I remembered Mrs. Pohler’s bruised cheek and crossed my arms over my stomach. “And what did you say?”
“That their Führer should find work that pays better so he can buy his own boots!”
I looked her over, but I couldn’t find any blood. She shook her head.
“They only pushed me down, ketzele, and the back of me is too soft for that to hurt so much.”
I didn’t believe her, since I was fairly sure her mother’s jewelry was still sewn into her girdle.
And then there was a knock on the door.
Mrs. Diamant froze, turned, and looked at me. Her smile was gone.
“Did they follow you home?” I whispered. She shook her head and shrugged at the same time, the scarf crumpled tight in her hand. The knocking came again.
“What they’ve come to do, the door will not stop them, my ziskeit,” said Mr. Diamant. He was stooped, leaning against the doorway of the living room. He looked one hundred years old.
Mrs. Diamant went slowly to the door. The lock clicked. The hinges creaked. I expected to hear German. Instead I heard Max say, “Were you hoping we wouldn’t come back, Mame?”
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, oh!” And pulled him inside. Then Chaim came through the door, and Henek, and there was Izio. They were dirty and wet, their sleeves ragged, and their mother kissed each of their unshaven cheeks twice. I kissed them once, making Henek push me away and Max blush, both of which made me laugh.
Izio hugged me, not long, but long enough to let me know he’d missed me. He was thin beneath his shirt. Older beneath his eyes. I wanted to tell him everything that had been happening. And then I didn’t want to tell him anything that had been happening at all. I went to make tea while Mr. Diamant smiled and smiled, pumping the hands of his sons.
There was a lot of talk all at once, about the Russian military hospital where they’d all found work, hoping to be evacuated with the army. But the evacuation order never came.
“The border is sealed,” said Chaim. “We can’t get out.”
None of us could.
We had a small feast of the broth with kasha, which was more filling than good, the rest of the bread, a pot of marmalade Mrs. Diamant had been saving, and a sack of apples. And even though the stories Chaim told were terrible, of German planes shooting down the refugees on the road and the executions of innocent men, there was more laughter than tears. We laughed at the ugly dishes I’d bought in a secondhand booth to replace the china. Roared when Henek asked why the Germans hadn’t taken the jewelry and his mother told him. And Max’s impression of Hitler reading Mr. Diamant’s copy of Commentary on the Talmud while wearing women’s boots made me laugh until I hurt. Izio held my hand tight beneath the table.
We didn’t know it then, we were all too happy to be together, but this was when the men should have been going to God with their heads beneath the prayer shawls. When I should have been on my knees, calling out to the Virgin and the Christ.
If we had known it, this was the time we should have cried.
A few days later, there were two letters on the kitchen table from the housing office. Mrs. Diamant slit a knife down one end of the first envelope. Whatever it said inside, a grim look of satisfaction came across her face. She trotted off, and I heard an argument in the hallway. I drank my tea, wondering what Regina and Rosa had done now, and slit open the second envelope.
I read the letter. Twice. And then Mrs. Diamant came back to the table and tossed the first paper down in triumph. Regina and Rosa were moving, because the front bedroom had now been reassigned. To me. I had my own room.
I savored this news for about thirty seconds before I gave her the second letter. This one said all Jews were being reassigned to housing in a ghetto. The Diamants’ new apartment would be only a few blocks away, inside a designated area behind the train station.
I might have my own room. But I would be alone.
Mrs. Diamant’s face worked. “We will not go until we have to,” she said.
Two days after that, Regina and Rosa moved to the ghetto. Three weeks after that, the posters went up. Any Jew not in the ghetto by midnight on the following day would be shot.
We did not sleep that night. I moved furniture and packed the ugly dishes while receiving advice in a nonstop stream.
“Remember, you are Catholic,” said Mrs. Diamant, as if I might forget. “They will not touch a Catholic. Lock the doors at night and lock your bedroom door at night. But it is only a place to sleep. We will see each other every day, yes? The things in this box, these you can sell when the money runs out …”
She shoved the box into my hands. She’d already given me one quarter of the money, now stuffed into the unused stovepipe in the kitchen.
“… and you will come to us,” she went on, mopping her brow, “and bring us the little things we do not have, because you can buy and sell, yes?”
“Why don’t I come with you?” I said for the hundredth time. “I can sleep in a hall, like I do now …”
“Don’t be stupid, ketzele.”
I probably was being stupid. I was probably being a Dummkopf. But my heart was breaking.
There was a burst of machine-gun fire in the street, shouts, and a woman screamed. Max set down his box, went to the window, and abruptly shut the curtain.
“Don’t look outside, Mame,” he said. “Okay?” He glanced at me, and I didn’t need to be told. Leave the curtain shut. And then a fist hammered on the door.
We knew now what it sounded like when the Gestapo came. Like Hitler and Stalin were fighting to see who could break down a door first. Like they were coming in whether you opened it or not. Mrs. Diamant spun and snatched a knapsack out of Izio’s hands.
“Quick,” she whispered, “all of you! Put your boxes in the front bedroom. Under the bed. Everything in the bedroom. Go! Chaim, Max! Put the kitchen table in there, too. And four of the chairs. Hurry!”
There was a scramble in the apartment. The fist hammered again. Or it might have been the butt of a club this time. “Gestapo! Öffne die Tür! Öffne!”
The table and chairs disappeared into my room. Izio waited for his mother’s nod, and he opened the door. Four SS officers crowded into the front hall, then fanned out through the house. One stayed, his cap with the skull grinning down at us. His boots were shiny black mirrors.
“What is happening?” Mrs. Diamant asked.
“Silence!” said the man. “Your Führer will allow you to donate what you will not need for the provision of the German Army …”
The German Army must need our sofa, I thought, because it was already being carried out the door. I ran to the living room. The third officer had come through from the kitchen and was rifling inside a box of Chaim’s clothes that hadn’t made it to the front bedroom. The room was dim from the closed curtains and the cloud of smoke surrounding Mr. Diamant’s chair, cluttered with all the little items from our packing. The officer wrinkled his nose and tucked the box beneath one arm.
“You Jews live like swine,” he said, or that’s what we thought he said. His Polish wasn’t near as good as the other man’s. He fished a full packet of cigarettes out of Mr. Diamant’s shirt pocket, put it in his own, and slapped him. And then he spit on the floor.
Chaim took a step away from the wall, and I watched Max put out a silent hand to stop him. Henek stood in the doorway of the kitchen with a clenched fist, Izio right behind him.
The room had the whining, whistling anticipation of a falling bomb.
I turned quickly to the spitting man and smiled like I wanted him to buy me a chocolate. He started, looked me over, set the box on the floor at his feet, and pulled out a list from inside his jacket.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“This is Miss Podgórska,” said Mrs. Diamant, hurrying through the door with the first SS officer. She went straight to the desk, fumbling through the papers in the drawer. “Like I have said to you, she has been assigned to our bedroom. So the things in there belong to
her. Not to Jews.” She found the letter from the housing office and held it out. “Not to Jews,” she repeated while the man with the shiny boots read. She shot me a look that said very clearly to keep my mouth shut. I shut it.
The second officer checked his list, then shook his head.
“Leave the girl’s room!” the first officer barked. “Take the rest.”
We watched while they took the last of the furniture, down to Mr. Diamant’s chair and the rugs off the floor. A truck stood parked in front of the building, its back end bulging with what had once belonged to the families of our building, and I saw a woman on the other side of it, throwing water over the sidewalk by the bucketful. The gutter ran red.
I dropped the curtain back into place. I’d forgotten I was supposed to leave it closed.
The SS man with the list took one last look around the empty apartment, at the seven of us sitting or standing on the bare floor. Satisfied that he hadn’t left anything valuable behind, he turned to go. Then he turned again, came back to me, and pinched my cheek.
“Find some new friends soon, ja?”
He smiled and left, and I scrubbed my cheek beneath the faucet in the kitchen sink.
* * *
It didn’t take much time for the Diamants to gather the things that had been left in my new room. But the table and the chairs, Mrs. Diamant said, were for me. She kissed my forehead, and Mr. Diamant, bent with a pack on his back and a red cheek, patted my arm. Henek ducked his chin at me, and Izio kissed me on the mouth. Max studied the pattern of the cracks in the plaster.
“Wait for me,” Izio said.
And when the door was closed, I went to the window and threw it open. There was a line of Jews with arms loaded or pushing carts, making their way down the street past the train station, and I listened to some of the same people who had bought blintzes and soda water and crackers and cheese in the Diamants’ shop hurling abuse as they left their home.
“Dogs.”
“Vermin.”
“Filthy Jews!”
I turned the lock on the front door, went into my new room, locked that door, put a chair beneath the knob, and got into the bed. I cried until the sun went down, until the commotion outside had died. The floors didn’t creak with footsteps. No distant call or slam of a door. The building had been Jewish, and now it was as empty as a freshly dug grave. And I was by myself in a corner of it. I saw shadows move. Imagined shiny black boots coming soft down the hall. And there was no one to talk to. No one to tell. I wanted my mother. I wanted Mrs. Diamant. I wanted Izio. I clutched my blanket to my chest, sweating.
I did not like being afraid.
The next morning, I put on Mrs. Diamant’s old coat, the one she’d lent me when mine got shredded, and peeked out the door of the echoing apartment. I put a foot over the threshold, then another, and another, until I was hurrying down the stairs, out the front doors, and into the quiet courtyard, where no children played. I darted through the tunnel alley that was Mickiewicza 7, around the corner, and over the little bridge that crossed the train tracks. Beyond the station was the neighborhood that was now the ghetto, and there I had to stop.
A fence had been put up, string after string of barbed wire, and a gate made of fresh planks of wood. A German policeman patrolled back and forth in front of this gate, and when he saw me staring, he yelled and waved his machine gun. I ran back along the train tracks, circling, trying to find an end to the fence, but every street that led into the ghetto had been blocked. The Jews had not been “reassigned.” They had been taken prisoner.
I wandered the streets of Przemyśl all day. Looking at the rubble piles where buildings used to be, in the windows of the shops or watching the factory workers—the factories were all German now—go to and from their shifts. I told myself I needed a job, that’s why I was wandering like this. That it had nothing to do with being lonely. That it had nothing to do with being afraid to go home.
I investigated a Help Needed sign at a dressmaker’s shop and discovered I would not find work anywhere because I didn’t have the proper papers. My papers were Polish. They needed to be German. So I went to the labor office in the city hall. My Polish papers would not do, said the little German man from behind the desk, one finger pushing up his wire-rimmed glasses, because I had never provided proof of my birth. I could be a Romany. I could even be a Jew. To get papers, he said, I would need a photo I could not afford and a birth registration that did not exist. No? Then perhaps there was someone who had known me since birth. Someone who could sign an affidavit swearing to my name and nationality and religion. No? Then auf Wiedersehen.
I went back to the apartment. I didn’t know what else to do. I shut the front door with the softest of clicks, afraid to hear the emptiness of an echo. But then I did hear a door slam. From somewhere downstairs. I listened to my heart beat, faster, faster, as footsteps came one by one up the stairs. Someone knocked on a door, but it was across the hall. Then the footsteps came again, and the knock was on my door.
“Hello?” said a voice outside. Young. Female. I opened the door a little and saw a smile. I opened it the rest of the way and saw a woman in a blue print dress, rocking back and forth on her heels.
“I’m Emilika,” she said. “And I’ve got a room on the first floor, only it’s spooky in here, isn’t it? All these empty apartments and closed doors. It’s quiet, much too quiet, and I wanted you to know I have sugar. Not a lot, but enough, and I thought maybe you would want tea. Or, I mean to say, that you might think this building is too big and want to have tea with me, too. Before the sugar runs out …”
“Yes!” I said, before she could keep going.
She smiled bigger. “I’ll get it.” And she disappeared down the stairs.
I hurried into my room and shoved the boxes under the bed and spread the blanket over my rumpled sheets and nightgown, hung the rosary on the bedpost, and straightened up Jesus and Mary on the windowsill. Then I lit the little stove. Emilika came running back with a teapot, two cups, the tea, and a paper parcel of sugar, and it was amazing how this time when the sun went down, my room seemed cozy instead of something from my nightmares.
Emilika was twenty-three, Catholic like me, had brown hair, a freckled nose, and worked in a photography shop. She thought it was terrible, what the Germans had done to Przemyśl. When the trains were running properly and she’d saved up enough money, she would go back to her family in Kraków. Or maybe the Russians would come back. Or maybe the war would be over soon and everything would go back to the way it was. But in the meantime, we were the landlords of the building, weren’t we? Queens of the kingdom of apartments. We could have it all our own way, couldn’t we?
She brought up a mattress and slept in my room that night, and neither one of us worried about the silence, because there wasn’t that much of it. She asked about boys. I told her I had one. But I didn’t tell her he was Jewish. I asked her about boys. She said she had several. She slept in my apartment every night.
And in the morning, ten days later, a noise woke me up. The sound of feet on stone pavement, all moving at the same time. I pushed the curtain to one side. The street below was filled with men, Jewish men, walking in lines, one behind the other, German guards with guns marching with them on either side. The men’s heads were down, eyes on the ground, but there was one looking up. Staring straight at my window.
Max.
I yanked off my nightgown, threw on a dress, and flew down the stairs without my shoes. Out the front door of the apartment building, through the passage of Mickiewicza 7, around the corner, and behind our block of buildings. A train was coming into the station, and I pushed through the crowd trying to get to it, all of us blocked by the people standing on the sidewalk, watching the Jews go by. I shoved my way along the column of marching men, chose a moment when the guard wasn’t looking, and stepped into the moving line beside Max.
“Hi,” he said.
“What’s happening? Where are you going?”
“To work, or that’s what they say. We are all supposed to work.”
I had a feeling that pay did not come with it. “Are you all right? How is everyone? Your mother? And Izio?”
He shrugged. He looked like Max, but with an expression I wasn’t used to. Tense. Tight.
“Mame wants you to sell some things and get us some food. There’s no way to buy in the ghetto, and there are eight other families in our apartment. We’ve already used what we brought.”
“How can I get it to you? I tried to come, and there were fences …”
“We pass this way every morning. Meet me here. I’ll bring it in somehow—”
“Halt!”
I jumped at the harsh bark. A German guard had spotted me. And now his gun was pointed at my head.
“I just needed to tell my friend something,” I said, backing away from the line of moving men. “I’m finished now …”
I turned and fled, not sure if the man was going to shoot me. He didn’t. I climbed the stairs, found Emilika gone, and washed my feet while I thought.
Eight families to an apartment. How could that be? That would have to mean twenty, thirty people. At the least. And they were already out of food, with no way to buy more. So they were hungry now and would stay that way until Max brought food after work tomorrow. Only how could Max carry enough for all of them? And even if he could, would he be allowed? Or would the Germans take that away, too?
I turned a brush through my tangled curls. How was anyone in the ghetto supposed to live? Were the Nazis planning to starve every Jew in Przemyśl? I put my clean feet into some socks and tied my shoes.
Maybe they were. But they weren’t going to starve mine.
I went through the box of things to sell and settled on a silk blouse long since too small for Mrs. Diamant and a set of silver candlesticks the SS hadn’t found because they’d been so tarnished in the back of a cabinet. I spent half the morning haggling at the market and the secondhand shops and came out with one chicken, a sack of coarse flour, half a kilo of butter, three dozen eggs, and some change to stuff up the stovepipe.
The Light in Hidden Places Page 4
