Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs by Fanya Heller

Author:Fanya Heller [Heller, Fanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789652298393
Amazon: 9652298395
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House
Published: 2015-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

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. 23 .

Sidor was kneeling by the bed in front of the crucifix saying his Paternoster. Illiterate, he garbled words he had learned by hearing them over and over. “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” It was the first day the four of us were together in his house.

He then took Hania on his knee and told her that my parents were her uncle and aunt, and Arthur and I her cousins, only it was a big secret and she mustn’t tell anyone that we were living in the house. Marynka came over, hairbrush in hand, and undid the child’s braids. The girl, stolid as a wardrobe, never flinched or complained as her mother yanked her hair into strands and raked her head with a fine-tooth comb, on an unending crusade against lice.

As Marynka worked, she warned Hania not to mention us at school or to the priest. And Hania never did; in fact the only time I heard her speak of us was to Rex, the family’s alert German shepherd, when, during a rainstorm, he was allowed in the house to dry off in front of the stove.

“Don’t tell,” Hania warned the dog, “or I’ll slice you up and cook you in the soup.”

That evening, I began to teach Sidor the words of the Paternoster. At morning prayers in Polish elementary school, when we Jewish students sat silently on the sidelines, the words had etched themselves into my memory.

Marynka said to Sidor, “You should be ashamed to take lessons from a Jew. God knows what you mean no matter how you say it.”

But Sidor took my efforts as a sign that I deserved protection. My parents concealed their pain when they heard me say the prayer, and my mother said to me later, “I suppose I shouldn’t worry, God will wash the words off your tongue since there is no faith behind them.”

We settled into the attic, which we reached via a ladder from an unused room filled with straw across from the entrance hall. The attic was small — we couldn’t stand, and we could barely crouch.

When the time came for the evening meal, Sidor closed the shutters, as he would do many times over the next weeks, and called us down from the attic. Plain though it was, Sidor invited us to share their bounty. Marynka set on the table a steaming bowl of potato stew made of whatever vegetables and grain she had thrown into the pot on the back of the stove that day. On market days, she added a few scraps of meat or a bone but, after our first weeks there, such luxury was seldom repeated.

Besides the nourishment of the food, Sidor’s good-natured presence had a cheering effect on me. We took turns dipping our spoons into the communal earthenware bowl.

But during the first few meals, my mother sat at the table with her lips pressed together when her turn came. By the end of the first meal, Sidor’s glare had fixed on her.

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