The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Months earlier, before the thaw, when the Russians were filling the countryside and the Germans were retreating, Etti had left her hiding place in the barn and made her way back to Lodz. It was only forty kilometres, but the weather was hard and old dangers still threatened. When would it stop? she asked herself as she trudged along. When would there be shelter and warmth and food and family? When would life be more than a fiercely guarded memory? As for the bluntest question of all – how much longer could she bear up against the dangers and deprivations? – it was never asked, for the rough wisdom of her survival was stark and simple: you keep going until you die.

  Back in Lodz she went straight to the area where her family had lived before they’d been forced into the ghetto. There were people in the streets – women with parcels, a mother carrying a baby, boys chasing each other; so much was familiar yet everything had changed. Or perhaps only Etti had changed, impossible to know for sure, yet she found herself choking on the injustice of these Poles going about their normal business when her own life had been wrecked. She couldn’t get away fast enough. She ran and ran, towards the ghetto she ran, the ghetto she’d been forced to enter years ago and later risked her life to leave, the ghetto which she now realised would probably yield the best information. Under different circumstances she might enjoy the absurdity of a voluntary return. But for now she just ran.

  Several minutes later and out of breath, she entered the ghetto through a set of the double wood and wire gates. How much lower were the gates now and how benign without the guards, yet she still didn’t feel free and she certainly didn’t feel safe. But she had to know if anyone was left, so forced herself in a stealthy movement through the dismal streets.

  The ghetto appeared as if shut down. The buildings were shrouded and splintering, and so many empty rooms, the furniture fed to the stove aeons ago and now just a scattering of rags and tatters across the gravelly floors. Don’t look, she told herself, don’t look at the remnants, having learned during the long years of loss that the things inadvertently left behind can be so cruelly voluble. Yet at the same time she cast an expert gaze across the floor, having also learned that survival can depend on other people’s dross. She missed nothing, not inside nor outside in the slush and mud. She saw the sagging wooden buildings blotched like starving skin where the shutters had been removed long ago for firewood; and still posted on some of the walls, weather-stained notices with orders and decrees in German, Polish and Yiddish. Caught in the muck and wreckage were a doll’s head, a scrap of shoe, a pretty button; and among the rubbish clogging the drains a length of blanket caked with filth but still holding together. And standing idle in the streets were the carts drawn not by animals during the long years of the ghetto but harnessed to men.

  Everywhere was dirt, decay and detritus. And hardly any people. Although in a sad reflection, it didn’t matter much whether there were people or not, for like Jewish Lodz itself, Etti, too, was shut down. She had a single mission: to find someone who had survived, just one other member of her family would suffice, beyond which nothing else mattered.

  After so many solitary months, her ability to communicate had stiffened and it took all her efforts to collect the words required for the simple questions which might lead to her family. Otherwise she kept to herself, and continued to do so even when there were more people about. She had no tolerance for others with their competing pain, no strength against those offering kindness, and most of all, no armoury left to protect her from the Poles.

  At the end of her life Etti would still be trying to make sense of it. The Poles had lost millions of their own: husbands, fathers, sons, and more women and children than could ever be explained. They had watched as their homes and farms, their cities and towns were destroyed; only the Jews had lost more. You’d think, she would say, the Poles and the Jews would be united in their loss. Instead, the Poles clung to their Jew-hatred more steadfastly than almost anything else. Indeed, there were Poles who having suffered horrendously at the hands of the Germans nonetheless believed the Germans had been right in wanting to rid the world of Jews. This Etti heard with her own ears.

  How different was their attitude to Jewish possessions. A quick rub and a cleansing prayer, what Etti would later call ‘Polish kosher’, and it seemed any Jewish taint could be eliminated from bowls, cutlery, a nice picture frame, carpets, cooking pots, a pretty bracelet.

  ‘We were as poor as you,’ Etti said, when at last she mustered the courage to approach the Poles in her family’s old flat. ‘We had to work as hard as you.’ But such appeals were useless. She explained she wanted very little of what her family had been forced to leave behind, just a few items of sentimental value. Yet even as she spoke she saw how much had been left, how much, in fact, was rightfully hers.

  With space in the ghetto so limited – two rooms between eight people when the family first moved in, and later only the one room – they had taken only the essentials. They had managed to sell a few items in the panic of those last days, but the remainder of their possessions had stayed in the flat: plates, cooking utensils, bed linen, furniture, lamps, a whole range of household goods which Etti now tried to reassure the Polish family she did not want. All she was after, she said again, were a few items of sentimental value, worthless to anyone else.

  She said ‘worthless’, but the Poles heard gold.‘What would my family be doing with gold?’ Etti said. ‘If they had possessed gold, would they have lived here? If they had possessed gold, wouldn’t they have used it to leave Poland?’ But either the Poles did not listen or would not believe.

  Etti stood in the room where she had grown up. She saw her father’s chair, she saw the table where her mother had prepared their meals, she saw the two embroidered mats made by her grandmother, the picture her sister Chana had painted as a child; she saw Lena’s shawl on a stranger’s back and Shimon’s shears in a stranger’s hands; she saw this family happy together like her family had once been. To lose everything is painful enough, but to have your losses so brazenly flaunted pushes you to breaking point.

  They told her to leave, but she was about to go anyway. They said the flat was theirs and everything in it. They threatened to call the authorities should she ever return. She would never return.

  If Etti were not crazed with loss and loneliness she might have given up at that point, but still hiding, still under threat, still looking over her shoulder, she continued what had become a dogged habit of survival. And she kept up her search for anyone, family or friend, to give her a future by supplying something of the past. Later she would say it was like living inside a barbed-wire costume.You see everything, and everything causes pain. And you feel so exposed that despite having suffered darkness enough for a lifetime, you find yourself preferring the shade of night.

  Etti remained in Lodz until the middle of May, but none of her family returned. She decided there was no point in waiting any longer, particularly given the fate of most of the Lodz Jews. She left messages with the relief groups operating in the area, did a deal with a Russian which earned her a pair of strong boots, and joined the westward flow. Sometimes she moved in a small group, sometimes a larger one, and no one asked any questions. For like everyone else, she knew that among the masses of Poles and Ukrainians and people from the Baltic states fleeing the Russians were many who had been complicit in the wartime atrocities. Everyone knew, although no one said. These traitors headed west towards Germany and Austria and the DP camps that had been hastily established there, trampling down the dirt of their involvement as they walked, so that in a staggeringly short time they were able to present a pristine and convincing past to the authorities.

  And Etti moves with the flow, feeling the swarm of humans around her. She tries not to think, just pushes herself onwards. As she walks through the warming air her greenish pale skin catches the sun and turns it rough and red. She feels the tight burning, but cannot find the energy to do anything about it. A woman about the same age as her own dead mother hands h
er some cloth; she wraps it round her face, leaving only her eyes free. With her slitted eyes and the cloth over her face she could be anyone. All those months in the hole beneath the barn have shrunk her young woman’s body into a rickety child’s, her small breasts are shrivelled, her limbs tightened to bony sticks, and the months in Lodz have done little to restore her. No one would know her now. She tears off the cloth: to be seen and not recognised is a prospect too awful. The next day she replaces it, not because of her blistering cheeks, but the endless hoping and the endless searching mean endless disappointments.

  Her bones ache when she sits, even more when she lies down, and with the trains so slow she prefers to walk. And the noise of the walkers far preferable to the slow punishment of the train’s clickety-clack: you’re on your own/ no one left/ you’re on your own/ no one left.And how effective the scraping of ill-shod feet to drown out individual complaints, individual losses, individual fears. For she wants no tales of woe, already has quite enough of her own. The background crunch and scrape is comforting, like walking through rushing wind or a busy street – except for the foul coal and slime smell of human dejection which refuses to let her forget even for a moment where she is.

  Now and then a kindly stranger will approach, and when Etti makes no response, the person tries to touch. Can’t abide the touch. No one must come close, no one is allowed to set up home in her heart. She wraps herself in herself and keeps moving. There is nothing more temporary than moving over strange ground, and nothing more permanent than the awful keening of a love searching for absent targets. Etti is only seventeen, survival’s most brutal strategies are tucked beneath her skin; her poor heart is punch-drunk from its incessant throttling. She’ll allow no one to add to her wreckage.

  It does not occur to her to walk into the surrounding woods where she might lie down and die. When you have spent every day of the past several years struggling to survive, you have acquired the habit. You breathe, you eat, you walk, you survive. None of these things is questioned. But she does miss her cow.

  The hole she lived in for six months was much the same size as a ghetto corpse wagon. Enclosed by a trapdoor in the floor of a barn, it had been used to store hay. For six long months this had been her sanctuary. Across the yard in the house were Paul and his wife, together with their five children. Only Paul knew of her existence and for the safety of his family it would remain that way. As he put it: If they don’t know about you then they have no reason to lie.

  It was September 1944 when Etti arrived at Paul’s farm. She had been surviving in the countryside since early July when she had escaped from the ghetto.At that time the ghetto was continuing to function with nearly seventy thousand Jews still alive and working, although Etti’s family was not among them. Her father was dead, and two weeks before she escaped, her two sisters and brother had boarded a train that was supposed to take them to a work camp in Germany; five days later her mother had died from a brain fever. With nothing more to lose and no one left in the ghetto who mattered, the dangers of escaping were stripped of threat.

  And then there was her work. Rumkowski, the leader of the elders in the ghetto, had said that work would save the Lodz Jews and her own father had agreed. But without her sisters beside her, and unable to explain exactly why, her work with the old clothes somehow became entangled with her family’s safety.

  About a year before she escaped the ghetto, Etti, together with her two sisters and mother, had been transferred to one of the old-clothes workshops. At around the same time, her father and brother were removed from the shoemaking workshop where they’d been since the family entered the ghetto in 1940, and assigned to the mountains of shoes in the old-shoe workshop.

  The source of the old clothes and shoes was a mystery, and although there were rumours, so terrible were they, people preferred the mystery. There were clothes of men, women, children and babies. Some clothes were patched and ragged, others were practically new. There were clothes of poor people and others of such exquisite quality that Etti touched with awe. Such a variety of clothes that if you could match them with their owners you might have all of Warsaw or Krakow, even Lodz itself. There was a peculiar chill to know so much about unknown and absent people:who had painful bunions yet had to work the fields, who by their white cuffs never did any work at all; which men had wives to take care of them and which women had husbands who appreciated them.You could learn so much from piles of old clothes but the last thing you wanted to know was the truth.

  When the rumours began to circulate that these were the clothes of dead Jews, no one wanted to believe such a thing, no one could believe, just kept on working – for their lives, so Rumkowski said. Huge containers of clothes brought to the ghetto, enough to keep countless people working, the ghetto Jews sorted, they repaired, they were ordered not to waste a single scrap of these clothes, and neither they did. For their lives.

  It was the shoes that killed Etti’s father, or more specifically a single shoe. Etti was twelve when they first entered the ghetto and growing fast, particularly in the early months when there was more food available. Later, when there was no food and with the rest of her body shrinking, her hands and feet kept on growing, her skull too. Seems that bone can grow on air.

  For small children in the ghetto there were scraps of cloth and leather that could be fashioned into shoes. Adults could replace their shoes from the stock that became available when people died, and there were the ghetto’s wooden clogs. But for those in between like Etti, when her shoes wore out, replacements were hard to find. Her father patched as best he could, reinforcing with upholstery hessian and his father’s tefillin, preserved to the old man’s blessed memory but now turned to more urgent use. But the winter of 1943 was harsh, and despite her careful walking through the ghetto’s unpaved streets, Etti’s shoes broke about her feet. Her father now working in the old-shoe workshop succeeded in stealing a left boot, perfect when stuffed with paper. But two days later when he was caught with a right boot hidden in his jacket, he was shot.

  Murdered for a shoe. These Germans, so scrupulous, so efficient when it came to preserving old shoes and clothes, dispensed so easily with human life. As Etti stood at the long table sorting old clothes, her left foot in a good boot and the other wrapped in rags, it was as if she and the rest of her family, indeed everyone in the ghetto were being made to work like starving people in a kitchen: up to their elbows in what they most needed but would lose their lives if ever they were to take.

  Her father was dead, and before him his mother, and within a month of his death, his mother-in-law. That left Etti, her two sisters, her brother, her mother and a welter of rumours. Many years later Etti would tell her own children that a rumour reveals something which should not have happened but is in fact true. As a girl in the ghetto, though, rather than truths, Etti was aware only of fantastic and improbable stories and tried not to dwell. So when early in the summer of 1944 notices announced that several thousand people from the ghetto were to be resettled at work camps in Germany, despite the thicket of rumours, many people, Etti’s family among them, jumped at the opportunity, believing that anything would be better than the crowded, disease-riddled ghetto with its starving, demoralised inhabitants.

  Such promises these Germans made, of work, of food, of shelter, but all were euphemisms for death. Their ingenuity was breathtaking. They would work you to death. Starve you. Freeze you. Deceive you. Shoot you. Bash you. Hang you. Torture you. Infect you. Gas you. Her two sisters and her brother were taken just a few kilometres to Chelmno where they were crowded into special vans. In the three hundred metres it took for the vans to roll to the mouth of the crematorium, Chana, Lena and Shimon were killed. It was like the clothes, it was like the shoes, everything must be saved except the Jews. And when she heard the truth about her sisters and brother, she knew the truth of the clothes, the clothes she had touched with her own hands, clothes that in her memory felt like human skin.

  Etti did not plan her escape from the g
hetto, rather a never-before-seen opportunity arose and she seized it. It was dusk, before the searchlights were lit, and two guards more interested in a jar of vodka than watching the gates. She saw, she did not think, she ran.

  For the next two months she scuttled through the countryside surviving as best she could. She was lucky it was summer, and fortunate, too, she was blonde. But without the right papers and always on the run, survival exacted a shocking toll.

  When she arrived at Paul’s farm she was broken, starving and exhausted. Whatever Paul wanted in payment he could have, she said, just as long as she could rest for a few days.With that she started at the rags of her jacket, her bony hands picking at the fastenings. A father and good Catholic with a daughter much the same age as Etti, Paul watched horrified as this child offered her scrap of a body. What was God doing that men could be such monsters and children forced into such depravity? Paul told her to fix her clothes, that he wanted nothing from her; he spoke gently so as not to embarrass, then took her to his barn. It wasn’t much, he said as he lifted the trapdoor and showed her the storage hole, but neither could he risk having her in the house.

  He fixed a handle to the inside of the trapdoor so Etti could open it from below – but only at night, Paul said, was she to venture out – and loosened one of the boards so she could slip it sideways to let in some light during the day. He brought clothes to replace her rags, and newspapers to fold between the layers of her clothing. He provided hessian and straw for lining the hole, and the pièce de résistance, a quilt which looked almost new. He was far from being a rich man, he said, but as God had brought Etti to him, it was his duty to take care of her. Nearly every day he left food for her in a tin to protect it from vermin, and after nightfall she would emerge from her hole. She would make a nest with the hay and the quilt, curl into her thin warmth and eat.