The Street Sweeper (26 page)

Adam thought he might be hungry. He was having trouble opening his peanuts. In disgust with himself he ended up tearing violently at the pack and some of the peanuts flew towards the front of the plane as though more serious than Adam about getting to Chicago. With salt on his hands, Adam watched them fly and then crash-land. He had no children. His parents were long dead. He’d tell people at the Illinois Institute of Technology that he was a historian from Columbia University in New York but soon that wouldn’t be true. When wouldn’t it be true? How fast did the plane fly? A man across the aisle and one row ahead turned back to look at Adam and what was left of his peanuts. Adam smiled weakly. He felt there were bits of peanut caught between his teeth. What was he doing flying out to Chicago to examine the sixty-year-old work of an unknown mid-western psychologist whose name was a little bit like the name an old man in Boston once wrote on a scrap of paper? This was absurd. Adam looked at his salty fingers and thought, Fuck, I hate me.

*

‘He came back out into the street. It seemed to me I had been waiting for an hour but it was only really a few minutes. I don’t know how long it was. He looked around the street, which was still empty. With his finger he beckoned me to come inside to his house. I didn’t know what he was going to do but I did as he wanted. I could have tried to run away, but to where? And, anyway, he could have shot me in the back with a pistol. It was still chilly at that time and he wore a coat. Perhaps he had a pistol inside the coat. I didn’t know.

‘We went inside, he closed the front door behind him and he told me to wait in the hall. He walked away from me into a room, maybe it was the bedroom, and he closed the door. I listened but I couldn’t hear much what he was saying. It was more like loud whispering between him
and a woman. This woman was his wife. After some minutes he came out of the room alone. He told me that I could sleep in the unfinished upstairs part of the house but in the day I would have to go somewhere else. I thanked him and then he went and got his wife. She looked at me like I was something she had never in her life seen before, a strange animal. She seemed fascinated. Maybe she was even a bit afraid of me. I don’t know. It was not how the guards who took us from the ghetto to work looked at us. They looked at us with contempt but it was different with her. It was a kind of fearful fascination; I would describe it like that. I nodded to her, not knowing whether I should shake hands with her or even with him.

‘He showed me upstairs and told me that he would come in the morning to make sure I was awake before the sun came up. I had to leave there before the builders came to start work on the upstairs. Then his wife came up behind him with some bread. They used a ladder. I don’t know what he had told her. I didn’t even know for sure if she knew I was a Jew but I guessed because of the way she looked at me that she knew. Perhaps this was the first time that the reality of what the Germans were doing there was getting through to her. I didn’t know what she knew. It was hard to imagine that she couldn’t know what was happening to us in the ghetto a few streets away from her new house, but perhaps she didn’t know. Even outside the ghetto they had hanged some Poles, non-Jews, and made their neighbours watch. But if she didn’t see this and nobody told her …’

*

Adam Zignelik checked into what looked like an out-of-the-way truck stop passing itself off as a hotel in a neighbourhood that had been described on the internet as downtown Chicago but which felt more deserted than any downtown should feel. A website had lied. A few days earlier he had not ever heard of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Now he was instructing a cab driver to take him there on Chicago’s south side. Though he had little time to observe his surroundings and was concerned not to look an idiot to the young professor he was due to be
meeting in the office of the School of Psychology, Adam couldn’t help but notice that, with its unusual variety of greenery among a mix of very old and very new buildings, some almost ostentatiously modern, the campus was unlike any he had ever seen before.

‘That’s the Mies van der Rohe touch, amazing, amazing architect, very famous,’ the young psychology professor waxed lyrically, walking Adam out of the building and escorting him to the Galvin Library, the institute’s largest library. ‘You should take a tour of the campus, if you’ve got the time. We often get people visiting just for the architecture. I hate to do this to you but I’ve got to rush. It was … What did you want to see again? It was the Border stuff you wanted to see, yeah?’

Within minutes Adam was in a dimly lit basement with some boxes filled with the files and papers of an academic psychologist who had worked there some fifty to sixty years earlier. Alone, Adam started to question the sense of the expedition. Not knowing exactly what to do next, he took out a pen and notebook and started jotting down whatever random facts of interest he could find while at the same time trying to shut out the voice in his head, his own voice, telling him in sharp and shrill bursts that he was a charlatan.

So … It wasn’t until 1939 that Armour College and Lewis University merged to become the Illinois Institute of Technology or, as everyone seemed to call it, IIT.

Adam had heard of Armour. An important Chicago figure or family, yes, but who was Armour, exactly, again? Then he read that Armour College was the bequest of Chicago’s Armour meat slaughtering, processing and packing dynasty. The Lewis money came from real estate back in one of Chicago’s booms.

Henry Border had been there from at least the time of the merger in 1939 in what was then the Department of Psychology and Philosophy. Before 1939 he had taught part time at Lewis, whose students were working class and/or immigrants, mostly men who, for various reasons no document of the time would make specific, were unable to get into the University of Chicago or Northwestern. Border himself, though, got his PhD from Northwestern some time in the 1930s. Adam read that he was a ‘student of Wundt’. Who the hell was Wundt? Wundt, he
discovered, was the ‘father of experimental psychology’. That sounded impressive. What was Wundt’s student doing teaching workers and immigrants part time at a nascent mid-western university? And how deep was the interest in psychology, experimental or otherwise, of the no doubt numerous workers and immigrants enrolled there as students? But Border could have been Wundt’s ‘student’ only in the sense of following Wundt’s methods or belonging to some Wundt-inspired school of thought because Wundt’s famous proto-typical experimental psychology laboratory was in Germany, in Leipzig. Furthermore, Wundt died in 1920 so Border can have been his student only in the way he was also a ‘student’ of Francis Bacon who died in the seventeenth century. What an embarrassing waste of time this could be.

‘You’re such an idiot,’ Adam whispered to himself. ‘The only saving grace here is that no one can see you wasting your time like this.’

*

‘I fell asleep in their second floor what was not yet finished,’ Mr Mandelbrot continued. ‘The cold came in through the missing windows but I was exhausted and fell asleep very quickly. The next thing what I knew was the SA man standing over me in the dark. I didn’t know where I was. It was morning but the sun was not yet up. He looked down at me and said good morning. He had come to wake me before the civilian workers came to start work on the second floor where I had slept. He told me I had to go. If I made it through the day I could come back there. I said good morning to him.

‘I went down the ladder and away from the house into the streets. I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe I should go back to the ghetto. My parents, my family, didn’t know where I was but I heard and then saw the work detail from the ghetto being led from the streets of the ghetto on the way to work. I hid and watched them go past under guard, none of them talking or they could be struck. I looked at them and saw what I must have looked like the day before this. What should I do?

‘I spent that day hiding in the streets around the ghetto wondering what should I do. At night when the sun was gone and when I knew
the civilian workers would be gone, I went back to the house of the SA man and his wife. Had I done the right thing? I didn’t know. Every day I didn’t know what was the right thing to do from one minute to another minute, but if you were still alive it means it was the right thing to do. But you only knew when the minute had passed and then you had no time to relax; you had to think of the next minute. I heard that they had started taking the Jews of Dabrowa Gornicza to a ghetto in Sosnowiec. Perhaps my family had already gone or would go the next day. Should I go to try to find them? Were they still all together? Maybe it was too late to find them in Dabrowa Gornicza. Would I be killed just trying to get back into the ghetto? I stayed like this upstairs in the house of the SA man every night for five or maybe six weeks until one day the SA man and his wife invited me to supper.

‘They sat me down at a table in their kitchen. He was on my right side, she was on my left. I was in the middle of them. The table, I remember, had a white lace tablecloth. There was more food on the table than I had seen since the war started. Chicken, cabbage, everything was there. They told me I should eat. I wanted to eat everything on the table but I started off slowly so that they would start to eat and not see how hungry I was. In the ghetto I was hungry every minute. I could see them looking at each other, the man and the wife. They kept looking like they had something they wanted to tell me and then he said it. The second floor would be finished very soon and this night was going to be my last night there. After this dinner the wife couldn’t look at me.

‘By now they had definitely begun the process of collecting the people what were at the ghetto at Dabrowa Gornicza to take them all what were still alive to Sosnowiec, those who had not died of starvation or of some disease. I thought that if my family was still alive they would be now probably in the ghetto at Sosnowiec. You can say it, Sosnowiec. Mr Lamont, you say it.’

‘Sos-nov-ietz.’

‘I could not stay any more at night in the second floor of this
Volksdeutsche
SA man and his wife and I decided to go to Sosnowiec. So I began this journey to Sosnowiec. Through my father and the butchery business what he had and my own dealings I knew a lot of farmers
and a lot of the people around from the villages what were in the area. There were many places I could go where the people, Poles –’ ‘Not Jewish?’

‘Not Jews, of course not. Jews then, all Jews in Poland were in a ghetto or hiding or they were dead. These were non-Jewish Poles, Polish farmers, and I knew them but I was ashamed to see them like this. I was wearing the same clothes what I had on. They knew what was happening to the Jews; some of them were sad about it, some were happy to see it and some didn’t care so much but they liked me. I couldn’t stay with any one of them for too long because it was dangerous for them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Nazis were killing Poles what were caught helping Jews and they made sure all the Poles knew this. I decided I would try to get into the ghetto at Sosnowiec to see if I could find my family. Maybe it was stupid but I didn’t ever know what might be clever and what might be stupid and I wanted to see my family. There was a part of Sosnowiec, a suburb, called Szrodula and the Germans moved all the Polish Christians out of Szrodula and made it a gated ghetto for the Jews of Sosnowiec and other Jews what came from around there. But by the time I got there they had already some time even a year or more earlier begun the deportations from Sosnowiec and I was told about this. The SS, you know what that is?’

‘I know … I’ve heard of it but –’

‘The SS – it stands for
Schutzstaffel –
was the elite armed force of the Nazi regime, an armed force on top of the regular army, and they had responsibility for the Nazi program against the Jews. From time to time the SS would order a large group of Jews from the ghetto to assemble in the town square with their families. These round-ups, what was called an
Aktion
, was repeated till there were no Jews left in the ghetto. Each Jew was made to pass in front of what was called a deportation commission who sent the Jew into one of four categories. You could be employed in a factory what was considered essential to the German war effort. Such a Jew would stay in the ghetto. This was one category. You could be transferred to Germany as slave labour for a labour camp. This was another category. You could be sent to another different camp or you could be in
a category what they hadn’t decided about you yet. These were the four categories.

You can imagine, Mr Lamont, that people from the one family would be split up into different categories. People would try to stay together with their family members so they would try to go into some other category other than what was selected for them. When this happened the person trying to cross to another category would be shot on the spot in front of the family members what they were trying to join. The bodies would just lie there. These
Aktions
could last till midnight.’

*

Deep in the Galvin Library at IIT in Chicago, Adam found a reference to a psychological museum, the Chicago Psychological Museum. What was a psychological museum and what did it have to do with Border and why should Adam Zignelik, a professor of twentieth-century political history, care? There was an article from
The Chicago Daily News
dated 27 March 1944. Dr Henry Border was inviting the public to attend the newly established Chicago Psychological Museum to see ‘exhibits and demonstrations of psychological apparatus testing vision, hearing, taste and smell’. There was something called a driver’s clinic testing perception. It was all situated in the Lewis Gymnasium at IIT. Border had established the museum and was its curator.

‘Look, sweetheart, your psychologist has the instincts and the tendencies of a historian,’ he heard Diana whisper.

‘You’re clutching at straws,’ he replied.

‘No, the man was a collector. Whatever this museum was, Border recognised that the methods, the practice and research of this discipline examining human behaviour in the middle of the twentieth century deserved recording. It deserved historical documentation.’