Let Me Tell You a Story Page 6

  Marynia laughed. ‘No, not far, they are still in Przemyśl. We will go there today.’

  Later that morning we set out. I was clutching my doll in one hand and with the other holding tightly onto Marynia’s coat. It was bitterly cold and Marynia had wrapped me up well in lots of scarves and stuffed my hands into a pair of old gloves which were far too big for me. We walked quickly and soon Marynia was panting and out of breath.

  ‘Are you tired?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ replied Marynia. ‘I get out of breath sometimes. It’s nothing to worry about.’

  We seemed to walk for ever along empty streets that I didn’t recognise. Every so often we passed groups of armed soldiers and Marynia’s hand would reach for mine and hold it tight. As we passed one group of soldiers one of them stared at us. Marynia tried to hurry by as if she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Papers!’ the soldier demanded, his gaze moving from Marynia to me and back again.

  Marynia said nothing but fumbled in her bag and drew out some crumpled sheets and handed them to the soldier. Then she began talking, explaining in her jovial, rambling way that she and her daughter were going to visit an elderly relative.

  ‘Can’t leave her too long on her own,’ she said, ‘not in weather like this. Who knows what might happen with no one looking out for her. Don’t want her getting sick, that would be the last straw. My daughter’s a good girl, always likes to see her aunt. Helps with the cleaning too. Makes my life a little easier, I must say.’

  The soldier said nothing but glanced again at Marynia and then briefly at me clutching on to Marynia’s coat before handing her documents back and gesticulating with his head for us to be on our way. We walked further on down the street before turning into a small alleyway that led between two buildings and out on to another road lined with houses.

  We stopped in front of a tall apartment house and Marynia rang the bell. An old man answered and after a short mumbled exchange that I couldn’t hear he led us slowly up several flights of stone steps and left us outside a closed wooden door.

  Marynia knocked three times and then three times again very quickly. After a short pause, bolts were pulled back from the inside and the door was opened just a crack. Then after a moment it was flung wide. Before I knew what had happened, I found myself in my aunt’s arms and someone grabbing my arm and dragging me inside. It was a delighted Zazula. She hadn’t changed very much; she was a little taller perhaps but her dark straight hair and heavy fringe still framed her pale face out of which her deep brown eyes shone.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ Zazula exclaimed. ‘We can play hospitals and mummies and daddies together. It’s been so boring playing alone all the time.’

  I was so happy. At last I was with people I loved and with whom I felt safe. So it was a great shock when Marynia bent down to kiss me goodbye.

  ‘Where are you going, Marynia?’ I cried. ‘I thought I was going to stay with you for ever until Mamusia or Tatuś come back. Or at least Tatuś, because you said Mamusia will never come back. But I want you to wait here till my father comes to get me.’

  ‘I can’t stay, my precious,’ Marynia explained, slowly kneeling down in front of me. ‘I have to go back to look after Jusiek. But you are a lucky girl to be with your aunty and your cousin and I’ll visit you whenever I can. I promise. I really promise. And you know I never break a promise.’

  She placed the doll in my hands and turned away as she stood up.

  She was crying when she left and so was I. Nothing stayed the same, people were either coming or going and I was so tired of trying to work out what was happening. Zazula saw that I was upset and brought a picture book to show me, and I soon cheered up when Aunt Adela offered me a piece of bread and jam.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come to live with us,’ Zazula told me again. ‘It’ll be fun to have someone to play with, even if you are still a baby.’

  Zazula would never let me forget that she was four years older. How I wished then that I was ten too. It seemed to me that to be ten was properly old and clever and thoroughly grown-up. I couldn’t wait to get there.

  I was very happy to be with my cousin and aunt even though we never went out. Each day a lady called Teodora visited us in the apartment carrying a basket covered with a cloth. Inside the basket was bread, milk, a few vegetables and sometimes even a few eggs or a very small piece of meat. It was the best food I had tasted for a very long time, but there was never quite enough and we were always hungry. Zazula kept talking about how much she missed sweets and chocolate, but I didn’t know what she meant. It had been so long since I had eaten them. Aunt Adela was always worried until Teodora appeared. When she arrived, Teodora would join Aunt Adela and they would sit in the corner of the room on hard-backed chairs and talk in hushed voices. Sometimes Teodora stayed a long time and other times she left without speaking a word.

  ‘She’s our only contact with the outside world,’ Aunt Adela explained. ‘She tells us what is going on in Przemyśl and the rest of Poland, and gives news of our friends.’

  We couldn’t leave the apartment and knew that we had to keep quiet at all times. Zazula and I played games and this made life much more fun than the ghetto. Of course there were times when we got on each other’s nerves.

  ‘Leave me, alone,’ I’d whisper, and then I’d wish that I was as grown-up and as clever as my cousin. Then I would win the next game of snap and some of the arguments.

  Aunt Adela spent many hours each day telling us stories. Some made me sad, like the ones she told us about my parents, which only made me miss them more, but others made me dream about the wonderful time we would have when we could all live happily ever after. Then there were the stories, some of which I remember Babcia having told me, about princes and princesses, giants, fairies and witches that came from two large books, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and another by Hans Christian Andersen. These stories were exciting and scary and we spent hours re-enacting them. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that I’d begun to suffer from terrible nightmares about dragons who breathed fire and monsters in grey-green uniforms, trying to devour me.

  I would lie in bed at night and look into the shadows in a desperate search to find the monsters hidden there before they found me. It wasn’t enough any more to simply put my head under the covers, close my eyes tightly and imagine I was invisible. The outside world now came into the safety of my bed so that I no longer felt safe anywhere. To try and calm my fears I took to repeating words over and over again, new words I had heard, strange words I couldn’t pronounce, and slowly my fears would subside and I would drift off to sleep.

  But these were the horrors of real life as well as of my imagination. Often we would hear thunder rumbling around, sometimes far away and at other times much nearer.

  ‘Silly, that’s not thunder,’ said Zazula. ‘They’re bombs. Houses being bombed. That’s why there’s so much smoke.’

  From then on I knew that each crash must mean that more people were dead or badly hurt. When I asked what the fireworks were, Zazula looked worried and whispered, ‘Those are the shots from soldiers’ guns. They are shooting people who aren’t doing what they are told and sometimes they are shooting people like us who are hiding from them.’

  Whenever we heard these noises our heads would jerk up from what we were doing and our eyes would search for Aunt Adela. As the terror mounted, Zazula then I would leap from our chairs and cling to my aunt for safety. When we heard them at night, it was the signal for everyone in the apartment block to descend the stone stairs to the cellar. We would drop whatever we were doing and go to Aunt Adela who would wrap scarves round our heads and rugs round our shoulders and lead us by the hand to join the other residents clutching pillows and blankets, desperate to reach the cellar beneath the house. No one gave us a second glance.

  The cellar was pitch black, musty and damp. The air was so cold that it hurt. It seemed to get under our clothes, and into our bones. Everyone huddled together in the bowels of
the earth, seeking warmth and companionship, waiting for the bangs and crashes to end.

  Eventually someone would light a candle and people would start to talk in low voices, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Their outlines flickered across the cellar walls, shadows that were huge and even more frightening than the dark, driving me back into the land of witches and monsters. They were out there in the darkness, waiting and watching for a chance to get me. Silent screams would fill my lungs and head and, as I tried to squash the fear inside me and fight the desperate urge to escape the cellar, I would reach out for my aunt’s hand and squeeze it tight.

  One evening the three of us were sitting at the table. At Zazula’s request, Aunt Adela was telling us a story about how she had met Zazula’s father.

  ‘Your father was Renata’s mother’s, your Aunt Tosia’s, brother,’ said Aunt Adela. ‘Cesio, your father, was a student at university because he wanted to become a lawyer so that he could help people. Anyway, one evening I went to a wonderful party. There were so many people; some were Jewish, others Catholic but that didn’t matter because we were all friends and all loved dancing and having fun. The ladies were wearing beautiful dresses and their hair was pinned up. The men wore suits and were very good-looking. I was so excited to be there. I’d been looking forward to this party for weeks. Then I saw him across the room, sitting there on his own watching all the men and women dancing. He was so handsome I couldn’t take my eyes off him.’

  Aunt Adela paused for a moment, smiling quietly as she remembered.

  ‘I knew then that he was the one. He turned and looked straight at me, and before I knew it he was standing in front of me asking me to dance. From that moment on we were never out of each other’s sight for long. He was so clever and full of fun and laughter – just like his sister, your mother, Renata.’ Aunt Adela stroked my hair. ‘I fell in love with him and he with me and so, of course, we wanted to get married. But our family was rich. Your grandfather, Zazula, owned part of a gold mine, had many houses both here in Poland and in a faraway city called London in a country called England. But Cesio was just a poor student. I thought my father would be angry and not let me marry him but he saw how much we loved each other, how hard Cesio worked and what a good lawyer he would be so he finally agreed.’

  Zazula sat entranced as she listened to the fairy-tale story of her mother and her father.

  ‘Where is Uncle Cesio now?’ I asked. I had never asked before because I had just assumed that he had gone away to fight the Germans like my father.

  Aunt Adela looked at her hands. ‘He was killed just after the war started.’

  Suddenly the thunder started. We jumped up and automatically followed the routine, bundling ourselves up in scarves and rugs and making our way along with the neighbours down into the cellar. Only that night it was different; the crashes were closer and louder than before; the walls of the cellar and the ground where I sat shook.

  ‘They are bombing very close tonight,’ someone said.

  At that moment there was a huge, almighty boom and the candle went out. I felt as if I was being lifted up into the air and thrown down again very violently. The crashing went on, and on, and so did the shaking. Then there came the sound of falling and smashing above us. The ceiling seemed to explode and enormous pieces of plaster and wood fell through the huge gaps above our heads and rained down on top of us. The blackness became clouded with dust and I heard screams. My throat tightened as my own cries fought to be let out to join the terrible confusion and noise. The debris kept falling. I couldn’t understand what it was or where it was all coming from until I detected the outline of a chair as it came hurtling crazily through the black hole, which had once been the ceiling.

  In terror I screamed my aunt’s name over and over again, but there was no reply. Then I heard Zazula’s voice through the darkness.

  ‘Renata, where are you?’

  ‘I’m here!’ I cried, crawling in the dirt, groping in the darkness for my cousin. Zazula appeared beside me.

  ‘Hold on to me and we’ll find Mummy.’ We clung to each other and cried together but no one came. Not for a long time.

  That night my nightmares became real. My night terrors that stopped me from sleeping were nothing compared with this. The noise, the smell and the dusty air only made me think that things could not get any worse. In the dark Zazula and I managed to find our way out of the cellar and up on to the street. The apartment block had been opened up like a doll’s house and all around lay piles of rubble. There were a lot of people lying on the ground moaning and more people busy digging a man out of one of the piles of rubble. He screamed as they freed him, his leg was twisted – it looked as if it had been put on the wrong way round – and blood oozed on to the ground. No one took the slightest bit of notice of us standing there, not knowing what to do or where to go. Then through the dust and the rubble we saw Aunt Adela, unhurt but ashen-faced and badly shaken.

  ‘Renata! Zazula!’ she cried, running towards us.

  She pulled us to her and hugged first Zazula and then me.

  ‘Oh no,’ Aunt Adela said. ‘Look.’

  Zazula and I followed her gaze up to our apartment block. It had vanished – at least the front of it had. From where we were standing we could see into the rooms, all the way up. Beds and chairs hanging over the edges of what had once been floors. As we watched, a bath with its clawed feet clinging to the remains of what had once been the bathroom fell out of an upstairs room, hitting the ground and shattering into a hundred pieces. We realised that there was no apartment. No hiding place. We were out on the street with nowhere to go and no possessions. I had lost a second doll – she had been left behind in the flat when the bombing had started.

  ‘We must go back and get my dolly,’ I said, turning to my aunt.

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling. We can’t. It’s not safe.’

  ‘But we must. She’ll be frightened and ever so hungry.’ I grabbed Zazula’s arm. ‘We must, mustn’t we, Zazula? You know how lonely she will be.’

  All I could think about was my doll, the one Marynia had given me to replace Baby Doll whom I’d had to leave in the ghetto.

  ‘We can’t get up to our apartment and that’s that. We must find somewhere else to go,’ said my aunt.

  We stood there in the darkness. All we had were the clothes in which we were standing. It was then, with the loss of Marynia’s doll, that I finally began to understand the seriousness of what was happening around me.

  The next few days blurred into a jumble of confusion and continuing sadness over my lost doll. Aunt Adela managed to find somewhere for us to sleep and someone who would give us food. But we couldn’t stay in any place for long.

  ‘No, we can’t stay here again tonight,’ my aunt would explain to us when I began to complain about having to move yet again. ‘It’s just too dangerous for them to help us any longer.’

  ‘Mummy’s friends are risking their lives helping us,’ Zazula said. ‘We are lucky that they help us even for a day or so, otherwise we would end up in the ghetto where you were.’

  I shuddered at the thought of being sent back there and vowed never to complain again. Aunt Adela no longer told us stories; she was either angry and impatient, or in tears. Occasionally she even smacked us if we didn’t instantly obey her. Then came the day when we found ourselves in a small cramped attic space above a kitchen dresser. Zazula and I had to climb a wooden ladder and crawl through a small trapdoor.

  ‘I can’t breathe, Zazula,’ I complained. ‘Where are you?’ I reached for her hand.

  Zazula and I were pushed in there on at least two occasions.

  ‘Stay still and don’t make a sound,’ Aunt Adela ordered us.

  With no room to move, and the pins and needles in my legs and pains in my arms getting worse, I could feel my panic rising. We could hear scrabbling and squeaks and then something ran over my body with hard, scratchy little feet. Just in time I remembered not to cry out but when it scrambl
ed over Zazula, she let out a high-pitched scream. Later, when we were allowed out, no one said a word. Aunt Adela stood and watched tight-lipped as the man in whose house we were hiding and whose name we didn’t know dealt with us.

  ‘You first.’ He pointed at Zazula.

  He put her, and then me, across his knee, lifted our skirts, pulled down our knickers and slapped us hard several times to remind us that we must never again make a noise, whatever happened, when we were hiding. It was our first beating.

  ‘The pain you have now is nothing, nothing, compared with the pain you will feel if the Nazis find you,’ he explained angrily as we stood in front of him crying and shaking and rubbing our backsides. ‘If you ever dare to make a noise again, I will use a belt on you.’

  Aunt Adela refused to comfort us.

  ‘You both deserved to be punished. Our friend is risking his life and that of his family by hiding us. Go to bed. I’m so cross with you both.’

  Crouching under the blankets with a bit of sheet stuffed in my mouth to make sure I didn’t make a sound and get another beating, I cried myself to sleep. It wasn’t the pain that made me cry. I simply couldn’t understand why I should have been punished for the noise Zazula had made. But we had learned our lesson. We had learned to accept whatever hiding place was available without complaint, and to never, ever make a noise.

  Chapter Five

  October–November 1943

  As the long hours became days and the days turned into weeks, Aunt Adela, Zazula and I moved from one house to another, spending no more than a few nights with any one family.

  ‘Why don’t they have to hide?’ I said, as we prepared to make yet another move.

  ‘Because the Nazis don’t want to kill them.’

  ‘But why do they want to kill us?’

  ‘Because we’re different,’ said Zazula, losing patience. ‘We are Jews and the Nazis don’t like Jews. I told you, it’s to do with our brown hair and brown eyes. Mummy’s friends are Catholic.’