He raised his eyebrows, surprised to hear me speaking his language. “I can see that.”
I didn’t know if there was maybe a new law that we couldn’t dance here in the ghetto. Or if Darija had unwittingly offended the soldier by playing the music loud enough to be heard through the windows, or because he didn’t like ballet. Or if he was just in the mood to hurt someone. I had seen soldiers kick elderly men on the street as they passed, simply because they could. In that moment I wished desperately for my father, who always had a ready smile and something new from his oven that he could use to distract the soldiers who sometimes came into the bakery to ask too many questions.
The soldier reached into his pocket, and I screamed. I threw my arms around Darija and pulled her down to the floor with me. I knew he was reaching for his gun, and I was going to die.
Without ever having fallen in love, or finished my book, or studied at university, or held my own baby in my arms.
But there was no gunshot; instead the soldier cleared his throat. When I was brave enough to squint up at him, I saw that he was holding out a business card. Tiny and cream-colored, it said: ERICH SCHÄFER, STUTTGART BALLET. “I was the artistic director there before the occupation,” he said. “If your friend would like to come to me for pointers, I would be happy to provide some.” He inclined his head and left, closing the door behind him.
Darija, who hadn’t understood a word he’d said in German, took the card from my hand. “What did he want from me?”
“To give you dance lessons.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. He used to work for the Stuttgart Ballet.”
Darija leaped to her feet and did a turn around the room, smiling so wide that I fell into the chasm of her happiness. But then, just as quickly, the light in her eyes burned hotter, angrier. “So I am good enough for lessons, but not good enough to walk down Zgierska Street?”
She ripped the business card in half and tossed it into the belly of the woodstove. “At least it is something to burn,” Darija said.
• • •
In retrospect, it’s amazing that Majer—my little nephew—did not get sick before. With my sister and Rubin and six other couples in a tiny apartment, there was always someone coughing or sneezing or running a fever. Majer, though, had been sturdy and adaptable, happy to be carried by Basia or, when he was old enough, to be in a day-care center while she worked in a textile factory. This week, though, Basia had come to my mother, frantic. Majer was coughing. He was running a fever. Last night, he had not been able to catch his breath, and his lips had turned blue.
It was late February 1941. My mother and Basia had stayed up all night with Majer, taking turns holding him. They both had to go to work, though, or risk losing their jobs. With hundreds of people streaming into the ghetto daily from other countries, a worker was easily replaceable. Some people were being sent to work outside the ghetto. We didn’t want to risk breaking our family apart.
Because Majer was sick, my father planned to send Rubin home from the bakery early. This was a big deal for several reasons—the most important ones being that my father did not really have the authority to do that; and that it meant one less man to transport the loaded bread cart to the distribution point storehouse at 4 Jakuba Street. “Minka,” my father announced that morning. “You will come at noon, and you will take Rubin’s place.”
There were no schools anymore, so I had a job, too, as a delivery girl for a leather goods factory that produced and repaired shoes, boots, belts, and holsters. Darija worked there with me; we were sent all over the ghetto on various errands or to make deliveries. It was believed that perhaps I might not be missed if I slipped away, or that if I was, Darija could cover for me for the afternoon. Secretly, I knew my father was thrilled to have me in his bakery. Rubin was not a baker by trade; he had been assigned to work with my father simply because they had been standing in line together to seek employment. Although it did not take an advanced university degree to bake bread, there was definitely an art to it—one that my father used to say I had in spades. I knew instinctively how much bread to pinch from the amorphous mass of dough in order to make a batard that was exactly thirteen inches long. I could braid six strands of challah in my sleep. But Rubin, he was constantly messing up—mixing a dough that was too wet or too dry, daydreaming when he should have been using the peel to move the loaves in the brick oven before the bottom crusts burned.
After running a midday errand, I slipped off to the bakery instead of returning to the shoe factory. I happened to catch sight of myself in the plate-glass window of a Fabrik where textiles were manufactured. At first I averted my eyes—that’s what I did when I passed people on the street, mostly. It was just too sad to look at others, to see your own pain written across their faces. But then I realized that it was just my reflection—and yet, oddly unfamiliar. The chubby cheeks and baby fat I’d carried around last year were gone. My cheekbones were sharp and angular, my eyes huge in my face. My hair, which had once been my pride and joy—long and thick—was matted and dry, hidden underneath my wool cap. I was skinny enough to be a ballerina, like Darija.
I wondered how I hadn’t noticed the weight slipping off me or for that matter, anyone else in my family. We were all starving, all the time. Even with our extra bread ration, there was never enough food, and what there was was spoiled, rotten, or rancid. As I walked into the bakery I spied my father, stripped to his undershirt in front of the brick ovens, sweating in the blistering heat. His muscles were no longer beefy, just striated like rope. His belly was flat, his cheeks hollow. And yet, to me, he still seemed a commanding presence in the room as he shouted directions to his workers and simultaneously shaped dough to rest on a plank. “Minusia,” he said, his voice ringing out across the floured table. “Come help me over here.”
Rubin nodded at me and slipped off his apron. He had arranged with my father to leave through the back door of the bakery, but he wasn’t going to announce his departure, lest someone else see it as a special favor. I stepped up beside my father and began to expertly rip pieces of dough and shape them into batards. “How was work today?” he asked.
I shrugged. “The same. What news have you had about Majer?”
My father shook his head. “Nothing. But no news is good news.”
And that was all we said. Even talking took too much energy when we had a set number of loaves to produce before the transport to the warehouse. I thought instead of what it used to be like inside my father’s own bakery, how sometimes he would sing in a scratchy baritone and how Basia, at the register, would say he was scaring away customers. I remembered the way the light would slant inside at about four thirty in the summer, when the sun was beginning to slip behind the buildings across the street; how I would curl up in the padded window seat with one of my schoolbooks and doze off, my stomach full from the roll my father had made me, cinnamon sugar dusting my skirt like glitter. How he would shake me awake, asking what he’d done to deserve such a lazy girl, smiling the whole time so that I knew he meant the exact opposite.
And I thought of Majer, who had just learned to say my name.
When it was nearly time for us to load the loaves into baskets and transport them to Jakuba Street, the door opened, letting in a flickering tongue of cold air. Rubin walked back into the bakery, his hands buried in his pockets, his chin ducked into the scarf wrapped around his neck. “Rubin?” I said, my stomach flipping. If he was here, it could only be to tell us something awful.
He shook his head. “Nothing’s changed,” Rubin said. “Basia and your mother are home now with Majer.” He turned to my father and shrugged. “It was doing me no good to sit around there.”
“Then grab a basket,” my father said, squeezing Rubin’s shoulder.
Rubin and I and the other bakery employees began to load up the bread from the wire racks where it cooled. It was backbreaking work—loaves weigh more than you’d think when packed tightly together. I
ferried baskets from the bakery into the cart that was pulled up to the front door. Three little boys gathered on the stoop across the street. They were shivering, but they stood in the snow, stamping their feet, for as long as we were out there. They could smell the steam and the flour, which was the next best thing to eating the bread itself.
When it was full, my father walked behind the cart and pushed, while two of the stronger employees grabbed the yoke in the front to tug. He motioned to me to walk beside him, because I hadn’t the strength to pull. “Oh!” I cried out, remembering that I’d left my scarf wrapped around the neck of a chair inside. “I’ll be right back.” I ran into the bakery again to find Rubin still inside. He had unbuttoned his coat partway and was slipping a loaf beneath his clothing.
Our eyes met.
Bread smuggling was a crime. So was any speculation on the black market for foodstuffs. But occasionally people would sell their rations on the black market, usually because something tragic made it necessary.
“Minka,” Rubin said evenly. “You saw nothing.”
I nodded. I had to. Because if I turned Rubin in to my father, he would look the other way. And if Rubin was caught trading that bread for something else and it was discovered that my father had been in on the theft, he could be punished, too.
As the cart creaked toward Jakuba Street, with a plume of steam rising from the bread and teasing our nostrils, Rubin disappeared. One minute he was walking behind me; the next, he was gone. My father did not comment, which made me wonder if maybe he already knew what I was trying so hard not to tell him.
• • •
I lied to my father and told him I had to give Darija a book I had borrowed and would meet him at our house before curfew. Instead, I went to the spot in town where I had seen the deals happening between smugglers and thieves, hoping to catch Rubin before he did something stupid. At nightfall, when the sky was gray and blending with the cobblestones and you could not be sure if what you were seeing was real, those who were desperate moved through the shadows, willing to trade their food, their jewels, their souls.
It was easy to find Basia’s husband, with his red beard and the loaf of bread wrapped in brown paper. “Rubin!” I cried out. “Wait!” He looked up at me, as did the man with the hollow black eyes who was taking the package from him.
One moment the parcel was there, and the next it was hidden, slipped somewhere in the ratty folds of the other man’s coat.
“Whatever you’re doing,” I begged, grabbing Rubin’s arm, “don’t. Basia wouldn’t want you to.”
Rubin shrugged me off. “You’re a child, Minka. You don’t know anything.”
But I wasn’t a child. There were none left in this ghetto, really. We had all grown up by default. Even a baby like Majer was not a child, because he would have no memory of a life that wasn’t like this one.
“Get rid of the girl,” the man hissed. “Or the deal’s off.”
I ignored him. “What could possibly be worth your own life?”
Rubin, who had kissed me on the forehead the night he got engaged to Basia and told me he had always wanted a little sister; who had found me a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales written in German for my last birthday; who had promised me he would interview any boy who dared to ask me out on a date—Rubin shoved me away so hard that I fell down.
My woolen stockings tore. Sitting up, I rubbed my knee where I had scraped it on the cobblestones. I watched the man press a small brown packet into Rubin’s palm.
At the very same instant, there was a shout, and a whistle, and suddenly Rubin and the other man were surrounded by three soldiers. “Minka!” Rubin shouted, and he threw the bag at me.
I caught it just as he was shoved to the ground. The butt of a rifle was smacked into the side of Rubin’s head, and I started to run.
I did not stop—not when I reached the bridge over Zgierska Street, not even when I knew that none of the soldiers was pursuing me. Instead, I flew back home, burst through the doors, and collapsed into my mother’s arms. Sobbing, I told her about Rubin. Basia, who was standing in the doorway with a wailing Majer, started to scream.
It was then that I remembered the package I was still clutching. I held out my hand, and my fingers opened like the petals of a rose.
My mother cut the twine with a kitchen knife. The paper, waxy and mottled, fell away to reveal a tiny vial of medicine.
What could possibly be worth your own life? I had pleaded.
His son’s.
• • •
Information in the ghetto traveled now like a wisteria vine: twisted, convoluted, and blooming from time to time with unlikely bursts of color. It was through this network that we learned Rubin had been put in prison. Yet even though Basia went daily to see him, she was not allowed in.
My father tried to use every business connection he had outside the ghetto to find information about Rubin, or better yet, to bring him home. But the connections that had gotten me into Catholic school back then were meaningless now. Unless my father happened to be friends with an SS officer, Rubin was going to remain in jail.
It made me think of Darija’s policeman, the one from the Stuttgart Ballet. There was no guarantee that he would be in a position to help, and yet, he had been a name in a sea of German uniforms. But Darija had burned his card, and so even that tiny spark of possibility was lost to me.
We did not know what would happen to Rubin, yet earlier that month, Chairman Rumkowski had issued a statement: thieves and criminals would be sent to do manual labor in Germany. It was the Eldest’s way of removing the riffraff from our community. And yet, who would ever have thought of Rubin as riffraff? I wondered how many people in prison were actually criminals at all.
The thought of Rubin being shipped away left Basia inconsolable, even though she had Majer—who had improved quickly once he’d started taking the medicine—to think of. One night she slipped into my room. It was just after 3:00 a.m., and I immediately assumed something was wrong with the baby. “What is it?”
“I need your help,” Basia said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re smart.”
It was rare for Basia to admit she needed anything from me, much less my intelligence. I sat up in bed. “You’re thinking of doing something stupid,” I guessed.
“Not stupid. Necessary.”
That reminded me of Rubin, selling the bread. Angry, I stared at her. “Do either of you even care that you have a little boy who depends on you? What if you wind up being arrested, too?”
“That’s why I’m asking you for help,” Basia said. “Please, Minka.”
“You’re Rubin’s wife. If you can’t get into the prison to see him, there’s nothing I’ll be able to do.”
“I know,” Basia said softly. “But that’s not who I’m going to see.”
• • •
Chaim Rumkowski’s reputation in the ghetto sat squarely on the fine line between love and hate. You had to publicly admire the chairman or your life could be hell, since he was the one who granted favors, housing, and food. But you also had to wonder about a man who had willingly agreed to deal with the Germans, to starve his own people, and to explain away the horrible conditions we were living in by saying at least we were alive.
There were rumors, too, that Rumkowski had a weakness for pretty girls. Which was exactly what Basia and I were counting on.
It hadn’t been hard to get my mother to watch Majer by explaining that Basia was once again going to try to get into the prison to see her husband. It made sense, too, that she would want to dress in her best outfit and style her hair to look as pretty as she could for her husband. I didn’t lie to my mother; I just neglected to mention that our destination was not the prison but instead Chairman Rumkowski’s office.
There was nothing I could say that my sister could not have said herself to talk her way into a private audience with the Eldest of the Jews, but I understood why she wanted me there. For courage, going in; and for suppo
rt, going out.
His office looked palatial compared to the cramped quarters of our apartment or the bakery. He had staff, of course. His secretary—a woman who smelled of perfume, instead of grime and smoke, like us—took one look at me and flicked a glance at a Jewish policeman standing like a sentry in front of a closed door. “The chairman isn’t in,” she said.
Rumkowski spent a lot of time traveling around the ghetto—having schoolchildren paraded around in front of him, giving speeches, officiating at wedding ceremonies, or visiting the Fabriken that he thought would make us indispensable to the Germans. So it was not impossible that he would not be present when Basia and I came to his headquarters. But we had been sitting in the cold for hours, and had seen the chairman enter the building surrounded by an entourage no more than fifteen minutes ago.
He was easily recognizable, with his shock of white hair and his round black glasses, his heavy wool coat with its yellow star on the sleeve. It was that emblem that had made me grab Basia’s hand outside when she shivered as he passed. “You see,” I whispered. “In the end he’s no different than you or me.”
So I looked the secretary in the eye and said, “You’re lying.”
Her eyebrows rose. “The chairman isn’t in,” she repeated. “And if he were, he would not see you without an appointment. And he does not have any openings for the next month.”
I knew this, too, was a lie, because I had heard her on the telephone arrange a meeting with the head of the Provisioning Department tomorrow morning at nine. I opened my mouth to say so, but Basia elbowed me in the ribs. “I’m sorry,” she said, stepping forward and averting her gaze. “I think you may have dropped these?”
She held out a pair of earrings. I knew that the secretary had not dropped these. They had, in fact, been screwed into my sister’s ears when she dressed for our outing. They were a beautiful pair of pearls that had been a wedding gift from Rubin. “Basia!” I gasped. “You can’t!”
She smiled at the secretary and spoke through her teeth to me. “Shut up, Minka.”
The woman pursed her lips, then plucked the earrings out of my sister’s hand. “No promises,” she said.
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