When we get to our workplace I bend my head over a sewing machine and mend the tough green fabrics of German army uniforms. I try to hold in my cough but it’s not easy. My shoulders shake and my chest feels like it’s going to burst. The cough only stops when I swallow down the weak black coffee that we are given at lunchtime.
One morning I wake up on the floor in my corner of the women’s block with the usual pains in my bones from the hard mattress and the usual pangs of hunger gnawing away beneath my sharp rib-bones and as usual I have been bitten by lice all through the night so my body is a mass of hard, swollen red lumps which itch like hell, and I realize that on top of this I am sweating and hot.
I lie still on my mattress, shivering under the rotten fabric which passes as a blanket.
I put my hand on my forehead. It is burning hot, so hot that I snatch my hand away in a panic.
“Lina,” I call. Lina comes over from the other side of the room where she is saying her prayers. She says them every morning before work. I see her clutch a red ribbon which belonged to her little daughter.
“My head is burning up,” I say. “And everything has gone swimmy.”
Lina does the same as me, laying her thin hand on my hot head. Tears prick my eyes. She does it like Mama would have done.
Lina frowns.
“I think you will have to go to the hospital block,” she says. “This doesn’t look too good, Hanna.”
I feel sick with panic. The room swirls about and closes in on me.
“But I have to try and keep going,” I say. “I promised Papa.”
Lina gives me a gentle hug. We are all thin enough to snap.
“I will be able to visit you,” she says. “They allow visits. It will be all right.”
She helps me get dressed. The feeling of the cloth on my skin burns but I have to wear something as it is still freezing outside. Lina half-carries me down the stairs and around the corner to the small hospital block. I am hardly aware of what we are doing. The fever is making me moan and wince in pain.
I am received into the hospital and put on a ward into a clean white bed. It is like being in Heaven. It is a long time since I slept in a proper bed.
“Don’t worry,” says the only Jewish doctor left. “We will look after her. You should keep away. She may have typhus.”
My heart contracts when he says this.
I think: No. First Papa is taken away, then Omama dies and then Mama. It is not my time. I have to keep going.
But these feelings are overtaken by a burning fever.
I lose awareness of everything.
For three days I am delirious with a high temperature and a wracking cough.
The staff shave all my hair off. Something to do with stopping the spread of typhus.
I wake up from my fever feeling light and strange.
My head on the pillow is cold even though the rest of my body is warm.
I raise my hand to my head and feel only a cold shiny dome of skin.
I scream.
Lina is there and tries to calm me down.
“You have been very sick,” she says. “They had to do it. There has been such an epidemic of typhus.”
I hold her bony hand in mine.
“Why are you here, then?” I say. “Surely you don’t want to catch it too?”
Lina shrugs.
“If I do, I do,” she says. “There is nothing left for me outside, even if we do escape this blessed place in the end. Nobody left.”
She looks so tired and sad that I can’t speak for a moment.
This is what has become of us.
But there is hope for me.
Somewhere out there I am convinced that my papa is still alive. I do not know how I know this. I just feel it. I have always felt it.
And there is more. Lina brings in a visitor.
“Oh!” I say. I struggle into a sitting position and try to adjust my hair before I realize I don’t have any now.
“I must look so bad,” I say. “Sorry.”
Max sits by my bed.
He has got very thin. I can see the skull under his eye sockets and there are pale veins bulging out of his neck.
“I did not think I would ever see you again,” I say. I am grinning like a lunatic. It is so good to have both these dear faces by my bedside. For a moment I feel as if I am not totally alone.
“I got your note,” says Max. “Plus my father is working in the hospital kitchen. He is making the revolting soup that you will be offered later.”
“Oh,” I say. Relief and jealousy flood over me in equal measures. Max has been reunited with Janis. Together they still count as a family.
I gaze up into Max’s warm brown eyes. I could stare at his face all day.
I realize something at that moment. Max is kind, deep down where it really matters. He is as different to Uldis as hot chocolate is to a bottle of Rīga Black Balsam.
Lina smiles and fades into the background.
Max holds my hand.
“I am sorry about your grandmother and mother,” he says in a hesitant voice. “They were good to me. Good people.”
I nod. For a moment I can’t speak. Then I remember.
“And I am so sorry about Sascha and having to tell you in a note,” I say. “But I thought I might not get to see you in the flesh again.”
Max’s eyes fill with pain.
“What sort of world is this?” he says. “Where little children are shot like rabbits.”
The anger in his voice frightens me.
“We will get out of here soon,” I say. “When I am better I will come and find you. There must be a way.”
Max gives a dry laugh. It is not a sound of amusement.
“Yeah,” he says, standing and putting his cap back on. “But I don’t think we Jews will be allowed to use it.”
Then he gives me a quick kiss on the forehead and leaves.
I can feel the imprint of that kiss for days.
I never get to leave the hospital of my own accord.
On the fifth day just as I am feeling stronger and better than I have for a while, thanks to the soup and bread I am given twice a day, a commotion starts up outside.
The nurse in charge of my ward wanders over to the window and peers out.
Her body stiffens.
“SS!” she yells down the corridor to the nursing station.
The nurses start to scurry up and down the wards. They tell us all to lie down and look as sick and germ-ridden as possible. They encourage us to cough because the Nazis are fearful of all disease.
I pull the sheet up to my head, shaking. With my bald head I imagine I look like a giant white egg lying on a striped pillow.
There are trucks and SS vehicles outside.
I can hear the dogs.
Footsteps pound into the entrance area of the hospital and then members of the SS burst into our ward and stare at us.
They go out again and begin to bark out orders.
A nurse comes to my bedside, pale with fright. I can see that she is trying to appear calm for my sake.
“Put this on,” she says. She is holding my dress and coat out.
I stand on the cold hard floor of the ward. My legs feel like icicles that might snap at any moment. I let her help me with the dress and coat and then I put my boots back on. My feet are so thin now that the boots feel heavy and too big.
I am helped out of the ward along with all the other patients. Some of them are very old and still very sick. The nurses try to support them as much as they can.
A male doctor hovers behind us, watching the SS as they order everybody outside.
“I beg you to be compassionate,” he calls. “These are my patients. They are to be treated with care.”
An SS man laughs in his face.
“They are Jews,” he says. “They will get what is coming to them.”
The SS in their dark green uniforms pace up and down by the trucks, their dogs snarling and barking in the direction of
the hospital. Some of the men now wear thick long leather coats to protect them against the winter cold.
They wear these coats while we sleep at night on bare boards with glassless windows. Our clothes have holes in and our boots let in the water.
These thoughts pass through my head in a mess. Along with a stream of old women and younger women in white hospital gowns I am being herded up the front path of the hospital and towards the waiting trucks.
Nurses and doctors in uniform are being hustled along with us. There is so much shouting and chaos that at first I can’t make out what is going on.
But then I see her.
Lina.
Running from the direction of the women’s block towards the hospital as fast as her thin legs can manage.
“Hanna!” she screams. “Hold on. I’m coming.”
“Quick!” shouts an SS man from behind me. He pushes me in the back with his gun and I stumble onto the path, landing on my wrists.
“No!” screams Lina. “You can’t take her. Leave her with me! I will look after her.”
She has reached the gate to the hospital but is being held back by a line of SS men with guns.
I stand up again, dizzy, but my knees give way.
I am no fool.
I know why a truckload of old and sick people is being taken from the hospital.
And the only person who can save me is being hit around the face by an SS man with a gun and a black snarling red-eyed dog.
“Lina,” I say, but my voice has deserted me. All that comes out is a cracked whisper.
I am pushed up into the back of the truck and land on the hard floor in a tangle of sore bones.
There is a gunshot somewhere behind me and a scream.
My heart runs cold.
The engine roars into life.
I don’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-two
We are not in the truck for long.
Most of the patients lie on the floor, moaning and crying. Some of them are no more than heaps of joined-up bones clad in white rags.
I sit with my back against the wall of the vehicle. I am shaking with cold and my stomach aches. I am still weak from the typhus.
There is nobody here for me now.
I think of Max’s kind face and my heart threatens to split in two.
If only I could have let him know what was happening.
He will find out soon enough.
But there is nothing he can do.
I take my first proper look at the other passengers in the back of the truck.
Some of them are very old, their faces creased with wisdom and angst, expressions of complete passivity and resignation sketched over their features. There are younger women with their arms in slings and their bodies covered in sores and bandages. They wear the same expressions as the older women.
Only the nurses and female doctors who have been thrown in with us look frightened, but they are already starting to try and tend to the sicker patients, redoing bandages, offering mouthfuls of bread hidden in pockets and sips of water from concealed flasks.
We are pushed off the truck at the train station near to the Central Prison.
I see the needle-shaped turrets rising up towards the empty winter sky and I think how long ago it seems that Mama and I were in there. Back then we had humour and each other and a little physical strength. We had enough hope to think that we were going to survive.
Now we are rounded up by barking dogs and pushed up into a dirty brown train which does not look like it is supposed to transport people. We are hounded up ramps and beaten into dark sealed cars.
Over one hundred women are shoved into this one car. They cry out as their bones hit the floor. There is some sort of rough sawdust on the floor and a strong smell of human excrement mixed with a fainter smell of animal.
I realize that the trucks have been used for transporting cattle.
So that is what we have become.
No better than herds of farm animals. But at least the animals get to spend time outside in the fields. At least they are fed and can feel the warmth of the sun on their backs in summer.
This is what happened to Papa. He was shoved into one of these trucks and taken God only knows where. He might have been starving just like us.
He might have been shot dead.
But I refuse to believe that last bit.
I find a spot and sit down in the corner of the carriage next to a rusting iron bucket.
The bucket is full of faeces and urine. It stinks. There is a small hole in the floor of the carriage so I try to pour as much as I can down onto the tracks but it is so heavy that much of the contents slop over the floor instead and a woman snaps at me to leave it.
More and more women are shoved in on top of me. Compared to this, our room in the women’s block was paradise. I have somebody’s elbow in my face and somebody else’s legs across my own, which stick out on the floor in front of me.
It is so dark and claustrophobic in here that I cannot even see who these people are.
All I hear is moaning and wailing and muttering and voices calling out in panic through the one tiny window high up on the side of the car. The window is covered in barbed wire.
Nobody comes.
The train sits there for what feels like ages.
Then with a great grinding jolt it begins to move. Through the tiny window I can just make out the figure of an armed guard standing on the step outside the next carriage.
The women scream as they are thrown on top of others with injuries and propelled forwards with the motion of the train.
“Where are we going?” I say, to anyone who might be listening. I can’t see very clearly as it is so dark in here. “What are the bastards doing to us now?”
I sound like Omama. My eyes fill with tears.
Nobody replies.
I grip my own hand in the darkness.
The train rattles on, neither slow nor fast but at some indeterminate speed heading towards some indeterminate location.
It becomes colder in the car despite the hundreds of bodies crammed inside.
Flurries of snow start to wend their way through the small barbed-wire window at the top of the car.
Women sigh with pain as they relieve themselves onto the floor of the carriage and then cry with shame when they realize the stench and mess are not going to go anywhere.
I try to sit on the bucket but I am too weak to squat in one position and the contents slop over the side and all over my feet.
I take off my coat and try to mop myself up as best I can. I want to put the coat back on because I only have one thin pullover underneath and the air coming through the tiny window is freezing but my coat is now soaked in urine. In the end I put it on anyway. I sit huddled in it, holding on to my own elbows and try to warm my arms that way.
As the train grinds on some women fall asleep sitting up and others cry or pray.
“Water,” they beg every time the train appears to stop at a station.
Nobody brings any.
One or two people have managed to smuggle out bits of paper and stubs of pencil. They scribble notes on the paper and push the fragments through the hole in the floor onto the tracks below.
“What good will that do?” complain others. “Who is going to see them?”
I think I understand. It is giving those women who wrote the notes a last glimmer of hope.
We travel on.
I lean against the side of the carriage and am surprised to realize that I don’t mind being a Jew any longer. I have learned something on my journey. I have learned that the only people worth knowing are the ones who accept me for who I am and not what I am. Mama, Papa, Omama, Max, Lina, Uncle Georgs.
I wonder if the people lying in heaps around me have realized this. It seems very important that they should hear my revelation, but I feel too weak to open my mouth to ask anybody.
I doze for a bit.
When I wake up Mama is sitting next to me.
I think I might be dying. I have heard about the last hallucinations witnessed by people who are soon to leave this earth.
She is sitting next to me and smiling. Her hair has become lush and brown again and she is all fleshed out with health.
“Sing, Hanna,” she says. “You have such a lovely voice.”
I clear my throat. It is dark in here and nobody can really see me. I still feel a little shy, though.
I think. Then I decide to sing the Hativka. It is our Jewish anthem.
At first my voice wavers, particularly when everybody else in the car shuts up to listen. Then I find strength from somewhere inside. My voice rises, pure and clear. A few people join in, their voices disjointed and weak, but it is like they are clinging to a life raft for those few moments.
When I have finished Mama squeezes my hand.
“Still Papa’s little songbird,” she whispers.
Then she fades away.
Our journey in the hell of that carriage continues through a night and into another day.
I do not feel much now. No anger, no fear, not even pain. I am just numb all over, in my head and in my limbs. I think my soul has already left my body and flown off somewhere warm, leaving a jumble of bones behind on the filthy carriage floor.
I watch a mixture of snow and sunshine through the high window. The barbed wire makes diamond patterns in the sky. It is quite pretty, although the scene in our carriage is anything but.
Then something happens.
A woman who until now has been sitting next to us, and muttering to herself in an agitated tone, stands up.
With frenetic gestures and an unexpected brute strength she tears at the barbed wire across the window with her bare hands and manages to rip the central section apart.
Then she begins to climb on top of me so that she can push her head out of the window.
“Ow!” I scream, trying to get her boot out of my face. “Get off me!”
Another woman starts to swear.
“How dare you crush a child!” she says. “If you need to stand on somebody, use me.”
The woman is trying to push herself head-first through the window. She gets her head and shoulders through but she has not accounted for the armed Latvian police who stand outside the carriages at all times of day and night.
The Earth Is Singing Page 19