The Earth Is Singing

by Vanessa Curtis

  The child’s face crumples to scarlet and she howls in fear and pain.

  Omama’s face lights up like the inside of the Doma laukums in our beloved old town.

  “I can see we’re going to get along just fine,” she announces.

  And that is how we come to share our apartment with three complete strangers.

  We establish a routine of sorts.

  We have to, or we would all trip over one another and tempers would fray. Mama sits up late one night and composes our rotas. There is a rota for who uses the toilet and the kitchen sink first in the morning. There is a rota for who makes the supper and who puts together the meagre breakfast. There is a rota for who goes out to queue for weekly rations.

  The sleeping arrangements are as follows:

  Mama, Omama, Sascha and I now sleep in the main room together. We call it “The Girls’ Room”. When the four of us are lying in our makeshift beds on the wooden floorboards, there seems very little air or space left in the room.

  Max sleeps in the tiny box room where Omama used to sleep. There is only enough room for one person there so Janis sleeps on the floor of the kitchen, rolled up in a blanket and with his jacket folded up for a pillow.

  It is hard to get to sleep, what with Omama muttering and cursing in her sleep, Mama coughing, Janis snoring and Sascha crying or being sick.

  The only one who makes no noise is Max. I have yet to work him out. We haven’t exchanged one word since he moved in.

  There is also an unwritten agreement that our new tenants must contribute to the food pot in any way that they can. Janis and Max have got a non-Jewish friend on the outside of the ghetto who passes in the opposite direction to their work column and slips them food at a particular point on their march to the army warehouse once every three days. In this way we get carrots, onions and more rotten potatoes, anything small and round which can be concealed in an inside pocket or a hand, but it helps to supplement our tiny rations from the ghetto grocer’s shops.

  Janis and Max also get black bread and sometimes cheese or a piece of hard sausage at the place where they work and they eat some and risk smuggling the rest. This is very dangerous as the guards still search people on arrival back at the ghetto gates, but starving people take risks.

  We all do. Mama still hides black bread in her mouth, between her breasts and once even somewhere far more horrible.

  Her face was full of shame and self-disgust.

  It is what we have to do to survive.

  Sascha is too little to smuggle food but even she knows how to rummage through the piles of garbage that mount up behind the ghetto houses and once she came in triumphant with half a loaf of mouldy bread and something which at first looked like a pile of droppings, but turned out to be some ancient peas.

  We share our hoard at the end of every day. If we hear the SS bursting into the houses nearby for one of their random Jew-checks, we throw all the food and dishes into the lavatory and shut the lid. The SS do not like to touch anything which may be riddled with germs or disease. When the risk has passed we get it all out again and wipe off the worst of the damage before eating the meal as planned.

  Just a few weeks ago the thought of doing this would have seemed disgusting.

  But I am no longer the Hanna Michelson who lived in the beautiful villa in Rīga or even the temporary apartment on Skārņu iela. The Hanna who loved Uldis and believed that he loved her back. The Hanna with a pretty best friend named Velna and a kind Uncle Georgs. The Hanna who dreamed of becoming a famous ballet dancer on the stage of the Rīga Opera.

  How did I lose so much in so little time?

  I am not the same Hanna any more.

  The barbed wire fences and gates around the ghetto are nailed into position on 25th October.

  On the way back from work Mama reads out the sign at the ghetto gates.

  Those who try to climb across the fence or try to communicate with the ghetto internees will be shot down without warning.

  “We are like animals trapped in a zoo,” I say.

  We are back in our apartment. From here we can’t quite see the main ghetto gate but we can see the command post at the end of our street. We are watching the guards who pace up and down here. Some of them are SS, some Latvian and now we have our own Jewish Ghetto Police who are there to keep order. They wear caps and uniforms with a blue Star of David on them.

  “Worse,” says Omama. She ignores Mama’s sharp look. I guess Omama knows that I have had to grow up pretty fast over the last year. It is impossible to hide the truth from me any longer. “Animals in a zoo would be fed twice a day with fresh meat. And they would not be shot.”

  As night falls the temperature drops.

  “Winter is starting early this year,” says Mama. She plugs up the gaps around our windows with bits of fabric from her sewing basket but still our breath freezes on the air inside the main room. “I don’t remember it starting at the end of October in quite this way before.”

  Tonight feels different. This time last week we could still have got out of the ghetto if we had wanted to risk our lives and try to hide back in the old town. Visitors were still finding their way in with food and aid. Non-Jewish friends and relatives visited the old people’s home or the hospital.

  Now we are sealed off in this island crammed to the limits with homeless Jews.

  There are thirty thousand of us in the ghetto. All crammed into sixteen blocks.

  It feels different, the night they seal the ghetto.

  I feel different too. All the lasts bits of my innocence have been stripped away, never to return. And I feel more determined, which is odd because I am also suffering a rising rush of fear and anxiety about how we will survive in here on our cut-off island.

  I promised Papa that I would look after my family. And I promised myself that whatever happens I will try to get out of here alive so that I can find Papa.

  There are some things I can’t control, though.

  I wake in the middle of the night with my teeth chattering. Over the noise of Janis snoring from the kitchen and Mama coughing in her sleep, I hear muffled noise from the street outside, as if it is coming from Omama’s forbidden radio buried underneath a pile of blankets.

  I ease myself up from the floor, stiff with the cold. There are freezing draughts of air coming in through the gaps in the window frame so I wrap myself in a blanket and pull aside Mama’s curtains.

  Outside, an SS vehicle is making its way down Ludzas iela. The muffled noise was its tyres crunching along a mass of white.

  A mass of swirling flakes takes my breath away.

  The twenty-fifth of October.

  The day they seal the ghetto.

  The day the first snow comes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We establish our routine and we stick to it for nearly four weeks.

  I can’t remember living any other way.

  My life is now that of an adult worker. I get up at five, wash with dirty water, gulp a cup full of weak black coffee and eat any small hard piece of bread that we might have managed to put by.

  Janis has to get up, visit the toilet and then return to the kitchen so that Mama and I, as the female workers, can get ourselves ready in what little privacy we have left. He sits by the sink, his eyes red-rimmed from cold, and feeds Sascha with whatever he can find.

  Max comes in from his box room, white from lack of sleep and with dark shadows around his eyes. He is sixteen but some mornings looks sixty.

  I expect I look this way too.

  I try to avoid looking in the dirty mirror if I can help it. I know that my plump olive-skinned cheeks are sallow and sharp and that my hair is lank and greasy from no proper shampoo.

  I lie in bed at night trying to recall if I was pretty or not. Sometimes I think of Uldis and my heart misses a beat. I can’t forgive his betrayal and the way in which he manipulated me into telling him where we were hiding, but a persistent little voice in my head reminds me that it was I who told him where t
o find us. And somewhere buried even deeper underneath the guilt is still a tiny shred of belief that Uldis can’t truly be all bad. I torture myself with images of the friendship we used to have before the war even started. He smiles down at me in broad sunlight. He teases me with that slow, lazy look in his eye. That insolent grin.

  Then I see the crumpled bodies of my aunt and uncle and sometimes I stuff a handkerchief in my mouth so as to muffle the sound of my crying and silently I pray that they might forgive me for my actions.

  I am starting to loathe Uldis Lapa.

  How could such a good friend turn so rotten right down to his very core?

  Although I feel sick when I think about him, I still feel compelled to look out for Uldis when I march to and from my workplace. I never see him.

  It’s probably a good thing. I am not sure I could control my anger. And he probably wouldn’t recognize the new, dirty, skinny and ungroomed Hanna who looks like she needs a good scrub with soap and water.

  We all do. There is only that one rusty sink and the water comes out brown or grey but never clear like you’d want it to. Mama rations out the bars of soap she brought from home. The sharp clean pine smell makes tears of homesickness rush up to my eyes.

  As well as feeling dirty, I am constantly hungry. My stomach produces sick, sour acid which rushes up into my mouth and my guts rumble all the time. I have started to take stupid risks, trading with non-Jewish visitors to the Heereskraftpark during my lunch break. Everybody does it, but depending on which member of the SS is patrolling the workshops you can get fined, beaten, robbed of lunch, or even shot. Some of the officers from the Wehrmacht are more understanding and do not mind if we slip a piece of lunch bread in our pockets.

  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?

  Chapter Sixteen

  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.