He had what Grandfather had said: a factory, a raid, bodies in a basement, a dead child, a bottle of milk. He had what the books in front of him said. He had what he had about Grandmother. The rest would have to find itself as he went. There was an extra layer of confusion in that his protagonist would have to be concealed as Israel Abramson, but that was just a name on top of the page. Was there a reason Israel couldn’t have a sister? Was the beauty of invention not that he very much could?
Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1939 to 1945.
Israel Abramson
It was after the four-day pogrom in July 1942 that I decided I would try to escape from the ghetto, come what may. In truth, it was my sister who decided.
Our job in the ghetto was to sort through the clothes of the murdered. Skirts here, pants here. After a while, the Germans wised up and made people undress first. By the end of ’42, the clothes had no holes or blood. You could still smell the people in the fabric, though: sweat and hay and sour milk and something else that must have been fear. It became ordinary to hold a dead person’s clothes in your hand, to see a dead body in the street. One time Sonya — that was my sister — saw an infant trying to get milk out of its mother’s breast, but the mother was dead, completely dead. And you had to walk by, keep going.
One day we were returning home from the warehouse where I sorted the clothes. It was me, Sonya, two other girls, and a guard in the back of the truck. When we were turning onto Komsomol’skaya, the guard leaned into me and said, “There will be a raid tonight. Don’t go home. Hide somewhere.” I said I couldn’t leave without Sonya, but he made clear the offer was only for me. I didn’t know what to do, but Sonya bulged her eyes and mouthed GO. “Now,” the guard said. So I jumped. I will always remember him. Herr Karitko. He was old. Thin, wrinkled face. Not tall. Maybe he liked boys. You had different kinds of Germans.
Already, there were bodies in the streets. The Belarusians who worked as policemen for the Germans, they were even more sadistic. Tables had been set out in the streets. They went from street to street, sitting down for a glass of beer and a plate of drumsticks between executions. You know what a drumstick looks like after you haven’t seen one in a year? I had scurvy; I’d lost half the teeth in my mouth. I always kept it closed and mumbled because they shot you on sight if you weren’t healthy.
My mind was racing because where was Sonya? War makes you make decisions no person should have to make. But also she was the kind of girl who, if she told you to jump from the truck, you jumped. She was steelier than all us boys in the yard. In fact, she was the only girl allowed to play with the boys, not that she asked anyone’s permission. One time the boys from the next street were over for a soccer game, and they tripped Khema something awful. He had snot and blood coming out of his nose. Sonya went to the boy who had done it, a real lunk, a meter eighty and not even thirteen, and said, “Watch out for the branch,” and pointed up. When he looked up, she kneed him in the groin and kicked him in the shin. While he wailed, she brought him over to Khema by the ear and held him like that until he apologized and wiped up Khema’s snot with his own jersey. So she was like that.
I didn’t know where to go except our neighbor Isaac because Mother and Father weren’t home yet from the factory. (They sewed German uniforms.) Isaac lived with his young wife and a child. They had a double cellar, and said we were welcome there whenever we needed it, may G-d spare us from needing it.
When I got there, Sonya was tapping her foot on the floorboard. “You take your time, brother,” she said, and winked. I was about to ask, but there was no time.
We had just closed the door to Isaac’s house when the Germans appeared on the street. We were in such a rush to get inside the cellar that Isaac closed the floor latch poorly. By then it was too late to pull it shut; they were entering the house. But what our luck was — one of them jumped in through the window. And he landed on the floor latch, closing it all the way.
We heard them upstairs. “Come out, Juden, cheepi-cheepi.” I wasn’t breathing and clutched Sonya’s hand. I could barely see, in the darkness, how many of us were edged into the cellar. A dozen, maybe. Isaac’s wife, Shulamit, was next to me, holding their baby. Somebody wept into a fist.
When I heard the sound, my blood stopped. At first it was soft, colicky, like a whine, but then it got louder, pained. Shulamit covered her child’s face with hers and began kissing its lips frantically to stop the noise. “Hush, mein liebe, hush, ikh bet dir, hush.” I can hear her saying it now. She would have swallowed that child if she could. But the baby continued to bawl. It became quiet upstairs. For a moment, there was only one sound in the world.
By now, my eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see Sonya staring at Shulamit. It frightened me to see that look on her face, to see her capable of that look. I can’t say how much of what happened next is because Sonya stared at Shulamit as only Sonya could stare. Would she have torn the child from Shulamit’s bosom and done it herself if Shulamit hadn’t? Maybe my eyes were merely playing tricks. Maybe I was so afraid that I imagined Sonya had something to do with it. I have never told this story to anyone, and I am telling it now only because Sonya is dead, as my parents—
—are dead. As all my friends are dead. I am the Last Mohican, as my grandchildren call me.
I didn’t see Shulamit do it. She was right next to me, so I couldn’t have missed it. I must have shut my eyes, unable to watch. When I opened them, the crying had stopped. Shulamit held a white square pillow over the child. It had stopped moving.
Eventually, the soldiers brought every pot crashing to the floor and stormed out. When darkness fell, some of us crawled out to the small garden on the other side of the cellar and buried the child, Isaac scooping out the loam with his hands, his eyes blank. Shulamit didn’t respond even to Isaac. She lost her mind. She survived the war, but she was never right in her mind again.
We ate from the garden for four days, beets and carrots, one meter away from the dead child. The garden kept us alive.
After four days, we peered outside. It was quiet. Everywhere, bodies. Both of the families who shared the house where my family lived had been killed. The pogrom had started during the workday, so Mother and Father had remained in the factory, hiding in a steel bunker. When they returned to our street and saw the murdered neighbors, my father fell on his knees, thinking his children were among them. Isaac walked to him, barely sentient, and touched his shoulder. “Yours are alive,” he said.
They had to pull us out of the cellar by the armpits. I was embarrassed to need so much help. Somebody had given Father a liter of milk. In his hands, it was as white and clean as fresh snow. He gave it to me first as the boy, but I gave it to Sonya, though I couldn’t look her in the eyes as I did. She drank from the bottle with the hunger of an animal. I hated her in that moment.