Fervor, page 8
“What do you want to know?” he’d ask.
“Anything. Whatever you want to tell me is interesting.”
“I disagree. What’s interesting in my life?”
“For a start, you survived.”
“No,” he said, suddenly angry. “No one survived. I got out.”
* * *
There ends Hannah’s introduction. What follows is an account of her subject’s life before the war.
Yosef Rosenthal had the misfortune to be born tone deaf into a family of musicians. Not that he was let off without trying. Along with his siblings, he began lessons on the upright piano aged three, and for years was made to practise every day or no dinner. His eyes stung from reading tiny scores that an aunt had transcribed by hand. He played scales and arpeggios until his fingers were stiff. Counterpoint was virtually impossible—like trying to run in two directions at once. Eventually, he committed swathes of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer to memory, but the music was only in his hands, not in his head. Definitely not in his heart. As he fumbled his way through recitals for his parents, they groaned and made faces. Afterwards, they asked, “Yosef, didn’t you feel anything as you played the music?”
“Miserable! I felt miserable!”
Over and over, he was baffled at being made to do something that brought so little joy to anybody, and at times drove uncles out of the room with hands over their ears. Poor little Yosef didn’t even like listening to music. Chopin, Grieg, whatever. All of it was too noisy, just reams of meaningless notes. As he later confided to Hannah, “I liked the girl who sang in the piano bar in Starówka and kicked her skirt in the air. Now that was music!”
Once he reached his teens, Yosef was finally permitted to abandon his musical studies. He devoted his time to running around with his friends, dreaming about girls. When the extended family asked after him, his parents said it wasn’t his fault, there was nothing anyone could do; Yosef was simply born stupid, “one in whom music goes to die.” At least his slow hands were good for something; with his school years behind him, Yosef was apprenticed to a tailor. It seemed a decent enough path for a dummkopf. No one was expecting that within a matter of months Molotov and Ribbentrop would have signed away the fates of an entire nation, Chamberlain’s peace would have shattered, the Wehrmacht would have smashed the last of Poland’s defences, and the plans of countless families would have gone up in smoke.
Longer than anyone else, Yosef’s mother persisted in her belief that the occupying forces would treat them humanely. This was the nation of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Handel. Germans were sophisticated, they spoke languages, revered culture. Nothing like the Poles. In the face of reported beatings and killings, she rationalised, “It’s like with a new boss. They start strict to give everyone a scare, then ease up later.”
When German decrees forced all Jews to relocate to the same corner of Warsaw—supposedly to halt the spread of typhus that was raging through the city—the Rosenthals had no choice but to vacate their modest home. “At that time,” Yosef explained to Hannah, “no one talked about anything else. Just typhus. We were more scared of typhus than Germans.” At the worst point in the epidemic, bodies were piled in the street, wrapped in nothing but paper, and left to rot as they awaited transportation to unmarked graves. Even Frau Rosenthal lost hope.
In the ghetto, Yosef and his family were confined to a single room, and Yosef now shared a thin mattress with his brother, Mendl, to whom he bore a strong resemblance. (Another mattress was shared by his two sisters, Helly and Tsirl.) So alike were Yosef and Mendl that once Yosef had the misfortune to be taken for his brother by a soldier. He was crossing Chodna Street, which led from the small ghetto to the large ghetto, where he hoped to trade stolen bric-a-brac for bread and soup. Moving between the ghettoes was always an ordeal. The road intruded into the Aryan Quarter, and before Jews were permitted to cross, they had to wait for patrolling Germans to halt the traffic. At busy hours, hundreds of Jews bunched at either side of the street. To amuse themselves at such times, on-duty Germans pulled musicians from local bars and ordered crippled and elderly Jews to dance to their music. A soldier, who was missing the top half of one ear, spotted Yosef and frogmarched him to an upright piano that had been dragged from across the street and lost its tuning. Once he’d got Yosef seated, he ordered him to play, thinking it was Mendl, the Jew whose artistry he’d rhapsodised about to his friends earlier that day.
Terrified of letting the man down, Yosef attempted a piece he could get through with few mistakes: the slow movement of “The Moonlight Sonata.” A few bars in, the soldier smashed Yosef’s hands with his truncheon, producing a loud, mangled discord. Pain seared through Yosef’s fingers.
“Cut the maudlin shit, eh! Give us something exciting, a dance tune!”
The other musicians had stopped playing. Nobody danced. Three soldiers stood round the piano now, waiting for Yosef to resume. Bending to the keys once more, he struck the opening notes of Bach’s “Minuet in G Major,” another staple of beginner keyboardists. That bright melody had never sounded more lifeless. Falling harder even than last time, the truncheon crushed his hands against the ivory. His knuckles bled.
“What’s wrong with you today?” the man demanded. Yosef said nothing. He heard the sound of a gun cocking, the barrel pressed to his skull. In his ineptitude, he’d enraged the one-eared man, who now shouted incomprehensibly. What could he play? He knew that whatever happened, he would never make the crossing into the large ghetto, would never see his family again. Instead, he would be executed for the crime of humiliating a German, and his body would lie beside the out-of-tune piano for any child to loot until the following morning, when Mendl or his father would collect the remains. Lacking any means of defiance, he let his hands fall to the keys and started to play, he didn’t know what, allowing his stubby fingers to chase each other over the keyboard of their own volition. And as the officer grew red in the face, puffing out his cheeks in rage, his two friends laughed and cheered. Yosef kept playing, not turning his head, just staring at the white and black keys bobbing up and down, up and down. When he reached the end of his clownish performance, thumping the major triad he’d started on, he still hadn’t been shot.
“What else do you know, Jew?” an amused voice asked.
His oppressor had at last discovered his sense of humour, deciding he liked Yosef’s terrible musicianship even more than his brother’s immaculate playing. The Germans kept him there for over an hour, calling out “Bravo, Maestro, Bravo!” while he hammered away ever more madly at the instrument he had hated since childhood.
SEVEN
One evening, Hannah paused on her way up to the top of the house to look in on her husband, who was reading in the study. She asked him if he knew who Ariel is.
Eric shrugged. “You tell me.”
“It’s a name your father mentions sometimes, then immediately clams up. He never spoke about him when he was younger?”
“Never.” Eric considered. “There’s an Ariel mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe. A lesser angel?”
“That’s not it. He’s talking about a human being. A friend from the old country maybe.”
Eric sighed. By now, the interview sessions between Hannah and his father had become an unignorable routine. “I’ve been wanting to say something. I’m not sure it’s good the way you go up there, stirring up the past.”
“Not good how?”
“When I was a teenager, in the days he started talking about the war, I used to hear him at night, weeping. The sobs came right through the wall. My father, my invincible father! Mame told me it was foxes. And now you’re putting him through it all over again.”
“Darling. He never stopped weeping.”
By now Hannah’s project had taken possession of her. She woke up, she listened to her tapes, she made notes, she spoke to her father-in-law, then she made more notes. Searching her own conscience, she found it clean. The work needed to be done, and who was better suited than her? She was on God’s path.
“Are you saying I should stop?”
“I’m saying you should be careful.” Eric picked a loose fleck of wood from the window frame. “There are some fields,” he said, “that should not be churned up.”
* * *
Survival in the ghetto depended on several things: not starving, not contracting disease, avoiding deportation, and not angering Germans. The safest course was to join the Jewish police, who imposed Nazi will within the ghetto walls. These men were responsible for choosing deportees, and generally found favour with the occupying soldiers. Although Yosef had friends among the police who tried to recruit him, he turned them down. “If I went with them,” he explained, “my whole family would turn their backs on me.” He did, however, sidle up to the authorities in other ways. He earned a reputation for repairing uniforms for soldiers. This work was of course unpaid, but not always unappreciated. A man named Leutnant Heinrich Beck, for instance, took a shine to the boy. Beck had seen his recital on Chodna Street. “I like your ugly face,” he told Yosef when they first met. “You look just like my step-mother.”
Beck treated Yosef to cigarettes and the odd beer for his labour. When Yosef, emboldened by drink, asked for help procuring coloured threads to embroider yarmulkes and other religious garments, the leutnant said he’d see what he could do. A week later, the officer brought him a box containing various cast-offs and balls of thread. “Make your Jew hats,” he said. “And be grateful. I’m risking my life here.” The German laughed. Both knew that the one whose fate was on a knife-edge was Yosef. Just that morning, two young men had accused him of collaboration. It was only after Mendl stepped in that they left Yosef alone. By now, Mendl was a respected member of the Underground; he helped to smuggle ammunition from the city, concealed within bags of flour.
According to official information, the Jews who were transported from the ghetto in packed train carriages were resettled in work camps abroad. No one believed this. Why send the sick and the elderly, why send infant children to work camps? A day came when the entire Rosenthal household was selected for deportation. Not daring to go to Beck, Yosef enlisted the help of an old family friend, a carpenter who’d sold his soul by joining the Jewish police. “Your father cuts me dead in the street,” the carpenter said. “Now you want help?”
“Please.”
“I can probably get you and Mendl taken off the list. Young men are always useful.”
“And my sisters? Helly and Tsirl?”
“Only the young men. That’s the best I can do.”
Yosef’s mother and father boarded a train the following day, along with their two daughters. As Frau Rosenthal kissed her sons goodbye, she wished them both long life. Returning to the empty apartment, the two brothers sat in silence. In one corner, Tsirl’s clarinet case. Neither Yosef nor Mendl could find anything else to look at.
“We should be on that train,” Mendl said. “We should have swapped with the girls.”
Yosef said maybe there really were work camps for the Jews. In the East, somewhere, a munitions factory. And his brother said, “Grow up.”
While preparations for the uprising were under way, Mendl taught Yosef how to make a petrol bomb from a milk bottle, some rubbing alcohol, motor oil, a cloth, and a cigarette lighter. He then pressed a gun into his little brother’s hand. Yosef tried to picture himself shooting a man up close. Herr Leutnant, for instance, with a hole punched through the side of his face. He passed the gun back to his brother. Give it to someone who knows how to shoot, he said. The rebellion was pointless, everyone knew it, like ants staging an uprising against children with stomping boots. Mendl was among the first casualties, his body torn by bullets, leaking onto the pavement. Exactly nothing was accomplished—the rebels were slaughtered, order restored, and the survivors loaded onto trains. Leutnant Beck paid Yosef a final visit during the liquidation. “My friend, did you know what was coming? Be honest, now, I won’t tell anyone. No? I don’t believe you. You should have been making helmets, eh, not skull caps. And Jews are supposed to be clever!” Before leaving, he thumped Yosef on the back and wished him luck. Viel Glück. He would put in a good word for him, he said, with colleagues on the other side.
Hannah asked Yosef what, looking back, he thought the Leutnant meant. Was this one final insult, gallows humour at its cruellest, or was he expressing genuine sympathy? Did he hope you’d survive? Yosef shrugged. “What does the hope of one Nazi matter? He is dead. He froze to death in Stalingrad, or was killed with machine guns in Normandy, or he got fat, and died with cancer after the war. Who cares? He’s dead. Everybody I know, Jews, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, all dead now. Everybody dead.”
* * *
The central chapter of the book, the heart of Hannah’s narrative, opens with Yosef’s arrival in Treblinka. As the train slowed to a stop, the peasants who lived and worked alongside the factory of death ran parallel to the tracks and gestured to the new inmates by drawing their hands across their throats. If this was a warning, to what end? Even supposing that after months of ghetto-deprivation and then the interminable hours crushed into a cattle car without sleep, without food, without water, if after all that there was a single human being still capable of making a run for it, the question remained: Where could you run to?
In the lager, Yosef wished he’d worked harder at the piano. “Some Jews got easy lives for themselves, playing in the band,” he explained to Hannah. While this might have been true, musicianship was no guarantee of safety. Yosef never saw any of his siblings or cousins again, despite their precision on violin, on the keys, and on the clarinet. The monsters put instruments in their hands, they made requests, they clapped and whistled derisively, and then they murdered them, all the same as the non-musical Jews, and burned the corpses afterwards, and sucked the ashes through the chimneys, and watched the drift of the black clouds.
“Here, see this candle,” Yosef said to Hannah, during one of their sessions. “What burns, the wax or the wick?”
“The wick, surely.”
“The wick doesn’t burn. The wax melts and cools it down. By itself, the wick would burn in one minute. Young people don’t understand nothing. Too much liquid, flame drowns. Yes? It’s the gas that burns.”
“What gas?” Hannah asked.
“From the wax. The wax turns into gas and burns. The package is the fuel. You see? This is the same concept in the lager. Burning human beings is tricky. The human liquid, the fat, drowns the fire. Fire dies, you have to start over.”
Yosef was shaking his head. Hannah knew he was trying to tell her something important, but she couldn’t see what it was. Not yet.
* * *
Music seemed to follow Yosef through life like a bad joke, the one scrap of his world before the war that nothing could shake loose. In Treblinka, he met a cultured man, a great lover of the arts. Unusually for a Jew, he was more comfortable speaking Polish than Yiddish. One day the man was crying into his hands, and Yosef asked him what was wrong. He had not been beaten, he had a good shirt, and there was bread in his pocket. Why was he so upset?
“Listen. Do you hear that?”
A waltz blared from the camp speaker system. Yosef recognised the music, vaguely, but could not have named the composer.
“How could they desecrate immortal Chopin?”
Yosef flared with anger. “Chopin?” he said. “That bastard made my fingers bleed when I was six years old!”
When Yosef came across the man again at evening roll call, he was even more miserable. Feeling sorry for this stranger, upset about things that no longer had any meaning, Yosef decided to cheer him up. He offered him a half ration of bread he’d somehow acquired.
The man devoured it in seconds. There was a case for eking it out, but that meant concealing the bread on your person, always dangerous. In the lager, there was only one real hiding place: the stomach.
Yosef said, “My grandfather was a pianist, and once shook hands with Chopin. Take my hand. Go on. Touch my hand, and through me you can reach all the way back to the master.”
It wasn’t true. His grandfather did meet a famous composer, once, but it was only Moniuszko, now largely forgotten. It was obvious the man of culture had already succumbed to despair. Yosef had seen enough to know he would soon be a Musselman, one of those empty husks, and before the month was out, he would be incinerated. But that day, at least, he didn’t only shake Yosef’s hand. He brought it to his lips and kissed it, then smoothed down the kisses.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m getting out of here. There’s a plan. Let me tell you.”
Yosef’s eyes moved to the watchtower, the barbed wire. “Don’t be stupid. No one gets out.”
Hannah asked her father-in law if the plan came off. Did anyone make it out alive? Yosef only sighed.
“But there were escapees,” Hannah said. “Not many, but some.”
Her father-in-law waved his hands dismissively. “Fairy stories for children,” he said.
* * *
A couple of weeks after Eric first confronted Hannah about her interviews, he finished work unexpectedly early and was home at teatime. Wandering up to his room to change out of his suit, he found Elsie at the foot of the stairs to the attic.
She said she was looking for a safety-pin she’d dropped. “Look, here it is.” She plucked it from the carpet and held it to the light. Muffled voices came from the room above, audible if you strained your ears.
Eric led his daughter to the kitchen downstairs, then shut the door. “What did you hear?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
Elsie pointed her big toe and made a figure of eight against the tiles. “Just some stuff about Zeide’s days in Poland.”
“That’s not nothing, then.”
“Ok. Can I go now?”
