Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  I keep the curtains wide open. I take the trouble to run a bath. I am the victim of a type of behavioural modification, conditioned by dread and by pain.

  On the other hand, is a tidy house so much to complain about?

  The ghetto has its own black market. Those among us who have managed to keep hold of a few notes, a few coins or something they can pawn make secret arrangements that yield them an apple, a potato, a stale crust of bread or one hundredth-part of a skinny chicken. This is not a community of equality. Those with a few coins do not share them with those outside their family.

  My father leaves the ghetto each day – this is permitted – to work in Lvov. He leaves by the ghetto gate in the morning and returns late in the afternoon. He has employment of some sort or another. Other men also work by day outside the ghetto. Each day he returns with morsels of food, or so we hope. We rely on him to keep body and soul together. This is all my father has to sell – his skill in business. But by the haggard look of his face, I judge that he does not harbour any great confidence that he will continue to earn such rewards in the future.

  It is not only food we need; firewood is almost as much a matter of life and death. The wood has to be purchased from Polish peasants, who bring it in by the barrow-full. Such a humble thing as wood helps to preserve the life of a human being! Really, how little of anything is required: a small quantity of food, rags to cover one’s body, a little wood for heat. This is the foundation of existence, and from this we reach out, eventually, and create greater comfort, and art, and music, and books.

  I do not ask myself questions about the politics that reduced us to this bare subsistence, but if I’d had the knowledge and the years, I would have said, ‘Why this? What harm have we ever done? Leave us the fragments of food you would normally throw away, the rags you would no longer wear, the fuel you would barely miss and we will survive. Why bother to murder us?’

  But no, they insist on murder. They come with trucks and trap the children and force them on board with shouts and threats.

  It was during one of these rounding-up actions that I witnessed the poor, whimpering boy, too ill to hurry, who is upended and swung by his feet, so that his head is shattered against a stone bollard. The perpetrator – the soldier – he can live with his brutality, he can still sleep, still eat, perhaps even show love for his own children, should he have any, God forbid. But it is harder for me, as a witness, to live with it.

  Now when we have warning that the soldiers are coming, we are hurried into a cavity in the shed beside the house – as many children as can be found, into a cavity behind a false wall. We are warned: ‘Say nothing!’ We are warned: ‘If they hear you they will kill you!’

  Parents who raise their children in places of peace still live with a dread of the terrible things that can happen to their darlings – attacks by monsters, men of diseased appetite, psychopaths or sadists. These parents attempt to guard their children against abduction with adamant rules backed up with examples of what can happen – no, very likely will happen – if the rules are disobeyed. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t accept a lift with anyone we don’t know well. Don’t go down to such-and-such a part of town by yourself. Always be home before dark. Transgress, and you could be murdered, eaten up in a pie, thrown in the river … and so on. Stories to frighten the little ones. And then there are other stories, also designed for children, that dramatise these lessons: Snow White, who accepted an apple from an old woman, a poisoned apple; Goldilocks, who took what was not hers and was chased through the woods by bears. So many cautionary tales! So many ogres who hid under bridges, giants who ground the bones of children to make their bread, wolves who ate little pigs who failed to build secure dwellings.

  I had heard such stories, back in times of comfort. But the stories changed.

  I was no longer in the realm of fantasy when my father said, ‘Listen to me. When you see gangs of boys, gangs of young men, you keep away, cross the street, hurry home. Do you understand, Vera? They will do you harm.’

  My father spoke from first-hand experience of the harm that such gangs of young men inflict. Only a year earlier he had himself been attacked in the street by a gang. These thugs carried walking sticks in which razor blades had been embedded, and would come up quickly behind men and women they identified as Jews, raise these lethal clubs and rain blows down on the Jewish skull. Their intention was certainly to kill before running off, and they would have killed my father except that he was wearing a hat, a Homburg, and the felt of the cloth partly cushioned the blows. He was badly injured and bled all over his suit, all over the sidewalk. The doctor who stitched him up – a Jew himself – said, ‘Bless your hat: it saved your life.’

  And when my mother said, ‘Vera! Keep close to me!’, it was not the sort of warning that other children in happier lands think of as caution carried to extremes. My mother was serious.

  The cautionary tales became peremptory warnings. The sinister castle where terrible things were done to children became Auschwitz. The salivating monster who tore children to pieces became a soldier battering a child’s head on a pillar of stone. The world’s nightmares came to life.

  We hide; we wait. We can see little, even when our eyes become accustomed to the dark: just the ghost forms of those around us. But we can hear our own breathing and we can hear when someone, after motionless hours, moves his leg, scratches her arm, his behind. We abide by the rules of darkness and frown at even the slightest infraction. We know that this is life and death. We sense that many of us – most of us! – will eventually die, but we hope and pray that we will not be among those many.

  I can feel my heart beating and I want it to beat for a long, long time.

  If we have to urinate and cannot control the urge a moment longer, we piss where we stand. There is no shame in it. None.

  We hear the sounds outside – the shouts of the soldiers, of the Jewish policemen, the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst assisting the Germans. We become skilled enough to be able to judge precisely how close the shouts are to us. We make the darkness our friend. We are like rats: creatures who will do whatever is required to stay alive.

  I think to myself, ‘Don’t die.’

  Or I speak to myself silently in my father’s voice: ‘Darling girl, live forever. No Sorbonne, no. But live forever all the same.’

  Byron Bay is the anti-Zamarstynów, the furthest I could take myself from the wretchedness and despair of the Lvov ghetto. The town and its politics are dominated by people whose most advanced conception of sin and wickedness is the unauthorised cutting down of a gumtree. Spirituality runs rampant. The folk of Byron Bay are engaged in an indefatigable search for peace at its purest: peace that you find by whispering prayers over crystals and invoking the ritual chants of the Hopi of North America.

  I love these little lambs, in all their folly. What harm could they ever do, with their aromatherapy and soul massages and macrobiotic eating habits?

  And those who are not seeking some sort of cosmic union with the spirits of the earth and stars are pursuing a hedonistic agenda based on the worship of the sun and surf, with interruptions to swallow down ale and lager in the cafés of the beachfront. The beer halls of Byron are as remote from the beer halls of Munich in the dying days of the Weimar Republic as you can get.

  If a ludicrous little ex-corporal of the German army of the Western Front should stand up in a Byron beer garden and work himself into a foaming rage as he assaults the Jews of Australia, he would be shouted down, told to shut up, told to fuck off. The Byronians will never march along the streets in torchlight parades carrying bundles of books they intend to burn in a gesture of contempt for intellect (knowing, as they did, those book burners of the Third Reich, that the human intellect is the enemy of everything they stand for). When the Byronians dress in costumes, it will not be the costumes of National Socialism but those of Moon Worshippers, or some such neo-Druidic falderol.

  Yes, this is the anti-Zamarstynów, the community by the s
ea that lets me be – lets all of us be – and settles any arguments that might surface with a couple of bongs and an invitation to al fresco sex under a palm tree. God bless it.

  And God bless me in my house of light and music and books. God bless Vera, whom the Nazis did not strip of her clothing and command to join a line of other naked people bound for the last ‘shower’ of their lives. God bless Vera who stared through the gates of hell but who lived to love, lived to savour kisses, lived to read with rapture books that were not even written at the time of the ghetto, lived to break hearts, lived to have her own heart broken, lived to drink the wine of life served in a ruby-red beaker of Venetian crystal, lived long enough to email Robert these words:

  Dear Robert

  We lost touch or perhaps you lost interest in the book and me. This would make me feel very sad. Do let me know, please, what is the state of our relationship now?

  With love as always, Vera

  What is he doing? Why is he so slow? Does he think I will live forever?

  7

  A SMALL BAG OF POISON

  My father, my mother and I each wear a bag of poison around our neck, concealed by our clothes. I say ‘poison’, and so it is, in a great enough quantity. It is sleeping powder. Where my father acquired it I can’t say. It is only to be used when all hope is gone.

  At this time in the ghetto, 1942, all hope is gone – from the moment you awake from sleep in the morning.

  It is not unusual to find Jews hanging from telephone poles. It is permitted to look at the hanging corpses, but not to cut them down and give them a proper burial. I have no desire to look at the corpses, and I don’t in any deliberate way. I only look for as long as an accidental glance takes, and that is all.

  I have no desire to cut them down, not that it would be possible for me. They are dead, I am alive, and that is the entire moral equation.

  All hope is gone in every moment of drawing breath. But still I do not open my sack and swallow what is inside. The poison I carry in that little sack – how I would come to swallow it, I can’t imagine.

  Although I live in fear of my life every hour of the day, I can’t say that I think constantly of death. While you have heartbeat and respiration, that’s what you think of: the pulse and the breathing that keep you alive.

  People who hear of my experiences in Lvov, or of the experiences of someone like me, think that our entire consciousness must have organised itself around a yearning for escape: liberty, green fields, a silver stream, and in the midst of this paradise a table overflowing with plates of food. Such an employment of my imagination would only have tormented me. The truth is that I think of very little, and the people around me – adults and children alike – they also think only of the most immediate danger. ‘May the soldier before me not take it into his head to crush my skull with the butt of his rifle’ – things like that. ‘May a morsel of food come my way.’ ‘May I find some warmth where no warmth exists.’

  It seems to me inconceivable that I could once have taken food for granted. In these times of hunger, food becomes the beginning and end of desire. Nothing on earth exceeds its beauty.

  It is so strange to use the word ‘beauty’ in this way! Yet an apple core eaten down to the pips, no more than a single shred of flesh left on it, can have a lustre that a hill of glistening gold could not exceed.

  These times of hunger teach me something that I strive to forget every day: that the things we value so highly in life – love, empathy, simple decency – fall away when food so dominates your imagination. No doubt this single-mindedness serves our survival, as if Nature is warning us that all the better things in life are dependent on your being alive to enjoy them. ‘Eat first,’ says Nature, ‘then love when you are replenished.’

  In the ghetto, people as hungry as I am struggle to grow a few vegetables in stray scraps of ground. When I find these plots, I steal whatever is growing there. I feel no compunction in stealing; I feel no remorse afterwards. If I had known that my theft would cause the death of those who had raised the vegetables, I would not have cared. Equally, if I had known that eating the vegetables would within a few days have caused my own death in some way, I would still have eaten them.

  In the catalogue of crimes that can be laid at the feet of the Third Reich, none quite equals the crime enacted on our souls by hunger. It makes monsters of us. But Adolf Hitler had a full belly when he wrote Mein Kampf and aired his hatred of Jews; he did not have the excuse of hunger.

  Those who can withstand the tyranny of hunger – how we value their stories, and how rightly we do so! Do we wish to know that we are, above all else, creatures of appetite? In a thousand, there is one who turns his or her face away from the lust for relief, and accepts death. Yet, we should not be distressed that the nine-hundred and ninety-nine surrendered their best selves to hunger, but instead rejoice that there was one who thought enough of life to die with a shrivelled gut. It is not what we seize that redeems us, but what we abjure.

  I must now write of a man I grew to detest in the Lvov ghetto, of a man I detest to this day. He is dead now: dead for many years. If it is wrong to hate a dead person, at my feet that sin can be laid. His own sins have been judged, or not, by whatever god, if any, has such authority, and since I still hate him, my offence is even greater.

  I have two uncles on my mother’s side, Maniek and Marian, the husbands of her sisters. Uncle Marian is a fellow of craft and cunning, and also very brave. He lives outside the ghetto on forged papers, and involves himself in various daring schemes. Uncle Maniek comes from a different mould. Like Uncle Marian, he is a black-market dealer, but in a more self-serving way. Uncle Marian is capable of taking risks to benefit complete strangers; Uncle Maniek, no.

  Maniek has managed to find a hiding place in a small apartment outside the ghetto, which he intended to use as a refuge for himself and his wife and three-year-old small son. But before he could hide his family away, the Nazis seized his wife and three-year-old son and loaded them on a train bound for Auschwitz, together with hundreds of other Lvov Jews. This was only a few months ago, and by that time, everybody knew that all who travel on these trains to Auschwitz will be murdered. News made its way back to Lvov – in what way I can’t imagine – that Maniek’s wife took the terrible risk of leaping from the train with her son in her arms. She broke her legs. Local people found her and her boy beside the tracks, informed the Nazis, and both were executed.

  Now Uncle Maniek has his eye on my mother, a woman whose good looks haven’t yet been withered by the stark life we live in the ghetto. Among the many schemes that occupy Uncle Maniek at any given time, the consummation of his lust for my mother is uppermost.

  He says to my mother, ‘Rysia, I can save you.’

  My mother says, ‘I’m listening.’

  My uncle says, ‘I have a hiding place in an apartment. It’s outside the ghetto. It was for my family, but now I have no family. It’s for you.’

  My mother says, ‘What’s the catch? I think I know.’

  ‘What do you think?’ says my uncle. ‘You are a beautiful woman. I am a widower.’

  My mother thinks for a moment. ‘And Samuel?’ she says, meaning her husband, my father.

  ‘Samuel stays in the ghetto – and so does the kid,’ says my uncle.

  And here my mother puts her foot down. Deserting her husband to enter into some sort of sordid arrangement with Maniek is one thing, leaving Werunia behind is another.

  ‘Vera comes with me,’ she says, ‘otherwise, no deal.’

  And my uncle says, ‘Okay, sure, bring the kid if you must.’

  My mother tells my father. I am not present. Probably she doesn’t mention anything about Maniek fucking her as part of the deal.

  God knows what my father says. Probably: ‘No way.’

  My mother says, ‘I’m going.’

  As fate would have it, my father has been offered a place in a transport that my Uncle Marian has organised to get men out of Lvov as workers des
tined for employment in distant factories. These transports – trains – are made up largely of Jews with false papers, who will have the privilege of toiling in the factories of the Third Reich until their true identities are discovered. Since his wife is about to give her body to Maniek to use as a playground, my father accepts Marian’s offer.

  I am not an unbiased witness. I love my father. I watch as my uncle destroys my father’s dignity. It is more piercing to me to watch that, to know in some way that should be far beyond my comprehension that my father’s greatest suffering in the midst of this hell is his humiliation – more piercing than the sight of Jews hanging by their necks from telephone poles, than Jews putrefying on the sidewalks. I love him. He loves me. What more can I say?

  This hell I speak of, during the time I live in it I do not call it ‘hell’. It is to be endured, that is all. Adults with greater experience of the world than me maybe look down a street in the ghetto, see the hanging men, the hanging women, the corpses on their backs along the footpath, their pockets rifled by those who once knew them, and think, ‘Yes, this is hell that I have come to. This is the worst.’ These adults know what civilisation will allow, and what it will not. They know that the Lvov ghetto is not anything that could be accepted by people with any belief in humanity. My own task is simpler: to ignore everything that stands between me and the food I crave.

  Or so I say. Or so I say.

  But I do not ignore what my uncle is doing to my father. When he moves me and my mother to the hiding place in the apartment outside the ghetto and has sex with her on the sofa while I am under a blanket a few metres way, I do not ignore that. Can I even say that the only cries of passion I hear are those of my uncle? No, my mother contributes. So she does.