The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tom closed the notebook and looked up. This was a nightmare. Truly, a waking nightmare.

He checked his watch. Too early to call Henning. He imagined what he would tell him. ‘I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that the dead guy may not be so innocent after all. The bad news is, you killed a Holocaust survivor.’

PR calamities didn't get much worse than this. Rebecca Merton would simply have to pop this notebook into an envelope and send it to any newspaper in London and the United Nations name would be caked in mud. He could see the headline, across a two-page spread: ‘“My father's wartime hell”, by daughter of UN shooting victim’, complete with full colour photo of ‘raven-haired Rebecca Merton, 31’.

Tom rolled a cigarette, before seeing the wagging finger of the waitress. Of course, London now had the same bloody puritan rules as New York. He kept it unlit and ordered another espresso. He went back to the notebook and girded himself for the next revelation.

I remember very little about those next few days. We moved around as if in some kind of trance. My sister Hannah the least. She did not allow herself to be stunned for very long. She had to be our mother now…

My job was to be the provider of food. I was a child, but I looked older and my looks held another advantage. I could pass for one of the local Lithuanian lads, not marked as a Jew. I would scavenge wherever I could, turning up at a baker's shop just before closing time, my hand out for any scraps. If there was a woman there I would try to catch her eye: women were more likely to take pity on me. ‘Such a sweet face,’ they would say, handing me a loaf-end of bread or a hardened rock of old cake.

‘Where are your parents?’

‘I'm an orphan.’

‘Hear that, Irena? He's an orphan. What happened to your mum and dad, little one?’

‘The Russians.’

‘Oh, those evil animals. And here I am giving you a hunk of stale bread. Irena, fetch that meat we have in the back. Come on, quick now. Here you are, young man. Now you be on your way.’

None of us told the truth. If anyone ever came near Hannah, she would lie outright. ‘My father will be back soon,’ she would say. ‘My mother has just popped out.’ At the time I thought she was simply ashamed to admit we were orphans. Now I understand better. She did not want people to know that in our two rooms, there were only children. She must have worried that someone would send us away or steal what we had. Or worse.

This time, between the Russians and what followed, did not last long. The books say there was, in fact, no time at all, that an advance group of Germans was already there, from the very beginning, even organizing the pogroms the night my mother ended her life. But when the Germans arrived in force, we knew it.

In fact, we heard them before we saw them. I was in the apartment, watching Hannah carve up the crust of bread I had brought into four pieces. As the boy, the man of the house, mine was always the largest. Rivvy and Leah had equal chunks – and the smallest Hannah gave to herself. The girls had learned patience and would eat their food slowly, making even a bite of bread last as if it were a meal. But, at that time, I could not control my hunger. I gobbled up whatever I was given as soon as it was in front of me.

At first, I thought it was a storm. But the sky outside was bright and clear. Yet there it was again, the deep rumble of distant explosions. ‘Shhh,’ Hannah said and we all held still. Hannah closed her eyes so she could concentrate. ‘Aeroplanes,’ she said eventually.

Soon there was a different noise. It was the thunder of an army marching into a city. And then there were sounds that were not nearly so far away. Hard, mechanical sounds of motorcycles and infantry and mammoth field guns on wheels and finally tanks, all rolling into Kovno.

Hannah edged towards the window, not daring to press her face too close. I barged ahead and took a good look. What I saw confused me. The windows of the building opposite to ours, and the one next to it, were opening. Out of them were unrolling large, billowing pieces of cloth: flags. Girls were leaning out, smiling and waving, throwing flowers at the men below.

‘Is everything going to be OK now, Hannah?’ I asked.

‘Maybe, Gershon. Maybe.’ But she looked unsure.

We went to school the next day and I knew immediately that even if our Lithuanian neighbours were glad to see the Nazis, we Jews were not. Everyone was tense. The headmaster spoke to the whole school and his face was carved with anxiety. ‘We are a people who have been tested many times,’ he said. ‘Children, you all know the story of Pharaoh. And of Haman. Men who came to destroy the Jews. And what happened each time?’ No one wanted to answer; this didn't seem like a normal lesson. ‘Each time they failed, because God protected us. We survived. Children, this may be such a test now.’

I'm not sure if it was that day or the next but it happened very soon. Notices went up in German. I stood on tiptoe, my neck craned, to read the one posted on a lamppost near the school, translating it first to the boys in my class and then to a small group that gathered around. The sign said that from now on all Jews would have to wear a yellow star on their outer clothing, to be visible at all times. And there would be a curfew: not for everyone in Kovno, but for the Jews. After dark, every Jew was to be indoors; there were to be no Jews on the streets. And we were not allowed to walk on the pavements. Those were reserved for Aryans only. We would have to walk in the gutter.

Even then, I don't know whether I was scared. These were new rules that we would have to live by, but it seemed better than the Lithuanians and their pogroms. If this was all they planned to do to us – make us wear a yellow star and stay home after dark – then it was better than being beaten on the streets.

But I could not comfort myself like that for very long. A few mornings later, we were woken by a loud banging on the door. I sat bolt upright. My chest was banging. For the first, confused seconds I wondered if it was my mother at the door: I imagined her, smiling, her hair combed and neat, come to take us away from here. I must have been about to say something because Hannah, who was also now sitting up, placed her finger over her lips and fixed me in a glare that told me to keep very still.

The banging on the door started up again, louder and more insistent. We could hear the same noise repeated up and down the corridor and outside on the street too: Nazis pounding on the doors of the Jews.

Hannah got up, grabbed something to cover her nightclothes and opened the door.

He was tall, his back straight. I couldn't stop staring at his boots. They shone like glass and when they moved, the leather creaked.

‘You have ten minutes to gather everything,’ he barked in German. ‘You are moving!’ And with that he turned and headed for the next door. There were more men repeating the same instructions up and down the staircase, above and below us. Now we heard those same words coming from the street below, amplified by a megaphone.

When Hannah turned around her face was serious. ‘Get dressed. Rivvy and Leah, don't just wear one skirt. Wear two or three. As many as you can, one over the other. Do the same with sweaters and shorts. You too, Gershon. As many clothes as you can.’

Then she scurried around the two rooms, shoving whatever she thought essential into suitcases. She moved fast, but she was not panicked. And because she wasn't, we weren't.

After a few minutes she added, ‘You can take one thing each that you really, really want. Just one. Everything else stays behind.’

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.