Read Online Vera by Robert; Vera; Hillman Wasowski - Free Book Online

families, I have found a place to call my own, in the way that a cat will settle in a certain place and remain there hour after hour. It’s a small solace to have my own small place, but important. I sit on top of a trunk, with my legs drawn up, and gaze out at the other ‘residents’ (perhaps too mild a word for what we truly are – ‘detainees’ might be better), who gaze back.
    In my gaze, there is no message, no enquiry. I am not trying to express loneliness or longing. I am simply looking. A day is made up of hours, and those hours have to be occupied in some way, however futile. I might notice such small things as the condition of the footwear of other children, judging whether it is better or worse than mine. Or I might study the way in which one person’s yawn will set off a dozen more. I find shapes in the stains on the walls and on the ceiling.
    We are not always confined to the house. If there are no militiamen about, no Polish policemen, no Germans, no Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, we go outside to play. At such times, playing hopscotch, we become children again. The dynamics of the game take over. We want to win, to triumph. We take care when we throw our ‘tor’; we argue shrilly if it is partially on a line. We appeal for adjudication from any adult watching. Our pulses race; even laughter is possible. I don’t recall thinking as I played, ‘Oh, but Vera, this is just a small period of normalcy bordered on all sides by danger.’ No, it is itself: complete. Everything else is briefly excluded.
    As soon as the game is over, we are instantly watchful again. Our watchfulness is something we can only suspend during play. It has become instinctive. The sound of a vehicle can cause us to vanish inside within seconds. We are like a flock of birds on a sidewalk, pecking at grit on the ground, preening, calling, but gone in the first instant of alarm.
    Such a shame. The play of children is one of the loveliest achievements of the human race. It’s up there with art, with music, with law. Have you ever stood outside a school playground and listened to the chorus of children’s voices at play? Nothing you do in life will ever honour your time on earth so completely as smiling at the shrieks, the laughter, the surge of competition, the gaiety of play. You have sinned if you have introduced a curfew of dread that mars that joy.
    Something like a routine governs our time here. My father is permitted to leave the ghetto to work each morning, and his absence fashions a division of the day’s hours: when he is here, when he is not here.
    My anxiety increases when he is not here – of course it does, for even though my mother cares for me, it is my father who loves me. The marriage of my parents is not one of equals: my mother’s will far exceeds my father’s. At this time, in this dreary place, I am aware of the greater warmth radiating from my father, but I don’t analyse it especially. Looking back, I realise that my mother was addicted to control and could never relax unless she had the final say in everything. No situation could have vexed her more than having her final say as limited as it was in the ghetto.
    The routine includes, too, washing ourselves in buckets, attempting to retain the vestiges of hygiene – which is to say, the vestiges of humanity. As I said earlier, I became perfectly accustomed to filth, but I never completely forgot what it was to be clean, to be groomed. The complete disregard of hygiene, even to the point of no longer remembering what it is – that’s one of the symptoms of the hopelessness that leads to death. People in the ghetto are shown many pathways to death, and utter unconcern about being alive any longer is one of them. Primo Levi, in his fine memoir of captivity at Auschwitz, If This Is a Man , makes this same point.
    The part of the routine of daily life that takes up the most time is doing nothing at