Let Me Whisper You My Story
Read Let Me Whisper You My Story Online
Authors: Moya Simons
To the memory of Anna Parnas, mother of Eve Thassim
For Mercy has a human heart
And Pity a human face…
Songs of Innocence
, William Blake
I
N THE
1930
S
, before war broke out, I lived in a two-storey house in a city called Leipzig, in Germany. We had a creaking front gate and a grassy garden and neat lines of flowers. In the spring, flowers, sleeping throughout the winter, budded and bloomed. Fragrant roses and carnations filled the garden with colour. In winter, it sometimes snowed, and the silence of the snow was very sweet as it gently covered the neighbourhood in a white cloak and the flowers and bare trees began their winter slumber.
There were four of us. Mama was tall and slim, with long fair hair and pale skin. Papa was stocky with a mass of black curly hair, dark eyes and a thick beard. Miri looked like my mother; she also had long blonde hair which she pinned up occasionally. I, Rachel, looked like my father with my dark hair, though it was long and wavy, like Mama’s. My eyes were also dark. ‘Like midnight,’ said Mama, while Miri’s were ‘like a midday blue sky’.
Miri was seven years older than me. I shared a
bedroom with her upstairs. This was my choice, and my good luck that Miri was easygoing. I didn’t want to sleep alone. On our dressing table, Miri had a silver brush, mirror and comb passed down to her by our ancient great-grandmother whose portrait hung in the dining room. On my side of the dressing table I had small toys lined up in a neat row. On my pink quilted bed lay my doll, Annie.
The third bedroom was used by my father as a study and library, and books were filed neatly in Papa’s orderly way on shelves against the walls.
‘You cannot take away learning,’ my papa would say when I asked him why he had so many books, and on so many subjects: religious books, medical texts, works on the Roman Empire, crime fiction about the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, and books on architecture and science.
Mama and Papa had the big bedroom with a pale blue quilt on their bed and a double wardrobe and a dressing table. There were photos of their wedding day and of Miri and me at different ages on the dressing table and on the small shelf. On the wall hung a painting of the Austrian alps.
Downstairs, a side entrance led to my father’s surgery. He had a waiting room with a desk and filing cabinets and a door that opened into his antiseptic-smelling surgery.
Before Jews were forbidden to employ non-Jews, my papa had a German non-Jewish lady working for him who made appointments. I don’t remember her, but Miri described her as very efficient and kind. She wore
her blonde hair pinned back from her face and had big round glasses. Miri told me she cried when she had to stop working for Papa. ‘It’s not fair,’ she said.
Mama then helped Papa with his book-keeping work and made appointments for patients or Papa did it himself.
The surgery was strictly out of bounds for me, though I knew what it looked like inside. There were locked cabinets in there filled with bottles of medication and packets of pills. Large drawers behind the desk where my papa sat contained medical equipment and a stethoscope. Against one wall was a bookshelf filled with medical books and on the other side there was a long examination bed covered with a white sheet.
Once, when my doll Annie lost her eye, I slipped past the patients in the waiting room and, without knocking, opened the surgery door. Papa was standing in his white coat peering down the open mouth of a seated patient.
Papa briefly glanced at me and his bushy eyebrows locked into one another as he frowned. ‘Please leave right away, Rachel.’
‘But you’re a doctor, and Annie’s lost her left eye. Can’t you fix it up?’
‘Find the eye and I’ll sew it back. Now go away. Quickly.’
Two ladies in the waiting room smiled at me as I came out with my one-eyed doll. Later, Papa told me never, ever, to do such a thing again.
Miri and I searched everywhere for the missing eye and couldn’t find it. Eventually, I told Annie:‘Bad things happen to Jews. Because you belong to me you are
a Jewish doll. That’s why you lost your eye.’ It seemed a very good reason for an eye to be lost. I comforted her and told her I loved her just as much with one eye as we sat, snuggled together, in an armchair in the living room.
A warm beige carpet covered the living-room floor and the cushions of the pale velvet lounge suite were soft and feathery. I would often curl up and sleep there. We would relax by the rosewood coffee table near the fireplace in winter and listen to music on the wireless, or Mama would play the piano and sometimes sing in her sweet soprano voice. By day, a cut glass vase on the coffee table caught sunlight through the window and became a kaleidoscope of colour.
In the dining room we had a long mahogany table and chairs with carved legs. It was a
special
room with a serious look about it, and was my favourite room. On the walls hung paintings of the countryside, as well as the one of our ancient great-grandmother, with her thick curly hair. She watched us in her high-necked black gown, her face solemn, her mouth like a thin pencil line. A fine glass cabinet against the wall held delicate porcelain ornaments, wineglasses, and a nine-branched
menorah
, a very special Jewish candle holder used at Hunukkah, the eight-day Festival of Lights celebrated in December.
We always ate in the dining room on religious festivals, which we usually shared with my aunt, uncle and noisy cousins who lived across the road.
Our home was in the Jewish part of Leipzig. There was a Jewish day school at the end of our street and not much further on, a synagogue.
Miri told me that once our street had been the happiest street in Leipzig, but I couldn’t remember such a time. She said that children played outside and everyone knew everyone else and there was nothing to be afraid of. It sounded like a dream to me. She said there was a time when non-Jews had friendships with Jews but that seemed like a dream too.
Once, a girl spat on me. I was walking with my parents along the streets of Leipzig. Papa wore his large brimmed hat and long black coat. This was the way religious Jewish men dressed and made it obvious to everyone that we were a Jewish family.
The glob landed firmly on my forehead and it was a great shock. My father hesitated in our walk. I knew he wanted to say something; his face was purple with rage. The girl’s parents looked away. They didn’t say a word. Mama took Papa’s arm in hers. ‘No,’ she said in her quiet voice. Then she leaned over me and wiped the spit away with her handkerchief.
When I arrived home, quiet and mortified, I went to the bathroom to wash my face. Although I washed my forehead raw, I could still feel this invisible imprint of hatred on my skin.
I
N
1938,
THE
year I turned five, German Stormtroopers in their brown uniforms with swastika armbands stood in front of Jewish stores urging Germans not to buy from Jews. I am sure this was happening before that year, but memories from 1938 onwards do not have the blur of early childhood and have become a movie reel playing and replaying in my mind.
I was too young to read the words of hatred written on the shop fronts, but Miri whispered them to me.
‘Let her be, Miri,’ my mama said. ‘Let her enjoy her childhood.’
I tried to understand. I was so little. Comfort for me was my papa tossing me above his head and catching me, my mama cradling me against the warmth of her body, my sister Miri brushing my hair and neatly fixing a bow in it.
My young age and reliance upon my parents protected me, but life for older children was more difficult. Running around the streets they were more likely to encounter gangs who beat them up. Once, my
cousin Erich came home with a bloody lip and a swollen eye. We were at our aunt and uncle’s place when he stumbled into the living room.
My uncle rushed to Erich, his lips trembling. ‘Erich. Oh, my poor boy. What did I tell you? Stay close to home.’
He held Erich’s head against his chest, rubbing his back and kissing his matted hair. Erich’s sister, Agnes, who was about ten years old, ran to her bedroom. ‘I wish I wasn’t Jewish,’ she screamed.
‘Don’t say that,’ Uncle Ernst called out to her. ‘It’s not our fault. We haven’t done anything wrong. You should be proud to be Jewish…yes, proud.’
‘It would have been easier to be Christian.’ Agnes banged the bedroom door closed behind her.
Uncle Ernst turned his attention to Erich. ‘My poor son.’
I watched as my nervous aunt put a cold compress on my cousin’s eye. I stood up close to his swollen face. ‘It hurts,’ he told me seriously.
I began to cry. Nobody should have hurt my cousin. ‘Why can’t we hurt the bad people back?’ I asked Papa.
‘If we could, we would, but there are too many of them, Rachel, and too few of us. This hatred has been whipped up by Hitler,’ my papa explained to me. ‘Jews fought for this country in the First World War. We have always been proud Germans. There has been anti-Semitism before and it has passed. I am sure this insanity will pass too.’ He took my hand and led me out of the house, across the road to our home, and handed me my doll.
Erich’s swollen eye and thick lip healed and, for a while anyway, he did stay close to home, and practised on his violin.
In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. This meant, Papa patiently explained to me, that German troops simply went into Austria, where people lined the streets and threw flowers and streamers at the soldiers. Austria became part of Germany. Most of the Austrians were delighted. They spoke German, and wasn’t it true that Hitler was Austrian?
‘That sounds very nice for the Austrian people,’ I told Papa, while he stroked his beard and looked thoughtful.
I became busy with other things. Busy exploring the insides of wardrobes and dressing up in my sister’s clothing or counting the tomato plants growing in our vegetable patch in the garden.
A few months later an order was issued for all Jews to be inside their homes by 8.00 pm. It didn’t bother me. ‘Maybe it’s to keep us safe from all the nasty people,’ I said to Papa. Papa ruffled my hair. ‘Maybe,’ he answered.
In November an event occurred like no other. It became known as
Kristallnacht
, which means the night of broken glass. Jewish shop windows were smashed and Jews were beaten up. Homes in suburbs where many Jews lived were set on fire. Some Jews were arrested for just being on the street and were taken away. It was like all of Germany went mad, and hatred of Jews became openly approved of, even part of German policy. We huddled together in the cellar of our house while around us we could hear the smashing of windows and the tortured screams of our neighbours.
Who would do such a thing? Mama held me to her and comforted me as I whimpered.
There was a thud on the front door. Was it the police? The hoodlums running around the streets? We stiffened.
Papa walked cautiously up the dark steps to the top of the landing. ‘Who is it?’ he called out.
It was Fritz, a neighbour from up the road. ‘Doctor, come quickly. You are needed.’
‘It’s too dangerous to go out,’ Mama pleaded, but Papa gently took her hand away from his and collected his medical bag from his surgery and went out into the night to help the injured. Papa took shards of glass out of arms and legs and faces and stomachs. He put splints on broken limbs. When he came home, his sleeves were rolled up and spattered with blood. He shook his head. ‘Never have I seen such terrible things,’ he said.
My papa was away from home most of the next day helping injured people. Mama and Miri washed the horrible slogans off our fence and boarded up our broken windows.
When Mama and Miri came back inside later, blood trickled from Mama’s fingers. I quickly ran to her. ‘You’re bleeding.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Mama replied as she examined her hands. ‘A bit of broken glass, that’s all.’
‘It’s everything,’ Miri called out from the bathroom. ‘It’s our lives bleeding away.’
‘Stop that, Miri,’ said Mama.
Though we little children stayed inside, many bigger children ignored their parents’ warnings and went to see the damage. All the local children of school age went to
the Jewish day school nearby, but this was now closed. Windows everywhere were smashed and some houses were burnt to the ground. Horrible anti-Jewish slogans were painted on the walls of Jewish shops, which had been looted. Religious Jewish men caught in the street had their beards cut off by laughing crowds. What had become of our city? Why was this happening?
When things quietened a little, members of our families finally went out to buy food and we waited anxiously for their return. I remember my parents’ silence and the way it breathed itself into every pore of my body when they came home. It soaked into the walls and hung from the ceiling like a thick cloak.
Papa mentioned the name of two elderly shopkeepers and said, ‘Gone.’ This one word echoed around the kitchen. Within a month laws were passed ordering Jewish shops to close and cancelling German Jews’ driving licences.
As Papa was a doctor you might think he told us everything that was going on in the world outside our house, but when he came home, he looked like someone I hardly knew. He seemed to have become smaller in a matter of days. His shoulders slouched and his head was bent. ‘It is beyond terrible,’ he said.
I suppose he must have told my mama, because I could hear her crying in their bedroom. And it wasn’t just Mama. Papa, who seldom wept, cried too.
‘The synagogue has been burnt down,’ I heard him say.
Miri, who stood with me outside their bedroom door, grabbed my hand too hard then let it go. She left me holding my one-eyed doll and ran out of our house.
I saw her through the window curling up on the grass near the fence. Her head was bent. I began to think about where I could go when I needed a safe place.
Later that day, after inspecting the different rooms, I decided that when I needed to feel better I would curl up inside my parents’ wardrobe. Sitting between the clothes amongst familiar family smells, I would tell the stillness there that a time would come when we could walk down all the streets in Leipzig. People would smile at us, and Papa would tip his hat at all the ladies. Mama would stop to say good morning to everyone. I tried so hard to imagine this simple harmony, and inside the warmth of the wardrobe all things became possible.
In early March 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. ‘Why didn’t we leave Germany last year?’ Mama complained to Papa. ‘We’ve waited and now it’s too late. We can’t get an exit visa. The world watches while Jews are trapped in Europe. The anti-Semitism is unbearable and Hitler encourages it.’
‘I am one of the few doctors left in Leipzig,’ Papa replied quietly. ‘Anti-Semitism has come and gone for seventeen hundred years, and so will this. Of course I am very worried for you and the children, and know now I should have sent you away to a safer place when I could, until everything returns to normal. I was stupid. Let’s pray that now Hitler has Czechoslovakia he will not go further, and that this madness will stop.’
My former school was now permanently closed. It had become a sitting target for gangs to vandalise. Some Jewish schools were still open but the number of children attending them grew smaller, and many were
being educated from home. Everyone was scared. A walk across the street, to the shops, anywhere out of the house seemed to involve some sort of risk.
Mama took to cleaning the house all the time, sweeping a clean floor briskly as if she was in a hurry, dusting cabinets that had already been dusted the day before. ‘Pick up your toys, Rachel. Stack your picture books in a row.’ It all seemed very silly at the time. Later, when I was older and thought about this, I realised she was trying very hard to keep order in a world that had gone mad.
I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1939, Germany invaded Poland, with the assistance of the Russian army. ‘This means that England and all the countries that are part of the British Commonwealth are also at war with Germany,’ Papa explained to Miri and me. ‘They have an agreement with Poland that if the Germans invade them the British will fight on their side.’ I didn’t really understand and Mama showed me a map of the world so I could see the different countries involved in the war.
‘What are they fighting for?’ I asked Papa.
‘War is about power. It’s always horrible and lots of innocent people die,’ Papa said, and ruffled my hair. ‘Don’t you worry about it. This will be over soon.’
‘We are being treated like criminals,’ complained Mama when Jews were ordered to surrender their wireless sets.
‘Even without a wireless we are getting news. The word on the streets is that terrible things are happening
in Poland,’ Papa replied soberly. ‘German Jews with a Polish background have been sent back to Poland from Leipzig even if they were born here. Why? The Poles don’t want them. Jews all over Leipzig are trying to leave Germany, and it’s impossible now. We have to be brave and hope this ends soon, and that life will go back to normal.’
Tears filled his eyes as he said this, and he put his arms around Mama and kissed her gently on her cheek. Then he embraced Miri and me. Miri cried and I cried too, because all that crying was making me sad. I couldn’t understand what war was about, that Europe was becoming one big Germany as countries were bombed and taken over.
In Germany, restrictions on Jewish life became worse. Jewish businesses were taken over by non-Jews. Papa, as a doctor, still worked, and harder than ever. There were many sick people. Many had been beaten. Most of the time they were too sick to visit him so he would go out to see them. He could not drive because of the new regulations but, as we lived in an area where many Jews lived, there were more than enough patients to visit.
When he’d come home later, he’d put his medical bag away and collapse into an armchair. ‘I cannot believe what I have seen,’ he would say to Mama, and she’d make him a warm drink. At such times my father’s eyebrows were knitted together in a deep frown. Then he’d see me and his face would light up into a perfect smile as I ran to him and sat on his lap.
Jewish homes were taken over by the Nazis, and Jews were sent to
Judenhäuser
—apartments that had belonged
to Jews and had been seized by the government to cram Jews together.
I wondered how long it would be before the Nazis came for us. I spent a lot of time in Mama and Papa’s wardrobe, worrying about this.
Once Mama and Papa talked together in the bedroom, unaware that I was sitting between the row of clothing.
‘They are rounding up Jews in occupied countries,’ my father told Mama. ‘Terrible things are being done. There is talk of concentration camps and murder.’
‘Concentration camps?’ Mama replied. ‘I heard they are moving Jews out of towns. That we are to be resettled. Isn’t that what these camps are for?’
‘Where do you think they are going to resettle us?’ Papa asked.
I must have shifted position in the wardrobe, for the door was opened abruptly and Mama stood there. She pulled her dresses aside and there I was, curled up in a ball, trembling at my papa’s words.
‘It’s all right, Rachel,’ she said to me, and leaned down and stroked my hair. ‘As long as we are together, we shall be fine. We shall come through this.’
‘Miri says that even though horrible things have happened to Jews before, this is the worst it’s ever been.’ I clambered to my feet and shuffled out of the wardrobe. ‘I don’t understand why this is happening, or why it has happened before. What did the Jewish people do?’
Papa looked at Mama. ‘That is the question our people have been asking forever, and we still don’t have an answer. Our customs are different, but that does not
make us bad. Why do you hide in the wardrobe, Rachel?’
‘I’m not really hiding. I like the smell of your clothing. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Papa said, and he tweaked my cheek, straightened the bow in my hair, and smiled.
Then, when it seemed as though each day we walked across a circus tightrope without the benefit of a net, something worse happened. There was heavy food rationing and all the complications that came with trying to buy food from shops where we weren’t welcome. Mama tried to think of ways to make simple meals tasty, and to make do with little. She cried a lot, but I say that because I heard her cry when I was in the wardrobe. She never cried in front of me.
Each day Mama dressed nicely in a floral dress and a fitted belt. She pinned back her fair hair and sometimes I’d catch her staring at herself in the mirror. She’d look at her reflection for ages, as if there was something she had just noticed for the first time. Then she’d see me watching and turn around, and a smile would curl on her face. Her eyebrows would rise like small wings and she’d say to me, ‘Ah. I have a little spy in the house.’ She’d gather me in her arms. Oh, how special that was. The world is always safe when your mama holds you to her.