watched blood drain from my father’s face and felt a strange tug at my heart, as though someone were trying to dislodge it from its steady beat. My mother gave a little cry and ran upstairs to embrace her husband. They seemed suddenly old, older even than Stasik, and the trap I thought I’d escaped by leaving Krzemieniec now seemed to close so tightly around me that I could barely breathe. Selfishly, all I could think of was Paris and the lycée and Jean-Phillipe and my music. In Paris, I could play and sing. There was no music left in Lodz.
The Nazis conquered Poland in October 1939. Lodz now became a German capital. Street signs were changed, so that Pomorska Boulevard became Fredericusstrasse, and Kowalska Street was now Sophienstrasse. German officers strutted the streets, resplendent in black uniforms and hats, as though they, not we, were its citizens. We learned to keep our voices low, our eyes downcast, our gait measured. We were a defeated people, the Jews most of all.
There was no word from Jozef. Papa finally got through to his school in Kraków, but he had left. No one knew where he had gone. The telegram I was expecting from the lycée telling me when school was to reopen never arrived, and when I called, I was told someone would return my call, but no one did. I knew that without the school’s acceptance letter I would not be allowed to leave Poland. Jews were obliged to stay where they were unless they had proof of need to travel. I was a Jew; I had no proof.
Stasik stayed, no longer as our butler but as our guest. Papa gave him two thousand zloty to buy clothes and to use as spending money. He now dressed as one of us but rarely went out. He lived in constant fear he would be discovered, interrogated, and forced to betray us, so he kept to the guest room on the second floor, a silent presence in a silent house.
My father was not allowed to return to his clinic, so he commandeered the laundry room as an office and saw patients—Jewish patients—without having access to adequate medicines. He, too, left the house rarely, and then usually to go to the Kehillah, the council of prominent Jews who met each week to discuss concerns of their community, which daily became more secularized and isolated.
After every session he would return, have a drink, and report to us:
The government in Berlin was encouraging able-bodied Jewish men to enlist in the German Army, but the local government was grabbing Jewish boys off the streets and sending them to labor camps. There seemed to be a choice of one or the other.
There was to be no marrying among Hebrews until further notice.
Groups of vandals had been breaking into Jewish-owned shops and homes, looting at will, the police doing nothing to stop them.
Jews were banned from jobs in all sensitive industries, including military and industrial and biotechnical research. Jewish professors at schools and universities were summarily dismissed, and of course no Jews were allowed to hold government positions. This last applied not only to Jews but also to all but a few select Poles, their places being taken by Volksdeutsche, many of them wholly without experience.
Papa would explain all this in a monotone, his eyes dull, his movements slow and awkward, and we, equally inert, would take in his words but not their full implications. During the day, I would go shopping for food, exercise as best I could, and go to a friend’s house where I would practice on her piano. But I played without enthusiasm. The works of Bach and Beethoven seemed without meaning, as though they had been written for a different time, a different place, a different people. I was no longer the girl who had returned to Lodz a few months ago, wearing a fine dress, a fancy hat, “the latest” shoes, and full of scorn for those not shaped by Paris, the City of Light. In fact, I could barely remember her.
Winter would be coming soon, and with it the darkness and cold. But it was already dark and prematurely cold in the Levy house on Sophienstrasse.
CHAPTER 3
One day in October Papa left for the council at nine in the morning and had not returned by three in the afternoon. Mama tortured herself with visions of him lying in a gutter, shot, or beaten. In her agony, she obsessed, too, about Jozef, certain that he had been conscripted into the German Army and was now in a field of battle, awaiting death. Her mood infected mine, and though she was hysterical and needed my comfort, I could not stay in the house or she would have driven me crazy.
“I’m going to get us coal and find us something for supper,” I announced, not sure she heard me.
When I returned, Papa still wasn’t home, and I watched with a combination of sympathy and irritation, my stomach a tin pit, as Mama cried and cried. Finally, there were footsteps, and she flew to the front door and pulled it open. Papa stood in front of her, shivering.
“I stood for two hours at the coal merchant’s, Pappie,” I said, coming up to him. “They didn’t have any fuel for us.”
“Krevlin Brothers?” He turned an anguished glance on me. “That’s impossible. We’ve done business with them since I was a boy. My grandfather used to walk to the synagogue with Rev Krevlin every Sabbath.”
“There’s a Volksdeutscher in charge now,” I told him. “Appointed by the Nazi High Command.”
He rubbed his neck wearily and let Mama lead him into the sitting room. “Ah. The war against the Jews.”
“I had to wait at the butcher, too. Then, though there were steaks and chops, all Mr. Goldberg would let me have was a chicken. I convinced him to sell us some potatoes, even though he swore the Germans had forbidden it. And we also have some cabbage and—”
“Where’s Stasik?” Papa interrupted. “I don’t see him. He should join us.”
My mother cleared her throat. “He heard about the new law preventing Jews from withdrawing more than two hundred zloty without written permission from the Kehillah—”
“So he went to his relatives in the Carpathians,” I finished. “He knew what the Kehillah would—”
“It’s the Judenrat now,” Papa snapped. “The Kehillah doesn’t exist any more. Only me and Applebaum and a few others remain. A third were slaughtered when the Aryans took over. Another third fled to Warsaw. Our New Masters have appointed Chaim Rumkowski Eldest of the Jews.”
“Rumkowski?” Mama’s face twisted in disgust. “But he’s a nebbish. Ignorant as dirt. Surely the professional class will refuse to—”
“If by ‘professional class’ you mean me,” Papa said, “then I’ll tell you we’ll refuse nothing. Chaim’s in charge of who gets to trade with the Germans and who gets sent to the labor camps. That’s all that gets decided now. Our agenda means nothing, it’s even dangerous to bring it up. Our neighborhood will be safe this week because we’ve paid dearly for peace. Tomorrow morning, Rumkowski will hand over a list of names for a labor crew. And, Nora, when he runs out of poor Jews and his personal enemies, the professional class comes next. Men and women both. You and me and Mia.”
“Stop it!” I screamed. “For God’s sake, no more.” His words were a virus and I was infected with fear. Yet what could we do? Run away? How far could we get, with Aryans prepared to turn us in as soon as they discovered us? And even if they didn’t, how could we move when it meant leaving Jozef behind? No, we were all trapped, not just me, and I felt a loathing for my Jewishness, for the Jews themselves, for my mother and father, more Jews, who should have converted when it was still possible. They had stolen my life just as Maria had stolen my piano, and with it my music. A blackness settled over me, stifling and impenetrable.
My father pulled me to him. “Come,” he said, “it’s time for our delicious-smelling supper. I have my beautiful wife and my exquisite daughter. Jozef is on his way home, he must be. Let’s thank God for what we have today and not worry about what we might not have tomorrow. It’s only a matter of time before England and France drive the Master Race back to Germany, and sooner than you know it, you’ll be in Paris again with your precious Jean-Phillipe.” His smile made my heart rise. “That’s a promise. I’m buying diamonds as a kind of insurance. They’ll pay for a trip to Paris. Pay for all of us.”
Mama