Girl. Alona Frankel
to wait in the hiding place seven more days. Like the number of days it took to create the world. Only then did they go out into the world that had been newly created for us.
We didn’t know how to walk in the new world. We continued to whisper in the new world. My mother was dying of tuberculosis in the new world. And they dumped me in an orphanage in the new world.
For eighteen months, my mother and father had been in their hiding place in the home of Juzef Juzak, carpenter and alcoholic, and Rozalia Juzakowa, the devout Russian Orthodox, anti-Semitic Ukrainian who was full of superstitions.
I’d been with them too. They saved our lives.
We went out into the street. The sunlight dazzled me, almost blinded me. My legs didn’t carry me. I didn’t know how to walk. I stumbled and sat down on the sidewalk. My mother, who was very sick, sat down too, and so did my father. We couldn’t speak, only whisper. The light and the noise stunned us. We hurried back into the hiding place. But we managed to see the army that liberated us, soldiers of the Red Army, those dear, beloved heroes.
Hooray! Hooray!! Hooray!!!
We owe them our lives.
It was good that they came to liberate us.
It took them a very long time.
They probably never imagined that there was a little Jewish girl who no longer had food, who’d forgotten how to walk and forgotten how to talk, whose beloved mice had run away and abandoned her during the first bombing, who could only whisper very very very quietly so they wouldn’t hear her outside, on the Aryan side, because all those Germans outside wanted to hunt her down and murder her.
A little girl who never cries.
FREEDOM.
Three years had passed since my father came home and told my mother that a flag with a swastika on it was flying on top of the city hall tower. Now it was replaced by the red flag, the flag with the golden hammer and sickle, the flag of the good people.
That was it, it was over. For us, the war was over.
It had happened. Absolute good had defeated absolute evil. I was seven. From now on, everything would be better.
The world would improve.
There would be no more wars.
No one would exploit anyone else.
People would not be discriminated against, and everyone would be able to take care of their children, healthy children who would have books and never be hungry.
We were liberated, but my mother was invaded. The tuberculosis bacillus had invaded her, and she almost died.
Thin, too weak to get out of bed and walk, her emaciated body was wracked with coughing and she spit up blood that often had lumps in it, maybe pieces of her lungs, like Grandpa Seremet in the village before he died. At least there were no chickens pecking at what she spit up. The rag she covered her mouth with when she coughed was always filthy with bloodstains.
My father took my mother to the tuberculosis hospital, and he took me to the luxurious home of Mr. Fishman and his wife, Hela Fishman, who had hidden in a bunker behind their photography shop. Their son, who had been my age, died in the bunker a few weeks before the liberation. He choked to death. He had diphtheria. Many children choked to death from that terrible disease, even when there was no war in the world.
The Fishmans were born in Lvov and had always lived there. At the time of their birth, the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they continued to live there during the time Poland was free between the two world wars, then when the Russians ruled after they invaded following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and during the German occupation, after Operation Barbarossa. And now the Russians, the Communists, were back; the Red Army had come back and liberated them.
The Fishmans weren’t Communists, not even salon Communists. They were wealthy businesspeople, very wealthy. They had a thriving camera shop and photography studio in the center of the city.
The man who saved them, who hid them, who managed the shop while they were gone and looked after their luxurious villa, was a good, decent man who’d worked for Mr. Fishman before the war. He was probably the only man who ever liked Mr. Fishman and his wife, Mrs. Hela Fishman—liked them so much that he was willing to endanger his life for them, to save them and even look after their property.
When the liberation came, Mr. Fishman and Mrs. Hela Fishman came out of their hiding place behind the darkroom of their photography shop and went back to the luxurious villa they had lived in until the war. They spent the first night of liberation in the bedroom they’d slept in before the war. That was a special story, a very rare one. But the boy was dead.
My father took my mother to the tuberculosis hospital and had to find a job right away. We didn’t have a penny. The only job he could find was selling newspapers in the street. And so my father, educated and proud, sold Czerwony Shtandar (The Red Flag) in the streets of newly liberated Lvov where confusion and want still reigned because the war was still going on, Berlin had not yet fallen. And since my father was not used to walking and was hungry and weak, he fell and broke his hand. He walked around the streets and sold newspapers with only one hand, and it was hard for him to take care of me. That problem was always there—what to do with the girl. He went to the Fishmans, whom he’d known before the war, and asked them to let me stay with them in their villa.
My father also hoped they’d find clothes there for me because I was wearing disintegrating rags swarming with lice, and over them the scratchy wool jacket that had belonged to the manager of the soda factory. My mother had brought it back when she went out to look for bread for us because we were hungry. The jacket was tied with a rope, and since the sleeves were longer than my arms, they were rolled up thickly and weighed heavily on my wrists. They weigh heavily on me to this very day. The rags I wore were patched, patch over patch of various fabrics with various patterns. My mother, who knew how to embroider so beautifully, was constantly busy patching. Delousing and patching, patching and delousing the patches again. It was all falling apart. Your clothes look like a political atlas of an unknown continent, my mother said, and told me about an atlas and its heavy freight. This whole big world in the colors of my patched underpants.
My father and I went to the Fishmans’ villa.
I was seven.
I thought that’s how it was in the world.
IT WAS A LONG, EXHAUSTING TRIP. WE HAD TO CLIMB LONG, steep streets, and we were very weak. We walked slowly, my hand in my father’s—like in the closet, when the Gestapo searched our hiding place. I expected his grasp to tighten around my hand when we crossed the street, but the opposite happened, it loosened and he walked so much more quickly that I could hardly keep up with him. I was a little girl.
We arrived.
The house stunned me. It was the first time I’d ever seen a place like that. Gleaming parquet floors, huge French windows, chiffon drapes, carved furniture covered with velvet fabrics, the so-familiar smell of varnish, and a piano, a gigantic piano, like my horse in the village, maybe even larger, as large as the piano of the Chopin Competition prize winner, Madame Czerny-Stefanska, who determined my fate by stating that I would never know how to play the piano.
But most miraculous of all were the bathroom and the toilet. It wasn’t the smelly alcove of the ghetto or the small, crumbling wooden shack in the backyard in the village. It wasn’t the tiny, peeling room in the hiding place at the Juzaks’, whose slippery floor was always covered with damp, stinking, chewed-up machorka cigarette butts.
It was a fairy-tale castle. The little mermaid’s palace. Green porcelain tiles, polished faucets, thick furry towels that looked like colorful animals.
In a glittering box on the sink was a piece of soap. Real soap. Round, pink, lilac-scented soap. Wonderful magic: the scent of lilacs instead of the stench that burned your eyes and made them tear.
My father said that, for the time being, I had to stay there.
My