The Earth Is Singing (20 page)

None of us dare go to her.

“You lazy Jewesses!” shouts the guard. “Even shooting is too good for you!”

Then he slams the metal door and leaves us reeling, our hearts pounding.

We are shut in this room for two whole days.

Mama and I lie together on the edge of the table at night and although we do not speak, I know that we are both thinking about the same things.

We dream of Omama and of our old life in the villa with Papa and the cherry trees in the garden.

I even wish I was back in the ghetto.

All things are relative. At least there we only had six of us to worry about and we had our own apartment even though it was cold and basic.

When I think of my grandmother and the way she was dragged away from us, a painful lump comes up in my throat and my eyes prick with what would be tears only my body seems to have dried up from lack of water and no tears will come.

If they did, I would probably try to drink them.

After two days the lock on the door turns and the supervisor comes in again.

“All out!” he shouts. “Quick.”

The women rise up like a mass of flapping frightened pigeons. Some of them start to scream.

“My God,” shouts one. “We are all going to be shot.”

I go dizzy when she says this. I hold on to Mama and she strokes my oily plaits and shakes her head at me, although how she can possibly know what is going to happen to us, beats me.

“They would have done it by now,” Mama whispers. “We must stay calm. Follow me, do what I do. All right?”

I nod.

We are being taken back out into the prison courtyard where we first began this ordeal.

There is even more chaos out there now. There is so much furniture strewn about with the mattresses and shoes that we can find very little space to stand on the ground.

The guards form us into one of the usual columns and start marching us into a large hallway. We blink in pain at the light streaming through the windows. This is some sort of administration building. By the huge arched windows at the end sit a line of SS officers in their military uniforms.

They are gesturing some women to the right and others to the left.

There is no way of telling which of these directions is good and which is bad.

We wait our turn in the queue and then Mama and I stand, trembling, in front of the officers.

There is one woman in front of us. I recognize her from our old life in
Skārņu iela
. Mrs Muris. She lived in our apartment block.

I am pretty sure she is not a seamstress.

The German officer barks something at her and then gestures her to the left.

“Thank God. I am going back to the ghetto,” the woman mutters.

This tells me that whatever I do, I must somehow get sent to the left-hand side. Now that there seem to be no signs of us being sent to work as seamstresses in the city, the best option must be to get sent back to
Ludzas iela
and be reunited with Max and Sascha.

Mama has obviously come to the same conclusion as she raises her eyebrows at me and tilts her head towards the left with a tiny movement that only I can see.

“Put samples of your work here,” says the German officer. He looks up at me with cold blue eyes.

Mama knows what to do. In her knapsack she has samples of her sewing work but instead of pulling out the exquisite examples of bugle beading and intricate embroidery, she instead lays out some plain coloured squares with uneven stitching. I realize that they are the pieces she got me to practise on when we still lived in
Skārņu iela
and despite everything I bite back a smile.

“Some of this is my daughter’s work,” she says, putting down another two pieces of material.

I hold my breath.

There is an endless silence whilst the officer looks at the bad samples. He then looks me in the eye for what feels like for ever and a day.

Then with a tiny flick of his forefinger he gestures us to the left.

We stand with the growing group of women and clutch one another’s hands.

There are beads of sweat on Mama’s forehead and she looks grey but she allows me the tiniest of sideways smiles and squeezes my hand.

Perhaps we are the daughters of fortune after all.

We are going back to the ghetto.

We survive to fight another day.

We are kept for one
last night in the crowded basement of the Central Prison.

Mama works out the date.

She has been trying to keep track of the days. It is difficult without a watch and the nights and days seem to be one long continuation of physical and mental anguish. We never have anything to eat and are rarely given water. In these conditions it is hard to tell whether one hour has passed, let alone a day.

But Mama keeps track.

“It gives me something to do,” she says with a cough. Her cough has got far worse in the dank atmosphere of our prison accommodation. I asked one of the guards if she could have some medicine but I was met with a glare and a laugh of displeasure.

“You are Jewesses,” he said. “We don’t owe you anything.”

When we finally get back to
Ludzas
iela
I will ask Max to go out and see if he can get some cough medicine for Mama.

Until then I have to watch my mother retch and cough her guts up onto the rough grey asphalt floor of the prison.

It is 6th December, Mama says.

We are ordered out of the attic and down into the courtyard where we are formed into columns five women wide.

Then with our usual accompaniment of stone-faced Latvian guards we are marched out of the great gates of the prison and alongside the railway track.

“We are going back!” I whisper to Mama as we retrace the route we came on a few short days ago. It feels like years.

We pass through the centre of town again. As before, Latvians give us looks of pity. Some of them give us looks of astonishment and vague smiles. I can’t work out why. It is almost as if they never expected to see us again. One or two even dare a nod or a small wave. Others ignore us and hurry past with their heads bent against the biting sleet and icy winds. I think of Velna and the air takes on a heavy grey chill.
Dirty Jew.
That’s what those people are thinking about me.

A couple of hundred or so of us are marched back towards the Maskavas area of town and the ghetto. Some of the women are so weak that they collapse during the hour-long walk.

Their bodies are shoved to the side of the road by the SS and left there, part-disappearing under the new flurry of snow.

I start to see the streets of the ghetto up ahead.

I clutch Mama’s arm, dizzy with relief. We will be back in our grotty apartment on
Ludzas iela
soon and I will be able to see Max and Sascha.

When we get to number 29 I almost hurl myself up the stairs. Part of me is hoping that Omama will have somehow escaped the old people’s home or the resettlement column and be waiting up here with open arms, but a larger part of me knows that this won’t be true.

At least Max will still be here waiting for us.

I burst into the main room of the apartment with a smile upon my face.

A tiny whimper greets me.

Sascha is curled up in the corner of the room underneath a blanket. Her tufts of hair are poking out of the top.

There is no sign of Max.

He’s gone.

We can’t get much sense out of Sascha.

We ask her as many questions as we can but she is fraught with hunger and anxiety and in the end Mama just makes a thin soup out of old vegetables, tucks her up and sings her some old nursery rhymes until Sascha’s eyes close and she lies immobile on her thin mattress.

I hope that Max has been taken away to work in the Small Ghetto.

I spend the evening straining my eyes to look out of the window while Mama finds what she can to eat. I can see some of the Small Ghetto from here and my eyes latch on to every man and boy I see in a cap in case they are Max or Janis but I just can’t tell from up here and it is too dangerous to go out and wander the streets.

My heart aches with longing for my grandmother. And there’s another thing. I really miss Max, with a sharp new pain I haven’t experienced before. I keep calling up his dark hair and brown eyes and trying to imagine that he is going to come back and give me his rare shy smile.

Mama and I huddle around our old box-table which still sits in the middle of the room. We try not to talk about Omama but her presence is everywhere, large and vibrant for such a small, wrinkled old lady.

The next morning I wake from a nightmare in which Uldis finds me and locks me inside a house in the countryside and forces me to have four blond children whose Jewish blood is diluted until they become pure Aryan.

“Fat chance,” I say, waking on the hard floor with a pounding headache and sore eyes.

“What?” says Mama. She has obviously been awake for a while because she is sitting with her arms around her knees, watching me.

“I dreamed of Uldis,” I say, before I become properly awake. I watch Mama’s face change into a hard shell.

“That traitor,” she says. “It is because of him that we are here.”

I shake my head.

“No,” I say in a small voice. “It is because of me that we are here.”

Mama’s face fills with pain and love.

“Don’t ever think that, Hanna,” she says. “He persuaded the secret out of you. As far as I am concerned, it is his fault and his fault alone.”

How could I have been so stupid as to betray my family’s hiding place?

I have made all this happen. It is because of me that Omama has been taken away.

The guilt is eating me alive, like worms inside an apple.

What I wouldn’t give for an apple right now.

We wait for the command to get back to work.

We are sure that we will have to work again for our measly rations of food and our cold and lice-ridden lodgings.

The command never comes.

The ghetto is freezing.

The sky refuses to get light.

When I go out to queue for rations I can see that most of the houses which were once crammed full of Jews sharing apartments together are empty, abandoned by their residents in a hurry on the November night when I last saw my Omama.

The ghetto is very quiet. Too quiet.

Only two days after we have returned to our apartment a new order is issued. It says that all able-bodied men remaining in the Large Ghetto must instead report to the Small Ghetto and that the rest of the population will be “moved”.

Mama and I hold hands and can’t speak. Sascha is in the room with us and is watching our every move with her big, haunted eyes. There is stuff we need to say but we can’t say it in front of her. We wait until she has been put to bed on the mattress in the corner of the room. Mama tucks the thin, rotting blanket over her and tries to sing a bedtime song, but her voice keeps cracking with fear, tiredness and emotion so in the end I take over and sing “Raisins and Almonds” in a thin, wobbling voice that sounds nothing like the one I used to have at our villa.

When Sascha is asleep for her afternoon nap, Mama and I chew on one of the endless lumps of stale hard bread that have become our life. Then she takes my hand again and looks into my face.

“We cannot trust them any more,” she says. “They lied about the work in the city and instead took us to the prison. They said that Omama was in the old people’s home but nobody has heard of her or seen her since. We have had no proof that all those people ever reached a camp.”

She stops for a moment. We are both trying not to cry. The spectre of my bad-tempered, loving old grandmother looms large between us, waving her stick and crowing in her sharp voice.

“So this ‘resettlement’ notice is a sham, too,” says Mama. “There’s no point pretending otherwise.”

I nod. I have known this since the order went up. I can hear the cries and panicky voices of the remaining residents of our ghetto. We have all seen too much to pretend that this news is anything other than the worst possible.

Even so, I still have a small bead of hope inside me.

Maybe they will take us to a work camp after all.

Maybe they still need seamstresses somewhere.

Maybe the war will end and we will be freed.

I see Papa’s face, strong and kind with his eyes flashing love and compassion.

I promised him I would look after Mama for as long as we both lived.

I grip her hand.

“We will be together, Mama,” I say. “I won’t let go of your hand. I promise. Whatever happens, we will be together. I have decided!”

Mama smiles a little at my catchphrase but she can’t speak. Her fingers feel like chicken bones in my hand. But she nods, her lip trembling. Her eyes speak of love and loss and torment.

On the other side of the room, Sascha throws her blanket off, restless and in tears.

I sing her another song and try to stem the flow of my own.

The ghetto is dark by six.

A couple more hours pass.

Mama and I are ready.

We have been listening to shooting all around the ghetto for several hours now and we have heard the commands shouted into the darkness for people to leave their lodgings.

We have our small knapsacks crammed with as much food and as many blankets and items of clothing as we can stuff in. We have dressed Sascha in the warmest clothes we possess and put a little knitted bonnet on her head.

The order comes from the streets.

“Out! Out!” shout the Latvian policemen. “All ghetto inhabitants must leave their buildings immediately!”

I take Mama’s hand and Mama offers her other hand to Sascha.

Mama looks at me.

“Ready?” she says.

“Ready,” I say.

Then we go downstairs to meet our fate.

We are pushed into columns
of people, five abreast.

The men are mostly old. No use as workers.

The women are either elderly or young mothers with tiny, terrified children.

This is the same thing I saw from the windows of our apartment on the day Omama was taken from us. The same terrified mass of people whipped into orderly lines. The same desperate clutching of bags and packages to chests. The same mixture of facial expressions – fear, terror, sadness, blankness, impassiveness and even acceptance on the faces of some of the more elderly residents of the ghetto. It is like they have given up already.