by Nora Sarel
I noticed earlier that you were reading the novel Exodus. That’s why I approached you.
In what language is your Exodus written? I see it’s in Polish.
You were moved when you read it, right? I saw you wipe your tears away.
I don’t know if my story will even interest you. It isn’t like Exodus. There are no acts of great heroism. I’ve never shared it, ever. My story is terribly, terribly sad. So perhaps I should stop? I can see that you’re an emotional person.
No, it’s impossible this way. The noise here is terrible, it’s distracting me. The lobby of the Radisson Blue Hotel isn’t a good place to tell horror stories, and it’s starting to fill up now for dinner. It’s hard to have a conversation here. Let’s move to a quieter spot where we can hear each other.
Look how beautiful Krakow is now, from the window. A city awash in the last light of dusk. During the war, we stopped noticing its beauty. We saw only fear.
Mom stayed home most of the time; she said that there was no point in going out because there were so many places she was forbidden to go, and if she went out anyway, she always wore her coat that had a white band with a picture of a blue Star of David sewn onto one of her sleeves, like on Papa’s coat. Mom explained to me that all Jews were required to wear this patch to show that they were Jewish. I don’t think I asked questions, because I probably didn’t understand yet what Jews were.
At night, before I went to sleep, my mother would sing songs in Yiddish to me, as she always did. You do know what Yiddish is, right? This is how she sang to me:
A yiddishe mame,
Zi makht dokh zis di gantse velt;
A yiddishe mame,
Azoy vi biter ven zi felt…
…In vaser un fayer,
Volt zi gelofn far ir kind…
Dos zi gevis di greste zind…
To this day, I don’t speak Yiddish. I understand only a little, but I do know that it’s a song about a Jewish mother who does only good for everyone and walks through fire and water to save her children. That song infused me with great confidence. Whenever my mother sang it to me, I believed that she would never abandon me, and that she would always protect me. Although I didn’t understand a single word, my mother’s body language while she sang and stroked my head had more of an impact on me than the lyrics. The sound of her voice was also soothing and I would fall asleep, safe and sound.
I went back to spending most of my time on the windowsill, watching without being seen. Although the courtyard was free of children and games, many people passed through, some wearing patches on their arms, while others went without. I also saw soldiers and police officers, hats on their heads, their shoes shiny, their batons hanging on a chain from their belt, and their pistols in holsters. I loved looking at everybody. Sometimes my mother was afraid I’d see things that children shouldn’t see, and she would take me down from my perch.
A number of times, my mother went shopping and left me at home for hours on end, and our neighbor Enya, came around with Mark, her son, who was much older than me, by five years perhaps. Then, we would both want to climb onto the sill, but his mother always told us we mustn’t look too much without first knowing what we’d see there.
I should have answered that it was more interesting when we didn’t know beforehand, because if you know, what’s interesting about it? But I didn’t answer. After all, I was so young. Sometimes, we’d go to Mark’s house and then his mother would go out shopping.
After the day of the big, frightening explosions, there were no more cookies at home, and we also ran out of fruit and candy. We almost never ate meat anymore, perhaps just once a week. I don’t remember vegetables, but I do remember that there were potatoes and onions. Whenever I was hungry and asked for something to eat, I was always told to wait a short while. Now I realize that Mom was buying a little more time each day, trying not to use up too much food. My mother was always a wonderful cook, but in those days, she didn’t have enough ingredients to cook with, so she would fry onion on a steaming hotplate until the onion became a sweet spread, like jelly, and I would spread it on a thin slice of bread. It was delicious. I still remember how the onion tasted.
Do you know that when you fry onion, it becomes sweet? There is even no need to add sugar.
One cold, sunny day, when the oak tree in our courtyard was once again beginning to adorn itself with a few green leaves, our apartment suddenly filled up with strangers. I think I was three and a half years old by then, and I remember everything. Everything.
“They’ve come to live with us,” my mother told me.
“Where will they sleep?” I asked apprehensively, fearing that these people would soon be invading my life.
“In both your room and the living room. And if that isn’t enough space, then in the bedroom too,” she whispered her answer to me. Her answer, which I could barely hear, shook me like a scream. I felt betrayed, as if things were being done behind my back. Why had nobody told me what was going to happen? How did they not share these changes with me?
It was a really strange day, the kind of day that occurs every few years and that people say will remain etched in their minds forever. On the one hand, the sun was shining brightly and managing to penetrate through all the layers of smog that always covered the city’s skies, and on the other, it was so cold outside it could break glass. Today I know that this all took place in March, the month that is supposedly the end of winter, the beginning of spring, and the weather was typical of that time of year: freezing cold that felt like the middle of December and the sun was blinding as in August. I remember that when I looked at the sky, it seemed to be low, almost touching the ground. And when my mother opened the window “to allow a little fresh air in,” as she used to say every time she pulled the shutter up from the windowsill, the apartment was immediately flooded with strong light and an icy wind.
The front door was ajar and a long procession of people carrying luggage started making their way in through the narrow doorway. They arrived at our home without explanation. They were all wearing dark coats with a patch sewn onto the sleeve that white fabric with the picture of a Star of David. They wore hats and their arms were laden with bundles. I stood with my back against the wall, holding a chair, and I could smell the pungent stench of sweat. I didn’t know these people, yet I realized, with a child’s sensibility, that I had some connection to them. They nodded their hellos, they didn’t even smile, just stole glances through cast down eyes. There were big and small children with them, who walked straight into my bedroom, my castle, uninvited. Unrestrained in any way, they immediately started touching the things that had belonged only to me until that day. And I was still so young. Frightened, I ran to my mother, who was standing in the kitchen doorway, so she could hold me and help me return to my daily routine by the window: to climb onto the chair and then onto the table, and from there to the marble counter by the kitchen sink, until I reached the window that was closer to the ceiling than to the sink. From there, I could peek into the inner courtyard.
The courtyard had been abandoned by the playing children and was overflowing with sadness, the sadness of people who walked slowly and quietly in a long, never-ending line, their eyes glued to the cobblestones, their arms laden with bundles, the heavy coats that they wore dragging along with them across the courtyard.
Today I know that, by pure luck, the building in which we lived was within the ghetto. The ghetto was sealed with a high wall topped with arches of a kind, a wall built right at the end of the bridge over the Vistula River, and we lived at the foot of the bridge, on the south bank of the river. We were fortunate; after the Nazi invasion and the transfer of Jews to the ghettos, we could remain in our apartment while many Jewish families were forced to look for a place to live in the ghetto. Four of those families, including children and grandparents, joined us in our apartment.
There were a lot of people livi
ng in our beautiful apartment. Now that I count, I believe there were nineteen of us in all. Brendel and Amelia, Yayshek and Rochella, and Yanek, a child a little older than I was. He also wanted to peek through the window, like me, but his mother wouldn’t permit him to climb up. She made a kind of mocking gesture, waving her hand dismissively at my mother, as if she weren’t a good enough mother if she allowed her little daughter to look out from so high. Yanek would cry that he also wanted to climb up to the kitchen window, and his mother would distract him and try to lure him away with other things.
I think that because of it, because of that kitchen window, I have such a good memory. And I remember everything because I was always looking out through it. I wanted to know more and more, and if you watch for so long, something is eventually etched in your memory.
That’s how we lived in our apartment with new roommates for about six months, maybe a little longer. Our neighbors also had people living with them, but I don’t know who lived with whom, just as I don’t know how many people lived in each place, and I also don’t know what they did during the day or night, because I never ever saw them again, not even Artek and Mark.
None of the children who lived with us in the apartment attended kindergarten or school, and nobody went out into the yard. The sound of children did not return to the courtyard at any time of day, but I still sat on the sill looking out. At what? At the bench in the far corner, at the people flashing by without noticing me peering out at them, and at the tree that had once again started shedding its jumble of brownish-green and yellow leaves. That’s how it was every day. In the mornings I’d play inside with the children. We played the games the mothers organized, with a different mother responsible for the games each day. After lunch, I climbed onto the windowsill and looked out until dark, when I could no longer see a thing.
We were starting to run out of food at home, the quantity and variety decreasing from day to day. We had no more meat, we no longer saw fruit or vegetables, and we ate barely one egg a week. We had long forgotten candy and I don’t remember missing it, because a person can’t miss something they have no memory of. But I did dream of a cup of warm milk and instead drank only warm, brown water they called “tea”. Sometimes, we were given biscuits with the tea, and then we sat in a large circle and dipped them in, sucking the crumbling biscuits until all the liquid they’d absorbed had entered our mouths.
Once, in the afternoon, my father came into the kitchen and took me down from the sill. He put his hands around my shriveled body like one does with a baby, although I was already three and a half, and we stood together like that by the window, with me in his arms, and looked outside. We could only see the treetop.
“Soon our tree will be completely bare”, he said suddenly, as if intending to tell me a story, but I burst into tears. Perhaps I was upset at the thought of the tree being cold in winter, or by Papa’s surprising embrace. He tried to comfort me and brushed away my tears. Perhaps he was alarmed by my crying because he didn’t understand what it meant, and he promised me that in the spring, our oak tree would grow new leaves.
“That’s the way it is”, he proclaimed. “Every year the leaves fall and new leaves grow in their place, but look my girl and see how beautiful and strong the tree is, even when it’s bare.”
I think I understood what he was trying to say, because I immediately fell silent and because of the fact that in the difficult times that followed, that sentence “Every year, the leaves fall and new leaves grow in their place”, would come to mind and echo inside me, and it was always accompanied by a strong sense of my father’s embrace. He gave me a glimmer of hope, as if he were trying to promise me that our situation would soon change and that we needed to be strong through the difficult times.
That day, another family arrived at our apartment. A family of four. Everyone welcomed the two children, who were older than me, and their parents.
You are wondering why they were received in that way? Through them, we could feel and learn about the world beyond the ghetto. They brought information from the outside world and everyone pounced on them, asking them questions. We were interested in knowing how they’d come there and from where. Suddenly, everybody realized that there was no more room in our home to put them up, no corner for them to have as their own. My mother solved the problem before it arose and asked them to join us in our bedroom. That was the moment I stopped counting how many people were living in our apartment. Maybe I couldn’t count higher than twenty, but if we do the math now, you’ll see that on that day, twenty-three people were living in an apartment that had previously housed only the three of us.
It was starting to become very cramped.
Sometimes my friend Yanek was there, and sometimes he wasn’t, and when he was, he’d read stories to me. I couldn’t read yet, and he could. His mother always told him to read quietly because it disturbed the others, and he would lower his voice slightly for a few minutes and then go back to reading his usual way, pulling faces and making funny gestures. To this day, I can remember the story he read to me from my book, about two neighbors, Pavel and Gabel. It was a hilarious story with a moral, and it wanted to teach children that sometimes you need to concede, and more importantly, to be considerate of each other.
It’s a story that all children in Poland can recite by heart. You most probably know it yourself. No? Then I’ll tell you an abridged version:
Pavel lived on the top floor and Gabel lived in the apartment below. Gabel was constantly making noise and a great disturbance, and when Pavel asked him to keep quiet because he found the noise very disturbing, the impertinent Gabel replied thus: “Everyone does what they want in their own home.” The following day, when Gabel was asleep, he was suddenly awakened by drops of water dripping into his nostrils. Angrily, Gabel jumped out of bed, looked at the ceiling and saw that water was dripping down straight from Pavel’s apartment. Fuming, he went upstairs to his neighbor Pavel, knocked on the door, rang the doorbell, but nobody answered. He looked through the keyhole and what did he see? Pavel sitting there, on the cupboard, holding a fishing rod and trying to fish from the whole room filled with water like a pool.
“Have you lost your mind?” Gabel shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Everyone does what they want in their own home”, was Pavel’s reply.
I loved listening to Yanek reading this story to me, and through it I actually learned how people should behave toward each other in order for so many people to continue living together in one small apartment. The book guided me for many years to come, and I lost it only after the war. I liked Yanek and his stories. Today I believe that his mother was angry that he preferred to spend time with a little girl rather than with boys his own age, as if I were progressing and developing thanks to him, while he was regressing because of me. When his mother went out to get food or something else, Yanek wanted to sit with me on the windowsill, but because he was already quite big, there wasn’t room for us both. So my mother would suggest opening the bedroom window, which was usually kept shut, and looking out at the river. And that’s exactly what we’d do, slowly open the window, just a crack, and peep out through it. Such a beautiful picture was revealed to us there. There were boats sailing on the Vistula, swans swimming alongside, catching the waves that the boats made, becoming one with the current. Two ancient stone bridges crossed the river, adorned by birch trees. It all looked as if it were from another world, quiet and calm, so that for a brief moment we could forget the commotion at home.
When Yanek’s mother wasn’t home, we also played with my dolls, Katie and Anna. You know, those soft fabric dolls with long hair. Katie had black hair and Anna had blonde hair, but they both had the same smell. I can smell their scent as I speak, and often, during the war, I’d close my eyes and take a deep breath to inhale it.
My toys had long been everybody’s toys, and all I had left were those two dolls, which I loved more than anything. I kept
them for myself and Yanek.
If his mother had seen him playing with dolls, she would have been even more upset, because after all, how could her son play with a girl’s toys? So we always hid this fact from her.
In our home, in the room that was once mine, by the bed that was once mine, the bed that Amelia’s grandfather now slept in, lived a man called Leo. He had no children of his own. Whenever he came home, he called me and Yanek to come to his corner. We sat on his mattress by his brown suitcase and he gave each of us a third of a sugar cube. He began the sugar-receiving ceremony with sideways glances to make sure that nobody was watching. Then he’d take the cube out of his jacket pocket and divide it in three with his teeth for me, Yanek, and himself. The three of us sat there sucking the third of a sugar cube, which was slightly wet from Leo’s mouth. One time, while we were sucking on the sugar, Leo told us that he always had a sugar cube in his pocket, which he managed to steal from the sugar factory where he worked, outside the ghetto, on the other side of the river.