Run, Boy, Run

by Uri Orlev

There was a knock on the door. He put on his jacket and opened it. A gray-haired woman with a youthful face was standing there. She was not much taller than he was, and her glance met his directly. She had bright eyes and a friendly manner, and she shook his hand as though he were a grownup, letting go of it only when she had led him to a chair. She sat on his bed, facing him, and said something that made him laugh. Afterward, when he tried remembering what was so funny, he couldn't think of it. But she brought a new feeling into the room, warm and bracing.

  "My name is Pani Rappaport," she said.

  "I'm Jurek Staniak. I guess you know that."

  "I do."

  She took his hand and stroked it. He didn't pull it away.

  "Jurek," she said, "I meet lost children like you all the time. They don't know who their parents are, or where they came from before they wandered in the forests or the villages, or hid with kind people who protected them. We've found children in convents and in orphanages. Mostly girls. I suppose you know why that is."

  "Yes."

  "I know it's hard for you. I understand."

  She kept talking in the same quiet, musical voice. He wasn't listening to the words. Their separate syllables ran together in a single, soft melody. The warmth of her hand spread through him and became a lump in his throat. He didn't know why his eyes filled with tears. She stroked his face. He was making strange, groaning sounds. It was as if something had opened inside of him, leaving him defenseless and exposed. He tried to close himself off again but couldn't. It was no longer in his control. Suddenly all the dams had burst. He was overcome by a feeling of helpless loss that flowed out of him with his tears. Pani Rappaport held his head and cried too. Then his head was in her lap and he was talking. He told her everything he remembered, everything he had forgotten.

  "Do you remember your name now?"

  "No."

  "You had brothers and sisters, didn't you?"

  "Yes. But I can't remember their names, either."

  "Do you remember where you're from?"

  He suddenly recalled the name of the town. He could picture the bakery and his father standing in the glow of the oven. There had been a smithy next to it, and then their home, and Pani Staniak's little grocery across the street. And now he saw his grandfather with a long, white beard, and his mother. He strained to make out her face. He thought he caught sight of his brothers and sisters, too, although they remained hidden in darkness. He remembered his father lying in bed, snoring with a funny sound like a train whistle's. And himself climbing onto the bed and tickling his father's mustache with a plant stem. Then the face was gray and covered by stubble. They were in a potato field. His father's eyes burned into him. He could feel his breath and hear him saying, "You have to stay alive, Jurek." That wasn't the name he had been called. But he had stayed alive. It was in order to stay alive that he had forgotten his name and the names of his brothers and sisters and even the name of his mother. It had all vanished into the great emptiness that opened inside him on the day she disappeared.

  Jurek wiped away his tears. In bits and pieces he tried telling Pani Rappaport about the scenes flashing through his mind.

  "You say the town was called Blonie? Would you recognize it?"

  "Yes," he said. "I'd recognize our house and the bakery. There was a smithy next to it."

  "Would you go with me there now?"

  They went in the little pickup truck in which he had been kidnapped. The two of them squeezed into the cabin beside the driver. Pani Rappaport put her arm around him, but perhaps this was only because she had nowhere else to put it. Sitting so close to her gave Jurek a warm feeling. "You see," he joked, "there are good things about having only one arm."

  She didn't laugh. She just gave him a big hug.

  They crossed the Wisla. It took over an hour to reach Blonie. Little farms with thatched roofs stood on its outskirts. As they neared its center, these changed to low wood and brick houses. Suddenly Jurek shouted, "There's the bakery!"

  The truck stopped. The door of the bakery was locked. Jurek ran to the smithy. No one was there, either. The place looked deserted. He grabbed Pani Rappaport's hand and pulled her after him. Soon they were standing in front of a half-destroyed house.

  "This is where we lived," he said with a sinking heart.

  He glanced across the street and his face lit up. "Pani Staniak's grocery is open!" he cried, pulling her after him again.

  They entered the grocery. A middle-aged woman was standing behind the counter. She looked at Jurek wide-eyed and let out a cry.

  "Srulik!"

  Pani Staniak turned pale. She clutched at her heart and leaned against the counter.

  "Srulik, you're alive?"

  Now he remembered. Yes, his name was Srulik. Not Jurek Staniak.

  Pani Staniak recovered, shut the store, and took the two of them home with her. She served them tea and cookies and they sat around the table.

  "Your mother and your brother Duvid were shot on the road not far from here," she told Jurek.

  "Do you know Srulik's family name?" Pani Rappaport asked.

  "Of course. You might as well ask if I know my own name. It was Frydman. He doesn't remember it?"

  "No. He goes by the name of Jurek Staniak."

  Pani Staniak laughed.

  "Who gave you that name?"

  "Papa."

  "He wanted you to have one you could remember. I knew the whole family well," she said to Pani Rappaport. "We were good neighbors. We were once invited to their Passover Seder and they came to see us celebrate our holidays. Srulik, don't you remember our Christmas tree?"

  Srulik grinned. He remembered. The grin was for what happened when he came back from looking at the Christian tree with its little candles and stars. His parents weren't home, and his brother took a hammer and hit him on the head.

  "Your big sister was Feyge. She escaped to Russia with your uncle when the war broke out. Your other sister was Malka. Your brothers were Yoysef and Duvid. You were little Srulik."

  Pani Staniak smiled at him.

  "What were the names of Srulik's parents?" Pani Rappaport inquired.

  "His father was Hersh and his mother was Riva. She was a pretty woman."

  Jurek tried picturing his mother again. He still couldn't do it. He could see his father more clearly. Not the haggard, stubbly face in the potato field, but his real one.

  They said goodbye to Pani Staniak. She kissed Jurek and shook Pani Rappaport's hand. On their way to the truck, Pani Rappaport hugged him and said, "Now we'll look for your sister Feyge."

  "All right," he said. "But I want to go on being Jurek."

  "Then you will be," she promised.

  On the return trip to Warsaw, Jurek was preoccupied with his thoughts. More and more memories kept occurring. Of someone swinging a chicken above his head. Of cleaning the house for a holiday and taking out all the mattresses and filling them with new straw. He remembered where each bed had stood, the one he shared with Duvid too. He remembered the corner for washing—or was he thinking of the Kowalskis'? He remembered the bucket that stood on the porch on winter nights, so that they needn't go all the way to the wooden outhouse. He remembered his grandfather taking him to the stuttering hatter and buying him a hat with a button on top. He could picture the pantry with its double doors and the drawers beneath them, in one of which his mother kept the cakes she baked. The memories kept coming, as though in a strange dream.

  "Jurek, wake up."

  His mother was bending over him. He knew it was a dream and that the voice was Pani Rappaport's. And yet it was his mother, too, her face as clear as if she were standing there. He did everything not to let go of her. He would never forget her again.

  "We're here," Pani Rappaport said.

  He opened his eyes. He could remember his mother.

  ***

  Jurek was excited and nervous when he went the next week to say goodbye to the Kowalskis. Hearing the hammer from the smithy, he went there first.

>   "I've come to say goodbye," he said.

  Pan Kowalski went on shaping a piece of iron. Tadek glanced at him and resumed working. Jurek waited.

  Pani Kowalski saw Jurek through the window and came from the house. Pan Kowalski put down his hammer and wiped his hands. Then he wiped his brow. "He's come to say goodbye," Tadek told his mother. Jurek gulped and said, "I'm staying on in the Jewish children's home."

  "It's up to you," Pan Kowalski said.

  "God watch over you," said Pani Kowalski, kissing him on his head.

  "It's the same God as ours," Pan Kowalski said.

  Jurek put his hand in his shirt and felt his neck. There was nothing there.

  Pan Kowalski gave him a left-handed handshake.

  Tadek walked him to the train station. He couldn't read, either. They had to ask directions. Jurek bought a ticket to Warsaw. The platform was crowded with passengers. When the train arrived, he pushed his way to a window. Tadek was standing on the platform. He grinned at Jurek. Jurek grinned back.

  * * *

  Epilogue

  Pani Rappaport searched Polish government lists of returnees from Russia after the war. She discovered that Pani Fayge Frydman had come back to Poland and left again for an unknown destination. A few years later, a staff member at the children's home moved to Israel and promised Jurek to look there for his sister. She turned to the missing persons' bureau and found her. Jurek received a letter from Fayge, with photographs of her, her husband, and their two Israeli children. By then he had learned to read.

  From Warsaw he was transferred to a children's home in the city of Lodz. He finished the eight years of elementary school in four years and the four years of high school in two years and continued at a local university. At first he thought of majoring in Polish history and Marxism, but his old high school adviser talked him out of it. "Are you crazy?" he said angrily. "What do you need all that Communist nonsense for? What will you do with it if you also decide to move to Israel some day? You're good at mathematics. Study that."

  Jurek took his advice. He lived in the dorms and received a double fellowship, once as a war invalid and once as an outstanding student.

  One Saturday night he took a trolley with a friend to a student function. Suddenly, looking out the window, he saw a beautiful girl in a red coat. Without thinking twice, he jumped from the moving trolley and followed her. Although after a while she felt she was being trailed, she was afraid to turn around. She entered the building of the Jewish Students Club and climbed some stairs. Jurek climbed behind her. On the door was a note saying, "We've all gone to the theater."

  Frightened, she turned around and saw Jurek, the blond, one-armed Jewish student renowned for being one of the most eligible young men on campus.

  Her name was Sonia. Despite the love that blossomed between them, they were forced to part a year later when her family moved to Israel. Yet they kept writing to each other.

  Jurek graduated and found work as an assistant teacher in the Polytechnic Institute. After encountering more than one incident of anti-Semitism, he decided to leave for Israel, too. There he was reunited with his sister and her family, and he married Sonia. They had two children, a son and a daughter.

  In Israel, Jurek took the Hebrew name of Yoram. He went on teaching mathematics and also taught others to teach it.

  In both Poland and Israel, he declined to be fitted with a prosthesis. He had gotten along with one arm as a boy, he said, and could do everything with it now, too—even wash the dishes.

  During his first years in Israel, he told the story of his years in wartime Poland to many people, all of whom thought he was exaggerating. A few years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the school he taught in was visited by a guest speaker, a man who had lost an arm and both legs in the fighting yet managed to go on living an active life. At the end of his talk, Yoram rose and told his story again. This time, to his surprise, the audience was enthralled. You could have heard a pin drop. Many people were moved to tears.

  As was I when I heard it.

  Uri Orlev

  Jerusalem, 2000

  * * *