Jewels and Ashes (7 page)

The room is saturated with learning: that ambience of cultured and humane fellowship which led me at an early age to identify with a continent I had never seen. Europe meant a sense of warmth and scholarship, love of family and tradition. It had the scent of yellowing manuscripts which evoked and spoke of bygone centuries hidden in mist-laden valleys. It was only in later years that the child began to be aware of cracks which undermined the fragile romance. Beneath the surface there hovered a different Europe of tribal brutality, where books were piled onto bonfires around which armies of the night danced in a frightening frenzy.

In Szymon Datner's study, Europe-the-haven prevails, in a room watched over by a wise guardian. Potplants are scattered throughout, their leaves spilling over with vitality. They reach towards rays of light that filter through double doors opening out onto a balcony. Books and plants, heart and mind, the Europe of my primal imaginings is concentrated in this one room hidden within the centre of 1980s Warsaw.

Szymon Datner lives out his remaining years in Warsaw, an internal exile, documenting the history of Bialystok in books and articles I have read on the other side of the globe. He is puzzled as to why I am so intent on exploring a city which he sees as one massive tomb.
‘A Yid derkent nisht zein Bialystok'
, he tells me — a Jew cannot recognise his Bialystok. In common with others I have met in this past week, he too has a refrain that ripples through his reminiscences.

As we converse, Datner's initial wariness fades and gives way to a fatherly warmth. I am, after all, the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski. Datner's eyes light up with the remembrance … Bishke, standing beneath the town clock behind a pile of newspapers, the transmitter of local news and gossip, the town crier who reduced momentous historical changes to a succession of headlines. He was the constant, a reassuring presence when time still had meaning, and when the young Datner, then a teacher of physical education at a Hebrew College, could still count on a future.

Bialystok is burning, and an old man in Warsaw is telling me that he is circling the flames, trying desperately to get through from the surrounding forests where he roams as a partisan and courier, moving in and out of the ghetto, delivering messages, smuggling food and arms, helping to foster and co-ordinate the Resistance, as he has been for many months, until this day when the ghetto is burning, and he cannot get through; and he knows that his wife and children are somewhere within, but all he can do is circle the flames. And over forty years later it seems as though he is still circling the flames, daring himself to come closer, then withdrawing, scorched, to pen the details of his vision as he retreats into his endless refrain: ‘A Jew cannot recognize his Bialystok'.

Datner fetches a large pre-war map of Bialystok which he spreads across the oak table. It is a detailed directory of streets, many of which have changed names or no longer exist. ‘The city you will see tomorrow', he tells me, ‘will be, at best, a distorted reflection of what once was.' It is as if, slowly and deliberately, he is wiping out any false expectations I may have, just as I am about to see Bialystok with my own eyes.

CHAPTER FIVE

SOON AFTER DAWN the Bialystok express emerges out of the subways of central Warsaw. A mist rises from the Vistula, unveiling a metropolis stirring into life. Just beyond the city limits a heron perches, motionless, on the banks of a stream. A woman dressed in pink sits astride a motorcycle at a level crossing. A farmer milks a cow on an embankment by the rail tracks; behind him, in the fields, rows of haystacks perspire vapours of gold-dust. Warmth spreads as the carriages are heated by an ascending sun. A moving landscape eases me into stillness. It is as if 1 have always been here, watching from a mobile window, tracing a path along the periphery of ancestral lands.

Open countryside gives way to the fringes of a city. On the outskirts loom high-rise housing estates. The rays of a midday sun mingle with the fumes of industry. The train slows down through a gauntlet of factories and emerges against a long platform drawing into Bialystok station.

A hand touches me gently on the shoulder, an unexpected greeting. I had met Witold's wife in Warsaw and she had offered me a room in their Bialystok flat. Witold welcomes me and we drive immediately to the centre of the city. A sudden halt, and we are in front of the clock-tower. ‘Give my regards to the town clock', were the last words my father had said to me when I left Melbourne. But he doubted whether it was still standing. And in a sense he was right. The clock-tower that overlooks the central square is a replica, erected after the War on the site where the celebrated original had stood. In fact the entire central enclave is a replica, recreated brick by brick in a land where memories cling tenaciously and demand to be honoured. Flowers in full bloom pour from balconies. Wooden cottages adjoin tenements that match pre-war appearances. Bialystok is far more ancient and beautiful than I had expected; at least, this is how it appears at first sight.

Witold leads me to a plaque inconspicuously attached to a building facing the pavement. It indicates that here once stood the Great Synagogue of Bialystok. ‘I was over there, on Friday morning, June 27th, 1941', Witold tells me, as he points to the corner diagonally opposite. The soldiers were annoyed at the nine-year-old Polish boy roaming the streets, hindering their work. They pushed him aside but he stayed, transfixed, as grenades exploded in nearby Jewish neighbourhoods, sending smoke billowing skywards. Menfolk were being dragged from their homes and driven to the house of worship. They were crammed inside, the doors locked and barred, the building doused with petrol and set alight. The intensity of the fumes drove Witold back. He saw windows broken and figures trying desperately to escape, only to be gunned down by the cordon of soldiers surrounding the inferno. The synagogue burned for twenty-four hours. Over fifteen hundred perished in the fire. This was the first Aktion; the day the Nazis entered Bialystok.

The tone has been set for my stay in Bialystok; an inevitable pattern, in fact, determined long before my arrival. Romance and terror, light and shadow, replicas and originals, hover side by side, seeking reconciliation, while within me there is a sense of awe and a silent refrain: I am here, at last I am here; and it is far more beautiful than I had imagined. And far more devastating. Yet, somehow, never have I felt so much at peace.

In 1320 a village is founded on the banks of the Biale by a Lithuanian nobleman, Count Gedimin. When my father tells the story he loves to separate the syllables. Any chance to dissect a word, any chance to take it back to its origins, he seizes upon with relish; for in words, he claims, lies the essence of things. Biale means white. Stok is a Slavic word for river. The kingdom of the White River is where we come from, says father, with one of his Romantic flourishes.

The village of Bialystok is handed down through generations of Lithuanian families until 1542, when the Polish King Zygmund August marries the widowed and childless Lithuanian Princess Varvara, and the lands of the White River become his private fiefdom. Six years later the first Jews settle in the village.

We leap through the centuries. Bialystok becomes entrenched Polish territory and the property of the Branitski family. In 1703 Count Stefan Branitski erects a wooden palace by the White River. Under Branitski patronage a house of worship is built in 1718 and evolves into a synagogue court around which Jewish settlement expands.

Count Jan Klemens Branitski the Second inherits the village from Stefan. As a child I would often gaze at his portrait in the Bialystok photo album, fascinated by his globular head. The Count's face is a fat full moon. A black toupee forms a perfect crescent on the uppermost rim. A formidable forehead descends beneath the crescent to thick but neatly trimmed brows arching over fiery black eyes. A handlebar moustache extends well past the extremities of the mouth, placed high above an enormous chin that collapses into several folds, rolling in waves across a bullish neck. A velvet cape is draped across a white blouse buttoned high onto the lower rim of the moon. The Count glows with the proud confidence of born rulers. The eyes, however, speak of something deeper, of cosmic visions and universes far beyond a mere village.

Jan Klemens propels Bialystok into the future. Anxious to expand, the Count invites Jews from nearby hamlets to settle and help build a town. In 1745 they are granted equal rights, and in the same year a wooden tower is erected over a municipal hall to be used as a prison for criminals on remand. Under the tower eighty shops are built and divided among Jewish families. Each family is given a key for which they must pay three gold coins — at least, this is how the story is told. We are in territory in which the boundaries between history and legend are thin.

In 1750 the entire settlement is destroyed by fire. Undaunted, the Count supervises the reconstruction of Bialystok. A more solid core of brick and stone emerges, with a new clock-tower — which is destined to become the first sight my father registers, as a two-year-old, dressed in a sailor suit, running beside his mother through the town square.

Count Jan Klemens Branitski dies in 1771 and bequeaths Bialystok to his third wife, Isabella, a sister of Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last of the Polish kings. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Bialystok's fate is increasingly determined not so much by local nobility, as by decisions taken in distant palaces, in the courts of contending empires eager to feed their voracious appetites for more territory. The ancient Polish-Lithuanian kingdom is dismembered in a series of partitions. Austro-Hungary, Prussia, and czarist Russia scurry off like hungry wolves clutching their share of the spoils.

The pace is fast; the game played for high stakes. Prussia grabs control of Bialystok in the partition of 1795. Napoleonic armies on the march eastwards take over the city for a year. In 1807 it falls into Russian hands. Napoleon recaptures White River territory in 1812. Three years later Czar Alexander the First regains jurisdiction and, for the time being, the ferocious game comes to an end; during the next one hundred years Bialystok is firmly under Russian control.

An invasion of a different kind takes place. The Industrial Revolution finds its way to Bialystok. In 1850 Nachum Minc and Sender Bloch establish the first silk factories, and the city is spun into orbit around steam-driven machines churning out textiles that are exported throughout Eurasia. Bialystok is harnessed to the assembly line, with both Jewish and German entrepreneurs directing operations. A new class of workers emerge, their schedules dictated by machines that permeate the tempo of their lives. Soon after dawn, sirens shriek the start of another working day, a typical day which will last for decades, throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. And thereafter', adds father, ‘the Biale River was no longer white, but a dirty ribbon polluted by industrial waste.'

In the surrounding countryside there are hamlets and towns where the hand-loom, the craftsman, the peasant, and the shtetl community move at a slower pace. In these settlements there live the families Zabludowski, Probutski, Liberman, and Malamud. Aron Yankev Probutski of Orla marries Chane Esther of Grodek; Bishke Zabludowski of Orla marries Sheine Liberman of Bransk. They are drawn, like so many others of their generation, into an industrial vortex called Bialystok. The lure of the factory, of an expanding city, can no longer be resisted. A young family needs bread, work, prospects for a better life.

Bialystok bursts beyond its boundaries, its outer limits trailing off into wooden cottages. In the city centre, three- and four-storey buildings shoot up in a housing boom during the last decade of the nineteenth century. By 1900 there is a population of 70 000: communities of White Russians, Tartars, Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians, Cossacks, Gypsies, Poles, and 40 000 Jews.

Steam power is replaced by electricity. The machines spin faster. Boom is followed by economic bust. Bialystok is on the roller-coaster again. My father is born in the year of the first Russian Revolution. The czarist empire is shaken to its foundations, and in the aftermath there stream shock waves of reaction, pogroms, confusion, and false Messiahs. Floundering empires are again on the prowl, and Bialystok is yet again prey to the wolves. The Great War erupts. The armies of Kaiser Wilhelm capture a city set adrift in a no man's land between past and future. There is fighting in the streets. Regimes come and go overnight. Europe is frantically sorting itself out. Red Army fights White Army. Poles, Tartars, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians flex their nationalist muscles. Each tribe wants its own territory, while Jews and Gypsies look on perplexed, not quite sure which way the wind is blowing. Mother and father run errands for their families in streets where armies sweep past them running east and west. At night they shelter at home to the sound of sporadic gunfire and artillery.

‘March, march Pilsudski', is the cry of the hour. In the 1920s the veteran nationalist triumphs and consolidates a reborn Poland. For two decades the infant republic remains poised in an uneasy truce between wars. Bialystok appears to flourish. Schools, secular and religious; houses of worship and study; cinemas and theatres; cafes, choirs, orchestras, and political parties all overflow with patrons, supporters, and fellow travellers. And years later group photos will appear in the albums of a vanished city, portraits frozen into still lives within which, if one looks closely enough, it is possible to discern the tiny face of my mother as a member of the Morning Star gymnastics troupe, or my father on an outing in the forests, with comrades of a youth movement called Future.

It could be said that these are good years: the harvests quite abundant; communal life intimate; love affairs permeated by the scent of forests; couples strolling arm in arm along tree-lined Sienkiewicza Avenue. And yet there are those who are boarding trains for distant ports, slipping away to faraway corners of the earth with a healthy sense of premonition, or just plain luck in having received a visa moments before the city gates are closed. To the west, armies are again assembling, with a ferocious hunger for conquest and territory, and a calculating madman at the helm.