The Quick and the Dead
Ashes And Fire
by Jacob Pat
Translated by Leo Steinberg
New York, International Universities Press, 1947.254 pp. $3.25.
Anyone who has visited a DP camp or a salvaged Jewish community in Eastern Europe will recall the macabre eagerness of its inhabitants to talk about their escape from butchery—as if the constant retelling of their story could somehow mellow the anguish through remembrance or, by sharing it with others, reduce the horrible to the normal. For his two-month tour of post-liberation Poland, the Yiddish writer Jacob Pat came equipped with a nimbler pencil than most, a larger notebook, a greater capacity for patient listening, and a sure instinct for selecting the human essentials from each saga of inhumanity. Ashes and Fire will endure as a documentary monument to the murdered Jews of Poland and to those who emerged alive, “every one of them a miracle of survival.” Fortified in English by a distinguished translation, the book deserves to endure also as a classic in the universal literature of martyrdom.
With fine economy, Pat contrives to narrate the chronicle of Jewry’s extermination by a series of glimpses at the carnage, all the more effective because he knows how to tell everything in a few paragraphs, even a few words.
“We were stripped and tied down and exposed to packs of bloodhounds,” one Jew says to him. “Huge German dogs they were. They would rise up on their hind legs, look right into our faces, and then bite—silently.” As twilight falls over Oswiecim, and Pat approaches the ruins of the crematorium, shadowy figures scurry from the vast gray fields of Jewish ashes and bones, where Polish “gold-diggers” still prospect for gold teeth, gold coins, gold watches, gold wedding rings. Taking notes on the physiology of massacre, he records the expert testimony of a Jewish observer that “children die more slowly than adults when they are shot; it’s because their blood circulates faster; many of them were still squirming when buried.” Another informs him casually that “women burn better than men; the Germans used them as kindling wood, placing them strategically among the corpses they wanted to burn; they are supposed to have more fat under the skin.” In the great square of Bialystok, his birthplace (which he reached on a mad dash by motor through “bandit” country, while nearby seventy members of the anti-Communist “Patriots’ Army” were hauling four Jews off a Bialystok train, robbing them, and abandoning them naked), Pat stands and “almost roars with laughter at the sheer absurdity” of the desolation: the famous clock tower, the busy stores, the factories filled with Jewish weavers and spinners—all vanished. “Where once stretched street after street, I can actually see the forest creeping up. . . . Once there was a mighty city—one day it disappeared. . . .” But in Chenstokhov, where forty thousand Jews perished, the church steps over which they were driven and shot have been satisfactorily washed; “inside, candelabras and tall candles diffuse a gentle light.” In the synagogue at Lodz, when the time comes for Kaddish, not two or three but the whole congregation rises, because every man has some one for whom he must say Kaddish. Outside, the little Jewish children romp and sing: “O, my name is Israel, and I am running wild. And O, my name is Israel, I am the ghetto’s child. They’ve killed my friends, they’ve killed my kin, the ghetto’s mine to whistle in.” And in Lublin, children like these dance delightedly around a venerable old Jew in the street, crying “Look! A grandpa!” and pointing to his long, silky beard, because it is a long time since they have seen a beard, and there are very few Jewish grandfathers left in Poland. And in Tarnov Pat hears how a doomed father and son at the Maidanek death camp, having only one piece of rope between them, agreed that the father should hang himself first, after which the son cut him down and used the same rope over again as a noose for himself.
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Many chose to fight rather than make a meek exit, or at least to sell their lives for the lives of a few of their assassins. Ashes and Fire confirms with fresh detail the already well-authenticated fact that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and the partisan forests merit a chapter all their own in the epic of hopeless resistance which the world has been writing since Thermopylae. There were some Jews, too, who fought another kind of fight, but just as effectively as those who died in blasts of fire in the bunkers and on the barricades—like the two hundred Jewish slave laborers who sang lustily on their way from work in order to keep the guards from hearing the whimpers of the little children being smuggled in the workers’ bread baskets to places of security. There were others, unable to give blow for blow, who demonstrated their valor merely by the incredible intensity of their will to survive. In Warsaw, Pat saw the stone block on which Jews broke their own legs to save themselves from the charnel houses. In the Jewish cemetery of Chentshin, a Jewess made an underground grave whose floor and walls and ceiling were tombstones, and lived there more than a year with the rats and the dead so that her little girl might live. When Germany fell, a pious Hasid lay dying in Oswiecim. “In my fever,” he tells Pat, “I saw the others creeping up to snatch my piece of bread. ‘He’s dead,’ I heard one say. That’s when I pulled myself together. ‘No, I’m not dead,’ I cried. ‘Give me my bread!’”
And there were the Jews of non-Jewish aspect, with the “safe faces,” the false Gentile names, the faked identity papers, who fought in their own good way by outwitting a whole army. They were the ones who perfected their parts as priests, nuns, peasants, beggars, woodsmen, and other inviolate “Aryans.” “We were all play actors,” they tell Pat, “and whoever didn’t act well enough, died.”
It was not only before the Gestapo and the SS and the Wehrmacht that these performers had to keep perpetually vigilant. The “million-headed enemy,” alert to “recognize the Jew and have him destroyed,” was also recruited from the incurably anti-Semitic Polish masses. Pat searches diligently and finds a handful of good Poles—some who (usually for a price) gave the hunted Jew a temporary shelter; a few who fought nobly by the side of their Jewish comrades; a saintly Christian lady whose sublime compassion led her, at her peril, to pick up the corpse of an anonymous Jew where the police had thrown it into a gutter, and dig a grave for it, because, as she said, “he looked so lonely in his dying.”
But the proof is that even those rare Poles who were kind to Jews have themselves become objects of reprisal by their countrymen for the sin of mercy. The Bialystok Jewish Committee is now supporting persecuted Christian families which befriended Jews—“so far, one man has been shot and a woman has had her tongue cut out.” In the days of the Nazis, it was the Poles who were quickest to detect and inform against the disguised Jew. “When you sit among Gentiles, never forget that you mustn’t sigh. They will know you at once. They will stop in mid-laughter at a Jewish oi.” It was the Poles, not their German conquerors, who knew the Jews most readily. “Just look at their melancholy eyes,” the Poles used to say. Or else—“he’s too smart, he must be Jewish.” When he escaped from the ghetto, Pat’s chauffeur recalls, “I found two hundred thousand Gentile doors—and every one of them banged shut in my face.” Even in the Warsaw uprising, certain anti-Nazi Polish units refused to enroll Jews, saying “Poland will win without the Jews.” And in the Zamosht forest, toward the end, a survivor discloses, “the Polish partisans, with whom we shared the forest, got orders to liquidate their Jewish comrades because post-war Poland would be better off without us.” As he watches a pitifully scant Jewish demonstration for Palestine in the streets of “liberated” Lodz, Pat hears a Pole beside him mutter: “So many Jews—dog’s blood!” The “Patriots” again are sending expulsion warnings and death notices to returning Jews. Jewish children are still running home beaten and bloody from their Polish schoolrooms.
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Pat knows, moreover, that in latter-day “democratic” Poland there has been no miraculous blaze of enlightenment, and he wisely refrains from blackening one side or whitewashing the other on the present Polish political scene. He observes that Socialists and Communists, “for tactical reasons,” failed to denounce a threatened pogrom in Tarnov, and that the chief of the government’s Security Police there was a notorious Jew-baiter, a member of the Endek, Poland’s pre-war fascist party. Pat is not misled by formal government disapproval of anti-Semitism, or even by Warsaw’s financial aid to Jewish institutions. He consults with Communist Premier Osubka-Moravsky and with Opposition Leader Mikolajczyk, and from each he obtains the “explanation” that the other’s faction—and not the innocent Polish masses—is to blame for continued excesses against the Jews. He draws the sound conclusion, on the basis of the evidence of his eyes and ears, that “the Polish people as such is rotten with anti-Semitism.”
Why, then, do Jews remain in Poland? Why do they build in Poland? Why do they return from Russia? Pat himself asks these questions of the Polish Jews.
About Russia they tell him that every one of them has rejected Soviet citizenship—every one of them is coming back: “It’s not so much that they want to return to Poland, as that they want to get out of Russia. We found no Jewish life in Russia. . . . All over Russia books were being ripped up for cigarette paper; morality counts for so little; man counts for so little. . . .”
In Poland, thirty new cooperatives of Jewish artisans have arisen, and Jewish communities have been reconstructed from the embers of thirty Polish cities. Only in Silesia, however, only in the territories taken from the Germans, is resettlement progressing without the shadow of Polish hate. But, Pat asks, who knows how long? This is “German soil on which a foreign government has settled Jews who are not masters of their fate. What will happen if the present scaffolding of peace collapses and German avengers pour back into Silesia to find the Jews?”
Why do the Jews build? Why do the upholsterers of the Lodz cooperative continue to fix springs in mattresses? “We also repair the springs inside ourselves.” The tanners and the bakers carry on at their labors in Chenstokhov because “we’d go insane, just sitting on packed trunks and waiting.” But in Poland, say the Jews, “you can smell the ships.” The ships to Palestine? To America? To anywhere. “What would Poland’s eighty thousand Jews do if they were presented with eighty thousand certificates for Palestine?” Pat asks himself at the end of his journey. “They would have themselves shipped to Palestine with the least possible delay. What would they do if they were given eighty thousand visas to America? They would sail for America with the least possible delay.” Just as everywhere else in Russia’s Europe, the Jews of Poland ask only for the way out. Meanwhile they mark time, on the edge of a precipice.
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