zeitgeist

The high pitched squeal of the truck struggling up the hill and over the cobbles told us that they’d brought food rations, ammunition and more drunk men. They also brought some new women to replace the old worn out ones, who had been unsatisfactory, prone to pus or infection, or guilty of the grievous crime of using part of a soldier’s shirt to stem the bleeding from a cut nose.

Eva the communist also had a new recruit Ania, who seemed to share some of her certainties, but brought her own uncertainties to the new religion.

‘How can you laugh and smile and joke?’ she asked, ‘when there is so much suffering. Your families. All dead.’

‘We don’t know that,’ I whispered in reply, for all of us and for any God that may be eavesdropping. There were no real answers apart from a turning away from Ania; an avoidance of her as if she had become the carrier of an infection that we might catch, that could murder hope. The only miracle was that Ania had survived so long on the streets with an attitude such as that. But she hadn’t of course. She’d been hidden away from the war and the suffering in a Catholic house in Castle Square; the ghetto no more than a background noise.

We knew form Ania’s endless twittering that she had lost a Parker Pen a watch and all the money she had, before losing her complacency, because nobody worked harder than the blackmailer. It was all so regrettable and unnecessary, but a person had to make a living. And Jews were rich. Always had a little something put away. She could have moved away, of course, but to shelter a Jew meant the death penalty and with no papers it seemed better to pay what she could. The Germans also paid a ransom for those Jews who were made worthless, had nothing left for the blackmailer. It was a cosy arrangement.

In the streets, The Polish Police, the ‘dark blues’ because of their uniform had taken an oath of allegiance to their German masters, but like many subordinates did more than was asked of them. They got involved in Ghetto sweeps and were invaluable in spotting a Yiddish pronunciation, or gesticulation that Aryan documents might have covered over. Perhaps Ania had made the best choice, because she survived longer than many others. It was not for me to judge. But I did grow quickly tired of her new found certainty, and her mantra, that the Russians would soon be here.

In her rags she confronted me with the reality that when the Russians came she would no longer have to make do. She would be a queen, part of the solid set of the working proletariat. The Germans would be toppled first. Next would fall those that owned the means of production. There would be no hiding place from the objective reality of a worker’s paradise. Stalin would see to that.

‘The basics, that’s what you’ve got to worry about, the basics,’ Ania’s mouth flecked with spittle when talked, word falling over one another and rolling over me like a T-4 tank, when I tried to change the subject.

‘You don’t want to waste your time on all that thinking about Freudian introspective stuff. We’re screwed,’ she said, mimicking the words of Nulah, the gypsy, taking them straight out of her mouth, but without the knowing smile and the easy laugh. ‘It’s no good pretending. Nobody waits for nobody. Our immediate task is the revolution’.

‘I have to live now. We are all living on borrowed time. The revolution is…’ I couldn’t find the right words for her and didn’t want to.

Eva was leaning on the pipes of the stove, listening and watching. ‘Most people live just for that day. And we are no different.’ She placed a placatory hand on Ania’s shoulder, but there was something clumsy about it and a flash from her violet eyes that made me uneasy.

Perhaps I was a dreamer, but that was all I had. I didn’t believe in the perfection of man, or woman. There were rumours of Soviet massacres of Polish officers and I had no reason to disbelieve them, think them any less likely than tales of the death camps to the East. Everything I’d seen so far convinced me of their truth. Nor did I think that Ania’s new found proletariat sensibility would have survived any great scrutiny. The Bolsheviks during their revolution has used a very simple test, not as effective pushing a man into a doorway and making him show if his penis had been circumcised, but effective nonetheless: workers had hard calloused hands; non workers hands were soft and white as Ania’s. The outcome in both cases was the same.

I was tired, so tired. I didn’t want to be rebellious. I only wanted to be left alone. Eve and Ania’s escape should have come as no surprise to me. But the guards came quick as sunlight using sticks to thrash us from our cigarette-burned sheets. The pain made light marks on my body. We were all up in an instant and it was then that we knew they were gone.

A teasing smile played on Herr Doktor’s face, as if he already knew and he already knew the outcome. I looked over at some of the new girls wondering if they had informed on Eva and Ania, but they were two sisters from the outskirts and I wasn’t sure Herr Doktor would let them open their mouths without an interpreter. But that wasn’t to say that they couldn’t have spoken to one of the guards. There was no real way of telling. It was a Faustian task best left to the Germans: angels could speak like demons and vice versa.

I looked for Marina not sure if I was seeking reassurance or to reassure. I was glad she was still there. Glad for my own selfish reasons that she had not run away with the others. Whilst the Germans strutted banged and shouted we stood in dumb view of their moving mouths and wove our own language: with a tilt of the head and a meeting of our eyes, we said everything that needed to be said.

‘For every person that escapes,’ said Herr Doktor, unless they are caught, one of you will replace them on the gallows. It’s up to you to tell me where they’ve gone’.

Herr Doktor returned to his office and his ringing phone and his paperwork. We returned to out beds, but all sleep was gone.