“You deliver us
Like sheep to be eaten
And among the nations
Have you scattered us?
You sell your people
For no fortune
And you did not
Inflate their prices.
You make us a disgrace
To our neighbors
The mockery and scorn
Of those around us.”
Psalm 44:11,12,13
“Things will get better,” Mama says repeatedly. But they don’t. They get worse. My brain cannot catch up to what is happening. Every morning I wake up and I realize where we are all over again. First, my brain says that I should be at work ironing the dresses that Leah sews, but then my body tells me that I must drag bricks like a workhorse. These are the longest days I have ever lived through, and somehow, one day just bleeds into another as if I am in a dream. Rumors circulate the brickyard as to what we are doing here. Some of the former leaders of Crasna, who were brought with us in the buggy, say we are here to work for the war effort for a few weeks. Eventually, they say, we will be able to go home. Some people say they were just evacuating our town and some of the neighboring towns, so they will not be bombed. I do not know what to believe. Mostly I do not have time to think. Before this, I actually thought that being a seamstress was the worst job in the world.
One morning, after a rainy night, we wake up tangled in blankets and wet, green mud. There is mud in my mouth and in the corners of my eyes.
“This war has to end soon,” Yecheskel says. He brushes wet mud from Mama’s back.
“It will,” Mama says. “This cannot go on too long.” She puts her arm around his shoulder and rubs it. He lays his head on her shoulder. “Come eat something before work,” Mama says.
I open our suitcase and Mama comes to pick out something for us to eat this morning. Our bundle of food has gotten smaller, and I feel a nauseated nervousness as I look at the dwindling pile and Mama’s shaking hand as she pulls out a loaf of bread and breaks off a small piece for each of us. She leaves only a tiny piece for herself. She looks like she has aged ten years in the ten days we have been here. The air is filled with dust from the bricks. We open our mouths to eat the bread, but instead we inhale the clay-filled dust. We all cough as it settles on our tongues and throats. Our fingers shake with hunger and the bread, what was once my mother’s beautiful bread, is as stale as the bricks we carry. My heart pounds irregularly. In the past few years since the Hungarians took control of Crasna, we haven’t always had a lot to eat, so I have known what it is like to go to bed feeling a little bit hungry. But I have never known hunger to this extent, the never-ending way it claws at your insides. The way it demands and demands something that you cannot give. Mama barely eats. Whatever little bit of food she packed she gives to us, and she knows it is not nearly enough. While I carry my bricks, I dream of the cakes Mama used to make, especially her dobosh,1 and I wish I had them and could stuff them in my mouth right now—to feel the lightness of the whipped egg and the smoothness of the sugar that floats on top like boats on a stream. I want to pile them into my mouth and gulp them down until my belly is so full that the button on my skirt feels like it will burst. For the past few days my skirt has been so loose that it slips off me. I’ve had to tie it with a rubber band to keep it up.
“Get to the factory, you lazy rodents!” A Gendarmerie says to us. He has his rifle out, so we stand up at once and we walk straight to the factory before he has a chance to hurt us. I swallow dust as I walk. I am so thirsty, but I know I will not get a drink all day. Mice and rats squirm around my ankles.
“Take this pile!” a Gendarmerie tells me, pointing to a small mountain of bricks by his feet. “Take these to the field!”
I bend down to get the bricks and he hits me on the back. I pause for a second as tears spring to my eyes, but I do not let them fall down my face. A rat scurries off the bricks as I pick them up. The pile is almost as big as I am. It reaches my chin and down to my shins. I take a step, but it is hard to move because the bricks reach my knees and block them from bending, but I walk as fast as I can because when I walk slow it only gives the soldiers an excuse to hit me. I walk through the thin winding path that leads to the field where there are other workers building structures. I am not sure what they are building, in fact I am not sure they are building anything of importance at all, but I try not to think of that. The long path to the field has been worn into the ground by the people transporting the bricks and it twists and turns past many trees. Everything falls away as I focus on breathing and try not to choke on the dust. I take step after step even though the bricks are so heavy, and I am so hungry. I feel gutted.
Suddenly, I see a lady suspended in the air in front of me. I stare at her for a second. She is our neighbor, Mr. Waldman’s daughter-in-law. She comes from a rich family in the town next to ours. She was always proper and polite, and I was jealous of how well educated she was. She screams a deep horrible scream, and I can’t comprehend how such a sound can come out of a lady as beautiful as she is. She has been hung from the tree. She floats in a distorted way. Her hands are twisted backwards, her knees are at the most peculiar angle. She is inches from the ground but tethered to the tree.
She screams again, a hollow sound. Her body convulses from her belly and her scarf falls from her head. The soldiers stand around and laugh in her face. One lights up a cigarette for the other.
She cries out again and they laugh harder. She turns white and she faints. The soldier splashes her with water, and she wakes up and screams again. They laugh casually and let the ropes go and she falls to the ground with a splat. Her limbs are twisted, and she does not move. I vomit into the trees next to me and then I carry the bricks to the other side of the field where they belong.
When I get back to our little tent, I see Mama and I fall into her arms.
“I saw it too.”
“What is happening here?” I sob. “Why is this happening?”
“I do not know, Mamale,” she says. She strokes my hair. “God will help.”
Leah runs into the tent. Her face is white. “Did you see that?” she asks.
We both nod.
She sits next to us, and Mama holds us both. “Go to sleep girls,” Mama says after a while. “I will wait up for Cheskel.”
I decide not to tell her I saw them do it to little boys, as well. None of us sleep until Cheskel comes in and we breathe a sigh of relief that he is unharmed.
The next day I see two more girls hanging from the trees by their hands. I know them from our town, and they are also from rich families. Maybe the Hungarians have something in for the rich ones. Nobody touches me. The women’s faces are white and the pain looks like it is too much for them to bear. I see little boys hanging. We are a sick game for the Gendarmerie. Hanging us from the trees until we faint from the pain, then waking us up so we can feel it again. Screams echo in the forest.
Toward the evening we gather around the oven to cook our food. We meet Mr. Waldman, our neighbor. He looks grave as he runs his fingers through his beard.
When my grandfather died, Mr. Waldman let us stay in our house rent free. He knew we couldn’t pay our bills. Mr. Waldman used to learn with Zaidy and every year, on the anniversary of his death, he threw a big party in his memory. Mamma made vanilla rugelach2 that looked like they would dance right off the table.
His daughter stands next to him. She has her baby tied around her chest with a cloth. Leah and I stand on our tippy toes to see him.
“Ooooh, Hi Eliyahu,” Leah says. She pinches his cheek lightly with her thumb and forefinger.
“He is getting so big!” I say.
Leah gives him a smile and he coos back.
“Oh, he is so cute!” we both say at the same time. His mother smiles sadly at us. I see the deepest expression of fear cross her face and she holds her baby tighter to her chest.
Mama and Mr. Waldman are conversing quietly. “There is a mint here . . . asking for the man of each household to report there . . . wives have to watch . . . then do the same thing to the wives . . .” Mama twists her fingers. “Men have been carried out of there on stretchers . . . full burns on his thigh . . . half dead . . .”
We keep looking at the baby, but I know Leah is trying to listen to Mama and Mr. Waldman.
“Maybe they won’t ask us . . . no man of the house . . .”
We hear Mama’s voice crack.
“They don’t care, they just want to know where all the money is hidden,” he says. “They will call me next, and I will have to hand over my entire life’s savings to them. They know I am wealthy.”
“Hopefully they will not call you,” Mama says.
A few days later Mr. Waldman is called into the headquarters. Later, his sons carry him out on a stretcher. His eyes are closed, and his face is white.
After two days, he dies. A group of men and his sons bury him right here in the ghetto, on a little hill over the factory. His daughter with the baby wails as they lower him into the ground. Mama cries along with her. He was a dear friend of our Zaidy, and he helped us so much.
“I am going,” Leah says to me one night as we stack up more sticks for our tent.
Mama is out of earshot.
“You can’t leave, Leah, in case you haven’t noticed, we are surrounded by soldiers with machine guns.”
“Not out of this ghetto, silly, to the mint office. I’ll let them interrogate me if they want to.”
“Are you crazy, Leah? You can’t! Not what after happened to Mr. Waldman!”
“So, what then? Eventually, they’ll make Mama go and they will torture her. She is already giving us most of the food and barely eating anything herself. She won’t make it. You can’t make me change my mind. I’ve already decided, I’m going.”
“No, you are not, Leah. Just leave it, maybe they’ll forget about us.”
“Does it look like they are the type to forget? Come on, Rosie. We can’t let them hurt Mama.”
“And I cannot let you walk into that awful headquarters.”
“I am going and there is nothing you can say to change my mind.”
I open my mouth to answer, but I know she is right. I feel sick to think of her walking straight into that office. I cannot look at her.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “I promise, I will be fine.”
But of course, I worry. We finally settle down to sleep for the night. My muscles are burning, I can’t lift my arms anymore, even just to scratch an itch on my foot. I am so tired, but I can’t fall asleep. I just lie there, watching my family sleep on the ground, and I can’t recognize us for the people we were just a few weeks ago. How is Leah able to sleep through this? She is going to march right into the headquarters tomorrow, maybe she will also be carried out on a stretcher, with burns on her legs. Would they burn her alive? They seemed capable of doing that, the way they hung that little boy, the way they killed Mr. Waldman. The worry swishes through my brain like sloppy water, sneaking into every crack and crevice. I pray nonstop, “God, let her be ok.”
The next morning, I wake up and Leah is gone. I can barely breathe. After a few minutes I see her walking toward us. She is like an angel floating with wings above all the sleeping families on the floor. When she reaches me, I hug her to make sure she is real.
“I did it,” she says smiling.
“Oh, my goodness, are you ok? What happened? What did they want from you?”
“They had a big pad and paper and they asked me where my family lives and where do we keep our valuables and if we are hiding anything.”
“What did you say?”
“I told them we have a very big wooden basin that we washed the clothes in, and it is made out of walnut wood, so it is very expensive.”
“And what did they say?”
“They started laughing!”
“You did not tell them about our sewing machine?”
“Nope! They are not taking my sewing machine.”
Leah is a master seamstress. We lived very near to a fabric store and bought yard after yard of fabrics from there. With those fabrics Leah made the most beautiful dresses—for every woman in town, it seemed. With her skills, she kept our family alive.
“You are crazy! Did they hurt you?”
“No, they looked up our family name on the papers and obviously we aren’t on the rich list, so they just told me to go.”
I sat down, put my head on my knees, and took several deep breaths. There was a pattern. They tortured the rich people: hung them, burned them, killed them.
Mama stirs. “What happened?” she says, sitting up quickly.
“Nothing, Leah is so brave. She went to the headquarters and told them all about our valuables.”
“Leah! I am you Mother! You cannot take responsibility like that! That is my job! Are you okay?”
“Do not worry, Mama. They only want rich families.
“Sick people,” she says. “I’m happy you are okay, Leah, but do not do that again. Ever.”
“I won’t, Mama”
Watching my mother, I understand a little more about her love for us now. She has sacrificed everything for us. Every day she has set out to make it a good one for us, even though she had to do it single handily. I know she would not hesitate to offer her very life up for us. She has always tried to shield us from her own suffering. And she doesn’t want us to shield her just yet.
“We are going to make it through this,” Mama says. “You girls are going to be all right.”
The soldiers come around and our moment as a family is broken up by their barks.