Original: Froyen aleyn
(פֿרויען אַליין)
From: Froyen aleyn: Dertseylungen un mosholim
(פֿרויען אַליין: דערציילונגען און משלים)
Year: 1980
Author: Relly Blei
(רעלי בלײַ)
Translator: Dov Greenwood
Class: Yale JDST 418 with Josh Price
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Women, Alone
Among the several hundred people who lived in a large two-story building, there were many women without men. Some of the men were stationed on the Soviet front, others had been sent by the fascists to work in Trykhaty or Tulchyn. Many had succumbed to typhus already, during the bitter winter of 1941–1942.
So it happened that in each house, where up to fifteen people could be packed together in a single room, there were at times ten or twelve women and one or two men.
Among the women, there were those who hungered bitterly yearlong, but they maintained their dignity and didn’t sell themselves out for a piece of bread.
Others, even before they felt the taste of hunger, found “friends” who provided them with all that they needed.
Truth be told, it was extremely difficult to find work. We could be shipped out for extermination any day, so who would want to give us jobs? But for the men it was easier to get ahold of something. Some were able to make a little money, and a few were even able to eke out a living.
Tsili was short and cheery, with shining clear blue eyes and cheeks that flushed like roses. She was just a girl when the war broke out, several weeks after her wedding, and her husband was sent off to the front. Then the shtetls of Bessarabia were emptied out. Her whole family perished in the Yeditz concentration camp, and she returned to Mogilev alone.
Slowly the roses of her cheeks began to fade and her beautiful eyes were clouded with anguish.
Tsili couldn’t bear the hunger. She felt her strength beginning to slip away. But she desperately wanted to live — and living means eating.
Death roamed the streets in search of offerings, frank and free. Yes, these were golden times for the Angel of Death, and as I said: Tsili wanted to live.
She quickly found herself a friend, a slightly older man from her shtetl in Bessarabia. Every day he brought her something. One day it might be bread, the next a stick of butter. So went one day, so went the next, until she needed to pay, and pay she did. Laughing, she said: “If my Misha lives through the war and comes back, he’ll be overjoyed to find Tsili alive, rather than one of the bodies on a mound in a mass grave... If he won’t forgive me, who cares — we’ll get divorced and I’ll stay with Leyzer.”
Another perspective. Who has a right to judge?
**********
In the spacious house with dozens of apartments, there were also several smaller rooms, where only one person could live. Into one such room moved a beautiful, young woman.
Her husband, a doctor, had been mobilized to Czernowitz.
She was used to a pleasant and easy life, so she didn’t want to suffer any hardship in Transnistria.
Every evening she was visited by men. Not deportees, mind you. She couldn’t get them to pay her very much. She wanted to lead the life she was used to.
These were German officers, S.S. personnel who were visiting here. The whole camp was outraged, and everyone despised her. No one spoke with her, no one greeted her, but that concerned her very little. She continued to enjoy the life of a harlot.
The years of the war dragged on bitterly, but if you live, you live to see everything.
We endured until that most beautiful, most joyous hour. From afar we heard the sound of the Katyushas. How long had we yearned for this very “music”?
It didn’t matter that we were all dressed in tatters. Over the course of those endless years our clothes had been torn to shreds. We were also hungry, and we had no strength left in us, but still we went out to greet the victors, who brought us the best gift: freedom, and we paid them back with our joy. And all of us hoped that maybe, just maybe, our husbands were with the red army as well. If only someone who had liberated Mogilev could be found among the squadrons.
But the elegant, beautiful woman remained in her room, despondent.
Several months passed.
We returned home. One day I got on a bus, and suddenly I saw the madame, sitting next to a very interesting man. She noticed me as well. Instantly, she became pale as a wall and began to tremble.
The man beside her spoke to her almost silently: What’s going on, dear? You seem unwell all of a sudden. Of course—you lived through harrowing years in that damned concentration camp.
I smiled to myself. I thought: this is already a good enough punishment on its own, to tremble forever, fearful that someone might tell the truth. And maybe someone will come along and do it.
**********
A day later I bumped into Tsili. Beaming as always, she told me how her romance turned out: — Misha came home, and she told him that Leyzer, their fellow townsman, had supported her through the harrowing years. Now she was used to him and didn’t want to leave him. She spent several years with Leyzer, with Misha only several weeks.
Anyway, Misha had to give her a writ of divorce. What could anyone do? The war — the devil take it — is to blame for everything.
Misha remains their friend and visits them often.
Now Tsili had a bigger concern: finding a nice girl for her good friend!
**********
Regina was another one of the many women who were alone.
She was a pious housewife who blessed the Sabbath candles every Friday evening. When she left her home, she took little candles with her, and bore tiny holes into a potato in lieu of a candlestick.
She could always be seen with her little girl in her hands. It was hard to get a hold of a cup of milk for the child. Many days they got by on a little coffee grounds, and soup consisting of a handful of corn flour in water with salt.
She was gorgeous, Regina, a real Jewish beauty, black eyes, pearl-teeth and beautiful locks of black hair.
Many men tried to sleep with her, but, proud and strong as she was, she always put them in their place.
On one occasion, someone said to her that her husband, away in a foreign country, certainly wasn’t nearly as holy as she, and that it was a shame for her to waste her youthful years like this. She answered with a smile: “A man may, because a man must, but a woman can wait” — and she did wait, pious and pure.
There came an end to the suffering. Whoever survived the war returned home.
News soon began to trickle in from the men who had been stationed on the front.
Messages also came from those who had been drafted for labor.
Many women discovered that their husbands had fallen on the battlefield. Others were receiving their first letters. Regina waited, with longing in her heart, with fear, with hope, she waited a week, a month; she waited, but for naught.
Slowly the survivors of the war in Central Asia began to return. Soon someone broke the news that he had seen her husband in Tashkent. That meant he was alive, so in that case, she wondered, why didn’t he write to her? Until, that is, an old friend came to her and told her the whole truth:
Her husband had been severely injured in battle and spent an extended period of time recovering in a hospital in Tashkent.
His attendant nurse became very close with him.
When he was let out of the hospital, feeble and alone in the foreign city, she took him in.
He stayed with her. Now they have a child. He has a new family. She shouldn’t wait for him any longer.
If she had been told that he had fallen in battle, no doubt she would have been in less pain. She remained alone, but chained — an agunah — and her child was an orphan, though her father was alive. It was hard to help her, to comfort her.
**********
Lia was shipped out together with her whole family. Their transport, one of the last, passed through Mărculești.
The journey itself was terrifying. Upon the snowy fields where they were driven lay the frozen bodies of the old and sick, who couldn’t make it and died of hunger and the cold. In the field there were also small, frozen children.
Who will light a candle each year to commemorate the passing of those who are buried without burial shrouds or tombstones?
Those who made it to Bershad were driven on even farther, until they arrived at the small hamlets. There they were herded into empty stalls.
Because they had nothing with which to cook or to wash themselves, the majority of the deportees soon fell ill with typhus.
The malignant guest eventually found its way into the stall where Lia and her family had taken shelter.
Starving, frozen through, without any medication, it was difficult to overcome the typhus. Lia lay sick with a high fever and didn’t realize that all of her relatives had already passed away and were lying, still, around her.
No one showed concern about what was happening, because in the other stalls just about everyone had fallen ill.
Death had it easy. And the harvest was great.
Whoever succumbed one day was forgotten the next.
Lia did not surrender. She fought bitterly with the angel of death. Thanks to her young body and healthy heart, she pulled through.
In every group of people there are the outcasts. We too had such people! And as a matter of fact, they weren’t small in number. Pillagers took to the stalls, robbing the dead and the feeble, who couldn’t defend themselves. Some of the criminals were also tooth-looters. By no means were they dentists; they were simple thieves, who ripped out golden teeth. These people took away backpacks and blankets and even stripped the corpses of their clothes. When they tried to take Lia’s blanket, she groaned, so the bandits made away with all of her things and left her with just the blanket.
Later, when she had recuperated slightly, she saw that she was now alone. She couldn’t stand, she didn’t even have the strength to shout, so she just moaned weakly. A man passing by heard her whimpers and entered to see what was happening inside.
Lia lay there on a bundle of straw. She was slender, skin and bone. The man pitied her, wrapped her up in the blanket, and carried her in his hands.
Together with his wife he looked after Lia until she could stand on her own feet.
Only then did she grasp that she had lost her entire family.
Mendl was a tinsmith, who always found something to fix up for the poor. In return for his work he received produce, so he had no lack of potatoes, and sometimes he even got bread, too.
After a few weeks Lia had recovered enough of her strength to get out of bed.
She remained with the people who had saved her life and became very close with them. She also came to love her new friends’ little daughter. The girl wanted to be told stories and Lia never tired of telling them.
It wasn’t long before Lia was once again the black-eyed charmer that she’d been before she fell ill.
She soon noticed that Mendl no longer gazed at her with pity, as he used to, but with awe.
A day later she realized that her heart was no longer occupied by feelings of friendship and gratitude toward the man who had saved her life, but something else that was burgeoning within her.
She was anxious and struggled hard to hold out against what was happening.
She noticed that Mendl was no longer so indifferent to her either. She often felt his eyes probing her. At times, unwittingly, she answered his gaze, and so she became aware that a hot passion was flaring up within him as well. For the eyes are the mirror of the heart, the greatest of traitors.
It grew more and more difficult to hold her emotions in check.
Whenever she tried to think about her husband, who was somewhere on the front, her thoughts soon turned to this other man, whom she craved with her entire being.
She was afraid that Erna would notice what was going on, so she started distancing herself from Mendl. She avoided staying with him alone, even for a moment. When Erna went away and took the child with her, Lia went with them, so that if Mendl were to come home, he wouldn’t find her alone.
And the day arrived when we had to part from one another, forever.
The Soviet squads liberated our camp and the few survivors prepared themselves for the journey.
On the last day they both roamed around despondent, unable to conceal their emotions, so difficult was it for them to say goodbye.
Erna had noticed it all long ago, but she also saw how Lia avoided Mendl, which drew out her sympathy toward the girl. Now she was searching for transportation and would be gone for a while. They could bid farewell with no witnesses.
For the first time they were alone. All the artificial, contrived boundaries fell away. Mendl embraced her, squeezing her tightly to his chest.
And for the first time their lips approached. Lia buried her head against his heart and cried bitterly.
Mendl tried to comfort her. He said: — We’ll still see each other, maybe we’ll find a way to be together forever.
“It can’t happen, it can never happen,” she replied, “Erna is like a sister to me — no, like a mother. Have you forgotten that when I was dying, she nursed me like a little child? She took away the little bit of milk that was for your daughter and gave it to me. This is how I should thank her?”
“I haven’t forgotten at all, but did we want it to turn out like this? Is anyone guilty?”
“But your child? Your child together!”
“Should we sacrifice what we have?”
“We must, my love, we must!”
Erna’s return broke off their conversation.
When she saw Lia’s tear-filled eyes, she said to her:
“Silly child, as if we won’t see you any more? You’ll come visit us and you’ll always be a welcome guest.”
She knew that her dear Mendl was having a hard time saying goodbye. She had already felt for a long time how strongly he yearned for this other woman. Now she was happy that it was coming to an end. She trembled thinking that she might lose him, because she loved him so much, like in the first days after their wedding.
It’s good that people part ways. He would forget, and Lia would, too.
Perhaps they would forget, but meanwhile Lia was broken, with a restless passion in her heart as she travelled home to wait for her husband, to whom she now felt so estranged, so, so estranged.
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