by Alan Gratz
I was almost thirteen years old now, and it was hard to remember any other life — except for my daydreams of food. Bigos stew, with meat and mushrooms and cabbage. Roast chicken. Cucumber salad. Pierogi filled with potatoes, cheese, and onions, fried in butter. Cheesecake, apple tarts. I would have traded a week’s worth of rations just to have another pot of my mother’s delicious tomato soup. With each passing day I grew thinner and thinner, until hunger was my constant companion. I longed for nighttime, and the blessed relief sleep brought. The only time I didn’t think about eating was when I was asleep.
One cold February day, the director of the Judenrat called for a ghetto-wide meeting in Zgody Square, and my father and I went to hear what he had to say. The director was not a popular man. The members of the Judenrat were hated throughout the ghetto for working with the Nazis. But any man the Nazis assigned to the Judenrat who refused was shot or hanged, so I didn’t see what choice they had. Some of the Judenrat police enjoyed their new jobs too much, it was true, but there were others who tried to do what the Germans told them without making things worse for their fellow Jews.
The square was crowded, but not everyone in the ghetto was there. Not nearly. The director could tell this too. He checked his watch one last time and bent forward to speak into the microphone. “When I call for a meeting, all of you must come!” he told us. “Tell your neighbors. Hiding away will not help!”
I glanced nervously at my father.
“We’re afraid we’ll be taken away!” someone yelled.
“Or shot and killed in the street!” someone else said.
The director signaled for everyone to settle down. “My friends, I come to you with a terrible request, but one which I have no choice but to accede to. The Nazis have ordered me to give them seven thousand Jews, to be deported from the Kraków ghetto tomorrow morning.”
The crowd came alive with murmurs and sobs and shouts. Seven thousand Jews! I thought, trying to comprehend a number so big. There had been Resettlements going on all the while, but nothing on this scale. Never so many people.
“We can do nothing about this! Seven thousand people will be deported! But we can choose who will go and who will remain.”
“You can choose, you mean!” someone yelled.
“The Germans need good, healthy workers here in the ghetto,” the director said.
“You call this healthy?” a man cried. “I haven’t eaten meat in a year!”
Others in the crowd shouted angrily that they were starving. I nodded, feeling my own hunger pangs.
“If we prove ourselves useful to the German war effort, they will take fewer of us away. They will keep us here, and keep us alive!” the director said. “We must therefore think carefully about who we send away, and who remains. We must give them those who cannot work.”
More murmuring among the crowd. “Who can he mean?” I asked my father. Everyone in the ghetto worked. Even my mother had been taken to the factories when she was caught out on the streets.
“My friends,” the director said, “I must reach out my arms and beg: Mothers and fathers, give me your children!”
The crowd in the square erupted with rage. Angry shouts were raised from every mouth. Fists shook in the air. An empty green bottle flew through the air and shattered at the base of the stage where the director stood. I was scared but I felt angry too. I held on to my father’s arm.
“They go to a better place!” the director said, ducking a rock. “The children will be sent to resettlement camps!”
“Work camps!” someone near me yelled.
“Death camps!” another person cried.
“I am trying to save lives!” the director roared. “Do you understand? Which is better, that forty thousand of us remain, or that the whole population perish? We must choose!”
“They can’t do this,” I told my father. “Why does he get to choose who goes and who stays?”
The reality was starting to hit me: I was going to be sent to a camp. I was going to be sent away from my mother and father. Away from my home!
The crowd yelled and argued with the director, surging toward the stage. My father put his hands on my shoulders and steered me away. “Come, Yanek. Let’s go.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “Papa, how can he ask such a thing?”
“Because the Nazis have promised not to take him and his family, and people will do anything to protect their families. He should know that better than anyone.”
“I don’t want to go! Don’t let them take me,” I said. I could feel myself trembling, but I didn’t want to let on just how deeply terrified I was.
“They won’t,” my father told me. “I’ll protect you.” He smiled. “Besides, tomorrow you will no longer be a child, will you, Yanek? Do you think I’ve forgotten it’s your birthday?”
To be honest, I had thought he would forget. Mother too. There was nothing to mark the days now except the Sabbath, and we had to observe it in secret, anyway. But I knew. Tomorrow was my thirteenth birthday — the day I would officially become a man.
“Your mother and I have said nothing because how can we possibly hold a bar mitzvah for you? If we’re caught celebrating it, we’ll be killed.”
I nodded. I’d been looking forward to my bar mitzvah for as long as I could remember, but now it wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t.
“Still,” my father said like he could read my mind, “we will celebrate it.”
“But how?”
“Tonight,” Father told me, “go to sleep in your clothes.”
That night, I lay awake in my clothes, tossing and turning. My bar mitzvah, I thought.
A bar mitzvah is the ceremony in which a Jewish boy becomes a man — the first time he reads aloud from the Torah. Usually all of my school friends and aunts and uncles and cousins would have come to see me read in the synagogue. There would have been a kiddush after the service, with challah rolls, potatoes, chicken — my stomach growled just thinking about it. But of course there was no synagogue anymore, and no challah rolls or potatoes or chicken.
A few hours must have passed before I heard my father stir. My mother too. I sat up on my mattress and waited while my father pulled on his overcoat.
“We must be quiet,” Father whispered. “Like the night we went to Abraham’s bakery.”
I nodded and stood. My mother came to me and hugged me tight. “Come back to me a man, my Yanek. Only come back.”
“I will,” I promised her.
Mother kissed me on the cheek and walked us to the steel door that protected our rooftop home. She slid the metal bars back in place when we were through, and we made our way quietly down the dark stairs of our apartment building. Tonight there was no snow, but it was cold. We could see the breath from our noses. I pushed my hands down into my pockets as far as they would go and wished I hadn’t outgrown my gloves.
Father led me through the back alleys again. Once, we turned a corner to find another night stalker. It was a Jewish boy carrying a bag of something over his shoulder — food, I guessed, smuggled through some hole in the wall — and all three of us gasped. When it was clear none of us was a Nazi we all hurried on our way without a word, but we were even more cautious than before. Our path took us toward the wall, and at first I wondered if Father meant to take us out. We climbed into an old abandoned warehouse building that stood along the wall at Dabrowki Street. Almost every window was broken and open to the sighing wind, and the rotted wooden floor had holes in it. There were stairs at the back, narrow and rickety, and occasionally missing a tread, and down we went into the basement. It wasn’t exactly where I had imagined celebrating one of the biggest milestones of my life, but I followed along without a word.
There were men in the basement waiting for us. My uncles Abraham and Moshe, my cousin Dawid, two more men I recognized as friends of my father, and three more I didn’t know. One of them held a set of Torah scrolls in a burlap sack, saved, perhaps, from one of the ghetto’s synagogues
before it burned to the ground.
The men whispered hello. Ordinarily my uncles and cousins would have embraced us and talked, but everyone was too scared of being out after curfew to say anything more. My stomach grumbled, loud in the silent basement, reminding me that now that I was awake I should be finding it some food.
The stairs creaked behind us, and we all turned. My heart was in my throat. If we were caught down here, together, with the Torah in hand, I would never become a man. I would be shot dead on sight. But the shoes we saw coming down were not the glistening boots of an SS officer. They were the brown leather soles of Mr. Tatarka from down the hall.
“Now we are ten men,” my father whispered. He smiled at me. “And soon we shall be eleven. I’m sorry we did not have more time for your studies, Yanek. Just do your best.”
The Torah scrolls were taken out and unrolled so I could read from them. My Hebrew was rough. Before the Nazis, I would have been at the synagogue once or twice a week ahead of time, practicing for this. But of course that was impossible now. I muddled through, and if God or man heard anything amiss, neither of them called me on it.
When I was finished, my father chanted a blessing over me in the place of our rabbi, who had been killed by the Germans. He prayed in Hebrew, then spoke in Polish.
“Yanek, my son,” he said, looking at me solemnly, “you are a man now, with all the duties of an adult under Jewish law. You are now responsible for your own sins, but also for your own goodness. Remember what the Talmud teaches: Life is but a river. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. All we are, all we are worth, is what we do while we float upon it — how we treat our fellow man. Remember this, and a good man you will be.”
“I will, Father,” I said. I had waited for this day, looked forward to it for years. Suddenly it didn’t matter that we weren’t in a synagogue, that we didn’t have a feast waiting for us afterward. The smile on my father’s face filled me with pride.
The men all shook my hand and wished me mazel tov before hurrying off.
“They’re leaving tonight, most of them,” Moshe told us. “Trying to escape before tomorrow’s Deportation. Seven thousand! Never so many.”
“We’ll survive,” my father told him. “Come to our pigeon coop and hide with us.”
“Oskar and his river,” Uncle Moshe said. “You should talk some sense into him now that you’re a man, Yanek. The man who falls asleep on the river drowns.”
“Jews of Kraków!” The announcement blared from speakers. “Get up! Get out! Get moving! Seven thousand volunteers are needed for the resettlement camps!”
The asked-for volunteers had not appeared in Zgody Square the next morning, and the Germans were not happy. Just after dawn they drove through the streets of the ghetto in trucks with big speakers on them, yelling at us to come out.
“It will be worse for you if you hide!” they called. “Come out now, and all will be forgiven.”
I didn’t believe them. None of us did. Uncle Moshe, Aunt Gizela, and my cousin Zytka were all there with us. They had decided to come hide in our pigeon coop. So had the rest of my aunts and uncles and cousins. There were twelve of us, all crammed inside the little shack on the roof. It was too crowded, but there was no way we would turn them away. Everyone was afraid of this new announcement, and we had seen too many smaller Resettlements to take it lightly. At least all of us pressed together in the coop helped keep us warm — we couldn’t start a fire, or the smoke would give us away.
A gunshot rang out. Crack! A woman screamed. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop went a machine gun. I scrambled to the little window in our coop, where we’d hung a blanket to hide us.
“Yanek, no,” my mother whispered, but I had to see. Across the street was a building that had been turned into a hospital, and I watched through a hole in the blanket as the Nazis pushed sick people out the door and down the steps. Some of them were too weak to walk and collapsed on the pavement. They cried out piteously.
“What’s happening?” Moshe asked.
My heart was in my throat, but I managed to answer. “Sick people, old people — they’re taking them out of the hospital.”
“They can’t be taking them to the work camps or for resettlement,” Moshe said. His voice was quiet, but urgent. “They would never take the sick and the old away to work. They’re taking them to die — and anyone else with them!”
As I watched, the Nazis walked up behind the sick people from the hospital and started to shoot. Bodies fell on bodies, a great pile of them in the street. They fell with terrible screams.
I pulled away from the window, unable to watch anymore.
“No,” I said. “They’re not taking them away. They’re shooting them right here.”
Not even Uncle Moshe had anything to say to that. My mother reached for my hand and pulled me back to her. We sat like that for hours, listening to the gunshots and the screams in the street, my younger cousins huddled next to their mothers, weeping on and off quietly.
I was terrified just like they were, but I wasn’t going to cry. I was a man now, I reminded myself. I was a man, and I wanted to do something. Something to stop the Nazis. To save my family. I asked myself over and over again what I could do to help, but I had no answer.
Shunk-shunk. The big metal door to the roof rattled — someone was trying to come through! I held my breath, listening. Shunk-shunk. Shunk-shunk. Would the steel bars hold? Would whoever was on the other side start shooting? I watched my mother’s eyes grow wide again, watched her chest heave as she breathed faster and faster. She looked like she might scream, which would give us away for sure. My father hugged her close, holding her face to his shoulder. Shunk-shunk. Shunk-shunk. I waited for a gunshot, waited, waited — but then, for whatever reason, the rattling stopped, and whoever it was went away. We held still, none of us daring to breathe, waiting for someone to try to come through again, but an hour passed, and then another, and another, and no one came back.
That evening, the trucks drove through the streets again with a new message for us.
“Jews of Kraków! Unless everyone comes to Zgody Square for selection, this ghetto will be liquidated! If you do not come out of your houses by six P.M., every one of you will be shot on sight when we find you!”
“‘Liquidated,’ do you hear that?” Uncle Abraham said. “Liquidated, like it’s a business decision. They would get rid of us like so many old pairs of shoes.”
“We should go,” Moshe said. He stood. “You heard them. They will kill us if we don’t.”
“They will kill us if we do!” I said.
“They said they will liquidate the ghetto only if we do not come out. By hiding, we seal our death warrant,” Moshe said.
“No!” I said. I could feel my pulse racing. “We can’t trust them! It’s a trick. I know it is. It’s a trick to get us to come out of our hiding place!”
“You’re still a boy, Yanek, even if you’ve had your bar mitzvah. Listen to me, all of you. If we stay here and are found, we’ll be shot,” Moshe argued. He opened the door to the coop. “We have to go now. If we do what they say, they may let us live.”
My uncles and cousins started arguing about it. Dawid agreed with Moshe. Abraham wanted to stay. My aunts argued too, and the younger children started to cry. I looked to my parents to see what they wanted, but my mother’s face was still buried in my father’s shoulder, and he was comforting her. Tears welled up in my eyes. I wasn’t a boy. Not anymore. Not after my bar mitzvah. Not after a year in the Kraków ghetto. I knew I had to be a grown-up now, for my parents. For everyone.
I pushed past Uncle Moshe and marched to the big metal door. I yanked off the steel bars and flung the door open with a clang.
“There!” I said. “Go! If you want to leave so badly, if you want to hand yourselves over to those killers, then do it right now! But I’m not. I’ve seen what the Nazis think of us. How they treat us. We all have. So they kill us if they find us here. If we go down there on our own they will most certa
inly kill us! At least if we hide out here there is a chance they won’t find us. That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
My outburst shut everyone else up. They all stared at one another without speaking until my father rose.
“Yanek speaks with the wisdom of the prophet Isaiah,” he said softly, then quoted, “‘Come, my people … and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.’” He cleared his throat and looked around. “Mina and I are staying too.”
One by one, the others agreed, until even Uncle Moshe sat down and was quiet. I closed the door and slid the steel bars back in place, making sure they were tight. Night fell, and with it came more gunshots, more screams from the streets below. The Deportation lasted for two days. But on the third day, when the sun rose, there were no more trucks in the streets, no more gunshots, no more Nazis. They did not liquidate the entire ghetto, as they had promised. Once their quota was filled, they went away again.
Seven thousand Jews had been collected and taken away to die, but we were not among them.
After the deportation, the wailing of old women could be heard from nearly every window and door in the ghetto. Seven thousand husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, brothers and sisters, and children had been taken to their deaths — or so we heard from survivors.
Rumors were whispered in the streets: that shootings in the woods were too much trouble for the Nazis. Now they were gassing Jews to death in trucks and boiling their bodies to make soap, or so it was said. The thought of that made my stomach turn. There were more Deportations, but for a time they were smaller selections, like those that had come before, and my existence in the ghetto — it wasn’t a life, just an existence — went back to what it was. Those who could work were not taken away, and so, reluctantly, my father and I showed up for work details every morning. I was assigned to a tailor shop, and the work was manageable, but it seemed as if my former life — school, friends, time to play and read — belonged to another world entirely.
