Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

When it arrived he downed it in two gulps, then sat back, closed his eyes and breathed deep. Only then did he remember the book in his bag. Could it be Rebecca Merton's diary? He knew he shouldn't open it, but he couldn't help himself.

The notebook was filled, page after page, with tiny, neat blue handwriting. Instantly he knew these were not the writings of a thirty-something woman. It had been a mistake to pocket it. But he only had to read the first few sentences to realize that he – and not only he – had made a much, much graver mistake.

My name is Gershon Matzkin and I was born in Kruk, Lithuania. My British passport says I was born in Kaunas because Kruk is such a small town and no one has heard of it. And also because the name of that place should be cursed a thousand times and it is better that it is never written down.

I was the second of four children of Meir and Rebecca Matzkin. I was different from the others. My sisters had dark hair, their features proud, while I was blond and had blue eyes and a small nose. I did not look like a Jew at all.

My father would joke that maybe my mother had been too friendly with the goatherd in the village. He could joke about such things because he knew they were impossible. These days, they would say that my genes were different, mutant. But then, who knew of such things?

I was born too early. My body was tiny; they said my life was hanging by a thread. When I was eight days old the rabbi said I was too weak to have my brit milah , too weak to be circumcised. Afterwards, because of everything that happened to our family, it was delayed. Maybe my mother did not want to think about it. And after that it was too late.

The little village whose name I do not want to mention did not have many Jews, maybe a few dozen families. We kept ourselves quiet, trying to get by. But every now and then there was trouble…

I was frightened even before it started. At that age – I was perhaps seven years old – the sound of the rain on the windows was enough to scare me. I liked snow, which we had plenty of, but the rattle of raindrops against the glass frightened me: it sounded like fingers, tapping, demanding to be let in. There was no rain that night but it was very dark and that scared me too.

But this night I was not the only one afraid. My sisters too were awake and crying. Local Lithuanians were running through the streets where the few Jews lived, banging on doors, shouting: You killed Christ! Come out, you Christ-killers!

This happened every now and then, especially at Easter. Even then, when I was just a child, I could recognize the slur in their voices. They were drunk, on vodka, no doubt, but also on hatred – the hatred of the Jew fermented by their faith and distilled for nearly two thousand years. I know this now: then I was just scared.

There were more voices than usual. We waited for them to fade as they went past, but they did not. They remained loud and near. My mother sat on the bed with us – all four of us children shared a single bed back then – telling us to hush. She was holding the youngest of my sisters, little Rivvy, cradled in her arms and was singing an old Yiddish melody:

Dos tzigele is geforen handlen

Dos vet zein dein beruf

Rozinkes mit mandlen

Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof.

It means:

The little goat went out looking

Just as you'll do some day

Bringing raisins and almonds

Sleep sweet baby sleep.

The men outside were still bellowing, Zhid! Zhid! Jew! Jew! But she carried on singing that song. Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof. Sometimes, even now, when I remember everything that happened afterwards, I hear that song again.

At that moment none of us knew what was going on outside. My mother thought my father was downstairs, peering through a gap in the curtains, watching for the moment when the thugs grew bored and moved on. She was partly right: that was why he had gone downstairs, so that he could look and tell us when the coast was clear. But then something had caught his eye. He had seen smoke coming from the barn.

We were not farmers, but like most people in our village we kept a few animals, some chickens and a cow. And now, late at night, my father could see smoke. Surely the men from the village had thrown a torch into the barn. He thought only that he had to rescue the animals. So he ran into the barn.

I don't know when my mother first realized what had happened but she suddenly called out. ‘Meir?’ Then she saw the first orange flames. ‘Meir!’ When there was no reply she threw Rivvy aside as if she were a rag doll and ran down the stairs. We watched from the window as she fled out of the house towards the barn. I was so frightened that I stopped crying.

We saw her tugging at something, bent double, as if she were dragging a sack of seed from the barn. In the dark it was almost impossible to see that she was, in fact, pulling at the ankles of a man. Hannah made out the shape first. ‘It's Daddy,’ she said.

We never knew for certain what had happened. Perhaps the smoke was too much. Perhaps he had hit his head on a wooden beam. Maybe one of the thugs conducting the pogrom had followed him into the barn and beaten him. Whatever had happened, our mother had been too late.

She was never the same person after that. Her hair went grey and she let it fall loose; her clothes were sometimes dirty. She would wear the same skirt and blouse for days on end. She no longer laughed and if she smiled it was a strange, misshapen smile, crooked with regret and sadness. And she never again sang the lullaby.

She decided we could no longer live in that place, whose name she would never say out loud. She had a cousin who had once lived in Kovno and so we moved there. She felt we needed to be in a big city, a place where we would not stand out. A place where there were not just a few Jews, but thousands of us. I suppose she thought there would be safety in numbers. So we headed to Kovno. If you look on a map now you will see no such place. Today they call it by its Lithuanian name: Kaunas.

We arrived when I was eight years old and I have happy memories of our first two years there. My sisters and I went to school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it. Russian and, especially, German. I found it easy. I only had to hear a word once to remember it. Of course ‘bread’ was Brot. What else would it be? The pieces clicked together like a jigsaw puzzle. I learned and learned.

In Kruk, we had followed only the essentials of Jewish tradition and – as my own penis testified – not even all of those. We lit candles on Friday evening to mark the start of the Sabbath, but we did not do much more. In Kovno it was different. Nearly a quarter of the people of this city were Jews and in the area where we lived, everyone. There were synagogues on every street, Yiddish schools, Hebrew schools, a famous religious academy, the yeshiva at Viriampole, even a Jewish hospital. There were people to teach me how to say Kaddish for my father. We did not feel like outsiders here, even if I now looked like one.

I wish I could say my mother was happy, but she was not. We lived in a couple of rented rooms on Jurbarko Street. I do not know how she paid for them. The rooms were dark, even when the sun was shining outside. During this time, I remember my mother's eyes were always empty.

And then, one day in 1940, a different flag was flying.

It was hot that day, the sun so warm it felt as if it would dry out the damp of what had been a long winter. We were playing in the street, as usual, me trailing behind Hannah while my sisters played a game of hopscotch. I was the first to notice it. I pointed upward at the deep red flag, billowing in the breeze. I couldn't quite work out the gold shapes in the top corner; I wondered if it was a letter in some foreign alphabet. Later I learned that these were the tools of the industrial worker and the farmer, the hammer and sickle.