Lusia was watching her daughter with anxious eyes. Ever since the clinic had closed down, Elzunia had lost interest in everything, and even Gittel’s lively chatter failed to raise a smile.
‘Play with me, Elzunia,’ the child would plead. ‘Tell me about Goldilocks and the three bears. Cut out a new dress for my dolly.’ But after a few minutes, Elzunia would put down the pencil and scissors and lie with her face to the wall.
To cheer her up, Gittel would sometimes sing ‘Almonds and Raisins’. She no longer had to fill in the gaps with her own garbled inventions because Lusia had taught her the words. The traditional Yiddish lullaby took Lusia back to her own childhood when her mother used to sing her to sleep with this song. To her surprise she still remembered the words. More and more frequently these days she thought about her parents, and the resentment she had harboured for so many years gave way to regret. She had thought that she would never forgive them for rejecting her but now she understood that by converting she had rejected their faith and traditions, which meant rejecting them too. It seemed to her that her plight was a cruel form of divine retribution. Although she often asked people whether they had seen her parents, no one seemed to know what had become of them. As life in the Ghetto became increasingly precarious, she longed to see them again and let them know she was sorry for all the heartache, and to tell them that, as they’d predicted, she had become a Jew again, in spite of herself.
The door slammed and Stefan came in.
‘Hey, Elzunia, I’ve got news for you,’ he said.
She was lying on the bed and didn’t turn around or react in any way. He shook her shoulder. ‘Listen. They’ve just opened the Jewish School of Nursing in the Ghetto. Why don’t you enrol?’
She sat up and, for the first time in months, she looked animated.
The following day she rang the bell on the wall of a large stone building on Marianska Street. The young girl who opened the door wore a pale pink dress with white stripes that reminded Elzunia of the peppermint candy sticks her father used to buy for her at the seaside so long ago. While she waited in the corridor outside the Director’s office, she studied a large portrait on the wall. It was a serious-faced woman in a nurse’s cap and apron, holding a lamp that lit up the gloom around her.
The door opened and the Director, a tall woman with greying hair pulled into a tight bun, walked stiffly towards her.
‘I’m glad you’ve come to enrol. We need all the nurses we can get, with what’s going on here,’ she said.
She followed Elzunia’s gaze as it flickered to the portrait on the wall. ‘That’s Florence Nightingale. I hung her portrait there to inspire us. She never let obstacles or prejudice stand in her way, and she never stopped trying to improve conditions for the patients.’
Elzunia nodded. ‘She’s the reason I wanted to become a nurse,’ she said.
She couldn’t wait to get started.
On the first day of lectures, the Director walked on to the dais with her stiff-legged gait and held up her hand for silence.
‘When you entered this building, you came through a door covered by a heavy curtain.’ She spoke quietly but emphatically. ‘I want you to know that this is no ordinary curtain.’
They all strained forward.
‘This curtain blocks out the outside world. In here, the Ghetto ceases to exist.’
As they absorbed the Director’s words, she continued. ‘I also want you to know that this course is exactly the same as the one we ran before the war. We will not be restricted by outside considerations. If there’s no power, we’ll use candlelight. If we have no textbooks, we’ll copy notes by hand. Any girl who fails to reach the required standard will be asked to leave. Knowledge is power, excuses are weakness, and the only thing that brings fulfillment is hard work.’
With a curt nod, she swept off the podium, leaving two hundred girls open-mouthed with apprehension and admiration.
Every morning, Elzunia put on her pink-and-white striped dress with the stiffly starched white cuffs and collar that scratched her arms and dug into her neck. Over the dress, she tied a starched apron with straps that crossed over at the back, and, last of all, she pulled a white cap on her head and secured it at the back with elastic. On cool days, she covered her shoulders with a navy-blue cape that swished as she walked proudly along the street. When she wore her uniform, she could feel Florence Nightingale breathing strength into her. She couldn’t wait to complete the two-year course and be entitled to sew a piece of black velvet onto her white cap like the graduates.
Lech sometimes sneaked into the Ghetto to walk with her to Marianska Street, casting sidelong glances along the way at her crisp uniform, and puffing out his chest. He was convinced that all the boys envied him and he hoped they took him for Elzunia’s boyfriend. He wanted to tell her that her eyes were the colour of those dark blue flowers that grew wild on his father’s meadows, the ones that the village girls used to place at Christ’s feet in the wayside shrine, but he was too tongue-tied to say it. Instead, he offered to carry her satchel, but, as usual, she refused. ‘Florence Nightingale used to carry her own bag,’ she would say.
He had no idea who the woman with the strange name was, or what part of Warsaw she lived in, but he nodded, happy to walk beside Elzunia.
The Director hadn’t exaggerated when she said that she intended to continue the prewar regime without compromise. There weren’t enough textbooks to go around, and Elzunia’s fingers grew numb copying out page after page in the unheated lecture room. The power was cut most days and she strained her eyes to see in the dim light. Sometimes the class heard screams and shots and exchanged terrified looks but none of the doctors or nurses ever interrupted their lectures or gave any indication that they’d heard. Eventually the students took their cue from them and stopped reacting to what was going on outside. There were two worlds now, and, while they were inside, the outside world didn’t exist.
Elzunia did her practical work in the surgical ward where forty-six beds were separated by small white metal tables. Although there were never enough medicines, the sister in charge insisted on maintaining the regime she had introduced before the war. Two ward rounds each day, records meticulously kept, and everything scrubbed and sterile. She would accept no excuses and terrorised the trainee nurses if she found any lapses. Although Elzunia was awed by this bustling little woman whose tongue could flay the skin off your back, she knew that the sister was always doing battle on behalf of the patients, and constantly begged the Judenrat to provide more money for running the hospital.
‘This work is driving me insane,’ she told Elzunia one morning, after the doctor on duty had thrown up his hands in a gesture of frustration because he couldn’t treat the patients the way he wanted to.
‘He prescribes food supplements for the patients but where am I supposed to get them? We only get ten vitamin supplements a day, and there are forty-six patients in this ward alone. I keep begging the Judenrat for more but it’s no use.’
Encouraged by Elzunia’s sympathetic silence, the sister continued her litany of complaints. ‘And we’re short of linen as well. How am I supposed to run a surgical ward without clean sheets? We’re short of bandages and cotton wool because the pharmacy only sends a fraction of what we need.’
Mulling over the sister’s woes as she hurried home, Elzunia almost tripped over an old man whose iron-grey hair hung down over his frayed collar as he teased soulful notes from the violin tucked lovingly under his chin. His eyes were closed and his sallow face had a beatific expression as he played lively klezmer tunes with agile fingers that seemed to belong to a far younger man. Even in this sad place where hope was a wistful sigh, his music transported people to an existence they’d almost forgotten, a life with laughter, dancing and celebrations, where there was enough to eat and drink and they didn’t watch their parents and children fade away before their eyes.
In front of him lay an upturned top hat with a red silk lining, its brightness defying the spectral figures on this grey street. There was one small coin that lay in the hat like a reproach. Enchanted by the music, Elzunia listened until he removed the violin from his chin and gave her a solemn bow.
‘That was terrific,’ she said. ‘Have you been playing long?’
‘An eternity,’ he said. ‘Fifty-five years to be exact. I used to play with the Warsaw Philharmonic and now I play in the Ghetto.’ He glanced at his hat and chuckled. ‘Unfortunately the pay here is poor and the conditions leave a lot to be desired.’
The clouds darkened and a fine rain began to fall, which quickly turned to sleet. Elzunia looked at the violinist’s thin jacket. ‘It must be terrible for you to play in the street for coins like this,’ she blurted.
He paused for a moment. ‘At first, I thought I’d die of embarrassment. But now I see it differently. You see, I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of. Today they think they’re lords of the universe but one day they’ll stand before the Almighty and have to account for themselves. They’re the ones who ought to be ashamed. Not me. And not you. Remember that.’
She drew her cape around her as he placed his violin back in its case.
‘Some of us get together sometimes and perform magic in the Library Hall,’ he said, and chuckled. ‘A dozen starving musicians give concerts for several hundred starving listeners, and two hours later our souls are nourished and our hearts feel full.’ He smiled at Elzunia. ‘Perhaps one afternoon you’ll come and hear us play.’
She was hurrying home when she spotted the young man with the large ears who had accosted her a few months earlier.
He looked at her uniform and nodded. ‘So you’re training to be a nurse. That’s excellent. We’re going to need nurses — lots of them.’
‘I’ll be ready whenever you need me,’ she said.