For Those Who Dream Monsters by Anna Taborska

man.
    The
painkillers they’re giving me have stopped working; the pain is becoming
unbearable, and soon I’ll be on morphine. The doctors tell me I’ll be
hallucinating and delusional, and nobody will believe the ranting of a
cancer-ridden old man… Is the Dictaphone working? Good… As you’re my
ghostwriter, the story I’ll tell you is most appropriate because it’s a ghost
story – at least, I think it is… Do I believe in them? Perhaps once you hear
the story, you’ll be able to tell me . I don’t know. It all
happened long ago…
    I’d only been working at the History Magazine for four months, but they
were pleased with my research skills, and I was the only person on the staff
who spoke Polish. It was my second job since leaving university, and I’d
already cut my teeth on an established, if somewhat trashy, London daily. So
when the powers that be decided to revisit the Holocaust, the Senior Editor
chose me to go to Poland.
    I’d
been to Poland before, of course. My mother’s family hailed from the beautiful
city of Krakow, and I’d been taken there fairly regularly as a boy to visit my
aunt and cousins. But this time I was to travel to Miedzyrzec – a small and
unremarkable town, the name of which caused considerable hilarity among my
colleagues, and which I myself could scarcely pronounce.
    “You’ll
be going to My … Mee … here …” said my boss, thrusting a piece of paper at me
with a touch of good-natured annoyance at the intricacies of Polish
orthography. Foreign names and places were never his thing in any case. He
seemed happiest in his leather chair behind his vast desk in the Magazine office, and I sometimes suspected that the furthest he’d been from Blighty was
Majorca, where he’d holiday with his wife and children at every given
opportunity. And nothing wrong with that; nothing wrong at all – I thought – as
I drove my hire car through the grey and brown Polish countryside, trying hard
not to pile into any of the horse-drawn carts that occasionally pulled out in
front of me without warning from some misty dirt side track.
    I’d done my homework before driving the eighty miles east from Warsaw to Miedzyrzec.
Before the outbreak of World War II there had been about 12,000 Jews living in
the town – almost three-quarters of the population. The town had synagogues,
Jewish schools, Jewish shops, a Jewish theatre, two Jewish football teams, a
Jewish brothel and a Jewish fire brigade. I wondered idly whether the Jewish
fire brigade was sent to extinguish fires in Christian homes too, or just in
Jewish ones. I figured it was the former, as by all accounts the Poles and Jews
got on like a house on fire – excuse the pun – and most of the town’s
inhabitants worked happily side by side in a Jewish-owned factory, producing
kosher pig hair brushes, which were sold as far afield as Germany. In fact,
commerce in Miedzyrzec flourished to the degree that the envious,
poverty-stricken inhabitants of surrounding towns and villages referred to the
place as ‘Little America’… Does prosperity render a man better disposed towards
his fellow man? I don’t know. Certainly, during the course of my research I
read of various acts of generosity – big and small – which were extended to
others regardless of background, so that, for example, when a film such as The
Dybbuk came to town, the cinema owner would organise a free screening for
all the citizens of Miedzyrzec, and the queue stretched half way down the main
street.
    As
with any positive status quo, the good times in Miedzyrzec were not to last
long. When war broke out in September 1939, the town was bombed, then taken by
the Germans, before being handed over to the Russians, and finally falling into
German hands once more. The horrors that followed were fairly typical for
Nazi-occupied Poland. The Polish population was terrorised, while the Jews were
harassed, attacked, rounded up and either murdered on the spot or sealed in