Читать книгу We Were Young and at War: The first-hand story of young lives lived and lost in World War Two - Sarah Wallis - Страница 88

At school everything seems normal. No tests so far but we’re working our way through the course. We’re doing Cicero’s famous speech against Cataline; in maths we’re on quadratic equations. We’re behind in most other subjects, except German. School soups are quite good, and my extra-curricular soup is much appreciated. But five portions wouldn’t be too much.

A school gazette is being set up. I contributed some caricatures and they might include one of my Jewish articles. All the ones I’ve written so far turned out to be unpublishable—even the ghetto has its bourgeois ideology, clearly formulated and defined.

Things are not too good at home, but Mum has a job now. She leaves at seven in the morning and comes home at nine in the evening. Father goes out to day shift from eight to eight. All the housework is on [my sister] Nadzia’s shoulders, she does all the queuing, cleaning and so on—all this on just one soup a day with 300g of bread (she and Mum each give Father 100g of bread, but he is very ungrateful and treats them as badly as he does me—it just shows how selfish he is). As she works in the kitchen, Mum gets one extra portion of good soup—the same as every worker in the ghetto. We don’t cook at home any more—there’s nothing to cook. It’s getting harder and harder to find food. There are no potatoes or barley, bread has 8 per cent chestnut flour added and its daily ration won’t increase. There is a real food crisis. And it’s only the second year of war!