13 Moons: #4
April 24, 2005

Warszawa, Poland

I stopped in the Okopowa Street cemetery today. Yitzchak Korczak is buried here, one corpse among many in the mass graves of ghetto fighters. He died, his sister told me, charging a squad of Wermacht, his cleaver upraised. A little man, just over five feet tall, his back bent from a childhood accident. He'd studied to become a Rabbi, but gave up and apprenticed himself to a butcher. I was shivering in an alley, hiding in a pile of rubbish, red with blood - my own and others'. He took me in, fed me, clothed me. I spent several months with him, locked in his freezer on the full moon, sweeping his shop and serving as a shabbas goy on Saturdays.

I was giving the wolf a little more freedom in those days, attacking the gangs of thugs that preyed upon the Jews in the ghetto when I could control it, locking myself up securely when I couldn’t. Yitzchak knew what I was, but he ignored the wolf and spoke to the man. "You try to be good, yes? That's more important than you think." Over coffee, we'd argue - was man inherently sinful, or was sin a false construct? What was the source of evil? Was I evil, or was it the wolf, or both, or neither? We'd swap sides, never reaching conclusions, often ending up laughing at each other's earnest defense of the position they'd recently attacked. The coffee was black and sweet – “dark as the Devil’s heart and sweet as a stolen kiss”, Yitzchak would say. 60 years on, I still order my coffee that way.

Yitzchak never married and doted upon his neices and nephews. He presented them with candy, with coins pulled from behind their ears, with jokes and silly rhymes.

When the Germans came in to the ghetto, Yitzchak was one of the leaders of the resistance. I was long-gone, had wandered on south. When the letters stopped, when I read of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, I worried, but not too much - with the Poles busy fighting two invaders, I thought, the Jews might actually get a break. I hadn't paid much attention to the posturings of that foolish man in Germany, not even when Austria and then Czechoslovakia fell without a fight. I was busy, after all. I was trying to find a cure, trying to stop the monster inside me.

I was blind to the greater evil.

After the war, I made my way back to Warsaw. Yitzchak's sister was aged, bone-thin. She alone of her family had survived. Her children, her parents, her cousins, her brothers - all had gone into the ovens. The blue numbers on her arm were her only link with them now - her home, her history had been wiped out by first the Germans, then the Polish collaborators and finally by the Soviets. "Yitzchak said many times he was glad you were gone, that he hoped you were safe, Joseph. He tried to protect us, hiding the children in his freezer when they came to take them." She recited the names of the dead, her voice calm and even as I sobbed, mourning the loss of my friend, and of her family, and mourning that I was nowhere near to help them when they needed me. I never saw her again - a neighbor told me later she went to Israel, but I could not track her down there. I sensed that she wanted it that way, that I was one more reminder of a world that failed her and her people in their time of need.

Tonight, in the graveyard, I can see toppled memorials covered with swastikas and antisemitic slogans. The sun is setting and I hear voices, a gang of skinheads are cavorting through the graveyard near me, drunk on cheap vodka and spoiling for trouble. To them, the thin man kneeling by a grave is an easy target, another Jew they can push around, use as a target for the frustrations of their useless, wasted lives. I don't even try to get up, don't try to run for the cement cell I've rented. I welcome the change this time, savoring the pain and as my consciousness slips beneath that of the wolf, I drink in the horror on their faces as they realize their easy meat is going to eat them instead.

April 25, 2005

I washed in the Wista river, beneath one of the docks. A pair of overalls stolen off a line of washing covered me. It felt good to let the wolf out last night. I shouldn't have, I'll be sick later, but right then, and right now, I'm glad I did it. Yitzchak wouldn't have approved - he'd have pointed out that I was punishing children for the sins of their grandparents, "So, what, I should find the child today descended from the procurator that burned the temple in Jerusalem, and I should cut his throat? Who would that benefit?" Yitzchak is dead, though. He died riddled with bullets, his skull smashed by a rifle butt and his beloved nieces and nephews starved and gassed and burned in an oven. I'm alive and alone, and even though I know that killing a gang of drunk skinheads won't bring back my friend, I can't feel guilty about it. Not today, not here.