The Prosperous Thief (29 page)

When the rumours began to circulate that these were the clothes of dead Jews, no one wanted to believe such a thing, no one could believe, just kept on working – for their lives, so Rumkowski said. Huge containers of clothes brought to the ghetto, enough to keep countless people working, the ghetto Jews sorted, they repaired, they were ordered not to waste a single scrap of these clothes, and neither they did. For their lives.

It was the shoes that killed Etti’s father, or more specifically a single shoe. Etti was twelve when they first entered the ghetto and growing fast, particularly in the early months when there was more food available. Later, when there was no food and with the rest of her body shrinking, her hands and feet kept on growing, her skull too. Seems that bone can grow on air.

For small children in the ghetto there were scraps of cloth and leather that could be fashioned into shoes. Adults could replace their shoes from the stock that became available when people died, and there were the ghetto’s wooden clogs. But for those in between like Etti, when her shoes wore out, replacements were hard to find. Her father patched as best he could, reinforcing with upholstery hessian and his father’s
tefillin
, preserved to the old man’s blessed memory but now turned to more urgent use. But the winter of 1943 was harsh, and despite her careful walking through the ghetto’s unpaved streets, Etti’s shoes broke about her feet. Her father now working in the old-shoe workshop succeeded in stealing a left boot, perfect when stuffed with paper. But two days later when he was caught with a right boot hidden in his jacket, he was shot.

Murdered for a shoe. These Germans, so scrupulous, so efficient when it came to preserving old shoes and clothes, dispensed so easily with human life. As Etti stood at the long table sorting old clothes, her left foot in a good boot and the other wrapped in rags, it was as if she and the rest of her family, indeed everyone in the ghetto were being made to work like starving people in a kitchen: up to their elbows in what they most needed but would lose their lives if ever they were to take.

Her father was dead, and before him his mother, and within a month of his death, his mother-in-law. That left Etti, her two sisters, her brother, her mother and a welter of rumours. Many years later Etti would tell her own children that a rumour reveals something which should not have happened but is in fact true. As a girl in the ghetto, though, rather than truths, Etti was aware only of fantastic and improbable stories and tried not to dwell. So when early in the summer of 1944 notices announced that several thousand people from the ghetto were to be resettled at work camps in Germany, despite the thicket of rumours, many people, Etti’s family among them, jumped at the opportunity, believing that anything would be better than the crowded, disease-riddled ghetto with its starving, demoralised inhabitants.

Such promises these Germans made, of work, of food, of shelter, but all were euphemisms for death. Their ingenuity was breathtaking. They would work you to death. Starve you. Freeze you. Deceive you. Shoot you. Bash you. Hang you. Torture you. Infect you. Gas you. Her two sisters and her brother were taken just a few kilometres to Chelmno where they were crowded into special vans. In the three hundred metres it took for the vans to roll to the mouth of the crematorium, Chana, Lena and Shimon were killed. It was like the clothes, it was like the shoes, everything must be saved except the Jews. And when she heard the truth about her sisters and brother, she knew the truth of the clothes, the clothes she had touched with her own hands, clothes that in her memory felt like human skin.

Etti did not plan her escape from the ghetto, rather a never-before-seen opportunity arose and she seized it. It was dusk, before the searchlights were lit, and two guards more interested in a jar of vodka than watching the gates. She saw, she did not think, she ran.

For the next two months she scuttled through the countryside surviving as best she could. She was lucky it was summer, and fortunate, too, she was blonde. But without the right papers and always on the run, survival exacted a shocking toll.

When she arrived at Paul’s farm she was broken, starving and exhausted. Whatever Paul wanted in payment he could have, she said, just as long as she could rest for a few days.With that she started at the rags of her jacket, her bony hands picking at the fastenings. A father and good Catholic with a daughter much the same age as Etti, Paul watched horrified as this child offered her scrap of a body. What was God doing that men could be such monsters and children forced into such depravity? Paul told her to fix her clothes, that he wanted nothing from her; he spoke gently so as not to embarrass, then took her to his barn. It wasn’t much, he said as he lifted the trapdoor and showed her the storage hole, but neither could he risk having her in the house.

He fixed a handle to the inside of the trapdoor so Etti could open it from below – but only at night, Paul said, was she to venture out – and loosened one of the boards so she could slip it sideways to let in some light during the day. He brought clothes to replace her rags, and newspapers to fold between the layers of her clothing. He provided hessian and straw for lining the hole, and the pièce de résistance, a quilt which looked almost new. He was far from being a rich man, he said, but as God had brought Etti to him, it was his duty to take care of her. Nearly every day he left food for her in a tin to protect it from vermin, and after nightfall she would emerge from her hole. She would make a nest with the hay and the quilt, curl into her thin warmth and eat.

At first the cows were uneasy, such lumbering shadowy beasts with their frosted breath and flicking tails, but soon they adjusted. In time it was as if her world blended with theirs: same home, same cycles of fitful sleep, same caked-on filth, same smell. How shamed her mother would have been, Etti thought as she tried to remove some of the dirt. And before the thought grew, she would shut it down, because totting up the losses made survival that much harder.

You live in your head when the obstacles of living in the world become too great. All the time Etti was in the barn, the cold hacked into her like an ice cutter. She would gather the good thoughts and separate them into stories, each story set in America where it was always light and warm with plenty of food and her family together again. The seam between waking and sleeping blurred while she lived in one or other of her storylands for whole days at a time.

She went to the toilet as seldom and neatly as possible, firstly in the barn, her smells mixing with those of the cows, but as she trained to hold her bowels, sometimes for more than a week, she would, under cover of night, venture out of the barn beneath a tent made of the quilt and find a place among the trees. As she shrugged off the hiss and spit of night noises, she was struck by how much she had changed: once so scared of creatures, now it was only people who frightened.

She made friends with the cows, one in particular, a smooth caramel beast whose stall was closest to her trapdoor. The cow would watch as Etti climbed out of her hole, the glassy brown eyes glinting as they caught the light. It was the cow who made the first move, a gentle nudge in the back as Etti sat eating at the edge of her hole. The cow must be hungry, Etti decided. She had put aside a small piece of meat to eat in a day or two, closer to when she would next have to move her bowels – she’d learned which foods settled and which ones made a fuss – and now after a brief hesitation she retrieved it; after all, this was the cow’s home and she the trespasser. But the cow showed no interest in the meat, just moved closer to Etti and nuzzled into her side.

Decades later, Etti would say she owed her life to a good Polish farmer and a lonely cow. After that initial contact, Etti would eat her food, turn fresh hay in the stall and stretch out along the cow’s flank, and there she would sleep for two maybe three hours, sucking in the warm alive smell of her cow, properly sleep, rather than the fitful time-filling she did during the day.

Months later, when the Russians came into the countryside and Paul deemed it safe for Etti to emerge, it turned out he had hidden a whole family as well as her. Here was a man so good that Etti’s poor wracked brain could not quite assimilate it. The cow, however, was easy to understand. Etti wrenched herself from that cow as her family had been wrenched from her. And never again would she eat meat. It’s not beef, she would say to Laura and Daniel, it’s a cow. It’s not a chop, she would say, it’s a lamb. Chicken, in contrast, presented her with no such problems. No chicken, she told her children, ever saved a girl’s life.

‘Just take a look at all this,’ Laura said to Nell.

It was four months after Henry’s death. Etti and Henry’s home was up for sale and all the contents had been dispersed, with a good proportion ending up at Laura and Nell’s place. Laura was standing at the kitchen bench. Set out in front of her were a bit of blanket, a dozen old letters from Paul the Polish farmer and some more recent ones from one of his daughters. There were nine plastic cows each individually wrapped in tissue paper, a flap of old shoe, a pair of tattered mittens, the faded photo of Etti’s family in Lodz, a purse, a scrap of shawl, two stones, a copy of the tape Etti had made for the Holocaust Museum and a transcript of the tape.

Nell and Laura took them in.

‘They’re remarkably volatile,’ Nell said at last.

Laura did not answer, could not answer, just wanted the things out of sight. She bundled them up and returned them to their box, wondering when it would all stop. Her mother had been dead five, nearly six years, and still her horrors kept coming. In all Etti’s telling of her past, she had never paraded this collection, or rather not as a
collection
. Laura had seen a couple of single items, but the cows, the stones, the scraps of clothes were new to her.And while she knew about the tape, she had never wanted to listen to it when her mother was alive, and after Etti died, was terrified of what new horrors it might contain.

She closed the box and moved it to the end of the bench, then a minute or two later picked it up and took it into her study. To deal with later, she told herself. Of course Daniel would need to know about these things, although she doubted he would be interested. He’d had so little involvement with the clearing of the house, had left it to his wife to lend a hand; neither had he wanted much in the way of Henry and Etti’s possessions.

So much for the sentimental Jew, thought Laura, again experiencing a longing for the brother she once had. As for Etti’s box of memories, even before he became religious Daniel had been critical of what he termed ‘Holocaust fixations’. He believed that dwelling on a single tragic moment in Jewish history to the exclusion of millennia of Jewish learning and discovery was a greater threat to the future of Judaism than the Holocaust itself. The Holocaust, he said, had taken over Judaism. And even when Laura and Melissa insisted that sorting through Henry and Etti’s possessions was about his parents not the Holocaust, he still refused to be involved.

As it happened, it had been a comfort doing the job with Melissa. Revealing considerably more foresight than her husband, Melissa had selected a number of Etti’s things to keep for the children and quite a few items for herself. She had not been particularly close to Henry, she used to joke that with her Australian background she was the wrong sort of Jew for him, but she and Etti had enjoyed a special connection.

‘There’s a safety zone between a woman and her daughter-in-law,’ Melissa said one day when she and Laura were working together at the house.‘The relationship begins somewhere beyond that often very fraught space which is the sole domain of your own children.’ She paused a moment to wrap one of Etti’s pieces of fake Venetian glass. ‘Your mother had nothing to lose with me. I was never dangerous ground for her so she could let herself go. And for me it was all pleasure: no guilt, no resentment, no debts.’

Melissa had wanted some of Etti’s crockery, also a selection of her
tchutchkas
, that vast collection of ornaments and objects which reflected Etti’s sense of the aesthetic but no one else’s. Laura was amazed: Melissa and style were welded together.

‘I know your mother had appalling taste,’ Melissa said. ‘But without her appalling taste she wouldn’t have been Etti.’

Melissa had selected a coral-coloured fake Venetian glass serviette holder – ‘I’ll use it for envelopes’ – a set of fruit knives with mother-of-pearl handles housed within a huge mother-of-pearl shell – ‘It’s a conversation piece’ – a mother-of-pearl butter knife – ‘Etti could have gone into the mother-of-pearl business’ – and a trio of amber-coloured glass pigeons grazing on amber-coloured glass grass which doubled as a hall lamp.

As for the rest, Laura’s reluctance to get rid of anything which had been important to her mother had left her with several cartons of kitchen goods she and Nell did not need, her mother’s jewellery – most of it clunk and paste – and the remainder of Etti’s
tchutchkas
.

‘We’ll have to move house to accommodate your mother’s hoarding,’ Nell said when Laura brought everything home.