Chapter 4 Dorotha #4
‘Last question,’ Miss Weiss said, smiling indulgently. ‘Poor Miss Berkowicz must be exhausted.’
Anne’s hand shot up, and Dorotha nodded at her.
‘Why did you become a librarian?’
‘That’s a good question, and one myself and my dear friend Joyce, also a librarian, tried to figure out.
Certainly not for the money.’ She laughed.
‘No, it was for two reasons, actually. Reading calms a troubled mind and whiles away the centuries. Why would you not want to be able to grant the gift of peace and time travel?’
Anne looked satisfied with the answer. ‘I’ll be a librarian after the ghetto.’
Dorotha touched the tip of her nose gently with the book. ‘I don’t doubt it.’
She stood reluctantly, promising to return soon to read the next chapter.
As the classroom door closed behind her, she knew, more certain than ever before, that books were portals to other worlds, capable of brewing magic in even the darkest realm.
And that sharing stories was a fundamental part of who she was.
It went to the very core of her existence.
‘Thank you, Miss Berkowicz,’ said Miss Weiss, as she guided her back up the corridor to the front door. ‘That was, well, just wonderful.’
She pressed something into Dorotha’s hand. A small piece of bread wrapped in cloth and a tiny piece of liver sausage.
‘Oh no, I couldn’t,’ she protested.
‘Please, I insist. This is my payment to you.’
“In which case, I insist you take this.” She pressed the radish into Miss Weiss’s hand.
Outside, Dorotha blinked, confused. The vibrant greens of the secret garden in her mind faded, to be replaced with monochrome black and white.
The gusty stench of something deeply rotten washed over her.
A team of sinewy young men, strapped to a cart like beasts, pulled a cartload of potatoes from the nearby train station, watched over by Germans with guns.
For a brief time, she had managed to convince even herself that she was in Yorkshire, not in this overcrowded, manmade hell.
Quickly, she ate the small portion of bread and sausage and hastened back towards the heart of the ghetto city.
Her mother would be worrying about her. She felt pleased, not just with the way story time had gone, but also because that meagre repast meant that she could give her evening ‘meal’ to her father.
He had lost a worrying amount of weight and, like so many in the ghetto, had a bone-rattling cough.
But at the corner of Fire Brigade Square on Lutomierska Street, she found her way blocked by a large crowd.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked a woman next to her.
‘The chairman is about to speak.’
She remembered Mr Weiss’s words of earlier. Something is brewing. The liver sausage twisted queasily in her stomach.
Dorotha knew she ought to make her way home, but she remained rooted to the spot.
There was a feverishness to the crowd. There must have been a thousand people gathered in the square, maybe more.
Old people leaned on the frail arms of their children.
Mothers clutched babies to their breasts.
She swore she spotted little Benny Perlman sitting on a wall, his skinny bowlegs dangling down.
You fool, Dorotha Berkowicz, you’re seeing things.
An expectant hush fell as the chairman appeared on a raised stage above the crowd. Her heart started to thud. No good news ever fell from his pinched lips.
‘A grievous blow has struck the ghetto,’ he announced, his amplified voice coming out of the loudspeakers. ‘They are asking us to give up the best we possess – the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children.’
‘Like hell you did,’ muttered a woman behind Dorotha.
His voice echoed out and settled like a toxic cloud over the crowd.
‘I’ve lived and breathed with children. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’
An awful wail rose up, like a murder of crows taking flight. Dorotha looked around at the horror dawning on people’s faces. On the chairman went, his words thrusting with the sharpness of a sword through the stunned crowd.
‘Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than twenty thousand Jews out of the ghetto. I must perform this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself! I must take children because, if not, others may be taken as well.’
‘Limbs?’ the woman beside her choked, incandescent. Her fingers curled tightly around her son’s hand. ‘He’s my heart!’
Dorotha looked with disbelief at the unfolding scenes.
Pandemonium was breaking out. Hysterical mothers were already pushing their way through the crowds in the direction of home.
Then she spotted him. It was little Benny Perlman.
He must have sneaked out of the orphanage.
He jumped off the brick wall, his little face rigid with fear, and vanished into the crowds.
An elderly woman wearing just one shoe had dropped to her knees beside her and was praying, her body rocking back and forth.
Dorotha turned and allowed herself to be propelled by the jostling crowds, which were all moving in one direction.
Home to hide. Home to hope. Home to pray.
She moved in a dream-like state until she found herself back at Brzezińska.
Her mind ricocheted. Should she tell her parents when she got home?
They would find out soon enough. Ghetto news always swept through the streets like wildfire. Let them have one night in peace, she decided.
But once inside, she saw there was no peace to be had. Her mother was feeding her father sips of soup as he lay in bed, eyes barely open. Her mother’s knuckles were so tense they looked like little white stones, and worry was woven over her face.
‘Tatu?, what happened?’
‘They worked him like a dog today, dismantling a derelict building, and he collapsed on the way home,’ her mother said. ‘He needs nourishment and rest. Not that this soup is nourishment.’
‘I could go and buy some bread on the black market,’ Ruth suggested. She was crouched by Dorotha’s mother, watching on anxiously.
Dorotha’s mother smiled sadly. ‘The thought is a kind one, Ruth,’ Dorotha replied. ‘But the price of one loaf is anywhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred marks. Our “wages” are twenty marks. We would have to work for eight months for one loaf of bread.’
‘Oh.’ Ruth looked crushed.
‘But thank you,’ Dorotha added, not wanting to extinguish her friend’s kindness.
‘Your soup is on the table,’ her mother said.
‘It’s all right, Mama. I ate already. I’ll feed Tatu? mine. You sit and rest.’
Dorotha sat down on the bed beside her father and gently spooned the broth into his mouth.
‘I remember feeding you like this when you were younger, my little shefele,’ he whispered.
He began to cough, and the soup trickled down his chin, pooling on the coat he was using as a blanket. ‘My daughter. I’m sorry you have to see me like this. The ghetto has turned me into an old man.’
Dorotha bent down and kissed his forehead. He was as cold as a block of ice. ‘I love you, Papa.’
His eyes started to flicker closed.
‘Please, Papa, finish your soup,’ she urged.
‘I’ll dine in my dreams,’ he murmured, before falling into a deep and, Dorotha suspected, dreamless sleep.
‘He can’t go to work tomorrow, but if he doesn’t, he’ll be arrested,’ her mother worried out loud. No one voiced the other uncomfortable fact: in the ghetto, if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. One day’s work entitled you to one portion of soup. And without the soup, he would die.
Dorotha looked at her mother, knowing she would be thinking the same thing.
Rachel had been so beautiful once. Liquid black eyes.
Skin the colour of cream. She used to take such care of her appearance, sewing all her own clothes with tiny invisible stitches.
Now, dressed in a rough, plain black dress, her dark hair faded to grey, her face so translucent that Dorotha could make out a map of blue veins beneath, she looked older than her forty-five years.
Far older, Dorotha realised with a jolt.
The spectre of the chairman’s words slithered over her.
‘Will you read to us?’ Ruth ventured, as the darkness closed in around them.
‘Of course,’ Dorotha replied, and reached for a book by her father’s favourite Yiddish author, Isaac Peretz. She spread her fingers over the mildewed page and prayed that the words would hold back tomorrow.
‘Libertatem per Lectio,’ she murmured.
‘What does that mean?’ Ruth asked.
‘Freedom though reading.’
The hands crept around the clock. Darkness fell over the ghetto.