Free Vera by Robert; Vera; Hillman Wasowski Page A

Nazis did not strip of her clothing and command to join a line of other naked people bound for the last ‘shower’ of their lives. God bless Vera who stared through the gates of hell but who lived to love, lived to savour kisses, lived to read with rapture books that were not even written at the time of the ghetto, lived to break hearts, lived to have her own heart broken, lived to drink the wine of life served in a ruby-red beaker of Venetian crystal, lived long enough to email Robert these words:
    Dear Robert
    We lost touch or perhaps you lost interest in the book and me. This would make me feel very sad. Do let me know, please, what is the state of our relationship now?
    With love as always, Vera
    What is he doing? Why is he so slow? Does he think I will live forever?

   7   
    A SMALL BAG OF POISON
    M y father, my mother and I each wear a bag of poison around our neck, concealed by our clothes. I say ‘poison’, and so it is, in a great enough quantity. It is sleeping powder. Where my father acquired it I can’t say. It is only to be used when all hope is gone.
    At this time in the ghetto, 1942, all hope is gone – from the moment you awake from sleep in the morning.
    It is not unusual to find Jews hanging from telephone poles. It is permitted to look at the hanging corpses, but not to cut them down and give them a proper burial. I have no desire to look at the corpses, and I don’t in any deliberate way. I only look for as long as an accidental glance takes, and that is all.
    I have no desire to cut them down, not that it would be possible for me. They are dead, I am alive, and that is the entire moral equation.
    All hope is gone in every moment of drawing breath. But still I do not open my sack and swallow what is inside. The poison I carry in that little sack – how I would come to swallow it, I can’t imagine.
    Although I live in fear of my life every hour of the day, I can’t say that I think constantly of death. While you have heartbeat and respiration, that’s what you think of: the pulse and the breathing that keep you alive.
    People who hear of my experiences in Lvov, or of the experiences of someone like me, think that our entire consciousness must have organised itself around a yearning for escape: liberty, green fields, a silver stream, and in the midst of this paradise a table overflowing with plates of food. Such an employment of my imagination would only have tormented me. The truth is that I think of very little, and the people around me – adults and children alike – they also think only of the most immediate danger. ‘May the soldier before me not take it into his head to crush my skull with the butt of his rifle’ – things like that. ‘May a morsel of food come my way.’ ‘May I find some warmth where no warmth exists.’
    It seems to me inconceivable that I could once have taken food for granted. In these times of hunger, food becomes the beginning and end of desire. Nothing on earth exceeds its beauty.
    It is so strange to use the word ‘beauty’ in this way! Yet an apple core eaten down to the pips, no more than a single shred of flesh left on it, can have a lustre that a hill of glistening gold could not exceed.
    These times of hunger teach me something that I strive to forget every day: that the things we value so highly in life – love, empathy, simple decency – fall away when food so dominates your imagination. No doubt this single-mindedness serves our survival, as if Nature is warning us that all the better things in life are dependent on your being alive to enjoy them. ‘Eat first,’ says Nature, ‘then love when you are replenished.’
    In the ghetto, people as hungry as I am struggle to grow a few vegetables in stray scraps of ground. When I find these plots, I steal whatever is growing there. I feel no compunction in stealing; I feel no remorse afterwards. If I had