My Bridges of Hope

by Livia Bitton-Jackson

  A huge Soviet flag with a brilliant red star flutters above the school entrance, partially obliterating the much smaller flag of red, white, and blue, the Czechoslovak colors. The school bell sounds just as I reach the wide front stairs. The front is deserted; all the pupils have gone inside. Oh, God, I must be very late. What time is it? I can’t see the clock tower from here. Whatever happened to the eight o’clock chime of the church bells?

  With suffocating tightness in my stomach I approach my classroom. The teacher looks questioningly toward the door as I enter the classroom. Pan Černik’s rugged square face and soft blue eyes seem amused rather than annoyed as he nods acknowledgment of my arrival. The floor squeaks as I tiptoe to my seat in the last row and squeeze awkwardly past Yuri and Marek. Yuri always seems slightly embarrassed when I come late. He clears his throat with disapproval, and whispers under his breath: “Where’s your assignment? I’ll hand it in.”

  “Have you submitted yours?”

  “Yes. He’s already collected the assignments.” Yuri snatches the sheet of paper from my hand and walks up to Mr. Černik’s desk:

  “Pan učitel. Teacher, sir. Friedmannova’s assignment.”

  Pan Černik nods again with a hint of a smile and begins his lecture, Health Study. Although Slovak sounds are relatively new for me, Pan Černik’s succinct pronunciation is easy to understand. He conducts the class with special consideration for the Hungarian-speaking students, pausing after every sentence, asking questions, explaining key points, and waiting patiently while we take notes. We have no textbooks, and every lecture has to be copied into our notebooks.

  Before the war, there was a separate teacher for each subject. But now Mr. Černik teaches every subject, except Russian. He does not know Russian. A Slovak from the hill country in the north, he is a tall, rugged man, with wide shoulders and a kind, swarthy, tired face. Miss Drugova, the Russian teacher, is pert and plump, with light brown hair swept up in a bun. Comrade Drugova has a firm, no-nonsense approach to teaching. She makes no allowances for the humorous effect of Russian language peculiarities, such as her reference to Hitler as “Gitler,” and to Hans as “Gans,” and she considers the ensuing hilarity in class as a personal affront.

  Comrade Drugova’s eagerness to teach is matched by my eagerness to learn. I am like a musician in her orchestra, learning Russian with almost the same relentless tempo as Miss Drugova directs. Poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, short stories by Gogol and Lazechnikov, plays by Chekhov. For me Comrade Alla Drugova’s unrelenting, humorless blitz transforms the Russian class into a love feast of learning.

  The Russian class has brought Yuri and me together. Our friendship has helped me learn Russian and Yuri practice his Slovak. His primary handicap was the script: Unlike the Slovaks, the Czechs, or the Hungarians, Yuri had to familiarize himself with Latin characters before he could take notes in class. Coming from distant Moscow, the adjustments in lifestyle were also much greater for him than for the Slovak nationals from neighboring Hungary, or for Czechs from indigenous Bohemia. I have sensed all along an invisible wall around Yuri created by the differences.

  And I believe Yuri senses that while I relish the thrill of learning and the excitement of new friendships, in reality I belong to another world, a world far from the classroom. He knows that the gulf that separates me from my classmates cannot be bridged. Not by him. Not by any one of my new school friends.

  The “Tattersall”

  Šamorín, July 1945—July 1946

  My secret world beyond the unbridgeable gulf is the Tattersall. The Tattersall is the communal home of our new family, our town’s few survivors. Out of Šamorín’s more than five hundred Jewish citizens, only thirty-six returned, mostly young men and women. Those who did not—our children, parents, grandparents, siblings, husbands, wives, aunts uncles cousins friends and lovers—have been replaced by an abyss.

  This abyss is like a moat around the Tattersall. I am not sure who gave this bizarre appellation, the name of an English horse trader, to the abandoned building the authorities allocated for us “repatriates.” The spacious house, with a cobblestoned courtyard, a large kitchen, and several sparsely furnished rooms, was abandoned by its owners, who fled from the advancing Soviet army. The town’s leadership then designated it as a shelter and retreat. Here we created a niche for ourselves, an island of togetherness.

  The world beyond the Tattersall belongs to “them,” the former neighbors, friends, classmates, and colleagues who violently eliminated us from their ranks and robbed us of our loved ones, and our homes. The world beyond the abyss has lost its relevance for us. Our birthplace, the motherland that brutally expelled us from its womb, has lost its reality.

  The Tattersall is our only tangible world. Here we are real: We have dreams of future happiness as young men and women, we have desires of emotional and physical fulfillment. The thirty-six of us spend our days in the Tattersall sharing those dreams. We talk as intimately as close family members, revealing our innermost fears, plans, and hopes. We talk about life far from here, far beyond the abyss.

  I understand my Tattersall family’s disapproval of my participation in the outside world. It is myself I do not understand. Why do I have such a passion for learning, such a compelling urge to reach out and touch that world? To be a teenager like other teenagers?

  Miki is the only one who understands.

  Miki is the secretary of the Tattersall, the most prestigious position in the family. He administers our food and monetary allocations from the government and serves as our representative to the authorities. Miki is tall and slim, with sloping shoulders and enormous light blue eyes shaded by drooping eyelids. I find drooping eyelids and shoulders romantic and exciting.

  Miki approves of my returning to school and singles me out for attention during group discussions. He invariably turns in my direction and asks for my opinion in front of everyone: “And what do you think, Elli?” The others fix their eyes on me in surprise and patiently anticipate my stammered response, out of deference to Miki. Afterward Miki always strolls by my chair and inquires about my studies, his clear blue eyes locked onto mine.

  Every afternoon at around 4:30 P.M. Miki has his tea in the dining room, where I do my homework. As 4:30 approaches I listen for his slow, nonchalant footsteps across the yard. I listen, and my heartbeat accelerates.

  “Hello, Miki,” I say softly, trying to control the tremor in my voice.

  “Hello there. How’s the work going? Need any help?”

  “Well, it’s algebra. But, do you have time?”

  “I’m free for about an hour. Let’s see, what’s the problem?”

  With his knowing, unhurried manner, Miki pulls a chair over, and within moments we are involved in the intricacies of algebra. A comrade on kitchen duty brings Miki his tea with lemon, a special privilege for the secretary of the Tattersall.

  Miki’s nearness does strange things to my senses. But I concentrate and drink in every word that escapes his lips. After the problem is solved and his teacup is empty, Miki takes leave with a nod and returns to his office near the entrance of the courtyard. I continue studying until the Tattersall gang begins to fill the hall for dinner.

  Dinner is served at seven sharp. Miki always joins us several minutes late. I watch him from the corner of my eye, but Miki seems not to notice. Much before the dinner company breaks up, Miki slips out of the dining hall without a glance in my direction. Why is he so agonizingly distant?

  But I know I will see him later. He will be waiting for me in his office, as he does every evening, to walk me home along Main Street, the entire length of our rural town.

  I am the only one in my family who eats dinner at the Tattersall. My brother Bubi is away all week. Since the beginning of the school year, Bubi has been living in Bratislava, where he is enrolled in a preparatory course for the “matura,” graduation from the gymnasium. It is a course designed for students who missed out on graduation because of the war. Before the war Bubi studied
in Budapest, the Hungarian capital. But now that our area is once again part of Czechoslovakia and an unfriendly border separates us from Hungary, Bubi cannot return to his old school.

  Mommy appears at the Tattersall occasionally only to socialize, not to eat. She is once again her old finicky self: She is unable to swallow food cooked by someone other than herself. She visualizes unwashed hands, unscrubbed vegetables, dirty utensils.

  What a remarkable recovery Mommy has made! I cannot believe she is the same person who not so long ago made me swallow the repulsive, smelly mush doled out in Auschwitz. Mother would tease me when I convulsed with nausea at the sight of the bits of wood, slivers of glass, human hair, and even animal fur in the foul contents of the battered bowl. “Eat it, girls,” she would cheerfully exhort us all. “Where else could you get such delicacy? Gourmet cooking, only in Auschwitz!” She would then put a spoonful into her mouth and swallow it. She would do this so we would follow her example and learn to consume the unimaginably revolting rubbish, and survive. Day after day she pleaded, threatened, and intimidated until we understood that no matter how putrid, how repulsive, how incredibly foul, it had to be swallowed, in order to live. Until starvation accomplished miracles. The mush was no longer smelly and repulsive; no longer was it difficult to swallow. We gulped it down with voracity, and in time we missed the solid bits that made the mess more substantial.

  Once, several months after our return, I attempted to eat an unpeeled raw potato. A potato in the camps was synonymous with a dream. “Why haven’t we ever eaten potatoes raw?” I had asked my mother one bitterly cold morning in the concentration camp when she’d managed to barter a bit of fabric she’d ripped off the bottom of her dress for a small, half-frozen potato. “It’s so tasty. It must be sweeter than an apple.” Now I scrubbed the potato and bit into it expectantly. It tasted starchy and cloying, and I was compelled to spit it out. How could my perceptions have been so totally overwhelmed by hunger? I know now what hunger can do, and I find the memory very frightening.

  Back in her own home, Mommy is once again haunted by the specter of dirt. To my great consternation she succeeded in talking the Tattersall leadership into giving us raw foodstuffs in the place of meals, so she can prepare our food with her own well-scrubbed hands and utensils. I, however, have been reluctant to forego the fraternity of the Tattersall for the sake of fully guaranteed hygiene at home. So Mother and I worked out a compromise. I eat lunch at home with Mommy, join the gang in the Tattersall for the afternoon, and stay on for dinner.

  Mommy is busy with her work as a seamstress. During the war, after the Hungarian authorities confiscated my father’s business, Mother employed her sewing skills to help support the family. Now she is making dresses for the Russian soldier girls in exchange for supplies: a few eggs, a bag of flour, a bowl of sugar, a live chicken, a bar of soap, even glass for windowpanes. We have no money with which to buy these things. And even those who have money find it hard to obtain supplies: most stores are closed, or stripped of merchandise.

  Shortly after our arrival in our barren home, Bubi came up with a lightbulb for the empty socket in our kitchen ceiling, and we delighted in the miracle of light. When Mommy asked him where he obtained it, he related how he saw a lamp on a night table in an abandoned house. Assuming there was a bulb in the lamp, he climbed through a window to find not only a bulb in the lamp but a Russian officer sleeping in the bed. Unperturbed, Bubi proceeded to unscrew the bulb from the lamp inches from the sleeping Russian’s head.

  “Wouldn’t it be great to have light also in the bedroom?” I ask rhetorically, fully aware of the impossibility of my dream. “Then we could read at night while we lie on our straw beds.”

  Half an hour later Bubi appears carrying a bedroom lamp. “Where did you get this?” Mommy asks in amazement.

  “The Russian officer is still sleeping,” my brother answers nonchalantly. “I climbed in and took the lamp from the night table. There are no light sockets in our bedroom. How could my little sister read without a lamp?”

  Mommy is in shock. “My God, Bubi! You could have been killed. The Russian officer could have shot you! Please, don’t do a thing like that again!”

  “Of course not, Mommy,” Bubi promises sheepishly. “We don’t need another lamp.”

  The Russian personnel are well stocked with all kinds of goods. To prevent my brother from making any more hazardous forays for vital provisions, Mother hit on the idea of sewing for barter. She stopped a group of soldier girls on the street and, using me as an interpreter, offered to make “pretty” dresses for them. The very same afternoon a slew of young Russian women came to our house with the most stunning fabrics and ordered all kinds of apparel. I managed to explain that Mommy had no sewing machine. In less than an hour, two male Russian soldiers arrived hauling a battered old sewing machine into the kitchen, and Mommy embarked on a career of making fancy satin dresses, frilly lace blouses, and colorful ruffled skirts.

  Since that day our kitchen has been brimming with barishnas and tovarishes, Russian soldier girls and their male counterparts. While they wait with enthusiasm and good humor for Mommy to put finishing touches on their garments, they sing Russian songs to the accompaniment of harmonicas and balalaikas. I love to practice the Russian I learn at school, and to sing along with these robust, good-natured young women and men. The local people despise the Russians, calling them primitive occupiers. I love them as heroes who helped defeat the Germans.

  So I am not concerned about Mommy being home alone while I spend my afternoons and evenings in the Tattersall, waiting for a few precious moments with Miki.

  Daddy’s Coat

  Šamorín, November 1945

  Winter has arrived early. Frost covers the bare, spindly branches of our acacia tree, and everything shimmers in silvery white. The windowpanes that our Russian friends installed have grown translucent with the intricate white-on-white pattern painted by winter’s artistic brush, and even the interior walls glitter with a crystallike patina. Only the kitchen window and walls are free of a frozen sheen. We cannot afford to heat the rooms. The pile of firewood Mr. Plutzer brought when we arrived must be saved for cooking.

  My habit of racing to school proves an ideal solution for keeping warm. The coat I received in Augsburg has grown threadbare and provides little protection against the ferocious wind. Fortunately, the classrooms are heated, and by the time the first class is halfway over, the chill evaporates from my puffy joints. An American army doctor who examined me after the liberation told me I had arthritis and advised me to keep my limbs dry and warm during the winter.

  I am lucky. I have a coat and sit in a warm classroom several hours every morning. But Mommy and Bubi have no winter coats. Bubi’s rented room in Bratislava is not heated. He warms up at friends’ homes where he does his studying. Mommy warms herself near the kitchen stove.

  “We must find our winter coats,” Mommy declares with determination. “We must get them back.”

  Before deportation, Mommy gave some of our best clothes and valuables to our closest Gentile neighbors for safekeeping. Nightly, during blackout, our Gentile neighbors would open their doors a crack for Mommy to slip in under the cover of darkness, carrying our things. Our Gentile neighbors risked their lives by hiding “Jewish things” in their attics and back rooms. It was an act of true courage and kindness to conceal “Jewish” garments, furs, blankets, embroidered tablecloths, and bedspreads.

  And it was an act of kindness to give our things back to us when we returned. After all, we had disappeared without a trace. More than a year passed without a sign of life from us: Our Gentile neighbors were justified in believing us dead. They were justified in believing we would never return and our things would become theirs.

  When they received news of our arrival, several neighbors hastened to bring back a number of essentials. Others did not volunteer to return any of our things; they feigned ignorance.

  All at once Mommy remembers that she gave her fur-lined
winter coat to Mrs. Fehér, and Daddy’s to Mrs. Patócs for safekeeping.

  “Thank God,” she exclaims. “Now we all will have coats. You can share my coat, and Bubi will have Daddy’s.”

  Mommy and I, a delegation of two, arrive at the gate of the Patócs’s farmhouse to claim Daddy’s fur-lined town coat. Mrs. Patócs is cordial, even friendly, but has difficulty remembering that Mommy gave her “anything at all” for safekeeping. As a matter of fact, she is quite emphatic in her denial. Instead, Mrs. Patócs suggests names of other neighbors who “might harbor a Jewish treasure or two.”

  At the Fehér house, the scene repeats itself with a minor variation. Mrs. Fehér does remember Mommy’s “lovely navy blue coat with the silver fox collar,” but woefully informs us that all our things “were confiscated by those bastards, may Jesus forgive” her language. The “bastards” are the Soviet occupation forces.

  In the severe cold Mommy and I shiver with bitter disappointment in Mrs. Fehér’s doorway.

  “Let’s go to the Kemény house,” Mommy suggests. “I remember that Serena gave them some things for safekeeping. Now that I am much thinner, I will be able to fit into my darling sister’s fur-lined coat.”

  Mommy’s older sister Serena was my favorite aunt. Her brutal separation from Mommy and me on arrival in Auschwitz, when she was sent to the gas chamber and we to work details, is one of my most painful memories.

  Mrs. Kemény does not have any of “dear Lady Serena’s” things. And she does not know who does. She has no idea whom among her neighbors dear Lady Serena trusted with her “precious pieces.”

  “So, your dear sister did not return? Poor Lady Serena.” Mrs. Kemény’s sympathy is heartfelt. “Whatever happened to that dear, gentle soul? We were so close. So close. Dear Jesus, I miss her so.”