From March 1940 to June 1941
For those of us not sent to Siberia, the Russians had brought Siberia to us. Every bit of fuel, everything that could burn, even tiny birds’ nests, was sent to the front. I practically lived in my heavy grey Afghan coat lined with rabbit fur. That coat was my saviour. Thank heavens Aunt Uchka had married a furrier. Hersch Leib had had coats made for everyone in the family. We could have chosen anything, even a famous Zolkiew fur, so popular in Paris. But with the icy winds blowing off the steppes, nothing was warmer than Afghan lamb. So that is what my family wore.
Six months after the Soviets occupied Zolkiew we were still in the icy grip of our first occupied winter. The news on my grandparents’ radio was just as chilling. We despaired when the United States announced its neutrality. And even though England and France had declared war on Germany, nothing had been done about the occupation of Poland. All France did was invade a lightly defended area of Germany. They made it all of 12 kilometres before turning back. We had been abandoned.
On most days after school, I would stop off at Uchka’s on the way home. I looked forward to sugar cookies, tea, and playing with Zygush and Zosia–especially Zosia. I had given up dolls for books when I was six, but I couldn’t get enough of her. Zosia liked to put her cheek next to yours and clutch your face when she was carried. I didn’t want to be any other place on earth when she did this. According to Uchka, I was Zosia’s little mother, her mammeleh.
One day, when I went to Aunt Uchka’s, her house was empty. Before, I would have thought nothing of their absence, but now I immediately assumed the worst. I ran through the lanes in Uchka’s neighbourhood back to my house, praying to find them there. It was like a snow-covered maze behind my family’s oil-press factory. I cut through the alley behind the pink walls of the convent to my street. I rushed up the steps into the foyer that separated our flat from that of my grandparents’, stamping off as much snow as I could. Even with my fur hat still over my ears, my coat collar up and my scarf wrapped tightly round it, I could already hear the noise coming from the next room. Something had happened. Everybody was speaking all at once. No one noticed I had walked in the room. I was relieved to see Uchka sitting in the corner holding the children in her lap. It took me a while to realize that everyone was beaming.
Mama finally sighted me. She rushed towards me with her arms out. ‘Who knew? Who knew?’
I asked, ‘Who knew what?’ I couldn’t imagine what had put such smiles on their faces. But everyone actually looked happy, which surely meant that nobody had died or been deported. It finally hit Mama that I really didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘You mean the entire town hasn’t heard yet? Clarutchka,’ she said, every word ripe with pride, ‘out of all the children in Zolkiew, not only was your little sister chosen to sing the lead aria in the spring concert, but she was the youngest! Can you imagine? Mania! The youngest! And a lead aria! Who knew?’
Never in a million years would I have thought I would be hearing Mama crow about this. Not now, not ever! Mania was always pulling rabbits out of the hat of her life. We didn’t even know that she had been asked to audition! I was as giddy as the rest of them. Who could have known that my little stick of a sister could really sing? We sang at holidays. We sang our children’s songs at school. But an aria? From a real opera? What a blessing to have such a talent in the family. We even temporarily forgot that the concert was to celebrate the superiority of the Soviet system. Even Dzadzio, Grandfather, who never had a kind word for the Russians, said, ‘At least they got this right.’ Apparently, the Russians knew something we didn’t about my baby sister. On the other side of the room, Mania was sitting on the baby bed where she slept. I could tell what she was thinking just by the look on her face. She would rather be out sledding while there was still snow on the ground and was ruing that she had brought up the concert at all. But it was like all the other things she had to confess to. Better to get it over with. Sooner or later Mama would have got it out of her anyway. She couldn’t see the glory in it. She had been told to sing, so she would sing.
For the next three months, all we got was humming. Humming while she jumped rope. Humming while she ran in and out of the house. Humming while my mama made her do the homework she hated. The one time Mama asked her to sing, Mania refused. She was as wilful as Mama, Babcia and Dzadzio. We would have to wait for the concert.
The entire town was temporarily distracted from the Russian occupation. While waiting on the long lines which stretched outside the colonnaded shops, mothers bragged about the Ukrainian and Russian folk songs their children would be singing. There wasn’t a loaf of bread to be found, but the air practically buzzed with gossip. I knew they were secretly keeping score. Which song was longer? Whose child was singing the favourites? Who had a solo and who was in the chorus? What would the mothers wear?
It didn’t matter that Zolkiew was a speck on the map of the world, or that our house was on a dirt road covered in dust in summer and mud or snow in winter. Mama and her sisters always dressed as though they lived in a capital city like Warsaw or Vienna. Aunt Giza was the only who had actually lived in Vienna, and then only for a year. Although Giza reigned queen of the undergarment, even Dzadzio recognized Mama as the true Coco Chanel of the family. Whenever he wore out the elbows in his only sweater, my mother Salka had to be the one to pick out a new one; no matter that it would only be a mispucha–a relative by marriage–of the same charcoal grey sweater he bought every five years. September would bring Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and the catalogues that arrived by mail from Paris, Berlin and Vienna. We would sit at the big kitchen table, catalogues everywhere, armed with scissors. Mama would have me cut out the bodice from one, the material from another, the skirt from a third, the collar from a fourth, ribbons from a fifth and put them together. She and her tiny doll of a dressmaker, Mrs Hirschorn, were thick as thieves. The two of them plotted out the family wardrobes for weddings as if they were military campaigns. Whenever Mania and I would show up in a new dress at the social hall we would see our friends wearing copies within weeks. Mama never said one word about how this pleased her.
But that was before the Soviets. Silk, satin, taffeta, sequins, feathers and lace were all one-way tickets to Siberia. Rough, olive green uniform wool was the fabric of this season. The peasant look was more than fashion; it was a matter of survival. Some of Mama’s friends had even started to wear clothes that had once belonged to their cleaning ladies. Mama’s beautiful silk dresses were now locked up in the massive mahogany armoire that had outlasted most of the governments of Europe. But like any mother whose daughter was making her debut, Mama wanted to look as proud as she felt. So after many hours and too many cups of tea, the Reizfeld sisters had decided that it was ‘kosher’ to wear the prettiest of their schmatas, rags.
Mania and I didn’t even have that much of a choice. Lead aria or not, Mania was stuck wearing the navy blue sailor suit that was our school uniform. As was I. As was every other girl in Zolkiew. To compensate, Mama ironed so much starch into the uniforms they could have walked to the concert on their own. Our hair got the same treatment. Mama washed and rewashed Mania’s dark hair until I could almost see my face reflected in its shine. It was one thing to argue with Stalin. It was another to argue with Mama.
When the day of the concert finally arrived, our little house was like a teapot filled to the brim with boiling water. The door flew open. Little Zygush had arrived, with Zosia on his heels. Nobody had ever taught him to knock. A knock was an insult. A knock said someone wasn’t talking to somebody else in the family. Uchka followed just in time to see her children jumping up on me, like they always did. But today was not about fun and games. Before I could even give them a kiss, Mama was yelling at me from across the room. ‘What’s going on? Do you need a written invitation? And take the kinder with you.’ She was telling me I better get dressed and bring Zygush and Zosia with me. I had, however, been dressed for hours.
Little Zosia, with her blond curls, black eyes and sweet disposition, was no more trouble than a little doll you sat on your bed. But for Zygush, small and dark-haired like his father, I needed a chair, a whip, a cage and a leash. He was already climbing me like his favourite walnut tree in the yard.
Dzadzio, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, the uniform of the orthodox Jew that he wore every day of his life, was the only quiet person in the room. As proud as he was of my sister, he refused to go to the concert. He and Babcia would stay at home. I could see the regret in his eyes, but his heavy black shoes were planted into the Persian carpet and he wouldn’t budge. Ever since he had been captured by the Russians in 1918, he had refused to breathe the same air they did. Mama knew enough not to argue about matters of principle with her father. She respected him and knew his deeds were truth.
Every few minutes, Mama would drop what she was doing to fuss over Mania. Her fingers straightened Mania’s collar and lingered on her shoulders. I could read Mama’s mind. Through a caress of her hand, she prayed to imbue Mania with every ounce of her will, if such a thing were possible. Because today, for the first time in her life, Mania would be on her own. Mania knew what was at stake. The show was to ‘honour’ the Russians’ ability to turn us, the children of corrupt capitalists and religious fanatics, into proper little Stalins and Lenins. And if we were really good students, into spies, informers and party members. She knew her teachers had agonized over the choice of singers. She knew they would watch white-knuckled and teeth clenched. She knew it all. Even at 11 she knew. Nobody had to say a word.
Mania had to run a gauntlet of hugs, kisses and pinches on the cheek before she could leave. Mama had parked herself at the front door. She straightened Mania’s dress one more time. She made sure Mania’s French knot was secure. She puffed out the ends of the red bandanna around Mania’s neck. ‘Stay still already!’ Mama moaned. Mania was a racehorse at the starting gate. She had to be at the opera early. ‘Enough already! Stop being such a nudge!’ Babcia took Mama’s hands off Mania’s shoulders and guided my sister on her way with a kiss.
I watched as Mania walked down the street. But the walking lasted only until she came to the orphanage for Jewish girls, just two doors down. With a look back, a smile and a wave, Mania sprinted off. On any other day, Mama would have run after her with a rag and a tin of shoe polish. Mama’s mouth hung open, but the words died in her mouth with a sigh. Tonight she just stood there and watched her daughter run down the street and out of sight.
An hour later, about 25 of us trooped off to the opera house in the sweet spring evening. The Russians hadn’t managed to take away the fragrance of the lilacs and send it to the front with everything else. If Mania and I had been alone, the walk would have taken no more than 12 minutes. But now we were a herd of cattle, shuffling along at a grazing pace. I looked back and watched Mama and her three sisters walking arm and arm, as was their custom. There were a half a dozen crossed conversations going on. My family couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. We would walk a few steps, one of us would greet a friend and all 25 of us would stop. We managed just a quarter of a mile in a quarter of an hour.
As we reached the sports field there was a sea of girls in their blue sailor suits and red scarves, the uniform of the Russian Girl scouting movement, of which every able-bodied girl in Zolkiew was a proud member, whether she liked it or not. It seemed the entire town was flowing like a river up the street and towards the doors. Everyone had had the same idea: to be there early to get the good seats.
Our opera house, the Eagle, had been freshly painted. Large banners announcing the concert had been draped from the frieze. I had never seen so many cars in one place. The street was filled with cars that had been waxed to an inch of their lives. Each one had its own detachment of soldiers to make sure little boys like Zygush didn’t commit acts of sabotage by getting fingerprints all over the finish. The cars belonged to the commissars who had taken all the big houses on Railroad Street, just outside the castle walls and across the street from the park. The previous owners were dead or in Siberia. If I wasn’t worried about his safety, I would have let Zygush get his fingerprints all over the cars.
Papa greeted friends who no longer could be trusted. Friends who informed on other friends. Jews who informed on other Jews and sent children to die in Siberia. There were even children who informed on their parents. My father shook their hands and laughed at their jokes as they discussed the glory of the evening. Papa said that snubbing such ‘old’ friends amounted to suicide. My dzadzio would have slapped their faces and told them to go to hell. Under the banner, I saw the political officers who roamed the hallways of our school from time to time, smoking cigarettes with their comrades. I knew even children couldn’t escape having a file. When we sang ‘The International’, ‘May Day Morning’ and ‘The Partisan Song’ at school, I tried to pretend they were just songs. But I felt I was denying my religion in a way I didn’t when we sang Christmas carols.
I saw all my friends from school with their families and wanted to run to my three best friends, Giza Landau, who was also my second cousin, Genya Astman and Klara Letzer, but Mama told me to hang on to Zygush and Zosia. Mama who always told me how smart I was could in the next breath treat me like I was an absolute child. The officers waved at us students and without a thought tossed their cigarettes on the stone steps that had been washed and swept and polished by a troop of peasant women
Outside, an army band played as we advanced through the crush, trying to stay together. Inside, another army band was playing. Zygush and Zosia were hypnotized by the chandeliers throwing off pools of dancing light. The best seats had already been cordoned off for the officers and officials and their families of the Russian army, the communist party and the dreaded NKVD–the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which ran the Gulag for Stalin. We fought our way upstairs and found a row of seats in the balcony. Zygush had to touch every red velvet chair on the way. From where we were sitting, we had a direct view of the orchestra and the boxes. Some of the Russian wives were wearing lingerie. They couldn’t even tell the difference between a nightgown and a dress. These poor women, many from beyond the Urals, many from villages without a phone or even a road, assumed the stylish silk garments, decorated with lace décolletage, could be worn on the streets of Paris, Budapest or Berlin. Here I was, in this balcony, literally looking down my nose at these women glowing with pride. I wish I could say my cheeks burned with shame. Communism had given these women better lives. Many of them were friendly. Many were kind. I went to school with their children. Yet we were so frightened of their husbands that not one soul in Zolkiew dared tell them they were wearing lingerie.
Before the music, we had to endure the speeches. The generals and the commissars pretended they meant them and we pretended we believed them. ‘We must unite in our unanimous opposition to reactionaries.’ ‘Revolutions are the locomotives of history!’ ‘Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.’ ‘Give us your children for ten years and we will give you a true Bolshevik.’
Mama, Rosa, Uchka and Giza all had the same idiot smile painted on their faces. The entire balcony looked like a collection of frozen statues in a graveyard. Zosia was squirming and Zygush was nudging. Every few minutes Zygush poked me and asked when Mania was going to sing.
But the moment Mania walked on to the stage, they were still with awe. She looked so slim and fragile, just like a willow. She was just a fraction of the size of the singers who preceded her. Down the row, I could tell that Mama’s asthma was acting up. She could hardly breathe from all the kvelling–bursting with pride times a hundred. And when my little tomboy of a sister opened her mouth, out came a voice so powerful and clear that chills ran up my spine. The winds are howling. The trees are bending. My heart hurts. And the tears are falling by themselves. I could practically hear myself wondering: ‘This is my sister? Is this my sister?’
Just for a moment everything was perfect. Nobody wanted to be any place else or thinking about anything else. If only she could have kept on singing. I knew as long as her voice, clear as sunlight and imbued with pure emotion, filled this hall, we were safe. And even as I knew all this, I also knew that her song would end and the open hearts of our Soviet masters turn back to stone. How much I loved my sister in that moment.
The Soviets had no way of knowing that listening to my sister sing would only make us long for the life they were telling us to abandon. Our enemies, the Russian officers and party leaders, ruthless and sentimental, who killed and deported and tortured us, wept as children weep. The applause went on and on and on. Little Mania bowed as she was taught to bow and accepted red carnations from a Russian general. There was talk that night, lots of it, about the career our Mania would have when the war was over. But even as we spoke of the future, I knew the words were hollow. They were meant as a balm to ease the world we would face again tomorrow and the day after.
When Mania and I lay in bed that night, I told her with all my heart how proud we all were of her. I told her that she surprised us with how wonderful her voice was and that she was able to keep it a secret from us for so long. Even in the darkness, I could see her smiling. I wondered how many other secrets she kept, like the perfect acorns, flower petals and stones Mama always found in the pockets of her dresses.
Mania was so worn out from the frenzy of her day that she fell asleep before she could finish the ‘night’ in goodnight. But I was sad, on this night of Mania’s triumph. This was my sister and in so many ways she was a stranger. I loved her so much, yet she was a mystery to me. I knew less about her than I did about the characters in the books I read. As much as I wanted to know, I didn’t dare ask her what she had been feeling on stage that night. I know she would just shrug off the question.
Tomorrow Mania would wake up, reach for her skipping rope and run outside without another thought of the concert. A spring day would be waiting for her outside the door.
Just weeks after Mania’s aria, the Soviets were no longer seducing us with concerts and the promise of a workers’ paradise. They were now demanding more than mere obedience. They wanted our very minds. Their security apparatus of secret police (the NKVD), spies and informers made you afraid to look at your own reflection for fear of being reported. The terror of deportation was around every corner.
Friend after friend and their families had disappeared in the middle of the night. Either they were accused of having too much money, or of being Polish loyalists. Or they might be intellectuals, whose minds might dare question what the communists were doing in Zolkiew. Or they might have simply voiced their opposition to communism once 20 years ago in a café conversation. The reason didn’t make any difference, the result was always the same. Families weren’t just deported. They just ceased to exist; they had never existed. By the sundown following their disappearance, Russians were already sleeping in their beds and eating the food in their pantries. I recognized my classmates’ clothes on the Russian daughters and saw Russian sons playing with the toys of their little brothers. My friend Sonia Maresky, from Silesia, was one of the first to be deported with a hundred other Jewish refugees from Austria and the west.
Mama had decided that if we were to be on the next cattle car to Siberia, at least we would be prepared. Every spare minute was spent sewing knapsacks from green canvas and filling them with woollen socks, underwear and food, and hiding rubles and gold coins in secret compartments. And when the knock would come, and it would surely come, maybe in the hour of our deepest sleep, waking us from a dream into a nightmare, our clan, all 17 of us living in our little stone house, parents, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins would march out with our brand new backpacks.
Despite the new threat, we adjusted to life under the communists. Only Dzadzio stayed the same. Even after eight months he hadn’t learned to keep his hatred of the Soviets to himself. Mama kept as busy as possible, but she was so worried that my father could no longer reassure her that because of the oil press we wouldn’t be deported.
My poor father was now working almost 24 hours a day. There were no peasants or anyone in the army that could run the factory so the commissars were forced to let him run it. But they gave him Vasiluk. He was a big lazy Ukranian with some Russian blood who had a thick drooping moustache and did nothing but sit around my father’s office to spy on him. If Vasiluk felt industrious, he would read the newspaper.
Papa said rubles were worthless. So we used oil instead of money. If I looked out of the window, I could see long lines of people waiting for their ration of oil at the refinery next to the factory. In our kitchen we exchanged the oil from Papa’s factory with the cheese, produce, milk and eggs brought by the peasants. We then exchanged these for flour, sugar, tea and other necessities at the store my friend Genya’s father owned. At least we never lacked for food.
My grandfather was the first of us to be taken by the Russians. I was in the hospital recovering from appendicitis when an old car had sputtered up to our house with three men dressed in cheap suits and hats pulled over their eyes. As Mama told me how they had taken Dzadzio down the four front stone steps to the waiting car, the image I had of my grandfather seemed to shrink and crumple up like a folded paper doll. There was nothing I could do except weep.
Once I had learned about Dzadzio, more terrible news was to come. My grandfather wasn’t the only one who had been arrested. The same night, the NKVD had carried out arrests in every city, town, village and shtetl in their newly occupied territory. They had taken into custody every former Polish army officer and government official, as well as dozens of teachers, politicians and intellectuals and businessmen.
A few days later, I found out from Mama (who was bribing prison guards for information) that Dzadzio’s kidneys hadn’t been withstanding prison conditions and he had been moved to the very hospital where I lay. One day Dzadzio was brought out into the garden, guarded by a couple of armed soldiers. Their crazy assignment was to make sure that this old man in a wheelchair, dressed in a hospital gown with his feet bare, didn’t escape. When my grandfather saw me, his eyes were glassy with tears. All he could say was gey avek, gey avek–go away, go away. His gestured with his hand, over and over, for me to go back inside. I knew he was afraid of what the soldiers might do to me, but I couldn’t stop. I walked over to him and we embraced. I could barely ask him how he was. That was all. There was nothing to say. Nothing to do.
Even though we weren’t able to speak properly with each other, I was happy just to sit with my grandfather. Over the next couple of days I could tell that our time together had lifted his spirits too. One afternoon, we were sitting in the garden in silence when two NKVD officers walked over. My grandfather was to go with them. There was no violence in their voices, no malice. To them, he was merely a package with sad eyes. The nurse ran to get the doctor. Dzadzio was in no condition to leave the hospital. Dzadzio smiled at me not to worry. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen on a human being. Then his face went white, and his body started shaking. I screamed, but the guards and the NKVD did nothing, because I was nothing. They loaded my poor dzadzio, in desperate pain, his eyes filled with terror, into the back of a horse-drawn wagon. The doctor argued, but only for a moment and only with half a heart. I backed away, afraid and helpless. They had put my dzadzio on a bed of straw and I was thankful for that. For a long time, I just stood there. As if by the act of standing still, time would stop as well. I knew Mama would bribe the guard again for news. All I could do was to wait for Mama to come and tell me what happened.
Mama didn’t visit for three long days. When she finally walked into the hospital chapel she looked as if she was in mourning. She had brought me some soup. As she poured the broth into a bowl, she started to talk. The day after Dzadzio had been carted away, a prison guard ran up to our house to tell Mama that her father and the other political prisoners were being marched down to the train tracks. Mama and Uchka had immediately grabbed some rolls to bring to him. They knew he would need food for the long train journey. When they reached the central plaza opposite the castle walls, they saw Dzadzio marching in a line, guarded by Soviet troops. Mama and Uchka threw him the rolls, even after the guards had yelled at them to stop. They were arrested and taken to the jail in the tower. She had just been released this morning. She looked at me with anger in her eyes. ‘Can you imagine, Clarutchka–they didn’t even let him pick up one roll.’
The knock came for the rest of my family while I was still in hospital. It happened in the middle of the night, but Papa had been across the street at the oil press working, as always. The agents had arrest warrants in the name of Meir Schwarz. Mama could barely get the words out. She didn’t have to say any more, I understood. My father’s family was so religious that they had considered it irrelevant to have their weddings recorded by the state. So even though we went by the name of Schwarz in our day-to-day life, all our official papers, including my birth certificate, bore the name of Gottlieb. My mother was able to show the NKVD these papers, proving that we weren’t the family they were looking for. My mother’s face filled with shame. The others hadn’t been so lucky. The NKVD took my babcia, Uncle Manek, Aunt Rosa, her husband Pinchas and their four children. Uncle Josek and Aunt Giza had been able to hide in the cellar. They had since gone into hiding in Lvov.
Mama had gone to the train station because this time the Soviets had allowed family members and the Jewish Joint Distribution committee to pass out food, bedding and other supplies to the prisoners. Mama was able to talk to Rosa and the others. Nobody had told them where they were going, how long the journey would take or what would happen to them once they arrived. Mama told me she had had to say goodbye to Babcia as if it were for the last time. We didn’t know if my poor grandmother would survive the journey, let alone what the Soviets would have in store for them at their destination. Rosa tried to console her younger sister, telling Mama that she had done the right thing to save herself. But those words were no comfort for the grief and guilt I saw in Mama’s face.
It had come to this for our family. The unthinkable. That some of our family would survive, perhaps not at the expense of the others, but with the knowledge that we couldn’t save them. I couldn’t stop crying. All I wanted to do was go home with Mama. I didn’t want to spend another night away from my family. I needed to be in my own bed, to sleep next to my sister and across the room from Mama and Papa. It was the only way I knew we could stay together.
Mama kept one more secret from me. It was there waiting for me on the back steps of our house when I returned home from hospital. Two children were playing in our yard. She introduced me to Stalina and Volodya Dupak. Stalina was four years old with white-blond hair and so very plump that the witch in Hansel and Gretel would have loved to pop her in the oven. Volodya was my age. I knew him from school. Volodya greeted us formally. He knew I had been in the hospital and inquired after my health.
Once inside, Mama whispered to me, ‘The sheets from Babcia and Dzadzio’s bed weren’t even dry when they moved in. The father is NKVD.’ Her eyes added, ‘God doesn’t even know if he was the one responsible for deporting Dzadzio.’
I had tried to prepare myself for the emptiness of our home without my grandparents. Their presence, voices, and laughter, as well as the smell of Grandma’s cooking were things I had lived with every day of my life. Even if they were gone, I had thought that I would at least be able to feel something of them. But now, the door between the two halves of the house, which had never been closed during the day, was shut tight. I shivered at the thought that the NKVD was sleeping in my grandparents’ bed.
Despite everything, it was a relief to be home. When I met Mr Dupak, with his bland face and thinning blond hair, he had nothing but pleasant smiles for me. And all of us were equally pleasant to him. They were the ideal communist family. They had benefited from the Soviet expansion and were convinced that they were bringing a better life to Zolkiew. Mr Dupak would leave the house in the morning, only to return late at night. His wife kept to herself and our interaction with them was mostly through the kids. The only thing they knew of the war was that their father was powerful and that all the children in town were especially kind to them. Nevertheless we were cautious. Before, we had never given a thought to how loud our voices were. Now, we hardly spoke above a whisper.
In the middle of June 1940, a letter finally arrived from Aunt Rosa. We had been waiting for news for almost two months, but now Mama seemed afraid to open the envelope. The opening lines put the worst of our fears to rest. They had all survived the journey. They were in Kazakhstan, somewhere in the endless desert of Central Asia, much closer to China than to our home. Rosa wrote that there were hardly any signs of the war; the place was remote and timeless. There were still camel caravans that moved goods from one town market to another. We were all relieved. How protected she must feel by the thousands of kilometres that separated them from the war. She went on to explain that they had just been thrown off the train along with everyone else and been told to find jobs. But there were no jobs. Rosa described how they had been close to starving until Uncle Manek had managed to find a job with an oil-press factory in Aktyubinsk that desperately needed specialists. They moved to the strange city, ready to start a new life. She described how thankful she was that they were together. They had food and shelter and would survive as a family. If only the letter had stopped there.
Mama continued to read and I watched her face grow taut as she came to the following words. Rosa wrote that her son, Wilek, had also found work in a factory. She described how nervous he had been to start his job without suitable overalls. Rosa had promised to buy him a pair so that he would have the proper work clothes for the next day. But in the first hour of his first day on the job, Wilek’s belt had got caught in the gears of a huge machine. He had been dragged into the machine’s belly, swallowed as if by a beast. Rosa wrote that there hadn’t been enough left of her son for a proper burial. He had been all of 19 years old. Since Rosa’s family had come to live with us in 1939, I’d thought of Wilek as an older brother. He’d only ever been sweet and protective. Mama mourned for her older sister and her nephew. When she looked at Mania and me, I knew she couldn’t help thanking God that it hadn’t been one of her daughters.
As the summer moved into autumn, I couldn’t count all the changes in our lives under this grey regime. The church bells didn’t ring. The Eagle stopped showing Hollywood films. The Polish patriots we had studied before the occupation were now criminals. People were afraid to go to the synagogues, so Papa had to sneak across the street to Mr Melman’s house where they now held secret minyan. Papa was now an employee. The Russians had taken over the vegetable-oil business our family had owned for five generations. Nobody talked about anything in public. The nuns in the convent up the street all wore long skirts now instead of their brown habits. We had to wear uniforms to school. Any kosher meat still available was delivered in secret. All the newspapers except the communist ones were closed. Mama was buying up woollen socks and underwear like crazy. The bags under Papa’s eyes were the darkest shade of purple I had ever seen. Mama closed the curtains before we had shabbat dinner.
I pretended to be a good young communist girl. I was afraid all the time. But the biggest change of all was in Mama. She practically disappeared from our lives. Almost every day she took the bus into Lvov and went to the office of every commissar, party member, every politician she could find, searching for news of Dzadzio. She would come home sometimes late at night, sometimes not for days, but always with the weight of defeat and exhaustion on her shoulders. They took Papa’s money, made promises and then didn’t even let Mama back in their offices. I knew she loved her father. I only wished Dzadzio, wherever he was, could see just how much.
I also knew that Papa and Mama were doing their best to protect us not only from physical harm, but also from worry. But their words were small comfort in the face of the Nazis’ lack of opposition in Europe. Two years ago, it would never even have occurred to me to wonder about what war felt like. War was something in Tolstoy, not in my life. Nobody could have convinced me that despite the occasional pogrom, our little town with its five thousand Jews tucked away in Galicia wasn’t the best of all possible worlds. For 700 years we had been batted back and forth between a half a dozen countries and empires that were like cats playing with a ball of yarn. We changed nationalities like, in better times, Mama had changed dresses. Before I had always held the bookish belief that everything would work out in the future because it always had in the past, but now I had become somebody different, with different thoughts and different hopes. Even the small things in which I used to take so much pleasure, like reading or going to school, didn’t make the empty feeling in my stomach go away. Despite the spoonfuls of optimism my parents fed to my sister and me, my mind was spinning. How could I read a novel when Hans Frank, the Gauleiter (Governor General) of Poland, had declared, ‘I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.’ What had become of my grandfather? What was going to become of us? Surely our green knapsacks wouldn’t be enough to save us? We were stuck between two massively powerful nations, both of which hated us. The Russians hated us because we didn’t adhere to their communist principles, and the Nazis hated us because of our religion.
Before the war, when the grown-ups spoke in hushed whispers, it was usually about a present for one of us, or some gossip. I never really cared much about either. Now I needed to hear every word, even if it brought demons into my sleep. The anxiety of not knowing was worse. I collected news, facts, anything that I knew I could rely on to be true.
In the past year, France had been invaded, along with Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. Italy and Japan joined Germany in forming the Axis Powers. Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had become German allies. And close to a million Jews had been sealed off in ghettos in Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin. The Allies had yet to make a single attack on the Nazis, who preened with their invincibility. Every apartment, every room in town, was filling up by the day with refugees from the Nazis. The horror stories were passed like the plague. Even my parents’ whispers couldn’t keep them from me.
The only thing that kept me sane was going to school. The churches had large libraries, as did some of the schools. There were also private libraries. Almost every day I made the rounds. The former nuns and Mr Appel, the old Jewish man who ran the private libraries, expected me and saved books they thought I might like. This was the year of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens; and of course the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Gogol. I picked books by their length and their weight. The longer and heavier the better. More and more, I tried to shut out the world with literature.
In the spring of 1941, almost a year to the day she was deported, I received a letter from my friend Sonia Maresky, in which she described the brutal and fierce cold, and the backbreaking work her family had to do in the coal mines. She wrote that the workers usually died within a year. The Jewish Community had got together to obtain permission to ship them matzos for Pesach. She ended the letter, ‘When this war is over only the korhany, the mass graves, will be a witness that there once were a people here.’
In early May, Mama somehow finally found Commissar Wanda Vashilevski, who was very high up in the NKVD. That Mama even dared to contact the NKVD spoke of her desperation about her father. She told us that Commissar Vashilevski seemed like a decent woman. The commissar said to Mama: ‘I’m sorry for you. I’m not going to lie. You should know that only the official who ordered his arrest can release your father. But I will try. Only if he gets back will you know if I have succeeded.’ We had had a little hope, but Papa had warned that we couldn’t be certain if Vashilevski was honest or a thief.
In the middle of June, Pan Ratusinski knocked on our door. He was a good-natured Polish peasant who had once worked for Papa. He had just been released from the Brigitka prison in Lvov, where he had been brought after trying to escape the Soviets and go to Romania. He told us that the prisoners had been kept in cells in alphabetical order. Just a few cells down from him was my grandfather. Not only was Dzadzio alive, but he was only 35 kilometres away. We prayed and thanked God for his mercy. It was a miracle. Mama brought Pan inside and made him tell her every detail. Pan Ratusinski told us that Dzadzio had been brought to the prison from a concentration camp in the east. We learned he was thin but in decent health, and with any hope, he might soon be released. Mama embraced Pan like a long-lost brother and put money in every one of his pockets before he left. Comrade Vashilevski, with the big or greedy heart, had come through.
The next morning, Mama took the first bus to Lvov and went to thank her and to try to speed up his release from there. Comrade Vashilevski did some checking and told Mama that there had been a mix-up with some of the paperwork, but that everything was fine. It would only be a matter of a few more days. Even though our patience was a frayed thread, we knew we could stand a few more days. Mama spent the rest of the day getting ready for Dzadzio’s homecoming, thankful to have something happy to prepare for, for a change. She cleaned the little apartment in our basement for him, washed and ironed his clothes, and bartered for a chicken for soup. I couldn’t think of anything else besides Dzadzio’s homecoming as I helped Mama with the chores. Mama knew that even after months in exile and prison, her father would be in a fury that the man who might have sent him away and deported his wife and daughter was living in his house. Mama was afraid of what he might do. Twenty years ago, her father had put aside the clothing of a Hassid and picked up a gun to fight the Russians. Only the fear of what the consequences would mean for us might temper his actions.
We awoke the next day to a big commotion next door. Footsteps raced across the floor. Doors were flying open and shut. From our window we could see the Dupaks frantically loading boxes and suitcases into a Soviet army truck and then their children into a car. Stalina and Volodya looked sad and frightened, framed in the open car window.
We looked on with a sense of relief as they emptied the house of all their belongings. Dzadzio would at least be spared one heartache and be able to move back into his house. Comrade Dupak kissed his wife and children and watched as the truck and the car drove off. He came to our door and told us he had sent his family east. Hitler had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and had invaded Russian-occupied Poland. Shortly after that, Dupak left the house.
In the span of a few seconds I had gone from fearing and despising the Russians for tearing our family apart to wanting them to stay. This could only spell disaster for us. This time it wouldn’t just be the Wehrmacht marching into town for a few days. We knew in terrifying detail what to expect. Rosa and the other refugees who had fled east had witnessed it all. It would be the SS, deportations and ghettos. The border to Nazi-occupied Poland was less than 60 kilometres away. And the general state of alarm up and down the street as the Russians packed off their families confirmed that no shots would be fired in our defence. We were being abandoned. Papa considered following the retreat; he went to see if it would be possible to go with the Russians. He came back soon thereafter saying it would be impossible. He had seen Malka and Rosa, two Jewish girls married to Russian soldiers, being helped on to trucks by their husbands, only to have the Russians wives throw them off.
Papa was still talking when Uchka came running in the door in a panic. My uncle Hersch had been ordered to report to the plaza. The Russian army was going door to door, impressing every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 and 45. They would be going straight to the front. She was surprised that my father hadn’t been taken as well. We didn’t know why he hadn’t. We did think it might have been Comrade Dupak’s doing. Mama ordered us to stay inside the house. We couldn’t go to the plaza to say goodbye. Uncle Hersch was hardly bigger than a rifle himself and had the same dark eyes and sweet disposition as his son, Zygush. It was hard for me to imagine a man like him fighting at all. Uchka told us later that they had marched through the gate near Paradise Hill, which had been named by King Sobieski because he thought it was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. I couldn’t imagine what Uncle Hersch could have been feeling as he was forced to stare up at the place where we had picnicked almost every Saturday and where his son had run wild through the thickly shaded forest, all the while marching with the army that had imprisoned his father-in-law, but was fighting the Nazi enemy. It was too much to digest. Poor Uchka told us how sad and excited the children had been. At only two and four years old, Zygush and Zosia hadn’t quite known what they were waving at or waving for, as their father, one of hundreds of stunned faces, walked towards oblivion. Uchka had tried to hide how frightened she had been, despite knowing that she was probably saying goodbye to her husband for the last time. It would have been so wonderful to be able to be proud of Hersch Leib, marching off to protect us and his country. But all we could think of was the Nazis, and what that meant for us.
The Russians had taken every car, every cart and every horse. Zolkiew was in chaos. Every day, more and more Russians left. They packed up everything they could take with them: sewing machines, scrap metal, lumber, bathtubs, grain, desks. It seemed the entire contents of our town were being passed in front of our window. Comrade Dupak showed up again with a muzzled German shepherd. He had come for his things. The Nazis were close to Lvov and he would be leaving. He told us he had enjoyed living next to us and hoped we would meet again after the war. He said dasv’danya earnestly and shook my father’s hand.
Not long after he left, the streets were filled with panic and weeping. At first we thought the Nazis had arrived. But then we learned that before leaving, the NKVD had emptied the local jail. The political prisoners were shot and then attack dogs were let loose on them. The dogs were tearing the faces off the prisoners. I couldn’t believe that Comrade Dupak had done such a thing. He was such a nondescript man with his thinning hair and pleasant smile. As soon as Mama heard the horrible news, she began to fear the worst for her father. She had been trying to find Wanda Vashilevski for days, only to learn that she had fled with the others.
There was no way to know now if Dzadzio had been released or if he was alive. We couldn’t bear to think what could be happening to him. And there was no longer any way to get in touch with Josek and Giza, who had remained in Lvov the entire year. There was nothing for Mama to do but wait. She had confidence that her brother would try his best to find out what had happened to their father.
Two weeks later Josek came home with Giza, a new wife, Rela, and several of her relatives, including her brother Dudio. The grief in their faces told us what had happened to Grandpa, and also what our own fate would be.
Josek told us that Lvov had been in chaos as well. The army and the commissars had been throwing civilians off the trains and shooting them if they didn’t move fast enough. Every car, truck and wagon had been appropriated for the Russian flight east. A day later the Nazis had arrived. One of the first things the SS did was to go through the streets recruiting Jews for work in the prisons. Josek had gone, hoping to find Dzadzio.
He told us that the smell of death on entering the prison had been overwhelming. There had been bodies in the corridors, in the cells, in the courtyard. Just as in Zolkiew, the last act of the NKVD before leaving had been to murder and disfigure all the political prisoners so that the approaching Nazis wouldn’t be able to identify them. They were protecting their own necks, but they let the real criminals, the murderers, the rapists, the thieves, all go.
We knew what was coming next. After the NKVD had shot the prisoners, they let the dogs loose. The beards of the Orthodox had been shaved when they were first imprisoned, so we couldn’t even bury another Jew in my dzadzio’s place. Josek and the others carried the bodies outside to the courtyard where families wandered among the corpses trying to find their loved ones. There were over 3,000 corpses. Many were children. Some were pregnant women with the bellies and breasts cut open. There were nuns and priests. Josek and the other Jews dug mass graves in the Ukrainian cemetery. They threw the bodies in and covered them with lime before they filled in the graves. But the burials were going too slowly for the Nazis. They ordered Josek and the others to simply cover the bodies with lime as they lay in the cellar and to brick up the doors and windows. Perhaps Dzadzio’s remains were in a mass grave. Perhaps they were in the cellar of Brigitka prison. We would never know.
Only a few days later, the Ukrainian Nationalists with the encouragement of the Nazis murdered 4,000 Jews in Lvov. The Ukrainian Nationalists thought that all of Galicia belonged to them. They felt that the Poles and the Jews were invaders of their homeland. Stalin had starved millions of Ukrainians to death and so the Nationalists celebrated the Russian retreat and welcomed the Nazis as their saviours and allies. Josek, Rela and the others were lucky to get out with their lives and to reach Zolkiew safely.
Our grief was beyond any words. It brought with it the gathering sense that our lives were out of our hands. It felt like a storm pulling together, the sky growing increasingly dark. It didn’t seem like anything in this world would make sense any more. Later we found out that all the old-time officers like Dzadzio who had been taken east and put in a concentration camp had been released and reunited with their families. The Soviets had decided they were too old and sick to give them any trouble. If Mama hadn’t moved heaven and earth and spent so much money trying to save her father, he might now be safely in Kazakhstan with his wife and family.