by Jim Shepard
“Look who’s here,” Lejkin said.
“I know where all the smugglers’ holes are,” I told him.
“So do I,” Lejkin said. The headband of his cap was so soaked you couldn’t read the lettering. He poured water down his shirtfront.
“I know where all the smugglers are,” I told him.
“So do I,” he said.
“No you don’t,” I said.
He looked at me like he’d been swindled before. “So I get you out of here and you’ll deliver those people to me?” he said.
I pointed to Korczak and Madame Stefa and said, “You get them out of here and I’ll deliver those people to you.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, a lot of people would like to get him out of here.” He said something to the policeman beside him and we walked over to Korczak.
“Pan Doctor,” he said.
“Mr. Lejkin,” Korczak said. He didn’t have his glasses and the sun made him squint.
“Another train is on its way,” Lejkin told him.
“Another train is always on its way,” Korczak said. He was shaking.
“This young man seems to think you should be saved,” Lejkin told him.
“I think we all should be saved,” Korczak said.
“It’s possible that could be arranged,” Lejkin told him.
Korczak looked up. “And how would that happen?” he said.
“You’d have to come with me and ask the commanding officer,” Lejkin said.
“And where is he?” Korczak asked.
“Not far,” Lejkin said. “A ten-minute walk.”
“Will you guarantee they won’t be taken away while I’m gone?” Korczak asked.
“You’re joking, yes?” Lejkin said. “You’re making a joke?”
“Then no,” Korczak told him.
“You might be able to get everyone out,” I said.
“So I should leave them here, all by themselves, in this place?” he asked me.
“I’ll watch them. You could hurry,” I said.
“You’ll watch them,” he said.
“I’ll watch them,” I said.
“And can you imagine what it would be like for them if the next train comes back while I’m gone?” he said.
“Please,” I said.
“Please what?” he said.
“Listen to me,” I shouted. But the truth was I couldn’t imagine anything. I always imagined myself, put upon. I never imagined anything else. And the next train sounded its whistle and ground around the curve into view and there was more screaming and calling out of names until its brakes drowned everyone out.
Korczak turned his attention back to his boys and Madame Stefa stood up and walked over to him. Girls hung on to her skirt. Korczak held out his hand and she squeezed it. Zygmuś and Mietek squatted wet-eyed and miserable. “I pissed myself,” Zygmuś told me as though that were the worst of all. By the train cars the shouting started up again.
“Everyone up,” Korczak said. “Rows of four.”
I wailed and shook and jabbered until someone took my hands from my face. It was Korczak. “Stop,” he said. But I wouldn’t.
“I never showed you my Declaration of Children’s Rights,” he said. Behind him the kids had collected their things, boys and girls together, and had gotten into their rows. Zygmuś was pulling at the back of his pants. A yellow policeman beside him started to weep.
“There isn’t a bit of me left in sound health,” Korczak said to himself.
He bent farther down until he was close enough for me to smell him. He put his hands behind my head and lowered his forehead to mine. I was blubbering and got his face wet but he only drew closer. “ ‘The child has the right to respect,’ ” he said. “ ‘The child has the right to develop. The child has the right to be. The child has the right to grieve. The child has the right to learn. And the child has the right to make mistakes.’ ”
NOTHING IS DEFINITIVELY KNOWN ABOUT THE last hours of Janusz Korczak and his staff members and his children, and for some time after the war it was said that he and Stefa and some of the orphans had been saved and that they had been seen in villages throughout Poland. Accounts vary, but most likely they were deported to Treblinka on the afternoon of August 5, 1942. Dr. Imfried Eberl, the commander of the camp, reported to his superiors that at the time Treblinka was in such a state of overtaxed chaos that mountains of corpses confronted the new arrivals, and therefore maintaining any kind of deception on the way to the gas chambers was nearly impossible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My main object here, to quote Marguerite Yourcenar in her Bibliographical Note to her Memoirs of Hadrian, has been “to approach inner reality, if possible, through careful examination of what the documents themselves afford,” and so this novel could not have existed, or would have existed in a much diminished form, without critically important contributions from the following sources: Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary; The Selected Works of Janusz Korczak, Martin Wolins, ed.; Aaron Zeitlin’s prose poem “The Last Walk of Janusz Korczak”; Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, Jacob Sloan, ed.; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak’s The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City; Marta Markowska’s The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation—Day by Day; Bogdan Wojdowski’s Bread for the Departed; and Dawid Rubinowicz’s The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz. I’m also hugely indebted to To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives O. S. (Oneg Shabbath), Joseph Kermish, ed.; The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg-Ringelblum Archive Catalog and Guide, Robert Moses Shapiro and Tadeusz Epsztein, eds.; The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, Alan Adelson, ed.; The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust, Guy Miron and Shlomit Shulhani, eds.; Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, Michał Grynberg, ed.; Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust, Jeffrey Shandler, ed.; From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds.; The Last Eyewitness: Children of the Holocaust Speak, Volume 1, Wiktoria Śliwowska, ed., Volume 2, Jakub Gutenbaum and Agnieszka Latała, eds.; Hunger Disease: Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, Myron Winick, M.D., ed.; The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia, Wendy Lower, ed.; The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staroń, and Josef Kermisz, eds.; and Betty Jean Lifton’s The King of Children. I also found crucially useful Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych’s article “The Last Journey of the Residents and Staff of the Warsaw Orphanage”; Lucjan Dobroszycki’s The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944; Leni Yahil’s The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry 1932–1945; Kurt Grübler’s Journey Through the Night: Jakob Littner’s Holocaust Memoir; Adina Blady Szwajger’s I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance; Abraham Lewin’s A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Antony Polonsky, ed.; Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews; Günther Schwarberg’s In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Heinrich Jöst’s Photographs; Hanna Krall’s Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; Naomi Samson’s Hide: A Child’s View of the Holocaust; Willy Georg’s In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941; Jürgen Stroop’s The Stroop Report; Larry Stillman and Morris Goldner’s A Match Made in Hell: The Jewish Boy and the Polish Outlaw Who Defied the Nazis; Manny Drukier’s Carved in Stone: Holocaust Years—A Boy’s Tale; Bernard Gotfryd’s Anton the Dove Fancier and Other Tales of the Holocaust; Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food; Joseph Ziemian’s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square; George Eisen’s Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows; Rubin Katz’s Gone to Pitchipoï: A Boy’s Desperate Fight for Survival in Wartime; Rochelle G. Saidel’s Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp; Aviad Kleinberg’s article “The Enchantment of Judaism: Israeli Anxieties and Puzzles,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (spring 2009); Cl
aude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah; and Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.
The book was also inconceivable without the inspiration, support, and expertise provided by Creaghan Trainor, Daniel Mendelsohn, Edan Dekel, Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Ohm, Rich Remsberg, Marketa Rulikova, Dan Polsby, Tomasz Kuźnar, and Michael Gross; the saving editorial enthusiasm and intelligence provided by Ben George, Reagan Arthur, Jim Rutman, Peter Matson, and Gary Fisketjon; and the research resources provided by Ron Coleman, Vincent Slatt, Caroline Waddell, and Nancy Hartman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Theresa Roy of the National Archives; Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych at the Korczakianum Center of Documentation and Research; Agnieszka Reszka of the Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; Aleksandra Bańkowska and Jan Jagielski at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute; and Justyna Majewska at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. I also have Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Jach and Wojciech Błaszczyk and Monika Oleśko to thank for their help in negotiating Warsaw. And the irrepressible and endlessly informative Alex Dunai to thank for his sheer resourcefulness and expert guidance in both the Polish countryside and the cities.
I also feel enormous humility in the face of the special debt the book owes to the testimonies of Frieda Aaron, Irena Abraham, Fela Abramowicz, Erwin Baum, Israel Berkenwald, Abraham Bomba, Helen Bromberg, Nelly Cesana, Mietek Ejchel, Lily Fenster, Henry Frankel, Simon Friedman, Henry Goldberg, Sam Goldberg, Henia Goldman, Doris Fuchs Greenberg, Marcel Gurner, David Haskil, Josef Himmelblau, Jola Hoffman, David Jakubowski, Erner Jurek, David Kochalski, Andrzej Krauthamer, Sara Lajbowicz, Anne Levy, Anna Lewkowicz, Jakub Michlewicz, Irene and Shimon Noskovicz, Henry Nusbaum, Samuel Offen, Michel Pinkas, Golda Rifka, Anka Rochman, Slama Rotter, Lidia Siciarz, Jack Spiegel, Czerna Sterma, Fela Warschau, Ryszard Weidman, Cyla Wiener, and especially Marian Marzynski.
Finally, I want to single out for special thanks and praise the contributions of those readers who encountered this work in its earliest stages, and whose optimism and rigor helped keep the project afloat: Gary Zebrun, Ron Hansen, and especially Sandra Leong, whose insights, early and late, were a crucial help. And I want most to celebrate my first and final reader, Karen Shepard, who remains fully justified in continuing to inform everyone that she renovates me for the better just about every single day.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels and four collections of stories, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
An A.A. Knopf Reading Group Guide
The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of The Book of Aron, the haunting new novel by acclaimed author Jim Shepard.
Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens with Aron discussing his name, and how he became known as “Sh’maya,” which means “God has heard.” Why is this important?
2. Shepard uses a child for his narrator. How does this affect the way the story unfolds?
3. Throughout the novel, other characters say things like, “Sh’maya only looks out for himself.” Does this ring true to you? Why do the others believe this?
4. On this page Aron says, “[My father] said a person with strong character could correct his path and start again but a coward or weakling could not…. It was terrible to have to be the person I was.” Does this prove true by the end of the novel?
5. What are the consequences of the death of Aron’s younger brother? How does it foreshadow what’s to come? Why doesn’t the author tell us his name?
6. Aron’s mother says, “One believed this and the other believed that but what was fated to happen always will” (this page). Does Aron share this worldview? In what ways?
7. Discuss Aron’s relationships with the other children in the gang—Lutek, Boris, Zofia, Adina. Which does he care about the most? Who is his truest friend?
8. Bit by bit, the situation in Warsaw worsens. Which of the characters seem to understand what’s going on? How do their actions reflect that understanding?
9. With his child’s-eye view Aron doesn’t spend much time on introspection, which forces us to read between the lines. How does this increase the impact of what’s happening?
10. Aron describes the food—and what his gang goes through to procure it—in matter-of-fact terms. Why is he so casual about what they’re reduced to eating?
11. Boris’s father thinks Janusz Korczak is “probably the safest Jew in the ghetto” (this page). Why does he think so? Is he right?
12. Why does Korczak insist on producing performances by the children? What does his choice of subject matter tell the reader?
13. How does the experience of seeing adults—including their own parents—abused by the Nazis change the children of Warsaw?
14. Discuss Aron’s relationship with Lejkin. Why does Aron keep insisting, “He’s not my friend”? Does having an in with Lejkin prove to be a good thing for Aron?
15. When Aron tells Lejkin where he and Lutek will be, do you think he understood the ramifications? Does it prove that “Sh’maya only looks out for himself”?
16. When Aron’s mother gets ill, she tells him she wanted to benusik, “something good. Someone useful and smart. She said that if she’d been nusik, then people who couldn’t get along, people with problems, would have come to her. She would have listened. She would have contributed more than she had” (this page). Who in the ghetto is nusik?
17. Compare Lejkin and Korczak. Both men chose Aron for special treatment—why him? What do the adults hope to get out of the relationship?
18. Why doesn’t Korczak leave when he has the opportunity? Aron spies on him during his refusal—why does he then negotiate with Boris to help Korczak escape?
19. On this page, Korczak argues with Boris and the boy:
“Tell them the truth,” the boy said. “Tell them we can’t save them.”
“Tell them they’re all just on their own?” Korczak asked, and his anger surprised even them.
“They are all on their own,” the boy said.
“They’re not all on their own,” Korczak said.
What is going on in this passage?
20. Why does Aron refuse to help Boris and the boy?
21. After the orphanage is emptied, Witossek apologizes to Korczak. “He said he wanted the good doctor to know that what was going to happen was going to happen and that how everyone chose to face it would be the point” (this page). Korczak agrees. Do you agree? Why?
22. Why do you think Shepard chose to end the novel with Korczak’s Declaration of Children’s Rights?
23. What is the overall theme of the novel? If there is one thing the author wants us to consider after reading it, what would that be?
Suggested Reading
Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone
John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Imre Kertész, Fatelessness
Jona Oberski, Childhood
Elie Wiesel, Night
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief