by David Safier
My father.
Last summer, he threw himself out of a window. His nerves were shattered. He couldn’t bear the terrible conditions in the Jewish ghetto hospital, and he had stopped working as a doctor. All our savings were gone. Papa had used our last money for bribes to get Simon into the Jewish police.
It broke my father’s heart to realize that his son didn’t give a damn about his family and couldn’t have cared less for his weak father, even though Papa had done everything he could for him.
I was still going to school when he killed himself. Mama worked in one of the German factories. So I was home before her and found him lying in the courtyard in a pool of blood. His head had burst open on impact. In a trance, I went to fetch help so that he could be taken away before Hannah saw him like that. Once the gravediggers had gone, I waited for Mama. She had a crying fit when she heard the news. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t comfort her. I hugged Hannah when she came home from school. My little sister cried and cried until she fell asleep in my arms. I carried her to the mattress and put her to bed, left my mother alone with her sorrow, and went out. I thought Simon should know that his father was dead. So I made my way through the crush of the ghetto toward the Jewish police station.
But halfway there, I gave up. I didn’t want to go to that horrible building with all those awful people where Simon was busy making a name for himself.
I didn’t want to do anything ever again.
I sat down on the curb. People walked past. No one saw me. Except Daniel. I don’t know how long I’d been staring into space. It could have been minutes or hours, but suddenly he was sitting beside me. Being an orphan, he must have sensed that I was someone in need of help.
I hadn’t been able to cry. But now that I wasn’t alone anymore and didn’t have to be strong, a tear trickled down my face. Daniel put his arms around me and kissed it away.
The sun was setting over Warsaw and threw a beautiful red glow across the whole city. Was Stefan out there somewhere watching the sunset, too?
Damn! Why was I thinking about him again? Daniel would be here in a moment, and my head was full of a boy who I knew nothing about. Not even his real name.
If I told him what had happened, Daniel would be glad that my life had been saved. But then he would ask me again to stop smuggling, and I’d say that that wasn’t possible, and we would spend most of our precious time arguing. It wasn’t worth it.
It would be better if I didn’t mention being on the other side today. But then I might have to lie to Daniel for the first time ever. All because of a silly kiss.
“You’re lost in thought.”
I was startled and jumped. I hadn’t noticed Daniel climbing through the skylight. He slid down the tiles and joined me. I stood up.
“Has something happened?” Daniel asked, and put his arms around me.
Go on, Mira! Tell him.
“No, everything is fine.”
Oh, well done, Mira!
“Are you sure?” Daniel asked. He wasn’t suspicious; he was sensitive and knew me well.
“Hannah kissed an older boy,” I said quickly.
He laughed.
“It’s not funny!” I said. I wanted to protect my sister’s innocence, and he wasn’t taking me seriously.
“It really is.” He smiled.
“No, it’s really not!”
“Don’t worry. That sort of thing happens in the orphanage all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”
He was trying to soothe me, as if I were one of the children he looked after. He spoke with a certain tone of voice that I found annoying.
“And apart from that,” he said, “girls are always a bit faster than boys.”
Except for us, I thought.
My friend Ruth had lost her innocence at the age of fourteen, but it was a step I was not ready for just yet. I didn’t even know if Daniel was a virgin. And I’d never asked him about his previous girlfriends—I’d have been far too jealous. Selfish me wanted to be his first one.
It was starting to get dark; the moon was only a small crescent in the sky—there had been a new moon three days ago.
Daniel kissed my cheek. This was usually the start of a real kiss.
Daniel kissed my lips gently, lovingly. Not as wildly as Stefan had. But because I was thinking about Stefan, I couldn’t return Daniel’s kiss properly. Daniel looked at me with his beautiful eyes and asked, “Is Hannah the only thing that’s upsetting you?”
After our kiss had gone wrong, it was even harder for me to tell him what had happened. What was I supposed to do when he asked me what that other kiss was like? I could hardly say, “More passionate than yours!”
I had to make sure that kissing Daniel was the best thing in the world. So I cupped my hands around his face, pulled him toward me, and kissed him as wildly and passionately as I could. More fiercely than I’d kissed Stefan. In other words, I made a complete fool of myself. Daniel couldn’t keep up with all my passion, and we let go of each other. He laughed awkwardly. “Sometimes you are a real surprise!”
“Is that good or bad?” I asked.
“It’s good,” he grinned. “I love surprises.”
He took me back into his arms and started to kiss me again. His hair tickled my nose, and I scratched it nervously until my hand got in the way and Daniel gave up trying to kiss me.
Daniel and I weren’t going to work, until I told him about Stefan.
“Someone…,” I started to say.
But then we heard a car.
We were both quiet at once. Jews weren’t allowed to drive cars. So it must be the Germans.
We could see all the way down Sienna Street from the roof. A car stopped in front of the building across the street.
Daniel and I lay down in case a German happened to look up in our direction. I grabbed Daniel’s hand. Unlike mine, it felt cool and dry.
While the chauffeur remained in the car, four men got out. One SS man, two soldiers, and a Jewish policeman. The policeman was wearing a blue coat and a black belt. It could have been a brown coat with a brown belt or a black one with a white belt. There was no such thing as a standard uniform for the Jewish police. The Nazis didn’t give their underlings uniforms. They had to acquire them somehow, including the mandatory peaked cap with the Star of David. The Jewish policemen got to wear an extra star beside the armband, marking them as Jews who were two times better than the rest of us—or twice as mean.
The policeman approached the entrance of house number four. He was carrying a truncheon. Of course, the Germans didn’t let their subhuman accomplices carry guns, either. But the traitors used their truncheons to attack their own people as brutally as they could whenever they carried out the occupiers’ orders.
That Jewish policeman could be my brother, for all I knew. I was too far away and the light from the street was too dim. I hoped it wasn’t Simon. It was one thing to know that your brother was a pig, but it would be something else to watch him arresting someone for the Germans.
As the men disappeared into the house, Daniel whispered, “It’s not your brother.”
He knew what I was worried about.
We stared at the house. It had to be awful for the people living there. Their only hope was that the soldiers charging up the stairs would rip open a neighbor’s door instead of their own. Somebody was in for it.
Lights went on in a flat on the third floor, and we could see through the window that the soldiers had broken down the door. A little boy hid behind his mother while the SS man pointed his gun at a man’s head. He was about fifty years old, wearing an undershirt. The Jewish policeman grabbed him and didn’t miss the opportunity to hit him with the truncheon. Although this was awful to watch, I felt a tiny bit relieved: in the lit-up flat I could see that the policeman was not my brother. Barefoot, in his undershirt, the prisoner was dragged out of the flat.
His wife pleaded with the SS man, who nodded after a few moments. Then she followed the men out, taking her child with her
. I couldn’t understand what she was doing. The men had been after her husband, not her.
“She wants to go with them to Pawiak prison,” Daniel whispered, “so she can find out what’s going to happen to him.”
“Who is he?” I whispered back. The lights stayed on in the empty flat.
“Moshe Goldberg, head of the barbers’ union, and one of the leaders of the Bund.”
The Bund was a forbidden organization of socialist Jews. They organized soup kitchens and secret schools and printed pamphlets against the Nazis. Papa had never liked the socialists and wanted nothing to do with them. Goldberg was pushed into the street and ended up under a streetlight. He appeared stoic. He didn’t want to show any fear in front of his little boy, who was being carried by the mother.
The soldiers would force him into the car in a moment. The chauffeur flicked his cigarette away, looking bored. If Goldberg’s family were to fit into the car, too, the mother would have to put the child on her lap.
The SS man went up to the prisoner and gave him an order.
A look of sheer horror spread across Goldberg’s face.
Beside me, Daniel gasped; he seemed to understand what was going on, while I didn’t have a clue. “Oh, God!”
Daniel could still believe in God, despite everything.
I envied Daniel so many things: his selflessness, his decent character, but the fact that he believed in God was what I envied the most. It must be so nice to find comfort in a higher being.
My comfort in this life came from Daniel. I believed in him. I clutched his hand. It was damp now, too.
Goldberg turned around.
Daniel hissed, “Mira, shut your eyes.”
But I was too slow; I didn’t understand. The soldiers took aim and fired. The bullets hit Goldberg in the back and he collapsed on the curb.
I bit my tongue to stop myself from screaming and held Daniel’s hand so tight that I almost crushed his fingers.
Goldberg’s wife screamed. The child started to cry. The SS man took his gun and shot them both in the head.
I bit my tongue so hard, I could taste blood. I cried silently and writhed in pain and anguish.
Daniel put his arms around me and held on. I think he wanted me to believe that everything was just a bad dream. And I wanted to believe it, too. I really did. We could hear more shots in the distance. This wasn’t a bad dream. The SS man Jurek had talked to had been telling the truth: Our “peaceful” life was over.
7
“Sausages!” the street seller with the grimy beard shouted. “Sausages with mustard!” At the sight of those sausages, my mouth started to water, despite the fact that they were small and shriveled and the seller was using his fingers to spread them with mustard, instead of a knife!
Together, Daniel and I wandered through the summer heat from one food cart to the next. For a small sum you could buy beans, soup, potato patties, or those sausages covered with filthy-fingers mustard. My stomach rumbled loudly. But by now I couldn’t even afford the puniest sausage. In the nine weeks since the “Night of Blood,” as it had come to be known in the ghetto, I hadn’t ventured over to the Polish side once because the SS had started to hunt the smugglers in earnest, as well as the underground activists. To emphasize their new brutal course of action, the Germans now drove a truck into the ghetto each morning and threw the bodies onto the street—the people they had caught on the other side of the ghetto wall the day before. The bodies were a warning.
No one was allowed into the graveyard without a permit now, and because I couldn’t afford any forged papers, there was no chance of me even getting a foot inside the gates, let alone through the hole in the wall over to the Polish side. Trying to climb over the wall in any other place was pure suicide these days. If you got anywhere near the wall, the Germans started shooting. We knew SS soldiers sometimes hid ready to jump out and mow down the smugglers with their machine guns. Frankenstein was said to have shot more than three hundred people so far, single-handed. Like most of the rumors in the ghetto, the number was probably exaggerated, but what if he had “only” murdered seventy or eighty people. If a single German monster could kill so many smugglers—or people he suspected might be smugglers—on his own, how many would have been murdered so far by all the guards patrolling the wall? Two hundred? Three hundred? More than a thousand, maybe?
All this didn’t exactly encourage me to risk anything new.
But still.
My stomach was rumbling, and my family had practically nothing left to eat.
“I’ll have to risk it,” I said to Daniel, and sounded far more determined than I actually felt.
Of course my boyfriend knew what I meant when I said “risk it.” We’d talked about it thousands of times; there was nothing else left to talk about these days, but we’d talked ourselves out. Which is why he didn’t repeat any of his endless arguments to try to dissuade me. I’d heard them all many times before. He didn’t warn me that they had started shooting corrupt Jewish policemen, or tell me that last week they’d even killed two women who were pregnant. He just looked at me and hoped that I wouldn’t do anything.
“It’s easy for you,” I said bitterly. “Korczak looks after you. You get fed on a regular basis.”
“It isn’t much,” he answered quietly.
A man beside me took a bite of sausage and clearly enjoyed it. The sight of him made me even more hungry and cross, which is why I snapped at Daniel.
“But at least you get something to eat!”
I was sorry right away. I was well aware that there wasn’t enough food at the orphanage to go around.
It’s not a good idea to pick a fight when you are starving and you are surrounded by the smell of food. I got a grip and explained things more calmly. “I can only afford the cheapest bread,” I said, and showed him the gray loaf I had just bought. “It’s just chalk and sawdust; there’s hardly any real flour in it at all.”
“If you get yourself shot, you won’t be able to buy any kind of bread,” Daniel said. He seemed to be immune to all the smells of food around us. Being an orphan, he had been used to doing without from an early age and could cope with hunger far better than me, a poor, spoiled doctor’s daughter. Why couldn’t I be as strong and steadfast as he was? Of course he was right: If I died, things would be even worse for Hannah and Mama. But if I didn’t do anything, my family was going to starve to death. When all my money was spent—and that would be by next week at the very latest—we wouldn’t even be able to buy the sawdust loaves of bread. What was I supposed to do then?
“Anyway,” Daniel started to tease me, “if you go and get yourself killed, I will murder you!”
I had to laugh at that. “You do have a strange way of saying you love me,” I said.
“At least I do say so.” Straightaway, Daniel tried to cover up the small reproach he’d just let slip by laughing. He was right. I hadn’t ever said the weighty words “I love you.” Precisely because my mother had shown me just how damaging love can be.
Ever since we started going out together, Daniel had been waiting patiently for some kind of commitment from me. Slowly, my silence seemed to be getting to him.
And it was mean of me. What would it cost me to say “I love you.” Just three little words. Daniel was my anchor, after all. Without him I’d have lost my way ages ago.
Tell him now. I took a deep breath, as if I were on the verge of diving into deep water, and said as I let my breath out again, “You know I…”
I didn’t get any further, though, because—silly me—I couldn’t do it.
“You…?” Daniel asked
I was searching for the right words. Why on earth was this so difficult?
“I…”
“Thief, thief!” Suddenly we were interrupted by a woman shouting.
A skinny little girl no more than seven or eight years old ran past us. She was wearing a hat that was far too big, a once-white, now very grubby man’s shirt, and no trousers. And no underwear, as
we could plainly see when the shirt flew up as she ran past, revealing her little bare behind. She was holding an open jar filled with jam. And she dodged through the crowds as fast as she could. The girl was being chased by an old woman in a tattered skirt. I noticed that though she was missing two fingers on her right hand, she had more fingers than teeth!
The girl looked over her shoulder to watch out for the old woman and bumped into the legs of a passerby who started shouting at her. She should be more careful, damn it! He’d string her up from a lamppost if it weren’t such a waste of good rope. The old woman managed to catch up. The girl tried to pull away, taking a couple of panicky steps, but the old woman had grabbed hold of the end of her shirt and she lost her balance, stumbled and fell over, jar in hand. All the jam slopped onto the street.
The girl got down on all fours and started to gobble it up like a dog.
I watched the little thief and wondered what I would end up doing once all my money was gone. If I got as hungry as the girl, would I steal from someone? Eat from the filthy street?
Would Hannah?
Could she turn into such an animal?
I imagined my sister on all fours, and shivered in the summer heat.
Daniel put an arm around me and said softly, “You’ll never be that desperate.”
He knew me inside and out. “No, I won’t,” I replied. “And Hannah won’t be either!” And all at once I was certain; the sight of the girl turned street mongrel had finally convinced me that I had to act to spare my sister such a fate.
I would have to start smuggling again. But not like before. I’d be more cunning this time. And more importantly: I needed help.
Daniel mustn’t know anything about this. I didn’t want him worrying about me, and I didn’t want to argue about it, not even for a second.
“I know that look,” Daniel said.
“Which look?”
“The one that tells me you are going to do something really risky.”
“I’m not going to do anything,” I lied.
“Promise?”