by David Safier
I leaned down and kissed Daniel.
The most precious moment of all.
I hurried up the ladder. As I scrambled out of the hole, Samuel leaped onto the back of the truck just as it was about to move off.
The comrades still in the tunnel weren’t going to make it. Perhaps I wouldn’t, either.
I ran toward the truck, my injured ankle a ball of pain.
It started moving.
Samuel reached out to me. I ran as fast as I could. The pain nearly made me faint.
Samuel grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the truck. I looked round. Amos wasn’t with us.
He was still standing beside the Polish policeman.
“Amos!” I screamed.
He yelled at the policeman, “Get out of here, or I’ll shoot!” The man ran away, and Amos started running, too. Toward us. The truck wasn’t going fast yet, he could still make it.
Two Poles who wanted to cash the ransom money blocked his way.
“Amos!” I screamed again. I wanted to jump off the truck, to help him, but Samuel grabbed hold of me from behind and wouldn’t let me go.
Amos pushed the two Poles out of the way. He had about twenty meters to go.
I struggled to free myself from Samuel’s grasp. But I couldn’t.
The truck gathered speed.
More and more Poles got in Amos’s way.
“Amos!”
He took out his gun and shot into the air.
The Poles ran away.
Our truck turned the corner.
I couldn’t see Amos anymore.
I screamed!
Samuel tried to calm me. He kept telling me, “We’ll come back and get him. We’ll fetch them all!”
I screamed and screamed and screamed.
Then Amos headed round the corner. He was running for his life, getting closer. The comrades reached out their hands toward him. To pull him up.
Amos tried to grab Samuel’s hand.
The truck drove faster.
Amos dropped back.
I couldn’t even scream anymore.
Amos made a last desperate effort and ran even faster. I put out my hand. So did Samuel.
Amos reached for mine …
… and grabbed hold of it.
Don’t let go, don’t let go. Never let go.
Samuel grabbed his other arm, and together we pulled Amos into the back of the truck.
As soon as he was on board we all crawled farther in, closed the tarpaulin, and drove out of the city.
79
I was too distressed to fall into Amos’s arms. I lay exhausted on the floor. The other survivors were quiet all around me, each of us lost in thought. Thinking of those who had died, the comrades we had left behind, the ghetto and the danger that awaited us in the forest.
Rebecca crawled over to me and asked, “Is Daniel still coming?” She was frightened.
I could have lied to her and told her we would go back to get him. But even if we went back to Warsaw in an hour—which was out of the question—Daniel and the others would have been caught or murdered by then. And I didn’t want to lie to her. So I said, “I promised Daniel that I would look after you.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
She wept for Daniel, and I held her tight.
80
Half an hour later, we stopped in Łomianki woods and got out in a clearing. The fresh air was like a drug. After all the hours in the sewers, all the days in the burning ghetto, all the months, even years with practically nothing green, I was intoxicated by the scents of the forest.
People fell into one another’s arms, sank to the ground, by themselves or together, some cried with happiness. Others laughed. I saw Abraham stroking the moss as if he had never touched anything like it before.
My ankle hurt so much that I lay down in the warm grass. Rebecca lay down beside me, her tears dried by now. She put a hand in her pocket, brought out the marble, and held it out to me. The marble rolled round the palm of her little scratched hand and came to rest in the middle. The sun shone through the trees right onto the marble, and it sparkled in every direction just like a diamond. It looked more magical than ever. A real treasure.
“For you,” Rebecca said.
“I … I can’t take that,” I stammered.
“Please…,” she said.
“It is the nicest thing anyone has ever given me.”
“I know.” She smiled, and the dried tears round her eyes sparkled in the sun, too.
To feel the marble in my hand, to smell the wood, the little girl’s smile … there was so much more to the world than my fear.
Rebecca pointed at the marble, and said, “You know what…?”
Her eyes could hardly stay open. I should have let her fall asleep, but I was far too interested to hear what she wanted to tell me about the marble, so I asked, “What do I know?”
“A deer lives in there…,” she mumbled with her eyes closed, “and a unicorn and three fairies … and … a…”
Her voice dropped to a whisper …
“teddy bear…”
… and she fell asleep.
The little glass ball was a world full of friendly creatures.
A world of peace.
Rebecca slept tranquilly, and the sun shone down on us. Amos came over and lay down on the other side of the girl. We watched her like my parents used to watch me when I was little.
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
“A miracle.”
A miracle, indeed.
We couldn’t stop looking at her. For a moment we were the family each of us had lost.
After a while, Amos said in awe, “Twenty-eight days.”
“What?” I asked.
“We resisted the Germans for twenty-eight days.”
Had it been twenty-eight days? Was that really true? I’d never counted. I didn’t have a clue what the date was. Not even what day. Monday? Wednesday? Was it summer yet?
“We held out longer than France!” Amos said proudly.
Something else meant far more to me. We had saved people from hell.
Saved Rebecca.
This wasn’t another Masada where everyone—fighters, women, children—perished and only the legend survived.
It was bigger.
We were alive.
“Amos?”
“Yes?”
“I won’t fight a twenty-ninth day.”
He didn’t know what I meant.
“I’m going to find somewhere to hide with her.”
Then he understood, but he didn’t say anything. He wanted to continue fighting. “Till the end.” The question was, did he want that more than he wanted to be with me?
I hardly dared ask, but I needed to know, even if his answer was going to break my heart. “Will you come with us?”
“Hiding somewhere is dangerous…,” he said slowly.
“More dangerous than fighting to death? I don’t think so!”
Amos struggled to make up his mind. Played with the wedding ring on his finger.
“You’ve repaid your debt…,” I started to say.
“I haven’t…,” he interrupted me.
“… as best you can,” I continued speaking.
No one could ever completely defeat the Mirror King.
Amos didn’t say any more.
I couldn’t breathe. It was like being back in the ghetto I’d left forever—only worse.
Here was a kind of fear I had never felt before.
The fear that he would leave me.
“I…,” Amos said, “I don’t want to abandon our comrades…”
I closed my eyes.
It was so painful.
“But I can’t live without you.”
I kept my eyes closed.
Amos kissed me. He didn’t care how much I stank.
With this kiss in the clearing in the forest in the warm sunlight, I knew what kind of person I was g
oing to be.
One who lived life to the fullest.
Dear Reader,
In the history of the Warsaw Ghetto you can see how truly terrible and how truly magnificent humans can be. All the Jews there were victims of the Nazis, but they acted differently. There were some who sacrificed their own parents just so they could stay alive themselves for a few more days. Yet others, who could have saved their own lives, stayed with their children to their death. There were heroes who took up arms, and heroes who taught the children even though it was punishable by death.
All of these were one part of what inspired me to write this book. The other part was the story of my own family. None of them were in the ghetto of Warsaw. But my father’s father died in the concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1940, and my grandmother died in 1942 in the ghetto of Łódź. As a young man in 1938, my father had to flee from Vienna to Palestine. He had to make similar decisions to those Mira has to make in this novel. He did not fight in the ghetto, but he did fight for Israel’s independence, first in the underground, and later in the military. At some point he decided to no longer bear arms, and he committed himself to the love of his life. He adopted a small girl, my older sister, and he built a family. Despite all the loss and suffering he’d witnessed, he chose life.
Mira, Amos, Daniel, and Hannah are invented figures, but this novel is based on historic facts and eyewitness testimony. Real people did experience things similar to those you have read about. Mira also meets some historic figures, such as the ghetto fighter Mordechai Anielewicz, the fool Rubinstein, and Janusz Korczak, who stayed with the orphans in his charge to their—and his—deaths. I hope that through Mira you experienced a bit what it was like to live and love and fight in the ghetto of Warsaw. That you learned what extraordinary acts humans are capable of, even in the most terrible circumstances. But most of all, how they were still capable of love, just like my father, whose capacity for love could not be destroyed by the Holocaust.
That’s why 28 Days is not just about the past. It’s about all of us. It’s about love, and it’s about those universal questions we all should ask ourselves: What would you do to survive? Would you sacrifice your life for others or would you sacrifice others to save yourself?
And what it really is about is: What kind of human, what kind of mensch do you want to be?
Yours,
David Safier
Thank you for reading this Feiwel and Friends book.
The friends who made
28 DAYS
possible are:
JEAN FEIWEL, Publisher
LIZ SZABLA, Associate Publisher
RICH DEAS, Senior Creative Director
HOLLY WEST, Senior Editor
ANNA ROBERTO, Senior Editor
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KIM WAYMER, Senior Production Manager
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ERIN SIU, Assistant Editor
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About the Author
David Safier is a bestselling German novelist and television writer whose credits include the TV series Berlin, Berlin, for which he was awarded the Adolf Grimme Award and an International Emmy Award for best comedy. He has published adult novels published in Germany, but 28 Days is his first young adult novel, and his first novel published in the US. He lives in Berlin. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by David Safier
English translation copyright © 2014 by Helen MacCormac. First published in Germany by Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, as 28 Tage.
A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
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fiercereads.com
All rights reserved.
“Kolysanka Dla Synka W Krematorium” (“Lullaby for My Little Son in the Crematorium”)
Words: Aaron Liebeskind
English translation taken from liner notes by Peter Wortsman translation © Folkways Records
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
Names: Safier, David, author.|MacCormac, Helen, translator.
Title: 28 days: a novel of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto / David Safier; translated by Helen MacCormac.
Other titles: 28 Tage lange. English|Twenty-eight days
Description: First U.S. edition.|New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2020.|Originally published: Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 2014 in German under the title, 28 Tage lange.|Summary: In Warsaw, Poland, in 1942, Mira faces impossible decisions after learning that the Warsaw ghetto is to be “liquidated,” but a group of young people are planning an uprising against their Nazi captors.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018302|ISBN 9781250237149 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Juvenile fiction.|Jews—Poland—Juvenile fiction.|CYAC: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)— Poland—Fiction.|Jews—Poland—Fiction.|World War, 1939-1945— Underground movements—Fiction.|World War, 1939-1
945—Poland—Fiction.|Warsaw (Poland)—History—Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943—Fiction.|Poland— History—Occupation, 1939-1945—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S2415 Aah 2020|DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018302
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First hardcover edition 2020
eBook edition March 2020
eISBN 9781250237156