by Jennifer Roy
The other soldier said,
“No, we need to bring in one more alive tonight,
and, anyway, we are running very low on bullets.”
So they said to the woman,
“You are lucky tonight,
you can keep one of the children,
and you will all live.”
They made the woman choose.
Then they took one child away.
My aunt told us later
that the woman thought her older son
would have a better chance
of surviving in the ghetto,
so she gave up her little one.
Maybe they will be kind to such a
small child?
One Child
This is the story I make up
in my head:
The Nazis come to our building.
We hear their heavy footsteps
thudding down the hallway.
Then they realize it is past dinnertime,
and they are very hungry.
So they go off to their headquarters
for sausages.
And they forget to come back.
Dora says Papa is making a plan,
but she doesn’t know what.
My sister has papers that show that she has a job.
The papers say that she is older than she really is,
so the soldiers won’t take her.
When they come to our building,
to our apartment,
they will find one child to take.
Me.
They’re Here
One night we are finishing our soup
and then…
they’re here.
The Nazis.
Well, not quite here,
but on the next street over,
close enough for us to hear the shouting
from our open window.
“Syvia,” says Papa. “Come here.”
I can’t move. My legs have stopped working.
“Go with your father,” Mother says.
Her voice is firm
but gentle.
I go to Papa.
He puts my coat and hat on me
and says,
“Let’s go.”
Dora watches with wide eyes.
She is chewing a piece of her hair.
She gives me a weak smile
and waves her fingers.
Then Papa takes my hand
and walks me out the door,
into the dark night.
Escape
Through the hallway,
down the staircase,
out the front door.
Hurry, hurry.
Quiet, quiet.
Across the street
to a tall brick wall
that separates our neighborhood
from an old cemetery.
Up you go,
I’m right behind you.
First Papa lifts me up
and over.
Thud! I land on my hands and knees
on hard dirt.
Papa climbs over
and jumps to the ground.
This way, this way,
Hurry, hurry.
Papa picks me up and takes my hand again,
and we start running.
It is nighttime,
but the moon is shining.
There is just enough light to see
the rows of light-colored gravestones.
Papa pulls me along,
weaving through the stones
until he stops.
So I stop.
We are next to a stone that is a bit
taller and wider
than most others I’ve seen.
Papa drops to his knees
and pulls something out
from behind the stone.
A shovel.
“Papa, where…how?”
I am out of breath from running.
Papa puts his finger up to his mouth
to say shush,
so I am quiet,
and I watch
Papa thrust the shovel
into the soft ground.
The Hole
Dig. Dig. Dig.
Papa works quickly,
scooping and tossing,
until there is a shallow hole
surrounded by mounds of dirt.
Papa stops digging and looks at me.
“Syvia,” he whispers, “get in and lie down.”
“You will hide here tonight.”
Lie down in the hole?
Alone?
I truly mean to obey my papa
and do it because
I always do what Papa says.
I am a good girl.
But I am in a cemetery
in the dark,
and all I can think of are scary things
like dead people and Nazis,
and instead of lying down in the hole,
I scream:
“No! No!”
“No! No!”
I can’t stop screaming.
“Syvia!” Papa rushes over to me
and pulls me into his arms.
My face is pushed into his chest
so my screams become muffled.
A button presses hard into my cheek,
and I can taste the old wool of his coat.
I stop yelling and close my mouth.
But my feelings can’t be pushed down
inside of me anymore
after so many months of being brave.
I just can’t keep quiet.
“I don’t want to die, Papa,” I sob.
“I don’t want to die!”
Papa holds me for another minute,
and then he says,
“I will hide here with you.”
He releases me and picks up the shovel again.
Dig. Toss. Dig. Toss.
I stop crying and watch
the hole grow longer.
Papa drops the shovel and steps into the hole.
Then he lies down in it.
“See?” he says.
“It’s not so bad.”
Hiding
I climb in and lie down beside him.
I turn on my side.
The hole is deep enough so that I cannot
see out over the edge.
It is just deep enough to hide a person
or two.
Papa puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Okay, my little girl,” he whispers.
And then we don’t talk.
The only sound I hear
is the beating of my heart—
very fast,
then not as fast,
then slower.
After a while I listen for other noises,
but there is nothing.
It is very quiet in a cemetery
at night.
Scary Thoughts
My body is still, but my mind is racing.
I want my mother.
I want my doll.
I want to be anywhere except
lying in the dark,
cold dampness
of somebody’s grave.
Even with Papa here, I am still afraid.
What if the Nazis know that a little girl
lives in our apartment,
and they say to Mother and Dora,
Where is the child?
Give us the child!
Then they get angry because I am not there.
What if the soldiers
come looking for me
and search and search
until they find Papa and me?
What if there really are
such things as ghosts
and dead people that walk around at night?
A Bed Fit for a King
After a while, I fall asleep.
When I wake up,
Papa is snoring gently.
I roll out carefully from underneath his arm
&
nbsp; and lie on my back
in the hole.
First I see black,
then streaks of gray,
as the sky lightens and
night becomes day.
Papa sits up beside me.
“Good morning, Syvia,” he whispers.
“What a fine night for sleeping
in this bed fit for kings.”
I smile a little at his teasing.
“Can we go home now?” I whisper.
“Can we?”
“Don’t move,” says Papa,
not answering my question.
He slowly,
quietly,
pulls himself up to standing
and looks around.
Plop!
Papa drops back down
into the hole.
“Not yet, Syvia,” he says.
Then he tells me something I can hardly believe.
When Papa stands up,
he can see our building!
Our apartment window faces the wall
of the cemetery
and from this spot
he can see a white sheet in our window.
“That white sheet,” Papa whispers,
“is a signal.
Your mother and I arranged that when
the Germans are nearby,
the sheet will be up.
When it becomes safe,
Mother will take the sheet down.”
Papa says he chose this grave site
weeks ago.
But he prayed that he’d never
have to use it.
“No more talking now,” says Papa.
“Now we wait.”
Waiting
Brown dirt with tan and white flecks.
My right hand with fingernails that need trimming.
A black button on the wrist cuff
of Papa’s wool coat.
A splinter in my left hand from the wooden
broom handle at home.
These are the things I can see while I am in the hole.
When I look down at the tip of my nose,
my eyes cross.
I can hold my breath to the count of forty.
The thread on my collar has unraveled
and needs to be stitched up.
A night and day can be a very long time.
These are the things I learn while I am in the hole.
Papa has checked from time to time all day long,
but still the sheet is up.
Then, just as the sun begins to set…
“Syvia! Syvia!”
It’s Dora! I hear her voice, not far away!
Papa leaps up.
The sheet is down!
I can get up now.
There is Dora, searching the graveyard.
“Syvia! Papa!” Dora runs over.
“I couldn’t wait! The Germans are gone.
Mother said I could come tell you.”
I am safe.
I am stiff.
I am sore.
But I am safe.
“Come on,” Dora says.
“This place gives me the shivers.”
The Others
Look! Over there!
From behind a gravestone not too far away,
a boy walks out.
And there’s a little girl holding
the hand of a woman
as they crawl out from behind another stone.
On our way back home,
we pass a few other children and grown-ups.
All that time they were hiding, too.
All that time, we were not alone.
Dora’s shouting has let them know, too,
that it is safe to come out.
Safe.
At least for one more day.
While We Were Hiding
The soldiers came to our apartment and searched
even under the bed.
Then, without a word to Mother or Dora,
they thundered out the door
and on to the next family.
But they remained in the neighborhood
through the night
and into the next day.
They searched and smoked cigarettes on the street
and laughed loudly
and sometimes took away children,
then returned for more.
“I thought they’d never go away,” Dora says.
“I hope they never come back,” I say.
But Papa says that his sources tell him
that the Nazis plan to return
again and again
until they are completely sure
all the children are
gone.
“So Syvia and I may be spending some more time
together under the stars,” Papa tells us.
He is trying to be funny, I know,
because there were no stars in the night sky.
Only a smoky haze
from the factories.
Good Ears
“What are sources?” I ask Papa later.
“You said sources tell you things about the Nazis.
Perhaps these sources are mistaken!”
“Sources are people with good ears,” says Papa.
“And I can trust them to tell me information
that is correct.”
Oh.
I think, maybe I can be a source when I get older.
I have good ears.
I often hear the neighbors arguing
through the walls,
and once I heard Papa whisper to Mother
all the way across the apartment
that she was a magnificent cook.
But then again,
maybe it’s sometimes not so nice to have good ears, because I just heard the train whistle and now I’m thinking about all the children who were rounded up last night by the soldiers. The children who are now on that train.
I cover my ears with my hands
to make the sound
of the whistle
go away.
More Nights
There are more nights
in the cemetery
for Papa and me,
until the Nazis learn that it is a hiding place.
“Run!” Papa tells me the night the Nazis come,
and together we flee from our hole,
over the fence,
back to the street.
“What luck,” says Papa,
“that the soldiers are searching
the other side of the graveyard first.”
We have time to find a stairwell leading to a
basement apartment
on a small side street.
No one finds us there.
Now Papa scouts out new places to hide
during the day,
while he makes his rounds for work.
We have been escaping to those places
during the night
while the Nazis swarm the neighborhoods.
Stairwells.
Alleys.
Tight corners and cramped nooks.
Papa and I learn to doze off
in the most uncomfortable of circumstances.
That’s what he calls our nights out.
“Are you ready for the most uncomfortable of
circumstances?” Papa will ask me.
Mother does not approve of his joking at times like
these.
So he always says it after we are out the door.
Before we leave, everyone acts serious.
We all know, without saying it out loud,
that Papa and I may not come back.
But every night for weeks we go out,
and Papa makes a little joke.
And the next morning we return back to our family.
Safe.
The Little Dance
The Nazis have made a new announcement:
No more nighttime searches!
No more deportatio
ns!
That is the good news.
When I hear it, I do a little dance.
Hop, skip, twirl.
No more hiding outside.
Hop, skip, twirl.
No more scary darkness—
I can sleep in a bed
with both my parents tonight!
Hop, twirl, bow.
Then I hear the bad news,
and my dance
is
done.
The Bad News
The searches and deportations
are over
because all of the children
are gone.
All of them?
The ghetto is a cage
holding parents wild with grief,
and all that can be done is
wait and hope and pray
that the Nazis are right,
that the children are in a better place.
Dora says that at the factory she, too,
must pretend to be very sad
because no one knows that her sister
is still here.
Everyone thinks that the soldiers found
all the boys,
all the girls,
all the babies,
and took them away.
All of them?
“Almost all,” Papa says.
“Mama’s sister Rose has her daughter, Mina,
hidden in the ghetto.
My brother Haskel’s wife, Hana, has not had the
baby yet, so it is safe.
And, of course, there is Syvia.
We must hope that there are others.”
But his brow turns down
as he says this.
“Mama’s other sisters are not so lucky.
Sara and Shmuel’s two boys are gone.”
I hope they will be all right.
Too Quiet
Dora says it is strange
to walk through the streets
and not see a single child
or hear one baby.
I do not know what it is like.
I am not allowed outside
in daylight anymore,
even with my family.
The New Rules
These are the rules:
No one must see Syvia.
No one must hear Syvia.
No one must know that she is here.
She must stay inside the apartment
at all times.
She must not play loudly or shout,
and she must stay away from the window unless the
curtain is down.
“For how long?” I ask Papa,
trying to sound brave.
“Until…
Until…”
Papa pauses and looks at the ceiling
as if the answer to my question is
up above us.
Finally he tells me he just doesn’t know the answer,
that these days we cannot plan the future
but instead must go day to day,
trusting that there will be an end to this situation,
that a better life is ahead.
Later, I think about what Papa has said.
I try to picture a better life.
It is hard to do,
since I have known this one for so long.
I squeeze my eyes shut
and see on the inside of my eyelids
a big meal of meat and potatoes and milk