Vera

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  After the concert, one of the Russian education officers talks to my father and mother in a serviceable version of the Polish language. He says, ‘Your daughter is very gifted.’

  My father says, ‘Thank you for saying so, sir.’

  ‘Yes, very gifted. Do you know what I am thinking?’

  ‘What you are thinking, sir?’

  ‘I am thinking that your daughter must come to Moscow and attend the conservatory. What do you say?’

  ‘To Moscow?’

  ‘She will be well looked after. The best teachers in Moscow. Maybe she is a genius. I don’t know. But maybe.’

  My father’s expression remains congenial, as if he wishes above all to convey gratitude, a cooperative spirit, but I know and my father knows that my mother will never permit me to travel to Moscow at my tender age of seven years. My father says he will think about it – that’s his response. He will think about it.

  His dream is not of his daughter at a music school in Moscow but of me, Werunia, in Paris: me at the Sorbonne. The Germans own Paris at the moment, yes, but in the future, some time in the future when the war is over and Henri Philippe Pétain is hanging from a statue of Marianne – maybe then.

  There is such poignancy in all that we didn’t know, once we come to know it! It is March 1941 when the Russian officer speaks of his plans for me. In three months, Hitler will disown his non-aggression pact with Stalin, and Panzer divisions will race into Ukraine. A week or so later, the German Wehrmacht will move into Poland with their long lists of those to be murdered. In September, the Jews and Romany people and left-wing intellectuals and communists of Kiev, tens of thousands of them, will be ordered to march to Babi Yar, where they will be shot. And in September, the killings will begin here, in Lvov, just as the siege of Leningrad gets underway. As for Moscow, by October the Germans will be camped before the forests to the west of the city and by December they will be closer still. A conflagration that will take the lives of tens of millions will be raging. In the whole of world history, nothing that compares to the savagery about to be unleased has ever been enacted.

  Tears, tears, rivers of tears.

  But at this moment, the smiling Russian education officer thinks it important to put a small Jewish child into the hands of a music teacher in Moscow.

  I want to go. I see only adventure in the proposal, and the opportunity to extend and deepen my understanding of this instrument, this piano. Inside my small chest, my heart beats out the notes of yearning for Moscow.

  When I look back now at the child I was, brimming with delight, I see the piano as a symbol that contradicts the savagery about to express itself in a thousand cities and hamlets. The Bechstein in our parlour at home, my fingers reaching left and right, my feet struggling with the pedals – that is also the world, but not the world of explosions, of sharpened implements hanging in a holster at a soldier’s side. The piano opposes in its beauty, in the embrace of its notes with their infinite combinations, the murder lists in the briefcases.

  I do not go to Moscow. Of course I don’t. I remain in Lvov with my mother and father and the Bechstein. I become more aware of the various expressions and intonations that index Lvov’s anxiety: my father’s troubled frowns; a slightly more forced quality to my mother’s singing; here and there in the shops and markets a type of grim resolve to look normal. Refugees – mostly Jewish – are everywhere; families searching for shelter with children in tow as puzzled as I am. My seven-year-old consciousness can only accommodate the breadth of anxiety, not its depth. I suppose I could precis my fears in the phrase ‘something is wrong’.

  Both of my parents tax me with a type of catechism of safety:

  ‘What do you do if you see a crowd of boys shouting?’

  ‘What do you do if men call out, “Jew! Jew!”’

  ‘Do you ever talk to strangers? No, Vera, never, never!’

  Indeed, the crowds of boys who amuse themselves by attacking Jews are showing ever-greater bravado; their loathing of Jews is being given a sharper edge, like a knife held to a whetstone.

  Even at a younger age – maybe five – I knew that I was different in some difficult-to-define way. I was darker than most of the Polish and Ukrainian kids, certainly. But I never thought, ‘Well, of course I’m different – I’m Jewish.’ In the first place, I’m not completely sure what being Jewish Vera rather than Christian Vera means. We celebrate Christmas in our household. We know many Christians. I have been to synagogue, of course, and have learnt to relish some of the more colourful and melodic rites of our faith, but we are not a family of strict observants and being Jewish has never been (and is never to become) the overwhelming fact to be learnt about me.

  So all I can comprehend of the dangerous packs of youths and the angry groups of adults who want to harm Jews is that it is one of those things about the world – or at least about Lvov – that is simply to be accepted. They frighten me badly, the Jew-haters, and that is enough.

  Certainly I don’t ever think about the motives of these people. I don’t ask my parents, or myself, ‘Why do they wish me harm?’ Who has ever fashioned an answer to such a question that a child could grasp? One could as well go to a fortune teller and simply settle for a summary of the tragedy: ‘It’s like this. Most of the Jewish children you see in the streets and many of the children in your school will be taken to certain places and killed, alas. The future that awaited them has been withdrawn by fate. A few will not die. A few will have a future, an education, a husband, children of their own, a life in a distant land. Will you become Vera of the future or Vera who is murdered? – that is yet to be decided.’

  One summer morning in my eighth year, I lie in my bed with all my senses alert from the first instant of wakefulness. What is wrong I cannot say, but it is as if a chill that defies the warmth of the season has settled silently on every surface in the house. My mother and father speak quietly to each other, almost in murmurs, and the tension that is always with them these days seems to have gathered around their eyes in a way that makes them seem as if they are wincing.

  At breakfast the hush persists. My father looks to me as if he is trying to simulate an air of unconcern, but without conviction. Once or twice he puts his hand to his head, I think unconsciously. Something about the menace in the air must recall to him the day two years ago when a number of students of the university, accomplished anti-Semites, followed him down the street jeering and taunting and finally attacking him with a walking stick in which razor blades were embedded. His hat saved his life, only just.

  Nothing saved the lives of certain other Jews at that time.

  I sit over my mamałyga (locally, ‘grysik’, semolina boiled in milk), wishing to know what is so concerning, but without asking.

  Finally my father, perfectly aware of my unspoken question, says simply, ‘The Russians are gone.’

  And I say, ‘The Russians are gone, Papa?’

  ‘Yes. Gone.’

  ‘Gone to where, Papa?’

  ‘Who can say? They are gone.’

  ‘Papa, why?’

  ‘A thousand questions! No more. Who can say where they are gone. Back to Russia.’

  The implications of the Russian ‘disappearance’ are not evident to me. Or better to say, the absolute disaster of the Russian withdrawal is not something I am equipped to grasp. I like the Russians; I am proud of the impression my piano – playing made on them. But how crucial a role they played in my life – no, I don’t understand. But I don’t need to. Whatever the consequences, they will apparently be bad. Look at the barely controlled anxiety in my mother’s face. Look at my father, finding the courage to appear calm when he is not.

  In my private prayers, I murmur such things as, ‘May the future be good’, hoping, as all who whisper private prayers hope, that God or other powerful cosmic interventionists will be listening. ‘May the future be good.’ May there continue to be grysik for breakfast, pumpernickel sandwiches with schmaltz and sausage for lunch, and for dinner ma
ybe some klopsy with mushroom sauce. Some pierogi would be good, and, before everything, soup – kapuśnyak. The spinach you can forget. Especially, let there be, now and forever on Friday nights at my grandparents’ matzos, gefilte fish, baby potatoes with butter and dill and lots of pepper, and knackwurst at supper. And I would be very, very grateful for some cheesecake. Or if not cheesecake, perhaps strawberries. May the future be full of music, of the Bechstein, of being warm in a woollen coat when the snow falls, of sleeping late when there is no school. And when there is school, let the future be days of success in my lessons to make my parents glad, days of my father confirming his love for me in endearments and caresses, of my mother exceeding my father in her endearments.

  In other words, let the future be everything it will not be.

  Lvov is, in 1941, a beautiful city, and I hear it remains so today. From the kitchen balcony, I have a view across rooftops to the Old City that forms Lvov’s heart, dense with churches for the Poles and Ukrainians, and even for the Armenians who centuries ago came here in their thousands, like the Jews, to escape madmen and murderers. I am aware that the churches are said to be beautiful, and I’m sure they are, but I have no desire to be shown them. The Church of the Transfiguration is said to shine with Christian gold inside, and the Ensemble of Armenian Church must have attracted my father’s gaze at times, with his eye for beauty. I can see all the way to the park of the High Castle, with its remnants of something or other pleasing to the Christians, standing on top of a cone like that of a volcano. I see treetops, a great deal of greenery, and I can make out the broad avenues and ‘prospekts’ (as the Ukrainians call them) of Zamkova and Svobody and Torhova.

  More distantly, the avenues become highways heading west to Yarvorov, Nemirov, Mastiska; north to Rava-Ruska and Czerwonogród; north-east to Krasnoye and Peremyshlyany; south to Nikolayeva. Some parts of the city I have never seen, and although I know the names of the towns around us – a few of them – I have not been taken to see them. But even my seven-year-old eyes tell me that this is a place of beauty, this Lvov.

  My eyes, so many decades older, now picture in my mind Vera on the kitchen balcony, and my heart, so many decades older, fills with pity for her. I want to enter into the picture I am conjuring and take the child Vera in my arms to a place of safety. I want to say, ‘Oh, child, you cannot imagine what is coming and how fast it will come; leave now with me.’

  Leave with me for where? For Byron Bay. I would like that. To live in my house so close to the blue ocean with the child I was at seven years. To rescue her.

  The Germans arrive the day after the departure of the Russians. I am again on the kitchen balcony looking down at the street. A hard, insistent roar reveals its source when three motorcycles come into view, the riders keeping abreast of each other. Five motorcycles follow in a separate group stretched across the road and all of them maintaining an impressive line. Then comes a further mass of motorcycles, the riders perfectly erect and the roar of their engines by now as threatening as it is intended to be. Objects on the kitchen shelves rattle faintly.

  A huge car follows the motorcycles, an open-topped car in which a number of officers in black uniforms are seated, each officer as erect, as proud of what he stands for and as menacing as the motorcycle riders.

  I watch in dread, one hand held to my cheek. I do not know why these people have come to Lvov and could not have explained, ‘Oh, they are the advance force of the German invasion, some of them regular Wehrmacht, some of them SS’ – but my horror is equal to anything I might have felt if I had known.

  The Germans have come like the vanguard of some satanic host, indomitable and pitiless.

  This is the arrival of the lists.

  4

  TALES FROM HELL

  The project is this: capture on DVD the testimonies of all those who survived the lists such as the one on which my name appeared. It is the initiative of Steven Spielberg. If you have a story, you tell your story and all the stories join together in a long, long narrative of the worst things human beings do to each other. Men and women find a seat in their home, some place where they feel comfortable, face the camera and talk about the day when the gates of hell opened to receive them, and when the gates of hell opened again to release them. Tales from hell.

  I had heard of the project, as had many thousands like me, and I had to ask myself whether I wished to speak to some stranger – a sympathetic stranger, surely, but a stranger nonetheless – of a time that I would never physically revisit if such a thing were possible, of a time when I never laughed and rarely smiled. I am a woman who has laughed all through her life, except for that time – laughed with genuine mirth, laughed with scorn when something ridiculous warranted scorn, laughed with joy, laughed with friends, with lovers. This time of fearful struggle – would I truly wish to recall it in all its details? My father dying by his own hand? Stepping over corpses in the street without the slightest dread or even compassion? Because we did that in the ghetto once we’d become accustomed to corpses – stepped over them and continued on our way.

  The answer was yes, I did want to recall that time, and I did want what I could recall recorded. I wanted it, and thousands of others wanted the same thing.

  The stories we would tell would be termed ‘testimonies’. And what is a ‘testimony’? A declaration of truth or fact. The evidence of a witness. When you have seen terrible injustice, there is a fierce desire to share what you have witnessed with people who have not seen it. It is as if you wish to say, ‘You may not believe that such vile things were perpetrated but I must tell you that they were, and you must believe me.’

  Until you are believed, your experience of horror claws at your heart unbearably. Belief is the gift of the listener to the witness. This is the powerful need working in you: not the desire to sicken people with stories of murder and torment, but the need to be believed. For those who make a name for themselves by denying the Holocaust, the special thrill is not the substitution of their self-interested version of the truth for the objective truth, but instead the theft from those who have suffered of the solace of being believed. We need to be believed, too, when we have experienced great happiness, but since no injustice is involved, the urge is not so powerful, and we can, if we wish, keep our happiness private.

  The project is vast. The USC Shoah Foundation, which oversees the recording of the testimonies, hopes to hear from everyone who wishes to tell his or her story. Poles like me, from Lvov; Poles from Warsaw, Katowice, Kraköw, Poznań, Wrocław and Łödź; those whom the huge, efficient apparatus of the Third Reich gathered from their homes in Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Belgium, Latvia, Romania, the Ukraine, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Russia, Belarus, Spain, Portugal and even Germany itself; every Jew still living who endured captivity in any of the fifteen thousand camps, in any of many thousand ghettos.

  Each person with a testimony is to be interviewed by someone trained to facilitate the process of getting the testimony onto a DVD. It is thought that journalists will be well suited to the task. Also psychologists.

  I am a journalist and I judge myself a suitable candidate. I will be both a subject for an interview, and later an interviewer. Indeed, those who are to do the interviewing are required to first submit themselves to the ordeal of being interviewed.

  And so on a certain day in a certain place (actually, my apartment in St Kilda) I dress myself in something stylish, clasp around my neck a black velvet band fitted with a blue moonstone and allow Max Wald (a man I know in a casual way; he deals in textiles, just as my father did) to ask me questions about my season in hell.

  Max asks me my name, speaking in an entirely matter-of-fact manner.

  I tell him my name, and I spell it.

  Max asks me my family name as a girl.

  I tell him, and I spell it.

  He asks me about Lvov.

  I tell him about Lvov.

  ‘And you were watching
from your kitchen balcony when the Germans came?’

  ‘Yes, when the Germans came I was watching. I saw three motorcycles, then five more, than a great many, then a big black car. SS officers travelled in the open-topped car.’

  I did not say, ‘They had come to Lvov to kill us. They sat proud and erect. They looked eager to get on with their work.’ But that was what I thought.

  The interview lasts for hours and hours. I sit beneath my Wendy Stavrianos painting ‘Fragment of a Cyclone’. It’s the artist’s response to a catastrophe of a different sort than the one Max is questioning me about. Winds of great fury tore apart the city of Darwin, killing some inhabitants. It was not my intention to fashion a correspondence between the violence in Darwin and the violence in Lvov: just coincidence. It was just coincidence, too, that the Nazi obsession with murder had its origins in a different Darwin – Charles Darwin – or more accurately in the eugenics fad, derived from a prejudicial reading of his works. If I wanted to draw out more from these coincidences, I could point out that the most violent tropical cyclone in history, as it was in 1974, took the lives of only a tiny percentage of those killed by the black cloud that hovered near Lvov in 1941 – a number equal to one tenth of one per cent of the Jewish population killed in camps and ghettos during World War II. Nature can’t compete with National Socialism.

 

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