Vera (8 page)

My uncle takes such risks for the sake of sex with my mother.

Our hiding place in the apartment is small. It is at the back of the area set aside for a shop, at ground level. During the day, this small space is closed off from the shop, disguised. In many such buildings in Lvov, as in other towns and cities in which Jew enclosures have been decreed by the Germans, great ingenuity has been employed to create niches and alcoves. When searches are conducted and Jews like me and my mother are found hiding in darkness, the Germans or Ukrainians or Lithuanians who make the discovery might feel moved to go directly from disclosure to murder and throw the bodies onto the street. There is nothing to restrain those – the Ukrainians and Lithuanians especially – who have a particular relish of murder. It is sport for them. One sees the thrill of the chase in their faces; one sees the glee when they kill, and the glow of satisfaction afterwards.

The transport to Ukraine fails in some way – I don't know how. I imagine that at some critical point, the driver thought it better to turn back.

My father returns to Lvov. He comes here, to this apartment in which his wife who is no longer his wife is living with me and Maniek. Mostly he wishes to see me.

When I face him, I can see that he is a husk. I love him; I pity him.

Uncle Maniek says, ‘Well, you won't be staying here.'

My mother says, ‘You must leave, you must go.'

My father says, ‘Where will I go? I have nowhere.'

It is agreed that my father can stay for a day, no longer.

He sits in the hiding place, staring at nothing.

I sit with my gaze on his face until it is too much; then I look away.

My father was a well-liked man in Lvov, a respected man. In the best of times, men would touch the brim of their hats in acknowledgement when he passed them in the street; their wives would smile courteously and murmur, ‘Good evening, Mr Samuel Miller.' Outside the synagogue, friends approached and lifted their hands and held them out, in the Jewish gesture of fraternal goodwill.

Now there is no-one in the world left to witness with compassion his grief, his despair – no-one other than his daughter, Werunia, a child.

At night my father creeps into a tiny area behind a sort of vanity unit. From where he is hiding, he must hear, as I do, the groans and gasps of my mother making love to my uncle. In the morning, he emerges into the light.

My Uncle Maniek says, ‘You are not welcome, Miller.'

My mother does not intervene. I wish I could say that she blushes with shame, and perhaps she does, but I have no recollection of a blush. She says, ‘Today you go.'

But my father stays another day, and another.

I yearned for him to stay with me not only for another day, but for many days. The expression on his face – today I would call it despair, or resignation, or a combination of the two. I have no such words at the time. In my heart, I feel that the end has come for my father, and such knowledge is just as good or as bad as knowing the meaning of ‘despair'.

I think, ‘It is my mother's fault.' And I think, ‘It is my uncle's fault.' My father says to me, ‘Werunia, I must tell you this. There will be no Sorbonne. Do you understand?'

I say, ‘I know.'

My father says, ‘I am sorry for this, Werunia. I am sorry.'

I say, ‘It doesn't matter.'

When my father shuffles into his hiding-place-within-a-hiding-place that night, I think, ‘Yes, it is the end.'

I wait for a day, and for more than a day, and for two, almost for three days, while my father keeps silent. I think, ‘Now he is dying.' Around my neck hangs the bag of poison. For my father to die is something horrible to me, something horrible and emptying. But I do not think of opening my own poison bag.

Food is brought for me, such as we have. It is my mother who brings the food. She says nothing. She does not ask about my father.

So he is dying, my father, but he does not die to the point of death. He has swallowed enough of the drug, the poison, to put him into a deep sleep very like death, but after three days he awakens and calls out.

I am in the hiding place alone. My mother and my uncle have gone about their business. I go to see what has become of my father in this tiny space in the world that is left to him.

My father has risen to his knees. The place behind the false wall stinks of urine. In his sleep, my father has emptied his bladder.

My father says, ‘Werunia, you must help me.'

I think,
But how can I help?

‘Bring me water, Werunia. Bring me a glass of water.'

His voice is weak, but I understand that he means what he is saying. I go to the tap and fill a glass with water.

My father says, ‘Werunia, thank you.'

He pours into the water what remains of his poison. It is a white powder that dissolves slowly. He drinks the water and the poison, still resting on his knees.

I watch him but I cannot say what it is that I feel. I cannot say if I am filled with sorrow, or filled with anything at all. But I watch. Not for long. Not for very long. Then I leave him, as he tells me to, and wait once more.

This time he doesn't wake, but goes all the way to death.

  
8
  

THE RUSSIANS RETURN

N
o, I cannot say I am filled with sorrow while I help my father leave life behind. I have some sorrow, I am sure, but it does not go on and on and become all of my life. In the Lvov ghetto, you do not see as much sorrow as you might imagine.

Think about it a little, if you can. Sorrow requires more energy than any other emotion, much more than joy. If you follow your sorrow down the path it leads you, you need stamina; it is like a marathon. Can you make such stamina out of a potato skin? Out of a quarter of a turnip?

What you do is this: you say, ‘Yes, my heart is broken, now let that be an end to it.' You might make a promise to follow the path further in the future, if there is a future left for you.

My father is buried in the cellar.

If he was to have a burial at all, it had to be in the cellar. Left on the street in the middle of the night, his body would arouse suspicion. And it would not be buried with prayers in its own place, but added to a heap of corpses to be disposed of in a trench, like rubbish.

I cannot recall that my mother found the will to weep.

A time comes when the city is being bombed by the Russians, before their second occupation of Lvov. My mother and I and the Poles of the house flee to the cellar for safety. And there in the cellar, I sit trembling on my father's grave.

My trembling is not caused by the fact that my father's remains are lying thirty centimetres beneath me, but by the bombing.

My mother, no further from her husband's body than I am, betrays no guilt, no remorse. She feels none.

But before the bombing, almost a year of my fugitive existence passes.

After my father's suicide, and between my tenth and eleventh birthday (and it's hardly necessary to say that both go by without celebration), the human being in me – the part that can love and sorrow and mourn, the part that gazes with delight on the colour and spectacle of the world, that smiles and weeps – diminishes to a tiny spark, without entirely dying away. It's better to say that the civilised part, the human complement, goes into hibernation.

The Ukrainians and Lithuanians of the black-uniformed militias licensed by the Germans amuse themselves by murdering and torturing Jews in the ghetto (I do not use ‘amuse' facetiously – the relish of killing shines from their faces). The SS ‘actions' (the German euphemism for mass murders) gather up tens of thousands of children just like me and despatch them to the gas chambers of the death camps. Jews in great numbers are hanged by the neck from lampposts and the boughs of trees, while other Jews hang themselves from any sturdy hook or lintel they can find.

But I do not see the hanged Jews anymore, only hear of them. I remain in the apartment with my mother and my uncle and wait for the end, or for nothing, or for whatever happens next. It may not even be true to say that I ‘wait'. I am simply doing in any given hour what I have done in the previous hour. I have a pulse, I breathe, I am conscious, but everything for which a heartbeat and respiration and human consciousness is a mere foundation is lost to me. I have no plans, no appointments to meet, no games to contemplate. Every Jew still alive in Lvov – in the ghetto, or, like me, in hiding outside the ghetto – has long relinquished any sense of an ending to what the Germans, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians are doing.

It might be true to say that a long, long way beyond the horizon, I hope that a tiny boat bobs along on the vast ocean: a boat that might one day come to the shore of my life and save me. Such a fugitive hope – barely to be acknowledged! It exists, that's all I can say. A great ocean, a tiny boat, and Vera in her secret compartment, who might one day look from the kitchen window and see that boat moored and waiting.

I have aversions – that is the only location of intensity in my small being.

My greatest aversion is to my uncle, who lets his eyes wander lasciviously over my ten-year-old body. In my state of waiting-without-waiting, of being merely something with a pulse that inhales and exhales, I nevertheless know very well that I do not want my uncle's hands on me.

I have an aversion, also, to my mother. How could this not be? My father, I had adored. My mother? – not so much.

Studying her in our room of the apartment, compelled to listen when my uncle satisfies himself with her body, I think, ‘She let this happen. I can never forgive her.'

But really, what she did is no more appalling than what many other people do to save their lives. Isn't it true that we revere those people who find a way to keep their dignity, preserve their belief in what is right, whatever the circumstances? Those souls who lift their heads and gaze into the eyes of those with the power of life and death over them, and say, ‘Then kill me'? My grandfather told the German soldiers who had come to export him to a death camp, ‘Do it here. I'm not going anywhere.' The soldiers shot him where he stood. We revere these people – certain men and women, only a few – because in their refusal to put up with contempt and violation in order to remain alive for a further hour, a further day or month, humankind itself is redeemed.

But only a few, very few. Most accept the squalor that has made a home in their hearts; most bow their heads when they are told to, stare down at the mud at their feet, and think: ‘Dear God, is there anything I can do or say that will persuade the angel of death to pass me by, for this morning at least? If there is, I will do it.'

I stare into the darkness while my mother shares her body with my uncle and seethe with disgust.

But what might I myself do if one of the men in black dangled a noose before me and said, ‘Lick the mud from my boots or this goes round your neck'?

I fear I would fall to my knees and make myself busy.

That is what is so horrible to recall – that knowledge.

The Russians return in July 1944. They bomb strategic German positions in the city, but some of the civilian population become what the CIA, with its genius for euphemism, will later call ‘collateral damage'.

We Jews have spent almost three years as the captives of the Germans, while the Poles have spent the same three years as citizens of an occupied nation.

Lvov over these three years is a small-scale version of the German project: everything that the Germans hope to achieve in regard to the Jews of Europe, they achieve in Lvov, except for their grand goal of total and complete annihilation. Given another year or two of war, the Germans would have succeeded in reaching that goal, too. The creation of ghettos that isolate Jews from non-Jews, actions that target for murder specific demographics within the captive Jewish population, mass transport of Jews to death camps, the outsourcing of murder to anti-Semitic militias, enforced starvation – all of this in the Lvov laboratory.

I am myself a unit within the scheme of that project.

In my compartment behind the false wall, I spend hours turning from one side to another on my bedding, while cockroaches scurry across my face.

I don't mind the cockroaches. Anyone whose greatest horror is cockroaches hasn't lived the life of a Jew under Nazi occupation. I have said that I maintain certain survivor rules in the comfortable life I now lead on the shore of the Pacific – no curtains, in order to avoid the feeling of being hidden away, and no showers, to spare me the anguish of looking up at the showerhead and imagining a gas emerging that paralyses the respiratory system and chokes one to death. But I have no such acquired aversion to cockroaches. They don't bite, they avoid my mouth (I was once perhaps not beyond swallowing them; I don't know) and I may even harbour some of the sympathy for them as living things that Coleridge's Ancient Mariner felt for the repulsive water snakes.

In the situation in which I live, one's senses are acutely tuned to creatures with predatory instincts, such as Nazis and Ukrainians and Lithuanians, and register merely ‘No harm here', when it comes to scurrying beetles.

We know that the Russian bombing is haphazard, and that the house in which we live is as just as likely to be blown sky-high as a German barracks. Whenever the bombing begins, we run to the cellar, where my father's body is buried. Everyone in the house runs – my mother, my uncle, the elderly Polish couple who own the house.