by John R Burns
‘Listen to her. Just listen to her,’ David would start joking, ‘And you wonder why we have women banned?’
Leon after school would walk past the tavern, trying to glimpse through the unwashed windows. It was an alien world where things were dangerous, where men could get out of control and finish up fighting each other. As a boy he was fascinated by the place. Uncle David had once come out of his tavern to notice his nephew sitting on a barrel sketching the building.
‘Don’t let your mother or father see you down here,’ he had called across the street before waving, then wiping his hands down the side of his work jacket before going back in.
Leon knew that when he was older he would drink in his uncle’s tavern. Whatever his family might think he would go there to show that he was at last a man who could take a drink with others of the town, Pole or Jew. They all drank there. It was the most popular place in Volnus.
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When he tried the next morning to sit up Leon’s body was stiff and his mouth was so dry he could not swallow.
The man Kas called big Paul was standing in front of him with the boy’s father and another of the Poles. The three just stood there looking down at him.
‘Are you going to get up?’ the boy’s father eventually asked.
With a push against the tree Leon managed to sit up.
‘We could have killed you on the first day,’ Kas’s father went on.
‘We could kill you now,’ the third one added.
‘Do you understand that?’
Leon’s head was throbbing and he was trying to swallow. He had pissed himself in the night and felt his trousers sticking to the inside of his legs.
‘My son reckons you’re not a Yid at all.’
‘Are you?’ big Paul asked in an angrier voice, ‘Or do we have to get a look at your cock to find out?’
‘Yes,’ Leon finally managed, ‘I am.’
‘So we don’t want you here. We don’t want you anywhere.’
‘I....I...won’t...’
‘Won’t what?
‘You won’t fucking do anything,’ came from Kas’s father.
‘Do you understand that?’ the third one went on, ‘You should have stayed in the town with the rest of em.’
‘Brucker,’ Leon muttered.
‘He’s a goner,’ big Paul said to the others, ‘I give him another day.’
The third one called Linski pushed against Leon’s side with his boot so he fell sideways.
‘Just leave it,’ was the last thing said before they went back to their digging.
Later Kas came over when it was still light.
‘They don’t mind me coming over today because they think you’re going to be dead soon.’
‘And.......and what do you think?’
‘I think if you don’t do something or we don’t do something then that’s what is going to happen and that would be really stupid and I don’t think you are, so you need to listen and I need to try and get you something more to eat.
It was as the light was beginning to fade in the forest that the boy’s mother came to speak to Leon.
She stood with arms clasped, the bottom of her skirt covered in soil, her scarf knotted under her chin. She had a wide face with high cheekbones.
‘He says you want to die,’ were her first words, ‘Is that what you want?’
Leon tried to force the energy to answer her but could only manage to look up at her.
‘He is trying to save you I think and yet you do this to him. You make it worse,’ she said before going back to the camp.
In a few minutes she returned with a small sack of softened beans and a mug of water.
‘Here, you drink this and then you eat these. This is not for you, this is for my son. You stop messing with him. I tell you and you listen Yid. He’s doing everything for you and you do nothing. You do what he says. You listen to him and you do it.’
When she had left again Leon chewed on the beans smelling himself, the diarrhoea that had dried in his pants and the piss and then the stink from the rest of his clothes. Feebly he felt the thin beard he had grown and the moustache over his cracked lips. Weakly he traced his ribs through his shirt and then back to his longer hair and the scabs over his cheeks.
‘We got this,’ Kas exclaimed that night, ‘Meat. Ruddy animal,’ as he handed Leon a shred of blooded meat that he immediately ripped with his teeth, ‘the traps are working. I went with some of the men. We got a fox and a stupid squirrel and two rat looking things.’
Leon’s gums ached as he tried to soften the meat in his mouth, looking at the boy’s eager features.
‘So all we need now,’ Kas continued, ‘is for me and you to dig you a hole, you. I call you you and I don’t know what you’re called except I could call you Jew.’
‘No,’ Leon said as he tried to swallow shreds of the raw meat.
‘Well what do I call you then?’
‘Leon.’
‘Leeeeon. What kind of a name is that? Sounds like a girl’s. I think I’d rather call you Jew than that. Leon. No, hasn’t got it really.’
‘Leon.’
‘Alright, Leon. We have to dig a hole, not for you dead, but for you hiding, a hole big enough for you to live in for the next however long. For Leon, a home, not that I think you will be much help.’
When he had swallowed the last of the meat he held onto the tree and tried to stand up.
‘And where the hell are you going?’ the boy asked.
‘Up,’ Leon said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I want to stand up.’
Kas held onto his arm and said, ‘You stink, do you know that, worse than me. You absolutely stink.’
‘I know.’
Kas told him to hold onto the tree as he went off for another mug of water.
‘Here. It tastes alright. You can have as much as you like and when you’ve finished we’ll use the mug to start on a hole right here. No, maybe further from the tree to get away from some of its roots. See how quick I’m learning.’
‘You can’t....can’t do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because....because it’s...it’s too much.’
‘No it isn’t. I’ve been helping with three or four already. We’re nearly done. We have a camp. Miserable place but still, we can’t be choosey and you being a Jew certainly can’t be choosey. I’m offering so don’t refuse. Well, you’re in no state to do anything. I’m going to do what I like. But if I manage you’d better bloody use it. Do you hear?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.
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Every day the men would go out to set new traps and the women would be searching for autumn berries. Once big Paul with Radek, who was Kas’s father and the Pole called Linski, went off to try and make contact with the nearest village. On their second such trip they came back with two rifles and some food and clothing.
‘I’ve brought you this,’ said Kas, dragging a winter coat behind him.
‘What do you think?’ was his question as he held it up in front of Leon, ‘It’s for you, to stop you freezing to death.’
For a moment Leon thought of his friend Benjamin as he looked at the Polish army coat.
‘Come on. Let’s join up. We might be only Jews. We’ll be heroes. Come on. What do you say? Because I’m going, whatever happens,’ had been Benjamin’s enthusiastic words.
The coat was thick and trailed down to his boots and it had huge shoulders, but at least it was warm and buttoned right up to his chin. He wondered about the soldier who had once worn it and what had happened to him.
The next day he and Kas worked on widening the shelter they had been digging. Finally when it was finished and Leon tried it out he was immediately aware of all the other creatures trying to share the same space. The
shelter was alive with different insects, beetles, worms. They fell onto his face, crawled over his hands, got inside his Polish army coat. One night he had been awoken by something dropping straight into his mouth. Tangled around him was an intricate network of roots like thin white veins of another, larger body.
Now the nights were getting colder he knew he had to get used to his shelter. It was the only way he would survive. He had washed himself and his clothes in the nearby stream, sat wrapped in the army coat waiting for the rest of his things to dry on a branch in the sunlight.
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‘Father would never go to Palestine. He’s not a Zionist,’ Hella said.
She and her brother were having what had become one of their regular discussions. It was when Leon had started the next stage of his education that his sister had decided to take him more seriously. Up till then she had tended to ignore him as only a child. But now things were different.
They were in his room one night after their mother and father had gone to bed.
‘And he’s certainly not religious.’
‘He’s never set foot in a synagogue as far as I know.’
Leon had smiled then at his sister sounding so experienced.
Her face was thinning out. For months she would go on a diet and then fall back into eating far too much. At the moment she was in control, a time when she always seemed a little easier about things. This meant not as many moods, although she could still get upset about what was happening across the Polish border.
‘I just know once the Germans start that things will be bad,’ she had said to Leon many times over the recent months.
‘Well they’d better not. I have my plans and they don’t include any war with the Germans.’
‘Leon the great artist living in Paris.’
‘The Polish Picasso, the Jewish Cezanne. Why not? I want to go there and paint everything to do with my memories of Volnus, to show people how amazing anywhere can be if it is seen in the right way.’
‘And how is father supposed to afford your trip to Paris?’ Hella asked.
‘That’s a minor detail.’
She looked at him then, her hazel eyes showing her concern for him.
‘I want everything to be alright.’
He smiled again before pushing back the hair from her face, ‘It will be sister. It’s in the stars. Our destiny is there, you the great teacher, me the great artist.’
‘I’m...I’m anxious Leon, just anxious.’
‘I know.’
‘It just feels bad. Every time I listen to the radio or read a newspaper it’s all about the German threat, about Hitler and the speeches he makes, about how he hates the Jews.’
‘Everybody says they hate the Jews. They know it’s what people want to hear. The Poles are just as bad.’
‘Mother and father don’t talk about it.’
‘That’s because they’re as worried as you,’ Leon told her.
‘How do you know?’
‘If they’re not talking they’re bothered. Uncle David says silence means the worst is happening.’
‘I’ll have to go to bed. I have so much to read for the exams,’ Hella mentioned as she got up.
‘We’re all still here Hella,’ Leon said then, ‘It’ll work itself out.’
‘I hope so,’ she sighed.
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It was the early morning when Radek came over to talk.
‘So this is your hole,’ was the first thing he said.
Leon struggled to stand up. He was always scared when any of the Poles sounded interested.
‘Kas helped me build it. He is better at it than me. He knows what he’s doing.’
‘Yes, my son seems to think that’s the best way to spend his time unless you’ve promised him something I don’t know about.’
‘I think Kas makes his own decisions.’
‘He’s a twelve year old boy.’
‘No. He’s somebody hiding with his family from the Germans.’
‘And what do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m somebody hiding without any family.’
Radek looked at Leon’s long matted hair and filthy face that was drawn in with hunger. The Polish army coat hung off him like a long cloak. He was hunched forward as if even standing was an effort.
‘Nobody asked you to be here,’ he finally said.
‘Nobody wants to be here. I know I’m supposed to be lucky. It’s just that I don’t feel like that, lucky to have survived so far after what happened back in Volnus. I’m not certain it happened. I’m just told that the Jews were killed. I hope it isn’t true. I hope that my mother and father and sister are still alive. Nobody knows for sure.’
‘That Brucker, the German officer, that’s what he was there for, to round up all the Jews and anybody he thought might know about those who had gone off into the forest like us lot. As far as we know nobody said a thing. They couldn’t because none of them knew where we were.’
‘They could have lied to save themselves,’ Leon said.
‘I suppose that’s what a Jew would do.’
‘I hope they did.’
‘Not a chance. They were wiped out, the lot of them. That Brucker would have made sure of that. It seems he was chosen for a reason. The bastard never flinched I hear, not once. Any way I’m here to tell you that if you want food you’re going to have to find it yourself.’
‘I know that already.’
‘You know nothing,’ Radek muttered back, ‘If you don’t think you’re lucky you’re even more stupid than I thought,’ were his last words before he trudged off back to the others.
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In the night memories were at their worst. He would repeatedly see Polyna, see her beautiful features with their sad eyes and mouth that curved slightly into her rounded cheeks. He had loved her from the beginning and yet had never once spoken to her. She had no idea about what he had felt for her. His feelings had been across a distance, a silence. It was the worst experience he had ever had, to love and yet never express it, to want to tell somebody and hope that they might in time feel the same. Now he would never know. Polyna had been butchered and he had seen it happen, the nightmare in all his thoughts, the one he tried so hard to block and always failed, especially at night when he was too uncomfortable to sleep, lying there with the wet earth almost touching his face.
‘She’s a gentile Leon, a gentile for hell’s sake.’
He could hear Benjamin after he had told him, his friend getting angry at the very idea of any Jew liking a Polish girl, knowing how dangerous such an idea was.
‘You’re mad, absolutely mad!’
‘I want to know her name. I want you to find out who she is.’
‘No.’
‘Benjamin, you have to.’
‘So where the hell did you see her?’
‘On Minski Street, she was with two other girls. I was coming home from school and they were walking over the other side of the street. I’ve never seen them before. And she....she was just....I just couldn’t stop watching her. I stopped, turned round and started following them. My heart started racing. I felt sick. My throat nearly closed up. Benjamin she is unbelievably beautiful. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, here, in Volnus, just walking down the street.’
‘But she must be a gentile, probably one of the new girls working in the bakery. They’ve taken on a load of new workers ever since they moved the bakery into its new building on Grison Street.’
‘I don’t care what she does, just find out who she is.’
‘And then what?’ was Benjamin’s troubled question.
‘I...I don’t know.’
‘This is Volnus Leon, remember. They would kill you if they ever found you with one of theirs. You know that. Us Jews just don’t even think about it. You’re supposed to be
smart.’
‘Not about her.’
‘So it seems.’
‘Not ever about her.’
CHAPTER 10
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The first frost came in October. Every night got colder. The first to die in the group was one of the youngest children followed a week later by a woman who had been ill ever since they had left Volnus. In the mornings the fir branches were silvered and shining as gradually the earth drew the cold further into the shelters. Now all of the group were quieter. There was little energy to talk.
Every day was the search for food, men going off in different directions for days at a time. Sometimes it was discussed whether to try another village and take what they could. Leon could feel the group’s growing desperation. Even Kas was succumbing to the general atmosphere. Now he was complaining all the time about one illness or another, sore throats, a fever, aching limbs, bad teeth. His usual rush of words when he came over to Leon’s shelter was now reduced to a dribble. The boy was suffering like all the rest. He still did all he could to help, bringing Leon food whenever he could, widening his shelter to make it more comfortable, finding bits of clothing to keep him warmer. And with all this Leon’s need of him had grown into a deepening friendship. Kas was always there. However much he might be suffering he would come over many times a day. He was fascinated by everything to do with the Jews. He had never talked to one before, had only seen some when his family had come into Volnus on market day.
‘You don’t look like them,’ he would say.
‘That’s because I’m not an orthodox Jew,’ Leon would explain.
‘And what might that be?’
‘Ones who read the Torah, which is our religious book. They go to the synagogue and are educated in a cheder, which is a school to teach Jewish boys all about their history and how to read the Torah.’
‘Sounds complicated to me,’ said Kas, pulling a face.
‘It is. But our family are not like that, so we don’t have the hair curls or wear all the black clothes. We don’t believe in any Jewish God, only that the Jews are a separate race who have to look after each other.’