• • •
My nephew, Majer Kaminski, was a shayna punim. It was March 1940, and he was six weeks old, and already he smiled back if you smiled at him; he could hold up the weight of his own head. He had blue eyes and jet hair and a gummy grin that, my father used to say, could melt even Hitler’s black heart.
Never had a baby been so beloved—by Basia and Rubin, who gazed at him like he was a miracle every time they passed by his bassinet; and by my father, who was already trying to teach him recipes; and by myself, who made up nonsense lyrics to lullabies for him. Only my mother was distant. Sure, she kvelled about her grandson and she cooed at him when Basia and Rubin brought him to visit, but she rarely held Majer. If Basia passed him into her arms, my mother would find an excuse to put him down, or to shuffle him to me or my father instead.
It didn’t make any sense to me. She had wanted to be a grandmother forever, and now that she was one, she couldn’t even bear to cuddle her grandchild?
My mother always saved the best food for Friday nights, because my sister and Rubin came for Shabbat dinner. There were usually potatoes and root vegetables in our rations, but tonight, somehow, my mother had purchased a chicken—a food we had not seen in months, since Germany occupied the country. There were black markets all over the town where you could get just about anything, for a price; the question was, what had she traded in return for this feast?
I was salivating so badly, though, I almost didn’t care. I fidgeted during the prayer over the candles and the Kiddush over the wine and the Ha-motzi over my father’s delicious challah, and then finally it was time to sit down and eat. “Hana,” my father sighed, biting into the first bite of the chicken, “you are truly a marvel.”
At first none of us spoke, we were that occupied with the delicious food. But then, Rubin interrupted the silence. “Herschel Berkowicz, who works with me? He was ordered to leave his home last week.”
“Did he go?” my mother asked.
“No . . .”
“And?” my father said, his fork paused en route to his mouth.
Rubin shrugged. “Nothing so far.”
“You see? Hana, I was right. I’m always right. You refuse to move, and the sky doesn’t fall on your head. Nothing happens.” On February 8, the chief of police had listed streets where Jews were allowed to live and posted a calendar citing when the rest were supposed to leave. Although at this point, everyone knew a family that had gone east to Russia or into the area of the town allotted for Jews, others—like my father—were resistant to leave. “What can they do?” he said, shrugging. “Kick us all out?” He patted his mouth with his napkin. “Now. I will not let this glorious meal be ruined with talk of politics. Minka, tell Rubin what you were telling me about mustard gas the other day . . .”
It was something I had learned in chemistry class. The reason mustard gas worked was that it was made in part of chlorine, which had such a tight atomic structure that it sucked electrons in from whatever it came in contact with. Including human lungs. It literally ripped apart the cells of your body.
“This is what passes for dinner conversation now?” my mother sighed. She turned to Basia, who was cradling Majer in her left arm. “How’s my angel sleeping? Through the night yet?”
Suddenly there was a pounding at the door. “You’re expecting someone?” my mother asked, looking at my father as she went to answer it. Before she could reach the door, however, it flew open and three soldiers burst into the parlor. “Get out,” one of the officers said in German. “You have five minutes!”
“Minka,” my mother cried. “What do they want?”
So I translated, my heart pounding. Basia was hiding in the corner, trying to make the baby invisible. They were Wehrmacht soldiers. One of them swept the crystal off my great-grandmother’s oak server, so that it shattered on the floor. Another overturned the table, with all our food on it, the candles still burning. Rubin stamped out the flames before they could spread.
“Go!” the officer shouted. “What are you waiting for?”
My father, my brave, strong father, cowered with his hands over his head.
“Outside in five minutes. Or we come back in and start to shoot,” the officer said, and he and his comrades stormed out of our apartment.
I didn’t translate that part.
My mother was the one who moved first. “Abram, get your mother’s silver from the server. Minka, you take pillowcases and go around and collect anything that has value. Basia, Rubin, how fast can you go home and gather your things? I’ll stay with the baby until you get back.”
It was the call to action that we needed. My father began rummaging through the drawers of the server, and then he started to move books from shelves and reach into jars in the kitchen cabinets, collecting money that I had not known was hidden there. My mother settled Majer in his bassinet although he was screaming, and began to collect winter coats and woolen scarves, hats, and mittens, warm clothing. I flew into my parents’ bedroom and took my mother’s jewelry, my father’s tefillin and tallith. In my own room, I looked around. What would you grab, if you had to pack up your life in only minutes? I took the newest dress I owned and its matching coat, the one I had worn for the High Holy Days last fall. I took several changes of underwear and a toothbrush. I took my notebook, of course, and a stash of pencils and pens. I took a copy of The Diary of a Lost Girl by Margarete Böhme, in its original German—a novel I had found at a secondhand store and had hidden from my parents because of its racy subject matter. I took an exam upon which Herr Bauer had written “Exceptional Student” in German.
I took the Christian papers Josek had given me, hidden inside the boots my father had made me promise to wear at all times.
I found my mother standing in the center of the dining room, surrounded by the broken crystal. She was holding Majer in her arms and whispering to him. “I prayed you’d be a girl,” she said.
“Mama?” I murmured.
When she looked up at me, she was crying. “Mrs. Szymanski, she would have raised a little girl like her own.”
I felt like my mind was filled with mud. She wanted to give Majer, our Majer, away to be raised by someone other than Basia and Rubin? Was that why she’d agreed to watch the baby while they ran home to pack? Yes, I realized, in a moment of painful clarity—because it was the way to keep him safe. It was why families had shipped their children to England and the United States. It was why Josek’s family thought I should go with them to St. Petersburg. With survival comes sacrifice.
I looked down at Majer’s tiny face, his waving hands. “Then give him to her, right now,” I urged. “I won’t tell Basia.”
She shook her head. “Minka, he’s a boy.”
For a moment I just blinked at her, and then I realized what my mother was talking about. Majer, of course, had had his bris. He was circumcised. If the Szymanskis told authorities their little girl was Christian, there would be no way to prove otherwise. But a little boy—well, all you had to do was open his diaper.
I realized, too, why my mother had not wanted to cuddle her grandson. Deep down she knew she should not become attached, in case she lost him.
My father appeared, a rucksack on his back and pillowcases stuffed to the breaking point in each hand. “We must go,” he said, but my mother did not budge.
I could hear screams as the soldiers worked their way through the homes of our neighbors. My mother flinched. “Let’s wait downstairs for Basia,” I suggested. Only then did I notice her watch was missing. It was what she had traded for the chicken, I guessed—the chicken, which now lay unfinished on the floor of the dining room; the meal she had cooked to give the rest of her family the illusion that everything was going to be just fine. “Mama,” I said gently. “Come with me.”
It was the first time I remember acting like the grown-up, being the one to take my mother’s hand, instead of the other way around.
• • •
My father had a cousin who lived in Bałuty, and
in this we were lucky. People who were evicted and who knew no one had to get assigned a room by the authorities. The authorities, in the case of the Jewish ghetto, were the Judenrat, which was headed by one man—Chaim Rumkowski, the Chairman, the Eldest of the Jews. My mother had never liked my father’s cousins; they were poor and lower-class, and in this they were an embarrassment to her. When they came to our home for my sister’s wedding dinner, my cousin Rivka kept holding things up to the light as if she were an appraiser, saying, And how much do you think this cost? My mother had huffed and muttered and made my father swear that she would not have to suffer their company again in her own home. It was ironic, then, to find ourselves on their doorstep in the position of beggars; to see my mother with her mouth pinched shut, at the mercy of their good graces.
In the four square kilometers that the Germans had decreed to be the Jewish part of town there were 160,000 people. Four or five families crowded into apartments meant for one. One-half of these homes had a bathroom. We were in one of them, and for this, I gave thanks every day.
The ghetto was surrounded by a fence made of wood and barbed wire. A month after we arrived, it was completely sealed off from the rest of Łód. There were Fabriken, factories—some in warehouses but many in bedrooms and basements—where people worked, making boots, uniforms, gloves, textiles, furs. It had been Chairman Rumkowski’s idea to become indispensable to the Germans—to be such a useful group of workers that they would come to see how badly they needed us. In return for our making what they needed for the war effort, they would pay us in food.
My father got a job baking bread for the ghetto. Mordechai Lajzerowicz was the head of the ghetto bakeries, and he reported to Chairman Rumkowski. There were times when no flour or grains came in a shipment, and there weren’t enough ingredients to bake. My father didn’t hire his own bakers; they were assigned by Rumkowski. The loudspeakers that blared all day in German in the squares would tell people who needed work to assemble every morning, and they would be directed to this Fabrik or another. My mother, who had not worked while I was growing up, now got a job as a seamstress in a fur shop. Until then, I hadn’t even known that she could hem—we’d taken our clothes to a tailor in the past. In only a few weeks’ time, my mother had calluses on her fingers from needle sticks, and she started to squint from the poor light in the factory. We split the food she received in payment with Basia and Rubin, because Basia had to stay home with the baby.
Except for the fact that my mother, father, and I all shared a tiny room now, I did not mind living in the ghetto. I had more time to write my story. I got to go to school with Darija again, at least at first, until they closed all the schools. In the afternoons we would go to the apartment she shared with two other families, none of whom had children, and we’d play card games. Often, because of the curfew, I would stay over at Darija’s. Being in the ghetto sometimes felt like we were living in a cage, but it was a wonderful cage, if you were fifteen years old. My friends and family surrounded me. It felt safe. I believed that if I stayed where I was supposed to be, I’d be protected.
In the late summer, when there was no bread in the ghetto because no flour had been brought in, my father became frantic—he considered it his personal responsibility to feed his neighbors. Thousands of people marched in the streets while my father pulled the shades down at the bakery and hid in the back, afraid of the mob. We are hungry! The chant swelled in the heat, like dough rising. The German police shot into the air to disperse everyone.
There was more and more shooting as people kept pouring into the ghetto, but its boundaries remained fixed. Where were they all supposed to go? What were they supposed to eat? Although by the winter there was full-scale rationing, there was never enough. Every two weeks, we each got 100 grams of potatoes, 350 grams of beets, 300 grams of rye flour, 60 grams of peas, 100 grams of rye flakes, 150 grams of sugar, 200 grams of marmalade, 150 grams of butter, and 2500 grams of rye bread. Working in a bakery, my father got an extra portion of bread during the day, which he always saved for me.
Of course, he could no longer bake me my special roll.
In the winter, the bakery closed down again. This time, it wasn’t because they ran out of flour but because there was no fuel. No wood had been supplied to the ghetto, and only a little coal. My father and his cousin and Rubin took apart fences and ruined buildings and carried the wood back home so that we would have something to burn. One morning, I found my cousin Rivka tearing up floorboards in a closet. “Who needs a floor in a pantry,” she said, when she saw me watching.
Yet even with all these extreme measures, people were freezing to death at night in their homes. The Chronicle, the newspaper that detailed everything that happened in the ghetto, reported on the casualties every day.
Suddenly being here didn’t seem so safe anymore.
One afternoon Darija and I were walking to her home from school. It was frigid, and a wind whipped out of the north that made it even colder than the thermometer suggested. We huddled with our arms linked as we crossed the bridge at Zgierska Street, which Jews were not allowed to walk down anymore. A trolley was passing, and standing on the platform of the car was a woman in a long fur coat, her legs in silk stockings. “Who would be stupid enough to wear silk stockings on a day like today?” I murmured, thankful for the woolen leggings I had on, double layers. When we had scrambled to leave our home, I had taken silly things like party dresses and colored pencils, but my parents had had the foresight to take our winter coats and sweaters. Unlike some of the others in the ghetto, we at least had warm clothing to weather this horrible winter.
Darija didn’t answer; I saw her staring at the woman as the trolley passed. “If I had them,” she said, “I’d wear them. Just because.”
I squeezed her arm. “Someday we’ll both wear silk stockings.”
When we reached Darija’s apartment, it was empty; everyone else was still at work. “It’s freezing in here,” Darija said, rubbing her hands together. Neither of us bothered to take off our coats.
“I know,” I said. “I can’t feel my toes.”
“I have an idea to warm us up.” Darija dumped her book bag on the floor and turned on the record player. Instead of putting on popular music, though, she found one of her old classical records. She started to dance, slowly at first, so that I could follow along. I laughed as I tried; I was clumsy on a good day, and here I was trying to be graceful in my winter coat and many layers? Impossible. Eventually I collapsed to the floor. “I’ll leave the dancing to you,” I told Darija, but it had worked; I was winded and my cheeks were pink and warm. Instead, I took out my notebook and read over the pages I had written last night.
My book was taking a turn, now that I had been relocated to the ghetto. Suddenly, the charming little village I had created was more sinister—a prison. I had lost sight of who was a hero and who was a villain; the dire circumstances in which I had set my story made everyone a little bit of both. The most detailed descriptions were of the smell of the bread in Ania’s father’s bakery. Sometimes when I wrote about smearing a slice with fresh butter, I found myself salivating. I could not conjure food for myself, and had not had anything but watery soup for months—but I could imagine so vividly what I was missing that my belly ached.
The other thing I could write about now was blood. God knows I had seen enough of it. In the few months I had been here, I had seen three people shot by German soldiers. One was standing too close to the ghetto fence, so a guard shot him. Two were women, fighting noisily over a loaf of bread. The officer who approached to stop the argument shot them both, took the bread, and threw it into a puddle of mud.
Here’s what I now knew about blood: it was brighter than you would imagine, the color of the deepest rubies, until it dried sticky and black.
It smelled like sugar and metal.
It was impossible to get out of your clothes.
I had come to see, too, that all my characters and I were motivated by the same inspiratio
n. Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love—well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.
As I wrote, Darija kept dancing. Turning, whipping her head at the last possible moment, in a circle of chaînés and piqué turns. She looked like she might be able to bore a hole through the floor with the chisel made by her feet. As she moved with dizzying speed, I put down my notebook and started to clap. That was when I noticed the policeman peering through the window.
“Darija!” I hissed, slipping my notebook underneath my sweater. I jerked my head in the direction of the window, and her eyes grew wide.
“What should we do?” she asked.
There were two police forces in the ghetto—one made of Jews, who wore the Star of David like the rest of us, and the German police. Although they both enforced the rules, which was a challenge because the rules changed daily, there were significant differences between them. When we passed German policemen on the street, we would bow our heads; and boys would remove their hats. Otherwise, we had no contact with them.
“Maybe he’ll go away,” I said, averting my eyes, but the German rapped on the windowpane and pointed to the door.
I opened it, my heart pounding so loud that I thought for certain he could hear it.
The officer was young and slight like Herr Bauer, and if not for the fact that he was wearing a dark uniform I had learned to be terrified of, Darija and I might even have giggled behind our hands about how handsome he was. “What are you doing in here?” he demanded.
I answered him in German. “My friend is a dancer.”
The Storyteller Page 23
