Read Online Train to Budapest by Dacia Maraini - Free Book Online Page A

ham, the hardboiled eggs, the bilberry liqueur and the biscuits. We were parched with thirst. We arrived dirty and thirsty. Where? At the Łódź ghetto, another Austrian told us in a whisper. Why there particularly? No answer. Only my mother kept asking questions and protesting. My father seemed more dead than alive. They assigned us to a small room in a crumbling building, on the second floor, in an apartment where four families were already living. Only one kitchen. One bath for everyone. Mamma started again on her long lament about her father having won a gold medal for military valour in the Battle of the Kolubara, but no one listened.
    The only thing that matters here is survival. Thousands of Jews are wandering about searching for work and food. They start at five in the morning. Any job, no matter how badly paid, can help to buy bread. They are pale and have difficulty walking. Even the young ones. ‘When your face and your feet start swelling, you know you’re going to die,’ a boy called Stefan, to whom I had given a sweater for two kilos of potatoes, unexpectedly told me. Bread, said Stefan, costs twenty-five złotys a kilo. But they also accept marks which are worth twice as much as złotys. I’m writing to you with a pencil I stole from the directors’ office where Mamma dragged me while she was going on about it all being a misunderstanding and that we ought not to be here. This is how I met Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, a strong man with glasses and a hat. Compared to the others we see around, hunchbacks with tuberculosis and legs reduced to sticks, he looks like a pasha. He too was forced to listen to the story of grandfather Georg Fink and the medal for military valour pinned to his chest by the Emperor. He didn’t bat an eyelid. But he then said very coldly that in the Łódź ghetto all are equal, that no one has any special privileges and that everyone has to work to earn the złotys they need to survive. Then he asked politely, ‘What skills do you have, madam?’ Mamma was so offended she couldn’t answer. But does she have any particular skills at all? Mr Rumkowski advised her to look for work in the textile factory where there are still a few places left for women, then shut the door on us.
    Łódź ghetto. March ’42
     
    A month has passed, I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any paper to write on. Now in our little room we also have Uncle Eduard, goodness knows how he came to end up with us. I’ve found a job in a carpenter’s shop. There’s always someone who wants a bedhead made into a table, or a shutter into a bench. Mamma didn’t go to the factory to begin with. But after starving for two weeks she made up her mind. Father is in bed with a fever. We hope it isn’t typhus. Lots of illnesses go around in the ghetto. Uncle Eduard hasn’t found any work. Four of us living in one small room is hell. I sleep on the floor on a shabby little mattress so short my legs stick out, Papà and Mamma make the best of a rickety sofa with exposed springs and Uncle Eduard spends the night on a camp bed. We do have a cooker but often there’s no gas. Worse still, there’s nothing to cook. The potatoes only lasted a few days. Now we’re waiting for Mamma’s first monthly pay packet which will give us thirty złotys to buy a little meat and some sugar for our tea. We still have half a jar of sugar left. The only thing they didn’t steal from Papà’s suitcase on the train. I earn five złotys a day. Butter costs twelve złotys, meat forty-five złotys a kilo. Today the temperature sank to seven degrees below zero. I curse myself for giving away my warmest sweater for two kilos of potatoes. I won’t say I wish you were here with me. That would be blasphemy. But sometimes at night I dream I’m in Florence in our tree, filling my stomach with cherries. Ciao, Emanuele.

9
    Uncle Eduard hides the pieces of bread Mamma and I steal under the cover on his camp bed. Mutti doesn’t complain, but says