Clara's War (4 page)

Once inside, Mama whispered to me, ‘The sheets from Babcia and Dzadzio's bed weren't even dry when they moved in.
The father is NKVD.' Her eyes added, ‘God doesn't even know if he was the one responsible for deporting Dzadzio.'

I had tried to prepare myself for the emptiness of our home without my grandparents. Their presence, voices, and laughter, as well as the smell of Grandma's cooking were things I had lived with every day of my life. Even if they were gone, I had thought that I would at least be able to feel something of them. But now, the door between the two halves of the house, which had never been closed during the day, was shut tight. I shivered at the thought that the NKVD was sleeping in my grandparents' bed.

 

Despite everything, it was a relief to be home. When I met Mr Dupak, with his bland face and thinning blond hair, he had nothing but pleasant smiles for me. And all of us were equally pleasant to him. They were the ideal communist family. They had benefited from the Soviet expansion and were convinced that they were bringing a better life to Zolkiew. Mr Dupak would leave the house in the morning, only to return late at night. His wife kept to herself and our interaction with them was mostly through the kids. The only thing they knew of the war was that their father was powerful and that all the children in town were especially kind to them. Nevertheless we were cautious. Before, we had never given a thought to how loud our voices were. Now, we hardly spoke above a whisper.

In the middle of June 1940, a letter finally arrived from Aunt Rosa. We had been waiting for news for almost two months, but now Mama seemed afraid to open the envelope. The opening lines put the worst of our fears to rest. They had all survived the journey. They were in Kazakhstan, somewhere in the endless desert of Central Asia, much closer to China than to our home. Rosa wrote that there were hardly any signs of the war; the place was remote and timeless. There were still camel caravans that
moved goods from one town market to another. We were all relieved. How protected she must feel by the thousands of kilometres that separated them from the war. She went on to explain that they had just been thrown off the train along with everyone else and been told to find jobs. But there were no jobs. Rosa described how they had been close to starving until Uncle Manek had managed to find a job with an oil-press factory in Aktyubinsk that desperately needed specialists. They moved to the strange city, ready to start a new life. She described how thankful she was that they were together. They had food and shelter and would survive as a family. If only the letter had stopped there.

Mama continued to read and I watched her face grow taut as she came to the following words. Rosa wrote that her son, Wilek, had also found work in a factory. She described how nervous he had been to start his job without suitable overalls. Rosa had promised to buy him a pair so that he would have the proper work clothes for the next day. But in the first hour of his first day on the job, Wilek's belt had got caught in the gears of a huge machine. He had been dragged into the machine's belly, swallowed as if by a beast. Rosa wrote that there hadn't been enough left of her son for a proper burial. He had been all of 19 years old. Since Rosa's family had come to live with us in 1939, I'd thought of Wilek as an older brother. He'd only ever been sweet and protective. Mama mourned for her older sister and her nephew. When she looked at Mania and me, I knew she couldn't help thanking God that it hadn't been one of her daughters.

 

As the summer moved into autumn, I couldn't count all the changes in our lives under this grey regime. The church bells didn't ring. The Eagle stopped showing Hollywood films. The
Polish patriots we had studied before the occupation were now criminals. People were afraid to go to the synagogues, so Papa had to sneak across the street to Mr Melman's house where they now held secret
minyan
. Papa was now an employee. The Russians had taken over the vegetable-oil business our family had owned for five generations. Nobody talked about anything in public. The nuns in the convent up the street all wore long skirts now instead of their brown habits. We had to wear uniforms to school. Any kosher meat still available was delivered in secret. All the newspapers except the communist ones were closed. Mama was buying up woollen socks and underwear like crazy. The bags under Papa's eyes were the darkest shade of purple I had ever seen. Mama closed the curtains before we had
shabbat
dinner.

I pretended to be a good young communist girl. I was afraid all the time. But the biggest change of all was in Mama. She practically disappeared from our lives. Almost every day she took the bus into Lvov and went to the office of every commissar, party member, every politician she could find, searching for news of Dzadzio. She would come home sometimes late at night, sometimes not for days, but always with the weight of defeat and exhaustion on her shoulders. They took Papa's money, made promises and then didn't even let Mama back in their offices. I knew she loved her father. I only wished Dzadzio, wherever he was, could see just how much.

I also knew that Papa and Mama were doing their best to protect us not only from physical harm, but also from worry. But their words were small comfort in the face of the Nazis' lack of opposition in Europe. Two years ago, it would never even have occurred to me to wonder about what war felt like. War was something in Tolstoy, not in my life. Nobody could have convinced me that despite the occasional pogrom, our little
town with its five thousand Jews tucked away in Galicia wasn't the best of all possible worlds. For 700 years we had been batted back and forth between a half a dozen countries and empires that were like cats playing with a ball of yarn. We changed nationalities like, in better times, Mama had changed dresses. Before I had always held the bookish belief that everything would work out in the future because it always had in the past, but now I had become somebody different, with different thoughts and different hopes. Even the small things in which I used to take so much pleasure, like reading or going to school, didn't make the empty feeling in my stomach go away. Despite the spoonfuls of optimism my parents fed to my sister and me, my mind was spinning. How could I read a novel when Hans Frank, the Gauleiter (Governor General) of Poland, had declared, ‘I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.' What had become of my grandfather? What was going to become of us? Surely our green knapsacks wouldn't be enough to save us? We were stuck between two massively powerful nations, both of which hated us. The Russians hated us because we didn't adhere to their communist principles, and the Nazis hated us because of our religion.

Before the war, when the grown-ups spoke in hushed whispers, it was usually about a present for one of us, or some gossip. I never really cared much about either. Now I needed to hear every word, even if it brought demons into my sleep. The anxiety of not knowing was worse. I collected news, facts, anything that I knew I could rely on to be true.

In the past year, France had been invaded, along with Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. Italy and Japan joined Germany in forming the Axis Powers. Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had become German allies. And close to a million Jews had been sealed off in ghettos in Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin.
The Allies had yet to make a single attack on the Nazis, who preened with their invincibility. Every apartment, every room in town, was filling up by the day with refugees from the Nazis. The horror stories were passed like the plague. Even my parents' whispers couldn't keep them from me.

The only thing that kept me sane was going to school. The churches had large libraries, as did some of the schools. There were also private libraries. Almost every day I made the rounds. The former nuns and Mr Appel, the old Jewish man who ran the private libraries, expected me and saved books they thought I might like. This was the year of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens; and of course the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Gogol. I picked books by their length and their weight. The longer and heavier the better. More and more, I tried to shut out the world with literature.

In the spring of 1941, almost a year to the day she was deported, I received a letter from my friend Sonia Maresky, in which she described the brutal and fierce cold, and the backbreaking work her family had to do in the coal mines. She wrote that the workers usually died within a year. The Jewish Community had got together to obtain permission to ship them matzos for Pesach. She ended the letter, ‘When this war is over only the
korhany,
the mass graves, will be a witness that there once were a people here.'

In early May, Mama somehow finally found Commissar Wanda Vashilevski, who was very high up in the NKVD. That Mama even dared to contact the NKVD spoke of her desperation about her father. She told us that Commissar Vashilevski seemed like a decent woman. The commissar said to Mama: ‘I'm sorry for you. I'm not going to lie. You should know that only the official who ordered his arrest can release your father. But I will try. Only if he gets back will you know if I have succeeded.'
We had had a little hope, but Papa had warned that we couldn't be certain if Vashilevski was honest or a thief.

In the middle of June, Pan Ratusinski knocked on our door. He was a good-natured Polish peasant who had once worked for Papa. He had just been released from the Brigitka prison in Lvov, where he had been brought after trying to escape the Soviets and go to Romania. He told us that the prisoners had been kept in cells in alphabetical order. Just a few cells down from him was my grandfather. Not only was Dzadzio alive, but he was only 35 kilometres away. We prayed and thanked God for his mercy. It was a miracle. Mama brought Pan inside and made him tell her every detail. Pan Ratusinski told us that Dzadzio had been brought to the prison from a concentration camp in the east. We learned he was thin but in decent health, and with any hope, he might soon be released. Mama embraced Pan like a long-lost brother and put money in every one of his pockets before he left. Comrade Vashilevski, with the big or greedy heart, had come through.

The next morning, Mama took the first bus to Lvov and went to thank her and to try to speed up his release from there. Comrade Vashilevski did some checking and told Mama that there had been a mix-up with some of the paperwork, but that everything was fine. It would only be a matter of a few more days. Even though our patience was a frayed thread, we knew we could stand a few more days. Mama spent the rest of the day getting ready for Dzadzio's homecoming, thankful to have something happy to prepare for, for a change. She cleaned the little apartment in our basement for him, washed and ironed his clothes, and bartered for a chicken for soup. I couldn't think of anything else besides Dzadzio's homecoming as I helped Mama with the chores. Mama knew that even after months in exile and prison, her
father would be in a fury that the man who might have sent him away and deported his wife and daughter was living in his house. Mama was afraid of what he might do. Twenty years ago, her father had put aside the clothing of a Hassid and picked up a gun to fight the Russians. Only the fear of what the consequences would mean for us might temper his actions.

We awoke the next day to a big commotion next door. Footsteps raced across the floor. Doors were flying open and shut. From our window we could see the Dupaks frantically loading boxes and suitcases into a Soviet army truck and then their children into a car. Stalina and Volodya looked sad and frightened, framed in the open car window.

We looked on with a sense of relief as they emptied the house of all their belongings. Dzadzio would at least be spared one heartache and be able to move back into his house. Comrade Dupak kissed his wife and children and watched as the truck and the car drove off. He came to our door and told us he had sent his family east. Hitler had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and had invaded Russian-occupied Poland. Shortly after that, Dupak left the house.

In the span of a few seconds I had gone from fearing and despising the Russians for tearing our family apart to wanting them to stay. This could only spell disaster for us. This time it wouldn't just be the Wehrmacht marching into town for a few days. We knew in terrifying detail what to expect. Rosa and the other refugees who had fled east had witnessed it all. It would be the SS, deportations and ghettos. The border to Nazi-occupied Poland was less than 60 kilometres away. And the general state of alarm up and down the street as the Russians packed off their families confirmed that no shots would be fired in our defence. We were being abandoned. Papa considered following
the retreat; he went to see if it would be possible to go with the Russians. He came back soon thereafter saying it would be impossible. He had seen Malka and Rosa, two Jewish girls married to Russian soldiers, being helped on to trucks by their husbands, only to have the Russians wives throw them off.

Papa was still talking when Uchka came running in the door in a panic. My uncle Hersch had been ordered to report to the plaza. The Russian army was going door to door, impressing every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 and 45. They would be going straight to the front. She was surprised that my father hadn't been taken as well. We didn't know why he hadn't. We did think it might have been Comrade Dupak's doing. Mama ordered us to stay inside the house. We couldn't go to the plaza to say goodbye. Uncle Hersch was hardly bigger than a rifle himself and had the same dark eyes and sweet disposition as his son, Zygush. It was hard for me to imagine a man like him fighting at all. Uchka told us later that they had marched through the gate near Paradise Hill, which had been named by King Sobieski because he thought it was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. I couldn't imagine what Uncle Hersch could have been feeling as he was forced to stare up at the place where we had picnicked almost every Saturday and where his son had run wild through the thickly shaded forest, all the while marching with the army that had imprisoned his father-in-law, but was fighting the Nazi enemy. It was too much to digest. Poor Uchka told us how sad and excited the children had been. At only two and four years old, Zygush and Zosia hadn't quite known what they were waving at or waving for, as their father, one of hundreds of stunned faces, walked towards oblivion. Uchka had tried to hide how frightened she had been, despite
knowing that she was probably saying goodbye to her husband for the last time. It would have been so wonderful to be able to be proud of Hersch Leib, marching off to protect us and his country. But all we could think of was the Nazis, and what that meant for us.