The Night of the Burning

by Linda Press Wulf

  “Shoo!” the man in Warsaw admonished some children who had edged closer. “Move away! Don’t bump me.” With great self-importance, he unfolded three tall metal legs into a triangle and attached the small box to the top corner. Then he hung a trailing black cloth over the long-legged box with a grand flourish and, without even a goodbye, climbed right under the cloth himself. His large bottom stuck out the back.

  “Hee, hee!” A couple of children giggled. “Peep-oh! We can see you.”

  “Be polite,” Mr. Bobrow said reprovingly, nudging his glasses into place as he hurried up to the crowd. “This man is a photographer. He uses that cloth to keep the light out of his camera. He’s going to take photographs of you for your passports. Now, no pushing. I’ll divide you into groups: twenty children in each photograph.”

  I searched quickly for Nechama and squeezed my way through the line to reach her. Sisters should be in the same photograph.

  Faygele, the little actress from the train, sat in front of us for the photographs. Her straw mattress was next to ours at night. Faygele was a chatterbox. “I love Mr. Ochberg,” she had whispered to me one night after Nechama fell asleep. “Some of us call him Daddy Ochberg now. He’s taking us across the ocean.”

  “Yes,” I replied briefly. I didn’t feel like talking, but Faygele was not easily put off.

  “I’m frightened of the ocean, Devorah. And of Africa. Aren’t you frightened of Africa?”

  “Yes,” I said again. If Faygele was frightened, why was she so cheerful all the time? Her busy chatter was as silly as Nechama’s childish giggles.

  “But I said yes right away when he asked me to come with him,” Faygele remembered. She sat up on her mattress and leaned closer to me, her eyes shining. “Don’t you think I was brave?”

  “We’re all either brave or crazy,” I muttered. “And there’s no turning back now.” I wasn’t going to tell her that I lay awake for hours at night, bargaining with God, begging my parents, trying with all my might to go back in time to our life before. But when I saw little Faygele’s puzzled eyes, I felt guilty. “Yes, you were brave,” I said.

  Each night, Nechama would grow quiet as darkness fell. She refused to lie on her own mattress and would climb under my blanket and curl into my arms. I loved those moments when she’d show how much she needed me. Often she awoke shuddering and trembling from nightmares, her body damp with perspiration.

  “Big knife,” she whimpered one night, clinging to me. “He had a big knife … Aunt Friedka, heavy …”

  “Shh, shh, it’ll be all right,” I whispered, stroking Nechama’s twining curls. “I’ll sing Papa’s song if you want. Shh, shh.” I sang the old Yiddish lullaby softly, until I felt Nechama’s tense body relax. Her lips parted in quiet, even breathing. I breathed quietly, too, feeling satisfied for a while. Only I knew how to take care of Nechama, how to soothe my sister. The nights were long, but we were together.

  In the mornings, however, Nechama awoke as cheerful as a bird, while I lay heavy and numb. After breakfast we had English classes, and then Nechama went off with Malke from Pinsk and her new little friend, Jente. I felt as if my strength went with her, leaving me limp and drained. Mainly I sat on my little iron cot, feeling tired down to my very bones, staring first at my photograph and then out of the window at the weak sun or the gray rain. Once or twice, Mr. Ochberg came over to lift my chin and look worriedly into my eyes, but I was too weary to wonder why.

  The only part of the day I looked forward to was lunch with Madame Engel. Regina Engel was a well-known and generous Jewish widow who owned a large restaurant in Warsaw. She had thick, very wavy hair like mine, strong black eyebrows, and a handsome straight nose. She held herself upright and ruled her restaurant like a general. Every day we received a message from her telling us when it would be convenient for us to come for lunch, either before or after the rush of her usual customers. Then two hundred of us would line up and walk in neat pairs through the tree-lined cobblestone streets to the restaurant.

  On our walks, I stared at the grand buildings and carved marble monuments, which alternated with piles of stone and rubble left by the war. On almost every corner, women and children as thin and sick as Mama had been begged for coins. I remembered Mama’s shrunken thighs, her belly swollen with emptiness, the dry paper-thin skin stretched over her bones. I couldn’t do anything for her. And I couldn’t do anything for these people.

  Once or twice we saw people in fur coats, too, stepping from their carriages into stately homes.

  “I wonder what they do behind those doors,” I whispered to Nechama.

  “Eat, of course. And dance with their friends,” she replied with certainty.

  The first time we visited Madame Engel’s restaurant, we were all silent throughout the meal. A weekday seemed like Shabbes in that great, majestic room, with snowy tablecloths cascading to the ground, silver candelabra, and red velvet curtains as soft as the Torah cover before the Night of the Burning. Waitresses in ruffled aprons moved quietly in the hushed atmosphere. Something on the ceiling caught my eye and I stared. Painted up there were fat baby boy angels without any clothes on at all. I quickly looked down again at the food, thick lentil soup and bread. Afterward came rolled-up cabbage leaves stuffed with potatoes and onions. Everything was tasty, and the helpings were generous, too.

  One lunchtime, I saw Isaac Ochberg point me out to Madame Engel and then whisper into her ear. I froze. What had Mr. Ochberg said? What had I done to make myself conspicuous?

  A few moments later, Madame Engel glided straight toward me like a ship.

  “You will stay at my restaurant a bit longer today, little one,” she said in a firm but kind voice. “Come and sit with me in my kitchen. I want you to taste a new recipe I am trying out. You will help me.”

  I flushed red, but found myself standing up and following her. It was not possible to say no to Madame Engel. And somehow I didn’t really want to. I began eating my lunch in the kitchen every day and then staying there for a couple of hours. Madame bustled around, giving the maids rapid-fire orders.

  “Quickly, wash all those children’s bowls. Maria, you dry and put them away—not so high up, Maria, we’ll need them again tomorrow. Good, now let’s hurry up with the regular customers’ dinner. We have one large party arriving in thirty minutes. Gerda, set the big table at the back with the best silver. Don’t forget to light the candles.”

  The kitchen was many times bigger than my entire old home, scrubbed spotlessly clean, gleaming with copper pots and towering samovars. Two huge stoves made the air warm and steamy. I sipped my soup slowly just outside the bustle, at a tiny table set up especially for me. “What do you think, mamaleh? Too salty? Too much onion?” Madame would ask. Sometimes she would stroke my cheek as she passed.

  It was all simple food because there was little to be bought at the market, but everything she made tasted delicious to me.

  Why did she choose me? I asked myself again and again. At first Mr. Ochberg pointed me out to her for some reason I don’t understand, but since then she has seemed to like me more than the other girls. She asks my opinion as if she really cares what I think. Even Mama never did that.

  Once Madame stopped bustling around the kitchen and looked at me as I watched her. Her heavy dark brows relaxed for a moment and she smiled. “Such eyes,” she murmured. “Huge dark eyes with the whole world in them.” Then she shook her head and strode back to the big stove. I wondered what it was that she’d seen in my eyes.

  How good Madame was. How quickly I grew to love her with all my heart. At night I had long fantasies that she would let me stay in her sweet-smelling kitchen forever—with Nechama, too, of course. We would remain in Poland and learn how to help her in the restaurant, and then we wouldn’t have to move to that strange, frightening land: Africa.

  THE BEGINNING OF THE BAD TIME

  1916–19

  The bad time in my home began when I was about seven, on the morning Uncle Pinchas came back. That shoul
d have been the happiest moment for our family, but it turned out to be the beginning of the end.

  One Shabbes in fall, Nechama and I slept at Aunt Friedka’s house.

  “Stay with your aunt this Shabbes,” Mama had told us. “She’s lonely.”

  Very early on Saturday morning, Aunt Friedka, Nechama, and I were all asleep together in the big bed. Suddenly we were awakened by the loud clatter of a cart stopping outside the door.

  “Your man is home,” a rough voice shouted in Polish. “Come and get him.”

  I reached for my aunt, but my fingers touched empty sheets. Aunt Friedka was already out of bed, at the door. As if even in her sleep she had been waiting a year for this moment. I pushed sleepy Nechama aside and jumped out of bed, too. I heard the clopping of hooves and the rattle of uneven wheels as the cart continued on its way.

  I stood blinking at the door. Uncle Pinchas? It couldn’t be. Aunt Friedka was leaning over a broken wreck of a man lying on the ground, dirty, gray-faced, and still. Still except for the bubbling, stuttering wheezes that seemed to come from a wet place deep inside him.

  “Easy, easy, you’re home now,” Aunt Friedka was murmuring again and again, her voice surprisingly calm and low. But when she turned to me, I fell back a step. Aunt Friedka’s face was white, her eyes empty.

  “Send Nechama for your parents and the barber,” she ordered. “Then help me carry your uncle into the house.”

  I fled inside. “Nechama! Nechama! Wake up!” I shouted, and pulled her roughly to her feet. “Run home and get Papa!” She stared at me, her mouth open. “Run!” I shouted again, pointing through the open door. “They brought Uncle Pinchas back. He’s— Go get Papa.”

  Still in her nightdress, she scampered outside, gaped at the figure lying on the ground at Aunt Friedka’s feet, peered back at me in horror, and disappeared in the direction of home.

  “Take his legs,” Aunt Friedka ordered.

  I couldn’t touch that filthy, wheezing bundle. I had to. I couldn’t. Then I saw his hand outspread on the ground. It was Uncle Pinchas’s long, slim hand. The last time I saw him, that hand had held hot tea, when Uncle Pinchas was master in his own home on another Shabbes morning a lifetime ago. I crouched down and lifted Uncle Pinchas’s cracked boots as firmly as I could, while Aunt Friedka carried him by the shoulders. Together, we managed to lift him onto the high bed.

  “Chanah’s gone for the barber,” Papa said as he ran in the door. The nearest doctor was more than a day’s journey away and no one in the village could afford his fees, anyway. So we had to rely on the village barber.

  Papa and I struggled to take off the boots, while Aunt Friedka began unwrapping something stiff and mud-soaked that had been wound around Uncle Pinchas. One single sob broke from her. “It’s the blanket I gave him. When they took him away.”

  There was a cough at the door as the barber announced his arrival. Lifting his bulging leather bag of medicines onto the table, he squinted at the long names on the labels.

  Mama followed him in. “Go home,” she ordered me. “Go home and look after Nechama. She’s very scared.”

  I’m scared, too, I wanted to whisper. I don’t want to be alone. But Mama was busy boiling hot water to heat the barber’s poultices. I walked out very slowly—maybe she’d change her mind and let me stay with her. She didn’t. Nechama, it was always Nechama who had to be taken care of.

  Late that night, I heard Papa talking bitterly to Mama. “There’s no medicine that will help Pinchas. The German gases eat up a man’s lungs. That’s how they poison thousands of men as they lie in the trenches.”

  Mama’s voice was tearful. “The army didn’t want him any longer,” she said. “He was already half dead, so they sent him home. Your poor sister.”

  I fumed silently. When I’m big, I’m going to organize the women of the village to hide our men in the forest, or in the cemetery maybe. I’ll never let them steal our men when I’m big.

  The next day I was allowed to help Mama and Aunt Friedka nurse their patient, while Nechama played outside. Uncle Pinchas lay on the bed heaving for breath, his eyes always on Aunt Friedka. Even when she walked across the room to heat a brick in the stove and wrap it in a cloth to warm his feet, he strained to see her. Mama said he must have longed for the sight of his wife for so long that he dared not let her disappear for even a moment. He watched her for six days and then he had to let go. He died with his eyes open, looking at Aunt Friedka.

  “Aai,” Aunt Friedka gasped. “Aai, aai, aai.”

  When the members of the Burial Society came to take away the body, she cried. I couldn’t bear to see that; not strong Aunt Friedka. Mama had her arms around her and I threw my arms around both and squeezed with all my might.

  But it was the only time I ever saw Aunt Friedka cry. After that, she closed her face and straightened her back, and she stayed closed and straight until the Night of the Burning.

  Some months after Uncle Pinchas died, I glanced up from my plate at dinner and caught a strange expression on Mama’s and Papa’s faces as they watched Nechama and me eat. Their own plates were scraped empty, and I realized suddenly and certainly that they were hungry. I looked down again right away; they wouldn’t want me to notice. It was true: there was less and less food in our house. Mama didn’t buy fish except for Shabbes and there was never any fruit. Potatoes weren’t merely a part of the meal anymore: potatoes were usually the entire meal, with goat’s milk to wash them down.

  Then one sad day, Mama, Nechama, and I took Tsigele to the marketplace, taking turns leading the goat with the leash for the last time. A butcher from a nearby town bought her after some hard bargaining with Mama, and we returned home silently. No more friend Tsigele, no more cheese. After that, we walked to the dairyman’s barn at the edge of town each morning, and Mama bought just a cup of milk for Nechama and me to share.

  “Thanks be to God we have saved a little, Chanah,” Papa said softly one night. “The peasants do not know how to save, even though they can make money from farming and we are not allowed to farm.”

  “But how long will the savings last us, Bzalel?” Mama whispered back. “The fighting goes on and on.”

  Papa only sighed.

  Since I was a little girl, I had known that there was a war going on in the world. But all I understood was that the Germans were fighting and killing the Russians. Then I had begun to hear my parents whispering about something called the Revolution. It meant nothing to me at all, except that first the Czar wasn’t the Czar anymore, and then he and the Czarina and their children were dead. The children’s deaths worried me especially.

  “Papa, did the Czar’s children know they were going to die? Would a czar’s children have to be especially brave?” I asked.

  But Papa had less energy to answer questions these days. He was very tired because he had to pull the wagon himself now. I still couldn’t believe it, but Papa had sold Soos. Mama had cried when she saw Papa coming home one night without the big horse. He had sold the heavy wagon, too, and was using a kind of harness to pull a smaller cart, with all of his old goods piled high. Papa made light of the change, saying he’d received a good offer for Soos and the wagon and couldn’t turn it down. He even pawed at the ground and neighed to make Nechama and me laugh. But when he slipped the harness off his shoulders, I heard him groan softly.

  The worst part was that every night when he trudged home, his wagon was still filled with the same goods. “Very little sold today,” he would say to Mama as he sank down in front of the stove. “The peasants don’t have money to buy things anymore.”

  Mama didn’t answer, but she took off his boots and brought warm water in a basin for his cold feet. One evening he reached up and pulled her against him, burying his face in her skirts. “There was typhoid in two villages,” I heard him mutter.

  I saw Mama shudder and slip her hand over Papa’s cheeks and forehead. “A fever,” I thought. “Was she feeling for a fever? Typhoid must be a sickness.” Something else t
o worry about.

  Like Papa, Mama, too, worked harder. She washed all our clothes herself in the big barrel in the kitchen, rather than paying Panya Truda to do it once a week. She bargained more firmly in the marketplace, but I could see that the peasants bargained just as desperately in return. Everyone was worried and there was little conversation between the Jews and the peasants. At least I didn’t have to endure the taunts of the children on the other side of the pond: there was no more cholent to keep warm at Panya Truda’s house.

  I did feel scared, though, of the occasional loose bands of soldiers passing through our town. They were usually on foot and wore odd scraps of uniform. Some spoke Russian, others Polish. I was scared by their unshaven grim faces.

  “Who are these soldiers, Papa?” I ventured.

  “Soldiers?” he said in disgust. “Those are just thugs, bandits stealing food from poor people like us.”

  “Papa,” I began, and then I stopped. The thing I was about to do was a hard sacrifice. I’d had the idea for days, and for days I’d been pushing myself closer and closer to doing it. It took some force—talking and talking and even a little shaking—until I finally persuaded Nechama to go along.

  Papa looked at me inquiringly, and then he sat down and took me on his knee just as he used to in the old days. “What is it?” he prompted.

  I had to swallow a painful lump in my throat. “Papa, you can sell our dolls for food. Nechama and I don’t mind.”

  Papa grabbed me in a tight hug and I squeezed him back, blinking away the tears in my eyes.

  Papa blew his nose. “Devorahleh.” He smiled at me, stroking the hair back from my face. “You and Nechama are fine girls and we appreciate that you would give up your dolls for the family. Always take care of the family, my big girl. But you can keep your dolls.”

  “We can?” Nechama squeaked from behind the door where she had been eavesdropping.

  I glared at the door.