Chapter 16 #3
The older lady had lost so much weight, her shapeless grey dress hung off her. She had already packed their possessions in a bundle and, what she couldn’t fit in, she had secured about her person with a ragged assortment of old scraps and scarves.
She lowered her voice.
‘I say we take the child and take our chances. We can make her up to look older.’
‘It won’t work, Mama,’ Ruth said, her voice strangely defeated.
Dorotha stared at her ghetto sister, usually so fierce and determined.
‘Ruth,’ she ventured. ‘What’s wrong?’
Ruth stood and paced to join her at the window, before exhaling hard, her breath leaving a cloud of vapour on the glass.
‘It won’t work because I’ve been ordered to stay here as part of the Raumungskommando, the clean-up team. I’ll never be permitted on the trains once they check my identity papers against the list.’
‘That’s where you were the other day!’ Dorotha breathed. Ruth rested her head against the window pane.
‘I’ve been working out how to tell you.’
She turned suddenly, her face a mask of anguish. ‘What can I do? Mama, I can’t leave you.’
Mrs Mordkowicz crumpled like an old paper bag and began to weep.
‘Please God no. Don’t let me be separated from my daughter. We’ve come so far . . .’
Gabriele got up and walked to the older woman, wrapping her arms around her.
‘Emil says that lucky people don’t have to be brave, only the unlucky ones.’ The little girl’s voice was heartbreaking in its clarity. ‘We all have to be brave now.’
Dorotha’s thoughts were racing. Could she? Would it even be possible?
‘You don’t have to be parted,’ she blurted.
‘But how?’ Mrs Mordkowicz asked. ‘You heard what Ruth said.’
‘We swap places and I stay here in the ghetto as part of the clean-up team. I become Ruth Mordkowicz and you become Dorotha Berkowicz.
‘That way, wherever those trains are heading, you can face it together.’ She smiled at Gabriele. ‘And I will stay here with Gabriele and we’ll tough it out until we are liberated.’
‘But the photos on our identity papers?’ Ruth queried.
‘They have thousands of people to move; they won’t be studying them that closely, if at all. And besides, now my hair’s been dyed, we don’t look so dissimilar. One emaciated Jew is much like another to the Germans.’
A long silence settled over the room before Mrs Mordkowicz looked up with hope in her eyes. ‘You would do that for us?’
Dorotha nodded, the memory of her final moments with her mama gripping her heart.
‘I would. You must stay together for the final hurdle.’
Ruth rushed at her, wrapping her in an embrace so fierce, it knocked the breath from Dorotha’s body. Her tears flowed, scalding, and Dorotha felt her cheek grow wet.
‘A dank! A dank. Thank you, my ghetto sister.’
For the next two hours, no one spoke as they tried to steel themselves for the heartache that lay ahead. The silence was only broken when Oscar knocked on the door. They had all agreed to go together to the station.
He walked in with the ghetto library briefcase and his clothes tied in a sheet.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he apologised. ‘But how do you decide which book to take and which to leave? In the end I settled for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The protagonist is facing his own mortality as he begins a journey. It felt apt.’
He laughed dryly, then trailed off.
‘What’s going on? Why isn’t Gabriele better dressed for the journey? I thought we agreed she would be made up to look older?’
‘We’ll wait outside in the corridor and say our goodbyes when you’re ready,’ Ruth said quietly.
‘What does she mean, say our goodbyes?’ Oscar demanded once they had filed out of the room.
Dorotha explained the situation as best she could; by the time she’d finished, his eyes were black with pain.
‘Is there anything I can say to change your mind?’
She shook her head.
‘Why am I not surprised? The reason I fell in love with you, for your empathy and courage, is the very reason we are now about to part.’
He dropped his suitcase and pulled her into his arms. And then he was kissing her.
His lips gently working along the sweep of her eyebrows, her cheeks and then her mouth.
She closed her eyes and tasted the salt of his tears on her lips.
She realised then, in the very moment she was losing him, how desperately she loved him, this beautiful, soulful man who had stitched himself into the threads of her story.
Who had given her such purpose with his quiet strength and support of her and her library.
Dorotha opened her eyes and stepped away to fetch something. ‘If you survive this and I do not, would you find my sister Adela and give her this?’ She pressed a battered copy of The Secret Garden into his hand. ‘Tell her . . .’
He pressed his finger against her lips to silence her. ‘You will tell her yourself when you see her . . .’
Her thoughts reeled as she put the book back on the table.
But what if I die here? What if I starve to death or am shot? What if I never see you again?
All those thoughts and more fractured the air between them. She took his hand in hers and smoothed her thumb over his palm, feeling the edges of their broken goodbye.
‘Be well, my wife-to-be,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘I will come back and find you.’
Oscar left and then, just like that, she was hugging Ruth and her mother.
None of them could speak for the pain of their parting. They just clung to one another, speechless that after so many years of surviving together, it had come to this.
‘If we never see each other again, I’ll write a book about you, Dorotha Berkowicz,’ Ruth whispered as she finally untangled herself from Dorotha’s embrace. ‘The librarian of the ?ód? ghetto, and it’ll be a bestseller, mark me.’
Dorotha smiled through her tears. ‘Mind you do.’
‘I’ll be seeing you, ghetto sister.’ Then Ruth was gone, her drab skirts brushing against the dusty ghetto street.
Dorotha watched them all through the window until they had blended into the shabbily dressed crowd, like a slow-moving grey river.
Her legs weakened and waves of red, shuddering pain washed over her. Then she felt a small hand in hers, looked down and saw the eyes of a child staring up at her expectantly.
‘Hey, bubbeleh, sweetie. It’s just you and me now.’