Vera (10 page)

We all put up our hands. We have never heard of Israel, but we love these men and we'd do anything for them. They are irrepressible. In all the years of the war, we'd never met men like this.

They were the pre-Israel generation of young Israelis, the generation of optimists. They were about to create a social-democratic state that would stand as a beacon to the Jews of the world.

They smile all the time. They are in love with their mission.

Later, these same optimists will say, ‘You know what? What we've done is impossible. Nobody can make a homeland here. Half the country is the Negev desert, the other half is stones. We have maybe four cedar trees and miles of scrub that not even a goat would eat. You can't grow a thistle. Too bad. We made Israel.'

We learn to jump, to tumble, to run. And we learn judo. Why, I don't know. Maybe just because it is a mode of defence. The Israelis don't approve of Jews succumbing meekly to round-ups, allowing themselves to be crammed into trains, bullied along streets at gunpoint. They think we should have thrown a few punches. So – judo. I like it. If I'd known judo, I might have knocked my uncle over when he tried to grope me. It is an adventure, the jumping, the tumbling, the judo.

Then the teachers say, ‘Okay, now you learn how to grow wheat and oranges. You learn how to milk a cow. Also a goat. You're going to dig holes and plant seeds. We're taking you to a farm.'

I've heard of farms, but I've never seen one. When I was younger, I was taught songs about the sounds farm animals make: the quacking, the mooing, the neighing.

Some of the children are puzzled. They come from the camps, and the leap of imagination that has sustained them since they realised that they could still have a life and that the Nazis were dead – that has taken a big effort. Learning science in Hebrew – strange and amazing. Jumping in the water and walking up the beach to Palestine, which will become Israel – stranger still. And now, the farm – milking, digging holes, planting seeds. But they get used to the idea.

As for me, I think only this: how much more exciting and fascinating could life become? A farm! The quacking, the mooing, the neighing.

Actually, not all the children at the camp are crazy about the idea of jumping in the water and growing oranges. These are the Orthodox kids. They stay in a building of their own, with their own teachers, everything one hundred per cent kosher, no laughing, dancing or singing.

I think,
So what? We don't bother them, they don't bother us
. They disapprove of us, sure; we dance, we sing – unacceptable. Planting orange trees is maybe a sin, too. But mostly they leave us alone.

The older girls wear skirts down to their knees, also
sheitels
(wigs) and a
tichel
(scarf). The boys wear
payot
(sidecurls) and of course a
kippah
(cap). Each teacher dresses in a
bekishe
(long coat), with a
shtreimel
(fur hat) instead of a
kippah
. When they pray in the morning, they wear a
tallit
and all day they keep
tekhelet
(blue threads) tucked into their belts.

Our camp is a microcosm of the Israel that will come into being. We are surrounded by a dense population of people who are unsympathetic to Jews. And us Jews ourselves are divided between those who follow an arcane code of costume and observance, and those, like me, who want to dress in pretty clothes and don't want to devote too much time to prayer and the study of the Torah. On the one hand, there are young men, socialists mostly, full of extraordinary conviction and bursting with energy, with a great sense of a new life in a new land. Then, on the other, among the Orthodox, there is a somewhat conflicted conception of this land of Israel in which Jews don't know how to be the true Jews of the Third Temple. We are Israel in Germany.

But the most vivid thing about our microcosm? I will tell you. It is the energy, the happiness.

I think, ‘If this is what Israel will be like after we jump in the water and walk up to the beach, I want it: yes, I want it.'

In the midst of my happiness, a letter is delivered to the camp for my mother. It has been sent by her sister. My mother is delighted. She has heard nothing of the fate of her sister, and now it is revealed that she is still alive and well and living in the Polish town of Olsztyn in north-eastern Poland.

My mother says, ‘Good. We'll go and live with Roma in Olsztyn.' She is happy for the first time in years. It startles me to see a smile on her face.

I ask, ‘What about Palestine? What about Israel? What about jumping in the water and planting orange trees?'

My mother says, ‘Poland is better,' and that is the end of the conversation.

I am deeply disappointed. What is so great about Poland? Nothing. The whole adventure of Israel withers in my imagination.

Within two days my mother and I are on a train that travels across Poland from west to east. The country is at peace, up to a point, and we see no Nazis, no SS. A year ago, the Germans controlled everything that happened in Poland. They made nightmares each day and released them. Children like me lived in dread of seeing an SS uniform, or the similarly black uniforms of the Ukrainian and Lithuanian militias. The men in black had the right to murder us. Now they are all gone, as is all that madness.

We are on our way to Olsztyn. I think all through the journey of the handsome men from Israel and of the orange trees I will never plant.

  
10
  

OLSZTYN

P
oland in the years following my reluctant return from Germany with my mother is in a historically familiar situation: people other than Poles are running the place. It's been this way for how long? A thousand years? The Russians to the east, the Germans to the west – in between, Poland. Maybe over lunch one day, the Czar says, ‘Better for the Poles if they're ruled by us.' If not the Czar, then Stalin. Or the Kaiser accepts a glass of schnapps and tells his secretary, ‘Call my generals. We invade Poland.' The Poles say, ‘Russians, Prussians, Adolf Hitler – enough. From now on we rule ourselves.' Then the Germans or the Prussians or the Russians shoot ten thousand Poles, and the whole cycle continues.

It's not inconceivable that the Poles could invade Germany or Russia themselves, but they don't do that. They're a romantic people. They think, ‘We'll write a ballad today; tomorrow we'll think about the Russians.' If not a ballad, a symphony. Or a poem. The poem will inevitably be about honour. Poles are crazy about honour. The greatest experience a Pole can have is to sing a ballad about honour, listen to a symphony, then about eight o'clock at night, write a poem and read it aloud at midnight. The Poles are courageous, but maybe not the most clever military strategists.

But here I am in Olsztyn in 1946, knowing nothing about politics. So far as I can tell, the politics of the Nazis is: ‘Invade, murder.' Now we have the communists, the Russians. The Russians' strategy is to invade by stealth and murder in secret.

I am later to learn that after the war Stalin struck a deal with Churchill and Roosevelt that assigned Poland to Russia. The government of Free Poland in London was jilted, and Stalin installed his own man, Bolesław Bierut, a Pole with a strong inclination to please Stalin.

So what now? I am alive, and glad of it. It would be better if I were in a ship, ready to jump in the water and run up the beach into the arms of the Israelis – but too bad.

My mother says, ‘What now? I'll tell you. You go to school.'

We don't stay with my Aunt Roma and my Uncle Marian in their apartment. No, we have an apartment of our own. But it does my mother's heart good to have a sister nearby. What she tells Aunt Roma about the ghetto in Lvov, and the death of her husband, and the serial fucking of my uncle I don't know. There's no reason why I should. She certainly doesn't expect me to tell tales, and that's a good reading of my character. I have never been what working-class Australians and the blue-collar criminal class refer to as a ‘lagger'. I sail along, I mind my own business, I accept that my mother is the boss.

I am also respectful towards my Aunt Roma and my Uncle Marian. They left Poland during the war and hid out in Ukraine, but God knows why; Ukraine couldn't have been any safer for a Jew than Poland.

When it comes to Uncle Marian, I have many reasons to think admiringly of him. He lived through the war fearlessly. He found food where there was no food to be found – using bluff, sorcery, chutzpah, outright theft. When it was necessary, he dressed up in the uniform of an SS officer and commandeered whatever he needed. How he came by the SS uniform was never revealed to me. Maybe murder was involved. He was capable of it, in the right cause, and I cannot imagine a better cause than ridding the world of an SS officer. He found ways to save Jews by having them transported (in his SS role) from Poland to Ukraine, where he hid them as if he were one of those street con artists hiding a pea under a shell. The war gave him scope for gifts that were in only limited demand in peacetime. He's a hero, and also possibly barking mad.

‘What now? I'll tell you. You go to school.'

That's all very well, except that the principal of the Polish school I might have attended looks at me for a minute, listens to me for two minutes, asks a few questions, then tells my mother, quietly, that her daughter is a barbarian – yes, Mrs Miller, a barbarian, unfortunately, for she knows next to nothing and has a slightly demented look about her. She might bite the other children.

‘Who will take her?' my mother pleads.

‘The nuns,' said the principal. ‘They'll take anyone.'

He meant the nuns of Immaculate Conception, across town. I am bound to please the nuns. I've spent time at a convent school in Lvov, after all; I've learnt Catholic prayers, which I still recall; I know the peculiar way in which the nuns and Catholics in general understand the world. They think it is crammed with sin, that a lot of people, most people, are going to hell – what we call Gehinnom – and it serves them right.

The nuns at Saint Ursula in Lvov said, ‘Jesus died to save you from your sins.' What sins? I haven't committed any. Maybe a few. I stole food to save myself from starving to death. Jesus died to save me from the sin of not starving to death? It is madness. But you can get along with nuns, learn the rules, play their insane games; it is no great burden.

Except, that is, when it comes to the Immaculate Conception nuns. They are a different breed from the nuns of St Ursula's. The nuns of Immaculate Conception take their mission almost as seriously as the SS. If they have to kill you to make you behave, that is a pity, but necessary.

One of the nuns, the commandant, says to me, ‘Here shoes are kept clean.' And she slaps me.

It's a strange thing, but even in the barbarity of the ghetto, where you might have a noose slipped over your neck before two strong soldiers hoisted you up a lamppost, I have never been slapped. I think, almost in these words, ‘This is an outrage.' But I accept it.

I think the long training of the more senior nuns consists mainly of learning to administer corporal punishment, sometimes personally, sometimes by delegating to more junior nuns. These junior nuns are all working-class girls with no education, whose religion is really a jumble of Catholic dogma and peasant superstitions that date back to pagan times. Slapping thrills them. Maybe it is a substitute for sex. You're a woman in your sexual prime, and there's no man around to kiss you: you have to do something.

Everywhere you look, you see Jesus with a cloth tied around his waist and his arms outstretched and big nails holding him to a wooden cross. We are supposed to pray to him.

I say this to Jesus, silently: ‘Rabbi, the slapping has to stop.'

There's lots to complain about at Immaculate Conception, but I am at least being educated. That part I like. Little Vera, out of the ghetto, filling her big brain with integers, lines of longitude and logarithms. I am beginning to develop ambitions for myself beyond schooling – ambitions for the Vera soul, or whatever you wish to call it.

I think, ‘Life will not disappoint you.' Maybe not in those words.

What I am beginning to understand in a blurry way is something that only comes to me clearly twenty years later: I attract drama. I don't mean melodrama, extravagant emotions, all that tedious nonsense. I mean that I am one of those fortunate people who never have to worry about boredom.

My first intimation is here at Immaculate Conception: my life will be vivid. I will be like one of those versatile strolling players you read about from centuries ago, who casually take on parts in one production after another. ‘Vera, can you play an ingenue? Can you play an angel? What about a vamp with a husky voice? You're Eurydice – can you do that? You're Electra, you're Ophelia, you're Mary Poppins …' All these roles that are not roles, but my life. I even play in soap operas.

Who has the right to be bored? The drama of life comes rushing at you in the currents of the air you breath. If you're ill, maybe locked up in hospital with nurses referring to you in the inclusive plural, chirrupy women full of encouragement: okay, you have the right to be bored. Otherwise, no.

This is the legacy of the many, many days of darkness in the Lvov compartments, listening to the shouts of the German soldiers, like the baying of wolves, to the militias speaking sometimes in Lithuanian, sometimes in Polish. In the darkness, for the most part, I did not think anything. I was in that state of tension where every sense is employed to detect some indication that your hiding place has remained secret, some cue for relief, such as retreating footsteps or the shouts coming from a little further away. I might have wished that the boy on my right could educate himself to breathe silently, and not rasp in that asthmatic way. The rest of us are breathing utterly without sound, so what is wrong with him? Maybe I thought, ‘It might be necessary to strangle him.'

But now and again in the darkness I dreamt of colour, of pencils in a box,
kredki
, twenty pencils of different colours, such as those I had once owned in the apartment near Ulica Połczyńska. I made a discovery in the darkness: that each colour in the world has a soul. The one thousand shades of pink in the world – each one has a different soul. It is the same for all the shades of orange, red, blue and so on. In the future I will stand before a Matisse and see that he was not simply painting with colours that came from tubes but experimenting with the essence of light.

But why did I dream of colour, of
kredki
, in my compartment where the very irritating boy who needed strangling kept up his asthmatic cough, and where the urine that had leaked into the floorboards made the place stink like a stable? I know now. Because colour is the poetry of light, and even as I bless the darkness that hides me, I crave light.

Two years at Immaculate Conception make me acceptable to a regular government secondary school and it is agreed that the nuns will relinquish me. At the convent school, I am a covert Jew, but once away from the nuns I settle into being Jewish in a more relaxed way. It is no big deal. In my life I've been Jewish, then not so Jewish, then a ludicrous sort of Catholic, then a very avid Jew bound for the orange fields of Palestine, then a Catholic with serious reservations about the excesses of the convent-school slapping brigade. Now I am Werunia again, the beautiful girl with the big brain, and that is the end of it.

I no longer think much about the handsome men who wanted to take me to Palestine to grow oranges, except when David Ben-Gurion proclaims the state of Israel in May 1948. I think, ‘So that's what they were talking about.' They are still fighting in Palestine, the Jews and the Arabs. I am not attracted to a place where people are being shot, so maybe it's a good thing my mother and I stay in Poland. I think, ‘Nice that we have Israel. When they stop shooting, maybe I'll go there for a few days. Poland will do for now.'

My convictions are not that deep. So what? Later I will have convictions strong enough to set me on top of barricades waving a red flag, or the beautiful Indigenous flag, or even the not-yet-invented flags of the ragged and homeless. I will be crazy with convictions, enough for a whole army of Werunias. But in Olsztyn, I think, ‘Take it easy. You outlived the Nazis. The stupid boy with the asthmatic cough didn't get you hanged. Your father died, your heart broke, your mother spent days on end up to mischief with your uncle. A little time worrying about nothing won't hurt. We have an Israel, so much the better. For now,
nite zaynmeshuge. Nemenemgring.