The Final Reckoning

I reached for a book of adventure stories. Leah grabbed her favourite doll, Rivvy took a hairbrush. And Hannah calmly removed a picture of my parents from its frame and placed it in her pocket. Then she ushered us to the door and closed it, for the last time. We waddled down the stairs: I was wearing four or five shirts and two coats, as well as carrying our largest suitcase. By the time we reached the street, I thought I might boil with heat.

We saw many Jews like us, trying to carry as much as they could. Many were carrying bags of food, tins or sacks of flour. Some had piled up makeshift wagons or trolleys. Hannah scolded herself. She had not thought of that.

Within a few minutes, we were ordered to walk. We would be crossing Kaunas, they said, to our new homes. We were surrounded by men with guns and, more frightening to me, dogs. We did as we were told.

Some people lasted just a few steps. They couldn't carry what they had taken and they began to drop plates and cups, which broke noisily on the ground. ‘Quiet, Jew!’ one of the Nazis shouted. Some of the older people collapsed.

All the time, the Lithuanians stood and watched, as if this were a street carnival. Sometimes they shouted and taunted us. If they saw something they liked they rushed forward and grabbed it. They knew the Germans would not stop them from stealing. I kept on staring at this crowd. And then suddenly there was a familiar face.

‘Antanas!’ I called out. ‘It's me, Gershon!’ It was the boy I used to play ball with; we had had a game a week earlier. But he just stared back at me, holding tight the hand of his father.

A lady began to walk beside us. She said to Hannah, ‘I hear they're taking us across the river, to Viriampole. We're all going to have to live there.’

‘All of us? But Viriampole is tiny.’

Hannah thought the Viriampole district would be too small for all the Jews of Kovno, who numbered in the tens of thousands, and she was right. What she did not know then, none of us did, was that there were more who would be crammed into those few small streets of Viriampole. The Germans had sent army patrols into the countryside searching for any Jews there, looking in every last village, little places like the one whose name my mother would never mention. If they found one Jew here or three Jews there, they too had to move into Viriampole. If a Jew refused to move, he would find his house set on fire. So he moved.

Years later, people always asked us, ‘Why did you obey? Why did you not rise up and resist?’ But we did not know then what we know now. We did not know that we were being marched into a ghetto. I remember thinking maybe things will be better for us if we are all together in one place. At least we will be far away from those Lithuanian murderers.

The walk was long and hard. I kept shifting the suitcase I was carrying from one hand to another, tilting like a reed that was about to break. But I did not stop. I was the man of the family now and I knew that Rivvy and Leah needed me to keep going.

Finally we came to the narrow concrete bridge which marked our crossing into Viriampole.

‘Quickly, quickly,’ Hannah said, shooing us over. I think she was hoping we would not notice the barbed wire and the watchtowers. Or perhaps she was hoping I would have no time to read and translate the German signs that marked the entrance. ‘Plague! Entry forbidden!’ said one and directly underneath there was another: ‘Jews are forbidden from bringing in food and heating supplies – violators will be shot!’

Once we were inside, the soldiers were no longer walking beside us. Now that they had herded us into the ghetto, their job was done. We waited for a few minutes, not just us but everyone. We were waiting to be given some kind of instruction or at least a plan. But slowly the penny dropped. One man broke away from the crowd and dashed into the first entrance he saw. He then appeared from a first floor window and beckoned the rest of his family to join him. Immediately another family followed and then another and then another. It took a second or two for Hannah to understand: this was to be a free-for-all, you lived in whatever corner you could find.

We went to Linkuvos Street with the lady Hannah had been talking to. Later I wondered if Hannah had given her something, perhaps some jewellery of my mother's, because I know Hannah wanted us to be with a family. She understood even then that there would be times when she would need someone else to keep an eye on us. And so we crammed thirteen people into two rooms, the other family and us.

It seems idiotic now, but I remember thinking that, yet again, this would be the end of our troubles. Yes, it was a ghetto. But we were all together and there was work for those who were fit – and work meant food. I lied about my age and got a permit to work. I was twelve now but tall enough to pass for sixteen. And so each morning I would cross the narrow bridge out of the ghetto in a detail of thirty men, all of them older than me. We were given special yellow armbands to wear on our right sleeves, then loaded onto trucks and driven a short distance to Aleksotas, where our job was to build the Germans a military airbase. We had to do the work of machines: lifting rocks and breaking stones. We worked from dawn till dusk, twelve hours or more, until every sinew, every tendon was screaming for rest. We stopped only for a few minutes, to drink thin soup and eat a crust of bread.

But at least it was food. Hannah, though, was struggling to find enough for the others to eat. And the girls were getting sick. Everyone was. The ghetto was so full, maybe thirty thousand people stuffed into an area fit for one thousand. People were sleeping on the streets, even in the cold. The synagogues became dormitories. One morning, I stepped over a man who I thought was sleeping. But he was not asleep. He had died and no one had buried him.

It was around this time that Hannah decided she too would have to get a work permit. If she had one of those precious yellow pieces of paper, then she would earn food for herself but, more importantly, she would have a chance to get out of the ghetto, somehow buy food and smuggle it back in: that way she could feed Leah and Rivvy something more than the starvation rations provided by the Nazis. It was the only way.

I don't know what she did to get that permit. I like to think she met up with the resistance, who were forging papers all the time. But sometimes I think something else. Because Hannah was a pretty girl and when you are hungry and your family is hungry you will do desperate things.

And so Hannah began to leave the ghetto each morning, along with me and the rest of the workers. There were checks at the gate, but the guards were not German. They were Lithuanian police. Perhaps this fact has been forgotten, but the Nazis did not do all this alone. There were very few Germans in places like Kovno. They relied on the local people to help them.

Then came that cruel day, the one that changed everything. Hannah never told me about it in so many words, but I have pieced together what happened and have made myself set down those events here. So that the memory of it will not die.

Hannah got through the check without any problems. She worked in the normal way. But at some point she must have broken away from the rest of the work detail, because when she came back that evening she had some bread. Not a whole loaf, but a chunk of bread that she was saving for our two sisters who had no permits and no food. She hid it under her coat. I think of her now, a little girl standing there with her heart thumping.

Perhaps in the queue at the gate she looked nervous. Something gave her away. Not to the rest of the policemen on duty: they were too drunk to notice anything. But to the son of one of the Lithuanian guards, a boy not much older than me, perhaps thirteen or fourteen at most, who often used to hang around at the gate with his father and his pals. The older men would laugh and joke with him, as if he were a team mascot. He even had his own uniform. But we called him the Wolf, because even though he was so young, he was as cruel as a beast. His face seemed to shine with evil. The smile was wide, baring teeth that seemed ready to drip with blood. Once you saw that face, you could never forget it. The Wolf would plead with his father to let him search the Jews and the men would laugh at his eagerness. That night he asked to search Hannah.

I can imagine how she trembled as he pushed and prodded at her clothes, feeling at her bony frame. He was about to let her go when he gave one last poke, under her armpits. And it was there he found the lump of bread.

The Wolf turned around to the cheering guards like a novice fisherman who has just reeled in a prize trout. Nodding, he soaked up their applause.

‘So what will be your reward, son?’ his father beamed, his truncheon dangling at his side. ‘Name it.’

The Wolf paused while Hannah stood there shivering. The rest of the ghetto inmates stared down at the ground, wanting this moment to be over.

‘Let me punish her myself.’

There was a loud, lecherous roar from the guards. Several placed their left hand on their right arm and pumped their biceps. They began a chant, a Lithuanian song about a boy becoming a man. The Wolf led Hannah to the ghetto cells, where the jailer recognized him. With pride the Wolf explained what had happened; the jailer stepped aside – and away.

‘Take off your clothes,’ the Wolf told Hannah.

Hannah stood still, unable to move.

‘I said, take off your clothes.’

Hannah was cold, her fingers like stiff shards of ice. She did not move fast enough. He punched her in the face. ‘Listen, Jew! I won't tell you again. Take off your clothes!’

Hannah did as she was told and stood there naked with her head down. She would not have seen the Wolf reach for his truncheon and hold it high before bringing it down onto her arms, her back and thighs. Her cries of pain must have sounded as if they were coming from a creature other than a human being. When she fell to her knees, the Wolf kicked her in the face, in the ribs, in the kidneys, in the place she always cherished as the womb of her future children. Soon she lay prone on the floor, waiting for unconsciousness, or death.

Then it stopped. The Wolf seemed to have grown tired, or bored, and he stepped back. Hannah let out a brief sigh; her ordeal seemed to be nearing its end.

There was a clink of metal, the sound, Hannah realized, of a belt being unbuckled. Was he about to flog her?

But now she felt two cold hands on her hips, hauling her up from the floor like a joint of meat. He was not trying to make her stand up, but rather forcing her into a kneeling position, so that she was on all fours.

She could barely feel her legs, let alone move them. She collapsed back onto the floor several times, but each time he pushed her back up. She was confused. Why did he need her to kneel like this?

Suddenly she sensed him near her, too near, his body arched over hers. She heard the unfastening of a zip.

The sudden realization made her scream in protest, but he brought his hand down over her mouth, clamping her jaw tight so that she could not bite, and thrust himself inside her.

How long it lasted she did not know. Her mind left her, it fled to the same place it had gone when she had seen her mother's corpse hanging from the ceiling. She vanished from herself. But then as his assault endured she saw something on the ground, just a few inches away. The mere sight of it brought the decision instantaneously, as if the object itself had determined how it should be used. She would merely follow the impulse that seemed to emanate from this small, random thing: a bent and rusty nail that lay loose on the floor.

She reached for it and curled it invisibly into her right hand, a new resolve powering through her. He was too focused on his pleasure to notice her movement: she could hear him panting and moaning as he struggled to grip her hips and keep her still. She did not hesitate. In a single movement, she pushed back, pulling his arm away from her face with one hand and wielding the nail, held between her fingers like a blade, with the other.

She found his left arm, the one that had been gagging her, its underside exposed. The nail tore through the cotton of his shirt and scored down the flesh. She had never known such strength inside her. It made her roar, louder even than the scream he let out as he felt his arm ripped open.

She shook him away. Instinct made her flee from there as fast as she could, first in a crawl, then in a crouch, grabbing her clothes from the floor. She ran and ran, only noticing once she was three streets away that no one was chasing her. She later told me what she guessed, that the Wolf was too ashamed to admit that he had allowed a naked girl – a snivelling Jewess – to get the better of him. He would claim the deep gash in his arm, which took many weeks to heal, was the result of an accident.

But it was Hannah who was wounded. Not just her face, which was no longer hers. But her soul. She could not be our mother any more. She would stay all day and all night in our small room. I had to keep on working, even though I was now very thin and forever hungry. I would bring back what food I could, deciding at the gate whether I could risk bringing it in. If the guards were drunk, I would try it. If the Wolf was anywhere near, I would pass what I had hidden to someone braver, or more foolish, than me.

Then, in late October 1941, a decree was plastered on every wall and lamppost, announcing that all inhabitants of the ghetto were to gather at six o'clock the next morning at Demokratu Square. No one knew what was coming. All through the night you could hear different sounds coming from the street: religious men praying, women wailing, others feasting and getting drunk, as if to enjoy what they feared would be their last night of life.

I looked to Hannah for advice on what we should do. But she was not the same Hannah. Her eyes were empty, just as our mother's had been. I was the one who took charge, collecting up a few scraps of food, ensuring the girls wrapped up warm. We left our doors unlocked. Those were the orders: so that no one would try to hide.

There was a light dusting of snow on the ground that morning, sleet really, the gloom broken only by the odd candle or lantern. Everyone was holding on to papers, either a work permit or an educational certificate, anything which might prove they had some worth, that they could be of use to the Germans.

We waited in the damp cold for more than three hours until finally SS Master Sergeant Helmut Rauca stood on top of a mound, where he could survey the tens of thousands of people huddled there, and nodded for the first column of people to be brought before him. I noticed there were machine-gun nests all around the square; further away, on the hillsides, stood local Lithuanians, anxious to exploit the good view they had of proceedings.

Rauca was the man to watch. With the tiniest movement of his hand, he would send some people to the left, some to the right. My sisters and I were lucky: where we had been waiting turned out to be the front of the queue. But it meant I had no time to work out the pattern: was it good to be sent to the left or better to be directed right? I couldn't tell.

My sisters and I picked up Hannah and stepped forward. Rauca made a parting gesture: he wanted the girls to go to the right and me to the left. I protested that we had to stay together. ‘As you wish – to the right!’ he barked, with what I thought was a smile.

And then I felt a hand grip my shoulder.

‘Not you,’ a man's voice said.

I turned around to see a policeman. Not a German or a Lithuanian, but one of the Jewish policemen that worked in the ghetto.

I tried to wriggle away from him and join my sisters, who were now being shoved ahead. Rivvy was reaching out for me, but I couldn't grab her hand. Leah began to cry. It was no use though. The policeman was holding me back. ‘Not you,’ he said again.

I began to cry out, pushing and punching at him. How dare this traitor separate me from my sisters? I tried to pull his hand off me, but he held me tighter. Now Rivvy and Leah were screaming – they could see what was happening – but he would not let me go, no matter how much I struggled. My sisters were disappearing deeper into the thick scrum of people sent right by a flick of Rauca's finger. Rivvy and Leah had vanished. The last thing I saw were Hannah's eyes, vacant and staring.

The policeman finally pulled me off and frogmarched me away, down a side alley, until we were gone from the square altogether. I had no idea who this man was or why he had done what he had just done.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Tom rubbed his eyes; the overnight flight was catching up with him. It had been a long time since he had read an individual story like this: case histories, they used to call them. When he had first started at the UN he would pore over such documents, absorbing each detail. After a few years, he would skim read them, seeking only the pertinent legal details. One person's horror story was pretty much the same as anyone else's. But he was reading this one attentively: must be out of practice.

The Jewish policeman – and you must remember we despised these traitors as much as we hated the Germans and the Lithuanians – left me there, where we stood. Once he was gone, I realized the street was completely silent. It was a terrible silence. It was quiet because all the people had gone.

I walked back to our little stretch of Linkuvos Street, past buildings that were now empty and still. I felt as if I was the last child on earth. Four thousand people had gone that day. Everyone else was either outside the ghetto, doing forced labour, or they were hiding. No one was on the streets.

I was twelve years old and I was all alone. I felt jealous of my sisters, imagining them living somewhere new.

I carried on working, still pretending I was sixteen. I did not dare tell even the other workers the truth about my age. Some were nice to me, as if they knew I was just a child. But some were so desperate they were no longer the people they had been. They were so hungry, they had become like animals. Such people would have betrayed me in an instant if they believed it would have made my ration theirs.

I lived in the same room we had shared, though now with a different family. The other lady and her children had been on the convoy to the Ninth Fort with my sisters. Now, the rooms were not so cramped. In fact, there was more space throughout the ghetto, because so many thousands had left. We did not know where they had gone or why we had not heard from them.

Nobody I knew was around. The children I had once gone to school with were all gone. The only familiar face belonged to that policeman who had stopped me getting on the convoy, that pig of a traitor. I only had to look at him to feel revulsion. And yet he seemed to be around often. I would return exhausted after twelve hours working on the building site, my legs and back aching, and there he would be, at the entrance to the ghetto. Or he would be patrolling outside the building where I slept. Sometimes he scared me, the rest of the time he just disgusted me.

Then one night there was a knock on the door. An urgent knock, three times, four times. At first, the woman in the apartment looked terrified. She believed it was the Gestapo. She glared at me in terror. What misfortune had I brought down on them? Had I been seen smuggling?

Then we heard the voice on the other side of the door. ‘Polizei, open up!’

It was the Jewish police of the ghetto. Everyone knew they could be as vicious as any Lithuanian collaborator. I looked over to the window, wondering if I should jump down onto the street and make a run for it. We were two floors up: could I drop down on the ground without breaking any bones? I saw that my hands were trembling.

Before I had even had a moment to make a plan, the woman had made her decision. She opened the door and there he was, the policeman who had pulled me off the convoy some three weeks before. Here, at my door, in the middle of the night.

‘You, boy, come now.’

I was frozen with fear. I did not move.

‘NOW!’

I was still wearing all the clothes I had. You did not dare take them off at night because they might be stolen. I let the policeman lead me away.

He marched me down the stairs and into the street, loudly promising to take me to the authorities for what I had done. I did not understand what I had done.

Eventually, he turned left and right, then into an alley and down an outdoor stairwell to the entrance of a cellar. This, I knew, was not the police headquarters. By now he had stopped shouting about how I was going to be punished. I felt the fear tighten in my stomach.

Then the policeman knocked on the door. Not a normal knock, but in a strange rhythm. Three quick blows, then two slow ones. A voice spoke on the other side of the tiny basement door.

‘Ver is dort?’ Who goes there?

‘Einer fun di Macabi.’ A son of the Maccabees.

The door creaked open and the policeman darted in, grabbing me with him. Inside were three other men, their faces lit by a single candle at the centre of a small, rotting table. To me they looked old, their eyes dark and sunken, their faces gaunt. But now I know they were young, one of them barely twenty.

They stared at me until one, who seemed to be the leader, said finally, ‘It's a miracle.’

Then another nodded and said, ‘He's perfect. Our secret weapon.’

The leader then spoke again, his face harsh. ‘Take off your trousers.’

I hesitated and he repeated it until I realized I had no choice. I lowered my trousers slowly.

‘All the way down! So we can see.’

And once they had seen, the three men all gave a small smile. One even managed a brief laugh. None spoke to me. ‘Well done, Shimon,’ they said and the policeman nodded, like a child praised by his teacher. ‘You have truly brought us a Jewish miracle.’

I had heard about the Jewish underground, but I had not believed it. The kids spoke about a resistance that was coming, how some Jews were trying to get guns to fight the Nazis, even to break out of the ghetto. But we had seen no sign of it. I believed it was a fairy tale, the kind of story boys tell each other.

Now though, I understood where I had been taken. The policeman had called himself a ‘son of the Maccabees’: that had been the password. I knew that the Maccabees had been the great Jewish fighters, the Hebrew resisters who had battled to save Jerusalem.

I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with an uncircumcised penis. I could pass for an Aryan. Perhaps they would use me to smuggle food into the ghetto. I was excited; I knew I could do it. After all, had not Hannah sent me out as a little Lithuanian orphan boy, to beg from our gentile neighbours who might take pity on a gentile child?

But then the leader of the men sent Shimon away and began whispering in Yiddish with the others, oblivious to the fact that I was still there, standing right in front of them. One said they could not afford to wait: ‘The boy has seen our faces.’ Another nodded. ‘He knows about this place. We can't afford to risk it.’ I did not know what they were going to do to me.

Finally, the leader raised his hand, as if the discussion was over. He had reached a decision. Only then did he turn and look straight at me. He told me his name was Aron. ‘Are you brave?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Are you brave enough to perform a task that carries with it a grave risk – most likely a mortal risk?’

‘Yes,’ I said, though of course I had no idea of such things. I was saying what I thought would save me.

‘I am going to give you a task on behalf of your people. You are to travel to Warsaw, to an address I will give you. You will give them this message. Are you ready?’

I nodded, though I was not ready.