time

The sound of the train on the outskirts of our school, roused us in the morning, marked out the start of our day. We were veterans of waiting; slaves to lost time. The unemployed; the poor; those that didn’t want to work; those without food; all followed the Pied-Piper whistle of the moving train.

‘Fine,’ ‘Fine,’ ‘Fine’ said Herr Doktor passing each bed, stretching his legs, and taking inventory of his stock.

One of the two sisters stepped forward, leaving the safety of her berth, in front of Herr Doktor, adjusting herself, standing straighter, taller, letting her long brunette hair swish back on her shoulder, now that she was in the limelight of his gaze.

‘Please Herr Doktor, I must see my child, my Berta,’ she said in a mixture of Yiddish and German.

Herr Doktor stopped and looked from her to me.

‘She said that she misses her child Berta,’ I said, translating her words into a form that I thought he might find acceptable. There was no great difference between the languages. Herr Doktor was testing my allegiances.

‘Fine,’ said Herr Doktor, ‘what is her name?’

‘Berta,’ said the woman.

‘This woman’s name,’ Herr Doktor said, looking at me and ignoring her interruption.

I looked down his list, beds marked out like desks in a school classroom, with the occupant of each, with their name underlined.

‘Her name is also Berta; Berta Kohner and her sister is Marysia,’ I was talking too much, giving him too much information, but I couldn’t help myself.

‘Lets put her on the next train,’ he said cheerfully, walking away from us, his business done, and back to his office.

He chose not to notice her slumping, falling slowly to the floor, her legs buckling under the weight of such knowledge, and her sister catching her and holding her in a bony- pyramid of hair and unhappiness.

I wondered if I could have said something different. The sharp smell that fear brings was contagious and made the other women look away and find some task that urgently needed done, some mending of clothes, some fixing of hair.
Berta’s sister, Marysia’s green eyes watched me, picked me out, bracketed me as the enemy, but there was something else, in her cool appraisal, which I recognized in myself, a great greed to live, at any cost, that somehow diminished her in my eyes.

‘Is there nothing you can do?’ she asked.

‘I can try,’ I said, ‘but…’.

Berta tried her legs, standing up like a colt.

‘It’s ok,’ she sniffed, ‘I’m glad,’ and finding no hanky sniffed again. ‘You heard about the hospital?’

I nodded. The Vernichtungskommando SS and SD had seemingly left Warsaw. But they had come back in the night and emptied the hospitals. It was as if I could hear the familiar whistle and calls that there was a blockade and the sound of feet running; German, Ukrainian and Lithuanian. The shouts of alles runter, and the worst sound of all, Jews appointed by the Council using the same guttural language, laufen, schnell laufen, and home made batons, to hunt down other Jews. The sick needed no documents and they could not run away. There was also no need for the doctors and nurses that tended them; their Ausweis cards were no longer valid. Overnight the price of peroxide rocketed. Crazy money, 100-200 zloty. Men grew blond moustaches and became more German than the Germans. Woman went grey and then grew bright eye-catching blond bubbles of hair.

‘And you heard about the school?’ Berta hands shook as she sat down on her bed and lit a cigarette.

‘No.’ I said.

I pushed through into the privacy of her curtained world. She sighed and smoked and sighed again, before looking up at me.

‘You know the school at Sliska Street?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Korczak Orphanage,’ everybody knew that.

‘Well,’ she said, and I knew… ‘the children, babies, toddlers holding the staff’s hands, older children dressed in their very best, Sunday clothes, glad to be on parade, walking hand in hand and their little white handkerchiefs at the ready, to wave at any passer byes, as they’d been taught. Mr Korczak, the headmaster, at the front, leading by example. The Germans had cuffed him with clubs; beat him at the Umschlagplatz. They were meticulous in their approach, a Christian gentleman, an Ayran, trying to get on the wrong train with Jewish children, was clearly wrong. But they relented and let him travel with them. It was easier that way’.

‘We could escape,’ said Marysia, ‘like those other two women, what was there names?’

‘Eva and Ania,’ I said, but there were rumours that they’d been caught and tortured. The guards could no longer be bribed and they followed us everywhere.

‘Yes,’ we could said Berta.

But there was no fight in her eyes. She was waiting for the next train out.