The Dressmaker's Daughter by Linda Boroff

Author:Linda Boroff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Santa Monica Press

The Price of Survival

I AWAKENED to a gentle push; somebody was shaking my shoulder quietly so as not to rouse the major. Dawn was barely coming through the curtains of the large bedroom. I sat up with a gasp.

An elderly woman stood beside the bed. When I opened my eyes, she put a finger to her lips and motioned for me to follow her.

I sat up, covering my nakedness, but she made a gesture not to worry. She held open a robe that she had draped across her arm—maroon linen with satin trim. I shrank away, but she smiled and urged me to put it on.

The major shifted in his sleep and mumbled some unintelligible words. The softness and cleanness of the robe on my skin was almost painful; it was more than I could bear. I wrapped it around me and followed the old woman out of the bedroom.

“I’m Elizabeta,” she said, studying me closely. “I wait on the major, and I’ll look after you, too. The war has taken my children and my husband. I have nothing but strangers around me, so I befriend them.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I too have nobody …” I stopped myself, thinking of Mihail, and Philippa, too. Perhaps I was not as bereft as I had thought. “I will be your friend, though I’m a Jew.”

“I do not hate the Jews,” said Elizabeta, “although everybody else does. I don’t know why. My grandchildren’s doctor was a Jew. He tried to save them from typhus. They were so small … we had an epidemic before the war broke out. I believe he would have traded his life for theirs. My daughter committed suicide.”

“I’m sorry about your family,” I said.

Elizabeta dabbed at her eyes with a chapped, roughened claw. “They were beautiful children, my daughter and her babies. The best a woman could want. I give thanks that I had them as long as I did. I will tell you about them sometime. Talking about them brings them to life for me.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I was working on the estate here as a maid when the Germans invaded. They sent my husband to a work camp, and there he quickly died. He was sick with tuberculosis, they told me, but I know they just worked him to death.”

When the Germans left to fight in Russia Elizabeta had remained to serve the Iron Guard who took their place.

She was a portly, kind-looking crone with her gray hair wrapped around her head in two thick braids. She had the wide cheekbones and sloe eyes of the Slavs, another “low” race that the Nazis intended to eradicate, just not as quickly as the Jews.

“The Nazis wanted to take our lands and starve us to death,” she told me. “They needed to expand eastward and our land was in their sights. Lebensraum, they called it. They calculated on making slaves of us and eventually replacing us with Germans. That would be after they had killed all the Jews.”

“I think they have by now killed all the Jews,” I said.

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