Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The operation was due to start at the military depot of the Burdujeni railway station on the designated day, at 4 p.m. The evening before, Major Botoroagă had suddenly appeared on our doorstep: “You’ve got two young children, you’ll have to carry them in your arms. It’s a long way. Don’t take with you more than the basic things,” he told my father in the most friendly manner. The deportation was to begin the next day, October 9, and end one day later. The rules were precise: “Each Jewish inhabitant may take overcoats, day clothes and shoes, as well as food for several days, not to exceed what can be carried. All Jewish residents will take the keys to their houses and deposit them, along with household inventories, in an envelope bearing the name and address of the Jewish inhabitant, to be handed to the commission at the railway station.”

Maria was listening attentively, looking all the time at little Noah, who stared, petrified, at the messenger. He turned toward her, as if demanding an explanation. Maria smiled back and thumbed her nose at him, their secret sign, meaning “This is all nonsense.”

The major continued his recitation: “Those who do not comply, or resist, or instigate protest and acts of violence against the authorities, those who attempt to flee or to destroy their own property, as well as those who fail to deposit their currency, gold coins, jewelry, and precious metals, will be shot on the spot. Those who help or hide Jews committing such acts of insubordination will also be shot dead.” The major did not necessarily look at Maria as he pronounced the last words, but she must have decided, there and then, to commit a crime more serious than merely helping or hiding the lepers — she would leave with them.

The head of the police, the prefect, the deputy prefect, the local garrison’s commanding colonel, and Major Botoroagă himself, as commander of the local gendarmerie, looked on in disgust as the madwoman was dragged away from the train door. Execution would have been too honorable a death, the best punishment was to allow her to live among those she had betrayed.

A few months later, Maria was at the gates of the labor camp, loaded with suitcases filled with clothes and food for her little prince Noah and his parents. The luggage, confiscated on the spot, would be used as evidence in her court-martial.

“From across the millennia, a tragic destiny has united the Babylonian captivity with the inferno of starvation, disease, and death in Transnistria,” wrote Traian Popovici, the Christian mayor of Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina. “The looting at the assembly points along the Dniester River of whatever personal possessions the deportees still had, the long marches, barefoot, in wind, rain, sleet, and mud, the hunger and thirst, could be from the pages of Dante’s Inferno,” the mayor continued. He had tried, until the very last moment, to halt the deportations. “In one single transport, out of sixty babies only one survived,” he wrote. “Those too tired or too disabled to walk were left behind on the roadsides, a prey to vultures and dogs. Those who made it to their destinations live in appallingly unsanitary conditions, with no proper accommodations, no firewood, no food and clothes, and are exposed to the harsh weather and the torments of their guards and of the camp’s administrators.”

This lesson in history and geography would not be complete without mentioning the crossing point on the Dniester — Ataki. Not Ararat, as in the biblical flood, but Ataki. Little Noah was only five years old at the time, but he would never forget that name. Fifty years later he still remembered it. The president of the Jewish community in Suceava, recalling the place, wrote: “Ataki will remain a mystery, to be understood only by those of us who stumbled, as if in chains, along its winding streets. Once-strong men suddenly collapsed. Previously sane people lost their minds. Rosa Stein, the widow of the lawyer Samuel Stein, believed she was still in Suceava and kept asking, politely, ‘Could you please kindly show me the way back to my house? I live in the same building as the Weiner bookstore.’” The Weiner bookstore still survives in the memory of the exile now being lulled to sleep in his New York refuge. After the war, it became a haven for the townspeople, brimming with miracles, until the moment when the Communists suppressed private property and all other private benefactions.

In 1941, another Jewish communal official, from Rădăuti, sent a desperate message from Ataki to his equivalent in Bucharest: “On October 14 we were evacuated and brought here, where we are now waiting to be transported over the Dniester and sent to an unknown destination in the Ukraine. We live outdoors, in rain, mud, and cold. Here in Ataki, hundreds of people have already died. Many have lost their minds, others have committed suicide. If something is not done immediately to save us, none of these unfortunate beings will survive. For the time being, there are around 25,000 souls in this situation. Some are on their way to the Ukraine, others are in Moghilev, still others here in Ataki.”

The name Moghilev is also one that is not easily forgotten. It was to Moghilev that the four members of the Manea family were sent. In a letter to a Zionist office in Geneva, dated January 6, 1942, a report from Moghilev mentioned “60 deaths daily.” That first winter was indeed the ally of Hitler’s army, Marshal Antonescu.

Transnistria did not live up to expectations and could only show a balance sheet of 50 percent dead. In that respect, it could not compete with Auschwitz. Transnistria’s achievement remained ambiguous, as did most things Romanian. Could Romania be considered Europe’s most anti-Semitic country, as some chronicles were claiming? The competition is difficult to assess, but the dubious Holocaust prize should still go to Nazi Germany, despite the reports that the German Army was scandalized by the random acts of barbarity committed by their Romanian allies, always ready to kill without orders and by any primitive means at hand.

Little Noah was initiated into life, as well as its opposite, in Transnistria. First death claimed my beloved grandfather Avram, then my maternal grandmother, striking twice within three weeks. The sudden magic of lifelessness: the afterlife, in a dead grave without a name.

In his mind, the boy saw himself lying, mummylike, in an eternal stupor. He could see the grave, the snow-covered earth, the frozen blades of grass, the wriggling worms. The wind was howling, the bearded men were swaying to the cadences of the ancient Kaddish prayer.

I was alive, thinking about my own death, but what I understood then was that crying and hunger, cold and fear belonged to life, not to death. Nothing was more important than survival, Mother kept saying, as she sought to sustain her husband and son. Death was extinction, which had to be fought at any cost. This was the only way in which we could be worthy of survival, she kept repeating. Gradually, the situation improved. The war was shifting westward, an Allied victory seemed imminent, and Marshal Antonescu resigned himself to keeping the insects alive, as alibi and collateral.

Former citizen Marcu Manea obtained permission to work in a factory, where he was paid the price of a loaf of bread, the daily sustenance of the four members of the family. Nobody could predict where the roulette wheel of life and death would next stop. The logic on which my father had carefully built his life was now useless. Saving one’s skin through corrupt dealings and bargains with fate disgusted him, as did the supreme reward, survival. My father’s views remained unchanged, despite his brutal beating by a formerly friendly officer, who now, disfigured by hatred, seemed ready to crush the insect as the insect deserved. He could accept death, but not humiliation. Risking everything, he recoiled in disgust from the grim truth of his present reality. He did not become servile and hypocritical, as was demanded of the slaves; he would not surrender his dignity. His wife didn’t care about such idiocies, but he did. The black market in sentiment, not only in aspirin or bread, that prevailed in the camps, disgusted him, and so did the barbarity of victims determined to save themselves at any cost from the barbarity of the oppressors. Monster-executioners breed monster-victims, he used to repeat in his soft but determined voice.