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

all. But not all ‘nothing’ is the same. My nothing still keeps at its core the determination to resume life. Even when I am sitting on my trunk with my knees drawn up and my hands clasped over them I know that I am alive.
    Others – and I can see it in their eyes – are no longer alive even though heartbeat and respiration continue. Hunger and dread have worn away some vital element of being. They have forgotten how to insist on living. If meat and vegetables and bread were suddenly to be brought to us and placed on the bare floor, they would fight tooth and nail for their share, certainly. But that would just be instinct. Imagination has worn away. God has worn away. Death has already whispered to them.
    In the ghetto we have leaders, but who they are I do not know. There is certainly no splendid person who walks into a room radiating charisma and says, ‘This is what we will do. This is how we will survive. This is the way we will outwit our enemies.’ Such a man or woman would be a miracle.
    And in our situation, or in the situation of those who have been taken from us, sent on trucks and trains to their deaths, how many opportunities pass within the space of an hour for miracles to unfold? Ah, the human race! A million people pray for a miracle, one is delivered of a miracle, and we all hope and pray for a miracle of the same sort!
    But I was not waiting for a miracle. I was waiting for life.
    I have a legacy, you know, from this time of waiting for life. Even here, in Byron Bay, in a house full of light and beauty, the walls adorned with works of art that delight me, with books that delight me just as much filling the shelves from floor to ceiling, the finest music in the world ready to be played, ready to fill the room, fill my ears and heart – even here, I remember. I can’t have the curtains drawn, because drawn curtains remind me of places in which I hid without light, shoulder to shoulder with other children for hours, for a day, for more than a day, two days, longer. I keep the kitchen immaculate after my experiences of filth. In fact, I keep the house so neat, so ordered, you’d think I was expecting a visit from royalty. And when I bathe, I never take a shower. I think of those Jews, those many, many Jews, who were packed into so-called shower blocks, and who looked up at showerheads from which a greyish-white gas emerged, and with seventy seconds of life left to them, either bowed their heads and accepted death, or scrambled desperately to get their heads above the fumes.
    It grieves me, of course, to confess to such a legacy; I would prefer to look back and say: ‘Adolf Hitler and your Thousand-Year Reich, remind me, where are you now?’ I resent the sudden shudders of fear that run through me at times (when I find myself, sometimes unavoidably, in some dark, confined place). It is as if the Nazis left me with an infection, something incurable, or if not an infection, a wound in my mind. But you can’t cure trauma by denying its existence.
    I keep the curtains wide open. I take the trouble to run a bath. I am the victim of a type of behavioural modification, conditioned by dread and by pain.
    On the other hand, is a tidy house so much to complain about?

    The ghetto has its own black market. Those among us who have managed to keep hold of a few notes, a few coins or something they can pawn make secret arrangements that yield them an apple, a potato, a stale crust of bread or one hundredth-part of a skinny chicken. This is not a community of equality. Those with a few coins do not share them with those outside their family.
    My father leaves the ghetto each day – this is permitted – to work in Lvov. He leaves by the ghetto gate in the morning and returns late in the afternoon. He has employment of some sort or another. Other men also work by day outside the ghetto. Each day he returns with morsels of food, or so we hope. We rely on him to keep body and