I didn’t think he should trust me with these things. I’d lost what he had brought me last time. And one of his brothers. But this kind of guilt was not new to Max. I saw it in his eyes every time we talked about his parents, who were dead when he was not. And Izio, dead in his place. We understood each other, Max and I. Blame wouldn’t bring them back. And neither would starving. And so I did what Max did, and set the guilt and the grief to one side. I became an expert at trading and reselling at the secondhand shops. One thing for another, another for another. Selling and selling and selling again until, somehow, I fed us.
It was like a game. Stay alive. Spite the Nazis.
I also managed to find shoes and a coat for Helena and a cast-off rug for our feet. Helena played on the stairs and in the street with the children who had moved into our building, and we saw Emilika most days, though she had stopped sleeping in my room. The building didn’t seem as full of ghosts as it had.
Except in the Diamants’ apartment. Those rooms were still empty, and sometimes, when I listened close, I thought I could hear Yiddish in the hallway. Smell blintzes and stale cigarettes. And if I sat quiet on the windowsill, I could almost see the shadow of Izio lying on the floor, hands behind his head, his feet propped up on the sofa.
Only none of it was really there.
I was like a gourd. Empty and rattling on the inside.
I came back to the apartment after a full day of running back and forth in the markets, and the best I’d been able to get for our money was kasha. A five-kilo sack of it. Too large to carry concealed beneath my coat. So I tied tight strings around the wristbands of my dress, another around my waist, and then Helena, laughing at the silliness of it, stood on a chair and carefully emptied the kasha sack into my sleeves and the upper part of my dress. I squirmed. All the little grains felt itchy and terrible, and I bulged in strange places, though it wasn’t so bad with my big coat on. But it also meant I couldn’t meet Max at the fence. I would have to go inside the ghetto.
Helena locked the front door behind me, and the chair scraped into place. She knew I helped get food for other people, but she’d never questioned who or why. It was just something I did. She believed me when I said I would be back.
So did I. It wouldn’t be that hard to get in and out. The rules had relaxed with less of a ghetto to control. The past few days the ghetto had been left to the Ordners, the Jewish police established by the Judenrat, Jews appointed to govern other Jews on behalf of Hitler. But if the policeman on patrol was Polish, he might just look the other way.
I stepped onto the sidewalk. The sun was gone, and the wind blew cool, bringing the first hint of the smell of autumn. But the atmosphere felt tense. Heads were down, collars up, everyone hurrying though it was only just past six. And no one was talking. No one was looking at one another. It made me feel cautious. I said good evening to Mr. Szymczak, our new neighbor downstairs, buying a German newspaper on the corner, and he just shook his head.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Szymczak?”
He took a quick glance around the street. “Gestapo,” he whispered. “Didn’t you hear? They searched every apartment and shop on Na Bramie Square.”
I hadn’t heard. Na Bramie was only a block or so from my little room, but my windows faced the other way. “What were they looking for?”
“Jews, of course. Hiding from … you know what.”
He meant the Aktion.
“And what did they find?” I asked, as if I didn’t care.
But Mr. Szymczak was out of information. I went slowly to the ghetto and stood in the shadow of a doorway, watching our deserted section of fence for a long time before approaching it. There was nobody there. But the barbed wire was loose—because Max had made it loose—giving just enough space to crawl beneath.
Sliding under was tricky with a shirt full of kasha, but I managed it, and when I did, nothing happened. No shouts or flying bullets. Relief lightened my feet. I slid my false armband—now inked with a neat Jewish star—up and over my bulging sleeve and darted into the ghetto like a bird.
I found the apartment with ease, on a main road not far from the gate. They were surprised to see me. Even more surprised when I took off my coat, stood on a blanket, untied my belt and sleeve strings, and let the kasha come spilling out. Siunek Hirsch laughed harder than Helena had, and little Dziusia, her long black curls frizzing down her back, was given the task of picking up every grain I’d spilled. Which made me wish I’d done things more carefully.
“We’ve gotten a letter,” Chaim said while I was shaking out my sleeves. Chaim was a shadow of himself, trying to heal starving people in the ghetto’s hospital with no food and no medicine. Max said that mostly, he helped them die. “Henek says he doesn’t know how much longer they will stay on the farm.”
“Let the boy stay!” said old Mr. Hirsch from his spot on the floor. “It’s better than sitting here, waiting for death.”
I exchanged a look with Max. We’d already discussed what might happen when the harvest was over. When Henek and Danuta were no longer needed.
“He also says he’s asked Danuta to marry him,” said Chaim, frowning. “It’s a strange thing to do. Now. Of all times.”
“It’s not strange,” I snapped. “Henek should be happy in any way he can. For as long as he can.” I jabbed an arm into my coat, poking around behind me with the other arm, but I couldn’t find my sleeve.
Old Mr. Hirsch waved a hand. “Let the boy be married! Why should he wait for death, wanting to be married?”
Dr. Schillinger went to distract Mr. Hirsch while Chaim shook his head, a move I thought might topple him over. Max came and held up my coat so I could get it on. He knew exactly why Chaim’s words had made me mad.
“There are rumors,” Max said quietly, “of another Aktion in the ghetto.”
I turned around. “That can’t be true.”
But I looked closer at his face and thought it could be.
“Is there a list?”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Or maybe it’s by street. No one knows. It’s not official.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I won’t be sitting and waiting, I can say that to you.”
Max had the biggest brown eyes. They reminded me of his brother’s. But there was something different from his brother in them. A look of no nonsense I’d never seen in Izio’s.
Maybe I’d never had the opportunity.
Max straightened the lapel of his mother’s old coat. “It won’t be like last time. We know now. We can prepare. Don’t worry …”
But I did worry. His words were exactly what made me worry, as I wandered the ghetto beneath moonlight instead of streetlights because the electricity was out, back to the loose place in the barbed wire fence.
Only I was worrying about the wrong things. I had just lifted the wire, ready to slide back to the other side, when I felt cold metal against my neck. I jumped and tried to turn my head, but I’d already caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. The long, gleaming barrel of a rifle.
I froze and slowly held up my hands. A flashlight clicked, and a yellow circle with the shadow of my body inside it appeared on the other side of the fence. Footsteps crunched on bits of gravel and glass, and another gun touched the back of my head. A pistol, I thought, because this body was close, close enough to jerk the handkerchief with its star off my arm. It had been sagging, loose on my emptied sleeve.
A low conversation began in German. I stayed on my knees, hands in the air, and considered dying. Being shot like this might not be so bad. I would never know it had happened. But what about Max? Chaim, and the rest? And Helena.
I should have listened. Paid attention. Done anything but what I had done.
My knees hurt, my heart hurt, and my arms ached. I prayed to God, Christ, and Mary. The German conversation stopped. I closed my eyes. Tried to be calm. And waited through the longest minute that had ever gone by in the history of Przemyśl.
And then I re
alized there were no guns beside my head. The circle of light with my shadow was changing shape, lengthening while footsteps backed away down the sidewalk.
I didn’t turn. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
The light switched off. And was gone.
I waited on my knees in the alley. And waited. And when I finally looked over my shoulder, the street was empty. I slid under the barbed wire and ran. I ran and ran, past the station, over the bridge, through a small square and up a hilly road of rough cobblestones, until I found an alley behind an apartment block and leaned against its wall, panting beside a rubbish heap. Sweating. Shaking. One of my knees was bleeding.
I couldn’t think why I was alive.
I limped slowly back toward the apartment, coat pulled tight around my neck, trying to smooth away the fear from my face before I had to see Helena. New posters had been slapped next to the now-familiar DEATH TO THOSE WHO AID A JEW warnings, some of them pasted around the posts of the streetlights. The design was simple, the word “Jude” at the top and “Vermin” at the bottom, a detailed drawing of what must have been a flea in between. I turned the corner, and it took me longer than it should have to realize there was a commotion in the street.
A small crowd had gathered just a few doors down from the passage at Mickiewicza 7. I heard the sound of blows, shouting, a child crying out. And there was a little girl running as hard as she could down the sidewalk, straight to me. It was Helena.
“What are you doing out of—”
She threw her arms around my middle, and the people thronging the street stepped back enough to show me what was happening. Two SS men were beating a child with clubs, a girl smaller than Helena, and then an older man with a beard came tumbling out the doorway of a warehouse like he’d been thrown. I think he had been thrown. He was followed by an elderly woman and a young girl about my age but smaller. She had lovely blue eyes. I looked again at the bearded man. Mr. Schwarzer. He’d been a friend of Mr. Diamant’s. I looked at the three of them.
They were Jews.
And they were not in the ghetto.
And then came a Polish family out of the warehouse. A man and wife and two more children, and another two SS officers behind them. The woman tried to tear the men with clubs away from her little girl, who was no longer moving, and so they hit her instead.
One of the SS came forward, and the noise of the people watching went silent.
“Death to Jews and all who aid them!” he said.
He drew his pistol.
I peeled Helena from my middle, took her hand, and ran her hard down the street in the opposite direction.
“Death to Jews!” he shouted. He sounded insane. Possessed. And then the gunshots began.
One. Two.
People screamed. Scattered. They ran around us, some toward the sound of the shooting, others away from it.
Three. I flinched. Four.
“What’s happening?” asked Helena, tugging on my hand.
Our neighbors had been hiding Mr. Schwarzer.
Five. Flinch.
“Stefi, what’s happening?”
They had helped three Jews. And now the Gestapo were shooting their children.
Six. Flinch. Seven. Flinch.
I’d promised to tell Helena the truth, even when it was bad. But I couldn’t tell her this.
Eight.
We turned the corner, ran another half block, and I turned again without thinking. Helena trotted beside me. I hurried down a set of stone steps into a quiet sunken courtyard and pushed open a carved oak door.
It was empty inside the cathedral. Silent. We were half-below street level here, and the stained glass was a dim muddle of colors. Candles glowed above the altar, the cross with the effigy of the dying Christ above that. We dipped our fingers in holy water, knelt, crossed ourselves like we’d done a thousand times, and I led Helena to a pew. It creaked in the silence.
We sat, smelling the incense. I wanted my rosary. I wanted different words to march like an army through my head.
They shot the children. They shot the children. They shot the children …
“Those men knocked on our door,” said Helena. “Only it wasn’t the right knock, so I didn’t let them in …”
Fear shot through me like a bullet.
“Then they broke the door and came in anyway,” Helena went on. “But we didn’t have what they were looking for.”
I breathed in and out. Helena squeezed my hand tight.
“Stefi, what is a Jew?”
I looked up at the image of the Christ and wondered what to say to her. And then I remembered the man in the market. When I first came to Przemyśl. Back when I was a little girl myself, full of hope. I stretched out our held hands, straightening both our arms.
“Look at our skin, Hela,” I whispered. “Yours is a little browner than mine, but it’s still skin, isn’t it? It’s skin over blood over bones, just like any person. A Jew is a person with blood and skin and a family, some of them good, some of them bad, just like everyone. Only they choose Moses as their leader instead of Jesus. But remember, Jesus was a Jew, too. One God for both, Hela. Our mama said that.”
I wasn’t sure our mama had meant it the way I did. She’d sounded confused and possibly disappointed. But Helena didn’t need to know that. I watched my sister think.
“Is it wrong to help a Jew?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “No, it is not.”
I didn’t know how she could understand. I didn’t understand anything. But she nodded, and we waited to go home until it was nearly curfew, though I took her into the little hidden courtyard of our building through the farthest entrance, away from the violence that had been on the street.
The apartment door hung open, as did the door to our bedroom, both the locks splintered from the wood. A chair was turned over, the bed blankets disturbed, but other than the fright they’d given my sister, everything seemed in order. We were lucky not to have been robbed.
I asked Mr. Szymczak if he would help me reattach my locks, and he did, somberly, while I made Helena a late dinner from our portion of the kasha. She sang and talked to herself, playing and pretending while she ate, and I couldn’t tell how much she understood about what had just happened. Mr. Szymczak left me his hammer and a handful of nails. He said I was bound to need them.
I think he felt sorry for us.
When Helena was asleep, I wandered into the empty living room and turned on the lights. It was dirty and bare and alien, though the scratches on the mantel were familiar, where the clock had scraped back and forth when it was wound, and so was the tear in the wallpaper that Mrs. Diamant was forever pasting back into place. It occurred to me that she was never going to get that wallpaper to stick right there. Because she was dead. Because she was a Jew.
Why did any of this have to happen?
I sat on the windowsill, wiping my eyes, propping my bare feet against the jamb. It was late, the streets empty except for the German patrol. There were no dead bodies down there. But I looked at the moon instead. Just in case. Because the moon, at least, was still beautiful.
I heard a pop and a tinkle of glass. And just above my head, I discovered a hole had appeared in the windowpane, little cracks splaying out from it like the web of a spider. The hole was small. Perfectly round.
A bullet hole.
I dropped off the windowsill like I’d been shoved, crawled across the floorboards, and switched off the main light.
Laughter floated up from the street, German voices joking back and forth as the patrol moved on to somewhere else. I heard another bang, another shattering of glass.
I went back into the dark bedroom, locked the door, pulled a chair up to one of the two windows, and nailed our new rug over it. The next day I bought another rug, very ugly, for next to nothing, then nailed it over the other window.
They would not win, I thought. I wouldn’t let them. Not against me.
But there was no need to advertise.
O
ne by one, the windows across the street went dark, and so did Mr. Szymczak’s. I wondered if this was why he’d left me the nails.
I didn’t tell Max about any of it. And he didn’t tell me what he planned to do about the Aktion. There wasn’t time. The Jewish Ordners were not as understanding as you’d think, being under the thumb of the Gestapo, and even the Polish police were watching closely. I passed him bread and eggs quickly through the fence.
Something was coming.
And it came with the winter cold of November, beneath a canopy of clouds heavy with unfallen snow. Noise in the ghetto. Familiar noise. This time I walked to the railroad bridge, and I saw the cattle cars, the throngs of people, the dogs. And I could hear the shooting. Volleys of it. Firing squads. Panic swirled around me like the mist.
Evil, I thought. This is what evil looks like.
I had to turn away.
Stand up, Max, I thought. Chaim. Dr. Schillinger and Dziusia. Old Hirsch and young. Or hide. Do what you have to. Just don’t let them stamp you out.
I listened to the train whistles scream as they pulled out of Przemyśl, and again I broke my promise to Helena.
Because how could I tell her that this was her world?
I didn’t know how much food to buy that day. Or the next. Or the next. The ghetto was guarded and silent. The outer fences were being taken down. Moved inward. Hemming in the remaining Jews like animals in a trap. I walked the new fence line. There was no sign of Max. I knew he was dead. But I could not accept it.
Maybe I just didn’t want to be defeated.
I washed our clothes. Showed Helena how to sing while she threaded string around her fingers, making patterns that matched the song. We treated ourselves to hot tea and sugar and went to bed.
And I listened to the dark.
How had the Gestapo known that Mr. Schwarzer was hiding in that warehouse? Had he been seen? Recognized? Or were the SS just searching everywhere, breaking down doors until they found something wrong?
The Light in Hidden Places Page 9