We Must Not Think of Ourselves

by Lauren Grodstein

I would love to live to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and shriek to the world proclaiming the truth . . . But no, we shall certainly never live to see it, and therefore do I write my last will. May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened and was played out in the twentieth century . . . We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us. —Dawid Graber, August 1942, Warsaw, Poland

The man came to my classroom on December 14, 1940, at 4:40 p.m.

I don’t want you to decide what’s significant. I want you to record. You are a camera and a Dictaphone, both.”

He spoke educated Polish with an eastern accent. His name was Emanuel Ringelblum. “I’ve heard of you,” I said. He was the one who was organizing relief agencies, soup

“I have an archival project I’d like you to be part of, if you’re interested.” He paused as if to consider his words. “It’s important work. I’ve asked several people I know—professors, writers—to take notes on what they witness during their time here, to write down everything that’s happened, from the time we wake up to when we go to sleep.”

“It is up to us to write our own history,” he said. “Deny the Germans the last word.”

“Our task is to pay attention,” he continued. “To listen to the stories. We want all political backgrounds, all religious attitudes. The illiterate and the elite. Every ideology. Interview everyone. Learn about their lives. I need the best minds here to help.” He paused, as if trying to decide whether to add something. “Will you join us?” I was flattered. “I will.”

“If they find the notebook, you could be killed,” he said. “They won’t find it.” He nodded, told me that we would meet on Saturdays at the library at 3/5 Tłomackie Street.

“Our group is called Oneg Shabbat,” he said. “‘The joy of the Sabbath.’”

Name: Adam Paskow Date: December 14, 1940 Age: 42 Height: 180 cm Weight: 75 kg I suppose I’ll start by telling you who we were. Several of us had been printers. A few had been dentists. About the number you might expect had been rabbis. Some of us, however, had practiced more unusual work: Lieberman, for instance, had been an ornithologist and, for a while, kept a stuffed hummingbird next to his mattress as a reminder of his former life.

I myself had been an English teacher, and in fact I remain an English teacher, the only one I know who’s still at it.

I teach in the basement under the bomb-crushed cinema on Miła Street.

I have six students sometimes, sometimes four, rarely none at all. Szifra Joseph comes regularly, but I knew her before the war, when she was my student at the Centralny Lyceum.

Szifra spoke to me of a house in the suburbs, several Polish maids. Her father had owned a clothing factory in Praga, but after the invasion some petty commandant forced him to hand over the keys along with a receipt claiming that the factory had been relinquished as a gift. Two days after that humiliation, her father shot himself in the mouth with the pistol he’d brought home from his service to the Polish army.

I have no family with me: my brother went in for Palestine several years ago, and now lives with his wife and six children on a cabbage farm outside Jerusalem. My mother joined him there in ’36, after the political situation here had become even more tenuous. She had suggested—begged, really—that I come with her. I was already a widower—there was nothing stopping me—but I was thoroughly uninterested in Zionism.

“But honestly, Anna,” her father said to his wife, shortly after our first meeting, “what kind of Jew is this? He has blue eyes! His hair is light! He looks like a Pole. He probably isn’t even really Jewish.

I had met Kasia in university, where we were both studying English literature—again, her parents were indulgent, and my mother was too grief-stricken from my father’s loss

Kasia and I married May 20, 1930, at the registry office of the courthouse, the same one I pass now when I walk to the Aid Society.

I also liked teaching poems because I believed poetry was where the English language really soared. It was utilitarian most of the time but somehow able to turn its simple grammar and plundered vocabulary into the finest poetry written: Shakespearean sonnets and Keatsian odes, and Chaucer and Eliot and Pound.

When I wanted wisdom, I found Dickinson; sorrow, Yeats; company in my grief, Wordsworth.

I was a fan, like many Poles, of Goethe and Rilke. Still, I was unsure that a language that could order children to be mowed down by gunfire was still a sane one to use for poetry, and anyway, when comparing the two, I found English more pleasing to the ear.)

“Do you know Merenstayn’s, Filip?” He gave me a rare grin. What child of Warsaw didn’t know this spot? To be a candy store in the middle of a ghetto was to be a paradox in the middle of a nightmare, but that didn’t change the fact that cinnamon balls and peppermint sticks were delicious.

“What’s a ‘Mozart chocolate’?” Filip asked. “Oh, it’s so good you wouldn’t believe how good,” Pan Merenstayn said. “A little candied hazelnut covered in chocolate, wrapped up in gold, with a picture of Mozart’s face on it. You know Mozart? The Magic Flute?” Filip shook his head. “Oh, that’s too bad. That’s a shame. If I were allowed to turn on the record player . . .” And here Pan Merenstayn gave me a look to see if he should go ahead and do it. But I couldn’t let him: It would all be too much, the candy, the promise of hazelnuts, the sound of Mozart. We could not have that much joy at once; we needed to parcel it out.

I thought: I will go to Merenstayn’s whenever I have a few groszy in my pocket. I thought: It is a miracle that it is here. One of the nicest parts of my childhood returned to me. I will go next week for a Mozart, and I will whistle The Magic Flute to my students, and I will hand out gumballs. But somehow, lost in the maze of the ghetto, I never found Merenstayn’s again, or maybe it had never been there in the first place, and I was already living in a dream.

First, we could no longer withdraw our money from the banks. Next, we could no longer own radios or go to movie theaters. Then, Jews could no longer teach in Polish schools. (And thus began my own exile from the life that I had known before.) We had to declare our property. We could no longer travel by train. Synagogues were closed. We could no longer mail letters abroad. We could no longer visit the parks. We could not sit on public benches. We could not see Polish doctors. We could ride only special Jewish trolleys. We could no longer employ Polish maids.

we were forced to abandon our houses and move to a new district, one and a half square miles of densely packed apartments and businesses in the old Jewish section in the middle of Warsaw.

The Nazis put up signs all over Warsaw claiming that we needed to be relocated because we carried disease. For the health of everyone, Jews had to separate from the “clean” Polish and German populations.

We were given ten days to pack the small amount we were allowed to bring and abandon everything else. And what apartments were we to find? And how were we to conduct our businesses or send our children to school from this entirely new location? Some of us lived in homes that had been passed down from our great-great-grandfathers. Were we really supposed to give them up?

Our new district was to be gated. Once we were in, we were to be locked in, like animals. We referred to our new home as the ghetto. After a chaotic few days, the gates were locked, on November 16, 1940, at two in the afternoon.

Name: Filip Lescovec Date: December 14, 1940, 10:10 p.m. Age: 11 years, 6 months Height: 140 cm? Weight: 30 kg? Filip Lescovec, age 11, plans on being a construction worker when he grows up, for he very much enjoys building things, as evidenced by the strange small shed he’s built on top of our apartment building at 53 Sienna Street.

There had been photographs in the Gazeta of rabbis with their beards cut off, made to dance for German soldiers as the soldiers smoked or threw bottles.

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?” Pani Lescovec stood surrounded by her husband, three boys, and about a dozen bags. It turned out they, too, had been promised this apartment—by a genial acquaintance of Pan Lescovec’s, a government lawyer they knew, who had told them the place had been empty for months and that it was theirs for the taking if they would agree to give up their comfortable home in the old city. “Yes, yes, Henryk Duda. Yes, he was the acquaintance.” When I showed Pani Lescovec my key, she shrieked again: “No, no, it can’t be!”

“What the hell is this?” Emil Wiskoff said, standing at the doorway, assessing the company in his apartment. “We live here,” said Pani Lescovec. “We live here,” said Emil, and soon enough it became clear that Henryk had snookered all of us out of our own places, for reasons we couldn’t begin to fathom (who was he putting up? why did he need our money? our apartments?), and that he had made various promises we couldn’t imagine were true: he’d find us papers, he’d arrange a passage out of the ghetto, he’d take care of our former apartments as if they were his own.

I was one of ten people in this apartment, and I had never felt more hideously alone. I sat on a cushion, cross-legged, and tried to read, but the words swam in front of me. “Duda’s just a shyster, that’s all he is,” said Sala Wiskoff, sticking her head into my alcove.

“How do you know Henryk Duda?” “He’s my father-in-law.” Sala raised her eyebrows. “Where’s your wife?” “She’s dead.” “Oh no. Oh, I’m sorry.” She paused, looked around my strange little living space. If I were her, I would have left, unable to handle such a confidence from a stranger. But Sala didn’t leave.

“What happened to your wife?” “She fell. Damaged her brain.” “Ah,” Sala said. She brought her knees up to her chest. “I’m sorry to hear that. Was it recent?” “Three years ago,” I said. She nodded, thoughtfully. “My mother-in-law died today.” “What do you mean today?” “I mean she was hit in the head by a Nazi guard during the relocation. My husband is walking the streets outside, weeping.”

I decided then that I felt comfortable in her strange presence. It calmed me, or at least made me feel less alone. “I didn’t like her very much,” she added. “Which is not a thing you should say of the dead.” “You can say whatever you want,” I said. “All the rules are different now.” “She was a terrible snob.” “Some people are.” “But also uneducated.” “As are many snobs.”

For years after my brother left, he’d sent me picture postcards featuring some novel aspect of desert life: a camel, an irrigation line, a date palm. Since we were boys, Szimon—now Shimon—had felt more attuned to his Judaism, or perhaps, more put out by it, which was almost the same feeling. He was three years younger than I was, and smaller and darker. He had never done particularly well in school nor fostered many outside interests, although he was a keen football player and could drink more beer in one sitting than anyone I’d ever met.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected to happen to him in Palestine—probably that he’d get stabbed in a brawl with a bunch of angry Turks—but instead he found a wife and a cabbage farm and a charismatic rabbi and some date palms, and a house made out of cypress wood and tin.

“Do you have regrets?” I asked, after a while. “About staying?” “How could I not?” “Does Emil?” “After what happened to his mother. Of course.” “I’m sorry—that was a cruel question.” “No, it’s natural.” Emil’s mother had been killed in front of the entire family for the crime of not taking off her wedding ring fast enough. She was trying—she’d said she was trying—but she had worn it for fifty years, and her finger had swollen around it, and the Nazi was screaming so loudly. And she had parkinsonian tremors, and it hadn’t taken much to kill her, really. Two blows across the head.

(But, truly, what would be the point of killing all of us? And how on earth could they pull such a thing off? And would the world really . . . let them?)

the Nazi just hits her. Twice.” “Oh, Sala.” She shrugged again, a sort of What can you do? Then she looked back down at the table. “And then he leaned down and took the ring off my husband’s mother’s dead body and put it in his pocket and walked down the street, as if nothing of consequence had happened.”

Emil tried to revive his mother, but then a soldier grabbed Rafel by the neck and told us to move or we’d never see our son again. And so we moved. As fast as we could. The soldier let Rafel go, thank God.” “Thank God “ “We had no choice but to leave Reva’s body in the street. Emil wanted to go back right away to bury her. He didn’t know that once we walked into the ghetto, we weren’t going to walk back out.”

“They say the soul of Jew who hasn’t received a proper burial will never be at rest,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly true for those of us the dead Jew leaves behind.”

“Everyone, perhaps you’ve noticed our newest recruit. This is Adam Paskow. He was the head of the foreign languages division at the Centralny Lyceum for fifteen years. He has a degree in English literature from the University of Warsaw, and a master’s degree from the same. Currently, he is teaching English literature classes several times a week for our boys and girls.”

“One of my students, Szifra Joseph, had attended Centralny before the war. She asked to continue studying with me and told some of the other young people she knew.

“Szifra Joseph? The daughter of Avram Joseph, the uniform magnate?” “Yes,” I said. “She speaks quite good English.” “She’s the beautiful girl with the blond hair?” “I saw her cozying up to a guard on the street the other day,” said the man across the room. “She should be careful.” “I doubt she was cozying up.” “Ask her,” Ringelblum said. “Ask her?” “We are creating a three-dimensional portrait of everyone’s activities, everyone’s survival,” Ringelblum said. “We are not painting some fanciful portrait of the last of the Polish Jews. We are telling the truth.”

Name: Szifra Joseph Date: December 30, 1940 Age: 15 years, 10 months Height: 175 cm? Weight: 55 kg? Szifra Joseph is the oldest of three children born to Irina and Avram Joseph, previously of Konstancin-Jeziorna, Poland. Before his death, Avram was the president and founder of the Joseph Apparel Company, situated in Praga, Warsaw, which for years produced and supplied the bulk of the uniforms for Polish hospitals and sanitary units. The family, therefore, was financially quite successful and lived in a large villa with a swimming pool, a greenhouse, and a gazebo on its grounds. The family employed a chauffeur, a cook, and several maids, all Poles, and found it especially distressing when the Germans decreed that Poles could no longer work in a domestic capacity in Jewish households.

the thing I miss most is—it might sound silly, but it’s the cinema. When they told us that Jews couldn’t go to the cinema anymore, that was the very worst of all the rules. A.P. Yes, it was particularly insulting. S.J. I did it anyway. A.P. What do you mean? S.J. I just . . . I knew I could get away with it. Nobody was going to demand to see my papers. And there were so many films I wanted to see! “Holiday,” did you see that? With Cary Grant? Ooh, I loved that. And “Jezebel,” with Bette Davis. And “Profesor Wilczur,” did you see that one? I don’t always love Polish cinema—I prefer American—but that was really good. Very romantic.

The problem was that it was hard for us to realize that we did not matter to anyone outside our own small company. For so long, we had lived under the illusion that our lives were still worth something to the broader community of mankind, and even though that illusion was shattered brick by brick (a 5:00 p.m. curfew, no going to the movies, no mailing letters abroad, no libraries, no telephones), we still refused to let go of it. Even though the truth was right in front of our faces!