1940
Each uphill step towards his grandparents’ apartment increased Bruno’s unease. The buildings with their bullet-scarred stucco seemed to be baring dingy wounds to the reddening sun. Faces emerged from gaping doors like mottled masks on sticks. The streets had grown more twists in them, the ruts in the cobblestone become potholes.
He had been gone some four months. How had his grandparents fared in his absence? Would they still be where he had left them? Such thoughts only assailed him now as he was on the point of reaching them.
He had turned thirteen while he was away. His grandmother had told him in a soft voice before he left that his thirteenth birthday marked manhood for a Jew. She had talked of taking him to a Rabbi, but his grandfather had grown irate and asked whether she thought she had been transformed into Abraham and was considering the offer of more than a ritual sacrifice.
His grandparents often argued over religious matters. He couldn’t help hearing them in their small quarters. Grandma said it was sinful how Grandpa behaved, denying everything, denying his people, denying God. Grandpa said he was denying nothing, simply being expedient. She would thank him later. Meanwhile, she could talk to her God silently and leave the two of them alone.
Only his grandmother was in, when Bruno arrived. She was sitting in a chair and gazing out at the dip in the valley that provided their only distant view. Maybe she was talking to God. She stared at Bruno as if he might be a hallucination then whispered his name in a soft voice and held out her hand to him. When he moved towards her, a smile illuminated her face. That face, he realized, had grown painfully thin, hollowed out so it was all eyes. The hair that cupped it was now utterly white, ghostly.
‘Brunchen, my little one. So happy. Tell me, tell me, did you find them? Are they…?’
He hugged and reassured her at the same time. She felt so fragile, he was afraid his embrace might break her.
When Grandpa returned, Bruno felt a sob rising up in him. He too had been transformed into an old man.
Over that winter, his grandmother slowly died. She just disappeared into herself and her chair and never re-emerged. The doctor they brought for her could do nothing.
‘Better,’ he said ominously, as if he knew something Bruno didn’t. ‘She’s peaceful. The rest of us are still at war.’
They buried her in the Jewish cemetery. She would have wanted that. It was an auspicious site, Bruno forced himself to think over the tears he refused to shed, just south of the city and not far from the grave of a great Tartar King who would protect her. According to tradition, there would be no stone to mark her resting place for a full year. ‘Memorize the spot,’ his grandfather said to him. He evidently imagined the earth would shift, and they would never find her again, so Bruno made a mental note of the names on the nearest tombstones and took a good look at the trees in the vicinity.
In direct contradiction of at least his mood at the cemetery, a week later his grandfather announced they were moving. ‘We’re wiping the traces,’ he said, as if all their movements left a rife trail for dogs in hot pursuit, and a great effort had now to be made to send them in a different direction. Every night he listened to the radio for hours, tuning into whatever stations he could get, comparing reports, scouring the papers which Bruno brought home for him from the neighbouring kiosk, interpreting propaganda. What he knew and Bruno only learned later was that Nazi troops were massing for a great push east on a variety of fronts and that the Nazi-Soviet pact was in its last moments.
Bruno didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay as close as possible to their local paper kiosk. It was run by a young woman who had become a friend of his. So much of a friend in imagination, that he spent his nights dreaming about her eyes, which appeared to him in improbable places – in the sky as giant stars, in murky fishponds as bright lilies.
But they moved. They moved into two tiny rooms not far from one of Przemysl’s many churches which had sprung up over the centuries as if in competition with each other so that each order could outdo the next in grandeur. His grandfather had somehow struck up a relationship with a priest. The clergy were not very well treated by the Russian administration, and the man evidently felt a friend who worked for them might prove beneficial. In turn and for various favours his grandfather didn’t tell him about, but which Bruno was quite certain had been granted, the priest was to provide them with baptismal certificates.
His grandfather had spent hours grilling Bruno about his experience of the German Arbeitsamt, the labour office, and the papers that were necessary. He had also carefully examined Bruno’s work permit, and as he did so mumbled something about ‘Trust the Germans to have papers for everything. And keep records of everything. Perfect students of Weber, even the Nazis.’
It sometimes seemed to Bruno that his grandfather had taken on outwitting the Germans as a personal mission. This one old Jew would get them at their own game. In revenge for what he had seen those young thugs in uniform do to those old men. In revenge for what he called their sadism. Their state-sanctioned sadism.
Now that his grandmother was gone, Bruno felt his grandfather talked to him as he had once talked to her, mulling over ideas and strategies late into the evening in the tiny kitchen where they ate their thin broth and tasteless potatoes, unless he had been able to trade more profitably.
One part of the strategy had to do with Bruno going to the priest for weekly tutorials. This time it wasn’t Russian. It was Catholicism that needed to be studied, together with lists of saints and the endless drill of Catechism, Mass and Communion. The priest believed that he was the son of lapsed Catholics, who had tragically died in the first German incursion. Now, however, he was under his grandfather’s aegis, a grandfather who was getting old and had seen the light despite the pressure of Soviet atheism. He wanted his grandson to embrace the true faith again. Bruno loathed the drill, but he couldn’t go against his grandfather’s will. He sensed that this project was the only thing that gave the old man a taste for life. And he knew that baptismal certificates, when copied into a central register, might not come amiss. The name on his was not to be the one that appeared on his grandfather’s Russian pass, but a new name, born from the romance of literature. He was to be Bronislaw Sienkiewicz: Bronek, for short. All traces of the Jewish Bruno were to disappear when his grandfather said the moment was right.
At the end of May, Bruno wanted once more to head off to see his mother and sister. His grandfather insisted that they had to wait for their baptismal papers and the accompanying birth certificates before attempting any river crossing. It was too dangerous now. There were too many soldiers about. And this time, they would go together, so they needed to be properly provided for.
The priest gave them the documents on June 19. Before they had got their provisions together for the journey and his grandfather had alerted his office of his impending absence, the Nazis had entered Przemysl. They had come by train from across the river, at first hoodwinking the Russian guards into thinking they were taking just an ordinary delivery of freight. Trainloads of troops followed together with flatcars bearing tanks and armoured cars and motorbikes. Many didn’t bother to stop at Przemysl but carried on further east into the Ukraine and Russia. The Russians in the town were surrounded. There was nowhere for them to run.
The fighting in the city was fierce. For two days and nights it raged, making the streets impassable. On the third day, Bruno tried to go out early to rustle up some food. Corpses lay strewn in the streets. The Gestapo marched, breaking into houses, heaving people out, arresting them or shooting them on the spot. They seemed to have a clear picture of where they were going. He raced home and bolted their door, hoping the knock wouldn’t come in this tiny apartment tucked in behind a church. His grandfather just stared out the window and shook his head. Bruno began to think he was taking on his wife’s old role.
Hunger forced him out in the streets again the next day, despite fear. Curiosity too. The German’s didn’t behave like the Russians. As he moved through his familiar haunts, he noted that the City Hall already sported a swastika, as did various other official buildings. Streets were closed off. Fierce-looking officers stood in front of them, guns at the ready. Decrees were posted on buildings. Bruno read that all weapons had to be surrendered on pain of death and that a curfew was in place from five in the afternoon till five in the morning. People caught breaking it would be shot. Everyone was to return to work. Or they too would be shot, he added to himself and raced off.
The market was empty. There was nothing to buy or steal or trade anywhere. And though the proclamations called for shops to open immediately, they looked decidedly shut. There was probably nothing to put in them. There had, after all, been little enough before, even at the Russian cooperatives.
Finally, not knowing where to turn, Bruno decided to knock at the priest’s door. The man took pity on him and gave him half a stale loaf. Bruno thanked him profusely, added from some perverse instinct that his grandfather had instilled in him, that Christ would thank him too. He rushed home with the bread, hiding it beneath his shirt, and told his grandfather the priest was a good man.
He became his grandfather’s eyes and ears. He ran like lightning, forking between ranked German soldiers, scudding up tiny lanes, sniffing out the lie of the land, rushing home to report on what he had seen and the proclamations he had read. His grandfather’s role was to interpret the signs he brought him.
The old man decided that he would need to return to his office as the edicts ordered. It would be too dangerous to try and cross the river now. The soldiers would be shooting on sight. If nothing else, it was clear that he would need to earn what he could, since Bruno’s bartering activities were too risky while everything was still in upheaval.
A few days later when he was out in search of food, Bruno noted that a new set of orders had gone up on the walls. These concerned Jews. Jews were ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David on them to indicate their nationality. They had to register immediately with the Arbeitsamt for mandatory labour and with something called the Judenrat – the new committee that administered Jewish life. They were only allowed out on the streets between two and four, unless they had papers showing they were employed. They were forbidden to be near government offices, including the railway station; they couldn’t buy provisions from anyone in town or countryside, nor could they possess any of the new official currency, the German Occupation Marks.
Bruno stared at these proclamations for as long as he dared. He wanted to tear them down, run around the city and rip them from the walls. He couldn’t bear the look on the faces of the two women who were reading beside him. Life was impossible under such orders. Life as a Jew was impossible.
He began to understand more clearly why his grandfather had wanted officially to cut all ties with their Jewish past and why their baptismal certificates were so important. He thought it might be time to take on his new name. He was about to hurry home, using a roundabout route as his grandfather had counselled, to bring him the news, when he determined that, no, he wouldn’t be daunted. He had set out for food, and he must find some.
He hurried on, past the limits of the city. German soldiers were stationed along the country road. Despite protests, they helped themselves to whatever the farmwomen had in their baskets and were bringing to market, then rudely tossed a few pfennigs at them.
In the distance, Bruno spied the red flowered headscarf of one of the women he used to help with her provisions. He ran towards her. She had a basket of radishes in one hand and eggs in another. He asked her if she needed assistance. She shrugged and handed him the radishes under which he spied slabs of butter. He quickly stuffed as much as he could of these into his pockets and under his cap, muttering at her that otherwise, as she probably already knew, the Germans would get the lot for next to nothing. He was right. An arrogant character stopped them and helped himself casually from the baskets. The woman named a price that he merely harrumphed at. A few coins were thrust at her, and he told her to hurry along if she didn’t want trouble.
By the time they reached the town, there were only a few radishes left in her basket. Bruno looked round and quickly emptied his pockets and cap of the butter and asked if he could have some radishes in return. She gave them willingly, plus an egg that she had hidden and suggested that he come a little further along the road on the morrow to help her out.
At home, his grandfather was eager for news. Bruno gave him the food first and only then, once they had eaten a little, recounted the content of the edicts against the Jews. His grandfather said nothing. He simply sat and stared, his once handsome face lined and dismal. After a while, he patted Bruno’s hand. ‘Remember. If anything happens to me, remember everything I have said. Tomorrow I will report to work. Everyone must work.’
Early the next morning, the sounds of heavy boots clattered up the stairs. They were followed by knocking and raucous calls in German to open the door.
Both of them were dressed, his grandfather in his shabby work-suit and tie, ready to go out. He winked at Bruno and started talking loudly in German, complaining about this new generation and their lack of manners. ‘Keine Erziehung. No respect for the old.’ He pushed back his shoulders that these days were so often slumped and took on his former military bearing, as he pulled open the door.
‘I hear you. I’m not deaf yet. That’s enough.’
Two SS men examined him with surprise.
‘You speak German?’
‘I’m pretty sure that’s what I was speaking. I take it you do as well. There’s no need to make so much noise. I’m an old man.’
The Germans looked sheepish for a moment.
‘Well. Do you want to come in?’
They stepped into the small first room of the apartment on the widest wall of which his grandfather had hung an old crucifix.
‘My name is Adolf Torok,’ his grandfather continued. ‘This here is my grandson. No one else lives here. I’m on my way to work. He’ll be on his way to school as soon as you manage to open some again. Is there anything else?’
The men looked at each other.
‘Heil Hitler,’ the soldiers said automatically.
Bruno closed the door behind them and waited until the footsteps receded. His grandfather slumped into his customary chair. ‘You see, Bruno? They’ve been taught to obey. As soon as you establish authority, they become docile. You have to give them what they understand. That’s, of course, if you’re lucky enough to look the part and have the additional good fortune of speaking a common language and aren’t shot first. We’re lucky men, you and I Bruno. Lucky men. Lucky to have the Führer as my namesake.’
There was a touch of something wild in the laugh that ripped through him. It was an unfamiliar sound. ‘This time we didn’t need those documents, but we must keep them close, in any case. Now I want you to accompany me to my office. We must see what my fate there may be, and perhaps we’ll have a stroll towards the river.’
The office in which his grandfather had worked was shut. A sign ordered all workers to report to the local Arbeitsamt.
‘That can wait until tomorrow. We’ve already had enough excitement for one day. And there’ll be queues.’
They walked through the city. It had an artificial feel to it, as if nothing was quite real, neither the marching Germans, their uniforms too neat and bright against the blighted streets and their impoverished citizens; nor the open, but empty, shops; nor the once handsome buildings plastered over with their hundreds of decrees. At one junction, they saw a group of men and women wearing Jewish armbands being herded into a warehouse.
‘That’s how my namesake conducts his economy, Bruno. Slave labour to finance his battles. That’s why temporarily he thought he had something in common with our friends to the east.’
The sight of a train rattling over the bridge caught their attention. ‘I see they have the trains running smoothly again. You know what they used to say in the old Berlin just after the Great War?’ His grandfather cackled. ‘They said Germany would never have a revolution. Because the trains had to run on time. Did your father ever talk to you about that? No, no, of course not. You were far too young. So sad. Well, Bruno, now, despite everything, the trains are still running on time. Come, I have an idea.’
They wound their way down to the yellow railway station that always reminded Bruno of Vienna. Gestapo officers stood by the front doors. To the side, where there was a way through to the old left luggage office, a man in a railway guard’s uniform hovered.
‘Ah, he’s here,’ Bruno’s grandfather smiled. ‘My friend, Pan Staszek. Let’s go and have a little chat with him. He owes me a favour. I arranged some papers for him.’
It was the first time Bruno realized that his grandfather’s cunning extended to help those beyond their immediate circle.
The two men chatted while Bruno listened. Pan Staszek confirmed that the trains were running again. With a degree of punctuality. And yes, it was just possible to go to Krakow.
Bruno wondered if this mention of Krakow was another of his grandfather’s ploys. Evidently, he didn’t trust anyone. The men had lowered their voices so that he could no longer hear. He watched the station door. Most of the people coming in and out wore either German uniforms or Polish Railway uniforms. But there were also one or two women about. No men. Of course. All men were meant to be at work. His grandfather was running a risk being here. He waited impatiently, and at last his grandfather was back at his side.
‘All is well, Bruno, we go to Krakow in three days’ time. You come with me to get your picture taken, then leave the rest to me.’
The early-morning encounter with the Gestapo had evidently breathed fire into his grandfather’s veins. For the next few days, he was all activity and when that evening he presented Bruno with his German ID, it was with the old smile of triumph he had when he had landed a particularly plump trout. ‘It’s as genuine as can be, Herr Bronislaw Sienkiewicz.’
He bowed to Bruno. The next day they took the first morning train to Krakow. Their papers withstood two checks by guards. Bruno watched the nonchalant manner in which his grandfather handed them over all the while carrying on a conversation with Bruno about the milling of barley or the families of fish found in Poland.
They got off at Tarnow and walked south, away from the tracks, hoping that they might meet a friendly farmer who would take them part of the way. The fields were flush with summer heat, and the walking was hard. His grandfather, Bruno noticed after a few miles, was short of breath and needed to rest in the shade. He urged him into the first copse, where a dog came barking at them, followed by a toothless farmer in an old floppy hat. He gave his suited grandfather a derisory look then looked at him again more closely.
‘Is that you, then, Pan Torok?’ He grinned, showing bare gums. ‘Neither of us getting younger, eh? Hard times these. I’m just supplementing the farm produce,’ he cackled again and pointed to the pouch he was carrying.
‘Well done, Pan Tadek. We’re on our way home. Needed a little rest in the shade.’
‘I can give you a little something to help you along.’ He tapped his pouch again.
‘What have you got there?’
The old man drew out a bottle and handed it over. His grandfather took a large sip then coughed and grinned. ‘You old rogue. Still brewing the devil’s drink, eh? Too strong for the young one here. But thanks. We’ll be seeing you.’
They hurried along after that and by mid-afternoon had reached the house. It looked oddly deserted. They cast worried glances at each other. Then Bruno ran forward, shouting: ‘Mamusia, Mamusia, Anna.’ A dog’s fierce barking met his call. He was there on the other side of the door, but no one opened to his knock. Bruno dashed to look through a grubby window. At first he saw no one, then he spied a movement beneath the kitchen table. It was Anna, he thought, Anna hiding. A stone settled in his stomach.
He called her name again. This time she heard him and came racing to the door with a stool. She unfastened the bolts, all the while shouting at the dog to get down. She leaped into her brother’s arms, while the dog prodded at him with his pointed snout. He had a shaggy pelt of indeterminate colour and mournful button eyes.
‘This is Bolivar, Bruno and…and…’ She was suddenly aware of their grandfather. She looked up at him shyly, uncertainly.
‘Come here, my little one. Come and give an old man a kiss. They’ve left you all alone?’
Anna’s words fell all over themselves in a confused rush as she tired to explain that Pani Alina had gone out to work and Mamusia had gone to Krakow last week to see some friends and maybe get some money, so she was guarding the house with Bolivar, their new dog, Wasn’t he beautiful and everyone would be so excited when they found out that Grandpa – and she rushed to kiss him again – was here with Bruno. Bruno. Her darling brother.
Bruno worried. He could see the worry reflected in his grandfather’s face. Little Anna should not have been left alone. The situation must have been desperate if she had. And she was so thin, her eyes deep caverns in her heart-shaped face.
She seemed as so often to read her brother’s mind. ‘Oh, you mustn’t blame Mamusia, Bruno. She had no choice. She had to see a doctor.’
Bruno could see that his grandfather was about to ask for what exactly, but he clamped his lips.
‘And you can’t blame Pani Alina. We’re very poor now. Pan Mietek has stopped helping us. And Mamusia’s not very good at fishing. And they stole the cherries from the little orchard. On top of that Mamusia’s German friend in the village, the major who helped us so much, has been sent east. So she had to go. She’ll be sooo happy that you’re here.’
Anna had grown up too quickly, Bruno thought. As if she were already a girl his own age, or even older, despite her smallness.
‘I’ll go fishing first thing tomorrow. We’ll have a feast and fatten you up. Won’t we, Grandpa?’
Grandfather nodded, preoccupied. ‘I’m going to go and have a little word with Mietek first. You look after your Anna, Bruno. Look after her very well.’
He didn’t return until evening when Pani Alina was already there and greeted him shyly, her saviour she said. But Grandpa didn’t respond with his usual smiles.
‘The man had the audacity to threaten me, Bruno. Me. After I set him up in style. I gave him a taste of my tongue, though. I think he’ll be all right for a while. I suspect he’s been stealing from under the women’s noses.’
‘I think so too, Pan Torok. The problem is we have no hold over him now.’
Grandfather brooded. Little Anna sat on his knee and tried to cheer him. Pani Alina told them about her day at the cement factory. It was a good fifteen kilometres away, but Mamusia had given her the bicycle her German officer had found while he was still in the area. It was so sad that he had been sent away. Some of the military weren’t so bad. It was the Gestapo you had to watch out for.
Grandfather stayed with them for only two weeks. He was determined to go to Krakow. He would make contact with Mamusia there and see if perhaps life mightn’t be better for them in the city. He told them to take good care of the small kitchen garden their mother had started. Before he went, he made a swing for Anna and tied it to her favourite tree. Swinging would bring colour into her cheeks, he said. Miraculously too, he came home one evening with a rooster and two chickens to fill the empty coop at the back. These were to be under Anna’s special care.
The summer passed in a fretful haze. Time became waiting for Mamusia’s return, until the waiting replaced the expectation of her arrival. Bruno worked in the fields alongside Pan Mietek, who had grown curmudgeonly and swigged his vodka at ever-shorter intervals. Under his boozy breath, he muttered continually, complaining he didn’t know how he was supposed to take care of all of them, make up his quota for the cooperative with its upstart Volksdeutscher head and feed his own as well. Bruno, growing irritated, told him he was lucky to have a strong pair of arms beside him that he didn’t pay for and extra fields that he robbed besides.
‘Christ-murderer,’ Bruno thought he heard him murmur, but he kept his temper in check. He had been with Pan Mietek when a visit from the cooperative had taken place, a routine visit which included a military presence, and he had seen the soldiers help themselves to baskets of fruit and vegetables, even vodka, while Mietek was meant to turn a blind eye or smile and nod. He hated those soldiers. It was hard to control that hatred and not somehow lash out.
Anna helped. She was always at his side, and he would do nothing that might harm her. When he wasn’t working, they fished together or scrambled about in the mossy wood, gathering berries. Blue and red juices stained their lips and hands. She was never so happy as in those moments: her straw basket perched on her arm and the upside-down mushroom hat on her curly blonde head.
One evening in the middle of August when it was already dark, Bolivar started to bark angrily. The bark was followed by a knock. Bruno asked who it was in his deepest voice.
‘Is that Bruno?’ a man answered. ‘I’m bringing a letter from your mother, from Pani Hanka.’
They opened the door inch by inch to see a dark-haired man of middle height with ruddy cheeks and a dimple in his chin. He was wearing shorts and an open-necked shirt and carrying a stout stick. He didn’t look as if he had come from the city. He walked in before they had asked him to and closed the door quickly behind him.
He pulled a letter from his rucksack and smiled at them all, particularly at Pani Alina, but handed the letter to Bruno and then asked whether in turn he might have a bed, straw would do, for the night. Any extra supplies would be welcome too. He would be off before dawn.
Bruno tore open the letter before replying. ‘My darlings,’ their mother wrote, ‘I hope to be with you before too long. Grandpa is well. You can trust the person who brings this.’
Bruno swallowed his disappointment.
‘Letters are always brief these days,’ the man said to him, as if he knew what his mother had written. ‘Of necessity.’
Bruno only understood him after some moments, when Pani Alina had already asked him to sit down and offered him a shot from the vodka bottle.
‘Do you know our mother?’ Bruno asked.
‘Not personally. But I’m told she’s a fine woman.’
‘I see.’
Bruno had to put himself into his grandfather’s place really to see. Covert matters again. Everything was always hidden. Nothing straight. Everything in code. Once he had thought it was just the way of the adult world. Mirrors within mirrors. But his grandfather had shown him differently. Living in fear meant living in secrets. Hiding in one way or another. The man must be a Jew.
‘Where are you going?’ Bruno asked.
‘Oh, just walking. A holiday,’ he winked. ‘I like the woods. Don’t you?’
‘Oh yes,’ little Anna answered for him, while Bruno suddenly had a memory of the raggedy people he had seen in the woods round a bonfire deep in the night when he was travelling from Przemysl the previous year.
They gave the man a bed, but before bunking down they talked. He talked mostly to Pani Alina though Bruno listened intently. Things were hard in the cities. All of them. Even Warsaw. Food was scarce. Everything was scarce – for Poles too. The Germans had instituted a blistering regime run by their own people. Those they didn’t like, the visitor looked at them intently, they forced behind guarded walls, concentrating a great many in very little space, so that conditions were foul, and disease spread like wildfire. They were well off here, he said. There was air. At least the illusion of freedom. That’s why he was going off into the woods. He turned to Bruno again as he said this. If he ever went walking, they might bump into each other again. It was always good to bring extra food along on such trips. It was also better not to mention to anyone that a stranger had been through.
In the morning, without so much as a single bark from Bolivar, the man was gone, together with the bread and sausage and onion Alina had put out for him. If Bruno hadn’t had his mother’s letter next to his bed, he might have thought he had dreamed his passage.
His mother returned with the first chill nights of autumn. They were so pleased to see her that Anna determined to bake a cake to celebrate her arrival. She stood on a stool and carefully broke two eggs into flour, added some spoons of blueberry jam Alina had made and three crinkly apples from the garden tree which they had carefully stored in the cold room alongside the potatoes and pears and dried mushrooms. The result was so sumptuous that they all declared Anna was now to be their chief baker.
Despite their joy at the reunion, it was clear that Mamusia was unwell. Her cheeks were sallow. The hollows in them had grown very deep, and her eyes had lost their sparkle. But she was still, Bruno thought, exceedingly beautiful: a grand lady in her pretty dress. He had forgotten what elegant women looked like.
He wanted to ask her what the doctor had said, what was wrong with her, but the moment didn’t present itself. He hoped too, that being home would soon revive her.
Mamusia had brought with her a small hoard of German Occupation Marks that Grandpa had earned, she wouldn’t tell them how. She hoped that might see them through the next months. They needed to move for the winter, though not to Krakow. Too many people knew her there.
‘But what about Grandpa?’ Bruno asked.
He was cleverer than she was. And it was better to separate so none would give the other away. The Nazis had become more stringent in their searches. That was another reason they needed to move. Now that her major had left, the new local authority was not to her liking. She had papers for herself and for Anna in the name of Lind, which could pass as an Austrian or Galician name. And the young Pan Sienkiewicz, her nephew, she knew was already taken care of. But the local farmers had known them for too long. And Alina was a worry. The major hadn’t been able to see to her Kennkarte before he had been transferred. She would start making enquiries in the next weeks.
With the first snows, Mamusia came home triumphant. Because of her German, she had landed a job in the Labour Office in the substantial neighbouring town of Tarnow, far enough away and big enough for no one to know them. It was potentially a good job too, since she could do some good in it. She had also found them lodgings. They would be cramped, but no matter. Alina would have to stay behind until Mamusia could find new papers for her. Or she might even be able to devise something herself, once she saw how the office functioned. Then a transfer from the cement factory to a new job in the District of Tarnow should prove no problem. None the less, after that, for the same reasons she had already given, it was best that they not see each other.
Mamusia had tried to warn him in subtle terms he hadn’t altogether understood that there were two real problems with Tarnow. The first was that he would now be going to technical school, the only kind of secondary education available under the Nazi Occupation. She wasn’t worried about his ability. An accounting course would hardly stretch him. But she wanted him to be careful with the other children. He mustn’t give anything away. She looked at him a little oddly as she said this, and he reacted quickly, saying that of course he wouldn’t, but he would far prefer to work and bring in money, he was old enough. No, she was firm on that point. They would try school first. A job would be far more arduous. But at school, he wasn’t to get too friendly with the other boys.
The second problem with Tarnow was that it contained a large ghetto. It was the first time Bruno had heard the word but when he had seen even a little of the reality, it seared itself into his mind, more indelibly than the rubber stamp with which his grandfather had simulated the authority of the Soviet State.
The Tarnow Ghetto stretched to the east of the old part of the city which was dotted with craters from the first days of the war when the Nazis had destroyed a large synagogue and other buildings belonging to the town’s sizeable Jewish community. The Ghetto gate lay just past Ulica Kupiecka. Bruno had little reason to go there. But he would sometimes make a detour on his way to school and stand and watch the guards, whether Polish or German, as they brutally pushed and prodded long queues of huddled people off to their work-sites in the morning. They all wore the telltale armband with its Star of David that somehow seemed to obliterate their status as humans, suck attention into itself and away from the all-too-human face. The Star meant they could be beaten without mercy. The guards, even if they were rigorous in checking traffic as it went in and out of the Ghetto, behaved quite differently when they didn’t have the Star to focus on.
Sometimes a smell would rise from the Ghetto gates like the odour of dead flesh in the woods, a sweet nauseating stink. One day, a little way past the main gate, Bruno saw a child crawl out of a hole under the wall, which had been covered over with rubble. She caught his eye then ran away on stick legs. She wasn’t much bigger than Anna.
Another day, it was after school and getting late so that he should have been rushing, he saw a youth hurl a bundle over the wall. It just skimmed the barbed wire and toppled over onto the other side. The youth strolled nonchalantly away pretending not to see Bruno. He wondered what the bundle contained and imagined it must be food.
The following Sunday, after church, which Mamusia insisted they all had to go to, instead of accompanying his mother and sister for a walk and smiling stupidly at all the churchgoers, he rushed home, packed up some bread and cheese and a cabbage, wrapped them in a cloth and rushed out again. He had been told to place a coin in the priest’s collection tray. Now he would place another coin. He walked until he found a quiet bit of wall and with a heave sent his package hurtling across. He did this several Sundays in a row until Mamusia began to complain that he was eating them out of hearth and home and she couldn’t come by enough food to keep him.
‘Send me to work,’ he challenged her, and then Anna piped up. ‘He gives it away. He gives it to the poor.’ His mother stared at him. After a moment she said: ‘You are not, I repeat not, to go there. You’re just like your grandfather. Do you want us all to be shot?’
‘And what about you?’ he retorted. ‘What about all those little work permits you give out to…?’ She hugged him, so as to seal his lips. Maybe she didn’t want Anna to know. Maybe she thought it was bad luck to say anything out loud. The walls had ears.
Yes. There were eyes and ears all around them. At home, in the streets, at school. What they saw and what they heard had only one possible outcome. Death. Mamusia had admitted it at last.