Tell me something, Karl. What use is a Germany that sentences people like Gerhard to death? You wept when I showed you his letter. Do you remember that mild, beaming face, often dreaming, often filled with self-doubt, but never withdrawn or gloomy?
At first it’s like an ember. Then it begins to flicker and soon there’s a flame. It is this flame that penetrates the brain. The result? Constant pain. It’s when my mind cannot contain the pain; when it overpowers everything – hope, love, pleasant memories, everything – it’s when it brutally occupies the past that the thought first occurs. The pain refuses to go away. And then, on a beautiful sunny afternoon like today, I think of the best way to go. Why shouldn’t I hang myself from the old oak in the garden? A semi-public act. The neighbours will report the event. Ultimately, Vlady, it is the only means of escape left to us. The Westies want to write us off completely. We never existed. Everything was shit. I cannot live in a country where human beings are once again being seen as rubbish to be swept aside … Spiritual poverty is worse than death, degradation or suicide …
The only image you have of us, Karl, is that of a vanquished generation whose entire legacy is poisoned. Telling you Ludwik’s story may give me the opportunity to tell you more than you know about your grandmother and about myself. Don’t panic just yet. Spare me your condescension and pity. This is not going to be a self-justification or an attempt to wean you away from the apparatus to which you have become so attached. Everything in this world is now relative. I rejoice that you are a Social Democrat and not a Christian Democrat, and one day you must explain what divides you from them today.
What I want, above all, is to rescue the people in this story from the grip of all those whose only interest in the past is to justify their version of the present. Those of us who have been formed by and survived the fire-storms of this century owe this, if nothing else, to ourselves.
If you don’t want to read what I have to say, perhaps you’ll drop it in a drawer somewhere and let it lie there till your children or their children take it out. Perhaps by the time I’ve reached the end, I might not want to send it to anyone. Much of what you will read is my imagination. The spaces between what I know for sure could not be left empty. With your permission, then, I’ll start in the time-honoured tradition.
Once upon a time, in the village of Pidvocholesk, in the province of Galicia, in the last decade of the preceding century, there were five boys whose names began with L. They all swam in the same river, went to the same school, chased the same girls and grew up indifferent to the fact that their little village, situated on the border between the Austro-Hungarian lands and the domains of the Tsar of All the Russias, was subject to the vagaries of imperialism. It changed hands every few years. All this meant was that they learnt two extra languages instead of one and were taught to read Pushkin and Goethe in the original.
Your grandmother, Gertrude, used to talk of a photograph she once saw in Moscow. There they all were. Five boys, virgin and uncorrupted, dripping with water from head to toe, their faces full of mischief, caught by the camera in their knee-length swimming trunks.
It was not till they were older that Ludwik, Lang (whom they always called Freddy), Levy, Livitsky and Larin, realized that the Tsar’s regime was far more oppressive. The Austrians had encouraged the building of a library and a reading-room where they could read all the German-language newspapers and periodicals. The reading-room had become a trysting place even for the less literate youth of the village and there was anger when the Russians closed it down.
Of the five Ls, three, including my father, Ludwik, came from Jewish backgrounds and spoke Yiddish. The other two were of Polish peasant stock. Everything was mixed. People spoke each other’s languages. When it was time to mark their tenth birthdays your grandfather and his friends were equally fluent in German, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.
We all know the negative features of the old empires, but they did have a positive side as well. Their existence united the populations over which they ruled by providing them with a common language and a common enemy.
The young men growing up in little Pidvocholesk never suspected that, within the space of a few years, most of them would be decimated by the First World War. Not that they were unaware of the turbulent times in which they lived. Life in a border village is rarely serene. It attracts fugitives of every hue. Criminals, political exiles, deserters from various armies, young couples fleeing from parental tyranny and trying desperately to find a way to the New World.
The Ls were well placed since Schmelka Livitsky’s father owned the village inn. In his black caftan and matching black beard, Schmelka’s father inspired both awe and respect. He was a kind man and clothed even the basest of his visitors with a rare dignity. It was here that Ludwik and his friends first heard from Polish exiles that a revolution had broken out against the Tsar in St Petersburg. The year was 1905.
They understood that the revolt had been crushed when a new flood of exiles passed through the village, which was once again in Austrian hands. The five Ls weren’t living in Essen or Manchester or Lille, though even there, despite the presence of trade unions and reformers, they might have been impatient with the pace of change. Pidvocholesk was a central European peasant village on the margins of two mighty empires, and eighty per cent of its inhabitants were Jews. They had initially greeted the news from St Petersburg with unconcealed delight, but had soon reverted to their normal mood of cautious pessimism.
One sunny day in March 1906, when the snow was beginning to melt, a diminutive man in his early thirties with horn-rimmed spectacles and tired eyes came to Pidvocholesk. He was a Pole. His name was Adam. He had spent many years in the Tsar’s prisons. All he wanted was a rest. Ludwik befriended him and Adam was admitted as an honorary member of the five Ls’ secret society.
He would join them for long walks by the riverside. He would listen to their chatter. The village girls were a central theme, closely related to crude gossip concerning the rabbi and other village notables. This was followed by a comparison of parental atrocities.
Adam was a patient listener. He smiled a great deal, asked a few questions, but volunteered nothing. It was only when they began to question him that they realized how different his life had been compared to theirs. Adam’s story moved them. Then he began to question them, and events that they took for granted soon appeared in a different light. Pogroms, for instance.
Ludwik told Adam of how, some years ago, he had accompanied his father to an uncle’s wedding in a neighbouring village. Pidvocholesk was almost entirely Jewish and usually under Austrian rule. It felt safe. But his uncle lived in Russia. The main street of the village where he lived was like a ravine. Jewish houses and shops on one side and everyone else on the other. As Ludwik spoke his voice grew hoarse as he recalled the fear he had felt on that cold, autumn night. It was the Sabbath. Candles had been left burning, and as they walked down the street the windows in Jewish houses were framed in a magical soft glow.
He described the congregation as it left the synagogue. Old men with bent backs, lowered heads and gaping caftans. Others, like Ludwik, were young, but trying hard to walk like men. Some of the old ones must have smelt danger for at one stage, and for no apparent reason, they all fell silent.
Suddenly, without warning, a group of peasants led by priests ambushed them. Ludwik remembered the whips, sickles, scythes and sticks falling out of the sky on their heads like bitter rain. An old Jew in his sixties felt the whip wielded by a strong young peasant with a moustache. Ludwik described a face disfigured by hatred, the eyes glazed over as if something had possessed them. It had: the old Christian hatred of the Jew as a monster from Hell, sent by the Devil to kill Christ and persecute the godly through trade and plunder.
Ludwik’s father had grabbed him by the hand and they ran and ran and ran till they had left the evil far behind. In their rush to escape punishment they had not even noticed another group rushing into Jewish houses
