Autumn dragged into winter, terror alternating with tedium. They were so starving that Dorotha had resorted to ripping up the weeds that grew between the paving slabs to throw in the soup. By the time the freezing new year slithered in, the ghetto clear-up squad could hear the sounds of the front creeping closer.
Bombs, rockets and anti-aircraft fire regularly lit up the sky over the ghetto. Dorotha privately began to fear that – even if the Soviets finally made it to the ghetto – she might not be alive to experience freedom. The daily work for the clean-up team was brutal. There had been nearly 200 factories in the ghetto producing goods for the Reich. The dismantling and cleaning up of every single factory fell, of course, to the 800 or so prisoners who remained in the ghetto.
Over the past five months, Dorotha had dug trenches in the cemetery for air raids, ploughed the frozen fields, and found herself hitched to a cart like a draught animal in order to haul materials from the ghetto city to the train station. Her legs were beginning to swell up with what she knew were the dangerous signs of famine oedema caused by a lack of protein.
But the job she hated most was being forced to go tenement to tenement, cleaning out squalid apartments and sorting out the deportees’ abandoned possessions. Not content with ripping them apart from their loved ones, the Nazis demanded the clean-up squad sift through every tatty piece of clothing, every rusty pot and pan, in case something of value had been left behind. Most people had strapped anything they could carry to their person, or carried it in shabby bundles, before being forced onto the wagons. There were no gold watches or jewels left in these turgid little hovels. The Nazis had already stolen those. But still, the grasping hand of the Occupier turned her into a magpie, sifting through piles of oldshmattefor anything that glimmered, with the barrel of a Nazi gun trained at her head.
It was incredible, in the midst of such decay, how much life she had unearthed. So many diaries, much like her own, books, drawings and notes squirrelled away under beds and behind rotting cupboards. Evidence of precious Jewish lives. Whenever she spotted them, Dorotha said nothing, silently covering them over, leaving them undisturbed for the Allies to find. Whoever had left them had done so as a sign that they had once existed in this world. They mattered. They had names, occupations and dreams of survival.
On a bitingly cold day in January 1945, the Kripo gathered them in Baluty Square for the afternoon work detail. They had already been up since the crack of dawn with no food, scouring houses for any hidden valuables, which they had to give straight to the Gestapo. The snow was falling thickly, and a sore on Dorotha’s left foot was beginning to burn with the telltale prickle of frostbite. Her eyes flickered shut in exhaustion.
‘Wake up!’ Next to her, Nathan nudged her. ‘Biebow’s coming to inspect us.’
Panic pierced her freezing delirium. She hadn’t been this close to the Nazi head of administration for the Lódz ghetto since that night he had caught her out after curfew. He had recognised her then as a typist in the office. Surely, he would again?
She could tell at a glance he was in a dangerous mood. His top button was undone and his blond hair, usually pristine, was tousled.
He swaggered up and down the line of prisoners, arranged as always in lines of five.
‘He’s drunk again!’ Nathan whispered.
Biebow slowed in front of Dorotha. His cloudy gaze settled on her, the smell of brandy coming off him in waves.
‘Meine Juden.The war is nearly over,’ he shouted, his breath like smoke in the freezing air. ‘Our suffering will soon end.’
Our suffering?
He staggered a little. ‘Then we can go back to our normal lives. Me to my coffee business. You to your...’
He jabbed her chest.
‘Library,’ she said dully. He looked at her with a flicker of recognition but his thoughts seemed too jumbled to place her.
‘We must hold on,’ he slurred.
Dorotha’s skin seemed to burn where he had touched her. She knew what game he was playing. Show the prisoners mercy now, and they might testify on his behalf. If he only knew the depths of her hatred for him.
Biebow stared at her. She met his gaze, her eyes burning with defiance. A mistake. Suddenly he motioned at a Gruppenführer.
‘Search them.’
The man walked up and down the lines, patting down the prisoners’ frozen and emaciated bodies.
‘He will take the last shirt from our back,’ Nathan muttered. Dorotha offered up a silent thanks that she had chosen to hide Oscar’s gold ring along with her notebooks in the secret library.As the man roughly searched her, she fought the urge to spit in his face.
The audacity. There wasn’t a Jewish possession they hadn’t stolen since sealing the ghetto all those years ago. Millions in Reichsmarks, gold, platinum, silver, diamonds, rings, pearls, fur, rugs...And people. Millions and millions of precious people.
A man three lines down was found to have a pocket watch, most likely his own, but it didn’t matter to Biebow, who took the watch and – with breathtaking irony – screamed in his face, ‘Verfluchter Juden.You cursed Jews will steal.’ The man was shot as a ‘deterrent’.
Dorotha and the rest of the prisoners were dispatched to the cemetery to dig more air-raid trenches.
All afternoon they worked, as the light bleached from the sky, sweating with the effort of trying to drive spades into the frozen ground. Dorotha could see Nathan’s face darken as he looked up and down the lines of workers, counting the holes and then the number of prisoners. He slid closer to Dorotha. Just then a terrific explosion lit up the horizon and the earth trembled beneath their feet. The light over the cemetery was as bright as noon. She screamed and clutched Nathan’s arm.
‘That was too close,’ she gasped.
‘The bombs are not what will kill us, Dorotha,’ Nathan whispered. ‘Don’t you see? We’re digging our own graves!’
She stared at him, stunned.
