by David Safier
I stood up. Hannah drew a sharp breath but didn’t say anything until I started trying to push the heavy dresser away from the opening to the pantry. My little sister whispered, “What are you doing?” but I didn’t say, “What does it look like?” It didn’t seem right.
I managed to move the dresser far enough away from the door to be able to squeeze through the gap into the kitchen. It took me a few moments to get used to daylight again. I hadn’t seen any for the past two weeks, just the light of the moon and stars when we came out of hiding at night. At last I could see the woman properly. It was the person I was expecting to see: Ruth.
She had lost weight, her hair had been shaved off, and her clothes were in rags. The contrast to her appearance at the Britannia Hotel couldn’t have been any greater.
I called to Hannah, “It is all right. You can come out.”
My little sister crawled out of the pantry carefully, and she, too, needed a moment to adjust to the light. She saw Ruth and was horrified by the look of her, although she didn’t say anything.
Ruth pulled herself up from the ground slowly and said, “Do you have anything to eat?”
I fetched a piece of bread from the pantry where my mother was still sitting.
Hannah asked me quietly, “What happens if the Germans come?”
“Then you go back into the pantry, I push the dresser across the entrance, and they just get me.”
Hannah didn’t look happy. But it was the best I could do if the Germans really came.
Ruth gulped down the bread so fast that she almost choked on it. She coughed, choked, and threw up a small amount of chewed bread, which I wiped away immediately. If the Germans did arrive, I didn’t want telltale signs of food to give us away.
I gave Ruth something to drink, and Hannah went back to Mama, who had stayed sitting in the pantry. She helped her get up. Mama should see some daylight, too, even if she didn’t seem to react to anything anymore. Hannah wanted to take her to the window, but I told her to be careful. No one must see us from the street. And so they stayed standing in the middle of the kitchen. Hannah looked up to the sun, which was something special to her now, while Mama just stared at the floor.
I took Ruth next door. I wanted to know what had happened to her and make sure that Hannah couldn’t hear. But when I asked her, Ruth didn’t say anything. I decided that what had happened must be so terrible that she didn’t want to answer. She sank to the floor again and leaned against the wall. I sat down beside her. Ruth coughed and coughed. It didn’t really sound as if she was sick after all. It was more like she wanted to cough something out of her body—not a sickness, something worse.
She managed to calm herself, and then Ruth said, “Lulay…”
“What?” I asked, not understanding.
As an answer she sang a lullaby.
An awful lullaby.
Lulay, lulay—little one
Lulay, lulay—only son
“What’s that?” I asked Ruth in the hope that the song had some sort of meaning.
Crematorium black and silent
Gates of hell, corpses piled high …
Had she lost her mind? Wonderful, that would make two of them in the flat, then, counting Mama.
Here he lies, my only little boy
Tiny fists pressed in his mouth
How can I cast you into the flames?
With your beautiful golden hair …
She definitely sounded crazy. What if she started singing when the Germans came looking for us? Could I risk letting her hide with us? Or would it be better to send her away at once? No matter if she died or not? Could I even think such a thing?
Now little eyes look calmly at the sky
Cold tears, I hear them crying …
I couldn’t stand this sick lullaby any longer and said, “Please stop singing.”
Oh my boy, your blood is everywhere!
Three years old—your golden hair …
“Please.”
Lulay, lulay—little one
Lulay, lulay—only son
“You’ve got to stop,” I shouted at her.
Ruth flinched and shut up.
I took a deep breath before I asked her, “What on earth was that all about?”
“I heard that song in Treblinka!”
“Treblinka?”
Then Ruth started coughing again.
It took a while before the fit was over and she started to talk. On the second day of the Aktion, she had been rounded up and forced into one of the cattle trucks. During the journey, a lot of people had suffocated and she had had to sleep on top of bodies lying on the floor because she was so weak.
It sounded so awful, it could hardly be true.
“Then we finally reached Treblinka…”
“A labor camp?” I asked.
Ruth laughed. In the most sinister way. And started to cough again.
“What sort of camp is it, then?” I asked, although I was afraid of the answer.
“You are forced to take off your clothes when you arrive. If you are not fast enough you get whipped. And then you walk naked past mountains of bodies. Thousands of stinking bodies. Swollen bodies. They can’t burn or bury the bodies as fast as they gas more people.”
I still didn’t understand. How could the Germans be gassing thousands and thousands of people in the vans?
“They force everyone into the gas chambers naked…”
Chambers? They had built chambers to gas people?
“Afterward, they burn as many as they can and the rest are buried in pits. You can watch the smoke rising in the wind as the bodies burn, and you breathe in the smoke … Mira, you breathe in the dead … breathe in death!”
Ruth had another coughing fit.
Now I understood. She was coughing because she still believed the ash of the burned bodies was in her lungs.
She was trying to get rid of the ash in her body, but it wasn’t possible, no matter how much she coughed and choked. The dead weren’t in her body, they were in her mind. Forever. Korczak and the children were among them. I had saved Daniel from that fate. He should have been grateful, instead of despising me.
“The lullaby,” Ruth went on‚ “I heard a watchmaker sing it. For his little son.”
The Germans were burning children. Was there no end to their monstrosity? They must be beasts and demons, straight out of hell. Victorious. Come to turn the whole world into hell, bit by bit.
“How … how did you manage to survive?”
“I was lucky. Practically no women survive the first twenty-four hours in Treblinka. The strongest men are forced to work. Burying the bodies, sorting the belongings of the dead … but there is only one kind of work for women. For pretty women like me.”
She had always been so proud of her looks. There was none of that pride left now.
“We were there to serve the SS.”
That was what she called luck?
I would have gone to the gas chambers rather than allow those beasts near my body. Although, that’s what I thought here and now, but who knows what I would have thought when I saw piles of corpses. Perhaps I’d even have been jealous of someone like Ruth who could stay alive because she was a whore?
“I was the doll’s favorite for three days,” Ruth said.
“The doll?”
“An SS man. He had such a pretty face that the Jews gave him the nickname ‘the doll.’ He shot Jews every day just for fun, or he beat them to death.”
Enough! It was enough. I didn’t want to hear another word about this camp. Just one last thing, “How did you manage to get away?”
I couldn’t see why the SS would let anyone get out of that hell.
“Shmuel paid the camp commander some money for me. A lot of money!”
The mafia boss had got her out of there. I was surprised that Ruth had meant so much to him.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Ruth smiled weakly. “He loves me.”
And I had never believed her.
“He and five of his men have been taken to Pawiak prison.”
She started coughing again.
I hoped that the coughing wouldn’t give us away and lead us all to Treblinka. Because I could never send my friend away.
26
Ruth sat in the pantry with us during the day from now on. We had to squeeze even closer together, and my bent knees started to ache as soon as I sat down. When we came out of the pantry at night, we could only crawl on our hands and knees at first.
Ruth still coughed, and there was no way I could stop her. It didn’t matter if I asked her nicely, warned her, or yelled at her. She was going to get us all killed if she didn’t stop soon. I started to lose my nerve with Ruth. Not just because I was scared, but also because the coughing reminded me what was going to happen in the end: whips, dogs, and then the gas chambers.
Lulay, lulay …
Hannah was the only person who managed to stay sane. She told more and more stories about the 777 islands. Not for ten hours in one go, of course. But again and again. For half an hour or ten minutes at a time. And when she was telling her story, even Ruth’s coughing stopped. Ruth was spellbound when Hannah and Ben Redhead managed to snatch the second magic mirror away from the Weather Wizard. Once again the two heroes succeeded because of the power of their love. No matter how many blizzards or hailstones or strokes of lightning the wizard bombarded them with, their love was stronger than any storm.
I bet that Ruth was thinking about Shmuel when she listened to the story. I know I was thinking about Daniel. He had stopped loving me because of what I had done. Where was he now, I wondered? Was he still alive?
He had to be alive.
Hannah and Ben reached Scarf Island. An island where all the inhabitants had to wear a scarf and where you could be hanged for not wearing one. Even Ruth grinned when Ben Redhead, who didn’t have a scarf, said, “This whole scarf business is a bum ‘wrap.’”
It was the first time that I had been able to laugh heartily since the deportations began. A happy moment—and for once, I didn’t care whether the SS heard me or not.
27
Simon kept his promise and came to see us every night. And each time, I was frightened that the day had finally come when he could no longer fulfill his quota of Jews and was forced to betray us.
How would that happen? Presumably he wouldn’t chase us out of the house himself, but just tip off the soldiers so they knew where to find us. Then he wouldn’t have to look us in the face when they came to get us and we would never know for sure if he had betrayed us or not.
But Simon managed to find other Jews to send to Treblinka. They were gassed instead of us.
Lulay, lulay …
Would this madness never end? Hundreds of thousands had been murdered by now. Was the very last Jew to be murdered, too?
Day by day, my hopes shrank that we would manage to survive. I even started to cough nervously, as if I already had the ash of the dead in my lungs.
It was actually Simon who improved the situation! What he told me after two and a half weeks of hiding made me come alive for the first time in a long while: Szeryński, the commander of the Jewish police, had been gravely wounded—by Jews.
Yes, exactly, by Jews.
Jews had defended themselves against oppression. For the first time.
There was no other policeman who deserved to die as much as Józef Szeryński did. The pig was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism long before the war and had never wanted anything to do with the Jews. Of course the Nazis couldn’t have cared less, they threw him into the ghetto regardless. A Jew was a Jew as far as they were concerned, even if he thought he was a Catholic. But they were so impressed by Szeryński’s organizational skills and his personal hatred of the Jews—wherever that may have come from—that they made him the head of the Jewish police. He carried out every order he was given with burning ambition. Even, or perhaps especially, during the Aktion. Day by day he personally made sure that enough Jews were forced into the trains at the Umschlagplatz. He sat in a rickshaw, tapping his shoes with his whip in a bored sort of way, and watched the goings-on as if destroying one’s own people were just another bureaucratic task.
Now his rickshaw would be empty!
“The person who shot at Szeryński was a Jewish policeman,” Simon said ambiguously.
I wasn’t quite sure what he thought about all this.
Was he proud that someone from his own ranks had shot the highest-ranking officer and didn’t want to admit it? But probably he was just more nervous than usual. The Jewish policemen would have to fear one another as well as everything else from now on.
“The killer rang Szeryński’s doorbell this morning,” Simon said. “The housekeeper opened the door, and this brute told her that he had a letter he had to give Szeryński personally…”
Simon had said brute—that must mean that he wasn’t pleased that the gunman was a member of the Jewish police.
“As Szeryński came to the door, the brute pulled out his gun. It jammed. Then he tried again and shot Szeryński only in the cheek; it was not immediately fatal. But the killer must have thought that he was dead; at any rate, he leaped onto a motorbike and drove away. In the end, he has got what he wanted. Szeryński is said to be dying.”
This was thrilling news.
I was shocked and agitated. In a strange way that I had never known before, I actually felt happy.
It probably wasn’t right to be happy about an attempted murder, but I was glad anyway, with all my heart. After all the suffering, somebody had hit back!
“Does anyone know who the killer was?” I wanted to know, half hoping it was Amos.
“They didn’t fetch him so far.”
I was even more pleased.
Simon was obviously not happy. “It was one of the policemen who went into hiding at the start of the Aktion…”
And who had a lot more honor than my brother.
“Do they know which group he belongs to?” I asked, and really hoped that it would be Hashomer Hatzair—Amos’s group. Then I would have some kind of connection to all of this. I would know Jews who could defend themselves. I had even kissed one of them!
“It was the ŻOB,” Simon said with a snort.
“ŻOB?”
“A Jewish fighting organization.” He almost spat out the words. I finally understood: Simon had signed a pact with the demons in order to save his life. He had believed that as long as he served them well and spread enough fear and terror himself, he would be saved. But now the beasts were getting more and more unpredictable, sending all those servants who didn’t satisfy their demands to the gas chambers. And the underdogs were starting to get dangerous. A Jew had shot the police commander. How safe was an ordinary policeman like Simon in that case?
“The ŻOB is a union of the youth organizations Dror, Akiba, and Hashomer Hatzair,” Simon explained.
Hashomer Hatzair—Amos was part of this!
“Those pigs,” Simon said, full of anger and fear, “will be the death of us all!”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what Simon was saying.
“If they kill even a single German, we will all be destroyed.”
“They are doing that anyway,” I said.
“But not everyone.”
“Don’t you know what is going on in Treblinka?”
“Of course I know!” His voice was shaking with anger. “But the Germans won’t kill everyone if we don’t provoke them. The Aktion won’t go on forever, and we can survive. We’ll belong to the fifty thousand Jews left in Warsaw to work here for them until the end of the war!”
He didn’t just hope this, he really believed it. He didn’t believe in God, or in himself. He believed in the grace of the beasts and demons. What was the point of arguing? I decided not to say anything. And was secretly pleased that Amos was fighting for our honor. More than pleased. I was filled with pride.
On the same night, Russian planes flew over Warsaw and bombed the city. What a day!
28
The next few weeks in our stuffy dark chamber seemed more bearable somehow. Although our knees and legs ached more and more from day to day, I had found new hope. The Allies must have heard about the crimes of the Germans against the Jews by now. Surely they would—must—come to our aid and bomb the railway tracks to Treblinka soon, so that no more people could be sent to the gas chambers.
When Simon saw us each night, the first thing I always asked him was if there was any news from the resistance movement. My brother was shocked that the ŻOB had set empty houses on fire to stop the Germans from stealing the properties of murdered Jews. I was so pleased by the news that Simon snapped at me, “You’d better hope they don’t set this house on fire, too.”
Even that thought couldn’t dampen my spirits. I imagined joining Amos’s group. I would plan attacks together with the other fighters. Not just against Jewish policemen, but against the SS, too. I would walk up to Frankenstein, holding a gun, and say, “In the name of the Jewish people, I sentence you to death for the murder of countless children!” For one long beautiful moment, I would see the fear in Frankenstein’s eyes. Then I would pull the trigger and fire a bullet straight into that swine’s skull. The Germans had better start worrying. They should be afraid of us. The Jews would get them shaking the way the Allied planes did.
I imagined moving in with the Hashomer Hatzair cell and sleeping in a dorm of mattresses with all the other resistance fighters. I would be one of the bravest ones. Fearing neither death nor torture, I would plan daring missions against the Germans and carry them out. Together with Amos, I would raze the headquarters of the Jewish police to the ground, throw Molotov cocktails at the German trucks, and execute the highest officers. Amos would realize what sort of person I really was, leave his girlfriend to be with me, and we would kiss even more passionately than at the market that time. Far more passionately.