Free The Final Reckoning by Sam Bourne

again sang the lullaby.
    She decided we could no longer live in that place, whose name she would never say out loud. She had a cousin who had once lived in Kovno and so we moved there. She felt we needed to be in a big city, a place where we would not stand out. A place where there were not just a few Jews, but thousands of us. I suppose she thought there would be safety in numbers. So we headed to Kovno. If you look on a map now you will see no such place. Today they call it by its Lithuanian name: Kaunas.
    We arrived when I was eight years old and I have happy memories of our first two years there. My sisters and I went to school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it. Russian and, especially, German. I found it easy. I only had to hear a word once to remember it. Of course ‘bread’ was
Brot.
What else would it be? The pieces clicked together like a jigsaw puzzle. I learned and learned.
    In Kruk, we had followed only the essentials of Jewish tradition and – as my own penis testified – not even all of those. We lit candles on Friday evening to mark the start of the Sabbath, but we did not do much more. In Kovno it was different. Nearly a quarter of the people of this city were Jews and in the area where we lived,everyone. There were synagogues on every street, Yiddish schools, Hebrew schools, a famous religious academy, the yeshiva at Viriampole, even a Jewish hospital. There were people to teach me how to say Kaddish for my father. We did not feel like outsiders here, even if I now looked like one.
    I wish I could say my mother was happy, but she was not. We lived in a couple of rented rooms on Jurbarko Street. I do not know how she paid for them. The rooms were dark, even when the sun was shining outside. During this time, I remember my mother's eyes were always empty.
    And then, one day in 1940, a different flag was flying.
    It was hot that day, the sun so warm it felt as if it would dry out the damp of what had been a long winter. We were playing in the street, as usual, me trailing behind Hannah while my sisters played a game of hopscotch. I was the first to notice it. I pointed upward at the deep red flag, billowing in the breeze. I couldn't quite work out the gold shapes in the top corner; I wondered if it was a letter in some foreign alphabet. Later I learned that these were the tools of the industrial worker and the farmer, the hammer and sickle.
    The Russians had arrived to make Lithuania part of the Soviet Union.
    At school, the teachers seemed nervous. My Russian teacher vanished. Hannah explained to me that the Russians were arresting people. They wereshutting down some of the Jewish buildings because they were against ‘the revolution’, whatever that was. Hannah heard that some of the men were taken away to Siberia. She said it was the coldest place on earth. I imagined the men standing on a huge sheet of white ice, shivering like penguins.
    We were frightened of the Russians but it was not they who frightened us most. Because we soon heard that there was a resistance to the Communists, local Lithuanians who were determined to kick the Soviets out of their country. It was these people who scared us. We remembered from Kruk how these men could behave once they were angry and stirred up.
    One day I saw the girls whispering. At first they would not let me see what they were all looking at. ‘No, he'll tell Mama,’ Rivvy said.
    ‘Tell Mama what?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘What have you got there?’
    Eventually, they gave in. Hannah made me swear to secrecy and then she showed me. It was a leaflet she had found on the street. It said the Jews were to blame for the Communists occupying Lithuania.
Without the Jews, we would be a free people!
    In whispers, Hannah issued our orders. ‘We must not let Mama see this.’ I was not yet eleven years old and I knew nothing of Communism or occupation but I understood that my mother was frail, like a cup that had