The Woman from Hamburg by Hanna Krall Read Free Book Online Page B

inhabitants of Izbica had to admit that after the wedding Ryfka turned out to be a nice-looking woman without a trace of madness. She bore a child. They all died in Sobibor.
    Nearby lived a Captain Dr. Lind. What was his first name? What brand of car he owned is known: an Opel. But then, it was the only car in Izbica. On the first of September 1939 the doctor’s wife cleaned the house, changed the linens and—what Tojwełe’s mother, Fajga Blatt, admired even more—placed a clean tablecloth on the table. Then the doctor donned his uniform and they got into the Opel. The doctor died at Katyń; where his wife died is not known.
    Flajszman the tailor sewed clothes for Tojwełe and his brother. The Flajszmans had a single room and nine children. They knocked together boards to make a bed large enough for all of them. A sewing machine stood under the window and a table stood in the middle of the room. But they ate at the table only on Shabbos; on weekdays, it served as an ironing board. The Flajszmans and their nine children died in Bełżec.
    Shochet Wajnsztajn, the ritual slaughterer. He studied Talmud all day long, and Mrs. Wajnsztajn supported their household with ice cream and soda water. She made the ice cream in a wooden barrel placed inside a container filled with salt. The sanitarian did not permit the use of cheap, unwashed salt in food preparation, and Mrs. Wajnsztajn could not afford the more expensive salt, so her sons Symcha and Jankiel kept a lookout at the door for the police. They died in Bełżec.
    The house of Mrs. Bunszpan; her surname has to be changed for obvious reasons. She had a hardware store. She had a fair-skinned daughter and a dark little boy. She told him to stay inside the house while she and her daughter went to the train station. The boy ran after them. He tried to get on the train with his mother, but Mrs. Bunszpan pushed him away.
    “Go away,” she said, “Be a good boy.” He was a good boy. He died in Bełżec. Mrs. Bunszpan and her daughter survived the war.
    “I have learned,” said Blatt, “that no one knows himself thoroughly.”
    Rojza Nasybirska’s brewery. She ran away from a transport. She entered the first house she came to. There were people sitting at the table, reading the Bible. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They decided that Rojza was a sign sent by God Himself. They gave her a Bible and told her to convert others. She waited out the end of the war in peace. It never entered anyone’s mind that it was a Jewishwoman who was walking from village to village, converting people. After the war, she wanted to keep on converting people out of gratitude, but her cousin came and took her to the States.
    Hersz Goldberg’s lumberyard. Cut lumber was stacked neatly everywhere. When the first star appeared in the sky on Saturday and Shabbos came to an end, people drank wine from a common goblet and said to each other, “
Git vokh
, have a good week.” That was a signal for the young folk; the boys would head out with their girlfriends to Goldberg’s lumber. Their younger siblings followed them to see what went on in the evenings on top of the lumber. Hersz Goldberg died in Bełżec.
    A shack near the Jewish cemetery. Jankiel Blatt, Tojwełe’s father’s brother, lived there. He had two children and no job; he was a communist. When the Russians took over in September 1939, Uncle Jankiel greeted them enthusiastically. “Now there will be jobs,” he kept repeating, “now there will be justice.”
    The communists put on red armbands and showed the Russians who the Polish and Jewish bourgeoisie were, and also pointed out the soldiers returning from the September campaign. Among those arrested was Juda Pomp, the sheet metal merchant and owner of the house with the toilet. Tojwełe’s father, a former Legionnaire, threw Uncle Jankiel out of the house, shouting that he wasn’t to show himself to him ever again. Two weeks later the Russianswithdrew. The Germans occupied the