Letter from my Father (2 page)

It was the beginning of autumn and I was nearly four years old. We lived in a room on the first floor of a two-storey house, with my father's Aunt Gutele. We shared the kitchen and bathroom with some other families. Our room had a bed for Mother and Father and a little sofa for me. There was a table with some chairs. Sometimes one of Aunt Gutele's sons, my father's young cousin Simcha, came to visit. I loved him. He played with me and liked to pick me up and carry me high in his arms. One night I was allowed to stay up until he was due to arrive. I was so happy. But I fell asleep waiting for him. He came and went and no one thought to wake me. When I realised I had missed out on seeing him, I thought how cruel grown-ups could be.

I was smacked by Mother for not eating enough, but I did like the sunflower seeds that my Aunt brought me. I enjoyed drinking tea from a saucer after it became nice and cool. My
mother kept telling me not to slurp it. At bedtime, Father would take me to the toilet, holding me close in his arms.

We were given white armbands imprinted with the blue Star of David. They were meant to let everybody know that we were Jewish, though I never went outside the house. Outside there was danger, bad danger. I forgot what the sky and the sun and the trees looked like. But I liked sweeping the floor of our room and the hallway where other people lived, with a little broom. This was my favourite pastime.

I knew that the grown-ups were more and more frightened and nervous. They talked about
mass killings
in forests and about people
digging their own graves
. All this was somehow
in the air
. I really did not understand it, but was distraught when I heard that my fun-loving cousin Simcha was one of those who had to dig his own grave.

Mother and Father, helped by the other people in the house, built a hiding place, a
bunker
, in the space beneath it. The entrance was concealed under a false step leading from our room to a little balcony. We climbed a ladder down to the bunker every time someone warned us that an organised raid was about to happen. This, I was told, was when the SS came into the house and took Jewish people away to be killed. One day there was no time for us to go down and we quickly hid under the bed as the men burst in. We lay quietly, barely breathing. I was becoming good at being very, very quiet. They made a lot of noise, then left. Good. Then there was another raid. We hurried down to the bunker and closed the step. On top of us we could hear the sound of the SS in their heavy boots stamping back and forth, throwing furniture about and shouting, always shouting. We sat there in silence. My heart beat fast with fear. Terrible things would happen if someone made a sound, they said. A child started to cry. People froze. It stopped. Everyone breathed out again. There was a long, long silence. At last it was
safe
to go up again. For now.

Another family moved into our room with us. Now it was really crowded. There was a mother and a father and their two little sons, with whom I sometimes played. The father was a tall man. They seemed nice. One day the SS came and took the whole family away. After a while the father returned alone. Everyone understood that the mother and the boys would never come back. The father behaved strangely. He just lay on a narrow mattress in the corner of our room for hours, staring at the wall, refusing to eat. After a few days he was moved to the hallway. They made chicken broth for him but he would not swallow it. He just wanted to be left alone. I could see that he was very sad but kept away from him as he got thinner and thinner. He died. His skeletal body was put in the room at the end of the hallway and covered with a sheet. I kept sneaking in along with another little girl to lift the sheet and see what a dead body looked like. We were curious and wanted to find out if he would move again. He remained completely still.

II

A Child Alone

I
was now four years old and learning new exciting words. But there were also other words, words that scared me. The most important was
aktion.
This is when the SS came into the house and took Jewish people away to be killed. I heard the grown-ups talk about how in August and September hundreds of Jewish people were taken to a
concentration camp
at Belzec or shot in the forests near the town. I didn't fully understand what these words meant, but I knew camps were places where some really bad things happened. In the midst of all these bad things my father kept teaching me the Aleph Bet every morning.

It was becoming colder. People felt that worse things would happen. In Zbaraz the SS rounded up Jewish men and women by dragging them from their houses and hiding places and sending them to Belzec. People whispered that the Zbaraz ghetto was like
a city of death
. The eighth and ninth of November were important dates to remember because many, many people were killed. My mother and father could not see how our family could
survive
. This meant staying alive. They decided that I must stay alive and arranged for me to be cared for by a Polish lady, Sabina, who was a Catholic. I was to go and live with her as an
Aryan
child while they remained in the Ghetto.

Sabina lived with her Jewish husband Yaakov and their two little boys in Tarnopol, a much bigger place than Zbaraz. Yaakov was born in Czechoslovakia and had known Cousin Simcha. My parents gave Sabina all the money they had as
payment for looking after me. Mother and Father told me that I would be staying with Sabina and her family for some time and that they would come and fetch me
after the War
.

I didn't want to leave my parents. I didn't understand how they could love me and give me away to strangers. But Father explained that I must go at once. I was allowed to take my favourite toys, a salt and a pepper shaker and a little white ball.
You must pretend to be a little Aryan girl
, they told me. I understood that meant Christian, not Jewish. I could no longer be called by my own name Ester Hadasa with its diminutive Dasia (from Hadasa). Now my name was Stasia, a real Polish name. Sabina told me that my
Slavic looks
, which meant high cheekbones, light brown hair and green eyes, would make it easier for me to
pass
as a child who was not Jewish.

My father explained over and over again that I must never tell anybody what my real name was. If I did, something terrible would happen. I must hide the real Ester. I absorbed this message. He took me through some streets I had never seen and then through a gate. Sabina was waiting for me. He left me with her.

I began a new life in Tarnopol. I was now Stasia, a Catholic girl and Sabina was supposed to be my mother. But she did not behave like my own mother. She never hugged or kissed me so that I forgot what it was like to be held and loved.

I watched carefully everything that was happening around me. Although I joined in some activities of the other children I did not seem to feel anything. It is as if my happiness had left for another place. It did not belong in my new life.

Sabina and Yaakov lived on the first floor of a three-storey grey apartment building close to the centre of the city. Inside our apartment were places where Yaakov hid whenever visitors came. One hiding place was a curtained-off space between the window and the broom cupboard, where he sometimes had to stand for hours without making a sound.
At other times he would lie under the bed. We knew we had to make a noise if he coughed or sneezed. The woman in the flat next door was one person of whom we had to be very wary. She was a
Nazi informer
, who snooped to see if there were any Jews hiding in the building and then told the SS about them. There was much whispered talk between Sabina and Yaakov about the risks of having her as a neighbour. There was always danger for me and Yaakov because if we were found we could be killed.

The neighbour thought I was Sabina's child, though I did not call her Mummy. I did not call her anything. One day the neighbour came to see us. She was smiling. She told us that she had discovered a Jewish family hiding in the ground floor flat and had informed the SS. When the men arrived, we all stood on the first floor landing outside our flat to watch a woman and her husband and children being dragged away. I noted that their hair was dark and that they looked terrified.

When I left the apartment or visited Sabina's mother in the country, I behaved like a good Catholic girl. Poland was full of images of Christ, shown in tiny statues or in paintings. I knelt before them, crossed myself and said prayers to Jesus.

Sometimes as I looked down from our apartment window, I would see groups of weak, ragged people, pale like ghosts being marched and pushed along the street by ferocious guards. I knew that they too were Jewish. But I couldn't show my distress.

One day Yaakov was sent a valuable watch that had belonged to Cousin Simcha. He gave it to me.

I was hungry most of the time. Sabina offered me speck cut into little cubes. I wouldn't eat this disgusting flavoured ham. It made me sick to look at it. Pig meat was forbidden to Jews. She also gave us bread and butter. Her two little boys, both younger than me, got more than I. They liked to eat the soft middle of the bread, leaving the crusts to me. I would have liked more but dared not ask. From time to time, when
Sabina and the boys were out, Yaakov would cut slices off a loaf of black bread, rub them with garlic, fry them in chicken fat and then let me feast on them. This was truly yummy food. At these special times, Yaakov also taught me the Aleph Bet, just as my father used to do. That seemed so long ago.

The right side of my jaw became swollen. I was taken to hospital to have what they called
the growth
removed. The hospital was outside town. I was left in a room with other children. The people in the hospital had no knives and forks, no soap nor toothpaste to give us. The other children's parents brought them spoons and knives and forks and soap but I had no one to bring me things. When the watery soup arrived in a little tin bowl, I had to slurp it directly from the bowl as best I could. I was full of envy when their parents visited.

There was no one to hear how I felt. Sabina and Yaakov were busy with their boys. I felt like crying and crying but kept everything inside.

But there were good times too. In summer I went to Sabina's mother's farm in a tiny Polish village. She lived in a whitewashed house with a thatched roof with a stork's nest on top. They told me that storks bring babies, so I was proud of our stork. The floors of the house were beaten black soil and the furniture was home-made wooden benches set along the wall and wooden tables. We slept on layers of fresh straw laid over bench-like beds. They were soft to sleep on and I loved the smell of the straw.

Most of my time at the farm was spent outdoors. I liked to run through the unfenced fields and forests. The sun shone and surrounded by trees and flower-strewn meadows, I felt happy and light. It was as if I had put down for a little while the very heavy parcel which I carried inside me.

I was still very careful to fit in with what the grown-ups around demanded. Each evening I knelt before the carved wooden statue of Jesus attached to the wall and said my prayers, just as I had been shown.

The little farm provided most of the food Sabina's mother and her family needed. Here I could eat well. We had milk from the cows, vegetables and fruit and flowers from the gardens, and meat from the chickens and geese. I was allowed to help. I picked vegetables and flowers. I scattered grain for the geese and helped milk the cows by pulling hard on their udders, making sure the milk spurted into the bucket. I liked doing this though I was scared of being kicked by the cow.

Back in Tarnopol, I sometimes thought about my mother and father and what it would be like when they came and picked me up
after the War
. Then one day a man I did not know but who may have been a relative, came to Tarnopol. He told Sabina and Yaakov and me news that I heard but didn't really understand. He said that both my parents were dead. Dead. Both Mother and Father. How could that be? All he knew, he said, was that they had been killed and that he was to come and tell us.

Sabina and Yaakov wondered how it could have happened. Did they run away from the Ghetto and try to hide in the forests? I ran to find my very favourite toy, the little white ball I had brought with me. But I could not find it. Where could it be? Now I had nothing from my home. I could not talk and neither could I cry.

I knew that I might get into trouble and make
them
angry if I cried. It was better, safer to stay silent. But now what would happen to me? Who would care for me? My parents had promised to come and fetch me after the War but now they could never come. It was so frightening. I was still a little girl. If there was nobody to hold and take care of me, I might stop being alive.

I tried not to think about it and went on playing, being an extra-good girl so that
they
would still want to look after me. I understood that when I fell, I had to get up by myself.

Time passed and new things were happening. Tarnopol was being bombed by
the Russians
. Often in the evenings we
heard the piercing sound of the siren and all the people in our block went down to the shelter in the cellar to wait for the All Clear. One person did not come. It was still not safe for Yaakov. He stayed upstairs alone. I hated leaving him there.

As the bombing raids became more frequent, there were changes in how people behaved. The grown-ups in the cellar were more excited and talked more. They spoke of how the Nazis were being forced back and the Russians were coming closer. One night the bombing was so heavy Yaakov came down to join us in the cellar. As he entered Sabina quietly said:
This is my husband.
Nobody made any comment.

It seemed the time for talk had ended. A bomb hit the building. The ceiling above us collapsed and the walls of the cellar cracked. Bricks and wood fell all around and on top of us until we were half-buried in the rubble. But soon we realised we were alive and that no one had been hurt.