solid below me – incapable of giving way – for the first time in a year.
Izzy and I were in the cellar on 7 July, helping Liza stack her freshly fired pottery on her shelves, when we heard two cars approaching. By now, we knew the routine. We crept behind the kiln, out of view. She rushed upstairs and closed the cellar door behind her. Two men soon entered through the front door, and Liza began talking German, but we couldn’t make out her words.
After a few seconds, she shouted, ‘Get out of my house!’
I listened for a gunshot. Instead, a German yelled, ‘Where are you hiding him?’
When Liza screamed, I jumped up.
‘Stay here!’ I whispered to Izzy.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, gripping my arm.
There was no time to explain. I leaned down. ‘Go to Louis when you get out of here.’
When I kissed him on the lips, he held me for a startled moment, then kissed me back.
‘Erik, no!’ he whispered desperately as I stepped away.
I meant to say with my eyes that our time was over, and I meant my smile to mean that I had no other choice. Did he understand?
When the cellar door opened, I started up the stairs with my hands extended high over my head.
‘I’m coming up!’ I called out in German. I didn’t dare glance at Izzy, because I was sure that his darkly shadowed eyes – and everything in them that I wanted to live for – might steal my courage, though I wished I could have reassured him that I’d be all right.
Three SS officers had come to the farm. Though I put up no resistance, the two younger ones knocked me down and kicked me. Liza stood by, shouting curses at them, until the one in command – forty-ish, with greying hair around his temples and black eyebrows – grabbed her and threw her to the ground.
‘I didn’t tell them!’ she shouted to me as I was dragged away. ‘I swear!’
The Germans shoved me into the back seat of their car.
Before I was able to holler out the window that I knew she could never betray us, the older Nazi raised his gun and fired. Liza fell over with a guttural cry, clutching her arm.
I shoved open my door and got out. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at him. ‘She only hid me to make money!’
He never even turned to me. He put the barrel of the gun up to Liza’s ear.
She showed him a bewildered look.
I can still hear the explosion of the bullet; it’s the sound of all the best people I ever knew being murdered.
The German in command got in the back seat beside me, demanding to know my name and where I was from. He slapped me across the face when I made no reply. Struggling for breath, I told him my name was Izydor Nowak and that I was a clockmaker from Warsaw; I appropriated my old friend’s identity because he’d be able to disappear more completely if the Nazis believed that they had captured him already.
I also told him that he had murdered a wonderful woman who had not deserved to die.
I next remember entering Pulawy, where my captors made me stand in a town square with a group of about fifty other Jewish men for the rest of that day and all through the night. The Christian residents – thousands of them, it seemed to me – passed us on their way home from work, but none of them offered us a crust of bread or a cup of water. The Germans wanted to prove to us, I think, that we were nothing – less important to our Polish neighbours than dogshit on the sidewalk. And it was true.
By the time morning came, I was unable to escape my misery even for a moment. My throat felt as though it had been blasted with sand, and I was having trouble breathing. I had no more tears left.
Polish and German soldiers soon marched us off. To where, we had no idea. My good fortune was that exhaustion and dehydration made me delirious. Pulawy was substituted by Warsaw, and I was rushing down Leszno Street. The dome of the Great Synagogue was rising into a sunlit sky just ahead, imposing, but like a grandfather only pretending to be stern, and summer rain had begun to fall, and its hammering against the dome was a good sound, the sound of life being born…
I stayed in Warsaw until a gunshot tugged me back to myself. A man in front of me had collapsed and been executed. Flies were already feeding at the wound in his head. We were walking down the platform of a small train station.
‘Keep going!’ someone yelled at me in German.
Stepping over the man, I knew that our blood would never be completely erased from the streets of every Polish city and town – not even if it rained every day for a thousand years. And I was thinking:
On the train, inside an oven-hot cattle car, I dropped down and curled into a ball to keep from being crushed. I wanted water so badly that I’d have opened a vein had I carried anything sharp on me.
I must have passed out. When I awoke, soldiers were jabbing us with their rifle butts, their Alsatians straining for a chance to taste Jewish flesh. They marched us forward. My head was heavy and cumbersome, as though it might fall off from its own weight, and my dry, useless tongue was a dead lizard inside my mouth.
We arrived at a large camp of wooden barracks and were marched through the front gate up to a desk where two prisoners were ladling water into tin cups. The liquid tasted of metal, but I gulped it down as fast as I could. I didn’t have enough saliva yet to eat, or even an appetite, but I grabbed my crust of bread as if it were Hannah’s hand.
I slept that night on a wooden floor surrounded by other recent arrivals.
The next morning, after roll call, one of the head prisoners called out Izzy’s name, and when I answered, he led me into a barracks that had become a workshop for tailors and escorted me to the back, where three skeletal men were seated tightly together, hunched over a table piled with hundreds of watches. ‘Enjoy your new office,’ he told me, and just like that he walked away.
A tall, anxious-eyed young man with a shaved head stood up and shook my hand. I told him my legs were still unsteady and asked if I could sit.
‘Of course,’ he replied, standing aside and gesturing towards his chair.
He told me his name was Chaim Peczerski. He introduced me to his two co-workers, Jan Glowacz and Jakub Weinberg.
Jakub had a torn ear and spectacles missing a lens. I thought that maybe one of the Alsatians had attacked him. Later, when I got to know what he was capable of, I asked some other prisoners, and I was told he’d started a vicious fight with a tailor from Turobin who’d bitten him to keep from being strangled to death.
Chaim explained that the watches on their desks had been stolen from Jews, as well as from Polish and Russian prisoners of war. We were in a labour camp run by the SS.
I was so disoriented I asked him if we were anywhere near Lublin.
‘You’re in Lublin, you idiot!’ Chaim replied, laughing.
‘You’re a Hebrew slave working for Pharaoh now,’ Jan added, sticking a homemade cigarette in his lips and grinning.
He had a waxy, sweaty face that I found frightening – as if it were a mask.
‘You’ll work with me,’ said Jakub, and his tiny brown eyes darted falcon-like from my face to my hands and then my feet, as if he was on a stimulant. Only a week later did I realize why.
‘We’ve a lot of work,’ Chaim told me. ‘We have a quota to meet each day or we don’t get any bread.’
‘The problem is, I know nothing about fixing watches,’ I confessed. ‘I lied to the Germans.’
‘You what?’ Jakub demanded indignantly.
‘I lied.’
‘You old bastard!’ he spat out, and he looked over at Chaim as though to demand my execution. The youngest among us was apparently in charge.
