The Last Girl (30 page)

In February 1942 I heard that Ira had escaped the ghetto. He had joined the FPO, the United ·Partisans Organisation. Making their way through the sewer system they had taken to the forests to continue the fight from there. A sister in the hospital gave this news to me. She was a Dominican nun and I was aware that their convent was sheltering partisans. Despite the conditions a theatre had been established in the ghetto. Concerts were performed to packed audiences and a lending library, even, had been organised. All this the sister told me. I listened but I did not ask.

Sometimes, in the early evening, despite the debilitating fog, I once again wandered the streets. Here I had first seen her.

Here we had talked. Here I had followed her. Here I saw her, radiant, her curls bursting out from the kerchief, her belly bulging slightly, giving away the reason for her joy. We had stopped by the old birch tree, a lifetime before. It shone silver. At the point where Old Mendle's path forked off the road. Her breath was ragged. We stumbled. Our faces met, in the pale light. Almost lip to lip. Almost.

The sun shone. Day followed night. Winter thawed and spring blossomed. The summer was warm. Autumn turned the leaves and winter froze them on the cobbles beneath my feet as I walked to the hospital tired. Always tired. The hospital overflowed with the sick and wounded. The smell of death filled my nostrils. Having been raised on a farm I was used to the death of our livestock. As a child my grandmother had taken me to sit with the bodies of dead neighbours, in the days before burial, but that was a normal part of the routines of village life. This death I now confronted in the hospital, with its dark corridors, plastered green walls, tiled floors and stench of disinfectant, was coldly industrious. Care of the sick and the dying was a chore and the bodies were removed hastily to make room for others. A typhus epidemic assailed the city population exhausted by war.

One evening Sister Martha found me crouched in a corner with my hands clasped tight over my ears, blocking out the sound of the suffering we could do little to control. She knelt beside me and stroked my forehead softly with the back of her hand.

‘How can you stand it?' I asked her.

‘If we don't, who will?' she said, simply.

She took me by the hand and lifted me from the floor. I followed her back out into the corridor where the sick sat on narrow benches, waiting for the dead to make room for them in the more comfortable beds.

 *

From December 1941 to early 1943 the city achieved a kind of peace. Nervous peace. Fearful peace. But the fog never entirely dissipated.

The peace lasted until July of 1943 when the Germans captured Wittenberg, head of the FPO. The partisan groups responded immediately, launching a fierce attack on the police station where he was being held, and freed him. Wittenberg went into hiding. The partisans had been carrying out small-scale attacks on the Germans around the city, blowing up rail tracks, murdering smaller isolated groups of German soldiers and stealing supplies. When I arrived at the hospital on the morning of the sixteenth Sister Martha, my Dominican companion, was distraught.

‘The Nazis have threatened to liquidate the whole ghetto if they do not hand Wittenberg over,' she told me.

As the hours trickled on towards the deadline, our hands worked and our bodies continued their tasks; our minds, however, gnawed at the news of the ghetto. Ira had, I knew, escaped to the forest and joined the partisans, but Rachael was still inside the walls of the ghetto with her young child. Sister Martha had been a nun for ten years. She was young and good-looking. Her hands were always steady and I never saw her flinch from the most difficult tasks; but when she lit a cigarette, later, in the semi-darkness it shook in her fingers.

We smoked the cigarettes sparingly; they had come from a former factory owner, a patient wanting a little better treatment.

‘You puzzle me,' she said, passing the cigarette across to me.

‘I do?'

She nodded, waiting for me to draw on the cigarette and hand it back to her before she continued.

She hesitated a moment before she said, ‘There is something strange about the way you behave. You're reserved and you say very little. You are interested in what is going on in the ghetto, though you pretend not be. But you are not with the partisans.'

‘You think I'm a Nazi informer?' I said dryly.

‘No, but I was wondering whether you had Jewish blood?'

‘Jewish? No,' I said quickly, flushing.

She gazed at me fixedly, inhaling the smoke deep into her lungs. ‘So?'

For some moments I said nothing. A small window high in the wall let in a sliver of grey light. Sister Martha had deep black rings around her eyes. Her sharp eyes did not leave my own, I felt them searching me. Perspiration beaded my forehead. I felt a sudden overwhelming need to confess to her, to tell her all. The agony of silence broke within me and I felt it rise in my throat, a painful lump. I coughed back a sob. For a moment I could not speak. She reached out a hand and let it rest gently on my knee. It was the first kind touch I had felt in months. I could not hold back my tears then. I wept bitterly. I told her about Rachael. I told her everything from beginning to end while we slowly smoked our precious cigarettes. She did not interrupt me. After the long silence words tumbled out. When I had finished she leant forward and wrapped her arms around me.

A young boy arrived later that evening and asked for Sister Martha. I ran to find her. Martha was weeping when she returned to the ward.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘Wittenberg has given himself up to spare the ghetto,' she told me.

Just over a month later the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto anyway. When we heard the news we rushed into the streets. I do not know what we thought that we could do. Sister Martha left me to find one of her contacts to see if anything could be done. The streets were full of soldiers. I hurried to the ghetto.

The closer I walked to the ghetto gates the more soldiers there were. Tanks loomed at corners. The soldiers were tense; their guns held at the ready. A large fair-haired young soldier approached me.

‘
Ja?
What you want?' he asked in heavily accented Russian.

‘I live that way,' I said, indicating past the ghetto gates.

‘Go!' he said. His hand pushed against my chest. Pushing me back down the street away from the large wooden gates. ‘Get out of here!'

A sweat broke out on my forehead and my hand began to tremble. ‘But I must get home,' I said, aware that he could ask for my papers and check my address.

‘Fuck off!' he said aggressively. He was joined by another soldier, slimmer, thin-lipped. He pointed his gun at my chest.

‘You heard him,' the second soldier said. ‘Get out of here.'

I retreated down the street. The gates to the ghetto had swung open. Soldiers swarmed around a couple of green army trucks. In the distance I could hear shouting. Orders barked. Impotently I stood in the shadows at the corner, looking down the cobbled street to the ghetto gates. They would take her through there. She would be loaded onto a truck. They would take her. My heart thumped and a thin fog appeared before my eyes. Where would they take her? Ponar? I pushed down the images, the pictures that had filled our nightmares. Bodies in ditches. The crack of gunfire startling the birds in the forest. Bloodied, lonely survivors, lying in stupefied silence beneath the corpses of their friends, families, waiting for darkness to creep away. Rachael oh Rachael, I breathed. Oh God help.

So intent was my attention on the flurry of activity at the gates of the ghetto, I did not hear the quiet footsteps on the cobbles behind me. A hand grabbed my arm and I had to stifle a scream. I wheeled around. Sister Martha held me, indicated for me to be quiet, to follow her.

‘I have a message,' she breathed. ‘A message?'

‘From the ghetto. Come. Quick.' Her attractive face was drawn and hard, the skin taut across her skull. She pulled my arm, turning me from the gates of the ghetto. I ran behind her.

‘The girl, your girl, the one you were telling me about. She sent a message through one of our boys.'

‘Rachael?'

‘Yes, Rachael.'

We ran through the winding narrow lanes, skirting the outside of the ghetto, keeping clear of the guards, who were jittery and suspicious. Ducking into a narrow alley Sister Martha took my hand and put a finger to her lips. At the end of the alley was a blank wall built crudely from poor quality bricks. A portion of the wall had collapsed and had been boarded up tightly with planks. Barbed wire spiralled the top of the fence.

The alley-way was dark and it stank of sewage. In the centre of the street was a manhole and Sister Martha pointed to it. ‘From here it is a quick journey into the ghetto. It is the route that our boys take sometimes.'

‘We're going into the ghetto?' I asked. My heart froze at the thought. To be caught in the ghetto would mean instant death. The place would be swarming with soldiers. Indeed we could hear their menacing voices echoing in the narrow lanes little more than a few houses away. Sister Martha shook her head.

‘She will come. She should be here.' She took a thin, long knife from her pocket and slipped it between two boards. They came apart with remarkable ease. The hole she made was just large enough for someone to slip through. A child perhaps, or a lean, small adult.

Sister Martha was tense. She glanced at the watch on her wrist. Her eyes flicked around the damp alley-way. ‘There is a regular patrol,' she said. 'You need to listen.' She waited a few moments more, though I could see her growing increasingly edgy.

‘I've got to go,' she said suddenly. ‘I've got to give help to the others. You must stay. She will come. I'm sorry.'

I nodded mutely. She turned to go then halted. She turned back and her eyes brimmed with anxious tears. ‘Be careful,' she said. ‘Be very careful.'

I watched as she dashed down the alley-way. The noise from the ghetto grew louder. Shouting vibrated the air. From somewhere came a scream. A chilling, heart-rending scream. A scream that made my knees tremble with fear. I pressed my forehead against the wall and tried to control my breathing. A vision of Jerzy swinging from the bow of the old oak flickered across my mind. Murdered for helping a Jew.

And suddenly she was there. Pressed against the wooden boarding. Pulling the loose boards out. The small child was quiet in her arms. Her eyes were wide with fear. Her lip was shivering. My heart leapt; she looked painfully fragile.

‘Steponas,' she said and her voice trembled so much it was hard to make out my name. The yellow star on her coat was dirty and frayed. Her hair was lifeless, dangling down the sides of her face like a spider's web. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin yellow and tired. My hand reached out to her. She did not move as I touched her cheek. She was deathly cold. I pushed another board from the fence, enlarging the hole she had made.

As the board clattered to the floor, I heard the heavy click of military boots on the cobbles. The ring of barked commands. Shouting. German accents. Rachael trembled so much she could say nothing more. She stared at me a moment in silent supplication, her discoloured teeth rattling.

‘Take me,' she stammered.

‘Take you?'

Take you where? To the forest where you would be safe. To a molina, a hideaway, beneath the church on Rudnicka where I knew there to be one. To Sister Martha and her convent to find safety with the partisans there. To the village, to my own home hidden in the forests, tucked in the hills. I reached out to her, my own hands shaking as they passed through the fencing.

The boots sounded loud on the road. They echoed in the narrow alley-way. Her eyes reached out to me. The soldiers turned into the small courtyard behind where Rachael was standing. They peered into the gloom, their guns cocked and ready. Rachael glanced back swiftly over her shoulder. One of the soldiers spotted her and called out, his young voice ringing sharply against the stone walls.

‘Take my child. Keep her safe. Keep her safe.' She thrust the muzzled child at me. It lay quiet in the threadbare blanket it was wrapped in. It was small and emaciated. Like a little sack of potatoes. A little Russian doll.

The soldier was running, demanding. He raised his gun. I jerked back from the fence.

‘Steponas,' she called.

My eyes could not meet hers. Those beautiful eyes. I could not look into them. She thrust the child forward, but my shivering hands did not reach out to take it. Jerzy had swung on the tree, when the wind caught him. His thin body hung so awkwardly. So uncomfortable with its neck wrenched out of place. His eyes were open. They popped from their dark, tired sockets.

‘Hey, what is going on? Hey, you!'

‘Please,' she said.

God in heaven. Dear God in heaven. My mind shivered between love and fear. My own teeth rattled. The child was close enough to take. The soldiers clattered up behind her.

I turned away.

‘Stop!'

I scrambled quickly down the alley-way. She did not cry out or call after me. The soldiers were shouting, cursing. My feet scuffed the cobblestones and in my hurry I stumbled. From behind me I heard a small cry. I did not turn. I picked myself up quickly and lurched on. I did not turn. I ran. I broke out of the gloom into a courtyard. I ran and I did not turn back.

I threw myself down on the bank of the river. It was dark. A thick layer of cloud hid the moon. I wept. A cold wind blew across the river. My heart burned with pain. Framed by the broken boards she held out the little child. Her eyes caught mine and would not free them. I dared not think where she was. Where she was going. I stood on the edge of the river, the current flowing fast and dark beneath me. Oh God, I thought, what have I done? And that was all. I could allow no other thought. I dared let in no other thought.

When dawn broke timidly over the city spires, my legs trembled still. I pulled myself up from the bank of the river which I had not the courage to throw myself in. I stumbled away from the city, following the serpentine flow of the river out into the forest.