Vera by Robert; Vera; Hillman Wasowski

her as part of the deal.
    God knows what my father says. Probably: ‘No way.’
    My mother says, ‘I’m going.’
    As fate would have it, my father has been offered a place in a transport that my Uncle Marian has organised to get men out of Lvov as workers destined for employment in distant factories. These transports – trains – are made up largely of Jews with false papers, who will have the privilege of toiling in the factories of the Third Reich until their true identities are discovered. Since his wife is about to give her body to Maniek to use as a playground, my father accepts Marian’s offer.
    I am not an unbiased witness. I love my father. I watch as my uncle destroys my father’s dignity. It is more piercing to me to watch that, to know in some way that should be far beyond my comprehension that my father’s greatest suffering in the midst of this hell is his humiliation – more piercing than the sight of Jews hanging by their necks from telephone poles, than Jews putrefying on the sidewalks. I love him. He loves me. What more can I say?
    This hell I speak of, during the time I live in it I do not call it ‘hell’. It is to be endured, that is all. Adults with greater experience of the world than me maybe look down a street in the ghetto, see the hanging men, the hanging women, the corpses on their backs along the footpath, their pockets rifled by those who once knew them, and think, ‘Yes, this is hell that I have come to. This is the worst.’ These adults know what civilisation will allow, and what it will not. They know that the Lvov ghetto is not anything that could be accepted by people with any belief in humanity. My own task is simpler: to ignore everything that stands between me and the food I crave.
    Or so I say. Or so I say.
    But I do not ignore what my uncle is doing to my father. When he moves me and my mother to the hiding place in the apartment outside the ghetto and has sex with her on the sofa while I am under a blanket a few metres way, I do not ignore that. Can I even say that the only cries of passion I hear are those of my uncle? No, my mother contributes. So she does.
    I should be more forgiving, maybe. But I am not. In the end, I give my father the assistance he needs to be free of his humiliation, free of the life he no longer wants.
    I wish what I do to be understood as an expression of my love for him. If you cannot conceive of a love of this sort, you must not read any further.

    My father is sent out of Lvov on the transport to Ukraine, organised by my other uncle, Marian, as I have said. Marian is an astute man. He knows that on any such transport the appearance of the Jews makes them stand out from the Polish workers alongside them. The Jews are as thin as pencils; hunger has made their skin as pale as the flesh of corpses. Their eyes glitter with fear and hunger. They have the look of men who could feel in their bones and blood the end of their days approaching. They survive on hope that has no foundation, like the wretched hope of those who find themselves in a dark tunnel with no way forward but into a deeper darkness. These doomed men ask – pray – for a miracle; they pray not only to the God of the Jews, but to any God with the power to save them. Beside the Poles, a Jew stands out. But my uncle thinks: if all the men in the transport have the same appearance, that of wraiths, then no one man will stand out.
    My father is one of these men who seem wraiths; one of these men in whom hope is no more than the glitter of desperation. He must have felt, when he accepted this offer to get out of Lvov, that whatever hell awaited him was to be preferred to the hell of remaining in Lvov, broken and humiliated. The woman who is his wife and my mother has found a path to survival that does not include him. She has as much said to him: ‘Better you should die, as you surely will.’ And so my father – poor, poor man