Students are most easily found in the cafeteria. Since university officials decided to attempt a semblance of a semester under the auspices of a local teachers’ college, its cafeteria has become the place where humiliated professors chase down their students, alternately trying to shame them and promising to keep the lecture short enough that they will be able to return to their place in the queue in time to receive the day’s balanda. But this time the dean’s secretary is calling out just one name, and Ester responds instinctively, forgetting even to stake her place before she follows the thin thirtyish woman to the dean’s office.
“Are you Ester Goldberg?” inquires an official matron Ester has never seen.
“Yes.”
“Date and place of birth?”
“Bialystok, January 5, 1923.” She is starting to feel the fear.
“We have received a letter for you.” An arm extending lazily, offering a brown triangle—now triangles have become the rule, since they save money and the censors’ time—a hand reaching for it, the recognition of Bella’s handwriting, the scramble of fingers to open the message, the first in eight months since that letter Bella threw out the train window.
My dear daughter,
I had nearly despaired about finding you. At first I could not write for five months—I will explain later, after I have received your response—and then all my letters to your institute were returned “addressee unknown.” But yesterday I met a woman, also from Bialystok, who told me your institute was merged with the university and the university was evacuated to Ashkhabad. I am writing right away, to say just the main things: I am all right, living in Biysk, in the Altai. The climate is hard, but I am managing to get by. No news about your father. I hope so much that this letter finds you, my girl.
Love, Mama
This is a message by a writer unsure it will be read, a discreet testing of the waters. Ester runs back to her room—stopping outside the building and returning to thank the matron, who acknowledges her gratitude indifferently, then running again—forgetting about balanda and everything else except the post office’s closing hour, by which she has to dispatch her letter. In the coming weeks, writing furiously back and forth, sometimes every day, their letters usually crossing en route, answers trailing questions by a half dozen missives, they will try to tell each other how they have lived through this separation.
How the cattle-car train carrying Bella and 3,001 other deportees from Bialystok arrived in the Siberian town of Biysk. The journey, if you can call it that, had taken twelve days. The sound of explosions had followed them at first, but they were more concerned with the lack of water and food. Indifference set in, dull as the sound of bombs in the distance, after they passed Moscow. Everyone in Bella’s car survived, thank goodness; though, in the heavy silence of the last few days, they could not be sure until they left the darkness and the stench of the cattle car.
How they were lined up alongside the train and told, by a young NKVD officer, that all of them would be put to work for the benefit of the Soviet state and its military might—this is when they knew what they had been sure of for days: a war had started between Germany and the Soviet Union. The secret-police officer assured them that each would be put to work according to his profession. Bella did not count on a job teaching Polish, of course, but she assumed that the deportees, mostly educated and largely middle-aged, would be assigned to clerical duties. When her job turned out to be digging toilet holes, she complained, “For twenty-four years of Soviet rule they relieved themselves behind the shed, and now they need Bella Goldberg to dig toilets for them!”
The local woman to whose house she had been assigned sighed that night, “You shouldn’t have said that. Not out loud. Your shift leader is a snitch.” How she was right, of course: there was a loud knock on the door later that night, an escorted walk to the precinct, the first of about one hundred and fifty nights spent in a small square cell.
The story of Bella’s protest has always been a family favorite. It does us proud to hail from this kind of stock: a woman who talked back to the NKVD. And this at a time when most people in the country were afraid to open their mouths on any topic at all. In the late 1990s, when certain archives were made public, I discovered my great-grandmother was not unique: it seems the Poles deported to Russia were not infected by the virus of fear that kept Soviet society so obedient. So they did things like talk back and even stage protests.
In August 1940, the deported refugees from German-occupied territories staged a mass protest—even referred to as a riot in some NKVD documents—in the Novosibirsk region. Over fifteen hundred people refused to work, demanding that they be given jobs according to their professions and be moved to urban areas in a warmer part of the country. The riot was put down, forty-five people were arrested, but less than a year later a special decision of the NKVD allowed educated deportees to live outside the so-called special settlements.
Another protest was staged by people Bella probably knew personally—deportees, most of them Jewish, taken from Bialystok to the Siberian city of Omsk at the same time she was taken to Biysk. For three days fourteen hundred deportees, temporarily quartered in the city circus building, of all places, managed to resist the NKVD’s efforts to ship them to their destinations in the distant villages of the region. It took a hundred and twenty armed policemen to force them into the trucks.
The most remarkable part of these stories is that, each time, it took the NKVD days to put down protests by sick, exhausted, unarmed people. Each time, the secret police were stymied by people who thought they could do the unthinkable. So Bella’s individual protest was not an isolated incident, but one that left her minders at a loss. Their ultimate solution was to sentence her to ten years of labor camps for “religious propaganda”—an absurd charge for an atheist, to be sure, but no more absurd than the charges against hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens sentenced in those days for espionage, terrorism, and sabotage.
As it happened, just when she was sentenced, in August 1941, the Soviet Union signed a cooperation agreement with occupied Poland’s government in exile and, in conjunction with that move, declared amnesty for all Polish citizens held in labor camps, prisons, and special settlements on Soviet territory. Many of them, including the future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, left the Soviet Union in the ranks of an army formed by Polish general Wladislaw Anders. The rest, like Bella, remained in the Soviet Union through the war.
Bella was never shipped off to labor camp, and was finally released from prison after five months—at least four months after the amnesty took effect.
Bella still has not learned her lesson, and she tells the story in letters to her daughter. But she does not write about prison; she writes instead about her search, about the overwhelming futility of looking for someone in this vast land, the absolute impossibility of finding her girl, her only daughter, her—she keeps repeating—one remaining person in the world.
By this time Bella, who had spent two years within miles of German-occupied territories, who knew exactly what the Germans did to Jews, assumed that her sisters in Warsaw and her husband in Bialystok were dead. She was wrong. Her husband, like the Bialystok ghetto itself, would survive until late 1943. Her younger sister Helena, who, after all of her Polish friends had refused to help her hide, had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by drowning, was saved by other Poles, who first hid her and her baby daughter and then helped her secure false Aryan documents that kept her safe until the end of the war. Helena’s husband, who was a strong swimmer, had chosen a different way of killing himself: as his wife looked on, he threw himself in front of a train; he succeeded.
Ester writes about how life changed overnight—the night of June 22, 1941. How the dormitories were emptied and the students moved to a school building in the center of town, where they slept on tables. How she and Eda got jobs as truck drivers. She omits the fact of her half-blindness because, of all the things that might worry her mother, this, it seems, could be kept secret. She omits the hard facts of her work and, of course, she does not write that they stopped going to bomb shelters after a while.
She writes that a friend fixed her and Eda up with a room, and that they caught a spy.
They both write that they must be reunited, that they will promise never again to part.
They both are now—briefly, as it will turn out—entitled to move around the country freely: Bella has been amnestied, and the strict travel restrictions that will be in effect for all citizens through much of the war have not yet been introduced. They try to decide who should undertake the arduous journey: Ester, who at nineteen is certainly physically better suited for it, or Bella, who would be going to sunny Turkmenia, where many of the newly amnestied Poles have rushed following the miserable Siberian winter.
Hunger is when potatoes—rather, the promise of potatoes—decide where and how mother and daughter should be reunited. “I made a final decision only when I got a letter from my mother saying that the Poles in Biysk were not starving because at the local market you could exchange items of clothing for potatoes, pretty profitably. That ended my doubts. In Ashkhabad we’d forgotten what potatoes tasted like. I ran and got a ticket that very day. My friends had been telling me to do just that all along: ‘How can you think about bringing your mother here when we are all going to starve to death?’ ”
Hunger is saying that the journey she began a week later was a good one because the military men she met on the trains—she had to take a total of four trains, each time spending a day or more at the layover station—were always giving her something to eat.
The journey northeast from Ashkhabad to Biysk could have taken two days, or, with all passenger train schedules suspended indefinitely in favor of military transport, it could have taken any number of days at all. It took a week, but Bella has been at the station every day since she received Ester’s telegram. She comes to the platform in the morning and stays there, pacing up and down, sitting on a bench, ducking for a half hour into the small station building. Wooden and unheated, it is better for a change of scenery than for trying to warm up. She stays until the train comes—there is just one every day, but its time of arrival is impossible to predict—and waits until it empties out: Biysk is the last station on this railroad. Though she is convinced that she will see her daughter from any distance as soon as Ester steps on the platform, Bella still stays until the last person has walked past her. She looks at every face, looking for her daughter’s.
They do see each other, finally, all the way across the long platform, and in an instant they are embracing and crying and whispering the kinds of nonsense words that long-parted lovers might say. Bella leads Ester to the low, huddled wooden house where she is renting a room. The landlady is a bit younger than Bella and has a daughter a few years Ester’s senior; the husband and son are both at the front. The owner of the house fires up her big wood-burning stove, fills a big tin bath with freezing water from the well, and together the two Russian women heave the bath into the stove’s large opening, which is usually used for cooking. Ester bathes—the last time she felt so dirty was when she arrived in Ashkhabad about five months ago—and afterward, flushed and relaxed, she sits with Bella and the Russian women at the table, drinking hot water from the samovar and receiving a stream of visitors: the Biysk population of exiled Polish Jews from Bialystok has been following Bella’s search for her daughter and has been waiting with her, and now all of them are coming around to get a look at a family story with a happy ending.
When they have all gone, and the two Russian women have gone to bed in an adjacent room, Bella and Ester cry. They cry for Jakub. Ester cries for Isaj. Bella cries for her nine brothers and sisters, her parents, Jakub’s seventeen siblings, and together they cry for an entire world that has died, leaving the two of them to face the aftermath.
But the next morning Ester wakes up unaccountably happy, feeling like, after months of struggle, life has resumed.