City of God (14 page)

Of course what drew me to the car was not its luster but the heat rising from the engine. So I was to have an unobstructed view of what happened. When Major Schmitz came out he was wearing his new custom-made uniform, including a rakishly blocked garrison cap. He
was a portly man with wide hips. Behind him was Srebnitsky, carrying the old uniform over his arm. The driver sprang forward to take this. He opened the rear door for his commandant and then the front door and was occupied in the next moments settling the uniform carefully over the front seat. Schmitz stood posing in his smart uniform and black boots with his hands on his hips and a contemptuous smile on his face. “But you won't pay?” Srebnitsky asked in a coy voice. The officer laughed. “Not one pfennig for Srebnitsky's beautiful work, even the sleeves lined, and all of it done in double stitching?” And he began to laugh as well. “Not even a cigarette for the old tailor who has worked so hard, the artist who has made this garment for the beautiful major of the Third Reich?” They were both laughing heartily at this joke, a Jew expecting to be paid. Srebnitsky suddenly frowned, his shoulders rounded as he peered closely at something on the new uniform. In his hand were his scissors. “Forgive me, Your Excellency, a bit of thread, one moment.” And putting his hand to the chest of the commandant, who looked skyward to endure this final snip of perfection, he yanked at the lapel and slashed the scissors-point downward across the front, a gesture so sudden that from one moment to the next a big flap of the ruined tunic hung down to the officer's knee. “Sew it yourself then, thief!” the tailor shrieked. “Thief, that's what you are, that's all you are. All of you, thieves, thieves of our work, thieves of our lives!”

The major stood dumbfounded, I think he had even cried out in fear. But his driver leapt upon the old man and clubbed him to the ground with the butt of his pistol. Then he began kicking him. “You dare to attack a German officer?” he shouted. “You dare to lift your hand!” He then aimed his pistol at the stricken tailor and would have shot him then and there had the major not commanded him to stop. Holding his ripped tunic against his chest, Schmitz was like a woman covering her breasts. He looked around to see who had witnessed his humiliation, and thank God he did not see my face, for I had turned my back and was disappearing into the alley between two houses. From this vantage point in the shadows moments later, I saw the car flash by in the street. I listened to the fading sound of the motor and then I ran back to Srebnitsky, who lay in the snow where he had fallen. His head was bleeding, he was coughing and poking at his throat and trying to speak. I knelt down beside him. He began to shake his head
and made an attempt to smile, and then he was coughing and cackling and coughing some more, and his eyes for a moment rolled up in his head. Then suddenly I was pulled to my feet by one of the neighbors. “Don't you know any better? He's finished, your old man. Move, run, get out of here!” And then he himself ran back to his house and slammed the door.

What he meant, that neighbor, was that when a head of family committed a crime or was otherwise designated for execution, it was the Germans' policy to kill his dependents as well. That is why when my parents had not come home I was quickly taken to the council office and given another name. It was to the council I ran now, by myself this time.

My arrival immediately stilled everyone in that busy place, the pale terrified face of a child a warning signal they knew all too well. What I had to say put them on the alert. Several boys were summoned and dispatched to spread the word among the houses and shops for people not known to the Germans to go into hiding. I sat there dumbly while these boys, whose ranks I was to join, ran off in all directions. In a matter of minutes, everyone in the ghetto knew what the tailor had done. After a while the news came back that he had been apprehended and taken to the Gestapo headquarters. The question now was how the Germans would adjudicate his crime. People began to gather in the street in front of the council office. Rumors were rife—the price for Srebnitsky's act would be thirty, fifty, a hundred Jewish dead. Several times Mr. Barbanel, the chief of staff, had to go outside and tell the crowd to disperse and go about their business.

In clear distinction to the public, who were becoming increasingly agitated, the council staff remained calm. The calmest of everyone, perhaps the source of the calm, was the council president, Dr. Sigmund Koenig, a handsome man in his sixties, a man of great dignity, a good six feet tall. Eventually he went outside and his mere appearance stilled the small crowd that was gathered. He told them he was awaiting a call from the ghetto commandant as to exactly what was to be done but that he doubted there was any immediate danger of a major action. He spoke almost in a whisper. Standing behind him in the doorway, I could barely hear what he said. He wore no coat or hat. The cold did not seem to bother him. He was neatly dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with a clean shirt and tie. I would
come to understand this was his only suit. It was threadbare, I had a tailor's eye for such things now, and it hung in a way that suggested his own physical wear and tear. His shirt collar was loose around his neck. His black shoes were also well worn, and I'd noticed the right eyepiece of his spectacles was cracked, so that his eye itself seemed fractured. Nevertheless, everything about him was meticulous. He was clean-shaven and he had this fine silver hair that was combed back in a long wave that caught my attention as something poetic, the pennant of some medieval knight flowing above him as he cantered into battle. He walked back to his inner office and took no notice of me. I wouldn't have expected otherwise from a man of his eminence.

It was sometime in the afternoon that a German soldier on a motorcycle arrived with a written order that the council immediately provide carpenters to construct a gallows in the town square leading to the bridge. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Koenig was able to reach the commandant by phone. He was told all Jews were to be in the square at dawn to witness the hanging of the tailor Srebnitsky. To everyone but me, it seemed, that was a great relief. Now that my pretend grandfather was finished, the council staff considered calmly what to do with me. From a search through the records they determined that no family was then available with a dead child whose identity I could assume.

Mr. Barbanel, the second in charge, a man I would come to revere, walked over to where I sat on a bench and squatted in front of me. He must have been about thirty-five or so, which made him by far the youngest member of the council. He was a thickset man with a good honest face, a thatch of black hair, and dark eyes under thick black eyebrows and a wide mouth and a Slavic ski nose that looked as if it had been punched into shape. He could joke, Barbanel. He could talk to a child.

“So Yehoshua X, man of mystery, secret agent, are you ready for your next assignment?” He had in his hands a garrison cap of just the kind I had seen on the other boys. And with no further ceremony, he plopped the cap on my head and I was thereby placed under the wing of the council itself as a designated runner, known to all as Yehoshua, though with no last name, neither Mendelssohn nor my own family name, and with no identity card for my protection, but instead the
runner's garrison cap with a yellow band that matched the yellow star on my jacket.

I suppose it was to keep me from brooding that I was quickly put on official runner business accompanying Micah, an older, gangly boy, on his rounds that evening as he informed his “customers,” as he called them, that they must be at the square at dawn. After a while Micah encouraged me to deliver the message. I managed all right. The old man would be hanged and now I was going around telling everyone to be there to watch him hang. I felt weird, as dizzy as if I had been turned around in circles. I was no longer the tailor's pretend grandson but a pretend someone else—a nameless public charge? a council runner? I didn't know—but in any case a boy who knew how to hide when a person was in trouble, and who knew how to tell everyone to come see the trouble the person was in.

I spent my first night upstairs in the runners' dormitory above the council offices in the grip of a cold dread. How sickening to see an old man knocked down and then kicked. And then he had lain in the snow with his eyes rolled up in his head. It was at that moment I should have helped him instead of running away. I could have stayed with him for a little while anyway, even if only to get him back to his house.

In the night, in the darkness, is when you see the truth. I didn't exonerate myself because I was a child.

Now another thing is that I had never before this been close to the actual management of the ghetto, though I had of course heard my father speak critically of the council. And so as I lay awake through the dreadful night, I thought of what I had seen in the office and I had mixed feelings about it. I had been treated kindly enough, that wasn't what disturbed me. It was that everyone was so calm, it was uniform, the calmness of being on the inside, of seeing the whole picture. And it was undoubtedly necessary if they were to function. But in a sense, to my young eyes their calmness, the effect of it on me, was to propose that what was happening was routine, as if this terrible power of the Germans over us were normal.

This Dr. Koenig, so burdened with his responsibilities—it may have seemed to me that he functioned at the level of the Germans and was their equal. Given his unassailable dignity, the Germans may have had the same impression, and perhaps to deny to themselves that this was so, they had given him, as I was to learn, the derisive title “chief Jew,”
a ridicule which let him know where he stood. Of course he was no fool, the situation did not have to be described to him. He understood everything. Nor did he deny to himself or the other members of the council what they might have been tempted to think—that their roles were not morally ambivalent. For every extra ration they argued for, or relaxation of rule, they paid with a concession. It was a brutal calculus of bodies and work and food and fuel and health and sickness. I do not mean here to question his honor, his fortitude, his nobility, Dr. Koenig. He had been pressed into leadership by virtue of the high regard in which he was held by the community. He comported himself with courage under the most dangerous circumstances, which I came to understand in some detail later. But at this time he did nothing about the tailor who was at the center of the crisis. Not that he could have changed anything, of course. But in my ten-year-old heart, wretched with its own guilt, it seemed to me that he and everyone else was quite ready to accommodate the disaster that had overtaken Mr. Srebnitsky and let it run its course. I have thought about all of this a great deal. This calmness that so puzzled me as a child was first of all the characteristic of doctors, who are familiars of death and are composed in its presence. Sigmund Koenig was, after all, a physician. But beyond that it comes of a capacity to respond with pragmatic realism to experiences that are surreal, a capacity given to adults, though not usually to children. And this is where the ambiguity occurs.

Of course all of these niceties of thought were later to vanish as I myself was connected to the administration as a runner, and absorbed myself in the drama of my duties.

At dawn the Germans lit the square with their guardhouse floodlights and the headlights of their trucks. Enough of the citizenry were gathered, perhaps a thousand, perhaps fifteen hundred, to fill the square and satisfy the authorities. There was absolute silence but for the idling engines of the trucks. Prominently in attendance were Schmitz and his staff, officials of the Lithuanian police, the mayor of the city, assorted soldiers, and so on. Mr. Barbanel had suggested that it might be better for me to stay back in the dormitory until the whole thing was over, but I chose not to. In fact I worked my way through the crowd until I was off to the side quite near the scaffold.

When they brought out the tailor, he was draped over the shoulders of two Jewish ghetto policemen and already half dead. His feet were
dragging. He could not walk, it looked to me as if his legs had been broken. They lifted him up the steps to the platform and held him propped under the arms while another policeman tied his hands behind him and slipped the noose over his head. His hands, those slender deft instruments I had admired, were mangled protuberances covered with dried blood. At the last moment before they kicked away the stand under his feet, Mr. Srebnitsky seemed to come out of his agonized stupor. He lifted his head and, of this I am sure, saw the scene before him clearly and, appreciating its magnitude, read his glory into it. You ask how I could know this: I had seen, we all had, the charred remains of the hospital victims, we knew the designated anonymity of the corpses machine-gunned en masse at the fort. I think now a mad triumphant light flashed from the tailor's eyes before the stand was kicked from under him and his frail body swung from the neck. There was no movement from him, no struggle, the life was gone from him almost instantly. The officials from the city got into their cars and drove off, the soldiers dispersed, the work details gathered in their ranks and passed through the gate and began their trek across the bridge. An S.S. man hung a crudely lettered sign around the corpse's neck: This Jew dared to raise his hand against a German officer.

The light began to appear at last in the sky. I lingered in the square. I had wanted Mr. Srebnitsky to see me, to see that I hadn't forgotten him. I sat down for a while with my back against the platform.

He'd had it in his power with his scissors to stab the commandant. For a moment I thought he'd done just that, so great was his rage. I have since concluded that he must have understood the disaster that would befall the ghetto were he to kill the man. So you see, what he accomplished was specifically self-sacrificial, a modulated act of defiance as deft and precise as his tailoring.

But after all these years, what lingers in my mind of this cantankerous old man, this iconoclast, this embittered soul, is that he let out my clothes as I outgrew them and saw to it that I got a new pair of shoes when the old ones no longer fit.