Yellow Star
Page 3
yes, no (bang).
Finally, I go over and tug on Papa’s sleeve.
“I don’t mind staying inside.
I don’t want Mother to worry.”
Dora rolls her eyes at me and mouths,
Such a good girl.
The truth is, I don’t want to go out
by myself.
But I also don’t want Papa to think
I’m not brave.
Dreams
That night I am poked awake
by Dora’s fingers.
“Shhh…,” she whispers, “come with me.”
I climb over Mother, careful not to kick Papa,
and stumble behind Dora over to her bed.
“Come in,” Dora says.
We lie down under the thin blanket.
Nighttime seems different over here,
more grown-up.
Dora tells me she had a bad dream
that I went missing, just like Hava.
“We looked and looked but you were
nowhere,” she says.
Her voice is snuffly, shaky, un-Doralike.
Just before we both drift back to sleep,
Dora gives me a hug.
“I will protect you, baby sister,” she whispers
fiercely.
I don’t mind being called baby.
I am warm and sleepy and on my way to
sweet dreams.
My Day
(now that I am not allowed outside)
Wake up.
Say good-bye to Mother, Papa, and Dora
as they go off to work.
Get dressed.
Eat breakfast (leftover soup or bread or
weak coffee).
Clean. Make beds, dust, sweep, move things,
put them back,
wash, wipe, scrape, inspect.
Play with my doll.
Eat lunch (leftover soup or vegetables
or weak coffee).
Lie on my bed and look at the shapes made by
ceiling cracks.
Make up stories about them.
Play with my doll.
Visit neighbors.
Family comes home!
Eat dinner (soup or vegetables and weak coffee).
Go to bed.
Sleep.
Goodbye, Dust!
Sometimes I clean and sing little songs.
“Good-bye, dust!
Hello, shine!
Cobweb in the corner—you can’t hide from me!”
It is a fine day when Mother brings home
new rags for cleaning!
SUMMER 1941
The Law
Hava is still missing.
She is not the only one.
Every day the neighbors buzz about who is gone,
who is sick, who died,
who has been murdered.
It could be an old person
or a baby or anybody.
The German soldiers (Nazis) who keep us here
do not care if we are sick or starving,
alive or dead.
They beat people and shoot them right
in front of everyone,
and no one can say anything,
because the Nazis are the law.
I do not understand this.
How can a person kill another person?
It hurts my heart.
I don’t want my family or friends to die.
I don’t want a Nazi to notice me and think,
Jew.
Because then I might die, too.
The Woman in the House
Dora and I are going to visit Aunt Sara.
The sun tickles my pale skin,
then burns.
We have to walk along the fence.
Dora meets a girl she knows from work
and stops to chat.
I can see through the fence to the outside,
where the Polish people live.
The ones who aren’t Jewish.
I see a white house with red geraniums in front.
What is it like to have flowers in your garden?
We only have vegetables.
It seems like a dream to live outside the ghetto.
The houses look so bright and clean.
A woman comes out of the white house
with a dog.
I would like to have a dog, but of course
there are no pets in the ghetto.
They would be killed for meat.
There are some places along the fence
where there are sometimes no guards.
A person could slip between the wires,
out of the ghetto.
But even if a soldier didn’t shoot you
and you got away,
a Polish person would see you
and call the Nazi police
and they would kill you.
It’s sad to think that the woman who lives in the
white house
would do that, but she would,
even if she is nice to her dog.
Another Loss
More bad news.
My doll is gone.
When I ask Papa and Mother where she is,
they say shush.
Papa’s eyes are sad, though,
and somehow I know that he had to sell her
(like the other things we have sold) for money or food.
I try very hard
to not make a fuss.
I am a big girl now,
I tell myself,
I do not need dolls.
Of course it’s not true.
There’s no best friend like a doll.
Like my doll.
I observe mourning for seven days.
After that I make a doll out of a rag
and two buttons.
FALL 1941
Love
Dora came home from work in a bad mood.
Mother and Papa are tired.
I miss my real doll.
And we are all hungry.
But there is not enough food for dinner.
Mother does not eat her meal.
She gives it to me instead.
She does not say “I love you” in hugs or kisses,
but her love fills my plate,
and I gobble it up.
Papa says Mother is a noble woman.
He tells me,
“From pain your mother gave you life,
through pain she continues to give.”
I think about Papa’s words as I finish my broth.
It hurt Mama to give me life? Why?
Didn’t I just pop out of her belly button?
I guess I think these words out loud, because suddenly everyone is looking at me. Then they all burst into laughter.
Papa, Dora, even Mother.
“Syvia, you are a tonic
for helping us forget our pain,”
says Papa,
and they all smile at me.
Their love fills the air around me,
and I gulp it down.
Hungry
Food and wood and coal
have been rationed even more,
and everybody says,
How will we survive the winter?
And now we hear that 20,000
more people
are being moved into the ghetto.
I am very hungry all the time now,
and we are all quite thin.
Dora, who is nice to me these days,
tells me what it is like to taste butter, eggs, milk,
chocolate.
She says she hopes to fatten me up with her words.
WINTER 1941
Imagining
Winter
erases whole families.
It has also erased the vegetables
that we grew in our yard,
a whole summer’s worth of vegetables.
There weren’t enough to last us through the fall.
Now the ground is froze
n,
bare.
My family
is weak and starving
but we are still together,
still alive.
Each day seems never ending.
Once, when I am alone in the apartment,
I think I might freeze to death.
Then under the mattress
I find a precious matchstick.
I light a lamp
and lean my face into it,
closing my eyes.
I am on a beach under a hot sun.
Waves of warm blue water slap in and out with the tide.
I sit in the glow of my pretend sun for a
long, long time,
until the lamp burns out and it is once more
winter.
Part Three
In January 1942, the Nazis began deporting people from the Lodz ghetto. They ordered people onto trains, telling them they were needed to work elsewhere.
This was a lie.
The Nazis had planned their “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem. They built concentration camps, also called extermination camps. The ghettos were like holding cages, keeping Jews penned in until the Nazis decided what to do with them. Extermination camps were the answer. These camps contained gas chambers, where Jews were gassed to death. Their bodies were then piled into crematory ovens and burned to ashes.
Beginning on January 16, 1942, the deportations from the Lodz ghetto went directly to the Chelmno extermination camp. Over the next four months, 55,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies were transported to Chelmno.
For a while, the deportations stopped. Then in September, they began again. But it was worse this time. German soldiers entered the ghetto and dragged Jews from their homes, from hospitals, and off the streets. The Germans declared a curfew in the ghetto, the Gehsperre (ban on movement). Survivors of this brutal time called it the Sperre.
The Sperre’s main focus was on children under the age of ten and adults over sixty-five. Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Jews, announced the news that the children were to be taken away. He said, “I have to cut off limbs to save the body,” meaning he had to let the children go in order to save everyone else. Parents were reassured that their children were being taken to a better, safer place.
Again, it was a lie. They had gone to the Chelmno extermination camp to die.
WINTER 1942
New Worries
Whoooo! Whoooo!
Every day now I hear a train
whistle in the distance.
Deportations have begun.
“What are deportations?” I ask Papa.
“The Nazis are moving people out of the ghetto,”
Papa explains.
“The train takes the people to other places
that need workers.”
“Ha!” I hear Dora snort.
She looks up from her mending.
“At the factory they say that the Nazis
are shipping people out
to death camps.”
Death camps?
“Shh…. shh….” Mother rushes over. “Not in front of the little one.”
Papa gives a stern look to my sister.
“Dora, don’t repeat silly talk when you don’t know
the whole truth.
They do need more workers elsewhere.
You children should think good thoughts.
Okay, Dora? Syvia?”
“Okay,” I say.
“If they need good workers,” Dora grumbles,
“why are they crushing hundreds of people
into small cars like cattle?
So their good workers can be
suffocated?”
“Dora!” says Mother.
“Enough!” says Papa.
And then we are all
quiet.
Wedding Invitations
Little papers
are being delivered to many people.
The papers say:
“Be at the train station…”
on a certain day
at a certain time.
Everybody in the neighborhood
is calling these papers
“wedding invitations”
and teasing one another.
“Have you been invited to the wedding?”
“Not yet, have you?”
Where exactly are the trains going?
There are rumors,
exaggerations,
stories,
but mostly people just wave the words away
and talk about weddings.
A Happy Night
What a treat!
Itka and her parents are here
for an evening visit.
Itka and I play dress up
with our mothers’ shoes and coats.
Even Dora is in a good mood.
She wraps Mother’s scarf around her head
and holds our hands as we dance
in a circle.
Around and around.
Until one of my mother’s shoes flies off my foot
and hits the wall.
We three take off our shoes and dance some more
in stockinged feet.
Our parents drink weak coffee
and talk in low voices.
Itka and I are comparing our feet
(mine are longer and skinnier).
Then Itka’s parents say it’s time to leave.
“Thank you for coming,” I say in my best
hostess voice.
“Good-bye, Syvia!” Itka smiles and waves
on her way out.
“Bye, see you soon!”
No Friends
Last night with Itka was so happy
but today is the saddest day ever.
Sadness.
Sadness.
Sadness.
Papa took me on his lap and told me this:
On his way home from work,
he passed the train station
and saw Itka’s face in one of the windows.
She was looking out
as the train pulled away.
Itka’s family had received a summons,
Papa told me.
It had come earlier that week.
I think of Itka
in a train car
packed with people
and Hava
disappearing from the street.
I have no friends anymore,
and I can’t even write a letter to Hava or Itka to say,
I miss you,
because I wouldn’t know where to
send it.
Silence
One day
there is no train whistle.
After three months of whistles,
deportations have stopped.
My family never received an invitation
to the wedding.
We are still here
in the ghetto!
Is this a good thing?
I guess it is.
We know what to expect here…
not very much.
SUMMER 1942
Bean Counting
Summer comes again.
Hot days, sweaty nights.
I am now eight and one-half years old.
One-half is a fraction,
says Dora.
A fraction is part of a whole.
It is summer, so we’re gathering a few vegetables
from our brown patch of yard.
Dora breaks a scrawny bean in two.
She pops one piece in her mouth.
“One-half,” she explains.
The other goes into my mouth.
Two halves.
I wonder, if I were in real school,
would I be smart at arithmetic?
“I’d rather have half of a cream bun,” says Dora.
“And if you acted very good,
I’d give you the other half.”
Such a nice sister.
That summer we eat a lot of fractions.
Bad News
No.
Oh no.
The Nazis have made a new announcement.
It is too horrible to think about,
so I am hiding under the bedcover
on the big bed
while my parents talk.
“What are we going to do, Isaac?”
“I just don’t know.”
“We can’t let them have her.”
“We won’t let them have her.”
“But, how…?”
“I don’t know yet. We will do something.”
I am a bear in a cave,
safe from the storms
that rage around me.
I burrow down further into the bed
and fall asleep.
Good-bye, Children!
Give us the children,
the Nazis say.
We will take them to a place
where they will have food and fresh air.
Parents, how lucky you are!
the Nazis say.
You won’t have to worry about your children
while you are at work.
They will be cared for by us.
All Jewish children
must report to the train station
for deportation
immediately.
The trains will leave daily at noon,
the Nazis say.
Repeat:
All children
to the train station.
All
Jewish
children.
Coming for the Children
Knock! Knock!
The soldiers are going door-to-door,
thumping their black-gloved fists
until someone lets them in.
Where are the children?
Give us the children!
They come at night,
storming neighborhoods,
kicking in locked doors
with their heavy boots,
searching room to room,
pulling children out from closets,
from under beds,
ripping children from their parents’ arms
and dragging them away.
Small children.
Big children.
Crying children.
If parents try to stop the soldiers,
Bang! Bang!
The soldiers shoot them dead.
A Mother’s Story
Each night the soldiers
come closer and closer
to our neighborhood.
A few blocks away,
a cousin of my aunt’s husband
was home with her two children—
one twelve years old,
the other just four.
The Nazis burst into their house
and said, “Give us the children.”
But my aunt’s husband’s cousin
would not let go.
She held them both tightly in her arms.
One soldier said,
“We don’t have time for this foolishness.
Just shoot them all.”