Word Column

 

Jacek Podsiadło
Word Column 

Translated by Alissa Valles

Her photo's faded.
A shade's shade shaded. 
A girl's radiance              
seeking a focus. 
Serious Bela
finds just the right rhyme 
both for Israel 
and for Palestine. 
Won't show her poems
to a living soul.
But they do enhance 
my self-confidence,  
because having lost 
parents (in Auschwitz),
brother (in Warsaw),
she wanted to live 
for them and invest
her poems with fire:  
where it dies down, or
where it flames higher. 
Where life's exchange rate
plummets to zero, 
life itself will set  
its own worth at naught: 
a seat left empty, 
a vain sacrifice.  
There, too, poetry
would fetch a good price -  
ghetto currency,
almost insurance:
poor, no doubt, and blind,
but the only kind. 
A poem some boy
would give to a girl. 
Leociak writes in
Street Biographies
that even if, There,
people were hungry,
unrelentingly
tortured by hunger, 
that it had in it 
a hunger for print.
Cervantes. Tolstoy
and "Resurrection".
And Tuwim's "Flowers"         
smuggled in somehow
from the Aryan side.
Hunger for all things,
bottomless cravings,
gave them sleepless nights; 
if it was hopeless,
maybe it hurt less
when you knew a piece
of Bialik by heart?
Kirman, Szajewicz,
and Katzenelson
even There and Then
trusted in poems.
Sutzkever. Szlengel. 
Like the game "Jenga"  
where I'm bereaving 
a words of its weight.
Throughout nights of hell
all Grey Owl's beavers  
flocked to Czerniaków. 
Grey Owl? Rings a bell.
Brightness has sounded. 
What kind of transport?
Desolate, crowded,
all over the globe
not just the ghetto. 
Kielce dialect
known from my childhood:  
double-dealing, dark, 
a speech made of tar: 
whatever y'all do, 
you're for the slaughter!
In swollen heads, thoughts
spin; words rattle in 
living skeletons: 
send the kids somewhere,
hide your wedding ring,
the honey's paid for,
I cut out the stamps. 
"Three are on my side,"
"Lejbuś, remember,
stay out of the camps!"
The boys from the ŻOB
torn from their workshops,
Lejb, Cwi and Abuś, 
look for a safe way
to take to their graves
a full brace of Krauts
and nasty Fritzes  
who're snarling nearby.
The Black Maccabees.
Die, sons of bitches.
The wine of battle
goes straight to addled   
brains; at Bałka's home
someone's trying on
her little dresses
and her only shawl. 
The heart of a girl
measures a desert
by even portions,
day-to-day measures. 
She's at the station.
Farewell, Kamienna.
When the world crumbles
the mast starts to sway. 
A Kielce kibbutz
teaches the young folks
to live and preserve
a splinter of hope. 
This Jewish misrule
asks for the cudgel.
These days Kielce is      
only for Christians. 
And even Hitler
failed to fix the Yids.
At Planty Seven          
a crowd assembles
to cure Jews of wounds 
and of misfortune
with fist and bludgeon.
By fire and by sword. 
In the Polish crowd
on the cobblestones
my hundred Mothers,   
Polish to the bones. 
Work by Joanna
Tokarska-Bakir
presents this type too, 
no one knows better
than I think I do
how blind and het up
the pride of Poles gets,
the heights they fall from
to the Holy Cross; 
those Holy-Cross folk 
get very pissed off
when the Jews can eat
fancy-ass dinners
and they've got tinned meat,
what Kielce housewives
can get like when riled
by their priest's advice,
by small-minded faith,
by stale verities, 
by their own dire straights,
how one practices
her role, trying on 
a shawl that belonged
to a Jewish girl
as if she's fitting 
a halo; a vein
in her forehead swells.
How she can convince 
herself just by yells
that she wore the shawl 
in a state of grace.      
Mommy dear. Mama.
These holy icons
contradict their frames. 
And so many times
I've heard the question
about the world's scorn,
where it all came from. 
So years have worn on,
meager and ugly.
Now more than thirty. 
In Bela Gertner's 
native town, after
the abject circus 
of school, we'd often
go to the Jewish
graveyard, feeling free
to "fuck it all up"
as much as we pleased            
and round a bonfire
we'd grind sparks from flame
before it all charred,
we'd curse like stevedores 
to the N-th degree,
play fly to the moon,
drink booze, eat and smoke,
we'd belt out "Long live...,"
take it on the cheek
and get a skinful,
spit, not give a shit
about work or school. 
We went for a leak
by crooked gravestones. 
I'll start from the end.
I'll survive Father, 
survive my brother. 
Again years will pass. 
Again thirty years.
Ostrowiec now has  
a memorial. 
Rubin Katz recalls
he had a passion 
for little Bela
and this confession
boosts my confidence. 
I'll try to begin.
All over again. 
Words have a meaning.
I take it on faith. 
That she was short
I know from the lab's
forensic report. 
Sometimes from ashes
something pale glitters.
A piece of jewelry?    
Maybe some Meissen?
Threading and letters.
Finished sentences
sewed into volumes
like dreams in quickly
thrown-together Homes. 
Poem, word-Golem,
now all but over.
The teeth knocked clean out.
The skull all bashed in.
Entire death squadrons 
taken straight from life. 
The stamps all cut out.
The honey paid for. 

In the crowded and sorrowful ghetto
the little Jews lived their drab lives...
Rachela Ofenberg, “Displacement” (a poem by an eleven-year-old girl preserved in the Ringelblum Archive)

Her brother Abek Gertner was one of the fearless fighters who fell in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Bela [...] loves to write and rhyme, but is too shy to show her work. [...] I have etched in my memory a few lines she was trying to rhyme [...] in Polish, about memory books and the paper gravestones erected more and more in memory of those murdered in the Holocaust. They went like this: "Mountains of words are too slight a thing to testify to a murdered child, killed in all its innocence, and writing memory books won't immortalize the Jews who burned in the ovens [...] Only words and letters remain, blossoming in the ashes in the shape of volumes of poetry."  
That beautiful girl was very talented.
Rafael Blumenfeld, Kibbutz Ikhud ha-Naor-ha-Tsiyoni - Akiva in Kielce before and after the Pogrom. 

... camp number A-16910, crushed skull, No.1 and No.2 teeth knocked out on the upper right-hand side. 
Postmortem examination file for Bajla Gertner, July 5, 1946

...a Jewish girl of about sixteen ran out of the cell, and one Polish Army officer began to beat her. When the said Jewish girl passed out, civilians lifted the soldier up on their shoulders, raising cries of "Long live". 
Interrogation file of witness Józef Białkowski in the WUBP in Kielce, July 5, 1946.

There a young woman, perhaps seventeen, was lying on the ground flat on her back, blood flowing from her nose. [...] some man from that group went up to the supine young woman and began stepping on her head with the heel of his boot in the area of the temple, which made blood flow from her ear. 
Interrogation file of witness Stanisław Adamczyk by the prosecutor of the Branch Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish People in Kielce, August 13, 2001.

Give me that scarf off your head, Miss, an acquaintance of Salomonowiczowa shouts, when she is being led from a cage to the transport, whatever y'all do, your're going to die. The poor woman went bareheaded into the icy weather, into the death car. 
Testimony of Celina Grünszpan about the liquidation of the Sandomierz Ghetto in January 1943.

My former landlady on Zamkowa Street refused to let me spend a night, she only told me that she'd made out very well, because when the Jews were led to the cars, she asked a Ukrainian guard to get her the shawl off one of the Jewish women, and he had torn the shawl off for her. 
Diary of Hinda Malachi of Ostrowiec nad Kamienną, fragment related to her stay in Ćmielów at the end of 1942.

A big pot on the gas ring. Mother lights the flame [...] We have no vegetables, noodles or potatoes. Not a grain of porridge. In spite of this, it seems to mother that she is making dinner. 
Sonia Landau (Krystyna Żywulska), Pusta Woda („Empty Water”). 

Doctor Szwajgier rescued children before she perished in Treblinka: she gave them morphine and the children died in hospital beds. (Once, toward the end of July, Inka came back from the hospital and didn't find her mother at home. Only a hastily written note: the stamps all cut out, the honey paid for). 
Anka Grupińska, „Reading a List”. 

Baila (Bela, Bałka) Gertner from Ostrowiec nad Kamienną was sent to Auschwitz at fourteen. She survived, but her parents perished. Her older brother Aba Gertner fell in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, the orphaned girl was invited to the kibbutz in Kielce by Rafael Blumenfeld. His recollections are the only source of information on Baila’s youthful writings: “She loves to write and rhyme, but she’s too shy to show her poems. (…) A few verses she was trying to rhyme in Polish stuck in my mind, about memory books and the paper gravestones that are being erected to those murdered in the Holocaust. The lines went like this: “Mountains of words – too slight a thing to testify to a murdered child, an innocent victim, and writing memory books won’t immortalize the Jews who were burnt in the ovens (…). All that remains are words and letters blooming in the ashes, volumes of poetry books.”

My poem contains more words of others than the words in quotations. Quotations from poetry written in the ghetto and documents connected to the Kielce pogrom attached themselves to the poem, some of them against all logic. I wouldn’t have put the phrase “Long live” into the mouths of boys getting drunk in the Jewish cemetery if it hadn’t been for a fragment of testimony probably describing Baila’s death, given by Józef Białkowski to the WUBP in  Kielce the day after the pogrom: “A Jewish girl of about sixteen ran from the cell, and a Polish army soldier began to beat her. After the girl fainted, civilians carried the soldier on their shoulders, shouting Long live“. I wouldn’t have thought of Baila’s shawl if it hadn’t been for other shawls – like the one memorialized in the testimony of Celina Grünszpan of Sandomierz: “Give me that shawl you have on your head, Miss, shouts a woman I know to Salomonowiczowa as they move her from the jail to the transport, you’re going to your death anyway. The poor woman goes bareheaded in the freezing weather, into the death car,” and the shawl from the diary of Hinda Malachi of Ostrowiec (which Barbara Engelking made available to me) who was in hiding in Ćmielów: “My former landlady on Zamkowa Street wouldn’t take me in for the night, she just told me she had done well, because when the Jews were taken to the train cars, she’d asked a Ukrainian for one of the Jewish women’s shawls and he had got it for her.”

The rhythm was suggested to me by a note in Anka Grupińska’s “Reading a List” devoted to Adina Blady-Szwajgier, “Inka,” a courier for ŻOB and a doctor at the hospital on the Umschlagplatz: “Doctor Szwajgier rescued children from death in Treblinka: she gave them morphine and the children died in hospital beds. (Once, toward the end of July, Inka came back from the hospital and found her mother gone. Only a hastily written note: stamps cut out, honey paid for).”

Jacek Podsiadło (translated by Alissa Valles)