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Chapter One
The morning it happened -- the end of my lovely world -- I did not water the lilac bush outside my father's study.
The time was June 1941 and the place was Vilna, a city in the northeastern corner of Poland. And I was ten years old and took it quite for granted that all over the globe people tended their gardens on such a morning as this. Wars and bombs stopped at the garden gates, happened on the far side of garden walls.
Our garden was the center of my world, the place above all others where I wished to remain forever. The house we lived in was built around this garden, its red tiled roof slanting toward it. It was a very large and dignified house with a white plaster facade. The people who lived in it were my people, my parents, my paternal grandparents, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins. My grandfather owned the house, my grandmother ruled the house; they lived rather majestically in their own apartment, and the rest of us lived in six separate apartments. Separate, but not exactly private. There were no locked doors: people were always rushing in and out of each other's apartments to borrow things, to gossip, to boast a bit or complain a bit, or to tell the latest family joke. It was a great, exuberant, busy, loving family, and heaven for an only child. Behind the windows looking out on our garden there were no strangers, no enemies, no hidden danger.
Beyond the garden, beginning with the tree-lined avenue we lived on, was Vilna, my city. For the best view of Vilna one went to the top of Castle Hill, and I was always asking Miss Rachel, my governess, to take me there. Built along the banks of the river Wilja in a basin of greenhills, Vilna has been called a woodland capital. It was a university town, a city of parks and white churches with gold and red towers built by Italian architects in an opulent baroque style, a city of lovely old houses hugging the hills and each other. It was a spirited and a gay city for a child to grow up in.
From this hilltop I could make out the place where my family's business took up half a block, the synagogue we attended, the road that led to the idyllic lake country where we had our summer house. When I stood on this hilltop everything was just as it should be in this best of all possible worlds, my world.
And, down to the smallest detail, I would not have had any of it changed. What I ate for breakfast on school mornings was one buttered roll -- a soft roll, not a hard roll -- and one cup of cocoa; any attempt to alter this menu I regarded as a plot to poison me.
I would sit down to this breakfast at a round table in the dining room with my young parents or my beloved Miss Rachel. My father -- called Tata, the Polish for papa -- was my most favorite person in the world, a secret I thought I ought to keep from Mama. Tata was gay and fun-loving and not only made jokes himself, but laughed at mine -- whether mine were funny or not.
Mama was gay, too, with an engaging talent for laughing over spilled milk, but at an early age I found out that she was a strong-minded lady who thought that one indulgent parent was quite enough for an only child. When I was four years old, she and I first locked horns. I had just begun to attend a progressive nursery school, and one morning, when I and a dozen or so other little girls were doing calisthenics on the floor, I made a shattering discovery. All legs had, been swung back over heads, all toes were touching the floor, when, rolling my eyes from side to side, I saw that all the panties thus displayed were silk-white, pink, blue, yellow silk, a gorgeous rainbow of silk panties, some even edged with lace -- except mine. Mine were white cotton, severely unadorned. I told Mama that this situation must be corrected immediately. She thought not. I said that if I could not wear silk panties I would not go to nursery school at all. Mama said: "Very well. Don't go." I didn't go; I stayed home until it was time for me to go to grade school when I was seven.
And when it came to choosing the school, Mama decided it was character-building for a rich child to go to a school where there were children from all economic brackets. I went to the Sophia Markovna Gurewitz School, where I learned Yiddish and was introduced to the literature and culture of my people.
I loved school and I loved the order of my life. My days were planned with the precision of a railroad schedule. On Mondays after school there were piano lessons; Tuesdays, dancing class; Wednesdays I went to the library and invariably argued with the librarian, who recommended children's books when I wanted grownup books, particularly mysteries and the more bloodcurdling the better. On Thursdays my cousins and I had calisthenics with a muscular lady who drilled us as if we were candidates for the Prussian Army, which made us explode into giggles. And on Fridays I was allowed to help Mama and the cook prepare the Sabbath meals -- braid the challah, the ritual bread, and chop the noodles. On Fridays, the seven kitchens of our house would send forth the marvelous smells of seven Sabbath meals all alike -- the same breads, sponge cakes, chickens, and chicken soup.
But in 1939 Hitler's armies marched on Poland.
When the first bombs fell over Vilna I was terrified, of course. But we were lucky; no bombs fell in our garden. Our garden was invulnerable.
The Endless Steppe. Copyright © by Esther Hautzig. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
