Fighting Fascism

Words by Rosanne Dingli

Art by Kaci Ellison

Esther was twenty-seven, and pregnant. She had waited for the signal to leave, for something to happen, for months. Asher was still missing. At first, she thought she had an idea where he might be; then it evaporated as the long days passed.

They were hurried away with little more than the clothes they wore, in the end. Someone said it might be a false alarm. But persecution meant living with alarm permanently outside one’s peripheral vision. It was a nightmare hardly remembered, because it was yet dreamed, and risk was dangerous to play with. Not merely foolish, as Asher said once; it was dangerous, dangerous.

They were given armbands to wear. It shook her, and she refused to place such articles on the children. Her old, mildly irrational mother, who mumbled to herself even more these days, these ominous days, wore hers even in the house. It made her angry, jumpy, resentful, afraid.

“Ima—take that off!”

“If they come for us, they will take me, my darling girl. My dear, dear tokhter.”

It silenced her. She stood silent. She might be a dear, dear daughter who did not want yellow bands on her children, but she was anxious and scared too.

They were warned several times. Warnings which grew in horror, which filled her with such foreboding she trembled half her waking hours. The news was not good. More and more Jews were squeezed into the Ghetto.

“It’s all right in the Ghetto, you know. We go out. It’s … almost normal.” The woman upstairs would stop to chat.

“See? It’s almost normal, Esther!” Her mother could be annoying sometimes.

But she did not believe anyone.

Out of pure generosity, people helped with shopping, so they wouldn’t have to broach the streets. The woman upstairs was friendly and obliging, despite her tendency to talk for hours when there were chores to be done. She brought cheese, bread, and vegetables for soup. “No need to go out, if you are so scared,” she said. “Think of it. Few people know you’re here. Please stay safe. Keep the little ones safe.”

And she did not know where Asher disappeared to most evenings, when he was still there, but he brought back news.

“The Germans are in Poland.”

“The Germans are in France.”

“The Germans are in Belgium.”

Such faraway places. And yet so close.

“But we’re surrounded by water. Aren’t we? This is Venice.”

“It’s not a good defence, water. Not these days.” He saw her crestfallen face. “Look—this alliance is not going to last.”

“What alliance, Asher? I don’t understand any of this.”

“Between Italy and Germany,” the old mother, in a lucid moment, shouted from her bed, a mattress on the floor in the corner of the big room.

“Between Italy and Germany.” Asher took on. “It’s fragile—it can’t get any stronger. And you know what will happen if the worst comes to pass.”

She whined in frustration. She stamped her foot on the rug she would have to leave behind if they fled. “No Asher, I don’t know what will happen.”

“Occupation, Esther, German occupation. Which would spell disaster for us. Real danger.”

She hugged her children at night, was startled by even the most ordinary noises down in the lane, which she could not see, because no windows overlooked the street. It avoided detection, and in fact another floor had been conjured out of the space between floors, under those high medieval ceilings. They lived in a loft.

“In a loft, we live, my children!” They did not see the tears in her eyes. They laughed and played, thinking the makeshift ladder was fun.

They had only one window, which overlooked a small internal courtyard, in the big room which served as kitchen, dining room, parlour, and bedroom for the boys and her mother, when they rolled out thick home-stitched mattresses on the floor near the stove.

She gazed at the little ones before she got into her own bed, wondering what would befall them when they had to move. She clutched her swelling abdomen when she sensed a new stirring inside. Whatever possessed them? A new life, in this?

She never tired of looking at the remnants of furniture they were able to bring here, the tallboy and dressing table, which were her mother’s. Her hope they would go to little Ruthie was all but crushed.

“Be prepared to go. There will be no notice. At any moment it will be our turn. Keep the children close. Someone will come with a rowboat, to the slippery steps near the bridge at the Calle Ghetto Vecchio. Do you know where it is? Can you get the children and their Bube there?”

“Yes, yes. Of course. Near the walled garden, where an almond tree grows over the wall.”

“They will take us all to Fusina.”

“Fusina!”

“Yes, Fusina, and from there onward to Marghera. Be ready. Always ready. From there a horse and cart will take us to the train at Gazzara.”

The strain of waiting and not knowing froze her insides to a knot of ice.

They had come to this.

But they were safe for now. Still, her heart was in her mouth whenever Asher brought home a group of men for a meeting. She gave them small glasses of strong carob “coffee”, apologized for the absence of honey to sweeten it with, and hastened them on their way in the dead of night, relieved to see their backs.

She stared at the sleeping children and knew they would hardly remember this place. They would grow up somewhere else. Perhaps it was for the best. Where on earth she would give birth was a nightmare she did not want to forecast or contemplate.

* * *

They came to fetch them on a rainy evening, when both boys had coughs and Ruthie was fast asleep near the stove. Her old mother was tight-lipped for a change. No mumbling, no dire predictions, not even a soft grumble. She kept looking toward the bedroom.

“Come, this is your only chance. The boat is ready. Are you ready?”

“But Asher is not home.” Panic in the pit of her stomach made her double over a hand she held to her waist. She held her breath. Should they go? Where was Asher?

“What do you want to do, woman?” Their leader was brusque and rude, angered and sorrowed by what he had to do. “Stay and fight? Eh? Stay and face the grey soldiers? It was Asher who told us to come.”

“How do I know you come from my husband? Tell me how I can know that.”

One of the men, who she knew by sight, approached and whispered.

She gasped.

Her ear hissed with the one word he said; the secret pet name Asher had for her.

She lifted a hand to her mouth in surprise. She doubled over her arm, held fast to her belly. It was a blasphemy, coming from someone else’s mouth in that way. It was a falsehood, and yet a truth.

He took Ruthie, and she pushed Taavi along, and lifted Izik, swaddled him in a thick shawl. All they could take were the bags she had ready packed.

“Soon you will be on the cart, and afterwards, the train.”

The old woman pointed at a big box.

“What? What, Ima?”

Her mother pointed again. “We must take my box.”

“No, no—too big and awkward. Leave it behind. Come, come now.”

They all filed out the narrow passage. She did not turn to look at the still warm stove, her well-scrubbed table, the open bedroom door, her dressing table, or the big handkerchief box standing there. She did not look at her mother.

She gave a small whimper when she pulled the door closed and pocketed the big black key. She did not turn to look at the street door when one of the men tugged it shut behind him.

She never saw Asher again.

* * *

How many years passed before she heard what Asher was doing the night they escaped the Jewish Ghetto in Venice—fifteen? Seventeen? She did not know. Their escape was now a muddle in her mind. She had slipped on the slimy canal steps, underneath the overhanging fronds from the almond tree behind the wall. She had pushed the sleepy children along. She had tugged at her mother’s sleeve.

Protecting them all, and yet desperately needing someone to protect her, and the unborn child she had discovered was inside her days before.

Asher was fighting Fascism, someone told her. He was a vital part of the resistance. He was the fulcrum upon which it all hinged. All on his own? She hardly knew what the word meant. She hardly understood what a Fascist looked like.

So Asher was a fighter. A savior. A champion. Perhaps she always knew that. But to think he was holding back the enemy while she and their children made it safely out of Venice brought hot tears to her eyes. And she had no idea what they looked like. No concept of who or what the enemy might be.

We all look the same, her mother used to insist.

“Oh, Ima. How could we all look the same?” Impatience with the aged. She felt guilty about it too.

She looked nothing like other Venetian women who raced around corners and bought bunches of wilting dill and spinach from bargemen wielding oars and sticks. Her nose was bony and much larger. Her eyes were huge and dark. Her hair had a kink in it, a stubborn kink which she pulled back, raked back with comb and water into a tight bun. She bound her whole head in a bright scarf and knotted it painfully under her chin. She spoke the Venetian dialect with an accent that spoke of stubbornness.

“Well, that’s your way of fighting Fascism.” Asher had laughed.

She did not understand what he meant. Stamping her foot on her carpet, her beautiful antique carpet, she tried to think. Her rug which, family folklore had it, had been rolled and unrolled in travels around the world: from Damascus to Haifa, from Haifa to Mersin, from Mersin to Tirana and Montenegro, and from there to Split and Trieste. That rug had her family’s peregrinations stamped into its warp and weft. And Asher said she had to fight. She did not know what they fought, but it brought her to her knees, to tears, nevertheless.

“They will come,” the people told her. Who were they?

She had never seen a soldier in grey, and yet it was a thought that terrified her. “We shall stand and fight.” She used her husband’s words. She repeated things she barely understood. “Is running away like fighting?”

“Yes, my darling, it is. Even if half a dozen of us are left alive … that is fighting.”

“Why on earth would they want us dead, Asher?”

“You know why, Esther. You know why.”

She packed and unpacked things, looking for folded nappies when she needed them for Taavi who had started wetting the bed again. She unrolled the mosquito net again when summer came round once more. The new stockings she had rustled away had to be used when her laddered ones were utterly finished.

The weeks rolled onward, and the rumors about collaborators and betrayals down in the squares reached her ears. How did one fight a betrayal? She smiled in the face of it all, even when she quaked inside.

“If word reaches the outside, they will come in here and pursue you.”

Was it true? She moved the family to this place without exterior windows. They fashioned a home for them with stolen timber, a loft between stories with a single window overlooking a courtyard, where she often saw the heavy man from across the way relieving himself against the wall. From all the way up there, through a single window, she watched life in the Venetian ghetto unfurl through the antics of her neighbors. Family fights, children’s bruised knees, the penury of sheep bones boiled twice and three times for soup. Of carrots with a woody core mashed and re-mashed. Little twigs and splinters found in the black bread.

“Is fighting starvation the same as fighting Fascism?” She looked Asher in the eye.

“My sweet darling. Everything we do is a fight. We resist. Even our prayers are bellicose.”

She did not understand the word, but prayed nevertheless. “Where do we go from here, Asher? Why can I not take my rug?”

“Oh, Esther. You must travel as light as you can. Think! Three children, we have.”

Four. Four now, and he did not know. She never saw him again.

* * *

Esther gave birth on a ship bound for the New World, they called it. After wagons and carts, and jumping onto a rolling train tender half full of potato sacks, where the children coughed more than ever and the putrid smell of rotting potato stuck to their clothes and the insides of their nostrils, they had to wait for a week, or a month; she could not remember any more. They waited forever underneath and inside the cabin of a ruined truck, which had been blown to bits by an aerial attack. Ruined, but whole enough to shield them from the bitter cold. They waited there, outside a high wall with two rows of barbed wire along the top, wondering where it was they were and where it was they were heading.

Finally, after stowing away on yet another slow-moving train, they ended up at a port and on an enormous vessel bound for heaven knew where. For the first time in their lives, the little boys heard a ship’s foghorn. And long before she thought she would even have to think or worry, she was delivered of a too-small girl, a strange little soaked bundle of a baby, well before her time was near. The cabin where it happened seemed full of women, full of noise, of voices shouting in Yiddish, and German, and Polish, and Italian, and a host of other tongues.

“Love her as well as you can now, my dear, because she is not for long with us.”

The mite was small and red, shrivelled and swollen at once. In her head she called her Venezia, because that was where she was conceived, with Asher, at a time she thought he would always be by her side.

It was obvious now she would never see him again. Someone said all those who resisted in the Venice ghetto were taken to a camp and gassed. Her Asher, gassed. It brought a chill to her heart and tears to her eyes. Her entire body ached. The children asked why she cried and what could she answer? What could she say to comfort their little hearts?

She looked into the vacant eyes of her new daughter and wept. Too early, she came, little Venezia. Too late.

“She will not live long,” she heard them whisper.

But the girl survived the voyage, unlike the thin man three cabins up, who expired one rough night, unable any more to take seasickness and sorrow. Unlike the woman one deck below, who succumbed to something that bloated her and turned her purple, even when still alive. Or twins who looked pale and sickly, but sang as they ran through companionways arm-in-arm, and erupted into a rash that took them away, despite the fact a number of children caught whatever it was, including Taavi, and survived and thrived.

“Is sorrowing for a dying child fighting Fascism?” she wondered.

But the child did not die. She suckled strongly, slept like a top, and gave her first vague smile the night they docked at a place they called Fremantle.

“Where are we, Ima?”

“We are right here, my daughter. And the fight is over.”

Perhaps she was right, perhaps she was wrong. They landed and touched the new soil, unaware they were about to take on the fight of their lives. It was no small battle getting used to the heat and the strangeness of this place, all the way round the world. Australia, they called it. She called it Jerusalem, but only in her heart. She called it Sinai. She called it Midian.

She fought the fight of lack of understanding, of xenophobia, of psychological terror and the paralysis of ignorance, of people who Ima said looked just like them, but who behaved so very differently. And she watched her children grow, turning into Australians in front of her wide open eyes. She told them the story of their flight from Venice. Over and over again she repeated things their father would say, but they did not remember Asher. They nodded and smiled, just as she nodded and smiled when her mother erupted into stories of the past.

Was it like that, then? Was all that suffering and sorrow so easily left behind? All it took was a decade or so, a decade, and it all grew softer and paler, and more able to be left by the side of the road, like the damp pack of laundered nappies they had forgotten somewhere, and the small box with her side combs and hand mirror. And her carpet, her carpet. They survived without them. They made do. Perhaps that was how it was. You fought Fascism and lived to tell the tale, whether you understood or not what on earth it was.

About the author

Rosanne Dingli has authored ten novels, six collections of published and awarded stories, and a collection of poems. Known for her well-researched historical fiction, she has accumulated a number of accolades, and has been included in several anthologies in Australia and internationally. Since 1985, her stories, reviews, articles and other short pieces have appeared in quality journals and supplements. She has lectured in Creative Writing at ECU, and still conducts the occasional workshop. She lives and writes in Western Australia.

About the illustrator

Kaci Ellison, a mother of two children from rural Western Kentucky, lives in a log home on 10 acres of forest. The homestead is also home to bunnies, chickens, a cat, and a dog. An art major from Murray State University, she works as a home designer for Champion Homes. Her hobbies include gardening, illustrating, hunting, fishing, running, and watching her children play sports.

Kaci Ellison is enchanted by nature. She loves bird watching. Sunrises and sunsets remind her everyday is a new beginning. Kaci is passionate believer in God. She believes everyday kindness is the lifeblood of our own happiness.