The Earth Is Singing (25 page)

“What good will that do?” complain others. “Who is going to see them?”

I think I understand. It is giving those women who wrote the notes a last glimmer of hope.

We travel on.

I lean against the side of the carriage and am surprised to realize that I don’t mind being a Jew any longer. I have learned something on my journey. I have learned that the only people worth knowing are the ones who accept me for who I am and not what I am. Mama, Papa, Omama, Max, Lina, Uncle Georgs.

I wonder if the people lying in heaps around me have realized this. It seems very important that they should hear my revelation, but I feel too weak to open my mouth to ask anybody.

I doze for a bit.

When I wake up Mama is sitting next to me.

I think I might be dying. I have heard about the last hallucinations witnessed by people who are soon to leave this earth.

She is sitting next to me and smiling. Her hair has become lush and brown again and she is all fleshed out with health.

“Sing, Hanna,” she says. “You have such a lovely voice.”

I clear my throat. It is dark in here and nobody can really see me. I still feel a little shy, though.

I think. Then I decide to sing the Hativka. It is our Jewish anthem.

At first my voice wavers, particularly when everybody else in the car shuts up to listen. Then I find strength from somewhere inside. My voice rises, pure and clear. A few people join in, their voices disjointed and weak, but it is like they are clinging to a life raft for those few moments.

When I have finished Mama squeezes my hand.

“Still Papa’s little songbird,” she whispers.

Then she fades away.

Our journey in the hell of that carriage continues through a night and into another day.

I do not feel much now. No anger, no fear, not even pain. I am just numb all over, in my head and in my limbs. I think my soul has already left my body and flown off somewhere warm, leaving a jumble of bones behind on the filthy carriage floor.

I watch a mixture of snow and sunshine through the high window. The barbed wire makes diamond patterns in the sky. It is quite pretty, although the scene in our carriage is anything but.

Then something happens.

A woman who until now has been sitting next to us, and muttering to herself in an agitated tone, stands up.

With frenetic gestures and an unexpected brute strength she tears at the barbed wire across the window with her bare hands and manages to rip the central section apart.

Then she begins to climb on top of me so that she can push her head out of the window.

“Ow!” I scream, trying to get her boot out of my face. “Get off me!”

Another woman starts to swear.

“How dare you crush a child!” she says. “If you need to stand on somebody, use me.”

The woman is trying to push herself head-first through the window. She gets her head and shoulders through but she has not accounted for the armed Latvian police who stand outside the carriages at all times of day and night.

There’s a shout. A shot.

The woman’s legs go limp.

They hang down on top of us where we sit.

“Dear God,” says the woman who stood up for me. “We will have to pull her in again.”

With the help of another woman we pull the corpse back inside. It flops down next to me and I try to shuffle away a little but there is no room.

My fingers touch something sticky on the floor. There is nothing I can do. We have no cloths, no water, no space.

For hours I sit next to the body of the woman.

I look up at the broken barbed-wire window.

“The snow is much heavier,” Mama whispers in my ear. “And the train is slowing down. Perfect.”

“You’re back!” I say. I don’t care whether I am dreaming or hallucinating. I am sure I can hear my mother’s voice in my ear.

Great thick flakes are now falling fast outside.

“You are thin enough, Hanna,” she says.

For a moment I am confused. I know I am thin. Why is she telling me? I can feel what used to be my buttocks and are now two big bones pressing into the hard floor of the train.

Mama takes my face in her hands. There is no warmth in her skin but I feel comforted.

“Go,” she says. “You have a chance. I will help you.”

I glance around. Maybe I am finally losing my mind. I have heard that it happens to people who are very sick.

“Go where, Mama?” I say. “We haven’t arrived yet.”

My mother’s profile in the dim light is tilted up towards the window.

With a pang of true horror I realize what she is suggesting.

“No way,” I say. “I would never get through that window. Anyway, I am not leaving you and that is final. I promised Papa.”

Mama traces the tears on my cheeks with her finger. There is something heavy upon my head. I realize with a dull twang that my hair has somehow come back again. She strokes my plait like she did when I was little. I have a dirty piece of string holding the ends together now, instead of a red ribbon.

“If you get out of here you may get to see Papa again one day,” she whispers. “I would like that.”

“But you have to come with us,” I say. I am crying now. “We’re not a family without you.”

Mama sighs.

“Hanna,” she says. “I have already gone. You have your whole life ahead. Somebody has to tell the world what has happened to us Jews. You could tell the truth.”

I am shaking now. With tears, with fright and with the enormity of what I am about to do.

“Mama…” I begin.

But my mother gestures at me to stand on top of the dead woman.

Most of the women in the carriage are asleep, but I sense some of them watching me with dull, disinterested eyes.

Most of them have given up on life.

But I, Hanna Michelson, the ballerina from Rīga?

I have the strangest feeling. There is a tiny stirring of something resembling my old spirit, deep within my starved, wrecked body.

I realize something. It gives me a real jolt of surprise.

I want to get old!

I want to get cranky and bent over and wrinkled, like Omama.

I have decided!

Mama was right. The snow is much heavier now.

I stretch up and place my hands on the bottom of the gaping barbed-wire window. The broken wire cuts my hands but I no longer feel pain in the way that I used to.

I pull some of the strands of wire aside.

“I am coming, Papa,” I say out loud, like a crazy lady.

“Should I push you up?” says the woman who helped me before. “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

I feel a flash of pure panic.

“I can’t do this,” I say.

“You could try,” says the woman. “You’re very thin and small. You will need to go legs first. When you get out jump quick, before the guard sees you.”

A second woman agrees to help. They ignore the moans and cries of protest from all the other people who are lying near to us and have to shuffle themselves out of the way.

I feel two sets of bony arms, pushing and heaving me up towards the tiny window until my legs hit the freezing air. The arms push me through the small gap as if they are posting a large parcel through a small letter box. My coat gets caught on the wire and I struggle to move forwards, but then I remember my ballet training. I let my body go as loose and flexible as I can and the women below keep pushing me until most of my body has scraped over the broken wire and is hanging outside the carriage. I grip the sill of the window with my frozen hands and hang on.

Only my head remains inside the carriage.

“Remember to tell our story,” says the first woman. “You can make sure that people know.”

I look down. I can’t see Mama.

My tears drip into the dark carriage below.

“God bless,” Mama whispers, from somewhere far away.

And then I am out.

I am standing on the ridge that covers one of the train’s wheels.

My head is in a blur of snow and cold and dark and for a moment I feel as if I am just going to fall under the wheels of the train.

I grip the side of the carriage. The wooden slats are thick with ice. My hands keep slipping off. I put them back up over the edge of the broken window and hold on to that instead.

The snow is thick, but not thick enough to hide the sight of an armed guard standing on the step outside the next carriage along.

He is carrying a long rifle and wearing a fur hat and long shiny boots.

He is facing towards me.

Everything seems to slow down.

I freeze. I cannot jump. My legs have turned to pulp.

The man raises his rifle with a deliberate action and points it at my head.

The snow lessens a little and I see his face.

My heart jolts with shock.

I know those eyes.

Cold, blue, set into a sharp, chiselled face.

I don’t think he recognizes me.

“Uldis!” I shout against the noise of the train. “It is me. Hanna. Don’t shoot!”

My voice is too thin to pierce the muted white wilderness swirling around us.

There is a moment where everything seems to stop.

I am no longer aware of the biting cold on my fingers where they still grip the train.

I don’t see the flakes circling around my head or feel the chill in my feet.

I focus with the greatest concentration I have ever had in my life. I am trying to get the thoughts to travel from my head to where he is standing.

I stare straight at him and block out the world until it shrinks down to him and me on the outside of a cattle truck travelling to a death camp and I think:

For every time you sat around the table with us.

For the times we used to go to the cinema and I wanted to hold your hand but was too shy.

For all those times my mama gave you her best food and my omama pinched your cheek so hard it hurt.

For all the times you sat and discussed your future with my papa and he gave you advice.

For everything I ever felt for you, Uldis. For everything you might have felt for me if I wasn’t a dirty Jew.

I know that there is still a good part of you.

Please.

I stare at the round end of the gun’s muzzle. It is lined up with my forehead. I try to imagine what the bullet will feel like.

Our eyes lock.

The world stops moving. It is the longest minute a person could ever know.

Please.

The gun is lowered. With a slow, deliberate gesture he turns his head in the opposite direction.

That’s when I do it.

I jump.

The snow receives me like a glove.

After the majority of the
Jews from Rīga were killed, the Large Ghetto became known instead as the German Ghetto and the Nazis arranged for huge numbers of German Jews to be moved in. Periodic killings continued, although not on the scale of the Rumbula murders. In November 1943, a train containing around 2,000 sick and elderly people from the ghetto, among them children, was sent to Auschwitz where all perished in the gas chambers.

At the end of November 1943, the Rīga Ghetto was finally closed down. Rīga Ghetto prisoners who were unable to work elsewhere were brought to the Biķernieki forest near Rīga and murdered. In 1944 the few surviving Jews from Rīga along with Jews from other parts of Europe still capable of working were sent to the Kaiserwald Concentration Camp on the outskirts of the city. Those unable to work at Kaiserwald were murdered during 1944 at the Biķernieki forest. This forest became known as Latvia’s biggest mass murder site of the Holocaust during the years 1941–44. About 46,500 people were reported to have been killed there, including Latvian and Western European Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, and the Nazis’ political adversaries.

There were only three known survivors of the Rumbula forest massacres, who later gave accounts: Frida Michelson, Elle Madale, and Matiss Lutrins. Michelson survived by pretending to be dead, as victims discarded heaps of shoes on her. Madale claimed to be a Latvian. Lutrins persuaded some Latvian truck drivers to allow him and his wife (whom the Nazis later found and killed) to hide under clothing from the victims that was being taken back to Rīga.

As Stalin’s Red Army advanced again on Latvia in August 1944, the Nazis began to evacuate inmates from Kaiserwald to Stutthof Concentration Camp in Poland. Conditions there were appalling and many died.

After Rīga was reoccupied by the Soviets, a notebook lay in an empty school building in which any surviving Jews could sign their name. Only 150 names were recorded in that book, which is now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Rīga was ruled by a Communist government right up until 1991, when Latvia finally regained independence – the first time they had done so since 1920.

Vanessa Curtis is an award-winning
author of books for teens and children, including
Zelah Green
which won the Manchester Children’s Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. She was also one of the co-founders of The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and is the author of two biographies on Virginia Woolf.

Vanessa reviews books for the national newspapers and runs The Curtis Children’s Literary Consultancy, specialising in YA fiction. She lives near Chichester Harbour with her husband and Poppy the cat.

• When the German army arrives in Rīga they are welcomed by the Latvians and Hanna is hopeful that “
  they will make things better
  ”. Why do you think this is?
  
• Mama and Omama are aware of the potential dangers they face when Latvia is occupied by the Nazis. Discuss their decision to stay.
  
• In Chapter Six, Hanna says, “
  I don’t want to be Jewish. I am going to be Latvian and not Jewish from now on. I will not wear the star.
  ” Consider your response to Hanna’s outburst, and the effects of wearing the star.
  
• Imagine you are being forced to leave your home and can only pack what you can carry. What would you take, and why?
  
• “
  Prayer is free,
  ” says Omama. “
  We can have as much of that as we want. The Nazis can’t take that away from us.
  ” Throughout the book, the Michelsons continue to practise the Jewish faith and observe Jewish rituals. Why do you think they do this?
  
• Do you believe Uldis ever cared for Hanna? Why do you think he betrays the Michelsons to the Nazis?
  
• Does everybody obey the Nazis all the time? What acts of resistance, small and large, can you find in the book?
  
• “
  We are like animals trapped in the zoo.
  ” In Chapter Fourteen we learn there are 30,000 people crammed into sixteen blocks in the ghetto. What impact do you think living in these conditions had on people, and on how those outside the ghetto perceived them?
  
• What are your thoughts on the book’s title?
  
• Throughout the book, Hanna remains focused on surviving in order to tell her story. Why is this so important?