Clara's War

by Clara Kramer

  Before the music, we had to endure the speeches. The generals and the commissars pretended they meant them and we pretended we believed them. ‘We must unite in our unanimous opposition to reactionaries.’ ‘Revolutions are the locomotives of history!’ ‘Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.’ ‘Give us your children for ten years and we will give you a true Bolshevik.’

  Mama, Rosa, Uchka and Giza all had the same idiot smile painted on their faces. The entire balcony looked like a collection of frozen statues in a graveyard. Zosia was squirming and Zygush was nudging. Every few minutes Zygush poked me and asked when Mania was going to sing.

  But the moment Mania walked on to the stage, they were still with awe. She looked so slim and fragile, just like a willow. She was just a fraction of the size of the singers who preceded her. Down the row, I could tell that Mama’s asthma was acting up. She could hardly breathe from all the kvelling–bursting with pride times a hundred. And when my little tomboy of a sister opened her mouth, out came a voice so powerful and clear that chills ran up my spine. The winds are howling. The trees are bending. My heart hurts. And the tears are falling by themselves. I could practically hear myself wondering: ‘This is my sister? Is this my sister?’

  Just for a moment everything was perfect. Nobody wanted to be any place else or thinking about anything else. If only she could have kept on singing. I knew as long as her voice, clear as sunlight and imbued with pure emotion, filled this hall, we were safe. And even as I knew all this, I also knew that her song would end and the open hearts of our Soviet masters turn back to stone. How much I loved my sister in that moment.

  The Soviets had no way of knowing that listening to my sister sing would only make us long for the life they were telling us to abandon. Our enemies, the Russian officers and party leaders, ruthless and sentimental, who killed and deported and tortured us, wept as children weep. The applause went on and on and on. Little Mania bowed as she was taught to bow and accepted red carnations from a Russian general. There was talk that night, lots of it, about the career our Mania would have when the war was over. But even as we spoke of the future, I knew the words were hollow. They were meant as a balm to ease the world we would face again tomorrow and the day after.

  When Mania and I lay in bed that night, I told her with all my heart how proud we all were of her. I told her that she surprised us with how wonderful her voice was and that she was able to keep it a secret from us for so long. Even in the darkness, I could see her smiling. I wondered how many other secrets she kept, like the perfect acorns, flower petals and stones Mama always found in the pockets of her dresses.

  Mania was so worn out from the frenzy of her day that she fell asleep before she could finish the ‘night’ in goodnight. But I was sad, on this night of Mania’s triumph. This was my sister and in so many ways she was a stranger. I loved her so much, yet she was a mystery to me. I knew less about her than I did about the characters in the books I read. As much as I wanted to know, I didn’t dare ask her what she had been feeling on stage that night. I know she would just shrug off the question.

  Tomorrow Mania would wake up, reach for her skipping rope and run outside without another thought of the concert. A spring day would be waiting for her outside the door.

  Just weeks after Mania’s aria, the Soviets were no longer seducing us with concerts and the promise of a workers’ paradise. They were now demanding more than mere obedience. They wanted our very minds. Their security apparatus of secret police (the NKVD), spies and informers made you afraid to look at your own reflection for fear of being reported. The terror of deportation was around every corner.

  Friend after friend and their families had disappeared in the middle of the night. Either they were accused of having too much money, or of being Polish loyalists. Or they might be intellectuals, whose minds might dare question what the communists were doing in Zolkiew. Or they might have simply voiced their opposition to communism once 20 years ago in a café conversation. The reason didn’t make any difference, the result was always the same. Families weren’t just deported. They just ceased to exist; they had never existed. By the sundown following their disappearance, Russians were already sleeping in their beds and eating the food in their pantries. I recognized my classmates’ clothes on the Russian daughters and saw Russian sons playing with the toys of their little brothers. My friend Sonia Maresky, from Silesia, was one of the first to be deported with a hundred other Jewish refugees from Austria and the west.

  Mama had decided that if we were to be on the next cattle car to Siberia, at least we would be prepared. Every spare minute was spent sewing knapsacks from green canvas and filling them with woollen socks, underwear and food, and hiding rubles and gold coins in secret compartments. And when the knock would come, and it would surely come, maybe in the hour of our deepest sleep, waking us from a dream into a nightmare, our clan, all 17 of us living in our little stone house, parents, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins would march out with our brand new backpacks.

  Despite the new threat, we adjusted to life under the communists. Only Dzadzio stayed the same. Even after eight months he hadn’t learned to keep his hatred of the Soviets to himself. Mama kept as busy as possible, but she was so worried that my father could no longer reassure her that because of the oil press we wouldn’t be deported.

  My poor father was now working almost 24 hours a day. There were no peasants or anyone in the army that could run the factory so the commissars were forced to let him run it. But they gave him Vasiluk. He was a big lazy Ukranian with some Russian blood who had a thick drooping moustache and did nothing but sit around my father’s office to spy on him. If Vasiluk felt industrious, he would read the newspaper.

  Papa said rubles were worthless. So we used oil instead of money. If I looked out of the window, I could see long lines of people waiting for their ration of oil at the refinery next to the factory. In our kitchen we exchanged the oil from Papa’s factory with the cheese, produce, milk and eggs brought by the peasants. We then exchanged these for flour, sugar, tea and other necessities at the store my friend Genya’s father owned. At least we never lacked for food.

  My grandfather was the first of us to be taken by the Russians. I was in the hospital recovering from appendicitis when an old car had sputtered up to our house with three men dressed in cheap suits and hats pulled over their eyes. As Mama told me how they had taken Dzadzio down the four front stone steps to the waiting car, the image I had of my grandfather seemed to shrink and crumple up like a folded paper doll. There was nothing I could do except weep.

  Once I had learned about Dzadzio, more terrible news was to come. My grandfather wasn’t the only one who had been arrested. The same night, the NKVD had carried out arrests in every city, town, village and shtetl in their newly occupied territory. They had taken into custody every former Polish army officer and government official, as well as dozens of teachers, politicians and intellectuals and businessmen.

  A few days later, I found out from Mama (who was bribing prison guards for information) that Dzadzio’s kidneys hadn’t been withstanding prison conditions and he had been moved to the very hospital where I lay. One day Dzadzio was brought out into the garden, guarded by a couple of armed soldiers. Their crazy assignment was to make sure that this old man in a wheelchair, dressed in a hospital gown with his feet bare, didn’t escape. When my grandfather saw me, his eyes were glassy with tears. All he could say was gey avek, gey avek–go away, go away. His gestured with his hand, over and over, for me to go back inside. I knew he was afraid of what the soldiers might do to me, but I couldn’t stop. I walked over to him and we embraced. I could barely ask him how he was. That was all. There was nothing to say. Nothing to do.

  Even though we weren’t able to speak properly with each other, I was happy just to sit with my grandfather. Over the next couple of days I could tell that our time together had lifted his spirits too. One afternoon, we were sitting in the garden in silence when
two NKVD officers walked over. My grandfather was to go with them. There was no violence in their voices, no malice. To them, he was merely a package with sad eyes. The nurse ran to get the doctor. Dzadzio was in no condition to leave the hospital. Dzadzio smiled at me not to worry. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen on a human being. Then his face went white, and his body started shaking. I screamed, but the guards and the NKVD did nothing, because I was nothing. They loaded my poor dzadzio, in desperate pain, his eyes filled with terror, into the back of a horse-drawn wagon. The doctor argued, but only for a moment and only with half a heart. I backed away, afraid and helpless. They had put my dzadzio on a bed of straw and I was thankful for that. For a long time, I just stood there. As if by the act of standing still, time would stop as well. I knew Mama would bribe the guard again for news. All I could do was to wait for Mama to come and tell me what happened.

  Mama didn’t visit for three long days. When she finally walked into the hospital chapel she looked as if she was in mourning. She had brought me some soup. As she poured the broth into a bowl, she started to talk. The day after Dzadzio had been carted away, a prison guard ran up to our house to tell Mama that her father and the other political prisoners were being marched down to the train tracks. Mama and Uchka had immediately grabbed some rolls to bring to him. They knew he would need food for the long train journey. When they reached the central plaza opposite the castle walls, they saw Dzadzio marching in a line, guarded by Soviet troops. Mama and Uchka threw him the rolls, even after the guards had yelled at them to stop. They were arrested and taken to the jail in the tower. She had just been released this morning. She looked at me with anger in her eyes. ‘Can you imagine, Clarutchka–they didn’t even let him pick up one roll.’

  The knock came for the rest of my family while I was still in hospital. It happened in the middle of the night, but Papa had been across the street at the oil press working, as always. The agents had arrest warrants in the name of Meir Schwarz. Mama could barely get the words out. She didn’t have to say any more, I understood. My father’s family was so religious that they had considered it irrelevant to have their weddings recorded by the state. So even though we went by the name of Schwarz in our day-to-day life, all our official papers, including my birth certificate, bore the name of Gottlieb. My mother was able to show the NKVD these papers, proving that we weren’t the family they were looking for. My mother’s face filled with shame. The others hadn’t been so lucky. The NKVD took my babcia, Uncle Manek, Aunt Rosa, her husband Pinchas and their four children. Uncle Josek and Aunt Giza had been able to hide in the cellar. They had since gone into hiding in Lvov.

  Mama had gone to the train station because this time the Soviets had allowed family members and the Jewish Joint Distribution committee to pass out food, bedding and other supplies to the prisoners. Mama was able to talk to Rosa and the others. Nobody had told them where they were going, how long the journey would take or what would happen to them once they arrived. Mama told me she had had to say goodbye to Babcia as if it were for the last time. We didn’t know if my poor grandmother would survive the journey, let alone what the Soviets would have in store for them at their destination. Rosa tried to console her younger sister, telling Mama that she had done the right thing to save herself. But those words were no comfort for the grief and guilt I saw in Mama’s face.

  It had come to this for our family. The unthinkable. That some of our family would survive, perhaps not at the expense of the others, but with the knowledge that we couldn’t save them. I couldn’t stop crying. All I wanted to do was go home with Mama. I didn’t want to spend another night away from my family. I needed to be in my own bed, to sleep next to my sister and across the room from Mama and Papa. It was the only way I knew we could stay together.

  Mama kept one more secret from me. It was there waiting for me on the back steps of our house when I returned home from hospital. Two children were playing in our yard. She introduced me to Stalina and Volodya Dupak. Stalina was four years old with white-blond hair and so very plump that the witch in Hansel and Gretel would have loved to pop her in the oven. Volodya was my age. I knew him from school. Volodya greeted us formally. He knew I had been in the hospital and inquired after my health.

  Once inside, Mama whispered to me, ‘The sheets from Babcia and Dzadzio’s bed weren’t even dry when they moved in. The father is NKVD.’ Her eyes added, ‘God doesn’t even know if he was the one responsible for deporting Dzadzio.’

  I had tried to prepare myself for the emptiness of our home without my grandparents. Their presence, voices, and laughter, as well as the smell of Grandma’s cooking were things I had lived with every day of my life. Even if they were gone, I had thought that I would at least be able to feel something of them. But now, the door between the two halves of the house, which had never been closed during the day, was shut tight. I shivered at the thought that the NKVD was sleeping in my grandparents’ bed.

  Despite everything, it was a relief to be home. When I met Mr Dupak, with his bland face and thinning blond hair, he had nothing but pleasant smiles for me. And all of us were equally pleasant to him. They were the ideal communist family. They had benefited from the Soviet expansion and were convinced that they were bringing a better life to Zolkiew. Mr Dupak would leave the house in the morning, only to return late at night. His wife kept to herself and our interaction with them was mostly through the kids. The only thing they knew of the war was that their father was powerful and that all the children in town were especially kind to them. Nevertheless we were cautious. Before, we had never given a thought to how loud our voices were. Now, we hardly spoke above a whisper.

  In the middle of June 1940, a letter finally arrived from Aunt Rosa. We had been waiting for news for almost two months, but now Mama seemed afraid to open the envelope. The opening lines put the worst of our fears to rest. They had all survived the journey. They were in Kazakhstan, somewhere in the endless desert of Central Asia, much closer to China than to our home. Rosa wrote that there were hardly any signs of the war; the place was remote and timeless. There were still camel caravans that moved goods from one town market to another. We were all relieved. How protected she must feel by the thousands of kilometres that separated them from the war. She went on to explain that they had just been thrown off the train along with everyone else and been told to find jobs. But there were no jobs. Rosa described how they had been close to starving until Uncle Manek had managed to find a job with an oil-press factory in Aktyubinsk that desperately needed specialists. They moved to the strange city, ready to start a new life. She described how thankful she was that they were together. They had food and shelter and would survive as a family. If only the letter had stopped there.

  Mama continued to read and I watched her face grow taut as she came to the following words. Rosa wrote that her son, Wilek, had also found work in a factory. She described how nervous he had been to start his job without suitable overalls. Rosa had promised to buy him a pair so that he would have the proper work clothes for the next day. But in the first hour of his first day on the job, Wilek’s belt had got caught in the gears of a huge machine. He had been dragged into the machine’s belly, swallowed as if by a beast. Rosa wrote that there hadn’t been enough left of her son for a proper burial. He had been all of 19 years old. Since Rosa’s family had come to live with us in 1939, I’d thought of Wilek as an older brother. He’d only ever been sweet and protective. Mama mourned for her older sister and her nephew. When she looked at Mania and me, I knew she couldn’t help thanking God that it hadn’t been one of her daughters.

  As the summer moved into autumn, I couldn’t count all the changes in our lives under this grey regime. The church bells didn’t ring. The Eagle stopped showing Hollywood films. The Polish patriots we had studied before the occupation were now criminals. People were afraid to go to the synagogues, so Papa had to sneak across the street to Mr Melman’s house where they now held secret minyan. Papa was now an employee. The Russians
had taken over the vegetable-oil business our family had owned for five generations. Nobody talked about anything in public. The nuns in the convent up the street all wore long skirts now instead of their brown habits. We had to wear uniforms to school. Any kosher meat still available was delivered in secret. All the newspapers except the communist ones were closed. Mama was buying up woollen socks and underwear like crazy. The bags under Papa’s eyes were the darkest shade of purple I had ever seen. Mama closed the curtains before we had shabbat dinner.

  I pretended to be a good young communist girl. I was afraid all the time. But the biggest change of all was in Mama. She practically disappeared from our lives. Almost every day she took the bus into Lvov and went to the office of every commissar, party member, every politician she could find, searching for news of Dzadzio. She would come home sometimes late at night, sometimes not for days, but always with the weight of defeat and exhaustion on her shoulders. They took Papa’s money, made promises and then didn’t even let Mama back in their offices. I knew she loved her father. I only wished Dzadzio, wherever he was, could see just how much.