Vera (2 page)

I light a new cigarette. The woman with the pretty daughter rolls her eyes. Robert takes up his pen.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘The ghetto.'

  
2
  

THE RUSSIANS

L
vov, in Poland, in Ukraine, in limbo.

The Russians have been here in Lvov for a week. The war began, and the city emptied; the Russians arrived and the city filled again. I am in the kitchen of our apartment, gazing down at soldiers in the street. Or not quite in the kitchen but on a balcony, looking down on Ulica Połczyńska, one of the city's main streets leading through the centre of town. At the age of five, my hair in plaits, I can just barely peep over the railing.

It's the first month of autumn in 1939, and what I am witnessing is the unfolding of the Stalin–Hitler pact, the mutually agreed division of Poland into portions to be exploited by Russia and Germany. I don't know this – of course I don't – and in the highly unlikely event of it being explained to me in pictures, I still wouldn't understand. I would have to grasp the meaning of ‘war', of ‘perfidy', ‘deceit' and ‘murder' – no, I wouldn't understand, and it would be cruel to make me try.

Something not quite as alien to my five years' experience of the world is ‘anti-Semitism' or, more precisely, ‘Jew-hating': Jew-hating as a practice, as a hobby, as a predilection, as a sport. There are a great many Jews in Lvov, and a great many more Jew-haters. They have been busy over the past few years, encouraged by the more accomplished Jew-haters of nearby Nazi Germany. My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew. I am a Jew. People who don't know us – who have never been to our house, have never spoken to us, have never had the opportunity to form an opinion about us – hate us. A small gang of these highly motivated thugs attacked my father with walking sticks in which razor blades had been embedded. They beat his head, and it was only his hat that saved him. They made my father bleed and will, if they can, make him bleed again. That's what I understand.

So, I watch the soldiers. I know that these men swinging their arms with rifles over their shoulders are Russians, because my mother has let me know. ‘Soldiers, Beloved – Russian soldiers.' They wear khaki jackets with a black belt at the waist, small caps worn to one side, trousers loose on the upper legs and tight below the knee – what I will one day know as jodhpurs – and black leather boots. On their belts they carry leather pouches, one either side. I am curious to know what is in those pouches. The faces of the soldiers are not quite the faces I am used to in Lvov; I can't quite say in which way they are different. Some of the soldiers wear a diagonal dark leather belt across their chests and carry holsters at their sides. I have seen such holsters on men before this day. I know what is kept inside them. The soldiers with holsters wear peaked caps with a red band and a red star.

From my balcony I can hear the rhythmic thud of boots on the road surface, but I don't feel much menace.

My mother and father, who know of the Hitler–Stalin pact, who know that a war that will engulf the whole of Europe has commenced, who know that the greater part of our land of Poland is occupied by the armed forces of Germany and that our city of Lvov is in danger – they would have experienced a stronger sense of menace, and some confusion, too. Who should they trust more, who distrust less? The Russians? The Germans?

Five years old, my hair in plaits, just tall enough to see over the railing, curious enough to feel a type of fascination with the uniforms, the unfamiliar faces, the steady rhythm of the boots on the ground, the pouches on the soldiers' belts, I am protected by all that I do not know. I do not know that the worst thing ever to befall the Jews of the world has been set in motion; that the number of Jews in the city will soon swell to two hundred thousand; that at the end of the war that is coming, only three hundred will remain; that in this city of ninety-five synagogues, none will be intact in three year's time.

But I don't know any of this at age five, and nobody else knows either, whether five years old or fifty.

When the soldiers have passed, I turn back and gaze at my mother in the kitchen, puzzled by the anxious look on her face.

‘What, Mama?'

She shrugs but doesn't say anything.

This is not what I am used to from my mother, who is in her nature a woman full of opinions, full of advice. I never see her looking daunted. As is normal in children, my structures of comprehension are not sophisticated. I register alarm in others – fear, joy, displeasure – but the nuances are not there. In my mind, the Russian soldiers have taken up an unthreatening tenancy. I see no harm in them, but I am troubled by the ambiguity of my mother's response.

To relieve myself of the troubled feeling, I return my gaze to the street and to the trees in the park, still in foliage at this early stage of autumn. I am returning not only to the scene that is spread out before me, but to the warm embrace of all that I don't know.

Soon, I will sit at the piano and practise. But first my mother will tidy my hair, maybe replait it if the plaits have loosened, sitting behind me with the hairbrush, murmuring endearments one moment, commanding me – in her bossy way – to sit still the next.

This is Lvov. This is our life.

In a modern atlas, Lvov is ‘Lviv', and it is not in Poland but in the far west of Ukraine, eighty kilometres from the Polish border. It is a city that has had a fraught life, sometimes ridiculously so: a plaything of despots, traded between states. It's Latin name was Leopolis, and that name remains the root of all the versions of Lvov, except for the name the Germans gave it: Lemberg. It was founded in 1256 in a region then known as Ruthenia, the Roman name designating it as the home of a fairly insignificant rabble called the Rus. By fits and starts, the Rus became more or less the Russians. The Poles seized the city in 1349, kept it until 1772 with the help of the Lithuanians, lost it to the Austrians for one hundred and fifty years, took it back after World War I, lost it to the Germans in 1941, to the Russians in 1944, and it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1945 as part of Ukraine.

Because of all that I did not know at age five, Lvov seemed the only possible world, the only possible home. The history of Lvov was a part of all that I did not know then, but knowing it now, in my seventies, it seems inevitable that the Russians should have marched into our city and that the Germans should have succeeded them. Almost everything that the Jews of Lvov endured seems inevitable.

If I fix in my mind's eye my small shape on the kitchen balcony, watching the soldiers marching, I can extend the evidence of inevitability north, south, east and west. The most powerful military machine the world has ever known, as of 1939, is poised to seize for itself villages, towns and cities by the tens of thousands all over Europe. The German machine is so cleverly organised that its agents know exactly what to do once a town or city becomes German-occupied territory.

Nothing has been neglected. The resources of sites to be invaded have been catalogued, right down to the volume of water consumed in each household. The forms of resistance to be encountered have been studied, and dismissed. The names of likely sympathisers have been recorded. The headquarters that the invaders will require – the houses, mansions, castles and palaces – have all been marked on maps. Indeed, more maps of Europe's nations have been commissioned and printed and filed by German High Command than ever before generated on the continent. The number of buses, automobiles, trolley cars and horse-drawn vehicles in all of the larger towns and cities is known. Age-old animosities capable of being exploited in every nation slated for invasion have been calculated: who hates whom in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, in Belgium; who would welcome the chance to take revenge, with the blessing of the German occupiers.

And then there are the lists of those who will need to be shot. Intellectuals with a vicious attraction to Marxism. Liberal politicians. Christians with a repugnance for murder who have raised their voices in protest at the Nazi program. Journalists of the left-wing press. Mayors of towns who have resisted friendly overtures, resisted invitations to provide certain information about the Jews of their region. And, of course, the Jews, like me, like my mother and father, like one hundred thousand others in Lvov, like a further one hundred thousand pouring into Lvov from regions of Poland where the Germans are already consulting their lists, already shooting those who require shooting.

In my mind's eye, the mind's eye of a woman now eighty, the small figure on the kitchen balcony – Werunia, as she is called by her mother and father: ‘beloved',
kochanie
– can never prevail against the malice of an army of three million, over a virulent philosophy that holds Jews accountable for everything from the Black Plague to the famines of the Middle Ages, to cattle blight, to hair loss and impotence in adult male Christians, and to elaborate ritual murder involving cauldrons of blood and the feathers of ravens.

Even here in my house in Byron Bay, the Arcadia of Australia's eastern seaboard, in a country of people so well-behaved that speeding motorists become newsworthy – even here, with all that I now know, I cannot accept that the child I was will survive.

What is important is the piano.

I have been playing for more than a year. My piano teacher has great hopes for me.

My father says, ‘Werunia, at the right age we will send you to Paris. The most beautiful city in the world, Werunia. Do you know where in Paris you will go? To the Sorbonne, the great university of France. You will attend the Sorbonne in Paris and the piano will be your life.'

I play pieces from The
Children's Bach
; I play Czerny, a Mozart minuet and a Chopin polonaise; Bartók's ‘Little Study', and ‘Study in G' by Brunner; ‘Study in A Minor' by Lemoine; a Clementi
andante
; ‘Curious' by Hesse, and Joachim's ‘Gossip'. And of course I play ‘Für Elise'. I play, most enjoyably, Debussy's ‘Golliwogs' Cakewalk' and ‘The Little Shepherd'. The music is in my hands, in my heart, in my stomach: all through me.

My piano is a Bechstein, tall and handsome and gleaming. I'm such a tiny figure at the keyboard, leaning sideways to reach for the top and bottom keys. I'm brimming with ambition, more ambition than my small frame can accommodate. To think that I might go to Paris, the most beautiful city in the world, and to the Sorbonne, the great university of France!

It pleases me to please my father, to hear his endearments. His ambition for me is the foundation for the sense of entitlement that will stay with me all my life. I don't mean ‘entitlement' in a snobbish way, as if it were my right to live a life of comfort and ease; no, I mean an entitlement to happiness. Ever since childhood, I have been impatient with unhappiness, impatient with situations that demand an uncomplaining acceptance.

At the keyboard of the Bechstein, I learn Debussy and Mozart and Czerny, and I learn to be happy. Once you have learnt to be happy, it is impossible to unlearn it. It becomes your expectation.

But it's such an irony that I should gain this sense of entitlement in our apartment in Lvov when all around me plans were being made to end, finally and forever, the happiness of a million children like me.

I am only able to conceive of happiness as a right because of everything I do not know.

If you travel due west four hundred kilometres from the place where my Bechstein stands, you arrive at Auschwitz – or, rather, at the time that I was sitting at my Bechstein, learning joy, learning happiness, you would have arrived at the entirely innocent hamlet of Oświęcim, yet to undergo its transformation. And two hundred and forty kilometres to the north, Sobibór; two hundred and thirteen kilometres north-west, Majdanek; further north, Treblinka; further north-west, Chełmno; and much closer to Lvov – no more than two hours by train – Bełżec.

Such an irony, as I say. Think of all that is expressed in the music of
The Children's Bach
, and think of what is expressed in the construction of facilities that include gas chambers and crematoriums waiting to receive, among many others, children like me, with Bechsteins of their own.