That’s how it was.
The children fought with each other all the time. They yelled in many languages, hit and punched, pushed and shoved, pinched, tore off ears, noses, braids. The boy with the folded legs who dashed around on his crutches hit the hardest. The children cried the most when he hit them. No one hit me.
One morning, we woke up to a loud commotion. A rumor spread that a boy had been hanged. They found him completely dead. He was hanging from a belt. They said that the belt was filled with dollars and his parents had wound it around his waist before they escaped from the ghetto. They sent him to a hiding place in a village, just as my parents had done with me, but his parents were murdered.
That boy had managed to survive until the liberation without being murdered. Now they’d hung him from a belt. He had a treasure in that belt. Like the treasure my father’s little brother David had, the treasure that was buried in the basement of my parents’ villa in Bochina.
And I cried and cried, cried and cried there, in the orphanage built of red bricks.
MY FATHER CAME TO SEE ME. HE STILL DRAGGED HIMSELF along, stooped, pale, and thin, while I was already walking quickly; I’d even learned to run. My father took me to visit my mother in the tuberculosis hospital. My mother was lying in the dying women’s ward.
Inside, everything was painted in a peeling, shiny white oil paint, a leprous color that had a strange smell.
My mother lay in a high iron bed. The iron was painted white too. My mother was as white as the pillowcase, and two orange-red spots blossomed on her cheeks like a clown’s makeup. She smiled at me with her hollow mouth that had only a few stumps of teeth in it because my father had so skillfully pulled all the crowns and bridges with his marvelous pocketknife, the red pocketknife with the white cross painted on it, the symbol of Switzerland, where there hadn’t been a war because it was neutral.
I stood next to my mother’s bed and she held my hand limply. My father dragged over a chair, sat down beside her, and stroked her hair with his unbroken hand. She always loved that so much. My mother’s hair was golden, straight, and shiny, a source of pride for her. Once, before I was born, when she was working in a kindergarten, the children loved her because of her hair, that’s what my mother told me.
In the huge, endless hall my mother was lying in, the hall of dying women, iron beds painted in peeling white paint were on her right, her left, all around her, and in all of them lay pale women with blazing clown cheeks. Some beds were surrounded by screens. Those women weren’t dying, my mother said; they had already died. They died every night and every day there.
They died, died, and died.
For the time being, my mother was alive. The Koch bacillus, the tuberculosis bacillus, had still not completely gnawed away her lungs.
The damp hole still hadn’t sucked her into it.
My mother asked me questions. What did I eat, what children had I met, where did I sleep, how was the bed, how many lice, bedbugs, and fleas were in the mattress. She was terribly sad when she heard about the filthy toilets and how I walked barefoot in them. Then her strength was gone. Her eyes, a yellow-green color she never liked, closed.
We left.
My father took me back to the orphanage made of red bricks and vanished. And I continued to cry.
When my father came to see me again, he brought a pair of wonderful slippers my mother had sewn and embroidered especially for me. Lying in her bed in that hospital where women died every night and every day, the tuberculosis hospital, she had made me a marvelous pair of slippers.
My mother, with her superb ingenuity and talent, had cut a piece of thick fabric from the hospital blanket, unraveled some threads from her robe, and even found a bit of red thread to embroider a tiny flower on each gray slipper.
That’s the sort of person my mother was.
And I continued to cry.
The crying that will never ever stop, that will go on for all eternity.
The crying seeped into the depths, ancient lakes of tears, tears from the abyss burst forth.
They stole my slippers. But the slippers weren’t very practical anyway. The filth of the toilets, the vomit, urine, and excrement were absorbed by their felt soles, and after a few days they stank terribly. I didn’t tell my mother that my slippers had been stolen. They were so pretty, the only ones in the world. And the embroidered red flowers—if only I’d unraveled the flowers before they stole the slippers, I would have had a red thread like the one my wonderful gray mice took from me and wove into their nest.
My mother knew how to embroider so beautifully. While in the hiding place, there was no end to her inventiveness, the things she thought up and made and gave to Juzakowa to sell in the market. So there’d be a little more money to send to Hania Seremet to keep me in the village, on the side of life. So there’d be a little more money for bread. She made purses out of old sacks and embroidered gorgeous designs on them. She embroidered tiny flowers on cheap sweaters and turned them into unique, extraordinarily beautiful sweaters. Juzakowa would go to the market, stand among the haggling peddlers, and sell my mother’s creations.
Juzakowa also sold the stones for cleaning cloth shoes that my father made using my Uncle Dov’s formula.
The Germans murdered Uncle Dov, his gentle wife Minka—my mother’s beloved older sister—and their two daughters, Rachel and Pnina.
Once, Hania Seremet came to the village with a dress made of shiny material the color of fine celadon, decorated with flowers made of the same material, but in pastel colors—pink, powder blue, yellow. Hania Seremet ordered me to wash, comb my hair, and wear the magnificent dress. I didn’t know that my mother had made the dress. Hania Seremet didn’t tell me. She took me to the neighboring town, to the photography studio, and tied a stiff ribbon on the top of my head. The photographer asked me to move closer to Hania Seremet, and he took a picture of us together.
When we went back to the village, I untied the stiff ribbon, took off the dress, and never saw it again. Only after Hania Seremet had dumped me at my parents’ hiding place did I see the dress again, in the pictures taken the day she gave me the dress and stole it from me, pictures she’d sent to my parents as proof that I was still alive. They no longer believed it, and they’d never trusted Hania Seremet. They called her a murderess. And yet, they’d given me to her, to a murderess.
Such beautiful pictures. In one of them, Hania Seremet and I are together, and in the other, I am by myself. The photographer had painted them in lively pastel colors. But he had made a mistake. In the picture the dress is pink, but in reality it was green.
The touch of the photographer’s hands as he moved my head, crowned with a stiff ribbon, until he thought the pose was right, the unpleasant closeness of Hania Seremet with her white face and clenched jaw. In the picture, Hania Seremet is wearing one of the sweaters my mother embroidered with tiny flowers. The sweater had most likely been given as part of the payment for my life. I remember the smell of damp, sweaty wool, a nauseating smell, and the slippery softness of the satin dress.
The photographer asked me to smile.
Sometimes, when she came to the village, Hania Seremet would bring me paper and colored pencils and tell me to draw. The drawings were also sent as proof that I was still alive, and Hania Seremet received money for them too. Then she received for them my father’s will bequeathing her my parents’ villa in Bochnia to use for the expenses involved in continuing to keep me alive, if I remained alive. Later, there were promises and threats, and when nothing was left, Hania Seremet had had enough and acted on her decision to get rid of me, that Jewish girl, and dump me at their hiding place after sending a strange, surreal telegram: Come