The Warsaw Anagrams

POSTSCRIPT

I took Erik’s advice and fled our island.

His parting words to me were, ‘Say a kaddish for me if you ever make it to the labour camp where I died.’

‘But you don’t believe in God!’ I exclaimed.

‘True, but you do!’ he replied, flashing a mischievous smile. Then he fixed me with a grave look. ‘And one more thing, Heniek. After the Germans lose, they’ll want us to forget all that has happened. One person – just remember one! – and you will have foiled their plans.’

My last memory of Erik: he is standing on the rooftop of Stefa’s building, raising a hand to hail me and smiling. Was he aware that he had those bamboo arms he used to notice on all of us?

It was a blessing that he didn’t realize how far he’d fallen. And that he didn’t know that the stench of decay he often smelled was his own.

I thought he’d soon leave the roof and let me get on my way alone, but every time I turned, he was still waving to me.

Two weeks later, I reached a boyhood friend’s house in Vilnius, but it was too risky to go any further. I’ll call my friend Johann, though that’s not his real name; I wouldn’t want anyone to be able to identify his children or grandchildren, since they might one day suffer reprisals for his having hidden a Jew.

Johann owned a small grocery and lived alone in big old draughty house on the outskirts of town; his children were already grown and his wife was dead. I stayed for nearly two years with him. I never went outside. During the day, I mostly read novels and listened to the news on the radio. In the evenings, the two of us played backgammon, listened to symphonies on his Victrola and discussed how the war was going.

Johann buried Erik Cohen’s manuscript in his back garden, underneath a rosebush. I’d begun calling it The Warsaw Anagrams by then, because Erik had told me that that was his working title.

The Nazis discovered my hiding place on 7 October 1943, while Johann was at his grocery. They took me to a local prison. A week later, they sent me to the Stutthof labour camp.

Eighty-three pounds.

When the Soviets liberated the camp in late May 1945, that’s what I weighed. My arms weren’t bamboo; they were fishing rods!

Dysentery had turned me inside out by then and I was in the infirmary.

By the time I saw my first Soviet soldier, Stutthof was nearly empty, since the Germans had evacuated most of the internees weeks before, marching them towards more secure territory and leaving only the sick behind.

In a way, I came back from the dead, too – as a ghost haunting his own life.

I’ve always believed I survived because of meeting Erik and taking down his story. It’s the only answer I have for why I am here and six million others are not. I’m aware that my explanation doesn’t make logical sense, but we all know by now that logic is not God’s strong point.

As soon as I had the strength, I made my way back to Johann’s house and dug up The Warsaw Anagrams. I learned from neighbours that he’d been executed the evening I’d been captured.

Lately, I’ve begun to cling to my memories of Johann when I begin to believe what the Nazis tried to prove to us all – that anyone can be made to betray those they love.

I moved back to Warsaw and opened a printing house again. Occasionally, I’d show The Warsaw Anagrams to the people I trusted, but Christian friends didn’t want to read about what the Nazis and their Polish helpers had done to their one-time neighbours, and the handful of Jews who’d returned were too fragile to revisit the past.

Erik and I wrote his story and it helps me pass my days easier knowing that we did it together. And I think the very act of reading is important – it means we have a chance to participate in a culture that the Nazis couldn’t kill.

Knowing you have done one good thing – no matter how small – is a comfort that no one can take away.

I like the tingling in my fingertips when I choose the type for the books I print. I like to have ink stains all over my hands. I like to invent words for the new language Erik wanted us to have.

Herzsterben – the death one feels in one’s chest on pushing away a starving beggar.

I try to live without expectations. I try to accept people as they are. I try to celebrate waking up every morning.

Zunfargangmeyvn – a connoisseur of sunsets; someone who has learned to savour what others take for granted.

And I try to live in a world where the most soft-spoken people win all the arguments.

Noc die Zweite.

The name of my dog. He’s a wiry dachshund who sleeps in my bed, his snout next to mine, and his snoring eases me into my dreams.

I try never to go to sleep without him. Too many memories await me if I enter the darkness alone.

Like almost everything else in the Warsaw ghetto, Stefa’s apartment house was blown up by the Nazis during the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, then levelled by the Russians when they took control of the city. All those rutted old streets – and all we had suffered – were gone. Except inside our heads.

Some day, weeds and trees will have covered up all the rubble. And after that, when the developers have enough złoty, buildings will go up – even steel and glass hotels with fountains in the lobby. Tourists will spread their gaze over an urban landscape being born again, and they will whisper to their children, Hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned here for years, but the kids will see only the maze of construction in front of their eyes and an army of helmet workers scurrying back and forth. They’ll ask if they can go swimming now in their hotel pool.

And why shouldn’t they?

Those who feel guiltiest will try to make us doubt the existence of all the bones that lie buried under the Polish topsoil and all the ash scattered through the Polish forests.

A walnut tree that was two feet high. Starting again like the rest of us.

An old man passing in the street spotted me staring at the spindly trunk and identified it. I’d thought it was a hazel. ‘No, it’s definitely a walnut,’ he told me, and he smiled at me as if it was a good omen.

I guess we’ll know if he’s right when we see the kind of nuts it gives us, five or ten years from now. Sometimes we need to wait a long time to know the meaning of what’s happening right at this very second.

I found the walnut tree growing out of the earthen pit where the courtyard of Stefa’s building had been.

I looked for Erik all over the city, but I never found him. How long must ibburs wander the earth? I’ve asked learned rabbis from Paris, Marseille and Istanbul, but none could tell me. ‘Their time may not be like ours,’ one of them explained to me, but I already knew that.

I like to think that Erik found Adam and Stefa, and during the easy days of summer, when the high, midday sun turns the rooftops to gold, I can almost convince myself that he must have. At night, however, when I’m listening to the rise and fall of Noc’s breathing, and beyond him to the loose web of silence that means that he and I are alone in a city that was once mine and no longer is, I trust only loneliness. I’m not much good at happy endings, just as Erik sensed.

While reading about the death camps a few years ago, I stumbled upon the identity of the official at Buchenwald to whom Rolf Lanik must have given his ‘gift’ of skin taken from Adam, Anna and Georg: Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald camp, Karl Otto Koch. In her trial for murder in 1951, German prosecutors revealed that she had made keepsakes – including lampshades – out of the skin of prisoners. Apparently, she was particularly fascinated by distinctive tattoos and often had men killed and their skin tanned so that she could display them in her home.

Lanik’s effort to win Ilse Koch’s gratitude does not seem to have won him the transfer to Buchenwald that he coveted, however; there is no record of his ever having served at that camp, which was overseen by Karl Otto Koch from July 1937 to September of 1941, when he and his notorious wife moved to the Majdanek camp.

Was it really Rabbi Kolmosin – the much-feared mystic Erik met in the Lipowa Street Labour Camp – who caused him to return as an ibbur? That is indeed what he led me to believe, though he was never sure. And yet I sometimes think that Erik may not have been entirely honest with me – that he may have had more to do with his unusual destiny than he was prepared to admit. After all, there were times when he seemed to let it slip that he was not the confirmed atheist he claimed, and that, at the very least, he knew about some traditional Jewish mystical practices. For instance, just after Stefa’s suicide, he chanted the names of everyone he’d ever loved until he lost his voice. Would a secular Jew really have made that effort? Additionally, Erik made it clear to me that he came to believe in the magical efficacy of names – a central tenet of kabbalah. After re-reading The Warsaw Anagrams on numerous occasions over the last few years, I have been forced to consider – though this remains just a speculation – whether Erik worked with Rabbi Kolmosin or some other unnamed sage in the labour camp in order to bring about his own return from the dead. As to why he wouldn’t have admitted this to me, there is a strong Jewish tradition that forbids such arcane and dangerous practices, and I suspect that he may have feared my judgement – or the judgement of any god he might have begun to believe in.

I mention this because I desperately want to do justice to Erik as the complex human being that I came to know, especially because it was he who gave me back a reason to live. But I must admit that the how of his reappearance among the living is no longer very important to me. Now that we know the full scope of the Nazi genocide – that the Germans almost succeeded in annihilating us – it’s only the why of his return that I still speculate about.

And, of course, I still wonder about the people whom he describes in The Warsaw Anagrams.

It was Dawid Engal, the superintendent of the building where Erik lived in the ghetto, who was able to tell me what happened to several of them. In the Before Time, he had been a professor of Polish literature at the University of Warsaw, and a colleague of his there was able to tell me that he emigrated to Brooklyn just after the war and found employment as a German teacher at Lafayette High School. We began corresponding during the summer of 1949.

Engal confirmed to me that Mikael Tengmann had indeed been killed shortly after Erik and Izzy’s escape from the ghetto. He told me that the physician’s body had been discarded one evening outside the front door of the Nozyk Synagogue. The rumour that Engal had heard was that bruises on Tengmann’s neck indicated that he had been strangled.

In response to my questions about Erik’s friends and neighbours, the professor added that the bakery in the courtyard where Ewa worked was shut down by the Nazis in July 1942. Shortly after that, Ziv purchased a pistol on the black market and joined the Jewish Combat Organization, telling everyone he would never permit the Germans to catch him alive. I have since discovered that, along with most of the members of that fighting force, he very likely died in the Ghetto Uprising, which began in January of 1943.

Ewa and Helena disappeared around the time the bakery was closed, and Professor Engal lost contact with them. In February 1952, however, the American Joint Distribution Committee was able to supply me with more information. Writing to me in Yiddish from New York, a researcher for that relief organization informed me that Ewa and Helena had been on the transport that left for Treblinka on 3 August 1942. They were gassed on arrival. My correspondent added that Rowy Klaus was transported to Treblinka several days later. From a camp survivor I later met while visiting Łódź, I learned that the young musician played violin in the camp orchestra that summer, but in the autumn he became ill with tuberculosis and was sent to the gas chamber.

Through my research, I have also learned that Zachariah Manberg – the little acrobat whom Erik hoped to save – managed to go into hiding with his mother and sister in Christian Warsaw in December 1942. Shortly after liberation, they moved to Canada. Zachariah is currently enrolled as a law student at the University of Toronto and we have established a correspondence.

I never learned whether Bina Minchenberg or Benjamin Schrei survived. They have vanished, like so many others.

Izzy was the person I most wanted to find out about, but I was unable to discover anything about his whereabouts – even if he had survived. Times were hard in Poland and it was impossible for me to travel to France to pursue my investigations. It took me years to accumulate enough savings and obtain the necessary papers from our Communist government. Finally, in the summer of 1953, I received authorization. Realizing that my wallet was as full as it was ever likely to get, I packed a bag and left.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find his sons at the address in Boulogne-Billancourt that Erik had given me. By then, I had learned that Erik had made an anagram of Izzy’s surname, which was not Nowak but Kowan. I located two Kowan families in Paris, but they weren’t Polish Jews and they had no relatives who were watchmakers from Warsaw.

To protect his old friend, Erik must have lied to me about Boulogne-Billancourt. Izzy’s sons were probably living in some other Paris suburb or elsewhere in France. I wished I had asked him to give me Louis’ full name – and made him swear to me that it wasn’t an anagram.

Shortly after my hunt through Paris for Izzy, I was able to locate Irene’s mother, Sylvie Lanik, in Bordeaux. When we met, however, she refused to tell me anything about her daughter except to say that she was alive and well, and living in Switzerland. Irene bore some responsibility for her stepfather’s death, of course, and though more than a decade had passed since his murder, Mrs Lanik may have still feared her daughter’s arrest.

In August 1953, after my travels around France, I caught a boat to Cyprus and went on to Izmir by freighter. By then, I had learned that Erik’s wife Hannah had had Sephardic cousins named Zarco. I questioned three members of the family about Erik’s daughter Liesel, and I talked to about a dozen other Izmir Jews, but no one admitted knowing her. On one occasion, while speaking with her second cousin Abraham Zarco, I had the feeling that his denial wasn’t entirely genuine, but all my attempts to win his confidence proved useless. Maybe Liesel didn’t wish to be found. Or perhaps the family wanted nothing to do with her because of her relationship with Petrina.

My most recent find is Jaśmin Makinska. Only three months ago, I learned that she was living in England, where she had emigrated shortly after the war. To my great joy, I received a reply to my letter to her about a month ago. She told me that she was living near Weymouth, in a two-room cottage by the sea.

Jaśmin confirmed that she drove Erik and Izzy to Liza’s farm in March 1941, and that her sister was murdered by the SS when Erik was captured on 7 July.

Izzy fled on foot late that same afternoon, she told me. He managed to telephone her from a nearby town and give her the terrible news about Liza.

Jaśmin received one letter from Izzy, mailed three months later from Istanbul. He had made it there by freighter from Odessa, just as he and Erik had planned, and he would soon be on his way to Marseille. He was in excellent spirits and had already received a friendly letter from his old friend Louis, though he was full of remorse over Liza’s death and without much hope for Erik.

‘Izzy told me that he would write again when he was settled in the south of France, but I never received another word from him. The war had spread by then, and I suspect that his letters simply never made it to Warsaw. After I moved to England, he had no way of finding me – and there was no way I could locate him either.’

I expect that Izzy, his sons and Louis may be living in or around Marseille. I shall do my best to find them.

Jaśmin promises not to give up searching for him, as well, though she also says that she’ll never set foot in Continental Europe again.

On the way home from Izmir, I stopped in Lublin and said a kaddish for Erik outside the Lipowa Street camp. And for all the other heroic friends of ours who were long gone, especially Johann, who had given up his life for me.

Seeing the muddy clearing where Erik had been hanged and hearing my trembling voice undid me, however. I felt as if I were pulling my existence out of an emptiness so great that everything I saw and felt was only an illusion.

I stayed just long enough to intone an ‘El Male Rachamim’ for Erik’s soul and then fled, though turning away from where he’d been murdered made me feel as though I was leaving behind the best part of myself.

I think of Erik every day of my life. I try to remember the dead in all their uniqueness, as he would have wanted.

The autobiography of the Jews is still being written. That is our victory. And I believe now that Erik’s deepest hope was for The Warsaw Anagrams to serve as his contribution to it. I am convinced, in fact, that that was why he returned as an ibbur.

Heniek Corben

Warsaw, 3 Kislev, 5715 (28 November 1954)