Vera (5 page)

I study the street below for hours each day. It is true that there's little else to do, but watching is also a feature of this new vigilance of mine.

The traffic – of people and vehicles – has changed. The Germans have made Lvov not only more dangerous, but busier. All leisure has vanished. The Germans shout: ‘
Rauch, rauch!
' and ‘
Schnell!
' and ‘
Du! Arschloch!
' and ‘
Hör mal! Hör mal!
' Everyone hurries in the way that people do when rain is expected.

Hurrying is one thing; running is another. Whenever I see people running on the street, I know they are Jews. They move as if they can imagine themselves sitting in the crosshairs of a rifle sight. The children keep very close to their parents. But after two weeks of this time of the Germans, I see no running Jews. Like me and my mother and father, they keep to their houses and apartments, wishing they knew what to do.

Dread is coiled in my chest and stomach every hour, but of despair I know nothing. I don't have the information that despair is built on.

Adults know that Jews in captivity nearly always die, not just in Lvov in the middle of the twentieth century, but in every century. People like my father, with his knowledge of antiquity, know that Jews were being murdered in Alexandria at a time when Plato and Aristotle were alive.

I am trying to recall what hope I had at this time in Lvov. Did I think that my parents would find a way to safety for us? Did I think that they had secret plans that would only be revealed at the right time? I have said that I didn't despair because I didn't know how to, but that isn't the same as saying that I had hope.

I think I believed that my life would go on; that there would be a future Vera. But of course, all the other Jewish children believed the same thing. What child can imagine his or her non-existence?

From my window I saw a Jewish boy of about five or six – one of many Jewish children rounded up by the Germans – wrenched into the air by an SS soldier, held by his ankles, the poor child, and swung violently so that his head smashed against a stone bollard on the roadside. The boy had irritated the soldier with his cries (he was injured in some way) and this was the soldier's response. Probably that child had entertained hopes of survival up until the time the soldier seized him. I'm sure he didn't believe that his life would come to an end in the way that it did.

The Vera who imagines a future Vera, who believes that she will be in the world for a very long time, or forever – that same Vera could easily have died in the same way as the boy who cried.

A new stage of the German occupation begins. This is the looting stage. But since it is beneath the dignity of the Germans to grab valuables and stuff them furtively into a big bag, they instead ‘request' the surrender of such things as jewellery, works of art, silverware, antiques. Many Jews choose to believe, in their desperation, that the ‘surrender' of their valuables will encourage the Germans to treat them leniently – something like that; so foolish. I am sure it must have amused the Germans to watch the Jews of Lvov humiliate themselves by offering up grandma's wedding ring in the hope of living for a week longer than a neighbour who had no ring. It is not in fact the Wehrmacht soldiers, nor even the SS, who accept this bounty from the Jews, but well-dressed men in civilian clothes. Maybe they represent a special department within the Third Reich – the Department of Dignified Looting.

But I shouldn't call those Jews who imagined their jewels would save them foolish. In the time to come, I will see people – my mother, for one – trade things of far more value than jewels and paintings to stay alive a day longer, and to keep me alive. Why should they not, if it is theirs to trade? If you are alive, the time might come when you can again manage to smile. If you are dead, all smiles are done with.

First they traded jewellery, then paintings, then antiques. Now it is the radios. It is announced that the German authorities will accept the surrender of all radios from the Jewish population of Lvov.

We have a radio, a large one of some quality.

My mother says, ‘Come with me.' And she carries the radio in two arms to a place where a long queue has formed.

Every Jew in the queue – hundreds and hundreds of them – has a radio to surrender.

We take our place in line, my mother whispering to me constantly, ‘Vera, stay close, stay close!'

Up and down the queue rumours run. The Germans will provide a special dispensation to those who hand over their radios. The Germans will permit Jews who surrender their radios to travel to safety from Lvov. We hear rumours saying one thing running up the queue and saying another on the way back.

I hold the fabric of my mother's coat since she requires two hands and two arms to hold the radio. If she puts it down on the cobblestones, who knows? Some scoundrel might scoop it up and run off. But the queue moves so slowly and our radio is so big that my mother finally has to set it down briefly, never taking her eye off it, never taking her eye off me.

At times it seems that the queue is not moving at all. But why? It takes very little time to accept a radio.

Then a new rumour runs along the queue. The Germans are not even bothering to write receipts. When the SS comes to your door, how will the soldiers know that you have donated your radio to the Third Reich? How will they know to spare you? Like the lamb's blood that the Angel of Death honoured on the night of the Passover, a receipt would be honoured (surely!) by the Angels of Death of the SS.

And as the hours pass, people begin to leave the queue. Just a few. For them, the folly of it all has sunk in. Most remain. Where else might they be today? Doing what? They choose to hope.

My mother, finally, is one of those who have had enough. ‘We're going,' she says.

‘Why?'

‘It's madness. We're going.'

She puts the radio down on the cobblestones, takes my hand and leads me away. Others in the queue watch her reproachfully, as if she has betrayed them. Perhaps they resent the emphatic way in which she has turned her back on the whole sham.

As we walk away, I wince at the firmness of my mother's grasp on my hand. But I don't complain.

  
5
  

ZAMARSTYNÓW

A
s far as I can tell, the broad Nazi scheme of domination went like this. Build the most formidable army, navy and air force the world has ever seen. At some convenient moment, demand of the Great War allies the return of various pieces of Europe to Germany. This demand not being met, invade first the Sudetenland, then Poland, then the rest of Europe, then the Soviet Union. Triumph speedily; rule victorious from Berlin.

I come into these plans before full domination is achieved, of course. I am a figure in certain complementary plans occasioned by Adolf Hitler's temperamental disdain for Jews. The remedy for this disdain (the euphemistic ‘solution' – and how like one of those CIA euphemisms it sounds, the ones we have come to know and detest, such as ‘terminate with maximum prejudice', meaning ‘murder them', and ‘rendition', meaning ‘torture them') has not been fully developed at the time of the German invasion of Lvov. But pending the embrace of the ‘solution', the Nazi plan is to establish sealed-off enclosures for the Jews of the conquered states of Europe and the Soviet Union – enclosures we have come to speak of as ‘ghettos' – in order that Jews should no longer pollute the broader communities from which they are drawn. If those in Berlin decide to murder the Jews of Adolf Hitler's disdain, those Jews will already be in compact concentrations.

Fifteen thousand of these ghettos were established in the cities, towns and small villages of nations invaded by the Germans. Some ghettos held fifty Jews, some tens of thousands. The feature they all had in common – well, one of the features – was wretchedness. The Germans may as well have erected signboards above the entrances to the ghettos, saying, ‘Die if you like – who cares?'

Think of what a human being requires to live a life of purpose and dignity, and then, day by day, deprive them of all those things. A person needs food and drink – take it away. Comfort and rest in times of illness – take it away. A source of warmth when the weather is cold – take it away. Security for family members – take it away. The means to attend to hygiene – take it away.

The rationale behind the creation of the ghettos was, as I have said, to isolate and concentrate the Jews of Europe. But surely there was another reason also? Surely the Germans wished to dehumanise the Jews they held in the ghettos. If you intend to exterminate a category of your fellow human beings, it is better for you if those fellow human beings are rendered subhuman. A man who picks potato peelings out of a sewer and eats them – is that a human being? Your disgust licenses the murder you intend to commit. And, of course, you enjoy watching these people who already disgusted you disgust you even further. It's a common strategy of any oppressing class.

Not long after the futile trip with my mother to the long queue of Jews attempting to save their lives by relinquishing their radios, I am told that we will be ‘moving'. I assume, correctly, that ‘moving' is something that the Germans insist upon, that it is not a voluntary move. I am aware of the many decrees directed at Jews that the Germans broadcast or print and publish on walls and noticeboards. Often the Germans spare themselves the formality of referring to us as ‘Jews' in these posters and broadcasts, instead using the word ‘kikes', as if whoever wrote the decree could not bring himself to overcome this pettiness, even for the sake of formality.

We are to move, but to where I have no idea. We are to take only specified items – a few chairs, a table, beds and bedding, crockery, cutlery and clothing. Since we now own so little, it is easy enough to comply with the rules.

On the day of our departure from our apartment, I gaze around at the now empty walls and experience neither regret nor resentment, but instead the beginning of an urgent need to stay alive throughout whatever days and weeks and months are to follow. It is as if my instincts have told me that I am heading into something dire, and a corresponding hunger to remain alive has taken up its needful home in my heart.

I am hardening. I am becoming the Vera I must become if I am ever to inhabit the future Vera who writes these pages. People who survive what should have killed them do so because they are capable of imagining survival. This is what is coming to life in me: the imagination of the survivor.

My grandfather and grandmother will come with us. They, too, are ‘moving'.

We are being taken by horse and cart, hired by my father and driven by the Polish owner. We are lucky to have a cart. I have seen other families moving to the ghetto with all they own on their backs and in their arms. Often, German soldiers are waiting in the street to hurry these families along. German soldiers, Polish policemen, Ukrainian militiamen. There is no suggestion of non-compliance among the Jews, and yet the soldiers, policemen and militiamen shout and gesture and push as if they are dealing with an unruly mob. It pleases them to shout and push. Unless they do, they feel they are not performing their task to the required professional standard. And the Poles do not wish to appear less brutal than the German soldiers, and the Ukrainians do not wish to seem less brutal than the Poles.

I may have asked, ‘Mama, why are we going?' But probably I don't ask any such thing. My heart tells me, ‘Be alive forever.' That is the only voice I need to listen to this morning.

Our street is not in a Jewish part of Lvov, and when my mother and father and grandparents mount the cart, no soldiers are waiting to harass us. The street is quiet, except for the occasional snort of the horse. We are a compliant group. We will make our way to where we are supposed to go. We will not carry out some bold scheme of escape.

When people read of the Holocaust some years after the Miller family's departure for the Lvov ghetto, many will think, ‘Why did they not resist? Why did they not make a run for it? These Jews: why so acquiescent?'

So far as their integrity would permit, Jews for the long centuries of the diaspora have been compelled to make a virtue of cooperation, or of what passes for cooperation. I would say that every Jewish family on earth, even before National Socialism, could trace their ancestry back to one ghetto or another, to one pogrom or another.

Many non-Jews could search and search along every branch of their family tree and never discover that a near or distant ancestor met his death when a frenzied mob burned down his house and put a knife to his throat.

But for us Jews, it is not so. We are a people of genius, of many varieties of genius, and part of our genius is for suffering. But there is no self-pity in our suffering, no shrill laments, no ‘We don't deserve this!'

We know we don't deserve it. Nobody on earth deserves it.

Lvov was a city of virulent anti-Semitism long before I was born, and the rabid killing spree that broke out in July 1941 was an expression of the hatred that had seethed in the hearts of the Ukrainian population (principally) for centuries. The German invasion simply licensed the Ukrainians to inflict whatever delectable punishment appealed to them on the Jews of the city.

We lived at the whim of the Germans and the Ukrainians.

We knew that the Ukrainian militia, with their yellow armbands, could employ whatever weapons they could lay their hands on – knives, swords, scythes, firearms, clubs and iron bars – against us, with complete impunity, and that they had.

We knew that the Germans, days before, had taken thousands of elderly Jews, and all Jews who were sick or infirm, and marched them down Peltewna Street. When they passed under the railway bridge, these Jews found their way closed off and were shot in a controlled slaughter, like beasts being culled; shot from above, for the most part.

We know that the march of the old and ill to the site of their slaughter was partly facilitated by the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst – a Jewish police force recruited with coercion for the task. They wore yellow Stars of David and were armed with rubber truncheons.

We know that no David is going to rise in Lvov and bring down his sword on the necks of those who torment us. We know that we are, in a word, powerless. The resistance of the Jews must wait on the Haganah and the Irgun, on the partition of Palestine, on the birth of Israel almost seven years to the day from when my family, the Millers, moved to the ghetto.

It is still autumn but the wind tells us that winter is on the way. The trees along the streets are half-naked; the leaves that remain, yellow and lank. I sit close to my mother, reduced by my fear to counting the rhythmic clop of the horses' hooves.

This is, for me, one of those times when I desire with all my heart a spontaneous message of assurance from my father. But his expression is grim; he cannot summon any words of encouragement. And to find such words, he would have to lie. He is as full of dread as I am, as my mother is, as my grandparents are.

The ghetto is located on the outskirts of the city in an area so poor, so ramshackle, that it looks as if it has been the home of the destitute and the damned for decades. I have never been to this part of Lvov before. It frightens me. Zamarstynów it is called, this ugly place. We have come here half-starved, but the people who peer at us from behind wire fences, from alleys or from windows are even more haggard than us.

As I will come to know, people hounded towards death in the way those of the ghetto are hounded lose not only their health to malnutrition but also their sympathy – as if their hearts, too, are starved. Nobody calls: ‘Find courage! We are all in this together!' The more Jews who arrive, the less there is of everything for the Jews already here. We are not a great brotherhood, we Jews; we are united, most of us, only in our dread.

Rubbish litters the streets, and the air is heavy with the stink of the sewer.

As we climb down from the cart, eyes that glitter with hunger fix on me, as if, impossibly, I may have brought food to share out. I stare back, knowing that the people around me are not enemies, but doubting at the same time that they are truly friends. Any relief will have to wait until I see someone I know: maybe someone from school.

Our dwelling is to be a wretched apartment building with filthy stairs. I am still new to filth and I step carefully behind my mother, disgusted at the lack of hygiene. The time will come when I will laugh at filth – it will mean nothing to me to know that I don't bathe, and the reek of unwashed flesh will not even register in my nostrils. But just at the moment, I feel that I have come to a place inhabited by people from a lower social order than that of my family. I am offended.

A Jewish policeman shows us to the apartment we are to occupy. The first shock is to discover that the five members of my family will be sharing the dwelling with two other families. If I am unused to filth, I am even less comfortable with such crowding as this. Once inside, I look around at all the adults and children and feel that some mistake has been made. We came from a once beautiful apartment with fine furniture, with paintings on the walls and a kitchen full of utensils – an apartment kept spotless by my mother and our housekeeper. Can we be expected to accommodate ourselves in this hovel? I still preserve my sense of justice, but it is linked to my still robust self-interest. The great brooding injustice that has brought me to this dump – one group of people, those with guns, insisting that another group of people, those without guns, are subhuman – is not powerful enough to overwhelm my belief that I, Vera, personally deserve better. But I will learn. We will all learn. I am learning even now as I return the gaze of the children already living in this place that is not a home. What I am learning is that I am not their friend. I am a competitor.