by Jennifer Roy
and help me walk toward the door.
My aunt and uncle follow
with baby Isaac.
Papa is last, yelling,
“Out the front door! It is closest!”
We go out the front door
to the street, where the Nazis fled
on motorbikes
just a little while before.
The lights in the red house are still on,
the soldiers were in such a hurry to leave.
The airplanes have flown out of sight.
It is quiet now.
We walk down the street,
lit by the moon and snow.
I don’t think we know where we are going.
We just keep walking.
Survivors Like Us
Then we see them.
Others like us.
Survivors.
Jewish men and women coming out from other
hiding places.
We meet up in the streets.
“Can you believe it? The Germans are gone!”
“We saw them all leave the ghetto.”
“It’s not safe to stay inside. The planes are bombing Nazi
buildings.”
Everyone keeps walking.
Together.
The crowd grows as more join us.
“What do we do now?”
“Are the soldiers coming back?”
“Where do we go?”
More people come.
I look around and cannot believe
how many people
have managed to escape and hide
and stay alive.
Then the noises begin again.
Everyone looks up
at the belly of a plane.
We hear a high-pitched whistling sound, then,
Boom!
A building not too far away
bursts into flame.
“Run!” somebody yells.
“Find a wide open place!” shouts a woman.
“Away from the buildings!”
“The courtyard!” Papa yells,
and he takes Dora and me by the hand
and pulls us down the street.
Mother runs beside us.
Word spreads that the courtyard
is the safest place,
and it seems like the whole crowd
is running as one body.
I do not know what the courtyard is
until we get there.
It is a large area of land—
a rectangle surrounded by buildings
but with enough space
to hold all of us.
Papa tells me to lie down on the ground.
Pressed between my parents,
I lie in the center of a crowd
of hundreds of Jews.
Wheee! Boom!
Wheee! Boom!
Whistling bombs start falling around us.
Sending a Message to Above
I hear voices—
some in Polish,
some in another language.
“Hebrew,” Papa says to me.
I look at him and see
tears running down his face.
“The language of our history,”
Papa tells me.
Then he starts to sing a prayer.
I did not know he knew any Hebrew.
His deep voice mixes in
with the chants of so many others.
The winter cold is less now
from the heat of all these people lying together.
I begin to remember what it is like
to feel warm.
I doubt if God can hear any of us,
with so much noise
from the airplanes
and bombs exploding,
but I squeeze my eyes shut, anyway,
and listen to the prayers.
I hope that God is listening, too.
Miracles
Then
there are no more planes,
no more sounds of bombs.
Our voices die down
and the courtyard is quiet.
It stays like that for a long time.
Everyone is afraid to move
in case a new wave of bombing
starts up.
“It is a miracle!” a woman cries.
Then suddenly everyone is getting up
from the ground,
shaking off snow,
embracing each other,
cheering.
“A miracle!” Mother agrees.
There is smoke in the air.
Fires are burning around the ghetto,
lighting up bombed-out buildings,
but we were not hit!
Somehow, they missed us.
Dora and I are laughing
and throwing little handfuls of snow
at each other.
It is a celebration
for a few minutes until somebody shouts,
“Men are coming!”
and the crowd goes silent.
I hear them.
Men in the ghetto are shouting.
Their words are not Polish.
The Nazis! I think,
and my joy turns to terror.
This is not fair! I want to cry.
We have tried so hard to be good,
to stay alive.
It just can’t end this way!
Papa grabs me up under my arms
and lifts me up
high,
so I can see over people’s heads.
I see men
entering the courtyard
on horses.
Horses?
“Syvia,” says Papa,
“it is the Russians.”
Liberation
The Russians!
Coming to rescue us from the Germans!
The men ride their horses
toward us.
Black, brown, gray.
The horses are so beautiful,
it seems like a dream.
One man in uniform pulls up his horse
and stops in front of
the crowd.
I am close enough to the front
to see the Russian’s face.
He has a beard
and bushy sideburns,
and when I look at his eyes,
I am shocked.
The Russian soldier is crying.
“Hello!”
“Hello!” the Russian says,
waving his gloved hand.
And I realize something else.
I understood him.
He said hello
in Yiddish.
He is Jewish, too.
A man in the crowd shouts something
in Russian
(some of the workers know many languages)
and the Russian answers.
People start speaking in
Yiddish, Russian, Polish,
and the soldier puts his hand up,
palm facing us,
mouth smiling.
“Soon, soon, you will know everything,”
he says in Yiddish.
Papa translates the words for me.
“But first…”
The Russian looks through the crowd,
right at me.
“There are children here?
I cannot believe it is true!”
The Russian waves his hand to me.
“Bring the children up here!” he says.
“I have a little gift for the children.”
I am unsure,
scared to leave the safety
of the crowd.
But the grownups are encouraging me,
pushing me forward
along with baby Isaac,
and The Chef and Nervous Hands
and the eight others.
We reach the front of the crowd
and step forward.
I am too shy to look at the soldier,
so I inspect the horse.
Large, gentle eyes,
flaring nostrils.
“Little girl,”
says the soldier.
I know these Yiddish words.
When I was very small
and the aunts came over for tea,
they would say “such a shayna maidelah,”
pretty little girl,
and pinch my cheeks
before I ran and hid behind my chair.
“Little girl,”
the Russian says again, and I look up.
He is leaning down,
holding out something in his hand for me.
I step forward
and take it.
Gifts for the Children
“It’s chocolate!”
says one of the older boys.
The Russian hands each child
a bar of chocolate.
I have never had chocolate before
in my whole life.
I open the paper wrapping
and take a bite.
Oh my goodness.
All of us children are gobbling the candy now.
Baby Isaac
has brown smudges around his mouth.
The chocolate tastes
so good.
It is wonderful.
Then the horse shakes his head
and sneezes a sloppy sneeze.
I laugh,
my mouth full of chocolate,
and look up at the Russian soldier.
He is laughing, too.
Freedom
We are liberated!
We are free!
People start yelling, and some begin to dance.
The Nazis are defeated!
I go back to my family,
grinning.
They hug me and tease me
about my brown tongue.
Papa leaves us
to talk with the Russian soldiers,
who have gotten off their
horses.
“Hooray!”
A shout goes up, and I see some of the soldiers
holding up knives.
“They are going to start cutting down the wires,”
Dora explains.
No more wires around Lodz!
No more ghetto!
We are free!
Poland is free!
We can go home!
An Amazing Story
Papa returns from talking to the soldiers.
He is still smiling,
but his eyebrows are turned down
and his eyes look worried.
“Isaac?” my mother says.
“I have a wonderful story to tell you!”
Papa announces.
People gather around Papa to listen.
“That Russian soldier
is a major, the leader of his men.
And, yes, he is Jewish.
He was actually up in one of the planes
dropping bombs on the ghetto.
He had orders to demolish
the whole ghetto,
and he and his men were doing so,
when he flew over the courtyard.
And guess what?
The spotlight on his plane shone down
and he saw…”
Papa pauses.
We all lean in to hear more.
“He saw our yellow stars!” Papa says.
“Our Stars of David glowed in the spotlight!
He immediately ordered his soldiers
to avoid bombing that area.
Then he flew down
to rescue us!
The Russians are stationed not far away
in Lodz
so they ran for their horses and rode in to find us!”
Amazing!
What luck that he saw us.
Thank God he is Jewish.
People are talking all around me.
I look down at my yellow star
which has been patched on my front
for so many years.
I had forgotten it was there.
Many of us also had stars
on our backs, too,
to show we are Jews.
“Well, they showed we are Jews all right.”
A man laughs.
“Showed us off
right to the Russians!”
And once again everyone
cheers.
“Syvia,” Papa says, “you are a hero!”
Me?
I turn to Dora, who nods.
“Without you we would have slept
through the bombing
and perhaps not made it outside
to the courtyard and safety
in time.
You woke up and were courageous enough
to check on the Nazis
and then you decided that you had to
alert us.”
“Hooray for Syvia!” says Mother.
“Hooray for Syvia!” other people say.
I am not used to this kind of attention.
I bury my face in Papa’s coat,
but secretly I am pleased.
A hero. Me. The mouse.
Who would have guessed that?
The Bad News
Then Papa tells us the bad news.
The horrible news.
The Russian major said he was stunned
to see Jews.
He said,
I thought there were no Jews left
in all of Poland.
No Jews?
Everyone around us is quiet.
Where are our family, our friends,
our children?
“Sent to concentration camps,” Papa says.
He hangs his head.
“The Nazis have committed mass murder.
Maybe some Jews are still alive,”
Papa adds.
“The Russian doesn’t know for sure.
But everywhere he has been,
it is the same thing.
No Jews left alive.”
After that, people cry.
Some seem to be in a daze.
I think of all the people
who went off in trains—
my neighbors,
my friend Itka,
my cousins.
My heart aches with sadness
mixed with relief and guilt
and joy
that my family is still alive.
“Come on, Syvia,”
Papa says.
He takes one hand.
Dora takes the other.
Mother walks alongside Papa.
“We are going home.”
Shattered
Papa wants to go to our apartment first.
“Let’s see if anything is left inside,” he says.
As we walk through the ghetto,
we see many people
running in and out of the buildings,
carrying things through the streets.
“The people who live outside the ghetto,”
Dora says,
“are coming inside to take
what they can find.”
When we reach our apartment
and go inside,
we are surprised.
People have already been in here.
The few things we had
are knocked over and broken.
On the floor
are some of the photographs that we took
before the war.
The glass in the frames is broken
and there are muddy footprints
across the faces
of my family.
I lean down and carefully pull the photographs
out of their frames,
shaking off shattered glass
and brushing off the mud
the best I can.
“Oh!” Mother cries out,
looking very upset.
“Mother’s jewelry!
They took it!”
I did not know my mother had
saved
a couple pieces of her own mother’s jewelry,
hidden for years.
“I was keeping it to give to Dora and Syvia.”
Mother sighs.
We look around one last time at the place
we had been forced to call home
for so long.
We leave quickly, taking nothing.
Stepping Out
Time to leave the ghetto!
Time
to leave
the ghetto.
I chant these words
inside my head
to the rhythm of my steps,
leading me
to the outside.
Outside
the ghetto.
Outside
the ghetto.
My weak legs seem to gather strength
with every step.
And then
we are at the wire fence.
There is a large gap,
newly cut,
and people are going through it.
Now it is our turn.
January 19, 1945
On the way out of the ghetto,
Papa says suddenly,
“I just thought of something.
The Russian said it is January 19, 1945,
our Liberation Day.
That means that tomorrow will be
Syvia’s birthday.
Happy birthday, Syvia.”
“Yes, happy birthday,” Mother and Dora tell me.
We step out of the ghetto
to the rest of our lives.
I am one day shy of ten years old.
Author’s Note
On January 19, 1945, approximately 800 Jewish survivors were liberated from the Lodz ghetto. On that day, Syvia, her parents, and her sister walked out of the ghetto for the first time in five and a half years. Syvia’s uncle Haskel, his wife Hana, and their young son, Isaac, walked out, too.
When the survivors came out of the ghetto, other Polish people stopped to watch. Some shouted cruel things at the Jews, even calling them names. Syvia heard one Polish woman angrily yell, “Look how many are still left!” Although the war was over, some of the Polish people still had bad feelings about Jews.
Syvia’s family returned to the house they had lived in before the war. It was still there, still theirs. But, postwar Poland was a dangerous place for Jews. Syvia’s father was afraid they would be hurt or killed. So he arranged an escape.
A few months later, Syvia’s family left Lodz at night, leaving almost everything behind, except for some clothes, photographs, and a little money that they had hidden before the war. They boarded a train out of Lodz. Then Syvia’s father hired a man with a gasoline truck to sneak them across the border into Germany, where displacement camps had been set up for war refugees.
Syvia and her family remained in a detainment camp for a few months. Then they received permission to go to Paris, France, where Syvia’s father’s brother lived. They moved to Paris, where Syvia spent her teenage years. The adjustment from hidden Polish child to “regular” French girl took some time. Syvia always felt “stupid,” since she was so far behind her classmates at school. But with good food and new clothes and movies and French friends…Syvia gradually adjusted to her new life.
At night, however, the horrors came back. Every night for years, Syvia woke up screaming from nightmares of Nazis, of starving, and of being buried alive. Syvia’s parents and sister took turns comforting her back to sleep.
