The Free Spirit

The War, 1937 - 1945

"Când m-or băga în mormânt Și n-oi mai fi pe pământ..."

You might notice that the dates featured above expand the entirety of the Second World War. This part of my life was so impactful on the rest of my life that I decided to give it an entire chapter dedicated to itself, although because it was so long ago, specific details are difficult to recall.

I was born in a small village called Tăure in the Transylvania region of Romania on the dying day of 1937 - that's the thirty-first of December, if you don't get the artistic metaphor - to a woman by the name of Minodora Vasiliakova, whom many called Mina, along with my twin brother, Costache. My name at the time was Katryna Romana Vasiliakova, but it was later anglicised to Catherine (my mother still called me Katryna until she died). Mina was a charming girl of seventeen years who was a member of a caravan of Romani people, otherwise known as gypsies. She was born on the eighth of June in the year 1920 to a fourteen-year-old mother called Soreana Vasiliakova, who was the daughter of Trandafira Vasiliakova and the mother to both Mina and Juliani Vasiliakova. We were a family of gypsy women among this caravan, each with different fathers that we did not know. Mum used to tell me that Trandafira said Soreana's father was a pirate from Africa, or a masked hero from Spain - Trandafira was a storyteller, so we never knew the truth. Soreana said that Mum's father was farmer boy she met near the border of Ukraine, however, Trandafira insisted that it was the boy's father and he raped her. My father was a soldier from England, with hair as red as the setting sun and a beard to match. I didn't meet him until the war was nearly over.

About nine months before I was born, my husband, Isaac Donald Everly, was born to an American coal miner-turned-musician named Isaac Milford Everly, called Ike, and his wife, seventeen-year-old Margaret Embry, on the first of February, 1937. I know very little of his life before his brother, Phillip, was born on the ninteenth of January, 1939. All I know is the town he was born in, Brownie, Kentucky, was a coal mining town and that his parents moved to Chicago, Illinois before Phil was born.

For the first year of our lives, Costache and I enjoyed the perks of being infants in a Romani caravan. Very few of us had fathers, and most of the men in our caravan were born into it as opposed to marrying into it, so all of the women were mothers to all of the children. I know this only from my mother's stories, as in mid-1939, we were removed from our nomadic caravan and placed into a ghetto by the German Nazis under Adolf Hitler. Being a year and a half when this happened, I do not remember any of it, and my earliest memories begin sometime in late 1940, when we were being brought to a concentration camp - Belzec, it was, in southeastern Poland. Trandafira, my great-grandmother, was put to work immediately (I know that 'great-grandmother' makes her sound old, but Trandafira was fifty-six at the time. Many children in our caravan had great-grandmothers or even great-great grandmothers, as we were all very young) and died in early 1941 from disease. We have no idea what happened to her body, but we were certain that it was burned, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jewish, Romani and other people that were murdered in the Holocaust.

I remember the day my left forearm was tattooed with the numbers '944217' in late winter of 1941. To this day, I still bear those numbers on my forearm and I tried to cover them with makeup for years, but they always came through. I was three years old then and am now almost eighty-two, and I can still remember the burning pain of the hot metal stamp pressed against my skin. Later in the year, children were corralled to be killed, and that was where my cousin, Avram Vasiliakov, son of my Aunt Juliani, was murdered that hot summer day in 1941. Distraught by the loss of her son, my Aunt Juliani went to attack a Nazi guard in rage, to which she was shot and killed. My mother hid me and Costache, feeding us her rations and allowing herself to starve. The other women in the camp whom had had children who died - Jewish women and Romani women - shared their rations with my mother and us as well, working hard to keep us hidden from the Nazi guards. In 1943, Costache fell ill and died, and an elderly woman sacrificed herself to remove his body from our barracks. I hardly remember him, and nowadays can no longer put a face on him.

If you know anything of the Belzec extermination camp, then you shall know that Belzec was built with the intention of killing everyone that entered its gates. In 1943, there were up to five hundred people left in the camp that were 'cleaning up' - burning the bodies and burying the remains and such - and then the prisoners were put on a train and shipped to Sobibór, another Polish concentration camp. Well, all prisoners but my mother and myself. We escaped as we were being loaded onto a train, running into the woods and never stopping until the sounds of the gunshots and barking dogs became distant. For two years, my mother and I survived off of the land as we trekked back to Romania, eventually stumbling into a British military camp in the woods of Germany, not even realising we had made a wrong turn and ventured into Germany. They clothed us, fed us and cared for us, offering to bring us home when the war ended - by this point, it was 1945, mere days before D-Day in Normandy. Between the military camp and Belzec, my mother did anything and everything she could to keep me alive.

I remember very vividly a day when my mother and I were still in the hospital tent and a redheaded, red-bearded soldier beside us had just woken up, having been placed there the night before after a battle wound, and as he turned to chat with us, he realised that my mother was the gypsy woman he had fallen in love with seven years ago. He said to her, "My Mina, I promise to marry you when this is all over and bring you home with me to England, where we'll raise Katryna and have a family of our own!" After the horrors of Belzec, that idea seemed charming to my mother, who agreed, and come D-Day, that was exactly what he did.

Still skinny from starvation, my father, Patrick Cromwell, brought me and my mother to Stepney, London, where he was living at the time working as a docker when the war started. My father was eight years older than my mother, having been born on the twenty-third of April, 1909, and he hailed not from London but from the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides island chain in Scotland. Why did he decide to settle in London, of all places, when it was so far away from home for him? "Because I'm bored of sand and fishy smells and salty air and fog horns and the sound of the ocean waves crashing against the shore," he said.

"And the wharfs are any different?" I'd asked him when this topic was brought up between us when I was a teenager. A wharf is basically a dock for large ships.

"There's nothing to do in North Uist - nothing! Not a goddamn thing!" Why were there Cromwells in a place where Celtic names were common? An ancestor of ours, cousin to Oliver Cromwell, fled England during the restoration in 1660 and hid in North Uist. How did he know of this remote island? Well, your guess is as good as mine, as that was over three hundred years ago. Anyway, my name was anglicised to Catherine Cromwell and I was enrolled in the local school. By this point, my mother was pregnant with my brother, Jeremy, who would be born the following summer. We feared the pregnancy would wreak havoc on her body, as she was still so malnourished from the horrors of the Holocaust.

I almost forgot about my first impression of London. Being from the small village of Tăure in a very rural region of Romania, I had never seen a city before. Belzec was the closest thing to a city I had ever seen before London and I was frightened of the tall buildings and concrete roads. "Where's the grass?" I recall asking my mother in Romanian, as I had not spoken a word of English at that point of my life. I did start learning English, as my father's sister, Anne, came to live with us to teach my mother and I English and English culture while my father worked. Within three years, I was fluent in English, but Mum and I still spoke to each other in Romanian. Thanks to school and teachers giving me extra lessons between, before and after classes, I developed a London cockney accent, which is the famed East End accent most associate with London, instead of a bizarre mix between my father's Scottish accent and my mother's Romanian accent.

To sum up this part of my life, the malnourishment I received as a child resulted in my possessing narrow hips - almost too narrow for a baby to pass through - and possibly developed a susceptibility to hyperemesis gravidarum, of which my doctor told me may have been caused by that malnourishment. I still bear that horrific tattoo of '944217' on my left forearm, hiding it whenever possible and not even telling my husband about it until much later. I developed trust issues and a fear of the unknown, but my father did instill in me a fierce sense of Scottish independence. Despite a fear of the unknown, I developed a desire to live my life as if every moment was my last, which leads us into the next chapter of my life.