Jill Rees: Welcome Press

I woke up one day and found I had turned into a giant insect. It was a long time ago, and I had thought I was as happy as the larks that sang above the closely packed houses of our village. I was a princess, so my uncle repeatedly told me, with his gentle smile which seemed reserved especially for me. I was a loved niece and cared-for wife, and a loving mother to my delicious baby son Immanuel. Everyone in the village gazed at me in joy and rapture whenever they saw me, pushing the baby in his pram, or sitting in my rocking chair next to the window feeding him.

Sometimes I thought maybe my husband didn’t think so much of me. I was 17 then, and we had married young. He had been encouraged to marry me and to end his wild ways, but he was still a boy. He wasn’t so much reluctant, as unprepared to tie himself down so young. His most urgent pleasures lay in playing games with his friends, with a ball in the village square, or setting traps in the woods. Our marriage was a dream of youth for the village, so many of our young men had ventured away, telling us they were going to look for the Promised Land, and they would soon come back for us, but they never did.

Isaac too was restless, and longed to go I could tell, though he kept his unhappiness from me. Although our lives were pleasant and we loved each other, he felt dissatisfied with our small, inward-looking community. Everyone knew each other, we were all relations, cousins, except when love blossomed at the weekly market when the boys and younger women took our produce to the great market at Lublin. Yet one day even that was stopped, our men were turned away at the gates, and told we no longer had the right to sell our produce, to work, or to mix with them in any way.

Even before that, the local people wouldn’t mix with us, and for an ambitious young man the outlook was bleak and hopeless. There were no prospects within society for any of us. We had heard the rumours that people like us were being taken away and forced to work in great camps, but we didn’t believe them, except Isaac maybe believed them a little. And my uncle, such a playman, roused them all in the synagogue with his tales of our brave armies in the past, and impossible battles we won, and how we should try unceasingly to reach the Promised Land as Moses did long ago.

The players from Josefov came each year with great stories, which they turned into plays and perfomed for us. How sad we were one year to hear that Franz Kafka had died, and there would be no more of his dark and strange tales. Yet later it seemed his death was a blessing, for at least he didn’t live to see his sisters murdered and his family destroyed one by one. I loved to see the plays, and since I was a child I helped with the costumes and later with the production itself, and we became friends with the troup. We turned the hall of the synagogue into a theatre, the players all slept underneath the stage and I would come down the stairs from our appartments with food and drink for them. My husband came around too, and there was laughter and some drinking too, until my uncle came roaring down for us to go up to sleep at last.

It was during one of these evenings that they began to speak of the terrors they had heard about in Europe, and especially in Germany, where whole populations had been rounded up and the rumours said they had been killed. We didn’t believe this, how was this possible, but the players assured us they had come to believe it. To me it was a horror story, but Isaac asked why had they stopped us going to the market already, we were not allowed to study or work anymore as normal people do, surely this was just as incredible? And then they said the most terrible thing, that we should run with them and try to make it to the Promised Land, which is a real place far to the south, where our people once lived. It was warm there and we would grow fruit and delicious things to eat, and there would be no shortage of food, and we would meet our ancient ancestors who had remained there before we had been scattered. I could see my husband tighten his blanket around him, dreaming of himself in that sunny place.

‘It’s not so crazy’, said Isaac, ‘Look at us, we look so different to the people here, we are dark like people from the south, let’s try to return to our homeland right now, when we are suffering.’

But I couldn’t go, because of the baby, and because my uncle said it was the most foolish thing, and that the Promised Land is a spiritual state, a state of oneness with God, and that is how we should excape our sorrows and our fate, as Job did, with prayer.

‘My prayer is to be in the land where Job lived’, cried Isaac, ‘And I’m going with them.’

‘Let him go’, cried my uncle, ‘He is young. Soon he will become a man, and want nothing more than to spend his evenings by the fire, bouncing his little son on his knee.’

But he never did. One day, instead of going hunting, he and his friends now decided to travel in search of the land of milk and honey, and we were deprived of our most energetic young men in one go, and my son deprived of a father. That grey day, with the cold drizzle dampening the backs of our necks, I waved, with tears pouring down my cheeks as he left, walking, every now and again turning for one last look at our poor rickety houses and colourless skies. My uncle shook his head all the while.

‘A life is something you make for yourself,’ he sighed, ‘Not something you find.’

Our lives became harder then, rare the times we had any meat, except rabbit, as we couldn’t go to the market in Lublin any longer, and the young women carrying large sacks of grain from the donkeys’ backs onto our own, while the old women once again took care of the babies. And the winter was harsh that year, several of the old people died, their bodies limed and waiting for the thaw to be buried.

Several weeks later, a group of policemen arrived in a brown canvas truck with news of a declaration, which they proudly read out to the whole village, gathered round.

‘You are no longer permitted to sell goods or participate in any employment or social activities of you own kind,’ they said, ‘Contravention is punishable by death.’

Strangely, these words didn’t register with us, and we carried on as normal. We were self-sufficient in everything we did, and had no intention of participating in anything outside our own village. Even when a group of youths passing through on bicycles yelled out as they laughed their way past the almshouses,

‘Scum! Non people! We’ll be back for you!’ This seemed like the nonsense of youth. Though unpleasant, we had long come to expect little better of them.

No, the day I learned that I had woken up a giant insect was the fourteenth of February 1942.

The day broke like any other. If anything, it was slightly milder than previously, with a weak sun breaking through the clouds to the west, a sign that the rain was passing. My baby was indolent that morning, and I was just sitting behind the window, gazing visionlessly into the street.

What was that noise, like rumbling thunder to the north? An unusual direction for a storm, away from the woods. I leaned closer to the window to get a more distinct view, and jerked back as I realised my neighbours were running up the hill outside.

Suddenly alert, I opened the door and found myself watching three large trucks similar to the one the men had come in to read the notice, roaring towards our houses, not even using the road. The tyres were huge, almost like tractor wheels, and the young men hung out of the windows shouting words in the official language, which I couldn’t understand at first.

The trucks came to a halt at the top of our village, and soldiers jumped out of the backs wearing uniforms and carrying rifles and larger guns. They quickly disappeared, but the screams of our villagers told me they had gone down into our streets. I had the prescience to reach for a blanket to wrap around the baby before two of them reached me. They were already pushing the women from down the street with the butts of the guns, and it was these women who were screaming, their hands clutching their faces in terror and shock.

I didn’t scream, but stepped out to walk with some dignity towards the trucks. Eventually, we all stood round with the exception of some of the older men who would be still in the fields. One of the young men, already wearing the epaulettes of a corporal, made an announcement.

‘You’re coming with us.’ I stepped forward. Because I had been so calm I wasn’t surrounded by guards.

‘Why?’

The corporal turned to me with a look of contempt and snorted,

‘What?’

‘Why are you taking us?’

‘Because you are vermin.’ The other soldiers laughed at me, as if I could not see the obvious, but I persisted,

‘What will you do with us?’

‘What do you usually do with vermin?’

That was the day I woke up to find I had changed into a vermin, when twenty-fours hours earlier I had been a princess and most-loved niece.

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Tags: Holocaust, Jewish, Kafka, Metamorphosis, Poland, Second World War, short story, Vermin.