The Storyteller Read online

  Hersz picked at a scab on his hand. His lips were trembling. "The next morning, we were divided into small groups by the soldiers. Your mother went with one group into a truck, and I went with another that held ten young men, all tall and strong. We drove up to a big stone mansion. We were brought to the basement of the manor house. There were signatures all over the walls, and one sentence written in Yiddish: He who comes here, does not walk away alive. There was a window, too, nailed shut with boards." Hersz swallowed hard. "I could hear through it, though. Another truck pulled up, and this time one of the Germans told the people who had been transported that they were to be sent east to work. All they had to do was take a shower first, and put on clean clothes that were disinfected. The people in the truck, they started clapping their hands, and then a little while later, we heard bare feet shuffling by the basement window."

  "So she is all right," my father breathed.

  Hersz looked down at his lap. "The next morning I was taken to work in the woods, with the others who had spent the night in the basement. As I left, I noticed a big van parked up against the house. The door of the van was open and there was a ramp to get inside. There was a wooden grate on the floor, like the kind you might see in a community bathhouse," he said. "But we didn't get into this van. Instead, we went in a truck that had tarpaulin on its sides. About thirty SS men came with us. There was a huge pit that had been dug. I was given a shovel and told to make it bigger. Just after eight in the morning, the first van arrived. It looked like the one I had seen at the manor. Some of the Germans opened the doors and then ran quickly away from it, while gray smoke poured out. After about five minutes, the soldiers directed three of us inside. I was one of them." He sucked in his breath, as if it were coming through a straw. "The people inside, they had died from the gas. Some were still holding each other. They were wearing their underwear, but nothing else. And their skin was still warm. Some were still alive, and when that was the case, one of the SS men would shoot them. After the bodies were taken out, they were searched for gold and jewelry and money. Then they were buried in the pit, and the towels and bars of soap they had been given for their shower were gathered to be brought back to the manor house for the next transport."

  As I stared at Hersz, my jaw dropped. This made no sense. Why would you go to so much trouble to kill people--people who had been manufacturing items needed for the war effort? And then I began to do the arithmetic. Hersz was here, my mother was not. Hersz had seen the bodies being unloaded from the vans. "You're lying," I spat.

  "I wish I were," he whispered. "Your mother, she was on the third truck of the day."

  My father put his head down on the table and started to weep.

  "Six of the boys who had been picked to work in the woods were killed that day, shot because they weren't doing their job fast enough. I survived but didn't want to. I was going to hang myself that night, in the basement. Then I remembered that even if I didn't have family left, your mother did. And that maybe I could find you. The next day on the transport to the woods, I asked for a cigarette. The SS man gave me one, and suddenly everyone in the truck was asking for a smoke. While he was being swarmed, I took a pen from my pocket and used it to poke a hole in the tarpaulin, and tear a long rip. Then I jumped out of the truck. They started shooting, but didn't hit me, and I managed to run through the woods until I found a barn, where I hid underneath the hay in the loft. I stayed there for two days, and then sneaked out and came back here."

  I listened to Hersz's story, although I wanted to tell him he was a fool, trying to break into the ghetto when all of us wanted to get out. But then again, if getting out meant dying in a van full of gas, maybe Hersz was the smart one. There was a part of me that still could not believe what he said, and continued to dismiss it. But my father, he immediately covered the only mirror in the house. He sat on the floor, instead of in a chair. He tore his shirt. Basia and I followed his example, mourning our mother the way our religion told us to.

  That night when I heard my father crying, I sat down on the edge of the mattress he had shared with my mother. We, who had been so crowded in this apartment, now had more room than we needed. "Minka," my father said, his voice so soft I may have imagined it. "At my funeral, make sure . . . make sure . . ." He broke off, unable to tell me what he wanted me to remember.

  Overnight, his hair went snow white. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.

  *

  It is probably the hardest thing to understand: how even horror can become commonplace. I used to have to imagine how you might look at an upior sucking the blood from the neck of a freshly killed human and not have to turn away. Now I knew from personal experience: you could see an old woman shot in the head and sigh because her blood spattered onto your coat. You could hear a barrage of gunfire and not even blink. You could stop expecting the most awful thing to happen, because it already had.

  Or so I thought.

  The first day of September, military trucks pulled up to the hospitals in the ghetto, and the patients were dragged out by SS soldiers. Darija told me that at the children's hospital, people reported seeing babies tossed from the windows. I think that was when I realized Hersz could not have been lying. These men and women hobbling in their hospital gowns, some too weak or too old to stand on their own, could not have been going to work in the east. The next afternoon, the chairman gave a speech. I stood with my sister in the square, bouncing Majer between the two of us. He had another cough and was fussy. My father, who had become a shadow of his former self, was at home. He dragged himself to the bakery and back, but he did not go out in public otherwise. In a way, my little nephew could take better care of himself than my father could.

  Chairman Rumkowski's voice crackled over the loudspeakers that had been erected at the corners of the square. "A severe blow has befallen the ghetto," he said. "They are asking for the best it possesses--children and old people. I have not had the privilege to have a child of my own, and therefore I devoted the best of my years to children. I lived and breathed together with the children. I never imagined that my own hands would have to deliver the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg . . . Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children."

  There were gasps and shrieks, shouts from the crowd around us. Majer was in my arms at that point; I pulled him tighter against me, but Basia ripped him from my grasp and buried her face in his hair. Red hair, like Rubin's.

  The chairman went on to talk about how twenty thousand people had to be deported. How the sick and the elderly would only tally thirteen thousand. Beside me someone shouted, "We'll all go!" Another woman cried out her suggestion, that no parents lose an only child, that those with children to spare be the ones to give them up.

  "No," Basia whispered, her eyes full of tears. "I won't let him be taken."

  She hugged Majer so close that he started to cry. The chairman was saying, now, that this was the only way to appease the Germans. That he understood the horror of his request. That he had convinced the Germans to take only children who were under ten years old, because they would not know what was happening to them.

  Basia leaned over and vomited on the ground. Then she pushed through the crowd, away from the chairman's podium, still holding Majer. "I understand what it means to tear a limb from the body," Rumkowski was saying, trying to plead his case.

  So did I.

  It meant that you bled out.

  *

  At the end of the workday, Herr Fassbinder did not let us leave the factory, not even to go home and tell our parents we would be staying late. He told the officers who demanded an explanation that he had emergency deadlines and was requiring all of us to sew through the night. He barricaded the doors, and he stood at the entrance with a gun I had never seen him carry before. I think that if a soldier had come to take away the little ones he employed, he would have fought his own country. This was, I knew, for o