Clara's War (10 page)

‘For our little writer,' he said. ‘I know you'll be a famous writer some day, Clarutchka, I just beg that you only say nice things about me.' Mr Beck knew that I was keeping a diary and had no book to write in. He also gave me a blue pencil, which he had sharpened to a fine point with his penknife.

Mr Beck could see how pleased I was. I was still so shy in his presence that I am sure my thanks didn't correspond with how deeply I was feeling. All my life, I had honoured my father above all men. I grew, I felt safe and happy, in both the shadow and light of his life. He and Mama and the rest of my family were enough. I thought Beck had barely noticed me, if at all, and somehow he had found for me what would become my salvation. No longer would our lives be written in the margins of discarded books. Whatever happened to us would be properly recorded on lined paper with a sharp blue pencil in a book with hard cardboard covers. Whatever his past and whatever his shortcomings, Beck was emerging from the circumscription and diminution of gossip and prejudice and becoming someone in my life who knew me. None of us was thinking
beyond the war or beyond living just another day, but Beck knew that what was happening to us was important. Our lives–our stories, and his–had meaning. Even if all we had to fight with were a composition book and a blue pencil.

There were more gifts. He had dried lilies for Klara Patrontasch, which he presented to her with a smile that was embarrassed and off kilter, as if he was trying not to smile or didn't know if he was giving too much away with it. This was Poland in 1942 and a married man didn't give flowers to an unmarried woman, widowed or not, unless she was on her deathbed or already in a coffin.

Then came a knock on the door that silenced the conversation, brought the terror of the outside inside and sent us all through the bedroom and down through the hatch, one after the other. We listened to who it might be. It wasn't the SS, the Gestapo or the Blue Coats (the Ukrainian police, who were vicious in their persecution of Jews). It was carol-singers, friends of the Becks who knocked on the door wanting to sing for them and wanting the Becks to join them in a song. Of course the Becks joined the carol-singers, and we listened to their voices in darkness. I sang along in my head until I fell asleep.

 

Christmas Day was spent downstairs as the Becks entertained Beck's brother and sister-in-law, and his nephew Wladek. There was nothing threatening to us upstairs, so I wasn't listening to the conversation. There was laughter, loud talking, lots of toasts, many more than at our party last night. I was writing in my diary. And then words that caught all our attention. Whatever we were doing we stopped. Potatoes dropped from hands. Books were put down. Knives were placed gently on our makeshift wooden counter. The men, however, kept puffing on their cigarettes and the smoke swirled around the bunker with
every turn of the head and floated up towards the ceiling to meet the words coming from Beck's voice, a voice that was at once quiet and conspiratorial, proud and defiant, a voice slurred, which meant that Beck was extremely drunk. We all knew that voice and now it was calling for more vodka. We heard Julia's steps across the floor and the clink of the bottle on the glasses and then Beck started…

‘Have I got a Christmas story for you!'

His brother was laughing. ‘I hope it's not a long one.'

Beck's voice dropped to an almost whisper that we could still just about hear. I could imagine him leaning in to talk to his brother whom I had never met. I could imagine the looks on the faces of Ala and Julia, looks that I knew would be as terrified as ours. But of course, they wouldn't interrupt Beck or change the subject. They would sit there as we were sitting, dumbstruck by Beck's folly.

‘You know the Schwarzes, the Melmans, the Patrontasches?'

‘Of course I know them. Where the hell have I been taking my grain to be pressed? We're in Melmans' house, for Christ's sake. They're nice people. All of them. For Jews. What? Are you drunker than usual?'

Then there was a long silence. I was hoping Beck had changed his mind and wouldn't continue. That he would get another drink or go off on a tangent and tell another story about us.

Then his brother was speaking again, his voice loud, his tone incredulous, ‘Downstairs? Are you crazy? Are you out of your blasted mind?

I knew that Beck must have smiled and gestured with his head to the bunker underneath the floor.

‘You worry too much. You're going to kill yourself with worry. What was I supposed to do? Give them to the damn Krauts?'

‘But we're
Volksdeutsche
!'

‘Are we? You know how the Nazis treat us. They wouldn't piss on us if we were on fire. We're just a step above the Slavs–not even–a half step. You think I'm going to let them come in and tell me what to do, to kill the Jews? Merry Christmas, fellow Nazis, and for your present we're hiring Ukrainian dogs to kill you if you take one step out of line!'

‘You put all of us in danger for them? Your wife? Your daughter?'

‘Whose idea do you think it was? My wife! Julia! She's got more courage than the both of us!'

‘You don't owe them a damn thing.'

Now Beck's voice was rising, rising loud enough to travel through our walls to the neighbours'. Thank God it was freezing and the windows were closed.

‘I don't? I don't?'

Finally, finally, Julia said, ‘Please, Valentin, not so loud.'

His voice dropped, but not the intensity. ‘In '39 when the god-damned Soviets shipped us out to the colony in Bazalia, and Bandera sent in his thugs and started burning us out, we were lucky to escape with our lives. Then the damn Soviets were going to ship us to Siberia for abandoning the colony, and you know who buys me out?'

Now his voice was starting to rise again.

‘You, my beloved brother? You, my fellow
Volksdeutscher
? NO! IT WAS THE JEW MELMAN DOWNSTAIRS WHO BRIBED THE FUCKING COMMUNISTS! I ABANDON THEM, I ABANDON MY HONOUR! I HATED JEWS MY WHOLE LIFE. I STILL DO. WHY? HOW THE HELL SHOULD I KNOW? But it was a Jew saved my worthless-piece-of-shit life, my sacred wife and my beloved daughter…Come over here, Ala, sit by your father. I want my Ala to look at her
father and see a man, not a coward. They can kill me ten times over…'

Then there was silence and some words we couldn't hear and then his brother and his wife were gone.

My father whispered, ‘Oh my God…we're dead…'

My poor mother tried to counter what everyone was feeling. Optimistically she said, ‘He wouldn't betray his own brother.'

Then Mrs Melman was whispering: ‘His wife's another story. She thinks she's descended from Polish aristocracy.' Mrs Melman was the pessimist to Mama's optimist and Mama was not intimidated.

‘She just says that to make herself feel better…A hunchback always feels better when he sees that the next fellow's hump is bigger.'

Well, what can we do if Mr Beck trusts them? We have to trust them too. We have no choice in the matter.

12 January to February 1943

P
anic spread through the bunker. We would have to leave. If Lewicki knew, it would be only a matter of time before the Nazis or their cohorts the Ukrainians would be at the door. It would probably be the latter, since Lewicki was Ukrainian himself. We knew that they would kill us and the Becks. We couldn't put their lives at risk.

There was no time to be upset that we had been betrayed by a neighbour whose children had been my classmates. At great risk, Hermann had been able to sneak out and warn us. Uncle Josek, in his role as a policeman, would escort Mama, Mania and me to the ghetto, while Papa and Mr Melman would hide in
the factory bunker and plan another hiding place for us. The others would go to the ghetto with the Patrontasches later.

We left early in the morning before the light of day. Uncle Josek told us that if we were to be stopped we should say we were a work detail. I hadn't been outside or smelled fresh air for 43 days. It was 20 degrees below zero. Mama, Mania and I marched in terrified silence behind my uncle Josek, our eyes downcast. We had all thought that when we came out of the bunker we would emerge to freedom and our old lives. But now, on this freezing cold morning, there were only Nazis and Ukrainian policemen on patrol. The streets in my neighbourhood were bereft of even one Jewish soul.

In the past, walking these same streets to the ghetto, I might see Uchka, Zygush, Zosia, Rela, Dudio, Josek or a hundred other friends or relatives. We would stop off at one of the stores in the colonnaded plaza for a sweet, or buy some chestnuts roasting on a coal fire that would fill my nose with the smell of wonderful smoke mixed with fresh winter air. There was no smell of roasting chestnuts that morning. On a normal day we would be holding hands, the three of us, or walking arm in arm, and laughing and gossiping. Women would come up to Mama asking where she got the material or design for our latest dresses. There were socials and fundraisers to be planned; food kitchens for the poor to be organized; clothing drives, the sewing school. All the things that required Salka the Cossack's attention were organized on our walks to town. A walk was not a walk, but a social event. But that morning we walked as prisoners, not allowed the luxury of conversation or the simple gift of holding a mother's hand. Luckily the Nazis out on the streets, with their fresh faces, were laughing and not paying any attention to us. They looked like conquerors without a care in the world. We were
invisible in our shabby clothes and stooped demeanour. I was thankful for that.

Josek led us past the 12-metre-high fortified stone walls of the cathedral and monastery. The border to the ghetto was at the next corner, where the wall made a left turn and continued up Turiniecka Street. Up ahead were the barbed-wire gates of the ghetto. I looked up only for a second and saw the guards before I looked back down at the dirty snow under my feet. Josek smiled and nodded at the guards as he walked us inside. We were nothing. Beasts of burden driven from one place to another.

The ghetto encompassed most of the Jewish section of town. It was like a nightmare. Walking corpses swollen from hunger intermingled with the fatted calves, sitting in the cafés in their best clothes, eating and drinking with money made from the black market or worse. There was laughter. I could see it through the windows, but it was grotesque, as grotesque as their faces. I wasn't judging; I didn't get that far in my reaction. It was fear, plain and simple, and everything around me was at the periphery of that fear. How I wanted to get back to the bunker, where, as frightened as I was, I felt safer, less exposed, away from the eyes of blue-coated policemen and fresh-faced German boys and my former Polish friends, not knowing who would sell us out for a few litres of vodka.

 

Two days after arriving at Uchka's, we got word that it had been a false alarm. We could return to the bunker. Mama decided to stay behind for a while to sell some more of our things. Little did we know that all the silk underwear Mama used to buy over afternoon cups of tea and slip into the chest of drawers before Papa came home would one day save our lives. I don't know how many kilograms of potatoes we got for one silk slip, but it was substantial.

Josek led us back out of the ghetto. We now had the additional fear that someone might see us go into the house. The houses in the neighbourhood were close together. In the spring and summer, they were hidden from each other by the large shady trees that lined the street. But now, in the dead of winter, the houses were exposed as every branch on every tree. I felt there were as many eyes as windows on the street and they were all looking out at us. I looked for any movement of any curtain, but couldn't see anything. Beck, who was waiting for us, opened the door and we were safe and inside. The others were already there. Mania and I collapsed from exhaustion.

I woke up early the next morning. It might sound crazy, but sometimes early in the morning was the only time I had to myself. Eleven people in a bunker, even when they were not saying a word to each other, could be very distracting. It was easier to write while the others were asleep, without their curious looks. No one asked what I was writing, though I'm sure everyone wondered whether I was being too ‘personal', or recording, for some unknown reader, the pettiness that sometimes overwhelmed our desire to get along.

Mania was up next and she looked over to me, crawled over and gave me a kiss, and then there was a kiss for Papa. We were hoping that Mama would come back from the ghetto today.

We heard a knock on the trapdoor and Mr Patrontasch crawled over the bodies to open it. As always it went up on its hinges with the satisfied sigh of a door on a Rolls Royce. Mr Beck looked down at us from above, his face framed by the hatch, like an austere and foreboding portrait. Klara looked up, thinking he might be calling for her. Mr Beck had got into the habit of asking beautiful Klara to join him upstairs when he was alone. But I knew he wouldn't this morning because I could hear Julia and Ala's feet moving across the floor upstairs.

We waited for the news of the day. If he was in a good mood, he'd join us with a bottle of vodka which he had ‘liberated' from the German alcohol depot along with cigarettes and an armful of newspapers. But he didn't come down. His hands were empty. He said simply, ‘Mr Schwarz, a word please.'

My father moved to the opening. I had never heard this tone from Beck before. Never before had he selected just one person to talk to. There could only be one reason why he would ask to speak with my father alone. Something must have happened to Mama. Mr Beck said, ‘Please, Mr Schwarz, please feel free to stand.' The bunker ceiling was barely four feet tall and no one could stand up, not even Mrs Melman, not unless they had their legs in the hole Mr Patrontasch had dug. My father stretched his long frame up through the opening of the hatch. His pants were much too big for him now and were held up only by the suspenders.

Mania grabbed my hand. She was as frightened as I was. How many thoughts raced through my mind in the few seconds my father and Mr Beck spoke. Mama was dead, captured, deported, shot, in jail, dying. As with the many moments of panic we had, this one, knowing it involved the fate of Mama, set my heart racing. Other mothers were killed. Other fathers, brothers, sisters, but they weren't mine and so this selfish guilty gratitude that my family was intact while others were destroyed was, I felt, coming to an end.

I strained to hear what Mr Beck had to say, but there was so much coughing and shuffling that I couldn't hear myself think, much less what Beck was saying to my father. How much noise a bunch of people can make without saying a word! The inhalation and exhalation of air sounded like the roar of wind. It might have been my own breathing.

My father bent down back into the bunker and Mr Beck closed the hatch. Papa crawled over towards us. For a moment
he forgot where he was and stood up, smashing his head against the wooden beams and floor above. His head began to bleed but he didn't notice.

In that matter-of-fact tone he would get when compelled to tell us the worst of news, Papa told us that Uchka had contracted typhus, and that Mama had decided to stay there to take care of her and the children.

Everyone stopped whatever they were doing. Not a potato was being peeled, not a glass of water drunk. The first cigarettes of the day remained unlit in mouths, and even Mrs Melman put down her precious jug.

Mania broke the silence. ‘Typhus! Typhus! When will she be back? Papa, you can't leave her there. Mama will die!'

My father simply said, ‘Mr Beck is afraid of what would happen if typhus got into the house.' The typhus-bearing louse was the Nazi's ally. They had marched hand in hand into Zolkiew. We had all become experts on typhus. There wasn't a louse alive that wasn't our enemy. We examined each other constantly, checking our hair, our bedding and even the lining of our clothing, where they liked to lay their eggs.

These words were a death sentence for Mama. Mania refused to accept them. ‘Just like that, Papa? Just like that? NO!'

Perhaps I was just selfish and stupid to want Mama back so desperately. I begged my father: ‘We have to get her back. Papa. Papa!' I was afraid to stop talking because as long as Mania and I argued and begged and pleaded there was at least some shred of hope. We knew that there would be an end, an acceptance, a resignation, once we ran out of words.

My father was already resigned as he told us: ‘I begged. I offered Mr Beck money. I offered him our business, everything we had, but he had to say no.'

Mama's death sentence meant life for everyone else in the
bunker and I saw the relief on their faces, especially Mrs Melman's. A part of me hated her; a part of me understood her. Panic and fear for her life and that of little Igo. As much as they loved Mama, who would be willing, knowing the consequences, to bring a woman infected with typhus into this 10-by 14-metre, dank, unsanitary place? The rules for mutual survival set us at one another's throats, if not physically, at least in our hearts. And yet we were condemned to live with each other for who knows how long. If, God forbid, anything should happen to Mama, Mrs Melman would have to look at me every day we shared this dirt bunker.

I heard my voice telling my father that I could get her back. I heard my father asking me how, and then I was telling my father that I would talk to Beck. Surely this was not me speaking? I had never really argued with my father about anything. Never contradicted him. Never raised my voice to him. Honour thy father and thy mother, and I did. Yet, how could I face a life without Mama? I knew in my bones that a part of me would die if she died; that if I had any will or courage at all I would need it now. And if I didn't, my life was nothing. I could see the questioning in his eyes and hear the hollowness in my voice. I didn't know what I could ever say to Mr Beck to change his mind and allow typhus in this house.

 

A day or so later, Mr Beck had gone out and I sat at the kitchen table with Julia. She didn't say anything because we both knew she had no voice in the matter at all. It was Beck and Beck alone I needed to talk to. I guzzled a glass of water and Julia was ready with a pitcher to give me a refill. It was a ritual. If for any reason I had to come upstairs, Julia was there with fresh water and rolls. I can't tell you how delicious that water was and how guilty I felt for drinking it.

My mind was racing and Julia was walking across the kitchen and back again with a roll. I tore the roll apart with my fingers and was putting part of it in a napkin to bring down to Igo and Klarunia. Not even Mama's impending death could stop me getting scraps for the children. The Nazis could be breaking through the door and I would be still gathering crumbs for the little ones. It was a simple reflex. Julia had seen me and brought over what I thought at first were more rolls, but turned out to be some potato and
kasha knishes
. Her dark brown eyes were full of compassion. ‘It's typhus, Clarutchka. Mr Beck is afraid and it's all on his shoulders. But as far as he knows, Salka doesn't have it yet.' I looked at her. I wanted her to tell me that she would talk to Mr Beck and make it okay for Mama to come home to us, but she didn't. She kissed me on the head and walked out of the room. I was watching the clock, knowing that I had to get to the ghetto before it got too late. Ala's head appeared in the doorway. With a finger to her lips, she gestured for me to come into her room. I wrapped up the
knishes
and followed her.

Ala whispered, ‘I'll take you.'

I couldn't believe what she was saying. I could barely manage a response. ‘Your father won't let her back into the house.'

Ala's voice was as light as if she were inviting me to see a film at the Eagle. ‘You know he can't say no to me. And if we bring her back then he'll let her in and nobody downstairs can say a word to him.'

I can't imagine the expression on my face as Ala kept on talking. ‘We'll be two girls out for a good time.' In Zolkiew? In Nazi-infested Zolkiew? Was she crazy? And she was laughing. ‘What could possibly be dangerous about that?'

I lived in fear of Mr Beck's approval and disapproval. We all did in the bunker. We would never argue with him, or even disagree.

Ala was the only one of us who had no fear of Mr Beck. Ever since she had been old enough to walk, her father had taken her with him whenever he went to Lvov or Warsaw or Krakow. He taught her how to haggle in the markets and how to play cards. They spent evenings together laughing and dancing to music on the radio. They never walked anywhere without her arm through his, and if anyone could defy Beck, it was Ala.

I don't know how I convinced my father. I was expecting an argument, but it was a measure of both his desperation and his sense of defeat that he simply nodded his head. My father, who had laid
tefilli
all his life and could argue with the rabbi for hours about the most obscure applications of the Talmud, had nothing to say. Perhaps he believed in miracles still. He was sending his daughter out of her safe hiding place into a world where her discovery might mean not only her death, but death to everyone in the bunker. I was surprised as well that there were no objections from the other families. Had we all become crazy? My capture would bring perhaps even more danger than Mama's return. I didn't look for the logic in their silence. I was simply thankful. I was going into a world with signs plastered on every wall and every building that harbouring Jews was
verboten
and punishable by death; that being in the streets past curfew was punishable by death; that going into the ghetto was punishable by death; that aiding and abetting Jews in any way was punishable by death. On our last trip to the ghetto with Josek just a few days ago, I had seen all these signs composed in that brutal Gothic typeface that was as hateful to me as the swastika on the Nazi flag. There was no time for my father to reason out his decision.