Free Train to Budapest by Dacia Maraini

One day you’ll read the letters I’m writing in this exercise book. Or at least I hope so. The ghetto’s getting more and more crowded. More Jews are arriving, some from Holland, some from Hungary. Bringing with them the odd bundle, or suitcases tied with string. Many have no shoes, just hungry eyes. An organisation here looks after them. Gives them shelter and something to eat. But only for the first few days, after that they have to fend for themselves, find some workshop to employ them so they can earn the złotys they need to buy a little bread and margarine or barley coffee and sugar which today costs forty złotys a kilo. Yesterday my mother gave her gold wedding ring for three pig’s feet and two kilos of potatoes. When Papà heard they are deporting those without work, he too started looking for something to do. Yesterday nothing, but today he helped carry bricks for a bricklayer with frostbitten hands. Luckily he still has his pigskin gloves and carried bricks all day for seven złotys.
    I’ve lost my job at the carpenter’s. There are too many of you, said the manager. There are fifteen of us boys and he can’t afford to pay us all. All the same, he let us have a portion of soup at midday. I don’t want to think my family have been stupid. I don’t want to think that. But I do think it sometimes, even if I don’t want to. The stupid patriotic idea of returning to Nazi Vienna when everyone else was trying to get away from it. Why am I not with you now? I see our cherry tree again, I remember our games, I can feel your hand again in mine. The thought of you distracts me and helps to keep me going.
    Łódź. April ’42
     
    Dear Amara. I’m writing to you from the shelter in the cellar of our block. There are hundreds of us crushed in here. Someone is singing a mournful dirge. A child is crying. Shots can be heard from far away. The good thing about a crowd is that it creates heat. It’s warmer here than in the flat. I’m writing by the wavering smoky light of an oil lamp. The pencil is still working. My letter is in this exercise book. It’ll be easier to write your name and your address on it and stuff it into a hole in the wall I recently discovered. Maybe it had something to do with the chimney of a stove that’s no longer here. It had been stopped up with a piece of wood and whitewashed over. But I managed to get it open with a penknife. I’ll leave my memories there for you, if we don’t manage to get out alive. Otherwise, if the war ends in a few months, I’ll bring it to you myself. How wonderful it would be to hug you again! An epidemic of typhus has broken out in the ghetto. There’s no medicine and people are dying of fever. It’s a miracle none of us is ill. Mother says all you need is to keep a pad soaked in vinegar between your lips. I’m not going to be able to stand the stink of vinegar much longer. Yesterday my father found some eggs for sale at a fair price. He brought them for my mother as a present, very proud of himself. How small and light they are! she cried. When she opened them she found nothing inside. Someone had pierced them with a needle and sucked out the contents and then sold them like this, empty. If you looked closely you could see the holes made by the needle, stopped up with transparent wax. My mother wept in despair. Those eggs had been bought with my złotys. Three days’ work gone up in smoke. 

    Łódź. April ’42
     
    Dear Amara. I’ve started working at the carpenter’s again. Every day more lorries arrive and pull up panting in the middle of the street. The SS grab whoever they see and make them queue up with others. Then they make a selection. They push the old, the ill and the infirm into the lorry and take them away. They let the others go, the young ones, especially if they’re in work. It’s said those in the lorries are taken to a camp and killed by a blow to the head after being forced to dig a ditch for their own grave. No one knows for