City of God by E.L. Doctorow Page B

sky was overcast, the weather unnaturally warm. The smoke lingered like fog. My eyes smarted, I coughed to expel the smoke. I imagined I’d inhaled the smoke of the dead, and perhaps I had. At dawn, everyone had to go off to work as usual. In the evening, after the workers returned, though it was illegal to gather in numbers, several men slipped into the rabbi’s house next door to say Kaddish for the murdered souls.
    This was not the first of the so-called actions by the Germans. There were and would be others, sudden, unannounced sweeps of the houses, when they trucked people to the old fort on the river west of the city to be murdered. They had these bouts of efficiency. But with this particular horror, my father resigned from his role with the council. He had found his complicity in a life of helpless subjugation no longer endurable. There was a secret meeting of the council the next night after the fire, and when he came back, I was upstairs supposedly asleep but as awake and alert as I could be. A silence while my mother put the bread and soup before him. He pushed the dish away.
    â€œTomorrow is the monthly meeting with the Germans,” he told her. “The council will make a formal protest. It would apply moral suasion to these ungovernable forces of terror.” His voice was uncharacteristically leaden, toneless.
    â€œWhat would you have it do?” my mother asked. She spoke softly. I could hardly hear her.
    â€œAbove and beyond the fact of our systematic slavery, they like to surprise us,” my father said. His voice grew louder, angrier. “They like to amuse themselves. Schmitz, that jackal who runs things”—this was the chief S.S. officer—“how can the council bear to look at him, speak with him, as if he is human? This ritual pretense of a common humanity to which we have to subscribe if we hope to outlast them! As if we are the caretakers of madmen who must never be told they aremad. Schmitz and the others will be laughing to themselves while affecting civilized conversation. They will say it is wartime and things that are regrettable are nonetheless unavoidable. They will go on to discuss the flour and potato allocations as the next order of business.”
    â€œAri, shah,” my mother said. “You’ll wake him.”
    â€œI can no longer endure this!”
    That cry of despair I will never forget, not only for the clenching of my boy’s heart that my father was, truly and in fact, without the resources to protect us, but for the piercing illumination it brought to me of my physical self as game for a predator. He went on about this effect of our history: that we had lived among them, the Christians, for generation upon generation, only to see ourselves bent and twisted to the shape of their hatred. We had been turned into Jews so that they could be Christians.
    Now exactly what happened after this I cannot tell you. It was perhaps two or three months after the fire, emotions had become numb. The shock had worn off in the routine of work, secret meetings, secret prayers on the part of the religious. The return once more to the hope of outlasting them, to hanging on until liberation came. There had been rumors of the defeat of the Nazi armies in Africa. It was in this period that my parents failed to return home from their labor. To this day I don’t know the circumstances. One morning at dawn, as usual, he helped her with her coat, she turned up his collar against the cold, they both kissed their son. They gave me the usual instructions for the day. And they opened the door into the dark morning and closed the door behind them and I never saw them again.
    I do know that around this time a notice was posted in the ghetto—the Germans were calling for a hundred intelligentsia for special work as curators and catalogers in the city archives. Mama and Papa discussed this. She was against volunteering, arguing that the Germans could not be