Short Fiction | ‘The Villa on Targova’

The villa at 61 Targova Street was built at a time when the city of Łódź, then part of the Russian Empire, thrived as a multilingual industrial metropolis, and one of the most densely populated places on earth. 

Today, local tour guides capitalizing on the villa’s storied past refer to it as “Palazzo of the Oskar Kon,” and tell you, in an English peppered with misplaced articles, that Oskar Kon was the very wealthiest of industrialists in a Łódź that teemed with wealthy industrialists: Russian, German, Polish, Jewish. 

In 1920, when a young Oskar Kon started his search for a home for his growing family, the handsome home on Targova caught his interest first and foremost on account of its location. It sat on a wooded plot a short ride from his factory complex near the center of town. It wasn’t a small building, but neither was it ostentatiously large, and it enjoyed balanced proportions and minimal Renaissance-style ornamentation. Kon, who had spent time in Paris and London, fancied himself a man of refined taste. He would not make his home in a monstrosity like that Poznanski palace overlooking a droshky-choked city square, its façade a mess of twirling colonnades and allegorical sculptures.  

After purchasing the tasteful villa on Targova, Kon dug a large hole behind his new home. He had always dreamed of living alongside a body of water. The pond he created was too small for ducks or geese to alight on its surface, but large enough to reflect the moon and stars at night. 

For security and privacy, he planted saplings around his property’s periphery and built a stone wall and a guardhouse. Throngs of peasants poured into the city each day. They were a boon to the industrialist, who had added a new wing to his factory complex every year for the past five: a bleachery, two tenements to house workers, an iron foundry, and a dedicated fire station. Yet, there were downsides to the burgeoning population of village folk in Łódź. A man of Kon’s stature would naturally want to distance himself from the hoi polloi.

The two decades that Kon lived in the villa were by far his happiest. He’d ride home daily from the factory for his midday meal and afterwards enjoy a stroll in the shade of his 100-year-old oaks. In the evenings, he’d sit with a cigar and bathe in the music, all baritone and bass, of the bullfrogs that had made their home in his pond. He imagined them negotiating with every bit as much vigor as the merchants in the center of town as they jockeyed for prime waterfront real estate under the boulders bordering his pond.  

You’ll need no tour guide to tell you that neither Oskar’s wall, nor the trio of Cossack guards he imported from Vlodivostock, were of any use when the Nazis blustered into Łódź in 1939. Upon occupying the city, they quartered their mid-level officers in Kon’s villa. (The top brass, unbothered by architectural vulgarity, preferred the glass ceilings, winter gardens and shooting gallery of the Poznanski home.)

Oskar and his wife the Nazis kept on at first, moving the couple into the guardhouse and charging them with maintaining the building and its grounds.

Only days after their arrival, one Major Bartelmus, a sensitive sleeper, got out of bed at two a.m., slung his MG-42 over his shoulder and fired three rounds into Oskar’s pond. 

Nights were quiet afterwards.

That October, the foliage on Oskar’s adolescent oaks glowed an eerie crimson. When the leaves browned and fell, Oskar shuffled out through the building’s gates, a rake in one hand, a broom in the other, and a lopsided star scrawled in yellow chalk onto the back of the long black coat one of his Cossacks had left behind. (His cashmere peacock, made the year before in London, was appropriated along with the rest of his wardrobe by his houseguests.) At first, only neighbors on their way to the shops witnessed the spectacle of Łódź ’s richest Jew sweeping the street. But word spread, and soon small groups gathered in the park across from the villa in the afternoons when the factories let out. Most people gawked from afar, not wanting to risk a confrontation with the Germans stalking in and out of the gates. But one Łódźian, rendered all but invisible by age and decrepitude, pulled a lame leg over to the stone wall and parked himself under a signpost in German. From his spot he watched Oskar for ten, twenty minutes each afternoon, filled with curiosity and wonder. Mostly he remained silent, but now and again he offered a critique of the industrialist’s sweeping technique. His language, vulgar and antisemitic in equal measure, made Oskar’s ears heat up under the Cossack’s hat. 

Oskar had always prided himself as being a man who looks reality square in the eye. 

He would not, now, allow himself to sink into pathetic self-regard, regardless of how pitiable his lot might be. 

The Nazis in his bed…well, Nazis are Nazis, their behavior cohered with their stated mission. There was no hypocrisy in it. What Oskar had trouble rationalizing were these people, the men and women across the street, spitting sunflower seeds as they ogled him in his misfortune. These people had only weeks earlier shown him nothing but deference and respect.  Love, even. They had smiled and flattered him at every turn. And he’d treated them as brothers and sisters. He’d made loans, given advice. He’d even crossed the thresholds of churches, making his own father ill with fury, to attend their children’s baptisms and christenings. Some of the faces he saw over the top of the park’s hedge made him weak with despair. Małgosia, his former bookkeeper, a woman who had once showed up on Targova Street in sheer stockings, hair curled like a prostitute’s, and declared the depths of her love for Oskar, while Oskar’s own dear Myriam played Chopin’s Berceuse on the piano in the next room. Had the roll of bills he’d tucked into Małgosia’s feverish palm that afternoon been too small? Had she really held a grudge all these years? 

As Oskarswept leaves, he tried to be honest with himself, to take stock of his mistakes. He acknowledged that life wasn’t always easy on the mills. Here and there, a finger would be snatched by the machines which churned and pounded and fumed in the mighty effort to expound textiles of a quantity and quality unknown anywhere else in the civilized world… 

But hadn’t Oskar always paid generous restitution to the victims of such incidents, which are, after all, par for the course in even the safest of factory work? 

What about the free factory clinic he housed in the basement of one of the tenement buildings?  

And the hospital bills he paid? 

He knew some of his employees had lost a great deal. The lame fool leaning against the German signpost each day, for instance. Based on the burn scars on his face, Oscar thought he’d worked in the bleachery, though he couldn’t figure how that squared with the lame leg. Legs in general were rarely injured in factory accidents.

In any case, despite the accidents, despite the occasional deaths, there remained an endless line of the willing waiting outside the factory each morning when Oskar rode up to the factory. The poor souls stretched so far down Zytnia Street, they might as well have gone on forever. Oskar had only despaired that he couldn’t hire more of these people in such obvious need. 

Yes, the factory had an outsize appetite for human digits. But it also provided that which every man and woman on earth wants: an opportunity to make an honest living. 

Snow fell. A dark fog veiled the city. The Nazis handed Oskar a shovel. This was harder work, and bad for his Oskar’s knees, but the cold had the benefit of chasing off his audience. Now only the bent and burned old man still showed up, never seeming to tire of the spectacle. 

One afternoon, Oskar decided he wanted to chat with the old man. Oskar was in an excellent mood. He had had a visitor that morning who had left him feeling unusually optimistic despite the dire state of the world.

“Sir,” he said, spearing his shovel into a snowbank and hooking his arm over it, “tell me, won’t you, what happened to you?” He was surprised at his own voice, so reedy in the cold air, so unlike the rich baritone in which he once addressed people like this man. 

Before the man could get over his surprise at being addressed, a limousine appeared out of the fog and stopped alongside them. Two high-level Nazis, arms emblazoned with swastikas, emerged from behind Oskar’s gates, marched past Oskar and the old man, and got into the car. One of these men, Oskar knew to be Goerig, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. Oskar nodded at him. It would have been a risky gesture under ordinary circumstances, but Oskar took the risk, and Goerig’s grimace gave him a shot of joy unlike any he’d felt since the war broke out. 

When the vehicle glided away, Oskar got to the point. “What year did your misfortune occur, sir?” 

 The man stared into the fog that had swallowed the limousine and its Nazis. Apparently, he wasn’t in a chatting mood. No matter. Oskar pulled his shovel out of the snow and went on with his work. 

“1917,” the man said, many minutes later, when Oscar’s shoveling brought him near again. 

 “I should, then, perhaps introduce myself,” Oscar said, turning back to the man and smiling gently, “My name is—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jew. I know who you are.” 

“Then perhaps you also know that it was not me but rather my predecessor who ran the factory during the time of your tragedy. Safety precautions were lax in Poznanski’s days, but things have changed, you know and—” 

“Poznanski, Kohn.” The man shrugged, indicating to Oskar how little distinction he saw. “What’s the difference?” 

Oskar returned to his task, chipping away at the icy crust of a snowbank, working with increased vigor now to distract himself from anger that had boiled up his chest. How absurd that he, Oskar Kon (and yes, he had indeed been born Kohn, Aszer Kohn as a matter of fact, but what of it?), a modern businessman who did business in seventeen countries, in at least four of which he had mistresses, both Jew and Gentile, who spoke six languages, should be held accountable by the likes of this broken halfwit for the crimes of a some totally different Jew. Some tacky, retrograde Jew like that Izrael Poznanski…And if a Jew in America, or a Jew in, say, Morocco, or Iran, or Turkey committed a crime? Was that Kon’s fault, too? Was he to be punished for it?

Oskar’s mind turned then, as it did with increasing frequency these days, to his father. 

In the year before Tata died, Agata, the nurse, would roll him out to the pond to warm his legs in the sun when the weather was fine. Oskar and his older brother David, who moved into the villa at Targova after his business failed, often joined Tata on the bench. 

The frailer Tata grew, the more singular became his obsession: 

The enemy, he intoned, was closing in. 

He could smell it. 

He implored his sons to flee. 

To take their families and leave Poland once and for all. 

Palestine, he told them. Palestine was the answer to all their ills.  

“Enemy,” David would scoff, sipping his brother’s armagnac. “What enemy? Here in Łódź , where the Russian, the German, the Catholic, the Jew, prosper side by side, dancing together on the backs of the worker.”  

“Oh, David, Davidek, you play the big socialist! But you know exactly what I mean,” Tata would cry out, his face reddening, his tremor worsening until his entire wheelchair shook against stones below it, and Oskar feared the contraption would fall apart right under the poor man. 

Oskar stroked Tata’s hand to calm him. He knew their father believed David had become a socialist only because of his humiliating failures as a businessman. Oskar, on the other hand, believed David’s spectacular failures were on account of his gentleness of soul. Forget exploiting a worker, David could hardly bear to witness a man at work. How many times had Oskar come into David’s shop and caught him cutting his own fabric while his employees putzed around, laughing at their boss? Was there such a thing as a successful business that didn’t exploit its workers? His brother’s gentleness in this cold hard world scared Oskar, but it touched him as well. This was why no matter what abuse David might hurl his way, Oskar insisted on generosity toward the younger man.  

“It’s these Zionists,” David went on, distaste in his voice. “They plant ideas into his vulnerable mind. You had them here last night, I could smell their cologne when I came home. Why do you insist on letting those adventurers harass the poor man in his old age? It’s bad for his heart, getting all worked up this way.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Oskar murmured. Tata should not be exposed to things that overexcite him. 

Regarding Zionism, Oskar thought the idea of turning Jews into peasants and having them farm a desert in the Middle East a laughable solution to the problem of antisemitism. But a few of his dearest friends, men and even women he’d known since childhood, had, over the years, become adherents of the strange idea. And what was he supposed to do, run these dear people out of his house? A person, he firmly believed, was worth more than his ideology. 

“Tata,” David went on when Oskar didn’t say any more. “The Bible itself tells us Amalek has been swept from the earth. We don’t need to go anywhere, we can stay right where we are.” 

“Then how do you explain,” Tata said, voice strained so that it emerged as a wail, “the hate? The hate that rises again and again, again and again? How do you explain what’s happening this very minute in Germany?”

Oskar elbowed David. “Remember, no excitement?” he hissed. “Let it be.”

But David could never let it be when it came to Zionism, which he considered cowardly, escapist and disloyal to Poland. He picked up a rock and skipped it across the pond’s surface, something he knew aggravated Oksar, worried as he was about his darling frogs. 

“This focus on differences, Tata, is what tears our society apart,” David said. “In proportion as the antagonism between the classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”  

“You’re quoting to me Marx?” Tata said, his tremor coming to an abrupt stop, his voice thickening. “The same schlump who said, ‘The emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism’? Who called ‘huckstering’ the religion of the Jew, and money our God? This is the sort of man my son deems worthy of quoting to his old father?”

That Tata’s brain, which could no longer call up the name of his children sometimes, could still quote Marx from memory stunned both David and Oskar into silence.

Soon after, David left with a group of comrades for Moscow. Tata’s tremor worsened. He gave up eating. One night, seized by a night terror, he called for Oskar. When Oskar kneeled next to his bed, out of Tata poured his hauntings. Descriptions of memories disjointed and harrowing: an old man with fingers removed; young men, castrated; women old and young, with shattered pelvises, speared genitals. 

Oskar knew that Tata’s parents had been murdered in Bialystok in ’06. But he’d never dared wonder what, exactly, the poor man had encountered when he opened the door to his family’s home that night, having been away on business during the worst of the pogrom. 

Next Tata told Oskar about Zhytomyr, a town he walked through on his way back from  the front after the Great War. Corpses in the streets, splayed in unnatural positions. Infants burned at the stake… 

He stopped speaking mid-sentence. 

For a long time, Oskar stayed at Tata’s bedside. When Agata tried to come in, he sent her away. Slowly, Tata’s breaths steadied and slowed. His tremor subsided to the gentlest of stirrings, and Oskar thought he had fallen asleep. Then the voice, very gentle now, sounded again in the darkness. “For most of my life, I remembered this things only as the briefest of flickers. But increasingly, as my end grows near, the memories come back in ever more detail. Why? What good are they to me now? Whom does this torment help?” 

When Tata died after a short period of relative calm, Oskar sent word to Moscow. He wondered over the next few days if he would tell David the things Tata told him. He feared David would scoff, would say Tata was just a looney old man, exaggerating as usual to justify his Zionism. 

But the shiva passed, and David never came home.

At around the same time that Oskar had bought the villa on Targova, he began transferring his wealth out of Polish banks and into Swiss ones. He didn’t actively fear for his future as Tata did. He was far too much of an optimist about his beloved, secular, civilized Europe. Still, he came to feel, upon holding his first child, Dvorah, in his arms, that it’s not God to whom man owes his greatest responsibility after all. It’s to his children. He scoffed silently whenever Abraham was invoked. What sort of man would sacrifice his child to prove his faith? Oskar would trust no one with his children’s safety, least of all a God that had proven himself over and over to be capricious and cruel. 

Oskar intuited something that his poor, gentle Bundist of a brother—almost definitely dead now, frozen in a Russian wood—never would: there’s nothing, no God, no Promised Land, and certainly no political ideology that will protect a Jew’s child. 

The only thing that might protect a Jew’s child is a Jew’s money. 

Oscar had been able to bear the brutal, humiliating months since September with relative equanimity. Because he knew the sum sitting in a vault in Switzerland was startling. Stunning, even. He had his statement balance memorized, and he whispered it to himself sometimes, when something particularly awful happened, for example, when he learned that the street where two of his daughters lived with their young families had been cleared, their residents sent who knows where. He was certainly the richest Jew in Łódź, if not Poland, if not the night world. He might have even been the richest man, if you took Rockefeller and Ford out of the running. 

The Nazis could take his factories, could take his wife’s furs and jewels, could seize his Polish bank accounts. But if they wanted what was in the Swiss bank, they would have to deal directly with him. And this morning, Goerig had come in person to present Oskar with an offer. It was only a matter of days that Oskar and his family would be free. 

And people, including that Marx character, wonder at the Jewish penchant for saving.  

After the war, the so-called Palazzo of the Oskar Kon became the seat of the Polish Army’s Film Production Division. A few years later, it was chosen to house the Polish National Film School, which remains headquartered there today.  

Soon after the school opened to students, passersby began noticing dim lights, sometimes red, flashing on and off in the villa’s basement long after classes were over for the day. The old building was haunted, people said, by the daughters of Oskar Kon: Dvorah, Basia and Chana, three elegant ladies whom the Nazis drove into the ghetto in ’40, and gassed to death at Chelmno. 

Oskar’s detractors still claim the greedy Jew left his daughters behind to die. There’s ample evidence, however, that his negotiations with Goerig included ensuring their safe passage out of Poland.  

No one can say why the Nazi did not keep his word.