by Jennifer Roy
out there.”
Papa points to the exit door
leading to the stairwell.
“Where are you going, Papa?” I cry out.
He’s leaving me again?
“Don’t worry, Syvia,” Papa says.
“I will return, I promise,
and you will see your mother and sister
again very soon.”
So I watch Papa leave
as I hold a small hand
and a suitcase.
After he is gone,
I take a deep breath and turn around,
staring at the others.
Children of the Cellar
“Hello,
my name is Syvia.
I am nine years old.”
This is what I would like to say.
It is what I would say
if I were someone like Dora,
who always knows the right words
around other people
and is not afraid to say them.
But I am not brave,
I am shy,
so instead I feel my cheeks burn,
and I look down at the floor.
“Come, Isaac,” I whisper,
and I drag my cousin and my suitcase
over to the corner of the cellar
that is darkest,
and we sit down on the floor
to wait.
No one else is talking
or moving.
I feel quite alone in the cool, dark
silence of this cellar.
The door to the outside opens
three times.
Each time I catch my breath,
expecting to see someone from my family.
But each time it is a strange adult,
dropping off another lost-looking child.
I squint and count
ten others
besides Isaac and me.
My family should be here soon.
If Dora comes first, I will run to her
and hug her.
The other children will look over.
No one can replace Hava or Itka
as my best friends,
but perhaps we will all get along well enough?
We already have one thing in common.
We are all children of the cellar.
Children of the cellar.
For some reason,
this thought strikes me as Very Important,
and I make a note in my head to tell it to Dora
when she comes.
“Syvia,” my little cousin’s voice breaks
into my daydreams.
“You look funny.”
I try to tell Isaac that
that is not a nice thing to say,
but my tongue seems not to be working
and my head has a buzzing inside it.
The room begins to tilt,
then everything
goes
black.
Not Myself
My mother’s face.
Papa!
Dora, what took you so long?
Red flowers.
What are flowers doing in the ghetto?
The dust family from our old apartment comes to life.
They sweep me with a broom.
Sweep, sweep, into a cellar
filled with dogs, big dogs,
staring at me with yellow eyes,
chanting my name, Syvia, Syvia.
Talking dogs?
I feel chilled, then hot, and I keep hearing,
“Syvia! Syvia! You’re awake!”
It is Dora,
looking with anxious eyes
into my face.
I am lying down on the floor of the cellar,
a thin blanket underneath me.
I feel damp, sweaty.
“Mama? Papa?” I ask.
My throat is scratchy, I do not sound like myself.
“They are fine,” says my sister.
“They are working right now,
but they have both been here to see you.”
“Papa and Mother were here?”
Dora has given me a sip of coffee-water,
so I can speak more clearly now.
“Lots of times,” Dora says.
“One of us has been here with you
so you wouldn’t be afraid when you woke up.”
“Was I sleeping?”
I don’t remember falling asleep.
“In a way,” Dora tells me.
“You fainted.”
“I did?”
I’m not even sure what fainting is, exactly.
“When?”
“Three days ago,” says Dora.
I take another sip.
And another.
A Little Tired
Three days ago,
Mother had come to the cellar,
Dora tells me.
At first Mother thought I was napping,
but when she tried to wake me up,
I wouldn’t respond.
Then Papa and Dora came down.
Dora said she got scared,
I looked so still and pale,
but Mother fed me some vegetable broth
that she had brought for me in a dish.
I sipped it,
half-awake.
Papa and Mother
let me rest
and drink broth
and told Dora not to worry.
Once my fever broke,
I would be all right.
“How do you feel?” asks Dora.
“A little tired,” I say,
“but not too bad.”
Dora smiles, as if I’ve made her very happy.
Suddenly I remember—
Baby Isaac!
I was supposed to be watching him!
I look around the room
and see him
playing a hand-clapping game
with another boy.
“Isaac is fine,” Dora assures me.
“He has even made a friend.”
I want to get up and go to him,
but my legs feel too shaky
and it is hard to hold my head up.
“Tell me one thing, Dora,” I say,
before sleep overtakes me again.
“Do the Germans know we are here?
Do they know that there are children here?”
“No.” Dora shakes her head,
her dark hair brushing her cheeks.
“No, as far as the Nazis know,
there are eight hundred adults
and no children
left in the Lodz ghetto.”
Well, then, aren’t we clever,
I think as I drift off.
We know more than the Nazis do.
A Pile of Bones
Sleeping.
Sleeping.
I sleep a lot over the next few days.
Papa and some other men carry down
bedrolls of blankets
so no one has to sleep on the hard floor.
One would think a room full of children
would be noisy,
but it is mostly quiet.
After months and months of very little
food or sunlight,
we are weak and listless.
I feel like a pile of bones
lying in the corner.
This is not what it was like
when I played with Hava and Itka.
We had energy to have fun,
but now that we are children of the cellar,
we just lie around
or sit propped against a wall
and wait for the grown-ups to visit.
We all know how to hide,
to keep quiet so that the Nazis don’t find us.
Even baby Isaac, the littlest one here,
plays quietly without fussing.
He naps on a blanket next to me.
I like to watch him sleep.
He breathes wit
h his mouth open,
making a funny snuffling sound,
and when he has bad dreams,
I pat his head
and tell him everything is all right,
to go back to sleep.
Special Gifts
Family visits are a gift from above.
Mother brings me vegetable soup.
“The Germans keep lovely gardens,” she tells me.
“And it is the women’s job to pick the vegetables
for the soldiers’ soup.
But we are also able to take some for ourselves.”
The soup is thick and warm,
unlike the thin broth I am used to.
Mother comes twice a day with this soup,
and I feel a little stronger after every bowl.
Dora brings me little bits of outside.
Twigs, leaves, some berries—
not to eat, just to look at.
“The weather has been quite nice,” she says.
“It makes the hard work almost pleasant.”
Dora and the others have to walk
through the ghetto,
collecting the belongings of the people who were
sent to the trains—
furniture, clothing, personal items.
The workers must clean everything,
then it all goes to the Germans.
They won’t have to clean anything from our apartment,
I think with some pride.
I kept everything very neat.
It is a treat when Mother and Dora visit.
But the very best part of the day
is when Papa comes.
He brings down stories,
and, when he talks, all the children listen
to his deep, kind voice.
How the Cellar Was Found
How did we children come to be in the cellar?
Papa explains:
“When I first arrived at these buildings,
I came inside and inspected each floor,
asking myself,
Where is a good hiding place?
Then I saw a door,
not easy to see unless you were really looking,
and I opened it.
There was a staircase going down! A cellar!
“Quickly I went back upstairs
and spoke to one of the workers,
a man that I knew from our old neighborhood.
After we spoke, this man walked out of the building
as if going about his new job.
He just walked by the soldiers, la-di-da,
humming a tune, so they wouldn’t
suspect anything.
Then when he was far enough away,
he began running,
running, running,
toward the train station
to the mob of people getting on the trains.
“My friend says it was chaotic and noisy and
easy enough to blend into the large crowd,”
Papa tells us.
“What was not so easy was finding people
with children.
There were so few left.
But here and there, he’d spot one.
“Come,” he said to a woman who was
holding a child by the hand.
“There is a place to hide the children
back in the ghetto.”
The woman shook her head
no
and boarded the train.
Again and again the man approached adults
who had children,
and most of them said no,
but some said yes.”
Yes or No
Papa continues talking.
Now all of the children are awake and listening.
“It must have been a difficult decision
for those people—
to get on the train
or stay behind.
Did they believe the trains were
going to a safe place
or did they think that anyone whose name was not
on the list
would be shot if he stayed?
“Or did they trust the stranger,
hot and sweaty from running,
enough to follow him back to the ghetto?
“We do not know where the people went who
chose the train,
but we do know that all of you
who turned around and came back
were smuggled in here
right under the Nazis’ noses.
“And,” Papa finishes his tale and grins at us,
“here you all are!”
How We Got Inside
“How did we all get in here
without the soldiers noticing?”
I ask.
“Sometimes it was too simple,” Papa says.
“The soldiers were not always
guarding the building,
since their work habits have gotten so careless.
Other times,
we used the method of distraction.”
“What is that?” asks baby Isaac.
He has stopped rolling around
a small ball of yarn to listen.
“One of the women would approach the soldiers
with a question,
turning the mens’ attention away
from the buildings
so we could smuggle in the children,”
Papa explains.
“The woman arguing with the soldiers!” I say.
“I remember seeing her
when baby Isaac and I arrived!”
I also remember that Papa had told me
to keep my head down that time.
“Yes, Syvia.” Papa doesn’t seem angry;
in fact he laughs.
“That woman was quite the actress,
wasn’t she?
“Many people worked together
to save you children.
We are blessed to have such good people
around us.”
While I agree with Papa, I am also aware of
another blessing.
I am thinking how good it sounds
to hear Papa laugh.
It has been a long time
since I’ve heard laughter,
and it warms a place in my heart
that even the soup cannot touch.
Upstairs
Papa talks about what it is like
upstairs.
There is a building for the men
and a building for the women.
They are supposed to stay separated,
but someone found a secret door
connecting the two buildings,
so the men have been visiting
the women’s building.
One person stands guard at the front entrance
and when the Germans approach,
the guard gives a signal
and all the men race back through the door
to their building.
“Like a pack of dogs running from the dogcatcher,”
says Papa.
The Germans check on the workers every so often.
But they rarely stay for long.
So Papa and Mother,
like the other men and women,
can spend some time together.
There are no tables,
so everyone sits on the floor to eat.
Like a big picnic, Papa says.
The best part is that the fruit
on the trees has ripened,
so everyone has the taste of sweet and juicy fruit in
their mouths.
Then Papa takes an apple out of his pocket and,
with a small knife,
he slices it up
and gives each of us children a piece.
I eat mine in small bites to make it last.
It is delicious.
The Ovens
In one part of the cellar is a large pile of coal.
The grown-ups use it to warm the ovens.
One morning Mother comes down to see me,
and I notice a red mark on the palm of her hand.
“Mother, did you hurt yourself?” I ask.
Mother looks at her hand and then at me.
Her mouth turns up in a small smile.
“Can you keep a secret, Syvia?”
Of course I can, I assure her.
So she tells me that there are
little electric ovens for cooking
upstairs in the kitchen.
The women use the kitchen to cook
for the Jewish workers.
The soldiers told the women,
No using the ovens!
Electricity costs too much money to
waste on Jews!
But the electric ovens work much faster
than the coal ovens
and instead of walking down and up stairs
carrying heavy coal,
all they have to do is flick a switch,
and the oven grows warm.
So, Mother tells me, the women have been using
the electric ovens
without the soldiers knowing.
They cook with the coal ovens,
but also the electric ones.
The soldiers just smell the food cooking
and think it’s coming from the coal ovens only.
When the soldiers do come in,
which isn’t often since the kitchen
is the women’s place,
the women are prepared.
Mother was browning potatoes in a pan
when she heard the signal.
Germans!
Quickly she grabbed the handle
and hid the pan, potatoes and all,
under a bed.
“There was no time for a pot holder,”
Mother says,
“so the pan burned my hand.
But it does not hurt too much.
And the soldiers did not find out about the oven.”
“What happened to the potatoes?” asks a voice.
I turn my head to see who is talking.
It is one of the boys.
He must have been listening, too.
“Unlike my hand…” Mother smiles again.
“The potatoes were unharmed.
In fact, you had some in last night’s soup!”
It is so nice to have Mother smiling
and telling stories!
She is usually so serious, even stern.
I think that things must be not so bad upstairs.
The grown-ups seem to be in good spirits
these days.
Late Summer
Dora confirms my thoughts.
We are sipping soup together and talking.
“It is not so bad up there,” she says,
“The weather is late-summer warm but not too hot
and food is more plentiful
than we have had in years.
It is like we are becoming humans again, Syvia.
Imagine!”
There is other good news.
The number of Germans appears to be dwindling.
The soldiers who remain seem more interested in
beer and liquor and cards
than in running the ghetto cleanup.
So the workers are mostly left alone,
