The Storyteller (30 page)

I did not think Darija was listening, but then she sighed. “Read it to me.”

So I did. Although there was nothing written on the page, I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider’s web, spinning a make-believe life. That’s why we read fiction, isn’t it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we’re not the only ones?

“Death,” Darija said when I was finished, when the last sentence hovered like a cliff. “She needs to see someone die.”

“Why?”

“Because what else would scare her more?” Darija asked, and I knew she wasn’t talking about my story any longer.

I took a pencil out of my pocket and made notes. “Death,” I repeated. I smiled at my best friend. “What would I do without you?”

That, I realized too late, was exactly the wrong thing to say. Darija burst into tears. “I don’t want to leave.”

I sat down beside her and hugged her tight. “I don’t
want
you to leave,” I agreed.

“I’ll never get to see Dawid,” she sobbed. “Or you.”

She was so upset, I didn’t even get jealous about being the second party in that sentence. “You’re just going across town. Not to Siberia.”

But I knew that meant nothing. Every day, a new wall appeared, a fence, a detour. Every day the buffer zone between the Germans in this city and the Jews grew thicker and thicker. Eventually, it would force us into the Old Town, like Darija’s family, or it would shove us out of Łód
completely.

“This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen,” Darija said. “We were supposed to go to university and then move to London.”

“Maybe we will one day,” I replied.

“And maybe we’ll be hanged like those men.”

“Darija! Don’t say that!”

“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” she accused, and she was right, of course. Why them, when everyone had spoken badly of the Germans? Were they louder than the rest of us? Or were they just picked at random to make a point?

On Darija’s bed were two boxes, a ball of twine, and a knife for cutting it. I grabbed the knife and sliced the fleshy center of my palm. “Best friends forever,” I vowed, and I handed her the knife.

Without hesitation, she cut her own palm. “Best friends,” she said. We pressed our hands together, a promise sealed in blood. I knew it didn’t work this way, because I had studied biology at
Gymnasium
, but I liked the thought of Darija’s blood running through my veins. It made it easier to believe I was keeping a piece of her with me.

Two days later, Darija’s family joined the long line of Jewish families
snaking out of this part of town toward Bałuty with as many possessions as they could haul. On that same day, the men who had been hanged were finally allowed to be cut down. This was clearly meant as an insult, since burial in our religion was meant to happen as quickly as possible. During that forty-eight-hour stretch, I passed the gallows six times—going to the bakery, to Darija’s, to school. After the first two times, I stopped noticing. It was as if death had become part of the landscape.

 • • • 

My nephew, Majer Kaminski, was a
shayna punim
. It was March 1940, and he was six weeks old, and already he smiled back if you smiled at him; he could hold up the weight of his own head. He had blue eyes and jet hair and a gummy grin that, my father used to say, could melt even Hitler’s black heart.

Never had a baby been so beloved—by Basia and Rubin, who gazed at him like he was a miracle every time they passed by his bassinet; and by my father, who was already trying to teach him recipes; and by myself, who made up nonsense lyrics to lullabies for him. Only my mother was distant. Sure, she
kvelled
about her grandson and she cooed at him when Basia and Rubin brought him to visit, but she rarely held Majer. If Basia passed him into her arms, my mother would find an excuse to put him down, or to shuffle him to me or my father instead.

It didn’t make any sense to me. She had wanted to be a grandmother forever, and now that she was one, she couldn’t even bear to cuddle her grandchild?

My mother always saved the best food for Friday nights, because my sister and Rubin came for Shabbat dinner. There were usually potatoes and root vegetables in our rations, but tonight, somehow, my mother had purchased a chicken—a food we had not seen in months, since Germany occupied the country. There were black markets all over the town where you could get just about anything, for a price; the question was, what had she traded in return for this feast?

I was salivating so badly, though, I almost didn’t care. I fidgeted during
the prayer over the candles and the Kiddush over the wine and the
Ha-motzi
over my father’s delicious challah, and then finally it was time to sit down and eat. “Hana,” my father sighed, biting into the first bite of the chicken, “you are truly a marvel.”

At first none of us spoke, we were that occupied with the delicious food. But then, Rubin interrupted the silence. “Herschel Berkowicz, who works with me? He was ordered to leave his home last week.”

“Did he go?” my mother asked.

“No . . .”

“And?” my father said, his fork paused en route to his mouth.

Rubin shrugged. “Nothing so far.”

“You see? Hana, I was right. I’m always right. You refuse to move, and the sky doesn’t fall on your head. Nothing happens.” On February 8, the chief of police had listed streets where Jews were allowed to live and posted a calendar citing when the rest were supposed to leave. Although at this point, everyone knew a family that had gone east to Russia or into the area of the town allotted for Jews, others—like my father—were resistant to leave. “What can they do?” he said, shrugging. “Kick us
all
out?” He patted his mouth with his napkin. “Now. I will not let this glorious meal be ruined with talk of politics. Minka, tell Rubin what you were telling me about mustard gas the other day . . .”

It was something I had learned in chemistry class. The reason mustard gas worked was that it was made in part of chlorine, which had such a tight atomic structure that it sucked electrons in from whatever it came in contact with. Including human lungs. It literally ripped apart the cells of your body.

“This is what passes for dinner conversation now?” my mother sighed. She turned to Basia, who was cradling Majer in her left arm. “How’s my angel sleeping? Through the night yet?”

Suddenly there was a pounding at the door. “You’re expecting someone?” my mother asked, looking at my father as she went to answer it. Before she could reach the door, however, it flew open and three soldiers burst into the parlor. “Get out,” one of the officers said in German. “You have five minutes!”

“Minka,” my mother cried. “What do they want?”

So I translated, my heart pounding. Basia was hiding in the corner, trying to make the baby invisible. They were Wehrmacht soldiers. One of them swept the crystal off my great-grandmother’s oak server, so that it shattered on the floor. Another overturned the table, with all our food on it, the candles still burning. Rubin stamped out the flames before they could spread.

“Go!” the officer shouted. “What are you waiting for?”

My father, my brave, strong father, cowered with his hands over his head.

“Outside in five minutes. Or we come back in and start to shoot,” the officer said, and he and his comrades stormed out of our apartment.

I didn’t translate that part.

My mother was the one who moved first. “Abram, get your mother’s silver from the server. Minka, you take pillowcases and go around and collect anything that has value. Basia, Rubin, how fast can you go home and gather your things? I’ll stay with the baby until you get back.”

It was the call to action that we needed. My father began rummaging through the drawers of the server, and then he started to move books from shelves and reach into jars in the kitchen cabinets, collecting money that I had not known was hidden there. My mother settled Majer in his bassinet although he was screaming, and began to collect winter coats and woolen scarves, hats, and mittens, warm clothing. I flew into my parents’ bedroom and took my mother’s jewelry, my father’s tefillin and tallith. In my own room, I looked around. What would you grab, if you had to pack up your life in only minutes? I took the newest dress I owned and its matching coat, the one I had worn for the High Holy Days last fall. I took several changes of underwear and a toothbrush. I took my notebook, of course, and a stash of pencils and pens. I took a copy of
The Diary of a Lost Girl
by Margarete Böhme, in its original German—a novel I had found at a secondhand store and had hidden from my parents because of its racy subject matter. I took an exam upon which Herr Bauer had written “Exceptional Student” in German.

I took the Christian papers Josek had given me, hidden inside the boots my father had made me promise to wear at all times.

I found my mother standing in the center of the dining room, surrounded by the broken crystal. She was holding Majer in her arms and whispering to him. “I prayed you’d be a girl,” she said.

“Mama?” I murmured.

When she looked up at me, she was crying. “Mrs. Szymanski, she would have raised a little girl like her own.”

I felt like my mind was filled with mud. She wanted to give Majer,
our
Majer, away to be raised by someone other than Basia and Rubin? Was that why she’d agreed to watch the baby while they ran home to pack? Yes, I realized, in a moment of painful clarity—because it was the way to keep him safe. It was why families had shipped their children to England and the United States. It was why Josek’s family thought I should go with them to St. Petersburg. With survival comes sacrifice.

I looked down at Majer’s tiny face, his waving hands. “Then give him to her, right now,” I urged. “I won’t tell Basia.”

She shook her head. “Minka, he’s a boy.”

For a moment I just blinked at her, and then I realized what my mother was talking about. Majer, of course, had had his
bris.
He was circumcised. If the Szymanskis told authorities their little girl was Christian, there would be no way to prove otherwise. But a little boy—well, all you had to do was open his diaper.

I realized, too, why my mother had not wanted to cuddle her grandson. Deep down she knew she should not become attached, in case she lost him.

My father appeared, a rucksack on his back and pillowcases stuffed to the breaking point in each hand. “We must go,” he said, but my mother did not budge.

I could hear screams as the soldiers worked their way through the homes of our neighbors. My mother flinched. “Let’s wait downstairs for Basia,” I suggested. Only then did I notice her watch was missing. It was what she had traded for the chicken, I guessed—the chicken, which now
lay unfinished on the floor of the dining room; the meal she had cooked to give the rest of her family the illusion that everything was going to be just fine. “Mama,” I said gently. “Come with me.”

It was the first time I remember acting like the grown-up, being the one to take my mother’s hand, instead of the other way around.

 • • • 

My father had a cousin who lived in Bałuty, and in this we were lucky. People who were evicted and who knew no one had to get assigned a room by the authorities. The authorities, in the case of the Jewish ghetto, were the
Judenrat,
which was headed by one man—Chaim Rumkowski, the Chairman, the Eldest of the Jews. My mother had never liked my father’s cousins; they were poor and lower-class, and in this they were an embarrassment to her. When they came to our home for my sister’s wedding dinner, my cousin Rivka kept holding things up to the light as if she were an appraiser, saying,
And how much do you think
this
cost?
My mother had huffed and muttered and made my father swear that she would not have to suffer their company again in her own home. It was ironic, then, to find ourselves on their doorstep in the position of beggars; to see my mother with her mouth pinched shut, at the mercy of their good graces.

In the four square kilometers that the Germans had decreed to be the Jewish part of town there were 160,000 people. Four or five families crowded into apartments meant for one. One-half of these homes had a bathroom. We were in one of them, and for this, I gave thanks every day.

The ghetto was surrounded by a fence made of wood and barbed wire. A month after we arrived, it was completely sealed off from the rest of Łód
. There were
Fabriken,
factories—some in warehouses but many in bedrooms and basements—where people worked, making boots, uniforms, gloves, textiles, furs. It had been Chairman Rumkowski’s idea to become indispensable to the Germans—to be such a useful group of workers that they would come to see how badly they needed us. In return for our making what they needed for the war effort, they would pay us in food.