by Jim Shepard
She made a noise like he’d slapped her and he fell back onto his bed once he heard her going down the stairs.
A BOY EVERYONE CALLED MANDOLIN BECAUSE HE never let go of his instrument, even holding it above his head during his lice bath, died in his bed with both arms wrapped around it. We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it. If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew. All anyone could think about was the table’s next loaf of bread. In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds. We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan. It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand. On the Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard.
Though there was no food, Korczak had us all address and mail invitations to our Passover seder on April first. We divided up his list of benefactors. When the day came, fifty guests arrived and sat near the door. The long tables were covered with tablecloths. I sat next to a kid whose blisters and scabs were so thick his neighbors called him Fish Scales. We had no eggs or bitter herbs and only a bit of soup and a matzoh ball each, and the smaller kids were excited because it was announced that Madame Stefa had hidden an almond in one of the matzoh balls. Our holiday starvation, Zygmuś joked, would be like the rest of our week. But Korczak told the guests that no child at his table had been abandoned and all were joined by the loving spirits of their absent mothers and fathers, and when he said that many of the kids started crying. Most of the audience did too. Mietek got the almond.
For a week no one came round to bother me. Then someone pounded on the orphanage door late in the evening, and Madame Stefa answered it and came over to my cot and said a Jewish policeman wished to see me.
At the door Lejkin said that he needed to find the apartment where my friend, the pretty one, had stayed before she’d left the ghetto. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said if I refused then the Germans he was with would take ten kids from the orphanage and shoot them. He said the Germans would be happy to tell me which ones they would shoot. He waited while I got dressed and then walked me down the stairs and we got into a car with Germans in the back. One of them asked him in Polish why I was crying and Lejkin said, “That’s what he does.”
At first I gave them the wrong address but once we stopped there I panicked and told them I’d been mistaken and gave them the right one. That was only seven blocks farther on. Something was caught in the heater in the car’s dashboard and made a fluttering sound. While I waited in the front seat, Lejkin and two Germans went up to the door and knocked and asked the woman who answered to step outside. She was in her red flowered bathrobe. She looked over at me in the car. One of the Germans shot her where she stood and they left her there outside her front door.
The next day the kids were talking about how many people had been shot all over the ghetto. Korczak told Madame Stefa to let me sleep, so the room was set up for the day around me. I told myself I wasn’t going to move and if I cried until I dried out that was fine too. No one knew how many people had been killed. One of the staff members finally told Mietek that she’d heard they’d all been connected to an illegal newspaper. Korczak said this didn’t need to be discussed with the children within earshot. The next day I was made to get up and do some chores and when I was washing dishes I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Jewish Council had circulated a memorandum saying that the Germans said the executions had been a singular event and wouldn’t be repeated.
After that there were daily roundups at barricades the Germans set up on different streets with a few sawhorses and signs. Once the barricades went up you only had a few minutes to get away before the cross streets and alleys were blocked too. “Now the day’s a success if you just manage to get where you’re going without an incident,” Madame Stefa said.
Korczak’s solution to all of this was letter-writing. Just because things were as bad as they could be, he said, that didn’t mean we had to accept that action was useless.
All of those with acceptable penmanship were set to writing Please if possible send packages to the Orphans’ Home at 16 Sienna Street for the sick children. He said there was more and that he would dictate the rest. He said to write that peaceably they run around and play, these children who so recently arrived wounded, frozen, abused, hungry, and hunted. Some of the kids asked how to spell peaceably and he told them it didn’t matter. He said to write that there was no food for them and a lot of the smaller children had stopped growing. That nightmares and weeping were their permanent experiences. And yet his teaching had been borne out, since when the adult community wouldn’t provide a stable or rational environment the children could create for themselves a world that was functional and tender. I wrote that sentence twice, I was so taken with it. He said to write that there were always more children imploring him to be admitted, coming to him in groups on the street and making their proposals like little skeletal aldermen. He said to sign the letters with our names and then for Dr. Henryk Goldszmit/Janusz Korczak/The Old Doctor from the Radio.
FOR THREE DAYS I DIDN’T LEAVE MY BED EXCEPT FOR meals and Korczak again told them to leave me alone. The bedbugs spared only the bottom of my feet. During the day, before the kids hung the blackout paper, a new rule said they had to stand to the side of the windows to watch the street, because now the Germans were firing at any movement indoors. A policeman the staff members called Frankenstein because he looked and acted like the monster in the film never missed an opportunity, they said, to break a window if he saw a silhouette.
The kids watched the roundups at the barricades. They could hear them starting with the whistles and the shouting. Sometimes they saw someone they knew. Jews went by carrying all sorts of things: cages or bowls or horns. One had a pot with a seedling in it. They were all going to the depot the Germans called the Umschlagplatz where the trains took them away.
On the fourth day Korczak again got me up to go on his rounds with him. Madame Stefa insisted he wear a warmer shirt and he had to struggle into it. She had to help him with his suspenders.
Out on the street he couldn’t remember where he was going. In one doorway he rang the bell and said to me, “What did I come to see him about?” In the gloom of another he said, “What is it I’m looking at?” The instep of his shoe came loose and flapped when he walked. The coal smoke in the air left grit on our teeth. Everyone moved as if in a daze and looked at me like I was a piece of bread. A woman ahead of us in a shop complained about the price and Korczak said to her, “Listen. These aren’t goods and this isn’t a store. You’re not a customer and he’s not a shopkeeper. So you’re not being cheated and he’s not profiting. This is just what we’ve decided to do, given that we have to do something.” On the way back his legs were so swollen he had to hire one of the bicycles with seats attached for passengers. He asked me to choose the strongest-looking driver and while we rode he leaned over to me and said in a hoarse voice that he was always moved by how gentle and quiet the drivers were, like oxen or horses.
MORE KIDS GOT SICK BUT MADAME STEFA STILL slept downstairs with the healthy ones and Korczak upstairs in the isolation ward. “It’s cold for May,” he said to me one night when I came up to sit with him. He was writing something while everyone else slept.
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“The carbide in the lamp,” he said.
The vodka bottle was gone. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Raw alcohol I mix with water and a dissolved hard candy for sweetener,” he said. He asked why I hadn’t eaten dinner and when I told him I hadn’t wanted to, he said fatigue and apathy were symptoms of malnutrition. I asked why he hadn’t eaten dinner and he said eating was work and that he was tired.
I sat next to him on Jerzyk’s bed. Jerzyk was sweating and his eyes were open. “Alcohol mixed with warm water takes away the ache and sore eyes,” Korczak said.
While he wrote he kept his face close to the paper.
“What are you writing?” I finally asked.
He said it was to the Judenrat, requesting he be allowed to take over the public shelter that housed a thousand children on Dzielna Street. He said on his application he was spreading rumors that he was a thief who would let children starve so he could qualify for the job. He’d said he was unbalanced and excitable and his health had passed the test in the Gestapo’s prison the year before: that despite the exacting conditions there, not once had he reported sick, not once had he requested a doctor, not once had he absented himself from work in the prison yard. He said he told them that he presently ate like a horse and slept soundly after ten shots of vodka and that experience had now endowed him with the ability to collaborate with criminals and born imbeciles.
“What does the job pay?” I asked him.
He said he’d requested a trial period and a minimum of twenty thousand złotys for the children’s upkeep.
“Do you think you’ll get it?” I asked.
“I already got it,” he said. “I was handed the job permanently and given one thousand złotys. Who’s going to deny the Old Doctor from the Radio the privilege of overseeing kids who are dying at the rate of ten a day?”
“So then what are you writing?” I asked him.
“I had imagined the criminal types among the personnel there would voluntarily leave since they obviously found the place so hateful,” he said. “And they were bound to it only by cowardice and inertia. But instead they closed ranks against me. I’m the stranger. The enemy. The one good nurse died of tuberculosis. I’m trying to get the rest sacked.”
“The salt of the earth dissolves and the shit remains,” I told him. It was something Lutek always said.
“That describes it,” Korczak said.
Jerzyk told us he was thirsty and Korczak pulled himself off his bed and went down to the kitchen and returned with a cup of water. “Here I have four ways of dealing with undesirable newcomers,” he said to me. “I bribe them; I agree to anything; I lie low and mark time, waiting for the moment to strike; or I wear them out. There, none of these will work.”
“Thank you,” Jerzyk said, and Korczak told him he was welcome.
“Today everyone will be restless because I’ve got a headache,” he said. “Or because it’s cold. Or because they want an outing.” Jerzyk drank his water.
“Oh, listen to me,” he finally said, and put his hand on Jerzyk’s head. “I remember an old teacher who got indignant with us because our hair grew too fast.”
THE NEXT DAY HE WAS TOO WEAK TO GO ON HIS rounds but the day after I heard him exclaiming, “I’m up! I’m up! I’m on my feet!” even from the floor below where I was sleeping.
“This one again?” Zygmuś said when he saw us getting ready to leave. “I think Pan Doctor has a new favorite.”
We went to a butcher shop Korczak had heard would be open for the day. “Is this made from people?” he joked when the woman told him the price. “It’s too cheap for horsemeat.”
“How would I know,” she said. “I wasn’t there when they made it.”
On Twarda the road was blocked by Lejkin and a line of yellow police. He called to us and left his spot in the front to come over to talk.
“I understand you’ve been given new responsibilities,” Korczak told him. Lejkin bowed, and Korczak turned to me. “Mr. Szeryński was arrested for black marketing in furs.” I told him I didn’t care and he explained that it meant my friend was now in command of the Order Service. I said he wasn’t my friend and Lejkin said, speaking of that, one of the new imperatives was a daily quota for deportation and Service members who failed to fill their quotas would be departing themselves. And some of his men would prefer not to select their neighbors and maybe they could use the rest of my old gang since smugglers were always a good place to start.
“Leave the boy alone,” Korczak told him.
“I’m giving him fair warning,” Lejkin said. “About business we’ll be transacting in the future.” Korczak pulled me away.
“You needn’t hide behind him,” Lejkin called. “I can see you.”
But then he left us alone and Korczak told me after a few days that I could stop hiding. “Mr. Lejkin has other things to worry about,” he said.
It got hot again on Shavuot, the Feast of First Fruits, and the fly problem got so bad that Korczak finally set up a toilet-fee scale: you had to kill five flies to piss and fifteen to shit. Whoever was next in line was the one who checked. Mietek asked me one morning if he could kill them later because he couldn’t hold it and I told him I’d do it for him.
Then at the beginning of June everyone had diarrhea and the chamber pots boiled over. Korczak and Madame Stefa figured it was something that had been in the bread. The Children’s Home was now a home for the aged, he told her one night, and the whole group was worn down and mutinous and resentful. You could hear kids moaning on the chamber pots and on the toilet.
She said maybe the Germans would stop and he told her the Germans were running the world’s largest enterprise and its name was war and they weren’t playing at it and it wasn’t clean or pleasant or sweet-smelling. He said that We are the Germans meant We are the steel roller. And then when she started to cry he said without sounding sorry that this was how he felt as well.
THE NIGHT THE YELLOW POLICE CAME FOR ME I WAS able to hide. There was shooting all night and Madame Stefa was weeping the next morning and wouldn’t stop until Korczak had two of the staff members take her upstairs. He gathered the kids around him and told them that Madame was distraught because one of her favorite boys had been killed. He named the boy and no one knew him and he explained that he’d already graduated. One kid asked what was happening and he said no one knew but that night I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Germans were exterminating all of the smugglers. Soldiers with dogs broke down doors and dragged people out of houses. The Order Service now patrolled the ghetto wall. They’d painted white numbers every fifty meters, with every policeman responsible for his own numbered area. The plan was apparently to use those Jews to starve all the other ones to death.
Madame Stefa remembered when the boy who’d been killed had helped bring in half a cow in six valises over the roof of a building that had been emptied by typhus and how much the beef had thrilled all the children. She remembered that after the city surrendered he broke into a warehouse of army stores and came away with two pillowcases filled with rice and sugar.
She asked Korczak if he wanted tea and he told her that if she wanted to make tea she should make some for Jerzyk, whose fever was worse. She asked if he wanted saccharine water and he said that if she wanted to make some saccharine water she should make it for a staff member who’d given his portion at dinner to one of the weeping little girls.
The next morning I was assigned the coal chute in the cellar and while I was down there Zygmuś came down the stairs with a carbide lamp. The carbide hissed. He said first that I looked like a chimney sweep and second that a boy had come to the door with a message for me and said that I’d know who he was. The boy said to tell me that Adina had come out of hiding because the Germans had called to her and told her they would kill her friends if she didn’t. And that once she did, the Germans hung her in her apartment in front of her mother. And the boy wanted me to know he was going to find me and kill me. When he finished, Zygmuś made a face as if to say that was that, then kicked at some loose coal and took his lamp back up the stairs.
“YOU KNOW ABOUT MY OTHER LATE-NIGHT COMPANION, I assume,” Korczak told Madame Stefa when she appeared in his doorway and saw me sitting on Mietek’s bed. Mietek had the fever now as well.
“You can’t sleep?” she asked, and gave me a sympathetic look. The whole house was quiet. Only a few kids were having noisy trouble breathing.
“There was so much wind and dust yesterday,” Korczak said, once she sat at the foot of Jerzyk’s bed.
“For a while I thought the storm had cleared the air and it would make breathing easier,” she to
ld him. It was so hot that kids had pitched their sheets onto the floor. Everyone who could walk had spent two days washing and washing the floor and it still smelled everywhere of the diarrhea.
I was with him because now each time the lights went out I remembered my mother when she woke and couldn’t find me in the hospital and then her surprise at her inability to make a fist. I saw Lutek’s face when his rabbit-skin cap flew off.
“While I was lying here I invented a machine,” Korczak said from on his back. “It was like a microscope that could look into you. It had a scale that ran from one to one hundred and if I set the micrometer screw for ninety-nine, then everyone who hadn’t hung on to at least one percent of his humanity would die. And when I ran the machine the only people left were mostly beasts. Everyone else had perished.”
“You’ve had a hard week,” Madame Stefa said.
“And after I set the screw to ninety-eight I was gone too,” he said.
“Yes, well, that would be terrible,” she said, and he let it go. Mietek flailed his arms in his sleep.
“The children now say even birds won’t fly over us,” Korczak said, and she rubbed her face, tired or impatient. He said reading had begun to fail him and that this was a very dangerous sign.
“I saw Bula yesterday,” she told him. He smiled at the name and she went on. “Can you imagine he’s forty now? Not long ago he was ten. He asked me in for cabbage soup. He’s still smuggling. He said each morning he gives his boy a half a pint of milk and a roll. I asked why he never visited and he said when he was well off there was never time and when he wasn’t how could he come by looking so ragged and dirty?”
“Bula,” Korczak said, and they were quiet.
“Did you tell him that now he has to stop?” he finally asked.
“You know Bula,” she said.
“Do I have to do everything?” he said. “Do I have to go and find him?”
“He’s not going to listen,” she told him. And he closed his eyes and didn’t answer.
