When I finish, Frau is staring out from tiny eyes, and her lips are pinched into a straight line.
“We need someone to teach the other children how to speak and write German,” she says at last. “Unfortunately, since Berlin will not be sending any new teachers until our dormitory is full, for now you will have to do.”
“I am too young to be a teacher.” I do not want to teach. I want to play.
Behind her, Nurse shakes her head—a warning, perhaps.
“But I will do what is required.” I try to sound contrite, but even to me the words sound false. I should stop there, but I can’t help myself—I have to know. “Why don’t the older girls teach them?”
“They have their own lessons to learn. They have their own teacher.”
“Will I be having that? I was told that I would have special instructions.”
“Some girls are designed for greatness, and others designed for purpose.”
These words are confusing to me, but I don’t ask, in case I sound stupid.
“I would like to learn how to be great,” I say, though I have no idea what that means.
“We shall see. I am hoping that you have learnt your lesson. From now on we only converse in German. If you didn’t speak it, you would have been on a truck to a place full of dysentery long ago,” she says, smiling like a cat. Any more smug, Dragos would say, and she might start to lick her own genitals.
Nurse nods in agreement. “You should count yourself very lucky.”
“Frau Haus,” I ask in my soft voice, “I was wondering if I might pen a letter to my family to let them know that I am well and happy.” I will of course tell them that this place is run by morons and monsters.
“We do not allow letters; however, we do send progress reports to your mother.” I imagine the letter:
Dear Frau Steuben, your daughter is in need of food, locked in a cold room without a warm blanket, and beaten regularly for asking questions. But she has learnt her lesson and is very happy to be here. Frau Haus
Catarina would perhaps be pleased. Perhaps she would think this outcome just.
Nurse returns with another blanket and the Führer’s book again, called Mein Kampf.
“It is an important book to read from. Every morning you must recite to me a paragraph by heart.”
She tells me that the children I will be instructing must learn it, also.
“You must spend several more nights in here while you read the book, and then you can join the others.”
More nights! Hure. I squeeze my lips together so that the word cannot escape.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ELSI
I have seen the stranger before. He is tall and long-legged, with strawberry-fair hair, and always seems in a hurry, but today he waits at the front of the building where I have recently started work. I have a job sewing badges onto shirts. For that I will receive coupons for goods. Mama is back working in the laundry—to replace someone who has died.
When I begin to walk home, the tall man falls into step with me. I button my coat as I go, cold nipping at my fingers.
“Hello,” he says. “I know you.”
“Do you?” I say shyly, surprised. I wear a hat not to protect me from the cold winds but because of my hair, which is barely an inch long all over. I begged Mama to leave some. Mama borrowed Lilli’s scissors and cut my sister’s hair, too. Leah did not fare so well, though she did not complain as much.
“Yes. You are Elsi.”
“How did you know?”
He shrugs. “I know things.”
I am going through the list of people I have met in the ghetto. I have not made too many friends because of how quickly circumstances change. I made friends with a girl who lived here once, and we might have become close. We used to sit in the stairwell and talk. She told me that her father was a teacher, and when they first came here he would teach her the things she otherwise would have learned at school. When I went to her apartment a few weeks ago, there was no one there. The neighbors said that after her young brother was deported, the family disappeared. It is like that in the ghetto. People come and go, move to other places, vanish. Sometimes one or two relatives, sometimes whole families.
“I’m Simon,” the man says. He holds out his hand, and I take it formally in mine; his skin is cool and smooth, and his grip is firm.
We stop walking. I look around to see if he is alone, or if we are being watched or followed. It is habit now.
“Where do you live?” I say, and then wonder if I should be asking this.
“Around there,” he says, pointing in a direction I can’t discern, his finger moving too fast in the air. “I remember watching you at the theater group. My brother was also part of it. I would come in and watch you rehearse sometimes.”
I redden, knowing he has seen a different side of me. Several groups came to watch from time to time, but I took little notice, too self-absorbed.
“You were wonderful. Do you think you will act again, when you are out?”
“I hope so.” The way he says “when you are out” means that he is an optimist. Such people are getting harder to find. “Who is your brother?”
“Was,” he says. “Gustav died shortly after we arrived here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I remember a boy with that name.”
He shrugs.
There is silence, and I can see that people are rushing home around us.
“I should be going,” I say.
“Yes, you should. If ever you are looking for something else to do, you should come and visit our group. My friends and I meet every week to talk about the ghetto and improvements we would like to make.”
I look up the street and see that several soldiers are stopping people randomly to ask questions. I turn back to Simon, relieved that he has slowed me down. This has given me an opportunity to take a detour. Sometimes the soldiers find reasons to punish even if there aren’t any.
“Where does the group meet?”
“Somewhere secret.”
I am relieved that it is behind closed doors because the Gestapo does not like meetings.
“Once you have permission from your father, no?” he says.
“My father isn’t here.”
“The camps?”
I nod.
“I see.”
“And yours?”
“I haven’t seen any of my family for months. I don’t know where they are. I don’t think they are coming back.” He says this casually, as if he is already resigned. “That doesn’t mean they won’t or that your papa won’t. I’m just not going to wait. There are too many things to do.”
I am about to ask what things, but remember that Papa always said I often speak before I think, and I should learn restraint. I will perhaps ask later because he is interesting, and I am keen to know what he does to fill his days.
I look again toward the guards, who are not far away now. They have not yet noticed us.
“We shouldn’t be talking, not in the street. I should go.”
“Yes, Elsi, you should. Maybe one day after work you can walk with me to where our group meets.”
I think about this.
“Perhaps.” I decide not to tell Mama, who will tell me to stay away from him.
“Good-bye, Elsi! May God and good watch over you.”
I watch him go. He wears a flat cap and a black coat and walks briskly, disappearing quickly from the main street.
I walk fast down Brzezinska Street. There has been talk of roundups being made to stop the dissent that has been rising among the Jews. I suspect this is why people are being stopped in the street this evening. Those “troublemakers,” as they are known, are taken from their homes at any time of day or night, from workplaces, from the soup line, or the community washroom. They are told to gather all their possessions. Sometimes they are taken with just the clothes on their backs. Sometimes the Jewish police deport them immediately. Sometimes the Gestapo arrives: senior officials dressed in fine tailor
ed jackets and polished boots and badges that mean nothing to any of us. They stuff their pockets with stolen money and jewelry first, before taking their victims to places unknown.
Searches have happened in our apartment building. They are happening everywhere. Mama cannot take the door knocking. Any sound makes her jump. Mama and I always walk fast along the street. You must never stop in the street and talk for too long to people you know. Idle people are more noticeable. Conversation is best made behind closed doors. Conspiracy is a punishable offense.
When Mama passes people she knows, salutations are brief and questions remain trivial and nonpolitical, as anyone could be listening. Eyes wander over one another warily. Are they on our side? This is what we have become: suspicious of our own people. It is what the Nazis want.
Last week a fire started at the back of a plastics factory that, along with a second building, almost burned to the ground. The Gestapo says that the fire was deliberately set. They are thinking of changing the curfew to five o’clock. The guards have become more alert, and they patrol the streets more frequently. Lilli says they have been told to look at us closely. To see if they can see the word spy written across our faces.
As I near our building, I see a family on the footpath. They hold some saucepans that they want to sell. I have seen them before. They move around to various locations. They are always told to leave. Last time they were here was weeks ago. Their faces are emaciated, their eyes fixed; they have the look of the starved. I notice that the youngest child is missing. There was frost on the window this morning, and I wonder how they coped with the night. I shivered for most of it. Mama was visiting Lilli today to see if she had any spare coal, as the nights become colder.
There are more homeless on the street. It is a worrying sight. It means the ghetto buildings will burst at the seams. We surely cannot fit in any more.
A thick cloud of smoke hangs above the city. Someone yells that there is another fire. There are whistles in the distance. A fire truck speeds down the center of the road, narrowly missing an elderly man who is crossing. One more life gone would not make a difference.
“Move!” says the officer. “Away from here!” The officer is speaking from behind me to the beggars on the street. Begging looks untidy to the Gestapo. The family is near the main street that visiting officials drive on.
When we first arrived in the ghetto, Leah and I would play board games on the stairs and on the footpath with other children from the building. We were hungry and cold, but we kept our hope. Papa, Mama, Leah, and I would spend a lot of time together in the apartment. The toilets did not work in the building, and we had to line up for the public amenities. Even this I didn’t mind at first, because it was an opportunity to see people we knew. The guards scared me, but I did not think that they would harm us, not if we kept to ourselves.
Leah and I would play skipping games with string, also, even though I was too old for such things, and sometimes we would sing at nighttime, but we don’t do that anymore. We are too tired to play and too hungry to talk for long.
Papa left the second month we were here. He was large and strong, exactly what the Germans wanted. We have not seen or heard from him in well over a year. I miss him and the scent of timber on his clothes. I imagine him coming in, brushing sleet from his shoulders as he takes off his hat and shakes out his hair.
Mama doesn’t talk of him much anymore. After he had gone, she sat by the window for days watching for his return. They’d had nineteen years of glances and touches, something that belonged only to them. I am hoping that one day I will share the same with someone I love.
We have stopped asking the Judenrat if Papa is coming back. At first we were checking every few days, and they would tell us that he was not on their list to return, though they couldn’t be sure of anything. They know as little as we do, but they like to pretend that they are more important, that they are privy to much more information. Mama went to the Gestapo, also, thinking they would know more, but they sent her away and told her not to come back.
There are no curtains to close. It takes five long steps to get from the kitchen to the three beds. Mama and Leah share a bed now. Leah can’t stand to be alone. Sometimes when Mama is too tired or not feeling well, Leah will sleep with me. Leah doesn’t talk about our old house anymore. For her, those memories are disappearing. But I remember the freedom clearly—the walks to the park, the shops, the little theater, Marta’s place, and my other friends. How Leah and I each had a bedroom, and how there were thick rugs on the floor and a garden out back. How we had lace curtains and so much food. Small things that I never really noticed. Until now.
It was so cold during our first winter in the ghetto that we would join our mattresses on the floor and lie together with all the blankets over us. One of us on either side of Mama, snuggling up to take some of her warmth, when she had so little herself.
In the mornings Mama would light a fire in the wood heater to boil some water and hand out slices of bread. Sometimes there was tea, but it eventually ran out. Mama would buy honey, which did not taste like honey, and biscuits with real money on the black market, and we would dip the biscuits in hot water and honey. Such biscuits, dry and hard, would have been considered flavorless before the war. Now they are much sought after.
After that, Mama tried looking for work. She worked for a short time at the laundry before someone else was given her job, and then eventually back there again. That was where she met Lilli, whose clothes she was employed to wash.
Then when the cold eased and the heat came, it was nearly as bad. The smell of sewerage was so strong we sometimes had to shut our window even on very hot days.
I saw my first dead body just after Papa left. I knew there had been public executions in a courtyard nearby, but we avoided that area as much as possible.
On the way back from the soup line, we discovered an old man lying on the cobbles, still wearing his thick coat in the midday sun. Mama said he was homeless. I did not know that there were those without apartments, and the horror of realizing that we were some of the luckier ones was even more abhorrent, even more soul destroying.
“Don’t look,” said Mama. But it was too late. His face was gaunt, his skin gray and mottled.
“Mama, why?”
“Shh! Wait till we get home. Don’t draw attention.” I tried not to cry, but the tears were about to flood my cheeks, and Mama made us walk faster to try and beat my tears. Mama told us later that it is likely the man had died of starvation.
Leah didn’t cry, but she put her hands over her ears so that she couldn’t hear Mama talking. Sometimes it is better not to hear.
I quickly stopped thinking of the ghetto as a place for temporary adventure and rather as a place of barbarity that I must sustain indefinitely. Mama says that the ghetto chips away at our souls, at the life within, and she is sorry that this is happening. It is true what people say: fatigue and hunger can turn people inward to shut out the world around them. Even Mama doesn’t watch us anymore, does not ponder our futures; now she thinks too much about the horrors that surround us, wondering how we will survive the rest of that day.
Darkness creeps into the ghetto long before dusk, and the cold creeps in between the cracks. On the floor surrounding the heater are splinters of wood and a trail from where Mama has carried some wood to light a fire. I watch the fire die down to an orange glow. Mama is more distracted than usual and does not seem to hear when I ask her questions. She is feeling restless about something tonight, and her hands are shaking.
She says she does not want to talk in front of Leah. I sing to Leah until she falls asleep.
Mama then tells me what she saw from our window. It was an execution—another one—this time over a piece of bread. She saw someone put the victim on a trolley and wheel him to the front gate.
The man who was executed had a loaf of bread wrapped in paper, which he must have bought on the black market. He did not hide it well. He was stopped by the Gestapo, and his
answers seemed to infuriate the interrogators. They accused him of stealing it.
The man then handed the bread to the Gestapo and walked off. “Take it!” he shouted, shaking his head in frustration. He began to walk away, and one of the policemen called for him to stop. But he didn’t. The policeman then raised his rifle and shot him through the back. The shooter walked over and kicked the man hard, but he didn’t flinch, which could only mean that he was dead.
“And then do you know what they did?” said Mama. “The murderers ate the bread. It made me so sick, I clutched my stomach as if my breath had suddenly been stolen from me, as if I could feel the bullet myself.”
She is trembling, and I put my arm around her. I am wondering if the ghetto has finally broken her, whether her nerves will ever recover.
“Mama, it is not the first time. You have seen this before. You must not get so upset. We have not done anything wrong. No one will kill us for doing nothing.”
“The young man was Imran, from the apartment below us.”
I am shocked. I have seen him many times. He is a little older than I am and always running errands for his parents, who live in the apartment with him. Mama has often commented that he leaves the apartment most nights to make deliveries. It is perhaps more shocking that this has happened because they are people we speak to every day. The ghetto suddenly seems much smaller.
“I can’t take it anymore,” she says. “All this death. Your father gone.”
I am thinking of Simon, and I say, “We will be out of here one day, Mama, and we will be free to live as before. You’ll see.”
“Oh, Elsi, what would I do without you? You are a shining light.”
I look into Mama’s eyes. Once a vibrant hazel, they have grown duller in the past few months to reflect the colors of the ghetto buildings.
Mama knocks on Imran’s apartment, but there is no one there. We open the door to find that the place is in darkness, chairs overturned, Imran’s parents missing. When we tell Lilli, she says that the bread was probably just an excuse to kill him. They were probably watching him, though for what reason she couldn’t say. There are too many reasons. We have stopped trying to understand.
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