Now she has to pee, but she cannot leave the chamber, that’s what her mother said before she left for work. Her mother will not come back again, for meanwhile all the occupants of the apartment are gone, all the occupants of the building on the street called Nowolipie, and all the occupants of the district in which the building stands. The district has no doubt been cordoned off meanwhile, for it has been completely still for a very long time now. But as long as this sentence still stands, her name is still Doris, and she still exists: Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben. So she gets up, knocks her head against the ceiling of her hiding place and tries to pee in such a way that the board on which she has been sitting does not get wet.
Sienna, Pa
ska and Twarda, Krochmalna, Chłodna, Grzybowska, Ogrodowa, Leszno and Nowolipie, where the girl is hiding, then Karmelicka, G
sia, Zamenhofa and Miła. When you die at age twelve, do you also reach old age earlier? Everything had kept getting less, they’d had to leave behind more and more baggage, or else it was taken from them, as though they were now too weak to carry all those things that are a part of life, as though someone were trying to force them into old age by relieving them of all this. Two woolen blankets they had — no featherbed — provisions for five days, wristwatch, handbag, no documents. This is how her mother, leading her by the hand, had entered the ghetto, and even the part of the city they had entered had already been relieved of many things. There were no trees there, let alone a park, but there wasn’t a river either, there were no automobiles, no electric streetcars and so few remaining streets that it didn’t even take the length of a Lord’s Prayer to rattle off their names. Everything that was still the world could easily be traversed on foot, even by a child. And this world had gone on shrinking as the end approached. At first the small ghetto was emptied out and dissolved, now it was the turn of the southern part of the large ghetto, and the rest was sure to follow soon thereafter. Don’t be so wild, her father had always said to her when she went skidding across the parquet from one end of the room to the other, now she was being a wild child here, but what being wild meant here was: not going instead of some other girl, not offering her head to be counted, playing dead instead of reporting to die, trying to survive without drinking or eating. Never in her life has she been wilder than in this tiny chamber in which she doesn’t speak, doesn’t sing, can’t stand up and, when she sits, keeps banging her knees against the wall. She, Doris daughter of Ernst and Elisabeth twelve years old born in Guben, a wild child, a blind and deaf old woman scarcely capable of moving her limbs any longer.
In Brazil, her father had said, you’ll need a hat for the sun. Are there lakes in Brazil too? Of course. Are there trees in Brazil too? Twice as tall as here. And our piano? It won’t fit, her father had said and then shut the door of the container, which now held her desk and several suitcases filled with linens and clothes, and her bed with the mattresses and all her books, closed it and locked it. This container was surely still standing on the lot of some shipping company in Guben, but all of this was so long ago that her bed, if she were now to arrive in Brazil, would be much too short for her, and the shirts and stockings and skirts and blouses several sizes too small. Their apartment in Guben had been dissolved when they packed the container for their move to Brazil; after this the girl had been sent to Berlin, and her parents’ address to which she sent her Sunday letters changed several times from one shabby part of Guben to an even shabbier one. But as long as there was still hope that they would be allowed to emigrate, it didn’t seem important to her parents or her that they’d had to pull the rug out from under their own memories when they packed for the journey to Brazil. When her father received the notice to report for forced labor at the autobahn construction site, the refrigerator built to withstand the heat of the tropics was still standing in the container on the lot of the shipping company. Only after her father’s death did it become clear that the packing up of their everyday existence in Guben into this darkness had in truth been an anticipation of their own being packed up, and that both these things were final.
The only place that can still be counted on to resemble itself and of which the girl would be able to say even from here in her dark chamber what it looks like at the present hour is Uncle Ludwig’s property. Perhaps that is why she remembers the few weekends and the two summers she spent there more clearly than anything else. On Uncle Ludwig’s property she can still walk from tree to tree and hide behind the bushes, she can look at the lake and know that the lake is still there. And as long as she still remembers something in this world, she isn’t yet in the foreign place.
And indeed it had already happened weeks before, precisely on that day in June when her mother had gone to Gsia to sell the wristwatch on the black market and she herself, waiting beside a book stand on Ulica Karmelicka, had discovered the book her mother had refused all that time to let her read, a novel with the title Saint Gunther or The Man without a Homeland, on precisely that day when she, standing on Karmelicka, struggling a little to hold her ground amid the press of people, leafed through this book and read and was happy that the owner of this portable booth lacked the strength to prevent her from reading the book without paying for it, precisely on that day all their possessions from their household in Guben were removed from the shipping container in reverse order from the way her father and mother had packed them into this container two years before in preparation for their journey to Brazil, removed by one Herr Carl Pflüger and the chief inspector Pauschel who had been assigned to him, removed and then prepared for auction. On that very day when she spent so long standing there on Karmelicka reading, because she didn’t have any money to buy the book and, as long as she kept reading, she didn’t have to think about stuff ed peppers or pancakes with applesauce or even just a simple slice of bread with butter and salt, precisely on this day in June, approximately two months following her arrival in Warsaw, her childhood bed from Guben, lot number 48, was sold unbeknownst to her for Mk. 20.—to Frau Warnitscheck of Neustädter Strasse 17, her cocoa pot, lot number 119, to Herr Schulz of Alte Poststrasse 42, just a few buildings down from the building in which they’d lived, and her father’s concertina, lot number 133, for Mk. 36.—to Herr Moosmann, Salzmarktstrasse 6. On the evening of this day on which she returned to her quarters only just before curfew, on this evening of one of the longest days of the year 1942, on which a faint early-summer breeze was lifting up the newspapers that covered the bodies of the dead and the odor of decay rose into the air, on this evening when it was still light out and she, as she had grown accustomed to doing here, was walking home in zigzags so as not to trip over corpses, on the evening of this day on which, as on all the other evenings, the crying of motherless children rose up in the hallways of the buildings, on this Monday evening on which her mother served her the potatoes she’d gotten in exchange for the wristwatch, very probably the last potatoes she will ever have eaten in her life, already on this evening all the bed sheets belonging to Ernst, Elisabeth and Doris, auctioned off by the pair at prices ranging between 8 marks 40 and 8 marks 70, lot numbers 177 to 185, lay neatly pressed in the linen cupboards of the families Wittger, Schulz, Müller, Seiler, Langmann and Brühl, Klemker, Fröhlich and Wulf.