Rohan Kriwaczek
[ Biography ]
Oskar Brantwein Gets a Present
"Rats! Oi! You've never seen so many rats! And every one a feast. If you could catch them that is. And that's not so easy in the dark. And with only one leg?! Ach, the human being is an amazing creature. I lived off those rats for nearly three years. Rats and tins of fruit. Brought by the sewer workers. Polish sewer workers! They were good men. Three years and not a glimpse of daylight! When I finally climbed out I was blind for a week!" Oskar filled the four empty glasses on the table with vodka and raised a toast. "Le chayim, to life, and to rats!" His three young friends raised their glasses and downed them in one, after which Oskar picked up the bottle and gave it a little shake as if to dramatise its emptiness. "Of course they never brought us schnapps!" and he chuckled at his own humour. Tomek took the cue and headed across the dreary lounge area to the bar.
The Polish-Jewish Club hadn't been redecorated for as long as anyone could remember. Everything inside was dark and heavy, and the lights seemed permanently on half power. But it did have a bar, sold good Polish kosher vodka from the freezer, and the sofas were well worn in and fairly comfortable. As Tomek waited at the bar for Josef, the club manager, to return from the kitchen freezer with the bottle, he looked up at the many paintings that adorned the peeling walls, pictures of old men with long beards and peculiar hats; pictures of Jews like his parents had described, and always with a slight hint of guilt. Growing up in Poland he had never knowingly seen a Jew; they were a mythical people, from stories set before the war, before the Russians, long before he was born.
Finally Josef returned with the bottle, but just as Tomek was about to take it Josef grabbed his hand and leant forward towards him across the bar.
"Tomek, I owe you an apology. You and your friends."
Tomek looked startled, and a little embarrassed.
"When you first started coming here I didn't like it. None of us did. We had a meeting. I wanted to get you barred... You see we have a history, Jews and Poles, a bad history." He loosened his grip on Tomek's hand. "But, you know, sometimes it's not so good to learn from history..."
Tomek wasn't sure what to say. "In Poland history was written by Russians. Not so good for learning."
"... And you have done wonders for Oskar. After his accident, well, he seemed to lose his spirit. For more than five years he came and he sat and he barely spoke a word. We were all worried. He became an old man overnight. But now, well, having a new audience, you have brought the life back into his eyes."
"Oskar. He is very funny man. He tells good stories, yes?"
"That he does, that he does." Josef smiled.
Tomek took the bottle from the bar. "You know, in Poland we have no Jews, but still we have kosher vodka, kosher milk, kosher water... It means good, special. Here it means Jewish. Real Jewish. Not just good. Yes?"
Josef nodded, smiled and turned his attention to wiping the bar.
It was early in the evening, and the club was still fairly empty. Tomek returned bearing the fresh bottle to see Oskar unstrapping his prosthetic leg.
"You see. How it turns in three directions. And here. The shocking absorber. A miracle! Not like the first one. Gevalt! It was dreadful. Well meant, but dreadful. Carved from a birch branch by Dr. Katz just after he cut off my leg. You see? Yes? Five days crawling through the woods with a bullet in it. It was a mess! When the partisans found me I was half dead. But Dr. Katz. He was a great surgeon. A great man. Even out there in the woods he worked miracles! I think once he cut it off they used it as bait to trap a boar. Yes indeed, we Jews, we ate pig in the woods. We were hungry. Everything is kosher when you're hungry. We even got the rabbi to bless it. He was a good man, Rabbi Dovid. He would bless anything." Oskar filled up the glasses from the by now frosted vodka bottle. "To Rabbi Dovid and Dr. Katz. May they never be hungry again!" They all toasted. "And all that time, do you know what I dreamt of? Every night. Noodle kugl. Hot sweet noodle kugl. Like mother made... And then, after the war, I married Elsa. And her noodle kugl is the best I've ever tasted. To this day, every week after the shabbos: noodle kugl. A man couldn't be happier!"
Just then Pawel arrived.
"Ah, Pawel. Go get yourself a glass. We're toasting noodle kugl." Oskar was on a roll. He filled the glasses, waited for Pawel to return, and then they all toasted noodle kugl.
Pawel sat down, put his bag on his lap and unzipped it.
"I have a thing for you, Oskar."
"For me? A thing?"
"Yes. For you. A... present. You were talking to us last week of your Yiddish songs, how you say, nigunim? And you can't listen them more because your tape player broke. Well..." He took from his bag something box shaped and placed it on the table.
"What's all this then?"
"It's a tape player. For to play your tapes. A present for you. It's umm, how you say, two-hand? But it works. I tried it. It's good."
"Well, I am speechless. Thank you. Thank you! You are a good man Pawel. May the Lord send you many children! And all of them hard workers!... Elsa will be so happy." There was a brief moment's silence before he refilled the glasses.
"Let's all drink to that! To Pawel, to nigunim, and to my Elsa's happiness!"
***
The club closed at 10.30pm. Oskar bid his young friends good night with much joviality and slightly stumbled the two hundred yards back to his flat, a bedsit above Klein's Bagel Bakery. He hated it, and he expected to die there, alone. And so, on the scale of things, keeping the place clean and tidy had never been a priority. Alex, his social worker, had often tried to arrange for a cleaner to come, but Oskar always insisted "They can sort it all out when I'm dead! It won't be long now!"
As he opened the upstairs door he was greeted with the familiar smell of mothballs, rotten gefilte fish and stale pee. He slumped down on the sofa that doubled as his bed, and absent-mindedly put the cassette player on the table in front of him. "Gevalt! Is this a life?" he mumbled to himself. "... It was kindly meant. Pawel, he is a good man." He looked at the machine and sighed.
And then, before he knew it, his eyes had closed and he was snoring.
****
Oskar woke with a start and looked at his watch. It was 3am. He shuffled himself up onto his feet and made his way to the bookcase, a large dark oak case filled with many layers of books, papers, boxes and various odd objects. "Where?" he demanded out loud. "Where did I put you?" Suddenly inspired by a vague recollection, he removed a section of the front layer of books from the third shelf up to reveal a stack of envelops and packages wedged behind, between the shelves. There, among them, was a brown padded envelope. It was one of many, but he immediately knew which. He pulled it from the pile and slowly made his way to his sofa, slumping down like a sack of damp flour, and sat there for a few minutes, still, and in silence, before finally taking a deep breath, mumbling something inaudible; and then opened the still-sealed package. He knew what it was from the logo on the front and the sound it made when he shook it. He had known when it arrived five years ago, as soon as he picked it up from the floor.
"Ach, Alex. You are a fool and a yente!" Then he added more gently, "But what can you possibly know, you're barely more than a child."
He sat there for a moment, lost in thought before pulling a letter from the package.
"Dear Mr. Brantwein
Further to the enquiry made on your behalf by Mr. Alex Bantry, I am pleased to confirm that Mrs. Eva Brantwein, your mother, did indeed record an interview with us on 7th September 1969, specifically regarding her and her husband's escape from Prague during the Nazi occupation, and the following years adapting to English culture. This was part of a major drive to document the stories of refugees from the war who had settled in Britain, which took place between 1967 and 1972. We are pleased to enclose a transfer of this interview onto audiocassette. If you have any further enquiries please don't hesitate to contact us.
Yours sincerely,
David Bennings,
Head of Research and Archives
The Imperial War Museum.
He took the cassette out of the packet and placed it in the tape machine, then pressed play. There was a quiet clunk and a few moments of hiss, before a thin and muffled voice...
"So, Mrs. Brantwein, I suppose we should start before the occupation. Could you tell us a little about your life, before the Nazis invaded?"
"Well, you see, we didn't have much, but it was a good life. My husband was..."
Oskar turned off the tape. He hadn't heard his mother's voice for nearly twenty-five years. It shocked him. He had forgotten how thick her accent was, and her quaint Yiddish intonation. But it wasn't just that, it was what she was saying, or was about to say. Neither she, nor his father, had ever told him anything about the times before they had arrived in England, before he was born; nor how they got there. They wouldn't speak of it. And he had learnt at an early age not to ask. Yet here she was, talking openly, and to a stranger. Oskar crossed his arms and stared at the machine for some minutes. "Too soon we grow old, too late we get smart" he muttered, remembering his mother's voice. Finally he took the tape from the machine and put it back in the package. He'd return it to the shelf in the morning.
Later that night he dreamt of noodle kugl for the first time in many years.