28 Days

by David Safier

  When we were relocated, our family was lucky enough—or rather we had enough money—to get our own room. Before we moved into the ghetto, we’d lived in a spacious five-room flat. But we were forced to give it to a childless Polish couple, who were very happy to have our furniture, as well. All we were allowed to take with us was a handcart loaded with a few suitcases. We pulled our cart through the streets of Warsaw among the silent, ghostlike procession of thousands of Jews on their way to the ghetto. We were guarded by Germans. And stared at by the Poles who lined the pavements or sat at their windows, and didn’t seem to mind that their part of Warsaw would be Jew-free from now on.

  When we entered the place where we were going to live at 70 Miła Street, my mother burst into tears. One single room. For five people. Without any beds. And a broken window. There were tears in my father’s eyes, too. He had spent the few days between the announcement that a ghetto was being set up in the most run-down streets of Warsaw and the start of the resettlement doing everything he could to find an abode for us. He had run from department to department, had bribed officials of the Judenrat—the Jewish council set up by the Nazis—and ended up paying thousands of zlotys. Papa had managed to make sure that we wouldn’t freeze to death in the streets when winter came.

  When we entered that tiny empty room we didn’t feel grateful, though. And he never forgave himself for not doing more to help his family and his dear wife who suffered so much.

  I had to walk through a larger room to get to our own. An extended family from Kraków lived there. We had not managed to become friends over the past couple of years. These people were quite religious. The women wore head scarfs, and all the men had beards and curled side locks, which went down to their shoulders. While the women did the housework, the men spent the whole day praying. That wasn’t exactly my idea of a happy marriage.

  The women were washing clothes in large metal tubs and looked down their noses at me as usual. I was young, I wasn’t wearing a head scarf, I had a boyfriend, and I was a smuggler—reasons enough to despise me.

  But I’d stopped caring about what they thought a long time ago. And I’d stopped trying to be nice.

  Ignore, ignore, ignore.

  I opened the door to our room. Mama had drawn the curtains again. She didn’t want any sun in the darkness of her life. I closed the door behind me and opened the curtains and the window to air the room. Mama groaned quietly because of the sunlight. But she couldn’t manage any real protest. She lay on a mattress we had swapped her favorite golden necklace for during the first winter. The necklace had been a present from Papa on their tenth anniversary.

  Mama’s long gray hair stuck to her face, her eyes stared into the distance. It was hard to believe that this woman had once been a beauty, or that my father and a Polish general had fought over her. It almost ended in a duel, but she had intervened and saved Papa from being shot.

  She had loved him. Loved him incredibly. More than anything in the world. Even more than us children. His death had destroyed her completely. Since then, I’d started to think it was a bad idea to love someone too much.

  My boyfriend, Daniel, saw things differently. He thought love was our only hope. He was probably the last surviving romantic in the ghetto.

  I took off my best dress, carefully put it on a clothes hanger, and then hung that up on a nail on the wall. I changed into a patched blue blouse and a pair of black baggy trousers, and started to make the omelet. Hannah was due back from the underground school any minute. In fact, she should have been back by now. Hopefully nothing had happened to her. I was always worrying about that child.

  Mama never said much, and she never asked me any questions. I still wanted her to share in my life in the outside world, though, so I usually pretended to have a conversation with her where I spoke both parts:

  “And how was your day, today, Mira?” I asked.

  “Quite successful so far, thank you!” I replied.

  “Really, Mira?”

  “Yes, really. I made lots of money and have bought loads of food…”

  I wondered for a moment if I should mention the szmalcowniks, but I didn’t want Mama to worry about me, assuming that she was actually capable of worrying about anyone anymore.

  So instead, without even thinking about it, I said,

  “I kissed a boy I didn’t know!”

  And she smiled. Mama hardly ever smiled. A little explosion of happiness went off in my heart. I desperately wanted her to keep smiling, and so I chatted away:

  “It was wild, and passionate and daft … And fantastic somehow…” Goodness, it really had been fantastic! I suddenly had a desperate wish to kiss Stefan again.

  Mama smiled even more. That was so lovely. When I saw her looking like that, I couldn’t help hoping that she might be able to be happy again.

  Hannah came in at this moment. She could be light-footed and boisterous at the same time. She was an elflike creature, shabby clothes with cropped short hair—she’d had lice last month and I had to cut off all her hair. When I’d fetched the scissors, I’d actually expected her to have a tantrum, but she’d turned the whole incident into one of her stories.

  “If my hair grew any longer, I could wind it into twelve long braids. I’d use them like extra arms and capture people. I’d be able to hurl my enemies through the air because of the mighty strength of my hair. And I’d win every fight.”

  “Well, then,” I’d said, laughing, “why don’t you mind me cutting it off?”

  “Because everyone would notice those braids and they would come and get me. I could use them to beat up soldiers and throw them through walls, even, but the soldiers have guns. And not even my hair can stop a gun. The Germans would shoot me. And then cut off my braids as a warning to everyone who wanted to grow their hair to fight. It’s better to lose my hair now, before it turns into a weapon and the Germans find me out.”

  Hannah didn’t want to be strong, she wanted to be invisible. If you were invisible you had more chance of surviving in the ghetto. As soon as I put the plate with the omelet onto the table, Hannah pounced on the food and started gobbling. Mama pulled herself up from the mattress, sat down beside me on the last available chair—I’d used the others as firewood last winter—and we both started eating, more slowly than Hannah. We let her eat more than us, but we always stopped her before she ate too much.

  “Why was Mama smiling when I came in?” Hannah asked with her mouth full. Her manners were appalling. But no one had the time or patience to teach this child any manners.

  “Tell me, what was going on?” she asked again. A bit of egg threatened to fall out of the corner of her mouth. Just in time, she caught it with the tip of her tongue.

  “Mira kissed a boy,” Mama explained in her thin voice. “And it wasn’t Daniel!”

  Before I could explain that the kiss had meant absolutely nothing at all, except for the fact that it had saved my life, and that I loved Daniel and only Daniel, and that it didn’t mean a thing if talking about this kiss made me feel nervous or made me go red, Hannah said,

  “Oh, so did I!”

  Now it was my turn to nearly drop my omelet.

  “You!—You kissed someone?”

  “After school.” So that was why she was late.

  “Who?”

  “Ben.”

  “Does he go to school with you?” I started to smile. I thought that the idea of a twelve-year-old giving my sister a kiss on the cheek was very sweet.

  “Nope,” she answered.

  With all this talk of kissing, Mama was drifting away again, back to the days when my father was alive and they were still happy together.

  “Is this boy even smaller than you?” I teased Hannah.

  “No, he’s fifteen.”

  Now I really did drop a bit of omelet.

  “And he is really, really nice,” Hannah said.

  “Any boy nearly my age out kissing twelve-year-olds is not nice!”

  “And he does French kissing.
”

  “Whaaat?”

  “He’s a good tongue kisser,” Hannah explained, as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say.

  She was far too young for this. Not to mention what it might lead to. I looked at Mama—she should do something! Anything! She was Hannah’s mother, not me! But Mama got up from the table and went to lie down again.

  “Hannah,” I said while she grabbed Mama’s plate, “don’t you think the boy is too old for you?”

  “Nope!” she said, chewing away. “Just a bit too shy.”

  “You kissed him?” I was shocked.

  “Isn’t that what princesses do?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Well, they do in my stories!” Hannah gave me a huge smile. If the Nazis didn’t manage it first, this girl was going to be the end of me. How could I stop all this nonsense? I needed help. Someone who knew more about dealing with children than I did. Daniel.

  6

  Janusz Korczak was the ghetto Jew everyone knew and admired. He was famous beyond the walls, in the whole of Poland and throughout the world. He had invented Hannah’s favorite story about Little King Macius, and I was sure that had triggered her imagination for storytelling.

  The thin old man with a beard ran an orphanage that was an inspiration to people all over the world. The children and caregivers were considered equals. If one of the grown-ups did something wrong, the children could hold a trial and pass a sentence, even on Korczak himself.

  At the beginning of the week, I had actually seen this happen. Korczak was on a chair in front of three children sitting behind their little tables like a judge with two assessors.

  “Janusz Korczak,” a girl of about ten who was the judge said severely, “you are accused of having shouted at Mitek, just because he threw a plate on the floor. Mitek was so scared because of your shouting that he started to cry. What do you have to say in your defense?”

  The old man smiled apologetically and said, “I was tired and exhausted. That is why I overreacted. It was wrong to shout at Mitek like that. And I will accept any sentence this high court may decide.”

  The little judge conferred with her assessors—two even smaller boys—and said, “Because you’ve pleaded guilty, we will give you a mild punishment. You are sentenced to wipe the tables for one week.”

  I would have told the children to get lost, but Korczak answered with the greatest respect, “I accept my punishment.”

  He took the children seriously and gave them dignity, dignity they could find nowhere else in the world.

  Daniel had lost his own parents as a child. They died of tuberculosis, and he knew nothing about them. He had spent most of his life with Korczak. Now he was one of the oldest children in the orphanage and shared the responsibility for over two hundred children.

  As soon as the orphanage had been moved to the ghetto, Korczak had had the windows to the street walled up. He didn’t want the children to be confronted with too much horror every day. At first, I thought it was a naive move, but Daniel had said no. He thought that it was far better for the children’s souls that way. And these days, I knew he was right. Whenever I entered the great hall, like now, I was amazed at how safe this world seemed. The beds were crammed together, but they were all made properly, and whenever there was food—every evening—everyone sat together at the big tables and behaved so well. No one gobbled their food like Hannah!

  Manners wasn’t a foreign word to these children, and thanks to Korczak’s lessons, most of them could actually spell it as well!

  Daniel was sitting at a table with lots of preschool children. With his looks, he wouldn’t have survived on the Polish side of the city for a minute. He had a mane of black curly hair, a large, distinctive nose, and dark eyes you could get lost in. But he couldn’t pass as a non-Jew.

  I watched Daniel fooling around with the children. A boy in a baggy sweater was hugging himself with laughter. Above the clatter of the knives and forks, I couldn’t make out what they were laughing about. Korczak was sitting at the next table. He looked more gaunt and starved every day. I had to find food for three people. But he had to find food for more than two hundred. Daniel had told me that just last week Korczak had tried to negotiate with the Jewish council for extra rations and received none. So he had had to take donations from the smugglers for the first time. Until now, this honorable man had never had anything to do with those people. But these days, he would have danced a tango with the devil to help support his children.

  Daniel saw me and called out, “Children, look who’s come. It’s Mira!”

  I stopped in the doorway. Some of the children waved, but they weren’t especially pleased to see me. One little girl, about seven years old in a red polka-dot dress, even stuck her tongue out. I didn’t belong to this community, although I’d been turning up regularly for nearly half a year now. No wonder: I’d never really tried to get to know all of Daniel’s little brothers and sisters. Hannah was more than enough for me.

  I would have loved to go out tonight. There was a play on at the Femina theater—yes, we had theaters in the ghetto—called Love Gets a Room about two very different couples forced to share a flat. One pair are musicians; the others work in the Jewish council administration. To start with, they detest each other, but then the two couples fall in love, crosswise, and all sorts of things start to happen. The play was supposed to be funny, touching, and a little bit sad. And it had love songs. Happy ones, sad ones. And a funny one about how you should spend all your money on alcohol. At least that’s what Ruth had told me. She had seen it with her favorite customer, Shmuel Asher the crime boss, but there was no point in suggesting a visit to the theater to Daniel. He had no money, and he would never let me take him out. Every zloty not spent on the children in the orphanage was a wasted zloty, as far as Daniel was concerned. And there was no point in arguing about it. I had tried on several occasions and ended up spoiling our evening, every time. That was one of the disadvantages of going out with such a decent boy.

  Daniel smiled at me. I knew I’d have to wait until all the children had washed up and gone to bed. The lights were turned off at eight o’clock, but Daniel always spent a few extra minutes with the smaller children who couldn’t manage to fall asleep.

  I could have helped him and the older children get the little ones ready for bed, but after today I didn’t feel like dealing with needy children. I was nowhere near as kind as my boyfriend. And a hundred times less selfless than Korczak, who cleaned the tables just as the little court had decreed. If I had been even a tiny bit less selfish, I’d have taken the tired old man’s cloth from his hands and wiped the tables myself.

  Instead, I left the hall and headed to the one place where Daniel and I went to have time to ourselves in this overcrowded world. The roof of the orphanage.

  This was where we spent our evenings together. Come rain or shine, even when it was freezing. Where else could we have gone? Daniel slept in the huge dormitory, and Hannah and Mama were always at home.

  Hannah. How could I stop her kissing older boys?

  Having gotten to the attic of the orphanage, I opened a skylight and crawled out onto the dirty brown tiles of the sloping roof. I had to slide down a bit to get to a two-by-two-meter platform. That was our little haven.

  I looked across the rooftops of the ghetto toward the wall. I could see a German soldier marching up and down with his gun across his shoulder. Perhaps it was Frankenstein. If I had a gun, I could shoot him down like a sparrow from here. If I could use a gun, that is. And if I was capable of killing someone.

  Was I? I didn’t think so. I didn’t hate anyone that much. I would never understand Frankenstein or those other Nazis.

  Anyway, the whole idea was just too stupid for words. Imagine a Jew—a young Jewish girl, no less—with a gun! There was no such thing. It was about as likely as a bunch of Germans singing “Shalom Aleichem.”

  It was starting to get cold so I pulled my brown leather jacket on over my blouse.
I loved that jacket. I sat down and let my legs hang over the edge—I wasn’t afraid of falling off—and looked into the distance, toward the Polish side of town. I could make out cars and a streetcar and loads of Poles who were still out and about in the evening. I even thought I could hear couples laughing, exiting the cinema without a care in the world. How I missed the cinema!

  Sometimes I blamed the Nazis the most for not letting us have films in the ghetto. Theater was all very well, but there was no substitute for cinema.

  What kind of films would Chaplin be making now? I wondered. I had loved City Lights. The poor tramp who makes sure that the blind flower seller regains her sight. And then she doesn’t know that the man in rags is the person who saved her. Not until she touches his hand and realizes who he is. I’d laughed and cried during that film, and when the lights came back on, all I wanted was to see those city lights. I dreamed of going to New York. Daniel always played along, and together we imagined how we would live in America, and how we’d go to the top of the Empire State Building to see where King Kong had taken his woman. Of course, I knew that Daniel would never leave the children or Korczak, who was like a father to him, even if he had promised to go to America with me. Korczak would stay with the children no matter what. Rich Jews from far away had collected enough money to smuggle him out of the ghetto, but he had refused to go. It was as if the children of the orphanage were his own—and what kind of person would ever abandon their own children?