The Fires of Lilliput Read online

  The Fires of Lilliput

  Michael Martin

  The Fires of Lilliput is fiction.

  Names, characters, places, events, and actual persons,

  living or dead, real or imagined, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 Michael J. Martin

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Published in the United States by Heart Beat Publications, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available on request.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Fires of Lilliput is fiction, but its story owes tremendously to the memoirs, diaries, and testimony of real people who survived the savage onslaught of the Second World War in Poland. No fiction could imagine the story presented in these pages. No imagination could conjure such a tale.

  I read two powerful and moving memoirs during five years of research: Why, Oh God, Why? A Daily Diary of Life Inside the Warsaw Ghetto by Halina Gorcewicz; and Bellum Vobiscum: War Memoirs, by Zygmunt Skarbek-Kruszewski.

  Neither Gorcewicz nor Skarbek-Kruszewski appear in this novel. But many chapters and passages owe much to their recollections of daily events, from which a central theme emerges.

  Articulated so well by Langdon Gilkey and Viktor Frankl, it is that under tense circumstance, we are neither Christian nor Jew, rich nor poor, but man and woman, essential and exposed. The naked reality of suffering strips evil of its subterfuge; reveals good in simple glory; and finds people striving and struggling for some worthy goal.

  In The Fires of Lilliput, that goal is life. – Michael Martin

  For my wife and children.

  For Bob Freedman and Selma Luttinger,

  who encouraged me to write this story.

  “THIS INTERNMENT CAMP REDUCED SOCIETY, ordinarily large and complex, to viewable sizes, and by subjecting life to greatly increased tension, laid bare its essential structures.”

  –Christian philosopher and concentration camp survivor Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure

  “WHAT MAN ACTUALLY NEEDS is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

  –Jewish philosopher and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

  “DESTINY DECIDED THAT I SHOULD FIND adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war.” –Primo Levi, survivor

  BOROUGH

  One

  The monsignor appeared with a young novitiate at her door on a cold Brooklyn day in November 1973. He had an address but no telephone number. He would not have called anyway.

  A teenage girl answered the knock. She stayed behind a screen door.

  “Is this the home of Shosha Price?”

  “Are you looking for donations?” the girl asked.

  “No. We came to talk to your mother.”

  “She isn’t here.”

  “It’s urgent.”

  The girl looked at the men. She looked at their black shirts and wide, white collars. They both wore black overcoats.

  “She’ll be home later,” the girl said. “Can you come back?”

  “Do you know when?”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  The men looked at one another and nodded to the girl. She watched them raise their umbrellas and walk down the steps. Then she opened the screen.

  “Why don’t you wait inside?” she said.

  The men turned and looked at her.

  “I can make coffee,” she said.

  They walked back up the steps. “Thank you,” the monsignor said.

  They spent little over an hour making small conversation. When the girl heard her mother coming in the back door, she stood and went to her. The monsignor and the novitiate heard them exchange words in another room. A well-kept woman in her early fifties came into the front room. The two men stood.

  “Shosha Price?”

  “Who is asking?” she said. She had a Polish accent, thicker than the monsignor’s. He shook her hand gently.

  “We are here on behalf of the Vatican,” he said. “Jaruslaw Bachleda.”

  The woman looked at them.

  “We’re here for something good,” the novitiate said. “From the Holy Father in Rome.” He smiled and took her hand and her face relaxed.

  “My daughter says you’ve come to speak with me.”

  “We have,” the monsignor said. “We need to speak about Jakub Chelzak, a Servant of God.”

  The woman stepped back and raised her hand to her mouth. She almost tripped.

  “My G-d—Jakub.” Her voice cracked and she felt her legs weaken. Her daughter took her by the shoulders and felt her trembling.

  “Then you are Shosha Mordechai?” the novitiate said.

  She looked at him. She was crying without sound.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  GHETTO

  Two

  Up close, Shosha Mordechai had never seen a soldier. She had only seen them passing in the streets and waving. The war had been a safely distant thing until a young Polish officer in uniform, Pavel Worcek, arrived with a flier advertising a vacancy in one of the Mordechai buildings. Shosha answered the door with a broom in her hand.

  “Good day panna,” he said. “Is your master here?”

  “My papa?” She saw the flier. “You’ve come about the flat.”

  “Your papa?”

  “I’ll get the key.”

  He followed her across the street and down a block through an alley. They went upstairs to the second floor and she opened the door to a small, clean three-room flat overlooking Pawia Street.

  “Fine,” the soldier said. “It’s fine.”

  “You should look around a little,” Shosha said. “Over here—look at this view.”

  They looked down through an X-shaped paper strip on the window and saw a man with sidelocks and a beard sweeping the front of a haberdasher’s shop.

  “Well, if I need a tailor,” Pavel Worcek said.

  The soldier turned away, but three young men walking up the sidewalk caught Shosha’s eye. They crossed the street to the haberdasher. Then she turned away.

  “If you like it, my father requires a cash deposit of a month’s rent.”

  “I have that—no problem.” He took an envelope from his pocket, counted out the bills, and handed them to Shosha.

  A scream from outside stopped her from recounting the money and she rushed to the window. “They’re cutting him!” She ran out of the flat, down the stairs, and into the street.

  “Gevalt! Gevalt!” The old man was on his knees crying—the thugs were shearing his locks with long scissors. People looked out windows and screamed “police!” but only Shosha approached. She turned and ran back and grabbed Pavel Worcek, who stood on the stoop outside the apartment.

  “C’mon—you’re a soldier,” she said and she tugged him, but he resisted. She dropped his arm and went toward the men on her own. The small one held up the scissors when he saw her. She stopped and screamed. She eyed the men and picked up a rock and threw it through a window over the haberdasher’s shop. Glass crashed onto the street.

  “Spierdalaj ty glupia pizda,” said one of the hooligans and they threw the scissors at Shosha and ran. She went to Meziel, the tailor, and bent down. He was bawling and she took his head in her arms. She looked up as a shadow crossed and saw the soldier Worcek. She jammed her hand into her pocket and held up the bills. She could not see the soldier’s face for the glare of the sun.

  “Keep
your money,” she said, and threw it at his feet.

  Three

  At first, it seemed anti-Semitism had suddenly gripped a whole generation of young Polish men, who wandered Warsaw’s streets in gangs of six or eight, smashing windows or slashing the cheeks of boys wearing yarmulkes. But gradually the attacks took on a planned character, orchestrated on holy days, more frequent during the Jewish seasons.

  “These thugs are Hitler’s men,” Lev Mordechai said. “Anybody who doesn’t see it now, and refuses to fight the way armies fight—well, they will see it soon and more painfully.”

  Before he left for a two-week service on the wartime planning committee, Lev Mordechai told his seventeen-year-old daughter Shosha “remember, you are a Pole and a Jew. No one is a better Pole because he is Catholic, Lutheran, atheist, or a Russian who settled here turn of the century.”

  “I don’t think about it, Papa.”

  “You will.”

  The Germans surrounded Warsaw in a fiery cannonade on Friday, the 1st of September 1939. Radio announcers said bombs fell at dawn on the outskirts of the city. Air raid alarms blared across Warsaw. People fled to basements and cellars. Tenants and homeowners glued X-shaped paper strips on windows to stop pounding vibrations from shattering panes. Shopkeepers secured mannequins and shelves. Children wearing gas masks played stickball in the street. The people were ignorant and brave.

  When the children organized parades, Shosha marched with them wearing a Red Cross satchel on her arm and a gas mask around her neck. When the sirens whined, she ran with the men and older boys to the attics, screaming and cheering and raising a toast with a fantasy glass whenever a German Stuka fell out of the sky. When her mother Rebekah found her in a loft, she dragged Shosha to the basement.

  “You should know better,” Rebekah said.

  “No one was shooting at us.”

  “Your father hasn’t told you about shrapnel? Or stray bullets?”

  “All the time,” Shosha said.

  The women hid clothes, fabric, furs, and jewels in trunks and crates and suitcases, secret rooms and cellars. They laughed uncomfortably when Warsaw’s president, Stefan Starzynski, lost his voice on the radio pleading for order and calm. Rebekah Mordechai stood over a fortress of food in the hallway, the stairwell, and the back rooms in her house.

  “Leiozia, we need to divide this,” she said to her housemaid. “Part to the cellar, part to the kitchen.”

  The Mordechai women set up a community pantry in a vacant ground floor flat. Rebekah, Shosha, and Leiozia spent the mornings cooking and giving hot food to anyone who was hungry. The conflict crept and lines formed at the pantry—lines that grew daily, and then with every meal: Refugees who lost homes to bombs; soldiers from platoons and brigades that fighting had reduced to a wounded few; Jews mobs had marked for injury before war reached them. The Mordechais brought beds out of storage and from vacant furnished flats. They bandaged the injured—soldiers and civilians.

  Polish propaganda director Colonel Roman urged Varsovians to build fortifications and all able men to leave Warsaw for the eastern front. A week into the conflict, the Polish government left the city. A stray bomb hit one of the Mordechai rental flats, killing an old widower, a Jewish classics professor forced to relinquish his emeritus status in a university purge.

  “We have to leave—at least for a while,” Rebekah said.

  “Leave our home?” Shosha said. “What will we come back to?”

  “They’re saying this is temporary—until the Red Army comes. We can wait it out at the farm.”

  The farm was a summer home in Lev Mordechai’s family for years, about fifteen miles north of the city. It was always stocked with provisions. The family took some belongings but left most of their food to people who couldn’t leave the city. The army commandeered taxis and buses so at first they walked, over barricades and past soldiers who jammed the streets, and past other refugees.

  “Shosha—don’t try that,” Rebekah said.

  Shosha stood poised to jump at the edge of an anti-tank ditch that ran the entire width of the deserted street, stopping at two brick buildings. The women couldn’t walk around it. The only other way was back and down another street. The ditch had water in it, and maybe explosives.

  “Mama—how wide do you think this is?”

  “You can’t jump it,” Rebekah said. “And even if you could, what about us?”

  Shosha saw an open door in an abandoned building and a pile of broken bricks. She picked through them, running her hands along the edges. She took the brick with the flattest edge, walked up the steps to the door, and used it to knock out the metal posts that held the door to its hinges.

  “Shosha. That’s not ours,” her mother said.

  “I’ll need help,” Shosha said. “When the door comes out from the last hinge.”

  The women hesitated, but Leiozia went up the steps and held the door. Rebekah watched, but when the door was about to unhinge, she stepped up. Shosha popped the last hinge post and the women lowered the door. Farther off, they heard explosions and voices through bullhorns: screams and commands. They dragged the door, raised and positioned it, and let it drop over the ditch. They set it securely. Then they crossed, one by one.

  “Shosha—my little saint,” Rebekah said.

  THE GERMANS BOMBED ALL NIGHT. The women passed the darkness in a drainage tunnel. They started out early next morning. They got out of the city by afternoon. They paid a carriage driver and traveled with a load of scavenged furniture to the farm. In a few days, after the curtains parted and fire lighted the house, Polish soldiers came.

  “Have you seen Lev Mordechai?” Shosha asked every man. “He’s a captain, he’s tall, about two meters, dark hair—he has all of it, and he’s very handsome.”

  Some soldiers thought they had seen him; some had seen men who looked like him. But in each case, the man they had seen had disappeared, together with men and munitions weaving a tattered web of advance and retreat across the countryside. Rebekah never had the nerve to ask about her husband. The man who vanishes from his family for too long has either taken up with a mistress or died.

  Lev and Rebekah Mordechai met after the First World War, Lev a Jew from a prominent family. Rebekah a Lutheran. Though neither family blessed it, the Mordechai union thrived, free from the whims of bickering siblings and the will of parents from disparate faiths. With no dowry, Lev Mordechai made himself a wealthy man, collecting rents and rental properties, a summer estate, and land inside and beyond Polish borders. To honor her husband, Rebecca took the more Hebraic “Rebekah” shortly after their marriage.

  Shosha grew up around the unmarried Poles and Jews who rented her family’s two and three-room flats. They were young and sometimes beautiful, intelligent, questioners, writers, and skeptics. Shosha’s friends included a bookish homosexual with a stack of unpublished novels, and a lovely researcher with three suitors who won a prestigious mathematics prize in Russia. A few of these open-minded intellectuals considered the Mordechai marriage a sign. The Jews, in particular, considered the union a philosophical bridge.

  Some people associated Rebekah’s faith with Hitler—even saying Lutheranism was the official church of the Nazi party (Hitler was baptized Roman Catholic and never named an official state church). Lev Mordechai was a member of the House of Ger, a great rabbinical line. He could trace his lineage to his great great great uncle, the Gerrer Rebbe Yitzchak Meir, the first Rabbi of Ger, a village in Poland. Lev Mordechai’s great uncle, the Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, completed a work of monumental Talmudic scholarship, the Sefat Emet al Ha Torah, a commentary on the Torah in five volumes. Lev Mordechai’s uncle, Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter, expanded the Hassidic community of Ger, to more than one hundred thousand people. He lived to see the Nazis annihilate most of them and lived to escape, to rebuild the Gerrer Chasidut from Jerusalem.

  REBEKAH SAW THE FIRST GERMANS BEFORE SUNRISE: columns of men and machines on the other side of the fence and the pines and
the bushes around the house. The tanks shook the windows and their tracks ripped the hard dirt and armored transports ground along in the dust. The women closed the drapes and built a fire at night. Warsaw fell a few days later.

  In October, Polish soldiers brought word to the Mordechai farm that all former inhabitants of Warsaw could return—and should return, to help fight in the coming insurrection.

  “If we go back, what can we expect?” Leiozia asked.

  “Papa,” Rebekah said. “Our best hope for him is in Warsaw.” She sat near a cracked window.

  “What’s left?” Leiozia asked. “What can possibly be left?”

  “I don’t know,” Rebekah said. “But I would like to.”

  They walked away from the estate, traveling at night across rough countryside to avoid Germans. Here and there, they hitched rides from friendly strangers. They stayed clear of lanes and roads they had used the first time. They saw villages burning, and they walked across deep ruts from tank treads and over mortar holes blasted into the Earth. Rubble, corpses, and tangled barbed wire outlined the edge of the city. Rebekah stopped and stood, stiff and still.

  “Mama—keep going,” Shosha said.

  Her mother’s eyes were dry and wide, her cheeks ashen. They walked to their house on Pawia Street. It took direct fire but the walls stood. Rebekah cried.

  “We can rebuild the roof,” Shosha said. “We can put in floors, ceilings, plaster and paint—the house would be good as new.”

  They didn’t hear from Lev Mordechai, but the novelist on the third floor had heard a house in London would publish his latest book. The manuscript had saved him from a bullet. He stuffed it into the wall after the worst night of shelling and took it as a sign. What a story! The book would be a great success! But first things first. Now he fretted about how to get another clean copy.