Resistance

by Jennifer A. Nielsen

  “I don’t wish them harm, of course, but evil is a strong word,” the man said, shuffling the weight of his sleeping wife’s head on his shoulder. “I’m only saying that the Germans have done us a favor by moving them out of Poland.”

  “They’re still in Poland,” Esther said. “Behind the ghetto walls and inside the barbed-wire fences of extermination camps.”

  “Extermination camps?” The man arched a brow. “There’s no such thing. Maybe you are a—”

  Anticipating his next word, I opened my mouth to defuse his suspicions, but before I could speak, the train lurched forward as its brakes locked. The mother protectively pulled her toddler boy onto her lap, then her eyes darted meaningfully from me to the train doors.

  The boy hadn’t pulled the cord.

  She had.

  I stood, drawing Esther up with me. “I think we’re near our stop anyway.” My grip on her arm was a merciless pinch, and I intended it that way.

  The train slowly ground to a halt, and behind us, I heard the train’s conductor already making his way to each compartment, looking for the person who had pulled the cord. A quick glance back confirmed that a Nazi soldier was with him.

  We ducked into the closest cove of exit doors, waiting for them to open. Why hadn’t they opened yet?

  “You look in these compartments,” the Nazi ordered. “I’ll search the rear ones.”

  The ones directly across from where we were standing. He’d see us.

  I tried to push the doors apart, seeking any gap with my fingers. But they weren’t budging, and the soldier was almost upon us.

  The mother immediately darted into the hallway, making such a fuss that all his attention shifted to her. “Forgive us, my son pulled the cord. It’s my fault.”

  “There’s a heavy fine for stopping a train without an emergency,” the conductor said.

  “I can’t pay it!” she said. “What happened was only an accident.” Her boy began crying, almost as if on cue, or perhaps she pinched him to make an even bigger scene. Other people peeked out of their compartments to see what was happening.

  The woman began crying too, louder than her son.

  “Come with me,” the Nazi officer said. “We’ll settle this in private.”

  He took her arm and led her and her children out of the compartment, away from us.

  “Will she be in trouble?” Esther asked.

  “If she is, it’s because of us,” I snapped.

  As soon as the doors opened, she hurried down the train steps first and I followed. We’d just passed through a farm town and somewhere ahead was a thick patch of woods, but aside from that, I had no idea how far we were from Lodz. I hoisted my heavy bag over my shoulder and led us off the tracks toward the nearest road. We couldn’t run, we couldn’t look suspicious.

  Anger rushed through every vein in my body. We were not leaving because of the communication cord. We were leaving because Esther decided to argue. The communication cord probably saved us from her full declaration of our true identities as proof of how wrong that man was.

  When we were far enough from the train, between gritted teeth, I said, “Our job is not to debate the racists, the uninformed. We are here to complete a mission, nothing more.”

  “But you heard his lies, all that stupidity! How could you sit there like it didn’t matter?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter. Not when compared to the larger picture of what we’re doing here. You could’ve gotten us killed, and for what? Did you think you’d change his mind?”

  “No, I—”

  “He was wrong and hateful, but he is not our enemy.”

  “He is the enemy, Chaya! The war will end one day and the Germans will go back to their own land. But here we must live alongside thousands of people like that man. If we can’t stop his hatred, this will happen again and again and again!”

  I stopped there, stunned to see so much force come from someone as small as Esther, and feeling humbled as well. Because Esther was right. This disease, this hatred of Jews, was as old as time itself.

  “You’re right,” I said. “You’re right about all of that. But your timing was terrible.”

  After a heavy pause, Esther asked, “What now?”

  I shrugged and looked back toward the tracks. The man in our carriage had undoubtedly reported our sudden exit from the train, and there were no sounds of it starting up again. We had to put as much distance between ourselves and the train as possible.

  If we had any chance of escaping this disaster, it was only because that young mother had risked her life to give us time to escape. She knew who we were, and I better understood now the kind of woman she was too.

  I began walking roughly parallel to the tracks with Esther at my side. Based on how long we had been on board that train, we were probably about halfway to Lodz. But that still left us a long and miserable walk ahead.

  “I knew you wanted me to keep quiet back there,” Esther said as we walked. “I tried, I really did. But isn’t that the point of the resistance, to make the world notice us?”

  “The point of the resistance is to save lives,” I retorted. “Every single day, more Jews are dying. Our fight is to stop that from happening. Nothing else matters.”

  “I’ll do better tomorrow,” she mumbled.

  “Can you?”

  “Yes, I can, and I will!” She crossed in front of me, forcing me to look at her. “Don’t you ever make mistakes?”

  I sighed heavily, then said, “Every day. But I learn from them and go on.”

  “That’s what I’m doing too. One day, I’ll become your equal, Chaya, not your burden.”

  A gust of wind swirled up around us and I buried my head in my coat for protection. When I looked up again, Esther had already walked on ahead of me. Facing the wind.

  Maybe there was hope for her after all.

  February 15–16, 1943

  Lodz

  The road to Lodz was even more wooded than it had appeared from the train. The waning sunlight was obscured by tall, thick trees, so strong that they choked out the smaller trees that should have been protected beneath their winter canopy. Between them, small farmhouses could occasionally be seen. I doubted any partisans were here.

  “Too bad,” I told Esther. “Partisan fighters would have given us shelter for the night, someplace warm.”

  If it had been cold before, the wind that pushed through the icy trees now was worse, each gust slicing through our coats like knives. It would only get worse when night fell. Esther pulled up the collar of her coat to protect her face, but she never complained. Maybe because she remembered why we were walking. I certainly did.

  At least I had the bag on my back for some protection. It felt heavier each minute, but it kept out the wind.

  Esther looked over at me. “I never used to lie. I wasn’t prepared for the number of lies we’d have to tell as couriers.”

  “You weren’t prepared for anything,” I snapped, my tone so sharp that it even surprised me. Softer now, I added, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “I tried to prepare, Chaya, I really did. I’ll bet I’m the only courier in Poland who can recite whole passages of the Torah and the Catholic Catechism.”

  “Every courier can do that.”

  “I stole apples once and smuggled them—”

  “You’re not even a courier, Esther.”

  “After Cyganeria, I was the only one left. Until—”

  I stopped and faced her, exhausted and cold and at the edge of my temper. “You’re not the only one that anything has happened to. If we’re still alive, then it’s because we all lie, we all steal, we hide the Star of David on our arms when we can and show it when we must. And we’ve all lost people we love. We’ve all lost everything to the point where we have nothing left, so our only choice is to curl up and die, or else to fight back.”

  “I am fighting back. That’s why I came!”

  “I’m here too, remember that, Esther. You are not the
only one affected by the mistakes you make!”

  I began walking again and she followed, staying two steps behind me. Finally, she asked, “Well, have you ever made holishkes without cabbage?”

  A smile nudged at my mouth. “You can’t make stuffed cabbage without cabbage.”

  “Then there is one story that’s only mine.”

  Despite my irritation, I laughed. It wasn’t much, but it warmed me for a few steps longer.

  Finally, Esther pointed out a home in the distance with overgrown weeds coming up through the snow. No lights were on, and no animals were visible in the gates.

  “Abandoned?” she asked.

  I shrugged and cautiously led the way toward the home. Whether it was abandoned or not, we wouldn’t sleep inside. That was too risky. But the barn might offer us enough shelter to wait out the night.

  In fact, when we opened the barn door, I decided it was probably better for us out here than it would have been in the house. Whoever used to live here had obviously left in a hurry. The straw for their animals was still in a large pile, waiting to be pitched to the horses.

  Esther and I buried ourselves inside the heap, letting our bodies slowly warm the air pockets around us until the feeling returned to our fingers and toes. Mine ached at first. I hadn’t realized on the road how dangerously cold we were. I’d have to be more careful in the future.

  “How many?” Esther cleared her throat. “How many lives have you saved?”

  My eyes were already closed. “Not enough,” I murmured. I remembered the faces of every person I’d helped into hiding, but rarely knew what happened to them afterward. Sometimes the Polish families seemed helpful until the Jewish person was settled into their home, then they would blackmail them or turn them in for rewards from the Gestapo. Sometimes the family couldn’t afford to keep the person in hiding. Their allotment of food was rationed too, and every person in hiding forced those rations to stretch further. Or maybe the family simply grew afraid of being discovered, of the brutality their own loved ones would receive if they were found out.

  I hoped every single person I’d placed into a safe house truly was safe, and I firmly believed they were better there than remaining in the ghettos, which would eventually force them into harsh labor camps, or worse, the extermination camps. But I didn’t know how many were still alive. I only knew that if I kept trying, kept fighting, maybe I could save even one person more.

  We stayed in the barn for the night, though I couldn’t have slept more than ten minutes at a time. Eventually, I forced myself to get up. When Esther awoke shortly after dawn, her sleepy eyes drifted to the hem of her coat in my hands. I was just finishing up with a needle and bit the thread to finish the knot.

  “What are you doing?” Suspicion was thick in her voice.

  I showed her the inside hem where I was stitching. “You can’t use your Jewish name outside the ghettos. The Kennkarte identifies you as Polish. If anything happens to you, you’ll be buried with a false name in a Christian cemetery. I’ve sewn your identity in here. If something happens … well, we have to hope this will be found.”

  “Do you have one?”

  I showed her my stitching inside an arm of my coat. “We all do.”

  She nodded. “You think of everything, Chaya.”

  “If I thought of everything, we wouldn’t be walking. Now, let’s go.” We lined our coats with straw for extra insulation, ate as little of our food as we had to, then returned to the road.

  Morning should have brought a friendliness to these woods, but nothing here felt friendly. The breaking sunlight was only a stark reminder of how the tiniest trees were dying. The largest ones must be taking too much of the groundwater, too much of the light. It was a rule of nature that the strongest would survive, but that morning, nature seemed unfair and cruel.

  Lodz was only a few more kilometers away, so we arrived by midmorning and asked for directions to the train station. The Nazis liked to place their ghettos there. It simplified their transportation to the extermination camps.

  Esther commented on this too. “We should have known the Nazis’ plans as soon as we saw where they placed the ghettos. We should have known.”

  I turned to her. “Did you come from the ghettos, Esther? Did you used to live in one?”

  She blinked, then turned away from me. “Should we keep moving, find the entrance?”

  I agreed, though she was obviously hoping to distract me from my question. That was fine for now, but it pricked my curiosity. Sooner or later, I’d find out the answer.

  Unlike most of the other ghettos where I’d been, there were no walls of any sort here, only stark wood fencing with barbed wire stretching between the wide slats. For a place we’d been warned away from until now, it seemed remarkably unthreatening.

  “It’d be easy to escape,” I whispered to Esther. “Cut the wire, slip between the posts, and they’d be free. Why don’t they leave?”

  Lines of Jews stood behind the fencing, most of them as still as a photograph, except for the occasional turn of someone’s head. They stared at the outside world as if it were a puzzle they couldn’t quite work out, a memory encased in fog. A few had hands outstretched, silently begging for a crumb of food. But no one passing by came near enough to the fencing to offer them anything.

  “Be patient an hour longer,” I muttered to them beneath my breath. “We will get food in to you, somehow.”

  Beside us on the road, the Poles walked by as if they were unaware of it all. How was that possible? Didn’t they care what was happening on the other side of that fence? Couldn’t they see it? Or were they afraid to look, terrified that if they stared, someone might wonder if they belonged there too?

  Then I noticed a patrol of Polish police walking the perimeter heading north while motorcycles of Gestapo officers circled it southward. That must be why no one offered food, and why the people remained inside a simple fence.

  Before long, we found the ghetto entrance, narrow and heavily guarded. A large sign in front read JUDEN, as if there were any question of who might be imprisoned within these walls. It added ENTRY FORBIDDEN. Somehow the sign seemed to be speaking to me, but not as a warning. I considered it a challenge, one I intended to win.

  “This is a large ghetto,” I mumbled, surveying the rows of buildings behind the guards.

  “Only Warsaw’s ghetto is larger,” Esther replied. “A resistance here could make a difference.”

  Perhaps, but first we had to sneak inside. As eager as I was to defy the Nazi orders to stay out, I didn’t like the look of the guards at the gate. There were too many of them to hope to pass through without being questioned. Without being searched.

  Esther touched my arm. “The gaps in the ghetto fencing—we can get inside that way.”

  It was probably the only way we’d get inside, but my stomach was already doing flips at the thought of it. Aside from the patrols on the outside of the fence, the OD would be watching from the inside, and for all we knew, we’d crawl right into their backyard.

  “We’ll go at night,” I said. “In the meantime, let’s find a safe place to warm up. A church, perhaps.”

  Esther began to nod but froze as a truck with Nazi symbols slowly drove on the road beside us. Her eyes darted around and I noticed her hand shaking.

  “Stop that.” I wouldn’t speak gently now. “Stop looking guilty!”

  The truck passed and we walked away from the direction it was driving. When all was clear, she said, “I can’t help it. Chaya, how can you not be afraid?”

  “Because it’s not possible to be afraid all the time!” I hissed. “I feel it, but I keep it in the background. You must use fear to sharpen your senses and heighten your instincts. It will drive your determination to stay alive, but it cannot control you. If you give in to the fear, you will die tonight. And you’ll probably get me killed too.”

  Her hand had stopped shaking, but not because of my words. For now, she was only pretending to have her fear under contr
ol, pretending that she could face what lay ahead. And for now, that would have to suffice.

  If she could pretend well enough, then one day she would feel the churning in her stomach, the sweat on her palms, the pulse in her temples, and know that she was terrified because of what was about to happen. But she would go forward anyway.

  Just as I would do tonight.

  Because if I was being honest, I’d been fighting the shaking of my own hands for most of the day. I hadn’t felt this nervous in two months, since the night we attacked the Cyganeria Café.

  Deep in my heart, I knew this was a bad idea. That sole thought occupied my mind as Esther and I stared at the ghetto in Lodz. It was the one place we’d been told never to go, considered the impossible ghetto. And we were going in.

  February 16, 1943

  Lodz Ghetto

  It took most of the day to find the perfect place to sneak into the ghetto, or for that matter, to find any place at all. We chose a spot on the northern boundary with a tall wooden wall that was rarely patrolled, which made me curious. Everywhere else we’d looked showed all the usual sights and noises of overcrowding. Not here.

  Esther noticed it too. “Why is it so quiet?” she whispered. “Quiet can’t be safe.”

  I shrugged in response. “Our choice is never between safe and not safe. It’s not safe or not alive, that’s all we have. This is the best place we’ve found—the only place we’ve found.” I turned to her. “Do we go in or not?”

  Our entry location could be worse. On those occasions when I had to sneak in, I most dreaded the tall apartments just outside the ghetto walls that sometimes hovered overhead. Every window was a spyglass, every occupant a threat, especially at night. Young mothers up late with a baby. The elderly with gout, or even curious onlookers who wondered about life on the streets after curfew. Something as simple as an innocent glance out a window could create enormous problems.