Vera (6 page)

History, as the saying goes, is written by the winners, meaning that the historical narrative has an in-built bias. In something of the same way, autobiography is written by those with an ‘auto' to put in front of ‘biography', and as soon as there is an ‘auto', there is a bias. It is the bias of the survivor: of the storyteller who lived long enough to tell a story.

I write these sentences from the point of view of a woman who had a great deal of life to live after she emerged from the gates of hell. I was still left with a head, a heart, all of my limbs, a mind. I was equipped to love intensely, and to be loved with equal intensity, I am happy to report. And the life I have lived has given me a broader context in which to set my knowledge of hell. I had the opportunity to experience, as a grown woman, the exact opposite of what National Socialism stood for. I came to be the beneficiary of the kindness and courage of others, and so I know that the world is not one thing or two things or a hundred things, but a thousand things, ten thousand things. I have learnt how great art redeems us, how love redeems us. And that there are so many simple things from which delight can be retrieved, like nectar from a bloom.

But most of the children I came to know in Lvov are not now living in Byron Bay, and they are not speaking on the phone with Robert (usually at very inconvenient times). They are not meeting him in cafés, not meeting anyone – because they are dead. This is the terrible thing about the deaths of the children of Lvov: that they cannot put ‘auto' in front of ‘biography'. Instead, they are mentioned by the gross in accounts of the Holocaust – two thousand died here, two thousand there, another ten thousand in this camp, twenty thousand in that camp. It is no memorial to be numbered among thousands. Because each had an individual story to tell, and if they had lived, they would have come to know that life is not only what lies inside the gates of hell. Each would have loved, and been loved. I lament that the stories of the children I saw in the ghetto apartment were so dominated by the worst things in the world. If they had been able to write their autobiographies at that time, what would they have said? I think just this: ‘I hope I will not die, but I'm sure I will.'

Yes, I lament that the children of Lvov would have had little to say in their stories other than that the world they were leaving was grim and bitter and dominated not by the love of their parents but by the savagery of strangers. At the same time, I must make sure that I don't sentimentalise childhood.

I was growing tougher even before the Millers went to the ghetto, and I toughen up a lot more once I am there. All the children in the ghetto do. Modern psychologists say that children usually think of death as a temporary and reversible thing, that a child's consciousness is not equipped to deal with the permanence of death. Not the children of the Lvov ghetto. We know that you can be alive in the morning and dead in the afternoon, never to be seen again. Once we become aware of the ultimate plan of the Germans and the Ukrainian militia – to see us dead – all the resources we have are directed to thwarting the enemy. We become hyper-alert; we become cunning. What little food we find is converted by our metabolisms to the energy of ingenuity. Life is only the hours that lie immediately before us; it is not even the days, and certainly not the weeks or months – and the years are unimaginable.

We cease to think of the world in the way we once did. We know that our parents can provide only very limited protection. Oh, we can still count on solace, we can still relish being held close, but if our parents were the unyielding protectors we thought they were in years past, would we be in this place?

We know that a smile means nothing – for the man who smiles at us may in a few minutes be carrying out orders to cull the sick from the ghetto population and take them away to be shot. A cat, a dog, a bird … even a mouse is no longer what it once was. We think, ‘Can it be eaten?' Just as the palette of the world is reduced in the variety and brilliance of its colours, so too are the sources of delight in our lives. Delight was once a hundred things. Now it is an extra mouthful of food, a little extra warmth – extra anything, in fact.

It is an ill wind that blows no good. In all the years of my life after the experience of the ghetto, of starvation, of murder, my heart has beat in sympathetic harmony with the hearts of children suffering their own versions of hell: those in refugee camps, those huddled for shade from an equatorial sun, those who scream when a shout is heard warning that men with guns are coming. I am glad of the heart I have. It is the last thing in my life and being that I would surrender. But the lessons that my heart learnt came at such a price.

Do you know, in Warsaw, after Germany was defeated, I lived under a regime that began to sponsor attacks on Jews? No more than ten years after the gates of the camps had been thrown open and the skeletal survivors had stood stunned and terrified, not knowing if some fresh scheme of torment was being enacted, the Polish government saw some advantage in scorning the remaining Jews, such as me. I trembled with fear.

My friends who were not Jews said, ‘Vera, darling. Vera, dear friend, we will not let the anti-Semites attack you. We will hide you. We will protect you.'

I thought, ‘You will not protect me, though you may wish to. And if you hide me, they will find me.'

It is not possible to travel much further from Poland and from centuries of anti-Semitism than to Australia.

That is what I did – I fled to Australia – because the other great lesson of the ghetto, of the war, is that hatred, once aroused, is attracted to the familiar.

And what is more familiar to those hungry to hate than scorn for Jews?

  
6
  

GHETTO

A
two-storey house in Wierzbowa Street is our address in the ghetto. It looks out over the stubbly fields you find everywhere on the outskirts of towns in this part of the world. I see little of beauty from one day's end to the next.

In the room in which I live, shared by other families, I have found a place to call my own, in the way that a cat will settle in a certain place and remain there hour after hour. It's a small solace to have my own small place, but important. I sit on top of a trunk, with my legs drawn up, and gaze out at the other ‘residents' (perhaps too mild a word for what we truly are – ‘detainees' might be better), who gaze back.

In my gaze, there is no message, no enquiry. I am not trying to express loneliness or longing. I am simply looking. A day is made up of hours, and those hours have to be occupied in some way, however futile. I might notice such small things as the condition of the footwear of other children, judging whether it is better or worse than mine. Or I might study the way in which one person's yawn will set off a dozen more. I find shapes in the stains on the walls and on the ceiling.

We are not always confined to the house. If there are no militiamen about, no Polish policemen, no Germans, no Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, we go outside to play. At such times, playing hopscotch, we become children again. The dynamics of the game take over. We want to win, to triumph. We take care when we throw our ‘tor'; we argue shrilly if it is partially on a line. We appeal for adjudication from any adult watching. Our pulses race; even laughter is possible. I don't recall thinking as I played, ‘Oh, but Vera, this is just a small period of normalcy bordered on all sides by danger.' No, it is itself: complete. Everything else is briefly excluded.

As soon as the game is over, we are instantly watchful again. Our watchfulness is something we can only suspend during play. It has become instinctive. The sound of a vehicle can cause us to vanish inside within seconds. We are like a flock of birds on a sidewalk, pecking at grit on the ground, preening, calling, but gone in the first instant of alarm.

Such a shame. The play of children is one of the loveliest achievements of the human race. It's up there with art, with music, with law. Have you ever stood outside a school playground and listened to the chorus of children's voices at play? Nothing you do in life will ever honour your time on earth so completely as smiling at the shrieks, the laughter, the surge of competition, the gaiety of play. You have sinned if you have introduced a curfew of dread that mars that joy.

Something like a routine governs our time here. My father is permitted to leave the ghetto to work each morning, and his absence fashions a division of the day's hours: when he is here, when he is not here.

My anxiety increases when he is not here – of course it does, for even though my mother cares for me, it is my father who loves me. The marriage of my parents is not one of equals: my mother's will far exceeds my father's. At this time, in this dreary place, I am aware of the greater warmth radiating from my father, but I don't analyse it especially. Looking back, I realise that my mother was addicted to control and could never relax unless she had the final say in everything. No situation could have vexed her more than having her final say as limited as it was in the ghetto.

The routine includes, too, washing ourselves in buckets, attempting to retain the vestiges of hygiene – which is to say, the vestiges of humanity. As I said earlier, I became perfectly accustomed to filth, but I never completely forgot what it was to be clean, to be groomed. The complete disregard of hygiene, even to the point of no longer remembering what it is – that's one of the symptoms of the hopelessness that leads to death. People in the ghetto are shown many pathways to death, and utter unconcern about being alive any longer is one of them. Primo Levi, in his fine memoir of captivity at Auschwitz,
If This Is a Man
, makes this same point.

The part of the routine of daily life that takes up the most time is doing nothing at all. But not all ‘nothing' is the same. My nothing still keeps at its core the determination to resume life. Even when I am sitting on my trunk with my knees drawn up and my hands clasped over them I know that I am alive.

Others – and I can see it in their eyes – are no longer alive even though heartbeat and respiration continue. Hunger and dread have worn away some vital element of being. They have forgotten how to insist on living. If meat and vegetables and bread were suddenly to be brought to us and placed on the bare floor, they would fight tooth and nail for their share, certainly. But that would just be instinct. Imagination has worn away. God has worn away. Death has already whispered to them.

In the ghetto we have leaders, but who they are I do not know. There is certainly no splendid person who walks into a room radiating charisma and says, ‘This is what we will do. This is how we will survive. This is the way we will outwit our enemies.' Such a man or woman would be a miracle.

And in our situation, or in the situation of those who have been taken from us, sent on trucks and trains to their deaths, how many opportunities pass within the space of an hour for miracles to unfold? Ah, the human race! A million people pray for a miracle, one is delivered of a miracle, and we all hope and pray for a miracle of the same sort!

But I was not waiting for a miracle. I was waiting for life.

I have a legacy, you know, from this time of waiting for life. Even here, in Byron Bay, in a house full of light and beauty, the walls adorned with works of art that delight me, with books that delight me just as much filling the shelves from floor to ceiling, the finest music in the world ready to be played, ready to fill the room, fill my ears and heart – even here, I remember. I can't have the curtains drawn, because drawn curtains remind me of places in which I hid without light, shoulder to shoulder with other children for hours, for a day, for more than a day, two days, longer. I keep the kitchen immaculate after my experiences of filth. In fact, I keep the house so neat, so ordered, you'd think I was expecting a visit from royalty. And when I bathe, I never take a shower. I think of those Jews, those many, many Jews, who were packed into so-called shower blocks, and who looked up at showerheads from which a greyish-white gas emerged, and with seventy seconds of life left to them, either bowed their heads and accepted death, or scrambled desperately to get their heads above the fumes.

It grieves me, of course, to confess to such a legacy; I would prefer to look back and say: ‘Adolf Hitler and your Thousand-Year Reich, remind me, where are you now?' I resent the sudden shudders of fear that run through me at times (when I find myself, sometimes unavoidably, in some dark, confined place). It is as if the Nazis left me with an infection, something incurable, or if not an infection, a wound in my mind. But you can't cure trauma by denying its existence.

I keep the curtains wide open. I take the trouble to run a bath. I am the victim of a type of behavioural modification, conditioned by dread and by pain.

On the other hand, is a tidy house so much to complain about?

The ghetto has its own black market. Those among us who have managed to keep hold of a few notes, a few coins or something they can pawn make secret arrangements that yield them an apple, a potato, a stale crust of bread or one hundredth-part of a skinny chicken. This is not a community of equality. Those with a few coins do not share them with those outside their family.

My father leaves the ghetto each day – this is permitted – to work in Lvov. He leaves by the ghetto gate in the morning and returns late in the afternoon. He has employment of some sort or another. Other men also work by day outside the ghetto. Each day he returns with morsels of food, or so we hope. We rely on him to keep body and soul together. This is all my father has to sell – his skill in business. But by the haggard look of his face, I judge that he does not harbour any great confidence that he will continue to earn such rewards in the future.

It is not only food we need; firewood is almost as much a matter of life and death. The wood has to be purchased from Polish peasants, who bring it in by the barrow-full. Such a humble thing as wood helps to preserve the life of a human being! Really, how little of anything is required: a small quantity of food, rags to cover one's body, a little wood for heat. This is the foundation of existence, and from this we reach out, eventually, and create greater comfort, and art, and music, and books.

I do not ask myself questions about the politics that reduced us to this bare subsistence, but if I'd had the knowledge and the years, I would have said, ‘Why this? What harm have we ever done? Leave us the fragments of food you would normally throw away, the rags you would no longer wear, the fuel you would barely miss and we will survive. Why bother to murder us?'

But no, they insist on murder. They come with trucks and trap the children and force them on board with shouts and threats.

It was during one of these rounding-up actions that I witnessed the poor, whimpering boy, too ill to hurry, who is upended and swung by his feet, so that his head is shattered against a stone bollard. The perpetrator – the soldier – he can live with his brutality, he can still sleep, still eat, perhaps even show love for his own children, should he have any, God forbid. But it is harder for me, as a witness, to live with it.

Now when we have warning that the soldiers are coming, we are hurried into a cavity in the shed beside the house – as many children as can be found, into a cavity behind a false wall. We are warned: ‘Say nothing!' We are warned: ‘If they hear you they will kill you!'

Parents who raise their children in places of peace still live with a dread of the terrible things that can happen to their darlings – attacks by monsters, men of diseased appetite, psychopaths or sadists. These parents attempt to guard their children against abduction with adamant rules backed up with examples of what can happen – no, very likely
will
happen – if the rules are disobeyed. Don't talk to strangers. Don't accept a lift with anyone we don't know well. Don't go down to such-and-such a part of town by yourself. Always be home before dark. Transgress, and you could be murdered, eaten up in a pie, thrown in the river … and so on. Stories to frighten the little ones. And then there are other stories, also designed for children, that dramatise these lessons: Snow White, who accepted an apple from an old woman, a poisoned apple; Goldilocks, who took what was not hers and was chased through the woods by bears. So many cautionary tales! So many ogres who hid under bridges, giants who ground the bones of children to make their bread, wolves who ate little pigs who failed to build secure dwellings.

I had heard such stories, back in times of comfort. But the stories changed.

I was no longer in the realm of fantasy when my father said, ‘Listen to me. When you see gangs of boys, gangs of young men, you keep away, cross the street, hurry home. Do you understand, Vera? They will do you harm.'

My father spoke from first-hand experience of the harm that such gangs of young men inflict. Only a year earlier he had himself been attacked in the street by a gang. These thugs carried walking sticks in which razor blades had been embedded, and would come up quickly behind men and women they identified as Jews, raise these lethal clubs and rain blows down on the Jewish skull. Their intention was certainly to kill before running off, and they would have killed my father except that he was wearing a hat, a Homburg, and the felt of the cloth partly cushioned the blows. He was badly injured and bled all over his suit, all over the sidewalk. The doctor who stitched him up – a Jew himself – said, ‘Bless your hat: it saved your life.'

And when my mother said, ‘Vera! Keep close to me!', it was not the sort of warning that other children in happier lands think of as caution carried to extremes. My mother was serious.

The cautionary tales became peremptory warnings. The sinister castle where terrible things were done to children became Auschwitz. The salivating monster who tore children to pieces became a soldier battering a child's head on a pillar of stone. The world's nightmares came to life.