The Storyteller (31 page)

My father got a job baking bread for the ghetto. Mordechai Lajzerowicz was the head of the ghetto bakeries, and he reported to Chairman Rumkowski. There were times when no flour or grains came in a shipment, and there weren’t enough ingredients to bake. My father didn’t hire his own bakers; they were assigned by Rumkowski. The loudspeakers that blared all day in German in the squares would tell people who needed work to assemble every morning, and they would be directed to this
Fabrik
or another. My mother, who had not worked while I was growing up, now got a job as a seamstress in a fur shop. Until then, I hadn’t even known that she could hem—we’d taken our clothes to a tailor in the past. In only a few weeks’ time, my mother had calluses on her fingers from needle sticks, and she started to squint from the poor light in the factory. We split the food she received in payment with Basia and Rubin, because Basia had to stay home with the baby.

Except for the fact that my mother, father, and I all shared a tiny room now, I did not mind living in the ghetto. I had more time to write my story. I got to go to school with Darija again, at least at first, until they closed all the schools. In the afternoons we would go to the apartment she shared with two other families, none of whom had children, and we’d play card games. Often, because of the curfew, I would stay over at Darija’s. Being in the ghetto sometimes felt like we were living in a cage, but it was a wonderful cage, if you were fifteen years old. My friends and family surrounded me. It felt safe. I believed that if I stayed where I was supposed to be, I’d be protected.

In the late summer, when there was no bread in the ghetto because no flour had been brought in, my father became frantic—he considered it his personal responsibility to feed his neighbors. Thousands of people marched in the streets while my father pulled the shades down at the bakery and hid in the back, afraid of the mob.
We are hungry!
The chant swelled in the heat, like dough rising. The German police shot into the air to disperse everyone.

There was more and more shooting as people kept pouring into the ghetto, but its boundaries remained fixed. Where were they all supposed to go? What were they supposed to eat? Although by the winter there
was full-scale rationing, there was never enough. Every two weeks, we each got 100 grams of potatoes, 350 grams of beets, 300 grams of rye flour, 60 grams of peas, 100 grams of rye flakes, 150 grams of sugar, 200 grams of marmalade, 150 grams of butter, and 2500 grams of rye bread. Working in a bakery, my father got an extra portion of bread during the day, which he always saved for me.

Of course, he could no longer bake me my special roll.

In the winter, the bakery closed down again. This time, it wasn’t because they ran out of flour but because there was no fuel. No wood had been supplied to the ghetto, and only a little coal. My father and his cousin and Rubin took apart fences and ruined buildings and carried the wood back home so that we would have something to burn. One morning, I found my cousin Rivka tearing up floorboards in a closet. “Who needs a floor in a pantry,” she said, when she saw me watching.

Yet even with all these extreme measures, people were freezing to death at night in their homes. The
Chronicle,
the newspaper that detailed everything that happened in the ghetto, reported on the casualties every day.

Suddenly being here didn’t seem so safe anymore.

One afternoon Darija and I were walking to her home from school. It was frigid, and a wind whipped out of the north that made it even colder than the thermometer suggested. We huddled with our arms linked as we crossed the bridge at Zgierska Street, which Jews were not allowed to walk down anymore. A trolley was passing, and standing on the platform of the car was a woman in a long fur coat, her legs in silk stockings. “Who would be stupid enough to wear silk stockings on a day like today?” I murmured, thankful for the woolen leggings I had on, double layers. When we had scrambled to leave our home, I had taken silly things like party dresses and colored pencils, but my parents had had the foresight to take our winter coats and sweaters. Unlike some of the others in the ghetto, we at least had warm clothing to weather this horrible winter.

Darija didn’t answer; I saw her staring at the woman as the trolley passed. “If I had them,” she said, “I’d wear them. Just because.”

I squeezed her arm. “Someday we’ll both wear silk stockings.”

When we reached Darija’s apartment, it was empty; everyone else was still at work. “It’s freezing in here,” Darija said, rubbing her hands together. Neither of us bothered to take off our coats.

“I know,” I said. “I can’t feel my toes.”

“I have an idea to warm us up.” Darija dumped her book bag on the floor and turned on the record player. Instead of putting on popular music, though, she found one of her old classical records. She started to dance, slowly at first, so that I could follow along. I laughed as I tried; I was clumsy on a good day, and here I was trying to be graceful in my winter coat and many layers? Impossible. Eventually I collapsed to the floor. “I’ll leave the dancing to you,” I told Darija, but it had worked; I was winded and my cheeks were pink and warm. Instead, I took out my notebook and read over the pages I had written last night.

My book was taking a turn, now that I had been relocated to the ghetto. Suddenly, the charming little village I had created was more sinister—a prison. I had lost sight of who was a hero and who was a villain; the dire circumstances in which I had set my story made everyone a little bit of both. The most detailed descriptions were of the smell of the bread in Ania’s father’s bakery. Sometimes when I wrote about smearing a slice with fresh butter, I found myself salivating. I could not conjure food for myself, and had not had anything but watery soup for months—but I could imagine so vividly what I was missing that my belly ached.

The other thing I could write about now was blood. God knows I had seen enough of it. In the few months I had been here, I had seen three people shot by German soldiers. One was standing too close to the ghetto fence, so a guard shot him. Two were women, fighting noisily over a loaf of bread. The officer who approached to stop the argument shot them both, took the bread, and threw it into a puddle of mud.

Here’s what I now knew about blood: it was brighter than you would imagine, the color of the deepest rubies, until it dried sticky and black.

It smelled like sugar and metal.

It was impossible to get out of your clothes.

I had come to see, too, that all my characters and I were motivated by the same inspiration. Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or
love—well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.

As I wrote, Darija kept dancing. Turning, whipping her head at the last possible moment, in a circle of
chaînés
and
piqué
turns. She looked like she might be able to bore a hole through the floor with the chisel made by her feet. As she moved with dizzying speed, I put down my notebook and started to clap. That was when I noticed the policeman peering through the window.

“Darija!” I hissed, slipping my notebook underneath my sweater. I jerked my head in the direction of the window, and her eyes grew wide.

“What should we do?” she asked.

There were two police forces in the ghetto—one made of Jews, who wore the Star of David like the rest of us, and the German police. Although they both enforced the rules, which was a challenge because the rules changed daily, there were significant differences between them. When we passed German policemen on the street, we would bow our heads; and boys would remove their hats. Otherwise, we had no contact with them.

“Maybe he’ll go away,” I said, averting my eyes, but the German rapped on the windowpane and pointed to the door.

I opened it, my heart pounding so loud that I thought for certain he could hear it.

The officer was young and slight like Herr Bauer, and if not for the fact that he was wearing a dark uniform I had learned to be terrified of, Darija and I might even have giggled behind our hands about how handsome he was. “What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

I answered him in German. “My friend is a dancer.”

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.”