A Cat In The Ghetto, Four Novelettes

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

A CAT IN THE GHETTO: FOUR NOVELETTES

By

RACHMIL BRYKS

Translated from the original Yiddish by

Dr. S. MORRIS ENGEL

With an introduction by

Prof. SOL LIPTZIN

and preface by

Prof. IRVING HOWE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

A LETTER BY MRS. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT 5

INTRODUCTION 6

PREFACE 8

A CAT IN THE GHETTO 10

2. 14

3. 18

4. 23

5. 30

A CUPBOARD IN THE GHETTO 45

SANCTIFICATION OF GOD’S NAME 51

2. 53

3. 59

4. 64

5. 66

6. 70

7. 72

8. 78

9. 84

10. 94

11. 102

BERELE IN THE GHETTO 105

2. 108

3. 109

APPENDIX—FOLK-MELODIES TO THE FOLKSONGS IN A CAT IN THE GHETTO 112

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 115

A LETTER BY MRS. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

MRS. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

202 FIFTY-SIXTH STREET WEST

NEW YORK 19. N. Y.

May 4, 1959

Dear Mr. Bryks:

I realize that we need reminders of human suffering. Your book A Cat In The Ghetto was hard for me to read and yet it is well written and one should read it in order not to forget.

Very sincerely yours,

INTRODUCTION

BY

PROFESSOR SOL LIPTZIN

Whosoever wishes to gain insight into the soul of the Jewish people must acquaint himself with the historic experiences that shaped this soul. These experiences range over millennia and are recorded in chronicles which keep alive memories essential for this people’s survival.

The earliest chronicles told of Jewish enslavement under Pharaoh and Jewish liberation under Moses. These were followed by narratives of Jewish defeats and victories under judges and kings, exile by the waters of Babylon, national restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, renewed destruction, dispersion, and repeated reemergence as an important factor on the stage of the world. Tragic eras and Golden Ages in various lands and continents have served as warnings and as inspiration to later descendants.

For twentieth century Jews the destruction of one-third of their kinsmen and coreligionists in a single decade and the homecoming of almost two million others to their ancestral soil have been the basic experiences that affected contemporary Jewish thinking and feeling. Singers have arisen who in the revitalized Hebrew tongue have chanted of rewon independence and collective hopes for the future. Other gifted writers have recorded in the more intimate Yiddish tongue the agony and the heroism of the murdered millions who passed through the extermination camps and death factories erected by the German people—das Volk der Dichter und Denker—when it fell under the spell of national megalomania.

Among the talented Yiddish narrators is Rachmil Bryks, the chronicler of Auschwitz. Bryks was himself an inmate of this most efficient death factory but miraculously managed to survive and to make his way to Stockholm and New York. As an eyewitness with the gift to communicate accurately and to depict artistically a corner of hell on earth. Bryks preserves for posterity not only the stories of the degradation of man by his fellow-men but also the record of the spirit’s ability to surmount all pressures and to sanctify the name of God in the hour of death. It may be needful for us who live in the post-Auschwitz era to forgive what has been done to our people during the years of Nazi arrogance and Jewish helplessness but it is not wise to forget our erstwhile affliction and misery, the wormwood and the gall, the tears of the victims and the brutality of their temporary masters.

The people of Lessing and Kant, of Goethe and Beethoven is an enlightened people, a humanitarian people, an ultra-civilized people. It excels in the arts and sciences, in philosophy and religious thought. Yet it is this people that in our century perfected the art and science of genocide, the philosophy and theology which made Auschwitz possible.

Auschwitz was not the result of the madness of a few degenerates, as German apologists would have us believe nowadays, although its handiwork did attract a disproportionate number of degenerates.

Auschwitz was national policy against which very few Germans protested during the years when the victims might have been succored. It is true that remorse did assail the German people after defeat and that a significant effort at some form of amend and restitution is being made—at least in the western half of Germany. Nevertheless, for Jews, a minority in all the lands of the Diaspora, to forget Auschwitz means to risk being again helpless in the event of a possible recurrence of similar virulent anti-Semitic outbreaks in another generation and at the hands of another majority group in whose midst they may be sojourning.

The reader of Rachmil Bryks will not easily forget. The images he conjures up and the scenes of horror and heroism he depicts will linger on in memory for a long, long time and will stimulate the thinking of Jews about their tomorrow no less than about their yesteryear.

A Cat In the Ghetto is a unique tale of fine artistic quality. Its bitter humor lights up the stark tragedy of the Lodz Ghetto. The streets of this dying district teem with emaciated figures from every walk of life, all of whom are engaged in the unceasing daily struggle to keep body and soul together until the hoped for day of liberation. However, amidst filth and rags, beyond cruelty and mutual suspicion, the warm Jewish heart comes to the fore and innate goodness triumphs over horror.

Berele in the Ghetto is the story of the pathetic resistance of the children of the Ghetto whose souls are kindled by a spark of Maccabean heroism and who manage to retain their human dignity under the severest pressures. It is such children, of whom alas only a pitiful remnant survived, that are today helping to rebuild the Jewish people as a significant moral force on the world scene.

New York, N. Y., February, 1959

PREFACE

BY PROFESSOR IRVING HOWE

To read the stories in this book is a harrowing experience, for they bring us directly to the concentration camps in which the Jews of Europe were tortured and the ovens in which they were burned. But in the original Yiddish of this book, Rachmil Bryks has included a page that is even more harrowing than anything to be found in his stories. It is a simple page, with no claims to being literature or history; it is a record of loss such as thousands of other Jews might write, and such as might be written for millions of other Jews if anyone survived to write it. For what Rachmil Bryks deals with is not mere literature but the most terrible event in modern life, perhaps the most terrible event of all human history.

The page to which I refer is simply a list of Rachmil Bryk’s close relatives who were destroyed in the camps. It begins with his father Tevya; and then his mother Sarah; and his sister Esther and her husband and their two small children Moshe and Rachel; and another sister and her husband and child; and still another sister and her husband. All of them were murdered in Treblinka in 1942.

But there are more; there is his brother Yitzchok burned in Auschwitz in 1942, his brother Simcha murdered by a Polish nationalist shortly after the war. And at the bottom of this unforgettable page—for whatever I may or may not remember of Rachmil Bryks’ stories, I know that I shall never forget this one page—there is a picture of his father, an old-fashioned Hasid dressed in the caftan and skullcap of the pious east European Jew, his face soft and quiet and bearded, his eyes tender and withdrawn, suggesting an innocence and otherworldliness that the world, apparently, took as an affront. To look at that face, to think of the millions of other faces like it, is wonder once again at the unbearable mystery of human suffering. It is to ask the ultimate question of Ivan Karamazov, which is not to challenge His existence, nor even His wisdom, but only to question His mercy. For no measure of justice or injustice, faith or skepticism can serve us here; before this fact of our time there is nothing to be said, no explanation that can fully satisfy us, not even a desire to find a fully satisfying explanation. The six million murdered Jews, all of whom look at one through the eyes of Tevya Bryks—it is a fact about which nothing more need or can be said other than: it is a fact.

Yet we live in a time when even so simple and basic a statement cannot be assumed with certainty. We cannot be sure that young people in America, raised with the nonchalance and mindlessness of a people that thinks it has escaped the blows of history, really know this simple fact. We cannot be sure that American Jews, with all their institutions and all their rhetoric, have absorbed even a fraction of the terrible truth about the time in which we live. And as for Europe—who would say that the events of only a decade ago have been grasped and struggled with and made part of the permanent consciousness of the people?

It is to remind us, above all, that we have lived in the age of Auschwitz that Rachmil Bryks’ stories are important. Himself a victim of the Nazis at Auschwitz, one of the few who survived. Rachmil Bryks has, of course, written imaginative compositions, what we call stories, and it may be that a later age will be able to regard such writings with poise and equanimity. Even we can make literary distinctions, if we wish. We can say that some of the stories in this book are better than others, or that all of them are written with greater—or less—skill than the stories of other Yiddish writers who survived the ovens. But at the moment it does not matter, and I for one feel no great desire to think in terms of literary standards when I read the work of those few who survived and who have tried to tell us what happened. For the truth is that in the deepest sense it is impossible to tell what happened: we cannot absorb Auschwitz in its fullness and its detail, we can only preserve—the fact.

And that, I hope, is what Rachmil Bryks’ book will help us do: to remember what, in part of ourselves, we would all wish to forget. But we dare not forget—that right was not given to us.

A CAT IN THE GHETTO

(The Treasure)

The food magazines in the Ghetto of Lodz (Poland) were infested with mice, which were ravaging the food-products. You couldn’t use poison for fear the mice would scatter it among the foodstuffs, so there was a great need for cats. But there were no cats to be found in the Ghetto. The Germans prohibited Jews under the death-penalty from owning any domestic animals; and as soon as the Ghetto was sealed off the Jews were forced to turn all domestic animals (even dogs and cats) over to the "Kripo" (Kriminal Polizei). Because of the frightful hunger the cats even ran away from the Ghetto on their own. Then, too, people ate cats. Suddenly a rumor spread over the Ghetto: whoever turns in a cat receives a four-pound loaf of bread! When the Jews heard this, their hopes and dreams turned to capturing a cat. Just think—a whole bread!

It happened on a fine summer evening. A group of Jews were working overtime at the dye-works. In a guard-house, engrossed in a book, sat the twenty-four-year old Shloime Zabludovitch, watchman at the factory. When Zabludovitch read, you could fire cannons and he would not hear it. Suddenly Mrs. Hershkovitch burst into the room with great excitement: Mr. Zabludovitch, I’ve caught a cat! We’ll be partners. Our agreement still stands: a half-bread for me—and a half-bread for you!"

For a moment Shloime Zabludovitch forgot all about his book. Just think—a half-bread! Really! he burst out as vigorously as if he had heard the war was over. Mrs. Hershkovitch immediately brought the cat in. Do you see? she declared. If God wills, there is help!

Zabludovitch’s heart expanded with joy. He was afraid to touch the cat. Since the day he was born he never yet held a cat in his arms. He was afraid to let the cat loose for fear it would run away. Suddenly he was struck with an idea and blurted out joyfully: Do you know what, Mrs. Hershkovitch? We’ll put the cat into a sack!

The woman brought in a ticking of a bed. (The Germans used these to hold the blood-smeared underwear of the murdered Jews; the underthings were dyed and then turned over to the Jews to be woven into carpets for the Germans). It was no easy matter for Zabludovitch to entice the cat into the ticking. Together they tied it up and placed it on the bench. Since the covering was a long one, the cat found its way to the floor. It crawled up and down, crying sorrowfully: Meow! Meow! Meow! It was searching for a way to escape.

Mrs. Hershkovitch, a widow, was a broken shard of a woman. At home, her orphaned children cried and shouted for food. She had to stand in line at the kitchen for soup and at the co-operative for her ration. She did not have a minute to spare and was in a hurry to go home. Mr. Zabludovitch, you have time, she finally said.