The Warsaw Anagrams

‘You? Why should we waste our time killing an old man like you?’ he demanded contemptuously.

I felt cornered, and all I had with me was the truth. ‘Because I’m more dangerous to you than the boy,’ I replied.

‘And why is that?’ he asked, amused.

‘Because he’s young and may forget you if he goes on to lead a happy life, but I won’t. I’ll write about what you did to us and then dance on your grave.’

The malevolent guard smiled at me and lifted his club from Albert’s neck, as if my courage to speak my mind had purchased both of us our lives, but by now I was aware that the Nazis adored playing a game called Fool the Jew. I sensed the worst and raised my hand for mercy. And to cut a deal. ‘If you let us both live, I’ll tell you where to find some ruby earrings that I’ve…’

Rearing back with his club, Caligula ended my plea by giving Albert so brutal a blow to his head that the crack of his skull sounded like a branch being snapped.

The young man groaned. His head sagged, and his arms went limp.

The German kept hitting Albert until blood was flowing down his face on to the ground.

When he was done, he stood over the boy like a prizefighter posing for cameras. It was his theatricality that made me realize how vain our Nazi guards were, all of them eager to be stars in their very own Leni Riefenstahl film.

When the flashbulbs in his head stopped going off, he pointed his club at me. ‘You!’ he snarled. ‘You’re number ten now!’

The body has a life of its own; when the noose was placed around my neck, the constriction that had gripped my gut for the last few days burst open. Several hundred men were watching, but none laughed at the moist sag I’d made in the seat of my rumpled trousers. I wished I could have recited a verse of poetry equal to all the damned and shipwrecked faces around me, but my mind was dim, as if a sack had been placed over my thoughts, which were all jumbled together.

I remember looking for Izzy, thinking that seeing his face would help me to leave this world. When I recalled that he wasn’t with me any longer, my heart dived towards a panic so wide and deep that I felt as if I would never hit bottom.

I wanted one of Kolmosin’s incantations now – one that would make me land on the solid ground I’d known at Liza’s farm, even if it meant my back would be broken.

And I wanted a phrase of wisdom that would sum up what I’d learned over the course of my life.

I wanted more time. And more words.

I spotted Jakub. Hate is eternal, he was telling me with his ugly frown.

That was when I realized he’d needed a mortal enemy to keep himself alive.

A man in front – I’ll never know his name – diverted my attention with a small wave. He was bent and twisted, like a bonsai plant. He was crying.

His tortured form had made him understand what I couldn’t say. I was sure of it.

He held me through his jade-coloured eyes, and he assured me with all he was that I didn’t need to find any wisdom. All I had ever done and thought added up to Erik Cohen and that was enough.

I thanked him silently for his tears.

I made believe that Hannah, Stefa and Adam would welcome me beyond death.

Near the end, I heard a melody from out of my childhood, a folk song called ‘Hanschen Klein’ that my mother always sang in a mixture of Yiddish and German – and that I’d taught to Adam when he was tiny. Had I started to sing or had the man in front? I didn’t know. My senses were clouded by too great a wish for life.

When the hangman pulled the chair out from under my feet, I tried to hold my breath, but the taut heaviness of my own weight squeezed the air from me. Choking, I pulled at the ropes binding my hands, but the pressure drawing me down was too greedy.

And then the pain was gone. I found myself standing at the front of the crowd, next to the bent-backed man who had held me with his eyes. I watched my body swinging. And yet, looking down, I saw my own legs. I stepped my fingers across my cheeks and nose and lips, like a blind man reading a face.

I wasn’t who I’d been. And I was in two places at once. And no one could see me.

But I wasn’t scared. I felt as though all of the forward motion of the earth had ceased; that I’d stopped hurtling through my life.

But, of course, it was life that had stopped hurtling through me.

When I understood what had happened, I took a first step towards the front gate of the camp. And fell on my face. My nose and mouth pushed half a foot through the ground, into what felt like cold clay.

And yet when I picked myself up, I saw that I’d left no imprint in the earth.

Imagine a landscape continually sliding away from you – men and barracks slipping away into the distance, as though tugged by the horizon.

My first steps left me dizzy, lurching, groping along walls that weren’t there. I fell several more times, and on each occasion my hands penetrated several inches into the ground.

After an hour, I’d learned to focus only on objects close to me. What was in the distance I just let slip away. It took my feet and eyes a full two days to adjust to death. Then, I strode out of the camp.

While crossing Lublin, I looked up at a handsome woman leaning out her third-floor window, beating a sisal mat with a broom, and for a moment it seemed as if she could see me. My heart leapt towards hope, but then I realized she was glaring at a skinny white cat pawing some garbage behind me.

When I closed my eyes, each dry thud of the woman’s broom took form as a bluish square – one that quickly faded to pale green inside my inner darkness.

That was my first experience of a confusion of sight and sound, but later that day I’d notice that my heartbeat pulsed reddish-orange at the fringes of my vision, and that my breathing – particularly at night – appeared as a white-grey mist.

I headed out of town, northwest, towards Liza’s farm. Sometimes, I believed I could feel the turning of the earth below my feet. And when I grew tired, the cold December air began to shimmer around me, as though made from pearls. It was beautiful – and it made me understand that something of the world’s exuberance had remained far beyond the reach of the Nazis all the time I was in the ghetto and the labour camp.

I trudged on for two days and nights by my count. I often felt the urge to lie down, and on occasion I did, but I learned I no longer needed sleep.

I discovered Liza’s house empty and abandoned; Izzy was long gone.

On the floor by the potter’s wheel was the intricately designed skeleton of a dead mouse – the scaffolding of a life so perfect and unlike our own. Sitting by it, I began to think of Liza and of how quickly everything can be lost.

I realized I had to make the journey back to Warsaw, to where I’d started life.

Perhaps all the dead must go home before they can leave for ever.

CHAPTER 30

As I dictate these words to you, Heniek, I can see a group of twenty-seven Jews from the Laskarzew ghetto digging a pit in a forest just outside town.

As I was walking back to Warsaw from the labour camp, I’d heard the clanging of their shovels and left the road. They’d already dug a couple of feet down into the hard earth when I reached them.

It was very early in the morning. Birds were arrowing through the trees, and once the fog burned off, we’d probably have a day of sun. Five Polish soldiers and one German SS commander stood outside the pit, their guns drawn.