Moishe and the group laughed and the energy in the room lightened.
‘How did you do this?’ Ruth asked, looking at the table.
On the table was a Seder meal, of sorts.
‘For months I’ve been squirrelling away a little flour for the matzah,’ Moishe explained.
‘But the Germans inventory everything; how did you manage it?’ Oscar asked.
‘I’ve been storing it in a paper bag, which we buried at the cemetery under a fake grave. My good friend Srulik is a cook for the chairman.’
A man sitting in the corner of the room nodded. ‘That’s right. Whenever I cooked soup for his midday meal, I skimmed off a cup of flour and took it to the fake grave.’
‘That bastard has plenty to spare,’ Mrs Cohen growled.
‘And the rest?’ Ruth asked.
‘No roasted lamb bone, of course, but I bribed a Polish worker from the outside to bring us a chicken bone from a slaughterhouse,’ Mrs Cohen said. ‘The maror is alebjoda, a weed that I found growing in Marysin.’
‘And the wine?’ Mrs Mordkowicz gasped, her eyes falling on the cups of red wine around the table.
‘The chairman has been most generous,’ Mrs Cohen laughed. ‘Even if he doesn’t yet know it.’
Dorotha was stunned at their ingenuity.
‘I have a question, though. How did you manage to bake the matzah without alerting suspicion?’ Oscar asked.
‘Our good friend Ziggi was a lecturer in philosophy in Kraków before the ghetto,’ Moishe explained. ‘He speaks impeccable German. If any patrols came down the street after dark, he told them the smoke from the bakery chimneys was from delousing clothes. Biebow’s orders.’
‘It was so dark and, trust me, those nighttime patrols are not so clever,’ Ziggi shrugged.
Dorotha could see Oscar was flabbergasted.
‘With your permission, I’d like to put this in theChronicle. Future generations must know the risks Jews took to hold on to our faith.’
Mrs Cohen nodded. ‘Now let’s begin.’
Ziggi presided over the ceremony, murmuring blessings over the solitary candle.
Then together the room of people repeated the words.
‘Praised be Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who kept us in life and sustained us and enabled us to reach this season.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Dorotha sneaked a glance at Oscar. Tears flowed down his cheeks.
Little by little, the group went through the story of pharaoh and slavery, of escape, hardship and, eventually, of freedom. The words had never felt so meaningful.
Dorotha gazed around the small group, the candlelight softening the lines of hunger and pain, and knew that whatever life held for them all, none of them would ever forget this secret Pesach ceremony in the ghetto, where for a short while, they ceased to be prisoners.
The Nazis had torn them apart from their families, but they couldn’t stop them from creating their own. Dorotha looked around the table at her hotch-potch family, from the matriarch Mrs Cohen down to Gabriele. She felt a soft feathering of hope. These elemental bonds, formed in the abyss: these were what had the power to save them.
The candlelight shining in the darkness lit up the thin faces gathered round it, living, against all odds, with hope.
14
Joyce
London, winter 1940–41
