Free Judenstaat by Simone Zelitch Page B

nursing home, a burial society, and the Mendelssohn club too. That one they wouldn’t let us in, because we were Easterners. They also had no use for us at the fancy synagogue by the Cathedral. No, my father would pray in a little room in somebody’s basement.
    [Abramowitz continues to walk down a busy street, umbrella furled now, and pauses before a gate flecked with rain and obscured by passing pedestrians. She makes an effort to clear space, assisted by a visible cameraman, and points to a grille in the shape of a Star of David.]
    There’s what they used to call the New Jewish Cemetery. It was already full by the time we came to Dresden. So was the old Jewish Cemetery. My dead, they’re buried somewhere else. The Germans deported all the Polish Jews in 1938.
    [Slow montage of images, exhumed pits from the Chelmno death camp, with the earth still clinging to the dead, pit after pit, and lingering on a tangle of bones and half-decomposed flesh. During this sequence, Leahla Abramowitz’s voice continues:]
    I remember the restaurant in the Neustadt where we had to wait before they took us by train back to Poland, across the border. You can still eat in that restaurant. We waited there for the truck to take us to the station. Maybe even then, my father, my mother, my two brothers, maybe we knew where we were really going.
    [Back to Abramowitz, who stands beside the tracks at the Neustadt station, staring right at the camera.]
    But we didn’t know how it would end. See, I know now. After the ghetto, the camp, after I marched in rags, in broken shoes, to a train that was supposed to take me to another camp so the Russians wouldn’t find us, I found myself back where I started. In my Dresden. I found myself there the day God rained down fire. What could I do?
    [She smiles.]
    I stayed.
    [Contemporary footage of Dolzchen forest on Dresden’s outskirts, villas, evergreens, a sandy path covered with pinecones. Abramowitz walks away from the camera, gesturing towards a clearing.]
    In the confusion, in the chaos after the bombs fell, many girls escaped from the factories where we did forced labor, where we made fuses. There were four of us who found each other.
    We knew pretty quickly that we’d have to get out of the city center. We’d steal clothing from laundry lines and potatoes from gardens, and the first month—in the cold—when we couldn’t find any other shelter, we dug ourselves a trench and tried to keep a fire going. We hung on to each other—a Polish girl named Maria and two Jews like me, Beryl, Gitel.
    And then one morning—it was April, yes, maybe late April. We were in that trench, the fire was long out, and we were all of us in a tangle, dressed in what clothing we could steal, and that was the first time I heard it. Russian. And they were taking photographs.
    [Photographs]: barely clad women, naked legs across each other’s backs, focus on a hand around a shoulder, a filthy cheek, a bare buttock. Then the camera pans to show the tangle of them.]
    Then I just kept still. My heart jumped inside me because I couldn’t believe they were here. And they were standing right over us taking those photographs as evidence because they thought that we were dead.
    [Abramowitz speaks to the camera, still surrounded by shadowy pines.]
    Now I couldn’t speak Russian, but somehow I knew—I knew what they were saying and I was the first to stir and get myself to my feet. My God—I was so ashamed and weak—and I told them not to take my picture, and I was speaking German, and the soldiers looked at me in such a way— I was afraid. But something made me say: “We’re Jews.” And then, their officer—
    [Photograph of Soviet officer, full face, cocked cap, crisp uniform.]
    He speaks and says, yes—he speaks in Yiddish to me—“ All of you, Jews?” And when I hear that Yiddish, I know this officer—he’s one of us.