No-one answered. The future was a question mark. Who knew what it held, and if there might come a time when we no longer had to hide.
Adam and I were allowed outside the house in the half-hour before sunrise and again just after dusk. The poultry roamed the yard during the day but were locked in at night.
‘Hanna,’ Elza said. ‘It’ll be your job to feed those six hens and the three ducks. You have to collect their eggs, and make sure the fox can’t find them. Adam, you’re to help round them up for the night.’
At first, we had no idea how to collect those birds. Any time we tried to get close they tried to peck us. After one time too many of being chased by a rooster rather than the other way around, I said, ‘Adam, we’re bigger and stronger than those chooks, aren’t we?’
He nodded.
I took a deep breath. ‘So they’d better know who is boss.’
He giggled.
After that, any time a hen or the rooster, a duck or a drake, tried to peck me, I gave them a tiny smack. Not enough to hurt, but enough to make them stop.
Very soon all I had to do was raise a hand and they knew to behave.
We named some of the hens. My favourite I called Marguerite after the beautiful heroine, a French actress, in The Scarlet Pimpernel. I had already finished it. I was so glad that I had picked that book to bring to the farm. It was wonderful.
Marguerite was the best egg-layer and she always let me pick her up and stroke her lovely brown feathers. The noisy bossy rooster I named Chauvelin, after the villain in the book. The ducks spent most of their time in the muddy pool at the end of the yard that was rapidly icing over. Because the drake was bad tempered and harassed the ducks, Adam wanted to call him Adolf, after the German Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.
I was horrified. ‘No! Not even the most horrid duck deserves that.’
We agreed to call him Sheriff, after the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood. That was Adam’s favourite movie.
The sow Elza bought was soon to have babies. She was huge. I was looking forward to playing with those piglets when they finally appeared.
‘Don’t get too attached,’ Elza warned me. ‘There are reports that the Germans are taking animals from some farms close by.’
‘But what if they do? What if they find us?’ I asked, scared.
Elza patted my shoulder to comfort me. ‘If they do come, they’ll be happy to take our animals and leave us alone.’
She taught me how to milk the cow. We had named her Daisy. As I pulled Daisy’s udders and milk came spurting out, I rested my head against her flank. This felt so warm and comforting, she must have known how much I liked her. She was sweet and gentle and never tried to kick me or the milk-bucket.
Once the morning chores were done, we were under strict instruction to return upstairs, to stay hidden, and to be as quiet as possible.
Papa had packed two slates, a few pieces of chalk, and a textbook in one of our suitcases. He was determined to teach us mathematics and science. Straight after morning chores, Papa led us through our lessons. Then he played with Ryzia, and Mama talked to us about music, humming her favourite pieces. Adam pretended to play them on a violin, arms held out as if holding an instrument, his right hand moving smoothly up and down as if running a bow across the strings.
In the afternoon I filled the long hours playing cards and reading. I had read The Scarlet Pimpernel three times already. I wasn’t bored re-reading it. The story engrossed me and I boasted to Papa, ‘I know some of it off by heart.’ To prove this, I quoted, ‘“Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.”’
‘Yes, yes,’ Papa said. ‘Think about how many ideas you have learnt. Can you tell them to me?’
I thought hard. ‘I now know that history repeats.’
‘Yes, bubbala? In what way?’
‘Well, just as the Nazis blame all Jews for the problems in Germany, and the poverty there after the war, the French blamed all the nobility for their poverty and rounded them up to be killed.’
His nod was approving. ‘Interesting, Hanna. Go on.’
‘The French wanted to kill or imprison everyone of noble birth. They didn’t discriminate. They just blamed them all. So the aristocracy had to try to escape.’
‘Just like us?’ Adam asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Although a lot of them didn’t get away. They were sent to the guillotine.’
‘But some did get away,’ Adam insisted.
‘Yes! And in the book, it is the Scarlet Pimpernel who saves them.’
‘And how does he do that, Hanna?’ Papa asked.
‘He has a band of friends who help him, and they undertake daring rescues together. He even smuggles people, by hiding them in old carts, just the way we escaped Warsaw! Only his friends know his identity. He is, in fact, Sir Percy Blakeney, an English aristocrat. Everyone believes he is a fool only interested in clothes and gambling.’
Adam was captivated by this story. ‘Is he a fool?’
‘No, that’s just a disguise. He’s quite, quite brilliant!’
‘Does he rescue people from the guillotine?’
‘He does! And each time he leaves a card, with a picture of a flower on it—a scarlet pimpernel.’
‘Don’t the French catch him?’
‘They try, but he’s far too clever. He is a skilled sword-fighter and can take on wonderful disguises. He always manages to escape the trickiest of situations.’
‘Can I read that book too?’ Adam asked.
‘Of course,’ nodded Papa. ‘I think that’s a marvellous idea, don’t you, Hanna?’
I longed to practise my gymnastics. In my imagination, I sprinted down a runway, vaulted from a springboard over a wooden horse and arms raised, landed on both feet. On an imaginary beam, I ran, skipped, did forward- and backward-circles. Hanging from a bar with both hands, then only one, I swung into different positions …
If only!
But in a loft there is only room to move around very quietly. Besides, even when I accidently made a tiny, tiny noise, Anya would hit the ceiling with her stick.
At least I could use my gymnastics ribbon without making a sound. If I sat on my patch of bedding, I could fling the ribbon upwards, twirling it under the highest part of the roof, making it dance. The ribbon unfurled, curled and undulated. It fascinated Ryzia and was a wonderful way of calming her when she became fretful.
We established a routine that made our life tolerable, and comfortingly predictable. At dusk, Papa, Adam and I headed downstairs and out of the house, me and Adam to round up the animals for the evening, Papa to do whatever needed doing in the evening light.
At night, we had a few oil lamps and candles if we needed them, but these had to be carefully conserved. We ate by the light of one candle, and then settled in our makeshift nests of clothes to sleep.
Being on the farm meant we had enough to eat. Anya and Elza cooked a porridge called kasha made from buckwheat. Mama and I also helped pickle cabbage, beets, turnips, corn and cucumbers and store potatoes. We sliced cabbages, and placed cucumbers in clay jars and poured salty water over them. We made jam out of sour cherries and berries.
Adam and I looked for pine mushrooms underneath the trees behind the house that might have survived under the first layer of snow. This brown yellow fungus had to be picked very quickly or it turned a weird greenish-blue. Elza warned us to keep away from anything red and spotty as those toadstools were poisonous.
Sometimes when we were mushroom-gathering I found a clear space between pines where the thin snow wasn’t too soft or too hard. While Adam kept watch, I took off my coat and boots and practised forward- and backward-cartwheels.
Pickled vegetables, mushrooms, a few boiled potatoes, and sometimes a slice of rye bread topped with sour cherry jam, kept hunger at bay. Most of the milk and eggs went with Elza to sell at the market, but occasionally we kept some. We had no meat. A
ny meat Elza could afford, she reserved for Anya.
‘Keeps the old lady happy,’ she said with her abrupt laugh, ‘even though she’s hardly got a tooth to chew with.’
We didn’t miss meat all that much—those pine mushrooms, sliced and fried, tasted almost the same. Sometimes Adam complained. Mama said he was hungry for meat because he was growing so quickly. When she measured him against me, he was nearly my height though he was three years younger. We decided that he was most likely going to end up as tall as Papa.
1940
Adam and I were getting used to life on the farm. Our bodies were still strong as we had food and could exercise, but our clothes were dirty and torn.
Winter had set in and snow covered the fields. There was less for Papa to do, though our animals still needed to be fed, to be let out, and their stalls cleaned.
Elza became worried about footprints. The soft snow showed where we had been, and how many people tramped around the farm.
‘Follow me,’ she said, leading the way to the barn. ‘Step in my footsteps.’ Elza’s boots left large dents in the snow. Adam and I made sure that we stepped inside her prints, and didn’t leave any extra marks.
The loft was so bitterly cold that Anya allowed us to sit by the stove at night. Not for long. Just long enough to warm ourselves before going to sleep. Our bedding had lessened as we now wore most of our clothes rather than using them as blankets. We slept in one clump, Mama and Papa on the outside, Ryzia curled inside Mama’s fur coat, me and Adam beside her, this way sharing what little body warmth we had. My nose felt like an icicle and I had to rub and rub to give it some feeling.
In the mornings I crept to the crack between the loft floor and the thatching, to look out at the trees behind the house. Those trees dressed in their overnight coat of glistening snow reflected the bright morning sunshine. It was like those stories I read about when I was little, far away lands where you could find gnomes, fairies and elves if you looked long and hard enough.
Even though there was no chance of finding mushrooms, sometimes at dusk for some air and exercise and to get us out of the loft, Elza allowed me and Adam to follow in her footsteps to where trees seemed to stretch right into the sky. Under the pale grey winter light, if you looked straight up, it was hard to tell where their snowy branches ended and the sky began.
One afternoon I couldn’t find my silver rabbit, the one Eva had given me, anywhere. I had obviously dropped it somewhere in the snow. I was so upset I cried for hours.
Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night thinking of Zaida. I thought I heard him calling ‘Hannale … Hannale.’ Then I opened my eyes half expecting to see his pince-nez, his little goatee beard, his immaculately turned-out person, and smell his distinctive odour of cologne and cigars.
But once fully awake, the slow realisation came that I would never see him again and tears ran down my cheeks. What had happened to him? What had happened to the Lublinskis? What would happen to us?
Then I slept and dreamt again.
Anya had taken an unexpected liking to Adam. She started asking Elza to send him downstairs to talk to her.
When I questioned Elza about this, she said, ‘He reminds her of my brother Marek.’
Elza’s brother Marek had been conscripted into the Polish Army when the call for able-bodied men had gone out. It wasn’t certain, though highly probable, that he’d been taken prisoner when Poland surrendered to both the Nazis and the Russians. Either that, or he was dead. No-one had heard anything from him since he had left the farm in September 1939. Though Elza wasn’t particularly fond of either her mother or of Marek, her kind heart couldn’t help feeling some anguish.
While Anya paid attention to Adam, she could not tolerate Ryzia. Even Mama coming downstairs to collect water or hang Ryzia’s nappy rags around the stove made her scowl and mutter curses. Poor Mama and Ryzia had no choice but to avoid the old lady completely. Unlike Papa, Adam and I, they were confined to the loft almost completely. I can’t imagine how they coped. The roof was so short except in the middle, Mama had to stoop to get around. What kept me sane was getting out with the animals and amongst the trees, breathing crisp fresh air.
I know Papa was worried about Mama. She was getting more and more unhappy. Ryzia was almost too young to know anything different, and Adam, Anya’s favourite, seemed to live only in his own world. He continued to play his pretend violin and hum the music only he heard in his head.
I lost myself reading and re-reading The Scarlet Pimpernel. I knew it almost by heart, as if the words had entered me and we were one. I twirled my ribbon in the rafters of the loft, and pretended I was Lady Marguerite at a fancy ball, dressed in a fine Parisian gown, my hair piled up on top of my head in auburn curls.
But of course my hair was nothing of the sort. Since we left Moscow and our hair was starting to grow out, we had looked very strange. We were more likely to draw attention to ourselves with brown hair sprouting from our scalps and a definite line to where it changed to pale orange. Soon after we arrived on the farm, Mama began chopping off the ends and more orange came off every week. Now everyone’s hair was brown, but mine was still short. Thank goodness the cutting had stopped and I could look normal again. Not that anyone cared or saw me. The whole point was not to be seen.
Most days I spent on my makeshift bed curled up with my book.
I read: ‘Recently a very great number of aristos had succeeded in escaping out of France and in reaching England safely. There were curious rumours about these escapes; they had become very frequent and singularly daring; the people’s minds were becoming strangely excited about it all. It was asserted that these escapes were organised by a band of Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled, and who, from sheer desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare time in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la Guillotine. These rumours soon grew in extravagance; there was no doubt that this band of meddlesome Englishmen did exist; moreover, they seemed to be under the leadership of a man whose pluck and audacity were almost fabulous. Strange stories were afloat of how he and those aristos whom he rescued became suddenly invisible as they reached the barricades and escaped out of the gates by sheer super-natural agency …’
‘Pluck and audacity.’ If only I had those qualities. How I wished I could do something more than hide in this loft and feel sorry for myself.
Winter seemed endless. Every morning after I woke, I crawled to the gap between wall and thatching to look outside. At last one day I saw signs of spring: the sun rising earlier; patches of brown where the snow was starting to melt; our animals becoming restless.
As the weeks wore on, and the weather grew warmer, Elza resumed her trips to the market in Otwock. As she was our only contact with the outside world, I asked her to describe that town for me.
Elza put down the clean buckets she had brought up to the loft. ‘There are some splendid buildings. There’s a lovely old theatre, the City Hall, and the City Museum.’
‘What else?’ I was as eager for information as I was to be back in my old life in Warsaw.
She smiled, the skin crinkling around her eyes. ‘Churches, markets, lots of houses, cottages, a train station. The usual.’
‘Are there shops?’
She seemed surprised I even asked. ‘Of course! Lots. Bakeries, butchers, greengrocers, stores where you can buy clothes, shoes and linen. But really for anything else you have to travel to Warsaw.’ She paused. ‘Most of those shops were Jewish. They’re closed now.’
‘Do any Jews still live there?’
‘Yes. Many, maybe about twelve thousand.’
‘Are they safe?’ Mama sounded hopeful. ‘They must be if they did not leave? Romek, is there a reason we can’t live safely in Otwock? Perhaps the danger has passed?’
Instead of answering, Papa’s brow wrinkled and he turned away.
Elza shook her head. ‘Since the German invasion, they’ve been pushed into one small district of the town.’
‘A ghetto?’ Mama asked.
‘Yes.’ Elza’s face fell.
‘What else is happening to them?’ Mama’s face was anxious. ‘Could you find out?’
‘I can try,’ Elza replied. ‘But I don’t think it’s a good idea to ask too many questions.’
A week later, she returned from the market with some more information. ‘I heard reports that Jewish people, whole families, were being placed on trains and sent away.’
‘Where to?’ asked Papa.
Elza paused before saying, ‘There’s talk of camps.’
‘What sort of camps?’
She shrugged. ‘Labour camps I guess. Where you work for food and shelter. I guess they are made to help in the war effort.’
‘Slavery,’ Papa muttered.
Mama shuddered. Just the thought of it was like bringing winter back, and we felt chilled to the bone.
The weather was becoming warmer, and we could now go out in the forest at dusk without fear of leaving footsteps. I ached to practise cartwheels, and stretch my limbs. I found a patch between the trees and ran through them before placing my hands on the ground, and wheeling: one, two three …
I stopped. Something glinted in the fading light beneath one of the silver birch trees. My heart leapt. It was my precious rabbit, the one Eva had given me I thought I had lost forever. I felt happier than I could remember. Surely this was a sign? Maybe this meant Eva was still alive?
Next morning, as Adam and I scrambled to get ready to creep down to the barn for the morning chores, we heard voices downstairs.
One was definitely a man’s. I knew it couldn’t be Papa because he was still in the loft.
I looked through the gap and saw a horse and a big black dog, a German Shepherd, with slobbery jaws. I knew these dogs were used by police to chase criminals.
Spotty didn’t like that dog, because she started to bark and didn’t stop.
We froze.
Thankfully, Ryzia was still asleep.
From downstairs I heard, ‘Good to see you home, Elza. Your mother needs all the help you can give her.’
My Holocaust Story: Hanna Page 5