“Your mother was not local,” Esther said. “She was quite pretty but very abrupt. She had a small son. I’ve remembered her surname. Kowacz, wasn’t it?”
I winced. I hate that name. I remember very well that my mother had a different surname. This was an assumed Party name used in one of the forged identity documents she lived under for half her life. One of the reasons I got married was to free myself of that false name. Everybody was terribly shocked. Fancy a Jewish woman from Poland marrying a German! Of course, Erich was a Communist, too, from the GDR. Otherwise he would not have been in Russia studying in the first place. That was where we met.
I gazed at Esther like a child mesmerized by a chocolate. She would have been the perfect mother, aunt, or grandmother, calm and gentle, elegant in a European way with her silk blouse and Italian shoes, but without ostentation or that naive American chic. She even called me “my dear child.” Without any prompting, she told me the ghetto had a robust internal organization, its own administration and its own special figure of authority, Rabbi Shirman, a renowned and learned man who people said was very righteous. Esther and her husband were themselves Polish Jews, both medically qualified, and had moved to those parts a few years before the war. Isaak was a surgeon and Esther a dentist. She had graduated from dental school in Frankfurt. They were not freethinkers, just ordinary Jews who would light the Sabbath candles but might just as easily go out on the Sabbath to a concert in the next town. The local Jews considered them outsiders but went to them for dental treatment. When Germany annexed Poland, Isaak immediately told his wife it was the end of everything and they needed to get out and go wherever they could—he even thought of Palestine. But while they were thinking what was the best and practical thing to do, they found themselves under German occupation, in the ghetto.
We were sitting in the drawing room of a fine apartment, furnished in the European style, old-fashioned but, to my mind, in very good taste. Its owners’ cultural level was plainly higher than mine, which is something I always sense because I don’t often encounter it. It was the home of wealthy people, with engravings rather than posters. The furniture was not a suite but had clearly been assembled piece by piece, and on a kind of low cupboard there was a big, wonderful Mexican ceramic, the tree of life perhaps.
Esther was sitting in a deep armchair with her feet tucked under her in a girlish way. She had kicked off her shoes, navy blue, snakeskin. Details like that always make an impression on me. My mother has good reason to consider me bourgeoise. The home, the orphanage are something that that chill in my back doesn’t let me forget. My mother regarded appalling penury as normal. She must have felt quite at home in Stalin’s prison camps, but when I escaped my poverty as an orphan, I could have kissed every cup, every towel, and stocking. In the first year of our life together in Berlin, in Prenzlauer Berg, Erich took a second job so I could buy things: clothes, crockery, and all the rest. He knew it was my way of getting over the past. The frenzy gradually subsided, but still, even here in America, my favorite pastime is shopping at sale time, going around garage sales and flea markets. Grisha, my present husband, takes it in stride. He is from Russia himself and grew up among people who hungered after everything. My son Alex was born in America, but he loves buying things, too. We are real consumerists, and Esther seems to understand all that.
“We thought conditions in the ghetto were dreadful, because at that time we had yet to see worse. We knew nothing then about the concentration camps, or the scale of the mass murder being perpetrated all through Europe.” She was smiling as she talked about all this, but there was something particular in her expression: detachment, sadness, and something indefinable. Wisdom, I guess. Yes, we were talking in Polish. That is always a treat for me.
“How long were you in the ghetto?” I asked her. “Less than a year, from the autumn of 1941. We left it on eleventh of August 1942. Then there were two more years in Czarna Puszcza, in the partisan unit. We lived in dugouts right through until liberation. A family partisan camp. By the end, out of three hundred there were one hundred twenty still alive. There were six children with us. Two more were born in the forest, you and a little boy, but he died. In spite of everything, we managed to keep all those who left the ghetto alive until the end of the war.”
“Why did my mother leave Czarna Puszcza?” I asked, knowing the answer my mother had given, but knowing also that she is a habitual liar. No, it is not that she is a liar, just that I don’t believe a word she says. That is why it was important for me to hear what Esther had to say. Esther wasn’t crazy.
“We tried to talk her out of it. I remember it well. Isaak was indignant that she was putting her children’s lives at risk by leaving our refuge. She did not even reply. The only person she had anything to do with in the ghetto was Naum Bauch, an electrician.”
That is how I discovered my father’s name. Mother never told me. If she had been a normal woman I would have been Eva Bauch. That was an interesting piece of information. “Do tell me about him,” I begged Esther.
“I didn’t know him well. I think he hadn’t qualified as an engineer.” She sat motionless, her back straight, every inch the aristocrat, and without a trace of the usual Jewish gesticulation.
“Isaak told me once, before the war, he asked Bauch to come to the hospital to repair some piece of equipment. He enjoyed a privileged position in the ghetto, as did Isaak, by the way. Some of the Jews had jobs outside, they had permits. Isaak saw patients at the hospital, and Bauch had work in the town, too.
“Your mother and Naum lived together in the ghetto. They had a little cell of a room in the left wing. The castle was half-ruined and we set about repairing it when we were forced in there. In the beginning we were even able to buy building materials. The Judenrat was in charge. Everything ended dreadfully. The fact of the matter was that the Judenrat was constantly buying off the Belorussian police. There was some complete louse, I don’t remember his name, a local police chief. He promised that the ‘operations’—you know what I mean, yes?—would not affect those of us in the ghetto as long as we kept bribing him. At this time all the Jews in the nearby villages were being exterminated, as we were well aware. The Judenrat was buying time, but that wretch couldn’t have done anything for us even if he had wanted to. He was just making money. By then nobody really had any money left. Women gave up their engagement rings, the last of their jewelry. I gave up mine. I didn’t know all the details at the time, and now they don’t matter.
“Some people really believed they could buy survival, and that is why, when the escape was suggested, a kind of community assembly was called and there was a split. Half were in favor of breaking out and half against. Those against were sure that after an escape attempt there would be terrible persecution of those who remained. Actually, things had moved on beyond mere persecution, you understand. Among those organizing the breakout were totally committed, real fighters. They wanted a showdown. They were receiving help from the town and there was contact with the partisans, although we didn’t know it at the time. In reality everything was being organized by a single Jew, a young chap, Dieter his name was. He was working as a translator in the Gestapo. Somehow he succeeded in concealing the fact that he was Jewish. He was arrested later, but he, too, managed to escape.
“On one occasion, when the war was already nearly over, he visited our camp in Czarna Puszcza. He was fighting in a Russian partisan brigade and was sent to us with a cow. The partisans had either bought it or helped themselves to it, and they asked one of our lads who was a butcher to make sausages for them. Dieter came with this cow, our people recognized him and were delighted. Somebody produced hooch, he sat down on a tree stump and started talking about Christ. People started exchanging glances. You couldn’t imagine anything sillier at that moment than talking about Christ. I think he had gone slightly mad. Believe it or not, by this time he had been baptized and was showing icons of some sort to us. It was hard to believe this was the person who had organized the breakout. In early 1945, after the liberation, we traveled with him on the first train into Poland. Somebody told me later that he became a Catholic priest after the war.