by David Safier
But these children didn’t need to be forced along. Led by Korczak, they headed off in an orderly fashion, along the ghetto streets in the midday sun.
The flag of King Macius fluttered gently in the breeze.
And they reminded me of the little king who strode to his execution with his head held high.
Did the children remember the story, too?
Because they were walking with heads held high.
And singing a song:
“And though the storm engulfs us,
Steadfast we remain.”
Some of the Jewish policemen started to cry.
And I cried, too, as the children sang.
23
Daniel woke up in the late afternoon. I was afraid. I’d done the right thing. I knew I had! But would Daniel think so, too?
He sat up and fingered the back of his head. It must have hurt terribly, but Daniel showed no reaction. He just looked at his fingers, which were sticky with blood.
It took forever before he even looked at me. His eyes told me that he could not believe what I had done. But he didn’t even ask for an explanation. He got to his feet too fast, and swayed. I went to help him, but he pushed my arms away roughly. I was stunned and moved back.
Daniel had no idea how many hours had gone by, hadn’t noticed that the sun was much lower now. He walked to the skylight.
“They are all gone,” I said quietly.
He opened the skylight anyway. He hadn’t heard me. Or else he didn’t want to hear me.
“They are all gone,” I repeated a little bit louder. And when he still didn’t react, I said, “They … they’ll be on the trains by now.”
Daniel turned back to me slowly. He fought back tears. Tears of rage.
“You had no right!”
“I … I,” I stammered, and tried to tell him that he had left me no choice.
“You had no right.”
“You would be dead…,” was all I could say.
“My place was with them.”
“I couldn’t bear it,” I whispered.
His eyes glistened with hatred. As far as he was concerned, it was my fault that Korczak and the children were gone. Nothing to do with the SS. It was my fault that he would have to live without his family from now on instead of going with them to what Korczak had termed a better world.
“I love you,” I said to him for the first time.
No one ever hated me more than Daniel did at that moment.
24
I walked through the streets of the ghetto in a trance. I didn’t feel a thing. No heat, no thirst. I didn’t look where I was going, not even to see if there was a roadblock round the next corner. My heart was full of emptiness.
I knew I’d lost Daniel forever.
I only remembered that I had set out to find Simon when I finally reached our door. And I only remembered because my brother was walking toward the house from the other direction, carrying a basket loaded with bread, ham, and cheese. I had no appetite left, although my body must have been craving food.
“We need to talk,” Simon said as soon as we met in front of our house.
I didn’t answer.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said again.
“You are talking,” I answered bleakly, and sat down on the steps. On the opposite side of the street, you could see the sunset behind the houses. A fiery burst of colors. I wanted to drown in it forever.
“We need to find you a hiding place,” Simon urged.
I didn’t say anything. I was watching the fiery sky.
“God, Mira!” Simon grabbed hold of my shoulders and made me look at him.
“No one is safe. They are going to get everyone!”
His breath stank of cigarettes. When did he start smoking? Why did I care?
“They’ll keep searching the houses, again and again,” he ranted. “There aren’t enough people going to the Umschlagplatz voluntarily, not even for the jam, so they are threatening the police now. If we don’t catch five Jews a day, we’ll be deported.”
He got my attention at last. “You … hand over Jews?”
“What else am I supposed to do?” he asked in despair.
Daniel wanted to die together with his orphan brothers and sisters, and my brother sent people to death in order to save himself.
What kind of human do you want to be?
“But,” he tried to defend himself, “I only take people I don’t know to the trains.”
What was that supposed to mean? What sort of excuse was that for what he was doing?
“I’ve seen policemen chase their own parents to the Umschlagplatz…”
“What?”
“Those pigs said that their parents had lived their lives already,” Simon explained, “and that they had their lives ahead of them.”
He was calling his own colleagues pigs, as if it made him look better somehow.
“I would never send my own family to death,” he said in desperation. “You’ve got to believe me.”
Wouldn’t he? Why couldn’t I trust my own brother?
“Do you believe me, Mira? Do you believe me?” Simon kept shaking me.
He wasn’t going to calm down until I lied.
“All right, I believe you.”
He let go of me and insisted, “We have to hide you.”
Simon wanted to help us, to convince himself that he wasn’t a pig like the others. So this was why he’d turned up again after all this time. To ease his conscience. To prove that he was a good person who was only forced to do evil.
We went into the house, and he explained as we climbed the stairs, “I’ll bring food every day. I can get hold of plenty.”
“Do you have that much money?” I asked, and then regretted it. I had a pretty good idea where the money was coming from. From desperate Jews who paid bribes to be spared.
“I got married,” Simon answered.
I didn’t understand.
“She’s called Leah; she’s a rich Jew’s daughter. He gave me money to do it. A lot of money.”
And as a policeman’s wife she wouldn’t be deported. Love in the ghetto had come to an end.
When we reached our flat, Simon put the basket of food on the table. Mama tried to hug him to thank him, but he warded her off. He wanted to stop her asking questions about where all the wonderful food had come from, and he didn’t want to have to explain that she had a daughter-in-law now, too.
He didn’t want to speak to Hannah, either. He wanted to be our hero.
Instead of talking, Simon ran into the kitchen, to the little pantry. Its empty shelves were a silent reminder that we had never really appreciated the times when they were full until it was too late.
“This is a good hiding place,” Simon said.
“We won’t all fit in there,” I answered.
“You will if I take out the shelves. All three of you can sit down then.”
“Only with drawn-up knees.”
“But you can do it.”
“The Germans will look in the pantry,” I said.
“Not if something heavy is put in front of it, and you can’t even see the pantry in the first place…”
He ran into the living room. I followed him over to a huge kitchen dresser. Its glass doors were filthy and cracked, and there were a lot of not very clean cups and plates inside, left behind by the family from Kraków.
“This dresser is big enough to hide the pantry,” Simon decided. “You go in there early in the morning before the sun comes up, and I’ll push the dresser in front of the door. And when the Germans stop looking after dark, I’ll push it out of the way and you can come out again.”
“What about air? Won’t we suffocate in there?”
“I’ll take out the door. That way enough air can get in through the space behind the dresser.”
“And what if the Germans see the door and shelves lying around?” I didn’t like this idea.
“I’ll break them up, so you can’t tell what they’r
e supposed to be and take them down to the cellar.”
“And what happens if you don’t come back at night?”
“You’ll be able to push away the dresser from inside. So you can always get out. You just need me to push it back again when you are all in there.”
I still didn’t want to agree to any of this. It wasn’t because I couldn’t see the need for a hiding place. And I wasn’t worried about spending hours cramped in the dark. Something else was bothering me.
“So we are to put our lives in your hands?”
“I’ll bring you food and water every night.”
“I just asked you something.”
“Do you have any choice?” Simon answered, insulted.
I had no choice. But I didn’t want to admit it. So I replied, “There is always a choice.”
“The trains,” Simon said. “There’s your choice.”
There was nothing left to say. But I still wasn’t ready to agree to all this.
“What happens when you can’t fulfill your quota?” I asked him. “Will you give away our hiding place so that you can stay alive?”
Simon was furious. “You think I would do that?”
“Be realistic!”
“That will never happen!” He was almost frantic.
“I find that hard to believe,” I retaliated.
“I swear,” he said in a trembling voice. Above all, I think he was trying to convince himself. I stopped arguing. Because there was no point. I really didn’t have any choice. But for Simon this meant that I trusted him at last. He gave a sigh of relief and started to get the pantry ready. I helped. It was the first time for ages that we did something together. The last time was when we had put on a play for Mama’s fortieth birthday. Hannah had written it and called it Brothers and Sisters Stay Together Forever—Even If They’re Idiots.
I wish!
We didn’t say a word while we broke the shelves off the wall: Simon was determined to get this right, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel.
I’d saved his life. I held on to that thought. It was all I had. It would have to do for now, to give me strength. I had lost the support Daniel had given me forever. I would have given up when my father killed himself if it hadn’t been for Daniel. How long could I cope without him before I gave up now? Let myself be dragged to the trains for a jar of jam? How long would my strength last if no one was sharing theirs with me? How long could I be strong for my sister?
It took several hours to clean out the pantry, demolish the shelves and door, and take everything down to the cellar. Then we moved the dresser into the kitchen. It was past midnight when we were finally done and Simon and I started talking again.
“Where can I stay tonight?” he asked. It was too dangerous to run around in the ghetto at night, even if you were a Jewish policeman.
“Take my mattress,” I offered. I didn’t want to stay in the room that had been Daniel’s and my retreat the past few days. I went to share with Mama. She turned away from me in her sleep. I closed my eyes. I held on to the fact that Daniel was still alive with all my might, even though I’d managed to lose him. There were worse comforts in the world.
A few hours later, Simon woke us up. It was still dark. Of course. We took food and water into the pantry and sat down on the dirty wooden floor. It was too cramped to lie down, and we had to sit with our legs bent. Simon pushed the dresser across the doorway, and we lit a small candle so that we didn’t have to stay in the dark. Of course, we would blow it out at the slightest hint of someone coming into the flat.
“I’ll let you out tonight,” we heard Simon say, “and bring something more to eat.”
“You are a good person,” Mama said to him.
I laughed scornfully.
Neither my mother nor my brother reacted.
The sound of Simon’s footsteps disappeared, and Hannah sighed, “So this is our new home. Smells pretty bad.”
The candlelight lit up her sad little face. The rest of our “new home” was hidden in darkness.
“I’m going to miss the daylight.”
I would have liked to comfort Hannah. Help make her time in the cramped dark space more bearable, but I simply couldn’t. I didn’t have enough strength left.
Instead, it was Hannah who stopped me from going mad in the weeks to come. As the world outside in the ghetto got more and more terrible—Simon told us on his evening visits that no one was safe anymore, not the people in the workshops or the members of the Jewish council—Hannah whisked us away to the world of the 777 islands. Really, she only took me with her. Mama disappeared into her own world, to her memories of Papa. Day by day, she became less aware of us, and after five days in the dark pantry she stopped talking altogether.
There were times when I envied her. It would certainly have felt better to live just in my memories of Daniel instead of knowing that I was in a hiding place that could be discovered by the SS at any moment.
In the world of the 777 islands, Hannah had the wildest adventures. Together with her dear friend Ben Redhead, Captain Carrot, and his werewolf sailor, she set off to find the three magic mirrors that would make it possible to defeat the evil Mirror King who already held 333 of the 777 islands in his power. The Mirror King was terribly cruel to his enemies. He locked them away in distortion mirrors where they had to stay forever as twisted mirror images. And this happened to many innocent creatures, too. No matter if they were children, living lanterns, or singing squirrels—the tyrant didn’t care.
And all the time, Hannah brought the beauty of the 777 islands to life—the sea was so wide, the sunsets lasted forever, the flowers were every color under the rainbow. I longed to live there. Why wasn’t that the real world and ours the imaginary one? Why couldn’t our world have been invented by a storyteller living on one of the islands? Someone who told horror stories about the ghetto to the members of his tribe sitting round the fire before they went to sleep? A storyteller would have been able to make up a happy ending for us, and we’d get to live happily ever after once the suffering was over.
Or maybe we were invented, and our storyteller was a very nasty man.
When Hannah’s heroes met the Scarecrow Dread on the Island of Fear to get their first magic mirror, Dread used a terrible charm made from straw. It was a charm that forced you to face your greatest fear. Once the fear filled someone’s mind, they were usually lost.
Captain Carrot watched his beloved ship, the Longear, sink beneath the waves. The werewolf saw his teeth falling out, one by one. Hannah and Ben Redhead had to face the worst fear of all: Hannah saw that Ben Redhead was going to die. And Ben Redhead saw that Hannah was going to die. And they learned that love and fear were very closely linked together.
But they were the first to resist the power of the straw charm because there was something Dread didn’t realize. The love they shared was greater than any fear.
25
One morning—or was it already afternoon? We had no sense of time in the pantry—I heard a quiet coughing sound.
“The captain drew his sword,” Hannah was just telling us when I heard the coughing again. A bit louder.
“… and the rattling skeleton said…”
“Shh!” I hissed at my sister. But Hannah was lost in her story and continued, “Feel my hatchet, Captain Carrot!”
“Shh!” I hissed more insistently, and blew out the candle. That shut her up at once. We both strained our ears. Was Mama listening, too?
Surely it was just another false alarm. It had to be.
We had had quite a few of those in the past few days. We’d thought we heard doors being opened, or people creeping through the flat. It turned out the door noise was because we’d left a window open to air the place and the draft had moved the doors a little. The other sounds must have been mice.
Another cough.
The kitchen door opened.
I could hear my heart beating. I even thought I could hear Hannah’s heart beating. For a moment I was sure tha
t whoever was out there must be able to hear our hearts beating, too, right through our chests and the heavy dresser.
The steps came closer. But they didn’t sound like boots. Please let it be some poor person hunting for food, who would be gone in a minute.
Would we be turned in if the person found us?
No way. That would be crazy; he or she would end up being sent to death by the Germans, too. Unless of course whoever it was couldn’t care less and handed us over for the sake of an extra piece of bread on the way to the Umschlagplatz.
The coughing got closer.
It didn’t sound like someone old, more like someone young. Maybe a woman? Whoever it was must be sick. Was it Daniel? I tried to remember how Daniel used to cough. Did he sound like that?
No, the cough out in the kitchen sounded very different. It was stupid to hope that Daniel might have changed his mind and come to find me.
Whoever it was seemed to have stopped directly in front of the dresser. Did the person know that we were hiding behind it? If so, why didn’t they try to push it out of the way? Would whomever it was fetch the Germans first?
Hannah and I held our breath. Only Mama continued breathing normally. In and out. In and out. She hadn’t even noticed that we had put out the candle and were sitting in the dark. I wished I could make her stop.
“Mira,” I heard a pitiful cry from the other side.
I couldn’t believe it. The woman—it was definitely a woman—knew my name.
“Mira, are you here?”
If she knew me, then I must know her, too.
She stopped calling. The dresser rattled. Had she found us? Was she going to push the dresser out of the way?
We could hear her sitting down. She must have leaned against the dresser and slid down to the ground. Which is why it had wobbled.
The woman stayed sitting where she was. She continued to cough but she didn’t say anything. In my mind I could still hear the sound of her voice, “Mira, are you here?” And all at once I knew who was sitting on the floor leaning against the dresser in our kitchen.