Free Displaced Persons by Ghita Schwarz Page A

heaviness, the dark blanket that kept even healthy ones in bed, at windows, alone on benches watching the slow entry of new arrivals.
    Berel had a momentum, one that started on the train from Poland to Germany, that moved even when the tracks stopped, that kept going inside him. Himself, his wife, and his daughter, all traveling—by choice! what a joke—to the country of the enemy, now transformed into a sanctuary from Poland, where Jews who returned to their hometowns were being murdered by their old neighbors. He had a momentum, one that had sprung up after the rainy week they had spent in Przemysl, venturing into the tiny storefront that served now as the Jewish center, a center that was only temporary, a committee that existed only to tell the repatriated to leave again. For safety, the small, clean-shaven man at the center had urged. For family. He himself was getting ready to flee. There was no use in staying to look. And trying to take back family property or business now occupied by Poles was to invite an assault. In Germany, the man at the center said, they might still find someone. They might still find.
    Berel had a momentum. He had a wife and a daughter to care for and protect. He had an obligation to make good on a promise—put Sima in school!—to Dvora, who, for all those years in Russian exile, had kept the three of them alive with her rage and efficiency, her insistence on sweeping the dirt floors of the huts they had slept in, her desperate and frequently victorious battle against her own hunger and fear. She could steal as if she were the eldest daughter of a skilled criminal, not a modest store owner.
    His own record as a thief was unaccomplished. It was a joke to his wife and daughter, his fear. He would come back to their hut from a day in the mill in Osh and take off his shoes, empty them into a metal cup, slowly, so as not to lose a grain in the cloud puffing up from the table. It would take a week of stealing to make even a small loaf. Sometimes his fear made him laugh too.
    But there would be no more theft. Or less theft—already he had heard that a black market thrived here too, just outside the confines of the camp, where starving German towns people traded their family china, elegant clothing, for a pound of the refugees’ Red Cross coffee.But Berel was not ready to start with the trading. He needed work, real work, in order to give his daughter the sense that she lived with a father, a man, that all three of them were full, flesh-and-blood bodies, not just shadows who stole and traded and lied for their food.
    In the main office Berel showed the identity cards he and Sima had been issued on their entry to the camp. There was a blank square for photographs of himself and his daughter, photographs that had been taken the day before and were ready to be glued in today, their first day as displaced persons.
    Now it’s official, Berel said, looking at his daughter. We have nowhere to go.
    But you do, said the man stamping their papers, mounting the cards into a dark holder. You have the kitchen—he pointed—and employment. You must have work. Even when you first arrive. Believe me, I didn’t rest from the moment I came, and it helps, you see? I have a good position. You can’t let yourself rest here, if you rest, you think. You’ll find a job easily, you will, my friend. There’s plenty. You must have work.
    And school. Sima’s voice broke through the sound of men, a bird sound.
    The man looked at her as if he hadn’t seen her before, as if he had not been busy slipping her photograph onto a white page that held her name, Sima Makower, as if her voice was what made her real. His eyes, Berel saw, were suddenly glassy. A young lady speaking Yiddish, the man said. What a pleasure. Berel thought he heard a shake in the voice, a small tremble.
    But the man went on. You must have been east, yes?
    Yes, said Berel. From Poland to Bialystok, of course just at the beginning, and Siberia, and then