by Jane Yolen
At that same moment, he understood what he had to do to stay alive. And to keep Gittel alive. He had to write—not just a line here, a line there—but something every day about what was happening, if only in his head.
He had to act as a living memory to the events here. He had to witness and then write about them. But because they were allowed no paper, no pencils, he had to remember each piece of writing whole. Not just a line here, a word there, but whole. As he still remembered the poem he’d written about the little girl dead on the ghetto street.
For a minute he remembered the Łódź ghetto with longing, even though when he’d been there, he’d loathed the place, hated the squalor, the casual deaths, the Nazis dragging people out of their beds to their deaths.
But compared to here, Łódź had also been a place of safety, because Mama and Papa were there, ever-vigilant guardians. It was where they’d all been a family who shared a history, a destiny, jokes, goals.
It was many days since he’d even thought of Mama and Papa. He could feel pinpricks of tears in his eyes. Had he become so callous as to forget what they’d sacrificed? Maybe staying alive and writing was what he had to do for them as well as for himself.
It will be like lighting a yahrzeit candle, he thought. A light for the year anniversary. However long this nightmare lasts. When you light the candle for someone dead, you remember the dead, the good they did, the work they drew sustenance from, and perhaps how they died. You witness. You remember. Mama and Papa did it for their own parents every year. It was the one constant Jewish thing they ever did. He put his hand over his heart and felt it thudding away in his chest.
And then he began.
A complete poem this time. But at its core, a memory. A yahrzeit. A truth.
Lev Was Only a Boy
Lev was only a boy, not much bigger than me,
not much older, smarter. With dark circles
under his eyes, yellow-gray shadow
marks on his arms from the work.
He ate gunpowder instead of eggs,
sucking it in like mother’s milk.
He died before his first kiss,
before he ever held a girl’s hand.
Before Death, that old interrupter,
took him away, her hand
on his shoulder, though not unkind.
In the end, Death alone keeps
all her promises, even the dark ones.
Especially those.
As I will keep mine, he thought. The first of those promises was already begun—to witness. Every moment he was awake, everything he saw would be written in his head. The second, also already in progress: to remember it. The third was to figure out how long they’d been at the camp. A yahrzeit candle has to know the year to commemorate it. And to know the year, one had to know the months. Had to know the days. When he knew the days, he would write a piece for each one. And maybe God, in His infinite wisdom, would finally let His people go.
* * *
• • •
Chaim tried to explain to Manya what he needed. It was noon, the Madams had gone out to eat, and he took the chance to go over to the table where Manya sat, having rehearsed the words over and over in his mind.
But by the time he’d taken the few steps to where she was bent over the table, stuffing gray powder into the canisters with a concentration that was both terrifying and unyielding, he’d lost half the words to panic and tried to change them as he stood there.
He stuttered through “Need days . . . days . . . witness . . .” Took a breath. “Yahrzeit . . . writing,” none of which served to pull Manya out of her fierce commitment to the munitions.
Either that or she couldn’t understand him.
When he tried again, painfully committing the five words once again to the air, this time without the intervening stutters, she deigned to look up at him, slowly, like a queen to a lowly subject, and her dark eyes were cold and distant.
She said with brusque simplicity, “Go away. You’ll have us both killed.”
He went away, frustrated, and kicked at a bucket containing saltpeter, which—luckily—was too full to overturn.
* * *
• • •
That night, as they lay on the hard slats of their bunk, covered with some sacking they’d lifted from the munitions warehouse—what the prisoners called organizing—Chaim said the same words to Gittel as he had to Manya. “Need days. Witness, yahrzeit, writing.” And then he said the first four lines of the Lev poem to her, which—because it was already written in his head—he could speak as if reading it. But he didn’t dare chance more than those.
Lev was only a boy, not much bigger than me,
not much older, smarter. With dark circles
under his eyes, yellow-gray shadow
marks on his arms from the work.
“I’ll talk to Manya,” Gittel said. “Now enough talking, I’m exhausted, and my stomach is aching. I just need to get to sleep.”
“Hungry,” he said.
“No, I know hunger. This is worse.” She turned her back to him, which ended their conversation, and was asleep before he could even attempt a broader response. But he had no doubt she’d understood what he meant. What he wanted. What he needed. She always knew his mind, as he almost always knew hers. What he didn’t know, though, was what that something else troubling Gittel was, and it kept him up half the night worrying. The other half the night, he worried because he hadn’t gotten any sleep, which would show in his work the next day.
* * *
• • •
That next morning, before they went off to their breakfast gruel, Chaim saw Gittel and Sophie speaking passionately with Manya, Sophie waving her hands about, Manya nodding and frowning at the same time. Then the three girls walked over to the bunk where he was still groggily putting on his shoes. All the while he was reciting the Lev poem quietly to himself, fiddling with it, improving.
Abruptly, Manya said, “Come with me.”
So with the one shoe in hand, he jumped down and followed her back to her bunk. It was the lower bunk of two, both singles. They stood side by side until everyone, even Gittel and Sophie, had left the building for breakfast.
When the last one was gone, Manya turned to him. “So you’re a poet.”
He couldn’t tell if it was a simple acceptance or a rejection, but he shook his head. “I write.”
“Your sister said something about a yahrzeit candle, about needing to know how many days you’ve been here. And—well—I am the only one who knows.
She nodded at her bunk. “My calendar.” Then pointed to a series of small lines cut by some kind of thin-bladed instrument into the slats on the far side of her bunk, the side nearest the wall. They looked like scratches made by an animal.
If he hadn’t been told what they were, Chaim would never have noticed.
“I won’t show you where I keep the knife,” she said, turning back to him and speaking directly to him, her eyes dark, mysterious. “Or tell you what it looks like. I won’t even admit I have a knife. Nor will you find it. And I will deny everything I just said, because you might try to sell me for a handful of candy. Sometimes, if they have been able to get some, the guards use it to buy information. You know they call this place the House of Candy?”
“Then . . .” He hesitated before adding, “If there’s candy, don’t trust Bruno.” A whole day’s worth of words to someone not a family member. And I didn’t stutter, not once. What will come next?
“I trust no one. Not even Gittel. Or Sophie. Or you. But I will remember what you said about Bruno. Besides, you’re a writer. I like that. Do you know Goethe and Rilke? Of course they’re German. Can’t be helped. But not Nazis. You look surprised.”
In fact he was stunned. She with her country accent . . .
“We country folk read a lot of poetry
, you know.”
He hadn’t known. Hadn’t even given it any thought before. Shook his head.
She smiled at him, a bit pitying. “I understand what you are doing, and I think it’s right. Making poems, Gittel says. But you—a Jewish poet. Here. In this corner of hell. A yahrzeit. Maybe even a memory macher . . .”
She used the Yiddish word—the “Jew word” the Madams would have called it. A macher, someone with big plans, who gets things done. The Madams could have punished her for that one word alone. So Chaim knew Manya was serious. And that she was offering him her life.
Her sudden rush of words, a cataract of them, reminded Chaim of a waterfall he’d seen when camping with the family back in the days long before the Nazis had come. He’d called it a gush. “See, Papa, a real gush!” Everyone had laughed at him then, even Gittel.
Well, he thought, Manya’s voice is a gush. Powerful and beautiful. He nodded again, this time his acceptance of the title—macher.
“Those scratches,” she said, turning back to the bunk, “mark each day I’ve been here. Organized into months. It’s been fifteen now.”
Fifteen months, he mouthed, but didn’t say it aloud.
She nodded, as if understanding him the way Gittel did. “Whenever new children come, I scratch a longer line. With a crosshatch for how many. Since you and Gittel, Sophie and Bruno are the latest, here is your line.” She touched it with her pinky. The line was so thin, even with the four crosshatches, her finger covered it and even managed to obscure the day lines on either side.
“You can count the ones that follow the line of your arrival, but not until after work tonight. And then only if you’re alone in here. I’ve told no one else, and neither should you, Mr. Poet. You’re welcome.”
That last made him grin, as he hadn’t actually thanked her.
She didn’t smile back but rubbed her forehead again, then turned and started toward the door. “I doubt you’ll get much breakfast if you don’t get your second shoe on and hobble out the door.” And she was gone.
It was a serious threat—no breakfast. But she’d made it with what he now understood was her characteristic dark humor. He slid his foot into the shoe and, without even bothering to tie it, hurried after.
* * *
• • •
That evening at dinner, he bolted down the thin potato soup and was first out the kitchen door. He quick-marched (Never Run Anywhere was the second rule of safety, after Don’t Talk Back) to Barracks 3 before the others so he could do the count of days with no one else around. He even had time for a recount before anyone else arrived.
They found him sitting on his own bed, legs swinging. The first through the door were Devorah and Essie, who looked enough alike to be sisters. They worked in a different factory room, so he barely knew them. Still, he nodded at them, secure in the knowledge that he and Gittel, Sophie, and Bruno had been at the camp for four and a half months. It felt like a lifetime.
He was also secure in his position: the poet, the macher. Even if no one else besides Manya and Gittel (and perhaps Sophie) knew, it was enough that he knew it.
He knew as well that he was beginning his work. He would write a poem about Karl the Wanderer that evening, before sleep washed the thoughts from his brain. He already had the first few lines.
Herring fisher, you drew me from the barrel,
a rough forest birth, the reek of it set in my clothes.
The afterbirth in the days that followed,
in fire and hunger, lingering fear . . .
Gittel Remembers
In the camp, it was said that news came slowly, but rumor had wings. I forget the first time I heard that. But the rumor—if that’s what it was—always came with just enough truth to be published in a magazine.
There were rumors about new food to be served, rumors about armies poised in the next town to either liberate or annihilate us, rumors about the partisans on our doorstep, disguised, within our midst.
No one ever knew how those rumors began. Perhaps in a dream, in a whisper, a hope. Perhaps someone who knew only a few words of German mistook a joke for something real.
I remember the joke that was evidently making the rounds of the guards, which Bruno translated as “The judge said to the defendant, ‘You are charged with luring your neighbor into the forest and then beating him like an animal. Do you not think you went a bit too far?’ The man accused answered, ‘Yes, I should have done it beforehand in the meadow!’” And after telling it, he laughed uproariously. Though no one else did. Yet, not a day later there was a rumor that the guards were taking people out of the barracks and beating them in the forest, while laughing because if they’d beaten them in the meadow first, it could have saved them time and the long walk.
The camp was like a small village that way. Sneeze at one end, and someone would say gesundheit at the other.
Or, as Chaim countered—with more words than usual—“Or I will shoot you before you infect others.”
The rumors in our old apartment house in the ghetto were a bit like the rumors in the camp. Sneezes that became pneumonia by the time they reached our floor. But different, too. Fewer people died of them in Łódź.
In the end, that was a huge difference.
27
Chaim knew he would be lying to himself if he thought writing poems would save anyone’s life but his own. But he also knew that if he was strong through his work, then he could help the others.
But making munitions was the ugly thin skin covering his poetic bones. He knew he had to keep the devil’s work going or he would die, and possibly the others would die with him.
So, as he carried the sacks without protest, all the while he was making odes to the saltpeter, to the grinder, to the blasts buried in the gray powder like a baby in its mother’s womb, angel and parasite in one. And without forcing anything, his steps got quicker, the sacks grew lighter, the lift into the grinder’s mouth became doable without Bruno’s help.
Madam Zgrodnik, whose belly seemed somewhere between large and huge, called Chaim “a tower of strength now.” Tiny, birdlike, Madam Grenzke, with her quick smile—quick to come, quicker to go—said under her breath, “Good boy!” Even Madam Szawlowski nodded at him and made a soft grunting sound, the closest she came to approval of any Jew.
Bruno didn’t notice what the Madams thought. He was too busy currying favor with the guards, speaking German to them, laughing with them, the only child prisoner to do any such thing. As time passed, he found himself a kind of go-between, especially when the guards wanted something specific done and couldn’t explain it in their still-fractured Polish.
Chaim knew there were other German-speaking prisoners. Manny the barber was one, and two of the men who worked in the kitchen. But none of them sought out the guards. Only Bruno did that.
Of course it made him a pariah among the other children, Chaim being the first to treat him with disdain, even when he saw the pain of it in Sophie’s eyes. But Chaim soon realized that though Bruno’s isolation hurt Sophie, Bruno himself didn’t seem to care.
The guards not only talked and joked with him, they also handed out treats to him—mostly bits of candy when they had it, or the occasional carrot or potato.
A bit like sharing the remains of a meal under the table with a dog, Chaim thought.
Bruno boasted about what the guards gave him. He shared his prizes with the other children if they’d pay him back with gossip, which—of course—he passed on. It became a game to see who could give him a piece of gossip laced with only a tiny bit of truth, just enough so it seemed possible to the guards without actually harming anyone.
The Madams soon stopped talking to Bruno entirely. He was now the guards’ pet and, as such, beyond their reach. Besides, if they disciplined Bruno, all he had to do was threaten to spill some silly secret about them, and it didn’t even have to contain any truth.
He’d already pulled this trick on Madam Szawlowski to great effect, so the Madams were very nervous. Madam Szawlowski had called Bruno a groveler and struck him for malingering. He didn’t say a word to her but went right to the guards and told them in German that she was stashing ammunition in her bodice to pass on to the partisans.
Later, he boasted about this to Chaim, Gittel, and a horrified Sophie.
When the guards strip-searched Madam Szawlowski in front of the children and found only candies stashed there, they simply laughed and said, “It doesn’t sweeten her. We’ll keep an eye out for tougher nuts in her bodice.” They meant, of course, ammunition.
As it was happening, Bruno gleefully translated for all of the children, without understanding the danger he posed to them. That made him an even greater pariah.
Sophie and Gittel, along with Madam Grenzke, led the weeping Madam Szawlowski into the bathroom and dabbed at her face with her wetted handkerchief, while Madam Zgrodnik tried, with Manya’s desperate help, to reestablish some control over the other children.
As Gittel explained later to Chaim, “We’re still in the camp, the guards still have the guns. We don’t want Madam to have us all killed because of Bruno’s joke. So we did what we could.”
And then Sophie had added, “Besides, she is still a human being.”
But Chaim remembered the dead child on the street, Karl Vanderer’s open mouth, the sound of gunshots shattering Mrs. Norenberg’s pleas. Silently he disagreed with Sophie, wondering to himself how human the Nazis and their collaborators actually were.
That’s when he began a poem about it in his head, beginning with Stripped of everything but her underclothes and her shame . . . But of course he didn’t let anyone know.
Mostly, though, the lines he wrote in his head were about the other children: their fears, small acts of courage, days of work, and nights of troubled sleep. The pieces about Bruno were not flattering. Chaim was especially pleased with the line He sells lives for a lick of chocolate.