The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER TWELVE

My name is Gershon Matzkin and I was born in Kruk, Lithuania. My British passport says I was born in Kaunas because Kruk is such a small town and no one has heard of it. And also because the name of that place should be cursed a thousand times and it is better that it is never written down.

I was the second of four children of Meir and Rebecca Matzkin. I was different from the others. My sisters had dark hair, their features proud, while I was blond and had blue eyes and a small nose. I did not look like a Jew at all.

My father would joke that maybe my mother had been too friendly with the goatherd in the village. He could joke about such things because he knew they were impossible. These days, they would say that my genes were different, mutant. But then, who knew of such things?

I was born too early. My body was tiny; they said my life was hanging by a thread. When I was eight days old the rabbi said I was too weak to have my brit milah, too weak to be circumcised. Afterwards, because of everything that happened to our family, it was delayed. Maybe my mother did not want to think about it. And after that it was too late.

The little village whose name I do not want to mention did not have many Jews, maybe a few dozen families. We kept ourselves quiet, trying to get by. But every now and then there was trouble…

I was frightened even before it started. At that age – I was perhaps seven years old – the sound of the rain on the windows was enough to scare me. I liked snow, which we had plenty of, but the rattle of raindrops against the glass frightened me: it sounded like fingers, tapping, demanding to be let in. There was no rain that night but it was very dark and that scared me too.

But this night I was not the only one afraid. My sisters too were awake and crying. Local Lithuanians were running through the streets where the few Jews lived, banging on doors, shouting: You killed Christ! Come out, you Christ-killers!

This happened every now and then, especially at Easter. Even then, when I was just a child, I could recognize the slur in their voices. They were drunk, on vodka, no doubt, but also on hatred – the hatred of the Jew fermented by their faith and distilled for nearly two thousand years. I know this now: then I was just scared.

There were more voices than usual. We waited for them to fade as they went past, but they did not. They remained loud and near. My mother sat on the bed with us – all four of us children shared a single bed back then – telling us to hush. She was holding the youngest of my sisters, little Rivvy, cradled in her arms and was singing an old Yiddish melody:

Dos tzigele is geforen handlen

Dos vet zein dein beruf

Rozinkes mit mandlen

Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof.

It means:

The little goat went out looking

Just as you'll do some day

Bringing raisins and almonds

Sleep sweet baby sleep.

The men outside were still bellowing, Zhid! Zhid! Jew! Jew! But she carried on singing that song. Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof. Sometimes, even now, when I remember everything that happened afterwards, I hear that song again.

At that moment none of us knew what was going on outside. My mother thought my father was downstairs, peering through a gap in the curtains, watching for the moment when the thugs grew bored and moved on. She was partly right: that was why he had gone downstairs, so that he could look and tell us when the coast was clear. But then something had caught his eye. He had seen smoke coming from the barn.

We were not farmers, but like most people in our village we kept a few animals, some chickens and a cow. And now, late at night, my father could see smoke. Surely the men from the village had thrown a torch into the barn. He thought only that he had to rescue the animals. So he ran into the barn.

I don't know when my mother first realized what had happened but she suddenly called out. ‘Meir?’ Then she saw the first orange flames. ‘Meir!’ When there was no reply she threw Rivvy aside as if she were a rag doll and ran down the stairs. We watched from the window as she fled out of the house towards the barn. I was so frightened that I stopped crying.

We saw her tugging at something, bent double, as if she were dragging a sack of seed from the barn. In the dark it was almost impossible to see that she was, in fact, pulling at the ankles of a man. Hannah made out the shape first. ‘It's Daddy,’ she said.

We never knew for certain what had happened. Perhaps the smoke was too much. Perhaps he had hit his head on a wooden beam. Maybe one of the thugs conducting the pogrom had followed him into the barn and beaten him. Whatever had happened, our mother had been too late.

She was never the same person after that. Her hair went grey and she let it fall loose; her clothes were sometimes dirty. She would wear the same skirt and blouse for days on end. She no longer laughed and if she smiled it was a strange, misshapen smile, crooked with regret and sadness. And she never again sang the lullaby.

She decided we could no longer live in that place, whose name she would never say out loud. She had a cousin who had once lived in Kovno and so we moved there. She felt we needed to be in a big city, a place where we would not stand out. A place where there were not just a few Jews, but thousands of us. I suppose she thought there would be safety in numbers. So we headed to Kovno. If you look on a map now you will see no such place. Today they call it by its Lithuanian name: Kaunas.

We arrived when I was eight years old and I have happy memories of our first two years there. My sisters and I went to school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it. Russian and, especially, German. I found it easy. I only had to hear a word once to remember it. Of course ‘bread’ was Brot. What else would it be? The pieces clicked together like a jigsaw puzzle. I learned and learned.

In Kruk, we had followed only the essentials of Jewish tradition and – as my own penis testified – not even all of those. We lit candles on Friday evening to mark the start of the Sabbath, but we did not do much more. In Kovno it was different. Nearly a quarter of the people of this city were Jews and in the area where we lived, everyone. There were synagogues on every street, Yiddish schools, Hebrew schools, a famous religious academy, the yeshiva at Viriampole, even a Jewish hospital. There were people to teach me how to say Kaddish for my father. We did not feel like outsiders here, even if I now looked like one.

I wish I could say my mother was happy, but she was not. We lived in a couple of rented rooms on Jurbarko Street. I do not know how she paid for them. The rooms were dark, even when the sun was shining outside. During this time, I remember my mother's eyes were always empty.

And then, one day in 1940, a different flag was flying.

It was hot that day, the sun so warm it felt as if it would dry out the damp of what had been a long winter. We were playing in the street, as usual, me trailing behind Hannah while my sisters played a game of hopscotch. I was the first to notice it. I pointed upward at the deep red flag, billowing in the breeze. I couldn't quite work out the gold shapes in the top corner; I wondered if it was a letter in some foreign alphabet. Later I learned that these were the tools of the industrial worker and the farmer, the hammer and sickle.

The Russians had arrived to make Lithuania part of the Soviet Union.

At school, the teachers seemed nervous. My Russian teacher vanished. Hannah explained to me that the Russians were arresting people. They were shutting down some of the Jewish buildings because they were against ‘the revolution’, whatever that was. Hannah heard that some of the men were taken away to Siberia. She said it was the coldest place on earth. I imagined the men standing on a huge sheet of white ice, shivering like penguins.

We were frightened of the Russians but it was not they who frightened us most. Because we soon heard that there was a resistance to the Communists, local Lithuanians who were determined to kick the Soviets out of their country. It was these people who scared us. We remembered from Kruk how these men could behave once they were angry and stirred up.

One day I saw the girls whispering. At first they would not let me see what they were all looking at. ‘No, he'll tell Mama,’ Rivvy said.

‘Tell Mama what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What have you got there?’

Eventually, they gave in. Hannah made me swear to secrecy and then she showed me. It was a leaflet she had found on the street. It said the Jews were to blame for the Communists occupying Lithuania. Without the Jews, we would be a free people!

In whispers, Hannah issued our orders. ‘We must not let Mama see this.’ I was not yet eleven years old and I knew nothing of Communism or occupation but I understood that my mother was frail, like a cup that had broken once before and must not be dropped. We succeeded too. She never did see that leaflet.

A year later I thought our troubles were over. At school, the headmaster announced that the Russians had gone. They had simply run away. Good, I thought: now the Lithuanians won't be angry with us, the Jews, for bringing the Soviets into their country. But the headmaster seemed more worried than ever.

This was June 1941. It was only after the headmaster stopped speaking, when I heard the boys in my class talking, that I understood that the Russians had not just left because they wanted to leave us in peace. They had vanished because they were frightened: the Germans had begun an invasion of the Soviet Union.

The next day I was in the street, playing catch with two other boys from school. Suddenly there was a noise, distant at first: the sound of faraway whistles and faint drums. We thought that people were celebrating, a marching band parading through the streets because the Russians had gone. But then there were new sounds: women screaming and children crying. My friend took his ball and ran. I stood there on my own for four or five seconds before a man grabbed my wrist and told me to get out of the street. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Go home now!’ I must have looked dumb and uncomprehending because he stared at me hard. ‘Pogrom,’ he said. ‘Pogrom.’

I ran as fast as I could back to Jurbarko Street. The screams were getting louder: the Lithuanians were marking the great occasion of the Russian withdrawal the best way they knew how, by attacking any Jew they could find. On Kriščiukaičio Street, I saw a man pulled out of a shop by his ears; three men began to beat him, hitting him on the head over and over. I saw other Jews dragged off. I don't know where these Jews were taken or what happened to them afterwards. But I can guess.

The Lithuanians were wearing strange uniforms, ones I had never seen before. They were black, with the flag of Lithuania on their sleeves, like an armband. These jackets were not all identical, like the uniform of real soldiers. And the men did not march in columns, but rampaged through the streets, shouting slogans: ‘The Jews and Communists have brought shame to Lithuania!’ They called themselves the Lithuanian Activist Front.

Later we found out that they took dozens of Jews to the Lietūkis garage, in the centre of Kovno. They killed hundreds of men there. Afterwards, in a book, I learned that on that night of June 23 1941 and on the three nights that followed, they killed more than three thousand eight hundred Jews. They used axes and knives, as well as bullets; they burned people out of their houses and out of any hiding place. They drowned others in the Neris river. They torched synagogues. At the time we knew no numbers. We knew only what we could see.

I was running as fast as I could, darting in and out of entrances and into alleyways, to avoid the men in black. I thought that if they found me they might beat me up too. After all, I was eleven years old now and I was tall: they might have thought of me as more of a man than a child. And I assumed they would know that I was a Jew.

Just outside the tenement where we lived, I ran into my sisters. Hannah was so relieved to see me that she clutched me in a tight, long hug. She bundled us into the building and up the stairs so that we could warn our mother what was going on. We wanted to tell her what we had just witnessed, the terrible things that were happening. But she already knew.

I understood what had happened when I heard Hannah's cry. So small, as if she was just a little girl, which of course, now that I am a grown man, I know that she was. She tried to stop us, my other sisters and me, from seeing it, but it was too late. I saw it and I can never forget what I saw.

My mother's feet were in the air, her body dangling from a beam in the ceiling. She was hanging there, swinging like the pendulum in a clock – a clock that said we had reached the end of time.