The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories 9781771331753, 9781771331722

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THE SAVIOUR SHOES AND OTHER STORIES

Copyright © 2014 Carol Lipszyc Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund. Cover design / artwork: Val Fullard eBook development: WildElement.ca Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lipszyc, Carol, author The saviour shoes and other stories / by Carol Lipszyc. (Inanna poetry and fiction series) Short stories. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-1-77133-172-2 (pbk.). — isbn 978-1-77133-175-3 (pdf). — isbn 978-1-77133-173-9 (epub) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) — Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series PS8623.I57S29 2014 C813’.6 C2014-905733-4 C2014-905734-2 FSC IF POSSIBLE HERE Printed and bound in Canada Inanna Publications and Education Inc. 210 Founders College, York University 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765 Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

THE SAVIOUR SHOES AND OTHER STORIES

Carol Lipszyc

INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC. TORONTO, CANADA

Dedicated to the memory of three children who perished in the Shoah, my uncles and aunt: Izzy and Heniek Handelsman and Leah Lipszyc.

Table of Contents

The Singers on Grodzka Street 1 City of Dreams 11 The Saviour Shoes 35 Feather Boy 45 The Deathwatcher 58 The Elder of the Jews 67 Merchants of Mercy 75 Journey of a Coin 88

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Homage to an Ordinary Man 101 Verses for My Priest 111 Converting Father 132 A Question of Gender 149 Crossing Borders 166 A Jewish Interrogation 173

Acknowledgements 183

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Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein. —Luke 18:15 We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language. —Henry Thoreau, The Art of Living From out of our childhoods, we are enlarged We have taken strides from our tiny versions of the world But who is ever out of childhood, apart from it When the raw and impressionable never vanish When our past keeps hold over our present Even when we are not aware Or more unusually When we are —Carol Lipszyc

Singers on Grodzka

G

rodzka street where I was born and spent my child-

hood was a street built for adventurers. This was true even when Lublin was under siege and the first bombing left part of the city in rubble. Some residents claimed that Divine Providence looked down kindly on our street in September 1939, protecting us from the bombs. Others attributed it to nothing more than random luck. Either way, my most immediate concerns were unchanged. Our apartment building at Grodzka 30 remained standing, as did the basement apartments next door where my friends, Pesia and Chana lived with parents, sisters, and maiden aunts. Untouched too was the orphanage across the street, whose children sometimes joined in running hopscotch on the wide sidewalks or rambled on the field called Grodzkaplac for a game of ball. For as long as I could remember, the children of Grodzka Street had been running up its cobblestoned hill like a school of salmon in shallow waters. Following the downward slope of Grodzka, we would reach a narrow enclave, a medieval tunnel with stalls of jam-filled candies, jellies and chocolate-covered almonds for which we gladly gave up our golden groschen. At the end of the tunnel, in the open, near pots of burning coals, stood bagel peddlers, eager to sell their hot rings of bread sprinkled with poppy seed or salt, and women vendors of small buckwheat cakes baked in stone cups and topped with butter, and beggars who arrived at the scene chanting

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their pleas for groschen in an unending chain of lament. Grodzka might have been a street like any other in Poland, but it was our kingdom and the focal point of our lives. When we emerged from out of that chasm of dark and light, from out of that cauldron of human despair and budding commerce, the cadence of its voices still ringing in our ears, we were enchanted, even disappointed that no one knew of what had transpired or remarked at the difference etched on our faces. We children would soon become aware, as our parents and caretakers must have been in those early days of war, that our dominion in the old Jewish district of Lublin was over, that we would be ruled by a new creed. We would, in fact, have to be far more economical and bear the narrowing job restrictions imposed upon us. We would have to bear the sporadic street beatings and stone throwing, and somehow stave off the coming cataclysm, about which we had a sharp, yet inarticulate sense. There were some around us, however, whose definition of war and their place in it, presented a different equation. Across the hall, in Apartment 3b, for instance, there lived a certain Mr. and Mrs. Singer. Keeping themselves socially separate and apart from the rest of the tenants, they were the only childless couple in the building. While the majority of families lived in a state of financial worry and growing insecurity, Mr. and Mrs. Singer enjoyed a lifestyle that climbed to levels of comfortable mediocrity in zloty and groschen, moderate abundance in goods and trinkets, and acquired tastelessness. Mrs. Singer, or Lola, was petite, with blonde hair, blue eyes like cool pools of water and a tiny seductive mouth. She moved, not with an aura of mystique, but with the promise of a high quotient of fulfilment. Whatever the intent of the onlooker, her usual response came in an expression that read: “What business is it of yours?” And when we children gawked at her, a capricious trio including me, my first-cousin Heniek, adversary and playmate in one, and my best girlfriend and neighbour, Shoshana, Mrs. Singer’s grin was nothing short of intoxicating. 2

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As for Mr. Singer, I expect most of the girls on the street harboured a secret crush on him, though no one openly admitted to a real infatuation. At ten, my childlike body was only on the brink of adolescence and the pleasurable eyeing of Mr. Singer was not a past time I would have voluntarily acknowledged. He preferred suits, gentle wools and tapered tweeds, suits made of a better quality fabric than my father, a tailor by trade, wore. I had a discerning eye for such things as my father, Eleazar, worked at home. Clients came and went from an entrance next to our kitchen to be fitted, to freeze in front of the full-length mirror, their arms outstretched, while father pinned and tucked and folded. Singer was not a client of my father’s but visited an equally reputable tailor whose shop was situated in the centre of town. How he carried himself! Mr. Singer wore vests prominently, neatly laundered shirts, and a smart, fashionable hat cocked on an angle, its brim lowered enough for him to appear unapproachable, without covering his grey, unerring eyes. He walked quickly, often pulling out his pocket watch, as if he were always en route to a pressing engagement. Smiling broadly and generously at us one moment, he could just as abruptly withdraw his favour in the next. We were not easily discouraged. Like bees to honey, we were anxious to learn more about the Singers, preferring to embroil ourselves in their adult concerns rather than the childish games we had already outgrown. The third figure was Sonya, close girlfriend of Mrs. Singer, a tall, dark-eyed, coal-haired beauty who wrapped her slick hair back so tightly in a bun that it became her immovable crown. Of the three, she was the least vocal, and I wondered where she came from and to what extent the Singers had influenced her decision to join them. A disengagement from the world, a wilful aloofness replaced any naiveté she may once have possessed. Her skin was transparent and her features so finely carved they looked surreal. She walked through the halls with the regal air of a dethroned Queen who had no subjects to rule. 3

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The three traced each other’s steps, forming a sinister shadow wherever they went. What a strange family they made, together much of the time, resilient in their ruthlessness. That was the sin for which they were not forgiven. That, in retrospect, turned out to be a somewhat premature judgement on our part. During the earliest months of the war, at around seven-thirty, eight o’clock, Mr. Singer greeted German soldiers at the entrance of our building, doffing his hat. After a brief exchange of words, Mr. Singer signalled the go-ahead with an accommodating nod in the direction of his apartment. Then, he either led the invaders in or, most often, waited outside as a company of soldiers climbed up the small set of stairs to the front doors for their entertaining soirees with Sonya and Mrs. Singer. In the hallway, we could hear for the first time the strange mix of German and Polish, and when meaning was temporarily lost, Yiddish, the bastard barterer, interceded. Although the Singers’ apartment door was slammed shut, the uproar from their flat kept us awake till the early hours of the morning. Thin scratchy music accompanied voices that bellowed in a raucous match of upmanship. Dancing and shuffling of feet thumped in broken rhythms; drunken laughter bounced off the walls. Many in the building swore that Mr. Singer alone was the mastermind, that he was buying and selling mysterious goods quicker than the eye could see, deep in underhanded deals with the enemy. The question was put: “What kind of man is he?” To which someone replied: “A man who bows down to the zloty.” Old and young voiced prophecies of doom, spurred on by their resentment and moral recrimination. “Whatever finery he may dress them in, the crepe and wool they drape around their bodies … all spoiled by the shame they wear.” Whispers became agitated talk, which transformed into malicious tongue-wagging and finger-pointing. Heads bobbing up and down, our neighbours recited anecdotes that took liberties with the line between fact and fiction, pleased with themselves 4

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for not having sunk so low as the Singers. We children imitated our parents’ scorn, giggling whenever Mrs. Singer or Sonya came in sight. Soon, our ridicule of the Singers took a new form. We began stringing words together and eventually wrote a verse about the Singers, which we put to a nondescript Yiddish melody and sang as much for the rhyme as for the subtext. Shoshana, whose knobby legs and frail body made me fear for her safety, possessed the surest voice of the group and started us up voluntarily, raising her voice like an invisible baton over the din of an itinerate troupe of children from the orphanage. I yielded my leadership to her, as a good singing voice was something you couldn’t deny. Like wandering balladeers, a ragged army of foot soldiers who do not flaunt themselves in front of their opponents, we sang this song behind their backs, after the Singers and Sonya had passed from view. I remember the words still, though the melody has intertwined itself with others. Tell me what the Singers sell Is it something worthy? The Germans come And pay their zlotys At Grodzka number 30 Dark-haired Sonya tum ba la la Which one will she choose? She only sells to those who march To the step of the German goose. The reasons for children turning indecent were discussed in the hallway and outdoor stoops, and this we lent a careful ear to for fear we might catch what the Singers had. Mrs. Pinkus confirmed that it had never been a question of upbringing in the case of Mr. Singer. His father was a pious Jew who, apart from his daily visits to the synagogue, lived inconspicuously 5

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at the back of our building. It was fitting for him to live there, tucked away from public scrutiny, Mrs. Pinkus pronounced with an equal portion of concern and disdain. When she was finished, a signal to all present that the discussion was closed, she pressed her lips so tightly they disappeared, invariably giving more prominence to her double chin. But the elderly Mr. Singer, an orthodox Jew, did not remain ignorant of the truth. When soldiers entered his son’s apartment, he stood and watched, dressed in his dark kapote, the long, black coat weighing him down, his beard and face blending into a deathly shade of white. I was certain I had seen a ghost in the disguise of a man. Raising his collar to cover his face, he retreated to his apartment. We children spared little sympathy for Mr. Singer’s father; the story and how it would end interested us. We would not be kept in suspense for long. On a mild winter night in 1940, there came a loud knocking on the wooden doors at the entrance of our building. The doors were tall and wide and had iron latches. I jumped out of bed and opened the front street window. Two German soldiers were calling out to Mrs. Singer to be let in. I was more than able to make out their words since Yiddish, my second language, was so close to German. I looked down on an empty Grodzka Street. The Germans formed silhouettes against the cold glare of the street lamp. Their voices echoed back and forth, ringing a message to a dominated world. We not only presume to occupy. We own. Soon, their fists were pounding down the doors, and our neighbours, awakened by the noise, crammed the hallways and jammed the stairs. Where was Mr. Singer when we needed him, I wondered as I stood at the window. He could have cleared up what appeared to be a double booking. The soldiers resumed their mating call. “Mrs. Singer, when is it our turn? Have you forgotten so quickly?” One soldier turned to face the other. “Women are fickle. Have you so quickly forgotten?” At that, both men howled. 6

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“Let us in, we say, Mrs. Singer. Sonya. Aufmachen schnell.1 An order’s an order.” The two soldiers held each other up. If there was ever a chance to uncover at least part of the mystery that existed between men and women, that moment had arrived. My parents and Izzy, my older brother, were awake and dressing in such haste that socks went missing and shoes were placed on the wrong feet. With plenty of scolding and scuffles about whose item of clothing went where, I rushed out, determined to maintain my record as the one on the front lines. Pushing through the crowd of people who had congregated in the main hall at the entrance, I placed myself ahead of the others, a few feet away from the front doors. Alarmed by the commotion, residents from the second floor had scrambled down the stairs. Neighbours’ voices were pitched in nervous excitement on the subject of the Singers, the rift the couple had caused between our neighbours ever widening. “She won’t let them in. Not when they’re with officers. She knows who is buttering her bread.” “Buttering her bread. What German would do that for us?” “Us. She is not one of us.” “They were officers in there, I tell you. I saw them with my own eyes. If you are going to sell it, why not sell to the highest bidder?” “And earn money they’ll never keep?” The banging turned to thunder. “Aufmachen, hast du nicht verstanden?”2 My heart pounded in double time. The door handles rattled but held fast. After a moment of protracted silence, we assumed the two soldiers had abandoned their pursuit of Mrs. Singer and Sonya. Then, gunshots were fired, piercing holes through the wood. A bullet whizzed by me, grazing my finger. I screamed and dashed back in the direction of our apartment, blood trickling down my right index finger and hand, staining my pajama sleeve. At first sight of their prodigal daughter, my parents, who 7

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were peering out from our apartment door, yanked me back in to relative safety. Why, but why had I stood so close, they pleaded, running out alone? I was trembling a little, and as my parents scolded me, they clinically examined my grazed finger, taking turns raising and lowering it. Disoriented from the firing of the gun, I was hypnotized by my wound, by my secretly-stored blood, and by the way that blood was so easily expelled from the inside out. Still, my courage and luck for survival had been tested; I had come bone-close to damage and had dodged it. The next morning, a rumour spread through the Jewish quarter of Lublin, or at least among the Jews who knew of the Finkelsteins, my mother’s family, and the Handelsmans, my father’s side. It was said that a young girl had died at the hands of two German soldiers on the previous night. I was at the centre of a tragedy that had never occurred. Relatives and friends rushed over to the apartment to hear the news and console my parents in their grief. My paternal grandmother, Sara, bolted in with her hands waving furiously and a tiny procession of foot-soldiering cousins behind. Cousin Heniek, shaken and emboldened by the nearness of death and the newsworthiness of the moment, cried out, “Is Roza dead? Really dead?” It was a false call, I reassured them all, as I appeared from behind a curtain, alive and standing before them in flesh and blood. Enjoying the spotlight, I falsely bragged that I alone had been at death’s door, at which point everyone respectfully applauded. Within months, this skirmish faded into nothing more than a humorous story, an interval of my girlhood ended. Passing edicts compressed our lives, sinking all hope like sediment. With the establishment of the first ghetto in March 1941, we were forced out of our apartment on beloved Grodzka, permitted to take with us only a few belongings. Father rented a private room on Szeroka, in one of the remaining areas Jews could freely move, to sew for a handful of private customers. My mother, Izzy and baby brother, Heniek and I escaped to the 8

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countryside, to the hamlet Osmolice, my grandmother Tema’s birthplace, where other members of my maternal family fled. Osmolice had been our summer playground, its woods home to Gypsy families who lit small fires to cook, played gay and sorrowful melodies on fiddles to dance, as my cousins and I slid down the slope of its valley. On its Bystrzyca River banks, I first tested my buoyancy in the water, sneaking out to swim in my undergarments and stashing the evidence from my mother afterwards behind a chest for clothes. But by 1941, Osmolice had become a place of detainment beyond which we could not stray far. To earn money for food, Mother and I picked white sugar beets for Polish landowners in Osmolice and in nearby Zabiwola, the expansiveness of the fields made all the more poignant on those long summer days. In a cousin’s backyard, my mother, brothers and I lived in a shed with an earthen floor, its only source of heat, a small wooden stove. We set to work to prepare for the coming cold, insulating the outside structure of the shack by propping up heavy, tall sticks, setting them a foot away from the walls and inches apart, and packing dry fall leaves in between. Unlike my family and so many fellow Lublin Jews, the Singers and Sonya enjoyed a fly-by-night prominence. Through 1940, Mrs. Singer and Sonya continued to serve their German clientele, the threesome still free to benefit from the fruit of their exploits. But Mr. Singer’s business arrangements with the enemy went bust as Hans Frank’s General Government set into motion a campaign of uncompromising brutality. If we had been zealous in our moral judgement of the Singers and Sonya, they had miscalculated the power of their allure. From all accounts, the following year, Mr. and Mrs. Singer and Sonya were incarcerated and shot in the Zamek Lubelski, the Lublin castle, a war-time prison for Jews and Polish resistance fighters. Mr. Singer’s father was carted off to the first Lublin Ghetto, the Podzamcze Ghetto, at the end of March 1941, and deported to the death camp at Belzec a year later. Of Shoshana’s fate, and 9

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that of her father, the Hebrew school teacher from whom she first learned to read, I know nothing. We did not survive as a family for long in Osmolice. Only I lived to see liberation by assuming a Polish Catholic identity during the war. After their imprisonment in the first Lublin Ghetto, the children and staff of the Ochronka orphanage were delivered by trucks to barren meadows near a sand pit in the second ghetto, Majdan Tatarski, and executed there on March 24, 1942. The building on Grodzka, which still stands today, bears a plaque to commemorate that date. The rectangular plaque is small, its engraved letters unobtrusive; its words memorialize not the pious or corrupt, but young victims, playmates whose faces have grown opaque over time, whose names are lost to me. And when it was all over, I wonder, did God pardon beautiful conspirators like Lola and Sonya for transgressing his laws? Was there room enough in heaven for Mr. and Mrs. Singer, Mr. Singer’s father, Sonya and their killers too?

Open up quickly. Open up. Did you not understand?

1 2

10

City of Dreams

I

am carrying Mutti’s1 straw shopping bag. It has short

straps that fit me. Herr Schuler, the grocer, stands on the doorstep looking for customers. His eyebrows are bushy and his eyes peep out from under his grey hairs. He crosses his arms over his stomach. I ask Mutti can I hold the bag when we go shopping, can I? Mutti squeezes my hand. We don’t go in to buy a bottle of milk. We walk past Herr Schuler to the long street. A tram bell clangs. The tram shakes the street. “The tram is going on the wrong side, Mutti.” “Traffic runs on the right now. We live under German law.” “We live in Austria.” “Yes.” “Mutti, can we ride the tram?” “No. Walk quickly, Peter.” “But the street turns. Mutti, I can’t keep up.” “Stay close to me.” I see a poster on a brick wall. The men on the poster have dark beards and hook noses and knotty stringy hair like straw in a bird’s nest. They wear caps on their heads like men praying in the synagogue. But men don’t look dirty in the synagogue. They wash their faces so their lips are clean when they kiss the Torah. They tidy their hair and dress in their white Sabbath best shirts, but the Rabbi remembers to say a special prayer for poor people who don’t have Sabbath clothes. The men on the poster stand in a circle, whispering

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a secret. At home, Mutti looks over her shoulder when she talks to Papi in case someone is sneaking up behind her. Papi asks where are you looking, no one is there, and that’s how fear can take you over, and Mutti whispers mind what you say in front of the children. I ask Ernst, my older brother, why Papi and Mutti have to mind what they say. Ernst says I should speak for myself. He is not a child anymore and what applies to me doesn’t apply to him and when I am his age I will understand. I point at the poster on the wall. Mutti smacks my hand. I am afraid of Mutti’s hand. “Let’s go home.” “We just came from home.” “There’ll be no errands today. I’ve changed my mind. We can’t loiter in this part of the city.” “What is loiter?” “Stop dragging your feet, Peter. Pick up the shopping bag or I’ll carry it myself.” “My feet burn.” “The sooner we get home then the better.” “Mutti this is Johannesgasse. There’s the Stadtpark. Can I play?” “Peter, do as I say.” “Can I play a little?” I ask sweetly but Mutti doesn’t notice. “I’ve told you before about the Stadtpark.” Mutti stretches the “o” sounds as if I am learning my alphabet. If only she would believe me. “I won’t sit on the benches.” “You may forget yourself.” “I promise.” “You can’t take off your shoes.” “I won’t.” “Didn’t you just say your feet were burning? Honestly, Peter.” “My feet will feel better in the Stadtpark.” “The park is the perfect tonic for your feet, is it Peter?” Mutti turns to me, raising her eyebrows. 12

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“Please Mutti. Other children play in the sandbox and I want to climb over the bars in the playground.” We hurry past the willow trees. They hang like open umbrellas and there is a pond in the park but you don’t swim in it. I want to chip off a little piece of bark from a tree and take it home. I think if we walk in the shade in the Stadtpark no one will see us. Once I hid behind a tree and Mutti and Papi couldn’t find me until I popped out like a squirrel and surprised them. “We won’t be returning to the Stadtpark, Peter.” Mutti pulls my hand. “Ever?” “I won’t say ever.” “How long then?” “We may not be back for a long time.” The trams run on the wrong side and my feet burn more and I cry. We won’t come back to the Stadtpark, I know. Not ever. In the front hall, Mutti talks out of breath to Karl our neighbour. She asks Karl for advice and Karl pretends he is Papi, but he doesn’t even have his own family. “How can you stop a child from being a child?” “You must be firm with him.” Karl calls me over to show Mutti how to be firm. He kneels down and his forehead crinkles and he raises his spectacles to the top of his nose. He doesn’t have a hook nose like the men on the poster and his hair is combed back with grease. He smells like the spice cologne on Papi’s dresser. Papi tips the bottle upside down and slaps the spice on his cheeks and on the back of his neck. “Don’t you know crying upsets your mother? Do you want to upset your mother?” “I want to go to the Stadtpark.” Karl shakes his stubby finger. “At a time like this, what kind of boy complains about leisurely pursuits like going to the park?” 13

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“Parks aren’t persoos.” “A spoiled boy, that’s who.” “I’m not spoiled.” “Peter, Karl is only trying to help.” Mutti’s hands rub my shoulders. Karl rises, takes out a silver watch from his vest pocket and reads its face. “Genug.”2 He turns to Mutti, “Do what you can.” “The child longs to play.” “What once was is no longer.” Karl stuffs his watch back in his pocket. The chain dangles. “I have no time for nostalgia.” The next time Karl sees me in the hall, he doesn’t scold me. My nostalgia keeps him away. Ernst changes schools. He went to a Gymnasium called Riar before but now he goes to Zwei Peres Chajes Gymnasium on Castillenzgasse. Ernst studies geography. He studies where countries are on maps and if their rivers flow up and down or left and right. On a map, rivers look thinner than a piece of hair on my head because a map is just a drawing and not the real river that flows and flows. In the evening, when Ernst bends over his work, his bangs get in his eyes. Papi calls his hair overgrown and wild. But with me, Ernst is strict, not wild. He lets me colour his maps if I don’t smudge the colours past the lines called borders. If I go past the borders with the wrong colour, I have trespassed into another country without a permit visa and the police can put me in jail. “They won’t really put me in jail. That’s just your game.” Ernst and I sit across one another at the dining room table. Mutti spread a plastic cover so I wouldn’t spoil the wood. “The police can do anything they want.” “I coloured the map right.” I slap my hand down on the green and purple countries. “That doesn’t matter. They have their own rules.” Ernst spins his globe, a present from Papi. It whirrs around in a flash of colors at the centre of the table. 14

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“I didn’t trespass. I’m not allowed to sit on the benches at the Stadtpark and I didn’t.” “What does your sitting or not sitting in the Stadtpark matter, Peter? That’s childish.” Ernst’s swats his hand in the air. Then he spins his globe faster and I see blue for all the water. Ernst leans in and drops his voice. “We can’t leave the country and they don’t want us here.” “Who?” “The government, the people.” I sit on my knees to get closer. “Are we going to move?” “We’re not going anywhere.” “Ernst.” “What?” I sit back against the chair. “I showed a poster to Mutti.” “Poster?” “On a wall. I just showed Mutti. Mutti was mad…” “Mutti wants to protect you from the Hitler Jugend.3 Don’t you know anything?” Ernst growls at me. Mutti repeated danke Gott4 twice when the tired doctor came to visit Ernst, once when the doctor told her not to worry, a stone only bruised Ernst’s leg, and again when the doctor said he was lucky the Hitler Jugend didn’t hit Ernst in the head like the other boy he attended. Ernst bragged in front of the doctor that he wanted to throw rocks and stones back at the Hitler Jugend and he was a good shot too. I asked how he knew he was a good shot if he didn’t aim? He said he knew from the times he pitched ball. So I said pitching ball was not the same as throwing rocks at strong boys in the Hitler Jugend and Ernst said I had rocks in my head that’s what and Mutti yelled something about her nerves and would we please stop fighting about pitching balls and throwing rocks. Then she said sorry to the doctor and that her boys were ordinarily well-behaved but it was the times and they were afraid. The doctor said that was to be expected and left danke Gott. Mutti went to sleep 15

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because she said her head was splitting from the two of us and all that talk about rocks. Mutti was wrong. Ernst is not afraid and neither am I. After that Mutti and Papi start Ernst and me on studies at home because the hate of the Hitler Jugend has no reason and can’t be fought with reason. I ask Mutti what is reason and she says reason means thinking clearly from the facts. What are facts I ask and she explains that facts can be proven and are true. I tell her Ernst studies facts he can prove and teach me in our apartment. Mutti says I am a good student. Mutti supervises my reading and numbers. Papi comes home late. At night, Mutti reads tiergeschicten5 and märchen6 to me. I have a cloth-covered notebook and a case of pencils, and Mutti has borrowed bilderbucher7 from our neighbours the Grosskurts, who live in the apartment next door. One day I study with Papi. “Jews live in our neighbourhood.” “Yes.” “The Hitler Jugend can find many Jews in the Leopoldstadt.” “Yes, they can.” “Isn’t that a fact, Papi?” “Yes, it is.” “Then why don’t we move somewhere else?” Papi says there is no point discussing things we can’t change. And when Papi says there’s no point, it’s like closing a book at night. You can open your book in the dark and look at some pictures from the streetlights in the window. Nobody has to know. Just don’t ask Papi for permission. The main street in the Leopoldstadt is the Tabourstrasse. We walk there every day. Ernst warns me to keep my eyes and ears open on the Tabourstrasse. He says that is where I will get my schooling. I haven’t been to school. The street is not a real school even if Ernst pretends. Something happened on the Tabourstrasse. It isn’t a make-believe story because it really happened. It sounds made-up but 16

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it isn’t. I drew five pictures in my notebook with no words. I numbered the pictures. I can write numbers but only some letters. I didn’t go to the Tabourstrasse alone because I am not allowed. I was with Mutti and we were walking home. It was crowded. People were shoving and there were police. Strangers from another neighbourhood other than Leopoldstadt were there. I was holding Mutti’s hand. I saw old people lined up. The men wore black pinstriped suits and the women wore fur coats even though it was warm outside. I thought they must feel hot and maybe they were dressed up for the Opera in their fancy clothes or they were putting on a show and that’s why everyone was watching. But the police ordered the old people to kneel on the Tabourstrasse. They gave them brushes and pails of water. There were white crosses on the road, the bad signs called swastikas. They had to wash off the bad signs. I asked Mutti why the old people were wearing their nice clothes to wash off bad signs and wouldn’t their clothes get spoiled? Mutti said she didn’t know why and she never would as long as she lived. The old people scrubbed the street as hard as they could. They took off their coats and jackets and there were watermarks on the backs and fronts of their clothes. They jiggled their arms and stooped their shoulders. Papi scolds Ernst or me if we stoop our shoulders. We are to keep our backs straight. The old people on the Tabourstrasse couldn’t help stooping. The strangers laughed and clapped. I asked Mutti if paint washed off and she said yes so I asked Mutti again why the swastikas weren’t coming off because the old people were scrubbing hard but she didn’t answer. The old people dipped their fingers in and out of the pails fast. Their knuckles turned pink. The water got dirty and dark like the Jews with the beards on the poster and Mutti squeezed my hand tighter on the street than she ever did before. When we got back home, I looked out from my bedroom window. I kept 17

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my eyes and ears open all the time but I was too far away and I got sleepy. The next morning I walked back with Mutti to the Tabourstrasse. I am never allowed to go out by myself. The old people were gone. So were the pails. But the swastikas were still there. They never washed away. I named my pictures Wash off the Tabourstrasse! One picture shows a swastika. It was easy to draw and I added little thorns. Another picture has brushes and pails. That makes the picture real. I drew the old people standing in a line dressed in their coats and jackets and then I drew them kneeling on the street without their coats and jackets. They are stooping their shoulders. Last I drew the police opening their mouths wide yelling orders. That’s five pictures altogether. After I finished, I ripped the pages out of my notebook and hid them in the pockets of my trousers. Otherwise, people might see them and laugh. My Grandmother, Ilse, was not one of the street washers. She wasn’t there. She lives in her own apartment far from the street. Her hair is grey like cat’s fur. Once, she took pins out of her hair and her curls went free. Grandmother Ilse wears shawls she knits from coloured balls of yarn. On Sundays, when she visits, the needles click, click. In the daytime, Grandmother takes care of her grocery store. My grandfather died a long time ago. I wasn’t born yet. Grandfather was an officer in the war. They awarded him with a medal of bravery, a Medaille. Grandmother Ilse keeps it in a wooden jewelry box. I have touched the medal only once. It is made of bronze and gunmetal, Papi says. Fifty-fifty. The medal is too valuable for a little boy to keep. Grandfather gave it to Papi and Papi says he will leave it for Ernst and me. And when I grow up, I will own a part of my history. At night, before I go to bed, I ask Papi. “What is history?” “My son is an inquisitive one. Aaah, Peter … history means something from the past.” 18

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“What part of history will I own, Papi?” “The part that shows your grandfather … my father … fought in the Great War.” “Why is it called the Great War?” Papi grins. “The Great War was to be the last war. It ended long before you were born. Come here, sit next to me and look at the coin. You see on one side the head of Franz Joseph. He was once the Emperor of Austria, the ruler, and on the other side is a wreath, a ring of laurels. The leaves are arranged around the ring to show respect, and at the bottom, there is a crossed flag and here, you help me, can you read the words?” “Der Tap-fer-keit.”8 “Your grandfather fought for the Empire along with his countrymen. They have short memories.” “Papi, I have a long memory.” “I hope in time you can forget the things you have seen.” Papi stares into space. Grandfather was brave. He was very brave for Grandmother the widow to get an allowance to buy the store and help the family. Papi gives Ernst an allowance but the store would cost pockets and pockets full of change. I press my fingers up against the windowpane of the store and count my fingerprints. I can count past one hundred without losing my place. When a customer asks for this or that much wurst,9 Grandmother Ilse wipes her wooden board clean with a cloth, plops the slippery skin sausage in the middle and swoops the blade down. Slam. On the same board, she cuts slabs of cheese with tiny holes called Tilsit. I open and close open and close the door to hear the bell on the door ring. Grandmother tells me not to bring in a draft and to stop bothering the customers and which will it be? Am I to come in or out? I come in and point at a cream pastry on my tiptoes and Grandmother wraps a piece in tissue over the counter without ringing the register. Sometimes she walks with a bulge in one of her apron pockets and if I guess 19

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right I can keep what is inside. That is easy. I guess it’s an apple. I take a giant bite and the juice runs down my chin and Grandmother wipes the juice away with her apron so I will not have a messy face for strangers to see. When there are no customers, Grandmother rests on a stool because the veins on her legs hurt. Her veins look like purple ink lines from Ernst’s notebooks. The stool is too small for her bottom. She reminds me of the turtle in my tiergeschichten. Sometimes I sit on her lap and I smell the cheesy store on her apron and after I am home, I still smell the apples and the wurst. Ernst says smell is one of the strongest senses and can bring back a memory faster than anything. I tell him I have a long memory and if he doesn’t believe me, he can ask Papi. Mutti sends me to pick up food, wait till Grandmother Ilse locks up the store, and come home with her, and not to forget those three things in that order. That is the day they come and spoil Grandmother’s store window. My fingerprints stay on the window for good. I look at my face through the glass when I hear boys shout: “Judah Verrecke.”10 They are the boys that didn’t hit Ernst in the head danke Gott. They wear white knee socks and brown shirts and carry rocks and stones. They march closer and closer, singing a song about the night of the deevoouring knives. I run across the street. They paint Juden on the window in big black letters with a Star of David and smash into the door with the bell and the bell clangs and drops to the ground and I am afraid they will cut Grandmother with the knife but they don’t. They throw Grandmother out of the store instead and she falls on the street and when she stands up she dusts off her apron. Then she hangs her head and covers her mouth with her hand as if she is about to cry but she doesn’t so she won’t look scared to strangers. The brownshirts go away. I stand across the street. I can’t go over to Grandmother. My head is banging like a drum. I am sick all over the street. I dirty the street and that is not allowed. I 20

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made the street dirty and I have no pail of water to wash the street for Grandmother. A crowd forms around the train at the Westbahnhof. Families are separating. Father straightens my jacket. “Ernst,” he says, resting one hand on my shoulder, “remember that as the older brother, you must look after Peter.” I nod quickly, but words don’t come. So many of the children are young like Peter. But no one knows – not the parents or their children – when they will be reunited. We can’t say, “See you after summer, or in two weeks’ time.” The surge of people breaks up our circle of four. Mother strains to be heard over the bustle. “Boys, check that you have everything. Peter, you have your rucksack. Don’t forget your change of clothing.” Mother is all hands, patting the baggage we carry as if she is committing to memory the single piece we have been permitted to take. She hugs me. I hold back my tears. It will only make things harder. There are children everywhere, maybe five carloads, and I want to be on our way. Mother slips a souvenir around Peter’s neck, a gold-plated locket with a photo inside, to remember her by. This, Mother and Father hope, will calm his fears. We are already wearing labels with our surnames tied with a string around our necks, marking us as refugees. I assume my obligation to protect Peter without question as I promised before. Weeks earlier, late at night, when Mother first asked me to join them in the kitchen. I had slept restlessly and was more anxious than I confessed. Father brushed his lips over the rim of a glass half-filled with water, “Ernst, you and your younger brother are our hope for the future.” “Yes, father.” He set the glass down. “I will speak frankly with you. For our people here, now, that future may be lost.” 21

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My eyes avoided Father’s. They scanned the deep lines on his neck. I never considered that Father was growing older. I saw that the cuffs of his shirt were yellowed, and he did not bother to roll them up. “A man’s deportment reveals a great deal about him,” he was inclined to say. “It is more than the suit he displays to the outside world. How you carry yourself, Ernst, the respect you afford to others, to any job you undertake, all these things measure you as a man.” The Father I watched leave for work every day had been a well-groomed man of numbers and up-to-date ledgers who doffed his hat to those women he greeted on the street. I sometimes thought him a bit of a Herr Lehrer and yearned for a father who would be spontaneous. That night, I longed to see the orderly, civil father I knew return, but he did not face me. Not since he had been dismissed from his position at the import-export firm, dismissed without compensation, the letter read, “at his own request.” “You and Peter are to have a future. For this reason, you will be leaving Vienna shortly. Help has come from the English. They have offered to accept our children.” Needles pricked my legs. “Fortunately, we still are in possession of a few assets.” Mother flattened a corner end of tablecloth like a steam iron, repeatedly bearing her palm down. Father nodded to her. “Your Mother and I have done what we could, what was in our power to do.” “Yes, Father, I understand.” “Our situation is not ideal. We have no friends or relations in England, no one who will directly sponsor you and Peter, but two places were promised to us by the Kultusgemeinde.11 “They have been promised to us,” Mother confirmed. “All the necessary documentation was sent; we saw to it ourselves. Your mother did most of the legwork. You can thank her. Exit permits have been issued, and what’s most important, Ernst, is that you are to try not to be fearful or to show fear to Peter.” 22

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Did they think I had no fear? I heard the Gestapo banging on the door on the night they plundered Grandmother Ilse’s antique menorah. Smoke rolled thick into the sky. Flames spread from rooftop to rooftop. From a distance, the shards of glass on the street were too small for the human eye to count… “Ernst, are you all right?” “Yes, father.” “I know we have placed a great deal of responsibility on you, son.” “I will do my best, Father.” He seemed relieved to hear that. “At some point your mother and I hope to follow.” Mother said something. Father answered. Mother’s face floated before me. I was sent to bed and there I tossed in my blanket till I’d twisted it into knots around my legs. I dreamed. I dreamed my pillow was a life buoy and I clung on tight. On the day of our departure, I kiss Father and Mother goodbye at the train station. I don’t wish to appear ungrateful or unfeeling, but I am not one for tearful scenes. Peter and I merge into the crowd of children as they head quickly towards the train. I must resemble a child entering his first day of school with this cardboard and string around my neck though I know strangers will need to identify us, sort us out alphabetically by family names and where there are brothers and sisters, by first names. My name then will be called out before Peter’s. I project ahead to the speed of the train. I picture how Peter and I will be travelling across the ocean to an unknown life. Who will greet us in England? What kind of home will we live in? I think of how my routine has been broken for some time, but even so, there was security in knowing my parents were there to guide me, to chastise me for not working up to their expectations. It is one thing to be reproached now and then by your parents over your schoolwork; they will do that because they are your parents and you are accustomed to it. But who 23

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will care about me or know me at all in England, know me as the boy I have always been? Only Father and Mother know me, and they are being pulled further back in the crowd. As I turn away, I wonder if Peter and I will ever see them again. I don’t tell Peter this, of course. But will our parents really follow us to England? Will we return to the old Vienna, different from the one that we have escaped, a city of elegant street cafes I had visited so few times? I will not reach manhood as my father and grandfather did before me in Vienna. The windows on the train are sealed. We are to be hidden from sight and closed in, that is clear. It’s all the same to us. No one wishes to return to Austria the way things are. I pull out a rough map Father had penciled in to show Peter the route. I explain that we are to pass Holland and from there we will embark on a boat and travel on the water across the English Channel. He is seated next to me turning his identity card back and forth. When he tires of that, he tugs at the locket with a picture of Grandmother and picks at the tiny latch, springing it open and clicking it shut. “Where will we arrive first?” “Holland.” “When will we get there?” “Soon. Be patient, Peter.” But it is not soon enough for me. As we wait for the train to start, I am terrified an order will be issued that we were all sadly misled and must return immediately to Vienna. I press Peter close to me. We hear the puttering sound of the engine, it hums and vibrates in a steady drone, the train jolts forward, rolls indecisively, and then with a blast of mechanical energy, we are off. I breathe more easily as the train picks up speed and our journey begins, but my relief is premature. When we arrive at the German-Dutch border, the first main stop, a troop of guards blasts into our cars opening the blinds on the windows so violently that they snap like tight elastic bands. We are all 24

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dazed and jump to attention. “Clear out,” they scream. We are made to stand in the gangway while they seize our suitcases and empty them from mid-air, throwing their contents on the ground like so much litter. I have an overpowering desire to jump in and claim my shirt or my trousers. Seeing them tossed with everyone else’s private things makes me want to defend our rights all the more. “Money. Give us whatever you have hidden.” We hand over the ten Reichsmark we were permitted to take out of the country. “There. We leave you with one Reichsmark. Your total worth.” There are laughs and snorts, doors are kicked and they are gone. Thankful that we have lost only money, we return to our compartments. A young girl across from us bursts into tears and is comforted by someone who must be her brother. The Nazis have broken her violin and that is worth a great deal more than ten Reichsmark. If I loved to play and was as musical as she must be, a kind of virtuoso I expect, they would have robbed me of something precious. She will get a new instrument, her brother tries to convince her, though there can be no guarantee of that. I haven’t yet found my talent. Father always said I was level-headed and quick on my feet and that will serve me well in these terrible times. In England, I wonder if the adults will constantly remind us of how terrible the times are and how brave we must all be. Will we be entitled to a future in England as father hoped and not be made to suffer for wanting to live one out? My mood changes on our last train stop in Holland. Through the windows, we see men and women cheering and waving from the platform. They are Dutch and have come to send us off with good wishes, food and drink. Canisters of lemonade wait along with packages of sweets and dried bread topped with cheese, something the Dutch call zweibuck. Here, we are welcome, not excluded, as we were in Vienna. We exit the 25

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train and mingle with the Dutch, responding to words we can understand. We say thank you shyly when we are first offered food, but before long we abandon all reserve and wolf down the sandwiches and chocolate squares. The canister of lemonade is emptied in a flash, we guzzle the drink down, wiping our mouths with our sleeves. A jovial, plump woman in a white ruffled shirt plants rose lipstick on Peter’s cheeks. “Our hearts are with you,” she reassures him, dabbing each eye with a lace-trimmed handkerchief that materializes from nowhere. Watching her, I feel a pang of loneliness for my parents. We are then transported to the Hook of Holland for our night crossing and board an old vessel docked at the port. It groans with each passenger’s embarkation. Water spills onto the plank. The sea spews out mouthfuls of foam. The only adults to greet us are members of the crew and the few members of the Jewish Organization in charge of taking us to England. The moment we board, a certain rebelliousness comes over us. Here no signs dictate what we can and cannot do. Here we are without our doting parents to warn us of danger. Peter runs freely up and down the deck. I point to the bow of the ship. “Think of that as the head, its forehead. See how it curves inwards. And the hind part of the ship in the opposite direction is called the stern.” Peter has regained his good spirits. We wander into the empty quarters where the crew will sleep. We pass through the jungle heat of the boiler room into the pumping and hissing noise of the engine room. Pistons drive and wheels rotate with unstoppable force. We escape, returning to the deck and the dark, lapping water. I hold Peter up against a railing. “Can you separate the water from the sky?” “The water grows lighter over there.” “That is the work of the moon.” Everything about the water is a mystery, I think. It has secrets. The motion of the water makes Peter queasy. I am not 26

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seasick. I must have good sea legs. We go to sleep in a saloon that has been changed to a dormitory. Peter lies on his side. I pat his face with a damp cloth. Some of the older boys have settled in and are putting on a show. They caricature Hitler, the way he thrusts his chest forward when he rails at the world and wheels his arm up and down like a mad crosswalk guard. They are not as funny as Fritz Grünbaum, the comedian at the Simplicissimus Café whom many of us had seen perform, but we are paying tribute to him since he was imprisoned in Dachau. After we have had our fill of Hitler, we move to Goebbel’s bad leg. Someone gets up and imitates him and we all clap and agree to produce a propaganda film featuring his walk and debut it at the Colosseum Cinema on Nussdorferstrasse. We write the script. The voiceover reads: “This is how the pure Aryan race walks. Their deformity is evident.” And I think we are truly experiencing freedom again to sail on the water and mock Hitler with no Gestapo officer beating down the door and dragging people to their headquarters at the Metropol hotel. We are a world apart from Vienna now. I watch over Peter, who has dozed off with his hand on his stomach. Then I lie down and close my eyes to the friendly faces of the Dutch people on the platform. The lemonade is tart on my tongue and the wind over the water sprinkles salt on my face. The memory of Vienna grows faint and distant with the miles. I am very tired and, like Peter, fall fast asleep. On a dark December night in 1938, the brothers reach the port of Harwich, a name they pronounce with little success. On shore, a north-easterly sea wind wraps around them. They move by bus to a summer camp where strangers jabber in a foreign tongue. Ernst picks out words addressing the children’s future, all the while recalling the lonely cries of the hungry seagulls perched on the hull of the ship, echoing the emptiness he feels inside. 27

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The countryside is flat and dull; its winning feature, the North sea, rises above the horizon. During the first week, Peter and Ernst run down a sand cliff to the water that spans beyond their imaginings. Their parents remain unsafe on the other side. Ernst writes two letters asking after them, with a postscript from Peter. Come morning, boys and girls mill about the few stoves in the central hall before sitting separately for breakfast. Their voices are subdued. Prospective foster parents usually tour the camp at mealtimes, picking out sons and daughters. This morning, a woman of seeming importance is walking with Mrs. Sutcliffe, the head childcare worker. “What are the children being served? There seems to be some confusion as to what they are eating.” Miss Dyson, a government official, has been called in to inspect the Dovercourt Bay Holiday Camp, which has been set up for the incoming children. She is directing her questions to Mrs. Sutcliffe. After completing her list on the particulars of the sleeping quarters – dark brown, unheated cabins, two windows apiece, four children per hut, beds and bedding provided – Miss Dyson focuses her attention on Mrs. Sutcliffe’s supervision of the breakfast meal. Miss Dyson is dressed in a navy blue wool coat, sports suit and beret, since the canteen, usually allocated for summer use, is, ill-equipped for the December cold. The children are dressed in their coats too. Miss Dyson walks with a heavy step in wide, thick-heeled buckle shoes. She stands a formidable number of inches taller than Mrs. Sutcliffe. “Porridge. Somewhat new for them.” Mrs. Sutcliffe snatches a saltshaker away from one of the children’s hands. “As I have explained, porridge is not eaten with salt but sugar. It is not a potato, but a grain, a cereal.” She pronounces the latter words slowly, revealing her front upper teeth in the process. Then, conscious of the unsightliness of her appearance, she steps back and offers Miss Dyson a protracted smile. “Not yet familiar with the culture, I’m afraid. And with all they’ve been through, one can only imagine what they do or 28

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do not understand.” She notices Peter, a student she favours, sitting at a table with a group of boys his age. He glances up timidly. She prompts him in a lilting voice. “Greet Miss Dyson, Peter. Show her what you have learned.” Peter turns and with great care to match his intonation with his teacher’s, asks, “How do you do?” “Very well, thank you,” Miss Dyson replies, in a curt checkmark response. Continuing down the aisles, she looks over the heads of the children. Loudspeakers broadcast news in English as the children listen, perplexed. Those who are able interpret to the others in German. “Have they been reminded not to publicly speak German in so brash a manner? There is a stronger likelihood than ever that we will soon be at war.” “Every effort is being made.” Mrs. Sutcliffe exerts herself to keep up with Miss Dyson. “Are the children sufficiently occupied? Given activities to fill their days?” “Absolutely. Apart from the language instruction, a Jewish sporting club was brought in last weekend to display fencing and boxing for the boys, and there was quite a lot of cheering and laughter, I can tell you. Such activities must of course take place indoors, what with the high winds and the stormy weather. Are you aware that one of the chalets was recently flooded?” “Flooded?” “Ankle deep in water.” “All cleared up?” “That chalet has been left empty for now.” “I see. Are there any other classes besides English being offered?” “We orient them to our traditions, as I mentioned. Oh, you should see what they make of our tea and milk.” “Tea and milk. Undoubtedly. And do they have enough to eat, clothes to wear?” 29

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“A butcher in the area has kindly volunteered to provide beef sausages, and Marks and Spencer has sent a large supply of shoes and clothing. Surplus, I would imagine.” “Excuse me, young man.” A teenage boy has caught Miss Dyson’s eye on her inspection down the aisles. She searches through the three pockets of her leather clutch bag for a form and pencil and flashes them before the boy’s eyes. “How old are you?” The boy comprehends. “Fourteen.” “And what grade, may I ask, have you finished?” “Gymnasium.” Miss Dyson shakes her head and fills in “not completed” with deft strokes of her pencil. “And what do you want to be? That is, how do you hope to best prepare yourself now that you have arrived in England?” The boy sits up. “Engineer will I be.” Miss Dyson aims her pencil like a sharp shooter. Her mouth twitches with the rapid certainty of her ruling. “It is not possible for me to write engineer down under chosen profession. You must remember that you are a refugee and will have to reconsider your options.” Flustered, the boy picks up his spoon and stirs the porridge that has grown cold. Miss Dyson slips her pencil and paper into her bag, snaps the flap at the front, and addresses the worker. She resumes her brisk walk. “You may already be aware that in a few days’ time representatives from the news will be here for a follow-up to the program Children in Captivity. That bbc home service broadcast aroused great interest and empathy among concerned citizens of this country. Will you, Mrs. Sutcliffe, along with the others, see to it that the children are ready to display who they are and where they come from in some way? I will leave it to you to find the most appropriate arrangement as long as they present something from their former homeland. Hearing their mother tongue may raise a degree of suspicion among our listeners, but if we insist the children try to speak English 30

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in a performance, it will only hinder support for our cause.” “Many of the children still feel a fondness for the German language.” “It would be best to remind our listeners and readers that these children have come from a place they once loved in order to be transplanted like seeds on our tiny island.” “We’ll come up with a presentation and stage it appropriately. Yes, that would be best.” “Well done.” The official shakes hands with the worker and dashes off to the pressing engagements noted on her agenda. Next afternoon, news people descend upon the mess hall already crowded with children and organizers. Tripods are maneuvered for the optimal angle. Mammoth-sized film cameras are hauled in for newsreel footage. Newspaper photographers scan the hall and the stage, taking preliminary shots. As for the staff working with the children, the task they have assumed at Dovercourt has taken on unprecedented importance, causing them to run in many directions at one time, occasionally blocking a photographer’s view. Across the room, the pleas, “Lady, I need to take a shot,” are heard, followed by the scuffling-about of workers and children. Some staff members rehearse small groups in corners, replenishing old reminders with last minute ones. Peter and Ernst walk hand-in-hand towards the platform where a microphone has been positioned centre stage like a great bulwark of the war effort. “Peter, you stand over there by the first row of benches with the younger children. I’m taller so I will stand above you.” “Who are we singing for?” “Do you see that microphone? It will be on the radio.” “Our voices? “Yes. On the same station Papi once played in our living room in Vienna. The bbc.” “Who are those men with the flashing lights?” “Cameramen. Newspapermen.” “Will there be a picture of us in the newspaper?” 31

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“Probably.” “Do we have to sing?” “You can sing quietly.” “I don’t know all the words by heart.” The workers’ voices climb in decibels. “Children, let’s not delay. We need each one of you immediately on the stage in rows according to height.” Children are moved, repositioned. “Now, remember. Sing out clearly so the words can be heard over the airwaves.” Hands are clapped to speed the children along. A trim teenage girl with a pert mouth and blonde braids stands next to Ernst. “Who do they think we are? Performing monkeys?” “I don’t know.” “Don’t they realize we have escaped from the city?” “They were not there. They did not see what went on.” “I won’t sing. I’ll just mouth the words.” “Stand all together. That’s it. Now, give us a nice wide smile. Wider. Auf wiedersehn.” A photographer in a bowler hat and bow tie has approached the children and addressed them with a German phrase he knows. They accommodate him, some revived by the novelty and attention, the majority staring stiffly into his camera. To the right, a worker is valiantly leading the choir. Three layers of voices rise, hesitantly at first. The younger children’s voices are reed-like and high pitched, the teenage boys’ voices form a bedrock of bass sound, while the young female altos round off the harmony. Wien, Wien, nur du allein12 The children pull back their shoulders and sing more confidently. They sing of memory, they sing to their parents and families far away, they sing of the streets of Vienna. Sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein, 32

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dort wo die alten Häuser stehn dort wo die lieblichen Mädchen gehn, They sing in their mother tongue. Wien, Wien, nur du allein sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein, dort wo ich glücklich und selig bin… The name of the city of their birth will not leave their lips. …ist Wien, ist Wien, ist Wien! They have found their voices on the last line. The song is about to end, and the children repeat the words as if they are stamping their feet. Waves of applause ripple through the great hall as the camera lights blind their eyes. The children step off the stage one row at a time. Peter lags behind. Ernst grabs his hand. “What’s keeping you?” “Ernst, the people who don’t speak German will not understand the words we sang.” “The song is a dream, anyway. Come on.” “Dream?” Peter catches his breath. “The song. Its meaning is false. Oh, you’re too young to understand.” “I am not too young. I know the words we sang were a lie.” Peter steps in line with Ernst. “A lie?” The two brothers stop at the head of the stairs. “I know what happens on the street. On the Tabourstrasse. Besides, you’re not Mutti, so don’t pull.” Peter tears his hand away from his brother’s, knitting his brows. Ernst’s voice softens. “Sometimes I forget how grown up you are, Peter. I’m sorry.” Peter cups his hand in his brother’s. 33

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“Let’s go, Ernst,” he leads with a grave sense of purpose, “I know the way back to the cabins.”

Mother’s. Enough. 3 Hitler Youth. 4 Thank God. 5 Animal books. 6 Fairy tales. 7 Picture books. 8 Bravery, Valour (Austrian medal for service in wwi issued by Kaiser Franz Josef). 9 Sausage. 10 Destruction to the Jews. 11 Central Jewish Organization. 12 Vienna, Vienna, you alone Will always be the City of my dreams There, where the old houses stand, There, where the pretty girls pass by, Vienna, Vienna, you alone Will always be the city of my dreams There, where I am happy and in bliss, In Vienna, Vienna, Vienna! (Rudolf Sieczynsky, 1959. English translation: William Mann). 1 2

34

The Saviour Shoes

A

boy sat under a birch tree. Resting his head against the

trunk, he studied a branch. Its icy tentacles turned to sterling silver in his hand. Around him, the snow cast a prism of light, which stung his eyes. “Here I am. This is where I have landed,” he announced in a mix of wonder and resignation. As he spoke, his breath peaked like a cloud, then vanished beneath the sun. With the branch in hand, he traced angel wings in the snow, pointing outward to heaven. He had been a willing apprentice to the winter, a student who had learned to mold his body to the cold, but this time fear lingered with a new persistence. He looked at his feet. The soles of his boots were ripped, the skin of the leather flicking up like the extended tongue of a cow. Unable to move to the adjacent town of Jenica in search of food, he was left behind in the Naliboki forest by the two boys who had joined him. Motek, the eldest at fifteen, had set out in search of food, and nine-year-old Eli followed where hunger led. They’ll come back with bread as they promised. We made a pact to look out for one another. They’ll honour it, if they can. If the danger is not too great. Still, I warned them of the risk. But I could not convince them to stay. Restless, he raised himself against the tree. Months ago, we were strangers. Now I depend on them. Drifts of snow covered the stump of a nearby tree, deepen-

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ing the slope of its path into an ice-white dune. As the wind whistled, the boy tucked his overgrown locks of hair into his felt cap. Then, feeling a curious urge to reacquaint himself with the shape of his face, he traced the outline of his lips. They were cracked from the cold. He winced at their tenderness. His skin, which used to tan to an olive brown in summers, was equally rough to the touch. How altered his appearance must be, he thought. In the early morning hours, he had climbed up the ladder of the bunker to look out for Motek’s and Eli’s return. A Polish farmer living on the outskirts of the pushcha1 had helped him build the bunker. He had promised to help that summer, in mid-August 1942, when the boy escaped from the second ghetto, the Mir Radziwill Castle, and appeared at the farmer’s door with a gash over his left eye. Recognizing the boy as a Jew, the farmer pressed his fingers on the latch. News of the liquidation had travelled fast, and he aimed to keep death at a distance. But the boy’s presence stirred in him a curious and disquieting compassion, a flutter of the heart, like a bird’s wings on the eaves of his shed. In a low, hesitant voice, he asked if the boy had escaped the massacre. The boy answered that he had. The farmer peered through a crack in the doorway. “I have a wife and three daughters and cannot open my home to you.” The boy stepped back in submission. Seeing this, the farmer opened the door narrowly. He might not fully appropriate his words. “Have you been sleeping in the fields? “Yes.” “These past nights?” “Yes. I was running and fell in the grass and when I woke, I saw the light in your window.” The farmer relaxed his grip on the latch. Loose hinges coaxed the door open, easing his way. As the farmer stepped over the threshold, bronze-coloured light from a lamp radiated the 36

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faces of the two. The farmer flinched at the purple blue stain that circled the boy’s eye. The raw cut pierced the farmer’s skin with a strange, unholy sensation. In the light, the boy volunteered more. “I was hit with the butt of a rifle,” he explained, covering his eye with the palm of his hand. “Did others from the ghetto survive?” “Don’t know,” the boy answered indistinctly, shrugging his shoulders. “You are alone?” “Yes.” The farmer looked past the boy, turning right, then left. The boy withheld nothing. “I can offer you some water and food. But aside from the little I can spare, you will need a bunker to survive the winter. While the weather is still warm, I can help you.” He hurried the boy in. First, the farmer boiled the bark of oak, which he applied to the wound, adding to that a poultice he made of flaxseed. In time, the wound healed. At night, they dug the hole secretly, little by little, till it was ten by four feet long, the farmer transferring the dirt on a wagon, inserting a metal pipe in the dirt for the boy to breathe through when the snow and rain fell, and it was necessary for the hole to be covered. True to his word, the farmer provided the boy with an ax and saw. Together, they cut the wood and constructed a six-foot ladder and two-tiered planks on which to sleep. Once every few weeks, the farmer left him cooked potatoes, cabbage or carrots in the pig stalls. On occasion, the boy picked raw potatoes from his field. Some nights he warmed himself in the farmer’s shed among the horses and cows before returning to the forest. Come winter the bunker was ready, and the boy had shelter and a place to hide. Over the course of that first year, he learned to forge paths through the forest using branches as signposts. In the spring, 37

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ear to the ground, he listened for steps and watched the trees for any swaying of leaves. Branches above him knocked, and he was sometimes fooled by the playful wind. Woodpeckers knocked too, red-browed cocks muttered, and once he heard the deep oohu of the eagle owl as it hunted in the twilight. Summer brought blueberries to pick, and brown-capped mushrooms with thick white trunks, as long as he was careful not to eat the poisonous ones. But water was scarce, and he couldn’t drink in the open by the river Niemen. When rain did fall, the wheels of the farmers’ horse-drawn wagons pressed grooves into the ground, forming puddles. To quench his thirst, he soaked the water from those pockets of rain with a rag and put the rag to his mouth. The forest became his ally. Pitiless as it is could be, he learned to gauge it, to read it intimately and follow its dark maze, which put him at an advantage over the enemy. His gain was tested the summer of ’43, his second summer in the woods. On a trip to the barn in late July, the Polish farmer briefed the boy on an imminent manhunt in the forest. The two sat cross-legged in the hay. Only the animals listened. The farmer stroked his jaw. Then, with the curves of his finger, he drew an aerial map. “The Germans will circle the forest searching for Jews, move across the River Niemen, where Russian partisans are camped. They’ll use fire to smoke you out. And if that won’t work, they’ll spray blind bullets into the trees.” When the Germans launched their raid, packs of dogs abetted their mission. It was then that the boy transformed into a watery chameleon. For three days, he floated in a swamp at the edge of the woods, his nose aligned to the surface, his eyes, cracks of white in a shaft. Since the water was thick with mud, he designed a wooden filter to suck the liquid. At night he crawled out from his prison and tested his swollen limbs. He tore at leaves and plants and chewed at them intently, resting until the first light, when he would go back into the marsh. 38

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He had plied the forest to his benefit. Motek and Eli came upon him as the cold descended in November 1943, darting out of the mystery of the woods, quietly, swiftly as if figments of the boy’s imagination. Gripping the boy’s hand, they read his eyes for consent. Yes, the bunker, which the boy camouflaged with branches and earth, could shelter three. They vowed to protect one another. Together, they might fend off capture. Confined underground, they conceived of plans in bold fits and starts in their familiar Yiddish, rebuking one another in one moment about the changing course of the war after the battle of Stalingrad, seizing on slim possibility against the embattled enemy in another. By that winter, however, the condition of the boy’s boots made quick searches for food impossible. Only Motek and Eli could venture out. “I will slow you down,” the boy began. Ukrainian and Lithuanian police brigades2 were sure to be on the look-out, he cautioned. “The two of us will find what food we can and bring it back to you.” Motek kneeled and pointed to the boy’s soles. “You can’t run with these.” The gentle timbre of his voice soothed the boy. “Let us take charge now,” Eli beamed. “The night will protect us.” When the boy last saw them, they moved like bears in the dark, heavy with hunger, their heads slightly bowed, their pawlike hands grasping his. After they had gone, the boy stayed awake through the night. I should make another fire with the few remaining shingles, he thought, never settling to the task. When they didn’t return, he became inconsolable, swearing that the bunker was a grave for the living. He climbed up and found the birch tree with its silver branches. After splitting them, he set them in a row, sat down on a cushion of boughs and recited a prayer. 39

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Blessed are you, Hashem, our God King of the Universe… As a child in his synagogue, the Talmud Torah in Mir, he had watched men’s lips move furtively in prayer. Huddled close to the Holy Book, the esteemed ones touched the cover and kissed their hands. All through the temple, worshippers draped white and cream-coloured tallis3 over their heads and shoulders, spreading a banner in glints of gold and blue. A silk fray of tassels brushed against his arm. Who selected us from all the peoples and gave us his Torah… Countless scribes eked out a livelihood in Mir, their calligraphy lighting the tinder of faith for generations to come. In a cramped schoolroom, a cheder of Mir, the boy’s exacting master, Kapelovitch, chafed with a question. “Will anyone here attend our beloved Yeshiva of Mir and read the books with students from all over the world?” He widened his arms to signify a small width of the globe before glancing around the room. The boy and his peers listened dutifully, some seated on benches, others on the floor. All cast their eyes down to the puzzle of passages, searching for secrets buried within the books as if they were scavenging for coins. “Read, read, my would-be scholars,” his teacher pointed to the yellowed scripture. “Think of the meaning of the words and they will stay with you.” The boy never passed the rite of Jewish manhood. Days before he was to read the Holy Book in the synagogue, the Germans invaded. Blessed are You, Hashem, Giver of the Torah. He could retrieve the words one by one, as Kapelovitch had instructed, but he could not pray. Shivering under the tree, he resisted the cold without the solace that pleas to the Almighty might bring. But he soon discovered that the intervals between minutes grew longer, and the weight of each minute was lulling him into a lethargy he had not experienced in the water. His eyes closed and his body tipped over. If only he could parachute 40

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to safety, he dreamed. But he plunged further, and as he fell, memory cut him like shrapnel. A half-open door led him back to his father, not in his prime, when he planted his feet firmly on the carriage floor, lifted the reins, signaling the horse with a clucking sound to move his wagon of goods. Not when he was healthy, and the boy sometimes joined him on excursions, but when his father’s chest rattled, and the raspy wheezing sound was the language he spoke as he lay on his deathbed. “Goodbye,” the boy bid him at the foot of the grave, for lack of any other words, for lack of sounds in his ears other than those of the blood-soaked sickness. Seven days later, as was the custom, after the guests of mourning had gone, he stood before the mirror that hung on the giant armoire. His mother, Chaya, had polished its foggy surface till it shone. He watched her hands move in firm and implacable strokes as she scrubbed the glass clean. With the task completed, she inspected her son’s posture, his neatness and cleanliness. Her gold-white hair, austere in its glamour, bound him in a spell. Round and round he spun to please her, from back to front, greeted by a reflection that grew larger, smaller each time he turned. His mother’s eyes stared back with mathematical precision. “That it is not enough. You must do better.” Searching, uncertain of the way, he returned to the familiar market square in Mir, where the inhabitants had been ordered to assemble. His mother’s steps followed behind his. Their pace quickened. His mother cried out to him, “Run away, run fast,” and he was under foot, leaping past his younger sister, Leah, crouching beneath the cold concrete steps of the town pharmacy. He watched as neighbours loosened wedding rings, as his mother and sister were beaten and chased away. When they could run no further, he later knew, they covered themselves with nothing but their hands, exposed on the crown of a hill that dipped into a valley. Metal fired in the brisk air, 41

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blood rained over the accomplice fields, and the valley became the open coffin of a community. The boy hid until night fell, his legs hard as stone. The pharmacy stairway covered him like a shrine. Moving pictures flickered before the boy in shutter speed, their sound spliced. He heard voices of the dead swell into a babble of tongues, and he wanted to answer. But what would he say? What did God expect of him? Was he to join his mother and sister? He had eluded killers once by zigzagging past bullets as he fled into the forest, but he couldn’t outrun anyone now. If he surrendered, if he could no longer struggle against the powers around him, would he be committing a sin? And why was he expected to display courage beyond his means? To bear witness for those who died? If it were true that Motek and Eli were gone, if they had been captured… He woke, released from a cold and lasting sleep. Dizzy with hunger, he arched his back. His socks had all but disintegrated. The leather on his boots was flayed. His eyes burned with fever as he counted his options. He was alone, he understood, and might remain alone as long as he hid in the woods. Motek and Eli could not be held to a promise. Yet, if he could survive as he had, one day and night into the next, if he could wake another morning … that would be reason enough to continue … to live. Just to live. He could profess to that much … as his mitzvah.4 Blood flowed into his numbed fingers, allowing them to bend. He opened the buttons of his jacket, his fingers growing more nimble and confident with each unfastening. From the inside of his jacket, near the place where he had stitched photographs of his mother and sister, he tore off strips of fabric. Removing what remained of his boots and the shredded socks, he wrapped the bands of cloth around his toes, his soles and ankles. Afterward, he sprinkled snow on the cloth so that it would cling to his feet and provide the temporary protection he needed. The quick movements warmed his joints too and injected a new determination in him to wait for help to come. 42

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A fresh snow started to fall. He stood up, stepped a few feet away from the tree and brushed his jacket clean. Icing his hands again, he filled the spaces where his body had been, packing the incline with snow. Carrying his boots in his left hand, he noted how light they were, yet how cumbersome he had become without them. With the cloth wrapped around his feet, he then walked deeper into the thicket. Holding a branch in his free hand, he wiped each imprint as he walked, smoothing over the surface of the fallen snow till it settled like a layer of dust. In a burrow, he found a new place to rest. There he laid a bed of birch and pine branches and sank to the ground. In a little while, I’ll go back to the bunker, he promised, wrapping his jacket tightly around him. He did not know how long he had rested, and was watching through a ridge of the forest as a company of grey clouds passed over the sun. They were travelling like a band of mourners, slowly yielding to the light, when a burst of gunfire shattered the air. The shots came within close range. He counted four then five in rapid fire. No sound followed but the soft padding of the snow as it gave way to the falling targets. He rose up, his heart flooding, its beat pounding in his ears. He had heard this beat before. It was an inalienable beat. The beat of the spared. It clutched at his throat, constricting it. He swallowed hard, breathing in short puffs of air. In the plaintive hum of the westerly wind, he gleaned a prayer for the dead, the Kaddish. Yit-gadal … V’yit-kadash… The wind moved his lips in unison, sounding Motek’s and Eli’s names, his mother’s and sister’s names, and then fell silent. The woods were still. Hushed. He looked down at the cloth wrapped around his feet. By his side were his boots, buried in the snow, their soiled leather flaps frozen and suspended in the air. Marred, of no use, they could not sustain him, but they had been a blessing. For the time being, he would keep them. He pulled them out of their icy sheath, placed them under his arm and turned back in the direction of the bunker. As he 43

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walked, he made plans. Once it was dark, he would go out to the farmer’s barn in search of food. Perhaps he’d find some boiled potatoes or cabbage in the stalls. The farmer had been generous before. He would be again. But it was necessary to wait before he could eat. The hunters were near and night had not yet fallen.

Wild forest (Naliboki Pushcha). Members of Schutzmannshaft or Auxiliary Police units. 3 Prayer shawls. 4 In obeying a command, one performs a good deed; it is a blessing. 1 2

44

Feather Boy

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n the day he was to be officially inducted into Andrusz’s

unit of Polish partisans, Dawid climbed up as high as he could on the moss-covered trunk of a pine tree. He stretched and twisted his limbs to adjust to the tree, until the dark undergrowth of brushwood below was a mesh of net-like veins and the dead branches lay like a heap of white-crossed bones. The air was moist in the Bialowieza forest, heavy with the scent of rotting wood, ferns and fungi. Dawid wedged his hand in a half-cavity of the tree. If he had been given a gun, he imagined, it would fit there, and if at that moment a German were to target him, he would aim and fire his gun in self-defense. Hidden and protected among the green-needled leaves, he practiced being invisible in the thicket, which was easy to do since he had not climbed high enough to catch the sunlight. He had been with the unit through the last winter and summer months, and he wished to remain. In the woods, he wore no white band of shame with the ink-stained Star of David. He could hunt for rodents: yellow-necked mice, bank voles and herbivores; he could eat anything the forest offered: herb plants, wild ramsons and purple hepatica. In the forest, he might have it in his power to lengthen the time he lived. That past summer of 1943, when the Germans retaliated with their own ambush, the partisans turned for sanctuary to the marshes. Their depth was unknown to the Germans, who seldom ventured there, but the partisans stayed close to the

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trees to avoid sinking into the mud. They took naturally to the trees and water, hanging onto the branches like monkeys, floating below the water’s surface like fish. Dawid was proud he could breathe without making bubbles. Air bubbles sent a message directly to the Germans. So he learned that if he lay just underneath the islands of water, hung to a branch, and put his mouth among the flowers and the vegetation, he could breathe in between them. Dawid was determined to throw himself into whatever challenge was put before him. If a test of courage lay ahead, he would meet it without complaint, fulfilling his duties as a fellow partisan. Early on a fall morning in 1943, he joined the other men as they gathered together. Some, like him, climbed down from the trees; others emerged from their bunkers, small shacks camouflaged in tree branches and peeled bark, dug into the ground or on the side of a hill. The partisans had collected dry wood, which produced less smoke, to cook their breakfast. After they had eaten porridge from a shared basin with spoons they stored in their boots, and chewed off some of the dark peasant bread they broke with one another, bread they learned to keep for the duration of the day, Andrusz approached Dawid, who was only too happy anytime Andrusz chose to show him attention. Andrusz sat down on a log next to the boy, rolled up a thick cigarette made of dried green tobacco leaves, and looked into the forest past the clearing. Smoking calmed him; his thoughts of Dawid that morning were burdensome, and a part of him wished they could be lifted from his shoulders. Once an idea was planted in his mind, he could not abandon it. In fact, it was a matter of principle to him that if an idea were a reasonably strategic one, it should lead to action. Here, where the woods could give a false sense of comfort, a commander had to be vigilant, his action swift and decisive. But did this idea involving Dawid have any real tactical value? He puffed his cigarette and considered this question with the brand of mischievous seriousness common to his nature. 46

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While Dawid waited for Andrusz to speak, he thought little of what plans Andrusz might have for him, of how important or unimportant they might be, concentrating instead on his uniform. Andrusz’s military tunic and civilian trousers looked shabby. A former officer of the Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, Andrusz wore no sign of the honoured Polish eagle emblem on his clothing. When Dawid had been in the ghetto, he couldn’t help but steal admiring glimpses of the Germans, never daring to let them catch him. Anyone staring would be hit. The Germans always appeared about a meter taller to him than the Jews, especially since they walked straighter. Their spines were made of steel, and their boots and buttons shone. Their uniforms were stark and clean, and the authority they commanded impressed him in the same way that his father’s suits once impressed him before the war. Andrusz did not look polished like the German officers, but then, Dawid was not afraid to look into Andrusz’s eyes. “You have been with us for a number of months,” Andrusz began. “Yes. I am one of you.” “Exactly how old are you?” “Seven, but I am one of you.” Dawid thrust his chest forward. The child’s conviction triggered Andrusz’s impatience and frustration with the waste of life he had seen. “You were captured in the woods – you are here because your father is a doctor and we are in constant need of them.” “My father has been away for a long time.” “He is working at the hospital that we patrol and will continue to guard at all costs.” Andrusz stamped his cigarette on the ground and then leveled his eyes at the boy. “We brought you here, Dawid, because the village of Bialowieza was unsafe. The Germans have set up their headquarters in the town. So, in these woods we do what must be done. Your eyes are young, but if you wish to be one of us, as you claim, they cannot remain shut.” 47

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“I have seen dead people before.” Dawid spread his hands over his knees. Andrusz leaned forward. “And when you saw those corpses, did they frighten you?” Pensive at first, Dawid gained speed. “In the ghetto in Lublin, I looked out the window every morning and saw them. The old people and the children. I thought they were sleeping. But then a cart would come and pick them up. They were naked and very thin. I have seen plenty of dead people,” he assured Andrusz. Andrusz studied the child’s face. Dawid returned his gaze with a steadfast attention Andrusz could not help but soften to. “Every pair of hands is valuable to us – yours no less than others. We have a job for you, Dawid, if you are ready to take it on.” “I am a fast climber and a careful guard, Andrusz. I am ready.” Dawid clasped his hands together in a show of solidarity. The commander laughed at his young disciple’s obvious desire to please. He liked the boy, unquestionably, yet he had found in this child, who was not estranged to death, an opportunity to avenge his people in a small way for what the Germans had done, an opportunity he could not let pass. He slipped his hand inside a pocket in his trousers and took out a silver white feather. “Have you ever used one of these?” “A feather?” “Yes. It is light, but it will have great significance. This will be your tool of war. Hold it. Feel it.” Andrusz handed it to Dawid. The boy handled the feather delicately. “Tomorrow, before dawn, you can join a small group of us on an ambush. Take nothing but your feather. Remember this. Your eyes and ears are your other weapons. Sharpen them. Do you know the motto of the partisans?” Dawid shook his head. “We are the seers who are not seen. We listen but cannot be heard. Repeat it.” 48

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Dawid did so as his oath of allegiance. “We are the seers who are not seen. We listen but cannot be heard.” “If you must, keep your mouth covered with your sleeve. Sit still in hiding until the enemy is close enough. When it is your turn to act, I will give the command.” There were two edicts or laws of operation in a partisan unit if ambushes were to succeed. First, as Andrusz instructed, there had to be an element of surprise; the blow was to be delivered without allowing the enemy any opportunity to cry out. Second, the partisans were to launch an attack only against a small group of Germans, no more than four to five targets at any given time. The attacks were made possible only because the Germans came into the dense forest on foot and not with their regular tanks and armies. A squad of partisans, including Andrusz, gathered around a pitched tent and navigated their plan through the woods. Two of the partisans were sons of families living in the vicinity; they knew the woods, the edges of the forest and the depth of the streams. They pointed to a route that would provide a detour. A horse was tied to a tree by the tent. One of the two young men would be sent that day by horse as a scout. The other partisans would scatter and hide in the woods and thickets, in places remote from any paths. They would meet again by the tent and, according to their findings, decide on the next operation. Under the stars that night, they headed out for the raid, each partisan carrying either a knife or rifle. Dawid carried his single white feather and followed silently, trusting the partisans knew where the Germans would be overtaken. The men weaved their way through the labyrinthine dark, till they stopped at an agreed-upon point in the woods. The troops were nearby, they claimed. Each of them climbed a tree, ready to ambush the enemy. Dawid now climbed as fast and far as any of them. He waited and watched. Despite their rough appearance, these were not wild men. Their timing and movements revealed the cunning and instinct 49

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of animals on the offensive, perfectly synchronized and relatively soundless. As predicted, two German soldiers soon came onto the path. They wore helmets and carried guns and appeared to be on rotation, testing the ground and trees ahead of them with suspicion. Ready for their prey, and empowered by their advantage from a height, Andrusz and another partisan lunged from a tree and attacked the soldiers from the back, their full weight hitting the Germans like boulders, so that they all but tumbled forward. The partisans gripped their necks with one arm in a choke hold, breaking their fall. Before the pair of Germans realized what form of man or animal had assaulted them, their throats were cut. There was a split- second struggle, one of the soldiers flayed his hands in the air, made a choking sound, and it was over. Two meters away, another German appeared. The mode of attack against him was duplicated, culminating in the same death rattle. The partisans were swift killers. Stepping in the pools of blood, they removed the prized treasure of boots. In a matter of minutes, all the armaments of the enemy were stripped. Once the Germans’ possessions were taken away, the last phase of the operation remained. Andrusz called Dawid down from the tree and over to one of the soldiers. His mouth was contorted, his limbs strung out at unnatural angles. “Take out your feather and put it under this one’s nose. Then count to one hundred. If the feather moves at all during that time, call one of us and we’ll finish the job.” Dawid knelt down over one soldier who lay silently on his back, his blood trickling around him. His eyes were closed. Dawid put the feather under his nose and concentrated. The feather remained stationary. He counted, whispering the numbers. His father had educated him when they had hidden in the cupboard, so he knew them well. For thirteen months, in complete dark, he had learned letters and numbers by feeling them on the palm of his hand. He could draw them on his hand or on his father’s hand, but he had never seen them. He could 50

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feel their shape on the palm of his hand the way the partisans knew the forest. His schooling in the cupboard had been useful. He counted to one hundred, remembering the sequence. The soldier did not move. Dawid looked up to Andrusz, awaiting his order. “This one is dead. But sometimes it is the shock alone that gives you the impression that they are dead. Call us then and we’ll finish the job.” After his first expeditions, Dawid became truly known as a feather boy, and he was skilled at his job. Both Andrusz and Edek, another partisan, a carpenter from Bialystok, explained to him they had to kill the enemy because the enemy was there to kill them. On a larger scale, if they were to liberate the country, this had to be accomplished. Even when the German soldiers pleaded with him, Dawid understood the reason for killing. As the official feather boy, he acquired his first German words. Never having spoken Yiddish, German was foreign to him. At times, when he bent over soldiers with his feather, the dying men managed to retrieve photographs from hidden places. Groping in anguish, they turned pictures of their loved ones towards the young witness. “Meine frau, meine kinder.”1 They whispered what Dawid called blood words from the backs of their throats. The photos sometimes had to be pried from their fingers. Dawid usually placed them back in the soldiers’ pockets, miniature black and white faces belonging to an already expiring life, a life that held no meaning to him or the other partisans. If the men below him twitched, convulsed, he estimated they would die within the half-hour. And if they did, it was his job to report any movement in order for the others to deal the final blow. His purpose on the mission was clear. He continued his guard and brought back necessities, stripping the dead men of their boots or shoes, wrapping them around his neck, snatching their watches, and returning the bounty to the others. Nothing detracted him from his purpose. He calculated that what he brought back was a measure of how 51

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well he could carry out his duty, and secretly fantasized about what he could capture that would be treasured, perhaps the most coveted submachine gun, one that he had only heard about, the German Schmeiser. The miracle of it for Dawid was that they were staying alive while the enemy around them was dying, that the reverse from what he had known until then was possible. Not that there weren’t casualties on their side, sorties that went out and never returned, people that went foraging for food and never came back. At times, they executed their own for safety. Like the partisans who came back drunk one morning and wellfed, without food for the other men. They were tied to a tree and executed for setting a bad example. He had known the two men and was surprised by the severity of punishment, by what Andrusz explained was the military administration of justice without appeal, but he was eventually converted in this thinking when Andrusz explained the probable consequences of their actions. “If we do not have food, what will happen?” “We will starve.” “And once men are drunk, how could they endanger our lives?” “They could lead the Germans to the rest of us.” “Unwittingly, but they could do it. There are laws of survival in the woods – laws that cannot be broken.” This detachment of partisans, whose main objective was the defense of the hospital, had suffered sporadic casualties, splinters of men who disappeared, but the greatest number of dead on their side came on a cold snowy night in 1944 during the last winter of the war in the region. For Dawid, beguiled by the winning war of the partisans, that night climaxed in events he felt inwardly he had prepared for. His shoes outgrown, he was sitting in the hollow of a spruce tree, his feet wrapped in layers of rags with pieces of wood at the bottom for soles. He rarely slept well at night in trees, always moving to keep his toes from freezing, but on the whole he was accustomed to 52

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the cold. That night, a stillness pervaded, as though the enemy had succumbed to the winter and had fallen temporarily asleep. When the bombs began to fall, Dawid had almost dropped his guard and joined the slumbering trees. At first, in his near-waking state, he imagined they were deadly curses whose power lay only in their sound but within seconds they bolted across the sky and the trees, jetting long and longer streaks of light and fire. They shot down into the tall snowy fortresses the partisans had until now safely inhabited, and a rumble tore through the earth. Balls of fire leaped upwards past the trees, and pyres of smoke hissed and burned his eyes. Exposed, he hugged the tree and tried to move his toes as he could think of no other defense. Though the night was not dark enough, the trees not thick enough to elude the enemy, the tree was all he had. He clasped its trunk and locked his feet around its branches. At dawn, hours after the bombing had ended, he climbed down. A number of disorientated partisans were already searching for casualties on ground pockmarked with black craters. The morning light, like an undertaker lifting the shroud of the dead, revealed that many partisans had been blasted off the trees. Bits of bodies were scattered everywhere. A low wail hummed through the air. Some partisans were trying to carry the wounded to the hospital, heaving them on top of their shoulders, carrying them in their arms. Dawid wandered through the woods strewn with the dead, searching for anything that could help the others. He stepped over the remains of men who had been picked out from among the trees like birds, scanning for any remnant of the living when his eye caught sight of a leg, a full size leg to the hip. It was frozen stiff with the trouser and boot still on it, which made it all the more human to him. He stood up the leg, measured it against himself and realized it reached the same height. The idea came to him that this leg would provide a new tool his father could use. He would surprise his father, make him proud when he 53

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delivered the leg on his own. Many patients in the hospital had had limbs amputated, and here was something he could do for the wounded. Convinced that his father could stitch a man up whole again, Dawid set out on his duty. His plan re-energized him; he could always be relied upon to deliver useful items to the partisans, and he would not fail in his responsibilities now. Dawid began dragging the leg. It was heavier than he had anticipated, and the snow that had fallen the night before was deep and thick. He sank into the frozen milk cakes of snow, lifted himself and tried once more, this time with the leg in hand. Again he sank, half-buried in the snow. He was pitted against everything, the snow-covered trees that stretched out like white scaffolding, the snow-packed ground that consumed both his own legs along with the one he carried. “I am not getting to where I need to go,” he uttered, exasperated. “Try again. Are you a partisan or aren’t you?” This reproach somehow veered him in the direction of the hospital. He devised a system of steps. First he pitched the leg in the snow, tilting it so that it would not lodge as deep; then he raised himself up with the help of the leg like a crutch, pulled the leg out of the snow, moved a few steps forward, and repeated the actions in the same sequence. Slowly, as his body adjusted to the rises and falls, he became calmer; the distance ahead could be slowly meted out. He measured his progress by periodically looking back at his footsteps and the imprint of the frozen leg. Since he wore no shoes, and he was short and the leg was large, the trip to the hospital, a mere kilometer away, took over four hours. He was exhausted by the time he reached his destination. The hospital was partially hidden, half underground and half above ground. Built from a forest dugout, it rose above the icy surface like a seal. Dawid plodded in with the severed leg, his clothing and face coated in patches of snow, his face beaming with pride and anticipation. “My father, I wish to see him. It is important. Tell him that Dawid, his son, is here.” 54

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A number of nurses, frightened by the sight of the boy holding the leg like a biblical staff, hurried to find Dr. Reikovsky. The sickroom was the main artery of the hospital, swelling with the dying and injured. Rows of beds were filled with men whose flesh had been torn apart by exploding bullets, whose arms and legs were missing, those whose wounds had been anesthetized sometimes with vodka when all else was unavailable, then covered in what precious bandages there were. Some who were recovered were now making their way toward the boy with the standing leg. Dawid’s father too was heading towards his son. Images of his father practicing medicine before the war in Radom, where he was born, flashed before Dawid’s eyes. His father, shaven, with a moustache, wore decent shoes, trousers, a clean shirt and tie, and over his clothing, a white gown. Around his neck was the instrument Dawid had always cherished and feared: his stethoscope. The father of his past had come back to a son who was grown and who had important news to offer. The doctor was panting and running, his anxiety apparent from a distance. Once he was within arm’s length, and not wanting to alarm the boy, he asked in as restrained a manner as he could, “What has happened, Dawid? Where have you come from?” “Father, I have come with some help....” “…Are you all right?” “Yes, Father. There was bombing and I found a leg.” The doctor’s eyes moved to the severed limb. “I don’t understand what you are saying.” He reached over to embrace his son, but his grip was tight and he shook him instead. Dawid drew back, still holding the leg protectively. His father had to listen to reason. “I found it, Father. I climbed down from the tree and found it on the ground. It belonged to a partisan.” “Were you injured?” “No, Father. Others were, but not me. I have walked all the 55

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way. But this leg, it is still in one piece. You can fix people with it. You know how. Quickly, Father!” His father was asking too many questions. He never had patience before when Dawid asked him questions. His father took the leg and held it consolingly. Turning his face away, his voice cracked with emotion. “Thank you, Dawid. It was good of you. I am grateful for what you have brought me.” “I looked very carefully for it. It was a lot of trouble bringing it or I would have been here sooner. Can you give it to someone?” “Give it… Yes, of course.” Dawid pointed excitedly at a man standing on crutches with one leg. “Like him. He is tall. It will fit him.” His father was by now mumbling to no one, it appeared to Dawid. He dropped the leg, distractedly, the full weight of the ghoulish thing, its truncated shape falling with a heavy thud. Then, he covered his face with his hands. “What sort of world did I bring you into? What sort of world?” Dawid’s father repeated. In his voice was the despair Dawid had heard in the ghetto and in the closet when his father had pleaded with the peasant woman to keep them longer. No one had listened either time. Dawid thought it unlikely anyone would listen now. He looked around the hospital, at the men and the nurses, before swerving back at his father with a stern and embarrassed expression. “Father, we are among the partisans here. Partisans don’t cry.” “Yes, you are right, Dawid. You are right to remind me.” “These men are living. And the man to whom this leg once belonged is dead. Isn’t that right? Partisans live or die, father, but they don’t cry.” His father appeared to come back briefly. He wiped his eyes, bent down and held Dawid firmly by the elbows. “Son, return to the woods. Go back to the men in your unit. .

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I will stay here. There are people that need me. Many operations ahead. I haven’t a moment to spare.” With these words, he turned and walked away. “But Father, you have forgotten the leg,” Dawid picked up the limb and called out after him, “take it with you, Father.” Dr. Reikovsky continued to walk and did not look back at his son. Dawid appealed to a nurse to intervene on his behalf. “You’d better go now,” was all she said. Dawid set the leg carefully down on the floor and left the hospital dejected. It had all been a waste. His father didn’t listen. If he had been older, he might have. And now what alternative did he have but to obey his father and rejoin what remained of the troops. He had one small consolation. The trip back would be easier without the leg. Dawid felt some relief about that. He talked to himself quietly on the way as he had in the ghetto, to keep himself company, to occupy the time and set things straight. As he walked, he became more convinced his father was not right in the head. His actions spoke for themselves. He replayed them in his mind to be certain. First, his father cried. Then, he mumbled. Finally, and this was worse than anything, he left the leg behind. He was careless to do that. If any one of the partisans were careless, if anyone forgot something, the others died. His father could learn a thing or two from Andrusz and the other partisans. Dawid hoped to see Andrusz when he returned. He hoped that Andrusz had survived the bombing and that he could tell him about the leg and what he had tried to do. His father could no longer be counted on. Perhaps, if the hospital were in jeopardy, he could protect his father. Andrusz had only to give the order. He would be ready.

My wife, my children.

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vrom goldberg, father of two and former shoe store

owner, stood at the corner of Leszno and Zelazna Streets in the Warsaw Ghetto and watched the clothes collector at work. Day by day, Stefan Jasianowsky entered and left the ghetto in his wagon. On it, he piled clothes belonging to the recently perished, the single commodity for which there was no shortage in the ghetto. These items he stripped from past owners, assembled, and sold to Poles in the countryside. Stefan looked to be a man in his mid-thirties. He had a ruddy complexion though his face was not coarse. Of medium height and build, he moved definitively through his daily routine. Stefan’s apparent vitality and freedom aroused envy in Avrom, who was by now a seasoned veteran of life among the dead, and awakened in him the sense that he must somehow enlist this stranger’s help. To ward off the despair that engulfed him in the ghetto, Avrom planned various means of escape, which he countered and replaced one by one. Only days before, he had plainly said to his family, “While we are not too weak, before winter comes, we must leave the ghetto.” Seeing the Pole and his wagon, he was resolved to act. Any man who was a member of the mercantile class in a place of such misery, Avrom deduced, would not be above accepting a bribe. Avrom had entered the ghetto with money. He had enough that he had been able to buy bits of bread, potatoes and groats for his family, and he would put

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that money to its most necessary and daring use. Approaching Stefan, he stated in a low, firm voice, “I have a deal I would like you to consider.” Stefan scanned the drawn frame of the man. “What could you offer me?” He sprang off the wagon and wiped his hands of the dirt and dust that collected after securing the goods with rope. What didn’t wash off as easily, though, what travelled and remained on his clothes, his person, was the sour odour of unwashed bodies. He had never become accustomed to that. Still he was thankful that no reported sickness had been transmitted to his clients since past owners of the clothing had generally died of disease. Avrom approached more closely. Stefan’s hands were large, he observed, the kind of hands a man could shake in a bet. Whether Stefan reneged on his word once given, Avrom did not know. “There is money. All that I have left and managed to keep hidden. Will you take me and my family out of the ghetto?” “Out of the ghetto? Why should I take such a chance?” Avrom pointed to an alley between two buildings where they would not be seen. There in the dark from the shreds of his pockets he removed a handful of gold coins wrapped in oilcloth. Stefan glanced impatiently at the coins. Their value was higher than any amount he had exchanged since the war, but he appraised them with an air of apathy. “How many of you are there? Not that I’m agreeing.” “Four. My two young sons, my wife and I.” “Impossible. Four is too many.” Stefan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was eager to get back to the neglected merchandise on the wagon. “How many then?” Avrom shot back. The deal was closing in Stefan’s favour, where it had, for all intents and purposes, always remained. Measuring his unlikely business partner, Stefan thought, “Why not earn something extra? If the Jews see me as a grave robber, an extortionist, they 59

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will have to grant me this deed.” In this way, he was satisfied that he made peace with his maker. “Two, I will take only two.” Avrom’s pulse raced. The other two members of his family would leave later. He would see to it. As the men solidified their deal, an elderly Jew pulled a handcart that housed a dead child. From a window above, screams were heard, much like the throttled cries that visited the ghetto throughout the night. In the dark, against the curfew, the voices of abandoned children drifted up like smoke and charred the windows as they moaned for alms, for bread, for a place to sleep. The morning found them ready for burial, frozen on streets or on the steps of dilapidated houses, without shoes, in ragged clothes. Avrom asked himself how he had slept after hearing their voices. He had slept, he inwardly confessed, because a body could do nothing else. But that night, the scale of suffering weighed Avrom down like a rucksack of stones. He tossed in his sleep, grinding his teeth, and then lay, eyes open, rehearsing the plan. The following day, as negotiated, Avrom and Henryk, his eldest son, were smuggled out of the streets of the skeletal city by their reluctant guardian. Stefan’s wagon clattered along the cobblestones past the sick and the starved and those who stood over the dead like sentinels of conscience. The further the distance, the more they appeared like undeveloped images to Avrom, snatched out of the dark solvent of the ghetto, their figures and faces vanishing from sight. He shuddered and looked ahead at the high wall that separated the ghetto from the living city. Relief came for him only when they were cleared at the entrance gate by the guard, who could be bribed with gifts of gloves, socks, or linen. As he exited the ghetto, the guard motioned yes to Stefan. They had come to some surreptitious understanding. Today, Avrom thought, his five-year-old son, Henryk, would not return to the tiny room where for two years the family had kept a steady vigil against death. They would go to Lukow, where his brother and 60

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sister-in-law lived and together deploy any means of survival. The wagon and its stowaways rambled on without notice until, at a crossroads near Lukow, its wheels ground to a stop. Avrom and Henryk rolled a few feet along the back of the wagon, their cries of alarm muffled between the bundles of clothing. Shouts outside mounted; a troop of soldiers from the Wehrmacht1 was about to undertake a search. With the butts of their rifles, the soldiers poked and harpooned the carefully bound recycled merchandise, flinging its contents on the street. Within moments, Avrom and Henryk stepped out of the funereal heap onto the country road. The soldiers’ faces beamed with childlike triumph. “Stand straight and say nothing,” Avrom instructed his son in Polish. The troops closed in on Avrom, jeering “Jud,” kicking him, striking blows with their boots and fists. At the sight of his father bent over in pain, Henryk dissolved into tears. In the midst of this, an officer, dressed in buffed jackboots, riding breeches, and a fitted military-style jacket with broad epaulets, appeared and ordered an immediate halt on the attack. “We have a schedule to meet, and this,” he pointed disapprovingly to Avrom, “will not take priority.” The soldiers stood motionless while Henryk helped his shaken and bleeding father up on his feet. The officer then shouted a command that sent his soldiers scurrying to their motorbikes. He was about to enter his own armoured vehicle, when Stefan, who had up to now remained silent, ran after him, blocked the passenger door, and exclaimed in his defense: “They jumped on, I don’t know how … I wasn’t looking…” The officer waved him away. “You talk too much. Keep going before I change my mind.” Needing no further encouragement, Stefan withdrew at full speed, freed at last of his passengers. Once he was a safe number of miles from the scene, he shook his head over the great and nearly fatal sacrifice he had made, swearing to God almighty that he would never again play chauffeur to the condemned, that is, if he did not wish to condemn himself in the process. While he was not a churchgoing man, he liked 61

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to take up these dialogues with God, innocuous as they were, on the condition that he could settle them on his own terms. Father and son completed their journey by foot. In Lukow, Avrom immersed himself in the mire of the ghetto that had been established there, but he could not rest at ease with the knowledge that he had left the rest of his family behind. When he was able to travel, he returned a second time to the walled Ghetto of Warsaw, for his wife, Regina, and younger son, Shmuel. Henryk stayed behind in Lukow. The three fled through the sewers of the ghetto before riding a tram during peak work hours. The yellow and red tram, colors of the flag of Poland, was filled to capacity. Regina took a seat with Shmuel on her lap, her blonde hair providing the cover they needed to pass unsuspected as a Gentile family. Avrom held a wrapped package with scant clothing, keeping his eyes on his wife and infant son. The murmur of commuters, the intermittent jolt of the brakes, the ringing of the bell to announce an exit – Avrom felt a rhythm in the soles of his shoes, the subdued rhythm of the occupied city, but one that still carried the semblance of a future. In moving, however, the family discovered yet another vanquished corner of the country. No sooner had the Goldberg family arrived in Lukow than word spread that the Germans were planning an Aktion there. Information had leaked from towns and villages as to what the Jews could expect. Once troops surrounded a town, all Jews were forced onto trains. Those found hiding were shot. The Goldbergs were a family of the times, resembling hares and rabbits as they ran from place to place, darting in and out of cages and coops. The coming afternoon, Avrom and his brother, Shlomo, looked for a hiding place in what remained of the once vibrant Jewish district. They stood on a muddy, exiled street and examined a row of houses, one indistinguishable from the next. The window panes were grimy. The shutters, skewed from disrepair, were dismissive of a future. If this banished block were to provide 62

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his family with a place to hide, Shlomo thought, it would be short-lived. The houses would be singled out for their inhabitants, those inhabitants cleared out – that was certain – but, he thought again, the anonymity of the houses, the lack of character in their design might tire the searchers; on entering door after door, room after room, after climbing one identical narrow staircase after another, a search, no matter how keenly initiated, might turn less thorough. That possibility attracted Shlomo. He felt renewed and energetic from the prospects circulating in his brain. Pointing to the gable-topped roofs, each with a window below, he reminded Avrom that the roofs contained attics, and that the attics were also adjoined. The brothers climbed up to one of the vacant attics in the row of houses, where Avrom formulated a strategy. Together, they would build a secondary wall between that attic and the one attached to it, made from the same rough wood boards already there. Since the walls would match, suspicion would be dampened. They would build this corresponding wall of about fifteen feet with an opening through which their family members could crawl. Anyone searching from either side would assume he was at the end of the house and might not search further. The narrow living space would measure about eight feet by thirty feet, but it would have to provide temporary refuge for twenty. They went to work at night with what building materials they could find in the ghetto: rusted nails, a tarnished hammer, plaster. They gathered together similar strips of rough wood boards. In the confined area, the two brothers also stored pillows, jars of dried food, bottles of water. After readying their families and reassuring them they would soon reunite, Avrom and his brother travelled to Kempke, about ten kilometers from Lukow, in search of a farm where they could continue to hide their families for a longer period of time. It was best to keep moving. The remaining family waited in Lukow and prepared for their ascent to the attics. 63

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Within the week, the predicted apocalypse began. At about six a.m., on a late fall day in 1942, Henryk and Shmuel, along with their mother, aunt, cousins, a total of about twenty human souls, hurried toward the attic as they had planned. One by one they climbed up, secretly wishing the sky would open, dreaming they were already at the top of Jakob’s ladder. With his father gone, Henryk appointed himself protector of his mother and younger brother. In all the hours he had carefully observed his father, Henryk had wished to be more like him. It would be his responsibility now to keep an eye out for the enemy. He would set himself up as a watch guard. In the hideaway, he searched for a place to be invisible, a way he could see the enemy without being seen. His shortness would be of great benefit. While the others leaned against the walls, stretched out, over and under one another, Henryk kneeled in a space between the slanted roof and the floor, keeping his eyes peeled on the street from a crack in one of the corners. From here he had at a vantage point. Shots were already ringing in the air when he first caught sight of the carnage. He looked down from his watchtower to the place of killing. Black-shirted men dragged a woman from an outhouse, her heels skidding along the road. The men screamed, “Achtung, Jude” and fired their shots. She collapsed, the air released from her punctured body. Henryk stared while more black-shirted men ran down the street in a frenzy, pulling people from out of bunkers. A group of four was lined up in a row. The SS shouted: “Achtung, Jude,” and a hail of bullets was again fired. The four dropped like pins in a gallery. Henryk tried to keep up with the black shirts as they cut sharp diagonals across the road, but his eyes were seared by the blood that spurted in the air. He squinted a little and followed the bloodlines with his eyes as they ran down the road, stopped midway, and collected into darker red pools. Each lull in the gunfire was followed by the executioners’ cries. Henryk’s eardrums were fractured by the spasm of sound and his muscles ached, but he did not give 64

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up his position. Morning became afternoon and more violence was unleashed, its power spiraling in the midday sun. Houses were ransacked, smoked out for escapees, but theirs was still safe. No one had come up and tested the wall. The sun set when Henryk surrendered his watch and turned to face the others. His limbs had grown stiff and heavy, as if estranged from his body. Members of his family looked back at him with buried eyes, their lips the color of bleached sand. After hours of sitting, only Shmuel could be heard. He was irritable. He fidgeted and whined. Gunshots ricocheted on the street. Henryk’s aunt volunteered to distract the child. “Here, give him to me,” she said as she entertained him by adding and subtracting with her fingers. “One. Now one is gone. Three. Now two are gone.” Amused briefly by the ruse, Shmuel bounced off and on her knee and slid down her thigh. But tears soon ran down his face. Regina took him over her shoulder and quieted him, smothering his cries in the bunched fabric of her sweater. Still, his crying persisted. A number of male cousins grew increasingly nervous. “Give him to us,” Henryk heard them say. The child was moved from shoulder to shoulder. Finally, he was quiet. Some time passed. A chain of withdrawing hands returned Shmuel to his mother. Regina lay his limp body across her thighs and nested his head in the crook of her elbow. The nape of his neck bent like a slender reed under her arm. His lips were closed. “Shmuel,” she sang his name. He gave no answer. “He is deep in sleep,” she thought, putting her ear to his chest. There was no rise or fall, no motion, however slight. She held his face in her hands and called, “Shmuel, mein kind.”2 He did not move. Her mouth opened in the shape of a dark O to ask who had done this, but only a gagged animal sound came out. Her sister-in-law gently touched her shoulder. Regina made no gesture toward her. Henryk crept towards his mother and stroked Shmuel’s forehead. It was not yet cold. His eyes were riveted upon his 65

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brother’s face. He would never forgive the others for taking his brother from him. He would never forgive them even if his mother did. The twenty stayed up in their hiding place until they were certain the killing was suspended. It was now two o’clock in the morning. Henryk’s older male cousins checked the deserted streets. Lukow was a ghost town. One by one, they climbed down and disbanded. Regina, Henryk, their aunt and two cousins started their walk to Kempke where their husbands and fathers waited. They had to reach their destination before daylight. Regina carried the bundle that was once her living son and buried him in a shallow pit outside Lukow. A swift blessing was made over the makeshift grave before they moved on. Henryk walked alongside his mother, each step, he believed, bringing them closer to his father. He would be waiting for his family when they arrived. As they made their way, Henryk compared his shadow to his mother’s. Hers was higher in the shape of an hourglass. He lengthened his steps and moved at a pace with hers. “Mother,” his heart cried, “I will ask the sun to hide its face. I can pray to the sun to keep our secret.” And the angels watched in awe at the procession below, for sometimes man worked wonders without their intervening. Four shrouded figures conspired with the night like trespassers on the earth as a child alone held back the inevitability of morning.

German army. My child.

1 2

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The Elder of the Jews

A

summer rain had come and gone, bringing little relief to

the ghetto. The uneven pavement had dried and was again a steaming repository of waste, while the open gutters stank of a potent serum of oil. Red and red-striped pillow covers and blankets ruffled in the faint wind. Women had hung them out to dry on windows and on stolen fence parts that had not yet turned into kindling. Dusk was settling. On a street corner, a boy attempted to sell packets of saccharine and tiny onions with short slender roots. An old man walked by taking no notice of the boy. His back was bent from the load he carried. In his basket were heads of cabbage, one of the main ingredients of the soup his family would eat for supper after coming home from the workshops and factories. The youngest of the ghetto, barefoot children, expended what energy they could on the street, flipping and falling over the gutters. Soon, a group of boys assembled near the orphanage on 76 Franciszkanska Street to play their games of war. “What should we play?” “Armies.” The boys’ voices played catch. They elbowed one another, playfully.. “Armies who fight.” “And win battles.” “We’ll divide into the Germans and the Russians. Agreed?” A banner of arms flew up. Two groups were quickly formed, the boys facing each

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other in a somber match of opponents. The Russian side was armed. In their hands were their rifles, mere sticks of wood, which they defiantly pointed at their enemy. Opposite them stood the Germans, standing at attention, disciplined, proud and prepared for battle. An orphan, Szymek, who was positioned at the front of the German line, was made commander-in-chief. Not long before, Szymek’s father had died of starvation. Too weak to work, his mother’s name had landed on a deportation list on one of the early raids. Szymek never saw her again. Those who ran the orphanage regarded him as a reclusive and obedient child. He accepted his role with the resignation of a grown man, hastily summoning his soldiers to march. “Achtung. Links. Recht. Links. Recht.”1 The little boys marched the goose-step, their knees high, their bodies rigid, imitating the Germans whom they had witnessed first marching into their villages and towns, and into the city of Lodz itself. “That is good, soldiers of the Third Reich, but you must do better,” the commander began to shout. He was a tiny boy, but he had purposely lowered his voice for effect and now bellowed in a self-satisfied tone. Straightening his jacket as if it were his official uniform, he clicked the worn heels of his shoes. “Sing while you march to show you are proud of the German army. Show these Bolsheviks how to sing.” At this, he signaled to his army to commence. The marchers began to sing the hymn of victory: “Deutschland über alles.”2 After a few bars, however, their enthusiasm waned. More and more of them withdrew from singing until only stray voices could be heard. It appeared that the German army had weakened in its reserve. The Russians too put down their pieces of wood. All the boys’ faces were uneasy. Members of the German side began to move away from the march. “Deserters,” Szymek, the commander shouted. “You will never be conquerors.” One boy, dressed in clean, tightly fitted clothing, and shoes 68

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still replete with soles and laces, stepped up in front of the commander to speak. He was no more than eight, had locks of golden-brown hair and large brown eyes that snapped in rebellion. Some knew him as a boy who made music out of makeshift instruments. He was, in fact, considered to be a virtuoso with a castanet he had constructed from the hardest piece of wood, which he clicked by swinging his hand with all his might. “I don’t want to be a German. The Germans separate children from their mothers. Then they kill them. We have all been witnesses!” He retreated into the throng. The boys colluded quietly. The commander, Szymek, was about to demand that his soldiers stand in an orderly manner when his entire German battalion disbanded. Aimless and stripped of his army, he would have left the scene had it not been for a third boy, a soldier from the Russian side. Ten-year-old Eleazar was not ready to give up on games. He possessed a stubborn resolve that his family had come to depend on. When faced with the usual shortage of matches that winter, it had been Eleazar who was chosen to go from neighbour to neighbour with kindling in hand, and he did not return till he brought with him some means of bringing warmth to a substantial number of the residents of his building. “Why don’t we play something we are all very familiar with. We’ll call this game: ‘Teaching the Jews Respect.’ Some will be Germans and others will have to be Jews. Remember, if you are a Jew, the Germans can stop you on the street and ask you anything. For instance, they can ask: What is your opinion about the food here? You must answer in a way they like. Or else…” The children were instantly receptive to this new idea. They were restless and wished to postpone returning to their families’ cramped quarters. Pairs of boys were already intertwined and secretly creating questions. Another boy, not yet occupied, added an all-important rule. “Remember when you 69

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see a German pass by, you must remove your cap with great respect or you’ll get beaten.” The boy demonstrated. Bowing down with an elegant swoop, he pulled his cap off his head and held it to his chest. The children cheered and laughed. More rules were recited with the strictest and sternest of precision. One boy announced a decree with a trumpeting “Achtung.” “No one can walk on the odd-numbered side of Franciszkanska Street.” A pair of boys saluted. “Ja wohl.” “Don’t turn any electrical lights on during the day.” More boys saluted, some clicking their threadbare heels. “Don’t walk close to the gate.” They roared in unity, “Ja wohl.” The logistics of the game remained to be settled. “Who will be the Germans and who will be the Jews?” “I want to be a German.” “So do I.” The boys hmmmed in agreement. “What will the punishment be?” “A beating.” One child leaped out of the crowd and mimed a blow on another’s boy’s impervious head. The supposed victim, hair cut close to his scalp, shrugged the other off until a warning sounded alarm in all the boys. “You’ll be sent off to Central Prison.” “No. Deportation.” At this, the children became silent. They dropped their heads and shuffled along the street. They knew the meaning of the word, were haunted by the sight of the loaded assembly points in the ghetto, the deportees who never returned. Sensing that this was a pivotal time to step in as a leader, Lipa, an older boy of thirteen, and a worker himself of the lathes and the milling machines, elected that the children play “The Elder of the Jews.” A buzz went through the crowd. He would graciously volunteer to play the part of Chaim Rumkowski, Chairman and head of the Lodz Ghetto. 70

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“Where is your horse and carriage?” the children immediately asked, putting his sovereignty to the test. Undaunted, the boy quickly found two sticks and started riding on one of them as if it were a horse. His body was thin, but he moved with commanding force, racing around the children, weaving in and out of the crowd with his head held high and the free stick held tightly in his hand. He was in need of a bodyguard, and after circling for potential candidates and waving the stick in his hand like a Cossack, he found a freckle-faced boy whom he chose as his right-hand man. He handed over the second stick to him. An exalted look of importance swept over the face of the newly appointed boy. The Elder of the Jews descended from his imaginary horse to assume his obligations. Cutting a line through the crowd, he shook hands and thanked the children for their support while his bodyguard waddled behind. As the two made their way to the head of the assembly, the children congregated around them, curious to hear their leader. Using a rusty board as a podium, the Elder stood before his subjects and began to speak. “Children, children, I fight for you, for your welfare.” The children heartily applauded. “No, no, I don’t want applause. I am a servant of the ghetto. Just like all of you.” Far fewer pairs of hands clapped. The Elder cleared his throat. He had heard Rumkowski speak often and attempted to deliver a message similar to his. “Children. I offer you work. If we work, we can earn the respect of the Germans who make the decisions. Thousands of children are already very useful in the ghetto. Many of you, as well as your brothers and sisters, work as apprentices in the tailoring workshops. The last inspection went well. The Germans were happy. Work will keep the ghetto alive. And remember, children, you must study, study. Feed your minds.” A voice shattered the silence of the audience and rallied the great cry of the ghetto: “Food is what we want. We are hungry.” 71

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The fighting spirit of the children was revived. The Elder motioned with his hand for silence in order that that he could resume speaking. His assistant elbowed his way into the crowd to pacify some of the children who were agitated at the mention of food. Many wore the trademark signs of hunger: their legs were swollen, their eyelids, cheeks, and chins distended. The Elder coolly responded. “I give you all the rations I can.” They slung their accusations and demands at the leader, their fists raised in a battle cry. “They only buy what is left at the distribution line.” “You keep them for yourself and the people who are close to you.” “We want bread and a thicker soup. Why can’t you get them for us if you say you are our leader?” “I have tens of thousands of people to think about,” the Elder of the Jews proclaimed. Then, seeing the dismay and anger in the faces of the children, he smiled benevolently. “But naturally, you, the children, are always my first concern.” One ginger-haired boy, gaunt and aged for his time, came up to the leader and pulled at his jacket. “Will you give us extra coupons for food? For some barley, some flour and butter? The way my mother says you do for the doctors and directors of the workshops?” The sickly boy was earnest in his request. The leader pulled abruptly away. “They work harder than everyone else. We need them.” Another boy with a round protruding belly pressed against the Elder of the Jews. Could the Chairman not place a member of his family in one of the bakeries where workers received a loaf of bread a week? His brother was ill and needed time, a week, at the very least to regain his strength. And if that wasn’t possible, could the Chairman issue an additional food coupon, just that, the b1 coupon? In this, the more modest appeal of the two, the boy became bolder. 72

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“Chairman, will you give me the coupon?” The Elder patted the boy’s head and then in an attempt to avoid his plea, blankly faced another side of the crowd. But the complaints about medical ailments only increased. The children rattled off the all too recognizable list of diseases that daily depleted the ghetto of its population: dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, spotted typhus. The children had also learned names like calcium, redoxin, betabion, which they spouted with critical expertise. All at once the street echoed with the medical lexicon of the dead and dying. A swarm of boys moved in closer to the Elder. Since it was evident to him that a crisis was approaching, the leader turned with some urgency to his bodyguard for help in fending off the revolt. His freckle-faced appointee geared obediently into action. “Get back. He can only listen to one of you at a time,” he yelled, swinging his timber stick at a crowd of boys. They were not easily discouraged. A voice from the back of the crowd called out for cod liver oil. The boy’s sister had tb and the doctor said it was urgent she get some. An exile from Vienna called out in German for Vigantol, the synthetic Vitamin d. Yet another child from Prague cried out for Vitamin c, mixing words in Czech. By now, the Elder was overrun by the pushing and by the demands being hurled at him, and he too began hitting back at the boys with his stick. The crowd surged. From out of a window overlooking the street, a woman’s voice rose above the shouts: “Children, children, remember the curfew. Off the streets quickly, or there will be hell to pay. Do you want the Jewish Police or German sentries to catch you? Quickly children.” Men and women appeared on the street from out of the grey light that covered the ghetto, intervening and separating the boys from their unpopular leader and bodyguard. The fighting was stopped. Dissatisfied, the boys walked back to streets named Glowacki, Drewnowska, Zgierska, and Limanowski, dispersing through unlit doorways to rejoin their dwindling families. 73

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Within minutes, the street had emptied. A gate slammed and the sound of rushing feet could be heard from open windows. Lipa, the defeated Elder of the Jews, retired to Podworzowa Street, renamed Hofgasse by the German invaders. He had been forced to retire from the street stage and was never again to play Rumkowski, but that night and for many nights afterwards, the sound of the games rang in the children’s ears and rocked them to sleep. The sound of their voices pleased them. It was best, after all, to remember all things imagined at night. Like a lullaby of the ghetto they had written in their own hands, in their own script, it could not be taken from them.

Attention. Left, right. Left, right. Germany rules the world

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Merchants of Mercy

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cluster of children navigate their way through a

dense and lifeless crowd. Theirs is a forbidden vocation in the city of walls. As smugglers of bread and potatoes, they must move quickly yet remain obscure. Today, they encounter an obstacle. Passersby have stopped to point to a newly constructed wooden bridge over Chlodna Street that now joins the larger, northern part and the smaller, southern part of the teeming ghetto. The children hear the voices of pedestrians as they provide an undeluded commentary; indeed, it may be said that every man and woman in the ghetto has become a sage or a visionary of a sort. “Look what they’ve put up.” Fingers wag at the novel structure. “A bridge for us to walk on.” “A convenience.” Onlookers flinch at the intimation of a life made easier in the ghetto. A group of unshaven men, their eyes feverish, peer up at the construction. One remark sets off the next. “Those at the top can look down.” “And see what?” “Misery.” “And those below?” “It’s one and the same.” They laugh. One man pats another on the back. “They’ve left nothing for us, Shlomo, but the noose from which to hang.”

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“You are mistaken,” his friend replies with gusto. “It takes ingenuity to find even a rope in the ghetto.” The three children do not stare at the bridge or reflect upon its novelty. The street below is their domain. They can crawl on their bellies like snakes through holes in the wall; they know what lurks underground, never fearful of the overflowing sewers. First among them is Rafael, the artist chronicler, who, after a few months of being entrapped in the ghetto, discovered the magic of a charcoal pencil and the lines and shapes his hands could form. He traces life in the ghetto as he sees it; his crude materials are suited to the place he draws, to its impure light and its engulfing darkness and to the grey limbo that lies between. Using sharp strokes, he jabs down on flimsy scraps of paper with measured passion, flicking his wrists, pressing his thumbs to shade the outer rims, drawing as if chased by a menacing force. Then, because nothing can be recorded for posterity, he buries his drawings under a rock or folds them to fit into a tin canister. Hovering over him is Jerzy, the uncontested leader of the three, who wears his hardness like a sheet of metal, and finally there is Ester, who ties the two by some invisible thread of diplomacy. Rafael is red-haired and short in stature while Jerzy’s and Ester’s coloring is darker. Their legs and arms sprout from their bodies like beans. Yet all three have come to bear a physical resemblance to one another that is the brand of the ghetto. Their eyes are shaped like saucers and their cheeks are carved out from hollow spaces. Their bellies, which are more reptilian than human, are emptied; all three children have adapted a weightlessness in body and lightness of foot that is unmatched in the city. Together, they walk towards Nowolipki and Przejazd Streets. Jerzy eyes the wall. “The hole is blocked today.” “More lime and brick,” confirms Ester. “Who needs bread and water when we have lime and brick?” Rafael grins mischievously. 76

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“There’ll be a new hole we can climb through soon enough,” Jerzy reminds them. “Should we wait then or try a new route?” Rafael turns to his leader. “We can wait and then go under. You’re not trying to back out, are you?” “No. Why would I want to do that?” Rafael’s jaw tightens. “Because you’re afraid.” Jerzy taunts. “Afraid of what?” “Of getting caught.” “And dying of a gun wound,” Ester nods. “If I’m shot, then I’m shot, and I won’t know any better.” Rafael says deliberately, making no eye contact with his challenger. He has rehearsed this possibility in his mind, only now releasing the words. “You see, Jerzy, Rafael is not afraid,” Ester smiles. “We are all very experienced here.” The three agree to wait a while. They enter a nearby gate and wander into a u-shaped courtyard. The houses that encircle them are desolate and battered with age; mud-stained stairways lead to doors with broken locks, airless rooms, sightless windows. At the centre lies the crowning remnant of the courtyard, the corpse of a man covered by a sheet of paper. Rafael ventures closer to the body, lifts the paper and tosses it aside. Prompted by a breeze, it glides above the ground momentarily and then lands. “He can’t move now or beg for food,” Ester says with grim satisfaction. “Naturally not,” Jerzy says under his breath. “Look how peaceful he is.” Kneeling next to the body, Rafael places his finger under the dead man’s jacket and tickles him. For a moment he waits, as if anticipating a response. “I’ll draw the corpse,” Rafael studies his subject, “after we come back with the goods.” Ester sits on the ground with her hands folded across her 77

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raised knees. “Maybe one day someone will find your pictures, Rafael.” “That is, if anyone gets out of here alive.” Jerzy stands against a wall picking at a scab on his arm. “We have to stick together now, you know.” Seeing a deflated ball, he punts it around the courtyard with little success. “But his pictures tell our story,” Ester protests. “Who do you think is interested in what happens here?” argues Jerzy, now feet away. “I don’t know.” “I’ll tell you. No one. What matters is putting bread in our mouths.” Jerzy tires of his improvised game and rejoins them. Ester sighs with the weariness of a midwife in the ghetto. “If we’re lucky today, we’ll get past the Wache1 and only meet up with the Gentleman2 guard on our return.” Mention of the Gentleman lightens their spirits. “He’ll let us pass through.” “Even when our pockets are bulging.” “The way he marches us into the ghetto. He’s a funny one.” “If we’re lucky, he’ll be there.” They return to the wall they had earlier surveyed. As they predicted, a number of bricks have been removed. On sight of the hole, Rafael’s body bends like rubber, though he is dragged slightly down by the length of his jacket. Ester’s hand thrusts forward as she follows behind him, wriggling her way through the opening. Jerzy, who waits until the other two have passed through, insists, “Hurry, fast,” before he too has passed safely to the Other Side. The three run with their adaptable lightweight legs past a work party of Jews assembled outside the ghetto, men who toil for the Deutsche Ostbahn.3 They run past fleeting streets till they pant for air and their chests burn. “You two go this way and I’ll go that,” Jerzy points briskly, dispatching them with terse and paternal commands. “Remember don’t stray too far where I can’t find you. If one hand refuses, go to the next. Good luck.” 78

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Ester and Rafael begin their ritual of begging door to door for money to buy or trade, or in a word, to haggle for potatoes. Rafael removes his cap. The two stand by side. At times, Ester half-curtsies. Their voices toll in succession like chipped bells. “I need only ten more groschen, dear lady.” “We are young, as your eyes can see.” “I have been on the street. Can we trade this much for a potato?” “I am an orphan – if you look you will notice these feathers on my clothing – that is how I sleep, gentlemen, without a pillowcase or a sheet.” The children’s dirty rags and faces do not work in their favour. With death so imminent, Polish citizens, who might be inclined to give, close their doors. “Pity won’t work. We must speak up for ourselves,” Rafael instructs Ester. “Show them we truly want to live.” Above all, he emphasizes, it is important to convince those from the Other Side that the three of them are free of disease. “We have no fleas or lice on us, dear lady, of that you can be assured. You will catch nothing from us.” “No fleckfieber.”4 “If we did, they’d have put us in the quarantine building.” “We ask only for a morsel of food.” Jerzy works the streets on his own. He mutters few words and holds himself upright and aloof. On today’s outing, Jerzy has stored a handful of kasha in a little bag he carries in his pocket. In the linings of his coats is his prize, a moderately sized onion. He has been fortunate. People have given freely to him, even throwing pieces of bread out of second floor windows. Later, the merchants of mercy reconvene to check their inventory. “How are you doing so far?” They huddle together in a circle so close, their heads knock. “Not bad, and you? “I’ve had better days.” 79

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“Let’s see.” “They pull out their swelling pockets, and open up their palms to display the staples of their diet. A tram reserved for German passengers sweeps across the road. The children break out of their circle and disperse. The driver of the tram shouts some obscenity. A work party ahead has obstructed the path. The driver shouts again, the blood vessels on his neck nearly bursting, and the road is cleared, allowing the tram to resume its course. The three hide their goods and cross Marszalkowska Street in a hurry so as to avoid the eyes of the tram conductor. “Are they far enough away?” Rafael asks. “Yes.” “Then it’s time to eat.” “Yes.” Ester pats her belly. “Be sure to save a little for later,” Jerzy warns in a gruff voice. “We’ll be hungrier than ever if we eat it all now.” Ester walks ahead of the two boys until she comes to a gateway. “Let’s rest here.” They sit down in a row, take scraps of bread out of their pockets and lay them out on their laps. The bread is minuscule. They munch with the purposefulness of cows grazing in pasture. Ester’s voice rises, heavy with memory. “Last night while I lay awake, I heard the sound of my mother’s machine.” “What machine?” the two boys ask. “Mama used to sew on her sewing machine in the living room. Sometimes I hear the sounds it used to make, the humming and pedaling. I would read books when she sewed.” “Why think of things that will only sadden you?” Rafael asks, resting his hand on Ester’s shoulder. “I think of the family I once had when we eat together. The three of us make a new family now.” “What did you read in those days?” Jerzy asks. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” 80

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“Girls and fairy tales,” Jerzy sighs. “Who misses books like that with all the monsters here?” Ester continues, mindless of Jerzy’s remark. “Father had been taken away, but Mama knew how to fix things. She used to put black ointment on my feet when they were cold. She found leaves to treat the sores on my legs too. Then she died of typhus and I said, “Shema Israel.”5 “I promised my father I would live and I will try and keep my promise. But if I can’t…” Rafael hesitates, lost for words. “As for me,” Jerzy breaches the discomforting silence, his fist piloted in the air, “my father taught me to defend myself. People smell fear, he said, and he was right. Take the Jews in the ghetto. They are a band of cowards. But I’m not. Just today, some Polish boys who saw me with the onion wanted to pick a fight.” “What happened?” Rafael asks. “I can take care of myself, don’t worry.” “Did you punch them?” “If I wanted to, I could have.” “But you didn’t?” “Polish police showed up and they scooted. So much for their bullying.” The evening sky darkens. One child’s thoughts lead to the next. “Maybe we should go.” “Maybe we should.” They look at one another without moving. “And do some more begging?” “That’s what we usually do.” “No, let’s go back to the ghetto. Where else can we go?” Jerzy asks. “Nowhere.” “That’s settled, then. The ghetto it is.” Jerzy rises and lifts his sagging pants at the waist. “Should we keep all our own food, or split it up like we did yesterday?” It is Rafael who first raises the issue of redistrib81

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uting the food as they begin to walk. “Let’s split up some of the bread just in case we do not all return,” Jerzy says. “I don’t want to think like that,” Ester shuts her eyes. Jerzy stops, waves at them to follow. He backs against a red brick tenement house with closed shutters. “Look. I have enough in my pockets. I don’t need much today.” “Let it come from me, Jerzy. Take a little of my bread.” Rafael breaks off two shriveled bits and offers one each to Ester and Jerzy. “And something from me.” Ester hands Jerzy a small pockmarked potato. “You’re our leader.” “Do you want my onion?” Jerzy asks. Their hands move surreptitiously in the city of hunger. “It’s harder to break. Keep it for yourself.” “Then, I have some kasha. Ester, Rafael, open up the pockets in your jackets, and I’ll pour some in.” “Okay.” The little grains rain in. “We’re done. Let’s go.” Jerzy whips his hands in a forward motion. They walk in the direction of the small ghetto. Mournful, indiscriminate sounds follow them. Shadows prowl like cats from every crevice. “Talk to me while we walk, Rafael.” Ester is trembling. “What should I talk about?” Rafael puts up his collar. The air has turned cold. “Something good. Good news.” “Well.” Rafael collects his thoughts, relieved to be filling up the time it takes to reach the gate. “There are the usual predictions about the war.” “Predictions?” Ester’s voice bounces back as they walk through a lane. “People ask if the Germans are winning or losing or how much longer it will last. Of course, no one’s word can be trusted as the truth because we have no contact from the outside. Just 82

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the same,” Rafael addresses his student with a professorial nod, “did you know that Hitler invaded Russia on the very same day as Napoleon?” “The French Emperor?” “Yes. Bonaparte.” “On the same day?” The street becomes their forum, a place for Rafael to share ideas he has hatched with his eager student of history. “June twenty-second. It’s no coincidence. Hitler read the history books and copied him. He can’t think of anything original. But his schedule is off. Even Napoleon was in Moscow by the middle of September. He made it in three months. Hitler is already behind Napoleon.” Rafael’s pace is hurried. “And you believe Hitler will be defeated?” Ester opens her hands wide. “It’s not a question of what I personally believe. It’s inevitable. Look at what happened to Napoleon?” As they turn a corner, Ester grabs at Rafael’s elbow. “He lost. But when will Hitler lose?” Rafael delays in his answer. “Watch out Rafael, or you’ll turn into one of the old women in the ghetto who can read into the future.” Jerzy, who has listened silently behind them, snickers. The three approach the gate on Grzybowska Street, surrounded as usual by German and Polish police. Avoiding that entrance back into the ghetto, they aim for a nearby wall, at the edge of the sidewalk. Like so many walls in the ghetto, new or old, those replaced last week, or moved only yesterday, this wall passes over drain grates. “You two historians, let’s get back to the present. Napoleon won’t help us now. This time I’ll go first,” Jerzy charges his company. “Rafael, you’re second and Ester you will be last. If there’s any trouble, you’ll have enough warning.” In a moment of silence, they brace themselves before the barrier. His limbs ignited, Jerzy slips through. Rafael follows, 83

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slick as an eel. Ester is slower, it is not her intention to wait, but there is a lapse in the time it takes for her to go down on her knees. At the last moment, and it is an involuntary action on her part, she grabs the bits of bread Rafael had shared from out of her pocket and clasps them in the palm of her hand, making a fist. She kneels and is ready to go under, her back arched, her muscles taut, her breath uneven, when she hears shots. On the other side of the wall, unknown to her, the dreaded guard, Frankenstein,6 has been waiting for his prey. Through the brick, she hears him announce in a dark, lazy voice: “Only two pieces tonight, that’s unfortunate.” Another voice moans. It is Jerzy’s. A final shot is fired. Ester squeezes the bread tighter. “Perhaps Rafael is still alive,” she hopes against hope. “No, he is gone. No sound came from him.” Her feet begin to move. The coveted morsels fall from her hand and lie wasted on the road. She glances back to see specks of bread whisked away by a gentle wind and dropped into a rain culvert. All is lost. She turns around with a jerky motion and runs on without direction. She cannot risk the wall, but neither can she be spotted on the Aryan side. Her pulse races. Her lips are dry as bones. Her brain commands: “Where to? What did Jerzy always teach us? Get under where they can’t see you. Get under.” The night plays tricks on her, a flash of light is a puddle, the cobblestones make faltering music out of her steps, the dark chases her in an unforgiving swirl of street corners. After some time, when she frantically wonders if she has not just run down the same road, something circular erupts from the street’s surface like a giant tarred coin. She dashes towards it. Her eyes have not been deceived. It is a manhole cover. Under the cover are the sewers. She squats, the muscles on her arms and shoulders strained to their limit as she lifts the cast-iron lid and opens it just wide enough. Then, sitting, she dangles her legs in the narrow opening and taps the walls 84

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of the sewer with the heels of her shoes, till she finds the metal bars jutting from the walls. Securing both hands on the street, she wedges her right foot, then her left on the first metal rung, and in this way, begins her descent into the dark cylinder, climbing one foot at a time down the sewer’s ladder. As she steps off the last rung, she hits the water with a splash, getting soaked up to her thighs. She looks up to the opening, black pitched against black, meters above the murky water. Certain the morning light will expose her, she counts the number of remaining hours in her head. The sequence eludes her. The sewer closes in. “I’m in another hell,” she concludes. “A new set of walls covered in waste, but they are not so very different from the ones outside.” A tangle of sewage winds around her legs. She tries to shake loose of it, and in her struggle to free herself, discovers a narrow tunnel. She crawls in and sits, shoulders bent, knees up in the dank inner tube. The sewage clings to her feet and ankles like a trailing vine, the cesspool’s chain. The foul odour of the sewer is suffocating. She breathes through her mouth. There is a bitter taste on her tongue. She grits her teeth. “Jerzy and Rafael would be proud of me if I waited silently. That is what I will do,” she says, making a promise she will keep throughout the night. The following afternoon, a man is seen straggling down a street in the city of walls. In due course, he picks up speed. Soon he is running and singing. He lifts his voice up to the windows darkened with black paper on Pawia and Dzielna Streets. Residents of the buildings cannot look down on the streets for it is a crime under the law, but the urchins who beg and cry “hob rachmunes,”7 and the quick-handed snatchers who rob ghetto dwellers of their crumbs, and even the cigarette vendors of homemade cigarettes or Swojak, all stop what they are doing to watch the madman singer. He is a virtuoso, known as the great Abraham Rubinsztajn, and his song has become the anthem of the city. I’ll never give up the bona.8 I’ll never give up the bona. 85

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Hitler is taking everyone into the grave. When I give up my food stamps I’ll be a candidate for the grave. The children tradesmen recognize his voice, which, more than any other, is the voice that heralds another day. Ester, who has emerged from out the sewers, hears him too. “Singing,” she looks up wistfully from a corner. “I like to hear that.” She laughs. “Don’t I know what Jerzy would say. Singing is for mad fools or for the ones who are preparing to die.” She gropes in her pockets and feels the grains he had given her. They have stuck to the lining from the wet sewers and are hard as pebbles. “And Rafael, what would he say about Rubinsztajn’s song today?” She sits up as if she has been abruptly awakened. “I’ll go and find Rafael’s last picture and bury it deeper. That’s what I can do. I’m the only one left now. The orphans’ orphan.” She sets out by foot, unnoticed, past the traffic of the rickshaws, through the lifeless crowds, until she finds the narrow passage and the lair where he had last slept and where she had come to get him the previous morning. Under a chipped brick, she discovers a charcoal drawn picture. In the foreground of the sketch stand three figures. Behind them a larger group of children stand aimlessly in their tracks. The three are dressed in the ragged garbs of the ghetto. In the middle stands a girl, self-possessed and protected by the two boys on either side. The boys have one hand on their hips and the other hand hesitantly placed around the shoulders of the girl. On their faces, they carry the burden of their experience and the nonchalance of youth. Ester smiles at their likeness to herself, Jerzy, and Rafael. Then she slides the picture under her coat and walks to a patch of neglected ground with little stacks of dried grass. “This was a favourite place of his to hide drawings,” she mumbles. Bending over, she begins to dig the burial site with her hands until she uncovers two short boards of wood Rafael had stowed away. After wiping them clean, she carefully 86

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places the drawing between them and buries the planks and the drawing back into the soil. Passersby briefly look on at the hunched figure of the little girl. “What is she doing? Potatoes can’t grow here.” “Perhaps she is searching for some buried treasure,” they sneer. “I’m afraid we’ve produced a generation of gravediggers.” “Listen to us … without a crumb of compassion for the children,” a woman laments. “You’ve been dreaming of bread for too long.” A feeble attempt at a laugh emanates from the group. “Something she values may one day be found.” The woman’s voice trails… The group walks silently on.

One of the three gates in the ghetto. Nickname given to a German guard who permitted Jewish children to pass to the Other Side to buy food, often playing games with them, or marching them through the gate. 3 German railway network. 4 Typhus. 5 Prayer – “Hear, O, Israel.” 6 Name for a German guard infamous for his shooting of children. 7 Have mercy! 8 Bread coupons in the language of the Warsaw Ghetto. This translated adapted excerpt of Rubinsztajn’s song is taken from an anonymous testimony of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. 1 2

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he trains come to collect us and do not leave Ostrowiec

until they are full. They arrive in early June, passing fields that shimmer in yellow and gold. Women farmhands pluck bright ripe ears of corn from the soil, their frayed cotton kerchiefs wrapped around their foreheads, their sleeves rolled up their tanned, intractable arms. They hear the rumbling sound of the trains bringing what Father calls the breath of death. Straightening their backs, the women press their callused hands on their hips and flinch at the sun. The sun blinds them. They do not see us as we go. The train groans with the weight of its cargo. In the sealed boxcars, we are not who we were. We open our mouths as if we were hooked fish. Stacked so close together, our bodies resemble slabs of dried meat. People defecate on themselves the way infants do, except that infants do not see the shame in it. Our minds and hearts have shrunk in size. Father alone frees himself from the net of trapped bodies propped against him. His voice announces softly, methodically, “The light leaps across the planks. That tells me a day and night have passed, Lodzia.” “Where are we, Father?” “In Poland. We have been travelling south, but we are still in Poland.” The train heaves forward. Father lifts himself and squints through the grating in the window like a messenger I have dispatched, a pigeon through the wire.

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Parched for water, I ask, “What is it, Father,” above a whisper, squatting where space allows. “I am looking for other children … to see if there are other children in this place.” “And are there?” I stand on the tip of my toes but can’t reach. Father kneels solemnly, slips two pieces of bread and a gold coin in my hand and with moral certainty says, “No one would dare steal bread from the mouth of a child. As for the coin,” he continues urgently, “do anything you can to stay alive.” I accept his words, his offering, with meek gratitude, obediently stashing the bread in my pocket. The coin clings to my palm. My fingers close over its cold surface. It is an American piece, father tells me, with a robed woman and her torch of freedom on its head, and a bald eagle on the other side. I feel the eagle’s sculptured wings, its two crests rising. I know nothing of how the coin crossed the ocean or how it landed in the clandestine market of a Polish ghetto where it found its way to Father. But now that he has given it to me, I will not let it go. The train screeches to a halt, its sealed doors pried open. We tumble blindfolded out of the fetid air and blink at assaulting light. A thin, straw-haired woman comes into view. She has noticed our transaction, father’s and mine, and is speaking to me. I cannot make out her words; her voice is drowned out by a din of obscenities and by the barking of hungry dogs. On the ramp, an SS guard in a tailored uniform beats a whip against his leg with his left hand while he holds a tightly leashed dog in his right. Around the train and on the ramp, the ss guards have launched a chase of the prisoners and are easily outrunning the stick-like, bowed men dressed in striped pants, shirts, caps, and wooden shoes. The prisoners don’t avert the guards’ blows, their kicks and the lash of their whips. Grey-faced and somnolent, they unload our baggage from the trains like automatons. I wonder how soon it will be before I see a reflection of myself in them. The straw-haired 89

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woman briskly intervenes. She grows more prominent on the crowded platform. Her mouth opens and shuts like the beak of a goose. Her eyes graze over me and fix on my hand. Her knuckles are gnarled. “The first thing they will do is take your bread.” She points to my hand with cunning accuracy. “Put the coin in your mouth, little girl.” I am afraid of swallowing the coin and clench it in my palm. Now, I am standing on the arrival platform with Father, his coin, and the thin-faced woman. I join the ranks of five on the ramp with Henya and Guta, my seven-and eight-yearold orphaned first cousins; Sela, my older sister; and Basia, my girlfriend, with whom I scraped lime off old bricks in the labour camp, never matching her stamina for standing waistdeep in the water. The trains deposit us in a land that was rumoured to have existed, a land of electric humming wires and sinking mud, a place like no other we have been, and one for which we could not prepare. Father is separated from me. I am left fatherless, he without a daughter. In entering this land, they hurl slurs at us like mud. Orders are punctuated by whips. No one recognizes the old language here. We shed layer after layer without question, the five of us shed our clothes, our shoes, most of our hair. My blonde pigtails are cut; thick chunks fall to the ground, tufts of hair remaining on my head. Our throats and lips still burning, we wade, stripped, in cold shallow water. In place of names, blue numbers brand our flesh, stretching out on our arms like shipping codes. My soothsayer finds me again. I listen. “You see now. They have taken everything away just as I told you they would. If you still have that coin, you better put it in your mouth.” This time I do as she says. It is warm and sticky from the sweat on my hand. The bulge in my left cheek escapes the attention 90

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of a female guard who inserts a sour candy in my mouth. My mouth is not searched since everyone has witnessed the guard placing a candy in it. The candy melts quickly while the coin remains tucked on the left side of my cheek. We are led to another room and we wait, feeling the bare patches on our heads, fingers gently circling the swelling skin around our tattoos. Our self-examination is interrupted by the arrival of a dark-haired, dark-eyed man who positions himself at the front of the room, with one shiny-booted foot planted on the floor and his other shiny-booted leg bent at the knee on a chair. He wears delicate white gloves. He is posing for us without the benefit of a camera or a portrait painter. Only his white-gloved finger bends and curves and points and we watch the white, unmerciful light. We do not yet know that his name is Dr. Josef Mengele. We do not yet know how much we will fear and hate him, but we are inclined to believe that this is the Kingdom of Hell. “Anstellen.”1 The order is shouted by an ss guard. Henya, Guta and I stand ahead of Sela. The white-gloved finger points to the left for the three of us, where older women and children deemed unfit for labour, assemble. We understand. The left spells death, as it did for those who were unable to work in the camp at Ostrowiec. The right will grant the others life that imitates death. Stillbirth came when we girls first entered the camp, in the tattooing of our skin and shedding of our hair and names, too. Sela moves forward in the judgement line. For her, the finger has swayed to the right. But Sela does not obey. She kneels before the emperor of death. “Please,” I hear her say in the old language, “I want to go with my sister.” He answers indifferently from his throne. “Then go.” She returns to the fold, triumphant. “No,” Henya, Guta and I plead, “you are young, there is still time for you,” but Sela insists she does not care to live without us. A few feet away, another child has chosen neither right nor left. A girl who could pass for my twin is scrambling, all feet and arms, clawing her way 91

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up to a two-by-four window. She is climbing through head first, scraping her bare legs and ankles as she knocks them against the wall. We are about the same height and weight, and like mine, her blonde hair is roughly shorn. A female guard hauls her back, tearing at what hair remains, all the while begging pardon for the infraction to Doctor Mengele, the emperor, who looks on appreciably. Another female ss guard intervenes, rushing in like a black ball of fury to separate those from the left side who have drifted to the right, and in her fervour to keep life and death apart, she mistakes me for the failed escapee. Swearing madly at my tainted Jewish blood, she raises a long, leather riding whip. The rod whistles high and sharp as she swings and cracks it in the air. There is a raw tearing where it lands, a gush of blood. My breath is cut short. I lurch forward, but my knees do not buckle. Lashes slice deep into my back. I cannot feel where my skin ends. I do not cry. My skin is for them, to toughen and tan like animal hide. To inscribe rows of numbers on parchment that they will burn. With my back a mesh of wounds, I edge towards the metal door, supported by my sister. There is nowhere else to walk but through the door, into the chamber; we pass quietly without being pushed and look up, curiously, at the ceiling, the showerheads and water pipes. No one speaks – our tongues are thick from thirst. The five of us close our knotted circle. My sister’s moist leg brushes against mine. I curve my arm around the slight indent of her waist; my fingers travel upwards, to where her bony ribs jut out. Seconds pass. We hold our breath. A sprinkle lands on the cheek opposite the one where I am hiding the coin. I cannot hold my breath any longer and inhale through my nose. There is no odour. A wet sensation sends a shiver of shock down my legs. More drops of what can only be water lightly tap on my head and trickle down my nose, my shoulders and arms. It is the same for the others. Our eyes gaze up to the ceiling. This faint shower 92

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cannot be death. It is something other than death. Mouths open to catch the water like drains. Because of the coin, I do not wet my lips. The others find their voices. We cry in relief to the ceiling, to God, to the murderers who have erred – I do not know which – and the metal door, meant to seal our asphyxiation, is opened. We make our way out of the death chamber when ragged clothes are thrown at us. My sister’s are very long. Mine are short and have oddly-fitted sleeves. Some of the women hide their baldness by wrapping their rags around their heads. We are also given rags for our feet as we will have no shoes, and in these rags we are led to the barracks. It is a dark dusty cave, this barrack, with three-tiered bunks made of boards. At the edge of each board, short misshapen figures sit. We stand at the entrance to the cave, hesitant to enter. Sallow faces stare back at us; we look again for we can no longer trust our eyes. They are twins; each pair is sitting on the wooden bunk beds, drinking milk and eating cookies. They resemble children, like us, but they are unlike any children we have ever seen. They stare at us with sad, monolithic eyes. We do not know how we should greet one another, or how we appear to them. We have lost our tongues, and for that matter, our need to be heard. An order is shouted: “Remove yourselves – this is no social visit.” We shuffle out, ten children in all, including our group and my look-alike, and are transferred to Block 32, which is populated with women who have only that day come from labour camps. My soothsayer has been moved to another barrack. I do not need her to tell me that we have survived our first selection in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Camp b, we are imprisoned with children aged seven to twelve, under the supervision of Edith, a Slovakian Blockalteste,2 whom we learn was among the first groups of Jews to have arrived. She emerges from her room at the right side of the barrack, 93

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near the entrance, just as we are being counted in, and after seeing us, pronounces, “Kiin-der,”3 as if she has forgotten the word and is reclaiming it. She has kept her brown hair short and cropped close to her forehead, a privilege extended to the Blockalteste. Her skin is dotted sparsely with freckles. I take pleasure in seeing them. Her face is oval; a slight disfigurement, a scar, veers imperfectly like a tiny diagonal slash across her chin. She protects us from the start, serving us first from the watery tubs of soup, ladling up the bits of turnip, grouping us together on the bunk beds strewn with straw where we fight the lice in a broken, fitful sleep. I continue to hide the coin in my mouth during the day, slipping it between my lice-infested rags through the night. This causes little suspicion, as I am not required to speak in Birkenau unless it is demanded of me, and when I do it is never in words, but grunts, murmurs, cowering vowels. Sounds only I can decipher. Whistles blow in the field. I rise and gulp down the seedy, hot ersatz liquid, my body alert to the savage call. “Verfluchte Juden.”4 I freeze at attention. “Marshieren.”5 I exert force on the balls of my feet and lift my knees. “Lauf.”6 I pound the muck with the heels of my feet. “Alles aufstehen.”7 I stand at the interminable zahlappell.8 I stand, careful that my toes do not stick too far out while the numbers are counted. Those who have died the night before are speedily set outside in rows at the front of the survivors. Whistles blow. The roll call begins again. In Birkenau, the sky and earth bear no resemblance to the sky and earth. Pillars of smoke rise from the chimneys, darkening 94

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the skies in molten grey. Ashes fly and whirl in the air like fleeting feathers. Sela warns against looking at the chimneys. “They are terrible, Lodzia. The air is so sweet. Don’t look. Don’t breathe deeply.” But I do. Music from the orchestra plays as the workers leave and reenter the camp. Music plays for the new arrivals who tumble off the trains and blink at the light – either the sunlight or the searchlights. I recognize the sound of violins from the past, but they have a shrill sound here, as if the strings will break. There is an accordion, too, puffing its way in and out, music for a blind man beggar with a tin cup, and always, a steady rolling drum. “Don’t listen,” Basia says. “Don’t. They want us to. That’s why we mustn’t.” But I do. I watch late in the afternoon through the barbed wire for Father, whom I have found again, to march back from work detail. His head shaven, his eyes downcast, he walks the sleeper’s walk, the walk of the chained and the enslaved. The drum beat is predictable. Links zwei, drei, vier.9 When he is able, when it is safe, Father snatches a glimpse of me. His eyes tear. We are haftlinge,10 Father and I, and after a short time, we will become musselmen.11 I stand at the wires because he is the only Father I will ever love. We do not remain idle. In a few short weeks, Basia proves she has the nerve to steal. She seizes her first prize, a loaf of bread, off a truck while the German driver is snoozing. “You are the brave one,” Sela congratulates her in the barrack. “I wouldn’t say that I am,” Basia shrugs. “You could have gotten fifty lashes, at least, for stealing a slice.” “I don’t want to starve. That’s all.” Basia shares her bread with the other prisoners in the barrack. One day, Basia calls Sela and me over with a smaller trophy. 95

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“Look. Just for us this time.” In her hand are two dry, shrunken potatoes. She has learned how to time this dangerous act, to drop the potatoes from the waistline down and tie her bounty to the bottom of her pants with string. We have no knife, only a red enamel dish folded inside our rags, which we carry wherever we go with a piece of string we use as a belt. “Let’s leave some for Henya and Guta,” Sela suggests. Basia asks how we will get them to the Krankenblock.12 Henya and Guta contracted measles within days of our arrival and were removed from the barrack and taken to the infirmary. We are afraid they will not return. My look-alike, Sonya, has seen the potatoes and is eyeing Basia and Sela enviously from the top tier of the bunk bed. “They will be wasted there.” “Why?” Basia challenges her. “Tomorrow the Krankenblock will be liquidated,” Sonya reports matter-of-factly. “How do you know this?” Basia edges toward the bed bunk. “One of the women in another block told me at the appel.” We stand next to Basia who asks on our behalf, “Who is she, this woman?” Sonya who is resting on her elbows, sits up. Without the promise of a piece of the potato, she relays everything. “She has a cousin who stayed there and came out alive and it was the cousin who saw and heard. All they give the patients are aspirin or charcoal-colored pills. It is a waiting room for the gas. If the sick do not recover quickly, they are sent to the crematorium. Or the doctors stick you with some needle in your heart and you die. Eins, zwei, drei, vernichtung.”13 Sonya’s eyes blaze with the importance of her words. “What do you think Basia?” Sela asks. She and Sela go to Edith to report what Sonya has heard. I follow behind. Edith speaks Czech so they use what Polish words they think she will understand and mix them with what 96

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Czech they have learned. Their mouths twist in a broken marriage of two tongues. “Tomorrow – selection. Henya and Guta – they are there.” Edith affirms in a telegraphic message that the woman who supervises the infirmary is Slovakian and that she will find a way to reach her if they can trade something for the lives of the two girls. Edith disappears into the back and returns with a dark woolen blanket. “Something like this.” I remember the coin and extract my buried treasure like a loose gold tooth. I speak for the first time. “My Father gave this to me to save myself.” The sound of my voice has startled Edith. I am not a mute, after all. She rests her eyes on the coin. The gold engraved head appears dull, the coin’s surface is slick from saliva, but it is a coin, regardless. “That may do.” She smiles and receives the coin with a tenderness that catches my breath. In the dark that night, Edith, Sela and I walk to the Krankenblock together. Edith reasons that our coming along might sway the guard’s heart. A band of hot light is thrown on our path from a watchtower. We shirk from it. In the half-dark, we notice a small heap at the foot of an electric fence. A man has thrown himself against the wire and has been left for the pick-up during the early morning roll call. “Say nothing.” Edith squeezes our hands as we approach the low-lying building. The woman guard appears from out of the mud-soaked entrance, her face rough as rock, her body hidden in shadows. “What are they doing here?” she points at us accusingly. Edith explains in a hushed voice that we are family, and then without delay, extends the woolen blanket to the guard. The guard accepts the blanket but does not budge. It is an insufficient exchange. Her voice is haughty. “A blanket. For this, two numbers on my list will vanish?” The woman guard waits as if she suspects something more valuable is about to be handed to her. Edith pulls out the coin from under her 97

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shirt and places it in the guard’s hand. The guard holds it up between her fingers, twirls it, and smiles slyly. “Well, you’re a fellow Czech, aren’t you? I’m not without patriotic feelings.” Minutes after they go into the Krankenblock, Edith returns, carrying Henya in her arms. Guta walks beside her. My two cousins are not yet recovered; their skin is pasty, but they are overjoyed we have come. We hurry back to our barrack. If only Father could see what the coin brought. On the following day, all the patients in the Krankenblock are sent to the gas just as Sonya predicted. During the long hours at the appel, the women who ordinarily buffer us from the cane beaters are especially careful to shield Henya and Guta from the wrath of their sticks. We scrub the earth with our hands more furiously, we dig deeper to bury the souls of the patients at the Krankenblock, and then gather stones to mount plaques over the dead because there is no real cemetery in Birkenau. That night, I begin to invent the story of the coin as Henya, Guta and I lie together like spoons. I do not know what prompts me except that I can honour Father in the telling. The woman on my left is rocking her body and mumbling, her eyes shut, her bowl held close to her heart. “Once I had a coin.” “We remember that coin,” Henya and Guta chime. “This coin,” I continue, “was given to me by my father.” “Our father and mother are dead.” I am silenced by their truth and mine. “That coin – your coin,” Henya’s curiosity has been piqued, “were you able to sneak it past the guards and their dogs?” “Yes.” “And the electric fences?” “Yes.” “And the chimneys with the dark smoke?” Henya rubs her hands together with each reply. “Yes, those too. When we first came, I hid it in my hand and 98

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my mouth. On the platform. In the shower. All along, I hid it.” “It was some kind of magical coin.” Henya’s eyes widen. “In a way.” “Where is it now?” asks Guta shrewdly. Little was explained to them about how they were released from the Krankenblock. “It was last in the hands of the guard who released you.” “You gave it away?” “Yes.” “What will she do with it?” Guta cocks her head. “I don’t know. Buy something with it. Would you like to hear where the coin came from?” “You got it on the train,” Henya’s voice grows sleepy. “I mean a time before that.” “Can we hear it in small pieces tomorrow night and the night after that? The way we eat our bread?” Henya asks. “We won’t hear it all at once,” adds Guta. I watch over my cousins as they fall asleep. They have accepted this gift I can provide. It will feed our imaginations if it cannot satisfy our empty bellies. I will fashion the story in stages with what energy I have. The following day at the appel, I imagine how the coin came into the black market of the ghetto, how it passed from merchant to buyer before that, and how it was originally minted in a country across the ocean. Henya and Guta will not believe that part when I tell them, that an ocean lies between freedom and the land of smoking chimneys and sinking mud.

Form a line. Chief of a block – a prisoner too. 3 Children. 4 Dirty Jews. 5 March. 6 Run. 1 2

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Everyone stand. Roll call, also referred to as “appel.” 9 Left, two, three, four. 10 Prisoners. 11 Skeletal looking prisoners, starved and near death. 12 Sick block, infirmary. 13 One, two, three, finished, exterminated. 7 8

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ll eyes converged on the long blue table positioned

at the centre of the hall. “Money must be laid out, items of warm clothing, pieces of jewelry.…” The ss officer read the list in an officious drone. Three hundred young men from the Polish town of Staszow, the most recent arrivals to Skarzysko-Kamienna, listened impassively. In the ghetto, the same announcements had been issued and reissued and they had complied each time, their belongings disappearing into boxes, the backs of trucks, the pockets of collaborators. The SS officer nodded to members of the factory security police, the Ukrainian Werkshutz,1 who were stationed at the door. It was time. Three prisoners from the line were seized at gunpoint and forced into the next room. Shots rang out. “Those three Jews tried to smuggle belongings,” the SS officer explained with an imperial lift of his chin. This was a camp and not their home, he reminded them, flicking a speck of dirt off his lapel. Things once precious to them in the past had no value now, he elaborated, scanning the crowd for hands that moved toward hidden places. Yitzchak, a boy of sixteen, who prized the jacket he was wearing, deftly cut its left lapel with his pocket knife. The amputation had its desired effect. An SS guard saw the jacket and grimaced. Yitzchak handed over the knife to him.

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Behind Yitzchak stood his cousin, Shaul, another native of Staszow, who had brought along some Polish money. “Give it to me,” Yitzchak whispered. Shaul hesitated. “Quickly.” Yitzchak stashed the bills in his boots. The ss guard who had grimaced at Yitzchak’s jacket but accepted his knife did not covet his boots. Later in the huts, sleeping quarters that held a hundred men, the cousins split the money to buy bread from the Polish supervisors at an exorbitant rate. The first cardinal rule, that all money was to be handed over, had been broken. At Skarzysko-Kamienna, Work Camp c, a man was guaranteed twelve hours of labour per day. Huts, emptied by eight in the morning, were routinely checked by the German ss and Ukrainian Werkshutz. Anyone found in the huts at that time was disposed of. During his third week at the camp, Yitzchak himself was selected to assist in the burying and disinfecting of some fifty to sixty boys from his hometown who had reneged on their work duties that day. On demand by the SS, the boys sat stripped around the edge of the trench Yitzchak had helped to dig. The simplest most laconic of reflexes was all that was required of the machine-gun-toting ss. Afterwards, Yitzchak and Shaul, who worked opposite shifts, conspired to cover for one another if ill. When Yitzchak predictably contracted typhus, Shaul carried his cousin into his hut and hid him till his own shift began. This continued for eight days until the fever broke. Yitzchak returned the favour when Shaul lay delirious. Neither was found because neither was in his designated hut when he shouldn’t have been, but was rather in another emptied hut where no one bothered to look. Rule Number two, on the matter of absenteeism, they disobeyed regularly. 102

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Yitzchak’s skills became more unexceptional as time went on. The money he had stashed away was all used up, leaving him no supplement for the thin slice of bread designated for a Jewish prisoner’s dinner. Harsh working conditions at the camp meant that a prisoner’s life span did not exceed three months. Yitzchak’s current job required him to unload artillery-filled shells weighing sixty to seventy pounds off trucks, stack them onto wagons, and push them into the factory on rails. To add to his trouble, winter had brought its first frost, impeding the transport of armaments. On one cold day, although he had managed to load the troytl-filled shells2 onto one of the wagons, he was unable to turn the wagon on the frozen rails. All the straining of his weakened muscles bore no effect; the wagon would not budge. A large-necked Ukrainian guard dressed in a green uniform too tight for his build came at Yitzchak wielding a rifle. The last thing Yitzchak remembered before he collapsed was the butt of the rifle striking his head. The next thing Yitzchak knew he was lying by the fence, about ten feet away from where he had been standing when the wheels of the wagon jammed. Rule Number three dictated that prisoners found next to the fence, symbol of the way out, would be shot. It was the job of the Ukrainian guards, German-released convicts, to ensure these prisoners did not escape. It was not their responsibility to supervise work, a responsibility relegated to the Polish supervisors, who beat their workers for violations. The Ukrainian, anxious that he had overstepped his position in the camp, had sought to stage Yitzchak’s escape by pulling his unconscious body to the fence. Once awakened, and sensing it could cause him no greater harm than he presently found himself in, Yitzchak began to scream. A German meister3 from hasag,4 the company that owned the camp, had arrived that day to inspect the picric acid underwater mines, part of the filling plant attached to Work Camp c. Hearing Yitzchak’s screams, he hurried toward the security guard. This German did not wear the hardened stare 103

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of the camp guards and in his manner more closely resembled a civilian work official. “Why do you want to shoot him?” the meister asked judiciously. The Ukrainian stood at attention, his mouth agape. Yitzchak speculated that he neither spoke nor understood German or was possibly apprehensive about practicing the little he knew on a person of higher rank. The German meister, growing impatient with the guard’s perplexed expression, left the two men to their respective jobs. Yitzchak was given a brief respite. Regardless of his own efforts, though, and the chance civility of superiors, Yitzchak’s health deteriorated. Starvation and disease plagued the boys from Staszow, whose numbers grew smaller. On a bright winter morning at the start of 1943, Yitzchak at last landed a position that better suited his weakened state. An announcement was made that twelve volunteers were needed to handle highly explosive material. It was common knowledge in the camp that no trace of the bodies of the Polish paid labourers who had previously held that job had ever been found. Of the two cousins, only Yitzchak volunteered, reasoning that death was everywhere, one way or another, and that the death the Polish workers suffered could not have been one of prolonged agony. The eleven men he joined were assigned to work in a small shack in the forest, separated from all the other labourers. The meister in charge, Weisleder, under whose supervision they were to work, was considered to be a specialist in anti-aircraft ammunition. But all was not well, Yitzchak was warned by the Poles, as Weisleder was a cruel beast who was sure to kill them within the week. He could be seen in the camp walking in wide strides, accompanied by a German Shepherd and an ever-present leather whip that he clenched in his left hand. Prepared for the worst, Yitzchak was greeted with a surprise on his first day, for Weisleder entered the shack and looked at the men with a spark of sympathy in his eyes. The Polish supervisor, ordinarily next in-command, 104

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stood beside Weisleder in a contradictory pose; on his face, the men read an offended expression, yet his stance remained compliant at all times. Weisleder’s orders were indirectly delivered. He spoke German to the Polish supervisor who then reinterpreted the instructions to the slave labourers in their native language. “The meister says you will produce 1,600 pieces a day.” The Polish translator enunciated “the meister says,” in a bitter drawl, further elongating the number “1,600.” Evidently, the men now understood, he took no credit for or pleasure in this change in protocol after his own countrymen had died producing the tens of thousands of pieces a day demanded by Weisleder. It took no longer than an hour for the twelve Jewish labourers to fill the quota. The white powder, mercifully odorless, was placed into a cylinder and covered up with a thick iron plate. This plate served as the only protective layer between the men and the powder. Working on a platform, they moved the cylinder out of the hut to the press machines. Back at the hut, they turned on a switch that set the press machine working. The press hardened the powder into blocks half the length and relative thickness of an ordinary candle. Once the pressing was completed, they removed the transformed blocks of powder from the cylinder. Weisleder hung a sign on the door that read: “Entrance is forbidden. Danger.” In private, once the work was done, the twelve workers commented incredulously on Weisleder’s response to them, on his consideration of their welfare. “He seems to feel sorry for us.” They looked at one another circumspectly. “I saw the same thing in his eyes as you.” “Can it be true?” “Who is he?” They encircled one another to uncover the mystery. “A decent sort.” “He says nothing to us.” 105

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“Nothing.” A young, newer prisoner breached the circle, cutting off their speculation with the straightforward question no one had asked: “Why would he protect us and not the Poles?” “Who can say?” Voices answered with a rippling effect. For the duration of each workday, the men sat idly by. Weisleder entered the shack, his dog faithfully at his side, for no purpose other than to stare at them with a gaze that seemed to say, this is not the best of situations, but I have tried to make things better. Taking additional steps to attend to their needs, Weisleder assembled a group of Polish labourers in the shack one morning with an order he made public to the twelve Jews. The group’s interpreter, pale and diminished, stepped up to the task, paying critical attention to Weisleder’s instructions. “Cans of soup are to be delivered.” The interpreter scowled as he repeated the words. The Poles nudged one another, murmuring in plain displeasure. “delivered,” Weisleder raised his voice, “from the Polish kitchen. Not the sweet watery soup, but the soup with carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips.” Weisleder listed the ingredients in alphabetical order as if such a demonstration ensured all ingredients would be included. The interpreter glanced skeptically at the Jews, pursed his lips, and translated the information. One of the labourers answered, “What is this? Their last supper?” That afternoon, tin cans of hot soup were delivered, their steam rising in an aromatic mist that brought tears to the prisoners’ eyes. The men gulped their soup down, their hands shaking so they spilled some of the precious broth. Yitzchak smacked his lips and curved his tongue around his mouth to savour each drop. Sensing Wiesleder’s eyes on him, Yitzchak froze, holding his bowl in mid-air. He felt shame. Weisleder nodded for Yitzchak to continue. Thankful, Yitzchak plunged his face down into his bowl with the gratitude of a starved dog. 106

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And so Yitzchak continued, month after month, moment by moment until one day Weisleder spoke to the twelve men for the first and last time. The camp was to be liquidated. While approximately forty percent of the prisoners were being shot, he ushered the twelve into an ammunition factory, benignly sinister now without its teeming, desperate labourers. There on the oil-stained floors, Weisleder slept with his disciples and brought them food. Before they were separated, he shook hands with each man, swinging his arms forward and back, replicating the words: “This is all I can do for you.” The twelve stood in a ceremonial line. For their part, he appeared to be a solitary figure since they had never before seen him without his ally, his German Shepherd. When Weisleder approached Yitzchak, he half-smiled and whispered an extended line. “That was all I could do for you then, and this is all now.” Yitzchak remembered the thick vegetable broth he had eaten and inhaled deeply. Here, in the empty space around Weisleder and the twelve men, the air was acrid. Outside the factory, bullets whistled. Weisleder and the men parted forever. When the twelve men banded together, they discussed again how strange Weisleder was, how he had uttered so few words to them throughout their time in the camp, and yet how he had saved them. “This is all I can do for you, he said.” “He did plenty.” The men nodded in consensus. “More than anyone else.” “It was good what he did.” “Righteous.” Voices stilled at the solemnity of the moment when Yitzchak added, his head bent, “We were lucky, that’s for sure.” The men summoned the words “luck” and “for sure” as praise for their redeemer. It was at that same time that Shaul and Yitzchak were separated. 107

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Alone now, Yitzchak was moved from site to site, sometimes digging anti-tank ditches, sometimes fixing tanks. He had no more talent or dexterity for these jobs, often sitting for a long period in a single tank, screwing and unscrewing the parts, mishandling the tools that were bigger than his hands, smearing oil on his face so that it would appear to the Germans that he was working when he was not. Time and time again, he was not punished for his ineptitude. When he was sent to Buchenwald, his pattern of ineffectual labour continued without interruption. Along with two hundred Jewish men, chosen because they cut more reasonable figures than most of the gravely sick and physically reduced prisoners, Yitzchak was ordered to dig up the German dead and rescue any wounded German civilians after a surrounding area was bombed. For months, from winter to spring, the two hundred men scaled bombed houses and buildings in and around the city of Weimar, losing themselves in piles of wreckage as they foraged for food (an act which was punishable by death). Unable to monitor their actions over the cavernous ruins, the ss recklessly left the two hundred to their own devices. As a result of this oversight, few if any Germans, dead or alive, were ever recovered by this team. The prisoners were, as they called themselves, the dead walking among the dead. Without the strength, the expertise or the inclination to risk their lives moving debris or corpses, they spent their energy rummaging for food. By virtue of the fraction of nourishment ingested, Yitzchak was chosen for the final job he was to undertake on behalf of the ss. Early in spring, near war’s end, Yitzchak was selected to be one of the hundred wagon pushers on the procession by foot of ten thousand Jewish prisoners from Buchenwald to oblivion. The lightweight wagons, filled with private clothing of the ss, were maneuvered by two prisoners, one pulling from the front and one pushing from the back. Yitzchak was, in effect, no more than a luggage carrier. The German ss, older, 108

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unappreciated members of the elite force, patrolled the thousands who walked behind the wagons with a brutality equal to their younger counterparts. As the march continued for twelve days, with no food or water given to the prisoners, the ss passed the time machine-gunning those who could not keep up, while a select group of prisoners equipped with shovels covered the growing numbers of bodies with sod along the way. The wagon pushers enjoyed two distinct advantages over their fellow prisoners. The wagons provided them with a warm cover to sleep under at night, and since they headed the march and were in front of the ss, they were able to run to the ditches where food lay waiting, where potatoes, pieces of cake, packed sandwiches had been left by German civilians, they guessed, or by an organization sent to aid them from heaven. When asked, so many years later, what he remembered about the day of liberation, Yitzchak described the empty wagon he continued to push after the ss had fled, disguised in civilian clothing. Did he attempt to stop his persecutors, American soldiers asked in a broken chain of translators, approaching Yitzchak with caution from their trucks. To this he answered guiltlessly and without guile in the negative. He was too weak, he admitted with a certain pride in his having retained a healthy quantity of common sense at such a time. Avid listeners of his story were often left disappointed. They wished to be educated as to the heroic means of sidestepping the reign of death, but Yitzchak laid no claim of bravery for posterity, repeating what he had said all along. “There was nothing extraordinary about me. And what’s more,” he declared, his eyes a playful and clear strain of blue, “I did not do my jobs very well, and it gives me some satisfaction to say that is what saved me.”

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Armed units supervised by German ss. Explosive material (tnt). 3 Supervisor, specialist, head 4 Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellshaft, company based in Leipzig. 1 2

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Beneath the earth A girl lay hidden In a cold damp grave A tomb for a living person Everyone knows That a tomb cannot house a living person But the girl believed She was made of earth So she returned To its belated womb

“S

abi, yuri,” I called up to the two wolf dogs. They made

no sound. If the Germans were there, the dogs would have barked three times as a signal. They were trained from the day I arrived to warn the family this way. I lay underground on the mattress my Priest set for me, wrapped against the cold in his mother’s fur coat, straining hard to hear the tapping of their paws. “Sabi, Yuri,” I called again faintly, my voice, weakening. I could stay hidden for no more than an hour at one time. With the help of the dogs, my Priest had torn open the parquet floor and dug up the earth below it. Sabi and Yuri’s paws worked furiously: digging, scooping deep into the soil, flinging debris into the air. When they were done, my Priest filled his pockets heavy with the earth and deposited the evi-

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dence behind the house. At the slightest suspicion of danger, I was instructed to jump in and close the top of the floor he had carved out with a sword. A dining table draped in a beige linen tablecloth with white embroidered flowers on the hem was positioned directly over my hiding place. The family lived in the one-floor brown house I came upon that day after my escape from the Riga Ghetto. His pockets are full With freshly dug earth And I wear a mink coat Of the deepest rich fur I lifted the tile, moved it aside, and with my palms pressed against the floor’s surface, I pushed myself up. The coat was bulky and hampered me. I was lightheaded and shivering when I reached the floor, my arms and legs wobbling this way and that. The two dogs stood like spectators in the centre of the room. I buried my face in the collar of fur around their necks. Their close-set eyes, golden brown in colour, answered: “You are with us now and we know you.” I had been wrong to have ever mistrusted them. They hid nothing from me. How I envied their long bodies and gangly legs. If I had not been born a Jewish girl but a wolf dog like them, I could have walked out of the house on all fours and roamed the woods. I could have sniffed the earth and eaten whatever grew wildly. But I was not born a wolf dog and I could not escape. “Yuri, Sabi, where has the Gestapo taken my Priest and his mother?” The dogs moved in a drunken dance. “It is better that you do not understand. I am afraid to stand or sit. Tell me, where should I put myself?” When Sabi and Yuri first sounded their warning that morning, and the order: “Open up!” shook the walls, I hurried underground, landing no further than a few feet away from the 112

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Gestapo’s heels. The table above me rattled. “Earth be good to me,” I prayed, “and hide my scent.” I heard no scratching over my head. God was with me. The Gestapo had not brought along their hounds. “We want Olga k,” the Gestapo demanded, “sister and daughter to the Family k. The porcelain painter.” “She does not live with us and hasn’t for some time,” my Priest answered in as sharp a voice as I ever heard him use. “Your sister, Olga k, aided two Russian prisoners of war to escape.” An officer’s boots stamped across the floor. “It is not our Olga that you speak of.” “There is no other. We have in our headquarters the false documents the prisoners carried as well as the priests’ clothes they wore.” “Bolshevik piety,” another one of the Gestapo officers sneered. “It is not our Olga,” my Priest’s mother repeated. “She is not here.” I imagined her tucking hairs at the base of her neck under her green wool scarf and tying its tails in a tighter knot under her chin. When she was worried, she did this, as if the wind overtook her. “The prisoners were headed for Ludza when we intercepted them.” The officer who had sneered, explained with meticulous care. I could not mistake a word. “We know nothing of routes to Ludza,” my Priest declared. “What are these?” This officer was in charge of following the Russians’ trail. There was a moment of silence; I couldn’t gauge where the officer was standing until my Priest’s mother came to my defense. “The slippers are mine.” His coat, the official long black coat of the Gestapo, must have skimmed the bed I slept on the night before. “The bed is warm. It has recently been slept in.” He was touching the sheets… “It was only the dogs. Our two dogs. They sleep on the bed from time to time.” A chair creaked. The Priest’s mother rose. 113

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Fingers snapped and the order came: “Come with us.” So the Priest’s mother protected me. And Yuri and Sabi helped save me though they could not have known it. Their hair was silver as the moon, tipped black as the night. I put out my hand. They sniffed it and swiped the air playfully with their paws. I talked to the dogs as I would confide in a human, as I might talk to God. If I were to die that day, if the German SS or the Latvian police, the Arajs Kommando, were to break down the door, I did not want to keep the actions of my Priest secret and bury them with me in my permanent grave. I sat on the floor with his mother’s coat around me and I told them. I told them for the sake of my Priest. The dogs sat up and it was as if their ears pricked open to listen. My story, the story of how God protected me, was a short one. I had not yet lived that long. Down neatly planted rows Grow Trees laden with apples Sweet cinnamon red and Green tart apples Voices in the synagogue Are singing of apples This is our ware, God This is our ware I am descended from a long line of Orthodox Jews. Grandfather was a Rabbi, and uncle was a Chazan, a singer in the synagogues. They lived by the books of Moses. Father was the rebel. He liked to say that he was not a scholar like his father and brother, but a farmer who reaped the fruits of God’s earth. Father was devout in his own way. He loved the land and thanked God for providing it. We had apple gardens and owned a store where we sold the apples we grew. We had a 114

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fine life. I had a sister five years older, Alla, whose advice I sometimes followed. You could hear any number of languages spoken in our house. “The whole world comes through our doors,” mother boasted. We mostly spoke the language of our country, Latvian, which I was first taught in school, then added to that Russian, which we were forced to learn in its place. I also read and wrote in Yiddish and picked up a little German too. Father had been a soldier in the First World War and had recounted how fairly the Germans had treated him as a prisoner of war in the hospital. It was Father who taught us German. “How can you borrow knowledge from a culture whose language you do not speak?” Father posed questions like that to Alla and me. We recited the poetry of Johann Goethe. Father asked and we answered about love, about losing and finding it. Woher sind wir geboren? Aus Lieb. Wie wären wir verloren? Ohn Lieb. Was hilft uns überwinden? Die Lieb. Kann man auch Liebe finden? Durch Lieb.1 And this our favourite verse, we loved to chant. Didn’t we own an orchard and didn’t we pick fruit, sweet and ripe, off the trees? Siehst du die Pomeranze? Noch hängt sie an dem Baume; …Du reife Pomeranze, …Du süße Pomeranze…2 When Soviet forces occupied Latvia in 1939, my father would 115

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not escape into Russia. “Will they protect us,” he asked, “after they confiscate property? We will wait for the Germans. The German soldier will treat us humanely.” None of us argued. Father’s word was law, and we would only disappoint him with our witless answers. Some two years later, in the beginning of July, when the German soldiers drove into Riga with their motorcycles, our Latvian neighbours waved red and white flags at their liberators. This day marked the end of Communist rule. Only Mother warned us. “This is the end of the Jews.” And that is what came to be. Mother didn’t need to borrow knowledge. Knowledge lived inside her. The ghetto Is a kingdom Of lice They alone rule the ghetto For the lice eat us While we eat crumbs of bread The Germans transferred us to the ghetto, and there we shared the cellar floors with lice. My hands became my weapons. I squeezed the life out of the lice between my thumbs. The ss searched us for candles, soap or bread. They had no use for lice. You could walk from one end of the ghetto to the other in no time at all. From Lachplesha Street along Ludzas Street, up to the old Jewish cemetery, tens of thousands of our people lived. Mother and I waited in endless lines for bread when brownshirters with swastikas on their foreheads took the whips to us. I could not remember how Father ate before the ghetto, for once we were inside, he nibbled at his scrap of bread to leave more for his family. He ate like the bird that once ate out of my hands in the apple garden. Alla and I had jobs in a shoe factory. I worked with the other children in the ghetto. We were all hungry. We smeared shoe polish 116

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all over the shoes, inside and out. Our fingers never washed clean. We were unprofitable workers for the Third Reich. Snow is not the colour of white It does not fall from the heavenly clouds I have seen snow turn blood brown That is its eternal colour One morning in 1941, it was late in November, on the twenty-ninth, because that is a number I can’t forget, Father instructed us to sew two pillows together and make a sack. In it we packed pieces of jewelry and gold we had buried in tin cans. Father hoped we could later trade these items for bread. Snow fell heavily. We’d slept little the previous night. Shooting had begun while it was still dark. Through the window of the cellar, we saw how the snow-covered street had turned the colour of brown. Wild men yelled in the two languages I feared the most. “Schnell. Schnell.”3 “Atrak, Atrak.”4 The glass dampened sound, as did the snow, but we heard. Whips went cracking. Bags littered the way. The young and the elderly who fell behind the pace demanded by the gunmen lay on the snow and icy cobblestones. Some were stamped on. They broke into our home. We were among the last to be taken with a whip. I ran with my father, mother, and sister on black streets of ice, down hilly Liksnas Street near the old Jewish cemetery. One by one, we passed through a narrow path, Zhidu alley, until we joined together on the open Moscow Boulevard. The sun had just come up. The workday began. Streetcars were in motion and pedestrians walked hurriedly by. Our column ran past the citizens on the wide boulevard, in the direction of the railroad Station Shkirotava. To the right was the Rumbuli railroad station and at that point, the front of the column disappeared into the forest. It was the longest line of people I had ever seen. 117

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It costs little to kill But there’s a profit to be made Said the greedy death dealers Of their newly found trade We had not been taken to Salspils, the camp, as the Jews assumed in the ghetto. Facing us in the forest was a large, open, wooden box, a chest overflowing with silver rings, gold wedding bands, watches, and earrings. Among the glitter were dentures, sets of teeth wired to flesh-coloured gums, stolen from the mouths of those ahead in the line. They were out of place in the box, not floating in a glass of water like Grandfather’s. There were man-made mountains in the forest. Shoe mountains of heels, laces and buckles, and separate mountains for women’s private clothes, for brassieres and girdles that stood up as if on hind legs. Mothers helped their dawdling children undress, some against their will. The mothers stripped bare and the children stripped bare while the mountains grew richer. I was wearing my best winter coat with a mink collar, a coat I had loved and saved, and I began to take it off. I slipped off the right sleeve and then the left and threw it in the direction of the pile. It skid along the side of the women’s mountain before it stopped, both sleeves wide open. A troop of men, the Shutzstaffel and Latvian Einsaztkommandos,5 raised their guns like black bats over the heads of the women. The women bowed over the edge of the grave, children at their sides, the tiny heads of their infants buried in their breasts. The trench was waiting, its sand dug out. I heard the Germans scream, “Twenty Reichsmark per Jewish head.” Bullets spat into the air. The smoke blew out of the guns, and the women’s heads snapped backward or forward, and they fell into the ditch, their infants wrapped around them. The children who were standing rolled in after, their bodies flipping over. I lowered my eyes and tugged at the hem of my shirt. A 118

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policeman pointed at me and yelled: “Off. Clothing off.” I covered my ears with my hands. We moved closer. The killers’ faces were spattered and smeared in bloody masks. Women wailed. I counted five rows – four, undressing – pitching my shirt into a new mountain that grew higher and higher. I counted three rows – our bodies huddled together as the distance grew short. I was steps away when Mother wrenched my arm. Mother first heard the sound of the horses. She grabbed hold of my sister and me and snatched us away from the robbery mountains and the hungry, bottomless pit, and we ran with her toward men saddled on horses and dressed in German uniforms. She looked up at them, we were half-dressed and our hair flew electric and she shrieked in German. “We can sew, my little one can sew, and my bigger one can sew.” The soldiers steadied their horses and asked Mother to repeat her words. Mother screamed, “Are you looking for seamstresses in the ghetto?” in a mix of German and Latvian. They nodded yes at the Latvian word for seamstresses and led us from the killing place. Father remained behind with a group of men and was shot within minutes. Nothing else is possible. Nothing else. One late November day A misled sun spilled light On pale and ashen skin Made gold and boldly bright We walked through the Aryan streets of Riga in ranks of five with other Jewish women seamstresses from the ghetto, and I could not say if it was God who had saved us then. Why had he chosen me? I did not think I had been so good, a true believer. I was not worthier than others to live, worthier than Father to live. Men on horses patrolled us to the Terminicietmus, the Termina prison. Women had been gathered there, Latvian political 119

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prisoners, and gypsies. From them, we learned that the men on horses were disguised Russian partisans and not Germans at all. The Jewish women were separated from the others, put out in the open, on the roof with the sky for a ceiling. It was the end of November, as I recall, and usually that month brought rain and snow. But in the days that followed, a miracle happened and the sun shone. The sun warmed us. Alla’s cheeks turned pink. Mine too. No army of men could hide the sun behind the clouds. A baby girl was born on that roof. I saw the cord being cut and the blood spill from the legs of the woman. Two Latvian female guards found a shirt for the mother to use as a blanket. The mother fed her child with her dried-up breasts. The baby sucked at nothing and cried. We named the baby Termina after her birthplace. In the ghetto The dancer is saved When shame becomes pleasure And pleasure is shame When we were returned to the ghetto, I lived in a room with my mother, sister, fifteen other women, and the rats. Rumours of a second liquidation spread. “We wait for death, childless as we are,” the women moaned, “while your young ones are with you.” Mother drew Alla and me near her. She answered, “Daughters are a mixed blessing in the ghetto.” Mother covered my body with her hands. Before the war, I had liked to dance and sing. I was proud I had grown up faster than other girls my age. Now the ss came in at night pretending to look for a piece of hidden soap. If found, the person was shot. In the dark, they turned their attention to the girls. One night, after midnight, we heard them shout, “Open up.” We dressed quickly and filed at attention. I stood at the end of the line. The commandant, Danskopf, and his men stormed 120

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in, but it was Danskopf himself who inspected us. His eyes were slimy like herring in a bucket. His eyes narrowed in on me. In the voice of a field commander, he ordered, “Take off all your clothes. Everything.” I looked at Mother to be sure I understood. In Latvian, she said, “Do what he asks. Do it.” I took off my dress and saw from the corner of my eye that Danskopf’s lips curved. I did not rush. His pleasure lengthened the time I had to live. I was naked when Danskopf motioned to an iron stove, our source of heat when we could collect wood. On this stove, too, we boiled our tea. There was a chair next to the stove. In German, Danskopf directed, “Take the chair and stand on it. Then climb onto the stove.” I turned to Mother, and she repeated his instructions in Latvian, insisting I obey. I climbed on to the chair, up to the stove, and stood at a halt. “Now jump back down onto the chair,” Danskopf demanded. Bending my knees, I jumped, landing on the soles of my feet. I climbed up a second time, springing fast as a cat. Ten times or more I did this. Climbing and flying weightless through the air, landing on my feet each time. I looked at no one. I was on the stove and could have made the leap to the chair with my eyes closed, when Danskopf snapped his fingers for me to stop. He ordered his soldiers to leave. Turning his back, he marched out of the room. My body trembled like a bottle you shake in the air. Mother covered me with my clothes. He could have violated me. I understood that. It was a crime a man could commit against a girl. He could have, but he didn’t. I didn’t yet believe that God was with me in those moments. But what other power could have stopped him? I paused there in my telling, my face flushed. I had not been aware of my movements, but I had performed a pantomime as I recounted that day. I then folded my hands on my lap and remained sitting on the floor across from the dogs. Their eyes had followed me, serene, bewildered, until I asked them how and why I had been spared as a girl. At that point, they dropped their sitting, watchful gaze and positions. As I started 121

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the next chapter, when we were all first brought together, they stretched out across the floor. I wished with all my might To appear nameless Without a past To be unrecognizable To walk with invisible feet On a road no one could follow A handful of days before the second killing, I knew I would escape the ghetto. Mother and Alla said they had come as far as they could. I did not wait for Mother or my sister to discourage me and disappeared without their knowing where I went. Five in the morning, I dressed in men’s clothing and joined one of the groups of male slave labourers on their way to work, at the double gate, the double-wired fence. It was dark, and the light beaming from the projector caught those who tried to run. The light could pinpoint a needle on the street. Somehow, I was not detected. I wore a hat and a man’s pants and oversized jacket. With all the men surrounding me, I was able to walk past the projector and the patrol through a door and a gate. Even as the guards were watching, I escaped out of the ghetto onto the street unnoticed. The next thing I had to consider was how to walk. The Jews were allowed to walk only in the middle of the street like horses, so I walked along the curb, stepping onto the sidewalk, stepping back on the road. Sweating, I tore off the Star of David from the front of my jacket. No one stopped me or thought twice of a small face and body in a man’s hat and pants. I walked past the railroad tracks, afraid someone from the city would recognize me. Deep into the woods I continued with no route or plan. Somehow I reached the doorway of the little brown house with its pile of wooden logs at the front. I knocked on the door. I do not know what power led me there. 122

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Two dogs barked. Only Germans have such dogs, I thought. I ran behind some trees. “Who is there?” A man’s voice called out. From his words, I knew he was not German, but Russian, and I found my voice. I came out from behind the trees and saw a tall, stately man. He did not move towards me. “I have escaped the ghetto,” I confessed, “and will only stay a few hours. In the evening, I will leave. Please, kind sir. I am frightened. Please take me in.” “Come my child,” he opened up his arms. “I have been expecting someone. Come in.” I approached the doorway. I thought his words were very strange, that he might even be mad, but I could not refuse his offer. And that is how I came to my Priest. That is how I first ventured into this house in the forest and met his mother, and the two of you, Sabi and Yuri. The dogs looked up at the mention of their names. Scrambling on all fours, they sat upright. They opened their jaws wide, slid their tongues out and in and sniffed at the air. I fed them the last bit of raw, leafy lettuce I scrounged from a bin in the kitchen. They ate from my hands, chewing thoughtfully. When they were done, they stretched back out on the floor. By now, my throat was dry. I had rushed my words without stopping for a sip of water. With no sign of the family in sight, I could not rest or drink. I talked to fill the hours, to tell of my life to the present moment. “Behold I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come into him, and will sup with him and he with me.”6 The first day turned into night. My Priest told me of his vision. God, the presence and spirit of God, warned him. Someone would knock on his door, and he should not be afraid but open the door and save that person. I looked at him more strangely than when I first heard him speak. I had never met a man who talked of visions or voices. “You expected me?” 123

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“I was expecting an older Jewish woman or maybe a Russian.” The streaks in his brown hair were wine-coloured, and I wondered if that was a sign of his holiness. “Not a young girl?” “I knew two days before you knocked at the door that someone was about to arrive. I was not surprised when I saw you. I was ready.” He fed me milk from a wooden cup. I stayed the next night and the night after that. He studied the Bible every spare moment. His prayer book was black with tattered corners; there was a thin red gold line on the edges of its pages and a tassel that swung from the binding at its centre. He traced each line with his index finger and wound back to the next line before turning a page. I asked him questions from the start, which sometimes interrupted his prayers, but he looked up from his reading, placed the book on his knees, never minding. His voice warmed me like a blanket, like his mother’s mink coat. “What do you find in those pages?” “A truth I cannot find in any other book.” “Can anybody find this truth?” “If they look. It is written that everyone who asks will receive, and everyone who searches will find.” He went back to his prayer, his lips barely moving. I sat beside him. “Grandfather read from the Bible.” He put the book aside, bent down, and touched my chin with his fingers. “Then you are a true daughter of the Jews who are the people of the Book.” I said nothing more and was relieved when he pulled away. What could he know about my Grandfather? The following evening, I questioned him again, this time, standing, fists closed on my chest. “I escaped from the ghetto.” “Yes.” 124

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“No one saw me. How is it that no one saw me or recognized me?” “When God doesn’t want a man to see, he makes him blind. The guards were struck blind when you escaped. The Latvians on the streets of Riga were likewise struck blind.” My hands dangled. “You can find this answer in the Bible?” “The words are there for us to read.” He recited a Psalm of David for me. King David created songs at a time when my people sang. It was hard to imagine that time. “Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap. Let their eyes be darkened that they may not see.”7 I asked him, “How is it you do not hate the Jews like the others?” “The Jews are God’s people,” he said. “You belong to the family of Abraham, God’s servant. You are a descendant of Jakob who will defend you.” He spoke of God watching over us. I knew things my Priest did not know. God had deserted Abraham and his descendants. God had gone blind in Rumbuli Forest and not the enemy. They aimed their guns well. I sat at my Priest’s feet at the end of the workday. A pot of potatoes might be boiling. The house was quiet. I could not keep my thoughts to myself. “Do you believe that we will survive? That I will survive?” “God will save you.” “Not you?” “God alone has the power.” “But it is you who took me in. You keep me here.” “It is God working through me. I have accepted his will.” He told me his life’s story. Setting the Bible on a tea table, he examined my face as Father sometimes had, when he wanted to teach me things he was not sure I would understand. 125

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“When I was a young man, older than you are now, I cared little about others and their welfare,” and at this, my Priest blushed. “I drank and liquor warmed me and that was satisfying. I left questions about life’s meaning to robed men in their houses of God and to the philosophers and teachers who filled halls of learning. Let books of prayer collect dust on their shelves, not mine.” My Priest sighed. “Simply put, I attended to my needs. I moved from place to place and was neither happy nor discontented until in my travels one day, I met a wise man who reminded me of the good I had squandered. He turned me to God, turned my eyes to the small light of a flame. Now this flame,” and he uplifted his hands as if in prayer, “this flame had an enduring quality I had never believed existed in the physical world. I came to God’s teachings gradually and was, in time, humbled by them.” He paused. “You are still a child and see me in a way I am not. I am no saint, only a student of the teachings of Christ.” I told him that my father had been shot and that my mother and sister might still be living in the ghetto. He said he would go in and look for them. It was too dangerous. He must not attempt it, I warned. My Priest entered the ghetto, dressed like a Jew, wearing the Star of David on his back. He brought food into the ghetto, using some of his own bread rations as well as some of the shares allotted to his mother and sister. Other times he smuggled jam and onions into the ghetto. He said nothing about where the food came from. It was his mother who explained. She was making tea in the copper urn, the samovar. Her voice and her body were as heavy as the urn. The steam rose from the urn and sprayed her face with a mist. “My son is good through and through. I can’t take the credit – I brought him up more or less the way any mother does. But my son does not tire. During the day, he works in the Sotsky Tea Factory. At night, he makes trips to the farmhouses of 126

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Latvians. I see him go out. There are farmers who are willing to barter. Those who still own their farms have allied themselves with the spoilers of our country. He exchanges food from them for clothing, what clothing we have left: Olga’s sweaters, his jacket, my shawl. If they knew he did this to feed Jews, they might betray him.” She motioned to me to come closer. Her eyes were hazel in colour and shaped like almonds. Beads of sweat collected over her upper lip. “He has no fear. Both my son and daughter do not fear for their lives. I do not know if it is a curse or a blessing. I am not so brave. My son speaks of visions, and it may well be the will of God that moves him to do what he does. Who can say anything with certainty in these times? The truth is hardest of all to believe.” My Priest entered the ghetto after the eight o’clock curfew. He told me that the second killing had taken place days after I arrived at the house but that my mother and sister were still alive. He had spoken to them, told them I was safe in his home, and had given them food. They were now living with refugees resettled from countries as far away as Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Besides the languages they spoke, the new inhabitants had replaced the dead Latvian Jews only in name. My priest brought letters to my mother and sister from January until July. In those letters we began to call him Angel, though I continued to call him my Priest. Mother had lost all her strength and my sister tended her. I read the letters until I knew them by heart. Once I was sure I could recite the words, I buried them in my hiding place, tossing handfuls of earth over them. They would be safer if they remained buried in the earth. The earth was a protector of mine. Dear Chana, What comfort I find in knowing you are safe and being cared for. Our Angel’s bread is the bread of life. He speaks to us of the brotherhood of men. We listen 127

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to his words. They are foreign to our ears. As for his deeds – they are the only signs of life we see. Chana, your sister is good to me too. You remember her loving nature. She carries the two of us. She keeps us both alive day to day. Stay in our Angel’s care. Do that for me. I entrust my daughter to him. Love, Mother Every night my Priest returned late, I had visions of his arrest. I was haunted by questions. How was it the Germans did not see my Priest enter and leave the ghetto? Or if they did see him, why didn’t they arrest him? Perhaps it was because he was a holy man and the good in them recognized this. Or maybe they did not kill him because they were afraid of his goodness. But Father was good and he was killed. And Grandfather, Aunt and Uncle, and all the others. Or could it have been, as my Priest said, that the Germans were struck with blindness as they were on the day I escaped, and for this reason he was able to walk past them unharmed? With these fingers I cross these threads And knit the wool That covers our heads And stitch all memory In a blanket of tears In a cloth of stifled voices I spent many days crying and knitting. My priest’s mother gave me wool and old material and I knitted hats, sweaters, and pullovers for the two of them. I did not need much light. My fingers found the loops. My fingers found the way in the dark. My Priest only asked that I colour my hair. He bought peroxide and his mother bleached my hair in a basin. “In case 128

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they find you,” he said, “say you are an Aryan child. Blonde is more common than brown.” In the coming months, fewer and fewer Jews remained alive in the ghetto, and by the summer, my Priest could no longer find my mother and sister. A possibility existed that they were among the surviving Jews sent to a camp called Stutthof. He continued to talk to me, to teach me from the Bible. I wanted to believe his words, but there was little hope. “Only I am left. This is the end.” “No. Hitler will be defeated. There will come a day,” he placed his hand over mine. “Everyone is gone.” I cried on his shoulder. To calm me, he told stories that Jesus taught, from Matthew’s chapter. I was to close my eyes and picture the world as a wheat field. I imagined I was standing once again in my father’s apple garden. “What,” he asked, “must be planted in the ground for the wheat to grow?” “Seeds.” “Good seeds, yes. But weed seeds also grow. Each has its purpose. Jesus taught us that the good seeds stand for the sons of the Kingdom and the weeds are the sons of the evil one. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. It is written in the book that the weed seeds which are scattered across the field by the evil one will be gathered and burned.” I opened my eyes. “Like the fisherman who separates the good fish from the bad, the evil Hitlerites will vanish.” He recited a psalm. “In a little while the wicked shall be no more; you shall search out their place, but they will not be there.”8 Don’t despair, he consoled me. God would bring home the Jews who were dispersed among the nations. We would ask the way to Zion and join him there. “Will we go by foot?” I wiped away any trace that I had cried. “By foot. By boat.” My priest stretched out his palms to 129

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me. We clasped hands, rose, and swayed a little, like the pious Jews in Riga. “How will we know the way?” “The spirit of God will guide you.” “And if someone recognizes us?” “You will be safe when the world is at peace. The nations of the world will understand that the Jews are returning and will step back and leave a path for them.” I released my hands from his. We stopped moving. “What if there are no Jews left?” “Those who survive will rebuild their nation.” Backing away a few steps, I ask. “What if it is just another trap? This place, Zion. Will there be room for us there?” “Say the words with me. The words will make themselves clear to you.” “I cry out to you, O Lord. I say: You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.”9 This psalm I loved. I wanted to be one of the living who would travel by foot or boat to a place called Zion. “I lie down and go to sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I do not fear the multitudes of people Who set themselves against me all around.”10 I repeated this psalm and fell silent. My story was done. I lay down next to the dogs, who had been sleeping for some time, and waited for the future to come. I did not sleep soundly because the stirring of the dogs woke me at an instant. They raised their heads, stood up on their thin, spindly legs, and shook their bodies. Neither one barked when there was a shuffling of feet outside the door. I prayed. “Oh, God. Father in Heaven. Tell me what to do?” The latch clicked and the door swung open. I rose to my feet and looked into the faces of my Saviours. My Priest and his mother had returned. Weary and red-eyed, 130

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they looked back at me as if they were surprised to be home. “Yuri and Sabi have been waiting with me. We have been praying together for your safe return.” My voice betrayed me. I hid my face in my Priest’s jacket and wept.

Where do we come from? From Love. How would we be lost? Without love. What helps us to overcome? Love. Can one also find love? Through Love. 2 Do you see the Seville Orange? It’s still hanging from the tree; …You ripe Orange, … How sweet you are. (translated by Dr. Jürgen Kleist). 3 Faster, move faster (German). 4 Faster (Latvian). 5 German ss and the Latvian killing squads. 6 Revelation 3:20. 7 Psalm 69:22. 8 Psalm 37:11. 9 Psalm 142:1. 10 Psalm: 3:5, 3:6. 1

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ister marya is like a bride of the Church in her black and

white veil. She wears a long chain of beads with a wooden cross that hangs from her waist and swings when she walks. She offers me a shorter string of beads from a pocket hidden in her habit. “You may keep these.” I rub the holy stones between my forefinger and thumb. “Count them and as you do, remember, each one holds a prayer.” “They are grouped in sets of ten.” “Can you see how they are placed on nothing more than a simple string?” “Yes, Sister Marya.” “They are precious to Jesus if your prayers come from the heart. If you are a believer.” I raise the rosary to my lips and imagine that the chain of beads connects my heart to my lips. I recite the prayer I have been taught at the orphanage: O, Jezu, Boze wiekuisty, dziekuje Ci za niezliczone dobrodziejstwa Twoje. Niech kazde uderzenie serca mojego bedzie nowym hymnem.1 Marysia kneels with me every day in the chapel at the foot of the cross of Jesus. I knew Marysia as Manya before we entered the Franciscan orphanage. She calls me Daniella and not Bela as she did before. Together, we examine the holy face and body of Jesus.

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“Look how he suffers.” “He is a man.” “He is Godly too.” I whisper in Marysia’s ear and she whispers in mine. “He is a man and God in one. Because if he was only a man, he couldn’t have the power.” “He is like us but he is better because he is closest to God.” “He is his son.” “Aren’t we all God’s children?” “Yes, but he is his first-born. A king.” We turn our eyes to the cross. An artist has sculpted the likeness of Jesus who is beautiful even in his pain. “What kind of king wears a crown made of thorns?” Marysia frowns. I nudge her. “A heavenly king.” Marysia lowers her eyes. “There is blood on his head.” “Thorns cut and so there is blood. Do you see how his finger is curved. Do you think he is pointing at us?” Marysia looks up. “His hand is nailed back onto the cross.” “But his spirit rose from the dead.” “Sister Marya says he will protect us if we believe.” Marysia squeezes my hand. None of the children of the orphanage suspects our true Jewish identities. Jesus does not betray us. Everything in the orphanage is coloured in black and white. That way, your eyes are not surprised and your head is peaceful and you have time to contemplate the spirit of Jesus. We wear black aprons over our uniforms. The nuns’ habits are black too. Their faces peek out of white frames. Their eyes stare back, still as portraits on a wall. “White stands for the goodness and peace in their hearts,” Marysia explains. “Isn’t the heart a muscle that pumps blood?” “Yes.” 133

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“The red blood on Jesus’s cross?” “The heart can do at least two things at the same time. Pump blood and give love. What’s so unusual about that?” We sing lamentations to Jesus. Birds sing high notes and the nuns teach us that we are to sing like birds, lightly and sweetly, as we are all a part of God’s creation. The low notes are sad, and these we sing from the bottom of our shoes and from the ground below our feet as we contemplate our sins. Our sins follow us wherever we go even when they are only in our minds and we have not acted on them. We confess our sinful thoughts to the parish priest who visits us; we confess that we wanted more bread than our share because that is a sin of selfishness. We ask to be forgiven and he nods and tells us Jesus alone can do that. Sister Agnieszka explained that Jesus died for our sins and carried their weight on his shoulders through the streets of Jerusalem. “Remember, children, how he was whipped and mocked as he walked with the heavy cross to the hill of crucifixion.” Then she asked us who would protect the orphanage from the German army if only the Sisters’ belief in Jesus was strong and ours was not. We tremble to think of the German army invading the orphanage and promise to believe. But Marysia and I do not need to imagine how Jesus suffered on the streets of Jerusalem. We witnessed many beatings in the Ghetto of Przemysl. The nuns kiss their crosses when they pray, and we kiss our beads. That way, our messages are linked in a straight line to God. Sister Agnieszka reminds us that the kissing of crosses is a sign of the spirit and not the flesh and we are not to confuse the two. Are my lips really sinful when I kiss the cross, I wonder? Sins bring shame but I don’t feel shame when I put my lips on the cross. I don’t see crosses painted on walls or sewed on clothing like the Star of David. The signs of crucifixion here are clean and holy. At the sound of a bell, religion classes with Sister Agnieszka begin in a study room. On the wall are faded red and brushed 134

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gold pictures of saints I can’t name. To our left is a window overlooking the yard. The grass has dried there. Weeds multiply. Only a few wild flowers grow, snow white, fluffy flowers, and a cluster with butter-yellow petals. The yard is our one temptation. We wish we could leap out of the study room, race under the archway, down the cobblestone steps, and leave our religious spirits behind for Sister Agnieszka to keep an eye on. “In what ways can we show our devotion to Jesus, children?” Sister Agnieszka quizzes us. Her right eyelid flutters behind her thick glasses. We are seated four to a bench and turn our minds outside, our elbows leaning on the splintery table. “Sit up. Elbows down. In what ways, children?” Her eyelid flutters again. No one answers. A rose blush travels up Sister Agnieszka’s neck to her forehead, where it brightens like the colour of beet red soup. Maybe the blood of Jesus is flowing through her because she guesses our thoughts. Her voice shakes. “Do you or do you not want to follow in the path of the righteous?” “We do, Sister Agnieszka.” I blend my voice in with the others. “Or would you rather remain unwanted children who walk this earth blind and deaf to Jesus’s words?” “No, Sister Agnieszka.” “Then eyes on the text and ears open to the healing words. How do you expect the teachings of Christ to reach you?” Sister Agnieszka, who has been holding the New Testament, bangs the book shut. At night, Marysia and I pull back the white curtain that separates our beds and pray to stay in the orphanage. We fear Sister Agnieszka will banish us to roam blind and deaf to Jesus’s words. We feel more safe in the black and white orphanage singing lamentations. In the ghetto, God did not hear the Jews 135

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even when they wailed loudly and struck their heads and fists on the walls like hammers. I hid where Father worked, in a tailor shop, between piles of material used to make German soldiers’ uniforms. It was really an army building and not a tailor shop. Guards were stationed at the front, so I crept through the basement window at night, sometimes sleeping under a jacket or slipping my feet in the giant legs of a pair of men’s pants. When the Gestapo came to inspect the shop, Father pretended they were his regular customers and asked them in his very cordial voice, “Would you like to see the suits now?” That was my signal to be perfectly quiet. Each time I walked out of the shop and onto the street, more people had disappeared from the ghetto. The ghetto was dirty. I have prayed to be rid of its taste in my mouth, but it is always there, like sand between my teeth. If we are to stay here in the orphanage under Jesus’s guard, and that is our true wish, Marysia and I must resemble the other children. At first, we pray in the last row to imitate the others. A bell calls us to vespers in the afternoon; we hear it ring on the sixth hour and mouth the words, praying as faithfully as we can. Wimie ojca I syna I ducha swietege, Amen.2 Eyes raised, then lowered, palm to palm, we do not overload Jesus with our secret wishes and fears. Then one day, because we are bursting to tell, we confess the truth. “We are your faithful students. We were Jews and did not know you before. Did you know us? Will you love us like the other children?” We wait for his answer. Lent is easy to learn. Fasting in the wilderness and being hungry in the orphanage are alike. After a few months of practice, we do not need to mimic the other Christian children. We file out of the rooms with the long dining tables to give thanks for our 136

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bread and soup. The church across the street is the house of soft voices and two of those voices include Marysia’s and mine. We kneel on the wooden slats for Jesus who gazes down at us. He can watch over his worshippers in any position but that gives us no cause to sit comfortably. His sacred heart is like a red satin cushion. I wonder if the halo over his head moves as we pray. I once saw it floating in my dreams, but the golden circle vanished each time I tried to touch it. Marysia asks why do you need to be convinced he is there by touching him? A true believer doesn’t need proof. The nuns teach us to read, paying special attention to words of humility and acts of charity. In the chapel of soft voices, we say a prayer at the ten stations of the cross, at the garden and pillar, and at the place where he was crowned. Jesus answers our prayers by keeping us safe. He is not deaf to our pleas. He does not mind that we were once Jews in the ghetto; he has forgiven us, or maybe he has forgotten because Marysia and I are forgetting. We work in the convent, bringing cold water in pails from the well. We scrub the laundry in stone basins and beat the clothes with wooden paddles. Our long buttonless nightgowns are hard from the clay soap. Everything must be kept clean. After peeling potatoes and washing the dishes from each meal, we scrub the floors and steps outside the orphanage. There are bristles on the brush that prick our fingers. The water is dirty and runs down the stairs onto the street. Once when we are scrubbing the front steps, Unterscharführer Schwammberger, the commander, passes by on a white horse. Marysia and I keep our backs turned, so he will not suspect who we are. He stops his horse and says, “It is commendable to see Polish girls clean.” We never let our eyes stray from our pails. Schwammberger trots away in his horse. He must continue to think that we are Polish girls from another district, as we pretended when we first came to the orphanage. We were orphaned, our story 137

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went, by bands of Ukrainians who used fire to win their independence. Mother Superior knows differently and so does Jesus who watches us work on the steps, weary and bruised from the cross flowing with blood. Schwammberger doesn’t know anything at all. He rides off satisfied that we have learned the meaning of cleanliness. Mother Superior assigns me to take care of a little boy in the convent with the sign of a Jew on his skin. Mother Superior calls for me one afternoon. I feel special entering her room. It is a sanctuary. Everything looks plain and sparse and holy. A soft light spills from a domed window. Her bible rests open on a solitary wooden table that is polished clean. A single gold cross hangs on the wall overtop, casting a shadow on the table. Mother Superior is standing behind a dark chair. She presses her body against the back of the chair, her fingers curling around its dented edges. I notice a silver ring on her left hand. This is the ring of her eternal devotion to the Church. Unknowingly, she blocks the shadow of the cross. Our eyes meet. Her brown eyes are wide-set and under her starched white cap, the skin on her forehead is craggy. She is very wise and is said to be the most modest of nuns. She does not lead her congregation but waits behind the sisters as they enter and leave the chapel. I have seen her eyes wander from girl to girl at prayer. Her mouth moves as if she is counting our souls. Her words to me, she says, cannot go beyond the room. “Daniella, do you have a younger brother or sister?” “I have a brother, Moshe.” “Do you know where he is?” “No, Mother Superior.” “Perhaps this child, the one you will look after, can take his place … in some way.” “I will never call him Moshe, Mother Superior.” “No, you will be careful. Here, we call him Stasiu although his birth name is Gabriel. He is a fair-haired boy, which works to our advantage. Whatever you do, be sure that no one sees 138

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the little one being washed. When you change him, keep away from the other children or anyone entering the orphanage.” I give my word, it is a sworn promise, and Mother Superior excuses me. I open the creaking door, when she calls out, “You will be our shepherd, Daniella. We are counting on you.” I love my boy. He has blue-grey eyes and thick-lobed ears he pokes his fingers into. He is younger than Moshe and cannot play as easily, but he recognizes the sound of my voice and knows my touch by heart. I want nothing more than to protect him, to obey Mother Superior and fulfill my promise to her, but I cannot keep my son away from those we most fear. As the Russian army approaches Przemysl, German soldiers take control of the orphanage. The sisters say they are retreating and will not remain behind long enough in Poland for the Russians to capture them. In the meantime, they crowd the study rooms, the prayer halls, and disturb the quiet with their talk of war. They pine for their homeland. They tell jokes in the German language, a tongue I am not supposed to understand as a Polish orphan, but one I remember hearing. Jewish refugees spoke that language when they stayed in my old home. They spoke it in a hurry as if they were about to burn their tongues. Hearing the language again frightens me, but I must never show fear. The German soldiers undo their jackets and lean way back on their chairs to drink a schnapps which Marysia says has fire in it. She says they drink sitting that way because the schnapps slides down their throats more smoothly. The nuns remind them not to drink around Jesus, but they do not respect their wishes. The soldiers call us “die arme kinderlein,” the poor unfortunates of war like children in the Fatherland. They say to my little boy, “Komm zu mir, du armes kindlein”3 and bribe him with their chocolate and cookies. I cannot stop him from running blindly to them. He stands by their long-booted legs like a dog waiting for a bone or a scrap of meat. The soldiers 139

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press the sweets into his hand or toss them in the air, laughing as they fall to the ground and he scrambles on all fours to collect them. “Do not utter a word,” I repeat to myself as I chase after him. “Do not let on that you understand. Stay quietly with the boy and watch.” Mother Superior is pleased with my work. I do not want to meet with her disapproval or fail her in any way. But just before the war ends, Mother Superior’s heart stops beating and I can only speak to her through Jesus. She cannot have the sacred magical heart of Jesus, but I believe she can hear me. I save a set of ten beads on my rosary for her and with them I carry the news of the orphanage to the chapel. My speeches to her are short, as she preferred them to be. We do not have to say much to our Lord, she taught us. He will understand. “Sister Agnieszka has caught us again with our minds wandering during lessons, but Mother Superior, our stomachs were rumbling and we could not concentrate.” “I doubted Jesus today. An inspector of the nuns from a nearby convent questioned my dark hair and eyes. ‘Wasn’t I a Jew?’” she asked me. “Father is here.” I rush to tell her the news on the day that Father comes back for me. My knees knock against the wooden planks. “I recognize his face, Mother Superior; it is shaven and clean as it once was, but some of the hair on his head has disappeared and a tooth has gone missing.” I am panting and slow down for Mother Superior’s sake. “He calls me Bela and not Daniella as you did. He stares at me as if I am someone he once lost.” I rise to make plain what I feel. “I have been here for a long time and am happy in my new home. He lived with a Polish family in town for a few weeks before he came because he wanted to look presentable. “It is a poor man’s suit I am wearing,” he said, “but it is the best I could find.” Why does he talk about the clothes he wears, Mother Superior? Why should I care 140

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about his suit? I am afraid of leaving the orphanage and the church, which I love so dearly. And what about Stasiu? Who will take my place? Tell me then, and I will ask you nothing again. Why do I have to leave?” I wait for her reassurance. If only Mother Superior could kiss the top of my head as she sometimes did and invite me to stay. She sends me on my way with a blessing for the new home I will build with my father. It is strange living with my Father, whom I cannot remember loving. We share the same flesh and blood according to Marysia, but you can’t see that the way you see the blood on the cross of Jesus. Father does not know how much I have learned and changed since we have been separated. What’s more, if I am to be a true and good daughter, I must follow in the footsteps of Mother Superior and save his soul, the way mine was saved. I must carry out my duty as a new Christian. So I announce straight away that if he becomes Christian, we can be a real family. He calls me Bela and asks why I feel this way. He irritates me by mentioning my old name, but I go on to explain. The disciples of Jesus did not wait to spread the word and neither can I. “Jesus saved our lives, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I went to Church, I wouldn’t be alive.” Father is carrying a paper bag of groceries: a few apples, potatoes, cereal grains, and I walk beside him in the Old Town Market Square, the Rynek. He answers in a far-off voice. “I have survived a great deal though the reason is not yet clear to me.” “It will be if we convert.” I skip ahead and walk backwards, facing him. “I built a tunnel underground with my bare hands weeks before I was liberated, Bela, and came to get you. Knowing that you might be at the end of the tunnel is what gave me strength. Now, stop walking that way. You’ll trip.” 141

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I turn around and walk alongside him. “That’s all the more reason for us to convert.” Father tilts his head to the left, considering my advice. I am winning him over. I reach out to carry the bag, but Father refuses my offer. “It is true that I counted on the goodness of the nuns when I placed you in the orphanage, and they did not betray my faith in them.” “You see, Father, how good they are?” Father plods along the path. “But, Bela, the war isn’t over yet. We have been liberated earlier than the rest. Your younger brother was sent to Plaszow labour camp. As for your mother, we will have to wait and hope.” I feel his sadness. There are four in our family, and only two of us are together. Father fastens his free arm in mine. “Perhaps you are right, and we should convert and put aside our religion. But why convert separately? We’ll wait till they return, and then we will all convert as a family.” I agree with Father’s plan, feeling lighter in spirit. At night, I pray for the return of my brother and mother so that we can convert together. It was selfish of me to forget that they have not been saved. But after a few months, I realize that converting Father will be harder work than I expected. If I am to save him, he needs a piece of God to hold on to, the way I hold on to my rosary. I give him a little wooden cross that I place on a red ribbon and tie to a string. One day, I notice he is without it. “Why aren’t you wearing the cross I gave you, Father? Have you lost it? Because if you have, I can make you another.” “No, Bela, there is no need. I was washing and didn’t want Jesus Christ to drown in all that water. I did not want to spoil his image so I took it off and forgot. I am not as accustomed to wearing a cross as you are. You must be patient with me.” I would like to inform him that Jesus is not about to drown in water and if he only shared in the power and goodness of 142

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the Son of God, he would know that. But Father is a new student, and I must be a patient teacher. Jews slowly come out of hiding and find their way back to Przemysl. Father spends his evenings with them in the kitchen, sharing stories of where they have been and how they survived. “It was worthwhile to live for your child,” they remind Father. They fuss over me and assume they know me. Father does not wear his cross around the new refugees because they might not understand. But I have found the true way and I will not lose it. On Sunday, I sneak out of bed while Father is sleeping. I return to the small chapel across from the orphanage, to the soft murmuring voices, and to Jesus who watches over us. When I return, my knees are red and scratched from kneeling on the slats. “Where have you been? What has happened to your knees, Bela?” Father uses the same voice the nuns used when they waited for you to repent. I lie. “I was playing with the other children in the orphanage.” “I see. Well, if you must play, then play. But you know, Bela, it is hard for me to take care of you alone. I work all day, cook for you, and what do you do but make yourself invisible and come in with excuses about your knees.” Marysia’s parents returned earlier than Father after hiding in a bunker and offered to adopt me if Father did not survive. They are thankful to the Hebrew God that their family has been reunited. They say they knew no other God before they hid in a bunker and they know even less now. Marysia sneaks out with me to Church when she can, when her mother and brother don’t lock her in a room. Some other children have been claimed, and a Jewish orphanage has been set up by a newly formed committee. One girl, Chanka, has been found hiding with the horses and pigs in a stall. She is like a wild child. She speaks to no one. Father wants to adopt her as his 143

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own daughter, to teach and to love her. I would then have a new sister. But Chanka finds her tongue. She blurts out that she doesn’t want to live with Jews. She prefers the pigs and horses. Stasiu moves to the Jewish orphanage and goes by his true name, Gabriel. He has grown-up teachers now, a husband and wife from Russia who lost their children from hunger and want to do some good. He plays freely with children his own age and still has a fondness for sweets, which are hard to come by. In the first Jewish New Year we, too, are free, Father takes me to a room to pray. The synagogues of the city have been bombed, and in this room, a group of Jews has gathered. It is a poor shabby room, and the paint on the walls has peeled the way your skin sometimes does in the summertime. The corners of the wall have turned yellow from the water that has soaked through. There are no benches, and what was once a banister has been broken up for firewood. The air is stale. Is it any wonder the worshippers cannot stand straight or kneel gracefully to pray? Two men have found a portion of the Sefer Torah4 for the small congregation to read. They hold it delicately as if the scrolls were china plates. I remember the word Torah, but I wish to go to Church and escape the unhappy room forever. “Why did you bring me here?” I whisper to Father. “If you come with me to church, you will see how beautiful it is. The windows are painted and there are carvings of Jesus and his mother. The carvings come alive.” Father’s eyes follow the men at prayer. He chants Amen. I have admitted my secret to him, but he does not listen. Why shouldn’t beauty live in the House of God? God would be pleased. Father wants me to pray in a room without hope, I think, because the Father of my past does not know me. He may wish to cover his eyes and pretend to see something beautiful when it is poor and crude, but I will not. 144

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More children appear at the Jewish orphanage where I spend my playtime. Gabriel is shorter than other boys his age, but he keeps up just the same. The children rattle in Polish and Yiddish. I like them well enough. Along with the couple who teach subjects in Polish, a Rabbi and his wife have returned from somewhere deep in Russia to teach the orphans Hebrew. I continue to go to church on Sundays and tell Father the old lie. He does not seem too concerned. One night Father approaches me with an idea. I am tucked under my blanket. Father sits at the end of the bed. “I see you are spending more and more time at the new orphanage.” “There are children to play with. They are Jewish.” “Since that is the case, Bela, how would you like to take some Hebrew lessons with these very same children?” I sit up. “Who will teach me?” I ask, already knowing the answer. Father mentions the Rabbi. “I’m not going to study with that old Jew and his long grey beard.” Father says nothing. I am not sorry for what I said. A few days later, the Rabbi approaches me in a narrow courtyard of the neighbourhood. It is a brisk day, and his cheeks are rosy. His beard is a tangled white and sooty grey. He smiles. He must not know I have insulted him. “Aren’t you Bela?” he asks. “Yes. But I have been Daniella for a long time.” “An interesting person, having so many names. Many of our people had different names during the war. As you know, your own Gabriel was Stasiu.” I find a stone and pivot it with my foot. He is complimenting me, speaking in a honey-sweet voice. He must think I am foolish or vain. “I have heard a great deal about you.” The Rabbi nearly stumbles as he pursues me. 145

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“From my father?” “Yes.” “What have you heard?” “Oh, that you like to read and learn new things. Bela. Will you not speak with me for a moment, calmly?” I stand, obedient. “In Polish. I read and learn in Polish.” “You know, Bela, I teach the children Hebrew.” “Father has already told me.” “I teach the children the modern language as it is spoken in the Holy Land and along with that, we read the older Hebrew of our forefathers in Bible Study.” “The Holy Land is a colourful place in pictures.” I kick the stone hard. It sprays some of the soil on my shoes and socks but lands no more than a few inches from my toes. Father is sure to notice the dirt. “How would you like to come and join us for class?” “Well, I don’t know.” I dig my toes deeper into the soil. “What harm could it do? Consider this, Bela. Jesus learned to read the Torah in Hebrew when he was younger than you are now. And Gabriel is one of our most eager students.” “No surprise,” I say, bending down to wipe my shoes. When I am done, I rise and look up at the Rabbi. His eyes are ginger brown like Mother Superior’s. “What day did you say you teach?” “Sunday.” “No good. I won’t come on Sunday. Don’t you know that Sunday is my holy day? It is the day I go to church.” “All right, Bela. You don’t have to come on Sunday. Come on Monday and I’ll privately repeat the lesson you missed the day before.” “Maybe I’ll come, but absolutely not on Sunday.” With this answer, the Rabbi opens the stone gate and walks out of the courtyard. I go once and then a second time and so on. I am the Rabbi’s disciple and sit on a stool, staring as he points at the Hebrew 146

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letters. My eyes must travel from right to left on the page. Reading gives me a headache. This language is going in the wrong direction, I tell the Rabbi. He teaches that there is no right or wrong direction since any language spoken to God is holy if it comes from your heart. He sounds very much like the sisters at the orphanage. The words tickle my throat. I pronounce “Chaaa…” He laughs. “You will grow used to the alphabet. The letters are new and strange to your ears.” I attend Hebrew classes three and then four times a week with the other Jewish children. I don’t go to school on Friday night or Saturday because those are the days the Jews pray, and I don’t go on Sunday because that is the day Christians pray and I go to church. The stories of the Bible the Rabbi reads come from the Old Testament. They are all written backwards. Slowly, Father encourages me, I will return to my faith. I like Hebrew more than I first did – I can’t say otherwise. But I have not been able to say goodbye to Jesus or Mother Superior, and Marysia swears she never will. She will remain Catholic as long as she lives. Marysia’s face has turned the shape of the full moon. She no longer wears braids to hide her curly hair, a sign of Jewishness, but wears her hair loose over her shoulders. I love Marysia and don’t want to be divided from her. But I can’t seem to swear on the cross like Marysia, and I can’t make any promises to Father either. If I break promises they aren’t promises anymore, but lies, and then I would have to go to confession. I’ll just have to see. A letter has arrived at the Jewish orphanage. Cousins from Belgium have found Gabriel. His family line stretches wider than he knew. We haven’t heard about my mother’s and brother’s fate, but news is travelling and lists are being posted. Father grows very sad some days and meets less often with the other Jews. I pray in Polish for my mother’s and brother’s return and add Hebrew words to my prayer. I feel sure Mother Superior wouldn’t object and it makes Father happy. Saying them in two 147

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languages shouldn’t confuse God. It’s not the Tower of Babel, is it? It’s only Przemysl and I am only Bela, and I have already had long discussions with his son, Jesus, who had plenty of time to hear me even when he was bleeding on the cross.

O, Jesus, eternal God, I thank you for all your uncounted goodness. Every beat of my heart will be a new hymn to you. 2 In the name of God, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. 3 Come to me, you poor little one. 4 The Torah book. 1

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hrough the window of the farmhouse, we see them.

The woman’s face is poised and thin; the child’s is full and expectant. He is twitching with the newness of sound and impression. A kerosene lamp bathes the woman’s hair, cheeks, and lips in gold. The child worships her face as if it were an idol. As the woman spins on a round stool, the hem of her house robe gracefully sweeps the floor. She presses her toes on the left pedal at the base of the old ivory painted piano, the hulk of a once-prized possession. Her hands rise in mid-air, then descend upon the discoloured keys, yellowed over time like teeth, chipped and cracked like the head of a porcelain doll. Her fingers pirouette. One-two-three, one-two-three, this is a waltz. Keep the time, she instructs the child, for the waltz is a lovely thing. Beside the piano is a mahogany chair with a rose-printed cushion. Its legs are turned and along the middle of its back is a carved rope. Stanislawa, owner of the farmhouse and schoolteacher to the children of Prawiednicki, leaves this piece of furniture empty for her deceased husband. She insists she plays for him and he hears her waltzes. Ghost or spirit or incarnation, she believes he is listening. The child’s eyes dart from Stanislawa to the chair as if he is waiting … waiting for her husband to appear. “Rubinko, come here to me.”

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The little boy swings in between Stanislawa’s legs. Her knees are strong and balance him. “Let’s play a game.” “What kind of game? “You will pretend to be someone else.” “Who?” “Janka. A girl named Janka. You will have to be good at the game.” “Do I have to be a girl?” She holds his face in her hands. “You are beautiful in the eyes of God. But there is a sign on your body that is different from other children, Christian boys. Are you listening, Rubinko? There is a sign on your body you mustn’t show to anyone.” “Is that because I am a Jew?” “Yes.” “Then I don’t want to be a Jew.” “You can’t change that sign on your body, so you must pretend to be a girl. I will sew you clothes to wear and grow your hair long. No one will suspect the truth.” “Mother and Father guessed when I played tricks.” “Your Mother and Father are in the forest. People from this area will not recognize you.” “Mother and Father climb trees and hide under ground.” “You will hide too. Not in the forest, but here with me in the house as Janka.” When the Feldstein family fled the assault on Lublin, they came upon the village of Prawiednicki, some twenty kilometers from the city, and by chance learned of the existence of the schoolteacher. She was a respected woman of the community named Stanislawa Pacek. Travelling with a horse and wagon through the woods, they arrived at her farmhouse. There, gold exchanged hands. Wedding bands were slipped off for a promise. “Protect our son,” the parents pleaded. Thus, the male child was taken by Stanislawa, in secrecy and silence and reticence. 150

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On the wall is a glass mirror where newly named Janka admires her skirts, blouses, and dresses, and where she flicks her hair and twirls her locks between her fingers. She is pretty, she thinks. But at night, Rubinko is afraid. God grows large. God looms over him. What if God knows he is playing deceitful games with his body and is angry? If he pretends to be the girl, Janka, all day, will God change him forever? If God were to do that, how would his parents recognize him when they returned? He shares none of these fears with Stanislawa. Once the girl’s clothing is removed and the child is ready for bed, Stanislawa says, “Siusiu, Smow Paciorek, Idz Spac.”1 Rubinko lies in bed. His skin is cold and prickly. He touches the part that is most secret, the part with the Jewish sign on it. He prays to God to show he is not playing deceitful games. Dear God. God is one. I am Reuben Feldstein. I am older than five. I am Jewish. I was born a boy. Amen. The roof of the wooden church of Prawiednicki is steep and high. Looking up, worshippers envision a piece of the firmament has been saved for them. A number of those attending the service are kneeling at their pews, bowing their heads in meditation and prayer. Lines of light flicker from tiny encased candles. Windows illuminate stories from chapters of the Bible; each onlooker seeks a new, untainted truth from the emerald and ruby hand-sculpted glass. There is one story on the glass panel the worshippers most often interpret. A tribe of students with upturned heads ask Jesus, their prophet: “In whom shall we place our trust?” Jesus stands at the bed of a river, at the foot of the Kingdom of Heaven, and answers, “In the hands of God. And in the good you do.” 151

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On this Sunday in the fall of 1942, churchgoers are curious about the most recent addition to the community. Stanislawa introduces Janka to the townspeople as her niece. Other children laugh. They think the little girl an oddity. Janka sticks her tongue out at them. The priest calls the new daughter of the flock up to the pulpit. His voice echoes her name in the air. The sleeves of the priest’s robe enfold her. She wishes to be lost in them so that the eyes of the congregation will not rest on her. The priest lifts one hand and sprinkles drops of water over her head. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, she is baptized. Janka sings Polish hymns. A picture of Mother Mary, a gift from Stanislawa, sits in Rubinko’s pocket. He says a blessing to her twice daily, before he eats and before he goes to bed. The picture is painted in brown and gold. Mother Mary is different from any mother Rubinko has known. Unlike his first mother, she doesn’t run away and climb trees in the forest. Unlike his second mother, she does not ask questions about his body. He keeps no secrets from Mother Mary. He looks at the picture whenever he wants to. On the farm, he tends to the cows. Dressed as Janka, he wanders with them in the meadows, pulling them with a rope. He gives all three girl’s names: Dunya, Katya, and Cila, even though one is not a girl. She can pretend just as he does. The cows have bells around their necks. The grass is tall and when he wants to hide from them, he lets go of the rope, runs a distance, and crouches in between the blades of grass. He can hear the cows approaching. Mooo … tinkle … mooo … tinkle. They trample on the grass and stare at him with cocoa brown eyes. Sometimes the cows lick him with a sharp lick. He wishes they wouldn’t. Their tongues are fleshy. They munch at the grass. They are not at war with anyone. Winter comes and paints the windows with frost. Leszek and 152

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Jerzy, Rubinko’s new brothers, pile into the farmhouse after a day’s labour in the fields. They have been covering the potatoes with earth to protect them from the cold. Greeting their mother, the two brothers throw empty punches in the air. Then they stand by the fire and rub their hands together. To keep his body warm, Leszek chases Rubinko, who is still dressed like Janka, around the room. Rubinko attempts to escape Leszek, whom he calls the spider, but Leszek traps him in a corner. Leszek’s hair covers his right eye like a pirate’s patch. He pins Rubinko to the wall. “Would you like to know what I do at night?” Leszek’s breath blows hot on the child’s face. “Let the child be,” Jerzy chides his brother. “I roam the streets of Lublin and catch little Jews like you and can you guess what I do then?” Rubinko’s imprisoned silence goads Leszek on. “I sell them to the ss for vodka or for a kilo of salt. Now, there, will you look at the pretty curls.” “Stop, Leszek,” Stanislawa intercedes. At his mother’s request, Leszek backs down, raising his arms like a bandit. Rubinko runs to Stanislawa and hides his face from Leszek. His cheek caresses Stanislawa’s. Leszek sits down on his father’s chair, crosses his legs and points his bony finger at the impersonating girl. “Didn’t his father threaten me? Give the Jews a free hand and see what they do. Swore he would burn down the village if a hair of his son’s tiny head was harmed. Oh, pardon me, should I say his or her head?” “You blame his father for instigating you as if you were a horse led to the trough, Leszek.” “I am a loyal son, and your blood son, Mother, in case you have forgotten.” He rises, paces with menacing authority to where his mother and the boy are, and stands akimbo before the two. “I am also a son who is informed. The news is this. The Germans will be searching the area for Jews within the 153

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week. Don’t say you weren’t given warning.” Leszek motions to Jerzy that it is time to leave. Slumping his shoulders, Jerzy capitulates to his brother’s domination, closing the door grudgingly behind them. For the next few days, Stanislawa stops playing the piano. She clutches at the pearl-coloured handle of her brush and strokes the curls around her face. At night, Rubinko hears her walking. Things move around the room. Then, one morning, she steers him past the armchair to a wall now covered in a tapestry. A village scene is revealed: thatch huts sprout out from the ground, stacks of hay are bundled and ready to load, plump blackberries hang ripe on the bushes, and a ladder stands idly along one tree. The scene boasts no villagers. At the top and centre sits a red, golden, thickly woven sun. Thin circles of fire radiate from its imperfect circle, red bleeding into the beige backdrop. Stanislawa lifts the tapestry and leans against the wall, nudging it with her right shoulder as if she was unsure of her own strength or of what she might find lurking behind the wall. With a jab of her hip, she shoves it open and enters a small dark room with wooden beams on the ceiling, a clay floor sprayed with dust, and a straw mat that lies against the wall farthest from the entrance. “No, I won’t stay here. I won’t.” Rubinko stalls, tears streaming down his face. He stamps his legs and thrusts his arms out, blocking the way. “Rubinko, I will let you out at night. We can walk together.” “No, Mamusia.”2 “I will come and bring you food and teach you.” “No. Please, Mamusia. No.” Rubinko grows tired. He obeys and enters the room. Day after day, he cries into the straw cot. “What have I done, Mamusia? Why have you punished me? Have you forgotten me?” His throat hurts. In the dark, he rocks himself to sleep. He sings to the spirits of past winters, frozen and trapped behind the wall. Stanisl154

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awa compliments him on his voice calling him a slovek.3 He practices singing a poem she teaches him. Children sang it long ago while waiting for their fathers to come back from their travels. They hoped the highwaymen had not injured them. Rubinko sings for his father’s return. Come children, come all together Out of the city and up the hill And there in front of the Holy altar Go down on your knees And devoutly say your prayer. 4 Each hour Rubinko stays in his hiding place, his ears hear more: the groaning of the wood floor in the living room, the whistling of the wind through the bare room where he now lies awake, Stanislawa’s double taps on the wall. “Are you there and well,” she asks. He replies “yes’’ by tapping back twice. Then, when she knows he is safe, she plays the piano. To Rubinko, the notes sound like the angels singing from the windows of the church and the tinkle of the bells from the cows mixed together. He has not seen the cows for some time. But he has seen the stars blinking across the sky. When he walks with Stanislawa at night, the stars come out. They don’t hide like him. They don’t hide like his first mother. He asks Stanislawa, couldn’t he be free to go outside? If God put stars in the sky at night, didn’t he want everyone to see them? “If we survive the war,” Stanislawa answers, “you can show yourself to the world. For now Rubinko, we will fight against the dark with our minds.” Come morning, Stanislawa lights a candle and writes the alphabet on the walls in white chalk. Her letters have straight lines, curves and loops. Rubinko’s hand shakes as he copies them and reads aloud the words they form. When Stanislawa first brings the candle, Rubinko is unaccustomed to letters in the dark. Soon he imagines they are hands waving at him, or 155

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that Jerzy is tossing chicken feed across the walls. In time, he carries on conversations with himself and traces the grid of strokes on the wall from memory. “This word is a – pple. I am the secret wall reader. This wall can open, but they can’t find me. Fiingertiips. White powder bloooww away. There … that’s round … o … p … then t … Look. A tree. My tree has a skinny trunk and long arms for branches and all the leaves are gone in the wintertime … Ssssh … the wall is moving. Stanislawa is coming to cut the bread. We’ll have mushrooms and potatoes for supper. I must chew slowly before I swallow. And I have to wait until the candle burns out. If I fall asleep before the candle burns out, the fire might come back. Once it hissed like a snake. Mamusia threw buckets of water over the fire. Then it crumpled like paper and turned into a hill of ashes. Watch the candle, Mamusia says. I can put my finger through this flame when she’s not looking. Not at the bottom where it’s blue. But across the high part.” Rubinko anticipates his teacher’s return. Nighttime is a cloak. Nighttime wakes Rubinko and whispers: stay safe, be safe, keep clear of the viper’s sting. Stanislawa appears, a shawl over her dressing gown, her hair tumbling down her shoulders. She stands at Rubinko’s bedside like a ghost who was freed from the walls of his room. Save yourself, she warns. Jerzy draws near. “Why is Jerzy here?” Rubinko cowers under his blanket. “He is taking you on a trip deep into the woods.” “Now? Why Mamusia?” Stanislawa massages Rubinko’s forehead with a soft, circular motion. “We have found a new hiding place. There is danger.” “Are you coming too?” She forces socks on his feet, pulls up his trousers, buttons his shirt. “You are my brave boy. It will be dark by the time you arrive at the house in the woods. Promise you will be as 156

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quiet as a mouse until Jerzy tells you otherwise.” Rubinko does not promise. He begs to stay. He will not get in the way and will do whatever is asked without complaint. Stanislawa kisses him goodbye and holds him while Jerzy pulls a burlap sack over his head. The burlap itches his skin; he is shut deeper in the dark with only a tiny hole through which to breathe. Jerzy lifts Rubinko on his back, hurling and towing him through the forest like a sack of potatoes. The air is cold. Branches break under Jerzy’s feet. He runs, panting from the weight on his back. They arrive at a small hut where Rubinko stays with friends of Stanislawa’s. Inside a fire is burning. Rubinko sits by it each night to remind him of his second mother. During the day, he picks white, pink, and red-spotted mushrooms in the woods. He is out and around the trees and is dressed as Janka and there he remains for a few weeks. Once the forests are clear and the search for Jews and partisans has been called off, he is reunited with Stanislawa. They resume their lives together. A spool of thread unravels in the weaving of this story; a needle punctures the faithfully mended fabric. Leszek, the spider, visits the village drinking hole in the afternoon, a wooden shack at the end of the main town road. Streams of light steal out from the loosely boarded windows. On occasion, the proprietor hires a young boy from the town to sweep the sawdust into a bin, but today, the broom stands against a back wall. Leszek’s boots rest on top of the one table cleared of glasses. After innumerable shots of vodka, he slurs something to the men around him about hiding little boys. Necks are craned, eyebrows raised. Did he say someone was hiding? Who? Did he know of their whereabouts? Leszek shrugs his listeners off, gulping down one last drink. No, it was just the effects of the alcohol. A man can’t be responsible for what he says while under the influence, can he? It was just a story he had heard. He was never a hero, he reminds 157

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them. He can be trusted to do one thing and one thing alone. Save his skin. The villagers are convinced. Cheers are made in the name of Leszek and his lack of principles. Bodies topple over him. He wrestles his way out past the jostling elbows and prying hands and stumbles back to the farmhouse to find the culprit, the source of his irritation, the burn that sears his chest. It is late on a Wednesday afternoon. His mother usually runs a mid-week errand in town. She will not be at home as a witness when he pushes open the wall and finally ends the charade. Leszek knocks at the wall timidly to rouse Rubinko’s anxiety, then heaves at it with a blow of his fist. It gives way more easily than he anticipates. He tumbles into the room, his knuckles aching. Hearing him, sensing it can be no one other than Leszek, Rubinko slides under the mat that is his bed. He has learned that he can shorten Leszek’s ranting if he avoids being seen. The mat, for there is nothing else in the room, catches Leszek’s eye. He stands up, walks toward it, and kicks the straw. “Come out and stop being a coward of a girl,” he shouts. “Come out, come out, whoever you are. Girl or boy?” His voice turns sing-songy. “Ru – bin – ko. Jan – ka.” Rubinko loses his cover. Straw litters the floor. Rubinko crawls out and surrenders. Leszek yanks Rubinko by the collar. “Which is it? Are you a boy or a girl?” He will be squashed, Rubinko is sure, like an insect between Leszek’s crushing fingers. His unprotected head will be split open like a walnut. Rubinko smells the alcohol on Leszek’s breath and tries to veer away. “Ah, what prize do we have hidden here?” Leszek grabs in between Rubinko’s legs. Just as the boy is about to fall, Leszek seizes him by the arms and spins him off the ground and around the room. Rubinko grows dizzy; his legs harden into two unyielding poles. He will not walk again even if Leszek releases him. 158

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“Who are you? Answer me.” “I am Stanislawa’s son. I am Stanislawa’s daughter.” “Which is it? You can’t be both. I won’t put you down till you tell me the truth.” “I am the son of Stanislawa. I am her daughter,” Rubinko repeats. “I should take you out, Jew imposter, against the wall, and shoot you, but when she comes back, she will know.” Leszek’s jaw sags. His eyes reproach the object of his mother’s affection. He drops Rubinko on the ground. Rubinko runs to the corner of the room. The carousel of terror is over. Leszek scampers back through the wall like a rat. When Stanislawa returns home, Rubinko encircles her. “Aren’t I your son and your daughter? Isn’t that right?” She laughs and says he is both to her. He is everything to her. Stanislawa sews new girl’s clothes for Janka. In time, Rubinko reads longer words and sentences from the lights of candles. He begins to speak Russian, which Stanislawa teaches him, and asks Stanislawa when he first moved to the farmhouse to live with her. She says he has been with her for more than two years. News spreads that the Russian forces are moving closer and that the German occupation will soon end. Rubinko can come out of hiding as Janka. In girls’ clothing, Rubinko pitches in with the chores on the farm and helps Stanislawa clean the house. He learns about farming that spring and summer of 1944. The family plants red winter wheat. If there is enough rain, a good crop will grow. If not, there will be summer fallowing. Leszek and Jerzy remove the chaff and the weed seeds and wash the wheat. Rubinko loses part of a finger when it is caught in a harvester, losing consciousness too at the sight of the fountain of blood that flows from his body. Stanislawa attends to his wound. Leaves from a birch tree are applied as a salve. A splint made of strips of cloth is wrapped around the limb. In time, his severed finger heals. 159

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He manipulates objects by curving and extending the fingers and thumb that remain. Summer arrives. The fruit trees grow apples and pears. Purple bunches of lilac smell sweetly. The days stretch out before Rubinko. He loves to watch the sun. When it sets at the end of the day, it sinks into some invisible part of the sky. In the morning, when it is early and the rooster crows, the top of the sun’s round head rises first. Then the full circle of light appears. “They are here, the Russians are here!” comes the town cry that July. At first, the Pacek family feels unfettered as the birds on the trees, but in short order Russian troops help themselves to stored food. “We Poles will never know freedom of any kind,” Stanislawa says with mounting anger in her voice. In a few days, a Russian officer bangs on the door of the farmhouse, demanding to see Stanislawa’s papers. Wearing a dress and stockings, his hair in curls, Rubinko sits on Stanislawa’s lap. Stanislawa hands the officer Rubinko’s birth certificate and explains in Polish and Russian that he is a Jewish male child she had taken in and harboured since the age of five. She confesses to the officer that she grew to love him as her own son and swears on the cross that she never intentionally caused him harm. The Russian bends down to see for himself whether the child is truly a boy or girl. Shunning the officer with the unshaven skin and bloodshot eyes, Rubinko locks his arms around Stanislawa’s neck. The officer rests his eyes on the lower-half of Rubinko’s body, gloating over the probable smallness of the child’s sex. What is the true gender here, the officer speculates. She appears delicate as a girl, but he has probably been trained. Cut the locks of hair, take off the dress, remove the stockings and both his masculinity and Jewishness will be revealed. The ploy will be uncovered. The officer laughs from somewhere deep in his belly. He roars. 160

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“To think that a mere woman and child of how should I put it – questionable gender – pulled the wool over the Germans’ eyes and tricked the devil itself. Such two people should be toasted.” He picks Rubinko up in the air. “This is the flag of victory. The children of Europe are at long last free.” Stanislawa follows the two outside. The Russian seats Rubinko on his white horse. It stands lean and proud, but not as proud as Rubinko is to be sitting for his first ride on a horse. As he leads the horse from the front, Rubinko bounces victoriously on the saddle, curls and all. The horse and its rider circle the centre of the village twice with the Russian officer leading. Rubinko forgets his past misfortunes. Some villagers come out of their houses and stand watching on the street. Others lean out from their windows. The faces of those indoors are pale as if they have recuperated from an extended illness. They begin to cheer. More voices join in. The townspeople know nothing of the hidden identity of the girl or that a secret was kept from them all those years. They run to pat the horse and touch the little girl’s dress. They lift their faces and hands to the sky and thank God for their day of deliverance. In the spring of 1945, a stranger knocks on the door of the farmhouse. She is wearing a cape with a hood that yields the hunted look of the refugee. Her voice falters at first sight of Stanislawa. Once she manages to identify herself as Gucia, the sister of Rubinko’s mother, she states that she has come back to claim her surviving nephew. Stanislawa invites her in. Rubinko looks on as the two women speak in confidence. Introductions are made, the tea pot laid on the table, and now they are deciding his future without him. “I want to stay with you, Stanislawa, on your farm as always,” he declares. “This is your true aunt, Rubinko, Gucia. She has come searching for you. You rightfully belong to her.” His aunt is meek and prone to tears, Rubinko thinks, but he 161

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has no tears for her. She fiddles with the strings of her cape, twirling them around her fingers. She is not calm like Stanislawa. “Rubinko.” Stanislawa calls him over to the head of the table where she is sitting, and takes his hand in hers. “You belong to many people.” She presses one finger at a time in the centre of Rubinko’s palm. “A part of you belongs to me, and a part to your natural mother and father, and now since they have passed away, a third part belongs to your mother’s sister, your aunt who sits before you.” “That is too many parts,” Rubinko answers, pulling away. He doesn’t know his mother’s sister and he can’t remember his mother and father clearly. Before he came to live with Stanislawa, he remembered sitting piggy back on his father’s shoulders, and his father asked how the trees looked from up high, and he remembered that his mother held his hand as they walked to the park, the Sasky Ogrud. Sometimes, he could hear his parents whisper. They were travelling on a wagon and the horses were galloping in the dark, and he breathed in short puffs under a blanket. If he had a picture of his mother and father, he could point out their faces now. Rubinko doesn’t tell Stanislawa that he lost his mother and father’s faces in his head, that they come and go away and he can’t keep them. He doesn’t tell this woman who calls herself his aunt either. The two would say it was because he was a child, and they would make a tsk tsk sound. But he knows it is bad. Rubinko takes his aunt’s hand on Stanislawa’s promise that she will visit soon. In a small apartment on Lublin’s Lubertowska Street, Rubinko and his Aunt Gucia live. The old building stands on the long, prized street in former Jewish Lublin. The Yeshiva, whose rabbinical students chanted from ancient scrolls, the Jewish Hospital, the most modern of its time, the workrooms, the shops displaying fine English wool – Lubertowska is now 162

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void of those voices, with few wares to sell and fewer prayers to hold fast to. Rubinko calls his new parent, Auntie. She is kind to him but she is not the mother who played music or soothed his fears. Gucia has met a young man, Yossel, a Jewish refugee with whom she keeps company. Born and raised on the outskirts of Lublin, Yossel endured the war years in Siberia. Gathering like-minded refugees around him from the vicinity, he holds court in a robust voice, laughing and shouting with the coarseness of a survivor who has sharpened his instincts against potential foes. Gucia appears all the more demure next to her beau and his clansmen who crowd around the apartment. As Rubinko’s guardian, she makes no nuptial plans with Yossel. Neither has the means to support a child. In the winter of 1946, Stanislawa visits. Stanislawa, Rubinko and his aunt sit on a faded settee in a communal bed and living room. Breakfast cups and saucers have not yet been cleared from a portable table. Bread rolls have been partially eaten. A pot of coffee, now bitter, sits on the coal stove. A lamp stands next to the couch; its misfitted shade sits on top of the bulb like a hat placed on a head at the last moment. “He is a masculine child and should begin a normal course of study.” The aunt speaks with greater conviction in this, her second meeting with Stanislawa. She has lost sleep worrying about Rubinko and asks if Stanislawa can appreciate the extent to which her decision will shape the boy’s future. “We all have limited resources. I taught him only so much under the circumstances. You must do what is in your heart.” “I find no fault with you, Stanislawa. I want him to study, to begin a new life. Perhaps I hope to make up for the time that has been lost.” “And you are certain that in order to do this, you must leave Poland?” “I feel I can make no home for the two of us here. Orphaned 163

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children are being gathered in Kinderheim5 in Lodz.” “But Rubinko has you. Why must he join orphans in Lodz?” “From there, children will make their way to Palestine. The authorities have promised that if Rubinko were to go along with this group, I could meet him there at a later date. The move would have to take place in the near future…” Weakening in her resolve, the aunt’s voice fades. “Palestine is very far. I am nearly estranged from one son as it is.” Stanislawa clenches her hands. She recalls Leszek’s imprisonment as a collaborator, the padlock clanging on the barred cell, the Soviet police saluting her with their visor caps as they released Leszek on her account. Her eyes tear. She dabs them with a kerchief Gucia recovers from a drawer. “You must excuse me. Sons are precious, whether they are born to us or not,” she explains as Gucia sits back down beside her. “What will I do, my dear lady, if Rubinko lives miles and miles away?” Stanislawa’s face turns up to Gucia. As if on a prompt, Rubinko leans over to Stanislawa and kisses her. Her face is thinner than he remembers in the gold light near the piano. “It is time to exchange gifts, Stanislawa,” he says, “but I had no box to pack my gift in or wrapping paper or tissue to cover it with.” Stanislawa has tiny feet. Rubinko gives her his boots and the cream his aunt bought to polish the leather. In return, she dips into her cloth bag and offers him a package. Inside he finds a new pair of women’s brown leather shoes. Gucia watches and remarks in a strained voice, “The war has touched all of us, and this is what has come of it. They have created a world of their own.” She says such things are beyond anyone’s understanding, and leaves the two alone in the room. Rubinko turns to Stanislawa. “We brought the same thing. They’re real presents even if other people don’t think so, aren’t they, Mamusia?” 164

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“Yes, Rubinko. Good for walking long distances if need be.” Stanislawa strokes the boots. “Not just make believe?” he asks again. “No, Rubinko.” She kisses him. “Never that.”

Go to the bathroom, say a little prayer and then go to sleep. Mother. 3 A little bird in a cage. 4 Original Polish verse: Chodzie o dzieci chodzcie wszyscy razem Za miasto pod wzgorze Tam pod cudownym kleknijcie obrazem Poboznie zmowcie paciorek. 5 Children’s orphanages. 1 2

165

Crossing Borders

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n a warm july night in 1946, a train rolled through

the countryside destined for Czestochowa, city of the Black Madonna.1 There were no available seats. Since the day the war had ended, an endless stream of travellers rode trains free across Poland. People were restless. It was discernible in the way they held their bodies, as if they were loose springs, coiled, propelled by a curiosity to see, to travel, because they had earned the right to indulge themselves. In one of the cars sat Pola Lwowska, a sixteen-year-old Polish Jewish survivor, who was herself returning to Czestochowa after visiting a friend in Waldenberg. Before the war, her trip would have taken her across the border to Germany, but Waldenberg had now been declared part of Poland. The borderlands between countries in post-war Eastern Europe were changing hands, as if on a chessboard with competing strategists. In the aftermath, there had been talk as she passed through the stations, satisfied talk among the beleaguered Poles, that the Germans lost territory the Poles had once possessed. She boarded the train alone, leaving behind her sister, Rivka, and her brother and sister-in-law, who were awaiting the birth of their first child. Taking a seat, she daintily flattened the folds of her skirt, laid her handbag at her side, and only then, made a quick mental note of those travelling with her. She still took this precaution in a world divided between Jews and non-Jews. Liberation from the Warta ammunition factory,

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the faction of the slave labour camp in Czestochowa where she had been interned, had not absolved her of this need. When she first left the camp with a group of fellow female prisoners in January 1945, freedom had been bitter. German troops had withdrawn and those residents who lived in the area would no longer have had to face retribution for aiding Jews. The women were blindly confident as they walked out into the nearest street that cold January night, dressed in rags and open-backed wooden clogs that froze to the ground. They looked at the windows. Perhaps one of the Poles who lived there would welcome them in, offer them hot coffee, some food. Their spirits sank. Window curtains moved mysteriously, bodiless hands motioned: “Go away.” They wondered where they would go, frozen from the wind, without shelter. Returning to their hometowns proved to be as desolate an experience as the day they first rejoined the free world. Former Polish neighbours greeted them with disbelief, guarded against any property claims the Jews might have made. Some turned openly hostile. “What. You returned? Have you come for your things? We thought Hitler had killed you all.” By surviving, the Jews had violated the laws of nature. Pola leaned back in her seat and breathed deeply. It was summertime, she was free, and the day with her friend had been a happy one. They had talked of their childhood homes in Lodz, of their families, and of the rich and precious lives they had once led as observant Jews. Summer had always been her favourite season. On a day like the one that had just passed, the windows in her family’s apartment would have been opened and residents of the neighbourhood would have heard her brothers sing the sweet tunes of prayer, the Zmirot. The house was transformed by her mother into a palace, its floors scrubbed, the merchandise her father sold covered up for the day of rest. She longed to relive the quiet sanctity and ceremony of those days, but she knew they could not be retrieved, not as they once were. 167

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She looked out at the night. The train spun by lone trees and sparsely grouped tiny wood-framed houses and barns that resembled children’s deserted playthings. Through the cloudy grime of the glass window, her own silhouette was obscured. There was little to discriminate that could occupy her mind. She became aware of the voices around her, which grew increasingly loud. A middle-aged woman sitting on her left was leading the discussion in an indignant voice. She had a snout-shaped nose, thick hair peppered with grey, arms that were bulbous, the flesh under them flaccid. Holding a wrapped basket of food on her lap, she used one free hand to accentuate her words. “Did you see how the Jews are walking around dressed in such finery with their heads held high? Did you see? We thought we were rid of them, but they have survived and wish to flaunt their wealth as they did before the war.” The woman gnashed her teeth as she spoke. “We shouldn’t have to put up with them anymore.” Her listeners smacked their lips in agreement. The blood rose in Pola’s cheeks. If she moved from them, she would give herself away. But how could she listen and say nothing? She was about to announce that she was a Jewess. No one seemed to suspect. Her fair complexion did not give her away. But the arguments against doing anything silenced her. To rebel was to put herself at risk. She was outnumbered, and the woman could easily incite the others against her. Pola lowered her head to hide her distress. Sensing she was not well, the woman turned and offered her a sip from the bottle of water she pulled out from the covered basket. Pola looked up at her face. Her features were set tightly, but it was not a face devoid of feeling, even tenderness that cracked open now like a broken shell. She gives me this, thought Pola, because she considers me a Pole, and for one of her own, she can find humanity in her heart. Pola gladly drank from the bottle. She would have her 168

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silent revenge. She wanted to tell the woman, “Do you know that your mouth will later touch the same bottle a Jewess has touched?” But she said nothing. Leaving the train, Pola walked by foot to the house where she rented two rooms with her family. It was pitch dark, and she held her handbag tightly, moving quickly with a fearful premonition. She entered the courtyard, walked toward the closed gate, and knocked for the janitor to open it. He did not come down. It was late, she guessed, and the janitor was probably in bed. She knocked again and waited. She called out softly in Yiddish, “Chaskiel.” There was no answer. Odd, she thought. The mild-mannered man was punctual. She frequently waited for his sprightly step and felt protected by his small thick hands as they opened the gate. He worked the lock with a persistence she admired. Perhaps today he had fallen sick. It must have been a sudden illness for there were no prior symptoms. A voice called out from above. Pola’s back stiffened. A young man who lived on the top floor peered down from an open window and asked who it was as audibly as he could without attracting attention. Pola informed him that she lived there and that she wished to come in. His head bobbed back inside. Within minutes, he was opening the gate. “What is it? What has happened to the janitor?” Pola asked anxiously. The tenant checked both sides of the street. “Didn’t you hear? Do you not know what has happened today?” Pola shook her head. “Not like this. We’ll talk inside.” When they entered the hallway, he spoke quickly. “Were you out of town?” The tenant was lean; his frame seemed to shrink further in the half-light that flickered from a single fixture in the hallway. “Yes. I came from Waldenberg.” “And you travelled on a train?” He leaned forward, moving into her space. His eyes were bloodshot. 169

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“Yes, of course.” His voice quivered life a reef. “From this train, from all the trains today, whoever was travelling, these Jews were murdered. There was a pogrom in Kielce and it has spread to the trains.” The tenant stepped back a few paces, acknowledging a breach of etiquette. “They have accused us again of the killing of Polish children, and rant how we were responsible for the war and for communism in Poland. A pregnant woman from nearby, her stomach was slit, and the baby came out. Some Jews were killed with boards, stones, earlier today in front of the train. Chaskiel, the janitor, that is how his life came to an end. It is terrible, this news. Would you rather we speak in my apartment?” The tenant pointed up the stairs. Pola declined the offer. Her feet would not move. “But how did it happen that he left the house? He seldom left.” The tenant’s hands fumbled in his pants pocket for his spectacles. Placing them carefully around his ears, he sighed. “Yes, a little simple in the head. We all knew it. Who didn’t know? Never travelled anywhere from the day he was released from the camps. But just yesterday, what luck, and it is the bad luck of a simple man. Just yesterday somebody came from another town. He had a house he needed to sell, and he wanted Chaskiel to be a witness. So the poor fellow took a train out of town for the first time. We discovered this evening that a group of Poles forced him off the train and stoned him to death. They killed him at the station.” Pola felt queasy and light-headed. Had she spoken back to the woman with the bottle of water… “My family is waiting. You will have to excuse me. I must go upstairs.” “Good luck,” the tenant shouted after her, his hands on the staircase rail. “We are, each one of us, getting out of this God forsaken country for good. We want nothing more to do with them.” News of the pogrom had spread. She found her sister, Rivka, in the apartment packing. Her brother and sister-in-law 170

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urged them to go and promised that they would follow once the baby was born. This time they would not wait as they had in 1939. Pola and her sister dressed in two layers of clothing and rested for a while. They would leave their few belongings behind and make their way out of Poland on a route others had taken before them. The two sisters would watch after one another, as they had done in the labour camp. In the morning, they boarded a train. Fearing a new outbreak against Jews, they masked their faces. Pretending she suffered from a toothache, Pola put on a kerchief while Rivka laid her head back against the seat and feigned sleep. A boy sitting across from them grew curious about the novelty of the two sick and sleepy girls with whom he was to share a ride. Long-legged, he tapped Pola’s shoe with a meddling insistence. “What’s wrong with you, lady?” Pola groaned and pointed to her kerchief. “Do you have a toothache?” He mimed a pained expression, displaying a front, chipped tooth. Pola noticed bristles on his raised chin. She nodded. “Where are you going to fix it? Do you have a doctor?” Pola directed his attention to the windows. “Where? I don’t understand?” She closed her eyes. “Poor lady. It is time for the dentist. Mother forces me to go, but most times I find reasons to postpone my appointment.” The boy soon became bored with her and to her relief, got off the train after a few stops. Pola and Rivka’s journey, on the contrary, had just begun. Pola and Rivka made new plans. Travelling close to the German border, they waited in an abandoned house with other refugees for members of the Jewish brigade of Palestine to lead them. These Jews were known to be fighters. A silent and solemn understanding between the refugees and their new leaders marked the journey. In a line of unspoken trust, they 171

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led the tribe single file through the woods to Czechoslovakia. As they crossed the border, many refugees fell to the ground and kissed it. They could not say what it was that awoke this emotion in them. Ahead of them lay nothing more than an empty field. No one knew of their arrival but a Czech farmer who at that moment crossed the field with a cow. When the farmer saw the wandering Jews, he gladly offered them water from a nearby pump. For the first time since they were liberated, they felt accepted. “Borders are strange entities,” Pola remarked to Rivka. “They change like the people who live within them.” The refugees talked of returning to Germany, to a displaced persons camp and the relative safety that might bring. But Germany would not be home for the two sisters. The day they arrived at that unknown place, they promised one another, would be a day of pure joy and would count as their first true day of liberation.

Jasna Gora, Poles make pilgrimages to visit this holy shrine.

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172

A Jewish Interrogation

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fter the war, trains throughout Germany ran sporad-

ically. I travelled lightly, boarding a train in Bremen that was en route to Frankfurt am Main. From there, I planned to reach Salzheim and join other Jewish refugees. I left a Polish Displaced Persons camp set up by the United Nations along with two male Polish companions I had befriended there. Both Jan and Bronislaw were slender, genteel young men who had fought in the Warsaw Polish Uprising and been taken as prisoners of war in Germany. There was about them a silent melancholy; they lapsed into it uncontrollably, briefly, as one lapses into a little sleep. But they did not lack hope. They were curious, restless as we all were, with latent desires and ambitions that were only now reawakening. I was sixteen and had survived the war under an alias given to me by a righteous Polish farmer in Noviny, with whom I was still corresponding. Through the war, letters had gone back and forth asking after my welfare, sometimes with the gift of baked and dried slices of cake and bread packed in paper. Now, I could shed the name, Helena Jablonska, which I had assumed while working in a rope factory for the Navy in Bremen-Vegesack, and return to my birth name, Roza Handelsman. My identity was something I had learned to wear, like my hair, which I braided in the early morning hours to tame its natural wave and quell any suspicion of Jewish heredity. Knees on the cold floor, I weaved my hair crisscross, fearful

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of detection. Eventually, I wore my identity like a second skin, becoming the Jablonski girl well versed in farm chores, creating vignettes whose details I loved to fashion and had to replicate perfectly with each telling. But language held me in limbo. Building a new person entailed sealing my lips for ever from uttering my mother tongue, Yiddish, which I had spoken at home with family and with my spawning circle of friends on the streets of Lublin. I had to bury Yiddish for safekeeping, for my preservation. On a winter morning in 1942, during the first winter of forced labour at the rope factory, I walked with a crew of Polish girls and my youngest maternal aunt, a twenty-one-year-old, who fled with me to Germany under the pseudonym, Lodzia Jablonski. She became both older sister and mother figure to me. I, in turn, consoled her with the naiveté and brashness of a pre-teen. As we walked outside the Sudetenhaus in Bremen-Grohn, my aunt pinned her hopes on me. “Do you really think we will survive?” “I have no doubt we will make it,” I answered, strutting. On guard, we listened for one another’s missteps, ready at an instant to close holes in our fabrication of the past. Most often, our eyes read our hearts. Each morning, we trekked to the factory from our quarters at the Sudetenhaus in Bremen Wegesak, a northern district of the city. Snow stuck to our wooden clogs, weighing us down. As we passed a group of timber-framed houses, a German boy, his winter coat open, his face sweaty, jumped out in front of us with a snowball in his hand. Polish pigs, schweine, he yelled, pitching his weapon with his right hand. The word “pig” in German is the same in Yiddish. I screamed back in the language of my fighting schooldays that I would punch his teeth out. The German boy dropped the snowball and stared at me, suspended. My aunt pulled me away, into the group. Generally composed and steady around the workers, she began to laugh nervously, which first set off tittering and 174

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then all-out laughter among the girls who mistook my words for German. I joined the chorus. In a small way, this was our act of resistance. But I knew, as did my aunt, that I had put our lives in peril. That evening and for the rest of the war, I could not retrieve a spoken word of Yiddish. The fear I felt was like a drug that lay my knowledge of the language to sleep. The power of the mind was more mystifying with each passing day of the war. I could understand Yiddish after the German defeat, though the words would not come to me when I spoke. My train ride to Frankfurt am Main brought this loss of language to a head. We three, Jan, Bronislaw and I, could not find vacant seats and went from section to section until we noticed two empty compartments secluded from the others. “Let’s sit here,” I suggested. We settled in, relieved to have found a place together. Our train ride would have passed uneventfully as we crossed Germany had it not been for one of the last groups of oncoming passengers who boarded. It was a stop whose name I cannot accurately recall, as if those particular passengers came from a place uncharted on any map. Two men, I remember, first bustled into our car speaking Yiddish and bits of Hebrew I could decipher. Standing at the train door, they directed those passengers who would presumably fill the remaining seats. I realized then they were Jewish survivors, and it pained my heart. How had they survived the war? I combed my mind for the possibilities, the same possibilities and dreams I had once carried for my own family. Some must have emerged from Siberia where they had lived out the war. Russian was scattered in their talk. Some Jews survived the camps, others emerged from hiding and some, like me, must have lived under an alias. The two men speaking Hebrew I estimated to be Zionist emissaries. I knew something of the movement. Its idealism appealed to me; I saw myself as a pioneer in a Jewish homeland, hands in the earth, the Star of David my personal banner. How I might arrive there, I didn’t know; what good I could do, I didn’t 175

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consider. The dream was a flame I would not extinguish, not even on my aunt’s counsel to protect myself and remain with her as the sole child survivor of the family. I knew only that I wanted to break away from a past I couldn’t relive. A number of the new passengers stood in the aisles, among those Jews who had returned to Poland and fled for their lives after the Kielce pogrom. Arms thrashing, they cried out to the two men in broken sentences that their property had been seized by Polish officials at the border, property that was especially dear to them. They drew objects in the air to make clear their plight, some with small gestures, others with an exaggerated display. “We understand,” the two men assured them, “now, don’t upset yourselves, and we will take this up with the proper authorities.” The train began to jostle all of them about. The new passengers muttered under their breath as they returned to their seats. On hearing the three of us speak Polish, they angrily demanded in Yiddish, “Who are these Poles, this Gentile girl? They do not belong here.” Jan stood up and nodded to Bronislaw to follow suit. “Let’s leave. We’re not wanted in this part of the train. Helenka, why don’t you join us?” Jan and Bronislaw did not know of my true Jewish identity. Out of a longstanding sense of secrecy and fear, I had not confided in them. “They’ll have to forcibly throw me out the door.” I pulled Jan down back into his seat. “We have every right to sit here.” Unwilling to enter into a conflict, my two Polish companions moved to another car. I remained, determined not to be jousted out of my seat. “Excuse me,” one of the two Jewish leaders, a short, stocky man, approached me once Jan and Bronislaw had left. “We mean no harm. This compartment is especially allocated for Jewish refugees. The turmoil, you understand. It is better this way.” His Polish was fluent, and his tone to me, courteous. 176

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“But sir, it is you who do not understand. I am a Jew.” I had not uttered these words throughout the war years. They sounded foreign. He withheld any questioning for a moment. Then speaking in Yiddish, he called over the other leader, a mustached man with white hair and glasses, to join us. “She says she is a Jew. We ought to give her the benefit of the doubt.” His associate asked, “Can you speak Yiddish?” I answered in Polish that I could not, though I had been fluent before the war. But my listening comprehension, I added in an effort to gratify, was excellent. The two men conferred. The mustached man declared that my answer was a lame one and I was not to be believed. “She claims she cannot speak Yiddish,” the more civil of the two repeated somewhat sympathetically. The other turned back to me. “If you are a Jewish girl from Poland, as you profess, how is it you cannot speak Yiddish?” I explained that I had developed a case of amnesia during the war. “Are you saying that out of fear you lost the language you learned as a child?” I nodded yes, one of the two, since I had spoken Polish on a daily basis too. “You don’t strike me as being the kind that would easily lose her nerve. Well, you’re seated here, and those other two men might as well have stayed with you.” That was not, however, to be the end of it. My alibi was a transparent one. Several survivors encircled me and began posing a series of questions to prove I was an impostor. They were serious in their quest and took turns examining me. I had presented them with a dilemma. If I was once a Jew, which they didn’t for one moment believe, I had over time been converted in my manner, and if I wasn’t a Jew, why would I pretend to be a member of a doomed race? Perhaps I was playing the ingénue in a drama of my own making? 177

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“Did you come from a religious home?” The first question was put to me. The speaker was young, his look ascetic and scholarly. “Mother was kosher, but we attended synagogue only on the Holy Days. No, we were not religious.” “When does Passover fall?” The second question was a test. “Usually, sometime in the month of April. We celebrated Seder with alternate members of the immediate family. Mother had four brothers and three sisters. Father had four brothers and one sister. I had many cousins.” A voice came from behind him. “That was too simple. Easter falls in the same part of the year.” They were confident that they would now catch the mouse in her own trap and watched intently for any signs of surrender. “Tell me, what does Passover mean? Every Jewish child knows this.” “Freedom from slavery. Moses led our people to their freedom and the land of Israel. We ask why this night is special from all other nights in a prayer.” I spoke with little feeling. I wanted to rest. They challenged me with an unlimited supply of questions, which I answered to the best of my ability in Polish. Details I had not considered for years flooded back, bits of stories, lines of a song I once sang. My responses were then translated back whenever necessary into Yiddish by the rabbinical council that had formed around me. “What do we hear on Rosh Hashanah?” “The Shofar, the ram’s horn.” “And what is the saddest day of the calendar year?” I hesitated. “Tisha B’Av.” The mustached man with glasses smiled and raised his eyebrows. “And it commemorates?” “The destruction of the First and Second Temples.” “And who destroyed the first temple?” His partner interjected. “The Romans?” 178

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“No, you name the wrong army and the wrong siege,” the stocky man hmmphed, “where did you learn about Judaism?” “A rabbi was brought into our home. He taught both me and my older brother.” “Brought into the home. I see.” I was to match other Jewish holidays and their rituals. Sukkot, I accurately named as the holiday that commemorated the wandering of Jews through the wilderness and the booths where they dwelled, booths we were commanded to cover only with things that grew on the ground. “What things?” “Tree branches, sticks, bamboo reeds.” “And what do we shake at Sukkot?” “Lemons, palm and willow branches.” “What about Purim? Which queen do we honour?” “Queen Esther of the Persian Empire who saved us from our enemy, Haman.” “Show us what you do when the name Haman is mentioned.” I stamped my feet. My audience turned silent, recognizing the truth, when a hypothesis was again put forward which weakened my credibility. I had merely witnessed other Jewish children in the act and mimicked them. Persistent, I volunteered more information. “My parents were members of the Jewish Socialist Bund before the war. Also, they joined the Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist organization.” I went on to tell them I was born in Lublin, on Grodzka Street, that my maiden name was Handelsman, that I had seen neither my mother nor father since 1942, and that my mother and brothers were said to have been deported to Belzec, but of this I had no written proof since there was no documentation of their death. From what little information I gathered, my father was seen alive by a Polish witness in Majdanek as late as 1944. “Belzec, Majdanek. Just names of death camps she could have read about. She gains no vote of confidence from me.” 179

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I protested. “I had a younger brother. He was circumcised. I remember this. How could I invent it?” But then hadn’t I invented a complete Polish Christian counterpart for the past four years, and hadn’t I succeeded in convincing everyone around me of my false identity? The rigorous questioning continued through dawn. By morning, I hoped I had satisfied my Jewish interrogators. Shortly before approaching the city of Frankfurt, I overheard one Jewish man say to another in Yiddish, “So what do you think?” “I’ll tell you. I bet she was a maid employed in a Jewish home.” “I agree.” I exited the train without a word. I felt a mixture of pride, sorrow and rage as a Jew. Nothing filled my growing sense of loss, and yet, I couldn’t comfortably embrace the Jews I met. My Polish Gentile identity was no more secure. Throughout the war, I feared betrayal, but in sharing food with the girls and working together, I became one of them. When I greeted a Pole, I wanted to say, “Sister, brother, let me join you.” Ours was a kinship I could not deny, and this caused me guilt since I couldn’t reconcile our affinity with the death toll exacted across our country. So little was left to salvage. The world had been sectioned off like the train I rode that night, and I doubted much would change now peace was won. I disembarked and walked through the crowd as a falsely assumed and reminiscent Pole, a newly declared and abandoned Jew. Passengers spilled out of the train cars in great numbers. “Make way, make way,” the station master announced. New voyagers crowded the doors to board the train while others waiting for recent arrivals strained to see above all the heads. It was as if a flock of migrating birds was in transit. Jan and Bronislaw greeted me. “Salzheim will be my first stop, not my last,” I told them of my dream of embarking on a boat to Palestine. 180

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“We remember some of the Jewish youth in Warsaw and their organizations. They had zeal.” Jan said gently, his arms rounded. “A homeland is somewhere to return to,” Bronislaw remarked, emboldening me. “As for the two of us, we plan on returning to Poland shortly.” We embraced with promises of reuniting on some unknown date. I walked on, saddened by our parting and apprehensive about the future. I too had a need to return, but to what place would I go? I was not a Polish patriot like the two of them, on their way to rebuild what had been ravaged. A hybrid soul, I was in search of new ground. And if I couldn’t take stock of my Jewish past, I would have to try and rejoin my people to build a future. That is, if we would have one another. Somehow, I had faith.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank generous readers who have helped along the way. Special thanks to my former suny colleagues, Michael Carrino and Dr. Bruce Butterfield for their editorial assistance in fine-tuning the manuscript. I am also grateful to Dr. Nora Gold for her edits on “Crossing Borders” and “A Jewish Interrogation.” Readers are presented in these stories with an arc of historical experience of child and teen survival during the Shoah. As a daughter of child survivors, I undertook this historical journey as researcher, writer, and archeologist of sorts, digging up familial sites. In the opening story, “The Singers on Grodzka Street,” my mother’s girlhood in Lublin’s old Jewish district is evoked at the eve of the cataclysm. The title story, “The Saviour Shoes” chronicles my late father’s ordeals as an adolescent surviving in the forests of Belarus. The final story, “A Jewish Interrogation,” closes with my mother’s quest for identity shortly after the war. The collection was primarily adapted from testimonies of survivors I interviewed who were part of the Toronto community where I grew up. Names were changed to protect privacy unless I was otherwise directed. Drawing from a community of informants, I reconstructed narratives from oral testimonies in: “The Deathwatcher,” “Journey of a Coin,” “Homage to

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an Ordinary Man,” “Converting Father,” “A Question of Gender,” and “Crossing Borders.” As these narratives unfold, the reader moves from ghetto to death camp sites to places of hiding that honour the Righteous Among Nations. In reconstructing these historical narratives, dialogue was necessarily summoned, characters fleshed out, events sometimes reordered to meet the needs and constraints of the stories, and to fill in voids and spaces intrinsic to the fragmented nature of traumatic memory.1 At the core of these narratives, therefore, lies the unresolved tension or interplay between what is historically authentic and what I have imaginatively configured (Lang as cited by Gubar 260). Specific mention should be made of the fictional protagonist children in “City of Dreams” and “Merchants of Mercy,” stories built from a composite of true events which occurred in Vienna, Dovercourt Bay Holiday Lido Camp, and the Warsaw Ghetto. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Paul Valent for bringing to fruition my adaptation of the testimony of the former child partisan in “Feather Boy,” a testimony that emanated from Dr. Valent’s research in the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children. (The survivor himself guided me to the story’s authentic site of trauma, the Bialowieza forest.) “Verses for My Priest” was adapted from the same global study, as headed by the late Dr. Judith Kestenberg. I would also like to recognize Sheva Glas-Weiner’s compassionate account of the Lodz Ghetto children in her memoir, Children of the Ghetto, an excerpt of which I incorporated in “The Elder of the Jews.” My gratitude goes out to Inanna Publications and at the head of this press for women writers, my deep thanks to Luciana Ricciutelli for believing in me and for publishing this work as a whole.

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Finally, I thank and acknowledge all those survivors who offered up their voices to stories that might have otherwise been lost, those adults who bravely revisited the psychic trauma of childhoods they had resisted forgetting. No killing fields or groups complicit in killing were falsely named within the narratives.

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References Gubar, Susan. Poetry After Auschwitz Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Glas-Weiner, Sheva. Children of the Ghetto. Victoria: Globe Press, 1983.

“A Question of Gender” was published in Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing 5774-16 (2014). “The Singers on Grodzka Street” was published in Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 30.1 (2013). “Crossing Borders” and “A Jewish Interrogation” were published in Issue 9 on www.jewishfiction.net (December 5, 2012). “The Deathwatcher” was published in Midstream 49.7 (November/ December 2003). “The Saviour Shoes” was published in Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing 11 (2002-2003). “Feather Boy” was published in Jewish Currents 56.2 (611) (MarchApril, 2002). “Converting Father” was published in Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing 10 (2001-2002). “Eldest of the Jews” was published in Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing 8(1999-2000) (subsequently renamed “The Elder of the Jews”).

Photo: Michael Carrino

Carol Lipszyc’s book of poetry, Singing Me Home, was published by Inanna Publications in 2010. Recent poetry has been published in Canadian Woman Studies, Room, and Parchment. Short stories have appeared in Parchment, Midstream, and www.jewishfiction.net. She has also published on arts-based and interdisciplinary education in the Journal of Artistic and Creative Education, Complicity, and Learning Landscapes. Her Literacy/esl Reader with chants, People Express, was published by Oxford University Press. Carol is currently Associate Professor at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, teaching English teacher education and writing arts. Carol earned her Doctorate of Education at the University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.