by Jane Yolen
“And you’ll get the clothes, too?”
“Of course.”
“And your partner out there?”
“He’s already too embarrassed to talk to anyone after what he’s done. But he’ll be relieved that the doctor won’t be sending him to the front now. You—you must make certain they understand . . .” He pointed at Chaim and Gittel. “They are to say nothing. And I mean nothing! Or they go up the chimney, too.”
She nodded. “I’ll make that very clear. That’s something I can do. Oh, thank you, thank you. Tell me your name. Look how my hands tremble. That you have done this for me . . .”
Chaim managed a quick glance at them before looking down at his shoes again. The guard was smiling. It was an unnerving sort of smile.
“My name is Wulf.”
She smiled at him. “Wulf. I feel so well protected.”
Once Wulf left, closing the door carefully behind, Madam Grenzke said in a very small voice, “It certainly took Wulf long enough to figure that out. Now you absolutely must pretend nothing has happened. All our lives depend upon it. The doctor will just disappear.” Her hands made a smoothing movement, as though making a bed.
“Perhaps,” Gittel said, “instead of the chimney, Wulf and the other one could drive the doctor’s car out in the evening and come back the next day—or not—saying they’re taking him to the city where he’s meeting with other medical professionals.”
“Best that he disappear completely the simplest way. But I see you have the mind to become a great spy,” Madam Grenzke said.
Chaim could tell she meant it admiringly.
“Don’t try to recruit me,” Gittel told her.
Recruit? Chaim’s mind spun out of control.
“I’m a Jew,” Gittel continued. “All I want to do now is remain alive till the war’s end.”
“As do we all,” Madam Grenzke told her. “As do we all.”
“We?” Chaim asked. “That may take y-years.” He surprised himself by barely stuttering.
Madam Grenzke smiled. She crossed her arms over her ruined dress. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that. The Americans are on the march, and we hear they aren’t that far away. Almost at the gates.”
“We?” Chaim asked again, but again she ignored him. However, now he knew what she was. A partisan, hidden in plain sight.
“Then it’s over?” Gittel asked.
“Maybe the Americans are a bit early,” Madam Grenzke said, putting on her little woman face. “Or maybe it’s just—you know—Sobanek rumors.”
Suddenly Chaim remembered someone—Mama? Papa?—saying, Better too early than too late.
Almost at the gates, he thought, liking the sound of that. And the first line of a new poem sprang into his mind.
Gittel Remembers
That is all of the story of our lives before we were rescued by American soldiers near the end of the war two years later. They were led to us by the Resistance, who’d been told about us by Madam Grenzke, who had, of course, been working with them all that time.
And there we all were at Sobanek, a huddle of semi-starving children and a few feeble old men in a falling-down factory, afraid to stop making munitions lest we be slaughtered, though our captors had all left two weeks before. Too frightened to leave what now felt like a fortress, we simply lived day by day till the soldiers came.
What a sight we must have been, our hair and skin stained a strange yellow by the chemicals, our fingers bruised, more like broken twigs than bones.
Chaim and I kept our promise to Sophie and refused to be separated from Bruno, so we were sent together to a way station. It was a softer processing, where no one slapped anyone with a riding crop or screamed in our faces to schnell!
We were fed by American army volunteers, such food as we’d never eaten before! Bologna served on white bread with mayonnaise. And peanut butter with grape jelly sandwiches as well. Our first taste of American food. It was an amazing feast!
Bruno was incautious again, ate too much too fast, and was dreadfully ill that first day and night of our rescue. But after that, he seemed to have—again—learned a lesson. Though I suspect, like his other lessons learned, it was forgotten in time.
We were sent by airlift with other children to America, where we were called orphans of war, though not all of us actually knew if we were really orphans.
In a very short time, we became totally Americanized. Were adopted. Learned English. Went to high school and college in the United States.
Chaim and I became part of a sprawling Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut. Bruno was taken in by some Hartford folk. We sent letters back and forth for a while and then just sort of stopped.
I went to college in Connecticut and roomed with a Jewish girl who was fascinated by my stories, though I left out the really hard parts. I wasn’t yet ready to speak of them.
It all seems a blur now. Everything moving so fast. Maybe when you’re happy and safe, time speeds up. When you’re in constant danger, it slows down.
I have memories, not nightmares. It’s taken a lot of therapy, but I think my recovery began when I shoved von Schneir away from Chaim.
Chaim has not been so lucky. He still dreams about the doctor standing near him, holding Gregor’s beating heart in his hand. But writing his poetry helps him heal, and judging by the letters he gets from other survivors, his poems help them, too.
* * *
• • •
I emigrated after college and graduate school to Israel, where I live now in a little house on a kibbutz near Rehovot. My partner, Sonya, and I have five adopted children, all orphans of other wars. There are always wars, and there are always orphans. We will no doubt adopt even more. We work as if we can remake the world one child at a time.
Chaim and his wife, Sunny, opted to stay in America, in Western Massachusetts. Their oldest daughter is Sophie, while their twins—a boy and girl—carry Mama’s and Papa’s Hebrew names as their first names, Madam Grenzke’s name secondarily.
Chaim works in the University of Massachusetts Computer Center, which he helped establish after working at IBM in New York City well into the 1960s. He still hardly speaks.
Survivor is the name of his first book. It won many awards. I told him that he needn’t worry about talking anymore. His poems speak volumes.
He laughed at my unintended pun.
When he reads the poems aloud on his many tours, he neither stutters nor falters with the words. I think that’s a miracle. He calls it sacred preparedness. Sunny says he just likes being well rehearsed. He even proposed to her with a poem he’d written, though she said yes before he got to the end.
* * *
• • •
We never saw Mama or Papa again. Never found out if they were alive or dead, though we’ve never stopped searching.
And we’ve never actually seen Bruno again either, not after college. Occasionally I get a line or two from him on a postcard from some romantic place—Rome or Vienna, Japan, Antarctica. Although he studied psychology, he’s never practiced. He seems to be always on the move, as if trying to outrun his past. He lives by writing and taking photographs of places he’s been and left.
We’ve forgiven him, of course. We were just children then.
Forgiveness is easy.
Forgetting is not.
I think Sophie would understand.
* * *
• • •
This is my favorite of Chaim’s poems. An autographed broadside of it hangs in our living room. Our oldest child, the brilliant Rose, has translated it into Hebrew. She has a gift.
She is a gift. As are all our children. They are the future I’d hoped for when Chaim and I were in the ghetto, in the forest, in the House of Candy. They have remade all our dreams.
This Is the Miracle
Not the escape from the wh
ip,
the bullet, the chimney.
Not safety across the deep water.
Not the poem kept in memory’s palace.
Not a warm house, cold cider,
hot bath every night.
Not even you in my bed,
who never had to flee anything.
Think of it: my child’s hand in mine
as she sleeps without fear,
knowing nightmares always become day.
That is the true miracle.
The only one.
—Chaim Abromowitz
Author’s Note
The old German folktale of Hansel and Gretel is divided into three clear sections: at home and starving, lost in the trackless forest, rescue (of sorts) by the witch in her house of candy who plans to kill them both.
In this book, also, there are three distinct places: the Łódź (pronounced WOODGE) ghetto in Poland, where people are starving; the deep forests, where Polish partisans work against the Nazi regime; and the labor camp, Sobanek, which I also call the House of Candy.
Yes, there was a ghetto for Jews in Łódź. And yes, “King Chaim” ruled there with a council of Jews, under the eyes and hard hands of the Nazis.
Yes, there were partisans in the forests. They were called leśni ludzie, Polish for “forest people.” In fact, the Polish underground was the largest such resistance movement in all of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Yes, children were smuggled out of the ghettoes (though more notably out of Warsaw than Łódź). I’ve modeled Irena after the amazing Jolanta (Irena Sendler), who helped smuggle 2,500 babies and small children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, in suitcases, ambulances, and other ways.
Yes, Polish Jewish children over the age of twelve after the invasion of Poland (as well as lower-class Polish Christian or Catholic children over the age of fourteen) were used in forced labor camps—some kidnapped right from their homes. These labor camps were established in decimated villages where most of the adults had been killed outright, but none of the camps near the Romanian border was called Sobanek. I used the beginning of the name of the infamous Sobibór and added part of Majdanek’s name—both labor/death camps in that part of Poland.
The use of forced labor grew more and more prominent from 1939 on. Many children and adults died through what the Nazis despicably called “annihilation through work.” Between 1942 and 1945, there were hundreds of subcamps (usually as parts of concentration camps), but I have opted to have Sobanek function specifically as a munitions labor camp to honor a Polish Jewish friend of mine who was a child in one like it. These camps, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, “were established adjacent to coal mines, munitions and aircraft parts factories, sites for underground tunnels and other sites convenient to production of goods for the German war effort.”
And yes, the Nazi death doctor Josef Mengele existed and did hideous experiments on twins in Auschwitz concentration camp near the Romanian border beginning in May 1943. Often he operated on pairs of twins without any anesthetic, even when removing limbs and organs, to test for pain reflexes. There were other doctors experimenting on prisoners, but Mengele’s ghastly work has always been thought of as the most evil of them all. Von Schneir in this book—mentored by Mengele—is not a real person but a combination of a number of those other doctors who forsook their oaths not to do harm, and lost themselves to evil in that most evil of times. Were they as mad as my von Schneir? Possibly. But more probably they thought no more of experimenting on Jews than they did of using mice and rats.
Writing historical novels sometimes does a bit of hand-waving to make the novel’s timeline work out perfectly. In real life, by the time the children needed to be at Sobanek, Łódź had already been decimated of most of the ghetto population. But in order to fit in the Mengele connection, I had to adjust and readjust timelines so my story could fit. In addition, it would have been difficult to cross over quite that quickly and easily from Łagiewniki to Białowieża. But for reasons of storytelling, I have shortened the time it would have taken—and the danger. But it is a story, not history, though based on a lot of the historical record.
Remember, this book is fiction. It draws on much research, but this particular story is one I have made up from a lot of real parts. The tale of Hansel and Gretel is the armature on which it hangs. In the actual Holocaust of World War II, there were many real stories. The vast majority of them did not have a happy ending. Or even a semi-happy ending. Over six million of those Jewish stories ended in brutality, humiliation, torture, starvation, and death.
But sometimes, in a novel, the author can save a few lives, can choose who makes it to the end. And that is what I have done.
© Jason Stemple
Jane Yolen has been called the Hans Christian Andersen of America and the Aesop of the twentieth century. She has written over 350 books, including The Devil’s Arithmetic and Owl Moon. She splits her time between Massachusetts and Scotland.
You can visit Jane Yolen at janeyolen.com and follow her on Twitter @janeyolen
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