Chapter 2 #2
‘Get used to it. In the ?ód? ghetto, there are no sewers or escape routes of any kind. I’ve heard from prisoners that, in other ghettos, there were cracks and crevices where children can squeeze out to smuggle food back in, but trust me, this place is hermetically sealed with barbed wire and guards.
Even the houses around the ghetto have been demolished, so resistance is limited. ’
‘How big is it?’ Ruth asked. ‘It looks much larger than the ghetto in Zdun?ska Wola.’
Dorotha nodded, dropping the cabbage into the pan of water, along with some radish greens, and wishing she had some herbs, chicken stock, or anything to flavour the soup.
‘The Germans have renamed ?ód?, Litzmannstadt. The ghetto perimeter is about seven miles, at a guess. Don’t walk too close, though. They’ll shoot you on sight.’
Dorotha refrained from telling her about the people who deliberately ‘went to the wire’ in order to catch a German bullet.
‘Red Cross letters?’ Ruth asked hopefully, and Dorotha shook her head.
‘Nothing gets through. This place may as well be on the moon. We are forbidden from even knowing the exact time.’
‘And you’re here with just your parents? What about your little sister?’
Dorotha turned to look at Ruth though the steam and, for the first time, allowed herself a half-smile. ‘Adela’s in London. We managed to get her out in time, so it’s just been me and my parents for the last three years. We’ve been here in the ghetto since the end of April 1940.’
‘You must be relieved about your sister.’
‘Very.’
Dorotha rarely allowed herself to indulge in thoughts of her old life.
That was only for the darkest days. But seeing Ruth had dislodged the memories.
She remembered the frantic flurry of letters back and forth between Joyce and her all those years ago, along with her relief that Joyce had agreed to act as a guarantor.
In order to get Adela a visa, her parents had paid a bond.
They’d refused to tell her how much, but she noticed her mother’s favourite pearl and ruby brooch had gone missing shortly after.
It had all happened so fast, within days.
The worst of it was that the Gestapo overseeing the transports at the station had warned about emotional scenes and watched them like hawks, so the final farewell had been muted and false.
‘I’d do anything to put my arms around Adela and give her a proper hug,’ Dorotha admitted.
‘Have you heard from her?’
‘We did manage to exchange a couple of letters before we were forced into the ghetto. She is working as a housemaid for an English lord.’
Ruth’s eyebrows lifted. ‘I am impressed. She has gone up in the world.’
‘I don’t know about that. From what I can tell, she is mainly scrubbing. But she has a roof over her head, food and safety. Please God, we’ll be reunited one day.’ Thoughts of her little sister were chipping away dangerously at the wall she had built around her heart.
‘Do you remember the library?’ Dorotha asked, changing the subject.
Ruth shook her head, and laughter lines crinkled at the side of her eyes. ‘Remember it? I travel there every night in my dreams. I wonder if old Mrs Kotwinski is still alive?’
‘If she is, she must have enough books to start her own library by now.’ They both laughed as they recalled the elderly lady, who used to visit the library every day in a fur coat with a cat on a string and smuggle out library books.
‘It didn’t matter how many times we told her she could borrow them for free, she still insisted on smuggling them out,’ Dorotha said.
Ruth smiled weakly at the memory. ‘And do you think the Germans will have allowed children’s story time to keep going?’ she asked.
Dorotha shook her head. ‘After you left, that was the first thing they closed down. They said the books we were reading the children were apparently undesirable to the regime. Soon after, I was ordered from the library. Also undesirable to the regime,’ she added bitterly.
Ruth was silent in response, but Dorotha refused to give in to the mean blues. Being reunited with Ruth was like opening the pages of a much-loved book and refamiliarising yourself with the story.
‘We will get back to our library one day, my friend,’ she said, squeezing Ruth’s hand.
‘You really believe that?’ Ruth asked, her brown eyes wary. ‘The Nazis could have overrun all of Europe by now, including Great Britain.’ Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘Some days, I feel we have been forgotten altogether. Or that maybe . . .’
‘Go on,’ Dorotha urged.
‘Maybe I’m already dead.’
‘I know how that feels, Ruth,’ she admitted.
‘But you are very much alive, and I promise you, together, we will survive. Don’t you think us finding each other here is a good omen?
The tide of war will soon turn. I feel it here.
’ She touched her heart and thought of the Secret Society.
She thought too about confiding in Ruth about Libertatem per Lectio, how she had continued writing her bulletins to the society in private, even though she could never send them.
But instinct told her, despite her affection for the younger woman, to keep that to herself.
In a place like this, sometimes too much knowledge was a curse.
‘The Allies are out there right now, fighting for us,’ Dorotha continued instead. ‘I feel it in my heart. Our liberation will come.’ She smoothed a hair away from Ruth’s face. ‘Believe me. Now, let’s get this soup back or our mothers will send out a search party.’
Back upstairs, her mother ladled out five bowls and handed them around.
Dorotha took a sip of the tasteless broth. She straightened her back. ‘This is a very fine borscht, Mama.’
Her father nodded. ‘One of your better ones, my dear. Could someone please pass me a slice of that lovely, soft white challah to mop it up?’
‘By all means,’ she grinned, handing him a heel of dark, lumpy bread. ‘But make sure you save some space for my Lokshen kugel.’
Ruth and her mother looked at them both askance.
‘We try to trick our tummies,’ explained her mama, as hers growled loudly. ‘Some days, it works better than others.’
‘It sounds crazy,’ Dorotha admitted. ‘The Nazis can rob us of everything but our imaginations.’
Mrs Mordkowicz’s face softened. ‘In that case, tomorrow I shall spoil you all with my pickled herring and rye bread.’
And that is how, in the space of an hour, Dorotha found that her family and her capacity for love could expand.
As the light bleached from the sky, Dorotha fixed the blackout blinds while her mother lit an old oil lamp that stained the ceiling grey. In the gloaming, the room looked even smaller.
For the past two years and four months, since their incarceration in the ghetto, her mother had waged war against the blowflies in summer and vermin and damp in the freezing Polish winters. What meagre possessions they had were stored in a small orange crate in the corner.
‘Mrs Mordkowicz, you take the sofa, and Ruth and I can have the floor,’ she said, stifling a yawn.
‘I couldn’t . . .’ Mrs Mordkowicz started to protest.
‘If the situation was reversed, I know you’d be proud of your daughter if she made that offer,’ Dorotha’s mother insisted. ‘Please allow us to afford you this small dignity. You have had a long and dolorous journey, I’m sure.’
The women locked eyes, and a current of understanding flowed between them.
‘Good. The matter is settled, then,’ her father said.
Outside, they heard the sound of a man’s voice pleading, followed by a single gunshot.
Mrs Mordkowicz started, her hand flying to her chest. Everyone in the tiny room stared at each other, as still as waxworks.
Such noises were the backdrop to daily life, but it did little to dilute the horror.
The smells of the street drifted in. Mouldy cabbages, piss, and now gun smoke.
‘They shot the head of the Judenrat in front of me,’ Mrs Mordkowicz blurted out.
‘He’d been preparing to board the transport alongside us.
Just like that. One minute, he was helping me into the wagon, the next, his blood was on my boots.
’ Her gaze dropped to the floor. ‘And then they took my parents. No goodbye. Not a hug or a kiss.’
Silence fell like a heavy blanket.
‘They are not men. They are demons,’ her father muttered.
‘A story,’ her mother announced overly brightly. ‘We need a story.’
She turned to Dorotha, but she was already digging around in the orange crate. She pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Secret Garden.
‘Wait. You have a book?’ Ruth exclaimed. ‘How?’
‘We were the first into the ghetto when the Germans established it back in 1940, so were allowed to bring a few more possessions than the more recent transports,’ her mother explained.
‘Everybody else’s families bring practical things, like frying pans and blankets,’ her father tutted, rolling his eyes. But there was no mistaking the love as he gazed at Dorotha’s mother. ‘My wife brings photos, candlesticks and baby teeth in a glass jar. My daughter brings her books!’
‘Dorotha, why don’t you read for our guests?’ her mother suggested.
Dorotha must have read this book a hundred times since their imprisonment in the ghetto but, each time, her mother listened as rapt as if she’d never heard it.
‘My daughter Adela was reading this book before the Germans invaded and we got her safely to England,’ she said, a look of fierce pride and love lighting up her face. ‘Please God, we shall all read it together one day.’
‘We will, Mama,’ Dorotha said, carefully opening the cracked spine and smoothing her hand over the tattered pages. ‘Because our persecutors have never outlasted our stories.’
She began to read, taking delight in the refuge of the pages. A fragile peace spread over the dark room. Dorotha loved reading stories out loud. She knew her words were helping to ease the agony of their existence.
Dorotha hated that her poor mama had to work fourteen-hour days in a workshop braiding blades of straws to line army boots, and then come home with her fingers bleeding.
And that her kind, gentle father, an accountant by trade, came home stinking of shit after being forced to push barrels of raw sewage to the outskirts of the ghetto, or other backbreaking manual labour for the Germans.
And she really hated that they saved their tears for the middle of the night when they thought she was sleeping.
But this . . . She ran her pale fingers over the paper, tracing the outline of a story that transported them all out of this manmade hell. This was the most precious of gifts.
Reading wasn’t just an act of defiance. It was the only thing left in their lives over which they had any control.
This war was madness, a twisted ideology that had spread like gangrene through the guts of Europe.
But reading reminded them that there was more to the world than Nazis.
And one day, they would be gone, and books would remain.
Each sentence was a time machine, a literary freedom she doubted Frances Hodgson Burnett could ever have realised she would grant them when she picked up her pen.
Were they not, after all, known as the People of the Book? Not solely for their reverence and deep connection to the Torah, Dorotha liked to think, but also because of their love of learning and stories.
Dorotha sneaked a glance at her roommates. Exhausted from the trauma of their long journey, Mrs Mordkowicz had knitted both arms around her daughter, and they both had their eyes closed, allowing the words to wash over them.
When the light guttered, her mother rose creakily and took the book carefully from her. ‘And so, to bed. But first . . .’ She turned to Mrs Mordkowicz. ‘Will you pray with me?’
‘I’m . . . I’m not sure I believe in God any longer, Mrs Berkowicz,’ Rebecca confessed, her eyes haunted in the dim light. ‘I’ve seen things that make me question how any God can allow such wicked acts.’
Her mother smiled gently and without reproach. ‘You will receive no judgement from my quarter.’ She turned, and covered her head with a scarf, gently covered her eyes with the palms of her hands and began to softly murmur Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.
Her prayers filled the room, as much a source of comfort to Dorotha as the book she had just read.
Not because she was devout. In truth, she shared Mrs Mordkowicz’s cynicism.
But more because she knew that, as long as her mama had faith, she had hope.
It was the touchstone of her life, as important an ingredient to survival as food and warmth.
When her mother finished, she turned and smiled. ‘We all must cling to a faith of some kind. My daughter Dorotha believes we have survived so far so that we can tell others our story. We will live to tell the world about this place.’
They all settled down to sleep in that miserable, sodden little room, each lost in their own private thoughts and fears. Before an exhausted sleep engulfed her, Dorotha whispered a silent goodnight to her little sister, asleep safe and sound somewhere in England, and then blew out the light.