by Alan Gratz
“The entire ghetto must be cleaned,” one of the Nazis told us. “There must be no taint of Jews left.” We were told how to search each flat for anything of value, and how to sort what was left into piles on the floor for removal and disposal — clothes should be sorted in one way, household items in another. We were to take nothing out with us, under penalty of death.
As I walked the empty streets of Podgórze, my chest felt heavy. I was overwhelmed with memories. I hadn’t been gone long, and the last few years I had lived here had been a nightmare, but what I remembered wasn’t the snow shoveling and the shootings and the starvation. I remembered walking to the market with my mother. Visiting my father at work. Playing ball in the street with my friends. This neighborhood had been my home once, and it always would be, even after the “taint” of Jews had been scrubbed away.
As if to tear my heart into even more pieces, I was assigned to clean out the apartment building where I had lived with my parents. While other boys worked the bottom floor, I climbed the stairs. I stopped and stood where no one could see me, remembering.
Mr. Barchwic on the second floor, singing along with the radio. Mrs. Szymansky sweeping the third-floor landing. Any minute now, I thought, my mother’s voice would come calling down the stairs: “Yanek! Dinner!” I waited, but there was no radio, no sweeping, no call from my mother. Nothing but the quiet shuffling of the boys working the flats on the first floor.
I climbed the stairs to my old floor and crept down the hall. This corridor had once been so familiar to me that I had traveled it without ever really seeing it. But now it was different. Now I could see the worn spots in the hall rugs, the broken piece of molding along the ceiling, the burned-out bulb in the light fixture. There was a new smell too, something putrid, like nothing I had ever smelled before. It was strongest near the door to Mr. Tatarka’s flat. The door was ajar, and I pushed it open the rest of the way to look inside.
Mr. Tatarka lay in the middle of the front room of his apartment beside the chair he’d stolen from the Immerglicks, dead in a pool of his own blood.
At least I thought it was Mr. Tatarka. The body was black and shriveled, all rags and bones and —
I stumbled back into the hall and retched. The smell, the sight of it, it was all just too much. I threw up again, tears streaming from my burning eyes, and I ran. I ran not for my old flat, the one we had shared with three other families. I ran instead for the roof, where it had just been me and my mother and father, safe and alone in our little pigeon coop. I burst through the big metal door and out onto the rooftop, gulping in big lungfuls of fresh air. The smell eventually went away, but not the memory of it — nor the vision of Mr. Tatarka’s decomposing body.
I stood with my hands on my knees for a while until my breathing returned to normal, but I knew I’d have to get back soon. It wouldn’t do for the Nazis to notice me for any reason. I went into the pigeon coop, fighting back all the memories of my mother and father. I sifted through what was left. Someone else had lived here after I had been taken — there was a tattered scarf I didn’t remember, and a red blanket that hadn’t been mine. But my father’s old coat was still there in the corner. I knew I couldn’t take it with me, but I picked it up and put it on, more to remember the smell of him than anything. It fit me better than it ever had, and I realized suddenly that, even though I was thin and starving, I had still grown. I was fourteen now, and almost as tall as my father had been.
I was pulling the coat off when I felt a lump in one of the sleeves. I felt it with my fingers. Something was sewn into the sleeve. Of course! Mother had sewn our extra money into our coats so it couldn’t be stolen in a raid! I glanced outside the coop to make sure no one else had made it to the roof yet, and I hastily ripped the seams of my father’s coat apart. There were a thousand zloty inside! I dug through the pile of things, found my old coat as well, and ripped out the seams. Another thousand zloty! Two thousand zloty! The Nazis didn’t sell food in the labor camp, of course, but there were ways to buy food smuggled in from the outside. Uncle Moshe would know how!
Using a needle and thread of my mother’s that had been left behind, I tore out one of the seams in my prisoner coat and sewed the money inside. I knew how to sew beautifully now from my work in the tailor shop. I finished quickly and was pleased with my work. Only the closest examination would find the money hidden inside.
I hurried to put the rest of the few things in the pigeon coop into piles, in case someone did come up here to clean up, and went back down to find the boys from my work detail. They had already made it to the top floor, and I joined in with the group cleaning out my family’s old flat, carefully avoiding Mr. Tatarka’s apartment.
We worked the rest of the day, putting clothes in one pile, household goods in another. I always went for the clothes first, running my hands along the seams to see if anyone else had had the same idea as my mother, and once found a pair of diamond earrings. I hooked them inside my jacket under my arms and hoped they wouldn’t fall out. Uncle Moshe and I were going to eat well tonight!
All the way back to the camp, I worried I would be discovered. But the guards either didn’t think we would try to sneak anything back in or figured there wasn’t anything left of value in the ghetto to smuggle. For the most part they were right — more than just the people had been taken from the ghetto. Two years of imprisonment and starvation and raids had bled the ghetto dry of almost anything worth owning.
As we assembled for roll call, I whispered for Uncle Moshe to come to my barracks at dinner. I also asked him what the score was.
“Goeth nineteen, Jews nil,” he whispered back. “It was a good day to get you out of the camp.”
I nodded. A very good day indeed.
Uncle Moshe couldn’t believe it when I showed him the money and the earrings. He hugged me and kissed me before remembering his own warning not to let anyone else see you care about anything.
“I know a man who works in the munitions plant,” Uncle Moshe whispered. “He smuggles in bread sometimes and sells it — for a price. I’ll buy us a little something to eat. You’ve saved us, Yanek!”
Later that night, Moshe brought me half a loaf of bread — a feast! He took it out from under his shirt and gestured for me to hide it quickly.
“You mustn’t let any of the other prisoners see you with it. They’ll try to take it. And don’t share it with anyone. Not if you want to survive, right?”
I nodded.
“The money will buy us more,” Moshe whispered. “I’ve hidden the rest to keep it safe.”
“Where?” I asked.
“I have a place no one will find.”
“The kapo,” someone near a window said. Someone always gave a warning when one of our overseers was coming.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Moshe said. “Remember what I told you! Don’t let anyone see.”
“I won’t.”
Uncle Moshe slipped out, and I climbed into my bunk. The bread lay against my cold skin. It wasn’t warm anymore, the bread, but my heart beat faster and my mouth watered at the thought of eating it. An extra half a loaf! In Plaszów I was a rich man, which suddenly struck me as funny. Before the war, there had been loaves of bread aplenty — always one or two in the kitchen, brought back fresh from the bakery every day by my mother — and I had never thought twice about them. Now a half a loaf of bread was life itself, and my mother was gone.
The kapo did his checks to make sure everyone was in their bunks. He didn’t have to worry about the man in the bunk below mine.
The man beneath me had crawled back after roll call, and hadn’t moved since. He was what the others called a Muselmann. He was so thin you could count his ribs and see the bones in his arms and legs, but it wasn’t just that. We were all skin and bones. Muselmanners were different in the way they breathed through their mouths, in the way they dragged their feet when they walked — if they could walk. Most of them just huddled on the ground on their hands and knees, even if the Germans or the kapos beat t
hem.
But no matter how he was standing, you always knew a Muselmann from his eyes. There wasn’t anything left there. Muselmanners had given up, and there was no life in their expression, no spark of a soul. They were zombies, worked and starved into a living death by our captors. If the man below me wasn’t dead when they came for us tomorrow, the morning roll call would kill him.
Half a loaf of bread might have saved him, if he could even eat it. Starvation did that to you after a while. Your body got so used to not having food it got sick if you ate even half a bowl of soup. I could hear him down there, breathing his ragged breath. I could hear him dying of starvation, and I had food. Half a loaf of bread! If I just gave him part of it …
But Moshe had warned me: Don’t share with anyone else. Not if you wanted to survive. Not if you wanted to make sure you never became a Muselmann yourself.
So I huddled on my bunk sneaking bites of bread in the dark, listening to the nameless man beneath me die.
My old apartment building was finished, but there were other buildings to clean in the ghetto. We worked for days, and I looked for hidden money and valuables wherever I went, but there was nothing. The place had already been picked clean before the liquidation. The Nazis had seen to that.
One night, Uncle Moshe brought me a carrot he’d bought with the money I’d found in the old coats. A whole carrot! I hadn’t had a carrot since the early days in the ghetto. It was soft and mushy, but it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten, I was sure. There was still money left, Moshe told me, lots of it. Even if I never found more money, we could keep buying a little extra food here and there for quite a while. Long enough maybe to survive. There were rumors the Russians and the Germans had abandoned their pact and were at war with each other now, making Hitler fight the English and French and Americans in the west, and the Russians in the east. One way or another, people whispered, we would be free by year’s end. I couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. Not until I saw an American or Russian tank rolling down the road. In the meantime, thanks to the money Moshe and I had hidden away, we would survive. No matter how long it took.
One evening when we returned to camp from cleaning the ghetto, I asked a boy in my barracks who worked inside Plaszów what the score was that day. He looked away and wouldn’t answer me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him, but still he said nothing. I spun him around. “Hey! Thomas, why won’t you tell me? What’s the score?”
“Just one,” Thomas said, looking at his feet.
“Who is it? Someone we know?”
“It was your uncle,” he said at last. “The man who comes to visit you at night.”
I staggered back, knocking my head on my bunk.
“No,” I told him. “No, that’s impossible. You’re wrong. Moshe he — he doesn’t work in the camp. He works at the furrier’s outside Plaszów. You saw someone else.”
Thomas shook his head. “They closed the furrier’s and reassigned all the workers inside the camp. Your uncle was made leader of a group breaking rocks. When Goeth demanded to know how much work had been done …”
“What? Tell me,” I demanded. My stomach was squeezing itself into a hard knot of fear.
Thomas shook his head. “Goeth didn’t like his answer.”
“No,” I told him. “No, you’re wrong. Moshe went to work today at the furrier’s like always. You’ll see. It was someone else.”
“I’m sorry, Yanek.”
“It was someone else! You’ll see at roll call.”
But Uncle Moshe wasn’t at roll call. I searched for him where we usually met. I looked up and down the rows for him. Nothing. I wanted to call out for him, but I knew that was suicide. Moshe had taught me: Do nothing to stand out. I had to be anonymous. I had to be no one, with no name, no personality, and no family or friends to care about.
But I did care. Uncle Moshe was the last of my family. The only person I could trust in Plaszów. My only friend.
And the money I had found! Moshe had hidden it, and he had never told me where. I’d never thought to press him on it, because Moshe would always be there. We were going to survive, the two of us. We were going to survive — the last two men in the Gruener family written on the pages of the world.
Now there was only me. Yanek. I was fourteen years old, and I was alone in the world again. This time for good.
As the Nazis went through roll call I fought back my tears. If Amon Goeth saw me crying, he would kill me too.
A few days later, my job cleaning the ghetto ended, and I was put back to work in Plaszów. Without Uncle Moshe, there was no one to help me get a job outside the camp again.
The work was brutal, and the food too meager to sustain me. Some mornings I could barely get myself up out of my bunk, and I had a hard time standing at roll call. Was this how it happened? Was this how a prisoner slipped from being a person to a Muselmanner?
One night after a hard day’s work digging trenches for new latrines, I collapsed to the floor of my barrack. I didn’t have the strength to climb into my bunk. I was desperate to get up, but I couldn’t make my legs obey me, couldn’t pull up my own weight with my stick-and-straw arms. But if I didn’t get up soon, the kapo would come through, and he would beat me for not being in my bunk.
No one bent to help me in my struggle to stand. Everyone else was like me — they barely had energy to spare for themselves, let alone anyone else. Be no one, care for no one. That’s how you survive. That’s what Uncle Moshe had taught me.
Moshe, I thought, my chest aching, why aren’t you here? Why did you have to die? I need help. I need a friend.
I needed Moshe. He would have helped me back up, despite his warning not to care. Who would help me now?
I rolled myself onto my chest to push myself up, but the board beneath me was loose. Wait — a loose board?
I knew the kapo would come any minute now. But lying there on the floor and staring right at the board made me remember building the new barracks across the camp when I first arrived. There was always a space, a small one, between the wooden floor and the dirt below. If this board was loose enough —
The board pulled loose from the floor in my shaking hands. I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, but of course no one had. The other prisoners were doing whatever they could to ignore me, just like I ignored them.
The gap in the boards would be wide enough for me to slide down inside, into the space between the floor and the ground. I was tempted to pull the board all the way up and roll down inside and disappear. But my absence from my bunk would be noticed. And what would I do, hide down there forever? I would be dead even quicker without what little bread and soup they gave us.
But tomorrow. Tomorrow after roll call, I could disappear into the barracks instead of showing up for my job. People were reassigned all the time. No one would know I was gone. I could sneak back and hide under the floor!
It was like Moshe was helping me, even though he wasn’t there. He had shown me the board. As I pushed myself up off the floor with every gram of strength I had left, I felt Moshe’s hand, helping me up. I reached out and grabbed hold of the bunk, clawing my way into my bed. I was not a Muselmann. Not yet.
The next morning after roll call, I grabbed the two boys I knew in my barrack, Thomas and Isaac, and showed them the board.
I don’t know why I showed them. Not when you survived by looking out for yourself and only yourself. Maybe it was because I’d wanted someone to help me when I had needed it. Maybe it was just that I would be lonely in there all day. But maybe it was that I just couldn’t keep the secret from someone else who could use help too. I’d done that with the black-market food Moshe had bought for us, and I’d felt guilty. I didn’t want to hide out under the floor alone while everyone else was worked to death.
“We can’t!” Thomas said immediately. “If we’re caught, we’ll be killed!”
“We’ll die if we don’t hide here,” I told them. “Do you want to go back out
there and be worked to death? Or worse, be killed by Goeth?”
“No! But this is begging for punishment.”
“This is survival,” I told them. I pulled up the board the rest of the way. “There’s room inside for all three of us.”
Isaac crawled down inside, and Thomas finally gave in. At first all we did was sleep. We had been worked so hard and fed so little all our bodies wanted to do was hibernate, like bears. The ground was hard, but it didn’t matter. So were the wooden pallets we called beds. We slept, only waking long enough to poke one another if we snored. The sound of footsteps on the floor above woke us, and we knew it was time to come out for roll call. We couldn’t miss a roll call, or they would come looking for us. As prisoners began to come back into the barracks, we pushed our way out, hurriedly replacing the floorboard and sitting down on my bunk like we had just come back from work. Nobody ever suspected — or if they did, they didn’t say anything. Talking got you killed.
The more we hid under the floor, the stronger we got. We weren’t healthy, not by a long shot, but without the heavy labor of the day, our bodies recovered a little. I didn’t have any more trouble climbing back into my bunk each night. And Thomas, Isaac, and I started to sleep less during the day, staying awake to whisper with one another. We talked about food, mostly, but also our homes, and our families, until it hurt too much to remember. Then we’d roll over and sleep again, always listening for the soft step of prisoners’ feet on the floor above to let us know when to come out.
But one day it wasn’t footsteps we heard; it was voices. And in the middle of the day.
Isaac slithered over to look out the cracks in the crawl-space wall. What he saw made him gasp.
“It’s Goeth!” he whispered. “Goeth and his dogs, and two guards! And they’re heading for our barrack!”
“We’re dead,” Thomas said. “Those dogs will smell us right away. They’ll find us, and we’ll be shot.”
