Vera (4 page)

Finally my father, perfectly aware of my unspoken question, says simply, ‘The Russians are gone.'

And I say, ‘The Russians are gone, Papa?'

‘Yes. Gone.'

‘Gone to where, Papa?'

‘Who can say? They are gone.'

‘Papa, why?'

‘A thousand questions! No more. Who can say where they are gone. Back to Russia.'

The implications of the Russian ‘disappearance' are not evident to me. Or better to say, the absolute disaster of the Russian withdrawal is not something I am equipped to grasp. I like the Russians; I am proud of the impression my piano – playing made on them. But how crucial a role they played in my life – no, I don't understand. But I don't need to. Whatever the consequences, they will apparently be bad. Look at the barely controlled anxiety in my mother's face. Look at my father, finding the courage to appear calm when he is not.

In my private prayers, I murmur such things as, ‘May the future be good', hoping, as all who whisper private prayers hope, that God or other powerful cosmic interventionists will be listening. ‘May the future be good.' May there continue to be
grysik
for breakfast, pumpernickel sandwiches with schmaltz and sausage for lunch, and for dinner maybe some
klopsy
with mushroom sauce. Some
pierogi
would be good, and, before everything, soup –
kapuśnyak
. The spinach you can forget. Especially, let there be, now and forever on Friday nights at my grandparents'
matzos
,
gefilte
fish, baby potatoes with butter and dill and lots of pepper, and
knackwurst
at supper. And I would be very, very grateful for some cheesecake. Or if not cheesecake, perhaps strawberries. May the future be full of music, of the Bechstein, of being warm in a woollen coat when the snow falls, of sleeping late when there is no school. And when there is school, let the future be days of success in my lessons to make my parents glad, days of my father confirming his love for me in endearments and caresses, of my mother exceeding my father in her endearments.

In other words, let the future be everything it will not be.

Lvov is, in 1941, a beautiful city, and I hear it remains so today. From the kitchen balcony, I have a view across rooftops to the Old City that forms Lvov's heart, dense with churches for the Poles and Ukrainians, and even for the Armenians who centuries ago came here in their thousands, like the Jews, to escape madmen and murderers. I am aware that the churches are said to be beautiful, and I'm sure they are, but I have no desire to be shown them. The Church of the Transfiguration is said to shine with Christian gold inside, and the Ensemble of Armenian Church must have attracted my father's gaze at times, with his eye for beauty. I can see all the way to the park of the High Castle, with its remnants of something or other pleasing to the Christians, standing on top of a cone like that of a volcano. I see treetops, a great deal of greenery, and I can make out the broad avenues and ‘
prospekts
' (as the Ukrainians call them) of Zamkova and Svobody and Torhova.

More distantly, the avenues become highways heading west to Yarvorov, Nemirov, Mastiska; north to Rava-Ruska and Czerwonogród; north-east to Krasnoye and Peremyshlyany; south to Nikolayeva. Some parts of the city I have never seen, and although I know the names of the towns around us – a few of them – I have not been taken to see them. But even my seven-year-old eyes tell me that this is a place of beauty, this Lvov.

My eyes, so many decades older, now picture in my mind Vera on the kitchen balcony, and my heart, so many decades older, fills with pity for her. I want to enter into the picture I am conjuring and take the child Vera in my arms to a place of safety. I want to say, ‘Oh, child, you cannot imagine what is coming and how fast it will come; leave now with me.'

Leave with me for where? For Byron Bay. I would like that. To live in my house so close to the blue ocean with the child I was at seven years. To rescue her.

The Germans arrive the day after the departure of the Russians. I am again on the kitchen balcony looking down at the street. A hard, insistent roar reveals its source when three motorcycles come into view, the riders keeping abreast of each other. Five motorcycles follow in a separate group stretched across the road and all of them maintaining an impressive line. Then comes a further mass of motorcycles, the riders perfectly erect and the roar of their engines by now as threatening as it is intended to be. Objects on the kitchen shelves rattle faintly.

A huge car follows the motorcycles, an open-topped car in which a number of officers in black uniforms are seated, each officer as erect, as proud of what he stands for and as menacing as the motorcycle riders.

I watch in dread, one hand held to my cheek. I do not know why these people have come to Lvov and could not have explained, ‘Oh, they are the advance force of the German invasion, some of them regular Wehrmacht, some of them SS' – but my horror is equal to anything I might have felt if I had known.

The Germans have come like the vanguard of some satanic host, indomitable and pitiless.

This is the arrival of the lists.

  
4
  

TALES FROM HELL

T
he project is this: capture on DVD the testimonies of all those who survived the lists such as the one on which my name appeared. It is the initiative of Steven Spielberg. If you have a story, you tell your story and all the stories join together in a long, long narrative of the worst things human beings do to each other. Men and women find a seat in their home, some place where they feel comfortable, face the camera and talk about the day when the gates of hell opened to receive them, and when the gates of hell opened again to release them. Tales from hell.

I had heard of the project, as had many thousands like me, and I had to ask myself whether I wished to speak to some stranger – a sympathetic stranger, surely, but a stranger nonetheless – of a time that I would never physically revisit if such a thing were possible, of a time when I never laughed and rarely smiled. I am a woman who has laughed all through her life, except for that time – laughed with genuine mirth, laughed with scorn when something ridiculous warranted scorn, laughed with joy, laughed with friends, with lovers. This time of fearful struggle – would I truly wish to recall it in all its details? My father dying by his own hand? Stepping over corpses in the street without the slightest dread or even compassion? Because we did that in the ghetto once we'd become accustomed to corpses – stepped over them and continued on our way.

The answer was yes, I did want to recall that time, and I did want what I could recall recorded. I wanted it, and thousands of others wanted the same thing.

The stories we would tell would be termed ‘testimonies'. And what is a ‘testimony'? A declaration of truth or fact. The evidence of a witness. When you have seen terrible injustice, there is a fierce desire to share what you have witnessed with people who have not seen it. It is as if you wish to say, ‘You may not believe that such vile things were perpetrated but I must tell you that they were, and you must believe me.'

Until you are believed, your experience of horror claws at your heart unbearably. Belief is the gift of the listener to the witness. This is the powerful need working in you: not the desire to sicken people with stories of murder and torment, but the need to be believed. For those who make a name for themselves by denying the Holocaust, the special thrill is not the substitution of their self-interested version of the truth for the objective truth, but instead the theft from those who have suffered of the solace of being believed. We need to be believed, too, when we have experienced great happiness, but since no injustice is involved, the urge is not so powerful, and we can, if we wish, keep our happiness private.

The project is vast. The USC Shoah Foundation, which oversees the recording of the testimonies, hopes to hear from everyone who wishes to tell his or her story. Poles like me, from Lvov; Poles from Warsaw, Katowice, Kraköw, Poznań, Wrocław and Łödź; those whom the huge, efficient apparatus of the Third Reich gathered from their homes in Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Belgium, Latvia, Romania, the Ukraine, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Russia, Belarus, Spain, Portugal and even Germany itself; every Jew still living who endured captivity in any of the fifteen thousand camps, in any of many thousand ghettos.

Each person with a testimony is to be interviewed by someone trained to facilitate the process of getting the testimony onto a DVD. It is thought that journalists will be well suited to the task. Also psychologists.

I am a journalist and I judge myself a suitable candidate. I will be both a subject for an interview, and later an interviewer. Indeed, those who are to do the interviewing are required to first submit themselves to the ordeal of being interviewed.

And so on a certain day in a certain place (actually, my apartment in St Kilda) I dress myself in something stylish, clasp around my neck a black velvet band fitted with a blue moonstone and allow Max Wald (a man I know in a casual way; he deals in textiles, just as my father did) to ask me questions about my season in hell.

Max asks me my name, speaking in an entirely matter-of-fact manner.

I tell him my name, and I spell it.

Max asks me my family name as a girl.

I tell him, and I spell it.

He asks me about Lvov.

I tell him about Lvov.

‘And you were watching from your kitchen balcony when the Germans came?'

‘Yes, when the Germans came I was watching. I saw three motorcycles, then five more, than a great many, then a big black car. SS officers travelled in the open-topped car.'

I did not say, ‘They had come to Lvov to kill us. They sat proud and erect. They looked eager to get on with their work.' But that was what I thought.

The interview lasts for hours and hours. I sit beneath my Wendy Stavrianos painting ‘Fragment of a Cyclone'. It's the artist's response to a catastrophe of a different sort than the one Max is questioning me about. Winds of great fury tore apart the city of Darwin, killing some inhabitants. It was not my intention to fashion a correspondence between the violence in Darwin and the violence in Lvov: just coincidence. It was just coincidence, too, that the Nazi obsession with murder had its origins in a different Darwin – Charles Darwin – or more accurately in the eugenics fad, derived from a prejudicial reading of his works. If I wanted to draw out more from these coincidences, I could point out that the most violent tropical cyclone in history, as it was in 1974, took the lives of only a tiny percentage of those killed by the black cloud that hovered near Lvov in 1941 – a number equal to one tenth of one per cent of the Jewish population killed in camps and ghettos during World War II. Nature can't compete with National Socialism.

I don't have the time during the interview to fashion idle comparisons between cyclones and Nazism. I am too conscious of feeling sick at heart. The moral obligation of adding my voice to the thousands of others who will contribute to this Shoah project is just that – an obligation. I don't mean to suggest that I am talking to Max with any sort of reluctance, wishing that I was doing something else – reading a book, pouring wine, feeding the birds in my garden. Not at all. But who would devote four or five hours to tales of wretchedness and despair unless she or he felt morally compelled to do so?

In Orwell's story,
1984
, the past becomes whatever those who rule in the present wish it to be. Black becomes white; white changes back to black; black becomes white again. Fashioning the past to suit the present goes on in our twenty-first century world all the time, and it has gone on in all the centuries before this one. Of all the wickedness of which we are capable, I doubt if any equals the wickedness of denying the deaths that people truly endured.

That is why I am answering Max's questions, and that is why thousands with stories very like my story will be answering the questions of their own particular Max.

A time might come when some vile agency might have control of the wide world itself, and it might suit that agency to say that there had never been such a people as the Jews; never been such a thing as Auschwitz; never been long lines of men and women and children shuffling forward towards wooden structures fitted with showerheads from which a suffocating gas will be released. And it might suit that agency to go further and claim that mud is caviar.

But not if I can help it.

Robert has called me to say that he's seeking out a publisher for this story of mine that is taking a century to write. Good. Now let him make some haste. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, lived for five hundred years, but I won't.

The killing begins the day after the motorcycles and the black car. I don't see the killings, but they are spoken of in the street. The lists are mentioned. The SS knew well who to take first: communists, intellectuals, anti-Nazis. Jews, of course, but also Christian Poles: anyone who gives the least evidence of capacity for independent thought. Some of these people were shot in their homes, some taken in trucks and shot elsewhere.

By this time – September 1941 – the German experience of summary execution is extensive. They are practised: one might say, experts.

Those who know that the Germans will likely kill them exhibit various degrees of dread: some maintain a type of sangfroid, not all that convincing; some go mad.

It doesn't take me long to realise that my life is now ruled by a tyranny that might end with my death. I don't doubt the love of my parents, but they do not impress me as the sort of people who can suddenly place me somewhere beyond harm. They seem as likely as me to succumb to the tyranny.

My hearing becomes extremely acute. I pick up the whispers and muted conversations within our house, and everything said in the streets that might warn me of danger sounds sharp and distinct. I become a finely tuned instrument for the reception of harbingers of murder.

Not that I have any plans for escape. There is no escape.

Within our household there is an unexpressed admission of powerlessness. No bold schemes of emancipation are being plotted. We are the prey. Those who stalk us will decide the week and day and hour of our death.

Nevertheless, every so often, there arrives a moment of misconceived optimism. My mother sings a line or two of a song she used to sing in full, or my father attempts a smile. But these moments are, I think (or I think now, at least – perhaps not then), just a reflex, briefly enacted. No-one can live with the threat of being dead in a week or less without some part of the brain suggesting, ‘No, no, all will be well, cheer up!' It lasts only a second or two. A person led to a wooden block where a man with an axe is waiting probably experiences a mad hope of reprieve even as the axe is raised.

We soon see the need to keep to our apartment. Lvov is a carnival of anti-Semitism. Whatever restraint the Russians were able to exercise on those who relished attacking Jews in the street has gone completely. It is as if an open season has been declared on Jews, and those of us who had escaped in the past with a torrent of abuse are now being chased in broad daylight and set upon with implements designed to spill our blood on the cobblestones. The Ukrainians of Lvov have a particular hatred of us, and a particular relish for killing.

From the windows of our apartment I follow the progress of the occupation. The Russians were sometimes drunk on duty, weaving along the sidewalks. The Germans are far brisker, and never drunk. When they arrive on the scene, they come purposefully, as if their strategies of domination are at all times clear to them. Any orders or directions to the public are shouted. They have cultivated a way of conveying menace even when they are standing still.

For a third of my life now, I have watched this thing known as ‘the war' play itself out in Lvov: watched from windows, watched from the kitchen balcony. The politics of the war is far beyond my grasp, of course, but I understand quite enough to know that the coming of the Germans is the worst of all the eventualities the Jews of Lvov have feared over the past two years.

And yet the faces of the Germans are not so different from those of the Russians: they do not have fangs; they do not drool. I have seen the German soldiers yawn, scratch their behinds and gaze about in boredom, just like other people. I have seen them smile, seen them laugh. It is what they smile at, what they laugh at, that makes them different, perhaps.

I notice, too, that the German uniforms are more various than those of the Russians. I have no way of knowing that the soldiers are regular Wehrmacht and also SS – that is something I learn later. The most common uniform is a greyish-green jacket with grey jodhpurs, insignia on the right sleeve and collar, a brown leather belt fitted with pockets worn high on the waist, dark-brown boots just below knee-height, and a rounded helmet that splays at the brim. The officers wear a holster at their waists and a peaked cap higher back on their heads than the caps of the Russian officers. The most frightening of the officers wear long black leather coats, even in September and October, when many of the days are still warm. The officers in the black coats don't shout. Someone else shouts for them. But it is evident that they are in charge.