Eva

A Novel of the Holocaust

Meyer Levin

• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839742194
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du peuple juif

Eva: A Novel of the Holocaust, first published in 1959, is a fictionalized account of Ida Loew, a young Jewish girl from Poland who survived the Jewish pogroms of the Nazis and the Auschwitz camp. The book opens with the girl at age 16 leaving her home in southeastern Poland and posing as a gentile from the Ukraine named Katya. The story follows Eva as she works as a maid in the home of a prominent Austrian family in Linz (the husband is an SS officer), and then as an office worker in a German munitions factory. When she is eventually discovered to be a Jew, she is sent to Auschwitz. After the evacuation of the camp she manages to escape, finding refuge with a Polish family. At the end of the novel she is trying to find her family and home, difficult because so many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe had been destroyed. In real life, Ida Loew made her way to Israel after the war where she settled in Tel Aviv.

1

PERHAPS you will be the one to live,” my mother said. “Then, Eva, if you live, you must write it all down, how you lived, and what happened to all of us, so it will be known. You must write down everything exactly as it was.”

It seems to me now that she is still saying those words to me, and I am still standing by the door, but I am already not myself. I am some strange, clumsy Ukrainian peasant girl named Katarina. Katarina can walk away from this house, but I, Eva, cannot leave. Katarina has the same bright cheeks that Eva always had, the firm bright-red cheeks bursting with life, the cheeks everyone had to stop and pinch—they just couldn’t help themselves, they said—when she was a little girl. Grown men would bend down to pinch them, and, of course, every mama in the town. Whether Eva was marching to school, or running errands, or bossing her band of playmates, nobody could resist stopping her. Even the town notary, Mr. Novick, who wore a prince-nez, would stoop down, exclaiming, “Ah, Eva, what cheeks! What life! What health! Like a real Ukrainian peasant!” And he would give them a little pinch, and she could see his golden cuff links.

So on this day Eva, with the same red cheeks, and her black hair combed down around her face, peasant style, Eva in a broad peasant skirt, holding her handbag containing her false identity papers, Eva was now Katarina, and that was why she would be able in the next moment to turn her back and leave the house, to try to slip, alone, into the world where life was allowed.

I know that I must not feel guilt for it, that life demanded it, that my mother, who still at that moment had the strength and power of life in her, demanded it. I know that Mama sent me out. She sent me out to live. And yet that moment is frozen, as though I still might never take the decision to walk out and leave them to wait there for their fate.

And it is as though my family can be released from their eternal anxious waiting only after I have come home and told them what happened to me in that whole long adventure outside, just as on the nights when I first began going out with boys, and if I was out late, I knew that my mother and father were lying awake waiting, and only after they heard me come home would they put out their light and turn to sleep.

It is surely not there in our town of Hrebenko that they might be eternally waiting, and yet it is there that I see them in that house, as I am leaving. It is not our own house, with the candy store downstairs and the three fine flats with bathrooms upstairs, the house that Papa managed to put up right near the courthouse square, putting it up floor by floor as he paid off the debts on the first story so he could borrow money for the second. But then the Russians came, in the summer of 1939, and took over our side of Poland, and took over Papa’s store.

And two summers later, just after my high-school graduation, the Germans came and drove out the Russians, and then they took over Papa’s house, and drove us back to the old Jewish neighborhood behind St. Stephen’s church, where I had lived as a little girl.

The Blumenfelds took us in, giving us their living room. Their house had always been a second home to me, because Alla Blumenfeld was my twin, born on the same day—on New Year’s Day! And her older sister Freda was the same age as my sister Tauba. The four of us had started to school together on the same day, because we younger ones wouldn’t let the two older ones go without us. We had stayed together right through, always in the same class.

So the Blumenfelds took us in. They had a piano and works of art in their living room, where we put our bedding; Mr. Blumenfeld was an “advanced” person; he had been the first to install a telephone, to own a radio. His daughters were the first two girls in town to own a bicycle, and Tauba and I were the next.

It was from the Blumenfeld’s house that Tauba was taken. She was taken in the third aktione, the third raid on the Jews of Hrebenko, when she ran out into the street to try to help four little girls get home. She was scooped up with the four little girls.

That was when the decision was made that I must leave. For some days we were stunned, and then Mother’s resoluteness returned. “We cannot all sit here and wait to die,” she said. “Eva, you must go out.”

The way had already been whispered about. To try to go as a Christian, as a voluntary worker, through the Arbeitsamt into Germany itself. The older people could not hope to do it. But a young girl might succeed.

At first I refused. Now, more than ever, I could not leave them. But Mother would not listen to me. “Eva, I tell you, you must go.”

Then I said I would try to go if I could take along my little brother Yaacov. “It would only mean the death of both of you,” said my mother. She was calm and practical. A girl might deceive them. But a boy—at the first doubt, they would see he was a Jew. No, I had to go without him.

But alone? Alone into that dark enemy land? I spoke of the plan to Alla, to Freda. They were even more frightened than I. We would be caught before we got out of Hrebenko. No, no, if it was to die, then it was better to remain with the family, to die together.

My mother kept after me. “Eva, you must be the first. If you succeed, other girls will follow, and they will be saved, too.”

She knew my vanity, my pride at being the first, the leader. “Eva the Cossack!” everyone had called me as a little girl. And so finally I said I would go.

Once agreed, we worked with frantic haste. First we had to decide who and what I would be. A Polish girl? Their faces were rather longer than mine, and paler. With my round face and bright-red cheeks I might pass for Ukrainian. Yes, yes, Ukrainian, Mother said. For there was an advantage in this. To the Germans, the Poles were conquered enemies, still unruly. But in our region most of the villagers were Ukrainians who had hated being governed by the Poles. They had never really given up their fight for Ukrainian independence. And the Germans saw them as allies and treated them with favor.

Settled, then. Ukrainian.

I had to have papers, a birth certificate, an identity. It was my schoolmate, Rachel Schwartz, who helped me. We had always thought of Rachel as a girl with a pretty face but not much sense. While the Russians ruled over us, Rachel had worked in one of their offices. Now it turned out that she had saved some blank identity forms, and even a rubber stamp.

From the public register, we picked the name of a dead Ukrainian girl, Katarina Leszczyszyn, of the near-by village of Werchrata. She had been four years older than I, but I was well developed and could pass for twenty-two. And so we made up a Russian identity paper for her, with the names of her parents, their dates of birth—everything. Besides this, I managed to get a blank German work card, which we filled out in her name.

And what would be my story? It had to be a common story, plausible. I thought of another of my classmates, Rita Mayer. Before the Russians came, Rita had lived with her family in a small resort town, and she had gone to boarding school in Lwów. During the Russian occupation, the NKVD had arrested her parents, who were leading Zionists, and shipped them off to Siberia. Then Rita had come to live with her grandmother, near us in Hrebenko.

There were many such stories of young people left alone when their parents were suddenly taken off by the Russians. Such a story, the Germans would be ready to believe. And so I would be the daughter of well-to-do peasants, kulaks, who had been deported while I was away at school. And now, alone, I found life difficult. There were no decent jobs to be had in Hrebenko. I would rather go to work in the Reich.

Now I had to transform myself into Katarina. The Ukrainian girls had their own way of dress. A wide, colorful skirt, but not a real peasant skirt because Katarina was already a girl of some education. The blouse, too, had to be “in between.” Katarina would nevertheless wear a kerchief, and comb her hair down around her face. And of course she would wear a cross.

Mama hurried to some Polish friends for a cross and a prayer book. I began to change myself, as an identity picture had to be made for my papers. I told myself that this had to be a real transformation, and not a disguise. For if I went out thinking of myself as Eva, only pretending to be Katarina, I would surely, somewhere, give myself away.

Mama returned, inspected me. And she too insisted, “You must cease to be Eva altogether. You must not think of us. Who knows when the war will end and what the world will be like?”

For in the fall of 1941 the German victories were uninterrupted; it seemed certain that they would rule all of Europe, perhaps the world.

Mama hung the cross on my throat. It was a good-sized cross, yellow, and it felt solid. I had never been particularly religious. On Sabbath, Papa would put on his long black coat and his fur-rimmed hat, and go off to the synagogue, but I always had felt this was mostly habit, and he had never required any observance of us. Mama kept a kosher house, also, I thought, out of habit, and on the great holidays—Passover and Rosh Hashana—we had feasts like all the other Jewish families. In school during the Russian occupation we had been taught, of course, that all religion is superstition. Still, this moment gave me a strange feeling. Their cross. Their Christ. It was as though, from when I was a little girl, some fear and awe of their magic talisman remained with me. It was as though some additional dreadful thing could happen to me if I were caught, even wearing their cross. But, after all, hadn’t Jesus been a Jew, too?

There was a knock. It was the photographer, and at the first instant he didn’t recognize me. We laughed. A good beginning. He took the picture, hurried home, and was back with it in an hour. Then Rachel and I pasted it on my Russian identity paper and stamped it, half across.

I would take with me a small wooden satchel, like the peasants used. Mama packed it. I saw her putting in one of my good dresses. “Mama! No!”

“You were at school in Lwów,” she said, reminding me of Katarina’s story. “So you could have a few city things. Eva, take a pair of high-heeled shoes, too. You must live openly and be like any lively young girl.”

I ran out on a last errand. That evening, my closest friends were coming to say goodbye, and I hoped to find something to offer them, perhaps some fruit. And then, as I was hurrying along toward the square, I encountered a close friend of my sister’s, Esther Warshawsky. In the last months of the Russian rule, Esther and Tauba had been sent to the normal school in Lwów. We talked a bit, carefully, so as not to touch on Tauba. It came out that I was “thinking of going away.” Suddenly Esther said, “I too have thought of going. But, by myself, I’m afraid to try it. And my parents would never let me.”

“Esther! Come with me!”

It was as though half my terror were taken from me. Not to be alone! We went directly to her house. As we walked together I kept looking at Esther, trying to see her as if I didn’t know her. She was quite small, thin, and pretty, with two long braids down to her waist. If the braids were wound in a circle around her head, she would appear completely Ukrainian. But in that moment she turned to me with a question, looking right at me. With her Jewish eyes. How could anyone ever mistake her eyes? Warm and dark, with their slightly melancholy look? And the way she had of twisting her head when she asked a question.

I knew where she had got that little mannerism with her head. It was her father’s way. Esther’s family was deeply orthodox. Reb Warshawsky was filled with sayings from the Talmud; only his sayings were usually questions. When the victim was stumped, Reb Warshawsky, his head cocked in just that way, would himself come out with the answer.

And now the same thing happened with Esther, except that her question was not from the Talmud. “How do you plan to get out of Hrebenko?” she asked. “You can’t just go to the station and get on a train. Everybody knows you.”

“I’ll get on the train at Huta Zielona,” I said. That was a stop about six miles away. “I’ll slip out from the edge of town, take off my armband, and walk to Huta Zielona.” It was possible. At that time, the Jewish area was not yet closed in with barbed wire. “You’ll go through town carrying a suitcase?”

I hadn’t thought of that.

So now she cocked her head and recited in singsong, exactly like her father quoting the Talmud, “First, we have to find a Pole to carry our bags to Huta Zielona—”

“Esther,” I said, “if we are going together, you’ll have to be careful not to talk like that, in singsong, like a rebetsen.”

She understood at once, without taking the slightest offense. “You too, Eva. You know, you talk with your hands.”

“I know. You’ll have to watch me, and I’ll watch you.” Oh, how much safer, to be going together.

“To carry our suitcases,” Esther resumed, “I’ll get Antek.” Antek, the father of a dozen children, was the porter at the post office where Esther had worked, after school, under the Russians. He would do anything for her.

We came to Esther’s house. She had two small sisters and an older brother. The whole family sat around the table as we discussed our ...