Marsha Skrypuch - Don't Tell the Enemy

Dolik took a piece and held it to his face, inhaling deeply. “It still has Tate’s scent.”

Dolik drew an outline of his father’s face and added the black-rimmed glasses and the wild hair, but then he pushed it away. “I can’t do it,” he said.

I pulled the paper over and added a few more details — Mr. Kitai’s lips that were always a moment away from smiling. The crinkles in the corners of his eyes. His skinny neck. I passed it back to Dolik.

“You forgot his shirt collar,” he said, drawing even more details.

We drew a picture of Doctor Mina. Leon put down the book he’d been reading and picked up a red pencil. “I’m drawing you,” he said to Dolik. “Why don’t you draw me?”

And as they drew each other, I made a portrait of Maria. Was she still alive? And what about Nathan? I wished there were some way to find out about them both.

Over the evenings we embellished the portraits, and made new ones. In the morning I would put them on a high shelf underneath our family Bible.

Leon particularly enjoyed looking through the real photographs of my family. He was struck by how closely my Auntie Stefa resembled Mama. “If this war ever ends, you should find Maria, and the three of you should go to Canada and live with your Auntie Stefa,” said Leon. “That would be an adventure.”

“She invited us to do that,” I said. “But I’d miss you and Dolik.”

Leon grinned. “Maybe we’ll come too.”

With Doctor Mina still in the ghetto, I would have liked to take food to her and see how she was doing, but Dolik said that one of her old patients who was in the Judenrat was getting her food. “And hiding us is risky enough,” he said. “You don’t want to call more attention to yourself.”

He had a point. There were many ways of calling attention to yourself when there are three people hidden under your floor. For example, Dolik, Leon and Mr. Segal couldn’t go to the outhouse, so they had to use a chamber pot. Which meant that Mama or I carried a brimming chamber pot to the outhouse in the darkness of night. We also went through more water and milk. If someone were carefully watching, we could be discovered.

But summer turned to fall and we continued the ruse.

The next Aktion took place on September 21, 1942, which was Yom Kippur. Police stormed through the ghetto again, rounding up more Jews.

The thought of witnessing people being marched at gunpoint onto the train turned my stomach, but I had to find out whether Dolik’s mother lived or not.

I counted as small children stepped onto that train of death, and grandmothers shuffled in. There were two girls my age that I recognized from school; they wept as a soldier pushed them through the train doors. Two hundred doomed Jews. Before the war, Viteretz had sixteen hundred Jews. Surely the ghetto was nearly emptied by now? There couldn’t be more than three hundred Jews still alive.

One single bit of grace: Doctor Mina was not among this day’s doomed.

Most of those who came to watch the Jews put onto the train cars were German and Volksdeutche workers — the people who had come to our town and been given the property of the murdered and the food of the starving. Snippets of their conversations floated in the breeze, about how soon our area would be Judenfrei — cleansed of Jews.

I don’t know what made me more angry and sad — the words themselves, or the satisfaction of the people who spoke them.

How I wished I could help the people who were herded onto that train, which would soon be on its way to the death camp at Belzec. I searched the crowd and noticed there were some of the original Ukrainian and Polish townsfolk standing and watching as well — and most looked shocked and disgusted at what the Commandant was doing. Did some of them have Jews within their floors or hidden behind their walls? I hoped and prayed that they did.

That night, once we moved the wood stove aside and helped our friends step out of their hiding place, Dolik and Leon clung to each other, weeping with relief at the news that their mother was probably still alive. But it was a bittersweet relief. Doctor Mina might be alive, but for how long?

Our double life continued, Mama and I doing daily chores and worrying about Maria. But we heard nothing.

At night we visited with Dolik, Leon and Mr. Segal. I got by on just two or three hours of sleep. It seemed too selfish to rest instead of talking or playing cards with our guests. I knew that if the roles were reversed, I would be desperate for company after spending the entire day in cramped darkness. But the schedule took its toll, especially with just Mama and me doing the heavy work of bringing in the harvest. Sometimes I think I slept through digging potatoes and scything wheat.

The arrangement took its toll on our guests as well. While Mama and I ached from overwork, Dolik, Leon and Mr. Segal got weak and sick because they could barely move for much of the day.

I felt most alive when we had finished playing cards and Leon would go to a quiet corner and read a book by candlelight. That was when Dolik and I sat side by side and flipped through pictures, or just talked. I told him of my earliest memories of Tato before he got sick, of how he’d put me on his shoulders and prance around, neighing like a horse. About how a honeybee would fly through our window each morning and land on the tip of his teaspoon. He’d feed the bee a drop of Mama’s berry jam.

Dolik reminisced about visiting his father’s parents in the country when he was little. “Bubbe and Zayde had geese,” he told me. “I tried to pat this one big white goose, but it would run away at the sight of me.”

“Did they have a horse or cows too?” I asked.

“They had an old mare named Sheyn that I’m sure had been pretty at one time.”

“Did you ever ride her?” I asked.

Dolik shook his head. “She was too old. I did feed her carrots, though.”

He also told me stories about his bubbe , who was an expert mushroom hunter. “I loved going into the woods with her,” he said. “What I loved even more was eating the fried mushrooms when we got back.”

We had a silent agreement to talk only of happier times. It took our minds off the fact that we were living in the midst of death.

One day in early October, Uncle Ivan visited after dark. He sipped his tea in silence and regarded us all as we sat around the kitchen table. “Kataryna, I have some news,” he said finally. “Nathan and Maria came to us in the forest when they escaped. They stayed with us for a few days and I gave them some lessons in survival and living on the run. They left for Lviv, hoping to blend in with the crowd and find work. I had Maria memorize the address of a woman she could leave a message with.”

Mama could not seem to find her voice, so I asked, “Have you heard anything from the woman?”

“Finally, yes,” said Uncle Ivan. “One of our couriers met with her in Lviv just a few days ago. Maria had left this with her.” He reached into his pocket, drew out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Mama.

She unfolded the paper and a twenty- zloty banknote fluttered onto her lap. Mama read the letter:

Mama, don’t worry. Assigned to the Huber farm near Thaur in Austria. I’ve heard it’s not a bad place. N sends love to father. Will write when we can. Love M.

Mama rested her head in her arms and wept with relief. “I wish she’d come home so I could watch over her, but at least now I know she got out of the war zone alive.”

I was so relieved to hear that Maria was safe, but like Mama, I would worry until I saw her with my own eyes.