The Earth Is Singing

by Vanessa Curtis

  It’s a long shot. I don’t even know if they are still working there.

  But after hiding behind a wall of the building next door for what seems like eternity, I see the lights in the factory window start to blink off like tired eyelids.

  I wait.

  A line of figures in dark coats assembles outside.

  I hear the usual crack of whips and the shouts of the Latvian policemen.

  The figures shuffle into columns and are given the order to start walking.

  I am in the right place.

  I wait until the line has reached where I am hiding and then I slip out from behind the wall and am into the line of people before anybody has had a chance to notice.

  I keep my head down and trudge along with the rest of the men.

  The ground underneath is slippery and treacherous but I don’t care.

  My heart is pounding hard and I can hardly believe what I’ve done.

  I’ve done it. I’ve joined a work detail. I am going back to the Small Ghetto.

  I am still alive.

  The walk back to the ghetto takes just over half an hour.

  I am jostled against the man next to me as I walk along but I take care not to look him in the face.

  The walk is silent and grim.

  The men walking with me are little more than skeletons wearing dark coats. Even in the gloom of the evening I catch glimpses when we pass near a street light. I can see their profiles of bone and skin and little else. There is a smell of decay and unwashed bodies and a feeling of – what?

  Acceptance?

  Resignation?

  Lack of hope?

  I am not sure. But whatever it is it comes off in droves from these silent men as they are marched back towards their foodless homes.

  I allow myself to be jostled and pushed back with them. My legs feel weak and my stomach aches from the raw fruit I ate earlier. I am going back to – what? No Mama, no Omama, no Sascha and no future. For the first time I think: It might be easier just to fall over into the gutter and die.

  Then I push the thought aside.

  Papa’s face looms up in front of me. My memory of him is a little less clear. I can’t quite get the exact shape of his face and for the first time I doubt the colour of his eyes. But the expression in them is still strong and clear.

  Be strong, my little dancing girl.

  That’s what he’s always telling me.

  And I promised.

  I failed to keep my other promise – to look after Mama. So I have to keep this one.

  So I take a shaky breath of the cold night air and continue to march with the silent men.

  I can see Ludzas iela ahead!

  It is different now. Divided right down the middle by high barbed wire and posts with warning notices pinned to them.

  As I am straining to try and see where we are going I jostle the man next to me and he knocks my cap off.

  It falls to the ground as if in slow motion.

  I make a grab at my hair with one hand and hold it up while I fumble on the ground for the cap but it is too late. For one flash, my long brown hair has tumbled around my shoulders and down my back and the man next to me has seen.

  He bends down and picks up the cap. He hands it back to me and for the first time I see his face clearly in the moonlight.

  It’s a young man, more of a boy. Sharp-featured, with fair hair that falls over one side of his face and the pale grey sheen of un-nourished skin that we all have.

  I don’t know who’s more shocked.

  I can’t speak but I implore the boy with my eyes as hard as I can.

  Don’t tell them. Please.

  The boy recovers himself fast. He moves in front of me a little to shield me with his body and with a brief jerk of his head, signals me to put my cap back on.

  I shove it on with a shaking hand and push my lank mass of hair up inside it.

  God has answered my prayers for the second time today.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I would like to thank this boy, but I can’t.

  The SS have stripped us Jews of all rights, including being able to talk when we want to. I swallow down great painful lumps of relief.

  The boy risks a low whisper.

  “I thought all the children were dead,” he says. “We heard rumours.”

  I give a small shake of my head and offer a tiny smile. More of a cheek-twitch, really, but then there’s a policeman about a metre ahead of us and he’s armed.

  “I am the only one who survived the forest,” I say, my whisper cracking as I realize the truth of what I’m saying.

  We have reached the gates of the Small Ghetto now and random men are being checked. I swallow. One more removal of my cap and the game is up for me.

  I shuffle by. The boy tries to block me from view a little and it works.

  No checks for me today.

  I am back in the grounds of the Small Ghetto.

  I have no idea where I am supposed to go for the night.

  “Do you know a boy called Max?” I mutter, as low as I can. “I need to find him. Or can I get a message to him through you?”

  “There is a women’s block now,” the boy hisses. “68 Ludzas. Go there. Tomorrow our work detail leaves from the usual place. If you can get a note to me I will try and find him.”

  I nod, tears rising up. I am not used to kindness from strangers any more.

  Then I walk down Ludzas iela to try and find my new home.

  The women’s block is on the opposite side of the street to the apartment at number 29 where I used to live with Mama and Omama. That half of the street remains in the Large Ghetto but seems deserted. The half that I am in now houses the remainder of the Small Ghetto inhabitants.

  The building I stop in front of is five storeys high and made of a dirty, yellow-grey concrete.

  I take off my cap, careful that no guard is watching me.

  I shake my dirty hair free and let it fall around my shoulders.

  Then I take a weary breath and head inside.

  Upstairs there are lots of rooms with doors wide open.

  I am so tired and dizzy and traumatized that I just walk into the first one that I find.

  There are women lying in groups all over the floor.

  At least – I think they are women.

  Some of them are so thin and ill-looking that at first I can’t tell what sex they are at all.

  Others are still able to stand and are leaning up against the walls or looking out of the window in a desultory way, like they don’t really expect to see anything out of it.

  One of these women sees me standing in a daze in the doorway and comes over just in time for me to fall half on top of her.

  “Steady,” she says. She supports me into the room and lowers me down with care onto a holey mattress. She has long chestnut-coloured hair streaked with grey. Her face is very thin and she’s wearing a shapeless coat and a dark scarf wrapped half over her face.

  “Where have you come from?” she says. “We all arrived here yesterday.”

  I seem to not be able to speak.

  It all comes back in a wash of horror.

  The pit – Mama, falling into it on her knees. Sascha tumbling after her. The cries and moans coming from the red earth.

  The warmth of Mama’s back against my skin.

  I bury my face on my knees and begin to rock from side to side.

  It takes me several hours to be able to speak.

  I just sit and rock and shake in the corner of the room.

  The woman, whose name I find out is Lina, makes me a cup of weak black coffee. The drink scalds and burns my stomach but it feels good to have something warm.

  I can’t stop shaking. Every time I close my eyes I see the forest again and Mama being shot and my body is wracked with spasms.

  Lina sits next to me on the mattress and holds my hand with her thin one.

  “We all came back yesterday,” she says, gesturing at the other women. “We w
ere being held in the Central Prison because we are good seamstresses. Apparently we are going to get work for the German army soon.”

  I stare at her in disbelief. My head computes like mad.

  So these are the women who were in the prison with Mama and me.

  These are the women who turned right instead of left.

  The ones we thought were going to die.

  Aren’t you just the daughters of fortune?

  These are the women that the guard in the prison was referring to. Now I understand.

  He knew what was happening to the rest of the Jews of Rīga. He knew that these few women would be given a chance to survive.

  Mama and I joined the wrong queue. We thought that if we came back to the ghetto earlier we would be safe.

  We got it the wrong way round.

  That split-second decision has resulted in her death.

  I begin to cry again.

  That night I recover my voice.

  In a whisper I tell the women about the massacre in the Rumbula forest.

  There are cries and shrieks as I describe it. Some of the women faint. They were hoping against hope that their relatives might after all have been “resettled” in an actual work camp elsewhere.

  “We suspected, of course,” says Lina. “We knew about the first ‘resettlement’ and we saw on the way back here all the empty buildings in the Large Ghetto and the unfinished meals on the tables. Nobody lives there now. There are just the few of us left in the Small Ghetto and we will have to go to work soon. But we always had hope.”

  “Oh,” I say in a tiny whisper. “I did not want to take away your hope.”

  Lina hugs me.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I think we already knew, deep down.”

  She is pensive, gazing at her feet in their grey lace-up leather shoes with holes all along the side.

  It occurs to me with a stabbing pain that nearly all these women sitting here on their own have lost somebody in the forest too.

  So these are the sole survivors of the Jewish women of Rīga. Lina tells me that there are about three hundred of us crammed into this one building.

  There are no words.

  Somebody has got hold of a candle and somebody else has a precious hidden supply of matches.

  A handful of the women mutter the Kaddish, our Jewish Prayer for the Dead.

  We sit up for most of the night and watch the flame in silence.

  The next morning we are woken early by a commotion on the other side of the fence.

  On the half of the street which is now off limits to us residents of the Small Ghetto, a long column of people clutching small bags is being marched in.

  The people all have a bewildered look on their faces. They are walking in silence, looking up at the ramshackle buildings with fear in their eyes.

  They are not from Rīga, I am sure of it. Something about their clothes and their skin and the way they are looking around makes me think that they are from somewhere different.

  “Oh my God,” says Lina. She is watching next to me, clutching a cup to her chest and inhaling the warm steam as it rises. We have one pokey, greasy little kitchen where we can use a tap. “They are bringing foreign Jews into the Large Ghetto.”

  We watch in silence as the bewildered mass of people start to enter the abandoned buildings of the Large Ghetto. What sights must await them. There are breakfasts still abandoned on tables, children’s toys strewn over the floor, cupboards open, blood smeared on the walls, maybe even the remains of people left for dead.

  “My God,” says Lina again, quieter this time.

  “That is why they killed them. So they could move Jews from other countries in.”

  “Don’t be silly,” says another woman from behind us in the room. She is older, with grey hair in a tight bun and crow’s feet around her blue eyes. “Even the SS would not do that, surely?”

  Her comment is greeted with total silence.

  The weight of what we are starting to understand threatens to push us all down into oblivion.

  We are expected to start work the next morning.

  I am disappointed. I want to go and find Max so much. I need to see his kind dark eyes and know that I still have my friend. But Lina tells me that we are strictly forbidden to mix with the men of the Small Ghetto even though they are only a few buildings away and there will be no time to find him. I realize that my only hope is to find the kind boy who helped me last night and get him to take a note. So I persuade one of the women to give me a piece of her precious paper supply and I borrow a pencil from one of the other women. I write him a note. This is what I write:

  Need to see you. I have sad news of Sascha. She died with Mama in the forest. We looked after her until then and we were with her right until the end. I think she knew that we loved her. I am so sorry to have to tell you this. I hope you are okay and that you have found your father.

  I don’t sign it. Signing my name to anything would be like asking for an instant death sentence.

  He will know who it is from.

  Then I shove it in my pocket as we are shouted outside into the streets and formed into columns. I am wearing the women’s clothing that I took from the Rumbula forest.

  The men and the women’s columns leave from different parts of the Small Ghetto but they merge together once we are on Maskavas iela and heading into town.

  I notice that some of the other women are casting glances at the men. Some of them still have husbands and sons alive here. It must be torture for them not to be able to speak, or touch, or spend any time together.

  I inch my way along our column, bit by bit so that I don’t attract the attention of the guards. I strain my eyes in case I see Max but as many of the men are wearing the same dark caps and coats it is difficult.

  Then a pale oval face half-turns towards where I’m standing and I see the boy who saved me. He has been looking out for me.

  I position myself in the women’s column again and shuffle along until I am right by him. With a lightning manoeuvre I shove the scrap of paper into his pocket and then fade back into line again. My heart thuds. Nobody seems to have noticed.

  The men turn off towards the factories in town and we are marched on further. I have no idea where we are going but we are sent on for another half-hour’s tedious cold walk in the ice and snow and in the end we come to an old market hall on the far side of the old town.

  Inside the hall are vast piles of clothing, heaped up towards the ceiling.

  Lina gasps when she sees them. She clutches my arm for support.

  “Please God don’t let these be what I think,” she says.

  I have been praying the same.

  Inside we are placed at long tables and for the whole day we sort belongings into piles. We separate coats and jackets from dresses and trousers. If we find any valuables in the pockets we put them in a box under the table. We are commanded to cut the yellow stars off all the coats and jackets and put them in a separate box underneath the table.

  The work is not difficult but it is relentless.

  I sort coats from jackets and remove yellow stars with a snip of scissors or sometimes they are so loose I can pull the cotton off with my hands.

  I start to notice little details as I pick up shirts and blouses and sort them into piles.

  Many of the clothes have holes in. The holes are big enough for me to put my finger through. Sometimes they are bordered with something dark red, almost black.

  Many of the clothes are tiny. Little white dresses, miniature pairs of grey flannel trousers. Pink baby bonnets and tiny brown caps.

  It’s like my brain shuts down at this point.

  I go into a mechanical state, like a doll in a museum.

  I sort. If I find a necklace or a tiny jewel I throw it into the box underneath my legs.

  I do this for eight hours and manage to keep my eyes clear of tears and my heart thudding in a dull fashion underneath my clothes.

  And then I see it.r />
  I would recognize it anywhere. It has Mama’s neat stitching all round the hem. She complained when she was doing it, but with the smile that meant she didn’t mind.

  “I don’t have black cotton or even any brown so you will have to put up with red,” she said.

  “Good God in Heaven, I will look as if I belong to the travelling circus,” said Omama.

  And that’s how I distinguish my grandmother’s winter coat from all the other black coats that sit in heaps around me.

  I push my finger through the hole in the chest. It is just below the yellow star. My finger wiggles, pink and alive against the dull rust stains surrounding the hole.

  Without even stopping to check where the guards are, I pull off the star with a shaking hand and slip it into my pocket.

  The tears run in silence down my cheeks.

  Our food is running low.

  We have managed to find out that there is a secret bakery operating in our building in the back room on the ground floor. There a woman is baking matzo for the Sabbath. The Nazis have retained a small number of the Jewish Police to keep us in order but the policewoman who guards our block has turned a blind eye to the baking and it is rumoured that she is the one who smuggles in flour.

  So we have matzo once a week to supplement the rations from the store but it is not enough to give us strength to work in the way that we have to.

  And then in the harsh depths of winter, I get sick.

  If you are too sick to work, you either go to the hospital in the Small Ghetto and risk catching something worse from the other patients, or you are “resettled” out of the camp, or you are shot where you lie in bed in your ghetto room.

  Some choice.

  At first I carry on dragging myself across town in the column every morning to get to work. I have been transferred with most of the other women to a sewing workshop near the river where we repair the uniforms of the German army.

  Lina holds me up by the arm on the long walk to work. She has got a lot quieter. I know that she found the clothing belonging to her children when she worked at the sorting depot. She came home that day and collapsed. Since then we have tried to support one another. So Lina tries to make it look as if I am walking to work but really she is half-carrying, half-pushing me.