Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [86]
“How good is your German? I don’t mean Yiddish. I mean German.”
“I read Schiller and Heine,” Nathan managed through dry lips.
“Polish?”
“I have lived on the border most of my life. My Polish is fluent.”
The German drummed his fingers on the desk a moment. “Take the yid to Major Mühldorf. If he can use him, all right. If not, bring him back for transfer.”
Major Rudi Mühldorf, the yardmaster, had arrived on the scene only a few days earlier. He was a hoary old civilian railroad man who had been pressed into military service.
His immediate problem was to get the yard and roundhouse into functioning order, the difficulty of the task being compounded by the need to use three languages. Nathan assured him of his value. Mühldorf neither liked nor disliked Jews. He liked trains and only trains.
Bialystok was now a key junction in the German advance into White Russia, the Baltic, and the Ukraine. Troops and artillery supplies would be pouring through to the fronts, but Mühldorf was faced with the chaos of war as well as an antiquated rail system. He was determined to make Bialystok at least a smooth operation, even if not by Germanic standards of perfection.
Thus Nathan earned himself a cot in the yardmaster’s building, German enlisted men’s rations, and a distinctive cap and armband to denote he was a protected worker.
Nathan thanked God he was not one of those hundreds passing through the yard in locked freight cars for the labor gangs, to repair rails and bridges. The death rate among them was fearsome.
Nathan spent most of his time at a desk translating manifests, repair orders, parts requisitions, regulations, and schedules. He was on call several times a day to straighten out foul-ups due to language. The major benefit of his situation was that he could help his family.
The German occupation was conducted with merciless disregard for civilians. With all the meat and poultry markets out of operation, Yehuda Zadok was again without a means of making a living. Everything usable from the land was confiscated by the Germans, leaving the population to fend for themselves.
The desperate food situation was made more devastating by a massive epidemic of typhus.
Material poured into the Bialystok depot for transshipment to the front, and a predictable black market evolved and flourished. Most of the rail system was operated by German civilians whose patriotism could easily be compromised.
Major Mühldorf knew the drill well. A little thievery always accompanied the romance of freight yards. Once in a while, when a black market gang became too greedy he would have them strung up or shot, to cool the fervor.
Nathan made himself an inconspicuous “honest broker” between buyer and seller for a small and reasonable piece of the transaction. It was a simple matter for him to hitch a ride to Wolkowysk, a few hours away, at least once a week with a package of food for the family.
Wolkowysk, 1920
YEHUDA ZADOK was back at his old stand, slitting the necks of chickens.
For years there had been a broil of armies—Reds, Whites, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Polish, all bashing at one another to snatch off pieces of the Czar’s fallen empire. While they slaughtered one another, they all shared a common enemy, the Jews. But the postwar, post-revolution pogroms paled even the worst of them a half century before.
“If you’re a Jew,” Yehuda told Sophie, “it seems you have to face the history of the world all over again, every day.” Yehuda’s forays into religious ecstasy at the chopping block eased his pain, but his thoughts were also invaded by the future of his family.
The saddest of days was the Sabbath and visits to the cemetery. The two youngest Zadok children, Reuben and Bessie, died in one of the typhus scourges before the end of the war.
The cemetery sat in a grove of leafless silver-bark birches, their bony top limbs pointing upward like fingers twisted in anguished prayer. Tombstones had been overturned and graves robbed during the pogroms. Desecration was perpetual.
Yehuda would wait at the cemetery gate so that