Clara's War (25 page)

The other tray held food. Now there was a plateful on my lap but I could hardly eat it, even though I knew I needed to. Every day I thought of my sister. Every time I looked at Zygush and Zosia, I thought of Uchka. But on this holiday, their spirits were more present and palpable than I could bear. It was like one of those dreams that felt so real. It was alluring and terri
fying all at once. Yet I craved the presence of their ghosts, despite the cost in grief.

We ate our meal and didn't even explain to the children the meaning of the bitter herbs and the Haroseth and the other things on the Seder plate.

The next morning, we woke up to the roar of airplanes and the ground shaking from explosions. The Russians were bombing Lvov. I had no idea that the explosions could be powerful enough to shake the ground where we lay. Almost immediately the electricity went out. They must have hit the electric works. We should have been elated, but like everything else, this victory had a double edge. They were bombing Lvov, but we would be in the dark and without food.

Beck returned home from an Easter visit to the sister-in-law shortly after the bombing ended and came into the bunker to show us a rifle he had got for protection. This was the second rifle he had acquired. I knew it wouldn't guarantee our safety, but I hoped it would give Beck the confidence to stay with us. I was wrong. He looked over at Klara and said, ‘I've been thinking it over. I can't take it. Those Ukrainians are bastards. I've got to join the partisans before they kill every Polack left in Zolkiew. I'd be a coward if I didn't. I can't even look myself in the mirror. But don't worry, Julia's sister Maria will take care of you.' I knew Maria couldn't cope with a tenth of what the Becks did for us. I was sure she would disappear at the first sign of trouble. I no longer felt like a real person. I was a reflection of Beck. If he was depressed, I was depressed. If he was confident, I was confident. If he wanted to kill the Ukrainians, so did I. If Beck had hope, I had hope. If he had none, I was also hopeless. I felt if I looked in the mirror I would see his reflection looking back at me.

The next time the trainmen left the house, Papa, Mr Melman and Mr Patrontasch crawled into the far bunker where the
Steckels were living. They had finally decided to ask Mr Steckel for money. Beck had run out of zloty. There was nothing left to sell in the black market and nobody left to buy it. A loaf of bread was so expensive not even Steckel could afford it. I couldn't understand why, when we were starving, the men didn't just take the money from Mr Steckel. I couldn't imagine anyone not sharing their money. I knew Mr Steckel was paying the Becks ‘rent', as we had when we had the money. Even Beck, who deserved it for risking his life for the Steckels, didn't ask him for a zloty more. They were all too
bababatish,
too ‘fine' for their own good.

If it was up to me, I would take their money in about two minutes. At the point of Beck's gun if I had to. Each of the three families had small children who were starving. But still the men hadn't asked before now.

Papa came back a few minutes later. At first Mr Steckel had outright refused, but finally he had given them a shiny gold English pound sterling. It might have been a rock or a lump of coal. To try and use this gold coin to buy anything would send every policeman, Blue Coat and Gestapo agent left in Zolkiew to this house. Any meal bought with the coin would have been the last supper. But the men looked at it like an answered prayer. When Beck came down and they showed it to him, he refused to buy anything with it. Nobody would touch it. Before the war and up to a few months ago, a pound sterling would have fetched much more in zloty than its value. But now, fear had overcome even greed. Papa told Beck not to worry about trying to sell it. That as long as he stayed with us, we could endure the hunger. Beck didn't say a word. We didn't know what to think of it. How could a useless one-pound sterling piece keep the Becks with us? I feared the Becks leaving even more than I feared the Nazis. As long as they were here, we still
had a chance. He finally took the pound sterling from Papa's hand and said he would try to find someone he could trust to exchange it for zloty.

On the eve of 18 April, the day Mania had been murdered, I went to sleep knowing what we would be facing the next day. It was hot at night now and the fleas were relentless, but I had still managed to find some sleep every night. But that night there was very little sleep. I knew Mama and Papa were lying in silence, awake, next to me. The next morning, we said
yahrzeit,
the mourner's prayer, and as we lit one of the few candles we had for her memory, I wondered if perhaps my beloved sister wasn't the lucky one. Her suffering had been shorter than ours. But I also knew that Mania would have fought for every second of her life. I owed it to her to survive. To fight for every second as she would. That to give in now would desecrate her memory. I would live for both of us.

There was another knock on the door. I heard four soldiers informing Beck he had new tenants. They walked through the house, from one room to another, pausing before moving on. They stopped in the room right above the hatch. One was standing on the hatch itself and said, ‘This room will do.' If the soldiers took this room, we might as well use the can of petrol. But Julia in her sweet and honest voice asked, ‘Please, sirs, if my husband and I could keep this room, we would be very grateful.' There was a moment of silence and then a kind voice, that I would come to know as Norbert, said, ‘We don't want to put you out. Stick us anywhere. We'll be fine. And don't worry. We'll stay out of your hair. We'll be gone most of the day.' That's what they all said before they got used to the comforts and Beck's radio and card games that went on despite the fact that the card table was resting on quicksand and bullets were whistling past their ears.

23 April to May 1944

B
eck moved the soldiers into the room next to theirs, and Ala moved in with her parents. The soldiers would be sleeping right above the bunker where Lola, Gedalo, Kuba, Artek and the Steckels slept. Unlike the trainmen, whose names I hadn't discovered in the two months they'd been with us, within minutes I learned that the soldiers were Norbert, Dieter, Richard and Hans. With six Germans living above us, water, food, the pails would all be impossible. If the soldiers were here, the trainmen would be gone, and vice versa. It was
like one of those theatrical farces where characters run in and out of doors, barely missing each other in a ridiculous chase, except the comedy going on above our head had lethal consequences.

As soon as Norbert's duffel landed on the floor, he fiddled with the radio until he'd found a station that played popular music and light opera. He started singing right away and suddenly reverberating through the floorboards was a clear and vibrant tenor. Most people when they sang to themselves, especially when others were around, were at least a little inhibited, even if they adored their own voices. But Norbert was singing to the audience in the balcony. He knew, it seemed, every song on the radio. My life couldn't have felt any stranger to me at that moment. I didn't know who Norbert was, what he looked like, where he came from, or whether he would turn out to be one of those Germans who'd regale the Becks with his proficiency in killing Jews. All I knew of him was that he had a voice that people would have paid money to hear and I had been moved by music in a way that had not happened since Mania sang at her concert three springs ago. I didn't want to love his voice. I didn't want to be moved by a man who had perhaps murdered Jews, but I was helpless. ‘You're Mine Tonight', ‘My Song Goes Round The World', You Are My Heart's Delight', ‘Today I Feel So Happy' were popular German cabaret songs innocuous enough to survive the censors. I had heard them on the radio before the war and while we were in the bunker. Listening to the radio through the floorboards was one of our only respites and when there was music on, it was a diversion, fleeting as it might have been. But when Norbert sang, I had a box seat at a concert. I listened to Schubert's ‘The Miller's Daughter' in both fear and rapture.

We all did. The song was about death and lost love and I fought the emotion it was bringing up in me. How dare a German have such a beautiful voice when his finger was on the trigger of a gun and there was a Jew in his sights.

Mama was so upset by the arrival of so many soldiers upstairs, she fainted. Yet neither I nor Papa dared move to help her because we were afraid of being heard, despite the noise upstairs. Life in the bunker had trained me to resist almost every natural impulse I had, so I watched the rise and fall of her chest as if she were in a pleasant sleep, and hoped she would come out of her faint without making any noise at all.

The second after all of them had gone out, Beck came down and said that God was sending an army to watch over us and keep suspicion far from our door. I didn't know how much longer I could believe in Beck's luck. I tried to see in the dim light if he believed his own words or was just encouraging us. But I couldn't see his eyes, and then there was a knock on the door, and Beck ran back up. The groaning trapdoor closing was covered by the sound of Beck's feet rushing to get the door. The hotel was full. I didn't see how they could fit anyone else. But it wasn't another guest. It was a Nazi policeman.

He was telling Beck to come with him to the chief of police. Immediately. Beck hadn't been ordered to the police station for months and months and this policeman was a stranger. Beck went away whistling, but we didn't believe it. One onerous reason after another swept through the bunker. He had been reported for hiding Jews; for dealing with the partisans; for
selling English pounds on the black market; for stealing vodka, and any of the other treasonable sins. Otherwise we would have heard laughter, gossip, an easy-going greeting and the reason Beck had been called. I prayed for Beck the way I prayed for Uchka, for Mania, for Zygush and Zosia. I prayed for him in the way I prayed for my dearest loved ones.

Waiting for Beck and our fate in darkness would have been too frightening to bear. Since the initial bombing of Lvov last week, we never knew if we'd have electricity or not. I didn't know if Beck would come back unharmed, or the police would break down the door and kill us. Ever since Beck had been taken away, we had all been so on edge that I feared we were going insane. Mr Patrontasch was calculating seconds, minutes, hours and days in his book again. Gedalo was writing madly, but wouldn't show it to anyone. Lola had her hand to her mouth, suppressing her laughter. The more everyone looked at her, begging with their eyes for her to stop, the harder it was. She turned her face to the wall until she calmed down. It had to be hysteria because there was nothing funny going on this morning. The Steckels fingered the cyanide capsules around their necks as they always did when we were threatened. Zosia grabbed a pillow and put it over her own face and started to cry silently. And there was Mama in the dirt. At least we had light this morning.

When we were alone in the house again, I asked Lola to tell us why she had been laughing so hard.

‘I was looking around the bunker and saw that everybody's hair had turned white or grey and so I didn't feel so bad about my hair.'

She was right. I hadn't noticed before. Mama, Papa, the Melmans, Artek, Gedalo, the Patrontasches all had grey hair now. Only the children and I had any colour at all. Some of us looked at Lola like she had snapped. But I understood. No one
could control the crazy things that went in and out of our minds down here. Yet unless we were able to exert self-discipline and control our fears and our suspicions, the society we had built in the bunker would disintegrate. Lola's laughter was the kettle singing. It was a warning that her emotions were boiling over inside her. I knew how she felt. At times I thought I couldn't stand it one minute longer. If there were guests upstairs, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs and bang my fists against the ceiling, just wanting it to be over. Beck had told us stories of Jews running to the wire in the camps and the ghettos. That might have been my fate if I was not in the bunker.

Beck must have run into the soldiers because he came back into the house with them. He was whistling ‘All's Well…' At least we knew Beck was all right and we were not dead yet. I knew we'd have to wait until the soldiers and the trainmen next went out before we found out the reason Beck was called by the police chief.

When he was finally able to come down, he told us that they wanted him to stand guard at the train station in addition to his regular job. He was still a trusted
Volksdeutscher
, and a vital part of the local German war machine. He was given a new gun, and he said he would give one of his guns to us as soon as he had the chance. I didn't know if there was a man in our bunker who had actually fired a weapon. But Beck was relieved and so were we. He also told us that the soldiers promised him they wouldn't be a bother to the Becks because they would be spending most of their time at their jobs, which were preparing the German motor pool for retreat. As soon as I had heard what they'd be doing, I knew they'd be here until the bitter end. The arrival of these soldiers caused so many changes for us that I felt despite all the suffering of the past 17 months, in so many new ways our suffering had just begun.

A conspiracy of events had to occur to get us fed. There had to be electricity. The trainmen and the soldiers had to be out. And the Becks had to be able to find food for the 18 of us. So Beck instituted a ration system for all of us down here, even the Steckels. He said we'd each get one kilogram of potatoes and 300 grams of bread per day. And even though 300 grams of bread would barely keep us above starvation, bread was so scarce I doubted Beck would be able to find even that much.

There was always a trainman or soldier at home, so the pails became almost impossible to empty. The men were forced to dig a trench in the back of the bunker and cover it with a piece of wood. This was our new toilet. I knew the smell would give us away. It had to. Days, weeks, a month, who knew? The trench added one more level of inevitability to our capture, but we had no alternative. Since the middle of April, the bunker had become increasingly hot, dank and oppressively humid. We were now in our summer uniforms. Slips with the backs cut out for the women and cut off long johns or shorts for the men. It had become so hot that we spent all our time, hours and hours every day, except when we were eating and sleeping, fanning ourselves with pieces of cardboard until our hands and arms were cramped with pain. We'd start out fanning with the speed of hummingbird wings, but soon these pieces of cardboard, which couldn't have weighed more than a few grams, felt like sheets of iron. When the trainmen had been out, the Becks could open the trapdoor to give us a small break from the heat. But now there wouldn't even be those few brief moments of relief from the heat, which I had looked forward to, just as I looked forward to food and water. The heat was so oppressive it became hard to breathe.

The only momentary relief any of us had was the few hours in which we slept. But the soldiers robbed us of that also. We
were so frightened that they might hear a snore, a cough, a sneeze while we slept that we were forced to change our sleeping arrangements. The Steckels, Gedalo, Kuba, Artek and Lola slept in the part of the bunker right underneath the room in which the soldiers slept. We hadn't removed the posts that supported the floor and it wasn't dug out as much as the main room. There was only enough room to lie down. Lola had started snoring and Kuba's asthma had got much worse as soon as the weather warmed up. He said it was the mildew. Whatever the cause, Kuba was coughing. Loudly. We were terrified that his cough would waken the soldiers. We decided that everyone who slept in that part of the bunker would sleep during the day and stay up at night. Awake, at least we had some control over our actions. At night, a snore, a sneeze, a cough could mean the end of us.

Mr Patrontasch conferred with Papa and they leaned over to me. Papa asked me to switch places with Kuba. I didn't snore, so it would be safer for us all if I slept where the soldiers were overhead. One of the few pleasures I had was to sleep with my arms around the little ones. But there was no question I would switch with Kuba. No one ever questioned anything that would help our survival. They needed someone slim and someone who didn't snore. They asked. I said yes. It was that simple. But since I didn't snore, I was at least permitted to sleep at night.

Within days of the soldiers' arrival, we started to deteriorate. I couldn't imagine that the few minutes the trapdoor had been opened a day had made such a difference. The prickly heat returned like a plague. Everyone was stricken by it. Mama had a bad case and so did I. But for some reason the prickly heat attacked the Patrontasch family with a viciousness that turned each of their backs into a carpet of raw, bright pink pustules. Not a centimetre of normal skin was visible. On all of us the back was most severely affected, and the pain meant we couldn't
sleep on them. There was no room to sleep on our stomachs because no matter how hard you try, you have to stick out your arms a little bit at least. And once you choose to sleep on a side, there is no moving, and the pain in shoulders, hips and knees became a dull and constant ache all night. And we didn't dare scratch ourselves. If the pustules started to bleed, they would become dangerously infected because of the humidity and lack of sanitation.

But if the Becks left us, all the planning, all the sacrifices, everything we had endured would mean nothing. There was nothing left to us except to go on. Hunger, thirst and fear had become my life. It was so simple now. I was in a train station and everything depended upon which train came first. Freedom or death. The itching, the exhaustion, the pain in my arms from fanning were all irrelevant. They were just something to occupy myself and my mind while waiting to see which train I would board.

 

The soldiers and the trainmen had gone out to the German soldiers' club in the city. The Russian air force was bombing Lvov again and since no one was home, Beck let us come up a few at a time to see the lights and the explosions. The night sky was lit up like nothing I had ever seen before. Not even the fireworks the Russians set off every May came close to the bombardment that turned night to day. And when the bombing finally stopped and the windowpane I looked through stopped shaking, the dark sky returned, but the horizon was a rim of fire. I was looking at the end of the world through slightly parted damask curtains. Beck had brought us upstairs to give us hope. He was thoughtful that way. He wore the smile of a false god as he told us it couldn't be too much longer because the Russians had crossed the Dniester, the river of Galicia, which rose in the Carpathians south of Lvov.

Beck could lie to the Germans but he couldn't lie to us. I was attuned to his eyes and voice in the way a baby was attuned to a mother's face. I also knew that, with us, a lie was a piece of foul meat in Beck's mouth that he would be compelled to spit out no matter how much he wanted to keep it down. Back down in the bunker, by candlelight because the bombing had knocked out the electricity again, he told us that he had again run out of money and there would not even be the food ration he promised. He told us the Ukrainians had posted a new ultimatum. All the Poles had to leave Zolkiew by 1 May, which was just in a few days away, or be murdered.

As he talked he became more depressed than I had ever seen him. He told us, ‘The bastards are still catching Jews. Mrs Bernstein and her three children. An informer told the Gestapo they were hiding in the Malachinski's barn.' Mama fainted. She was close friends with Mrs Bernstein. To find out in the same breath that she was alive and in hiding as we were for the past 17 months and then murdered as the Russians were approaching was too much. Beck told us how much Ala had been pressing him to leave. Ala, like our darling Mania, wanted to live. She had done so much, and how much more could we ask of her? She was a child, barely three years older than I was, and I didn't want her to die for me. I couldn't imagine the torment in Beck's heart as every day he had to choose between us, strangers, and his daughter who was the love of his life. It would take a miracle for Mr Beck not to go with his daughter even as he assured us he never would.