‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Bulletin No. 85
Friends,
Since the Nazis sealed the gates on 30 April 1940, the mortality rate in the Lódz ghetto has been horrifying. More than 13,000 people have died in the first seven months of 1942. Disease is rampant. I have seen people drop dead in the street in front of me, to be iced over in winter or settled upon by swarms of blowflies in the summer. I can’t find words to describe our suffering. Cold, hard numbers provide a more eloquent testimony to our plight than words ever could. By some ‘luck’, if one can call it such a thing, I am working in the administration block, which means occasionally I have access to the lists. I observe. I document. The Nazis have forced me from my library into a cage, but I am still a librarian. Freedom through reading.
Yours, Dorotha.
On her walk home from work, Dorotha looked up and down the huddle of mean streets. At the jumble of old wooden shanty houses that leaned inwards like old drunks propping each other up. At the children of theScheisskommando, their filthy, sticky feet wrapped in tattered shreds, straining to push a giant wooden cart filled with human excrement. Even one of her favourite authors, Charles Dickens, couldn’t have dreamt up the depravity of the Lódz ghetto.
As she drew closer, the sharp, acrid stench of the contents of the cart prickled in her nostrils and, for a moment, she thought she might faint. She stopped and sucked in a stale breath. The children drew level, their bodies so frail and withered they barely cast a shadow on the street. But it was their eyes, dull and vacant, that hollowed Dorotha out. It was a fact that – in such a position – most of them would soon be dead from disease.
Dorotha wanted to weep and rage at the sight of those children, but she didn’t even have the strength to cry. Instead, she turned and trudged towards her room on Brzezinska. She crossed over the footbridge, passing over the ‘Aryan’ Limanowskiego Street, the street that carried non-Jewish traffic, pausing at the top as a tram rattled beneath her and stopped. Below her, a young couple disembarked onto the ‘Aryan’ street beneath the footbridge, spilling out into the evening sunshine, well-fed and well-dressed. They looked like creatures from another world as they paused to embrace. Did they not see the barbed wire that separated their world from hers? Were they blind to the suffering of the people on the other side? The couple pulled apart and, as if drawn by a magnet, the woman’s eyes travelled up and met Dorotha’s.
Realisation shivered through Dorotha. Sheknewthe woman! It was Magda Nowak. Once upon a time – in what felt like a different lifetime – Magda had been one of Dorotha’s most avid patrons in the library, visiting weekly with eager smiles and book requests. Magda had had a penchant for medieval romance, which she concealed beneath more serious literary classics, hidden from view to keep her mother happy.
Now, Dorotha raised her arm in recognition to her former library patron. The woman’s face fell, etched with surprise and then something else. Shame, regret? She clutched her sweetheart’s arm and whispered something in his ear beforethey both strode quickly away from the ghetto, back to ‘their’ side of the city.No, Dorotha thought bitterly,revulsion.
Dorotha had once kept Magda’s secrets, laughed with her over the stacks and recommended books to her. How had her brain been so polluted that Magda, like so many other fellow Poles, seemed to be happy their side of the city wasjudenfrei, free of Jews?
Dorotha wondered what it would feel like to jump from this spot, at the top of the footbridge, like so many hundreds had done over the past two years. Scoured with pain, hunger and a desperate wish for an end to this suffering, she gripped the wooden handrail and looked down at the tram tracks twenty-five feet below.
But then she heard it. Joyce’s voice, rattling in her brain.Come on, old girl, what’s all this? What would Virginia say?
Dorotha blinked, the dust from the tracks shimmering in a heat haze. ‘The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages,’ she murmured, finding comfort in their favourite author’s words. She pulled herself back from the edge and carried on her way, repeating her mantra with every slap of her old clogs on the pavement.Survive. I must survive.
Back at the slum tenement block they called ‘home’, Dorotha trudged up the dark concrete stairwell and opened the door to their room on the third floor, pausing to nail on a smile for the sake of her parents. ‘Mama. Tatus. Look what I managed to get...’
She pulled a cabbage from her bag. In peacetime, she wouldn’t have paid a single zloty for this, but in the ghetto, it was a precious gift. A plague of caterpillars had recently eaten what little food supply they had. ‘We can put this into tonight’s soup...’ Her words trailed off as she saw her mother’s face.
‘Dorotha. We have two new house guests,’ announced her mother.
A young woman stumbled forward, her pale face drenched in sweat. An older woman was seated on the couch behind her, mopping her face with a grubby handkerchief.
‘Ruth?’ Dorotha exclaimed, staring at the woman. ‘Ruth Mordkowicz? Is that really you?’
Ruth nodded, and then they were hugging fiercely, and Dorotha could feel her heart beating against her ribs.
‘I’m so sorry to intrude,’ Ruth wept. ‘Only my mother Rebecca and I didn’t know where else to go.’ She broke off as more tears wracked her body.
‘It’s all right,’ Dorotha breathed into her hair. ‘You’re safe with us. Breathe.’
Seeing her old library assistant Ruth Mordkowicz and her mother here in this tiny room made her feel discombobulated, a sharp reminder that she’d had a life before the ghetto.
‘Forgive us for turning up on your doorstep unannounced,’ said Mrs Mordkowicz, a little bird of a woman. ‘We won’t abuse your kindness for much longer. We just arrived in...’ Her breath hitched, and she fought to compose herself. ‘Into this place. We were on our way to the administration block to be given accommodation when Ruth spotted an old library patron who said you lived here. We couldn’t bear the thought of queueing. We have been on our feet in the transport for so long, you see, so we thought we could just sit and rest for a moment or two. If it’s not an imposition?’
Dorotha sensed that the woman hated asking for help. Despite her ragged appearance, Ruth’s mother held herself with natural dignity and grace.
Dorotha turned to her mother, who nodded. They had always been close, but two years in the ghetto had formed a bond between them that went beyond words.
‘No, please, Mrs Mordkowicz. We insist you and Ruth stay with us.’ The room Dorotha lived in with both her parentswasn’t big enough to swing the proverbial cat, but she knew she couldn’t turn Ruth and her mother away, no matter what their situation was.
She looked around the room, suddenly seeing it through Ruth and her mother’s eyes. One double bed, which her parents shared, a dilapidated sofa that doubled as her own bed and a bucket for fetching water from a tap on the landing. The ceiling was stained with damp and looked dangerously close to collapse.Eight peoplelived crammed into the room above, so that prospect was real enough.
This wretched room and its paltry contents! It wasn’t a home. It was a hovel. Shame swept over Dorotha and angrily she shook it off. The Nazis had reduced them to living like animals in this overcrowded hellhole. Shame was not her burden to bear.
‘You came on a transport?’ Dorotha’s father asked.
