‘Right,’ said Lamont Williams. ‘See I’m not, we’re not s’posed to move patients around. That’s only for PES and Mr Mandelbrot … see, he was cold and he asked me if I could take him back up … you know … to his room? Well, I told him I couldn’t, you know, ‘cause I wasn’t allowed but he kept at me, you know? He was cold and he … someone from PES had brought him down but now they were gone and Mr Mandelbrot, he didn’t care, he just wanted to go back to his room. That was all he cared about.’
The son of the late patient had a smile on his face now.
‘I mean, you know how he might be, right? He got me to bring him up to his room on the ninth floor … It was my first week here. And he was lookin’ out the window, out at the East River and … and he thought he was lookin’ at New Jersey. Maybe my third or fourth day here and I told him … Then he saw this … he saw … like a chimney, three of ’em. He saw three chimneys out the window ‘cross the East River and I remember ‘cause he looked at ’em and he said just, you know, suddenly … like out of the blue, that there were six death camps, and then later on he made me learn all their names and I did, you know: Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz, where he was. That’s the six of ’em. You all know what a death camp is? I didn’t know but he told me. It’s not a concentration camp, not the same thing. People think it is. He wanted me to know all this. Was important to him. I don’t know why he chose me. He said there were hundreds of concentration camps all over Germany and occupied Europe but there were only ever six death camps, extermination camps, and they were all in Poland and they were purpose-built with gas chambers or sealed gas vans and ovens and pits to exterminate every last Jew in Europe. That’s the whole reason they were built: to kill people, Jews mainly. He said Majdanek and Auschwitz had slave labour factories too but the others didn’t. But I’m maybe getting ahead o’ myself … Should I … should I be standing up for this?’
Over the next almost ninety minutes Lamont Williams held the room with his recollection of what Mr Mandelbrot had told him had happened to him during the war.
‘Leading out of the ghetto in Dabrowa Gornicza from the street where Mr Mandelbrot’s family lived there was a street where an SA man and his wife lived in a house.
‘You all know what the SA was?’ Lamont Williams asked them before continuing with his late friend’s story, how his friend was eventually captured, identified by a now adult version of a boy who’d been at school with him and from there, after a beating, he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They all sat in the office of the Head of Human Resources and listened without stirring. Before too long he had reached the Sonderkommando. Lamont took them to the undressing room. He told them how the Jews would come down the stairs in fives, the first to come down usually being women, exhausted, confused and very ashamed to have to undress until they were completely naked in front of strangers.
‘ “The showers …” Mr Mandelbrot was sometimes asked. “They’re the same one for men and for women?” Or “You’re a Jew?”
‘Then five more would come down followed by another five, some bleeding, and all pushed by the five behind them. Then another five …
‘ “It’s gas, isn’t it?” some would guess.’
Lamont told everybody in the office of the Head of Human Resources how the Jews would walk naked to the door, the only door, marked ‘To the Disinfection Room’.
‘It was warmer there than in the undressing room. Adults would cry softly. Children separated from their parents would call out for them in terror as the room filled.’
He told them how, as the hydrogen cyanide gas, given off by the Zyklon B pellets released into perforated shafts through ports in the roof by the SS, rose upward from the bottoms of the shafts to fill higher and higher levels of the chamber, the climbing would start, the climbing to get air. He told them how quickly the pain would become extreme and how people would drool and how their eyes would bulge and how their bodies would jerk in wild spasms as the gas rendered completely useless whatever oxygen they could find. He told them how after three minutes they were bleeding, some from the scramble, the struggle to climb to the top of the heap, but all from the effect of the gas, bleeding from their noses, from their ears. He told them how people lost continence and how they were pushed down into a mess of blood, urine, vomit and excrement. He told how human beings with memories, affections, ambitions, relationships, opinions, values and accomplishments all sank into a tangled phalanx of human beings a metre deep covered in their own fluids, all of them gasping, their bodies jerking, their faces distorted by their agony till they were no more. Lamont Williams left nothing out.
He told them about Oberscharführer Moll, Oberscharführer Schillinger, about a man called Ochrenberg, about the two Zalmans, Gradowski and Lewental, who kept a record of the work of Sonderkommando and buried it so that after the war people would know what happened there.
He told them how women in Kanada and in the gunpowder section of the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory smuggled gunpowder to the Sonderkommando.
‘Know why they called it Kanada?’ Lamont Williams asked his audience didactically.
He told them about the various resistance movements within the camp, about the joint Auschwitz Military Council and the Sonderkommando resistance. He told them how Chaim Neuhof and Mr Mandelbrot had been sent to plead with the joint Auschwitz Military Council without success and explained why.
‘So now it’s 7 October 1944.’
Then he told them about the Sonderkommando uprising. He told them about the Kapo Kalniak who had prepared for the uprising the night before and wouldn’t save himself, about the destruction of Crematorium IV and how, when Mr Mandelbrot got up from the ground, of the 663 Sonderkommando men alive before the uprising only 212 were left and neither Zalman Gradowski nor Zalman Lewental were among them.
When Lamont Williams was finished he was taken back to the basement where he collected the broom and the cart that was legally the property of the John Doe Fund. The son and daughter-in-law of the late patient had not needed to hear the story in its entirety but no one wanted to stop him. He got to say everything he wanted. He walked out onto York Avenue with the oncologist Dr Ayesha Washington and the historian Dr Adam Zignelik. He hadn’t realised the time. He was going to be late for dinner with his cousin Michelle and her family. He had to call them. Adam Zignelik proffered his mobile phone and, to give Lamont some privacy for the call, he and Dr Washington turned away.
Lamont’s call from Adam Zignelik’s mobile phone to his cousin Michelle was about to be connected when, seeing him trying to negotiate the phone, his broom and his cart, Dr Washington offered, ‘Here, let me take that for you,’ and she took hold of the broom and also of the silver menorah. The son and the daughter-in-law had been convinced from early in Lamont’s testimony that the old man had given his unlikely friend the candelabrum. This was their conclusion and this was what Lamont was explaining to his cousin on the phone. He was going to get his job back. Later, Adam Zignelik would tell the whole story to Diana and later still to Charles and Michelle McCray, which was when he would become aware of the connection between Michelle and the street sweeper. Had Adam perchance looked, he would have found that the last number dialled came up as ‘Michelle’, although it had been called not by him but by the street sweeper. But he didn’t look.
Dr Washington thanked Adam. He replied that, on the contrary, he was grateful to her because his involvement had led him to a memoir of the war-time experiences of a Sonderkommando, something that would be invaluable for his research. It was, he said, a godsend. When Lamont was finished with the phone he began thanking them both for their assistance. They couldn’t imagine, he explained, what this meant to him. He was getting his job back. He would have two more weeks in Building Services as a probationary employee and then he would be full time and permanent. He couldn’t remember when he last felt like this. In the course of congratulating him, Dr Washington gave him back his broom and the cart.
&n
bsp; ‘I believe this is yours too,’ she said.
‘I believe so,’ he said as she gave him back the menorah.
*
Most of the afternoon was spent but it was still light enough on York Avenue for oncoming strangers to see each other from a distance. People walking past the three of them, the oncologist, the historian and the street sweeper, paid them little if any attention. On the other side of the street, on the leafy campus of Rockefeller University, a Nobel laureate walked his dog leash-free. The university, it appeared, allowed the disregard of certain university laws by Nobel laureates (and their dogs) in recognition of the natural laws they might have discovered. Despite the strong wind that was blowing, the entirety of one particular tree seemed impervious to the ferocity of the various gusts that played mercilessly with the composure of all the other surrounding trees. Yet no part of this particular tree near Founders Hall on the campus of Rockefeller University on York Avenue opposite Memorial Sloan-Kettering moved in any way that was perceptible to the human eye, no part of it except the smallest branch at the very top. The tiniest twig-like apogee of this old, much-revered tree shuddered as though in spasm while the rest of the tree remained as impassive as a monolith.
Neither the Nobel laureate nor his dog noticed the strange behaviour of the tree but it was appreciated by a young graduate student. This young woman from a province in northern China noticed the phenomenon on her way out of Founders Hall where she had gone to collect her mail. On her way to First Avenue to buy groceries, she had been contemplating the gap between her expectations and her experience, both in the lab and out of it, when she caught sight of the convulsing twig at the end of the otherwise unmoving tree and, quite taken by what she saw, she wished she could share the sight with the sort of transient random group of people that sometimes forms to stare at something out of the ordinary. Then suddenly, this strange arborial behaviour stopped. As far as the Chinese student was aware, no one else had noticed it.
The Nobel laureate with his, dog now on a leash, was stopped at York Avenue waiting for the lights to change when she caught up to them. Other people waited too, some from the university, some not, none of them known personally to each other.
When the people who had congregated waiting for the lights to change reached the western side of York Avenue they became momentarily part of a disparate group of people who slowed, some even stopped, to see something that aroused their curiosity. On the western side of York Avenue between 67th and 68th streets a young African American oncologist and a white Jewish historian stood smiling and talking to a skinny black street sweeper in a bright blue uniform. The oncologist handed the street sweeper a silver menorah, which he took in his one bandaged hand while the other hand lightly held a large broom that rested against a cart with its own shovel of sorts attached to it.
It was the late afternoon rush hour and a light-skinned black girl with braided hair tied tight with red ribbons, aged somewhere between seven and ten, had been unable to find a free seat ever since she had got on the M66 bus way over on the west side. She was still standing when the wheels stopped at 68th Street and the bus suddenly jerked forward and then back before coming to rest completely. With the emission of a gasp the doors opened and the passengers began spilling out.
‘Thank you,’ she said as she filed past the driver slowly. But once the pavement was able to beckon the soles of her shoes, she hit the ground in an automatic skip that quickly became a trot and was already a full gallop by the time she reached the corner and turned into York Avenue. Despite the school bag strapped to her back full of books she sped up when she saw the group of three, the oncologist, the historian and the street sweeper. Perhaps it was the Mayor of East 67th and York who was the first to notice what happened next or perhaps he was just the one the others followed but the people on the corner seemed to want to see and then even people on the eastern side of York Avenue craned their necks to see what it was that seemed to suddenly have captured everyone’s attention.
‘Mom!’ the little girl cried, interrupting the conversation of the three adults and lunging at her mother with arms that soon met each other around the waist of the oncologist.
‘This your daughter?’ the street sweeper asked and the oncologist nodded and smiled. Then the man in the bright blue uniform from Co-op City with a broom in one hand and a menorah in the other, the nobody, the skinny-assed black man cabs would pass by, this man squatted down on his haunches and raised the menorah in one hand as though expecting one of his new companions to take it for him, which the oncologist did.
‘Hey, little girl. I got a little girl ’bout your age,’ Lamont said. Kneeling down on the pavement to improve his balance he moved towards the little girl as if to hug her. She looked up at her mother for some kind of a signal for guidance on how to respond. Her mother looked down at her, smiled a smile of pride and nodded whereupon the little girl gently, politely permitted herself to be hugged by the street sweeper, just tentatively. Still looking up at her mother as the man on his knees rubbed her back with one hand, the girl saw her mother’s polite smile transform into a broad grin that mixed approval with pride and the satisfaction of accomplishment. Unsure of the protocol for this situation and too young to know there was none, trustingly and as a matter of instinct that seemed only encouraged by her mother’s smile, the little girl deliberately put more weight into the hug. Quite unambiguously she leaned in to him. And when this happened he felt the full weight of the little girl on his chest as she hugged him and he let out a cry. It was as involuntary as it was unexpected. Tears began to stream down this man’s face as he held on to the little girl as she hugged him and the sound he made, coming from deep within him, was loud enough for all those around to hear. And when they heard it they looked to see.
Everybody in the random group of onlookers wondered what it was they were witnessing. Of all the strangers there on that corner and those approaching it, only the Mayor had ever seen the man before and though even he had no idea what was really going on, he found himself grinning and then beaming. But his was not a unique response. Others looking at the scene found themselves similarly uplifted.
Nobody, not the Nobel laureate, not the young graduate student, not the Mayor nor anyone else on the corner really understood what they were seeing or why they were so heartened by it. The onlookers had no idea what it was that had led to the strange convergence of these three diverse individuals and the little girl. But if they had known the people they were looking at, if they had known where they had come from, if they had known their histories, if they’d had even an inkling of the events the historian, the street sweeper with the menorah, and the oncologist had knowledge of, if they had known the whole story of everything that had got these three people to that block at that time, they might well have felt compelled to tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.
author’s note
Nearly all the present-day characters in The Street Sweeper, and therefore their interactions, are fictional.
Apart from a few minor exceptions, the mid-twentieth-century events depicted here all occurred and are on the historical record.
Of the characters who inhabit the novel during that mid-twentieth-century period, some are real people (well known and less known), but most are fictional characters many of whom are based partly on real people.
Of the fictionalised characters based partly on real people, the ones who should be mentioned are: Henryk Mandelbrot, Henry Border, Rosa Rabinowicz, Estusia, Ala, Regina, Hannah, Zalman Gradowski, Zalman Lewental, Noah Lewental, Chaim Neuhof, Dorebus, Panusz, Handelsmann, Kalniak, ‘Rot’, Dürmayer, Kazuba, Nahum Grzywacz, Tommy Parks, James Pearson, Ralph Hellerstein, Herb Marks, Eileen Miller, Marvin Cadden, Cecilya Slepak, Rafal Gutman, Eliyahu Gutkowski, Jacob Grojanowski, Israel Lichtenstein, David Graber, Israel Gutman, Joshua Leifer, Jake Zignelik, SS Kommandant Hössler, SS Oberscharführer Moll, SS Oberscharführer Schillinger and SS Scharführer Busch.
In the wri
ting of this book I was conscious of the possibility of causing offence by employing the idioms of cultures other than my own. It is my hope that no offence has been caused. On reflection, I think that possibility, in a general sense, is a risk more or less inherent in writing about anyone other than oneself.
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