Chapter 13 - Dorotha #3
‘Tell me about your sister,’ Dorotha prompted him.
Without opening his eyes, a faraway smile flitted over his face.
‘She was the other half of me. The better half. She was responsible for stopping me from taking myself too seriously.’
‘Did she always want to be a teacher?’
‘The way I suspect you always wanted to be a librarian,’ he said, finally opening his eyes. ‘It was more than a job. She thrived around children. I confess, I was almost a little jealous of her ability, her naturalness.’
‘How so?’
He picked a blade of grass and stroked his lip with it.
‘Teaching always struck me as a chaotic career. Children are unpredictable and I suspect at times hard to control, but she revelled in it. She harnessed that energy and turned it into creativity. She saw the best in each and every single child she taught, even the unruliest.’
He tore the blade of grass. ‘She would have gone on to achieve greatness.’
On impulse, she took his hand in hers.
‘You remind me of her,’ he said.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s walk.’
The pair walked through the fields, ignoring the barbed-wire perimeter fence and the high wooden look-out towers looming over them like storks, making sure to keep a safe distance.
They walked, imagining they were like any two normal young people out for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon, not two prisoners.
They talked of the library and her plans, his previous job as an accountant and, despite themselves, predictably meandered back to food and the best meals they had ever eaten.
For Dorotha, her mama’s cholent, full of barley, peas, potato and meat. For Oscar, chicken schnitzel, followed by rich chocolate Sacher torte and an espresso. They lapsed into silence.
‘I don’t care if I never see another bowl of soup in my life,’ he said eventually.
‘No liquid food ever again,’ she agreed.
He reached up to a nearby tree and pulled a slender branch of early blossom off a branch and tucked it behind her ear.
‘You are the light in this godforsaken place. You offer hope. You are . . .’ He broke off, searching for the words, ‘a very impressive woman, Dorotha Berkowicz.’
In the distance, a siren sounded. ‘Let us hope it is the Allies. Let me walk you back before curfew.’
He held out his arm, an oddly quaint gesture.
Dorotha found herself leaning in to the serious, intelligent man.
Oscar made sure to tip his hat to ladies as they walked past, as if he were strolling the boulevards of a cosmopolitan city, not a squalid ghetto street.
He could only have been a few years older than her, but he had the dignity and chivalry of a gentleman far older than his years.
His pride seemed to lift her that bit higher too and, for the first time since her parents had been taken, Dorotha threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin.
‘This is me,’ she said when they reached the door of her building.
He looked down at her and sighed. So much was said and unsaid in that exhale of air. ‘In another world,’ he said eventually.
‘Are you sure you’re happy to take the risk to join us at Mrs Cohen’s?’ Mr Weiss knew Iris Cohen, most people did, and had also received her invite.
He raised one eyebrow. ‘I’d rather risk being caught than letting Mrs Cohen down,’ he said dryly.
‘Very well,’ she laughed. ‘Let’s get the others and go.’
Dorotha was still smiling as she let herself into their room. But before she even took off her coat, her ghetto sixth sense told her something was wrong. Adrenaline reverberated through the airless room.
‘There was a selection earlier,’ Mrs Mordkowicz blurted.
‘I know,’ Dorotha replied. ‘I heard. Two shot and a dozen taken.’
‘One of them was Ava,’ Ruth whispered. ‘Or, at least, we have to assume so. She hasn’t returned from her walk.’
The room seemed to warp and tilt, before revealing the fifth occupant.
‘What could we do but bring her back here?’ Mrs Mordkowicz asked, wringing her hands. ‘We couldn’t leave her alone in that basement. We’re all she has now.’
Sitting on Ruth’s lap was little Gabriele Kamiński.
Dorotha had the strangest sensation of falling from a great height with no safety net to catch her. How could this be! Day to day they lived in danger and depravity, their lives a ticking time bomb, and now they had a child to care for?
The very worst had happened. With Ava in all likelihood snatched in a selection, they would all now be plunged into a void of uncertainty.
Fractured thoughts crowded her mind. Where was Ava?
Would she return? How could she possibly explain her mother’s absence to Gabriele?
In reality, there were no clean answers to any of these questions and, in the depths of Dorotha’s soul, she knew there was only one thing they could do. Find a way to keep living.
‘We’re due at Mrs Cohen’s shortly,’ Ruth exclaimed. ‘We can’t go now.’
‘The chance to celebrate Pesach. Are you meshuge?’ Mrs Mordkowicz snorted. ‘Of course we go.’
And so, the group slipped out as darkness settled like a cloth over the ghetto.
‘Will my mama be there?’ Gabriele asked, her little voice heartbreaking in the darkness.
‘I’m afraid not, bubbeleh,’ Mrs Mordkowicz whispered. ‘You have to stay with us for a little while. We’ll look after you. Please God you will see your mama when the war is over.’
Gabriele accepted this answer, like so many other devastating changes she had been forced to accept in her short life.
Mrs Cohen lived in one room over the baker’s with her son Moishe, the baker, and an assortment of other people; Dorotha had no idea whether she was related to them or not.
They found the blocked-off alley Mrs Cohen had told them about earlier, and Ruth moved aside some crates to the side of the baker’s to reveal the entrance.
As they trod the rickety, rotten steps to her room, Dorotha’s mind wandered back to the delicious Seder meals of her childhood.
Her stomach growled at the memory of the symbolic foods.
There had been charoset, a sweet mixture of apples, dates, nuts and wine, which stood for the mortar the slaves used to build the Egyptian pharaohs’ buildings.
Maror, a bitter herb like horseradish, represented the bitterness of slavery.
Karpas, dipped twice in salt water to remind them of the tears shed during the years of slavery in Egypt.
Then her mama and bubbe would present a feast of food all cooked with love.
The adults would stay up late talking, and she and Adela would beg to stay up too until their eyes grew heavy.
Pesach was family, it was pure love, it was togetherness.
At the door she hesitated, her heart breaking afresh. ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
The last Pesach had been with her beloved family. Would she be betraying them by celebrating it without them?
‘It’s what your dear mama would want,’ Mrs Mordkowicz said, reading her thoughts and gently pressing a palm on the flat of her back.
The door opened and Mrs Cohen ushered them in.
‘I have one extra, I’m afraid,’ she said, gesturing to Gabriele.
‘What a blessing to have a child with us at Pesach,’ Mrs Cohen said with a rare smile, taking Dorotha by surprise.
Inside, faces shone out from the single candle on the table, and they were warmly welcomed.
‘So, you’re the girl with the books,’ a man who must have been Moishe remarked, pulling out old crates for them to sit on. He was a tall young man whose presence seemed to fill the tiny room. ‘Mama’s been trying to persuade me to come to the library, but I’m not such a reader.’
‘So come, I’ll find you something,’ she replied.
‘She’s very persuasive,’ Oscar said. ‘Just say yes now and save yourself the trouble.’
Moishe and the group laughed and the energy in the room lightened.
‘How did you do this?’ Ruth asked, looking at the table.
On the table was a Seder meal, of sorts.
‘For months I’ve been squirrelling away a little flour for the matzah,’ Moishe explained.
‘But the Germans inventory everything; how did you manage it?’ Oscar asked.
‘I’ve been storing it in a paper bag, which we buried at the cemetery under a fake grave. My good friend Srulik is a cook for the chairman.’
A man sitting in the corner of the room nodded. ‘That’s right. Whenever I cooked soup for his midday meal, I skimmed off a cup of flour and took it to the fake grave.’
‘That bastard has plenty to spare,’ Mrs Cohen growled.
‘And the rest?’ Ruth asked.
‘No roasted lamb bone, of course, but I bribed a Polish worker from the outside to bring us a chicken bone from a slaughterhouse,’ Mrs Cohen said. ‘The maror is a lebjoda, a weed that I found growing in Marysin.’
‘And the wine?’ Mrs Mordkowicz gasped, her eyes falling on the cups of red wine around the table.
‘The chairman has been most generous,’ Mrs Cohen laughed. ‘Even if he doesn’t yet know it.’
Dorotha was stunned at their ingenuity.
‘I have a question, though. How did you manage to bake the matzah without alerting suspicion?’ Oscar asked.
‘Our good friend Ziggi was a lecturer in philosophy in Kraków before the ghetto,’ Moishe explained. ‘He speaks impeccable German. If any patrols came down the street after dark, he told them the smoke from the bakery chimneys was from delousing clothes. Biebow’s orders.’
‘It was so dark and, trust me, those nighttime patrols are not so clever,’ Ziggi shrugged.
Dorotha could see Oscar was flabbergasted.
‘With your permission, I’d like to put this in the Chronicle. Future generations must know the risks Jews took to hold on to our faith.’
Mrs Cohen nodded. ‘Now let’s begin.’
Ziggi presided over the ceremony, murmuring blessings over the solitary candle.
Then together the room of people repeated the words.
‘Praised be Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who kept us in life and sustained us and enabled us to reach this season.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Dorotha sneaked a glance at Oscar. Tears flowed down his cheeks.
Little by little, the group went through the story of pharaoh and slavery, of escape, hardship and, eventually, of freedom. The words had never felt so meaningful.
Dorotha gazed around the small group, the candlelight softening the lines of hunger and pain, and knew that whatever life held for them all, none of them would ever forget this secret Pesach ceremony in the ghetto, where for a short while, they ceased to be prisoners.
The Nazis had torn them apart from their families, but they couldn’t stop them from creating their own.
Dorotha looked around the table at her hotch-potch family, from the matriarch Mrs Cohen down to Gabriele.
She felt a soft feathering of hope. These elemental bonds, formed in the abyss: these were what had the power to save them.
The candlelight shining in the darkness lit up the thin faces gathered round it, living, against all odds, with hope.