began suffering from prolapses of the large intestine.
Mitrikova did spend some time with the older children. She didn’t give them any medical treatment—she had neither the wherewithal nor the skill for that—but she got them to do dances and taught them little poems and songs. Well, it was meant to look good when the time came to pack them off to an orphanage. All the children really learned in that house was the cunning and craftiness of old camp lags. They learned how to cheat and to steal, and how not to be caught doing it.
Before I had figured out what sort of person Mitrikova was, I told her how badly some of the nurses treated the children, and begged her to do something about it. She looked thunderous and promised that the guilty parties would be punished, but things remained exactly as they had been, and my little Eleonora began to fade even faster.
On some of my visits I found bruises on her little body. I shall never forget how she grabbed my neck with her tiny skinny hands and moaned, “Mama, want home!” She hadn’t forgotten the bug-ridden slum where she first saw the light of day, and where she’d been with her mother all the time.
The anguish of small children is more powerful and more tragic than the anguish of adults. Knowledge comes to a child before he can fend for himself. For as long as his needs and wishes are anticipated by loving eyes and hands, he doesn’t realize his own helplessness. But if those hands betray him, surrendering him to callous and cruel strangers, his horror has no limits. A child cannot grow used to things or forget them; he can only put up with them, and when that happens, anguish settles in his heart and condemns him to sickness and death.
People who find nature tidy and readily understandable may well be shocked by my view that animals are like small children, and vice versa—that is, small children are like animals. Both of them understand many things and suffer much, but since they cannot speak, they cannot beg for mercy and charity.
Little Eleonora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for “home” were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breastfeed her), she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing at my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed.
In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world, and died on March 3, 1944.
I don’t know where her tiny grave is. They wouldn’t let me leave the camp compound to bury her myself. By clearing the snow off the roofs of two wings of the infants’ house, I earned three extra bread rations. I swapped them and my own two rations for a coffin and a small individual grave. Our brigade leader, who was allowed out without a guard, took the coffin to the cemetery and brought me back a fir twig in the shape of a cross, to stand in for a crucifix.
That is the whole story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.
9.
GUSTAV HERLING
W hen he was arrested in 1940, Gustav Herling was, at age twenty-one, already a published journalist and critic. Like Kazimierz Zarod, he was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland while trying to escape over the border. The NKVD jailed him, interrogated him, and deported him to a camp near Arkhangelsk, in the Russian far North. Finally discharged in 1942 along with other Poles, he left the country with “Anders’s Army,” following it through Persia and Palestine. After the war, Herling remained in Italy, not wanting to return to Soviet-dominated Poland. He made his living as an émigré writer and novelist in Naples, working for the Paris-based Polish
Mitrikova did spend some time with the older children. She didn’t give them any medical treatment—she had neither the wherewithal nor the skill for that—but she got them to do dances and taught them little poems and songs. Well, it was meant to look good when the time came to pack them off to an orphanage. All the children really learned in that house was the cunning and craftiness of old camp lags. They learned how to cheat and to steal, and how not to be caught doing it.
Before I had figured out what sort of person Mitrikova was, I told her how badly some of the nurses treated the children, and begged her to do something about it. She looked thunderous and promised that the guilty parties would be punished, but things remained exactly as they had been, and my little Eleonora began to fade even faster.
On some of my visits I found bruises on her little body. I shall never forget how she grabbed my neck with her tiny skinny hands and moaned, “Mama, want home!” She hadn’t forgotten the bug-ridden slum where she first saw the light of day, and where she’d been with her mother all the time.
The anguish of small children is more powerful and more tragic than the anguish of adults. Knowledge comes to a child before he can fend for himself. For as long as his needs and wishes are anticipated by loving eyes and hands, he doesn’t realize his own helplessness. But if those hands betray him, surrendering him to callous and cruel strangers, his horror has no limits. A child cannot grow used to things or forget them; he can only put up with them, and when that happens, anguish settles in his heart and condemns him to sickness and death.
People who find nature tidy and readily understandable may well be shocked by my view that animals are like small children, and vice versa—that is, small children are like animals. Both of them understand many things and suffer much, but since they cannot speak, they cannot beg for mercy and charity.
Little Eleonora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for “home” were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breastfeed her), she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing at my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed.
In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world, and died on March 3, 1944.
I don’t know where her tiny grave is. They wouldn’t let me leave the camp compound to bury her myself. By clearing the snow off the roofs of two wings of the infants’ house, I earned three extra bread rations. I swapped them and my own two rations for a coffin and a small individual grave. Our brigade leader, who was allowed out without a guard, took the coffin to the cemetery and brought me back a fir twig in the shape of a cross, to stand in for a crucifix.
That is the whole story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.
9.
GUSTAV HERLING
W hen he was arrested in 1940, Gustav Herling was, at age twenty-one, already a published journalist and critic. Like Kazimierz Zarod, he was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland while trying to escape over the border. The NKVD jailed him, interrogated him, and deported him to a camp near Arkhangelsk, in the Russian far North. Finally discharged in 1942 along with other Poles, he left the country with “Anders’s Army,” following it through Persia and Palestine. After the war, Herling remained in Italy, not wanting to return to Soviet-dominated Poland. He made his living as an émigré writer and novelist in Naples, working for the Paris-based Polish
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