She walked with grace and dignity, shoulders back, gaze steady, a Nazi gun trained at her head. And then they were gone, swallowed into the belly of the truck.
‘Category B,’ said the SS man as he slammed shut the doors. ‘For resettlement.’ He signed a form, and the truck rumbled to life.
Category B.Dorotha knew what that meant. Unfit for work, which to the Nazis meant only one thing. Unfit to live.
Dorotha was not in her body. Rough hands were pulling her back. Germanic screams tore through her skull. The walls of the claustrophobic courtyard seemed to be toppling down on top of her.
Ruth had her other arm and was guiding her back to their room as a primal, keening wail erupted from her belly.
‘Silence, Dorotha, or you’ll get shot,’ she urged, but at the doorway, Dorotha managed to wrench free from her grasp and started to run. Then she was stumbling, spiralling deeper into the labyrinth of dusty streets.
Too exhausted to keep it up for long, she slowed and slipped through the streets like a ghost. She could not believe the sights she was witnessing. Apartment blocks were surrounded, entrances and exits blocked. The horrific scene Dorotha had just witnessed was being replicated in every single street in thesprawling ghetto, as the Nazis combed methodically for anyone who they deemed a useless mouth.
With a scream ofAlle Juden raus!,the rupture of families. Wives prised loose from husbands. Babies and children ripped from their mothers’ breasts. People torn from their loved ones with such force that their shoes were left behind on the streets. A basket strewn on the cobbles. A door hanging on its hinges, blood and milk teeth on the doorstep. A mother who dared to fight back lying crumpled in the mess, howling and clawing at the pavement.
Every courtyard and turning showed evidence of precious human lives stolen. The air over the ghetto shuddered, as if the world had been torn in two.
Along Rybna Street, there was such a commotion that Dorotha struggled at first to make sense of it. Then she looked up. Little children were being thrown from a second-floor window onto a flatbed lorry below. Thrown. As if they were packages. Their tattered nightgowns billowed around them as they fell. Dorotha covered her eyes and moaned.
The children!She began to stumble in the direction of Marysin and the orphanage, panic piercing her grief.
Outside the building, there were horses and carts, guarded over by the SS and Gestapo.
Out they came, one by one. Dorotha slid behind a wall and watched, paralysed in horror. Ghetto policemen and porters, known as the White Guard, formed a ring around the orphanage, their own loved ones no doubt exempt from selection in return for performing this monstrous duty.
The SS laughed and joked with the children, chucking little Benny Perlman on his chin as they hoisted him up into the back of the cart.
‘You’re going to the funfair,’ they told him. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you? We have seen you watching it.’ Benny looked at themwarily with huge, haunted eyes, too scared to speak to the men in uniform.
She could hear Miss Weiss’s voice begging and pleading from inside the doorway. Then a gunshot.
At this, the children started to scream, those already in the cart trying to climb out, and now the mood changed.
‘Raus, raus,’ the SS guards ordered, roughly throwing the children up onto the cart, urging them to budge up until soon the whole cart was filled with little children.
‘Radegast Station,schnell!’ the SS ordered the driver, smacking the horse on the rump with his whip. They pulled off with such a jolt that children lurched off their seats.
The cart drew level with her, the horse’s hooves mingling with the sound of sobbing. Images came to her in snapshots. Brave little Benny Perlman, his cheeks soaked in tears. A girl clinging to the wooden sides of the cart, calling out for Miss Weiss. As the cart pulled away, she locked eyes with a girl sitting nearest to her. It was Anne. There was a bolt of recognition between the pair.
Reading calms a troubled mind and whiles away the centuries.
Had she said it, or Anne? Or maybe she had only thought it? The cart turned a corner, and they were gone. Dorotha doubled over and vomited onto the floor. In that moment, she wanted to die. She could not live in this world any longer. For there was not enough room in the world for her grief and pain. The third anniversary of the war had brought its most savage, sadistic blow yet. Her thoughts travelled to Joyce and the Secret Society of Librarians. Would they ever believe that human beings could be capable of doing such things to other humans?
The round-ups went on for another seven days, until 12 September 1942. All week long, the ghetto was filled with the sound of screams, gunshots, barking and the knock of rifle buttsbattering doors, always with the same order. ‘Alle Juden raus!’ All Jews out.
Neither Ruth, nor her mother, could stop Dorotha from breaking curfew every night to slip out and observe the catastrophes.
Selection.Such a bland, dry word for the visceral horrors she witnessed with her own eyes. The fifteen-year-old boy caught hiding in a dustbin in Zgierska Street, dragged out and executed. An old rheumatic woman, stumbling on swollen legs, gunned down. A stampede when the Kripo opened fire on a crowd. It seemed that, aside from the young and the old, outward appearance was the deciding factor on whether someone was selected.
When dusk finally fell on the eighth day, Dorotha guessed that many thousands of Jewish souls had been stolen from the ghetto, leaving behind a shrieking vacuum of grief and pain.
On the morning the curfew ended and they were ordered back to work, Ruth and her mother could hardly hide their dismay. Dorotha’s dark hair had turned white overnight.
‘It’s shock,’ said Mrs Mordkowicz, tying her headscarf around Dorotha’s head and knotting it under her chin.
‘I don’t care,’ she said, unknotting the headscarf and looking down with bland detachment at the dry white hair that fell over her shoulders. For truly, she didn’t. With Mama and Papa gone, what did anything matter any more?
‘Come,’ said Ruth gently, ‘we’d better leave for work.’
