We Must Not Think of Ourselves

by Lauren Grodstein

We could live—we could thrive—under any conditions. We had been doing it throughout our history. And so it was easy for us to decide that what was happening in our city, in our country, was more of the same.

There’s a poem by Wordsworth I often teach called “Surprised by Joy.” Despite the title, the poem is not about joy specifically, but about the strange combination of feelings that accompany joy in the midst of grief—when a person who has been deep in grief feels unexpected joy.

There should be another word for this feeling—a sort of sorrowful happiness, or a happiness that only deepens someone’s sorrow. The closest I can come to it is the Portuguese word saudade, which nears this feeling but tempers it with nostalgia, a wish for something that was and can never be again. A grieving person lives in a permanent state of saudade, but saudade does not incorporate joy. And grief might be simpler if joy never tried to intrude.

Name: Charlotte Grosstayn Date: January 20, 1941 Age: 11 years, 10 months Height: 144 cm? Weight: Too thin Charlotte Grosstayn has shown up to my English classes regularly since I established them in late November 1940. She lives on Śliska Street with her parents and her older brother, Roman, another student of mine, in an apartment they lived in before the relocation. In this way, and in others, Charlotte is luckier than most ghetto children: she never had to abandon her childhood bedroom, and her parents did not have to rid themselves of most of their belongings.

These children, raised in fire, will be some of the finest Jews who have ever lived. They will be the strongest and the toughest and the smartest. They will be the most proud and will have the most to be proud of.

Name: Sala Wiskoff Date: March 7, 1941 Age: 35 Height: 160 cm Weight: Not telling Sala Wiskoff, who describes herself as a “formerly active housewife,” agreed to be interviewed at the table in the kitchen she shares with nine other people, including me, in a converted one-bedroom flat on Sienna Street. Formerly of Saska Kępa, Sala was born and raised in Oświęcim, in the southern part of the country. She was the fourth child of Shlomo, a scholar, and Malka, a scholar’s wife. Her parents both died before the invasion; she believes her remaining brothers and sisters either perished in September 1939 or are surviving somewhere in hiding. For our interview, Sala wore a blue housedress that smelled like the soap she makes herself in a tin pot in the kitchen.

There were other ghetto nihilists, but I tried to avoid them—the ones who thought we all were doomed, or that there was no point in charity or kindness, since in the end it would keep the suffering alive only to continue suffering. These people were exhausting to be around, and confused their own darkness for wisdom.

Name: Emil Wiskoff Date: March 8, 1941 Age: 48 Place: Kitchen of our shared apartment building, 53 Sienna Steet, Warsaw, Poland Emil Wiskoff is an imposing figure. He stands at least 2 meters tall and weighs perhaps 115 kilos, and boasts consistently excellent posture. He has a ruddy complexion, thinning brown hair, a trim, well-greased mustache, and green eyes that project authority. He is often clothed in a well-fitting suit, which he wears to his position at the Judenrat. His laugh is as sharp as a dog’s bark. His voice is loud.

“Is that you have no will. You just accept things as they are. You don’t stand up and fight. You don’t believe in the power to change. You’re a realist, which isn’t a bad thing, but if the world were only made of realists the world would never change.”

Name: Mariam Lescovec Date: June 30, 1941 Age: 41 Height: Who knows Weight: None of your business M.L. I must warn you again, as I see you writing, that there’s nothing very interesting about me. How do you write so fast? A.P. It’s like shorthand. I have a system. Everything you say—I don’t stop to think. I just write it all down. I’m writing too fast to judge, by the way. So you never have to be embarrassed by what you say. M.L. And why are you writing down what I say? A.P. To have a record. I’m trying to collect a record of all the different people who lived here. All the different kinds of lives. M.L. Because? A.P. Because we don’t want to forget. M.L. Ha! As if we could forget.

That November, I began to truly believe I would spend the rest of my life in this apartment, that deliverance would never come. I would sit in my alcove and look at the pearl necklace and sometimes wonder at its grandeur and sometimes at its impotence. To trade it meant to trust that someone would actually get me a kennkarte, would actually ferry me to Stockholm, would actually keep his word to me, a Jew. Nowak, Henryk, the greed of a stranger, the goodwill of a stranger: none of them seemed particularly reliable to me. Any one of them could take the pearl, surrounded by diamonds, and give me nothing in return.

In December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The following day, the Americans declared war on Japan and, a few days later, on Germany. I put the necklace back in the space under the floorboards in my alcove. For the first time in a year, I thought that perhaps salvation was on the way.

We allowed these fights to simmer even in the relative calm of the Oneg Shabbat group; we had to be angry at someone, after all, and it was easier to be angry at one another instead of the Germans.

Ringelblum still stood straight, still darkly handsome, still well-dressed, the sadness just barely visible in his eyes. Yehudit still attended our meetings too, with her air of inviolable calm. They were both intimately involved with the soup kitchens and the Judenrat board; they knew the players at the post office and the members of the religious council. Ringelblum still had occasional phone access to New York, and so he knew the most current news of the war. He was a barometer, and we looked to him to know how to feel: When he was hopeful, we were hopeful. When he stood straight, so did we.

“Shabbat shalom, friends,” Ringelblum said. “What news do you have to report?” “A wedding,” I said, startling myself, as I was rarely the first to speak. Ringelblum nodded, made a note. “A religious wedding?” he asked. “Or courthouse?” It had been a religious wedding, overseen by a rabbi who lived on the top floor of our building, in the courtyard of the bride’s family’s apartment building on Leszno Street. “Wonderful,” Ringelblum said. “You attended?” “The groom has been my housemate for over a year,” I said. “I stood in attendance by the chuppah.”

The women danced in circles with the women, and the men danced in circles with the men, and then the bride and groom, breaking custom, danced in circles with each other.

“I live in that building,” said one of the Oneg Shabbat archivists, a dark-haired middle-aged woman. “I watched the wedding from my window. I painted . . . I painted a few watercolors of it,” she said, almost embarrassed. And then I remembered who she was, the artist who had painted lovely pictures of her toddler daughter. She removed a few images from a folder and passed them around; they were pale and spare, a small crowd in a courtyard, a distant bride, the sun shining in the cold. A group dancing in a circle, furiously, to keep warm and spread joy.

“This is exactly what it was like,” I said. “You really captured it.” Gela smiled. “It was so good to paint something happy,” she said. “Would you give this one to the bride and groom? Maybe they’d like a keepsake.” She passed me a watercolor of a bird’s-eye view of them as they walked together out of the chuppah, man and wife. “Tell them to keep it out of the sunlight. I make my own paints—they’re not very stable.” “I’ll do that,” I said, and Gela smiled briefly.

The surviving Lescovecs never returned to the apartment, and we never discovered where they went. After seven respectful days, I moved from my alcove into the maid’s room. I covered the bed with my remaining sheets, put my increasingly tattered clothing on the shelves. I hid the pearl necklace in the space between the bed and the floor. Finally, I hung Gela’s watercolor on a wall away from the sun. Despite my caution, however, the paint started to fade, and within days the painting was little more than a series of smudges on white paper, a faded wheel of color where a wedding had been.

In the distance, the lights of the Ferris wheel rotated through space. I told her that I loved her to try out what it sounded like, and once I said it, I couldn’t stop saying it. I told her in Yiddish, in Polish, in French, in Portuguese, in Latin, in my pidgin Spanish. I told her in Mandarin, in Cantonese. I told her in Russian. But my favorite, of course, was to tell her in English: three simple syllables, subject, verb, object. I (Adam Paskow) love (with my whole heart) you (Sala Wiskoff).

I loved the words for the sound they made, for the cleanness of expression, for the solidity of what they meant: I loved Sala, and therefore I had a reason to keep living. I kissed the warm soft back of her neck, which tasted like dust and salt.

Since Filip’s death, I had stopped asking the children to trade for things, so I, too, had been reduced to nothing but my ration coupons and the few zloty I earned every week. What was I eating? Bread flavored with sawdust, watered-down powdered milk. A few mornings before, I had walked into the kitchen and imagined Mariam Lescovec there, frying the skin from chicken feet; I was certain I saw her, even said hello, and then I realized I was dreaming.

Name: Jakub Joseph Date: February 20, 1942 Age: 10 Height: Maybe 139 cm? Weight: I have no idea. Szifra might know. J.J. So what do you want to talk to me about, anyway? Is this for English school? A.P. No, it’s not for school. J.J. Good! I was afraid you wanted me to talk in English the whole time. A.P. Well, you’re welcome to if you’d like. J.J. No, thanks! That language is crazy. No offense. A.P. None taken. (Jakub and I are speaking at the Aid Society soup kitchen. I had not planned to conduct this interview, but he sat down next to me as I was taking my break and I realized I had an opportunity to take some notes for the archive.

Ringelblum reported on more massacres to the east, and that a German soldier, Anton Schmid, who had saved hundreds of Jews in Lithuania, had been executed by his fellow Germans upon discovery. Ringelblum had known of Schmid’s heroism for several months and asked us to say Kaddish for the man. It felt surreal, saying Kaddish for a German soldier, but life underwater being what it was, we did as he asked.

“Paskow,” Emil said sharply. I sat, kept my eyes on my lap. “Deportations are coming.” “Excuse me?” I looked at up at him then. “The Judenrat has been asked to make lists of Jews here in the ghetto to be deported east.” “I don’t understand,” I said, although I did. “Jews will be gathered and taken to the train station on Strawki Street. From there, they will be transported to some sort of relocation camp in eastern Poland.”

“What will happen, Emil?” Sala asked. “We don’t expect them to survive,” he said.

Emil lifted himself, heavily, out of his seat. He went to the window. “For now, they are sparing workers, members of the council, Jewish police,” he said. “So we have some time.” “But only if you turn in your neighbors,” I said. “Correct,” Emil said.

“They are showing no mercy to the children,” Emil said. “They want to include the orphanages in the first deportation.”

“Meet me here the Thursday after next,” he said. “I’ll have a kennkarte.” “I don’t trust you,” I said. “You can trust me or not,” Nowak said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here Thursday. You don’t want the papers, someone else will buy them.” “This is my life,” I said again. Nowak shrugged, stomped out his cigarette, lit a new one. Walking home without the necklace, I felt surprisingly light. What was this lightness? It didn’t make sense. And then I realized: I had given it away. I had given everything away. This was the lightness that came with the freedom from hope. I practically floated all the way home.

Name: Adam Paskow Date: July 23, 1942 Age: 43 Time: 2:00 p.m. I find myself hiding from today’s events by scribbling in this notebook. This is cowardly, I know, the hiding, and perhaps I shouldn’t write any of it down for posterity. Perhaps I should pretend I spent the day distributing false working papers or hiding children in attics or shoving as many people as possible under holes in the walls to imaginary safety on the outside. But I have done none of these things. I have simply sat here at the kitchen table, pretending that what is happening outside isn’t happening. Yesterday we saw the posters: We were to report to the Umschlagplatz for resettlement to the East. Those who reported voluntarily would be rewarded with two kilos of bread and a kilo of jam.

Sala Wiskoff, my housemate, asked me what I had seen outside, and I told her nothing, because it was too difficult to find the words. (I still have some soup in my pail; for the first time in quite some time, I have lost my appetite.) At two in the afternoon, the streets here are emptier than they have been the entire year and a half we’ve lived here, emptier than they were on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, emptier than at the height of the typhoid epidemic. Those who have a house to hide in are hiding in their houses.

“What is a ‘runcible spoon’?” Charlotte asked, tripping over the pronunciation. “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t think ‘runcible’ is a real word. The poet—his name was Edward Lear—he liked to make things up.”

Holding my breath, I unbuttoned the coat and reached inside to where I thought there might be a pocket. There was indeed a pocket right there, in the satin lining. And in that pocket, as I thought there might be, as though I dreaded there might be, were two perfectly authentic gray Polish kennkartes for two boys, Jan and Piotr Krasinski, ages ten and thirteen. Birthdays, places of birth, region, religion. And, where the photos of Jan and Piotr should have been, small square photos of Jakub and Eli, Szifra’s brothers. Carefully, I rebuttoned her coat.

I put the kennkartes in my satchel and hurried up the stairs. I did not think to stop to say Kaddish, even though I had said it for a Nazi and for Jews I barely knew.

The guard relaxed. “Very good,” he said. He’d been expecting us. He said, “Go ahead.” And then, as though it were nothing, as though it were any other day and we were any other people, he opened the Chłodna Street gate. One day, I would give these boys the words of their mother, the remembrances of their mother.

How she loved her children so much that, like Moses’s mother, she gave them away. But for now, they were mine: my charge, my responsibility, my promise to Sala, a woman I had loved. I held their hands as we walked through the Chłodna Street gate. It was strange and immediate how the air outside the ghetto was cooler, cleaner. The noises on the street were of automobile traffic and bicycle bells. The boys’ faces were impassive and still.