A Tale of Love and Darkness

MANY YEARS later I discovered that a woman I knew as a child, Mrs. Abramski, Zerta, the wife of Yakov-David Abramski (both of them were frequent visitors to our home), kept a diary during those days. I vaguely remember that my mother sometimes sat on the floor in a corner of the corridor during bombardments, with an exercise book supported on a closed book on her knees, writing, ignoring the exploding shells and mortars and the bursts of machine-gun fire, deaf to the noise of a score of inmates who bickered all day long in our dark, smelly submarine, writing in her exercise book, indifferent to the Prophet Jeremiah's doom-laden mutterings and Uncle Joseph's lamentations, and the penetrating, babylike crying of an old woman whose mute daughter changed her wet diapers in front of all of us. I will never know what my mother was writing: no exercise book of hers has reached me. Maybe she burned them all before she killed herself. I do not have a single complete page in her handwriting.

In Zerta Abramski's diary I find written, among other things: