I look at her another second before I hug her again. Harder.
“And then the soldier with the black cap came …”
I lean back to look at her again.
“And he was going to take me away, and … and …”
I hold her face in my hands.
“And so I kicked him, and he made me fall down, and then I bit him!”
“You bit him?”
“In the leg! Are you mad?” she asks, and then she asks again. “Are you mad?” Only this time her voice is muffled by my hair.
I shake my head.
“But it might have said something important …”
“Which is exactly why you ate it, you clever, clever girl. And you’re braver than the whole Polish army, because I bet not one of them has ever bitten a Nazi on the leg. Not once.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
I kiss her forehead and both her cheeks and then her forehead again, and before I’m done, Helena’s tears are drying and a smile is starting to sneak around her split lip. I’m so proud of her I could burst.
And I’m also determined that she will never, ever have to be that smart or that brave again.
Which means that tomorrow, I am going to sneak into the ghetto.
* * *
I decide to go early in the morning, after work. The time Max always prefers, because he says the night guards are sleeping on their feet. The easiest way, I’ve decided, might be through the basement window. If it’s unlocked. And if I don’t have a Polish policeman watching my every move.
I’m not sure what I’ll do if that happens.
I take the back way around the fence, circling in a zigzag pattern through the alleys and behind buildings, until I reach the recessed doorway of the deserted shop. Where I watch, like I did before, looking through the empty glass display windows. I stand there a long time. No patrol goes by, which either means there isn’t any or they’re going to come any second. I wait more, then walk to the edge of the alley and bend down like I’m tying a shoe. I look up and down the length of the fence. No one is there.
I dart forward and crawl beneath the barbed wire. The window is so close I have to pull it open while I’m only halfway through the fence. But it opens, and I crawl in, turning awkwardly to get my feet in front of me, sliding down into the basement with a bump and a hard landing that leaves the soles of my feet stinging. I hadn’t known it was so far to the floor. The window shuts harder than it should, and now there’s a crack jagging down the pane, a pane so dirty it lets in almost no light at all.
I’m in the dark.
And then something moves. A shadow that is bigger than a rat and suddenly standing upright. It takes everything I’ve got to stifle a scream, until I hear, “Fusia?”
“Max!” I whisper. “Is that you?”
“Here, prop the window open a little …”
He has a stick of some kind to keep the window open, and when he uses it, I can see where his eyes should be, and the shape of him in the dim, but not much else.
“What are you doing in here?” I ask.
“Waiting to see if you’d come to the fence so I could tell you not to. I thought you’d throw a rock. What happened to the note?”
“Hela ate it while she ran, but she didn’t know what it said. How is Henek? And Dr. Schillinger?”
“They’re going to live. There’s a lot of typhus. You need to be careful coming in here. Schillinger was so weak the Gestapo nearly shot him.”
“What do you mean they nearly shot him?”
“They were shooting anyone too sick to get out of bed. We put Henek in the bunker in the cellar, but I had to roll Schillinger under the bed. Dziusia sat on top, with her feet hanging down …”
I think I know where he got this idea. And then it occurs to me how casually we’re discussing the cold-blooded murder of the sick.
“You really shouldn’t have come,” he says. “The ghetto is dangerous right now. Going in and out.”
Though I notice he seemed to know I would.
“I have a plan for getting us out, but it will take some days to get the right clothes, the things we need. Siunek Hirsch and I will come first. One week from today. Meet us at the station, on the platform, so if you’re late, we can pretend to wait for the train. Then you’ll go first, and we’ll follow, and if there are police, you will distract them, and I will lead Siunek to Tatarska.”
“What time?”
“Six in the morning, the end of the night shift.”
“If I’m on the night shift, I can’t get there until six thirty. If I’m on the day shift, I will have to meet you at five.”
“Walk by the fence gate the day before, and hold up six or five fingers so I’ll know.”
“I’ll do that.”
And then Max’s arms are around me, and he pulls me into a hug. He’s warm and gritty from the floor of the cellar. And very thin.
“Thank you, Fusia,” he says.
He lets me go.
“You need to hurry,” he says. “Everything is being watched. The cellar window, too. I don’t know how you’re not caught …”
I wonder if it’s because the window is being watched by my Polish policeman.
“Go out by the old way. It’s a block if you take a left out the door and cut right through the next alley. I’ve loosened the wires again, but I don’t think they know. And here. Take this.”
Max turns and fumbles in the dark around his feet, then thrusts a bundle into my hands.
“I wish I could go with you, but the two of us together … If you see the guard change, if you see anything wrong, hide. Or sit on the ground. Lie on the ground. Like you’re tired. And if you hear them yell, ‘Schwammberger!’ you just run. As fast as you can. Promise me.”
“Who’s Schwammberger?”
“The officer in charge of the ghetto. He likes to shoot people while he walks. If you hear his name, you run. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“In five days, walk by the fence. In six days, I’ll be at the train station.”
And then he will be in Tatarska. For better. Or worse.
Max takes me to the steps leading out of the cellar, up to two slanting doors that go straight onto the street. I’m pushing them open when he hisses, “Fusia!”
I turn.
“Buy me a shovel!”
And I creep out onto the streets of the ghetto like bombs are about to drop.
It’s so much worse than the last time. People huddle in little clusters, or by themselves, just sitting in the cold. And then I realize that many of them are dead, or so near to being dead it’s almost the same thing. Typhus. And starvation. And who knows what else on top of that. I cut through the alley like Max said, clutching his bundle to my chest, trying not to see.
And then I hear the bark of an order.
“Stop!”
The voice is behind me. I look over my shoulder.
“You there. Stop!”
A man is coming fast down the alley, wearing dirty coveralls like a worker, a cap pulled low on his head. His boots are loud on the pavement.
“What are you doing here?” he demands. “What have you got?”
He’s too clean to be a worker. Just like I’m too clean for the ghetto.
Something slows inside me, and my mind speeds up. I look down and discover I’m holding a bundle of two shirts and what appear to be curtains. “Buying curtains,” I say. “That’s all.”
“You know you’re not to buy in here. Or sell.”
I try smiling. “But I have a sister to feed, and I need—”
“Come with me,” he says, grabbing my arm. “Now!” he adds when I resist. “Or should I call the SS?”
He marches me down the alley and then down the street, past the living and the dead, into a building that seems to be offices, though people are sleeping here as well. Cots are lined up along one wall. I pull my arm away and step back.
“Who are you?”
“Judenrat,” the man says.
“The Jewish police? Where’s your uniform?”
He doesn’t answer, just leads me to a room with a desk and sits me down. Another two men come in, Ordners, wearing uniforms this time, and there is a long and whispered conversation that I cannot hear. Then they take away my bundle and examine it, shaking out the two shirts and the two sets of curtains. I don’t know where Max got those curtains, but the material is dark and thick with white lilies printed on it, and I know immediately what they’re for. Blocking hidden Jews from eyes that might be looking through the windows of Tatarska 3.
They leave the cloth in a pile on the desk. The man who arrested me leaves, replaced by another man, also not in uniform. This one sits down behind the desk, the other two Ordners standing at attention behind him. The man looks well fed but weary. And determined.
“Papers, please,” he says.
I hand him my papers and decide not to mention that the address is wrong.
“Podgórska,” he says, eyes running over my picture. He looks up. “We know who you are.”
“My name is on my papers.”
He smiles. “Perhaps I should say that we know what you are. And that we know what you are doing.”
“You know I’m buying curtains in the ghetto?”
He smiles without humor. “We know, Miss Podgórska, that you want to hide Jews.”
If I had looked up and found Hitler sitting at that desk, I couldn’t have been more surprised. How could I be caught? Now? When I haven’t even done it yet? I sit back in my chair.
“I am not hiding Jews. I’ve only bought cheap curtains from people who don’t need them anymore.”
The man sets down my papers and opens a yellow folder. “You have been observed, Miss Podgórska, going back and forth from the ghetto. We have seen you passing goods at the fence. We have seen your sister at the fence …”
That sends a jolt through me. He shuffles through the file, reading.
“… and we know you plan to hide a … Dr. Schillinger and his daughter. Siunek Hirsch and his father, Dr. Leon Hirsch. Henek Diamant and Danuta Karfiol.”
You forgot Max, I think.
“You see, Miss Podgórska, you cannot lie. We know.”
I don’t have anything to say about what this man knows. All I want to know is, how can he know it? And can I possibly get out of this? I give him a small smile.
“There’s one problem with your information. It’s incorrect.”
“You are hiding Jews, Miss Podgórska. Or you will be very soon.”
One of the Ordners grins, smug. They seem to think their business with me is done up and tied like a parcel from the shops. The man straightens his papers neatly inside the file and places it on the desk.
“As required by law, you will be taken to the Gestapo office, where you can explain yourself and answer for your activities. My officer here will—”
“Whose law?” I ask.
He looks up, surprised. “The German law, of course.”
“You are Jews,” I say, “and you are going to turn me over to the Germans … for saving Jews.”
A grimace twists the man’s face. “We are trying to save Jews, too, Miss Podgórska. You must understand. If everyone follows the rules, then there will be no reprisals. But if even one Jew is caught in a crime, then the SS have promised that hundreds will be punished. You have enabled the criminal activity of seven Jews, Miss Podgórska. That could cost a thousand lives. If anyone is to survive this, we must have order. We must protect the innocent—”
“But the Nazis are killing the innocent! Your own people! And in the meantime, you keep ‘order’ so those monsters can have a whole ghetto of victims who are easier to kill!”
The man blinks at me.
“You know I’m speaking the truth.” I glare at the other two men in the room. They aren’t smiling now. “Don’t you? Don’t you? Or has no one ever dared to say it to your face?”
“We will save as many as we can,” says the man at the desk.
“By sitting back while they’re murdered and starved? By loading them on trains to be …” I look at these men, staring at me like I’ve lost my mind. “I hope you do take me to the Gestapo,” I say. “Then I can tell them what I’m going to tell you. That you are cowards. And idiots. Of course I want to hide Jews. I admit it. It’s the truth. I want to hide them and save them until somebody decides to end this war. And until that happens, I will fight for the ones I can, even if you won’t, and I won’t make excuses about it, either.”
I stand up. Like I’m ready to go.
My legs are two pieces of soft, wiggly rubber.
“So take me to the Gestapo. Go on. And when they kill me, and all the ones I could have saved, I hope God will forgive you. Though I really don’t see how He can.”
“Leave us,” says the man behind the desk. But he’s talking to the Ordners. They shuffle out, and the door closes with a click.
“Sit down.”
I stand there.
“I said sit!”
I sit.
“Do you think I like my position, Miss Podgórska? I wonder what kind of choices you think I have. Perhaps you think I chose to be here? That the SS can’t walk into my house and shoot my family whenever they please?”
He pulls open a drawer and starts scribbling on a small piece of paper he tears away from a pad.
“We do try to save them,” he says. “By giving the wrong lists, delaying the deportations. Limiting the reprisals caused by people like yourself, so that someone, somewhere, might be saved. If you have other suggestions of what I can do to protect my people, please give them.” He sets down his pen, waiting for my reply. “No? Then gather your belongings and come with me.”
I do as I’m told and fold the curtains and the shirts, my bravado leaking out like water through a sieve. When they kill me, what will happen to Max? To all of them?
What is going to happen to Helena?
I should have done something more for Helena.
I pick up my papers, clutch the folded fabric to my chest, and the man opens the door. I follow him down a long, dim hallway, away from the front, where I entered, threading our way past more rows of cots, some with men asleep on them.
I try to think what to do.
Fight? I don’t have anything to fight with but a curtain and some fingernails.
Cry? I might do that anyway.
Push this man down, kick him as hard as I can, and run for my life?
I wouldn’t get out of the ghetto.
We come to a little room at the end of the corridor, a makeshift kitchen that is warm with cabbage steam. The man pushes open the back door.
“Take this,” he says, handing me the paper he tore from the pad. “Go to the front gate and give it to the guard.”
I look up from the paper. “And then what?”
“Go home, Miss Podgórska.”
I look at the paper again. I don’t understand.
“Go home,” he says, “and don’t come back. And …” I have to strain to catch his next words. “And if something is to be done, it would be better to have it done soon. Do you understand me?”
I nod, and nod again, and step quickly through the door. “Wait,” I say, turning around. “How did you know?”
“Talk,” he replies.
“Whose talk?”
“People like to talk.”
“And who else likes to listen?”
He raises a shoulder and a brow. “I don’t know the answer to that. Be careful, Miss Podgórska. And God forgive us all.”
He steps back and shuts the door, and I stand there, staring, too stunned to feel my own relief, listening to the misery of the ghetto.
I think about what he said about his family. About Izio, dying in the camp because the Judenrat made a list. About the Ordner who threatened to throw a grenade into Max’s hiding place and gave them away.
They should have been organizing an army, not Nazi death trains.
They should have fought.
Men like Max would have fought.
That’s what I should have told him. That’s how he should have protected his people.
Or maybe, like the rest of us, he didn’t know what was coming. Maybe they didn’t know what was coming until it was too late.
He never even told me his name.
I hurry to the gate, show my note to the guard, and to my surprise, he lets me out. And when my door on Tatarska Street is shut and locked and the lamp is lit and Helena is making my tea, all I can think about is talk, and how long it will be until the Gestapo hears it.
I spend the next days sweating at the factory and sweating at Tatarska 3. Someone has talked, and I don’t know who, or why, or who they’ve talked to. Maybe we’ve already been denounced. Maybe the Gestapo will come in the middle of the night and pull me away from my machines. Maybe they’ll come in the middle of the day and break down my door. Or maybe they’re waiting.
For Max and Siunek to come.
And I have no way to warn them.
I can’t sleep. I can barely eat. I tell myself that if the Gestapo knows, then they would know the names of the Jews already. They’d take them from the ghetto, not look for them among the people in the streets. That the SS have never been worried about little things like evidence and proof, so why wait to get it?
If they knew, I tell myself, they would have been here already.
It’s easier to tell yourself things like this than to actually believe them.
I can’t always expect to be arrested and let go.
In five days, I walk past the fence on my way home from work. I see Max there, sitting on a stoop beyond the patrolling guard. I’m so relieved to see him not arrested that I smile. Like it’s Easter and my birthday.
He smiles back.
I hold up six fingers as I walk.
He nods.
I go home and hang the curtains.
And at twenty minutes after six in the morning, I wander past the railroad station on my way home from work. Two men sit on the platform bench. They have caps pulled low on their heads, grease on their faces, lumpy bags that could be full of tools on their backs, and one holds a thermos with a handle. The one with the thermos is Max, and the other must be Siunek, and I’m not sure what kind of workers they’re supposed to be. But whatever they are, they get off the bench and start moving in my direction.
The Light in Hidden Places Page 17