I don’t have the time during the interview to fashion idle comparisons between cyclones and Nazism. I am too conscious of feeling sick at heart. The moral obligation of adding my voice to the thousands of others who will contribute to this Shoah project is just that – an obligation. I don’t mean to suggest that I am talking to Max with any sort of reluctance, wishing that I was doing something else – reading a book, pouring wine, feeding the birds in my garden. Not at all. But who would devote four or five hours to tales of wretchedness and despair unless she or he felt morally compelled to do so?
In Orwell’s story, 1984, the past becomes whatever those who rule in the present wish it to be. Black becomes white; white changes back to black; black becomes white again. Fashioning the past to suit the present goes on in our twenty-first century world all the time, and it has gone on in all the centuries before this one. Of all the wickedness of which we are capable, I doubt if any equals the wickedness of denying the deaths that people truly endured.
That is why I am answering Max’s questions, and that is why thousands with stories very like my story will be answering the questions of their own particular Max.
A time might come when some vile agency might have control of the wide world itself, and it might suit that agency to say that there had never been such a people as the Jews; never been such a thing as Auschwitz; never been long lines of men and women and children shuffling forward towards wooden structures fitted with showerheads from which a suffocating gas will be released. And it might suit that agency to go further and claim that mud is caviar.
But not if I can help it.
Robert has called me to say that he’s seeking out a publisher for this story of mine that is taking a century to write. Good. Now let him make some haste. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, lived for five hundred years, but I won’t.
The killing begins the day after the motorcycles and the black car. I don’t see the killings, but they are spoken of in the street. The lists are mentioned. The SS knew well who to take first: communists, intellectuals, anti-Nazis. Jews, of course, but also Christian Poles: anyone who gives the least evidence of capacity for independent thought. Some of these people were shot in their homes, some taken in trucks and shot elsewhere.
By this time – September 1941 – the German experience of summary execution is extensive. They are practised: one might say, experts.
Those who know that the Germans will likely kill them exhibit various degrees of dread: some maintain a type of sangfroid, not all that convincing; some go mad.
It doesn’t take me long to realise that my life is now ruled by a tyranny that might end with my death. I don’t doubt the love of my parents, but they do not impress me as the sort of people who can suddenly place me somewhere beyond harm. They seem as likely as me to succumb to the tyranny.
My hearing becomes extremely acute. I pick up the whispers and muted conversations within our house, and everything said in the streets that might warn me of danger sounds sharp and distinct. I become a finely tuned instrument for the reception of harbingers of murder.
Not that I have any plans for escape. There is no escape.
Within our household there is an unexpressed admission of powerlessness. No bold schemes of emancipation are being plotted. We are the prey. Those who stalk us will decide the week and day and hour of our death.
Nevertheless, every so often, there arrives a moment of misconceived optimism. My mother sings a line or two of a song she used to sing in full, or my father attempts a smile. But these moments are, I think (or I think now, at least – perhaps not then), just a reflex, briefly enacted. No-one can live with the threat of being dead in a week or less without some part of the brain suggesting, ‘No, no, all will be well, cheer up!’ It lasts only a second or two. A person led to a wooden block where a man with an axe is waiting probably experiences a mad hope of reprieve even as the axe is raised.
We soon see the need to keep to our apartment. Lvov is a carnival of anti-Semitism. Whatever restraint the Russians were able to exercise on those who relished attacking Jews in the street has gone completely. It is as if an open season has been declared on Jews, and those of us who had escaped in the past with a torrent of abuse are now being chased in broad daylight and set upon with implements designed to spill our blood on the cobblestones. The Ukrainians of Lvov have a particular hatred of us, and a particular relish for killing.
From the windows of our apartment I follow the progress of the occupation. The Russians were sometimes drunk on duty, weaving along the sidewalks. The Germans are far brisker, and never drunk. When they arrive on the scene, they come purposefully, as if their strategies of domination are at all times clear to them. Any orders or directions to the public are shouted. They have cultivated a way of conveying menace even when they are standing still.
For a third of my life now, I have watched this thing known as ‘the war’ play itself out in Lvov: watched from windows, watched from the kitchen balcony. The politics of the war is far beyond my grasp, of course, but I understand quite enough to know that the coming of the Germans is the worst of all the eventualities the Jews of Lvov have feared over the past two years.
And yet the faces of the Germans are not so different from those of the Russians: they do not have fangs; they do not drool. I have seen the German soldiers yawn, scratch their behinds and gaze about in boredom, just like other people. I have seen them smile, seen them laugh. It is what they smile at, what they laugh at, that makes them different, perhaps.
I notice, too, that the German uniforms are more various than those of the Russians. I have no way of knowing that the soldiers are regular Wehrmacht and also SS – that is something I learn later. The most common uniform is a greyish-green jacket with grey jodhpurs, insignia on the right sleeve and collar, a brown leather belt fitted with pockets worn high on the waist, dark-brown boots just below knee-height, and a rounded helmet that splays at the brim. The officers wear a holster at their waists and a peaked cap higher back on their heads than the caps of the Russian officers. The most frightening of the officers wear long black leather coats, even in September and October, when many of the days are still warm. The officers in the black coats don’t shout. Someone else shouts for them. But it is evident that they are in charge.
I study the street below for hours each day. It is true that there’s little else to do, but watching is also a feature of this new vigilance of mine.
The traffic – of people and vehicles – has changed. The Germans have made Lvov not only more dangerous, but busier. All leisure has vanished. The Germans shout: ‘Rauch, rauch!’ and ‘Schnell!’ and ‘Du! Arschloch!’ and ‘Hör mal! Hör mal!’ Everyone hurries in the way that people do when rain is expected.
Hurrying is one thing; running is another. Whenever I see people running on the street, I know they are Jews. They move as if they can imagine themselves sitting in the crosshairs of a rifle sight. The children keep very close to their parents. But after two weeks of this time of the Germans, I see no running Jews. Like me and my mother and father, they keep to their houses and apartments, wishing they knew what to do.
Dread is coiled in my chest and stomach every hour, but of despair I know nothing. I don’t have the information that despair is built on.
Adults know that Jews in captivity nearly always die, not just in Lvov in the middle of the twentieth century, but in every century. People like my father, with his knowledge of antiquity, know that Jews were being murdered in Alexandria at a time when Plato and Aristotle were alive.
I am trying to recall what hope I had at this time in Lvov. Did I think that my parents would find a way to safety for us? Did I think that they had secret plans that would only be revealed at the right time? I have said that I didn’t despair because I didn’t know how to, but that isn’t the same as saying that I had hope.
I think I believed that my life would go on; that there would be a future Vera. But of course, all the other Jewish children believed the same thing
. What child can imagine his or her non-existence?
From my window I saw a Jewish boy of about five or six – one of many Jewish children rounded up by the Germans – wrenched into the air by an SS soldier, held by his ankles, the poor child, and swung violently so that his head smashed against a stone bollard on the roadside. The boy had irritated the soldier with his cries (he was injured in some way) and this was the soldier’s response. Probably that child had entertained hopes of survival up until the time the soldier seized him. I’m sure he didn’t believe that his life would come to an end in the way that it did.
The Vera who imagines a future Vera, who believes that she will be in the world for a very long time, or forever – that same Vera could easily have died in the same way as the boy who cried.
A new stage of the German occupation begins. This is the looting stage. But since it is beneath the dignity of the Germans to grab valuables and stuff them furtively into a big bag, they instead ‘request’ the surrender of such things as jewellery, works of art, silverware, antiques. Many Jews choose to believe, in their desperation, that the ‘surrender’ of their valuables will encourage the Germans to treat them leniently – something like that; so foolish. I am sure it must have amused the Germans to watch the Jews of Lvov humiliate themselves by offering up grandma’s wedding ring in the hope of living for a week longer than a neighbour who had no ring. It is not in fact the Wehrmacht soldiers, nor even the SS, who accept this bounty from the Jews, but well-dressed men in civilian clothes. Maybe they represent a special department within the Third Reich – the Department of Dignified Looting.
But I shouldn’t call those Jews who imagined their jewels would save them foolish. In the time to come, I will see people – my mother, for one – trade things of far more value than jewels and paintings to stay alive a day longer, and to keep me alive. Why should they not, if it is theirs to trade? If you are alive, the time might come when you can again manage to smile. If you are dead, all smiles are done with.
First they traded jewellery, then paintings, then antiques. Now it is the radios. It is announced that the German authorities will accept the surrender of all radios from the Jewish population of Lvov.
We have a radio, a large one of some quality.
My mother says, ‘Come with me.’ And she carries the radio in two arms to a place where a long queue has formed.
Every Jew in the queue – hundreds and hundreds of them – has a radio to surrender.
We take our place in line, my mother whispering to me constantly, ‘Vera, stay close, stay close!’
Up and down the queue rumours run. The Germans will provide a special dispensation to those who hand over their radios. The Germans will permit Jews who surrender their radios to travel to safety from Lvov. We hear rumours saying one thing running up the queue and saying another on the way back.
I hold the fabric of my mother’s coat since she requires two hands and two arms to hold the radio. If she puts it down on the cobblestones, who knows? Some scoundrel might scoop it up and run off. But the queue moves so slowly and our radio is so big that my mother finally has to set it down briefly, never taking her eye off it, never taking her eye off me.
At times it seems that the queue is not moving at all. But why? It takes very little time to accept a radio.
Then a new rumour runs along the queue. The Germans are not even bothering to write receipts. When the SS comes to your door, how will the soldiers know that you have donated your radio to the Third Reich? How will they know to spare you? Like the lamb’s blood that the Angel of Death honoured on the night of the Passover, a receipt would be honoured (surely!) by the Angels of Death of the SS.
And as the hours pass, people begin to leave the queue. Just a few. For them, the folly of it all has sunk in. Most remain. Where else might they be today? Doing what? They choose to hope.
My mother, finally, is one of those who have had enough. ‘We’re going,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘It’s madness. We’re going.’
She puts the radio down on the cobblestones, takes my hand and leads me away. Others in the queue watch her reproachfully, as if she has betrayed them. Perhaps they resent the emphatic way in which she has turned her back on the whole sham.
As we walk away, I wince at the firmness of my mother’s grasp on my hand. But I don’t complain.
5
ZAMARSTYNÓW
As far as I can tell, the broad Nazi scheme of domination went like this. Build the most formidable army, navy and air force the world has ever seen. At some convenient moment, demand of the Great War allies the return of various pieces of Europe to Germany. This demand not being met, invade first the Sudetenland, then Poland, then the rest of Europe, then the Soviet Union. Triumph speedily; rule victorious from Berlin.
I come into these plans before full domination is achieved, of course. I am a figure in certain complementary plans occasioned by Adolf Hitler’s temperamental disdain for Jews. The remedy for this disdain (the euphemistic ‘solution’ – and how like one of those CIA euphemisms it sounds, the ones we have come to know and detest, such as ‘terminate with maximum prejudice’, meaning ‘murder them’, and ‘rendition’, meaning ‘torture them’) has not been fully developed at the time of the German invasion of Lvov. But pending the embrace of the ‘solution’, the Nazi plan is to establish sealed-off enclosures for the Jews of the conquered states of Europe and the Soviet Union – enclosures we have come to speak of as ‘ghettos’ – in order that Jews should no longer pollute the broader communities from which they are drawn. If those in Berlin decide to murder the Jews of Adolf Hitler’s disdain, those Jews will already be in compact concentrations.
Fifteen thousand of these ghettos were established in the cities, towns and small villages of nations invaded by the Germans. Some ghettos held fifty Jews, some tens of thousands. The feature they all had in common – well, one of the features – was wretchedness. The Germans may as well have erected signboards above the entrances to the ghettos, saying, ‘Die if you like – who cares?’
Think of what a human being requires to live a life of purpose and dignity, and then, day by day, deprive them of all those things. A person needs food and drink – take it away. Comfort and rest in times of illness – take it away. A source of warmth when the weather is cold – take it away. Security for family members – take it away. The means to attend to hygiene – take it away.
The rationale behind the creation of the ghettos was, as I have said, to isolate and concentrate the Jews of Europe. But surely there was another reason also? Surely the Germans wished to dehumanise the Jews they held in the ghettos. If you intend to exterminate a category of your fellow human beings, it is better for you if those fellow human beings are rendered subhuman. A man who picks potato peelings out of a sewer and eats them – is that a human being? Your disgust licenses the murder you intend to commit. And, of course, you enjoy watching these people who already disgusted you disgust you even further. It’s a common strategy of any oppressing class.
Not long after the futile trip with my mother to the long queue of Jews attempting to save their lives by relinquishing their radios, I am told that we will be ‘moving’. I assume, correctly, that ‘moving’ is something that the Germans insist upon, that it is not a voluntary move. I am aware of the many decrees directed at Jews that the Germans broadcast or print and publish on walls and noticeboards. Often the Germans spare themselves the formality of referring to us as ‘Jews’ in these posters and broadcasts, instead using the word ‘kikes’, as if whoever wrote the decree could not bring himself to overcome this pettiness, even for the sake of formality.
We are to move, but to where I have no idea. We are to take only specified items – a few chairs, a table, beds and bedding, crockery, cutlery and clothing. Since we now own so little, it is easy enough to comply with the rules.
On the day of our departure from our apartment, I gaze around at the now empty walls and experience neither
regret nor resentment, but instead the beginning of an urgent need to stay alive throughout whatever days and weeks and months are to follow. It is as if my instincts have told me that I am heading into something dire, and a corresponding hunger to remain alive has taken up its needful home in my heart.
I am hardening. I am becoming the Vera I must become if I am ever to inhabit the future Vera who writes these pages. People who survive what should have killed them do so because they are capable of imagining survival. This is what is coming to life in me: the imagination of the survivor.
My grandfather and grandmother will come with us. They, too, are ‘moving’.
We are being taken by horse and cart, hired by my father and driven by the Polish owner. We are lucky to have a cart. I have seen other families moving to the ghetto with all they own on their backs and in their arms. Often, German soldiers are waiting in the street to hurry these families along. German soldiers, Polish policemen, Ukrainian militiamen. There is no suggestion of non-compliance among the Jews, and yet the soldiers, policemen and militiamen shout and gesture and push as if they are dealing with an unruly mob. It pleases them to shout and push. Unless they do, they feel they are not performing their task to the required professional standard. And the Poles do not wish to appear less brutal than the German soldiers, and the Ukrainians do not wish to seem less brutal than the Poles.
I may have asked, ‘Mama, why are we going?’ But probably I don’t ask any such thing. My heart tells me, ‘Be alive forever.’ That is the only voice I need to listen to this morning.
Our street is not in a Jewish part of Lvov, and when my mother and father and grandparents mount the cart, no soldiers are waiting to harass us. The street is quiet, except for the occasional snort of the horse. We are a compliant group. We will make our way to where we are supposed to go. We will not carry out some bold scheme of escape.
Vera Page 4