Dorotha grasped at the significance of what she was saying. During the random selections on the street, the grey-haired and weakest were the first pushed into the back of the trucks.
‘Thank you.’
‘Keep strong!’ Mrs Cohen ordered. ‘Our liberation will come.’
She lowered her voice. ‘There are rumours reaching the ghetto from Warsaw. A prisoner uprising.’ Dorotha was still reeling from that when she stunned her further. ‘We’re celebrating Pesach this evening. You, Mr Weiss, Ruth and her mother are invited.’
‘But how?’ she gasped. Mrs Cohen glared at her.
‘Sorry,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘How can we observe Passover without a Seder?’
‘You leave that to me. Just be at mine this evening, and take the alley by the side of the baker’s. It looks blocked off, but it’s not.’
She moved off to smoke by the window and her place in the queue was swiftly taken by another woman.
‘I want something set in the Great War.’ It was Milly Hauser, who Dorotha knew had lost both parents and all three of her children in theSperre. ‘I need revenge on the enemy. If not in reality, then through literature,’ Milly remarked. ‘Anything set in 1918 and about the downfall of the Germans is thrilling, is it not?’
Dorotha nodded. ‘I know just the book for you, Mrs Hauser.’
The woman left with Erich Maria Remarque’sAll Quiet on the Western Frontand the smallest of smiles.
It was exhausting, but enormously gratifying work, as everything she had in stock, from romance and adventure, to history, philosophy and classics, flew out the door. Every book picked up and examined lit little sparks of hope in her patrons’ eyes. The Sunday open-door policy was working well, and Dorotha thought at an estimate she must have loaned close to200 books. By the time the queue thinned out, Dorotha felt, if not joy, then a sense of satisfaction glimmer in her chest. A small fraction of women in the ghetto would escape tonight. If not in reality, at least through the pages of a book. Another thought shimmered through her too. Thanks to the generosity of these beautiful women, she also knew that she had a little extra lard, a potato, half a turnip and a quarter decagram of meat she could take over to Ava and Gabriele’s this afternoon.
But even as she worked, Dorotha couldn’t shake Mrs Cohen’s words. Celebrating or observing any kind of Jewish festival or holiday was strictly forbidden by the Germans and would mean almost certain death, but no one said no to Mrs Cohen, and the chance to celebrate one of the most important Jewish festivals was a risk worth taking.
Maybe Mrs Cohen’s fearlessness came from another source, Dorotha mused.
‘I heard a rumour that the Allies are bombing Germany,’ she overheard a woman whisper to Mrs Cohen by the window.
‘Please God,’ Mrs Cohen muttered back. ‘Biebow would be the first person I’d like to see hanging from his own gallows!’ She stubbed her cigarette out viciously on the window ledge. ‘Then the chairman.’
‘Remind me never to make an enemy of Mrs Cohen,’ Ruth whispered in Dorotha’s ear.
Finally, when the room was empty save for a few stragglers, a shout rose up from the street outside.
‘A razie is du.’ A ration has arrived.
The room emptied in seconds, with the last remaining women rushing outside to make it to the food distribution centres to purchase whatever meagre supplies were on offer.
Dorotha was just tidying away the remaining few books with Ruth, when a man’s voice startled her.
‘Do you have anything by Flaubert or Gorky?’
She looked up and felt a jolt of surprise.
‘Mr Weiss! I didn’t know you knew where I lived.’
‘Oscar, please,’ he replied, taking off his hat and running his finger nervously around the rim. ‘And I head up the Department of Vital Statistics, so you could say it’s my job to know where you reside.’
‘Oh...’ was all she could muster. Ruth gave her a wink and busied herself with her mother on the other side of the room, but Dorotha was acutely aware of them both listening.
‘I told you there isn’t much demand for the literary heavyweights. I don’t have any books by those authors. There is even less demand for Dostoevsky and Romain Rolland. But I have heard there’s a gentleman by the name of Mr Otelsberg, a former bookseller, who can be seen around the ghetto with his briefcase, should you wish to find him.’
It came out far more reproachfully than she had intended.
‘I’m teasing,’ he laughed. He lowered his voice to just above a whisper.
‘Actually, I came here on something of a more personal matter. I wonder if you’d like to go for a walk in Marysin if you’re finished here? Spring finally looks to have made an appearance.’
