The Light in Hidden Places

by Sharon Cameron

  “You’re not going to fall out the window?”

  Actually, I was in danger of falling out the window. I stood, surprised to find my knees were shaky, and Izio got up from the floor. He took both my hands in his.

  “Three years,” he said. “Probably more. Will you wait for me?”

  “But what will your parents say?” I was thinking of the synagogue on Saturday and a cathedral on Sunday. What would mine say?

  “You’re already one of the family. You know that. But maybe it will be our secret. For now.”

  Like it always had been. He touched my hair. “Stefania, Stefi, Stefushka, Stefusia, Fusia Podgórska,” he whispered. “Will you wait for me?”

  And then I kissed Izydor Diamant. I kissed him for a long time. And a month after that, German bombs fell again on Przemyśl.

  This time the explosions came during the deep sleep before the dawn. But I knew exactly what they were. I came out from behind my curtain, and Max grabbed my hand and his mother’s, pulling us into a stampede of people in nightclothes making their way down the shaking steps to the cellar of the apartment building. Chaim and Henek were behind us, Izio carrying his sick father like a sack of potatoes.

  We shivered in our thin clothes, and then the crowded cellar got warm. Stuffy. Full of crying children and dirt shaking down from the bombs above us. Henek complained that I was crowding him, complained again, and I kicked him in the shin. Izio put his arm around me. Mrs. Diamant saw and shook her head, mumbling.

  When the sun was halfway across the sky, the bombs and the artillery shells went quiet, and I heard the machine guns come, faint, then closer, jeeps driving fast past our building. Izio looked down at me, and I looked at him, and then we both looked at Max. If the Germans came, they would have to run. But I thought Mr. Diamant could be right. Russia might win.

  The fighting came right outside, gunfire and breaking glass, and when the shots finally slowed and stopped, Henek crept up to the street. There were dead German soldiers, he said, propped up in the shop windows like mannequins. A few people in the cellar cheered. Until the guns started up again. I pressed my hands to my ears, trying not to hear the wounded men, and when it finally stopped, and Henek again stole up the stairs, he said there was no one on the streets at all. No wounded, no vehicles. And the dead soldiers posing in the shop windows were Russians now, propped up with broomsticks, their faces painted with swastikas.

  “The Germans are coming, Mame,” said Chaim.

  Mrs. Diamant stirred, as if she’d woken from a sleep. “Upstairs,” she said. “Quick! All of you!”

  We did what we were told, stepping over the miserable crowd and up the stairs.

  “Fusia,” said Mrs. Diamant, huffing as she climbed. “Get the cashbox from under the bed. Count the money and divide it five ways, yes? Boys, wear your boots and two layers of clothes so you will have room in your bags for food. And on the way you will go to the shop and take all the bread you can carry …”

  By the time I got the money doled out, the boys were dressed and Mrs. Diamant was stuffing empty bottles into knapsacks, because there was no water coming from the pipes. Chaim nodded to me, and Henek looked away; Max smiled once, and Izio kissed my forehead.

  “Wait for me,” he whispered.

  “Take care of our parents,” said Max. “Please,” he added.

  And before I could answer, they were gone.

  I hadn’t thought this would happen.

  Mr. Diamant slumped down in his chair, too stunned to smoke, and I had a great bleeding wound somewhere deep inside my chest. And Mrs. Diamant saw it. Just like she had seen Izio’s arm around me and that kiss on the forehead. She took off her glasses, rubbing them on the coat she was wearing over her nightgown. She had dust on her face, a clean ring around each eye, and there was an emotion there that I had never seen directed at me. Anger.

  It hit me like a blow to the stomach.

  I went to the sink to do the dishes we’d left two days ago, but when I turned on the faucet, nothing happened. I’d forgotten there was no water. Only what was streaming down my face. Then Mrs. Diamant sighed, pulled me into her arms, called me her ketzele, and we cried together for her sons while the ambulances went by.

  We should have saved our tears for later.

  The German Army marched down Mickiewicza Street, row after row with boots that could be heard with the windows closed. Rosa and Regina came out of the cellar, shook their dusty clothes in our hallway until we sneezed, and slammed the door. I thought about how they’d fled from Germany. About Izio, and every story I’d ever heard and refused to believe. The stories that he believed. I looked at Mr. Diamant, weak and thin, at my babcia, soft as warm butter with her tear-streaked face. I turned my back to the army marching on the other side of the glass and said, “I think we should run.”

  It took some convincing, but without her sons, Mrs. Diamant wasn’t as hard to persuade as I thought she might be. We’d go east, I said. To Nizankowice. Maybe the Germans wouldn’t care so much about Jews in a village. Not like in the city. They’d have to come a long way to find us.

  Mrs. Diamant sewed her jewelry into her girdle and our money into her bra while I found water, tidied the kitchen, packed food, and hid the candlesticks. I didn’t trust Regina and Rosa not to ransack the apartment while we were gone. We didn’t even tell them we were leaving.

  There were no trains, so we made our slow way through the city, staying off the main streets as long as we could, finally joining a line of people like ourselves, all trying to escape the Germans in Przemyśl. Mr. and Mrs. Diamant had to stop and rest about every forty-five minutes, even though I was carrying all our supplies in the knapsack, and I had to bite my tongue and force my feet to slow. I stared at the sky, waiting for them to catch up. What was I doing? How could I take care of two people old enough to be my grandparents? Someone else should have been doing this job. Making these decisions.

  Only there was no one else. There was only me.

  The second part of my education had begun.

  It was late in the afternoon, and we were only halfway to Nizankowice, traveling with a group of other old people, some older than Mr. Diamant, women with children, and carts carrying the sick. The slow-moving. Weapons lay scattered along the road, dropped as the Russians fled, free for the taking. We heard single shots, bursts of machine-gun fire in the woods, the whooping of boys right after. We passed three people nursing their own bullet wounds beside the road. I wanted to stop, to do something, but I had my two old people, and no way to help them.

  The sun was still hot, Mr. and Mrs. Diamant were exhausted, and there had been no water for a long time, so I led our group down a lane, hoping to find a farmhouse with a well.

  Which is exactly what we did find. A house with a sloping red roof and a barn where cows mooed, a sheltered well right in front. I knelt in front of the well, grateful, while the others sighed with relief, pulling up the chain with a full bucket on the end, trying to fill a bottle with a very narrow opening. Mr. and Mrs. Diamant helped each other to the ground to sit, chests heaving.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I looked up to discover a woman with a scarf around her head. And the end of a Russian rifle.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I should have knocked.” I gave her my best buy-me-a-chocolate smile, but it didn’t work. Not this time. “My … my friends are tired, and we’ve traveled a long—”

  “I know who you are,” said the woman, pointing the rifle at my ragtag group huddled in her yard. “Swine Jews. Now get out!”

  I looked back at the group. Were they Jews? I didn’t know. “But …”

  “Get out before I shoot!” she shouted.

  Some people didn’t like Jews. Of course I knew that. But denying a drink to children and a few ragged old people was something beyond my experience. I helped Mr. Diamant to his feet and watched the group make their slow way to the road, backs bent. I adjusted the heavy knapsack and looked back at the woman with her
rifle and her well full of water. And suddenly I was so angry that my vision blurred.

  “I hope one day you will be dying of thirst,” I told her, “so that, then, someone can deny you water the same way you did to them!”

  “Come, ketzele,” whispered Mrs. Diamant. I turned my back, then jumped as a shot rang out. Something buzzed past my head, and blood pooled from a man’s arm just in front of me, a man I didn’t even know. He cried out, but he didn’t stop moving down the lane. None of us did. Not until we got back to the road. Mrs. Diamant used her scarf to bind the stranger’s wound, and I wanted to be sick, but I wasn’t.

  If I was going to take care of them, if they were my responsibility, if any of us were going to survive, then I had to learn to control my temper. No matter how unfair. No matter how angry I became.

  I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  We hobbled into the village of Nizankowice near midnight, and I knocked on the door of Mrs. Nowak, the Catholic woman who had been boarding Max during the week while he worked with Dr. Schillinger. She was surprised to see us, but she didn’t seem sorry. She put us in Max’s room, and I think Mr. and Mrs. Diamant fell asleep before their heads were on the pillow.

  I looked at Max’s room. It was a young man’s place. There were dirty shoes in the corner, medical books beside the bed, pictures on the bureau. One of his brothers and sister. One of him in a hat and coat in front of the shop. One of a girl I didn’t know. And one of me with his mother, caught by surprise, smiling behind the chocolate display. I found his extra blanket and slept on the floor.

  I would miss the shop.

  The next afternoon, while the Diamants rested, I slipped out of the house to the village square. We needed food, a job, a more permanent place to stay. I thought there might be a store that needed help. A house that needed cleaning. What I found was three bodies lying in the dirt—dead or unconscious, I wasn’t sure—and a village near rioting. Two men were taking turns standing on a crate, shouting over the noise of a raucous crowd. They were unshaven, dressed in boots and coveralls like factory workers. But their haircuts were short. Suspiciously neat. I shrank behind a parked delivery truck.

  “This war was started by Jews!” the man on the crate yelled. He was pointing at the people, his face red and sweating. “They bankrupt our country, starve our children. Your families will not be safe, this war will never end, until every … last … Jew … is dead!”

  A roar went up from the crowd, some against, some for this speech, and while the people were busy arguing, the man in the dirty coveralls and his companion trotted out of the square and into the woods just beyond. I watched three men follow, and immediately there was gunfire. The crowd scattered, a few heading for the woods with sticks and clubs. There were still three bodies lying in the square. I ran back to the boarding house and locked the door. I was sweating.

  “Did you find anything good?” asked Mrs. Diamant. She was reading a magazine, her swollen feet propped up on a cushion. I plastered a smile on my face.

  “Not today,” I said, and shut myself in the toilet. I could hear that bullet whizzing by my head, the old man’s cry when it passed through his arm. The Jews didn’t do that. Or drop bombs on my city. What had come over everyone? I splashed cold water on my face.

  Mrs. Nowak knocked on the door and then opened it a crack. I straightened over the sink. She was very sorry, but after tonight, we would need to find another place to stay. Someone else had reserved the room. Max’s room. With his pictures in it. Mrs. Nowak’s mouth was drawn in tight.

  “Does someone know you have Jews here?” I asked.

  She looked caught. And guilty. “I … I just don’t want trouble, that’s all.”

  I patted my face dry, trying to think. I wanted to cry.

  “Should we go east?” I whispered.

  Mrs. Nowak shook her head. “I do not think they will let you into Russia,” she said.

  We didn’t wait for morning. I got Mr. and Mrs. Diamant up at three thirty, before the house was stirring. Mrs. Diamant left a note, thanking Mrs. Nowak for her hospitality; I shut the door without noise and hurried them down the dark road. I wanted to be far away from Nizankowice before the sun rose.

  We made excellent time. Much better than the first trip. Mrs. Diamant kept a good pace, and Mr. Diamant wasn’t having as much trouble with his diabetes. Or maybe they were more afraid this time than sad. Not that I told them what had happened in town. But the obedient way they were following me said maybe they had figured it out for themselves.

  The woods were quiet, no gunshots, the morning air cool, the rising hills misty, and the only people we saw were a few more refugees going the opposite way. We arrived back in Przemyśl at two in the afternoon with nothing worse than sore feet.

  So much for me being in charge, I thought. In the city, at least, our neighbors wouldn’t shoot us.

  Mrs. Diamant steered us toward the shop before the apartment, to take some inventory home. We were hungry and tired, and the market hadn’t reopened. A long, jagged crack ran through the front window of the shop, a dripping yellow Star of David and the word “Jude” painted across the glass. And the shelves were empty. Not an apple or a chocolate remained.

  I left the Diamants on the sidewalk and walked across the street to the bank. The manager, a man Mrs. Diamant had known since he was in diapers, said that the Diamants no longer had an account there. That no Jew had an account there. I emptied my account instead. Mrs. Diamant didn’t say anything. She just took her husband’s arm, and we walked slowly back to the apartment.

  At least that was the same. Though it looked as if someone had gone through the cupboards and the desk. And someone had beaten their dirty rugs right in the hallway, because my red bedroom curtain was gray with dust. I saw my suspect for both crimes, Rosa, peeking out from her door, though she slammed it shut again when she saw me looking. I think she hoped we weren’t coming back.

  Mrs. Diamant went with me to the market the next morning to use some of my savings and buy something that could be sold for profit in the shop. Only to discover that Jews were no longer allowed in the market between eight in the morning and six o’clock at night. Which was, of course, when all the food was there. I sent her home and I did the shopping, and all the shopping after that, though there was very little money to do it with.

  I also crossed the bridge the Nazis had thrown up to replace the one that was bombed. But my sister was no longer on the other side of Przemyśl, and neither was anyone who knew where she might have gone. I wrote a letter to my mother, giving it to the postman the first day we had mail again. He whispered that it was good we’d come back from Nizankowice when we did, that the road wasn’t safe. Others trying to come back to the city had been beaten, robbed, murdered on the way. But it wasn’t safe here, either. Mrs. Diamant brought home new German identity papers and white armbands stamped with Jewish stars, and she did it by walking in the gutters, because Jews were not allowed on the sidewalks. We watched boys in their yarmulkes scrubbing the streets beneath the eye of a German machine gun. I didn’t get a reply from my mother.

  Somehow, the air felt like winter long before the cold came. Oppressive. Dark.

  Lonely.

  It made me angry.

  I splashed home in a cold rain with the little food we could afford, and when I walked through the front door and slipped off my boots, my feet made tracks across the hallway. My curtain, my bed, and even the door to the kitchen were once again covered in dust. I went to Rosa and Regina’s door and knocked. When there was no answer, I banged. One eye—Rosa’s, I think—appeared in the opening crack.

  “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to shake a rug outside? You’re covering everything in dirt!”

  The eye in the door crack narrowed.

  “And you’re taking it right back into your room every time you come and—” But the door had slammed shut. I went to find the dustpan.

  The next morning, my coat, left hanging to dry in the hallway, had been cu
t into ribbons.

  “Never mind,” Mrs. Diamant said, running her hands through the shreds. “Sadness can become cruelty. Remember that, ketzele. We do not know what happened to them in Germany. We should pity those women.”

  I wasn’t sure I could. But maybe I wouldn’t have so much to forgive if I could control my own temper.

  Two days later, Regina and Rosa called the new German police, the Gestapo, to the apartment. The first time we met the Gestapo, they’d helped themselves to most of the books, one painting, the silver menorah, and all of Grandmother Adler’s china. Now they’d come because Mrs. Pohler had refused to give Regina the key to the attic—where we all took turns hanging our wet linen—until her own linen was dry. Two SS officers with skulls on their caps hammered on Mrs. Pohler’s door, called her a stinking Jew, slapped her face, and removed the linen key from her shaking hands. They gave the key to Regina, whom they also called a stinking Jew, and Regina and Rosa disappeared to the attic, I assumed to shred all Mrs. Pohler’s clean laundry.

  This time Mrs. Diamant did not speak of pity. “I will take care of this,” she muttered. She put on her coat, tied her scarf around her head, and hurried out the door.

  I made broth for Mr. Diamant, who was ill and in his bed, then sat stewing on the windowsill. Mrs. Diamant couldn’t have gone to the market. It was late afternoon. Curfew wasn’t until nine o’clock, but even the Polish police, who did what the SS told them, would find any reason to stop a Jew. Rain blew and streaked down the window glass, and when Mrs. Diamant blustered back into the apartment, I hurried to meet her.

  “Where have you …”

  She dismissed me with a wave and locked the door behind her. Water dotted the scarf on her head and the white armband on her coat, and she was barefoot, her round, muddy toes sticking out from torn and filthy stockings. I changed my question.

  “Where are your boots?”

  “Hitler has them,” she said. “The Gestapo says their Führer has more need of them than an old woman walking in gutters running with the rain.”