We were roused at four o’clock in the morning, driven out into the snow at five o’clock and kept running until eight o’clock, by which time the others were already sitting comfortably at breakfast, which consisted of tea with sugar and chunks of shriveled bread.
Since I was healthy enough not to be among those who collapsed during our morning run, I still had not fully realized what I was in for during the next three years and eight months. But I soon received Czar Nicolai’s proper sholom aleichem , and that sobered me a little.
What happened was this: having not tasted hot food for three days because our names were still not on the roster, I awoke early one morning with a powerful thirst, and took my own little teakettle over to the cookhouse. The mess attendant explained he was not allowed to give out any hot water until the bugle had sounded. I slipped him a cigarette, got my hot water and ran happily back to my cot to drink my tea.
I was about to pour the first cup when a Ukrainian non-com with a face like a sheep and a nose like a bulldog, the kind of treasure whom, in Russian-Yiddish, we called a katzap , entered the barracks. Reading from the ominous roster in his hand, he asked for, “Marateck, Yakub .”
When I answered, he took one shocked look at my cheerfully steaming kettle and promptly gave me a Russian misheberach , that is, a blow across the face that sent me sprawling.
Blood-spattered and stunned, I had barely managed to get back on my feet when he screamed, “ Zhydovska morda ! Jewface, pick up your hand and salute!” (Except morda , more precisely, refers to the snout of an animal).
Until he said that, I had been willing to overlook his bad manners. But I grew to manhood in a section of Warsaw where a man does not lightly let someone spit into his kasha. So without thinking, I snatched up the full kettle and walloped him once across the head. While I was at it, I also allowed my fist to find a resting place on his broad nose. In the commotion that followed, with plenty of warm encouragement for both sides, he ended up on the bottom and I on top while the blood from our mouths and noses mingled fraternally on the floor.
At the hospital, my injuries turned out to be hardly worth mentioning: a tooth knocked out by the first blow, and a finger cut to the bone by the sharp edge of my own smashed kettle. But the staff insisted on putting me to bed so that my opponent who, among other things, had lost part of his nose, should not suffer by comparison.
It was here that Mordechai found me at two o’clock the next morning. He’d brought his own little welcoming delegation of Jewish soldiers from our home town. But when he found out I had committed violence against a Russian of superior rank, Mordechai, in his loving anxiety over my ignorance and dimming prospects for survival, started to shout that unless I learned to control my “Polack temper,” I would spend my army years going from one prison to another until I forgot what a Jew was.
I listened to him with respect. He was, after all, something of a big shot in Vanya ’s army. Only later did I find out what made him so important. As Quartermaster, he was in charge of the warehouse from which the men obtained their uniforms. The way the natchalniks in the Quartermaster worked their racket was as follows: each soldier was entitled to a new uniform once in three years. The old one was supposed to be ripped apart and used for rags to wash the floors. But many of the old uniforms were still in good enough condition to wear so that, if cleaned up, and with in a new lining sewn in, they could be sold again, or even issued in place of new ones. There were large sums of money to be made out of these “resurrections,” and everyone from the colonel on down had a lick of this juicy bone.
Mordechai was the only Jew in that entire operation and I suspected that they kept him only because they needed at least