The Earth Is Singing (16 page)

I feel like I’m their guardian angel.

Over the scraps of food we talk.

Mama coughs, but Omama and I ask questions.

The man’s name is Janis and he was born here just like me. His children are called Max and Sascha. Max is sixteen and Sascha only four.

“Where is your wife?” I ask. Mama does an extra-loud cough on purpose to stop me asking such personal questions but I figure if these people are sitting here wolfing down my peelings-and-yeast speciality then I have a right to know a bit about them.

Janis continues to stuff food into his mouth and lick his fingers but his eyes take on a wary look. He has not removed his leather cap or his coat. It is colder inside this apartment than it is outside in the ghetto streets.

“You remember the first days of the Nazi invasion?” he says. “When there was fighting and a lot of apartments were looted and Jews killed?”

The three of us nod. It is hard to forget the screams and sounds of gunshots and burning buildings.

“My wife, Sara, was shot,” he says, in a matter-of-fact voice. He reaches out for more peelings and puts them in front of Sascha. “She died in my arms. The children were watching.”

I stop eating. I am hungry but somehow I can’t pick up another morsel.

“Hanna,” says Mama. “Go and make some coffee for our guests.”

Omama has managed somehow to buy a tiny amount of ersatz coffee from the Jewish shops in the ghetto. The coffee tastes nothing like coffee used to before the war but it is hot and black and something to offer the others, so I go in and boil up water in a small grey rusty saucepan and pour it into the assorted cups that we brought in our barrow from
Skārņu iela.

I cut pieces of Mama’s strange sugar-cake and divide it up amongst the five of us. It amounts only to an inch cubed each but Sascha eats it as if it is the very best chocolate torte in the whole of Rīga. I look at Max. He has kept his head down so far, concentrating on the food. I notice that his fingernails are very dirty.

“Do you work?” I ask him, but it is his father who answers.

“Well of course,” he says. “We have to work. What choice is there?”

I flush. It was a bit of a stupid question.

“Where?” I say.

“Army warehouse,” says Janis. “We sort coats and boots captured from the Soviets.”

That explains his solid work boots and Max’s thick, warm black coat. I am envious of that coat. Mine is thin and patchy and the yellow stars are starting to flap at their seams.

“Where have you been sleeping?” I ask. I can’t seem to stop my voice sounding harsh and suspicious. The truth is, I don’t want these people living with us and sharing our food. I have got used to it just being the three of us.

“On the floor of a house in
Līksnas iela
,” says Janis. “Before that, on the streets. We were one of the last families to enter the ghetto. There was no room left.”

I am about to pop my square of cake into my mouth but a beseeching look from the little girl stops me with my hand halfway to my lips.

“Oh, go on then,” I say, passing it to her. “I’m too tired to eat anyway.”

That part at least is true. I ache from a day hunched over a sewing machine under the cold eyes of the SS and from the long walk to and from the workshop.

“What happens to Sascha when you go to work?” I say, yawning. It is nearly ten o’clock and we must be up at five for work again the next day.

Janis pulls the little girl onto his lap.

“She is looked after by whichever kind lady happens to offer,” he says. Then he gives a sly look at Omama.

“Oh no,” she says. “I am not a nursery. I am an old woman without a stick. I cannot chase after a little child all day.”

Janis’s face falls. He looks at me and then at Mama.

“Sorry,” she says. “We work all day every day.”

Omama puts her hands together as in prayer and rolls her eyes.

“God help me,” she says. “It is Yom Kippur
.
He knows full well that I can’t disobey His wishes on such a holy day.”

Then my grandmother, with a great creaking of knee joints and much moaning and sucking of teeth, levers herself towards the floor. She peers into Sascha’s doubtful little face and then offers the greatest compliment that she knows – an Omama cheek-pinch.

The child’s face crumples to scarlet and she howls in fear and pain.

Omama’s face lights up like the inside of the
Doma laukums
in our beloved old town.

“I can see we’re going to get along just fine,” she announces.

And that is how we come to share our apartment with three complete strangers.

We establish a routine of sorts.

We have to, or we would all trip over one another and tempers would fray. Mama sits up late one night and composes our rotas. There is a rota for who uses the toilet and the kitchen sink first in the morning. There is a rota for who makes the supper and who puts together the meagre breakfast. There is a rota for who goes out to queue for weekly rations.

The sleeping arrangements are as follows:

Mama, Omama, Sascha and I now sleep in the main room together. We call it “The Girls’ Room”. When the four of us are lying in our makeshift beds on the wooden floorboards, there seems very little air or space left in the room.

Max sleeps in the tiny box room where Omama used to sleep. There is only enough room for one person there so Janis sleeps on the floor of the kitchen, rolled up in a blanket and with his jacket folded up for a pillow.

It is hard to get to sleep, what with Omama muttering and cursing in her sleep, Mama coughing, Janis snoring and Sascha crying or being sick.

The only one who makes no noise is Max. I have yet to work him out. We haven’t exchanged one word since he moved in.

There is also an unwritten agreement that our new tenants must contribute to the food pot in any way that they can. Janis and Max have got a non-Jewish friend on the outside of the ghetto who passes in the opposite direction to their work column and slips them food at a particular point on their march to the army warehouse once every three days. In this way we get carrots, onions and more rotten potatoes, anything small and round which can be concealed in an inside pocket or a hand, but it helps to supplement our tiny rations from the ghetto grocer’s shops.

Janis and Max also get black bread and sometimes cheese or a piece of hard sausage at the place where they work and they eat some and risk smuggling the rest. This is very dangerous as the guards still search people on arrival back at the ghetto gates, but starving people take risks.

We all do. Mama still hides black bread in her mouth, between her breasts and once even somewhere far more horrible.

Her face was full of shame and self-disgust.

It is what we have to do to survive.

Sascha is too little to smuggle food but even she knows how to rummage through the piles of garbage that mount up behind the ghetto houses and once she came in triumphant with half a loaf of mouldy bread and something which at first looked like a pile of droppings, but turned out to be some ancient peas.

We share our hoard at the end of every day. If we hear the SS bursting into the houses nearby for one of their random Jew-checks, we throw all the food and dishes into the lavatory and shut the lid. The SS do not like to touch anything which may be riddled with germs or disease. When the risk has passed we get it all out again and wipe off the worst of the damage before eating the meal as planned.

Just a few weeks ago the thought of doing this would have seemed disgusting.

But I am no longer the Hanna Michelson who lived in the beautiful villa in Rīga or even the temporary apartment on
Skārņu iela.
The Hanna who loved Uldis and believed that he loved her back. The Hanna with a pretty best friend named Velna and a kind Uncle Georgs. The Hanna who dreamed of becoming a famous ballet dancer on the stage of the Rīga
Opera
.

How did I lose so much in so little time?

I am not the same Hanna any more.

The barbed wire fences and gates around the ghetto are nailed into position on 25th October.

On the way back from work Mama reads out the sign at the ghetto gates.

Those who try to climb across the fence or try to communicate with the ghetto internees will be shot down without warning.

“We are like animals trapped in a zoo,” I say.

We are back in our apartment. From here we can’t quite see the main ghetto gate but we can see the command post at the end of our street. We are watching the guards who pace up and down here. Some of them are SS, some Latvian and now we have our own Jewish Ghetto Police who are there to keep order. They wear caps and uniforms with a blue Star of David on them.

“Worse,” says Omama. She ignores Mama’s sharp look. I guess Omama knows that I have had to grow up pretty fast over the last year. It is impossible to hide the truth from me any longer. “Animals in a zoo would be fed twice a day with fresh meat. And they would not be shot.”

As night falls the temperature drops.

“Winter is starting early this year,” says Mama. She plugs up the gaps around our windows with bits of fabric from her sewing basket but still our breath freezes on the air inside the main room. “I don’t remember it starting at the end of October in quite this way before.”

Tonight feels different. This time last week we could still have got out of the ghetto if we had wanted to risk our lives and try to hide back in the old town. Visitors were still finding their way in with food and aid. Non-Jewish friends and relatives visited the old people’s home or the hospital.

Now we are sealed off in this island crammed to the limits with homeless Jews.

There are thirty thousand of us in the ghetto. All crammed into sixteen blocks.

It feels different, the night they seal the ghetto.

I feel different too. All the lasts bits of my innocence have been stripped away, never to return. And I feel more determined, which is odd because I am also suffering a rising rush of fear and anxiety about how we will survive in here on our cut-off island.

I promised Papa that I would look after my family. And I promised myself that whatever happens I will try to get out of here alive so that I can find Papa.

There are some things I can’t control, though.

I wake in the middle of the night with my teeth chattering. Over the noise of Janis snoring from the kitchen and Mama coughing in her sleep, I hear muffled noise from the street outside, as if it is coming from Omama’s forbidden radio buried underneath a pile of blankets.

I ease myself up from the floor, stiff with the cold. There are freezing draughts of air coming in through the gaps in the window frame so I wrap myself in a blanket and pull aside Mama’s curtains.

Outside, an SS vehicle is making its way down
Ludzas iela
. The muffled noise was its tyres crunching along a mass of white.

A mass of swirling flakes takes my breath away.

The twenty-fifth of October.

The day they seal the ghetto.

The day the first snow comes.

We establish our routine and
we stick to it for nearly four weeks.

I can’t remember living any other way.

My life is now that of an adult worker. I get up at five, wash with dirty water, gulp a cup full of weak black coffee and eat any small hard piece of bread that we might have managed to put by.

Janis has to get up, visit the toilet and then return to the kitchen so that Mama and I, as the female workers, can get ourselves ready in what little privacy we have left. He sits by the sink, his eyes red-rimmed from cold, and feeds Sascha with whatever he can find.

Max comes in from his box room, white from lack of sleep and with dark shadows around his eyes. He is sixteen but some mornings looks sixty.

I expect I look this way too.

I try to avoid looking in the dirty mirror if I can help it. I know that my plump olive-skinned cheeks are sallow and sharp and that my hair is lank and greasy from no proper shampoo.

I lie in bed at night trying to recall if I was pretty or not. Sometimes I think of Uldis and my heart misses a beat. I can’t forgive his betrayal and the way in which he manipulated me into telling him where we were hiding, but a persistent little voice in my head reminds me that it was I who told him where to find us. And somewhere buried even deeper underneath the guilt is still a tiny shred of belief that Uldis can’t truly be all bad. I torture myself with images of the friendship we used to have before the war even started. He smiles down at me in broad sunlight. He teases me with that slow, lazy look in his eye. That insolent grin.

Then I see the crumpled bodies of my aunt and uncle and sometimes I stuff a handkerchief in my mouth so as to muffle the sound of my crying and silently I pray that they might forgive me for my actions.

I am starting to loathe Uldis Lapa.

How could such a good friend turn so rotten right down to his very core?

Although I feel sick when I think about him, I still feel compelled to look out for Uldis when I march to and from my workplace. I never see him.

It’s probably a good thing. I am not sure I could control my anger. And he probably wouldn’t recognize the new, dirty, skinny and ungroomed Hanna who looks like she needs a good scrub with soap and water.

We all do. There is only that one rusty sink and the water comes out brown or grey but never clear like you’d want it to. Mama rations out the bars of soap she brought from home. The sharp clean pine smell makes tears of homesickness rush up to my eyes.

As well as feeling dirty, I am constantly hungry. My stomach produces sick, sour acid which rushes up into my mouth and my guts rumble all the time. I have started to take stupid risks, trading with non-Jewish visitors to the
Heereskraftpark
during my lunch break. Everybody does it, but depending on which member of the SS is patrolling the workshops you can get fined, beaten, robbed of lunch, or even shot. Some of the officers from the
Wehrmacht
are more understanding and do not mind if we slip a piece of lunch bread in our pockets.