Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  Two days later, when Jerzy went back, as he had to, he saw a bunch of carnations laid on the bloodstained stones, where no one was walking, and a candle, flickering in the open air, but still burning.

  Anna had found a job, through a cousin of Natalia’s. He ran a chain of dry cleaners, two in Praga, three in the centre of Warsaw, another two in the suburbs. Anna was taken on in the one in Wola, a long tram ride away from their new home. The dry cleaners was in a street near the leafy cemetery in Powzki where Mama was buried – when they first got married, she and Tata had lived not far away. Tata used to bring Anna and Jerzy here, to visit her grave, but that was a long time ago, before Teresa, before the war.

  Before the war, the dry-cleaning chain had flourished. Now, with the shortage of chemicals, it was barely possible to keep even two open. Anna took in the coats, suits and dresses from the few people who could still afford such a luxury – she and most of their friends were used, now, to rubbing out stains with tea leaves, mending and remaking everything they owned. It wasn’t an enjoyable job, taking in the clothes and sorting them for the central cleaning depot, but it was hardly arduous, and it gave her the document she needed, to prove she was working. To get there, however, she had to take a tram through the ghetto.

  When the tram stopped, and stood, humming, at the gate, the passengers travelling through were watched as they got on by armed guards. On her first journey, Anna was issued with a yellow pass; when she was inside she saw that the pass for the Jews was different – yellow, but with a blue diagonal stripe. The tram began to move again. It was early morning, still very cold. Anna had had nothing for breakfast except a slice of the wretched black bread with Wiktoria’s beetroot jam – she had come and visited soon after they arrived, and shaken her head. Hungry, still half-asleep, Anna leaned against the grimy glass and peered out. Within moments, hunger and fatigue were forgotten: now she saw things which, when she had first walked along Senatorska, and explored the empty apartment, she had not dared to allow herself to imagine. She gripped the handrail with sweating palms, feeling a wave of nausea.

  A woman in rags, her hair matted, her skin blue-grey, was pacing up and down a gutter, holding a baby. She was wailing, but no one on the street took any notice: the pavements were filled with slowly moving skeletons. Grey-faced men and women stood staring from doorways of the tenement buildings, scratching at lice in an endless, abstracted rhythm; just before the tram gathered speed Anna caught a glimpse through an open door of a dark room filled with crouching figures. Down a side street she saw two children picking listlessly through a rubbish heap. There were stalls, if you could call them that – women squatting beside a heap of old shoes, or clothes, or shawls. Later, Anna found out that the shawls were for wrapping bodies for burial. Just beyond the track a man was propped up against the wall, his head lolling forward. Two other men appeared, slowly pushing a handcart piled high with – dear God, with naked bodies. They stopped beside him, and as the tram moved past, Anna, heaving, turned to see them bend down, strip off his clothes and with great difficulty heave the body on to the cart. They trundled it down the street and stopped again.

  The tram moved out of the ghetto, and into the quiet streets of Powazki, where it stopped to let off a couple of passengers and take on a few more. Anna stared at the people around her. They were quiet, but they seemed unperturbed, as ordinary as any group of people going to work, some reading the paper, others talking. Then a woman touched her arm.

  ‘Is this your first trip through?’ she asked quietly.

  Anna nodded, her head swimming. ‘Yes.’

  The woman patted her. ‘It is terrible, I know. But you will get used to it.’

  ‘What?’ Anna looked at her incredulously.

  The woman shrugged. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘But surely –’

  ‘Sssh.’ The woman lowered her eyes and Anna, suddenly aware of being watched, turned to see a German officer, at the front of the tram, observing her carefully. She gazed down at the floor, at all the patched and cobbled shoes of the passengers. Then the tram stopped, and she got off quickly, and walked through the streets to the shop without looking back.

  Late in the afternoon, before going home, she went to the cemetery; walking along the paths under the trees, she searched for her mother’s grave, listening to the intermittent chirruping of the birds as they settled for the evening. It was cold, but as the spring sun sank diffusely into the pale sky she felt able to breathe properly for the first time in months. No one was here, no one was watching; there was only the fading fight, and space, and the ordered rows of the graves.

  She came at last to her mother’s: it took quite a long time to find it again, after those long-ago visits. Now, above the tangled mass of weeds and brambles which had grown, she re-read the brief inscription: To the memory of my beloved wife, Ewa Kurowska, 1898–1932. Like many of the others, the headstone bore a small ceramic oval, with a sepia-printed photograph: as they had done in the picture on Tata’s desk, the soft dark eyes she could barely remember looked beyond her, into the dusk. Anna sank down. I am still here, she said inside herself. Shall I tell you what I saw today?

  She made the journey morning and evening for three months. After a time, as the woman on the tram had predicted, she grew accustomed to such sights, or learned not to look. One incident remained with her always.

  Returning from Powazki one June evening, she closed her eyes as they entered the ghetto gate, and listened to the numb silence fall on the other passengers, as it usually did: she had probably been wrong to assume, the first time, that they were undisturbed. Everyone knew that some people had made fortunes, early on, by bribing the gate police and then smuggling in food, sold at extortionate prices; many knew, or guessed, that the underground was secretly supplying what they could manage, that some familes were risking or had lost their lives, to hide the few Jews who escaped, or who had been in hiding outside since the wall first went up. Between exploitation and sacrifice most felt impotent and afraid; they shuddered, and concentrated on their own survival.

  Anna felt the tram slow down, as it did not infrequently: the track was badly in need of repair. But then she heard a banging, and a shout, and opened her eyes to see people craning towards the doors. There was a mutter from near her: ‘Someone’s on the side,’ and she too craned her neck and saw, clinging to a lever, a young Jew so thin and grey that it seemed impossible he could hold on. There was another shout, in German: ‘Stop! Stop the tram!’ and as it juddered to a halt the police officer jumped down from the doors right at the front and ran round to the side. Anna cried out involuntarily: ‘No! No!’ Then she clamped her hand over her mouth and watched as he drew his pistol from his belt. He did not fire. Instead, he cracked the pistol violently across the boy’s face – once, twice – and he fell immediately, long thin hands covering his mouth in agony, blood streaming between his fingers, rolling and writhing beside the tramlines. The officer watched briefly, in disgust, then climbed back on. The doors closed.

  ‘Drive on!’ And the tram gathered speed and left him lying there.

  In July, Anna began to hear of new rumours going round when she travelled through the ghetto: all Jews living in Warsaw were to be ‘transported to the east’.

  ‘What does that mean?’ she asked Jerzy. It was a hot, airless evening; they were standing on the balcony after supper, looking down into the well of the courtyard, where no breeze ever came.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Not exactly. Andrzej seems to think something dreadful is going to happen.’

  ‘What? What sort of thing?’

  ‘Sssh! I’ve told you, I don’t know.’

  Behind them, in the kitchen, Teresa was washing the dishes. They heard the clatter stop for a moment, and fell silent.

  ‘Are you two all right out there?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Somewhere across the courtyard a child who couldn’t sleep began to cry; they could hear the mother, snapping irritably: everyone
’s nerves were on edge. Anna leaned on the balcony rail, and wondered how it could be possible to have kept a suspicion secret for so long, even to have felt it for so long. Surely, in three years of occupation, Teresa would have been discovered by now? She hadn’t been, so it must mean they were safe. But Anna didn’t feel safe, ever.

  A couple of days later, she arrived at the gate of the ghetto to find it closed, the street lined with police.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked a woman hurrying past with a shopping basket.

  The woman shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me.’

  Anna took a deep breath, and approached one of the guards.

  ‘Are there no trams any more?’

  ‘All transport through the ghetto has been halted,’ he said flatly.

  ‘But – how am I going to get to work?’

  ‘You will have to make other arrangements,’ he said, and turned away.

  Anna stood for a moment, her heart racing. If she couldn’t get to work, she would lose her job, but she had to have a job, she had to have her papers in order … The thought of being stopped by a patrol, demanding to see them, was so terrifying that whatever might be going on behind the walls was for the moment forgotten: she stood looking up and down the street, wondering which way to go. Very well – if she couldn’t go through, she’d go round. She began to walk quickly, breathing fast. It took her over an hour to get to the dry cleaners. When she told the manager what had happened, he was sympathetic.

  ‘Don’t worry, you just come when you can.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She began to sort through piles of clothes, packing them in baskets to go to the central depot. Surely there must be something better she could do than this? Perhaps the problem with traveling was a good thing, in its way – it would force her to try to find something else. I am sixteen, she thought·bitterly – I should be at the liceum, starting my studies for duz a matura, preparing for medical school! If I can’t do that, then perhaps at least I could get a hospital job – I’ll talk to Wiktoria, there must be people who knew Tata who could help.

  That night, she woke suddenly, shaken as if from a nightmare, but she hadn’t been dreaming, she couldn’t remember anything … Why was she awake?

  ‘Anna?’ Across the tiny room Jerzy was sitting bolt upright in bed.

  ‘Yes. What’s happened?’

  ‘Listen!’

  She listened. There was a distant burst of gunfire. Machine guns? It must be – she remembered it from the seige.

  ‘Oh, my God …’

  They scrambled out of bed, and ran to the window.

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  ‘The ghetto,’ said Jerzy. ‘Where else?’

  Silence. Then another burst of firing, and shouts. Anna put her hands over her ears. Behind them, the door was quickly opened, and they swung round. Teresa came in in her nightdress, her face white.

  ‘You are awake – I just came to see.’

  She came over, and put her arm round Anna.

  ‘It’s coming from the ghetto, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what we thought.’ Anna put her own arm round Teresa’s thin waist, and felt her trembling. ‘Are you – are you all right?’

  Teresa nodded. ‘Yes, yes.’

  The three of them stood, listening. After a time, the shooting and shouting died down, and they went uneasily back to bed.

  Within days, Jerzy was coming home full of stories. The shooting had been just a preliminary, something to terrify the Jews into submission. Now, every day they were being herded in groups out of the ghetto, marched to a square near Stawki Street, a few blocks; away. The street adjoined a railway siding, and the cobbled square – Umschlag Platz, the Germans had renamed it – was full of buda. Sometimes the Jews were driven off in the buda, sometimes they were crammed into railway cattle trucks. Everyone was talking about a camp called Treblinka, some sixty miles away.

  ‘Who is everyone?’ Teresa asked. ‘How do you know all this?’ Jerzy looked away. ‘I just do. How do you think?’

  The meeting was to be held at seven, two hours before curfew, in apartment a couple of streets away: Andrzej had told him the number. He didn’t tell Teresa or Anna where he was going, although he knew they worried every time he went out in the evening, because he knew that they would worry even more. Anyway, he didn’t know himself exactly what was going to happen.

  As he came out of the courtyard and into the cold unlit street it began to rain; he pulled down his cap, turned up the collar of the burka and began to run, his boots letting in water even before he’d reached the corner. Everything was shuttered and boarded, there was almost no one about; it felt as if he were running through a ghost town, or a film set. The autumn rain was falling fast now; he stopped in a doorway and watched it bounce off the cobbles; in a first-floor apartment, opposite, there was a chink of light in the shutters, and there the rain shone as it fell. He ran on, past the peeling notices on the walls, turning into Plac·Z elazna Brama, Iron Gate Square. In the daytime, the square was full of market stalls; now it was empty, the gate leading into the Saxon Gardens closed. Walking over the cobbles, breathing hard, he felt vulnerable and exposed in all this space, and ducked between a row of stalls left standing, and waited, listening to the rain patter on the canvas tops. He could hear voices, but they were Polish voices, just a few people going home across the square; he came out, casually, and walked as slowly as he dared until he was in the right street, and began to search for the address.

  The apartment house was almost halfway down; by the time he had reached it he felt as if a dozen German eyes were watching. He entered the open doorway, and leaned back against the wall, sweating. A curving flight of broad stone stairs led inwards, upwards; he peered out from the shadows, quickly, right and left along the wet street. If someone had been following, he must know, now – he thought of leading them to the meeting place, of them creeping silently up the stairs behind him, watching him being let in, then suddenly hammering on the door, bursting inside …

  He could see no one. No patrol, no watchers. He turned and climbed the dark stairs, lit by a single lamp on each landing, and reached the second floor, the third door along. Knock twice only, Andrzej had said: he rapped softly, waited. The door was opened, just a crack. He saw Andrzej’s large fair face, in a grin.

  ‘Well done.’

  He led him down the hall into a large cold drawing room, lit by a single desk lamp. Three people were sitting in their overcoats: two boys in their late teens, like him and Andrzej, and an older man, tall and balding, who reminded him a little of Tata. Jerzy took off his cap and held it, awkwardly, waiting to be spoken to.

  ‘Dobry wieczór – good evening.’ The tall man rose, and shook his hand. ‘I am the Captain of this unit.’ He gestured to the two boys, who also got up, nodding: he did not introduce them by name. ‘This one you know, of course,’ he said with a flicker of a smile, indicating Andrzej.

  ‘Yes, sir. We were at gimnazium together – and in the same Scout troop.’ He cleared his throat, suddenly very nervous.

  ‘Sit down, please.’

  The Captain was nodding towards a straight-backed chair, and Jerzy walked over to it, self-conscious, feeling the others watch him closely. Could they tell he was afraid? They wouldn’t want a scaredy-cat, would they? He sat down, his cap held on his lap, stiffly, to stop himself twisting it. It was one thing to think about joining, to listen to Andrzej’s hints and stories and feel left out and useless. It was one thing to read the Biuletyn, scanning it quickly, and passing it on. But to be a proper member, to have to obey orders no matter what, perhaps to have documents in the apartment, and be responsible for distributing them … to creep out at night on assignments … I’m scared either way, he thought: scared he’ll take me, and scared he won’t.

  ‘So – you want to join us.’

  His hands sweated into the cloth of his cap. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Perhaps you could tell me a little about yourself, your family?’
>
  ‘My father –’ My father looked like you. ‘Before the occupation, my father was a doctor, in Praga. He was posted east in 1939, then taken prisoner by the Russians. We had a card, once, from a camp called Kozielsk, but we’ve heard nothing for two years, not even since the amnesty.’

  The Captain was nodding. ‘There are plenty in the same position. How are you managing? Your mother –’

  ‘My mother died when we were small,’ Jerzy said quickly. ‘My stepmother and my aunt have … have a few contacts on the black market. We were all moved out of Praga in April – I have a sister who is working in a dry cleaners now, but I think she wants to do something else, if possible …’ He was talking too fast, he was gabbling. ‘She has been attending komplety, I’ve been working, odd jobs, mostly with Andrzej …’ Across the room, Andrzej’s head was lowered; he was gazing at the floor, letting him get on with it. He swallowed. ‘We’ve sold coal, paraffin. I tried making some soap, once …’

  ‘I see. And do you read our bulletins?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You are very careful about doing so?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Was that right? Short respectful answers – it sounded military, didn’t it?

  ‘You know that we are renamed now. The AK. Armia Krajowa. The Home Army – pledged to help the Allies. We are in constant contact with the exiled Government.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The Captain was silent for a moment; his fingers drummed on the table. Then he looked Jerzy straight in the eye.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eighteen, sir.’

  ‘Hmm. You don’t look it. And are you absolutely to be trusted?’

  Jerzy swallowed again. ‘I … I hope so, sir.’

  ‘Hoping is not enough. You are aware that every task we undertake, no matter how small, is done in extreme danger? That if you are caught, and betray a single secret, you will put the lives of the whole unit at risk? You could put your family at risk – your stepmother, your sister, your aunt. You understand?’