Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘If it’s making you so angry I’ll stop asking,’ I said, looking at the marks at the base of my thumb. ‘Christ!’

How the Gentile world felt about the thumb, or to be more specific the skin between the thumb and forefinger, I had no idea, but in Jewish Crumpsall we were almost as phobic about the thumb as we were about mad dogs. In some households bread knifes were kept under lock and key and kids my age were not allowed to use them without at least two adults being present. My mother was less strict but she still filled my head with the terrible things that could happen to you if you took a cut anywhere near the thumb. Lockjaw for one. Bread knife, not looking what you were doing, slip, break skin, blood — lockjaw. Simple as that. Face set in rictus of horror. Dead in an hour. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when our two phobias came together and a mad dog bit us between our thumb and forefinger. Then it was lockjaw followed by foaming at the mouth. Rabies. With rabies you had a chance, medically, of living longer than an hour, but they had to shoot you in case you went on to bite someone else.

I was relieved, after Manny’s bite, to discover that my jaw still moved, and that my lips, when I wiped them, were free of foam. But I still snarled at him.

‘Now you won’t forget who Dorothea Binz is,’ he said. The lunatic that he was.

‘So what are you going to do to make me remember Vera Salvequart. .’

‘. . may her name be wiped out. .’

‘. . may her name be wiped out. . Chop my head off?’

‘No. To be consistent I’d have to poison you. What I just did to you, Dorothea Binz did to her prisoners. Only she did it harder.’

‘She bit them?’

‘Not personally, as far as I know. But her dogs did. They tore Jewish women’s arms off. She was taught to do it when she was at Belsen.’

‘They had a school at Belsen?’

‘I don’t know if they had a school, but they had a teacher. Irma Grese, may her name be wiped out. While they were in Belsen together she showed Dorothea Binz what you could do with a dog.’

(May its name be wiped out, I thought.)

This was the hard part — not the names so much as the family connections, this one knowing that one, that one receiving tuition from the other. Listen to Manny Washinsky and you could never believe there’d been a German who hadn’t known what was happening. Not only did they know what was being done, they personally knew or were related to every person who was doing it. Manny’s genealogy of guilt. It didn’t surprise me to learn that when he was in prison he compiled lists and tables. No good at maps, but if ever anyone could have drawn the tree that showed the interconnectedness of German responsibility, from Martin Luther to the trump of time, Manny was that person. As it happened he was drawing lists of a very different sort.

‘Irma Grese,’ I said, wanting to be sure I had this right, ‘may her name be wiped out, being the one who poisoned her patients. .’

‘I’ve just told you — Vera Salvequart, may her name be wiped out, was the poisoner. The one who’d been imprisoned herself at Theresienstadt, for being in love with a Jew. Then they moved her to Ravensbrück and put her in “The Tent for Pigs”. After that she took up poisoning fellow prisoners.’

‘What, as a hobby?’

‘No one knows why. Maybe the Jew she was in love with had left her.’

I nodded. Dangerous for a Jew to leave a woman. There could be grave consequences. The women lost their wits. I’d heard many stories to that effect. Lose a Jew and you lose your mind. That was what a prize we were. ‘So Irma Grese was. .’

‘Senior SS Supervisor at Auschwitz and Belsen. They called her “The Grey Mouse”.’

‘Doesn’t sound very frightening.’

‘Might not sound very frightening to you, but at Auschwitz she killed on average thirty people a day.’

‘And at Belsen?’

‘The same.’

‘By the dog method?’

‘Some. Others she shot. She carried a revolver that was always cocked. She was also a bisexual.’

Did I know what a bisexual was at that age? Did Manny? I doubt it. But if it happened in Auschwitz or Belsen I assumed it wasn’t a good thing.

‘So she taught Dorothea Binz, may her name be wiped out, that as well.’

‘What?’

‘To be a bisexual.’

He thought about it. He had turned very red in the face. There was an experiment he was conducting, which he only partially allowed conversation to disrupt, to see how long he could go without breathing. First he was trying it in the open air. Later he would continue the experiment underwater. He was anxious to discover how much privation he could suffer. You never knew when it would come in handy, being able to stay alive without the benefit of oxygen. Over a number of years I saw him put all manner of objects over his head — paper bags, tallis bags, the tallis itself, pillowcases, his mother’s tablecloths, his satchel, my satchel, the cushion covers from a three-piece suite. On one occasion he invited me to tighten his school tie round his throat like a noose, making me promise not to loosen it until he told me to. In the event, I stopped long before he was ready. ‘Hanging’s too good for me,’ he once said, apropos of absolutely nothing. When I asked him what he meant he told me he just liked the sound of the sentence.

His thoughts, in between choking, must have been following the same direction as mine. ‘Hanging would have been too good for her,’ he said, rather dodging, I thought, the question of bisexuality.

‘So what did they do to her?’ I wondered.

‘They hanged her.’

‘And what would you have preferred?’

From what appeared to be a number of suggestions he could have made, he chose ‘Pickaxing?’

‘Is that a question?’

He thought about it. His mind seemingly somewhere else. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

It occurred to me that I had now lost track of who we were talking about. ‘Is that Irma Grese or Dorothea Binz, may both their names be wiped out?’

‘Binz. Gas chamber for Grese. Pickaxe for Binz because she pickaxed Jewish women to death. She also rode her bicycle into them. And got them to stand to attention all day long while she slapped their faces.’

How did he remember these details? How was he able to go on attaching atrocities to names?

‘They had to stand to attention all day?’

‘All day and all night.’

‘And she slapped them with her hand? Wouldn’t that have hurt her? Wouldn’t her hand have got tired?’

‘Hand, whip, belt, stick, whatever was lying around. One prisoner she slapped unconscious with the blotting pad on her desk.’

‘Blotting paper! Sheesh!’

‘Not the paper, the pad.’

‘The pad? Double-sheesh!’

I feigned some of my surprise. It oils the wheels of sociability to act the ignoramus. Especially when the other party might up and bite you should the whim to do so take him, or when he happens to be a religious fanatic and you happen to be the sort of Jew who humours religious fanatics, perhaps because you’re hiding one in your own heart. Though I knew nothing like as much as Manny knew about these flowers of German womanhood, I had garnered odd items of information about them on my ownio, from war comics which other kids brought to school, from odd articles in Jewish newspapers which Tsedraiter Ike passed on to me when no one was looking — for in our house the Jewish Chronicle was underground literature — and of course from Errol Tobias, though he was inclined rather to harp on the one string. But the minutiae didn’t stick for me the way they did for Manny. I would like to think that was because I had other things to think about. I suspect, however, the real reason I lumped these Morys and Binzes and Greses together was that their cruelty was all expressed against women. If I understood what I was hearing correctly, it was women prisoners Aufseherin Binz rode her bicycle into. Women to whom Schwester Vera Salvequart administered her little white powder potions of death. Women at whom ‘The Grey Mouse’, otherwise known as ‘The Beast of Belsen’, widened her Asiatic eyes and aimed her revolver or her whip. Many years later I read some of Irma Grese’s own descriptions of herself at her trial in Belsen in 1945 and was struck by how prettily she remembered that whip, like a girl recalling her first toy. ‘Cellophane paper plaited like a pigtail — it was translucent like white glass.’ But she never, as far as I was able to deduce, brought it down on a man. There was nothing inhumane about my preference; I wasn’t indifferent to the sufferings of women prisoners in the death camps, some of whom might well have been distant relatives of mine, women who would have married an Ike had they lived, or even a me had I been so lucky, nor was it that I felt more keenly, man to man, the indignities visited on my own sex. It was simply that there was a terrible inversion of the nature of things in the idea of a woman beating a man, of power and cruelty being deflected so perversely from their usual course. And if that inversion happened to be your bag, then Ilse Koch was the person to go to.