with rubies and diamonds,
even her gold wedding band.
They were content for a time,
but now they are back.
Father is still ill,
and now Mother’s treasure box is almost empty.
Hunger has made itself at home.
Moved in and filled our bellies.
Emptied our minds of reason.
We can barely form a complete thought between us.
But Henry rallies.
He finds a hole,
an eye just big enough for a thin needle of a boy
to pass through.
We wait for nightfall,
then spool me into my father’s black coat
with big pockets.
“They shoot smugglers,” Henry warns,
but I’m not afraid.
Guided by moonlight,
I thread my way through
the forest to Janek’s farm.
Something moves in the darkness.
Wolves?
I sew myself into the night
until we are seamless
and hold my breath.
A rabbit flashes by,
doing what I cannot.
Running for its life.
Shining in the moonlight.
MIDNIGHT MARKET
Once again, our family is asking something of Janek.
Will he help us?
Or will he say
“Enough is enough”?
I should not have worried.
Janek still wears his friendship with my father.
He is nervous,
but not for himself. For me.
He asks about my family
as he leads me to the back of his house.
Janek is thinner.
I can tell that Hunger has come to visit him
a time or two.
Janek does not have much food,
but he gives me as many potatoes as I can carry.
A boy would fill only his pockets,
but I am becoming a man.
I stuff the legs of my knickers.
Fill my shirt.
I keep my hands free.
Extend one to Janek to say
thank you
the way a man would.
The way my father would.
I head back through the dark forest,
squeeze through the opening in the ghetto wall.
Ollie Ollie Oxen Free Free Free.
I am safely back in our prison.
Recaptured by my own hand
with enough food to feed my family for a few more days.
MATHEMATICS
In school,
I did not like math,
and now, I must admit,
I like it even less.
In the ghetto,
even though we are all in the same boat,
we are divided.
Father says we cannot help it.
It is what our minds think we must do to survive.
I look at my father with a question in my eyes.
“Yes,” he says, “it is a ’scratch your head’ mentality.”
We are hungry all the time.
Each day Mother opens up a small velvet pouch and
subtracts a small shiny treasure.
Mother is selling her jewelry to buy us food.
We eat, but it does not take away our hunger.
There is so much sickness.
Hunger is greater than dying, and dying is greater than death.
We are a pie chart,
just like the ones we made in school.
But here, our shaded area keeps shrinking because
The Living are less than The Dead.
We are a word problem the Wolves know how to solve.
DEATH
There is sickness
and sadness
and death.
Death is our all-the-time companion.
There is a corner in the room
reserved for him.
His door is always open.
Father and Mother
cover Bella’s eyes.
She has already seen too much that is
not good in the world.
Father, Saul, and I try to stare Death down—
we want him to think
we are not afraid.
Deep down we know
if he invites us over
we will not be able to refuse.
Death does not take “no” for an answer.
CHAPTER 5
THE LIQUIDATION
AUGUST 1942
WEIGHING IN
There is a pounding at the door—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
The wolves are howling:
“Everyone out!
You can take twenty kilograms.
No more!
Move!
Now!”
Our eyes are wide with fear.
Bella is crying.
She clings to her doll.
My mother looks around
the room that is not ours.
There is nothing here that belongs to us.
My mother,
always thinking of her family,
takes a loaf of bread and a few potatoes.
And then my father takes
her hand
and my mother takes
Bella’s hand
and Bella takes
Saul’s hand
and Saul takes
my hand.
The wolves are
pushing and shoving us out the door.
There is no need for a suitcase.
What we want weighs too much.
We take each other.
DON’T LOOK
The soldiers march us out of the ghetto,
past St. Wojciech Square,
to the waiting trains at Okrzeja Street.
“Moishe, don’t look at the soldiers,” my father says.
I don’t look.
No one in my family looks.
We watch the ground.
I feel as if we are sinking into it—
our fear has weighed us down.
TODAY THE SKY HAS NO COLOR
Today the sky has no color.
I think that’s because the sun is on our side.
It is protesting what is being done
to the Jews by refusing to shine.
The air is hot, thick, and still.
BANG!
The sound shatters our ears and
our dear friend David lies on the ground.
Too slow.
BANG!
Too old.
BANG!
Rebellious.
BANG!
Sickly.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
This is a new kind of thunder.
People raining on the ground.
We navigate around the fallen.
Pray the soldiers don’t notice Father is sick.
In a lightning flash, Mother’s hand leaves my shoulder
and she and my sister are dragged away.
I hear her crying for us, her two sons,
“My children! Who will care for you? Who will feed you?”
I could not see her, but I knew her voice.
I didn’t know that these would be the last words I ever
heard from my mother.
We are torn asunder
and a new kind of rain
pours from our eyes.
LAYER BY LAYER
The Nazis peel us like onions,
layer by layer.
Mothers
Fathers
Brothers
Sisters
Family
Friends.
Each time someone is ripped away
a sulfuric gas is released until
the aroma of our sadness stings.
We squeeze our eyes shut tightly,
hoping to burn their memory onto our corneas,
but it is too painful.
All we can do is cry.
THE CHOSEN
In school
it meant something to be chosen.
If you could run fast, kick hard, snatch balls from the sky.
It was an indescribable feeling to find favor with your peers.
But we are not in school.
We are huddled together,
like cattle,
waiting.
And then we are divided up,
as if for teams.
Families are separated.
Women here.
Children here.
Young men over there.
The wolves encircle us.
Some carrying guns
while others hold on to dogs champing at the bit.
There is too much chaos, even, for fear.
The wolves yell.
The dogs growl.
This is the first selection.
We did not know what it meant.
We learned fast.
There was no need to grade on the curve—
even a schlemiel could figure it out.
If your feet move too slowly,
your body is disabled,
or you are guilty of having lived through
too many or not enough years,
you did not make the wolves’ team.
At school,
being left for last
made us sad.
But then the bell would ring
and back to class we’d go,
optimistic that tomorrow
we might have a different destiny.
The team not chosen
doesn’t have time to feel sad about not being
“good enough.”
The wolves raise their weapons and
FIRE!
Saul and I watch as people fall like stones to the ground,
their eyes frozen in surprise.
I wish I could let my father know,
I now understand the meaning of irony.
NO CHILDREN HERE
The worst thing is
not knowing.
Where is my father?
My mother? My sister?
Where is my best friend Henry?
When I was small
and I would cry,
my mother,
no matter where she was,
would find me and scoop me into her arms.
She always made me feel safe
and loved.
It was the best part of being a child.
Saul and I are led back to the Kielce Ghetto
in the company of other boys and young men.
We move down streets where nothing is familiar
except their names: Stolarska, Jasna.
There is a stench that causes some to gag.
Others bring up bile.
We must move bodies. But they are stiff and gnarled
like tree branches.
I am not afraid.
The people who lived in these bodies are gone.
We have a job to do—
repair the roads, load coal, clean out the
rooms in the ghetto,
and bury the dead.
With each body we toss into makeshift graves
some of our youth is tossed in, too.
We now know things that only men
could know.
Only men should know.
We are young.
We can see the saltwater
paths that our tears have left on our faces.
We are young,
but we are not children.
There are no children here.
HOPE
Nothing can be bad
when you are looking into the face of
a friend.
Janek has come
wearing hope like a tailor-made suit.
He stands on the other side
of the barbed-wire fence.
“Saul, Moishe,
you’re getting out of here.”
He is happy to be a messenger
bearing good news.
“Your father is coming for you.
He has joined the resistance.”
My ears are hearing,
but my mouth can’t move.
Janek has done something
no one has been able to do.
He has given voice to hope.
It feels like the wind has been knocked out of me.
Saul lays his hand on my shoulder
to keep me steady.
I can hardly breathe.
All I hear is
TOMORROW.
HERE.
RESCUE.
FREEDOM.
BE READY.
I’ve had nothing to be ready for
for a long time.
I need to get that part right because
my father is coming.
For us.
A BRIGHT LIGHT
We can’t stop shining.
I’m sure the wolves can see.
We try to tamp down the happiness
dancing around the edges of us.
Keep our heads down to hide
the light in our eyes.
But time goes by slowly.
Tomorrow has stopped to pick flowers
or chat with yesterday
and is in no rush to get here.
My father’s words sing to me.
“Where there is hope,
there is life.”
Knowing my father is coming for us,
that we are worth being retrieved.
Rescued.
We make it through the day
undetected.
TOMORROW NEVER CAME
I wait for my father to come and save us,
though patience and I are not good companions.
Saul and I act as if today is a normal day.
And it is, until …
Until it won’t be.
Is he close?
Is he almost here?
We are ready.
I will bring nothing with me.
I will need both hands to hug my father,
to hold on to him.
Where is he?
We are ready.
The sun is a Ferris wheel
bringing yesterday around for another spin.
Todays go by so quickly.
And yesterdays are always there to help you reminisce
about the today that is gone
or to trick you into thinking about tomorrow.
Yesterday
I knew that my father was coming.
I waited.
Hope and patience keeping me company.
My father did not come.
Janek said,
Your father will come tomorrow.
My father will come tomorrow.
But this is today.
And suddenly I see how the trick works—
Tomorrow
never comes.
CHAPTER 6
FROM CAMP TO CAMP
1942–1945
FROM CAMP TO CAMP
The location changes.
We are moved from camp to camp,
again and again,
but one thing stays the same—
how hard we work.
All.
Day.
Long.
It gets so cold
our tears freeze.
We once were trees, but now we are twigs.
Some of us have shriveled up
and gone back to the earth from where we came.
Those of us who remain
are a poor excuse for kindling.
I HAVE A PLAN, LITTLE BROTHER
My brother, Saul,
has a scent, and a sound, and a texture, and a taste,
and a shape.
I experience him with all my senses now.
We are together.
We are luckier than most.
We are blessed.
Saul is three years older.
&
nbsp; Back home, we barely acknowledged
each other.
We were strangers
tethered together by blood.
But now we have forged an alliance.
See each other for the first time.
Choose each other every day.
We work side by side
making gunpowder.
A fine mist covers us like a second skin.
We cannot wipe it off;
it has taken root.
When the sun shines through
the window,
we can see tiny particles dancing on air like
deadly little diamonds.
They disguise themselves as air
and we breathe them in.
Guns kill from the outside in,
but this gunpowder has found a way to end us
from the inside out.
I tell Saul
I think we are dying.
He says, “That may be true,
but not here.
I have a plan, little brother.”
NOW
I see our father in my brother, Saul.
He, too, is a thinker.
Walks through his thoughts.
He has learned patience.
“Are we going?” I ask again.
“Wait,” Saul says.
He watches the guards.
They are coming and going.
They are everywhere.
Except when they are not.
Each day Saul reveals small cracks in time
with no guards
that we slip through.
“Are we going?” I ask again.
“Wait,” Saul says.
At night he lifts the wooden bunk we sleep on,
me in it,
and then I lift it, empty, over and over
until my arms ache.
“We need to be strong,” Saul says.
“Are we going?” I ask.
“Wait,” he says.
And then,
one night while I am sleeping
Saul shakes me awake.
I sit up quickly and the only words
I can think to say are,
“Are we going?”
“Yes,” Saul whispers.
“Now.”
Saul leads as we make our way
through an invisible maze.
We press ourselves into
the sides of barracks,
or into the earth.
He keeps me close.
I know he is determined to get out.
We make it to the fence
unseen.
It is a giant hurdle in front of us.
Our wills lace their fingers together to give
us a leg up.
We run at the barricade and are over it in what seems like
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