Free Things Could Be Worse by Lily Brett Page A

after his wife’s death. There were also quite a few wives who didn’t want to live without their husbands.
    Fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, and even brothers and sisters, wrote poems for the dead. Such touching poems. They were bad verses, but Renia was always touched by the depth of pain and sadness, and the great effort it took to put this into a poetic form.
    Renia was scathing about the death notices that came in large boxed advertisements. She scoffed at the ads that began ‘The Managing Director and the Staff of’.
    â€˜Mr Bigshot, Mr Important!’ she would say out loud.
    Renia often wondered why it was so hard for these notices to say how very much someone was loved. People tried, but always came up with the same half a dozen sentiments. The same neatly packed phrases at the end of a notice. The announcements usually ended with ‘Forever In Our Hearts’, or ‘Will Be Sadly Missed By All Who Knew Him’, or ‘Forever In Our Thoughts’. Why was it so hard to write out a scream, or an ache, or a cry of pain?
    Renia had never buried anyone she had loved. She had never written a death notice. In the ghetto, Josl had carried their stillborn son to the cemetery, but there had been too many bodies waiting to be buried, and Josl had had to leave the baby. Renia had stayed in bed. She had been too sick to walk to the cemetery. Renia wasn’t sure exactly how her mother and father and her four brothers and three sisters had died. She knew that her mother and two of her sisters had died in Auschwitz. Her last image of them was of the three of them walking towards the gas chambers. Her mother was holding Renia’s niece Hanka by the hand.
    Renia had often wondered who had knocked her on the head and pushed her out of the queue for the gas chambers. Was it a Kapo? Was it a fellow prisoner? Was it a member of the Gestapo? She never knew.
    Renia had heard several conflicting reports about the deaths of her father and brothers. After the war, she heard that Jacob had died in Bergen-Belsen, and that Felek had been shipped to Mauthausen and was shot when he tried to jump off the train. Someone said that Abramek and Shimek and Renia’s father, Israel, died in Dachau. But there was no conflict about the fact that they were all dead.
    In 1972, when the passengers on an American plane were taken hostage in Lebanon, Renia Bensky was beside herself. The news almost paralysed her. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t talk on the phone. She sat in her kitchen all day, and waited for the radio news bulletins. Nothing could distract her from the fate of the hostages. Genia Pekelman said to Ada Small, ‘I think Renia has lost her mind.’ When Renia knew that the hostages had been released, she rang Lola.
    Lola was twenty-five. She was so overweight that even her face had doubled in size. She was wearing a long, blue, voluminous, flower-patterned dress. Lumps of mashed pumpkin had dried on her cuffs. Lola was sitting in her kitchen looking at a huge bucket of nappies soaking in Milton solution. It was ten o’clock at night.
    â€˜Lola, darling, I hope I didn’t wake you,’ Renia said. ‘I want to tell you what you should do if you would be one day hijacked on an airplane. First of all you must never say you are Jewish. If anyone should ask you why you are born in Germany, just say it is because you are Polish. Say that your Polish parents went for a holiday to Germany after the war. You see, Lola, Jews who survived the camps were, a lot of them, in Germany after the war.’
    Lola was used to calls like this. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I said I was German?’ she asked.
    â€˜Yes, maybe you are right,’ Renia agreed. ‘Yes, maybe you are right. And see, Lola, how handy it will be that you did study German at school. You can say a few words in German to the hijackers. In Auschwitz, quite a few times I was saved because I had such