Entry #17: Pogrom in the radiation shelter
Entry #17: Pogrom in the radiation shelter
I was working from home on my computer when news of the nuclear war hit the feed. Israel had launched nuclear ballistic missiles into Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Yemen, the Gulf States…
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Day ten of the lockdown. I slept ten hours but woke up haggard, feeling like I drank all night. But I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in two days. No pills, either. No sunlight. That’s what did it. The natural rhythms are all fucked up with no sunlight.
Dreamed I was back in the temporary rad shelter again. Everyone was gone, just me in the underground parking garage, wandering around, going down level after level…all empty, wondering where everyone had gone. I woke up and lay in bed confused, not sure where or when it was. For a minute I thought I was still down there, sleeping in a corner of the garage. A faint smell of motor oil lingered in my nostrils.
It was a rough time those two weeks I was stuck in that place. Windowless underground structure, surrounded by strangers, sleeping in cots, not knowing what was going on with my daughter on the other side of the country or if she’d survive, living in fear of radiation seeping in…invisible and deadly, not knowing if we’d ever emerge. Right after the nukes fell we had found out that our government had no plans for this kind of situation. We were on our own. On that first day people started seizing underground garages haphazardly and turning them into temporary shelters. Anything with thick concrete walls was seized, too. I managed to get a spot in a garage under a condo building on Stanyan and Haight a few blocks from my apartment. It was a grim setup. People dragged their bedding, mattresses, inflatable beds, meds, books, stuffed toys for their kids, camping tents, propane canisters for cooking, water jugs…and set up everything up in the parking spaces where the cars should have been. We’d go up and shit in the lobby, doing it as quickly as possible to minimize possible radiation exposure. Down there underground in the dark most people were either on the verge of a mental breakdown or in the grips of one. And of course the Jewish Question came up almost immediately.
I think it was on the second day of us in the shelter…three days after the nuclear attack wiped out most of the Middle East and took out Paris. The fallout cloud was still over the ocean and headed our way. Forecasts predicted it would hit soon. People were losing it, parents melting down and sobbing in front of their children. One guy in particular had a bad episode. He was walking around, cursing, hitting walls. People tried to comfort him but he’d push them away and scream in their face. He then started yelling about the Jews, about how Hitler was right. “If he done his job none of this would be happening,” he screamed. “The fucking Jews! The fucking Jews! Those fucking kikes! Hitler was right! Hitler was right! Hitler was right!” He’d yell that over and over, walking up and down the levels of the parking garage in a big insane loop.
The guy was in his late 30s, pasty, tall, and skinny. As I later learned, his name was Ben. He was from Toronto and came to San Francisco to work at a startup that made military drones. Watching him pace back and forth, muttering and yelling to himself, his eyes wide and unfocused, I started to get scared for real. He didn’t scare me. No it was the group’s response. There was no condemnation, no shocked expressions. It was clear he was voicing what was on everyone’s mind. “The Jews did this to us. The fucking Jews did this.” And they were right to think so. Most Jews in America had supported Israel…they had supported it through the genocide and had supported it even when the rabbis took over and started threatening everyone around them with nukes — “the Lord’s fire,” the beards called it. So yeah the Jews here in America were to blame. But it wasn’t just the Jews. Most Americans supported Israel, too. Or at least they voted for people who backed Israel all the way to the end. But that part would be memory holed and Jews would be only ones who’d pay.
I was working from home on my computer when news of the nuclear war hit the feed. Israel had launched nuclear ballistic missiles into Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Yemen, the Gulf States…and even lobbed a few at France. Iran and Pakistan retaliated, targeting Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and dozens of other locations — they spared Jerusalem, though. Several thousand nuclear warheads had been used in total. On the feed people were live-streaming nuclear war. Some had their cameras pointed at the sky as missiles descended down in an arc on top of them…and then exploded, releasing a blinding flash and then blackness, terminating the feed. Others captured the fireball as it rushed towards them, a wall of fire and then…screams. There were streams of mushroom clouds, of people running with flesh hanging off their bodies, of entire cities on fire. Then the internet began malfunctioning and stopped working altogether.
I went outside after that. My entire neighborhood was out on the street, too. Without the feed people were compelled to seek others out, to not be alone. It was instinctual. For a few hours it seemed like time had stopped. People just stood around, confused, chatting in subdued tones. And then, after the initial shock had passed, there was panic. News began to filter through that there would be global radioactive fallout. People started storming the stores and grabbing groceries, emptying pharmacies, seizing garages. It was clear to me then that if we’d ever survive this thing here in America, we Jews had a reckoning coming. People would make us pay.
Anyway…Ben kept walking around the garage screaming about the Jews and Hitler. Then, suddenly, an older guy popped out of the shadows and confronted him. He was all rage, vein bulging on his forehead. “Fuck you! You antisemite!” he screamed. “It’s because of people like you! That’s why we needed Israel! That’s why we Jews need our own country.” Then he defended Israel’s nuclear attack. “The military had no choice! We were surrounded by enemies! We had been backed into a corner by Islamic radicals!” He went on and on and on with stuff like this. His wife was at his elbow, tugging at his arm, trying to get him to stop. But he pushed her away. He was in the grips of a rage, spittle flying from his mouth.
His outburst triggered total pandemonium down there in the garage. People surrounded him, yelled at him, shoved and grabbed. Someone threw a punch, hitting him in the face. A woman yelled that her daughter was on vacation in Paris. “What did she ever do to you? What did she ever do against Israel?” At this point his wife had disappeared. She was smarter than he was…she did not want to share his fate.
There were like twenty people around him now, all hitting him and kicking him and trying to grab him. The whole mass of people tipped over and fell in a tangle of bodies. Then after a while they started dragging him up to the higher levels of the garage…towards the exit. They probably would’ve beaten him to death and thrown him out of the building if the radio hadn’t suddenly turned on and the emergency broadcast hadn’t started updating us on the status of the fallout. There was good news for once — at least for us in San Francisco. The fallout cloud had shifted trajectory over the ocean and was going to pass just north of us. So we wouldn’t take the brunt of the fallout. The good news saved him.
The old man used this distraction to crawl away. He and his wife retreated to a corner of the garage as far away from everyone as possible. I thought about going over to talk to him but then I decided against it. I heard him angrily muttering to his wife: “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not gonna be a pushover ghetto Jew! I’m gonna stand up for myself! We Jews have a right to exist!” I shook my head and backed away. He was too far gone. And I noticed later that his wife moved away from him, too…moved her stuff to another level of the parking lot.
That night I changed my sleeping place so I could have my back against the wall. I was genuinely afraid. The man’s defense of Israel had riled everyone up. He made it more dangerous for other Jews there. And there were a few others I was sure. Was there gonna be a pogrom here down in this damp garage? Were they gonna go person to person and try to root us out and make us pay? Is this how I would meet my end? Being bludgeoned to death by a bunch of lawyers and engineers? I wouldn’t hold it against them if they did. If I was in their position, I’d probably do the same thing. Still I didn’t want to go out this way…especially because I had no love for Israel. What would I do if they came for me? I had been publicly critical of Israel’s policies as a journalist. Could show them some articles I wrote years ago about the repressive policies in the West Bank? But how would I do that? The internet was down. It’s not like I carried a print out in my pocket. And even if I had the article…if the mob was convinced that I was Jewish and supported Israel, would they stop to read it? I could picture it in my mind: An angry crowd surrounding me, clawing at my face, hitting me with sticks, blaming me for destroying their life and the world…and me waving a couple of flimsy pages, saying: “No, no! You don’t understand. I’m innocent. I criticized Israel in a series of articles I wrote a decade ago about the West Bank. If you just stop for a moment and read this. You’re making a big mistake!” I do have one thing going for me, I thought. Thanks to the fact that I was born in the Soviet Union, I’m not circumcised. That’s negative proof right there. No cut = not Jewish. But then all American men are circumcised so it’s not even a real marker of Jewishness, is it? I decided that I’d tell them I’m Ukrainian and Russian and that I hate the Jews, too. The Jews enslaved me and my parents and grandparents with Bolshevism. That’s what I’ll say. And the nose? Oh I have some Armenian in me, too.
I kept drifting in and out of sleep, paranoid and dreaming that someone was coming to attack me. I woke up at some point to a loud shriek. It was coming from somewhere below me in the garage. I got up and made my way down there. A crowd has already assembled. They were pointing their flashlights. It was the old guy’s wife. She had found him sprawled on his stomach in a pool of blood…a kitchen knife protruding from his back. It was easy to guess what had happened. He had gone to the bathroom to relieve himself and…and, well, someone was waiting for him.
The woman was quietly sobbing now, sitting on the floor in her pajamas, her eyes cast down. No one did anything. People just left her there and went back to their beds. And I did, too. I didn’t feel any sympathy for him. The idiot got what he deserved and she was better off without him.
In the morning no one talked about the murder. It was like it never happened. But I could feel that a major tension had been lifted from our little community. People were more relaxed, joked a little even. It was a like cathartic ritual had taken place.
Entry #18 will be published next week. See all installments of Two Pigeons here.