Long Journey Home: A Young Girl's Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust by Lucy Lipiner

Author:Lucy Lipiner [Lipiner, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Usher Publishing
Published: 2013-12-07T02:00:00+00:00

25

Kibitka, Our Hut

Late in 1941, before the winter rains turned the hot, dusty streets into mud, Papa found us a place of our own—a hut, or kibitka, with a dirt floor and walls of hardened dirt mixed with straw.

The one room had a low ceiling, two cots, a small table, one small, iron stove, and a little kerosene lamp. During scorching summer days, we washed the dirt floor with a bucket of water. The water seeped into the dirt floor and kept our little room cool all day long. Our hut was part of a compound with a courtyard. The owners of the property allowed us to use the courtyard, which was a blessing on hot summer days and nights.

The narrow dirt alleyways of Leninabad were lined with hardened dirt walls, heavy doorways here and there, with no windows anywhere to be seen. Who knew there were homes behind those walls? Those streets were extremely claustrophobic, twisting every which way with no particular logic, sometimes just leading to vacant and foreboding stretches of land. It seemed so strange, so uninviting.

We lived in the old part of town on a crooked, narrow alleyway, Madanyat 195, which ran perpendicular to a wider street called Lahuti, always crowded with shoppers and Tajik men riding their donkeys, seated on “saddles” that were doubled-up carpet bags. Sometimes, the donkeys were encouraged to gallop, usually with a gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle kick to the belly of the poor animal.

Mama warned Frydzia and me to be careful at all times. “Never enter deserted places,” she always told us. I was still very young, but she was determined to keep her little girls safe from abuse by strangers. She was especially uneasy about sexual abuse. The women in the region were in some ways protected from sexual abuse by the clothes they wore. We did not wear such clothes.

But as we grew taller, our dresses got shorter, and with our bare legs, we were more at risk for sexual abuse. One day, she brought home some fabric from some place, I’ve no idea where. By hand, she sewed a piece of fabric into the hemline of our dresses. Mama was pleased to see us in dresses that reached below our knees.

She worried so much about our safety in the streets. I think she wished that she could keep us locked up in the hut. Maybe she was right. In some ways, we were like baby animals in the wild. You either survived or you didn’t. It was a wilderness out there; that was something I did not understand as a child.

So Mama taught us well in the best school of all—the school of survival. “Lusia, don’t look at me like that,” she would say to me. “You think you are cute with those innocent blue eyes, but that alone will not keep you safe. If you see two or more boys or young men, turn around and walk—or better yet, run—the other way. They will not hurt you if they don’t see you, so stay out of sight.

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