I have done no research on the subject of childhood and death. But I have thought about it a lot. Before the war came I had only seen one death, one dead person. Then in the course of one winter I saw dozens, hundreds of dead people, including my mother, my brother, my grandmother, my aunt and her husband, and their son... Death stalked my childhood, was mistress of it, doing whatever she liked to my sanity. I cannot be sure what effect it had on me. Of course, it was not my fate alone; it befell many children like me who were sent with their parents into the ghetto.
After somebody is born and for a certain time, they know nothing of death, it simply doesn't exist. Then comes the day of their first encounter with it. I was not quite seven when I first saw a dead person, in the autumn of 1940. It was our neighbour, an elderly man, known and respected by everybody, the cashier in the railway ticket office. He was a Russian but he also spoke fluent Moldavian and Yiddish, that is, all the languages of the inhabitants of Dondyushany. That was and still is the name of the small town in the north of Bessarabia where I come from. Bessarabia is the part of Romania which, in that year of 1940, only three months before the death of our elderly neighbour, had been incorporated into the Soviet Union under the secret agreement signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop. There was already a Red Army regiment stationed there; incidentally, its military band played at the funeral.
The funeral was unforgettable. It was a bright, sunny day. The dead man lay in a large spacious coffin in the centre of a courtyard. The whole community-all the nations-turned out to see him off on his last journey. I looked with terror at the dead face of a man whom I had seen alive and happy a couple of days before. He used to stroke my head with his large warm hand. Now, pale and white, it lay motionless. I could still hear the sound of his voice, but my eyes only saw the lips, the mouth now closed forever. At the time I could not have expressed my feelings in words, but I do remember thinking that in the whole world there is no deeper gulf than that between someone alive and someone dead. I could already feel that difference-and I was terrified. I did not imagine then that one year on or less, my eyes would learn to look on the dead with indifference.
The transfer of power in Dondyushany took place at night: we went to bed under Russian rule and woke up to the Germans-and to some Romanians too, because the previous Romanian authority had been simultaneously restored. There were two commandants. Needless to say, the German had the last word on any subject. So when the German commandant ordered all the Jews to be rounded up, the Romanian commandant immediately obeyed. When we had been assembled-and it has to be said that no Jew hid, or tried to escape-they formed us into a column four deep, took a head count and gave us one cart for the elderly and the sick on to which we managed to get our Granny Tsyupa. She could barely stand up. Then they led us away, we knew not where. En route it became apparent that we were being taken to a Jewish ghetto somewhere in the Ukraine. I cannot say for how many days, or perhaps weeks, that miserable journey lasted. I do remember that we not only stopped for one night, but sometimes for three or four, or more. I have never established our route, nor any other facts. While he was alive I never asked my father about it. I do not wish to know any more about that time-I have no interest in new details. Those imprinted upon my memory are quite enough.
We walked and walked, sometimes stopping, and then they'd get us on our feet again and push us until we found ourselves in the town of Bershad in the Vinitskaya district of the Ukraine. I remember that the frosts had started by the time we reached Bershad. We spent our first nights on the icy floor of a filthy building with high ceilings-it might have been a former synagogue. It was the beginning of the most terrible winter of my life-the winter of 1941-42 after which, out of the 14 members of our family, only two people survived.
Volodya was the first to die. He had been born just before the outbreak of the war. Mama was breast-feeding him. On the third or fourth day's march, her milk gave out and the child died. He died while we were on the move and Mama carried his little dead body as far as the next halt, still on the right (Romanian) bank of the Dniester River. I remember that my father found a handleless spade and began to dig. At that point someone came up and told him that a woman had also died, the mother of people we knew. It was decided to bury the two together. They dug a shallow grave near the river bank and lowered the woman into it. And then on top of her, on to her breast, they laid my little brother wrapped in a cloth. They covered them with soil. And we moved on.
A few days later, at one of our periodic halts-if I am not mistaken, it was in the town of Yampol, already in the Ukraine-we laid Granny Tsyupa on the ground. She was dying but she was still alive, lying motionless, silent, with her eyes open. We could not decide whether to stay with her or to carry her. We no longer had the cart. The guards suggested two options: leave her lying there or shoot her. With her handkerchief Mama wiped away the dirt from Granny Tsyupa's wrinkled face and kissed her. Then we went on our way.
That was before we reached Bershad. Bershad's Jewish ghetto covered about half the town: the area between the bank of the river (a tributary of the Bug) and the main highway. Here were contained local Bershad Jews, Jews from nearby towns and villages, but also Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and western Belorussia. Every building was crammed full of Jews, mainly of large families trying to keep themselves together. Our family and another two families from Bukovina ended up in a kind of semi-basement, some of us establishing our place on the cement floor, others on hastily knocked-up wooden beds. As people died, others who were still alive could graduate from the floor to the beds. There was no question of any heating, one warmed oneself with one's own breath and with the proximity of ragged, unwashed, starving, louse-ridden bodies. And the frosts during that first winter were such that they came right through the thick brick walls.
One of the first to succumb was my mother. At that time she was 31, exactly half the age I am now. For a whole week I lay on the planks, shoulder to shoulder beside her dead body. I slept and ate next to it. Five days, or four, or six. In the same way that she had lain beside me when she was alive, she continued to do so in death. On the first night she was still warm and I touched her. Then she went cold and I no longer touched her. By the time they came to take away her body there were several more who had died that week. They used to collect the corpses once a week, sometimes twice.
None of my close relations was killed. They all died-of hunger or cold, from dreadful living conditions or mental suffering, or from despair. Or from all of those, taken together.
By the spring there was more space in many of the buildings. Some stood empty and remained so during the rest of the three years we were held there. Apparently by that time, there were no Jews left at liberty in Europe who could be deported.
But as far as I was concerned, everything was fine. Throughout those years in the ghetto I played games without interruption-in particular, I played the game of war. I took part in important battles as a general over all generals. The surrounding horror did not destroy my burning imagination. To this day I do not know what that says of me-whether it is something good or something dreadful. I am afraid to think about it. Perhaps I was not entirely sane, and in that persistent playing lay my madness. I went mad at the age of eight.
Our basement was situated halfway between the river and the main road. I set up my "headquarters" in the shape of a dugout beside the river; on intelligence missions I would go towards that main road. There was always military movement on it: artillery, tanks, or convoys of vehicles carrying German or Romanian soldiers. At the beginning everything was moving to the east, later it was to the west. They were real German units, albeit under my personal command. For my games I used the real military forces moving on that road. I would turn them this way and that to suit my plans, and they would obey my commands unconditionally. In my war everything could happen. Ukrainian partisans could fight under the command of German officers against the Romanian gendarmerie. By turns I would be a German general, then a Russian, then a Romanian one. If an Italian unit came by I would instantly become an Italian general.
My pre-war life and my life in the ghetto were so different, so alien to each other, that it was impossible to find a way of carrying both in my mind. So when I came to the ghetto I forgot my pre-war life; it just dropped out of my memory like something falling out of my pocket -gone for ever, it seemed. The only thing I brought from that earlier life was the spirit of play. I was always passionately playing at something. I didn't run or jump or shout, as I used to do in Dondyushany. I had learned to play silently, for myself alone.
Did I understand that I was a Jew, that everyone there was Jewish, and that was why we were being punished? Yes, I did. But in my games I stopped being Jewish. There were no Jews in them-no Jews served in my troops, there was not a single Jew on my staff. I only became Jewish in intervals between battles, like an actor stepping out of character for a while.
I realise now that my games are what saved me. If today I am more or less sane it is thanks to the fact that-like a madman-I never stopped playing. I played ceaselessly through those three years, and continued playing for a long time following my return, after the war...
I came back from the ghetto not just any old how, but on a Soviet battle tank. It was the first one to enter Bershad and it had come to a halt suddenly when it shed one of its caterpillar tracks. It was surrounded immediately by a crowd of emaciated people. An unshaven, young-looking trooper appeared from the turret and smiled down. "Well, Yids, you're still alive then?" he shouted, loudly and open-heartedly, and jumped down to inspect what had happened. People didn't take offence-they squeezed and hugged him, shook his hand, and he was laughing. He spent a couple of hours doing the repair. I helped, so he took me with him when he left.
We were moving on a particular war-front. I forget which it was, maybe the second Ukrainian front which, unless I am mistaken, was commanded by Marshal Koniev. Needless to say, in my mind Marshal Koniev was under my command.
When we had crossed the bridge over the Dniester the trooper found Dondyushany on the map, and shook his head regretfully. It seemed that the town was too far off his route. "I'm afraid I can't take you all the way," he said, standing up in his turret. I was beginning to get down from the tank when he suddenly gave me a resigned wave, dived back down to the controls, and set off at a crazy speed. Making a detour of some 30 kilometres, he dropped me off on the edge of my native village.
I had come back to Dondyushany armed to the teeth. I had two pistols-one Russian, one German-a dagger, some 20 rounds of machine-gun ammunition and two hand-grenades. I couldn't recognise my village. I had difficulty finding our house, which seemed minute, like a toy. I was hailed by our neighbour, a girl called Klava Russu. She was so pleased to see me, but in all that time I had never given her a thought. I'd forgotten that she existed. I was 11 years old. I could neither read nor write.
War for children is like war for lunatics and simpletons. They don't understand a single thing. Blood flows, they grin. Houses are destroyed and priceless treasures perish, they are enraptured-how splendid! Wartime life was, in fact, unusually colourful, interesting, many-sided. Tanks, lorries and troops were constantly on the move in one direction and then back again. All around there was bustle, hooting, and the throb of engines. It was easy to get hold of a pistol or a grenade; even in the ghetto I had several rounds of ammunition and a machine-gun breechblock, although admittedly, no machine-gun.
I still did not understand about death, although I had seen dozens, hundreds of dead bodies. In effect, I lived for three years in a morgue. In normal peaceful conditions children learn gradually, slowly over the years, about the inevitability of death. Instinctively they try to cross that important and dangerous threshold as lightly as possible. A child's spirit feels its way carefully, with trepidation, towards a dignified acceptance of its mortality. The process must not be accelerated. It is dangerous to change or break the natural rhythms, the more so when it happens as rudely and roughly as in war.
As a writer who has lived in the USSR throughout my life, I struggled as hard as I could against the dead hand of political censorship. But there is another kind of censorship. It is biological censorship: the organism itself-muscles, brain, neurons, even the blood-prevents one from discovering the whole truth about oneself. One has to be very careful not to fight against this censorship. Maybe that is why I am wary of trying to come to a final understanding of what happened to me in the ghetto. I fear the lifting of biological censorship, because it hides the unbearable, the killer in us.
