Vera (3 page)

The Russian soldiers march with their rifles on their shoulders; the maples and lilacs are about to yield their foliage. I am practising at the Bechstein. This evening we will visit my grandparents who live in the Jewish quarter – or one of a number of Jewish quarters – of Lvov.

We could live in the same Jewish quarter as my grandparents if we wished, but that was not my father's choice. He didn't want to live cheek by jowl with all the other Jews of Lvov. But his choice was also to do with comfort. Lvov is an old, old city; my grandparents endure living conditions more in keeping with the Middle Ages than the twentieth century. Our own apartment is modern. My father makes a good living from his textile business. We can afford luxury.

We are about to enter the High Holy Days. The Nazis, in their malice, have made sure, in the rest of Poland, that Jews everywhere will remember the High Holy Days of 1939 with sorrow enough to bow their heads to their chests. The Jews now pouring into Lvov bring tales of murder, torture and theft – stories that are kept from me, at least in their details, but the impact of which I can see on people's faces.

On our way to my grandparents' house, I am thinking not of murder but of the thrill of the approaching season. We are not especially observant Jews but we maintain the traditions. The day after tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of Tishrei. I know, because I have been told, that if we were to go back far enough, we would reach the Day of Creation of the universe, and that Rosh Hashanah commemorates this greatest of all events in the history of the cosmos. For my father and every other Jew in the world, Rosh Hashanah offers the promise of renewal: one's fortunes may have become blemished, but repair is possible.

Rosh Hashanah does not fall on Shabbat this year, so I will hear the shofar, and the Mussah will be especially long. I will hear my grandfather wish my father
shana tova emetukah
(‘a good and sweet new year'), however unlikely that is under the circumstances. I will witness the gravity in my father's expression, and also the quiet pride.

Then ten days later will come Yom Kippur. The more observant Jews will spend most of the day in one of the many synagogues of the city. They will fast for twenty-five hours straight, atoning for the sins of their life: sins against God, against fellow Jews, against everyone and anyone. Their sins – even my sins, my father's sins, my mother's, those of my grandparents – are known by God in their every detail, and on Rosh Hashanah the fate of each of us is inscribed in the Book of Life. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the last chance we have to convince God that we have repented, to be granted forgiveness, to avoid an unwelcome fate being sealed in the Book of Life.

The rituals of our faith delight me. How could they not? It is not their object to delight me, rather, to instruct me, console me, wrap me in the cloak of observant belief and veneration. But I am too young for any higher understanding of our faith, and am content with delight.

Even at the age I am now, knowing all that I did not know in 1939, I still settle for delight. In truth, delight is the highest plane of experience I ever hope to reach. What am I to do in this hedonistic Arcadia by the sea, where I now live? Stalk the profound, the sublime? Grasp finally and forever the meaning of the Shoah? No. My revenge on Hitler is not a lifetime devoted to the study of his motives and means, but a lifetime in which delight has reached me from a hundred sources, and been welcomed.

Only consider this: in 1939, on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed in the Book of Life the fate of every living Jew. He inscribed the fate of the two hundred thousand Jews in Lvov, including those who had escaped to our city from Nazi-occupied Poland. In the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement, the two hundred thousand Jews of Lvov found ways to show their repentance for the sins of their life, and particularly for those of the past year. Their fates were sealed on Yom Kippur in that great book: sealed by God, by Adonai. And for all but very few of the Jews of Lvov, that fate was death at the hands of those who had sworn an oath of hatred against us, against all Jews. How many years would I have to labour in thought to grasp the wisdom of such a sentence?

I am again in Lvov. I am again on the kitchen balcony. Yom Kippur is past. The Russian soldiers are still to be seen in the street. My hair is in plaits. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. The theme of this chapter has been all that I did not know in Lvov in the year of 1939. And here is something else that I do not know as I stand on the balcony, gazing down on the street, with my mother singing, with the lilacs and the maples now losing their leaves, and winter approaching. I do not know that I will be standing on this same balcony in the year of 1941, witnessing the arrival in Lvov of officers and soldiers of a different army. I do not know that these officers will be carrying with them carefully prepared lists. I do not know that my name will be on their lists.

Vera Miller. Werunia. Beloved.

  
3
  

THE LISTS

T
hink of this. My name to the officers and clerks of the SS is just one of a number of names stamped by the metal keys of a type-writer onto a sheet of paper. The keys fashion a shape for each letter of my name until the ‘r' of ‘Miller' appears. Then it is done. I am on the list.

But the letters of my name are no more than the title of my story. Underneath those letters, as in a palimpsest, lies another text, and in this text resides my true story, my joys and fears, the people and sights I love, the things I rush towards, the things I shrink from, the words I have spoken in the small number of years in my life, and those that have been spoken to me. In the story underneath the ink on the list is Vera: Vera with life in her small body, Vera who breathes, Vera who laughs and weeps, Vera who struggles to understand the world, Vera who gives up trying to understand and gives her attention to other things, things that delight her, to her piano, to the food on her plate, to the warmth in the voice of her mother and father. And also under the ink, it is Vera with her two legs, her two arms, her two eyes, her ears, her internal organs, her central nervous system, and her complement of rich red blood. It is Vera who could, in certain circumstances – circumstances that are quite close now – be made to shriek in dread, shriek in pain, shriek to her own God or to any other God who might be prepared to save her and say, ‘Don't let this happen to me, don't let me be Vera who suffers, Vera who dies.'

It is 1941, and the Russians remain in Lvov. The lists have been written, but the SS staff members who will carry them have not yet departed from Berlin.

The Jews of Lvov don't fear the Russians – other than those who refused the offer of a Russian passport, preferring to keep their Polish passports; those Jews and a number of Poles are no longer with us, deported to who knows where. The more cooperative Jews and those with greater insight realise that the Russians soldiers stand as a bulwark against the catastrophe that is building; a cloud foreshadowing terrible harm builds on the horizon. But for other Jews, the way in which the war will unfold is not yet resolved. Maybe they tell themselves that the cloud could easily blow away in another direction, one that doesn't threaten them. Even the thousands of Jews who have found refuge in Lvov – Jews who have witnessed the murder of other Jews, who have seen that the Germans carry the law with them wherever they go and that the law they carry is the only law – even they have hope, although of a desperate sort.

My father is free to carry on his business, and to indulge his love of Greek and Roman civilisation (our house is replete with works of art that testify to my father's passions); my mother is free to fulfil what I consider her most essential role in life, that of being my mother. And I am free to attend school, to gaze at other children my age and think, ‘I am taller than that one. I am prettier than that one. I think maybe that one likes me, but that one doesn't.' In other words, I am free to be a child: to join my voice in the chorus of kids at play; to engage with integers, angles, participles; to wet my hands with paint and fashion shapes on coarse sheets of paper.

But for me, above all, there is the piano.

The Russians enjoy the piano, particularly the sight of a seven-year-old girl in a frilly dress extending her small fingers left and right to pick out the notes of Debussy and Tchaikovsky.

I am told by my teacher, my mother and my father that I am talented, and perhaps I am. For me, it is not any talent I might possess that delights me, but rather the thrill of making the instrument sound as it should.

It is at a school concert that the Russians hear me playing. The education officers who came to Lvov with the occupying army (for the Russians are an occupying army) have been invited to the concert by the principal, and they sit in the front rows while I'm introduced and perform my curtsey. I am not the only attraction; other children accomplished in various ways precede me and follow me. As I play, I sense the pleasure of the Russians. They smile, they nod and they applaud. My mother and father, also in the front rows, take even greater pleasure than the Russians in my performance. My fingers dance, the notes rise, and my ignorance of the world keeps me safe and warm and, I might even say, happy.

After the concert, one of the Russian education officers talks to my father and mother in a serviceable version of the Polish language. He says, ‘Your daughter is very gifted.'

My father says, ‘Thank you for saying so, sir.'

‘Yes, very gifted. Do you know what I am thinking?'

‘What you are thinking, sir?'

‘I am thinking that your daughter must come to Moscow and attend the conservatory. What do you say?'

‘To Moscow?'

‘She will be well looked after. The best teachers in Moscow. Maybe she is a genius. I don't know. But maybe.'

My father's expression remains congenial, as if he wishes above all to convey gratitude, a cooperative spirit, but I know and my father knows that my mother will never permit me to travel to Moscow at my tender age of seven years. My father says he will think about it – that's his response. He will think about it.

His dream is not of his daughter at a music school in Moscow but of me, Werunia, in Paris: me at the Sorbonne. The Germans own Paris at the moment, yes, but in the future, some time in the future when the war is over and Henri Philippe Pétain is hanging from a statue of Marianne – maybe then.

There is such poignancy in all that we didn't know, once we come to know it! It is March 1941 when the Russian officer speaks of his plans for me. In three months, Hitler will disown his non-aggression pact with Stalin, and Panzer divisions will race into Ukraine. A week or so later, the German Wehrmacht will move into Poland with their long lists of those to be murdered. In September, the Jews and Romany people and left-wing intellectuals and communists of Kiev, tens of thousands of them, will be ordered to march to Babi Yar, where they will be shot. And in September, the killings will begin here, in Lvov, just as the siege of Leningrad gets underway. As for Moscow, by October the Germans will be camped before the forests to the west of the city and by December they will be closer still. A conflagration that will take the lives of tens of millions will be raging. In the whole of world history, nothing that compares to the savagery about to be unleased has ever been enacted.

Tears, tears, rivers of tears.

But at this moment, the smiling Russian education officer thinks it important to put a small Jewish child into the hands of a music teacher in Moscow.

I want to go. I see only adventure in the proposal, and the opportunity to extend and deepen my understanding of this instrument, this piano. Inside my small chest, my heart beats out the notes of yearning for Moscow.

When I look back now at the child I was, brimming with delight, I see the piano as a symbol that contradicts the savagery about to express itself in a thousand cities and hamlets. The Bechstein in our parlour at home, my fingers reaching left and right, my feet struggling with the pedals – that is also the world, but not the world of explosions, of sharpened implements hanging in a holster at a soldier's side. The piano opposes in its beauty, in the embrace of its notes with their infinite combinations, the murder lists in the briefcases.

I do not go to Moscow. Of course I don't. I remain in Lvov with my mother and father and the Bechstein. I become more aware of the various expressions and intonations that index Lvov's anxiety: my father's troubled frowns; a slightly more forced quality to my mother's singing; here and there in the shops and markets a type of grim resolve to look normal. Refugees – mostly Jewish – are everywhere; families searching for shelter with children in tow as puzzled as I am. My seven-year-old consciousness can only accommodate the breadth of anxiety, not its depth. I suppose I could precis my fears in the phrase ‘something is wrong'.

Both of my parents tax me with a type of catechism of safety:

‘What do you do if you see a crowd of boys shouting?'

‘What do you do if men call out, “Jew! Jew!”'

‘Do you ever talk to strangers? No, Vera, never, never!'

Indeed, the crowds of boys who amuse themselves by attacking Jews are showing ever-greater bravado; their loathing of Jews is being given a sharper edge, like a knife held to a whetstone.

Even at a younger age – maybe five – I knew that I was different in some difficult-to-define way. I was darker than most of the Polish and Ukrainian kids, certainly. But I never thought, ‘Well, of course I'm different – I'm Jewish.' In the first place, I'm not completely sure what being Jewish Vera rather than Christian Vera means. We celebrate Christmas in our household. We know many Christians. I have been to synagogue, of course, and have learnt to relish some of the more colourful and melodic rites of our faith, but we are not a family of strict observants and being Jewish has never been (and is never to become) the overwhelming fact to be learnt about me.

So all I can comprehend of the dangerous packs of youths and the angry groups of adults who want to harm Jews is that it is one of those things about the world – or at least about Lvov – that is simply to be accepted. They frighten me badly, the Jew-haters, and that is enough.

Certainly I don't ever think about the motives of these people. I don't ask my parents, or myself, ‘Why do they wish me harm?' Who has ever fashioned an answer to such a question that a child could grasp? One could as well go to a fortune teller and simply settle for a summary of the tragedy: ‘It's like this. Most of the Jewish children you see in the streets and many of the children in your school will be taken to certain places and killed, alas. The future that awaited them has been withdrawn by fate. A few will not die. A few will have a future, an education, a husband, children of their own, a life in a distant land. Will you become Vera of the future or Vera who is murdered? – that is yet to be decided.'

One summer morning in my eighth year, I lie in my bed with all my senses alert from the first instant of wakefulness. What is wrong I cannot say, but it is as if a chill that defies the warmth of the season has settled silently on every surface in the house. My mother and father speak quietly to each other, almost in murmurs, and the tension that is always with them these days seems to have gathered around their eyes in a way that makes them seem as if they are wincing.

At breakfast the hush persists. My father looks to me as if he is trying to simulate an air of unconcern, but without conviction. Once or twice he puts his hand to his head, I think unconsciously. Something about the menace in the air must recall to him the day two years ago when a number of students of the university, accomplished anti-Semites, followed him down the street jeering and taunting and finally attacking him with a walking stick in which razor blades were embedded. His hat saved his life, only just.

Nothing saved the lives of certain other Jews at that time.

I sit over my
mamałyga
(locally, ‘
grysik
', semolina boiled in milk), wishing to know what is so concerning, but without asking.