Ester and Ruzya Read online

  “Where have you been, the moon?” the youth asks, and he and his buddies guffaw. “General mobilization’s what’s going on. All grown men fit to serve must stop any available means of transport and get on. The likes of you have to get off.” Isaj is seventeen, a year short of conscription age—none of the Shomrim traveling together today are old enough for the army: they were schoolchildren on vacation.

  “The Germans?” Isaj asks, more because he does not want to let the conversation end with a put-down than because he has any doubt that it is the German army that is about to invade Poland.

  “The Germans,” the young man confirms.

  The train crawls along, the Polish men with their bags keep piling in, and soon the male Shomrim have to start disembarking to make room for the conscripts. The girls are allowed to stay on. Isaj takes his leave quickly, perhaps even sooner than necessary—there is still some air around their bench—with a quick “bye” to Ester and a peck on the cheek. Wedged in among Jewish girls and Polish men, Ester sits dazed for what might be five or ten hours, until the overburdened train pulls through the pitch blackness into Warsaw’s well-lit railway station, where the pale faces of Bella’s two brothers appear in the window before Ester has had a chance to move. Bella has apparently been calling them for hours, making them sick with her worry, and now they drag Ester away to visit her grandparents—the entire family, which has remained religious, is ignoring bans on traveling on the Shabbat, and this only adds to the chaotic, frightful feel of the day.

  The visit is a blur: Ester is exhausted, and no one is making much sense anyway. The next day she is put on the train to Bialystok, which takes about six hours instead of the usual three, and this time she is picked up at the station by Bella, who refuses to try to hold back her tears. “I will never, ever, let you go anywhere without me,” she shouts, for all of Bialystok to hear. “You hear me?”

  Ester looks for signs of change or danger or something. But Bialystok looks the same as ever. Over the last two days people have stocked up on the panic essentials—matches and salt and grains—and now everyone is just waiting. The whole city is quietly sick to its stomach, but you cannot see that out in the streets.

  SEPTEMBER 3, 1939

  Two days after the German army invaded Poland, the Shomrim hold a meeting. This is a reunion of sorts: this summer’s male campers have just finally reached town, having traversed the country by foot, buggy, and the kindness of strangers. The mood is what it has always been, only more so, the point of the meeting being to reinforce the members’ resolve to stay faithful to their mission. “War is coming, sure,” Isaj proclaims, attempting a somber tone to disguise his excitement. “No one knows what tomorrow may bring. But we have chosen our path, whatever the circumstances! Everyone may be hiding in cellars, but we won’t be frightened! We shall carry on despite the war.” Applause all around, then some talk of the work units and certificate applications, and then it is back to the cellars, the waiting. That night German planes circle the city for the first time.

  SEPTEMBER 15, 1939

  The small crowd that has been gathering in the Goldbergs’ apartment for the last three weeks to listen to one of the city’s few radios is now fast dispersing. Today’s news is that the Germans are about to enter the city, so everyone is to go home, close the shutters, bar the gates—as though the German army were a hurricane, a force of nature to be weathered, waited out. The Polish army is offering no resistance in these parts—this is the east of the country, and the military’s strength was spent in the west, where the Germans first invaded—so the Germans’ entrance seems almost casual: they drive in on their odd motorcycles with the high seats and the sidecars, with no tanks for cover. Still, though the logic of their entrance might dictate a sort of peace, they do descend on the town like a force of nature, proving that conquerors, even German soldiers with their legendary love of order, are universally trigger-happy. People who happen to be in the street are shot, and those who do not die immediately lie in the street slowly bleeding to death as their neighbors watch through the cracks in their shutters. The city’s famed ambulance cannot make it out of the gate. Most of the dead are Jews, and many of these are the observant men and women who hear the news in the synagogues, where they have gathered to pray on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. They run out into the streets in panicked clumps and continue to run as the bullets fly, the men losing their wide-brimmed hats, the women getting tangled in their skirts, falling, dragging their children so their feet barely touch the ground, falling again. “What a way to start the year,” says Jakub, and Bella glares at him. To be flippant at a time like this, her look says. There will be plenty of time yet to be morbid, he looks back.

  Ester is glued to the shuttered window of their apartment, but the view of the intersection with Sienkiewicz Street—the bigger street where there is much more action than on their small road—is skewed, full of black shadows that can only be interpreted through the sounds that accompany them. There is shouting in German, screaming in the assorted languages of Bialystok, the clatter of hobnailed boots and occasional snaps of gunfire. Later in the day, the gunfire starts coming in bursts, and there is the sound of glass shattering: with the Bialystokers now hiding in their homes, the soldiers start shooting through windows, then barging into the houses to remove valuables. A neighbor is killed for refusing to part with her rings, which the soldiers then leave stuck on her fat fingers. This information comes from a neighbor boy who takes the senseless risk of running from house to house to report the news: two murders on this block, one robbery, and now they have posted a notice saying curfew is in effect from eight in the evening till five in the morning. Not that anyone besides this madman would consider going out.

  SEPTEMBER 16, 1939

  Is she expected to stay inside forever? It is not as though the Germans were going anywhere. Sooner rather than later the Goldbergs’ modest food supplies will run out and they will have to venture outside, if only for food. And anyway, one can die from boredom or go insane before any real danger presents itself—if one insists on staying inside, that is. Bella’s objections and Jakub’s silence ignored, Ester goes out. At the last minute Bella manages to convince her not to wear her Ha-Shomer ha-Zair uniform: she puts on a dark blue dress that is too small—a consequence of having refused to accompany Bella to the tailor’s for over two years now—and she is gone.

  Sienkiewicz Street is quieter than usual but by no means deserted. There are few men out—rumor has already spread that any male risks being conscripted for bizarre duty like washing the sidewalks or lugging dirt from one place to another—but there seems to be something vaguely festive in the manner of the women strolling the street. Ester supposes that is what happens when going outside becomes a special event. She laughs inside at how little it takes, but she feels excited, too, and proud of this wide tree-lined street, already cleared of the shattered glass from two days ago. She has not quite decided where she will go, and by default she is readying to turn a corner onto a side street leading to the Jewish quarter when one of those large black German cars screeches to a halt at the corner and a green-uniformed officer—well, she just assumes he is an officer if he is riding in the backseat of a car—jumps out and grabs her by both elbows. Now she is in the car, in the backseat, between two Nazis barking something—at her? at the driver? at each other? Are they going to kill her now?

  “Do you understand German?” is what it turns out they are asking.

  “Yes,” she answers in Yiddish.

  “Drive,” one of the officers says to the driver.

  They continue down Sienkiewicz, past several Jewish shops, now shuttered, and stop in front of a Polish-owned food store. She gets out of the car with the officers, who make no particular effort to make sure she is following them—but she is anyway.

  “Bread,” the older of the two says in German when they enter the store.

  “Bread,” she repeats in Polish.

  “Bread.” The shopkeeper nods and p
laces a loaf on the counter.

  It takes no more than an hour to visit three stores, buying food and wine for the officers’ dinner and a pair of hats for their wives. After Ester regains feeling in her legs, she is able to translate easily, even adding a polite word or two to her companions’ barked orders. The shopkeepers show no surprise at the odd union of two Nazi officers and a Jewish girl: apparently, this method of procuring translation has been practiced widely the last two days. When her services are no longer needed, the German car dumps her on the side of Lipowa Street, and it is all Ester can do to walk rather than run home. She rushes past German soldiers putting up notices on lampposts, but she learns their meaning only when she gets home, from the neighborhood’s self-selected messenger. The curfew hour, it turns out, has been changed from eight to six in the evening.

  About an hour later, over fifty people who did not learn of the curfew change are shot dead in the streets—without warning, just as the notice said they would be. Ester, still shaking from her encounter with the German officers, has resolved to stay inside as long as she possibly can.

  It was probably impossible to gauge the danger, to separate the fear of any aggression, any army occupying your land—and the Jews, whatever dreams they had for their future, did consider Bialystok their land—from the specific fear of the Nazis. Bialystok’s and Warsaw’s Jewish newspapers had reported on the Third Reich’s racial politics, but these stories always took second place to reporting on anti-Semitic activity in Poland itself. And what really made German policies so different from Polish ones? Both countries had for years been subjecting their Jews to a state-sponsored economic boycott. Both states openly discriminated against Jews in education and the professions. Only in the year leading up to the German invasion of Poland had there been news reports that may have indicated that the horror of Nazi policies would exceed what Jews had known in Poland—or anywhere else.

  In addition to the news reports, there were about seventeen thousand Polish-born Jews who had been exiled from Germany in October 1938. Most of them had settled into a nightmarish existence in the borderlands, but a few had made their way east as far as Bialystok, and their fear of the Germans was the most convincing argument that the occupation would bring unimagined terror. But when the occupation came, it did not proceed according to the usual rules of such things, though few Bialystok Jews had the experience and the presence of mind to realize this. The Polish army had given up this part of the land without battle, yet the occupiers did not seem to be acting like they planned to stay. They murdered, raped, and marauded, but they preferred to do this, oddly, under the cover of night, as though someone could have stopped or reprimanded them.

  In fact, the Germans were not planning to stay in Bialystok. According to the secret agreements signed by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, on August 23, Bialystok, like the rest of Eastern Poland, would be annexed by the Soviet Union, while the rest of the country would become part of Germany. The specifics, however, had not been ironed out by the time Germany entered Poland a week later, and two and a half weeks into the Nazis’ faster-than-expected offensive, Stalin still had not made up his mind on the date, manner, and justification for the Soviet attack on its neighbor. So the German army pushed on, while the German government was secretly urging Stalin to hurry and take his part of Poland. While he hesitated, the Nazis took Eastern Poland. The Jews and others of Bialystok—those who had bled to death in the streets, the fat woman killed for her jewelry, the fifty unwitting curfew violators—were the casualties of imprecise planning, caught in a sort of no-man’s-moment in history.

  At two o’clock in the morning on September 17, Stalin received German ambassador Schulenburg, to inform him that Soviet troops would cross into Poland four hours later. A gentlemanly telegram exchange followed, with the Soviets asking the Germans to hold their planes west of the designated territorial-division line, and the Germans, citing short notice, asking the Soviets to take care not to fly too close to the line themselves, lest someone get hurt.

  The Jews of Bialystok learned of the Soviet advance into Polish territory on the morning of September 17 and shifted into a state of relieved anticipation. Little as was known about the country to the east, the Soviets were believed not to be consistent Jew-haters. After all, they even had Jews in their government. Jakub Goldberg, for one, had his doubts—he had always distrusted Communists—but there could be no arguing: after the German occupiers, the Soviets appeared as liberators. The first of the Soviets arrived the next day, and the handover of the city was completed in four more. The process was bizarre: officers of the two armies shook hands when encountering one another in the streets; the ostensibly defeated Germans took time readying themselves for the road, and departed, in plain view of their supposed enemies, with trucks full of looted goods.

  Still, the city had been occupied by the Nazis and now liberated from them, and no one—not even a consistent anti-Communist like Jakub—could argue that this was not cause for celebration.

  OCTOBER 8, 1939

  These are days of joy. The Soviets have set up movie screens in several of the city’s squares and parks and have been showing films. In the rush of relief and gratitude, Bialystokers have set upon the liberators with endless questions. “Will there be a war between you and the Germans?” “Will you move farther into Poland?” “Can you save all the Jews?” “Are there Jewish officers?” “Do you have enough food?” The soldiers’ answers are cheerful, slick, and alarmingly free of substance. “The situation must be stabilized.” “Order must be restored.” “Everyone is equally valuable as a contributing member of society.” “We have everything aplenty.” This last response becomes a refrain, and the younger people test the Russians’ comprehension and sincerity by asking, “And cholera? Do you have that too?” or “And consumption?” They continue to insist they have everything aplenty, but the officers betray themselves in the shops of Bialystok.

  “Do you have men’s shirts?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take them.”

  “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  Shopkeepers jack up prices daily, but this is no deterrent: the officers seem to have nothing but money and need. In a particularly grotesque episode about three weeks into the occupation, the Red Army officers’ wives relieve the shops of all the floor-length silk nightgowns, which they proceed to wear to the opening show of a visiting opera company from Minsk.

  The initial celebration has coincided with the Jewish high holy days, but now is the time for the traditional autumn slowdown, for getting back to school. On the first day of her last year at the gymnasium, Ester has discovered that her school is no longer the Hebrew Gymnasium but Bialystok Secondary School with Instruction in the Yiddish Language. Hebrew, which is banned in the Soviet Union, shall no longer be taught, read, or spoken in Bialystok. A few students’ in-class protestations that they will continue to study the language and work for the dream even if they have to go underground are cut off by the teachers with uncharacteristic swiftness.

  On the evening of the first day of school Ester and Isaj are strolling on Lipowa Street when they encounter the gymnasium’s Hebrew teacher, a single-minded pedant known for chastising his students whenever he encounters them speaking a language other than Hebrew, in school or outside of it.

  “Shalom,” Ester addresses him, opening her mouth to add something in Hebrew in a show of good faith and solidarity.

  “Good evening,” the teacher responds in Yiddish, anxiously. “I will see you in school tomorrow for our Yiddish lesson.” He scampers off.

  Ester expects Isaj to say something appropriately deprecating, but her boyfriend is oblivious. He is in a relentlessly great mood. In the last two weeks he has added a joyful skip to his walk, and his talk has mixed his favorite socialist rhetoric with the propaganda spouted by the Soviet soldiers. The changes in his own life have been remarkable: his father has been given
a job in a newly nationalized factory that never used to hire Jews, and Isaj himself has left his job as a pharmacist’s assistant (a charity post he got after the leather factory fire) to enroll in a newly formed high school for future teachers.

  “You shouldn’t get upset about small things,” he tells Ester. “Look at the bigger picture. The Soviets have to restrict all other political movements, including Zionism, in order to advance their policies of equality and opportunity for all. Can’t you see what that means for us? We can leave Poland; we will go study in Moscow together!”

  Moscow has never been a part of Ester’s geography, but Isaj’s enthusiasm, coupled with the rapid disappearance of all other options, will reorient her: she will gradually grow accustomed to the idea that she will go east.

  There were those who refused to accept the new dispensation, who scrambled for a way to reach Erez Israel. They bought counterfeit passports, took advantage of early wartime confusion to cross borders, and some of them ultimately did make it to Palestine. Jakub Goldberg’s general inability to scheme and his sense of responsibility conspired to make him stay in Bialystok. He gave refuge to relatives who fled from the other side of the Bug River—the dividing line between newly Soviet and newly German territory—and tried to maintain the ways of his existence for as long as possible. He added his voice to Isaj’s, encouraging his daughter to travel into the Soviet Union proper, farther away from the Germans and the arrests that were becoming more frequent as the Soviets rushed to bring their new lands into line with the rest of their purged and scorched country. “If we survive all this,” Jakub promised, “we will move to New Zealand.” Why? “Because there will never be a war there.”

  For many Jews in pre–World War II Poland, Zionism was a politics of despair and Israel itself purely a dream of escape. For all their talk of destiny, Erez Israel was merely a destination, one that could be exchanged—for New Zealand, for Moscow, for any place that seemed to offer a future.