The Art of Resistance. Justus Rosenberg
He scurried along the sidewalk in agony as three booted Nazis went at him relentlessly.
More shouts and groans, from inside now. Two Nazis emerged from under the shutter, dragging Frau Goldberg by the hair and by her arm.
I saw all this from my perch as clear as can be, but it was as if I didn’t understand what I was seeing. In films, there were images of violence a bit like it, but they were just films, unreal. Outside the theater everything would be normal again. The Nazis let Frau Goldberg stand up. Her clothes were torn, her face brutally battered, one black eye and eyelid terribly swollen.
I had always thought of Frau Goldberg as a beautiful woman, so beautiful that when I passed her on the street, I slowed down to look at her; when I approached the store, I tarried in hopes that she would be there and that I would see her long, blond hair and her large, soft blue eyes. What I was looking at now wasn’t possible. And yet it was she. I was filled with rage and fear. I wanted to strike out, to smash my fists against the wall, but all I could do was stay quiet, gnash my teeth, and say nothing.
I came down from my perch. I shouldn’t have stayed there. I shouldn’t have seen what I saw. I began to run. How could this street, this street that I crossed every day and that had always been so peaceful … It wasn’t real; it wasn’t real; it wasn’t possible. But I had seen it with my own eyes. It was the truth. I didn’t need to turn around again to see. I didn’t understand. That was all. These people weren’t human beings; this street, this city, was not my city. I saw Frau Goldberg’s face again, the beautiful one, at first, and then the other … I was ashamed.
I was out of breath by the time I reached my father’s storage facility. I couldn’t speak. He had just finished talking to a prospective buyer. I told him what I had just seen, spurting out everything at once, trembling with anger and fear. My father, placid as he always was, didn’t seem surprised by my story, as if it was all just part of the occurrences of life—but he was disturbed by my agitation.
“Calm down, calm down. Yes, I just heard about it. You shouldn’t be upset, that’s what they want probably. They’ll end up quieting down. Anyway, what do you want us to do? Come now, everything will subside. These people are just louts. They’re not the ones to be afraid of. It’s the Nazi politicians who let others act like that that frighten me. Anyway, we’ll see. It’s just a bad time we have to get through, a crisis.”
Nothing I said upset his placidity. My father thought the wave of violence wouldn’t reach him. I was exaggerating, my imagination was playing tricks on me. “Let’s wait a little,” he said, “let’s give ourselves some time.” But I knew it wasn’t my imagination, and that we didn’t have time.
“Please, Dad, close up shop. I’m sure they’re coming this way. When I left them, they were at the Goldbergs’.”
My father was surprised to see me so upset. He put his arm around my shoulders and spoke to me gently.
“Come, come. Don’t work yourself up into a state.” But he saw that there was something really wrong. I remember his exact words. “You’re pale as death. I’ll close up, I’ll close up, since you’re taking it so tragically.”
He went out to lower our shutters and I sat down on a sack of grain. I watched the metal panels come down one after the other as darkness filled the room. In the coolness of this half-light, I felt protected.
I could hear my father out on the street latching the three big padlocks. This time, I thought, it’s really over. We were safe.
My father reentered the building through the back door, and it was he, now, who seemed agitated. He had heard the sound of boots on the pavement. Either they had made it all the way to our street or it was a second group, like another wave.
“Good Lord! You were right! They’re here, a whole mass of them!”
We could hear shouts, the same ones as before. They must have been attacking the first shop on the corner, the bookstore. My father said we should go upstairs, that we’d be okay there.
“From the window, we’ll be able to see what’s happening.”
My mother was coming down the stairs to meet us.
“You locked up? You did well!” she said, visibly relieved.
“I might not have done anything, but Justus was so insistent …” Then he changed his tone and lowered his voice and said to my mother, “He was there. Justus saw everything. Not nice to see. What bastards.”
As we reached our landing on the third floor, we heard muffled blows from not too far away.
“They’re at the Levis’ now,” my father said. “That’s very close!”
There was only one store between the Levis’ and our facility.
Down below we could hear the blows, redoubled in violence. My father had gone over to the window and opened the shutters carefully. He leaned a little outside, then pulled back in quickly. “They’re here.”
My mother had let herself fall into a chair and had begun quietly crying.
Below, they were working a girder like the one they used at the Goldbergs’, slamming into the shuttered door rhythmically with increasing violence. The window collapsed—we could hear the glass shattering. My father went over to the sink and poured himself a large glass of water and drank it in one gulp. He went to the window again, standing on tiptoe to see without having to lean too far out. Through the open window we could hear everything—the insults, the shouts—except when the battering ram struck the shutters and shook the building, about every five or six seconds.
“The shutters must be holding. Maybe they’ll give up,” my father said in a whisper, turning toward us.
One of the demonstrators must have seen him at the window, because they stopped hammering at the shutters and began insulting my father. He stood to the right of the window where he couldn’t be seen but could keep observing the street. Some of the Nazis had gathered stones and were trying to hit our window with them, but by the time the missiles reached the third floor, they didn’t have enough velocity to do much damage. This seemed to tire them out. I thought that they’d start attacking the hall door downstairs again and expected to hear the blows of the battering ram in the hallway. On the other hand, perhaps they’d refrain from invading the building. We in fact were the only Jewish tenants, but did they know that?
I was right about their either being tired or becoming circumspect about the house not being fully infested with Jews. The battering ram did not begin again. They just shouted, “Jewish garbage! You just wait! We’ll be back, we’ll burn down your hovel! Vermin! Dirty Jew! Come downstairs if you have any balls! Hang all the Jews!”
Little by little, they rejoined their comrades, who were already shaking the shutters of a neighboring store. A few citizens had joined them and most of the crowd, behind, still just as curious, followed without saying a word, as before. My father closed the window and with a weary gesture wiped away the sweat from his face.
“Well, my children, it’s over for today.”
THE DAY AFTER these events, the Danzig government took the position that it opposed such acts of violence, even though, of course, it had not deployed police to do anything about what happened the day before.
As a matter of fact, the Nazi president of the Danzig senate assured the Jewish community that physical assaults against the Jews and the destruction of their businesses were breaches of “party discipline.” Nevertheless, my father was no longer so optimistic that the anti-Semitism was just normal, periodically awakened, eastern European behavior. He and my mother now felt that it was only a matter of time before things would get much worse. They began to consider sending me away from Danzig to continue my studies once I passed my final exams at the gymnasium.
In the days that followed, the political climate indeed became more and more turbulent. Personal relationships between German Jews and other Germans began to be affected. Elisabeth, a close friend of my mother, had a