From my balcony I can hear the rhythmic thud of boots on the road surface, but I don’t feel much menace.
My mother and father, who know of the Hitler–Stalin pact, who know that a war that will engulf the whole of Europe has commenced, who know that the greater part of our land of Poland is occupied by the armed forces of Germany and that our city of Lvov is in danger – they would have experienced a stronger sense of menace, and some confusion, too. Who should they trust more, who distrust less? The Russians? The Germans?
Five years old, my hair in plaits, just tall enough to see over the railing, curious enough to feel a type of fascination with the uniforms, the unfamiliar faces, the steady rhythm of the boots on the ground, the pouches on the soldiers’ belts, I am protected by all that I do not know. I do not know that the worst thing ever to befall the Jews of the world has been set in motion; that the number of Jews in the city will soon swell to two hundred thousand; that at the end of the war that is coming, only three hundred will remain; that in this city of ninety-five synagogues, none will be intact in three year’s time.
But I don’t know any of this at age five, and nobody else knows either, whether five years old or fifty.
When the soldiers have passed, I turn back and gaze at my mother in the kitchen, puzzled by the anxious look on her face.
‘What, Mama?’
She shrugs but doesn’t say anything.
This is not what I am used to from my mother, who is in her nature a woman full of opinions, full of advice. I never see her looking daunted. As is normal in children, my structures of comprehension are not sophisticated. I register alarm in others – fear, joy, displeasure – but the nuances are not there. In my mind, the Russian soldiers have taken up an unthreatening tenancy. I see no harm in them, but I am troubled by the ambiguity of my mother’s response.
To relieve myself of the troubled feeling, I return my gaze to the street and to the trees in the park, still in foliage at this early stage of autumn. I am returning not only to the scene that is spread out before me, but to the warm embrace of all that I don’t know.
Soon, I will sit at the piano and practise. But first my mother will tidy my hair, maybe replait it if the plaits have loosened, sitting behind me with the hairbrush, murmuring endearments one moment, commanding me – in her bossy way – to sit still the next.
This is Lvov. This is our life.
In a modern atlas, Lvov is ‘Lviv’, and it is not in Poland but in the far west of Ukraine, eighty kilometres from the Polish border. It is a city that has had a fraught life, sometimes ridiculously so: a plaything of despots, traded between states. It’s Latin name was Leopolis, and that name remains the root of all the versions of Lvov, except for the name the Germans gave it: Lemberg. It was founded in 1256 in a region then known as Ruthenia, the Roman name designating it as the home of a fairly insignificant rabble called the Rus. By fits and starts, the Rus became more or less the Russians. The Poles seized the city in 1349, kept it until 1772 with the help of the Lithuanians, lost it to the Austrians for one hundred and fifty years, took it back after World War I, lost it to the Germans in 1941, to the Russians in 1944, and it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1945 as part of Ukraine.
Because of all that I did not know at age five, Lvov seemed the only possible world, the only possible home. The history of Lvov was a part of all that I did not know then, but knowing it now, in my seventies, it seems inevitable that the Russians should have marched into our city and that the Germans should have succeeded them. Almost everything that the Jews of Lvov endured seems inevitable.
If I fix in my mind’s eye my small shape on the kitchen balcony, watching the soldiers marching, I can extend the evidence of inevitability north, south, east and west. The most powerful military machine the world has ever known, as of 1939, is poised to seize for itself villages, towns and cities by the tens of thousands all over Europe. The German machine is so cleverly organised that its agents know exactly what to do once a town or city becomes German-occupied territory.
Nothing has been neglected. The resources of sites to be invaded have been catalogued, right down to the volume of water consumed in each household. The forms of resistance to be encountered have been studied, and dismissed. The names of likely sympathisers have been recorded. The headquarters that the invaders will require – the houses, mansions, castles and palaces – have all been marked on maps. Indeed, more maps of Europe’s nations have been commissioned and printed and filed by German High Command than ever before generated on the continent. The number of buses, automobiles, trolley cars and horse-drawn vehicles in all of the larger towns and cities is known. Age-old animosities capable of being exploited in every nation slated for invasion have been calculated: who hates whom in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, in Belgium; who would welcome the chance to take revenge, with the blessing of the German occupiers.
And then there are the lists of those who will need to be shot. Intellectuals with a vicious attraction to Marxism. Liberal politicians. Christians with a repugnance for murder who have raised their voices in protest at the Nazi program. Journalists of the left-wing press. Mayors of towns who have resisted friendly overtures, resisted invitations to provide certain information about the Jews of their region. And, of course, the Jews, like me, like my mother and father, like one hundred thousand others in Lvov, like a further one hundred thousand pouring into Lvov from regions of Poland where the Germans are already consulting their lists, already shooting those who require shooting.
In my mind’s eye, the mind’s eye of a woman now eighty, the small figure on the kitchen balcony – Werunia, as she is called by her mother and father: ‘beloved’, kochanie – can never prevail against the malice of an army of three million, over a virulent philosophy that holds Jews accountable for everything from the Black Plague to the famines of the Middle Ages, to cattle blight, to hair loss and impotence in adult male Christians, and to elaborate ritual murder involving cauldrons of blood and the feathers of ravens.
Even here in my house in Byron Bay, the Arcadia of Australia’s eastern seaboard, in a country of people so well-behaved that speeding motorists become newsworthy – even here, with all that I now know, I cannot accept that the child I was will survive.
What is important is the piano.
I have been playing for more than a year. My piano teacher has great hopes for me.
My father says, ‘Werunia, at the right age we will send you to Paris. The most beautiful city in the world, Werunia. Do you know where in Paris you will go? To the Sorbonne, the great university of France. You will attend the Sorbonne in Paris and the piano will be your life.’
I play pieces from The Children’s Bach; I play Czerny, a Mozart minuet and a Chopin polonaise; Bartók’s ‘Little Study’, and ‘Study in G’ by Brunner; ‘Study in A Minor’ by Lemoine; a Clementi andante; ‘Curious’ by Hesse, and Joachim’s ‘Gossip’. And of course I play ‘Für Elise’. I play, most enjoyably, Debussy’s ‘Golliwogs’ Cakewalk’ and ‘The Little Shepherd’. The music is in my hands, in my heart, in my stomach: all through me.
My piano is a Bechstein, tall and handsome and gleaming. I’m such a tiny figure at the keyboard, leaning sideways to reach for the top and bottom keys. I’m brimming with ambition, more ambition than my small frame can accommodate. To think that I might go to Paris, the most beautiful city in the world, and to the Sorbonne, the great university of France!
It pleases me to please my father, to hear his endearments. His ambition for me is the foundation for the sense of entitlement that will stay with me all my life. I don’t mean ‘entitlement’ in a snobbish way, as if it were my right to live a life of comfort and ease; no, I mean an entitlement to happiness. Ever since childhood, I have been impatient with unhappiness, impatient with situations that demand an uncomplaining acceptance.
At the keyboard of the Bechstein, I learn Debussy and Mozart and Czerny, and I learn to be happy. Once you have learnt to be happy, it is impossible to unl
earn it. It becomes your expectation.
But it’s such an irony that I should gain this sense of entitlement in our apartment in Lvov when all around me plans were being made to end, finally and forever, the happiness of a million children like me.
I am only able to conceive of happiness as a right because of everything I do not know.
If you travel due west four hundred kilometres from the place where my Bechstein stands, you arrive at Auschwitz – or, rather, at the time that I was sitting at my Bechstein, learning joy, learning happiness, you would have arrived at the entirely innocent hamlet of Oświęcim, yet to undergo its transformation. And two hundred and forty kilometres to the north, Sobibór; two hundred and thirteen kilometres north-west, Majdanek; further north, Treblinka; further north-west, Chełmno; and much closer to Lvov – no more than two hours by train – Bełżec.
Such an irony, as I say. Think of all that is expressed in the music of The Children’s Bach, and think of what is expressed in the construction of facilities that include gas chambers and crematoriums waiting to receive, among many others, children like me, with Bechsteins of their own.
The Russian soldiers march with their rifles on their shoulders; the maples and lilacs are about to yield their foliage. I am practising at the Bechstein. This evening we will visit my grandparents who live in the Jewish quarter – or one of a number of Jewish quarters – of Lvov.
We could live in the same Jewish quarter as my grandparents if we wished, but that was not my father’s choice. He didn’t want to live cheek by jowl with all the other Jews of Lvov. But his choice was also to do with comfort. Lvov is an old, old city; my grandparents endure living conditions more in keeping with the Middle Ages than the twentieth century. Our own apartment is modern. My father makes a good living from his textile business. We can afford luxury.
We are about to enter the High Holy Days. The Nazis, in their malice, have made sure, in the rest of Poland, that Jews everywhere will remember the High Holy Days of 1939 with sorrow enough to bow their heads to their chests. The Jews now pouring into Lvov bring tales of murder, torture and theft – stories that are kept from me, at least in their details, but the impact of which I can see on people’s faces.
On our way to my grandparents’ house, I am thinking not of murder but of the thrill of the approaching season. We are not especially observant Jews but we maintain the traditions. The day after tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of Tishrei. I know, because I have been told, that if we were to go back far enough, we would reach the Day of Creation of the universe, and that Rosh Hashanah commemorates this greatest of all events in the history of the cosmos. For my father and every other Jew in the world, Rosh Hashanah offers the promise of renewal: one’s fortunes may have become blemished, but repair is possible.
Rosh Hashanah does not fall on Shabbat this year, so I will hear the shofar, and the Mussah will be especially long. I will hear my grandfather wish my father shana tova emetukah (‘a good and sweet new year’), however unlikely that is under the circumstances. I will witness the gravity in my father’s expression, and also the quiet pride.
Then ten days later will come Yom Kippur. The more observant Jews will spend most of the day in one of the many synagogues of the city. They will fast for twenty-five hours straight, atoning for the sins of their life: sins against God, against fellow Jews, against everyone and anyone. Their sins – even my sins, my father’s sins, my mother’s, those of my grandparents – are known by God in their every detail, and on Rosh Hashanah the fate of each of us is inscribed in the Book of Life. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the last chance we have to convince God that we have repented, to be granted forgiveness, to avoid an unwelcome fate being sealed in the Book of Life.
The rituals of our faith delight me. How could they not? It is not their object to delight me, rather, to instruct me, console me, wrap me in the cloak of observant belief and veneration. But I am too young for any higher understanding of our faith, and am content with delight.
Even at the age I am now, knowing all that I did not know in 1939, I still settle for delight. In truth, delight is the highest plane of experience I ever hope to reach. What am I to do in this hedonistic Arcadia by the sea, where I now live? Stalk the profound, the sublime? Grasp finally and forever the meaning of the Shoah? No. My revenge on Hitler is not a lifetime devoted to the study of his motives and means, but a lifetime in which delight has reached me from a hundred sources, and been welcomed.
Only consider this: in 1939, on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed in the Book of Life the fate of every living Jew. He inscribed the fate of the two hundred thousand Jews in Lvov, including those who had escaped to our city from Nazi-occupied Poland. In the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement, the two hundred thousand Jews of Lvov found ways to show their repentance for the sins of their life, and particularly for those of the past year. Their fates were sealed on Yom Kippur in that great book: sealed by God, by Adonai. And for all but very few of the Jews of Lvov, that fate was death at the hands of those who had sworn an oath of hatred against us, against all Jews. How many years would I have to labour in thought to grasp the wisdom of such a sentence?
I am again in Lvov. I am again on the kitchen balcony. Yom Kippur is past. The Russian soldiers are still to be seen in the street. My hair is in plaits. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. The theme of this chapter has been all that I did not know in Lvov in the year of 1939. And here is something else that I do not know as I stand on the balcony, gazing down on the street, with my mother singing, with the lilacs and the maples now losing their leaves, and winter approaching. I do not know that I will be standing on this same balcony in the year of 1941, witnessing the arrival in Lvov of officers and soldiers of a different army. I do not know that these officers will be carrying with them carefully prepared lists. I do not know that my name will be on their lists.
Vera Miller. Werunia. Beloved.
3
THE LISTS
Think of this. My name to the officers and clerks of the SS is just one of a number of names stamped by the metal keys of a type-writer onto a sheet of paper. The keys fashion a shape for each letter of my name until the ‘r’ of ‘Miller’ appears. Then it is done. I am on the list.
But the letters of my name are no more than the title of my story. Underneath those letters, as in a palimpsest, lies another text, and in this text resides my true story, my joys and fears, the people and sights I love, the things I rush towards, the things I shrink from, the words I have spoken in the small number of years in my life, and those that have been spoken to me. In the story underneath the ink on the list is Vera: Vera with life in her small body, Vera who breathes, Vera who laughs and weeps, Vera who struggles to understand the world, Vera who gives up trying to understand and gives her attention to other things, things that delight her, to her piano, to the food on her plate, to the warmth in the voice of her mother and father. And also under the ink, it is Vera with her two legs, her two arms, her two eyes, her ears, her internal organs, her central nervous system, and her complement of rich red blood. It is Vera who could, in certain circumstances – circumstances that are quite close now – be made to shriek in dread, shriek in pain, shriek to her own God or to any other God who might be prepared to save her and say, ‘Don’t let this happen to me, don’t let me be Vera who suffers, Vera who dies.’
It is 1941, and the Russians remain in Lvov. The lists have been written, but the SS staff members who will carry them have not yet departed from Berlin.
The Jews of Lvov don’t fear the Russians – other than those who refused the offer of a Russian passport, preferring to keep their Polish passports; those Jews and a number of Poles are no longer with us, deported to who knows where. The more cooperative Jews and those with greater insight realise that the Russians soldiers stand as a bulwark against the catastrophe that is building; a cloud foreshadowing terrible harm builds on the horizon. But for other Jews, the way in w
hich the war will unfold is not yet resolved. Maybe they tell themselves that the cloud could easily blow away in another direction, one that doesn’t threaten them. Even the thousands of Jews who have found refuge in Lvov – Jews who have witnessed the murder of other Jews, who have seen that the Germans carry the law with them wherever they go and that the law they carry is the only law – even they have hope, although of a desperate sort.
My father is free to carry on his business, and to indulge his love of Greek and Roman civilisation (our house is replete with works of art that testify to my father’s passions); my mother is free to fulfil what I consider her most essential role in life, that of being my mother. And I am free to attend school, to gaze at other children my age and think, ‘I am taller than that one. I am prettier than that one. I think maybe that one likes me, but that one doesn’t.’ In other words, I am free to be a child: to join my voice in the chorus of kids at play; to engage with integers, angles, participles; to wet my hands with paint and fashion shapes on coarse sheets of paper.
But for me, above all, there is the piano.
The Russians enjoy the piano, particularly the sight of a seven-year-old girl in a frilly dress extending her small fingers left and right to pick out the notes of Debussy and Tchaikovsky.
I am told by my teacher, my mother and my father that I am talented, and perhaps I am. For me, it is not any talent I might possess that delights me, but rather the thrill of making the instrument sound as it should.
It is at a school concert that the Russians hear me playing. The education officers who came to Lvov with the occupying army (for the Russians are an occupying army) have been invited to the concert by the principal, and they sit in the front rows while I’m introduced and perform my curtsey. I am not the only attraction; other children accomplished in various ways precede me and follow me. As I play, I sense the pleasure of the Russians. They smile, they nod and they applaud. My mother and father, also in the front rows, take even greater pleasure than the Russians in my performance. My fingers dance, the notes rise, and my ignorance of the world keeps me safe and warm and, I might even say, happy.
Vera Page 2