Their door opened and slammed shut and Elzunia saw Stefan coming in. He threw his cap down on the table, and dropped onto a chair.
‘They’re having another disinfection the day after tomorrow,’ he said.
Elzunia began to tremble. The humiliation of standing naked in public for hours, the mocking laughter of the guards, the screams, the riding crops flailing their bare bodies, shivering outside after an icy shower without a towel, her few remaining clothes drenched in carbolic and ruined …
She could hardly get her voice out. ‘I don’t care what happens; I’m not going through that again.’
Stefan looked at his sister with concern. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I came to warn you as soon as I found out. Maybe you can hide somewhere. They’ll be going from room to room, but I’ve asked around, and, from what I can gather, they’re not likely to check every single person, so you might get away with it.’
It was the longest speech she could remember him making.
‘I just wish there was something I could do for both of you,’ he added, looking despondently at the floor. ‘I thought I’d be able to protect you, but I’m not doing a very good job.’
Lusia stroked his smooth dark hair. ‘We know you’re doing all you can.’ She turned to Elzunia. ‘Perhaps you could sneak out to your clinic?’ she suggested.
Stefan shook his head. ‘They’re doubling the number of guards at the gates and cancelling all the passes. Can you think of some way of getting out?’
Elzunia was too numb to think.
But when she ran to tell Edek about the disinfection, he knew all about it and had it all worked out. ‘We’ll get the little kids out through the hole in the wall the night before the disinfection,’ he told her. ‘When I was on the other side this morning, I made contact with the rabbi of that church across the road.’
She couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘The priest, you mean.’
He made an impatient gesture. ‘Whoever. Why do girls always quibble? He said we can bring the little ones over tomorrow and he’ll hide them until the disinfection’s over. At least they won’t have to go through that.’ He looked intently at Elzunia. ‘Next we have to figure out what to do with you, now that you can’t fit through the wall any more.’
She blushed and tried to pull her blouse down to flatten her breasts.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve thought of a way,’ he announced. ‘You’re going to become an acrobat.’
She thought he was joking but in an excited torrent of words he described his plan for her to sail across the top of the wall in an oil barrel.
‘You can’t be serious!’ she exclaimed when he’d finished, torn between admiration and trepidation. ‘No way am I going to do that. It’s too dangerous!’
Edek shrugged. ‘You’re right. Why take risks? You’re much better off playing it safe and getting disinfected.’
She stood there, vacillating. Both options were frightening, but she knew which was worse.
‘I wish there was some way of getting you out,’ she told her mother.
Lusia sighed. ‘At least you and Gittel won’t have to go through that,’ she said.
The following evening, Elzunia’s knees knocked together as she stepped on to the balcony of a room at the top of her building. Suspended from the railing by a thick rope, a rusty barrel swayed above the ground. Standing behind her, the occupant of the room tried to hold the barrel while she clutched the rope and stepped inside, dangling in mid-air until the man gave it a push. Lurching and bumping like a cabin in a rollercoaster, she pushed her palms against the sides until she felt herself being hoisted up over the Ghetto wall and on to the other side, where Lech and Edek were waiting. Her face was yellow and she was retching when they pulled her from her metal cage.
Edek gave her a hearty slap on the back. ‘I reckon you’d be a hit in the circus with an act like that,’ he said.
She glared at him as she wiped her mouth.
It was already curfew, so they crept along the street until they parted company. Edek was going to stay in Lech’s room for the night, and Elzunia had decided to hide at the back of the Jewish cemetery. She swung open the creaky wrought-iron gate and tip-toed inside, hoping the sound hadn’t aroused suspicion. It was frosty, and icy rain leaked from a grey sky, giving the cemetery a bleak and desolate air. Many of the marble gravestones had been torn out and used for paving, and those that remained had sunk unevenly into the soft loam, like exhausted figures slumped in despair.
In the gloom of the wintry evening, Elzunia walked along the avenues of the dead, past ancient trees that seemed to hold out their bare branches in supplication to the sky. She looked at tombstones whose carved symbolism she didn’t understand and whose Hebrew inscriptions she couldn’t read. At least most of these people had died normal deaths and been buried according to their traditional rites, unlike those who were killed every day in the Ghetto.
At the far end of the cemetery, she came to a wooden shed. Propped up around its walls were ladders, buckets and hoes. She unbolted the door and looked for a place to hide. The latest change to the boundaries of the Ghetto had excluded the cemetery from its terrain, so being found there would be dangerous. One corner of the shed was piled with empty crates and boxes covered by dusty old blankets and tarpaulins, and a jumble of gardening tools. In the centre, several stone slabs were stacked on top of each other. She pulled a blanket off one of the boxes and curled up behind the largest crate.
Elzunia sat up with a start, her heart pounding. Light slanted through the chink under the shed door. It was morning, and she heard yelling and screaming from the direction of the disinfection station. She squeezed her eyes tight and pressed her hands against her ears to shut out the screams but they shrilled inside her head.
Let Mama be safe, she kept thinking. Let Mama be safe.
Footsteps crunched along the dirt path and there was rustling outside the shed. She covered her head with the blanket. The door creaked open. She held her breath as someone shuffled in.
‘I could’ve sworn I bolted that door when I went out,’ an old man muttered. She waited for a reply but the same voice went on. ‘Oy yey, that’s what happens when you get to be older than Methuselah. You forget from one minute to the next …’
Elzunia peeped out from behind her hiding place and saw an old hunchback with a skullcap on his large head, rifling through some of the spades and mattocks on the other side of the shed. She stood up.
‘So you’re the one who unbolted the door!’ he exclaimed.
To her relief, he was smiling. ‘So I’m not as senile as I thought!’ He peered into her face. ‘What are you doing here?’
But before she could explain why she was there, he asked, ‘Have you got anything to eat? I haven’t got any food left.’
She shook her head. ‘Why don’t you come into the Ghetto?’ she asked ‘You might get something to eat in there.’
‘And leave them all on their own?’
She looked around, startled. Who else was here?
Pointing to the graves, he said in a quavering voice, ‘To a young lady like you, they might seem dead, but I think of them all as my family. I’ve taken care of them for over fifty years now, ever since I was a lad, sweeping the paths, pulling out weeds, making sure the inscriptions are legible, looking after the ohel, keeping the register up to date. Do you think I’m going to desert them now? I’ll stay till the Almighty decides it’s my time to join them.’
The words shot out of her mouth before she had time to hold them back. ‘Do you really think God will decide that? Because it seems to me it’s the Germans who make the decisions around here.’
He came closer and shook his bony finger at her. ‘Don’t blaspheme, young lady. Maybe God has stopped believing in us but we have to go on believing in him. Otherwise, what will separate us from the beasts, eh?’
She didn’t know what to say.
‘Respect for the dead; that still counts for something in this world, doesn’t it? Even animals keep vigil over their dead.’
He shuffled away, muttering to himself, but soon returned with a mug of grain coffee. ‘It’s freezing in here; you need something to warm you up,’ he said. ‘This is all I’ve got but you’re welcome to it.’
Elzunia spent the rest of that long day huddled in the shed. She pulled the dirty old blanket over her head to try to shut out the screams and yells, but nothing could shut out the images in her mind.
Unable to get back into the Ghetto at night when all the gates were locked, she waited until the next morning and sneaked back inside while the guard on duty was inspecting the passes of a work group about to leave for one of the German factories. It was always easier to get in than out.
The moment she was inside, she had a sense of foreboding. She ran home, calling her mother even before she had opened the door. She almost cried with relief when she saw Lusia at the table.
‘Mama, thank God you’re all right! I kept hearing those screams …’
Lusia was sitting very still, staring straight ahead, her face chalk-white. She didn’t turn when Elzunia entered, but swivelled her eyes in her direction and looked past her.
Elzunia took her mother’s limp hand. ‘It must have been dreadful,’ she said.
Her mother looked at her dully. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
They sat in silence until she said, ‘Pani Szpindlerowa’s gone.’
‘What happened?’
Lusia’s shoulders shook. ‘They kicked her to death while she was saying her prayers. She said God would punish them but it looks as if He punished her instead.’
‘What about the others?’ Elzunia couldn’t stop herself from asking. ‘What about Edek’s family?’
Lusia gave her daughter a piercing look. ‘Don’t ask. I’m sure you heard the screams.’ She shuddered and turned away. She looked so thin and vulnerable that Elzunia wanted to put her arms around her and comfort her, but she felt inhibited. They had never been demonstrative towards each other and even here her mother seemed to hold her at arm’s length.
Elzunia was about to reach out and take her mother’s hand when there was a knock at the door and Lech was standing there with Gittel. ‘Old ladies in funny black hats gave us milk this morning. Can I go there again?’ she squealed.
‘She means the nuns,’ Lech said, chuckling. ‘I don’t suppose she’s ever seen them before.’
As soon as Lech had gone, Elzunia ran to Edek’s place to make sure his mother had got through the disinfection ordeal. When Edek opened the door, his face told her everything. There were dark hollows around his eyes and for the first time since she had known him there was no light in them. She looked around. Edek’s mother and baby brother weren’t there, and the children sat on the floor, looking blankly into space. Someone gave an occasional harsh sob, while the little ones kept asking for Mama.
She put her arms around Edek and wet his cheek with her tears. He cleared his throat noisily and pulled away. ‘I’m all right,’ he said, avoiding her gaze. ‘I’m not going to blub like a girl. I’m a soldier and soldiers don’t cry. They fight.’
Elzunia clenched her fists. ‘If only we could,’ she whispered.