Jakob’s Colors (26 page)

I
t is in the second month that the soldiers from the barn finally come to take them. There is the sound of trucks arriving, the sound of stones spitting up from the dirt track that leads from the road to the farm, the slamming of doors, metal on metal. Jakob feels the smash of them in his chest, like a stack of red bricks cracking. He hears footsteps. The cupboard door opens, the light in his eyes. He goes to scream, but the sound stops in the wreck of his chest, and he exhales precious air.

Markus is in front of him, his eyes wide with fear.

“You have to go now, Jakob, my boy. They are going to find you. They have come to look. We cannot wait any longer. Out of the back door. To the forest. And then you run south. South until you get to the border. If you wait in the woods they will find you. The man Moreali, he knows you are coming. He will cross you over to the other side. You hear? Now go.”

His bony hand reaches for Jakob's, grips and pulls at it.

“You were what I held onto when life was full of loss” is the last thing Markus says to him. “Do you know that? Do you?” And that is it. That is the last of him, his gray-eyed gray-hairedness. He is
the color of an old pearl. Jakob watches him go, scurrying into the kitchen, where he hears the front door slam open, loose hinges ripping from the wood like ice cracking, and the sound of breaking glass. Heavy boots sound on the stone flags, the tap of a metal sole and a shout, thick with spittle. A table is wrenched across the stone flags. Then there is a gunshot, just the one, but the sound of it reverberates in his ears over and over.

Until weak limbed, rope thin, and quivering, Jakob crawls out from the warmth of his triangle.

“Cherub,” he calls. “Loslow.”

The cupboard doors are open, and there, hunched in the splintered darkness, are his companions, raw and slight, with hollowed jowls, and hair that is barely distinguishable from the jaundiced pallor of their skin. Too much hollowness. Too much bone.

“Cherub,” Jakob chokes, seeing him for the first time, and the image he has held for months and months, the image of this treasured man—arms splayed out above the handles of his bike, as close to flying as he can get without leaving the ground, head tipped back, a smile too wide for his face to contain—shatters. Of that image, only a shriveled emaciation remains. A sunken hole, all nose and teeth. “Cherub,” Jakob cries. “What you gone and done? What you gone and done, Cherub?”

For in front of him is not the image of two men who have eaten more over the past weeks so that they might grow strong enough to run alongside him, but rather of two who have gone without. Of two who have put aside half of every meal, day by day, morsel by morsel; the husk of their bread, the pulp of their potato, the hot burning goodness of their soup, so that a small gypsy boy, who lay cramped in a triangle cupboard, who for them had become the very essence of hope, might run toward freedom.

“Go,” Cherub weeps. “You must go.”

Jakob reaches for him, grasps his hands. “I cannot. I cannot without you.”

“We are with you, Jakob. We are very near. Always near.”

“Run now,” Loslow echoes. “You must run. You must not stop.”

Jakob sobs.

“Please,” Cherub whispers. Their hands pressed palm to palm. All the love in their fingertips. “Please, my beloved boy.”

Te den, xa, te maren, de-nash
, Jakob has been taught. A whispered plea. Run if you can. Always, if you can.

And so, a small wooden box clutched to his chest, a stone of lapis lazuli in his hand, Jakob, a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish, pulls open the back door and runs out, beneath a blue sky, alone.

Spourz na kolory
, he has had whispered to him all his life. See the colors, my boy. Tell me what you see.

Malachite, azurite, vermilion, mauve. Rusted ochre from a mossy bough. Steely white from the sap of the youngest tree. He runs on. Cremona orange, saffron yellow.

The sky—
Kek ceri pe phuv perade
—it has not fallen to the earth.
Kek jag xalem
. He eats no fire.
Kek thuv pilem
. Drinks no smoke.
Kek thaj praxo
. Becomes not dust.

He knows how to read the wind. He knows how to read the clouds. When to seek shelter, when not. Knows which tree to interpret the land by, knows to seek out the giant that stands wider and higher than all the others, or the tree that stands alone. Knows too that sweet is south facing, that the berries he finds will be riper on the southerly side. Knows which flowers follow the sun, which lift their heads to face the golden orb in the sky. Knows to sleep where the spider webs cling to the nooks and crannies, where the wind won't find them or him as he slumbers beneath their jewel-frosted weaves on a pillow of moss. He has grown up directing himself with the wind and the shadows. He is not afraid of them.

“
Zyli wsrod roz
,” he whispers to himself, his breath hot in his ears, his feet pounding toward the greenest grass, swift and invisible. “They lived among the roses.
Nie znali burz
. And they did not know of any storms.
Nie znali burz
. And they did not know of any storms.”

T
he Porrajmos is the Gypsy Holocaust. It means “the Devouring.” The exact number of Romani lives lost by 1945 is unknown. But figures from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Institute in Washington, DC, puts the number at “between a half and one-and-a-half million.”

In December 8, 1938 Himmler's “Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race” marked the beginning of plans to exterminate all Sinti and Roma. In February 1939 a brief by Johannes Behrendt of the Nazi Office of Racial Hygiene stated that “all gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should be the elimination without hesitation of this defective population.”

• A Chronology of Roma Persecution:
  
• 1933: Officials in Burgenland, Austria, call for the withdrawal of all civil rights of Roma.
  
• 1935: Marriages between gypsies and Germans are banned.
  
• 1936: The Roma are no longer given the right to vote.
  
• 1938: “Gypsy Clean-Up Week”—the start of the Porrajmos (the Gypsy Holocaust) where hundreds of Sinti and Roma throughout Germany and Austria are rounded up and incarcerated.
  
• 1940: January—the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place: 250 Romani children in Buchenwald concentration camp are used as guinea pigs to test the Zyklon-B gas crystals. There are no survivors.
  

  August: Internment camps are built throughout Austria.
  

• 1941: 5000 Roma are sent to the Jewish ghetto of Lodz in Poland.
  
• 1942: Himmler orders the deportation of all German Roma to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the same time all 5,000 gypsies in the Lodz ghetto are transported to Chelmo and gassed.
  
• 1943: March—1,700 Romani men, women, and children are gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
  

  In July Himmler orders that all Roma are to be killed.
  

• 1944: August 2—
  Zigeunernacht
  (Gypsy Night) takes place. 4,000 gypsies are dragged screaming to the gas chamber and killed.
  
• 1945: January 27—Soviet soldiers reach Auschwitz and find one Roma survivor.
  

The Killing Tree:

So as not to waste bullets, other methods were adopted to kill children and babies. Some were drowned. Others were picked up by their feet and swung against the trunk of a tree.

The mass murder of gypsies was not recognized at the Nuremberg trials, and not a single gypsy was called to witness. To this day only one guard has received a sentence for crimes against them.

The Nazi genocide of the gypsies was only officially acknowledged in 1982 by West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, but even then the few gypsy survivors struggled to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles, and, unlike their Jewish counterparts, gypsies orphaned by Nazis do not qualify for reparations.

It was not until April 14, 1994, that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial held its first commemoration of gypsy victims.

In 1926, the Swiss charity Pro Juventute established the Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse [Charity for the Children of the Country Road] with the support of the Swiss Federal Council.

As its director, Pro Juventute named the Romanist Alfred Siegfried (1890–1972) whose research focused on “
Vagantenkindern
” [children of vagrants]. He defined his task as follows:

“Whoever wants to combat vagrancy successfully has to try to explode the union of the traveling peoples, he has to rip apart the family ties. There is no other way. Chances of success are only then favorable, when the children can be totally isolated from the parents.”

Between 1926 and 1973, social workers would receive a notice from either a citizen or the local police that a group of “itinerants” had arrived in the vicinity. Siegfried's people would then, accompanied by policemen, drive to the campsite of the Yenish and demand that the children be handed over. Often, resistance was met with force. The children were taken to a home for orphans. Children who escaped were caught again and sent to psychiatric clinics for evaluation. Difficult children ended up in juvenile hall, psychiatric units, or prison. Over 700 gypsy children suffered this fate.

Yenish is a term for travelers of Swiss origin. They are the third-largest population of nomadic people in Europe. They differ culturally and ethnically from the Roma. Today 35,000
Jenische
live in Switzerland. Only about 5,000 of them live the traveler lifestyle.

The Romani are a diaspora ethnicity of Indian origin who arrived in midwest Asia, then Europe, at least one thousand years ago. They are called in the world by various names such as Romany, Roma, Zigeuner, Cigáni, or Gitano, but in their own language, Romani, they are known collectively as Romane. They live mostly in Europe and the Americas.

T
his book is a work of fiction but in the writing of it some books were very useful to me. They were:
Stone Age
, by the Swiss Yenish writer Mariella Mehr;
Gypsies Under the Swastika
, The Gypsies During the Second World War:
From Race Science to the Camps
, and
The Final Chapter: Gypsies during the Second World War
, by Donald Kenrick;
A Gypsy in Auschwitz
, by Otto Rosenberg;
Travels Through the Paint Box
, by Victoria Finlay;
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
, by Isabel Fonseca; and
The Roads of the Roma: A Pen Anthology of Gypsy Writers
, by Ian Hancock.

I'm indebted to the following people: my agent, Charlotte Robertson at United Agents, for her initial faith in the few chapters I first gave her, her steadfast support, and for making it happen; my editor, Kate Parkin, for her passionate belief in this book and her discerning and heartfelt approach in all things editorial; the team at Hodder & Stoughton and Quercus US, for their delightful enthusiasm; Lindsay Clarke—my wise man in writing and the first to encourage some semblance of worth; Andrew Miller, for his gentle assurances that all would be well and for the books he gave me; Vaughan Sivell, for the early years.

Thank you to my friends, for seeing me through the murky places: Lisa Chae, Katherine Roper, Sally and Tim Palmer, Sarah and Burn Gorman, Kate Jones, Pippa Menzies, Andrew Downey, Venetia Osborne, Alex Price, Sarah Bland, Katie Skasbrook, and Alice Wyn Edwards. And to Holly Price, for her generosity and thoughtful red pen in initial chapters; Alex and Christopher Romer-Lee, for their wise council; Geraldine Thomson, for knowing what to say; Viv Blakey, for her lovely photographs; Lisa Joffe, for the inspirational talks; Lola and Mike Straw, for supporting my work; Paul Rolleman, for sharing his sunlit home; and Stephen Taylor, for listening to the stumbled early drafts and for liking them.

And lastly, but immensely, thanks to my parents, Robin and Sheila Hawdon, for a writing room with a glass roof and a view of the sky where I could finish this book, for their time and insight, their faith in my ventures, and for being there always in the dark and the light; my sister, Gemma Lee Hawdon, for writing in cafés, for swinging on vines with me, from childhood and up into the bewildering beyond, and for being the safe haven that she is to me now; and to my children, Dow and Orly, my
Apasavellos
, for their love and patience and for the day-to-day sharing of a life.