Spring Will Be Ours (16 page)

They were to be moved, like many other families from the better residential areas, to the old Jewish quarter bordering Stare Miasto. The letter of relocation gave an address near Senatorska, one of the main streets, just outside the ghetto wall.

On the day of the move, they carried heavy suitcases along their own street to the tram stop. It was a bright, cold morning; they stood at the stop and waited, not talking. Anna imagined the German officers whose quarters their apartment was to be, choosing rooms, opening the windows on to the courtyard, with plenty of money to do the repairs, and make it all nice again. Except that it wouldn't be nice, because They were living there. When the tram which would take them across the river arrived, she began to cry.

‘I don't want to go, I don't want to. How will Tata ever find us now?'

‘Sssh,' said Teresa, pushed along by the queue behind her. ‘Get on, quickly.'

‘He'll go to Wiktoria, won't he?' said Jerzy, taking her bag.

‘Oh. Yes, yes, of course he will.' She climbed on, and they swung across the Vistula, the water sparkling in the spring sunshine. They had to take another tram, through Teatralny Square; then they got off, and crossed into Senatorska. Teresa held the letter; they walked slowly along, searching for the address. In cobbled squares off the main street they glimpsed a few trees, just in leaf. Here, towering tenements rose above them; there were endless rows of dark, closed casement windows. Anna remembered the few occasions she had travelled through the quarter, on streets like this one – not on the dreadful day when Jerzy showed her the families pouring into the newly-created ghetto, but before the war. It had been so crowded, then, and everything had looked so foreign: the faces, the clothes, the shops and shop signs. There were a great many people here now, but none of them were Jews, they were just ordinary Polish families like them, weren't they? Forced out of their homes and shunted across the city. The shops were boarded up, the ground-floor windows shuttered; old Yiddish shop signs creaked in the wind above them: there were peeling pictures of umbrellas, of jackets above the tailors', shoes above the shoemakers'. All those shopkeepers and craftsmen were inside the ghetto, now, working in the German slave shop's and factories, turning out uniforms, saddlery, mattresses and machinery. People said their ration allowance was two hundred calories a day.

Litter blew along the pavement and across the cobbles. It wasn't hard to imagine rats, scurrying through the gaps and broken shutters of the doorways. Many of the pasted-up notices flapped torn corners; others, put up months ago, were wrinkled from winter snow and rain. A Proclamation in heavy black capitals seemed to appear on every block: Anna slowed still further, seeing the words ‘Jewish' and ‘Death'. Jerzy and Teresa were ahead; she stood by herself, reading the warning.

PROCLAMATION Concerning the death penalty for illegally leaving Jewish residential districts.

In recent times Jews who left the residential district assigned to them have in many cases proved to be carriers of typhus. In order to avert the danger that hangs over the population, the Governor General hereby decrees that a Jew who in the future illegally leaves the designated residential district will be punished by death.

He who deliberately offers refuge to such Jews or who aids them in any other manner (i. e. offering a night's lodging, food or by taking them into vehicles of any kind, etc.) will also be subject to the same punishment.

Judgement will be passed by a Special Court in Warsaw.

I draw the attention of the entire population of Warsaw District to the new statutory decision because it shall be henceforth applied with pitiless severity.

‘Anna? Anna! We've found it – come on!' Jerzy had left his case with Teresa and was walking back towards her. ‘What are you
doing?'

Anna turned to him. ‘Are you in such a hurry?'

He picked up her bag. ‘No, but Teresa's tired and jumpy. I just want to get in there and get it over with. What are you reading?' He looked up at the notice. ‘That. It's months old, it's been everywhere. You haven't seen it before?'

‘Somehow I haven't. And you didn't tell me.'

‘Anna … you knew, anyway. Everyone knows.'

A gust of the cold April wind sent more rubbish scattering past them along the cracked, uneven pavement; he turned up the collar of the
burka
and shivered. Under his cap, his face was very thin.

‘Come on.'

Anna could see Teresa, a hundred yards or so ahead, waiting for them. She, too, was so thin now that her coat was hanging off her – Anna supposed that she must look like that, as well. Had Teresa read the notice?

‘Jerzy? What's it like, the place?'

‘It looks horrible.' He put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Don't worry,' he said, with a wry smile. ‘I'm here.'

She smiled thinly.

The entrance to the tenement courtyard where Teresa stood waiting was tall and narrow. A single iron gate, rusted, was pushed open and looked as if it could never close again without losing its hinges. Inside, as they crossed the courtyard, searching for their stairwell, they passed two lavatories, like sheds, with hanging doors, and they stank. The windowless flight of stone stairs was worn and dirty and frightening – unlit, with peeling doors to other, unknown apartments. Theirs was on the third floor, with two more floors above, and had been shut up since the evacuation of its occupants to the ghetto; it was dark, and smelt of damp and emptiness. They put down their cases inside the door and looked into the two small bedrooms, the kitchen-living room. Furniture from the apartment in Praga would be coming on a cart, tomorrow. Here, there were bed frames but no mattresses, a table in the kitchen but no chairs. The plaster on the walls crumbled to the touch, and the floors were thick with dust.

‘How many people do you think lived here?' Anna asked, and was chilled by the sound of her own voice.

Teresa shook her head. ‘Six? Eight? Too many, anyway.' She crossed the kitchen, and with difficulty pushed open the filthy windows on to a tiny balcony. They stood leaning on the rail, with barely room for the three of them, and looked down on to the courtyard, barred with heavy shadow and motionless slabs of sunlight. Above, the sky had been trapped by the four sides of the block into a square without prospect or horizon.

Jerzy went back inside, and they could hear him move the cases, two into the room he and Anna would share, the heaviest, crammed with everything she could bring, into Teresa's. When they went in they found him in the corridor, holding something.

‘This was under one of the beds.'

Teresa and Anna looked at the limbless body of a small cheap doll, its mouth open in a smile, its eyes rolled up into the head. Teresa took it, and gently tilted it upwards, but the eyes wouldn't open any more.

The newspaper boy stood on the corner, waving the
Nowy Kurier
at a passing German patrol. ‘Come on, you lot, buy your rag – no one else is going to!' In the bread queue, where he stood each morning, Jerzy heard it with the others, and grinned. It was early, the narrow street thronged with people queueing, or on their way to work; suddenly, crossing it at the far end, a
buda
appeared, a covered German lorry. It stopped, blocking the exit.

There was a ripple, and then heads turned at the sound of another, at the near end, which screeched to a halt, so that the street was sealed. ‘
Buda! Lapanka!
Round-up!' yelled the newspaper boy, and vanished. There was a surge towards the open shop doors: with a dozen others Jerzy managed to shove through into the baker's just before it slammed shut. Kneeling, he raised his head and peered over the bottom of the window sill.

The street was full of German soldiers, pushing their way through the terrified people who remained, seizing first one man, then another, then another, until they had six, lined up with their faces pressed against the wall on the other side. Forced by rifle butts to stand opposite them, and watch, the crowd fell back, and the officer gave the order to fire. The soldiers raised machine guns; in seconds, the street existed only as a roar of sound: shouts, gunfire, screaming. Six bodies slumped to the ground, and dark pools of blood crept along the pavement.

An utter silence. Then two women ran forward wildly across the cobbles and sank by one of the bodies. What followed happened so fast that for a moment Jerzy didn't know if he could have seen it: the officer gave the order to fire again, and the two women barely had time to raise their heads before they also fell.

Slowly the officer walked over to their sprawled bodies, lifted their heads by the hair, and let them drop with a crack on to the stone. Then he turned to the frozen onlookers.

‘A rail transport of supplies vital to the German Reich was sabotaged last night,' he said in broken Polish. ‘Let this punishment be a warning to all of you.'

He nodded to his men, and they ran to the waiting lorries and drove off.

Behind him, Jerzy heard someone being sick. He dragged himself up by the window sill as the shopkeeper, his fingers trembling, scraped back the bolts on the door; reaching for hands, sleeves, anything human to touch, and hold on to, they all stumbled out on to the pavement. Already, the bodies were partly hidden by a press of people, bending, lifting, slowly carrying them one by one through a doorway. A woman came out from a shop with a bucket of water. She was about to throw it on the stones, to wash away the blood, but another woman stopped her.

‘No, don't,' she said quickly. ‘Leave it – let everyone see.'

The woman with the bucket hesitated, then nodded and took the bucket back indoors. Just a little slopped over the sides.

Two days later, when Jerzy went back, as he had to, he saw a bunch of carnations laid on the bloodstained stones, where no one was walking, and a candle, flickering in the open air, but still burning.

Anna had found a job, through a cousin of Natalia's. He ran a chain of dry cleaners, two in Praga, three in the centre of Warsaw, another two in the suburbs. Anna was taken on in the one in Wola, a long tram ride away from their new home. The dry cleaners was in a street near the leafy cemetery in Powzki where Mama was buried – when they first got married, she and Tata had lived not far away. Tata used to bring Anna and Jerzy here, to visit her grave, but that was a long time ago, before Teresa, before the war.

Before the war, the dry-cleaning chain had flourished. Now, with the shortage of chemicals, it was barely possible to keep even two open. Anna took in the coats, suits and dresses from the few people who could still afford such a luxury – she and most of their friends were used, now, to rubbing out stains with tea leaves, mending and remaking everything they owned. It wasn't an enjoyable job, taking in the clothes and sorting them for the central cleaning depot, but it was hardly arduous, and it gave her the document she needed, to prove she was working. To get there, however, she had to take a tram through the ghetto.

When the tram stopped, and stood, humming, at the gate, the passengers travelling through were watched as they got on by armed guards. On her first journey, Anna was issued with a yellow pass; when she was inside she saw that the pass for the Jews was different – yellow, but with a blue diagonal stripe. The tram began to move again. It was early morning, still very cold. Anna had had nothing for breakfast except a slice of the wretched black bread with Wiktoria's beetroot jam – she had come and visited soon after they arrived, and shaken her head. Hungry, still half-asleep, Anna leaned against the grimy glass and peered out. Within moments, hunger and fatigue were forgotten: now she saw things which, when she had first walked along Senatorska, and explored the empty apartment, she had not dared to allow herself to imagine. She gripped the handrail with sweating palms, feeling a wave of nausea.

A woman in rags, her hair matted, her skin blue-grey, was pacing up and down a gutter, holding a baby. She was wailing, but no one on the street took any notice: the pavements were filled with slowly moving skeletons. Grey-faced men and women stood staring from doorways of the tenement buildings, scratching at lice in an endless, abstracted rhythm; just before the tram gathered speed Anna caught a glimpse through an open door of a dark room filled with crouching figures. Down a side street she saw two children picking listlessly through a rubbish heap. There were stalls, if you could call them that – women squatting beside a heap of old shoes, or clothes, or shawls. Later, Anna found out that the shawls were for wrapping bodies for burial. Just beyond the track a man was propped up against the wall, his head lolling forward. Two other men appeared, slowly pushing a handcart piled high with – dear God, with naked bodies. They stopped beside him, and as the tram moved past, Anna, heaving, turned to see them bend down, strip off his clothes and with great difficulty heave the body on to the cart. They trundled it down the street and stopped again.

The tram moved out of the ghetto, and into the quiet streets of Powazki, where it stopped to let off a couple of passengers and take on a few more. Anna stared at the people around her. They were quiet, but they seemed unperturbed, as ordinary as any group of people going to work, some reading the paper, others talking. Then a woman touched her arm.

‘Is this your first trip through?' she asked quietly.

Anna nodded, her head swimming. ‘Yes.'

The woman patted her. ‘It is terrible, I know. But you will get used to it.'

‘What?' Anna looked at her incredulously.

The woman shrugged. ‘What can we do?'

‘But surely –'

‘Sssh.' The woman lowered her eyes and Anna, suddenly aware of being watched, turned to see a German officer, at the front of the tram, observing her carefully. She gazed down at the floor, at all the patched and cobbled shoes of the passengers. Then the tram stopped, and she got off quickly, and walked through the streets to the shop without looking back.