‘They shot the head of the Judenrat in front of me,’ Mrs Mordkowicz blurted out. ‘He’d been preparing to board the transport alongside us. Just like that. One minute, he was helping me into the wagon, the next, his blood was on my boots.’ Her gaze dropped to the floor. ‘And then they took my parents. No goodbye. Not a hug or a kiss.’
Silence fell like a heavy blanket.
‘They are not men. They are demons,’ her father muttered.
‘A story,’ her mother announced overly brightly. ‘We need a story.’
She turned to Dorotha, but she was already digging around in the orange crate. She pulled out a dog-eared copy ofThe Secret Garden.
‘Wait. You have a book?’ Ruth exclaimed. ‘How?’
‘We were the first into the ghetto when the Germans established it back in 1940, so were allowed to bring a few more possessions than the more recent transports,’ her mother explained.
‘Everybody else’s families bring practical things, like frying pans and blankets,’ her father tutted, rolling his eyes. But there was no mistaking the love as he gazed at Dorotha’s mother. ‘My wife brings photos, candlesticks and baby teeth in a glass jar. My daughter brings her books!’
‘Dorotha, why don’t you read for our guests?’ her mother suggested.
Dorotha must have read this book a hundred times since their imprisonment in the ghetto but, each time, her mother listened as rapt as if she’d never heard it.
‘My daughter Adela was reading this book before the Germans invaded and we got her safely to England,’ she said, a look of fierce pride and love lighting up her face. ‘Please God, we shall all read it together one day.’
‘We will, Mama,’ Dorotha said, carefully opening the cracked spine and smoothing her hand over the tattered pages. ‘Because our persecutors have never outlasted our stories.’
She began to read, taking delight in the refuge of the pages. A fragile peace spread over the dark room. Dorotha loved reading stories out loud. She knew her words were helping to ease the agony of their existence.
Dorotha hated that her poor mama had to work fourteen-hour days in a workshop braiding blades of straws to line army boots, and then come home with her fingers bleeding. And that her kind, gentle father, an accountant by trade, came home stinking of shit after being forced to push barrels of raw sewage to the outskirts of the ghetto, or other backbreaking manual labour for the Germans. And shereallyhated that they saved their tears for the middle of the night when they thought she was sleeping. But this... She ran her pale fingers over the paper, tracing the outline of a story that transported them all out of this manmade hell. This was the most precious of gifts.
Reading wasn’t just an act of defiance. It was the only thing left in their lives over which they had any control. This war was madness, a twisted ideology that had spread like gangrene through the guts of Europe. But reading reminded them that there was more to the world than Nazis. And one day, they would be gone, and books would remain. Each sentence was a time machine, a literary freedom she doubted Frances HodgsonBurnett could ever have realised she would grant them when she picked up her pen.
Were they not, after all, known as the People of the Book? Not solely for their reverence and deep connection to the Torah, Dorotha liked to think, but also because of their love of learning and stories.
Dorotha sneaked a glance at her roommates. Exhausted from the trauma of their long journey, Mrs Mordkowicz had knitted both arms around her daughter, and they both had their eyes closed, allowing the words to wash over them.
When the light guttered, her mother rose creakily and took the book carefully from her. ‘And so, to bed. But first...’ She turned to Mrs Mordkowicz. ‘Will you pray with me?’
‘I’m... I’m not sure I believe in God any longer, Mrs Berkowicz,’ Rebecca confessed, her eyes haunted in the dim light. ‘I’ve seen things that make me question how any God can allow such wicked acts.’
Her mother smiled gently and without reproach. ‘You will receive no judgement from my quarter.’ She turned, and covered her head with a scarf, gently covered her eyes with the palms of her hands and began to softly murmurShema Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.
Her prayers filled the room, as much a source of comfort to Dorotha as the book she had just read. Not because she was devout. In truth, she shared Mrs Mordkowicz’s cynicism. But more because she knew that, as long as her mama had faith, she had hope. It was the touchstone of her life, as important an ingredient to survival as food and warmth.
When her mother finished, she turned and smiled. ‘We all must cling to a faith of some kind. My daughter Dorotha believes we have survived so far so that we can tell others our story. We will live to tell the world about this place.’
They all settled down to sleep in that miserable, sodden little room, each lost in their own private thoughts and fears. Before an exhausted sleep engulfed her, Dorotha whispered a silent goodnight to her little sister, asleep safe and sound somewhere in England, and then blew out the light.
3
Joyce
London, Saturday 7 September 1940
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Bulletin No. 12
SSL. Going free. Creaky old girl, her bonnet hasn’t been lifted in a while, a few miles on the clock, but plenty of life in her yet. No, not me (Clara, stop that, I can see your eyes rolling from North Devon), but an old mobile library.
We’ve had a flood of evacuees and servicemen from all around the country now that the Library Association has lifted the bar on one branch membership. The good old WVS had the jumble sale to end all and, would you believe, raised enough money to purchase a brand-new library van. Now my old travelling library van is sitting unused in the garage behind the library. Would any of you like her – Joyce? She’s something of a behemoth, but she’s not ready to go out to pasture yet. Keep up the good fight, girls. See you on the other side of this wretched war.
