Vera (9 page)

In the cellar, I listen with a type of rapture to the explosion of the bombs. I don't think, ‘I will be blown to blazes!' No, I think of the Germans listening in dread, of the Germans dying in droves.

Some of us may have thought, ‘Ah, poor Lvov! – first the Russians, then the Germans and Ukrainians and Lithuanians, now the Russians again!' Lvov – this laboratory of misery, where I stand on my father's grave in the company of a mother I heartily detest and an uncle I loathe.

If there is enough light down there – we sometimes light a candle for illumination – we are free to occupy the hours by studying the faces of those around us. But there is little of that. A human face, as an object of study, is quickly exhausted, unless you are in love with its owner, and I am not in love with anyone in this cellar.

My preoccupation in the cellar is to persist in being alive, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, and to imagine the destruction of my enemies.

The Germans might have seen the writing on the wall (to employ a figure of speech derived from the Book of Daniel the Jew) as early as the end of 1943. They would not win the war. And given the character of the German leader, the only option that would see the war come to an end was the complete annihilation of the German military, and along the way, the violent death of millions of Adolf Hitler's countrymen; their violent death, and that of millions of others who were not German.

I think it is fair to say that even if Hitler had known the full cost of his persistence, he would not have cared.

I am in the cellar, standing on my father's grave, breathing steadily, my heart beating. I do not know that a vivid life is waiting for me. I do not know that I will survive Adolf Hitler's persistent attempts to kill me, or my uncle's persistent attempts to rape me. The whole of my consciousness is focused on the sound of bombs exploding, the rapid scuttling of cockroaches across the floor, and the desire to be a person who at least has the opportunity to live through the experiences that await me.

The bombs prevail. The Germans leave the laboratory of Lvov, having completed – or almost completed – their various experiments.

The Russians return. We do not greet each other as old friends, since a great many of the Russians who came here three years earlier are now dead, and another great number – mostly Jews – who saw the Russians march into Lvov three years earlier are also dead.

And the writing on the wall – ‘
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsia
'; ‘Numbered, weighed, divided' – that was formed in flaming letters for the Germans to read? We who live between hidden compartments and cellars have not seen the writing. For all we know, the Germans might again replace the Russians.

We emerge from our compartments warily, blinking in the sunlight, and gaze like penniless tourists at the townscape that we had once known so intimately. This is Lvov, where we had laughed and loved, eaten with our families in restaurants while we chatted and joked, before making our way back to secure homes to sleep and dream. But how faint those memories are compared to the Lvov we knew after we became compartment dwellers! The Lvov where some of the worst things that had ever happened in the history of the world were enacted.

The Russians are victors, and they appear to have the confidence of accomplishment. They know, as we do not, that the Germans will not return. Whatever hideous reprisals are being visited upon those whom the Russians consider their new enemies – Poles with anti-communist leanings, Poles with communist leanings of not quite the right slant, intellectuals (if any remained) with a habit of questioning – are carried out away from our gaze.

And the old enemies, too, are being dealt with, as history informs us: Ukrainians who had embraced the Nazis with such relish; black-uniformed Lithuanians who had discarded their costume but who were identified by those they had victimised. The trains that had once rolled out to the Nazi camps now roll out to camps of a similar sort in Russian territory.

My mother very quickly finds her bearings. She wants our apartment in Ulica Obertynska back, and she takes it; she liberates it herself. This is the apartment in which she had lived with my father, her husband, whom she had helped on his way to suicide more surely than I had – I, who had filled a glass with water and handed it to him, so that he might wash down the powder that killed him. She moves back into the apartment with my uncle and me. For she still needs my uncle. She has no means of making a living in Lvov for herself, while my uncle, with his native cunning, is able to bring in enough to support us.

Liberated in this way, with only pleasant thoughts about the Russians in my heart, I begin to hunger for education even more than for tables overflowing with food. So curious! I would have thought that my experience of a famished compartment dweller would have left me with one abiding desire: to eat. But once my other appetites have been catered for, however lightly, it is my brain that craves nourishment.

The hours, days, months and eventually years without anything to engage me intellectually have encouraged me to abandon Judaism (more or less) and adopt Polish Catholicism. The Polish Catholics are not the intellectual superiors of the Jews, no. But the Catholic kids went to school, and it is judged unwise for the Jewish compartment dwellers to declare themselves too soon and demand enrolment in the state school system. So if I want to learn, I must be a Catholic.

Does anybody doubt the need for Jews to remain wary? With our history? It's true that the Nazis are vanquished, but there's always scope for some other mendacious movement to decide that their salvation demands the murder of Jews in large numbers.

I've had enough of being a Jew, if Jews are forever attracting the contempt of Christians. I had earlier in my ordeal learnt all of the Catholic prayers by rote, and I now offer myself to the Lvov school system as Vera the darling of the Holy Father.

The school is St Ursula's, in the heart of Lvov. Since my mother and vile uncle have no interest in what path I take, I make myself ready for school, apply to the nuns for books and pencil and paper, and prepare myself as well as I can with such scant resources as I enjoy.

It is my verbatim memory of the prayers that convinces the school administration that my Catholicism is genuine: kosher, as it were.

I am told, ‘Make the Sign of the Cross,' and I do, remembering to use my right hand, and that in the Polish church, one touches one's left shoulder before the right.

I am told, ‘Recite the Our Father, Vera,' and I declare in a strong, clear voice, ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.'

I am told, ‘Vera, recite the Act of Hope.' And I lift my head and say, ‘Oh my God, relying on your almighty power, infinite mercy and promises, I hope to obtain pardon for my sins, the help of your grace, and life everlasting through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Redeemer. Amen.'

The meaning of the prayers, their significance, remains a mystery to me. This is the language that Catholic children employ when required to, and it will be the language I will speak. I know, of course, to maintain the demeanour appropriate to recitation of prayers. I do not look bored; I do not look flippant.

And I am accepted as a Catholic Christian. It's as easy as that.

My fixed star during all this pantomime is, of course, what I will learn in the classroom. And I am not disappointed. Geography, mathematics – how they gleam for me! My mind, indeed my brain itself, has endured so much through the years of compartment living, of ignoring hanged men, women and children in trees, of hunger that made me think like a rat and eat like a rat – all of that, and yet my mind is still with me, still avid to learn. Is that not the greatest of wonders? Jewish Vera, the make-believe Catholic girl, has found a little piece of heaven at St Ursula's.

  
9
  

IMAGINING ISRAEL

A
war comes to an end, normal life resumes. Except that it doesn't. I don't know what ‘normal life' is. I don't have any true confidence that the people around me will not shoot me one fine day, although I am beginning very slowly to believe that I am safe enough. That is a big improvement on what passed for normal life while the Nazis were in charge. I am being educated at St Ursula's, so that might be called normal. But I cannot be sure what half of my life is the normal half: when I lived in an apartment with my mother and father before the Russians and then the Germans arrived, or my five years in hiding subsequent to that, or this life I live now.

This new ‘normal' stage of life at least starts with a happy event. My uncle dies.

I am entitled to speak in a cheerful way about my uncle's brief illness followed by his burial because he has tried to rape me, more than once, as I have said. I know what he craves. I know of the connection between his plans for me and the panting and groaning he enacts with my mother.

Where is my mother while my uncle is groping me with his goblin hands? I don't know. Elsewhere. Perhaps she has a job; perhaps she is bartering. I don't know. But my uncle knows, and he knows how much time he has alone with me in the apartment before my mother returns.

I don't shriek and flail away with my fists when he attempts to fondle me; I stand still, or push his hands away when he becomes too insistent. I think, ‘Mum, come home. What in God's name are you doing?'

Then, as I say: my uncle has a pain in his stomach, a queasy feeling, spends a couple of days in bed, and then he is dead.

When my mother gives me the news in a few brief words – ‘Vera, your uncle has died, so that's that' – I think it is the most wonderful event in the history of my life. A miracle. A smile spreads over my face that I can't get rid of for days.

This miracle contradicts everything in my experience over the years of the Nazis and Ukrainians and Lithuanians. They are bad people, but they don't get sick and die, not for a long time. But I don't reflect on this haphazard quality of miracles. I just accept that my uncle has died exactly when I'd wanted him to.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine has sent representatives to Europe to find displaced Jewish children and transport them back to the land that will be called Israel within a few years: a scheme known as Brihah. What the organisation is doing is more or less illegal, but compared to the illegality of murdering Jewish children by the hundreds of thousands, it is nothing. The agency people are highly dedicated. They are representatives of one of the few organisations in the world after the war that still burns with a visionary purpose it considers noble. They fan out all over Eastern and Western Europe, the agency people, full of conviction.

Two of them come to Lvov. They come to our apartment.

They say to my mother, ‘Vera must come to Palestine; she'll be happy.'

My mother says, ‘If you want Vera, you take me too. Take me to Palestine.'

The agency people confer in whispers for a few minutes. Then they say, ‘Sure, we'll take you too.'

What do I think about it? Do I want to give up St Ursula's and my education? These agency people consider me a Jew, which I am, but I am a Jew who is content to not be a Jew for the time being. So I'm not sure.

They are very intense, these people, but friendly at the same time. And handsome. Very handsome. I can't say if I want to be in the hands of such earnest people who, after all, are doing something that seems a bit cloak and dagger. But my mother calls the shots. I'm not about to say, ‘My point of view must be respected.' I don't have a point of view. In any case, in Lvov kids don't override the wishes of their parents. So I go along with the project.

The idea is this: truckloads of Jewish children will be taken to a displaced persons camp in Germany, where they'll be fed, sent to school and later taken by train to a port where a ship will be waiting, and this ship will carry them to Palestine. The fact that Palestine is still a British-mandated territory and that Jewish immigration to the region is illegal does not matter in the least to the agency people. Their vision is fixed on a future date when the State of Israel will be proclaimed and children like me will become its first citizens.

The agency people are Zionists, and the steel of their determination to build a Jewish state in Palestine has been tempered in the fire of the Holocaust. Most of them have not lived through the Holocaust itself; they have spent the war in Jerusalem, Haifa or Jaffa, but the news out of Europe over the years of the war has had the effect of deepening their conviction. They go about their business with the quiet confidence of people who have never experienced doubt.

Usually, you would think of people who are strangers to doubt as zealots, dangerous people, but the agency people have warmth to share with us. Their revenge on the Nazis is to be this: a homeland, a haven, a country where Jews make the laws, a land that contradicts in its very existence the Final Solution of Adolf Hitler.

So we journey to Germany in the back of a covered truck, myself and ten other children, with more children to follow.

I hope it will all work out well. Being told that the war is over does not mean that the war will not come back again. I have no historical perspective of war, no understanding of the way in which kings and despots and empires blaze like the sun for a time, then falter and fail. All that I know is that events have taken a turn for the better.

I sit with my mother and the many other children and watch the countryside go by. My mother says little; the other children say little.

Some of them have survived the death camps and have very little reason to believe in some future happiness. They hope that food will come their way, that they will be kept warm. They hope that the truck carrying them into Germany will not deliver them to a camp like the ones they've known. But it is only hope. I doubt if any of these children would have been shocked to find themselves again facing the Angel of Death. All they have is the freedom, perhaps temporary, to imagine comfort and health and food and a warm coat.

We come to a camp in the green of the countryside outside Eschwege in the spring of 1946. The children from the camps remain watchful. I have not seen an Auschwitz or a Treblinka, but I can't see anything menacing about this place we have come. Single-storey wooden buildings serve as dormitories; another plain wooden building has been set up as kitchen and mess hall.

One of the agency women shows me my bed and says, ‘Vera, this is where you sleep.' To my mother she says, ‘Mrs Miller, you sleep here, next to Vera.'

All the beds are made up with fresh linen. I look around in a type of wonder. The curtains on the windows are pulled open so that the outside world can be seen from inside.

We are alert for the sort of sounds that would tell us we have been tricked, betrayed – loud voices shouting in German, the barking of angry dogs – but we find only kindness. What the children from the death camps have permitted themselves to imagine – warmth and food and comfort – that is what is provided for us.

The agency people gather us together. ‘School for everyone,' they say. ‘Exercise for everyone. Grow strong. Then we will take you to Palestine.'

I ask my mother, ‘What is this place?'

She says, ‘Who knows?'

She doesn't share the convictions of the agency people. For her, Palestine is better than starving, but it is not the destination of her dreams. Who knows anything about Palestine? My mother probably thinks a Jewish homeland is a good idea, but better we should all live in Poland.

Me, I would be content to live in the camp forever. I love the camp. I love going to school, and the food, and the people I meet.

We are taught Hebrew, and within a day I am a Jew again. I slough my Catholic skin and underneath is a fresh Jewish skin. Hebrew seems a fine language.

My confidence grows with each passing day, and I feel safe for the first time in five years. Feeling safe is something I have forgotten about. It has been bred out of me. But some part of me remembers. In my bed at night, I think, ‘This is the best thing. This is the best thing in the world. Safe is the best thing.'

I begin to smile. Before long everything makes me smile. The Hebrew lessons make me smile, and the exercises, and the confidence of the people who care for us. All that time in Lvov when the children were taken away and put on trains, all that time when I was crouched silently in a lightless compartment, all that time when I thought only of remaining alive for another hour, another minute, my smile was alive, hibernating. The feeling of a smile on my face is like sunshine warming my flesh.

The program of the agency people is corny, but engaging. We are to be taught science, maths, history and geography: all in Hebrew. And we are to be taught Hebrew itself. We are to sing in Hebrew, and we are to dance traditional dances of the Jewish culture of Russia and Poland.

We are to be cheerful. It is practically an order. Nobody says anything about the war, about Nazis, the SS, death or missing parents. This is all a type of post-traumatic stress therapy, before such a thing existed. The philosophy is simple. You've had a bad time; you've been in the power of vile people; those times have gone: cheer up.

It works perfectly. When we aren't singing and dancing and learning science in Hebrew, we learn how to jump and run. The handsome agency guys tell us that we are all going to Palestine by ship. ‘When the ship reaches Palestine, you jump into the water and walk up to the beach. Okay?'

We say, in Hebrew, ‘Sure. We jump into the water and walk up to the beach.'

‘And you don't stop for anything. Okay?'

‘Sure, we don't stop for anything.'

‘The British in Palestine, they don't want you. The Arabs, they don't want you. Too bad.'

We say, ‘Yeah, too bad.'

‘Our people will meet you on the beach. And you will be safe. Okay, now we learn how to jump into the water. Put up your hand if you want to learn how to jump in the water and make your life in Israel.'