The Forgotten Read online

  Lianka bowed her head. “There’s a time for everything.”

  Two young people abandoned by a world thirsty for blood, fire and hatred. Two mouths seeking each other. Two hearts open to each other’s pain. Two souls conversing, two memories calling, each to the other.

  “When I was young,” Elhanan said, “I was not afraid of dying but of waiting for death.”

  The hours passed, and the two partisans exchanged memories of childhood and times of trial, bound themselves together and shared secrets as if they were alone in the world, as in fact they were: the contours of the ghetto were the contours of their world, and that world had been drained of beauty and life. For how long? They did not know and had no way of guessing. They were the last Jews in Stanislav.

  While they waited to go back to the main square, Feherfalu was ridding itself of its own Jews; but Elhanan and Lianka had no way of knowing that either. The ghetto in Feherfalu, invaded by Hungarian gendarmes and German officers, was evacuating its humble and unhappy inhabitants to an unknown destination, and Elhanan and Lianka could not know that.

  Lianka was already an orphan. Elhanan had lost his father and was about to lose his mother, but the birds in the sky brought them no news of all that. Elhanan and Lianka had to cling to the present, to discover themselves in each other, to offer each other reasons for hope.

  The afternoon seemed too long, yet suddenly too short. They were hungry and thirsty; exhausted. They would have liked to stay in that abandoned house with leprous walls until tomorrow, until the end of time. But they forced themselves onto their feet. A sense of duty? No, solidarity. Itzik and his men were already on the road. They would soon be in town and would look for their scouts.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Everything went according to plan. No one suspected them. It was almost five in the afternoon. There was still a line outside the shop. Elhanan and Lianka joined it. Other customers came along, but the two partisans made room for them. From where they were they could observe the hotel and the restaurant. German officers crowded into both. Thank you, Lord. Let them eat, let them drink, let them shout their joy as masters of the humble and the pure in heart. Let them celebrate their power. Their lust for it will soon die.

  Soon was now. Itzik arrived, sauntering casually. With his cap half covering his eyes, he looked like a workman hurrying nowhere. Lisa and Dora emerged from the alleyway on the left, hand in hand. In less than twenty minutes the whole team was in place. Four partisans kept watch in the next street: they would cover the retreat.

  Itzik was standing behind Elhanan and Lianka. He greeted the girl just like a flirt. She smiled at him and blushed. They whispered a few words that Elhanan heard. It was all quite clear. Two grenades through the open door: Lisa and Dora to toss them. Four incendiary bottles through the window. And we run. When? At six-fifteen sharp, when it won’t be hard to lose yourself in the crowd approaching the restaurant. The watch ticked, the shadows lengthened.

  Now. Itzik casually slipped out of line and wandered toward the restaurant. He opened the door as if to take a peek inside. In the next instant a deafening roar shattered the main square. That’s for Vitka, Itzik shouted in Yiddish. Lisa and Dora were already at his side. A window opened and everything blew up at once. It was like a bombardment, a barrage of shellfire. Furniture flew through the air, shards of glass carpeted the sidewalk. Elhanan thought, Ha! How easy it is to destroy! Shouts in German, in Polish. Men firing blindly. People running every which way. Police shouting. Germans issuing orders that no one understood. Time to regroup, and the partisans were already in a dark alley behind the square. They left town running, breathless. Suddenly Itzik cried, “Elhanan! Where the hell has he gone?”

  Elhanan had been left behind. Dead? Wounded? Taken prisoner?

  “I saw him two minutes ago,” Lianka said.

  “What held him up?”

  Impatient voices rose. “He’ll make out all right. He knows the area. There’s not a minute to lose.”

  “I’ll wait for him,” Lianka said.

  Itzik hesitated. Could he abandon his friend for the sake of his unit? Itzik was torn. Meanwhile the debate intensified. But Elhanan’s return put an end to it. He was out of breath but satisfied.

  “Let’s pull out,” Itzik ordered.

  The sky was darkening now. Here and there a door opened a crack to see who was defying the police and the night. The townspeople had no idea that these were Jewish partisans; they thought it was the secret army, the Armia Krajova. “Good luck, men!” shouted a few old patriots. At last the partisans were sheltered by the forest. But Itzik allowed no respite. Hurry, he told them, panting. Hurry: only that would save them. After what seemed hours of running they reached camp, where David greeted them, almost mad with worry.

  Itzik asked Elhanan, “Can I see you alone for a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me. Why did you stay behind?”

  Elhanan’s face clouded. “I’d rather you didn’t ask me that.”

  “You endangered the whole group. I must know.”

  Elhanan rubbed his brow and thought. “Some other time, Itzik.”

  “Now.” Itzik was angry. “Why did you endanger us all for no reason?”

  “I didn’t realize,” Elhanan said, contrite. “It was a stupid impulse.… I wanted to—”

  He broke off, but Itzik pressed him: “You wanted to what? You tell me, or next time I won’t trust you.”

  Elhanan did not reply immediately. Why this sadness within? His friend’s confidence and affection meant so much. “All right. I don’t know how to tell you. I saw the grenades go off. I heard the wounded men shrieking. And I suddenly felt a crazy desire to go right up to the window and look inside, and see these killers laid out, flat on the floor, see them wounded, whimpering in pain, calling for help. Well, I saw them. Mutilated. Their faces twisted. I thought about the ghetto we visited once—do you remember?—and I was furious, and I pulled my pistol and fired into the whole bunch, roaring like a madman, ‘That’s for the ghetto! And that’s for my uncle! And that’s for all the Jews you persecuted, humiliated, starved, assassinated!’ “ A sigh prevented him from talking.

  Itzik took him by the shoulders. “You stayed behind for that? For revenge?” Itzik was happy. He was proud of his friend. “Bravo, Elhanan! Bravo a thousand times! I underestimated you. Let’s have a drink.” And he dragged Elhanan into David’s tent, where they were all celebrating their victory.

  But Elhanan couldn’t swallow anything.

  Father and son often strolled the sidewalks of New York, exploring exotic neighborhoods and meeting colorful characters: a synagogue for black Jews in Harlem; a Chinese restaurant whose customers spoke Yiddish; Times Square and its passersby lost in the neon maze; the Village and its too rich or too poor street people in search of money, pleasure, danger; Brighton Beach with its Russian cabarets and cafes; a square for the lonely and uprooted, a forum for visionaries; a restaurant for jazz-lovers, a movie for jazzhaters. Malkiel knew the big city as well as his father had known his hometown.

  “We too had our madmen,” Elhanan said. In Brooklyn he was reminded of Feherfalu. In the American version of a shtetl, Jews lived in a sealed-off world. No business on the Sabbath, no school on Jewish holidays. They taught Talmud and mathematics in Yiddish. Life proceeded by the ancient Jewish calendar.

  Once Malkiel took his father to the home of a great Hasidic master, who received visitors only after midnight. Impressive and even majestic, radiating strength and faith, arms stretched out before him on a bare table, the rabbi listened to Malkiel but gazed steadily at Elhanan.

  “Rabbi,” Malkiel cried, “I turn to you because ordinary medicine is powerless.”

  “Doctors are only God’s messengers,” the rabbi replied calmly. “I, too, am only His messenger. Men may be powerless; God is not.”

  Anxious, tormented, Malkiel crossed and recrossed his legs, trying to catch the master’s gaze, which was fi
xed on Elhanan. “Isn’t it a rabbi’s duty to speak to God in our name?”

  “God needs no intermediaries.”

  “But we need them!”

  “Why do you speak for your father? If he has something to say, let him say it himself.”

  Elhanan heard and understood all of this. He opened his mouth, looked for the right words, found them. “Rabbi,” he said, “I’m going under.”

  The rabbi’s gaze remained steadfast. Abruptly he looked away.

  “Is it hopeless?” asked Malkiel.

  “God commands us to hope,” said the rabbi, straightening his shoulders before hunching again in concentration. Outside, a drunk sang out his woes while policemen shouted, chasing a thug. Would the world’s violence break and enter this room? The rabbi’s voice deterred it: “Elhanan son of Malkiel, listen to me. In our prayers on the high holy days we beg the Lord to remember the near sacrifice of Isaac. What an idea! We beg God to remember? Can you imagine the God of Abraham as an amnesiac? The truth is, we make such requests in the name of memory to prove to Him that we ourselves remember. Next Rosh Hashanah you will go to synagogue; I command it. And you will remember. That too I command.”

  Outside, thirty disciples besieged them. “What were your impressions? What did he say to you? Which of his words struck you particularly?”

  “It’s confidential,” Malkiel said.

  Next day Malkiel told Tamar about the visit.

  “You should have taken me along. I’ve never seen a Hasidic master.”

  “Next time you’ll come.”

  Tamar pondered what Malkiel had told her. “I have every confidence.”

  “In him?”

  “In your father. If he believes in the rabbi, that can only help.”

  On Rosh Hashanah father and son attended synagogue. Tamar was with her parents in Chicago. Elhanan followed the long service as always, with a prayer book in his hand. Then they invited him to the Torah. Malkiel panicked: how could his father recite the blessings without stumbling? Elhanan recited them from memory. Malkiel’s happiness was unbounded. But it lasted only until the day after Yom Kippur.

  “Let’s see your rabbi again,” Tamar suggested.

  They were admitted at four in the morning. Malkiel stood near the table, Tamar in the background. The exchange between the reporter and the rabbi took on an unreal character. “My father’s slipping again,” said Malkiel. “We need more help.”

  “Help does not come from the mortal that I am. How many times must I tell you that?”

  “Plead with God in our name.”

  “And why don’t you plead with Him yourself, young man?”

  “I’m sure my prayers don’t reach heaven.” Malkiel had to explain himself: he was too busy at the newspaper, too tormented by his father’s illness, too harassed from too many sides.

  The rabbi sighed. “Your father has priority. All the rest can wait. He cannot wait. Your father gave you everything; it is your turn to give it back to him.”

  “How should I go about it? The student can teach; the apprentice can become independent. But what can a son do for his sick father?”

  “Speak in his place; pray in his name. Do what he is incapable of doing; let your life be an extension of his. Learn, since he no longer learns. Be happy, since he no longer laughs.”

  His throat dry, his head burning, Malkiel murmured his answer. “You’re asking the impossible of me, Rabbi. How can I be happy, when my father …”

  Laugh? Give himself over to life’s pleasures? By what right could he be happy? He had never seen his father happy. An inconsolable widower, an uprooted man, Elhanan had never seemed carefree, capable of gaiety. Sometimes Malkiel was even angry with him for that; I’m here, he would think spitefully, I exist, I live, I love him and he knows it, isn’t that enough for him? Doesn’t he understand that when he wallows in melancholy and mourning he’s putting space between us and condemning me?

  “Rabbi,” Malkiel said, “perhaps my father was happy once, in Palestine, before I was born—”

  “All the more reason for you to be happier longer and more often! Will your father’s sadness be less heavy, less burdensome, if it weighs the more on you? It is your duty to resist it. The person with you tonight will help you, I know. Who is she? Your fiancée? Marry her. Invite your father to the wedding. He will lead you to the huppah, I promise. He will recite the seven blessings; I promise that, too. It will be the happiest day of your life, and of mine. I shall remember it, and so will you.”

  The rabbi broke off; someone had knocked at the door, a discreet knock. An uneasy, fragile smile dawned in his bright, sharp eyes, but vanished immediately.

  For Elhanan, Palestine was Talia. And Itzik. But while Talia was tenderness, Itzik meant violence. Talia or love. Itzik or friendship. During the last months of the war Itzik had but one purpose: revenge. For him it was as important as victory.

  Born of sighs and sacrifices, the friendship between the two partisans was bound to last. And yet. As they said in Feherfalu, man acts and God laughs. No; in this case God would not laugh. God does not like to see friendship torn apart. God weeps for a parting as He weeps for a death. And in fact this friendship ended with a murder.

  A few weeks after the attack on Stanislav came the liberation of Feherfalu. Summer sunshine warmed the red-brick roofs, the trees in bloom and the cottages with their closed shutters. The remaining villagers, sick with terror, awaited the invader. Some had fled to the mountains, others as far as Budapest. Still others went to hide in the cellars of abandoned Jewish homes. As always, great fear preceded the first offensive. Fear of falling into the hands of the last German unit, which, beaten, would kill before meeting death. Fear of bombs, artillery, stray bullets. Fear of Russian soldiers; propaganda said appalling but likely things about them.

  Evacuated by the Germans and Hungarians, Feherfalu was a ghost town that day. Empty, the houses. Shut, the shops. Closed, the blinds. Deserted, the offices. The town was dead, breathing only in its grave. There was anguished silence, a wait heavy with foreboding.

  Preceding the Red Army, David’s partisans entered the town. The shooting lasted a solid hour. It was in fact pointless: the enemy was gone. Then again, you could never tell. They might flush out some stragglers. So the assault group moved in as if there were Germans in every building and Hungarians behind every window. Exploding grenades, the clatter of submachine guns—and then the terrified cries of women dragged by their hair and men shoved against a wall.

  Elhanan said nothing and heard no one, but headed straight for his house. The gateway to the courtyard was open. The kitchen door, too. He rushed inside and ran from one room to another: no one. He cried out, he shouted, “Where are you?” No answer. Suddenly he noticed a muffled sound, a kind of scratching, from down below. They’re in the cellar, he thought. “Come on out!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Come out! It’s me, Elhanan!” The cellar door creaked open. An old woman’s face appeared: it was the widow Starker. Elhanan knew her. She lived two streets over. What was she doing here? He told her to come up. “What are you doing in our house, Madame Starker? Where are my parents? Quick, don’t stare at me like that, tell me, tell me, for the love of heaven! Where are my parents?”

  She fell to whimpering and sniffling and hiccuping. “Then you don’t know—”

  “Know what? Come on, tell me! What don’t I know?”

  “Your parents, sir. They’re not here anymore. They’re—”

  “Where are they?” Elhanan was out of patience and suddenly weak.

  “They took them away.…”

  “Where did they take them?”

  “I don’t know. They took all the Jews.”

  Elhanan wanted to scream, to strike out at someone, more than ever before in his life. He collapsed into a chair and stared into space. Madame Starker asked, “Would you like a glass of water?” He hardly heard her, he was not there, all this was happening to someone else. He, Elhanan Rosenbaum, was not armed; the woma
n before him was not a neighbor; the catastrophe had never occurred. Yet Madame Starker was talking. “I came to your house to hide … to hide in the cellar.… I said to myself that your shelter was safer than mine … especially since there are so many Jews in the Red Army.” When Elhanan only sat there, she shouted down the cellar. Other heads appeared. Several women and some children. Frightened and obsequious, they kissed his jacket. “Thank you,” they said, “thank you for letting us come to your house. Can we stay another day, another week? Until everything calms down … and the Russians get tired of looting and raping?” Elhanan stood up and walked out. In the house across the way—it belonged to the Cohen family—he ordered the living out. Terrified, they obeyed him, babbling explanations: “We had to hide. The Russian soldiers, they’re capable of anything, everybody knows that.” And why in Jewish homes? It seemed reasonable to them. Elhanan went to inspect the house next door: there the new inhabitants had been shrewder, affixing an old mezuzah to the door.

  The synagogue: transformed into a stable by the Germans. The Hasidic house of study: a military brothel. The yeshiva: a museum of anti-Semitism.

  Elhanan encountered acquaintances, who told him in breathless staccato about the ghetto and the cruelties inflicted on it by the Nyilas chief, a man called Zoltan. Here was Kovago, his old schoolmaster, saying to him, “Your parents left two candelabras and three ritual silver chests; they are yours.” Vasaros, a former judge, told him, “Before the transports, I suggested to your father that they leave the ghetto.” The transports. They described them to him, and he thought he must be living in a nightmare: the town betrayed all its Jews, and these men, these women, who looted their homes afterward, dared now to lament the Jews’ fate in his presence.… He wanted to tell them of his revulsion but knew he could not. God, teach me wrath! Make me an avenger! But God did not will it so. Elhanan shrugged and went off to find other witnesses, other clues, other guilty parties. A voice called to him: Lianka, her cheeks aflame, was asking him if anyone in his family was alive. “Not one Jew survived,” Elhanan said. “The town sold them all to their killers.”