Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

Łódź. 11 July ’42

It’s my birthday today, Amara. But I’m so tired I can hardly write. Even so I will write, so long as there’s anything left of my pencil. Because I want what’s happening in this place to be known. Max, who is so well nourished that I think Kasimir must be right to say Max is ready to sell himself for a bowl of soup, has told me the Nazis are winning on all fronts. He doesn’t seem desperate when he says it; he has a mocking smile I don’t like. He says Sebastopol has fallen and the Führer’s armies have reached the Don district. He says that in the Chełmno and Auschwitz camps children are being shut in gas chambers and, once dead, are burned in cremation ovens. But who tells you all these horrible things? objects Mamma who as always wants to look on the bright side. She doesn’t believe the rumours but thinks they are poison spread by the SS to terrorise the Jews. Shut your nasty mouth, Max, she says angrily, but Max just looks her up and down with a cold, ironic stare that brings shudders to the spine.

Łódź. 5 September ’42

Today I went out of the carpentry shop to get some planks and stayed sitting in the sun for a few minutes. The last warmth on my back before a winter of cold. The ‘Black Man’, as we call the foreman, came and beat me up. I dragged myself home where I found my mother furious. Read this, she said, just read it; though I could hardly stand. She disinfected the cuts and bruises on my back with a little lukewarm water and soap. Read it! she repeated. An announcement from Rumkowski that had been hung up in her factory, among other places. I’ll copy it here because I believe everyone should know it in its true atrocity. ‘A terrible blow has struck the ghetto. We are being asked to give up our most precious possession — our old people and children. I have been judged unworthy of having a child of my own and thus have dedicated the best years of my life to the children of others. I have lived and breathed with the little ones and I could never have imagined I would be forced to sacrifice them at the altar with my own hands. But in my old age I have to reach out my hand and implore you: Brothers and sisters! Pass them to me! Fathers and mothers! Give me your children!’ My mother says she will go and spit in his face. I begged her to calm down. Max sniggered when I got him to read the announcement. Don’t you realise this will save us, you and me and other young people strong enough to work? The children, poor things, are too little to understand and serve no purpose. As for the old, they haven’t much time left anyway. You should thank our leader instead of criticising him, you’re as stupid as my brother Kasimir.

15 September ’42

The ghetto has entrusted its children and old people to the loving hands of our leader Rumkowski: may they depart in peace.

20 October ’42

Only four potatoes left. I’m still spitting blood. A neighbour of seventy died of hunger last night. My legs are swelling up. I’m scared, Amara. Why don’t the allies come? Why don’t they bombard the Łódź ghetto? Why does no one in the world do anything for us?

24 December ’42

The SS choirs and the Christian chapel can be heard celebrating on the other side of the wall. Tonight we’ll go and search for scraps.

25 December ’42

Found some potato peel. And a fish’s head. Also a piece of dessert but so mixed with soil it was impossible to put it in my mouth. Max made me a present of a segment of orange. Who knows where it came from! Perhaps the officers’ mess.

31 December ’42

They’ve distributed an extra ration of bread to everybody and a spoonful of jam. Mamma gave her portion to me. She said she never liked jam! In return she told me that the women workers sometimes agree for one of them to distract the foreman while the others damage the machinery so it can’t continue producing uniforms for the army. I told her the sentence for sabotage is shooting or hanging. She shrugged her shoulders.

7 January ’43

Twenty below zero. Can’t write anything. My mule-headed mother is coping better than me. I’m dying, Amara, I can’t go on.

20 January ’43

With a mouthful of blood stained on my shirt, my mother took me to Wesola Street, all that’s left of the ghetto hospital. I’ve started a cure. The Jewish doctors are kind. They get a little more to eat than us. But there aren’t many of them and they work all night. Am I going to get better, doctor? I asked. Of course — as soon as the war is over, he answered with a smile.

25 April ’43

Max says all hell has been let loose in the Warsaw ghetto. With the help of the Polish Resistance, the men hid arms they had bought at an exorbitant price. On the agreed day they pulled out these ancient revolvers and hunting rifles and started firing at their Nazi jailers. But how did it finish, Max? Well, how would you expect? With the victory of the forces of law and order. What law? The existing law, that’s the only one. The law of the SS? Jawohl! You’re a pig! I just see what the rest of you don’t see. You’ll all die. But I shall save myself. I have been promised that by Willy, who knows a thing or two. Hitler’s going to win, Willy will become a general and I shall enter Berlin with him in an open car under a torrent of flowers. You believe that swine? In any case you haven’t long to live, in the state you’ve been reduced to, poor Emanuele! Damn you, Max, I don’t want to talk to you any more, you’re a beast! But he just laughs; the rest of us get thinner but he puts on weight.

28 April ’43

Mamma arrested. I went to look for her in Czarnieckiego Street, in the ghetto prisons. They told me there was no Thelma Fink or Thelma Orenstein there. But I caught a glimpse of her behind a door that opened and closed rapidly. She was tied up and her face was all swollen from blows. I had to go back to the carpentry shop. Where Max was quick to put me in the picture: your tart of a mother formed a small group of female saboteurs. They put four machines out of action. The work of the factory was halted. Technicians were called in. The defects were discovered. Someone turned spy. She was the leader. She’ll certainly be sent to Auschwitz. And you with her, you can count on it.

30 April ’43

Thelma Fink, once famous variety star, a woman of unquenchable fortitude, owner of a thousand furs, wife of the toy-manufacturer industrialist Karl Orenstein, Florentine by adoption, worker no. 52899 at the textile factory of the Third Reich in the ghetto of Łódź, mother of one Emanuele Orenstein who works there in the carpentry shop, has been hanged in the Basarowa Street marketplace at the end of Lutomierska Street, the place nowadays preferred by Rumkowski for his addresses to the population of the ghetto whom he calls his beloved children.

6 May ’43

I wake to the sound of Mamma’s footsteps as she puts away plates in the kitchen. There’s nothing to eat, Mutti! But she continues regardless. She puts water on to boil. She strikes a match a thousand times but it won’t light and repeatedly turns the knob of the gas ring but it produces no gas. Mamma, please, go to sleep, I’ll see to it. But she won’t speak. She’s mute, diligent, insufferable. Why can’t you leave me in peace, Mutti? I told Rumkowski I’m the daughter of an officer in the Austrian army, and that my father won a medal for military valour, which was pinned to his chest by the emperor in person. Mamma, please stop it, you’re giving me a headache. But she laughs and goes on fussing over the pans. She’s driving me mad. Please let me sleep because tomorrow I must be at the carpenter’s at six. Mamma, you’re dead, can’t you understand that? But she takes no notice and goes on shifting pans and plates.

20 May ’43

Yesterday at dawn they took away all the people in the house next door. Among them Kasimir and Max. I saw them from the window, being dragged onto the lorry with the others, furious. Max was dumbfounded. Who knows what his protector will say!