Chapter 16 #2
‘Could it not be true? If the Allies aren’t so far away, we could end up being bombed by the very people whom we look to for freedom? I say we go. Enough already. Wherever they’re planning to send us can’t possibly be worse than here!’
‘Fools are taken in with fine promises,’ Mrs Cohen muttered. ‘If the Allies really are coming then, believe me, their plans to annihilate us all will only escalate. I for one will not make it easy for them.’
‘But what will you do?’ asked Ruth.
‘I’ll spend the next day gathering as much food and fuel as I can, then I’ll go into hiding with my son. It’s my belief that the Red Army will have the last word!’
She took Dorotha’s hand and clasped it firmly.
‘I hope to see you again one day. But if I don’t, know this.
What you’ve been doing in this ghetto, uniting us with books and reminding us of the precious life we must fight for .
. . Well, in my opinion, that is bashert.
Pre-ordained. Keep doing what you’re doing. It is God’s will.’
Then the redoubtable lady was gone, slipping off into the maze of streets and alleys that led off the square and into the unknown.
‘I just don’t know what to do for the best,’ Mrs Mordkowicz worried.
‘Let’s decide this evening,’ Ruth said, shooting a meaningful glance at Dorotha. ‘But I believe we must all stay together.’
Back in the administration offices, there was a mountain of forms to type and file.
Everyone was filled with anxiety, the slightest noise making them all jump.
When Ruth was led away to work in another part of the administration, Dorotha sat staring after her, chewing the inside of her cheek so hard she drew blood, and it wasn’t until the afternoon that Dorotha finally got the chance to be alone with Oscar.
Before she had even uttered a word, he was leading her up the corridor.
‘Follow me,’ he said, glancing left and then right, before stopping outside the stationery cupboard where the books were kept.
‘Now’s the time to show you something. Quick. We haven’t got long.’
He opened the door and hustled her into the small room. Usually being in the little library, breathing in the alkaline tang of paper and being around her books, was an instant balm to Dorotha’s soul, but today her stomach was clenched like a fist.
‘You need to know about this, should you ever find yourself in need.’
The back of the room was lined with bookshelves but, at the bottom, there was a gap of about two feet, through which a skinny person might, with some effort, be able to squeeze. Oscar was crouching down on his belly on the floor, then suddenly he was disappearing into the gap under the bookcase.
‘Follow me,’ she heard him call. Dorotha blinked.
She was finally losing her mind. People didn’t simply disappear into bookcases.
She got down on her belly and began to pull herself under.
To her shock, the back of the bookcase seemed to have vanished.
In the darkness she felt Oscar’s hands pulling her through.
She found herself in some sort of dark cavity space.
‘What is this?’ she gaped, looking around her. The small room was about six feet wide and tall enough to stand up in.
There was a sputtering of sparks, then a flame lit up the dim interior space. Oscar had lit a candle placed on an upturned crate.
‘When I first started working here all those years ago, I managed to create a fake partition wall upon which I built the bookshelves, thus creating this small secret space. The resistance managed to supply the plywood and there are candles in the crate.’
‘How . . . Why?’ she spluttered, astonished to find her library was a front for a secret room.
‘Believe me, it’s been used plenty of times over the course of this war.’
Dorotha could make out scrawled names graffitied on the walls. She was utterly confounded by the discovery, and her nose was a little out of joint that she did not know about it before.
‘I suppose this means you are in the ghetto resistance? I had my suspicions.’
He grinned and somehow his smile sneaked in under her defences.
‘My love. So are you! Reading is in itself an act of resistance.’
She nodded, understanding. ‘So why are you telling me this now?’
‘I want there to be no secrets between us. And besides, it might come in handy.’
It was then that Dorotha noticed he had a bag over his shoulder and was hurriedly pulling sheafs of notepads out of it.
‘Today is Monday 31 July 1944. I’ve edited my last post for the Chronicle. After this morning’s speech, it’s now time to safeguard its contents. I’ve been hiding different editions around the ghetto.’
He tucked the file under the crate.
‘We’ve all been in a state of powerlessness in this waiting room of death,’ he murmured, touching the notebooks lovingly one last time. ‘Writing, and observing, like reading, reminds us that we are alive. Bearing witness is our last chance of establishing a link to the outside world.’
His eyes burnt fiercely in the gloom as he touched her hand. ‘Maybe it’s human nature to want the future world to remember us, to know that we existed.’
‘And to connect to our suffering,’ Dorotha concluded.
‘Precisely, my love.’
He pressed his lips against hers so softly, she wondered if she had imagined it.
‘But also, our hopes and our dreams. That we weren’t just nameless prisoners. We dared to fight back.’ He took her hands in his. ‘Last night my sister came to me in my dreams. She told me that I would never find another woman like you, with your capacity for love.’
In the darkness she saw a flash of gold. Oscar was holding a ring with a beautiful emerald at its centre.
‘Would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’
‘The ring,’ she breathed. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘My sister gave it to me shortly before the Great Sperre for safekeeping. Told me she had a premonition of her death and said she wanted me to have it. Of course, I didn’t believe her. I should have. So now, when she comes to me in my dreams, I listen.’
Tears filled Dorotha’s eyes as the enormity of what he was asking her sank in.
Did she love this man? Undoubtedly. Would she say yes to his proposal even if they had a guaranteed lifetime stretched ahead?
‘So . . .?’ he pressed. ‘If you say yes, you give me the greatest gift of all. Hope.’
‘But surely we should marry for love, not just for hope on the eve of our destruction?’
He laughed. ‘Dorotha, I could not possibly love you more than I do now.’
Why was she overthinking this? There was every chance she would not be alive next week. She nodded and choked on the burst of a laugh.
‘It was also my dream that I’d be proposed to in a library,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t imagine it would be a library like this.’
‘Is that a yes?’ he asked, and she nodded, tears trickling down her hollow cheeks.
Carefully he slid the ring onto her finger and they leaned into one another’s embrace. She felt his ribs under his flesh and the hard thump thump of his heart.
The irony of her predicament was not lost on her.
Somehow, in this monstrous machinery of death, she had a child to care for and now a fiancé.
Who would ever have believed it? There was so much to live for.
And yet, so little time. Standing in their precarious little library, she visualised the books as a shield.
If only they could stay here for ever, they might just hold back the war.
And perhaps, Dorotha thought, were it not for Gabriele and her dear friends, that is precisely what she would have suggested to Oscar.
Three days later, the situation was critical.
Doors to the ghetto workshops and factories had been nailed shut in an effort to force prisoners to present themselves at the assembly points for deportation.
Hospitals and food distribution points were closed.
No more bread or food of any kind was being brought into the ghetto.
Now the lines gathered not at the food distribution points, but at Radegast train station in the northern quarter.
The first transport left on 3 August. The Germans were demanding 5,000 persons a day report at the station for deportation.
All over the ghetto, people forced their raw and ulcerated feet into wooden clogs and old boots and began the dreadful trek.
Great columns of people tramped northwards towards the station, with shabby bundles on their backs, precious soup bowls and pots tied around their waists.
Trembling, damaged bodies dragged themselves to destinations unknown, one thought circling around and around.
Were they really going to Germany to work?
Dorotha stared bleakly out of the window of their little room as she watched the dust that had been kicked up drifting along the street.
In a matter of weeks, this street would be deserted.
Her eyes settled on a woman walking on her own, lagging behind because she could not keep pace with the crowd.
A strand of her grey hair escaped from under her headscarf.
She was bent almost double, her legs so swollen, it was painful to look upon them.
Dorotha saw the moment she decided to give up, perhaps thinking that it was better to die in the ghetto than face the unknown.
Her knees buckled and she crumpled to the ground, her metal soup bowl clanking against the concrete.
Dorotha swallowed hard and turned away from the window, back to their room, despair twisting deep inside.
Who was that nameless woman? Was there anyone who could keep the memory of her life alive?
‘Enough already. What are we waiting for?’ Mrs Mordkowicz said impatiently, gesturing to the window. ‘We should be out there getting a spot on the wagon before it’s too full.’