Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

The Ghetto, Łódź. 18 April ’42

For several days now we’ve been tormented by swarms of fleas that get everywhere. They are obsessive and tenacious. The more you kill the more they reproduce themselves from one night to the next, thousands of them, and they invade beds and clothes. We’ve tried putting petroleum under each foot of the bed. Though Mamma believes in talcum powder. She says fleas hate talcum powder. But it makes you laugh that in the whole ghetto there’s not a pinch of talcum powder to be found. We’ve taken to boiling everything: clothes, sheets. It’s only when we boil cloth that the damn things die. But there are others hidden in cracks in the floor, clefts in wood and the interstices of tiles, and the minute you spread clean sheets on the bed you’re attacked again. You should see the water in the pan after it’s been boiling clothes for a while: black with fleas. You can cream them off with a skimmer, like fat.

Łódź. 22 April ’42

Amara darling, I’m afraid I shan’t ever get out of here. I’m covered with chilblains and you can count my ribs, I weigh forty kilos, I may have tuberculosis. I’ve spat blood a number of times, but I don’t want to go to the ghetto hospital because they conduct constant rounding-up operations and if you are really ill they jot down your name on a list and at the next deportation they throw you onto a lorry and off you go. I don’t want to end up in Auschwitz or Chełmno. Even if what they say of those places isn’t true, even if they really are just labour camps, I don’t trust them. Here at least we’re together and can survive somehow. Mamma says I’m too distrustful; if it was down to her she would leave at once, convinced she was heading for a better place. We’d get a bit more to eat then, she says. But deep down I don’t think even she has any confidence. Here at least we do have a home of our own, even if it consists of only one room. There, it seems they throw everyone together in a kind of hen-coop. There’s talk of dead bodies piled in ditches, of a foul-smelling smoke constantly pouring from the camp chimneys. The smoke of burned bodies. Can we trust them? Nobody knows how things really are. Some say it’s just rumours. Others insist it’s all true. I’m still working, even if they only pay me forty Reichsmarks a month. It’s the only reason they don’t take me away: if I work I’m productive and if I’m productive I’m helping the war effort. Twelve or thirteen hours a day for a handful of Reichsmarks. They don’t talk about złotys any more now, only marks. Which is like saying that the cost of goods in the ghetto has doubled without any increase in our pay. A kilo of sugar costs eighteen RM. And who can allow themselves that! Even Mamma, weakened as she is, gets up at five to go to the factory. Even she has realised that so long as she can work she won’t be deported. Her optimism keeps her alive. She believes in a benign future. We’ll get out of here, she says, I feel it, the allies will come, they’ll liberate us, you’ll see, we’ll start living again, eating and sleeping. We’ll even get back to Florence, to Amara. Yes. Mutti, we’ll get out of here. But when?

Time to sleep, Amara, time to sleep, says a sensible voice inside a dark room that she persists in regarding as the place of internal tribunals. But there’s an echo and her words return to her doubled. People seem different in that empty room. But who can be there other than that tiresome pain in the arse, her maltreated conscience?

Her fingers, of their own free will, open, run and give signals and her eyes follow, drowsy but attentive. All she can do is return to Emanuele’s words that spring to life again in those pencil markings, if sometimes so weak and faint as to be almost invisible.

Łódź. 15 May ’42

This morning on my way to work I saw a woman crouched on the dry mud selling early cherries. I went up to her thinking to buy a few, but had a severe shock. Three marks each. I took one in my hand just to smell it, but the woman made a scene. If you eat it I’ll force you to spit it out, she said, either you pay or nothing, don’t touch it! I abused her in a loud voice, calling her a thief, and she answered in verse: Filthy boy, can’t you see yourself? Got no hair and covered with scabs! Go and piss somewhere else! But if she’s selling those cherries it must mean someone is buying them. There are distinctions even here in the ghetto, where some Jews have rights and others don’t, rich Jews and poor Jews. Only rich in a manner of speaking, of course, but a little less stricken than we who were once seriously rich and are now the lowest of the low.

Łódź. 3 June ’42

Papà has been arrested. He was on a list of workers of low productivity. They took him away. We’ve heard nothing of him for days. Mamma in her invincible optimism says they’ll have sent him home. But I don’t believe it. I’m afraid they’ve deported him, like Uncle Eduard who disappeared into the void after he was thrown onto a lorry at five in the morning. There’s no longer talk of shootings, only of goods trains leaving for Chełmno or Auschwitz or even Dachau. We don’t really know what goes on inside the camps. The Germans call them labour camps. But there’s a rumour doing the rounds that anyone who can’t work is shut in a large room and suffocated with gas. That’s what’s being said. By voices overheard by the sharp ears of people who know German well and work in the SS kitchens or barber shop.

Łódź. 6 June ’42

This morning on Zidowska Street I saw three girls with scarves on their heads and stars on their chests running away. Two German soldiers were after them. They ran quickly, leaping over any obstacles: buckets, shovels, dead bodies. Then one of the soldiers shouted ‘Stop, or I’ll shoot!’ All three went on running so both soldiers fired together. The girls fell, first the one at the back, striking her face on the pavement; then the second, dressed in black, who curled up on the ground and shook as if with St Vitus’ Dance. The third, though hit, continued to run. The stronger of the soldiers shouted and chased her. The other stopped to make sure the two fallen girls were dead. The wounded girl had nearly reached the corner of the street when the SS man reached her, knocked her down with the butt of his rifle and shot her in the head.

Łódź. 8 June ’42

Despite the hunger that torments me, but perhaps precisely so as not to think about it, I slipped into the theatre on Krawiecka Street where on Saturdays they put on concerts or funny plays to raise morale. It seems strange to have theatre performances in a besieged ghetto. But it’s the only thing they can do. That’s what they say. The hall was packed. There was a strong smell of feet. But also intense concentration. One comedian mimicked the wretches in the camp. Another set to music all the things he would have liked to eat. Two girls danced like bears. Everyone laughed. At the end they went round with a small plate. Some people gave two pfennigs, some half a pfennig. I was ashamed: I had nothing in my pocket, nothing at all. The hand holding the plate was trembling. I pulled out the slice of bread I had kept for my supper and gave that. She thanked me with a click of the tongue.

9 June ’42

Papà has been found dead with his chest ripped open by bayonet thrusts. A woman working at same textile factory as Mamma found him, thrown down near the wall of the ghetto. Mutti tried to drag him away to bury him, but two guards came at once with rifles cocked and sent her back to work. We recited the Kaddish at home at night in memory of him. Two neighbours joined us, Kasimir and Maximilian, boys who have lost their father and mother and work with me at the carpentry shop. They are from Vienna too. They brought some barley coffee, a great luxury these days, and we sat on the floor to talk. Max is extremely well informed. It seems he is friends with a young SS girl who supervises the ghetto hospital. Every now and then she gives him something to eat in exchange for a little sex. That’s what his brother says but there may be a touch of malice in it because they always go out together but Kasimir comes home with empty hands, while Max always has something in his pocket: half an apple, a slice of bread, a potato. Max says they are emptying the hospital. They have already taken away the old and ill and no one knows where to. Certainly not to work, so it must be to the cemetery. But now it seems they want to take away the children too. But to send them where?