Vera Read Online Free Page A

Lvov in the year of 1939. And here is something else that I do not know as I stand on the balcony, gazing down on the street, with my mother singing, with the lilacs and the maples now losing their leaves, and winter approaching. I do not know that I will be standing on this same balcony in the year of 1941, witnessing the arrival in Lvov of officers and soldiers of a different army. I do not know that these officers will be carrying with them carefully prepared lists. I do not know that my name will be on their lists.
    Vera Miller. Werunia. Beloved.

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    THE LISTS
    T hink of this. My name to the officers and clerks of the SS is just one of a number of names stamped by the metal keys of a type-writer onto a sheet of paper. The keys fashion a shape for each letter of my name until the ‘r’ of ‘Miller’ appears. Then it is done. I am on the list.
    But the letters of my name are no more than the title of my story. Underneath those letters, as in a palimpsest, lies another text, and in this text resides my true story, my joys and fears, the people and sights I love, the things I rush towards, the things I shrink from, the words I have spoken in the small number of years in my life, and those that have been spoken to me. In the story underneath the ink on the list is Vera: Vera with life in her small body, Vera who breathes, Vera who laughs and weeps, Vera who struggles to understand the world, Vera who gives up trying to understand and gives her attention to other things, things that delight her, to her piano, to the food on her plate, to the warmth in the voice of her mother and father. And also under the ink, it is Vera with her two legs, her two arms, her two eyes, her ears, her internal organs, her central nervous system, and her complement of rich red blood. It is Vera who could, in certain circumstances – circumstances that are quite close now – be made to shriek in dread, shriek in pain, shriek to her own God or to any other God who might be prepared to save her and say, ‘Don’t let this happen to me, don’t let me be Vera who suffers, Vera who dies.’

    It is 1941, and the Russians remain in Lvov. The lists have been written, but the SS staff members who will carry them have not yet departed from Berlin.
    The Jews of Lvov don’t fear the Russians – other than those who refused the offer of a Russian passport, preferring to keep their Polish passports; those Jews and a number of Poles are no longer with us, deported to who knows where. The more cooperative Jews and those with greater insight realise that the Russians soldiers stand as a bulwark against the catastrophe that is building; a cloud foreshadowing terrible harm builds on the horizon. But for other Jews, the way in which the war will unfold is not yet resolved. Maybe they tell themselves that the cloud could easily blow away in another direction, one that doesn’t threaten them. Even the thousands of Jews who have found refuge in Lvov – Jews who have witnessed the murder of other Jews, who have seen that the Germans carry the law with them wherever they go and that the law they carry is the only law – even they have hope, although of a desperate sort.
    My father is free to carry on his business, and to indulge his love of Greek and Roman civilisation (our house is replete with works of art that testify to my father’s passions); my mother is free to fulfil what I consider her most essential role in life, that of being my mother. And I am free to attend school, to gaze at other children my age and think, ‘I am taller than that one. I am prettier than that one. I think maybe that one likes me, but that one doesn’t.’ In other words, I am free to be a child: to join my voice in the chorus of kids at play; to engage with integers, angles, participles; to wet my hands with paint and fashion shapes on coarse sheets of paper.
    But for me, above all, there is the