Elzunia looked at Rahela and sighed. How romantic to defy danger and live together, and, if necessary, die together. Her mind slipped into her fantasy about the Polish airman whose moody face often invaded her waking dreams. Time had intensified her feelings and endowed him with more heroic qualities. Daydreaming about him lifted her from her surroundings and her terror, and enabled her to envisage a future. She saw herself fighting by his side and earning his admiration —
Edek disturbed her reverie by nudging her. ‘You look as if you’re in a trance. Why is it that you girls can’t concentrate on anything for long?’ he hissed. ‘They’ve just asked for a show of hands.’
By the time the meeting ended, they had agreed to form the Organisation of Jewish Fighters. The name alone gave them confidence. They were part of an army now, activists not victims. The revelation that their arsenal consisted of one pistol didn’t discourage anyone. That they had no funds, no weapons and no safe way of smuggling arms into the Ghetto were no longer insuperable problems but challenges to be solved. Caught up in the general euphoria, Elzunia’s eyes shone. Now she would have her chance to fight back.
Ever since the deportations had begun, Stefan had kept away from home, and on the rare occasions he appeared, he said very little. He felt sickened by what he saw every day and disgusted with his own weakness at not resigning from the service, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. He still tried to comfort himself with the thought that his position would protect his family but, as the days passed, he doubted his ability to do this more and more.
He had become less communicative than ever, so Elzunia and Lusia were surprised when he dropped in one evening and told them to listen carefully to what he said.
‘Since those notices have been plastered all over the streets telling people to ignore the order for resettlement, the Germans have got tougher. From now on, having the right documents or being related to someone in the Jewish police force won’t protect anyone, so you’ll have to watch out or you’ll be caught,’ he said. As he spoke, he realised the futility of his warning. He wished he could say or do something that would help them but knew that in the end there was nothing he could do to even save himself.
He turned to his mother. ‘Get a job at one of the German workshops. They’re not likely to deport people making uniforms for their soldiers.’
Elzunia was drawing cats for Gittel on the back of one of the subversive notices and slipped it under an exercise book when Stefan looked in her direction. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘you’d better spend as much time at the hospital as you can.’
Lusia’s eyes flashed. ‘They’re hunting people down like wild beasts. Do you really think they’re going to respect workshops and hospitals?’
Something in his mother’s sharp tone jogged Stefan’s memory. Rifling in the pocket of his jacket, he held out the trinket he’d been given.
‘I forgot to give you this. It’s from an old woman I met a couple of weeks ago. She said it was for you.’
Lusia’s hand trembled and the colour drained from her face as she recognised the small sapphire ring she had admired as a child.
‘It’ll come in handy,’ said Stefan who didn’t notice the look on his mother’s face. ‘Everyone’s running around in a panic trying to get work in a German factory. You might be able to bribe a factory manager with this and get a job.’
Lusia didn’t appear to have heard him. ‘What did she look like?’
He shrugged. ‘She was old. Grey hair, wrinkled face, that sort of thing.’
‘Did she say anything else?’ she asked in a voice that was almost inaudible.
‘Not that I can remember.’
Clutching the ring, she reached out and clasped his hand. ‘Stefan, I have to know. You have to tell me. How did she come to give it to you? Where did you meet her? Where is she now?’
His mother’s face was white. Stefan hadn’t expected such an emotional reaction, but, thinking back, he remembered that there was something familiar about the old woman’s expression. Now he knew why. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t bear to describe the scene in the Umschlagplatz or the one at the cattle train.
His mother was tugging his arm. ‘You have to tell me. Where can I find her?’
Stefan swallowed. ‘When I saw her, she was in one of those trains heading east.’
Elzunia saw her mother sink into a chair and bury her face in her hands. ‘What is it, Mama?’ she asked, alarmed. ‘Who was that woman?’
Lusia looked up but didn’t reply. She had the fixed stare of someone who had seen a phantom materialise in an empty room. The ring was a dying fire that consumed painful memories, leaving nothing but ashes. Without realising it, in one corner of her mind she had clung to the hope that one day she and her parents would be reconciled, but it was too late now and they would never be reunited.
Elzunia saw Stefan looking at their mother with a mixture of compassion and shame, and in that moment she understood who that woman was and why her brother was so uncomfortable. From the upstairs window of the hospital she could see the Umschlagplatz, and was sickened by what she saw. The fact that her own brother was involved added to the disgust and horror she felt whenever she happened to look down.
She looked anxiously at her mother, who was still sitting in frozen silence. So that woman had been her grandmother. Elzunia had never heard her mother speak about her parents, and now she felt a sense of loss that she had never known her maternal grandparents.
With a deep sigh, Lusia passed the ring to Elzunia and clasped her daughter’s hand. ‘I want you to have it,’ she said. ‘I hope it brings you luck.’
It was still warm from her mother’s touch, and, as it brushed against her skin, Elzunia sensed that it had forged a closer bond between them. She shook her head. ‘Stefan’s right. You should use it to get work in one of the German factories.’
Lusia nodded dully. While she was staring out of the window, lost in her thoughts, Elzunia walked with her brother towards the door.
‘I don’t understand why you’re still with them,’ she whispered. ‘It’s disgraceful. Why don’t you quit?’
They often argued about his role as a policeman, but this time she had an additional reason for drawing him aside. ‘Do you realise that the OJF regards the Jewish police as collaborators?’
‘Am I supposed to be scared of a mob of kids playing at being heroes?’ he scoffed.
She was about to make a stinging retort but something in his expression silenced her. ‘Stefan,’ she said quietly, ‘I’m worried for you.’
He nodded, gave her arm a hasty pat, and walked out the door.
After Stefan left, Elzunia hurried to an urgent meeting called by the Organisation of Jewish Fighters, or OJF as they now called themselves. ‘This is Maks,’ Itzak said, introducing the speaker. ‘He has a very important story to tell.’
‘I’m a messenger from hell,’ Maks began in a voice that shook so much that his large shaven head wobbled on his thin neck.
Edek and Elzunia looked at each other, not sure how to take his dramatic words.
‘I’ve come back to let you know what’s awaiting you at the end of the train journey, so you can stop deluding yourselves,’ Maks said. ‘If you find it hard to believe, all I can tell you is that I can hardly believe it myself. And I was there.’
For the next hour they listened, mesmerised and incredulous. As he spoke, they heard the wagon doors clanging shut, and felt the searing heat in the cattle truck where people were jammed in so tightly that there was no room to move. They felt the panic as people became hysterical, screamed, wept and fainted. They saw the young father who kept his arm over his small son to protect him from being suffocated by the crowd pressing in on them, but who was unable to keep his arm up any more, passed out and fell forward, suffocating the child with his own body.
Elzunia swallowed. Like a man possessed, Maks described a place called Treblinka with its savage dogs, whip-wielding guards and the smell of death
blowing from chimneys that spewed black smoke day and night.
A shudder ran through the silent room. So this was the resettlement they’d been promised. Their eyes were glued to his bony face as they struggled to comprehend the machinery of death he was describing. It was inconceivable that in Europe in 1942 a civilised nation was murdering thousands of innocent people every day with such systematic, cold-blooded efficiency.
Maks had been fortunate. Instead of being sent to the gas chambers as soon as he arrived, he’d been selected to sort the belongings of the doomed, but he soon realised that his reprieve would be short-lived, and hid under a mountain of clothes being sent by train to Germany. ‘The last sorter who tried to escape got caught and ripped to pieces by the dogs,’ he said, ‘but I had nothing to lose. If I stayed, they would have killed me anyway. I could have run away when the train got to Warsaw and tried my luck on the Aryan side of town, but I was convinced that my life had been spared so I could come back to the Ghetto and warn you.’
Exhausted by recounting his ordeal, he sank into a chair, mopping his face. No one wanted to break the long silence that followed. They didn’t want to believe him but knew he told the truth. Their ultimate destination was resettlement in the other world.
Itzak rose and faced them. ‘Czerniakow must have found out the truth. We have to warn everyone and resist however we can,’ he said slowly. ‘Somehow we have to get hold of weapons and ammunition. I’ll make contact with the Polish Underground. Perhaps they’ll help us.’
A week later, Edek smuggled in a copy of the Information Bulletin, an Underground newsletter published by the AK.
‘Have a look at this,’ he told Elzunia. ‘It’s an open letter addressed to the Ghetto. It says, Fight them, whatever the cost. Resist the police. Don’t wait for them to kill you. Each of your homes should become a fortress.’
While Elzunia enthused about the article, Edek said, ‘That’s all very well, but fine words won’t fire any bullets. Talk is cheap. I want to see guns and grenades but I can’t see the Poles helping us.’
‘But listen to this,’ she said and read on in an excited voice. ‘Whoever remains silent in the face of murder is an accessory. The duty of Poles is to help the persecuted Jews. Every day, six or seven thousand Jews are deported to the east. What their fate is, no one knows but it’s obvious that the Ghetto is being liquidated. Only scoundrels or fools don’t realise that after the Jews it will be our turn to be deported east. Poles must help Jews to resist the hideous plans of our mutual torturers.’
She turned to Edek. ‘Whoever wrote that article really understands what’s going on and wants to help us,’ she said. ‘If the AK did supply us with weapons, and the people outside the Ghetto joined us, we’d have a hope of defeating the Germans, wouldn’t we?’
Her eyes were shining with hope and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that what he had heard gave little ground for optimism.
Twenty-Three
On a sunny August afternoon in 1942, while the deportations were still taking place, Elzunia happened to look out of an upstairs window of the hospital. Down in the Umschlagplatz, a bald man with a neatly trimmed brown beard and round glasses was walking at the head of a long column of children. No! she wanted to cry out. Not him! Not them! Dr Korczak was walking at the head of his charges, a tall, stately figure, ramrod straight, not looking right or left as he strode ahead, holding two children by the hand. Behind him, accompanied by the orphanage staff, came the rest of the children, some clutching their rag dolls or teddy bears, others waving paper pennants that fluttered in the light summer breeze. One of the older boys held aloft the green flag that Dr Korczak had designed for the orphanage.
The square was already crowded but, as soon as the line of children approached, people moved aside to make room for them to pass. Sitting back in his rickshaw, surveying the scene, was the commander of the Umschlagplatz, who, like a Roman emperor, could spare a man’s life or sentence him to die by one casual gesture of his thumb. At a signal from him, the guards surrounded Dr Korczak and the children.
A moment later, one of the Jewish policemen ran up to the doctor and, from the urgent way he was gesticulating towards the man in charge of the deportations, it looked as though he was pleading with the doctor. Dr Korczak listened but his calm demeanour didn’t change. He pointed to the children and shook his head. From the gestures and expressions, Elzunia sensed that the doctor had been offered a chance to save himself, but had refused to abandon his orphans.
The matron called her but she couldn’t move from the window. It was as though her shoes had been nailed to the floor. She couldn’t bear to look at the scene below but she couldn’t tear herself away. Surely they wouldn’t kill the famous children’s author and educationist. Surely not even the Germans would pack two hundred children into wagons and murder them in gas chambers. Surely any moment someone would realise the mistake and turn them back.
Dr Korczak’s glasses glinted in the sunlight as he turned to the children and together with his assistant arranged them in rows of four. When they were all lined up, they made their way across the Umschlagplatz towards the train. Ignoring the cordon of guards on either side, the old doctor seemed to be chatting to his charges as though they were on an excursion. The sound of the children’s voices floated up to Elzunia and she could hear them mimicking the rhythm of a locomotive as they chanted a poem about a train.
Silence fell over the square. In the weeks since the deportations had begun, over 100,000 people had been deported amid screams, panic and chaos, but there had never been a scene like this.
Elzunia’s throat swelled and she couldn’t swallow. She watched the children walking confidently with their protector, as though on their way to a picnic. She didn’t doubt that he would continue to reassure them throughout the journey, until the very last moments, after the door of the gas chamber slammed shut behind them.
She was still trembling when she went back to the patients. What was happening here was beyond words, beyond tears, beyond human comprehension. No one who hadn’t witnessed it could possibly believe it. If only she had a pistol or a grenade to blow up those barbarians. How long before the Polish Underground supplied them with weapons? And where was the rest of the world? Surely they knew what was going on. Why was no one doing anything to stop this slaughter? Where was the League of Nations with all the lofty ideals that she’d learned about in school? Didn’t anyone care?
Usually she was able to bring a smile to some of the sad faces in the children’s ward but this morning’s ward round only deepened her depression. She saw death hovering above the beds. She looked at the swollen, deformed bodies of the malnourished children staring at her with huge solemn eyes in their old faces, and wondered what was the point of trying to keep them alive.
Dr Maryla Sztejn, who was in charge of the hospital, noticed her downcast expression and took her aside. With her frizzy grey hair and a face that was a network of intersecting lines, Dr Sztejn looked like a typical grandmother but her purposeful gait and decisive manner belied her years and inspired her staff.
‘One day you’ll look back and realise that we practised superhuman medicine here, and you’ll feel proud of what you did,’ she said.
‘I can’t see the point any more,’ Elzunia said.
The doctor put her arms around Elzunia’s shoulders. ‘As long as we live, our job is to fight for these children and make their lives as comfortable as possible. That’s all we can do. The rest is not up to us.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes I have to force myself to keep going. You have to do the same.’
As the day dragged on, the image of Dr Korczak and the children tore at Elzunia’s mind. She had to do something, anything, even if it meant saving only one person.
Nurses in their white caps and aprons were usually able to walk across the Umschlagplatz at the end of the day undisturbed by the guards. Perhaps she would be able to take advantage of her uniform in some way.
That evening, when her shift had ended,
Elzunia stole into the linen press, pulled out an apron and smuggled it out under her cape. Down in the Umschlagplatz, she glanced around. She spotted a young woman sitting on a knapsack some distance from the guards, walked over to her and held her wrist as though checking her pulse. ‘Quick, put this on before they see what we’re doing,’ she whispered to the startled woman as she whipped out the apron. Her heartbeat was roaring in her ears. If a guard saw what she was doing, they’d both be shot.
‘Leave your things here and walk beside me as though we’ve just finished our shift,’ she said as soon as the apron was fastened, and she linked arms with the woman so they looked like two nurses strolling home after a day’s work.
Emboldened by her success, Elzunia repeated the deception at the end of each shift. Although she was aware that the reprieve might only be temporary, plucking individuals from under the noses of the guards raised her spirits. She couldn’t fight the enemy with weapons, but at least she’d found a way of defying them.
Occasionally she managed to persuade the drivers of the ambulances and funeral carts to pick up some of the old people and speed away with them, but the German guards had woken up to that ploy and were now inspecting every vehicle to check that the occupants were either dead or gravely ill. There was only one way of providing old people with proof of their injury. In a small room behind the square, without an anaesthetic, some of the nurses broke their bones in the hope of saving their lives.
Summer was over but the heat persisted, sapping people’s energy and resilience. And still the deportations continued. Day after day, wagons left the Umschlagplatz crammed with people, and returned empty. The ghosts of the Ghetto outnumbered the living. The hunters had grown even more rapacious in their search for prey and people stayed indoors as much as possible to avoid being caught.
Every morning, while the sky was streaked with dawn light, Lusia hurried to Toebbens’ workshop. Observant passersby would have noticed something bulging under her coat. It was Gittel whom she smuggled into the factory every day and hid in a cupboard under a pile of the uniforms they were making for the German army. Little as she was, Gittel understood that she had to be as quiet as a mouse all day but she jumped joyfully into Lusia’s arms when it was time to go home.
Nocturne Page 18
