The Earth Is Singing (13 page)

I shudder. I have read all about the anti-Semitic Pērkonkrusts political party in
Tēvija.
They were outlawed by the Latvian government in 1934, but their slogan “Latvia for Latvians – Work and bread for Latvians!” is too close to what Uldis once said when I asked him why he was joining the auxiliary police. And yet because I loved him I chose to hear everything he said, and view everything he did, as good.

So he had been planning his betrayal of us since the beginning of July.

I sink down onto the floor as our chairs have been taken.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whisper.

Mama comes and sits on the floor next to me. She puts her arm around my shoulders and presses herself close to me.

“Uldis’s mother is a good woman,” she says. “She does not share the beliefs of her husband and son. It was because of her that we let you see Uldis even though I was never really happy with it, as you probably could tell.”

“I thought it was because you wanted me to make a Jewish marriage,” I say, leaning into her.

Mama laughs.

“Why would I want that?” she says. “I was happy with Papa, no? And he was not a Jew.”

I note that she says “was” rather than “am” but I am too tired to protest.

“Besides,” says Mama, “we did not think you would ever have to see Uldis again after we went into hiding.”

“Well, you got that bit wrong,” I say. A new feeling is rising up inside me. Anger. Anger at the way Uldis sat at our family table when Papa was still here and talked about his plans for the future and ate our beautiful home-cooked food and charmed my Omama.

A whole chunk of my future will have to be rewritten. No more blond-haired blue-eyed children with handsome, chisel-faced Uldis.

When I think of him from now on, I will try just to see a rat. Rats are slippery and unpleasant and have eyes that are too close together.

But it will not stop the hurt of his betrayal. I know that. I feel old, weary, about a hundred. It is like I have gone to sleep in a world of fantasy and woken up in a world of real life. In the cold light of day, everything I have left looks fragile and unappealing.

“We need to focus on getting to the Russian part of town now,” Mama is saying. “We have to go to the ghetto, Hanna.”

“Where will the Russians go?” I say.

I picture us moving into their houses without them leaving. All squashed together and speaking different languages.

“Hanna, there is no time for your questions,” says Mama. “See if you can find any plates and spoons in the kitchen. And cups or bowls. I need to sort out transport.”

She goes downstairs to the cellar of our apartment building, leaving me and Omama pulling together the few possessions we can find.

Twenty minutes later Mama comes in triumphant with two wheelbarrows and wobbles them sideways to fit them through the front door.

“There,” she says. “Now we can move.”

I stare at the barrows in disbelief. They are not very big, plus one of them has a broken wheel at the front.

“We have to use these?” I say.

Mama comes over to put her arms around me.

“Hanna,” she says, “we are not allowed to have private transportation. We are not allowed to get on trains or buses or boats or hire carriages. We are not even allowed to walk on the sidewalks. So we have to use what we can.”

Omama is already putting pillows and blankets into one of the barrows.

“Perhaps we should push you, Mama,” says my mother. “You are very thin. I have just found out from the caretaker that there is a
Gesundheitsamt
set up to help those who are elderly or unwell. They can give us a pushcart.”

Omama stands up straight and glares at us.

“I might be old,” she says, “and yes, my arms and legs do not work as well as they once did. But I’ve still got enough dignity not to be pushed in front of the population of Rīga in a barrow, thank you very much.”

As a last gesture of defiance she chucks the small black radio on top of the pile.

Mama groans.

“At least put a blanket over it!” she says. But she does not offer to put Omama in a pushcart again. Omama seems to have got a bit of her fighting spirit back since we were hustled out of Uncle Georgs’s attic.

None of us mention what happened to Uncle Georgs and Aunt Brigita.

It is too raw. We can’t yet find the words.

We leave our apartment the next morning.

The weather is starting to take on a sharp edge. Mama has spent the rest of the early hours sewing new yellow stars onto our winter coats so that we can wear them over our thinner jackets and, in that way, manage to take as much clothing as we are able into the ghetto.

We have loaded up the two wheelbarrows with blankets, pillows, pots, pans and as many clothes as we can fit in. Mama manages to squeeze her sewing kit in on the very top. We tie the bulky loads down with pieces of rope so that our belongings do not fall out in the street.

The janitor of our apartment block helps us carry both barrows downstairs, although he pulls a face when Mama asks him and says he won’t go any further than the downstairs corridor.

“You Jews are nothing but trouble,” he says. But his face is not cross when he says this. He’s always had a soft spot for Mama. I reckon he’s scared, just like the rest of the non-Jewish population of Rīga now. He is risking his life by helping us.

“Thank you,” my mother says to him. “We will leave you in peace now.”

We stand outside the door to our apartment block and look up at the building one last time.

Then Mama and I push the two barrows into the gutter and, with Omama walking behind, we start our journey out of the old town and towards our new home.

It takes nearly an hour to navigate our barrows into
Maskavas iela
and the heart of the ghetto.

We struggle across town, alongside the river, and join other streams of Jews pulling carts, wagons and barrows loaded up with their only remaining possessions.

The Latvian citizens of Rīga regard us impassively from behind their coat collars as they hurry to work. Some of them mime things at their Jewish friends on the way past. Others go out of their way to cross the road when they see us coming. Helena and her mother are heading towards the centre of the old town where they will buy food in the shops we are not allowed to queue in and sit in the cafes we are no longer allowed to eat in. Mama risks a wave but is rewarded with a blank, hard stare from the friends she has had for years.

“Told you,” I mutter. I don’t even try to make eye contact with Helena. What is the point? She will not lower herself to offer a smile to a Jew.

There is a marked contrast between the speed of Rīga’s workforce hurrying along in their smart office clothes in one direction and the slow, cumbersome pace of us Jews of Rīga, with our yellow stars visible on coats and jackets dragging our loads in the other.

“Oh,” says Mama, her face brightening. “Look. There is Mr Gutkin!”

She is pointing at Rīga’s leading manufacturer of our beloved matzo crackers. He is being wheeled along in one of the makeshift pushcarts that Mama wanted to get for Omama. He is waving and smiling at everybody in the Jewish queue as he travels beside them. I like Mr Gutkin’s grey moustache and beard and his kind dark eyes.

“Free matzo for everyone after we leave the ghetto!” he is shouting. Many of the Jews are smiling and shouting back, but Omama’s face is set like stone.

“He is living in a world of fantasy,” she mutters. “Maybe he ate too much of his own damned bread!”

I can tell that Omama’s bad temper is because her hip is hurting, but I’m too frightened to stop wheeling my barrow along the uneven gutters so that I can turn round and help her. There are SS units in open-topped cars patrolling up and down the streets and every now and again their soldiers leap out and beat the slow-moving Jews until they either speed up or fall to the ground and lie there motionless.

I dare not stop.

On the endless walk we learn from other Jews that we must report to the Jewish Council in
Lāčplēša iela.

When we reach this street we are cold and numb from lack of sleep the night before.

There is chaos in the large school building which has been converted into the headquarters of the Jewish community. Here a small number of Jewish men and women have been assigned by the Nazis to manage every aspect of our lives in the ghetto.

A dark-haired lady called Mrs Blumenfeld is in charge of the apartment office which deals with housing. She is wearing a white armband with a blue Star of David on it and sitting at a small desk being begged and besieged by several hundred desperate Jews who have walked across town and now have no place to live. In the courtyard at the back of the building, despondent people sit on barrows and suitcases with their heads in their hands whilst their children cling to them and cry.

Mama sits Omama down outside in the courtyard and puts her own coat around Omama’s shoulders before she remembers that she can’t remove her own yellow star, so she takes it back again and then she and I queue up for nearly two hours until it is our turn to be dealt with.

Mrs Blumenfeld looks up our names and then copies them into a large register.

“You have been assigned a first floor room at number 29,
Ludzas iela,”
she says. “There are already some Jews in the building and you will probably have to share the room with others.”

I look at Mama, horrified, but Mama is signing her name on a document and appears to have nothing to say about this latest horrid twist of fate.

“Go and register at the labour office across the street,” says Mrs Blumenfeld. “All able-bodied Jews must work.”

Mama nods. Her face is full of fear and confusion but she is determined not to make a fuss.

Then we negotiate our barrows out of the crowded community centre buildings and with Omama grumbling behind us, enter the crowded building of the labour office at 145
Lāčplēša
. Mama and I queue up again and are given yellow cards.

“We already have blue cards,” says Mama. She means the ones we first got when we registered at the police station for work.

The man behind the desk frowns.

“It says here you are seamstresses,” he says. “So you are specialist workers. You need yellow cards.”

“Oh,” says Mama with a faint smile. I can see she is pleased to be called a “specialist”.

Omama is too old to be registered for work. She throws her hands up at the harassed staff from the Jewish Council and protests, but she is informed that she can stay at home and keep house for us.

Mama is told that we will not receive any pay for our work.

I open my mouth to complain at this but she shoves me in the ribs and turns me round before I have a chance to say anything that we might all regret.

Thank God Omama does not hear the bit about us not receiving pay.

Our registration is finished. We make our way down
Sadovņikova iela
and into
Ludzas iela.

We brush past other Jews who are stopping and consulting one another, trying to find their lodgings. I try not to look too closely at the buildings we are passing but I can’t help it. Many of them are only one storey high and their thin walls are made of cheap wooden slats. Several windows are smashed or missing altogether and there are boards nailed up over the gaps. One or two of the houses have no roofs although others have pointed gables and might have been pretty, about a hundred years ago. There are dogs chained to walls and barking in the run-down front gardens of some of the houses. I guess their owners had to leave them behind if they were moving in to smart apartments in town so that Jews could move into these dilapidated houses.

“I know this area,” says Omama. “When I was a girl, I used to visit my friend here. It is a nice place, no?”

We ignore her sarcastic tone.

“Very near the Jewish cemetery, too,” says Omama, waving her arm in front of us. “Most handy.”

When Omama is in this mood it is best to ignore her. Mama stops, out of breath, and sits for a moment on the side of her barrow. We are outside number 29. It is a fragile building of three storeys. There is an attic window in the roof. The wooden walls are brown and the windows are thick with grey dirt and bordered by sills whose paint has long since rotted away. There are wooden shutters hanging off the ground-floor windows and the roof is missing several slates.

I stare at this place which is to be our new home and realize that the apartment in
Skārņu iela
was really not as bad as we had always thought it. This building is in a different league altogether.

“Well!” says Mama in the bright voice she always assumes when she senses my fear. “We’d better get in and start unpacking.”

She steps forward and pushes the main door. It swings open with a creak and a small bird flies out into her face and makes her scream.

We navigate our barrows into a dark hallway. Although it smells of damp and something less pleasant, there are brown panels on the walls which may once have been smart and there are holes where picture hooks were inserted.

Mama is looking around with a frown.

“This was a family home,” she says. “It must have been divided into apartments by the Soviets. I hope the previous residents are having better luck than us.”

“Well,” says Omama, “those penniless Russians will now be put into the apartments we Jews left. Of course they will have better luck than us! For the first time they will have electricity and running water!”

Mama has abandoned her barrow at the foot of the stairs and is climbing up, hanging onto what is left of the banister. The stairs creak and there is a smell of mould and dust and overflowing rubbish.

“This must be ours,” she calls from the first floor. “There is nobody else here.”

I help Omama up two flights and we enter the apartment which is to be our new home.

There is only really one main room, with a wooden floor with split floorboards and one uncurtained window overlooking the street. Off this room is a tiny kitchen with one sink, a greasy stove and nothing else. There is a small bedroom which opens out of the opposite side of the living room but there is no furniture in it. There is no dining room and no bathroom but Mama finds a toilet in what looks like a cupboard.