Chapter 15
Dorotha
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Gabriele’s been with us for fifteen months.
She’s the dearest child and, despite my best intentions, I grow fonder of her every day, which is a dangerous thing in the ghetto.
I’ve read her Emil and the Detectives hundreds of times.
It’s become our good-luck talisman. It’s the only one of Eric K?stner’s books to have escaped Nazi censorship.
Let’s hope she manages to achieve the same feat.
Friends, I fear my bulletins will become shorter.
We’re running short of everything now. Food. Paper. Time.
The resistance is warning of an imminent liquidation of the ghetto. The chairman’s lost all his power and the Gestapo have taken control of administration. Even the Germans are twitchy. I long to stay alive to see liberation.
Your Dorotha x
The clock was ticking, counting down the days until the liquidation of the ghetto, which most prisoners suspected meant only one thing.
The liquidation of human lives. The mood in administration since the chairman had been replaced with the Gestapo was dire.
His dwindling power proved what Dorotha had suspected all along; it was only ever an illusion.
Everyone wondered what would get them first: disease or the Germans. The horse-drawn doroz?ki death cart had become an increasingly familiar sight in the ghetto, rattling over the cobbles, with emaciated, naked legs dangling over the sides.
Outside it was so hot, the sky looked as though it had curdled.
It was ten a.m. on a Sunday morning in late July, and the temperature was already topping 40 degrees.
Administration had ordered the windows remained closed in the office to prevent the rotten smell of the ghetto from drifting through from outside, but all it did was seal in the smell of many ripe, unwashed bodies.
For the past hour, Dorotha and Ruth had been busy in the stationery cupboard library, organising which books to take back to their room for their patrons to borrow later that same day.
Dorotha had just nipped out to use the bathroom, but when she returned and opened the door, she jumped.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ Ruth exclaimed. She was curled up in the corner, with a book propped in her lap, jammed in between a mop and a bookshelf.
In that moment, Ruth looked so extraordinarily like Joyce reading in the broom cupboard at the London School of Economics, the day Dorotha had met her, she felt like she’d stepped through a portal into another world.
Dorotha staggered as another wave of light-headedness hit her.
The heat. The hunger. Yesterday, she had queued at a food distribution point for two hours, only to come away with half a loaf and some potato peelings.
All they had eaten for the past seven days was a thin soup, raw grated radish on stale bread, and a sort of pancake made from potato peelings.
‘Come,’ she urged Ruth. ‘There’s no time to read. Fill this briefcase with as many books as you can. Mrs Cohen is looking after Gabriele, but we must get her out of the room before we open the library.’
Thank heavens for Mrs Cohen, formidable matriarch of the ghetto.
After the Pesach celebration, Dorotha had told her the whole story, including their fears for Gabriele’s mother, along with their own at how on earth they were to keep the child safe.
The secret had simply felt too big to shoulder, but of course Mrs Cohen and Oscar had helped without reservation, not just in securing extra rations, but Mrs Cohen had often stepped in to help with the care of the little girl.
Dorotha and Ruth worked fast, piling as many books into the briefcase as they could. A shadow passed over the little library.
‘Oscar, what’s wrong? Why are you here on your day off?’
Panic etched his usually stolid features. ‘I’m going to lock this door and you must stay silent,’ he said. ‘Biebow is in the building.’
‘But it’s Sunday!’ Dorotha exclaimed. Biebow never normally came near the administration offices on a Sunday.
‘Something’s happening,’ Oscar explained.
‘There’s a dozen top brass visiting from Berlin.
Biebow has a face like thunder. Added to which, the Gestapo are trawling all over the ghetto.
Some 1,600 workers were ordered to be settled outside the ghetto yesterday, and half have gone into hiding.
Biebow’s ordered a manhunt into every nook and cranny. ’
Ruth and Dorotha exchanged a horrified glance before their faces were cast into shadow. Oscar backed out of the room quickly, closing the door behind him. The key turned in the lock and the darkness swallowed them. The small sliver of light under the door-frame was cut off by heavy boots.
‘Was ist hier drin?’ What’s in here?
Panic snaked down Joyce’s spine and her head was all pins and needles. Ruth’s thumb drew a circular motion on her wrist, round and round, returning her slowly to herself.
‘Nur briefpapier,’ she heard Oscar reply. Just stationery.
The moment drew out, more discussion, and then they moved off. Dorotha slumped back against Ruth and realised in horror that she had wet herself. She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. How much loss and fear could one heart and soul take?
She felt Ruth’s arms circle her.
‘Don’t. I’m so embarrassed.’
‘You think I care about that?’ she scoffed. ‘All I care about is you, my friend. I love you. You and I, we’re getting out of here together. We’re ghetto sisters now.’
Her sweet eyes shone with power and sincerity.
Dorotha nodded and, in that moment, knew she would forever love Ruth Mordkowicz and her mother like family.
On so many occasions in the two years since her parents had been taken from the ghetto, Dorotha could have let death come for her, happily surrendered to it, in fact, and every time they had thrown her a lifeline. How did one ever repay such kindness?
Twenty minutes later, they heard the key turn in the lock again.
‘Leave quickly, while they’re touring the ghetto,’ Oscar ordered.
On the way out, her fingers brushed Oscar’s and she looked up at him.
‘I’ll be over later,’ he said. ‘Save me a book.’
They went on their way, crossing the footbridge which offered them a view of the so-called normal world from their prison.
Trams rattled beneath, transporting Polish and German civilians to whatever it was free people did on a sunny summer morning.
Dorotha found herself fantasising. Curl up with a book in the shade of the park?
Escape to the beautiful Karolewski Forest with a picnic?
Swim in the cool, clean waters of ?agiewniki lake?
At the top of the footbridge, she and Ruth paused to get their breath as the sun beat down.
‘Crossing this damn bridge feels more like Mount Everest every single day,’ Ruth complained, shaking her from her reverie.
Coming the other way was a bookseller Dorotha knew from before the war.
‘Good day to you, Mr Otelsberg.’
He tipped his hat. ‘Miss Berkowicz.’
A long look passed between them as they stared at each other’s identical leather briefcases. She knew he too was loaning books, and it made her wonder: how many people were doing what they were doing in this strange, sprawling ghetto?
‘Be well,’ he said, going on his way. Then, in a whisper, ‘Keep going. We are facilitators of joy.’
Mr Otelsberg was right. They mightn’t have picnics, lakes, or the luxury of choosing how to spend their day, but they did have books and that afforded them some small measure of freedom.
Back in their room, Gabriele flew into her arms.
Dorotha felt the little girl’s ribs through her dress. She held her hand to Gabriele’s forehead. ‘You’re so hot.’
‘Everyone is hot,’ Mrs Cohen, who had been looking after Gabriele for the afternoon, grumbled, fanning her face with her hand.
‘Come!’ She ordered Gabriele to her side.
Immediately she set about making the girl look older than her eight or nine years, by tying a headscarf and applying a little rouge to her lips and cheeks.
Dorotha didn’t believe for a moment that any of her patrons would ever betray them, but it was better to avoid talk.
While Mrs Cohen saw to Gabriele, Dorotha changed out of her urine-soaked dress, too exhausted any longer to feel shame, and did her best to wash it out.
Soon their room filled up with women in search of books.
Dorotha glanced around at the women in their headscarves and tatty dresses, with their scrawny ankles and clumpy wooden shoes.
She observed them as an anthropologist might, trying to commit them to memory, at the way their lips moved as they turned the book jacket over and read the description on the back, trying to work out whether this book would be the key to release them from their prison.
Dorotha drank in the warmth of their smiles, as they traded news and hugs with friends on their one precious day out of the stifling workshops and factories.
Dorotha had seen the hardening of hearts in the ghetto, but here, in this little book-lined room, people remembered what it was to be human.
The ghetto was a tapestry of misery, but tug at a few spare threads and reminders of kindness and humanity quickly unravelled.
By this point, people had started giving her their books in return for one of hers, and in many ways, it had become more of an unofficial swap shop than a library.
Lily Shapiro, who worked in a tailoring factory on Brzezińska Street, wove her way through the cramped room until she reached Dorotha.
She pressed a copy of The War of the Jews by Lion Feuchtwanger into her hands and then, to Dorotha’s surprise, a small, slightly tattered piece of fabric embroidered with the words Books Unite Us With A Future.
‘To say thank you,’ she said.
‘It’s beautiful, Lily,’ Dorotha said, humbled by the gift. ‘I shall treasure it.’