She turned to Lech. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’
He flushed, offended that she doubted his carefully thought-out scheme. ‘Why would I joke about a thing like that?’
Elzunia allowed herself to be seduced by the vision of living on the other side of the wall, where people could stroll along normal streets and children still rode on carousels. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where her heart wouldn’t stop beating whenever she heard footsteps on the stairs, and where she wouldn’t risk being bashed or killed whenever she went outside.
‘That sounds fantastic,’ she said with a sigh. ‘But what about you? You’d be taking a terrible risk.’ She knew that neighbours often reported people who were hiding Jews, and when the Gestapo came, they took the rescuers away as well. Sometimes they shot the whole family on the spot, even the children.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve figured it all out. The only thing is, you’d have to keep very quiet so my landlady wouldn’t hear you.’
It sounded so easy. Up in his attic room, she’d be safe at last.
‘You’d risk your life for me?’ she asked slowly.
For a moment he couldn’t speak. She didn’t understand anything. She filled his mind every minute of every day and he wouldn’t want to go on living if something happened to her. But he’d only make a fool of himself if he said that, and, anyway, the words wouldn’t come out right.
He gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘Life’s a gamble these days, anyway. What’s one risk more or less?’ Then he added casually, ‘So what do you reckon?’ He stared at his feet so she wouldn’t see he was holding his breath.
Elzunia longed to say yes so that she could live outside the hated wall like a normal person. She was entitled to be free. But just as she was about to agree, her legs began to wobble. How could she have even considered his offer? When she spoke, it felt as though a lump of wood was stuck in her throat. ‘What about Mama and Gittel?’
‘But your mother would want you to be safe, wouldn’t she?’
She sighed. His offer was so tempting. ‘There’s no point panicking,’ she said. ‘This might be just another rumour.’
For one crazy moment, he wondered whether he might be able to hide all of them, but knew it was impossible. His nosy landlady even made comments when he flushed the toilet more often than usual.
As they walked side by side through the Ghetto streets, Elzunia tried to still the turmoil in her head. If only there was some way of saying yes and making it right. But however hard she tried to justify her decision to leave the Ghetto, guilt tugged at her mind. How could she abandon Mama and Gittel? And if she put herself first, she wouldn’t be the kind of person her father would be proud of. But why should she adhere to principles that he himself had found too inconvenient to maintain? It wasn’t fair. If not for Mama and Gittel, she’d be safe on the other side of the wall. Surely at times like these, ideals like loyalty and honour were unrealistic. Lech was right. Mama would want her to save herself. Elzunia looked up at Lech and was about to speak but the words wouldn’t come. It didn’t have anything to do with her father. The only person she had to answer to was herself.
Outside the hospital, she turned to Lech and, placing her hand on his arm, looked up into his face. ‘I wish I could say yes but I just can’t. But it was really noble of you to suggest it,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget it.’
As he walked away, he kept repeating her words in his head like a mantra. He never wanted to forget the look on her face or the feel of her small hand when she touched his arm.
With the sunny July weather, the atmosphere in the Ghetto lightened and Stefan occasionally told them a joke. ‘Hitler died and went to heaven but he was shocked when he ran into Christ,’ he told Lusia and Elzunia when he dropped in one afternoon. ‘What’s that Jew doing here?’ Hitler asked. ‘You have to leave that one alone,’ St Peter whispered. ‘He’s the boss’s son!’
Stefan was in an unusually talkative mood that day. ‘They’re going to resettle some people because the Ghetto’s so overcrowded,’ he told them.
He had been at the Judenrat that morning and had seen a delegation of SS officers entering the President’s office. He didn’t know what they’d come to discuss but an ominous silence had suddenly descended over the entire building that had sent a chill down his spine. It was as though everything was in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the axe to fall.
And then they heard music blaring. Some of the SS men downstairs were playing Strauss waltzes on their hand-cranked gramophone. But instead of lightening the atmosphere, these lilting melodies had sounded grotesque and menacing.
Lusia looked up from the lace edging she was stitching onto an apron. She had grown so thin that the skin hung from her forearms and wobbled like empty sacks. Although she frequently lamented about her husband’s disappearance, she rarely expressed the hope that he would rescue them, and it seemed to Elzunia that her mother had finally realised that he was either dead, or had abandoned them. As both possibilities were too painful to talk about, Elzunia never raised them, and resolutely maintained her silence about what the caretaker’s wife had said.
‘What’s the difference where they send us,’ Lusia said with a shrug. ‘They’ll finish us off one way or another. It’s only a matter of time.’
‘All I know is that it’s somewhere in the east,’ Stefan said. There was something else he had been told. The Jewish police, whose job was to help keep order in the Ghetto, had been told that to speed up the resettlement they’d have to help the Germans round people up and escort them to the departure point. But that was one piece of information he didn’t share with his family.
At dawn the following morning, Lusia and Elzunia were woken by the rumbling of trucks that made the whole building vibrate. Gates clanged and voices yelled. They ran to the window and gasped. Their street had been surrounded by German soldiers, the houses had been cordoned off by Ukrainian guards and blocked by a convoy of trucks and carts.
Down in their yard, Jewish policemen were shouting orders. ‘Everyone downstairs. You can bring fifteen kilos of baggage, food for three days, and your documents. Leave your doors open. Anyone who doesn’t come down will be shot.’
Elzunia and Lusia looked at each other in alarm. Why were the Jewish policemen involved in this action? Were the guards really going to shoot people for not going down? Where were they taking them? Clutching Gittel and their knapsacks, Elzunia and Lusia made their way down the stairs, which were already streaming with dishevelled and disoriented people. Some were throwing on their clothes as they went, while others were still in their nightwear. Everyone carried bundles and valises bulging with warm clothes, shoes, spoons, and pots and pans. Hearts pounding, Elzunia and Lusia stood in the yard and saw groups of frightened people emerging from neighbouring houses.
White-faced, people argued that it couldn’t be anything sinister if they were told to bring their essentials and food for the journey. Anything would be better than this stinking hellhole, even digging ditches or working on farms in Germany. Others sensed impending doom and tried to reassure their frightened children and calm their elderly parents.
The policeman checking papers shouted that doctors, nurses and the families of Jewish policemen should step aside. Elzunia and Lusia breathed out in relief. Thank God they wouldn’t have to go.
As they climbed back upstairs, their footsteps sounded eerie in the empty building. They had just returned to their room when they heard boots thumping up the stairs. Someone bashed open a door with a rifle butt and yelled in a language that wasn’t Polish or Russian but had elements of both. There was a scream, a shot, and the sound of something heavy bumping down the stairs. When all was quiet, Elzunia ventured out of their room and peered into the room next door. A half-finished glass of tea was cooling on the table and summer flies squatted on a crust of bread. She leaned over the railing and saw a bundle of brightly coloured rags lying at the bottom. It was Madame Ramona. Her black eyes w
ere still open and, for a moment, Elzunia had the impression that she was looking straight at her. She wondered whether the clairvoyant had foreseen her own fate.
Elzunia and Lusia fell silent and even Gittel stopped chattering.
‘I don’t know where those Ukrainians and Germans are taking people,’ Lusia said later, ‘but I wish Stefan wasn’t involved in this.’
That was the feeling Stefan tried to stifle in himself as the day progressed. At first, he’d felt good striding about in his uniform as he escorted the people towards the assembly point, especially when some of the girls cast admiring glances his way. But, as other groups joined them, they merged into an endless sea of people that clogged the roads and he found the magnitude of the operation worrying.
The SS officers in charge had emphasised the need for efficiency, a request that their Ukrainian auxiliaries had interpreted as a need to smash people with their rifle butts and shoot anyone who tripped or pleaded to be released. Stefan noticed that some of his colleagues had become overzealous and brought their batons down on the shoulders and backs of people who were lagging behind, even mothers carrying toddlers. Keeping order was one thing but mistreating people was another. However, it seemed as though each act of violence released the brake on their consciences a little further.
When the group he was escorting finally reached the gate that led from Dzika Street to the walled area on Stawki Street called Umschlagplatz, he was horrified by what he saw. The square was surrounded by a cordon of German guards with rifles. It was mid-morning and the sun was blazing down and there was no shade. More and more people were being pushed into the square, squeezed in like sausage meat into casings.
So many people had been herded into the loading area that they had no room to move, and those who pleaded to be allowed to use a toilet were met with laughter and jeers. ‘No one leaves!’ one of the guards yelled, and took photos to record the degradation of people forced to relieve themselves where they stood. By mid-afternoon, the stench was nauseating. Stefan gritted his teeth. If only they’d let people get on the train so they could get away from this appalling place.
As the afternoon wore on, the sun beat down on their bare heads but appeals for water were met with the same response as those for toilets. Children’s lips were cracking and their eyes became glassy.
A woman near Stefan was holding a listless baby. ‘You look like a decent young man,’ she whispered. ‘Please let me have some water for my child.’ He made his way through the throng, trying to ignore the moans and supplications of other desperate mothers, and returned with a mug of water. He was about to hand it to the young woman when it was knocked out of his hand. A Ukrainian had come up behind him, determined not to ease the suffering of a single child. As the precious water spilled on the ground, the woman desperately tried to scoop up some of it in her bare hands before it ran into the excrement and urine. Stefan looked away, unable to meet her stricken expression.
Something was very wrong. If people were to be resettled to ease the congestion in the Ghetto, why were they being tormented like this? But there was no one with whom he could discuss his concerns. The other Jewish policemen were busy keeping order and there was no point expecting compassion from guards who entertained themselves by humiliating people, especially the young girls whose screams made his scalp prickle.
As he tried to make sense of the situation, his attention was drawn to an elderly woman sitting on her valise, staring at him with a gaze like a cut-throat razor. There was something familiar about her face and his glance kept sliding in her direction.
‘You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago,’ she said, not taking her eyes off his face. ‘What’s your name?’
A strange expression came over her face when he told her, and she made a small involuntary movement with her right hand.
‘And what’s your mother’s name?’
‘Lusia,’ he said.
The woman made a strange hollow sound. ‘So that’s what she calls herself now!’ she muttered. Her eyes slid from Stefan’s face down to his uniform. She reached into the inside pocket of her loose black coat and held out something. He thought she was about to offer him a bribe so that she could escape, but she pressed something small and hard into his hand and said, ‘Give this to your mother.’
Then, looking him straight in the eye, she said in a quiet voice, ‘Shame on you.’ He was stung and wanted to answer back when the order was given to load the wagons. The officer in charge of his unit called him away before he had time to ask her for her name.
He lost sight of the old woman in the chaos as people were herded towards the train by guards beating them with rifle butts and whips. The wagons, which were used for transporting cattle, had no windows and when Stefan was ordered to push a hundred people into each one, he didn’t think they could possibly fit. Mothers were screaming that they’d been separated from their children, daughters were shouting to their frail parents, and husbands and wives tried to clutch onto each other. In that atmosphere of hellish desperation, Stefan broke out into a cold sweat and he pushed them in more forcefully than he’d meant to because he couldn’t stand the shrieking and screaming. He hated them but most of all he hated himself for being so helpless. His throat was as tightly sealed as those wagon doors when the guards slammed them shut and slid the bolts in.
In the white faces pressed against the tiny grille, Stefan saw that these people finally understood that their hopes had been illusions, and all was lost.
Twenty-Two
As soon as night fell, Elzunia crept around the dark streets, jumping each time shutters rattled in the wind. She was pinning sheets of paper to the lamp-posts. She stood back and surveyed them with pride. The notices she was distributing, which were printed on primitive hand-presses in the stinging light of carbide lamps, warned people not to trust German promises of resettlement, and not to go to the Umschlagplatz.
Whenever trucks rolled past their building, she and Lusia blanched, wondering whether this time the trucks had come for them. The ferocity of the Germans to fill the quota of those destined for resettlement had intensified to such an extent that having the right documents no longer guaranteed immunity and even children were being snatched to make up the numbers. Only the day before, Elzunia had seen a young woman standing in the street, tearing out clumps of her hair and howling like an animal because, while she was out, they had taken her little girl away.
The thought of Gittel being snatched like that terrified them. ‘If anyone bangs on the door, run and hide under the bed and be as quiet as a mouse. Stay there until you can’t hear a single sound,’ they told her over and over again. Gittel understood. She looked at them with her big brown eyes and nodded. ‘So the bad men don’t find me,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘But where will you hide?’
Elzunia had just come home after pasting all her notices on the lamp-posts when there was a soft knock on the door. Four short knocks and two long ones. Edek’s signal.
‘You’ll never believe what happened,’ he said. ‘Czerniakow has committed suicide!’
Elzunia’s hand flew to her mouth as Edek told them that the President of the Judenrat had been found slumped at his desk and there was a faint odour of almonds in the office. Apparently he had left a note but what was on it Edek hadn’t been able to find out. Elzunia wondered what Czerniakow knew that had made him swallow the cyanide. He had compared himself to the captain of the Titanic and she suspected that the ship was about to sink. But whatever happened, she no longer felt powerless because she had joined the youth resistance group in the Ghetto.
Several days after the deportations had begun, the young man with the large ears had sought her out. ‘The time has come,’ he’d said. ‘Will you join us?’
She couldn’t wait.
The summer rains had begun to fall and the sky was as grey as fate the day that Elzunia and Edek attended their first meeting to be inducted into the Ghetto resistance. Elzunia was looking around the hall expectantly when
Edek whispered, ‘There must be two or three hundred in here, every youth group in the Ghetto, and they’re prepared to work together. Things are really happening.’
Just then, a young man with a shock of wavy hair falling over his forehead and a moustache that needed trimming rose to speak and Elzunia craned forward for a better view.
‘We have to forget our political and religious differences,’ he said and from his tone she knew that he was accustomed to commanding attention. ‘Some of us are Bundists and some are Zionists, some are from Dror and some from Haszomer Hacair, some are Chassids and others are atheists, but we have one vital thing in common that binds us more closely than our differences divide us. We’re all determined to resist and that’s the only thing that matters right now. We have to join together, form a non-political group, and pool our resources.’
‘That’s Itzak,’ Edek whispered. ‘He’s one of the leaders. And see that guy out in front? They reckon he’s going to be the commander.’ Elzunia followed his gaze and saw a short fellow with thick dark hair and heavy eyebrows who looked more like a student than a military leader.
‘Him?’ she asked, dismayed. ‘But he’s so small and young.’
‘So was Napoleon,’ Edek retorted.
‘We’ve been waiting for the older people to take the initiative but there’s no point waiting any longer,’ Itzak was saying. ‘They’re too frightened, so we have to take action ourselves.’
He was greeted with cheers and applause.
‘About time,’ voices called out in unison.
Elzunia looked around at the gathering. The air in the crowded room vibrated with intensity and excitement. They were pioneers about to embark on a journey into uncharted territory. They had no money, no weapons and no chance of success, but the prospect of banding together to take action against their oppressors was exhilarating. They would take control of their destiny, whatever the cost. A girl with a mass of curly hair standing beside Itzak was watching him with obvious admiration. Pointing to her, Edek said, ‘That’s Rahela. She’s eighteen. They got married two weeks ago.’
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