by Jim Shepard
“Why did you turn around?” he said. He seemed angrier at me than at the kid.
“Is he dead?” I asked. But I could see that he wasn’t. His head was jerking back and forth and his hands were clenching.
Boris squatted and pulled out a safety pin and a note that said LIVE AND LET LIVE and pinned it to the kid’s shirt.
“Give me the honey,” he said. Then he pulled me back onto the street.
“We’re just going to leave him?” I asked. But we already had.
That afternoon we had Chłodna Street to ourselves. Boris said the other gang was probably still out looking for its leader. We used ten or twelve smaller kids to swarm the gate. They went off shoulder to shoulder running as fast as they could and the blue and yellow police beat and tore at the clothes of as many as they could reach but most got through. We paid each a saccharine candy and told them to wait until the gate was at its busiest. Boris found the whole thing funny. He said that because we’d been paid in money for a recent load he was going to have us split up and buy things in Aryan shops outside the wall. He said the trick was to walk slowly and to pass the police as though they were vendors and not to run even if someone made a first step at us. And to clean our clothes and shoes as much as we could before we left. And when we were in the shops to ask for what we wanted as though we owned the place.
“How’s your sister?” Adina asked Zofia, and I slapped my head for not having asked her myself.
Zofia said Salcia was doing poorly. Adina wrapped an arm around her and Zofia asked if she was getting sick and Adina told her that two more families had moved into their apartment. And while those families had been sitting and chatting with one of their uncles another had arrived. She had no idea where they were going to put them all. “Now we’re six to a room,” she said. “And in the cellar and in one corner the water’s always dripping. Next to my head, all night long. We asked them to fix it but they didn’t fix it.”
In the square one of the blue policemen had a kid by the shirt and tore it off his back. “Did you cut yourself?” Zofia asked me.
“He has bad gums,” Boris told her. “Have you smelled his breath?”
So I told them what Boris had done.
“With a brick?” Lutek said when I finished.
“On the head,” I said.
“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.
“I think he’s dead,” I said.
“He should’ve realized stealing is wrong,” Boris said.
“Do you think they’ll leave us alone now?” Zofia asked.
“If they don’t they’ll get another brick to the head,” Boris told her.
“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.
“You already said that,” Lutek told her. And then I understood why Boris had used me instead of Lutek.
“He might really be dead,” I said again, but they all looked like they had their own problems.
“Why are we still sitting here?” Adina wanted to know.
“We’re waiting for confirmation from the other side,” Boris told her. We had to move an exchange location and had sent one of the smaller kids with a note.
I asked Zofia if her father was still sad about the Brysz girls.
“What do you care?” she said.
“I asked, didn’t I?” I said.
“Poor Sh’maya,” Boris said. “No one thinks he cares.”
She said her father was better but that Hanka Nasielska still wept night and day about it. “Hanka Nasielska saw me with you and called me treyf slops in a treyf pot,” she told Boris. He laughed.
“What were you doing with him?” I asked.
“She told me she’d make my mouth kosher again,” she said to Boris. “She put a stone in a pot with some steam but I screamed that it was too hot so she cooled it down before she put it back in my mouth.”
“So that’s how you make a mouth kosher?” Boris asked.
Zofia looked away and wiped her eyes and Adina punched his arm. “There’s not one good Jew among us,” Zofia said.
“The good Jews buy what we bring in,” Boris said.
“What about your brother?” Adina asked.
“What about yours?” Zofia said. “The oldest one.”
“He prays by himself on weekdays and goes to the public services on holidays,” Adina said. “When they have them. Weren’t your uncles religious?”
Zofia said one uncle went to shul but didn’t daven and just sat there, and that the other didn’t even go to shul. Though he always tried to get them a carp or goose for the Sabbath.
A kid who hadn’t gotten through the gate started to come over for his saccharine candy but Boris warned him away with his eyes.
“Sh’maya here had only four people move in with him,” Adina said bitterly. “We had a village move in with us.”
“It could’ve been a lot worse for his family,” Boris told her. “I had six brothers and sisters and five of them died as babies.”
“Your poor mother,” Zofia said.
“And look at the son who lived,” Lutek said.
“I used to tell my mother I was afraid I wouldn’t have children,” Zofia said. “She used to tell me not to say that and that I’d have children; I’d see.”
“Maybe this year,” Boris said. Lutek laughed.
“Where I come from the girls are tough but not smart,” Adina said. “For a while I thought from a kiss you could get pregnant.”
“From mine you can,” Boris said. Lutek and Adina made fun of him for boasting.
“It’s a miracle I’m normal,” Zofia said. “If I am normal.”
“You’re not,” Lutek told her.
“I know you’re not,” she told him.
A work detail came back through the gate. It took a half hour for everyone’s papers to be checked at all three guard posts. Neither of our fathers were in the group. Neither of my brothers were either.
“Did you ever act in the holiday plays in kheyder?” Adina asked Boris. When she saw his look she said she was just asking.
“What’s wrong with you?” he wanted to know.
The kid who’d had his shirt torn off was shrieking in the square from the beating he’d received. Where he was squatting the traffic had to go around him. He was trying to reach the part of his back that hurt.
“Enough already with the noise,” Lutek said. The kid’s shrieking turned to weeping and he crouched around in the dust without standing up.
“I’ll see what’s going on,” Boris finally said. He stood and crossed the street to the pharmacy.
“Where’s he going?” Adina asked.
“From the second floor you can see over the wall,” Lutek told her.
After a few minutes Boris came back and flopped down so his feet went up into the air. “He’s over there,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s waiting for.”
The squatting kid finally stood up and headed over to us like a little cripple.
“Just what we need,” Boris said.
“Give me my candy,” the kid said when he stopped in front of us. No one at the guard posts was paying attention.
“Give him his candy,” Boris told Zofia. She handed him a piece from a little sack in the waistband of her skirt.
“I should get two,” the kid said. He had a lazy eye that made him even uglier.
“Why should you get two?” Boris asked him.
“Because I took such a beating,” the kid said.
“Well, I should have a roast goose,” Lutek told him. “But we don’t always get what we want.”
“I should get two,” the kid repeated.
“Get away from us or we’ll show you what a beating looks like,” Boris told him.
“I’ll call the police,” the kid said.
Boris stood up and lifted him off his feet by the neck with one hand.
“What are you doing there? Put him down,” someone shouted, scaring us.
It was Korczak, the Old Doctor. “You should be ashamed,” he said. He pulled B
oris’s arm from the kid’s neck. Zofia and Adina got to their feet.
“Get out of here, Grandfather,” Boris told him. “I can smell the vodka.”
The old man straightened up. I couldn’t smell it. Then he said, “Pay attention. What I have to say may come in handy.”
“This is the Old Doctor,” Adina told Boris. “He runs the orphanage.”
The old man waited, as though that was going to change something.
“So did you come to lecture us or do you have a suggestion to make?” Boris said.
“I have a suggestion to make,” Korczak said. “I suggest you leave my boys alone. I suggest you leave all these boys alone.”
“Who made you King of the World?” Lutek said.
“I’m sorry for our friends,” Zofia told him.
“Mietek, go home,” Korczak said to the kid. The kid moved behind him. They made quite the pair: the old man with dirty spectacles and the shirtless kid with the lazy eye.
“You have pants like a hobo’s,” Boris said.
“A hobo wouldn’t take them,” Korczak told him.
“You know where I found him?” Boris said, nodding at the kid. “Looking through the garbage. Maybe you should feed your kids.”
“Anyone who’s gotten in my way can tell you I can still kick pretty hard,” Korczak told him.
“This old wreck’s threatening me?” Boris asked Zofia.
“Boris, let’s go,” Adina told him.
“Did we make you do anything, kid?” Boris asked.
“You don’t care what happens,” Korczak told him. “Or who gets hurt. Just so in the meantime you can find a piece of bread someplace. Right?”
“You’re the big shot with your own place, judging us?” Boris said.
“Our own place? What does a Jew have?” Korczak told him. “We’ve never owned a thing.”
“So maybe the houses are theirs,” Boris told him. “But the streets are ours.”
“The streets are yours?” Korczak said. “Look around.”
“We do all right,” Boris said.
“Leave my boys alone,” Korczak repeated.
“Go back to your orphanage,” Boris told him. “Dish out some soup.”
The old man turned to the rest of us. “For each one who acts like that, there’s another who behaves decently,” he said. Then he left, holding the kid by the shoulder. And the kid we’d been waiting for finally made it through the gate to let us know that our new arrangement was going to be okay.
EVERY MORNING MY MOTHER BEGGED ME TO GO TO the Order Service headquarters to see what information Lejkin would give me. Sometimes I waited till noon before he would see me. He told me that my father and one brother were still together and that they’d worked in the SS barracks in Rakowiecka Street, in the cavalry barracks at Służewiec, and spreading coal bricks at a railroad siding outside of town. He said he thought they’d also done some road construction. They hadn’t been paid for it yet since the Judenrat was behind in its wages, but they had been given bread and radishes. He thought they were in a camp in the Kampinos forest. My other brother and Boris’s father he knew nothing about. He said families whose main breadwinner had been selected for the camps were eligible for a small welfare payment from the Judenrat, though he wasn’t sure who to see about that. He also said that since I was now thirteen it was time for me to be registered as well. I left this out of what I reported to my mother.
He said he had little information beyond that. Czerniaków himself had personally intervened about the state of the camps with the SS man in charge of Jewish affairs and the director of the Department of Jewish Labor in the Arbeitsamt, and both more food and better conditions had been promised.
One morning in a downpour I opened our door and Lejkin was standing there in the hall with an SS officer behind him. The officer was tall and had a rain bonnet on his cap. He smiled and shook the water from the arms of his raincoat and moved Lejkin aside with his hand and said, “Guten Morgen.” He sounded like someone who was happy that he’d kept his patience for so long with misbehaving children. He asked in Polish if I spoke German. When I told him no he nodded and wiped the mud from his boots so energetically that he split our old doormat in two.
The left sleeve of his uniform jacket was tucked into his belt and there was no arm in it. He saw me looking and said in Polish, “Wars aren’t much fun. Now don’t you feel like a lucky young boy?”
Lejkin introduced him as Obersturmführer Witossek. I said hello and the German seemed amused by my tone.
Boris pretended to be asleep on the floor near my feet. “I’d ask to come in but perhaps now is not the best time,” the German said.
“His Polish is good, isn’t it?” Lejkin asked.
“You’re Aron Różycki?” the German asked.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Could you step into the hall,” he said.
“Aron!” my mother called from the kitchen.
I stepped out and he shut the door behind me. The window in the hallway was broken and it made the rain louder. A family camped under it had strung up a shelter to keep dry. A bucket caught the runoff.
The German said he wanted me to come to an office he was setting up on Żelazna Street. A dozen Jews were already there, and Lejkin had recommended me.
What was I supposed to do at such a place, I wanted to know.
“It’s a little Jewish concern,” he said. “Your friend here is part of it. He’s the one who recommended you,” he repeated.
“Recommended me for what?” I said.
“Well, there’s always more to discover when you stick your nose into the world,” he said. I looked at Lejkin, who raised his shoulders.
“Or you can serve in a labor battalion,” the German said. “Do you have your card?”
“I’m not registered yet,” I said.
“It’s 103 Żelazna,” the German said. “Your friend can tell you if there’s anything else you need to know.”
“There isn’t anything else you need to know,” Lejkin said.
“Oh, and yes,” the German said as he was leaving. He opened the door and there inside the apartment stood my mother and Boris’s mother, gaping. “Could I ask you for some sort of Jewish holy volume or object?”
We looked at one another. “An object?” Boris’s mother said.
“Something in which you believe,” the German said.
“Something in which they believe?” Lejkin said.
“To serve as a charm,” the German said. While we still stood there, he added, “I had one before from Cologne and you can see what happened when I lost it.”
Boris’s mother left the doorway. My mother just stared. “Good morning,” the German said to her.
“Good morning,” she answered.
Boris’s mother returned with a mezuzah that she handed to the German.
“Thank you,” the German said, once he had it. “Auf wiedersehen.”
BORIS SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY HAPPY BECAUSE ONE OF our contacts over the wall told him that so much bread was being smuggled into the ghetto there was an actual shortage of it on the other side. Lutek’s old chiseled passage in the wall on Przejazd Street had been bricked up and reopened so often that people started calling it the Immortal Hole. The Germans cleared away the shed that covered it. Boris said that the hole proved there were only three invincible forces in the universe: the German Army, the British Navy, and Jewish smuggling.
The guards at Chłodna Street developed a new moneymaking scheme of announcing at twenty minutes to the hour that it was already curfew and charging twenty złotys apiece to fix their watches to the correct time and send you on your way, so we went back to the Immortal Hole. Boris worked out a schedule with the other gangs that let us use it right before and after curfew. We went through and did our buying and selling in pairs, and if we didn’t see the next pair behind us we didn’t wait for them.
In bad weather Zofia went through with her shoes around her neck and the laces tied together.
She said her shoes actually fit her and if she ruined them she’d never find another pair that did.
Boris hadn’t mentioned the German or Lejkin after they’d left and he ignored how upset my mother was about it, but after four days he stopped me as we went downstairs and asked if I was just going to act as if nothing had happened. I asked what he was talking about.
“Do you think they’re just going to forget you?” he said. “Do you really want to piss in that one-armed German’s beer?”
“I was going to go,” I told him.
“Try not to always be so stupid,” he said. “These are the people with the whip hand. These are the people who are going to have information first.”
“What information?” I said.
“Whatever information there is,” he said. “Where the jumps will be, what gates will play, what players will be there, who they’re going to move against and when.”
“I know that,” I told him.
“Use your head,” he said.
“I said I was going,” I said.
“Then go,” he said. “Don’t stand here with me.”
But Lejkin wasn’t there and no one knew what to do with me. I was told to wait in the hall. It was a big fancy house so the floor was marble. Everyone’s steps echoed. Yellow police came and went but the only Jew who introduced himself was a shoeshine boy named Ajzyk. He sat opposite me in the front hall along with a few rickshaw drivers who took Germans around the ghetto. All morning laborers carried in what looked like an entire kitchen, and in the afternoon a barber’s chair and other crates and boxes as well. I had no breakfast and asked if there was anything to eat but no one answered. Twice more I went in to ask what was happening and was told to wait. The fourth time I presented myself I was told to come back the next day. Then going down the steps I ran into Lejkin, who said I should come back Friday.
THE NEXT TIME WE GOT TO THE IMMORTAL HOLE A German soldier was standing in front of it while a Jew in a smock unloaded a handcart filled with metal sheets. The building alongside had a slanted roof with dormers that hid you from the street so we went up to watch. We’d found the spot a week earlier. You got there through a hatch on the ceiling of the janitor’s closet on the top floor. We could all fit between the dormers and every so often one of us could keep an eye on what was going on below.