Today, we meet with Gita. When we arrive, she greets us downstairs at the entrance to her block of flats. She is effusive with her hospitality and walks us upstairs to her flat. When we enter, I can see that she has laid out a spread on the dining table, with her best teacups and saucers. She starts apologising for the condition of her flat, saying how in the Soviet times, the flat was drab and without colour and how by the time she can redecorate, she doesn't have the energy to put in the necessary effort. It is a lovely, well-kept flat, sparse and clean. She is obviously quite house proud.
We go about setting up our equipment. Ruta starts to ask her a few questions for a biography brief; the name of her parents. Gita starts to sob as she tells Ruta the name of her parents. I don't know where to look. I busy myself plugging in the mics to the audio recording equipment. I am thinking that she may not be up to an interview. But I am wrong.
Gita tells her story with great simplicity and honesty, in a moving narrative enhanced with specific details and memories. I am thinking that she really wants to tell her story and maybe even thought about what she was going to tell us. She tells her story in a collection of vignettes. How Jews, Poles and Russian POWs are shot in Baruk forest. How the ghetto was liquidated; the German soldiers strafe the ghetto with machine gun fire, then go door to door searching for survivors. Her parents are killed. How she and 7 other survivors escaped through a hole in a fence as the ghetto was set alight. How they crawled through a potato field on their bellies. Gita sobs as she tells her story; I am finding it very hard to listen to her and not be caught up in her pain.
Gita
An hour into the interview, I am finding it increasingly painful to listen to her story. I look at her face and notice little things; like how thick her earlobes are. How to the Chinese this is considered a sign of good fortune, and I wonder if she had lived in a different time, would she have had a different life?
She tells us after the war, she went home but she "had nothing, no shoes." She wanders about the town, looking to see if she can recognise neighbours. She has on her feet socks made out of parachute fabric... On her back, she has her father's jacket, which she took down into the basement the day he died. She cries when she talks about how she felt she had no home to return to.
I cannot reconcile this story with the gracious hostess who tries to feed us coffee and cakes and biscuits and cold water. She is a proud woman and she insists we eat, eat, eat and when we leave, she stuffs apples into plastic bags and makes us take them with us.
"Eat, eat, eat!"
I take away with me her caution that differentiation is something to be wary of; she says she does not divide people into nationalities, only good and bad, and that "goodness is the best nationality." I don't think she has reconciled for herself why the holocaust befell her and her kind. She says she thinks it is important to tell her story - "I think people should know, what was done, and for what? To remember… children were thrown into pits, the earth was mourning, the forest had streams of blood...” Her faith in humanity has not been destroyed, I don't think; only that she has been disappointed and baffled. She recalls fondly how at the factory where she worked, people of all nationalities were kind to her. Again, I am awed by the ability to forgive and yet not forget.
Later that night, I scan photos that Gita has lent to us. I see the carefree joy of youth; it is hard to imagine the suffering in the smiles. I look at the photos of her I took today and see the contrast. Does age reveal what youth hides?
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