Ester and Ruzya Read online

  The local woman to whose house she had been assigned sighed that night, “You shouldn’t have said that. Not out loud. Your shift leader is a snitch.” How she was right, of course: there was a loud knock on the door later that night, an escorted walk to the precinct, the first of about one hundred and fifty nights spent in a small square cell.

  The story of Bella’s protest has always been a family favorite. It does us proud to hail from this kind of stock: a woman who talked back to the NKVD. And this at a time when most people in the country were afraid to open their mouths on any topic at all. In the late 1990s, when certain archives were made public, I discovered my great-grandmother was not unique: it seems the Poles deported to Russia were not infected by the virus of fear that kept Soviet society so obedient. So they did things like talk back and even stage protests.

  In August 1940, the deported refugees from German-occupied territories staged a mass protest—even referred to as a riot in some NKVD documents—in the Novosibirsk region. Over fifteen hundred people refused to work, demanding that they be given jobs according to their professions and be moved to urban areas in a warmer part of the country. The riot was put down, forty-five people were arrested, but less than a year later a special decision of the NKVD allowed educated deportees to live outside the so-called special settlements.

  Another protest was staged by people Bella probably knew personally—deportees, most of them Jewish, taken from Bialystok to the Siberian city of Omsk at the same time she was taken to Biysk. For three days fourteen hundred deportees, temporarily quartered in the city circus building, of all places, managed to resist the NKVD’s efforts to ship them to their destinations in the distant villages of the region. It took a hundred and twenty armed policemen to force them into the trucks.

  The most remarkable part of these stories is that, each time, it took the NKVD days to put down protests by sick, exhausted, unarmed people. Each time, the secret police were stymied by people who thought they could do the unthinkable. So Bella’s individual protest was not an isolated incident, but one that left her minders at a loss. Their ultimate solution was to sentence her to ten years of labor camps for “religious propaganda”—an absurd charge for an atheist, to be sure, but no more absurd than the charges against hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens sentenced in those days for espionage, terrorism, and sabotage.

  As it happened, just when she was sentenced, in August 1941, the Soviet Union signed a cooperation agreement with occupied Poland’s government in exile and, in conjunction with that move, declared amnesty for all Polish citizens held in labor camps, prisons, and special settlements on Soviet territory. Many of them, including the future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, left the Soviet Union in the ranks of an army formed by Polish general Wladislaw Anders. The rest, like Bella, remained in the Soviet Union through the war.

  Bella was never shipped off to labor camp, and was finally released from prison after five months—at least four months after the amnesty took effect.

  Bella still has not learned her lesson, and she tells the story in letters to her daughter. But she does not write about prison; she writes instead about her search, about the overwhelming futility of looking for someone in this vast land, the absolute impossibility of finding her girl, her only daughter, her—she keeps repeating—one remaining person in the world.

  By this time Bella, who had spent two years within miles of German-occupied territories, who knew exactly what the Germans did to Jews, assumed that her sisters in Warsaw and her husband in Bialystok were dead. She was wrong. Her husband, like the Bialystok ghetto itself, would survive until late 1943. Her younger sister Helena, who, after all of her Polish friends had refused to help her hide, had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by drowning, was saved by other Poles, who first hid her and her baby daughter and then helped her secure false Aryan documents that kept her safe until the end of the war. Helena’s husband, who was a strong swimmer, had chosen a different way of killing himself: as his wife looked on, he threw himself in front of a train; he succeeded.

  Ester writes about how life changed overnight—the night of June 22, 1941. How the dormitories were emptied and the students moved to a school building in the center of town, where they slept on tables. How she and Eda got jobs as truck drivers. She omits the fact of her half-blindness because, of all the things that might worry her mother, this, it seems, could be kept secret. She omits the hard facts of her work and, of course, she does not write that they stopped going to bomb shelters after a while.

  She writes that a friend fixed her and Eda up with a room, and that they caught a spy.

  They both write that they must be reunited, that they will promise never again to part.

  They both are now—briefly, as it will turn out—entitled to move around the country freely: Bella has been amnestied, and the strict travel restrictions that will be in effect for all citizens through much of the war have not yet been introduced. They try to decide who should undertake the arduous journey: Ester, who at nineteen is certainly physically better suited for it, or Bella, who would be going to sunny Turkmenia, where many of the newly amnestied Poles have rushed following the miserable Siberian winter.

  Hunger is when potatoes—rather, the promise of potatoes—decide where and how mother and daughter should be reunited. “I made a final decision only when I got a letter from my mother saying that the Poles in Biysk were not starving because at the local market you could exchange items of clothing for potatoes, pretty profitably. That ended my doubts. In Ashkhabad we’d forgotten what potatoes tasted like. I ran and got a ticket that very day. My friends had been telling me to do just that all along: ‘How can you think about bringing your mother here when we are all going to starve to death?’ ”

  Hunger is saying that the journey she began a week later was a good one because the military men she met on the trains—she had to take a total of four trains, each time spending a day or more at the layover station—were always giving her something to eat.

  APRIL 1942

  The journey northeast from Ashkhabad to Biysk could have taken two days, or, with all passenger train schedules suspended indefinitely in favor of military transport, it could have taken any number of days at all. It took a week, but Bella has been at the station every day since she received Ester’s telegram. She comes to the platform in the morning and stays there, pacing up and down, sitting on a bench, ducking for a half hour into the small station building. Wooden and unheated, it is better for a change of scenery than for trying to warm up. She stays until the train comes—there is just one every day, but its time of arrival is impossible to predict—and waits until it empties out: Biysk is the last station on this railroad. Though she is convinced that she will see her daughter from any distance as soon as Ester steps on the platform, Bella still stays until the last person has walked past her. She looks at every face, looking for her daughter’s.

  They do see each other, finally, all the way across the long platform, and in an instant they are embracing and crying and whispering the kinds of nonsense words that long-parted lovers might say. Bella leads Ester to the low, huddled wooden house where she is renting a room. The landlady is a bit younger than Bella and has a daughter a few years Ester’s senior; the husband and son are both at the front. The owner of the house fires up her big wood-burning stove, fills a big tin bath with freezing water from the well, and together the two Russian women heave the bath into the stove’s large opening, which is usually used for cooking. Ester bathes—the last time she felt so dirty was when she arrived in Ashkhabad about five months ago—and afterward, flushed and relaxed, she sits with Bella and the Russian women at the table, drinking hot water from the samovar and receiving a stream of visitors: the Biysk population of exiled Polish Jews from Bialystok has been following Bella’s search for her daughter and has been waiting with her, and now all of them are coming around to get a look at a family story with a happy ending.

  When they have all gone, and t
he two Russian women have gone to bed in an adjacent room, Bella and Ester cry. They cry for Jakub. Ester cries for Isaj. Bella cries for her nine brothers and sisters, her parents, Jakub’s seventeen siblings, and together they cry for an entire world that has died, leaving the two of them to face the aftermath.

  But the next morning Ester wakes up unaccountably happy, feeling like, after months of struggle, life has resumed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Biysk was life—with jobs, suitors, a household—which replaced waiting and writing letters, and Biysk was hunger too. But at least they had currency they could exchange for food. They had silverware, and they had a man’s suits and an overcoat.

  The silverware had belonged to Bella’s sister Helena: her husband had brought it with him from Warsaw when he still hoped he could smuggle his wife and baby to the Soviet-occupied territories. The clothes belonged to Jakub: when the police came to arrest them in Bialystok, they instructed Bella to pack, separately, fifty kilos of luggage for each of them, and she had refused, thinking she could manipulate the Soviets into keeping them together. In the end he was left without even a spare set of underwear and Bella was delivered to the train and then to Biysk with all of her husband’s clothes.

  Another good Russian word, one that goes well with vpro-good’, is spasat’sia—literally, to save oneself, but to do it on a regular basis, every day, persisting, surviving, habitually balancing on the edge. My grandmother uses that word when she recalls trading her father’s clothes for potatoes, then trading the silver. They thought they might hold on to the silver, sell it later in Moscow for more, but gradually it went too: the local elite, the factory directors and such, would give a cupful of grain for a silver spoon, a small bag of flour for a spoon and a fork or a fork and a knife. The flour was good because Bella learned to make bread patties with it, and they ate half and sold or traded the other half on the market, to get potatoes to vary their diet.

  Ester chose to drink plain hot water instead of the carrot tea, a brew of carrot peels, that everyone drank. It always disappointed, because it looked like it should taste like tea. At least hot water tasted just the way it looked.

  Some people’s memories live on as fears; my grandmother Ester, a stranger to that emotion, calls her phobias “hatreds.” She claims to hate driving, and she has not driven once since the war. Another thing she hates is the smell of fish frying. There was a day when all of Biysk was in an uproar: the drugstore was selling castor oil. You could fry potatoes in that, and they did, and they were delicious, but she still cannot forget that nauseating smell.

  “So my father’s clothes—we saved ourselves with that a little, because to work the way I worked—it was mostly physical labor—on that ration of bread alone would have been very hard.”

  My grandmother Ester’s anecdotes of her Biysk jobs are a family treasure. There is the one about her first place of employment, a munitions-factory steel-casting department staffed by convicted criminals—the beneficiaries of early-release policies instituted to provide the rear with a workforce—and by Ester, a nineteen-year-old philology student. She still had some telltale signs of having come from the West, from a well-off family—well, maybe just one telltale sign, a wristwatch. One day she looked down and it was gone, and she remembered all the curse words she had heard her loaders use in that awful GAZ-AA, and she unleashed a torrent of words that would have made the most hardened of criminals—well, if not blush, then develop an abiding respect for her. Which they did: to show it, they returned the wristwatch—stolen, as it turned out, on a bet.

  She also says she hates swear words, and just shivers when she is forced to hear them. (My grandmother Ruzya, incidentally, does not, and has been known to use them on occasion with moderate virtuosity.)

  She was probably lucky to get that steel-casting job, but she was even luckier to be able to get out of it, because she could not have carried on much longer than the four months she toiled there, making casting forms out of clay and sand, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Extraordinary measures introduced during the war outlawed worker resignations in the military industry. But the personnel manager, who was Jewish, noticed the young girl in the casting department and suggested he could get her out of the job.

  Our favorites are the anecdotes from her next job, the one at the spirits factory. She worked in bottling. She learned to drink because she had to: the women—here it was all women—worked standing up to their ankles in ice-cold water, and the only way to keep the blood warm was drinking. They were allowed to drink all they could, and they could down a couple of liters a day each of so-called raw spirits, a clear liquid that is seventy-five percent alcohol. The women called it wine, and so did she, a foreigner. As a result, she nearly poisoned her future husband when he showed up for a visit blue from the minus forty outside, and she suggested they drink some wine to warm up. My grandfather was never much of a drinker, and that night he nearly choked to death on the raw spirits.

  Remarkably, my grandmother does not claim to hate drinking. She can still drink. This was my salvation in 1991, during that first visit back to the Soviet Union. I was not a drinker then, and at endless family-related feasts I continually poured the contents of my vodka glass into my grandmother’s, and she drank for the both of us. But what she hates is her grandchildren bragging about how she can drink anyone under the table—as if there were nothing else remarkable about her.

  In any case, the job at the spirits factory, for the couple of months that it lasted, was the best a girl could wish for: she got an allotment of the clear liquid to take home, and they traded it at the market.

  Until she started getting fired.

  They must have noticed her right away in Biysk. Anyone and anything atypical was suspect, and here was a young woman who had left a warm place to come to Siberia, left the relatively privileged position of an evacuated university student to live among recently amnestied deportees. Among the roughly six thousand former Polish citizens now living in Biysk, Ester was possibly the only one who carried a regular five-year domestic Soviet passport, that most important document in the land. She had received it when she arrived in Moscow as a full-time student, becoming a resident of the capital rather than the occupied territories and thereby gaining all the rights of citizenship.

  Over the nearly two years when its troops were occupying part of what used to be Poland, the Soviet Union did not recognize an independent Polish state. But with the signing of the cooperation treaty in August 1941 and the amnesty for Polish citizens on Soviet territory, Poland, in the official Soviet view, was once again restored to statehood and the deportees to Polish citizenship. Upon release from prisons, labor camps, and special settlements, they received temporary identity papers that indicated they would in the future be exchangeable for Polish passports. In cities like Biysk, where the deportations had created a concentrated Polish population, the government in exile set up representative offices to serve the residents with this odd status. What an unnerving proposition this must have been to the local NKVD chief, charged with monitoring and controlling the local moods and motives: he was used to subjects who were in every way cogs in the Soviet machine, and here he was responsible for watching a population that was not even really Soviet. And what an opportunity he must have seen in Ester, a bona fide Soviet citizen, a Komsomol member entrenched in the community of exiles: it was as though a ready-made agent had been sent for his convenience.

  The NKVD officer’s name was Gurov. Major Gurov.

  NOVEMBER 1942

  The knock on the door is perfunctory, followed immediately by the stomping of feet: two people are shaking snow off their felt boots in the entryway, the unheated shed that traditionally precedes the door to a Russian home. By the time they knock on the inner door, Ester is opening it: it is probably an acquaintance, one of the many Jewish Poles here. No, it is a policeman, a young man bundled in cotton-stuffed winter garb, red-faced from the cold. He is accompanied by a middle-aged woman in civilian clothin
g, vaguely familiar, but Ester can’t quite place her.

  “Your documents,” says the officer.

  So the woman must be a residence official, one of those low-level snitches charged with keeping tabs on the inhabitants of a particular block. She must live nearby, which is why she looks familiar. A document check is not an extraordinary occurrence—it never was in the Soviet Union, and now, with the new wartime vigilance, it has become almost routine—but there is something about this one that feels scripted. Bella and Ester hand their documents to the woman, who makes a face of feigned surprise and hands the papers to the officer silently.

  “This is very strange,” says the officer. “Different-issue documents. Strange. We’ll have to check on this. Get dressed.” He nods to Ester.

  She pulls on her father’s overcoat and her shoes, and she can feel, without looking, that the pair are eyeing them with distaste: city shoes, leather, where only traditional Russian felt boots are warm enough—and with holes too. She straightens up carefully—her head will spin if she does it too fast—and stands, demonstrating her willingness to follow the pair.

  They walk in the night, lit only—barely—by starlight reflected off the snow, to the two-story brick building that houses the police. They proceed directly to the second-floor office, where a man who introduces himself as Major Gurov is already waiting for her.