Crossing the River

1. How It Began

1 How It Began We abandoned our flat and set out. The closer we got to our allotted area the more people we met dragging things along with them. Some carried huge bundles on their heads or on their backs. Others pushed wheelbarrows or children’s carriages; some even dragged overloaded tin bathtubs on the street. A fortunate few had a wagon hitched to a horse. I began to spot more and more people I knew among the marchers, young and old; they were all on the move from different directions to the same place, and this gave me something like a sense of relief. The flow of people, which grew denser on the bridge, thinned out again on the other side of the river. I managed to notice that we had passed through a high wooden gate with two doors that leaned on a tall barbed-wire fence that stretched out and disappeared into narrow alleys. We were now in the ghetto. It seemed huge to me, broad and endless. The fence at its edges didn’t bother me at all. The new arrivals poured into the houses to find places for themselves. Quarreling broke out over an extra room, over a private corner, over the right to put a stool in the common kitchen or to stretch a clothesline. They argued and bargained and raged, unwilling to resign themselves to the conditions imposed upon them. We dove into that turmoil, and there was no turning back. For years I have tried to recall what I had been dreaming the moment before I woke that Sunday, trying to persuade myself that I was still dreaming, what my feelings were during the last seconds before the thunder came. One day I will wake and it will be a regular Sunday morning in my hometown, Kovno, on June 22, 1941, one of the longest days of the year. At first I attached little importance to the sounds that woke me. Together with the explosions, I heard gunfire, which was somehow already familiar to me. I had first heard similar noises on the riverbank during summer break the previous year. On that fine morning I was attentively watching a tennis match between relaxed, white-clad vacationers, when airplanes suddenly began perform- 2 Chapter 1 ing odd maneuvers high above us. One after another they would dive with a loud roar toward a large tube-shaped sack that another, slower plane was pulling . While we children on the ground were engaged in a furtive struggle over the privilege of retrieving tennis balls for the players on the court, the planes in the air abruptly opened fire at each other in several short, sharp bursts. We were startled, but those among us who knew assured us that these were only maneuvers , and thus we learned a new word. The tennis players went on with their game, and this was a sufficient hint for me that it is better to pretend that all was well. Suddenly, at no great distance from us and with no warning sound, a sooty brass shell fell to the ground. We rushed to look at the oddity that had dropped from the sky. Perhaps it was dangerous? Every bystander had a suggestion about what to do with it and whom to deliver it to—the police or the soldiers patroling in pairs—anything as long as it was taken away from the sharp-eyed boy, the lucky devil, who had first discovered the strange thing. So the peaceful tennis lawns of a summer resort were the scene of my first contact with the sounds and weapons of war. Several weeks before that Sunday morning I had gone with my parents to see a famous movie about Lenin. In one scene, a pretty young woman with dark eyes and black hair, Fanya Kaplan, was preparing to kill the great leader. Smoking a cigarette, deep in concentration, she lined up a number of small bullets on a tabletop. One was given to understand—perhaps my mother explained this to me—the connection between these seemingly innocent details and the barrel of the gun that the young woman aimed later at the much-loved man, just after he had finished a rousing speech to a group of factory workers. There was a dry cracking sound, and Comrade Vladimir Ilyich dropped to the floor in a pool of blood. My parents broke into a fierce argument on our way home from the movie theater...