Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life by Yehoshue Perle

Author:Yehoshue Perle [Perle, Yehoshue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Jewish, Cultural Heritage
ISBN: 9781480440821
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1935-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Everybody seemed pleased with the new quarters, Mother, Father, and, especially, I. Really, was there another place as dry and warm as this?

When summer comes, said Yankl, we won’t know what to do with all the apples and pears, the cherries and currants that grew there. My friend Yankl … who else could tell such wonderful stories about Warsaw? And where else did I have as good a friend as Yankl?

Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Mother began crinkling her nose. Living behind the prison was somehow not to her liking. She didn’t mean the dwelling itself, God forbid. On the contrary. The place was dry and bright, and she was on good terms with all the neighbors, with Yarme the coachman’s wife, with Itele the flour-seller, as well as with the chief prison guard’s family. What irked her was the approach to the house, the narrow lane behind the prison. She didn’t mind it so much during the day, but once it turned dark, Mother said, she was overcome by a “spooky feeling” that she couldn’t shake off. She never quite explained why nightfall brought on the “spooky feeling,” but I could well imagine.

Yankl had already told me the story of the Russian captain, but it wasn’t the supernatural part that scared me, so much as the story itself. Between the yellow wall of the prison and the abandoned hut where the Russian captain had hanged himself, when night fell, it cast a darkness so deep, you could touch it. In no other street in town, not even in the lane behind the shul, was it as dark as this. To me it seemed that the darkness emanated from the sentry house, the wooden shack which by day served as a place for prison guards to take a break, but at night was a gathering spot for demons.

After dark, the sentry house stood completely untended, for it was then that all the guards went on duty inside the prison. That was when the sounds began and you could hear hoarse groans coming from inside the shack. Sometimes there was loud laughter, and occasionally, the unmistakable gasping of stifled moans.

At first, just after we moved in, I thought that all the moaning and groaning came from behind the crooked bars of the prison windows. It was my understanding that in prison, where the inmates were shackled in chains, at night they were whipped and made to undergo all kinds of torture. Surely such murderers as Sczepka and Sherman, who had slaughtered entire Jewish families and set fire to a dozen manor houses, wouldn’t just be locked up without having to suffer additional, cruel punishment. Later I learned that this wasn’t the case. If there was any torture, we didn’t hear about it.

All the moaning and groaning disturbing the darkness did indeed come from the wooden shack. My friend Yankl explained it all.

“That’s where that whore, Big Yuzhke, has set herself up in business,” he told me in hushed tones, and elaborated.

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