The door opened with a loud shriek. I bolted upright, memories scattering.
It wasn’t an officer or a policeman, but a tired looking woman with frizzy hair bound up in a bun. She wore a faded dress with an apron over top. She clapped her hands and said, in that kind of clipped Ukrainian that the Germans who lived in my country used, “Quickly, children. You must come with me.”
She sounded almost kind.
She had us line up in front of two policemen who sat outside one of the administrative buildings at a wooden table. When it was my turn, one of them took my hand and pressed the tips of my fingers onto a black pad and then firmly pressed my inky fingers onto a small white form. He waved the form in the air to dry the ink, then handed it to his fellow officer, whose fountain pen was poised.
“Name?” he asked, without looking up.
“Lida Ferezuk.” I watched him write down my name using German letters instead of Cyrillic.
“Date of birth?”
“March fourteenth,” I said.
He looked up briefly and said, “Happy birthday.”
Today was March 14? So I was now nine years old. The last days and weeks had been a blur of sadness. My birthday was the last thing on my mind.
“Year?” he asked.
“Nineteen …” And then I hesitated. If I told the truth, what might they do to me? Would they consider a nine-year-old to be useless? I couldn’t take the chance. “Nineteen thirty.”
“Are you sure you’re thirteen?” He looked up, clearly not convinced.
“Yes, officer.”
He wrote it in, then looked at me, his mouth curved into a near smile. “Consider that your birthday present.”
“What is your country of origin?” he asked.
“Ukraine.”
“No such place.”
I watched as he filled the space with Occupied Eastern Territory — a term I hated.
“Place of birth?”
“Verenchanka,” I said, then added, “Chernivets’ka region, Bukovyna, Ukraine.”
He slashed a line through several spots without asking anything. In the part where it specified nationality, he left it blank.
“Can you put that I’m Ukrainian in that spot?”
“No such thing,” he said. “You’re finished.”
Kataryna Pich was the next person in line. I was curious to hear how old she would make herself, so I paused.
“February sixth, nineteen twenty-nine,” she told him.
She had made herself fourteen instead of eleven! The officer didn’t question her, but wrote down the year and date with studious boredom.
“Go to the Kantine,” he said to her as he finished. He looked up at me and said, “You, no dawdling.”
Kataryna stepped away from the table and the two of us stood in the next spiralling lineup. We had both heard each other lie about our ages. I squeezed her hand and her pale blue eyes met mine. “I hope we guessed right,” she said.
The moment we entered the Kantine, I could smell the food despite being so far down in the lineup. Meat in gravy, onions, even vanilla? How long had it been since we’d last eaten? A day? Two? Long enough that my stomach had forgotten how to growl. Even before the war, food was not plentiful. It hardly seemed in keeping with the way the Nazis had treated us so far. Perhaps my nose was playing tricks on me.
Conversations of people lined up with me buzzed in the whispers of many languages. The Russian I could understand by listening carefully. Some of the words were the same as Ukrainian, but others were not. The German I could understand. A German family had lived on our street, but the Soviets had taken them away. I caught wisps of unfamiliar tongues as well.
I looked around at all the people. Some wore rags faded to dirt grey and others were clothed in tattered party dresses, nightgowns, school uniforms. It all depended on what they were wearing when they were captured. Some wore mismatched shoes or wooden clogs. Most were barefoot. I looked down at my own bare feet, now blue with cold. Wooden clogs would be good. Some of the prisoners wore badges on their clothing — mostly square blue-and-white badges with OST in the middle, but there were some diamond-shaped P badges in purple and yellow. There were no yellow stars like my friend Sarah had had to wear.
I craned my neck to see if I could find Luka and the boys from our cattle car, but I couldn’t. When we were almost at the front of the line, the warden pointed to a stack of bowls, tin cups and spoons. “Each of you shall take one bowl, cup and spoon. After you’ve eaten, you will clean them and take them to your sleeping quarters.”
I clutched my bowl, cup and spoon to my chest and stepped forward in hungry anticipation. The wonderful scent of cooking had revived my appetite. Our warden stood at the front of the serving window, her arms crossed and a look of boredom on her face.
When I finally got up to the front, I smiled at the cook, who stood sweating beside four open vats of soup, three clustered together and one set apart. Each vat had a tidy label painted on the front: German, Aryan, Polish. The one set apart from the others was labelled Russian.
My mouth filled with saliva as the cook ladled out a bowlful from the German pot, with its chunks of meat, potatoes and carrots floating in greasy thick broth. A person in front of me held out her bowl. After filling it, the cook reached to the table behind him for a dish of vanilla pudding! He gave that to the prisoner as well. I could hardly believe my eyes.
I waited for the people in front of me to be served.
When it was finally my turn, I held up my bowl and said, “I would love some German soup, please.”
The cook barely glanced at me. Instead, he looked over to the warden and raised his eyebrows.
“Russian,” she said.
“I’m not Russian, I’m Ukrainian.”
The warden frowned at me. “Do you see a sign here that says Ukrainian? You’re from the east. You’re Russian.”
The cook stepped over to the lone Russian pot and slopped some of its contents into my bowl, using a separate ladle. I looked down at the murky brown mess and my eyes filled with tears.
“Could I at least have some pudding?”
“We don’t waste precious food on sub-humans,” she said. “Go sit now.”
What did she mean by sub-human?
I balanced the bowl and made my way through the maze of jostling people. I found a spot to sit at a long wooden table. I sniffed the soup. A faint rotten smell. I dipped my spoon in and swirled it, trying to figure out what it was made from. The skin of a turnip rose to the surface. I stirred again. A small white curly thing — a worm? Bile rose at the back of my throat. I pushed the bowl away.
“You’d better eat it,” said a voice in German with an accent I didn’t recognize.
Sitting across the table from me was a girl not much older than I was. She didn’t wear a badge but she looked like a prisoner. Her black hair had grown out a few centimetres from the shaving she must have received upon arrival. It stuck out like bristles on a hairbrush. How long had she been here? Her eyes looked bruised with exhaustion, but her mouth curved into a faint smile. She dipped a spoon into her own soup with relish and pulled out a small chunk of meat.
I was outraged. “Why do you get meat and I don’t?”
“They don’t consider you a valuable human,” said the girl.
“All humans are equal.”
“The Nazis consider you sub-human,” said the girl, gesturing with her spoon. “Just look around. There are people from many countries that have been brought here to do labour for the Germans. Some are political prisoners — like me. I was caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Others were captured — like you. The German police and soldiers get to eat the best food because they are the most valuable humans. They even get vanilla pudding for dessert.” She dipped her spoon back into her soup and placed a chunk of potato on her tongue. She chewed slowly, as if savouring the taste. “But I’m Hungarian and they consider me a valuable human because my government is allied with the Nazis.”
“What do they consider Ukrainians?”
She took another spoonful of soup and swallowed it with a satisfied look. “No such thing. Don’t you mean Russian? Or maybe Polish?” Her eyes lit up with excitement. “If you get the choice, tell them you’re Polish. They get better food than the Russians.”
“I don’t think I get to choose.”
“Too bad.” She shoved a chunk of meat that glistened with fat into her mouth. She chewed another mouthful of her tasty smelling soup and her eyes met mine. “You’d better eat up,” she said. “Or another Russian will come and steal it from you. All you Russians are thieves.”
I looked down at my bowl of goop and dipped my spoon back into it. A worm? So what? It was as close to meat as I would be getting for a while. It was important to keep up my strength so I could get out of this place and find Larissa. I filled my spoon as full as I could and shoved it into my mouth, trying not to gag at the awful taste. I kept my eyes locked on the Hungarian girl’s face as I chewed.
I licked my bowl clean, making sure not to waste the merest morsel of turnip. All too soon, our warden stood at the door of the Kantine. She clapped her hands sharply and said, “Barracks Seven, we leave now.”
We were scattered at different tables but we all stood and went with her.