Free Vera by Robert; Vera; Hillman Wasowski

cushioned the blows. He was badly injured and bled all over his suit, all over the sidewalk. The doctor who stitched him up – a Jew himself – said, ‘Bless your hat: it saved your life.’
    And when my mother said, ‘Vera! Keep close to me!’, it was not the sort of warning that other children in happier lands think of as caution carried to extremes. My mother was serious.
    The cautionary tales became peremptory warnings. The sinister castle where terrible things were done to children became Auschwitz. The salivating monster who tore children to pieces became a soldier battering a child’s head on a pillar of stone. The world’s nightmares came to life.
    We hide; we wait. We can see little, even when our eyes become accustomed to the dark: just the ghost forms of those around us. But we can hear our own breathing and we can hear when someone, after motionless hours, moves his leg, scratches her arm, his behind. We abide by the rules of darkness and frown at even the slightest infraction. We know that this is life and death. We sense that many of us – most of us! – will eventually die, but we hope and pray that we will not be among those many.
    I can feel my heart beating and I want it to beat for a long, long time.
    If we have to urinate and cannot control the urge a moment longer, we piss where we stand. There is no shame in it. None.
    We hear the sounds outside – the shouts of the soldiers, of the Jewish policemen, the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst assisting the Germans. We become skilled enough to be able to judge precisely how close the shouts are to us. We make the darkness our friend. We are like rats: creatures who will do whatever is required to stay alive.
    I think to myself, ‘Don’t die.’
    Or I speak to myself silently in my father’s voice: ‘Darling girl, live forever. No Sorbonne, no. But live forever all the same.’

    Byron Bay is the anti-Zamarstynów, the furthest I could take myself from the wretchedness and despair of the Lvov ghetto. The town and its politics are dominated by people whose most advanced conception of sin and wickedness is the unauthorised cutting down of a gumtree. Spirituality runs rampant. The folk of Byron Bay are engaged in an indefatigable search for peace at its purest: peace that you find by whispering prayers over crystals and invoking the ritual chants of the Hopi of North America.
    I love these little lambs, in all their folly. What harm could they ever do, with their aromatherapy and soul massages and macrobiotic eating habits?
    And those who are not seeking some sort of cosmic union with the spirits of the earth and stars are pursuing a hedonistic agenda based on the worship of the sun and surf, with interruptions to swallow down ale and lager in the cafés of the beachfront. The beer halls of Byron are as remote from the beer halls of Munich in the dying days of the Weimar Republic as you can get.
    If a ludicrous little ex-corporal of the German army of the Western Front should stand up in a Byron beer garden and work himself into a foaming rage as he assaults the Jews of Australia, he would be shouted down, told to shut up, told to fuck off. The Byronians will never march along the streets in torchlight parades carrying bundles of books they intend to burn in a gesture of contempt for intellect (knowing, as they did, those book burners of the Third Reich, that the human intellect is the enemy of everything they stand for). When the Byronians dress in costumes, it will not be the costumes of National Socialism but those of Moon Worshippers, or some such neo-Druidic falderol.
    Yes, this is the anti-Zamarstynów, the community by the sea that lets me be – lets all of us be – and settles any arguments that might surface with a couple of bongs and an invitation to al fresco sex under a palm tree. God bless it.
    And God bless me in my house of light and music and books. God bless Vera, whom the