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. Puławy 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 Głowacz 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.
‘I had to protect a friend,’ I explained.
‘That’s fine, but you’re not working with me!’ Jakub snarled.
I stood up to go, but Chaim pushed me back down roughly. ‘What do you really do?’ he asked.
‘I’m a failed novelist,’ I replied, since it seemed safer to keep pretending I was someone other than myself.
Jakub laughed at the absurdity, and Jan sneered, ‘You’re useless!’
‘Get up!’ Chaim ordered. He pointed to the door. ‘Wait outside while we talk.’
