The Earth Is Singing (17 page)

I have traded in the last small bits of Mama and Omama’s jewellery although I felt wracked with sadness at handing over the precious pieces into the hands of strangers. Mama hid much of it in her clothing when we moved from Uncle Georgs’s and we have not buried any of it, despite the constant risk of the SS bursting into our apartment and robbing us.

“What is the point of burying our things?” Mama says. “It is no good to us buried and we may never come back here once the war is over.”

She is right. So one day I decide to trade some of my jewellery too.

I sneak a bit of Mama’s old lipstick to work and then I say that I have to use the toilet just before lunch.

I slash the red across my mouth and pinch my cheeks to give them a bit of colour.

In my pocket I have a silver and amber necklace that Mama bought me for my thirteenth birthday. I wore it every day until Mama told me that it was dangerous to flash jewellery in the streets after the Nazis invaded.

I am thin now. Thin enough to push myself out of the window at the back of the lavatory and into the courtyard behind where trucks arrive with more uniforms for us to mend.

I wait until one of the men slides out of the high cab of his truck. I cast a quick look back at the factory to check I’m not being watched and I sidle up to him and stand by the side of the truck and the open door in such a way that I can’t be seen from the factory.

“What are you doing out here?” says the man. I stand my ground. I have been watching this particular soldier for days now and I reckon he has a kind face. He’s a member of the German army but not one of the SS so I have decided that I will take the risk even though my heart is beating fast with the daring of it all.

“I have this,” I say, pulling out my pendant and letting it dangle in front of his eyes. The amber catches the light. It is a good piece of Rīga’s finest.

The soldier groans but quick as a flash he snatches the necklace and opens a flap at the back of his truck before shoving me inside. For one moment I think he is going to report me and my head pounds with panic but then he follows me in and starts to feel around in some of the knapsacks strewn about inside.

“Here,” he says. “This is all I’ve got. Now get back inside. I should report you.”

I flash the man my best smile and hold my hands out.

“Thank you,” I say.

Then I shove my bounty into my overall pockets, climb back through the tiny lavatory window, unbolt the door of my cubicle and go back inside the factory as if nothing has happened. The whole transaction has taken less than five minutes.

We get searched when we arrive back at the ghetto and coat pockets are the first place that the guards look so I have got good at hiding things wedged under my chin and wrapped around with a thick scarf or sometimes shoved down my socks. I watch to see who is searched in front of me and I try to get right behind them as soon as I can, because I’ve realized that the guards check every four or five people along.

And that is how, that evening, I come to bring a meat sandwich, an apple, a half-packet of cigarettes and two bars of chocolate to my delighted family.

Max has managed to get a small amount of canned fish from his contacts on the outside of the ghetto. We share out slivers of pilchard and herring with reverence. This is now the equivalent of a major feast.

We are all risking our lives, but I have decided to carry on risking mine if it means I can feed Mama and Omama. I am starting to see the veins in Mama’s neck bulging out and Omama’s legs are more like brown shiny twigs than ever. It is filling me with panic. I can’t lose Mama or Omama.

I don’t have enough spare energy to worry about our room-mates. They can look after themselves.

So every morning Mama and I join the work column marching to
Ganu iela
and Max and Janis join another column to work at the Lenta Factory which is on
Jelgavas iela
so they don’t have to walk as far as us. I am envious of that. By the time I have sat for twelve hours in a sewing workshop breathing in the air full of bits of fluff and fabric and staring at the rough khaki material as I push it under the needle, my back and eyes ache with exhaustion, and the long trudge back to the ghetto in the numbing snow of Rīga is tough on my body.

We are all beginning to starve.

Some people in the ghetto are dying of malnutrition and disease. On the way to work we see bodies laid outside apartments in the snow, waiting to be taken to the Jewish Cemetery. Many elderly people have been put in a temporary old people’s home near to our apartment. Omama goes there to visit one of her cronies and comes back in a foul mood, wiping away tears.

“They are living in piss and shit,” she says. “The place stinks. There is one big room with beds down each side and there are no windows. Nobody is going to get me into that home. I would rather die first.”

She glares at me for a moment, making sure that I get the message.

“I will not put you in a home,” I say. “Mama might, though,” I can’t resist adding.

“Rude girl,” says Omama, bestowing one of her cheek-pinches on my thin face. It hurts like hell but it’s a little taste of home and the tears that it brings are not just from the pain.

Sascha backs away into a corner.

She and Omama have a testy sort of relationship. When the two of them are left alone together in the house, it tries both their patience to the limit. I would never have paired the big-eyed, pretty, four-year-old Sascha with my old, bony, hunched-over grandmother, but that’s just the way it has to be in here.

Max and I have started talking a bit now. It’s awkward, because we haven’t chosen to get to know one another, we’ve just been thrown together by circumstance.

He’s not the sort of boy I would normally like anyway. He’s very dark and serious with olive skin and quite the opposite of Uldis with his blond, tanned look.

At first I thought he was rude but then he passed me a bit of the treasured canned fish hoard with a small smile and I thought:

Oh. He’s just shy.

After that we had a conversation. I told him about my ambitions to be a ballet dancer at the
Opera
and he told me that he would like to be a lawyer. He doesn’t mention his mother and I guess that it’s too painful so I hold back from asking even though I want to. Instead, I tell him a little about Papa.

That’s different. Papa isn’t dead.

I describe my papa’s brown arms and long, sensitive hands. I talk about his soft moustache and the sparkle in his brown eyes and the way it felt when he picked me up and how the cherry blossom trees at the bottom of our garden would blur into a solid sheet of white as he spun me round and round while I screamed in mock fear.

I wish I knew that wherever he is, Papa was having a better time of it than the ghetto inmates here.

I tell myself that he is fine, every single day. I have to believe that.

But as each day melts into the next and I watch the other Jewish residents of the ghetto struggle to find food, tiny shreds of hope start to detach from my solid belief and float away on the freezing air.

So we have our routines and we try to stick to them and somehow come together at the end of each day and still keep the Sabbath, if it is a Friday, even though we have no wine or candles or matzo now.

“Prayer is free,” says Omama. “We can have as much of that as we want. The Nazis can’t take that away from us.”

So we pray to our God. As everything else is stripped away it seems more important than ever to rely upon Him. We ask that He might keep us all alive and perhaps find His way to providing us with a bit more food and I feel that as long as we gather together on a Friday night and say the prayers that somehow we will be all right.

A voice inside me tells me that I am being stupid. A stupid girl who thought that people like Uldis meant what they said and kept their promises.

A girl with a blind faith in a God she can’t even see or hear.

I am pitting God against the Nazis and expecting God to win.

Doesn’t He always win in the end?

A sign is pinned to
the gates of the ghetto on 27th November.

It is Mama who sees it as we trudge back through the snow and ice from our workshop on the other side of town.

“No, no,” she says, her voice rising up in panic. Then she lowers her head. Anybody causing a noise in the work columns is likely to be beaten by the Latvian soldiers guarding us. Sometimes just a word out of place can result in a shooting.

When we arrive back at number 29 Mama moves up the stairs like a wiry deer trying to escape the rest of a trampling herd. I have not seen her move so fast in a long while.

I find her with Omama. They are holding hands.

“What does that mean?” Omama is saying. “‘Resettled’. It sounds as if we are all moving to another part of the country.”

Max and Janis are back from work and putting together our meagre evening meal but at the sound of Omama’s raised voice they come out of the tiny kitchen and stare at her with concern. Sascha plays on the wooden floorboards, oblivious to what we are saying.

“Maybe they are taking us to Germany,” says Janis. “There are camps there where we could work.”

Mama is shaking her head in distress. I notice how thin her neck is, so thin that all the veins seem to bulge outwards.

“It said that we should take up to twenty kilograms of food and clothing,” she says. “And there’s more. It also said that all able-bodied men between eighteen and sixty should report to
Sadovņikova iela
on the 29th and that they will be put in another area of the ghetto and sent to work in the city!”

Janis goes grey in the face.

He looks at Sascha playing with her ragged doll on the floor and at Max, who is laying out bread on the box.

“We are to be split up?” he says. “No. I won’t have it. I will not go.”

Omama pats his shoulder.

“You should go,” she says. “Who knows where we are all being sent to? At least you will get a place of work and be able to stay warm, maybe get some food. Perhaps you will follow us to wherever we are going.”

Janis does not look appeased by Omama’s reassurances.

“My children have lost their mother,” he says. “And now they will lose their father.”

Tears roll down his thin cheeks. Max looks at him, awkward. They exchange expressions of pain and desperation that make the pit of my stomach feel strange.

Mama sits down on the floor and stares at the grey lumps of bread that make up our dinner.

“I wish I could feed you all properly,” she says.

There doesn’t seem to be anything we can say to this so we sit down and eat the bread in silence.

At the end of the meal Omama produces an extra cigarette for Janis and for once she doesn’t tell him off for smoking the room out.

“We will do our best to look after Sascha and Max,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

But the six of us go to bed with worry heavy in our hearts.

Nobody sleeps a wink.

The next night is the last Sabbath we will all spend together.

The Gestapo have issued an order to evict people from the apartments around
Kalna, Līksnas
and
Lauvas ielas
and the bottom half of our own street,
Ludzas,
from the 28th November. All we have heard all evening are the sounds of gunshots and screams as the Jewish Police carry out the Gestapo’s commands and the Latvian police enforce them.

Max has risked going outside to see whether the work details are still in place. Mama, Omama and I have not dared to leave the apartment. The ghetto is in chaos and nobody seems to know what is going to happen, but Max finds out that the newly-emptied apartments are to be fenced in and made into something called the Small Ghetto.

He is right. We are up in our apartment peering out and can see new fences being nailed hastily into place by Jewish men taken out of the Central Prison for this purpose.

“Look,” says Max. “SS Krause.”

SS Krause is the ghetto commandant. He is inspecting the streets with other SS men that we haven’t seen before. Something in the way that they are walking and conferring, their heads bent together, sends a deep chill into my heart.

“Don’t watch, Hanna,” says Mama but I can’t seem to stop. I am balanced not only on the narrow window sill but on the brink of a whole new life somewhere else. There is danger and unsettledness hanging in the air tonight, mixed up with the unspoken sadness of Janis having to leave us tomorrow morning.

We are unable to sleep again. Mama sits up sewing bags for our possessions and packing everything she thinks we need for our journey into the unknown. She packs what is left of our food supplies into one bag, and as many cups, blankets and pieces of clothing as she can into another.

It is the Sabbath so we sit around our box-table and offer up prayers to God but it is difficult to focus on a God you cannot see when the sounds and smells of danger and fear are all around.

Janis sits up all night with Max squashed close beside him and a sleeping Sascha in his arms. When dawn breaks Mama makes us all a cup of black coffee and distributes what is left of our bread.

The sound of men’s feet trudging past comes up to our first-floor window. I glance outside, my eyes stiff from lack of sleep.

“The men are going,” I say.

We all turn and look at Janis.

He puts his brown cap on and wraps his coat around his thin frame.

Then he kisses Max on the cheek and Sascha on top of the head.

He does not say a word.

We listen to the clomp of his leather work boots as he goes downstairs.

A moment later we see him join the line of men heading to
Sadovņikova iela.

Max and Sascha manage not to cry.

I think they must have used up all their tears over the past year.

Instead Mama keeps them busy with packing and tidying and from time to time she catches my eye and I can see how frightened she is, but we do not discuss where we might be going.

She gets me to put on as much underwear as I can manage. She does the same to Sascha. We are very restricted by the twenty kilogram limits.