The Fiftieth Gate Read online

  Their sons and daughters applied the derogatory appellation, Żydek, to my father in the playground, but in the school records he is listed as Mojżeszowe, Mosaic, bearer of the religion of Moses, a respectful if somewhat antiquated term. According to Polish law, schooling was compulsory for children aged between seven and fifteen years, regardless of religion and nationality. The privileged Jewish children might attend a private Jewish school whose curriculum included modernised religious studies. Most Jewish children, however, were obliged to attend a state Polish primary school and therefore supplemented their religious education in a cheder, meaning ‘room’. And typically it was no more than a room, located in the household of a rabbi who instructed his young students in the traditional curriculum of biblical and talmudic studies.

  Listen, don’t tell anyone. I remember one cheder; the teacher had six or seven daughters, he was very poor, but I didn’t want to go. I brought him the money, every Thursday, and made him promise not to tell my father that I wasn’t coming. ‘No,’ he said, but I warned him, ‘Then you won’t have nothing, not me, not the money.’ My father found out and sent me to another cheder, but there it was worse. Shloymele Szkop he was called, Shloyme the Bucket. I did such terrible things to him. Jumped out of windows to escape, but the worst thing was when we tied up his legs to a table and I pished in his jacket pocket. Pished, and when he saw what was happening he jumped from the table and fell down. Really, I was terrible, the worst student, I hated school and cheder, but don’t tell anyone. Poor Shloymele Szkop.

  ‘Did you know that your parents could have been arrested because of your escapades?’ I torment him, quoting a threatening paragraph about truancy from Polish education policies.

  ‘My father lost control over me,’ he answers. ‘When he caught me running away from school he used to smack me. But it didn’t hurt.’

  My father’s smacks didn’t hurt either. He always waited till I had escaped into bed, so that he could cushion my bottom with layers of quilt. Generally, he disciplined me with unfulfilled threats. ‘I’ll take out the pasek,’ he would say, pointing to the belt around his trousers. I would laugh, assured of my security by his passive and patient nature. The angriest I ever saw him was when I played truant from school one day. I ran away with a friend, not expecting my absence to be noticed. It was noticed, and my parents spent the day searching for me. They cried when I eventually came home, their anger mixed with gratitude for my safety.

  He casts his eyes at his report card again, and observes the next item.

  POLISH LANGUAGE: Niedostateczny.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I ask.

  ‘No good,’ he mumbles timorously.

  ‘Unsatisfactory,’ I translate. ‘A failed grade.’

  I am quick to salvage his punctured ego by quoting from his brother’s performance. ‘You mean he failed a whole year?’ my father asks in amazement. ‘How could they do it to him? He was so clever. Read it to me again.’

  I did, the two sections which record that Baruch Bekiermaszyn, a grade five student, will not be promoted ‘because his Polish is weak’, to which the teacher disapprovingly adds the point, ‘only speaks Yiddish at home’.

  Even today my father’s Polish is weak; niedostateczny the teacher would say about her grown and greying pupil, the product of a community where most Jews answered ‘Yiddish’ in the space provided for mother-tongue on the census forms. My mother, on the other hand, belongs to a region where a considerable proportion proclaimed Polish as their national language (‘the intelligentsia’, she reminds her family). Consequently, she has perfect mastery of its hard consonants which she glides over like a sailboat on the Vistula.

  ‘You didn’t find my report card from Bołszowce?’ she interrupts.

  ‘Not even your birth certificate,’ I answer her. ‘Your year is missing from the town registry.’

  ‘Bardzo dobry,’ she informs us. ‘Excellent! I’m telling you it would be bardzo dobry all the way down. No, in art I was never good, maybe there it would be unsatisfactory, but in language, and history and literature and science, even in sport—straight A’s.’

  I hesitate before reminding her that she was five years old when the war broke out.

  GEOGRAPHY, I continue reading from his report card: Unsatisfactory.

  HISTORY: Unsatisfactory.

  ‘Not like you,’ he flatters me.

  I found my own report card in a cupboard in my parents’ bedroom. HISTORY brings with it memories of Tutankhamen and other Egyptian mummies; of my schoolteacher, his hands stained with nicotine, his breath stale from alcohol, violently throwing me against the school lockers, shouting, ‘Who do you think you are Baker? The greatest bloody historian in the world?’

  ‘So what did you get?’ my father asks.

  ‘Just a C.’

  ‘Nu?’ he wants to know, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Unsatisfactory,’ I confirm, ‘Niedostateczny.’

  Together we laugh. He reads the teacher’s entry for 1972: ‘Mark takes great pleasure in disturbing other members of the form while they are still working.’

  ‘At least I got an excellent grade for Behaviour,’ my father gloats. We compare our results, item by item, as if we are schoolmates exchanging secret notes under our desks.

  ‘How could you not get higher grades for arithmetic?’ I ask my father whose mathematical brain is legendary in our household.

  ‘Adds like a computer,’ my mother remarks proudly while perusing his report card as if she were his teacher. ‘ART, HANDICRAFT, MUSIC, PHYSICAL EDUCATION—just a Satisfactory, Yossl. Didn’t your parents help with your homework?’

  My mother used to help me with mine. She would never throw away her women’s magazines, ‘just in case’ we were required to illustrate our school projects. When I had to prepare a project on the Holocaust, she had no pictures to offer me. I found one myself, an image of a young boy from the Warsaw ghetto with his arms raised in the air. I never associated his fear with my parents’ captivity. It was somebody else’s child. My project and my fear. I received an A for it. HOLOCAUST: Dostateczny, and for the remainder of the year, it hung on a wall along the school staircase.

  My father asks one final question: ‘My sisters, Martale and Yentale?’

  Marta and Yenta, his baby sisters of whom he never speaks as if their murder was intended to erase their memory from the earth.

  ‘They had blossoming brains,’ I answer him, and together we study the report cards of his eight and six year old sisters.

  ‘Yenta was only in grade one when the war broke out,’ he notices. ‘She didn’t live long, did she?’

  ‘And where were you during that last term of school?’ I ask.

  ‘Scared. Scared they would give me another black eye.’

  He does not remember much else, except running to another town during the first days of war. It seemed pointless, running from bombs, but it was a response shared by most of his town who feared that German war planes would target the Starachowice ammunition factories. He was wrong, not wrong to have not known it, but wrong because in the end these factories saved his life.

  My mother’s survival was random. Nothing makes sense of her miraculous fate.

  For her it began on 21 September 1939 when the Red Army crossed the Polish frontier and invaded Bołszowce, installing its own civil administration. It was the fifth occupation of her town in a single century.

  During this, the latest occupation, all she remembers is her father frightened, running, seeking to protect his property.

  He had good reason to run, although at least 300,000 Jews were simultaneously pouring into Soviet-conquered territories in flight from Nazi occupation. In nearby Przemyśl, where my grandfather had studied law before being ousted by anti-Jewish quotas, Nazi occupying forces had massacred 600 students before passing control of the territory to the Soviet Provisional Government. As a lawyer, and an estate owner to boot, he was an early victim of Soviet economic repression. The fields of Kinashev
—his children’s inheritance situated in a village outside Bołszowce—suffered the fate of all personal estates in the Western Ukraine which were nationalised in November 1939. Administrative restrictions were imposed on their owners, some of whom were banished into the Soviet interior as enemies of collectivisation. Stripped of most of his property, Leo Krochmal’s professional credentials were also rendered obsolete by the introduction of a Soviet system of law which compelled Polish-trained lawyers to seek new forms of employment.

  Repression and intimidation soon gave way to arbitrary arrests, resulting in the incarceration of one in ten adult males in Eastern Poland. Summary executions and mass killings were performed in the name of the policy of sovietisation—the forcible repression of Polish culture, and the integration of the Western Ukraine and Belorussia into the Soviet system of satellite republics. Toward this end, Bołszowce’s residents were enticed to the voting-hall on 22 October 1939. At 4 a.m. on election day, the agitators woke the sleeping town which was draped in pre-election banners. Transportation was provided to mobilise every resident, including the infirm, to polling stations heavily guarded by uniformed soldiers. Anyone resisting was threatened with arrest and expulsion.

  My mother does not recall this day, nor does she remember much else about the Soviet occupation. All she has to show for it are her rudimentary Russian linguistic skills, and a deeply ironic fondness for Tolstoy’s heroines.

  ‘Spoiled dreams,’ she ponders, ‘but no use talking about what might have been.’

  What might have been—a sixth-grade schoolchild, a first-grade pupil; a young boy playing soccer for the Wierzbnik Maccabi sports club, a girl with plaited hair dancing to Hebrew folk-tunes at Bołszowce’s Zionist youth organisation. Summer holidays at Polish spa towns, Sabbath walks along the Kamienna River.

  Instead, my parents sing a Yiddish lullaby to their numerous grandchildren about what might have been:

  Sleep now child, my pretty one

  Close your dark eyes.

  A little boy who has all his teeth

  Still needs his mother to sing him to sleep?

  A little boy who has all his teeth

  And will soon attend cheder.

  There he will study Torah and Talmud

  But still he cries when mother rocks him to sleep.

  A little boy who will become a great scholar

  And a successful business man as well.

  A little boy who’ll grow to be a bridegroom

  Has soaked his bed as if he’s in a pool.

  So hush-a-bye my clever little bridegroom

  Meanwhile you lie wet in your cradle.

  Your mother will shed many a tear

  Before you grow up to be a man.

  And I sing to them:

  Shloft zhe mir mayne eltern, mayne sheyne

  Sleep my dear parents but do not dream.

  Tomorrow your children will shed your tears,

  Tuck your memories in bed and say goodnight.

  XIV

  He wants to know if he had a good or bad Judenrat in his town.

  ‘What’s a good Judenrat?’ I ask him.

  He thinks for a few seconds. ‘Didn’t hand Jews over to the Nazis.’

  ‘And a bad Judenrat?’

  ‘Gave up Jews like they were delivering clothes to a shop.’

  The Jewish Council in his town was neither good nor bad. It simply did what had to be done.

  I found my father’s name on a list of male Jews, aged beween twelve and sixty years of age, submitted by the Jewish Council of Elders in Wierzbnik to the newly installed SS Mayor. He appears on this list, dated 3 January 1940, as Josek Bekiermaszyn, born in 1927, without a profession, but deemed suitable for compulsory labour; a thirteen year old lad—a mere barmitzvah boy.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ my father answers when I ask about his barmitzvah celebration. ‘Who thought about such things then?’

  I asked him recently if he would consider having a barmitzvah ceremony now, more than half a century after he has physically passed his due age. The question hurt him: ‘Why?’ he first said, and then mumbled something about my being crazy for even mentioning it. I thought about it later, the arrogance of my request, the unintended disrespect. He was no longer a child, and I, his son, was inviting him to return to those days as if his childhood could be fixed.

  On my barmitzvah day, my father stood beside me in synagogue. He trembled with excitement as I chanted in Hebrew from a biblical scroll, while my mother, leaning forward from her seat, silently mouthed my words. For the evening celebration my parents dressed me in a purple velvet suit, a colour and texture considered fashionable in the early seventies. Although I refrained from protest against the suit, I still lost a fierce battle over the white shirt bursting with frills. My mother would ruffle them up as each new guest arrived, examining my cheeks for lipstick stains. ‘It gives me naches,’ she said, an emotion beyond pride, approaching parental nirvana.

  There were times when I foiled my parents’ hunt for the ‘Great Naches’. These occasions were not calculated to frustrate their dreams, but would prompt an onslaught of hysterical threats. ‘You’ll see how it feels when you have children,’ my mother would say. Or, in angrier moments: ‘You’ll kill me.’ I’m not sure how my long hair, or teenage involvement in a Zionist socialist movement, could effect this response. I have more understanding of her perspective on my choice to forgo my studies as a law student. ‘History, shmistory,’ she railed, ‘where will the past get you in life?’ Worst for my parents were my erratic plans to resettle in Israel, or to join the Israeli army, or to live on a kibbutz, a collective farm, in northern Galilee.

  But on the day of my barmitzvah more than twenty years ago, I was a willing partner in their unrestrained quest for pride. My parents exploded with naches, dancing on table-tops the guests lifted toward the ceiling, my mother demonstratively waving her arms in the air.

  My father’s parents did not have the opportunity to reap anything from their son’s entry into manhood; he was thrust into a role beyond the capacity of his years.

  All in all, the Judenrat reports in its census of the town completed on my father’s thirteenth birthday, there are 3569 Jews resident in the area of Starachowice–Wierzbnik—the territory of these formerly separate jurisdictions united by Polish authorities in February 1939.

  The barmitzvah novice is counted here with other members of the tribe, although an official report on the census indicates that the Jewish Council of Elders is ‘always finding ways and means not to carry out directives and to circumvent them’.

  ‘See!’ my father interjects with pride. ‘They were a good Judenrat, they didn’t always obey orders.’

  The accused Judenrat leadership, headed by Simcha Mincberg, was made up of twenty-three other members, predominantly merchants and industrialists, although a number of artisans—tailors and shoemakers—were counted amongst them. Most of the members were also active in the social and cultural administration of the Jewish community before the war transformed them into unwitting and unwilling tools of Nazi policy, accused by the Mayor of the following evasions:

  Item One

  The Jewish Council of Elders is obliged to provide the Mayor every Monday with a written report on Jews moving in or moving out. Despite repeated warnings, these reports do not arrive within the determined time.

  The restrictions on movement were the first step in the ghettoisation of the Jewish population of Wierzbnik, although the ghetto itself, formally designated as such on 12 April 1941, was never entirely sealed, a practice common for towns in the Radom District.

  ‘Our house was in the centre of the ghetto,’ my father recalls, ‘so we didn’t have to move.’ His wooden residence was evaluated by the Judenrat to be worth 4000 złoty.

  My childhood house was also located in ‘the ghetto’. That’s how we referred to the Jewish streets of Caulfield, even though no one compelled us to concentrate in the same suburb. There were no walls, only an invisible bounda
ry securing us within a familiar enclave of Yiddish-speaking neighbours and the convenience of kosher butchers, bakeries, and synagogues. Every house in our street was marked with a mezuzah scroll on the doorpost, a sign of the religious identity of its occupants as much as of God’s promise of protection. All the children in our neighbourhood gathered each morning on the street corner, where a bus collected us for transport to the same Jewish school. Our separate universe was all-embracing, punctured only by excursions to the city, or by glimpses through breaks in the fence of the school next door.

  Today I live with my family in the same cloistered neighbourhood.

  ‘Just like Poland,’ my father says, ‘before the war, I mean.’

  Requests for the right to move outside the Wierzbnik ghetto continued in defiance of the town enclosure. Illegal entries were reported to the relevant authorities. This information, the Mayor noted, ‘is based on details provided by the Jewish Council of Elders’.

  ‘What could they do?’ my father defends their honour. ‘What would you do?’

  I evade the question, and continue reading a list of the Mayor’s itemised complaints:

  Item Two

  When the Jews were relocated here from Litzmannstadt (Łódź), I delivered 1306 portions of food, upon the request of the Jewish Council of Elders. The sum of 326 złoty per portion was to be paid back by the Council of Elders. Despite the fact that I divided the payment into instalments of 50 złoty per month, up to today nothing has been paid.

  To make matters worse, the Jewish Council proved unable to pay the Mayor of Starachowice–Wierzbnik the rent for the Judenrat offices on the market-square. The situation grew worse with the arrival of refugees following the German conquest of Poland.