The Earth Is Singing

by Vanessa Curtis

  They are gesturing some women to the right and others to the left.

  There is no way of telling which of these directions is good and which is bad.

  We wait our turn in the queue and then Mama and I stand, trembling, in front of the officers.

  There is one woman in front of us. I recognize her from our old life in Skārņu iela. Mrs Muris. She lived in our apartment block.

  I am pretty sure she is not a seamstress.

  The German officer barks something at her and then gestures her to the left.

  “Thank God. I am going back to the ghetto,” the woman mutters.

  This tells me that whatever I do, I must somehow get sent to the left-hand side. Now that there seem to be no signs of us being sent to work as seamstresses in the city, the best option must be to get sent back to Ludzas iela and be reunited with Max and Sascha.

  Mama has obviously come to the same conclusion as she raises her eyebrows at me and tilts her head towards the left with a tiny movement that only I can see.

  “Put samples of your work here,” says the German officer. He looks up at me with cold blue eyes.

  Mama knows what to do. In her knapsack she has samples of her sewing work but instead of pulling out the exquisite examples of bugle beading and intricate embroidery, she instead lays out some plain coloured squares with uneven stitching. I realize that they are the pieces she got me to practise on when we still lived in Skārņu iela and despite everything I bite back a smile.

  “Some of this is my daughter’s work,” she says, putting down another two pieces of material.

  I hold my breath.

  There is an endless silence whilst the officer looks at the bad samples. He then looks me in the eye for what feels like for ever and a day.

  Then with a tiny flick of his forefinger he gestures us to the left.

  We stand with the growing group of women and clutch one another’s hands.

  There are beads of sweat on Mama’s forehead and she looks grey but she allows me the tiniest of sideways smiles and squeezes my hand.

  Perhaps we are the daughters of fortune after all.

  We are going back to the ghetto.

  We survive to fight another day.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We are kept for one last night in the crowded basement of the Central Prison.

  Mama works out the date.

  She has been trying to keep track of the days. It is difficult without a watch and the nights and days seem to be one long continuation of physical and mental anguish. We never have anything to eat and are rarely given water. In these conditions it is hard to tell whether one hour has passed, let alone a day.

  But Mama keeps track.

  “It gives me something to do,” she says with a cough. Her cough has got far worse in the dank atmosphere of our prison accommodation. I asked one of the guards if she could have some medicine but I was met with a glare and a laugh of displeasure.

  “You are Jewesses,” he said. “We don’t owe you anything.”

  When we finally get back to Ludzas iela I will ask Max to go out and see if he can get some cough medicine for Mama.

  Until then I have to watch my mother retch and cough her guts up onto the rough grey asphalt floor of the prison.

  It is 6th December, Mama says.

  We are ordered out of the attic and down into the courtyard where we are formed into columns five women wide.

  Then with our usual accompaniment of stone-faced Latvian guards we are marched out of the great gates of the prison and alongside the railway track.

  “We are going back!” I whisper to Mama as we retrace the route we came on a few short days ago. It feels like years.

  We pass through the centre of town again. As before, Latvians give us looks of pity. Some of them give us looks of astonishment and vague smiles. I can’t work out why. It is almost as if they never expected to see us again. One or two even dare a nod or a small wave. Others ignore us and hurry past with their heads bent against the biting sleet and icy winds. I think of Velna and the air takes on a heavy grey chill. Dirty Jew. That’s what those people are thinking about me.

  A couple of hundred or so of us are marched back towards the Maskavas area of town and the ghetto. Some of the women are so weak that they collapse during the hour-long walk.

  Their bodies are shoved to the side of the road by the SS and left there, part-disappearing under the new flurry of snow.

  I start to see the streets of the ghetto up ahead.

  I clutch Mama’s arm, dizzy with relief. We will be back in our grotty apartment on Ludzas iela soon and I will be able to see Max and Sascha.

  When we get to number 29 I almost hurl myself up the stairs. Part of me is hoping that Omama will have somehow escaped the old people’s home or the resettlement column and be waiting up here with open arms, but a larger part of me knows that this won’t be true.

  At least Max will still be here waiting for us.

  I burst into the main room of the apartment with a smile upon my face.

  A tiny whimper greets me.

  Sascha is curled up in the corner of the room underneath a blanket. Her tufts of hair are poking out of the top.

  There is no sign of Max.

  He’s gone.

  We can’t get much sense out of Sascha.

  We ask her as many questions as we can but she is fraught with hunger and anxiety and in the end Mama just makes a thin soup out of old vegetables, tucks her up and sings her some old nursery rhymes until Sascha’s eyes close and she lies immobile on her thin mattress.

  I hope that Max has been taken away to work in the Small Ghetto.

  I spend the evening straining my eyes to look out of the window while Mama finds what she can to eat. I can see some of the Small Ghetto from here and my eyes latch on to every man and boy I see in a cap in case they are Max or Janis but I just can’t tell from up here and it is too dangerous to go out and wander the streets.

  My heart aches with longing for my grandmother. And there’s another thing. I really miss Max, with a sharp new pain I haven’t experienced before. I keep calling up his dark hair and brown eyes and trying to imagine that he is going to come back and give me his rare shy smile.

  Mama and I huddle around our old box-table which still sits in the middle of the room. We try not to talk about Omama but her presence is everywhere, large and vibrant for such a small, wrinkled old lady.

  The next morning I wake from a nightmare in which Uldis finds me and locks me inside a house in the countryside and forces me to have four blond children whose Jewish blood is diluted until they become pure Aryan.

  “Fat chance,” I say, waking on the hard floor with a pounding headache and sore eyes.

  “What?” says Mama. She has obviously been awake for a while because she is sitting with her arms around her knees, watching me.

  “I dreamed of Uldis,” I say, before I become properly awake. I watch Mama’s face change into a hard shell.

  “That traitor,” she says. “It is because of him that we are here.”

  I shake my head.

  “No,” I say in a small voice. “It is because of me that we are here.”

  Mama’s face fills with pain and love.

  “Don’t ever think that, Hanna,” she says. “He persuaded the secret out of you. As far as I am concerned, it is his fault and his fault alone.”

  How could I have been so stupid as to betray my family’s hiding place?

  I have made all this happen. It is because of me that Omama has been taken away.

  The guilt is eating me alive, like worms inside an apple.

  What I wouldn’t give for an apple right now.

  We wait for the command to get back to work.

  We are sure that we will have to work again for our measly rations of food and our cold and lice-ridden lodgings.

  The command never comes.

  The ghetto is freezing.

  The sky refuses to get light.

  W
hen I go out to queue for rations I can see that most of the houses which were once crammed full of Jews sharing apartments together are empty, abandoned by their residents in a hurry on the November night when I last saw my Omama.

  The ghetto is very quiet. Too quiet.

  Only two days after we have returned to our apartment a new order is issued. It says that all able-bodied men remaining in the Large Ghetto must instead report to the Small Ghetto and that the rest of the population will be “moved”.

  Mama and I hold hands and can’t speak. Sascha is in the room with us and is watching our every move with her big, haunted eyes. There is stuff we need to say but we can’t say it in front of her. We wait until she has been put to bed on the mattress in the corner of the room. Mama tucks the thin, rotting blanket over her and tries to sing a bedtime song, but her voice keeps cracking with fear, tiredness and emotion so in the end I take over and sing “Raisins and Almonds” in a thin, wobbling voice that sounds nothing like the one I used to have at our villa.

  When Sascha is asleep for her afternoon nap, Mama and I chew on one of the endless lumps of stale hard bread that have become our life. Then she takes my hand again and looks into my face.

  “We cannot trust them any more,” she says. “They lied about the work in the city and instead took us to the prison. They said that Omama was in the old people’s home but nobody has heard of her or seen her since. We have had no proof that all those people ever reached a camp.”

  She stops for a moment. We are both trying not to cry. The spectre of my bad-tempered, loving old grandmother looms large between us, waving her stick and crowing in her sharp voice.

  “So this ‘resettlement’ notice is a sham, too,” says Mama. “There’s no point pretending otherwise.”

  I nod. I have known this since the order went up. I can hear the cries and panicky voices of the remaining residents of our ghetto. We have all seen too much to pretend that this news is anything other than the worst possible.

  Even so, I still have a small bead of hope inside me.

  Maybe they will take us to a work camp after all.

  Maybe they still need seamstresses somewhere.

  Maybe the war will end and we will be freed.

  I see Papa’s face, strong and kind with his eyes flashing love and compassion.

  I promised him I would look after Mama for as long as we both lived.

  I grip her hand.

  “We will be together, Mama,” I say. “I won’t let go of your hand. I promise. Whatever happens, we will be together. I have decided!”

  Mama smiles a little at my catchphrase but she can’t speak. Her fingers feel like chicken bones in my hand. But she nods, her lip trembling. Her eyes speak of love and loss and torment.

  On the other side of the room, Sascha throws her blanket off, restless and in tears.

  I sing her another song and try to stem the flow of my own.

  The ghetto is dark by six.

  A couple more hours pass.

  Mama and I are ready.

  We have been listening to shooting all around the ghetto for several hours now and we have heard the commands shouted into the darkness for people to leave their lodgings.

  We have our small knapsacks crammed with as much food and as many blankets and items of clothing as we can stuff in. We have dressed Sascha in the warmest clothes we possess and put a little knitted bonnet on her head.

  The order comes from the streets.

  “Out! Out!” shout the Latvian policemen. “All ghetto inhabitants must leave their buildings immediately!”

  I take Mama’s hand and Mama offers her other hand to Sascha.

  Mama looks at me.

  “Ready?” she says.

  “Ready,” I say.

  Then we go downstairs to meet our fate.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We are pushed into columns of people, five abreast.

  The men are mostly old. No use as workers.

  The women are either elderly or young mothers with tiny, terrified children.

  This is the same thing I saw from the windows of our apartment on the day Omama was taken from us. The same terrified mass of people whipped into orderly lines. The same desperate clutching of bags and packages to chests. The same mixture of facial expressions – fear, terror, sadness, blankness, impassiveness and even acceptance on the faces of some of the more elderly residents of the ghetto. It is like they have given up already.

  I stand in line with Mama and Sascha and although a nasty sick feeling has got me in the pit of my stomach I remind myself of Papa’s face and I think: I will not give up.

  We stand for an hour. It is cold, but there is no snow.

  A Latvian policeman says that the elderly men and women and the mothers with children are being treated to a special sleigh so that they do not have to walk. These people are to form a separate column.

  Mama catches my eye and as if of one mind we push Sascha between ourselves and cover her with our coats. Then we watch as other mothers holding tiny children by the hand and babies in their arms, walk towards the column to wait for their special sleigh.

  “May God protect them,” whispers Mama.

  The order is given for our column to start moving.

  Each crack of the whip pushes us further forward. Sometimes the police use guns instead.

  We pass out of Ludzas iela and into Līksnas iela.

  On the junction of these two streets is an SS man. He is holding a gun and a wooden club.

  “Drop your packages here!” he commands, as we straggle by.

  People begin to shed their bags and packets with looks of stunned disbelief.

  I drop mine straight away. There seems little point in arguing with an armed member of the SS. Mama drops hers too, with an anguished look at Sascha. We have packed bread and a precious bottle of milk for her in our bags.

  A woman who is either brave or stupid runs up to the SS man. She throws herself at his feet.

  “Please,” she begs. “I have food for my children with me. Let me keep some of it!”

  “You don’t need to worry about food where you are going,” says the SS man with a sneer. He uses the butt of his gun to hit the woman across the cheek. We hear the crack of bone and watch as she staggers back into line, clutching her face.

  We are being marched past the old Jewish cemetery.

  I remember Omama’s half-joke about how convenient our new lodgings were. A shudder of ice passes up my spine.

  The road is slippery. Snow has melted during the night and made the pavements treacherous underfoot. I help Mama stay upright and together we are almost lifting Sascha’s feet off the ground so that she does not fall or worse, get trampled by the column.

  When I glance back, the column is so long that I cannot see the end of it. There must be thousands of us here, being whipped and shouted towards who-knows-what.

  We are now on the main Maskavas iela. The faint light of dawn is starting to appear.

  Maybe the SS are panicking about the ordinary people of Rīga who will soon be using this road to go to their shops and offices. Maybe they haven’t allowed enough time to get us all to our destination, for they start to shout at us to go faster. Some people cannot. They fall to the side of the road and lie there, motionless and forgotten. If they are still alive they are finished off with a brief shot to the head.

  We stumble on for several more kilometres.

  Then I recognize the Rumbula railway station.

  Mama and Papa used to bring me here when I was a little girl. We would walk from the station to the nearby forest and have a picnic amidst the trees.

  I see this image as if I am looking into somebody else’s past and not my own. How can that fat little girl with the pigtails and chubby red cheeks rolling on a blanket be the same person I am today? Now I can hardly straighten my legs. Every bone in my body hurts. My teeth have become grey and loose from lack of brushing and my hair is starting to fall out from never having enough to eat. />
  Mama was so pretty. I can see her handing out the fresh rolls and smoked fish that she brought on our picnics. She bends over the food, her dark hair thick and lush and her lips full and red.

  I glance sideways at Mama.

  She looks like an old woman. She looks older now than Omama.

  A terrible fear rips through me.

  For the first time I realize that my mother is weak and vulnerable.

  She is not a person to the Nazis. She is just another frail, starving Jew, cluttering up land that they want for themselves.

  I look down at Sascha, stumbling along on her short pencil-legs between Mama and myself and my heart contracts.

  Surely they must be able to spare the children?

  I am brought back to the present with a jolt.

  I can hear shooting.

  This is not the occasional gunshot. No. This is the ack-ack-ack of a continual motion.

  The harsh sound of dogs barking grows louder as we approach the forest.

  I begin to shiver. Panic is rising up in me now and I get an overpowering urge to scream and break free, run in the opposite direction.

  But we are surrounded by both SS and Latvian police now, along with their snarling, red-eyed dogs.

  Mama begins to pray. I mouth the words with her in silence, trying to focus on them so that I don’t give in to my urge to try and run.

  We are whipped and beaten towards a large box at the edge of the forest.

  A soldier of the SS yells at us to remove our jewellery and put it along with any valuables into this box.

  People obey meekly, like sheep.

  The gold and silver flows into the box and onto the ground. I see the soldier pick up the fallen pieces and shove some of them into his pocket. He does this in full view of everybody, with an insolent grin.

  What are you Jews going to do about it?

  That’s what his expression says.

  We are herded on ahead. A Latvian policeman orders us to remove our coats and throw them onto a huge pile which is growing in a pyramid nearby.

  Mama removes Sascha’s little coat with shaking hands, fumbling at the buttons.

  Sascha begins to wail. Mama shoots me a look of anguish. I crouch down and put my hand over Sascha’s mouth so that Mama can finish the unbuttoning.