Chapter 9 - Dorotha
Dorotha
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Friends. My parents were taken in the Great Sperre.
I’m not alone in my grief. The entire ghetto is in mourning.
Yesterday, a woman jumped to her death from a third-floor window.
She landed in front of me. Her name was Sara Weinberger.
She used to attend my story time in the library with her daughter, before the ghetto, before her daughter was stolen.
I confess, in my darkest moments, I’ve considered the same.
It’s only the thought of being reunited with Adela and you, my beloved friends, that keeps me alive.
I have two aims now. To start a library and to survive.
Your Dorotha x
Dorotha began work on her library that very evening, soon after the shift in which Mr Weiss had handed her the key to the stationery cupboard, along with the list of vacant properties.
It had to be now. Time was not on her side.
She slipped out under cover of the blackest night in the ghetto.
The air was eggshell thin, the sky studded with brilliant stars.
It was so cold that the sticky mud coating the streets had iced over and glittered under a sickle moon.
She kept to the catacomb of back alleys where she knew there would be the fewest nightly patrols, but it didn’t stop her heart thumping.
If she was spotted, she would be executed on the spot for being outside after the evening curfew, no questions asked.
Within minutes, her ghetto sixth sense told her she was being followed. She doubled back and pressed against the side of St Mary’s Assumption’s Church. The two distinctive red towers soared over her.
People had taken to calling the church the White Factory, as day and night white feathers drifted out through the door and floated up the grimy streets. No one knew why feathers might float from under the locked door of churches, but in the polluted Nazi brain, anything was possible.
The footsteps grew closer. Dorotha pushed herself back into the church door and felt the latch loosen. It was open! She slipped inside the cavernous space.
It took a while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the church and when she did, her stomach lurched.
At first, she thought it was bodies, then she realised it was sacks.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of hessian sacks filled every available space, from the aisles to the pews, reaching up to the high church windows.
Mounds of sacks even spilled over the pulpit.
She felt a breath on her neck and panic kicked hard.
‘What are you up to?’ hissed the voice.
‘Ruth!’ She whirled around, furious. ‘You followed me. Again!’
‘Too right I did. I knew you were pretending to be asleep. You cry in your sleep, so when you were silent, I knew you were up to something.’
Dorotha sighed, enraged at herself more than Ruth.
‘Very well. I have a list of properties empty after the deportations. I am going to salvage books that’ve been left behind and I plan to loan them out.’
‘Then it’s settled, I’ll help.’
‘No, Ruth. If we’re caught, we’ll be shot on the spot. You have your mother to think about.’
‘I’m your library assistant,’ Ruth replied, the whites of her eyes glowing in the darkness. ‘If anyone should help, it’s me.’
Dorotha shook her head, defeated by the logic.
‘But before we start . . .’ Ruth unfastened the knot of the sack nearest to her. ‘I’ve always wondered what the white feathers are.’
‘What are you doing?’ Dorotha gasped, but it was too late. Ruth had already emptied the contents of the sack onto the floor.
‘Shmatte,’ she murmured. ‘Coats, dresses, petticoats.’ She ripped open the next sack and a feather eiderdown slithered out, disgorging white feathers, which spiralled over them.
‘Where have these all come from?’ Dorotha asked, feeling foolish as soon as the question slid from her lips.
So, it was true. The deportees’ clothes had returned from Che?mno. But not them.
Dorotha picked up a white damask tablecloth by her foot. The name Abramowicz was embroidered in delicate golden yarn by the hem. Images swallowed by the dark, hungry throat of war crawled over her.
Her frail parents pushed into a covered truck. Milk teeth on the doorstep. Children tossed from windows.
Ruth reached over and gently picked off a white feather that had settled in Dorotha’s hair.
‘The world must know about this,’ Dorotha breathed.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Ruth said with a shudder. ‘I feel like I’m drowning among the dead.’
They bundled the clothes and quilt back into the sacks, retied them and slipped out the way they had come in.
They walked in silence, keeping to the shadows and shooting glances over their shoulders, the ice splintering under their feet like cracking glass.
Finally, they came to the first street on the list, Kelmstrasse.
Dorotha held up four fingers to signify the flat number and they slipped inside the dark stairwell.
Together, they crept up the stairs, clutching the crumbling concrete wall for support.
The stench of damp and urine was so strong, it made her eyes water.
Fear clamped her heart. There were no sounds but for the drip, drip, drip of water and their heavy, laboured breathing.
They found the apartment easily enough. Its doors were hanging off its hinges and spiders had spun fine webs around the frame. Gingerly, Dorotha pushed open the door.
The room was an empty shell. The deportees couldn’t possibly have taken it all, so people must have trawled through it looking for food, clothing and furniture to burn for fuel. She tasted the disappointment, sharp and sour on her tongue.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she mouthed.
On the way out, Ruth stumbled. ‘Wait,’ she whispered. Bending down, she worked at the edge of the loose board until it came free.
‘They did leave something behind,’ Ruth said, her eyes gleaming triumphantly in the dim light.
Dorotha plunged her hand into the dark void and then she felt it. Paper. A thrill rolled through her. Books! She pulled them out, one after another.
Stories in Yiddish and Hebrew by the great classical writers Isaac Peretz and Sholem Asch. There must have been a dozen or more hardback books hidden beneath the floorboards. Not just novels, but short stories, poetry and plays too.
Ruth looked at her and winked, her fear giving way to chutzpah. ‘I knew you’d need me. If you want to know where anything is, ask a library assistant.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Dorotha grinned. ‘Very good, my friend.’
She picked up one of the books and inhaled. It was the smell of leather and dust. And home.
Her thoughts soared. The things she could do with these books.
She remembered the joy stories had brought her parents and the children of the orphanage.
To those of them left behind, counting down their days on death row, these books could be passports to hope.
And in the absence of all else, hope was a precious commodity.
‘Whoever lived here was a bibliophile,’ she declared, feeling a strange sense of kinship with the departed. ‘They must have hidden them for their protection.’
‘Come on, we have many more addresses to get through before dawn,’ said Ruth.
By the time the sun rose up over the ghetto, they must have salvaged close to seventy books from empty homes, taking as many as they could carry back to the secret library before striking out again.
They would have carried on too, but light was streaking over the horizon, a gauzy wash of gold and apricot, like the sky in a French Impressionist painting. It was a rare glimpse of beauty.
In each room, Dorotha had seen the last valiant attempts to cling to life. Here a bullet hole. There a pan of soup, long grown cold and congealed. An upturned chair.
A part of her felt dishonest, creeping around under cover of darkness and taking other people’s precious books. But then she reminded herself: their owners would not be coming back. Better she should treasure and protect these books than see them be burnt by a Nazi.
By five a.m., her feet were blocks of ice, rubbed raw inside her heavy clogs, but her discomfort had been worth it.
She would need time to inspect and catalogue the rescued books, but already she had seen such treasures.
From family heirlooms and holy books, to manuals on gardening and children’s fairy tales.
Books in Yiddish, Polish, German, French, and even one in English.
Such treasures in the abyss. Words and pictures, scriptures and stories that could hold back the tidal wave of despair.
She and Ruth had turned the corner to Brzezińska, yawning and dreaming of thick wool socks, warm scented baths and hot coffee, when a black car overtook them and screeched to a halt by the kerb. Only Nazis drove cars in the ghetto.
‘Don’t talk,’ Dorotha ordered Ruth. It all happened so fast. The car door opened and a black boot emerged.
In a dream, she found herself lowering her head to Hans Biebow, as a new proclamation had decreed all ghetto Jews must do when faced with anyone in uniform.
‘You’re in breach of curfew.’
‘I apologise, sir.’
She stared at the floor, her pulse hissing in her ears. Even without looking, she could tell his glacial blue eyes were unpicking her. She hugged the books so tightly they might be a shield.
‘Don’t I know you?’ he asked.
He stepped closer. So close, she could smell fresh coffee on his breath and her stomach lurched at the memory. ‘Yes, I do,’ he went on. ‘You’re a typist in Rumkowski’s offices.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What are you carrying?’
There was little point in lying.
‘Books, sir.’
Biebow pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit up. The smoke drifted up the empty road. Though they were alone, Dorotha could sense dozens of eyes watching from windows.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘From an address in Kelmstrasse I knew had been vacated.’
‘I see. You’re a reader?’
‘I was a librarian, sir, but these books are not for reading. I was intending to burn them for fuel.’
The lie was necessary, and in that moment, Dorotha thought, just about their only hope of salvation.
The heavy silence stretched out between them. She could hear Ruth’s breath coming in short, shallow gasps.
‘What kind of philistine burns books?’ he asked eventually. The hypocrisy was so breathtaking, Dorotha had to stop herself from actually laughing.
‘A cold one,’ she shot back, astonished at her own verve.
Biebow laughed, a deep-throated rattle that sounded like a motorcar backfiring.
‘Very well then. Be on your way. If you’re seen out during curfew again, I promise you, you won’t be shown such leniency.’
Before she could leave, Biebow picked up the book on the top of the pile. Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The only book in English she’d found.
‘This is too good to burn. I’ll keep this.’ Then he saw the one underneath and a nostalgic smile flashed over his face.
‘Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre. My daughter will enjoy this.’
Dorotha inwardly cursed. Heidi would have been a popular book. Biebow tucked both under his arm and turned to her, the smile vanishing and hatred icing his features.
‘You disappoint me.’
Then he was gone, his long legs easing themselves back into his chauffeur-driven car.
Dorotha felt at that moment that, had she a knife, she could easily have slid it between his ribs.
He was a mass-murderer and a thief, responsible for the slaughter, misery and suffering of thousands, and she disappointed him? There was no fathoming the Nazi mind.
‘We’ll have to be more careful next time,’ she whispered to Ruth as his car vanished round the corner.
‘Next time?’ Ruth gasped. ‘Are you meshuge? You mean to tell me we are going to do this again?’
‘No, I’m not crazy. Or maybe I am a little bit, but no library was ever built in a night.’
She looked down at the treasures in her hands. ‘I’ll comb every inch of this hellhole if I must, and hunt out every hidden book. Whatever the cost. That bastard just reminded me why we need a library in the ghetto.’
Dorotha stared at Biebow’s car as it vanished through the heavily guarded entrance to the ghetto and made a vow.
‘These books will still be here when his neck is snapped and he’s hanging from his own gallows.’