It’s snowing. It’s cold. I sleep in my coat. Mamma looks like a whale, wearing all the clothes, both summer and winter ones, that she brought with her, three pairs of thick socks, and a now almost hairless fox muff that she wears on one arm even while cooking. The butter’s finished. Lard costs ten złotys and we can’t afford it. My father has run out of tobacco for his pipe. He’s started smoking birch leaves which makes a nice smell in the house. But it also makes him cough like a consumptive.
Yesterday I saw two SS men beating up a boy who had no yellow star on his coat collar. The boy showed them that he had his star sewn in full view on the lapel of his jacket, which he was wearing under his coat. But they went on hitting his head just the same. The boy was holding his head in his hands. One ear began spurting blood which stained the snow all round. A very thin and decrepit dog came from God knows where and began licking the blood up as though it were redcurrant syrup.
Amara tries to imagine Emanuele in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto in Łódź, with the snow falling. She has always loved snow. It softens and refines houses and countryside. But what can it have been like in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto?
Łódź. March ’42
I’ve found some paper. I swapped a silk handkerchief of Mamma’s for an exercise book. Writing to you is like writing to the whole world. But I’ve no money for a stamp. And in any case I don’t know if the post will take letters sent abroad. When we first came to the ghetto letters did go off. And sometimes they arrived, even if half blocked out. But not now, no longer. We’re shut in, closed in a trap. But I’m writing to you all the same. One day you’ll read the letters I’m writing in this exercise book. Or at least I hope so. The ghetto’s getting more and more crowded. More Jews are arriving, some from Holland, some from Hungary. Bringing with them the odd bundle, or suitcases tied with string. Many have no shoes, just hungry eyes. An organisation here looks after them. Gives them shelter and something to eat. But only for the first few days, after that they have to fend for themselves, find some workshop to employ them so they can earn the złotys they need to buy a little bread and margarine or barley coffee and sugar which today costs forty złotys a kilo. Yesterday my mother gave her gold wedding ring for three pig’s feet and two kilos of potatoes. When Papà heard they are deporting those without work, he too started looking for something to do. Yesterday nothing, but today he helped carry bricks for a bricklayer with frostbitten hands. Luckily he still has his pigskin gloves and carried bricks all day for seven złotys.
I’ve lost my job at the carpenter’s. There are too many of you, said the manager. There are fifteen of us boys and he can’t afford to pay us all. All the same, he let us have a portion of soup at midday. I don’t want to think my family have been stupid. I don’t want to think that. But I do think it sometimes, even if I don’t want to. The stupid patriotic idea of returning to Nazi Vienna when everyone else was trying to get away from it. Why am I not with you now? I see our cherry tree again, I remember our games, I can feel your hand again in mine. The thought of you distracts me and helps to keep me going.
Łódź. April ’42
Dear Amara. I’m writing to you from the shelter in the cellar of our block. There are hundreds of us crushed in here. Someone is singing a mournful dirge. A child is crying. Shots can be heard from far away. The good thing about a crowd is that it creates heat. It’s warmer here than in the flat. I’m writing by the wavering smoky light of an oil lamp. The pencil is still working. My letter is in this exercise book. It’ll be easier to write your name and your address on it and stuff it into a hole in the wall I recently discovered. Maybe it had something to do with the chimney of a stove that’s no longer here. It had been stopped up with a piece of wood and whitewashed over. But I managed to get it open with a penknife. I’ll leave my memories there for you, if we don’t manage to get out alive. Otherwise, if the war ends in a few months, I’ll bring it to you myself. How wonderful it would be to hug you again! An epidemic of typhus has broken out in the ghetto. There’s no medicine and people are dying of fever. It’s a miracle none of us is ill. Mother says all you need is to keep a pad soaked in vinegar between your lips. I’m not going to be able to stand the stink of vinegar much longer. Yesterday my father found some eggs for sale at a fair price. He brought them for my mother as a present, very proud of himself. How small and light they are! she cried. When she opened them she found nothing inside. Someone had pierced them with a needle and sucked out the contents and then sold them like this, empty. If you looked closely you could see the holes made by the needle, stopped up with transparent wax. My mother wept in despair. Those eggs had been bought with my złotys. Three days’ work gone up in smoke.
Łódź. April ’42
Dear Amara. I’ve started working at the carpenter’s again. Every day more lorries arrive and pull up panting in the middle of the street. The SS grab whoever they see and make them queue up with others. Then they make a selection. They push the old, the ill and the infirm into the lorry and take them away. They let the others go, the young ones, especially if they’re in work. It’s said those in the lorries are taken to a camp and killed by a blow to the head after being forced to dig a ditch for their own grave. No one knows for sure because no one has ever come back from these expeditions. The story came from a Jewish cook who heard the SS talking about it while they were having a meal after an ‘action’.
Yesterday I saw an old man refuse to get into a lorry with the others, so they tied his hands and feet and attached him with a hook to the lorry which set off at high speed with his body bumping and rolling behind. It made a strange noise like the rattling of an empty box. You know, I can’t dream any more. What d’you think it means when you can’t dream any more? I wake in the morning with my tongue burning in my mouth. I’m hungry, that’s all I can think about. The bricklayer my father worked for has been taken away too. His hands were covered with sores. He kept them wrapped in two filthy rags. He was about thirty years old, so he told me, but he looked fifty. He had grown old suddenly, his neck wrinkled and his hands covered with ulcers. The Nazis grabbed him and pulled him towards a lorry. He shouted that he could still work, that his hands were only bleeding temporarily, that in a couple of days he’d be able to start working with bricks again, but they took no notice and lifted him bodily onto the lorry. I was watching from the window. I couldn’t feel the compassion I would have expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing at all. Perhaps this is the beginning of the great change. I am in the process of being transformed into a human being made of stone. Stone eyes, a stone brain, a stone tongue and even a stone heart. Even my love for you is becoming cold and mineral. Another stone in the little cemetery of memory. I must say a prayer.
How can that stone child have survived in that ghetto? Would he have had the strength to survive? Was turning to stone a way of holding on? And what if, after all, he had made it? A boy has his life before him. And it isn’t easy to break a stone.