Isaac's Torah by Angel Wagenstein

Author:Angel Wagenstein [Wagenstein, Angel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

Sometimes on army transport carts, more rarely on military trucks, and mostly on foot along the dusty roads between villages, exhausted to the very limits of our strength, we finally dragged ourselves to Lvov. It was evening but there were no streetlights, the city was roaring with explosions, in the north the sky was red with fire. Soviet soldiers were running toward some destination, dragging a heavy machine gun, two nurses were bandaging the side of the head of a chap wounded by burning pieces of oil-soaked cloth, which were emitting more smoke than light. Nobody even answered our question about what exactly was happening in the town.

It wasn’t necessary to convince ourselves that at this time of night, our only option was to get somehow to my sister and her assistant pharmacist, where maybe Schura and Susannah were still to be found—the naive romantics, who came all the way from Kolodetz to watch Othello and listen to Rachmaninov, without even realizing that a slightly different performance would be presented to them.

We passed turned-over and incinerated streetcars, wrapped in their own wires, by the side of a still smoking automobile with its four doors wide open, which turned out to be, who knows how, in the middle of a fountain. And right in the middle of the boulevard we saw, as if ready for a grand concert, a Petrov piano, which people who were running away must have wanted to take with them but along the way had thought twice about. In the high school yard the cement cast of Lenin, with a thumb stuck under his vest, and his other hand pointing toward the bright future, was overturned, and even the hand pointing to the above-mentioned bright future was partially broken and from the inside iron rods quite prosaically peeped out, and from the depths of a rampaged and burnt shoe shop, a crazy telephone was ringing constantly. Such a picture it was, dear brother, of devastation and panicked flight, which—I imagine—was probably described in the TASS communiqués as a “planned and organized evacuation of the population,” and by Radio Berlin as an “indescribably enthusiastic welcoming of the liberating German troops.”

On a side street close to us again three young soldiers came running up with a machine gun, set it down on the pavement, and hit the ground in anticipation, and I, in a most friendly manner, hailed them in Russian: “Hello, comrades!”

The soldiers didn’t even reply, and I was just about to ask them about the situation and this and that, when my rabbi squeezed my arm above the elbow till it hurt and dragged me in the other direction.

“Idiot!” he hissed. “Don’t you realize they’re Germans?”

How could I have figured it out in the darkness, and moreover, at the movies I had seen mostly what the Japanese samurai looked like, and not German soldiers. We went away fast, but behind our back someone shouted in Russian-German: “Hey, Russki, halt! Stop! Stop!”

Behind us, nailed shoes started heavily stomping, and we stopped, without daring to turn around—in expectation of a shot in the back.

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