‘Thanks, Lale. I’ll send the old women in to help you. I don’t know what to do with the bodies. I can’t leave them here.’
‘The SS will be around to pick up the dead, I’m sure.’ It sounds so callous, matter of fact. Tears burn behind Lale’s eyes. He shuffles on the spot. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What are they going to do with us?’ the man says.
‘I don’t know what fate lies in store for any of us.’
‘To die here?’
‘Not if I can help it, but I don’t know.’
Lale sets about gathering the young boys and girls to shepherd them indoors. Some cry, some are too shocked to cry. Several of the older women join him. They take the surviving children to the far end of the block and start telling them stories, but this time they don’t work. The children cannot be comforted. Most of them remain in a silent state of trauma.
Lale goes to his room and returns with chocolate, which he and Nadya break up and offer around. Some of the children take it, others look at it as if it too will harm them. There is nothing more he can do. Nadya takes him by the hand, raising him to his feet.
‘Thank you. You have done all you can.’ She brushes his cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Leave us now.’
‘I’ll go and help the men,’ Lale responds in a faltering voice.
He staggers off outside. There, he helps the men gather the small bodies into a pile for the SS to take away. He notices they are already picking up the bodies that lie in the compound. Several mothers refuse to hand over their precious children and it is heartbreaking to Lale, to see small lifeless forms being wrenched from their mothers’ arms.
‘Yisgadal veyiskadash shmei rabbah – May his name be magnified and made holy …’ Lale recites the Kaddish in a whisper. He doesn’t know how or with what words the Romani honour their dead, but feels a reflex to respond to these deaths in a way he has always known. He sits outside for a long time, looking skyward, wondering what the Americans had seen and thought. Several of the men join him in silence, a silence that is no longer quiet. A wall of grief surrounds them.
Lale thinks about the date, the fourth of April 1944. When he’d seen it on his work sheets that week, ‘April’ had jarred with him. April, what was it about April? Then he realised. In three weeks’ time, he will have been here for two years. Two years. How has he done it? How is he still breathing, when so many aren’t? He thinks back to the vow he made at the beginning. To survive and see those responsible pay. Maybe, just maybe, those in the plane had understood what was going on, and rescue was on the way. It would be too late for those who died today, but maybe their deaths would not be entirely in vain. Hold that thought. Use it to get out of bed tomorrow morning, and the next morning, and the next.
The twinkling of stars overhead is no longer a comfort. They merely remind him of the chasm between what life can be and what it is now. Of warm summer nights as a boy when he would sneak outside after everyone had gone to bed, to let the night breeze caress his face and lull him to sleep; of the evenings he spent with young ladies, walking hand in hand in a park, by a lake, their way lit by thousands of stars above. He used always to feel comforted by the heavenly roof of the night sky. Somewhere my family will be looking at the same stars now and wondering where I am. I hope they can get more comfort from them than I can.
?
It was in early March 1942 that Lale said goodbye to his parents, brother and sister, in his hometown of Krompachy. He had given up his job and apartment in the city of Bratislava the previous October. He had made this decision after catching up with an old friend, a non-Jew who worked for the government. The friend had warned him that things were changing politically for all Jewish citizens and that Lale’s charm would not save him from what was coming. His friend offered him a job that he said would protect him from persecution. After meeting with his friend’s supervisor, he was offered a job as an assistant to the leader of the Slovakian National Party, which he took. Being part of the SNP was not about religion. It was about keeping the country in the hands of Slovakians. Dressed in a party uniform, which too closely resembled a military uniform, Lale spent several weeks travelling around the country, distributing newsletters, and speaking at rallies and gatherings. The party tried in particular to impress on the youth the need to stand together, to challenge the government, who were utterly failing to denounce Hitler and offer protection to all Slovaks.
Lale knew all Jews in Slovakia had been ordered to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing when out in public. He had refused. Not out of fear. But because he saw himself as a Slovakian: proud, stubborn and even, he conceded, arrogant about his place in the world. His being Jewish was incidental and had never before interfered with what he did and who he befriended. If it came up in conversation, he acknowledged it and moved on. It was not a defining trait for him. It was a matter discussed more often in the bedroom than in a restaurant or club.
In February 1942, he was given advance warning that the German Foreign Ministry had requested that the Slovakian government begin transporting Jews out of the country as a source of labour. He requested leave to visit his family, which was granted, and was told he could return to his position in the party at any time – that his job there was secure.
He never considered himself naive. Like so many living in Europe at that time, he was worried about the rise of Hitler and the horrors that the Führer was inflicting on other small nations, but he couldn’t accept that the Nazis would invade Slovakia. They didn’t need to. The government was giving them what they wanted, when they wanted it, and posed no threat. Slovakia just wanted to be left alone. At dinners and at gatherings with family and friends they sometimes discussed the reports of Jewish persecution in other countries, but they did not consider that, as a group, Slovakian Jews were particularly at risk.
?
And yet here he is now. Two years have passed. He lives in a community largely split into two – Jewish and Romani – identified by their race, not their nationality, and this is something Lale still cannot understand. Nations threaten other nations. They have the power, they have the military. How can a race spread out across multiple countries be considered a threat? For as long as he lives, be it short or long, he knows he will never comprehend this.
Chapter 19
‘Have you lost your faith?’ Gita asks, as she leans back into Lale’s chest at their place behind the administration building. She has chosen this moment to ask the question as she wants to hear his response, not see it.
‘Why do you ask?’ he says, stroking the back of her head.
‘Because I think you have,’ she says, ‘and that saddens me.’
‘Then clearly you haven’t?’
‘I asked first.’
‘Yes, I think I have.’
‘When?’
‘The first night I arrived here. I told you what happened, what I saw. How any merciful god could let that happen, I don’t know. And nothing has happened since that night to change my mind. Quite the opposite.’
‘You have to believe in something.’
‘I do. I believe in you and me and getting out of here, and making a life together where we can –’
‘I know, whenever and wherever we want.’ She sighs. ‘Oh, Lale, if only.’
Lale turns her around to face him.
‘I will not be defined by being a Jew,’ he says. ‘I won’t deny it, but I am a man first, a man in love with you.’
‘And if I want to keep my faith? If it is still important to me?’
‘I have no say in that.’
‘Yes, you do.’
They fall into an uneasy silence. He watches her, her eyes downcast.