Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

The only thing that matters here is survival. Thousands of Jews are wandering about searching for work and food. They start at five in the morning. Any job, no matter how badly paid, can help to buy bread. They are pale and have difficulty walking. Even the young ones. ‘When your face and your feet start swelling, you know you’re going to die,’ a boy called Stefan, to whom I had given a sweater for two kilos of potatoes, unexpectedly told me. Bread, said Stefan, costs twenty-five złotys a kilo. But they also accept marks which are worth twice as much as złotys. I’m writing to you with a pencil I stole from the directors’ office where Mamma dragged me while she was going on about it all being a misunderstanding and that we ought not to be here. This is how I met Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, a strong man with glasses and a hat. Compared to the others we see around, hunchbacks with tuberculosis and legs reduced to sticks, he looks like a pasha. He too was forced to listen to the story of grandfather Georg Fink and the medal for military valour pinned to his chest by the Emperor. He didn’t bat an eyelid. But he then said very coldly that in the Łódź ghetto all are equal, that no one has any special privileges and that everyone has to work to earn the złotys they need to survive. Then he asked politely, ‘What skills do you have, madam?’ Mamma was so offended she couldn’t answer. But does she have any particular skills at all? Mr Rumkowski advised her to look for work in the textile factory where there are still a few places left for women, then shut the door on us.

Łódź ghetto. March ’42

A month has passed, I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any paper to write on. Now in our little room we also have Uncle Eduard, goodness knows how he came to end up with us. I’ve found a job in a carpenter’s shop. There’s always someone who wants a bedhead made into a table, or a shutter into a bench. Mamma didn’t go to the factory to begin with. But after starving for two weeks she made up her mind. Father is in bed with a fever. We hope it isn’t typhus. Lots of illnesses go around in the ghetto. Uncle Eduard hasn’t found any work. Four of us living in one small room is hell. I sleep on the floor on a shabby little mattress so short my legs stick out, Papà and Mamma make the best of a rickety sofa with exposed springs and Uncle Eduard spends the night on a camp bed. We do have a cooker but often there’s no gas. Worse still, there’s nothing to cook. The potatoes only lasted a few days. Now we’re waiting for Mamma’s first monthly pay packet which will give us thirty złotys to buy a little meat and some sugar for our tea. We still have half a jar of sugar left. The only thing they didn’t steal from Papà’s suitcase on the train. I earn five złotys a day. Butter costs twelve złotys, meat forty-five złotys a kilo. Today the temperature sank to seven degrees below zero. I curse myself for giving away my warmest sweater for two kilos of potatoes. I won’t say I wish you were here with me. That would be blasphemy. But sometimes at night I dream I’m in Florence in our tree, filling my stomach with cherries. Ciao, Emanuele.

Uncle Eduard hides the pieces of bread Mamma and I steal under the cover on his camp bed. Mutti doesn’t complain, but says the war will be over in a few months. We just have to stick it out. Every morning at six she walks to the textile and uniform factory on Drewnowska Street. She puts on her apron and starts her sewing machine. Mamma is showing a courage I never expected of her. But Papà seems desperate. He can’t get over the fact he ever left Rifredi. He spends half his time in bed. Uncle Eduard was deported on the same train as us and we never knew. He wanders about the ghetto picking up cigarette-ends. But he says there are no longer many to find. People have no money for cigarettes. What most upsets me is losing my books. I used to have more than a hundred. Most got left behind in the house at Schulerstrasse in Vienna. I only managed to keep the three or four I threw into my suitcase at the last minute. Picked up at random. Now I read them again and again. Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pinocchio and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Łódź ghetto. March ’42

Dear Amara. Today my father came home with three passports bought from forgers. He used the last of our hidden money to buy them. Mamma screamed at him that he was mad. He’s convinced we’ll be able to use them to get out of the ghetto and go to America. But everyone knows all passports have been cancelled and no one is allowed to leave the Łódź ghetto for any reason. With or without a passport. Uncle Eduard is ‘going off his head’ as Mamma puts it. He collects fag-ends in the city and buries them under a loose floorboard. The other day he killed a mouse and said: you lot can eat this. I’ll stick to pork.’ But there aren’t any pigs round here. The only little pig in this house is made of pottery and has a slot in its back for coins but it’s empty now and its gentle sugary pink face looks over at the window with a disheartened expression. ‘He’s been driven mad by fear,’ says my father, teasing him. But Uncle Eduard doesn’t smile. ‘We’ll all end up dead, all of us dead!’ he keeps shouting as he collects crumbs of bread round the house, hiding them in his pockets. The other day my mother sniffed the air and asked, ‘What’s this stink?’ Then she discovered it was half a turnip rotting under Uncle Eduard’s camp bed and giving off an unbearable stench.

It’s snowing. It’s cold. I sleep in my coat. Mamma looks like a whale, wearing all the clothes, both summer and winter ones, that she brought with her, three pairs of thick socks, and a now almost hairless fox muff that she wears on one arm even while cooking. The butter’s finished. Lard costs ten złotys and we can’t afford it. My father has run out of tobacco for his pipe. He’s started smoking birch leaves which makes a nice smell in the house. But it also makes him cough like a consumptive.

Yesterday I saw two SS men beating up a boy who had no yellow star on his coat collar. The boy showed them that he had his star sewn in full view on the lapel of his jacket, which he was wearing under his coat. But they went on hitting his head just the same. The boy was holding his head in his hands. One ear began spurting blood which stained the snow all round. A very thin and decrepit dog came from God knows where and began licking the blood up as though it were redcurrant syrup.

Amara tries to imagine Emanuele in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto in Łódź, with the snow falling. She has always loved snow. It softens and refines houses and countryside. But what can it have been like in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto?

Łódź. March ’42

I’ve found some paper. I swapped a silk handkerchief of Mamma’s for an exercise book. Writing to you is like writing to the whole world. But I’ve no money for a stamp. And in any case I don’t know if the post will take letters sent abroad. When we first came to the ghetto letters did go off. And sometimes they arrived, even if half blocked out. But not now, no longer. We’re shut in, closed in a trap. But I’m writing to you all the same. One day you’ll read the letters I’m writing in this exercise book. Or at least I hope so. The ghetto’s getting more and more crowded. More Jews are arriving, some from Holland, some from Hungary. Bringing with them the odd bundle, or suitcases tied with string. Many have no shoes, just hungry eyes. An organisation here looks after them. Gives them shelter and something to eat. But only for the first few days, after that they have to fend for themselves, find some workshop to employ them so they can earn the złotys they need to buy a little bread and margarine or barley coffee and sugar which today costs forty złotys a kilo. Yesterday my mother gave her gold wedding ring for three pig’s feet and two kilos of potatoes. When Papà heard they are deporting those without work, he too started looking for something to do. Yesterday nothing, but today he helped carry bricks for a bricklayer with frostbitten hands. Luckily he still has his pigskin gloves and carried bricks all day for seven złotys.