Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

  Łódź ghetto. March ’42

  A month has passed, I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any paper to write on. Now in our little room we also have Uncle Eduard, goodness knows how he came to end up with us. I’ve found a job in a carpenter’s shop. There’s always someone who wants a bedhead made into a table, or a shutter into a bench. Mamma didn’t go to the factory to begin with. But after starving for two weeks she made up her mind. Father is in bed with a fever. We hope it isn’t typhus. Lots of illnesses go around in the ghetto. Uncle Eduard hasn’t found any work. Four of us living in one small room is hell. I sleep on the floor on a shabby little mattress so short my legs stick out, Papà and Mamma make the best of a rickety sofa with exposed springs and Uncle Eduard spends the night on a camp bed. We do have a cooker but often there’s no gas. Worse still, there’s nothing to cook. The potatoes only lasted a few days. Now we’re waiting for Mamma’s first monthly pay packet which will give us thirty złotys to buy a little meat and some sugar for our tea. We still have half a jar of sugar left. The only thing they didn’t steal from Papà’s suitcase on the train. I earn five złotys a day. Butter costs twelve złotys, meat forty-five złotys a kilo. Today the temperature sank to seven degrees below zero. I curse myself for giving away my warmest sweater for two kilos of potatoes. I won’t say I wish you were here with me. That would be blasphemy. But sometimes at night I dream I’m in Florence in our tree, filling my stomach with cherries. Ciao, Emanuele.

  9

  Uncle Eduard hides the pieces of bread Mamma and I steal under the cover on his camp bed. Mutti doesn’t complain, but says the war will be over in a few months. We just have to stick it out. Every morning at six she walks to the textile and uniform factory on Drewnowska Street. She puts on her apron and starts her sewing machine. Mamma is showing a courage I never expected of her. But Papà seems desperate. He can’t get over the fact he ever left Rifredi. He spends half his time in bed. Uncle Eduard was deported on the same train as us and we never knew. He wanders about the ghetto picking up cigarette-ends. But he says there are no longer many to find. People have no money for cigarettes. What most upsets me is losing my books. I used to have more than a hundred. Most got left behind in the house at Schulerstrasse in Vienna. I only managed to keep the three or four I threw into my suitcase at the last minute. Picked up at random. Now I read them again and again. Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pinocchio and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

  Łódź ghetto. March ’42

  Dear Amara. Today my father came home with three passports bought from forgers. He used the last of our hidden money to buy them. Mamma screamed at him that he was mad. He’s convinced we’ll be able to use them to get out of the ghetto and go to America. But everyone knows all passports have been cancelled and no one is allowed to leave the Łódź ghetto for any reason. With or without a passport. Uncle Eduard is ‘going off his head’ as Mamma puts it. He collects fag-ends in the city and buries them under a loose floorboard. The other day he killed a mouse and said: you lot can eat this. I’ll stick to pork.’ But there aren’t any pigs round here. The only little pig in this house is made of pottery and has a slot in its back for coins but it’s empty now and its gentle sugary pink face looks over at the window with a disheartened expression. ‘He’s been driven mad by fear,’ says my father, teasing him. But Uncle Eduard doesn’t smile. ‘We’ll all end up dead, all of us dead!’ he keeps shouting as he collects crumbs of bread round the house, hiding them in his pockets. The other day my mother sniffed the air and asked, ‘What’s this stink?’ Then she discovered it was half a turnip rotting under Uncle Eduard’s camp bed and giving off an unbearable stench.

  It’s snowing. It’s cold. I sleep in my coat. Mamma looks like a whale, wearing all the clothes, both summer and winter ones, that she brought with her, three pairs of thick socks, and a now almost hairless fox muff that she wears on one arm even while cooking. The butter’s finished. Lard costs ten złotys and we can’t afford it. My father has run out of tobacco for his pipe. He’s started smoking birch leaves which makes a nice smell in the house. But it also makes him cough like a consumptive.

  Yesterday I saw two SS men beating up a boy who had no yellow star on his coat collar. The boy showed them that he had his star sewn in full view on the lapel of his jacket, which he was wearing under his coat. But they went on hitting his head just the same. The boy was holding his head in his hands. One ear began spurting blood which stained the snow all round. A very thin and decrepit dog came from God knows where and began licking the blood up as though it were redcurrant syrup.

  Amara tries to imagine Emanuele in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto in Łódź, with the snow falling. She has always loved snow. It softens and refines houses and countryside. But what can it have been like in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto?

  Łódź. March ’42

  I’ve found some paper. I swapped a silk handkerchief of Mamma’s for an exercise book. Writing to you is like writing to the whole world. But I’ve no money for a stamp. And in any case I don’t know if the post will take letters sent abroad. When we first came to the ghetto letters did go off. And sometimes they arrived, even if half blocked out. But not now, no longer. We’re shut in, closed in a trap. But I’m writing to you all the same. One day you’ll read the letters I’m writing in this exercise book. Or at least I hope so. The ghetto’s getting more and more crowded. More Jews are arriving, some from Holland, some from Hungary. Bringing with them the odd bundle, or suitcases tied with string. Many have no shoes, just hungry eyes. An organisation here looks after them. Gives them shelter and something to eat. But only for the first few days, after that they have to fend for themselves, find some workshop to employ them so they can earn the złotys they need to buy a little bread and margarine or barley coffee and sugar which today costs forty złotys a kilo. Yesterday my mother gave her gold wedding ring for three pig’s feet and two kilos of potatoes. When Papà heard they are deporting those without work, he too started looking for something to do. Yesterday nothing, but today he helped carry bricks for a bricklayer with frostbitten hands. Luckily he still has his pigskin gloves and carried bricks all day for seven złotys.

  I’ve lost my job at the carpenter’s. There are too many of you, said the manager. There are fifteen of us boys and he can’t afford to pay us all. All the same, he let us have a portion of soup at midday. I don’t want to think my family have been stupid. I don’t want to think that. But I do think it sometimes, even if I don’t want to. The stupid patriotic idea of returning to Nazi Vienna when everyone else was trying to get away from it. Why am I not with you now? I see our cherry tree again, I remember our games, I can feel your hand again in mine. The thought of you distracts me and helps to keep me going.

  Łódź. April ’42

  Dear Amara. I’m writing to you from the shelter in the cellar of our block. There are hundreds of us crushed in here. Someone is singing a mournful dirge. A child is crying. Shots can be heard from far away. The good thing about a crowd is that it creates heat. It’s warmer here than in the flat. I’m writing by the wavering smoky light of an oil lamp. The pencil is still working. My letter is in this exercise book. It’ll be easier to write your name and your address on it and stuff it into a hole in the wall I recently discovered. Maybe it had something to do with the chimney of a stove that’s no longer here. It had been stopped up with a piece of wood and whitewashed over. But I managed to get it open with a penknife. I’ll leave my memories there for you, if we don’t manage to get out alive. Otherwise, if the war ends in a few months, I’ll bring it to you myself. How wonderful it would be to hug you again! An epidemic of typhus has broken out in the ghetto. There’s no medicine and people are dying of fever. It’s a miracle none of us is ill. Mother says all you need is to keep a pad soaked in vinegar between your lips. I’m not going to be able to stand the stink of vinegar much longer. Yesterday my father found some eggs for sale at a fair price. He brought them for my mother as a present, very proud of himself. How sm
all and light they are! she cried. When she opened them she found nothing inside. Someone had pierced them with a needle and sucked out the contents and then sold them like this, empty. If you looked closely you could see the holes made by the needle, stopped up with transparent wax. My mother wept in despair. Those eggs had been bought with my złotys. Three days’ work gone up in smoke.

  Łódź. April ’42

  Dear Amara. I’ve started working at the carpenter’s again. Every day more lorries arrive and pull up panting in the middle of the street. The SS grab whoever they see and make them queue up with others. Then they make a selection. They push the old, the ill and the infirm into the lorry and take them away. They let the others go, the young ones, especially if they’re in work. It’s said those in the lorries are taken to a camp and killed by a blow to the head after being forced to dig a ditch for their own grave. No one knows for sure because no one has ever come back from these expeditions. The story came from a Jewish cook who heard the SS talking about it while they were having a meal after an ‘action’.

  Yesterday I saw an old man refuse to get into a lorry with the others, so they tied his hands and feet and attached him with a hook to the lorry which set off at high speed with his body bumping and rolling behind. It made a strange noise like the rattling of an empty box. You know, I can’t dream any more. What d’you think it means when you can’t dream any more? I wake in the morning with my tongue burning in my mouth. I’m hungry, that’s all I can think about. The bricklayer my father worked for has been taken away too. His hands were covered with sores. He kept them wrapped in two filthy rags. He was about thirty years old, so he told me, but he looked fifty. He had grown old suddenly, his neck wrinkled and his hands covered with ulcers. The Nazis grabbed him and pulled him towards a lorry. He shouted that he could still work, that his hands were only bleeding temporarily, that in a couple of days he’d be able to start working with bricks again, but they took no notice and lifted him bodily onto the lorry. I was watching from the window. I couldn’t feel the compassion I would have expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing at all. Perhaps this is the beginning of the great change. I am in the process of being transformed into a human being made of stone. Stone eyes, a stone brain, a stone tongue and even a stone heart. Even my love for you is becoming cold and mineral. Another stone in the little cemetery of memory. I must say a prayer.

  How can that stone child have survived in that ghetto? Would he have had the strength to survive? Was turning to stone a way of holding on? And what if, after all, he had made it? A boy has his life before him. And it isn’t easy to break a stone.

  Łódź

  Dear Amara, one day the ghetto fills with people and the next it’s empty again. They arrive in their thousands, some in good shape, from towns and cities newly conquered by the Führer. Many, already tried and tested, thin and with their stomachs full of parasites, come from other ghettoes. But they soon disappear. The SS bring their lorries every day, collect two or three hundred people and take them away. No more is heard of them. So when people hear the engines of the lorries making their way along the streets, they start running away. But the SS push their way into the houses and grab the children and the old. A monster who specially loves children. Do you remember when we used to read Tom Thumb? This is the great ogre, greedy for little people. In order to keep in condition he needs to swallow at least a hundred a day. And to make sure they’ll be good about being eaten, and not shout or wriggle too much, he strokes their heads and gives them big friendly smiles and talks to them in a reassuring voice: now take off your little hats, no need for shelter, it’s warm here even though there’s snow outside; it’s nice and warm in here. No, take off your little coats, you don’t need them. There, that’s right. Take off your shoes too and come to me. And the moment they get close, whoomph! he crams them into his mouth five at a time. And if at this point they start kicking what does he do? He crushes their bones with his teeth and swallows them at a single gulp. Little children are so tender!

  I am a little stone man now, watching petrified from my window. My mother fusses behind me, but she doesn’t bother me. Except now and then when I beg her not to move so much because she’s causing a cold draught. She says Uncle Eduard was right, they’re going to kill us all. Or we’ll starve to death, like our neighbour Chaim Bobrowski who knew how to play the violin like a king. His feet and face swelled up till he could hardly walk. But he dragged himself to work just the same, his shoes full of holes, so as not to miss his soup ration. Then one morning he fell to the ground. No one stopped. No one picked him up. When someone dies, they die. We know the gravediggers will come in the evening and take the body to the cemetery. Every day my father risks his life trying to get a pass. He runs this way and that with the forged passports in his underclothes trying to find a way out. A mouse in a cage. I know we’ll never reach America as he hopes. He paid so much for those passports but they’ll end up like the eggs, empty and useless, fit only to throw away. But he’s obstinate. Now all he has left is a single valuable earring of my mother’s, hidden inside a pillowcase. An earring with precious stones with which he hopes to bribe someone to let us through, maybe at night, to make our way to the station. Two mornings ago they took Uncle Eduard away. He went out to look for a piece of coal. It was early in the morning and nobody seemed to be about. He had often done this. He thought he was safe because no lorries could be heard anywhere near. But there was one round the corner with its engine switched off and as soon as they saw him they told him to get in. He tried to run away but two bursts of gunfire landed at his feet. He wasn’t hit but he stopped and climbed into the lorry with a heavy heart. Since then we’ve heard nothing. Stefan who lives in the corner house told us about it.

  10

  Kraków. Returning absent-mindedly to the Hotel Wawel, Amara doesn’t see the partly rolled carpet, trips and crashes to the floor. A young porter with red hair runs to her rescue. ‘Are you all right? Sorry about the carpet, we were just moving it out of the way.’ Then she hears him shouting at a boy in trousers that are too big for him bargaining over other rolled-up carpets piled on a hoist.

  ‘There’s a letter for you,’ says the porter after checking that she hasn’t broken anything or needs medical attention. He hands her a buff envelope with the key to her room.

  My dear Saviour … Amara reads and rereads again but nothing makes any sense. Saviour from what? The letter is indeed addressed to her, but she doesn’t recognise the sender’s name: who’s Hans Wilkowsky? She reads on: I have such a vivid memory of your ears. Why particularly your ears, who knows. They seemed to me like two unbelievably graceful pink shells. Perhaps I remember them because I was trying so hard to make sure the profound and sincere sound of my voice would reach you through them.

  Now she remembers: the train to Prague. They had stopped at the frontier. The man with gazelles on his jumper. The guarantee she signed in such a hurry. The sound of the locomotive in the night. And next to him the other man with fur armbands, the mother with the young baby, and the smell of smoked herrings and birchbark.

  I trusted you and you trusted me. You saved me from two days of bureaucratic torture. I reached Poznan´ safe and sound. I found my daughter Agnes had just given birth to a beautiful boy who will be called Hans like me. The child looks like my mother. I told you in the train my mother Hanna was Hungarian and Jewish, and died in the Treblinka concentration camp. My father is half Austrian and half Polish. I’m not sure the two young people did the right thing in coming together as a couple but, I assure you, they were really beautiful: a girl with honey-coloured hair, very long legs and a crystal-clear soprano voice, and a tall dark young man with shining eyes and a playful and well-formed mind. Tadeusz and Hanna. I have here a photograph of my parents at Graz. She is wearing a long light-coloured skirt and a pair of lace-up sandals; he has a jacket with wide sleeves and a pair of shoes with spats. They met in the first years of the twentieth century. My father was studying music at the famous con
servatory at Vác. He wanted to be an orchestral conductor. My mother had studied singing in Budapest and had won a scholarship to Vác to follow a course at the conservatory which was reputed to have produced great singers. One evening they met and walked beside the Danube under a huge moon that made their eyes shine and silhouetted them against the long white riverbank. You may ask how I know these details. I answer that my father never stopped talking about it. It was a little piece of family mythology that made him intensely proud.

  They spent all that night chattering. And in the morning, when the sun had warmed them, they decided to take a dip in the river naked. They never even kissed. Just lay close together in the sun without their clothes, then left each other, each going home. But they began writing to each other and after two years of lively correspondence they decided to get married.

  They went to live in Graz, in a little apartment without water or lighting, because he had not yet found work as a conductor and she was singing in the theatre for next to nothing, just to get known. They were so deeply in love they could not bring themselves to separate for a moment. ‘I was afraid of meeting you again after so long apart. We had grown used to that and I was afraid our separated bodies would not understand each other. But they understood each other perfectly and we have never felt any need to be unfaithful.’ This was what my mother used to tell me when I was a child and too young to understand. It is only now I understand what their love was.