Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  Elzunia never looked down at the Umschlagplatz from the windows of the hospital without holding her breath in case she saw her mother and Gittel among the people being herded towards the wagons. Don’t let them be there, don’t let them be there, she would mutter to herself each time she scanned the square. She started counting in her head. If she didn’t spot them by the time she reached ten, they wouldn’t be there. Stefan could no longer protect them. Jewish policemen were despised by the Ghetto population, held in contempt by the Germans, and regarded as collaborators by the OJF, who had already shot one of the highest ranking officers and ambushed several others.

  Lusia had been right in suspecting that the Germans wouldn’t spare the hospitals. Elzunia was spooning watery semolina porridge into the mouths of the babies in her ward one morning when a crash downstairs made her jump and drop the enamel bowl, spilling the precious food.

  Something was being smashed, glass shattered and Elzunia could hear bloodcurdling screams. Before she could gather her thoughts, boots stomped up the stairs as a unit of SS men stormed into the adult wards like maddened beasts, rifles in hand. Jesus Maria, she thought. There was no way of hiding the infants. She closed the door and murmured a prayer to the Virgin Mary. At times like these, she instinctively reverted to the faith of her childhood. But she had no time to think because her ears were ringing with salvos of gunshots and shrieks that pierced her eardrums. These sounds were followed by dull thuds as patients with bandaged heads, legs in plaster and intravenous drips still attached to their veins were pushed and kicked down the stairs, towards the covered trucks lined up outside. ‘Doctor! Sister! Help!’ they shouted. Watching through a crack in the door, Elzunia pressed her hands against her mouth to stop herself from crying out.

  As soon as the trucks roared away, the nurses and doctors rushed upstairs over the bodies banked up in the stairwell and the corridor. The patients who couldn’t walk had been shot as they tried to crawl towards the door.

  The following day, Dr Sztejn called all the nurses and doctors together. Her face was almost as grey as her hair and they braced themselves for bad news.

  ‘They’re coming back today,’ she said. ‘I’ve been given a hundred numbers to distribute among the staff.’

  No one moved or spoke.

  ‘Anyone without a number will be deported,’ she said and her voice cracked with emotion.

  Elzunia’s mind was a jumble of panic and dread. So they were holding a macabre lottery in which the prize was life. Until the next time.

  There were almost three hundred nurses and doctors at the hospital. What if she didn’t get a number? Suddenly she didn’t care who missed out, who was taken away, if only she could go on living. The emotion was so powerful that she swayed and someone brought her a chair, thinking she felt faint. She sank into it, and kept her head down for fear that her thoughts were written on her face.

  ‘The Germans are very clever at making us collude in our own destruction,’ she could hear Dr Sztejn saying. ‘Needless to say, I won’t be participating in their ghoulish selection.’

  The iron ring around Elzunia’s chest loosened and was replaced by a sense of shame. Everyone was talking at once. Some admired Dr Sztejn’s resolute stand but others argued that if she refused to follow the order they would all be killed.

  The doctor nodded. ‘That’s quite possible. But following their orders means sentencing some of you to death and that I’m not prepared to do.’

  In the end, they decided to draw lots. One by one, with bated breath, they came out to choose the slip of paper that would signify life or death.

  Some closed their eyes as they plucked their ultimate destiny from bits of paper fanned out on the table, while others hesitated, their hands hovering in the air as though hoping to divine the contents by supernatural means. Elzunia took a deep breath. Please, please let it be a yes, she prayed as she reached out for the paper that would decide her fate. Slowly she opened it and breathed out. The Blessed Virgin hadn’t abandoned her.

  As she stood there, coming to terms with her reprieve, Madame Ramona’s words floated into her mind. Three lives. She had just received a new lease of life. She felt a rush of exhilaration but almost immediately felt guilty because, all around her, distraught doctors and nurses were staring in stunned silence or weeping, while the lucky ones held their doomed colleagues and cried with them.

  Later in the day, Dr Sztejn took Elzunia aside. ‘You work in the paediatric ward, so the children know you,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I need your help.’ Elzunia was astonished at the doctor’s businesslike manner and the speed with which she had regained her equilibrium. She was even more amazed when Dr Sztejn told her to put fresh sheets on the children’s beds, sponge them down, and dress them in clean clothes. It was a strange request to make in the afternoon but she didn’t question it. Sensing the sombre atmosphere in the hospital, many of the children were fretful. Some of the toddlers clung to her while she dressed them, while others asked what she was doing. She wondered about that herself.

  When the children were ready, Dr Sztejn came in. Elzunia noticed that her usually rapid gait was slow, as though she were dragging herself uphill. ‘We don’t have much time. They’re coming for the children any minute,’ she said and her face was the colour of ashes. Elzunia looked down and saw that the doctor was holding glass phials.

  ‘I’m not going to allow them to come in here, and shoot the little ones or toss them into trucks like garbage,’ Dr Sztejn was saying. ‘The least we can do for them is give them a dignified, peaceful death.’

  Elzunia was staring at her. She must have misunderstood. Or had the doctor become unhinged by the day’s events? Surely she wasn’t planning to kill the children. Then the alternative flashed before her mind. Terrified toddlers being shot in their beds or thrown into trucks with no one to comfort them, pushed into wagons without food or water, and then … she didn’t need to think any more.

  She leaned over their cots as she had done so many times before, and told them in a trembling voice that she was about to give them some magic medicine that would make them well again. As they opened their mouths, she and Dr Stejn poured a teaspoon of morphine for each one in turn.

  As they waited until all the children had closed their eyes, Elzunia hummed the lullaby that she had heard Gittel and her mother sing in Yiddish to the tiny angels in white, asleep in their little beds.

  Twenty-Four

  The first winds of winter had begun to blow early through the Ghetto. It had become a ghost town. Spectral figures inched along silent footpaths in empty streets where loose shutters rattled in deserted rooms. Gone was the hubbub and febrile activity that had filled these streets, gone were the hawkers and traders rushing around trying to sell their wares, the desperate people begging for a pass, permit or certificate that would entitle them to get work and food. Apart from the starving and homeless, few people ventured outside.

  On her way to the youth group, Elzunia looked up. As in the surreal landscape of a dream, white particles were floating in the air, buoyed by the October wind. Soft and weightless, they fluttered to the ground as soundlessly as snow. Some landed on her head and, as she brushed them off, some stuck to her hand. Feathers from slashed pillows and eiderdowns were falling from the windows of tenants whose heads would never rest on them again. Shreds of bed linen, carefully monogrammed and lovingly embroidered, had been pulled from beds, trunks and valises, and ripped by frenzied hands in their search for Jewish gold.

  Transfixed by the strange vision, Elzunia stood watching, as though the falling feathers were a revelation that might illuminate the recent events. Looking around to make sure that no guards or policemen were prowling around, Elzunia moved stealthily from doorway to doorway. The hunt for survivors continued with increased ferocity and the Germans now ordered the Jewish policemen to bring five people to the Umschlagplatz every day or they and their families would have to make up the numbers.

  As Elzunia crept along the pavement spe
ckled with the feathers and shreds of bed linen, she thought about Stefan’s visit the night before. He was no longer in uniform. ‘I’ve quit,’ he’d said in a hollow voice and covered his face with his hands. ‘I never thought I’d end up doing some of the things I did. I thought I’d just be helping to keep order, like they said, but somehow one thing led to another. I couldn’t even protect you and Mama.’ He was shaking his head and sobbing in loud, harsh gulps.

  She had knelt beside him. ‘I’m glad you resigned,’ she said. She wanted to say he should have done it long ago but kept her thoughts to herself. She had her own demons to deal with. The vision of the babies so still in their cots haunted her.

  As she walked on, shots rang out and she flattened herself against a wall. The purring sound of a motor drew nearer and she held her breath. Any second now the driver would see her. But the handsome young SS officer, leaning out of the window in the back seat of his Opel, wasn’t looking in her direction. His pistol was tilted upwards and he was shooting casually into the windows of the buildings across the road. He laughed each time glass shattered onto the pavement but the driver swore when a shard struck the roof.

  The SS man signalled the driver to reverse. Following his gaze, Elzunia saw a small figure in the doorway of a building on the other side of the street. A little boy had run downstairs to pick up a toy that had fallen from the window. The SS man took aim. Suddenly, Elzunia heard herself yelling, ‘Halt! Don’t shoot!’

  Startled, the officer slowly turned around with a look of such loathing on his perfectly proportioned face that she trembled, but something stronger than fear had taken hold of her.

  ‘Did your Mutti teach you to kill children? When you go home, will you tell her what you did?’

  His finger was still on the trigger.

  ‘And what about God? Your belt says Gott mitt uns. Do you think God will reward you for murdering babies?’

  From the corner of her eye she saw that the boy had crept inside. Now it was just her and the officer.

  She closed her eyes and felt a strange calm filling her veins. So this was how her life ended. Let him get it over with.

  An eternity passed. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the pistol trained on her. But the officer was looking past her, as though she didn’t exist and he hadn’t heard what she’d said. He clicked his fingers and ordered the driver to move on.

  Elzunia’s knees buckled and she sank to the ground, resting her head against the wall. She had just confronted a murderer with a loaded pistol in his hand and had made an appeal to his humanity while he was shooting people for fun. Her legs were so weak that, when she tried to scramble to her feet, she felt like a rag doll. She was on her way to her youth group, to help them dig and shovel dirt to hollow out a bunker, but she wondered whether she’d manage to hold the spade in her trembling hands.

  Every evening, since the deportations had begun, the guards left the Ghetto at sundown, afraid of its accusing ghosts, dark shadows and avenging angels. That was the time the Ghetto came to life, when it resounded with banging, hammering, gouging and digging. Young insurgents working in teams were feverishly building a network of bunkers, passages and tunnels, subterranean dwellings that would link apartment blocks through the cellars so that eventually they wouldn’t have to use the streets. They had all thrown themselves into the work, relieved to have a physical outlet for their grief and fury. While they bided their time to rise up and fight their oppressors, the leaders of the OJF were planning ways of obtaining cash for buying weapons. There were whispers of daring raids in which some of the wheelers and dealers had been ambushed and taken hostage until they handed over large sums of money.

  Down in the cellar, her colleagues stared in disbelief as she described her miraculous escape.

  ‘Hashem was watching over you,’ Berus told Elzunia. He wore a skullcap and frequently prayed to the Almighty.

  ‘So why wasn’t Hashem watching over my little brother and all the others?’ retorted Genia, flicking a strand of strawberry-blonde hair from her freckled face.

  Berus had a soulful expression in his pale blue eyes. ‘Rabbi Szapiro told us that Hashem himself is suffering and weeping in secret in an innermost chamber of heaven,’ he explained.

  No wonder, Elzunia thought. Anyone claiming credit for creating a world like this should hide in shame and weep.

  Berus turned to Elzunia, ‘You saved that little boy’s life.’

  ‘That was pretty irresponsible. You could have got yourself killed,’ Genia was flushed and the freckles became more noticeable. ‘Your life is too valuable to throw away,’ she said. ‘You know the Uprising can’t be far off now. We need you to help fight them.’

  Elzunia felt the blood rushing to her face. ‘So are we putting a relative value on lives now? If mine is more important than that child’s, whose life is more important than mine? Yours?’

  The others were becoming restless. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ someone interjected. ‘Let’s just get on and dig this passage.’

  They had just picked up their picks and spades when the door opened. It was Szmuel, the young man who had inducted Elzunia into the resistance.

  His eyes swept around their faces until he saw her. ‘You’re to go to Headquarters straight away. The OJF commander wants to talk to you.’

  Outside the headquarters of the Organisation of Jewish Fighters, people were standing around or sitting on the stairs, waiting to see the leader. Each time his door opened, Elzunia started, expecting to be called, but messengers came and went, and still she sat there, awed and curious. What could the commander possibly want with her?

  Finally she was ushered inside. The commander was short and youthful, as she remembered, but he exuded strength and confidence, and the air around him sparked with energy.

  ‘An Underground courier will be coming into the Ghetto tomorrow. He’s going to England to tell them about the situation in Warsaw, and he’ll report on the Ghetto as well, so his mission is vitally important to us. We have to smuggle him in and give him a guide so he can see what’s going on here.’ He was studying her, weighing her up. ‘Szmuel says you’re keen and capable. Will you do it?’

  Elzunia hardly slept that night, and, when she dropped off to sleep, her dreams were filled with terrifying images. She had slept in and missed the guy from the AK. The tunnel caved in on top of her and she was suffocating. The courier she brought in was a German in disguise who whipped out his pistol and shot the commander. After each dream she woke with a start and jumped out of bed, only to see that it was still night.

  The guards hadn’t yet come on duty when she ran across the quiet streets of the Ghetto to the building on Muranowska Street, as the leader had instructed. She stole down to the cellar. The tunnel through which she had to reach the Aryan side started from here, and she scrabbled under the sacks and boxes in the far corner until she struck something hard and uncovered the concealed door.

  She prised it open and took a deep breath. It was dark and musty inside, and the beam of her flashlight disturbed blind, slimy creatures that crawled out of the dirt. Occasionally something scuttled over her feet and she suppressed a scream as she saw a long tail and small bright eyes. The tunnel was longer and narrower than she had visualised, and, as she crept along, showers of dirt fell on her head. The timber roof supports were sagging and she had to control a rising sense of panic. What if the soil collapsed and entombed her?

  At the end of the tunnel, old furniture had been piled up to conceal the entrance on the Aryan side, and, after pushing it away, she blinked at the spear of light that dazzled her eyes. She climbed out, brushed herself down, and looked around. Standing on the corner of the street was a tall man in a shabby suit with a workman’s cloth cap pulled low over his face. Surely that wasn’t him, she thought, and again panic seized her. Perhaps her dream had been prophetic and she really had missed him.

  But when he started whistling ‘Lili Marlene’, she breathed out again. As she walked past him, sh
e whispered, ‘Uncle Michal will be late today.’

  Without looking up, the man gave a slight nod and buttoned his jacket, as arranged.

  ‘We’d better hurry,’ she said, looking around to make sure no one had seen them. ‘The tunnel is pretty low, so you’ll have to bend over most of the way.’ He made a gesture indicating she should go, and followed her into the passage. Apart from an occasional expletive when he hit his head on the timber, he didn’t speak.

  Finally she came out of the darkness into the cellar and turned to her companion. As he took off his cap to shake out the dirt, she saw his face for the first time. Those heavy-lidded eyes with their bored expression, those gaunt cheeks, that sardonic twist of the mouth. It couldn’t be; it wasn’t possible. If the Virgin Mary had stepped off the pedestal and stood before her, she wouldn’t have been more astonished. She was looking at the airman who had saved her life, the man she had dreamed about during her sleeping and waking hours for the past three years.

  Twenty-Five

  It was a week since Adam had been summoned to meet Zenon in a location so secret that it hadn’t been revealed to him until he was taken there. As their meetings were rare, he had wondered whether this one was connected with that terrible business about Karolinka, his liaison woman. He was weary of Warsaw, sick of the secrecy, subterfuge and duplicity that didn’t seem to achieve anything, and fed up with the misery all around. For the first time since he’d become an AK operative, he wished he could throw it all in and find some place where people still lived normal lives. But deep down he knew that what he was really tired of was not Warsaw or the Underground work but himself and his relentless pursuit of women, which always ended in disaster.