and flimsy. Their stomachs cramped and thundered, indignant and desperate. The men found it impossible to think of anything but the ache in their guts.

They received potato soup, thin and pale, twice a day, a small metal container of it ladled from a huge, battered vat. And at every meal they silently asked themselves the same question: Will my soup be nothing but water, or will it contain a few pieces of potato?

The man with the ladle had enormous power, the power of life and death, really, over every person in the encampment. If a man received only broth without potatoes for too many meals, he weakened and died.

“If it's someone he knows or someone he's decided he likes for one reason or another,” Moshe observed to Yankel after a few days of watching the soup distributor, “he dips deeply, to the bottom of the cauldron, and that person gets a few extra pieces of potato. We must figure out a way to befriend him. If we can't do that, we must at least never upset him or offend him.”

Moshe worried about his older brother. Yankel wasn't as strong as some; never had been. He had been severely jaundiced at birth, his condition so dire that their parents had delayed his circumcision from the prescribed eight days after birth until he was four weeks old and more likely to survive the procedure. As he grew up he was more sickly than the other children, always had the hardest time when illness ripped through school. He also seemed to be on the receiving end of harm more often than most. One evening, when someone had hurled huge rocks through the windows of the synagogue, one had slammed into Yankel's head, slicing a huge gash and knocking him unconscious. It took three weeks in the hospital for him to recover.

Moshe believed the past was evidence enough that his brother was not suited to the demands of forced labor, and he regularly coached Yankel on survival skills that he developed as time went on. The first of several rules was this: When there is food, eat it; don't save it. Soon after they arrived in Ruda, Moshe ate half of his daily bread ration one night and put the rest under his head for the next day, when with some extra nourishment he might work fast enough to escape at least some of the whip cracks. While he slept, someone stole the bread. Desperate men do desperate things, and all starving men are desperate, he now knew. Survival could hinge on an extra ounce of bread.

Shoes, too, were a vital commodity. They meant the difference between manageable pain and sheer anguish that could bring a man to his knees. The prisoners quickly learned to sleep with their shoes on their feet, or shoved under their heads with the laces tied around their wrists so they wouldn't disappear in the night.

Many of the men at Ruda knew each other, but the building was oddly quiet in the evenings, the men too tired to waste energy on conversation, and too hungry. There was little to say, in any event. They had no idea how long they would have to shovel muck from the river bottom, and they had no idea what would become of them once someone decided the project was done. They knew only that to leave this place alive, if such a thing was even possible, they had to do exactly as they were told and conserve whatever strength they had to meet the demands placed on them.

They worked at the river seven days a week. Every night they had two hours of free time, and during that time they washed their shirts and picked lice off their arms and chests—long, moving armies that multiplied with stunning speed. The men scratched endlessly at the bites and the sores that sometimes festered, oozing a putrid stench.

At nine p.m., after the sun had slipped away, they moved toward the platforms to settle in for what passed as sleep in this place. If one man changed position in the night, they all had to, crammed so tightly together that the slightest motion required the clump of bodies to shift in unison like trees bending in the wind. Sometimes a man moaned in the night or screamed from a nightmare. Sometimes the July and August heat that had collected in the building, so heavy and oppressive, made sleep impossible. Sometimes the scratching at bites became so intense and noisy that it woke others, and they would growl for silence. Tempers erupted from time to time. But exhaustion and lethargy quickly dampened disagreements to fizzled-out impotence, like a sodden blanket tossed over a fluttering flame.

As summer lost its grip and autumn advanced, a few of the men succumbed to starvation. Before they died they showed the telltale signs of near-death that became horridly familiar to prisoners in the months and years ahead: skeletal bodies, swollen faces and legs, vacant eyes.

“He stopped wanting to live, that man,” Yankel said after yet another had died. There was nothing judgmental in his tone. It was obvious he understood how easy it would be to take the small step from an exhausted determination to live to a resigned gravitation toward a place of no pain and no hunger.

“Possibly it's true he gave up,” Moshe snapped, worried his brother might fall sway to dark thoughts that could pull him under. “But we must continue to do what we have to do in this place. We must believe that when it's finally over, we will be alive. It serves no purpose to think about why that man died or anything else. Often we have seen it, Yankel. The people who think the most are beaten up the most.”

One November morning, when the snow had begun to fly, the workers were ordered onto the trucks again, with no notice or warning. New location, different work, they all assumed. Their only concern was whether the work would be harder, the guards crueler, and the food scantier than what they had just endured.

Several miles into the journey the brothers realized that they were heading toward Krasnik.
Was it possible? Had the long, awful summer's labor been all that was required of them? Would they be returned to their families in the ghetto?

The vehicles stopped not at the ghetto but on the outskirts of Krasnik, at a sawmill. There they performed cold, dangerous work throughout the long winter and into the next spring. Cut the wood. Pile the wood. Load the wood into trucks. They were cutting, piling, and loading huge underpinning ties for thousands of miles of railroad that the Germans were either laying or repairing.

The men didn't see their families. They never left the worksite or the empty warehouse—midway between the sawmill and the railroad station—where they spent their nights. No sleeping platforms existed here; the floor was considered good enough. The men who had wrapped themselves in long coats when they had been rounded up or somehow had managed to acquire one along the way could spread their coats on the floor to cushion their bones from the concrete. The rest of them settled like dogs, shifting and rolling to find the least uncomfortable position.

Their food rations were identical in quantity and type to those at the river worksite.

“Our captors have developed or stumbled upon the perfect formula for what they want to accomplish,” Moshe said to his brother one night as they took tiny sips of thin soup, nursing it as long as possible, trying to trick their bellies into believing they were growing full. It was just enough food to keep the men working but little enough to inhibit outbursts, escape attempts, and, ultimately, most feelings or thoughts. Hunger, when it lasts long enough, displaces pride, neutralizes intent, and extinguishes most normal emotion. And that was evident in this group. The Nazis called their captives
Untermenschen—
subhumans. After so many months of severe food deprivation, that was almost how they felt.

As the men became weaker, their diminished strength led to work accidents, injuries, and deaths. A poorly stacked pile of wood ties rolled onto Moshe one afternoon, and a claw of pain dug deep into the marrow of his foot. He could tell by the wavy way his toes moved when he tried to flex them inside his shoe—before the swelling locked everything into place—that some bones had been broken. He settled himself into a fixed position, all of the weight on his good foot, and kept working, trying to conceal the gnarling pain that coiled from toes to ankle. He couldn't allow the injury to be detected by the guards; if they thought he was working more slowly, they would withhold food.