The Book of Aron

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MY MOTHER AND FATHER NAMED ME ARON, BUT my father said they should have named me What Have You Done, and my uncle told everyone they should have called me What Were You Thinking. I broke medicine bottles by crashing them together and let the neighbors’ animals loose from pens. My mother said my father shouldn’t beat such a small boy, but my father said that one misfortune was never enough for me, and my uncle told her that my kind of craziness was like stealing from the rest of the family.

When I complained about it my mother reminded me I had only myself to blame, and that in our family the cure for a toothache was to slap the other side of your face. My older brother was always saying we all went without cradles for our backsides or pillows for our heads. Why didn’t he complain some more, my mother suggested. Maybe she could light the stove with his complaints.

My uncle was my mother’s brother and he was the one who started calling me Sh’maya because I did so many things that made him put his finger to his nose as a warning and say, “God has heard.” We shared a house with another family in Panevzys near the Lithuanian border. We lived in the front room with a four-paned window and a big stove with a tin sheet on top. Our father was always off looking for money. For a while he sold animal hides. Our mother wished he would do something else, but he always said the pope and the peasant each had their own work. She washed other people’s floors and when she left for the day our neighbors did whatever they wanted to us. They stole our food and threw our things into the street. Then she came home exhausted and had to fight with them about how they’d treated us, while I hid behind the rubbish pile in the courtyard. When my older brothers got home they’d be part of the shouting, too. Where’s Sh’maya? they’d ask when it was over. I’d still be behind the rubbish pile. When the wind was strong, grit got in my eyes.

Sh’maya only looks out for himself, my uncle always said, but I never wanted to be like that. I lectured myself on walks. I made lists of ways I could improve. Years went by like one unhappy day.

My mother tried to teach me the alphabet, unsuccessfully. She used a big paper chart attached to a board and pointed to a bird or a little man or a purse and then to the letter that went with them. A whole day was spent trying to get me to draw the semicircle and straight line of the letter alef. But I was like something that had been raised in the wild. I didn’t know the names of objects. Teachers talked to me and I stared back. Alef, beys, giml, daled, hey, vov, zayin. My last kheyder results before we moved reported my conduct was unsatisfactory, my religion unsatisfactory, my arithmetic unsatisfactory, and even my wood- and metal-shop work unsatisfactory. My father called it the most miserable report he’d ever seen, and invited us all to figure out how I had pulled it off. My mother said that I might’ve been getting better in some areas and he told her that if God gave me a second or a third life I’d still understand nothing. He said a person with strong character could correct his path and start again but a coward or weakling could not. I always wondered if others had such difficulty in learning. I always worried what would become of me if I couldn’t do anything at all. It was terrible to have to be the person I was.

I spent rainy days building dams in the street to divert the runoff. I found boards and pushed them along puddles with sticks. My mother dragged me out of the storms, saying when she found me that there I sat with my dreams full of fish and pancakes. She said while she bundled me into bed next to the stove that I’d never avoided an illness, from chicken pox to measles and scarlet fever to whooping cough, and that was why I’d spent my whole life ninety-nine percent dead.

At night I lay waiting for sleep like our neighbor’s dog waited for passing wagons. When she heard me still awake my mother would come to my bedside even as tired as she was. To help me sleep she said that if I squeezed my eyelids tight, lights and planets would float down past them, though I’d never be able to count them before they disappeared. She said that her grandfather told her that God moved those lights and planets with his little finger. I told her I was sorry for the way I was and she said that she wasn’t worried about school, only about how I was with my family and our neighbors. She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.

YET WHEN MY YOUNGER BROTHER WAS BORN, I TOLD her I wanted him thrown into the chicken coop. I was glum that whole year, when I was four, because of an infected vaccination on my arm. My mother said I played alone even when other kids were about. Two years went by without my learning a thing. I didn’t know how to swim or ride a bicycle. I had no grandparents, no aunts, and no godparents. When I asked why, my father said it was because society’s parasites ate well while the worthy received only dirty water, and my mother said it was because of sickness. I attended kheyder until my father came back from one of his trips and told my mother that it was 1936 and time for me to get a modern education. I was happy to change, since our kheyder teacher always had food in his beard and caned us across the fingers for wrong answers and his house smelled like a kennel. So instead I went to public school, which was cleaner all around. My father was impressed that my new teacher dressed in the European style and that after he taught me to read I started teaching myself. Since I was bored and knew no one I took to books.

And in public school I met my first friend, whose name was Yudl. I liked him. Like me, he had no future. He was always running somewhere with his nose dripping. We made rafts to put in the river and practiced long-distance spitting. He called me Sh’maya too and I called him Pisher. When he wasn’t well-behaved he was clever enough to keep the teacher from catching on. One morning before anyone arrived we played tipcat so violently we broke some classroom windows. We scared the boys who had nice satchels and never went barefoot. He was always getting me into trouble at home, and one Sabbath I was beaten for taking apart the family scissors so I could have two little swords, for him and for me. His mother taught him only sad songs, including one about the king of Siberia, before she got sick because of her teeth and died. He came looking for me once she was dead but I hid from him. He told me the next day that two old men carried her out of the house on a board and then his father moved him away.

THAT SUMMER A CARD ARRIVED FOR MY FATHER from his cousin in Warsaw, telling him there was work in his factory. The factory made fabric out of cotton thread. My father hitched a ride to the city in a truck full of geese and then sent for us. He moved us to 21 Zamenhofa Street, Apartment no. 6—my mother had us each memorize the address so we could find it when we got lost — and my younger brother, who had a bad lung, spent his days at the back window looking out at the garbage bins. We both thought the best thing about the move was the tailor’s shop across the square. The tailor made uniforms for the army and in the front of his window there were three rows of hand-sized mannequins, each dressed in miniature uniforms. We especially loved the tiny service ribbons and medals.

Because it was summer I was expected to work at the factory, so far away that we had to ride the trolley. I was shut up in a little room with no windows and four older boys and set to finishing the fabrics. The bolts had to be scraped until they acquired a grain like you found on winter stockings. Each of them took hours and someone as small as me had to lean his chest onto the blade to scrape with enough force. On hot days sweat ran off me like rain off a roof. The other boys said things like, “What a fine young man from the country we now have in our midst; he’s clearly going to be a big wheel in town,” and I thought, am I only here so they can make fun of me? And I refused to go back.

My father said he would give me such a beating that it would hurt to raise my eyebrows, but while I sat there like a mouse under the broom my mother stopped him and said there was plenty I could do at home and school was beginning in a few weeks anyway. My father said I’d only been given a partial hiding and she told him that would do for now, and that night once they started snoring I crept to their beds and kissed her goodnight and pulled the blanket from his feet so that he’d maybe catch a chill.

Because I couldn’t sleep I helped her with the day’s first chores, and she told everyone she was lucky to have a son who didn’t mind rising so early. I worked hard and kept her company. I emptied her wash buckets and fetched hot compresses for my brother’s chest. She asked if this wasn’t much better than breaking bottles and getting into trouble, and I told her it was. I was still so small that I could squat and ride the bristle block of the long-handled brush she used to polish the floors.

When she told my father at least now their children were better behaved he told her that not one of us looked either well-fed or good-tempered. He joked at dinner that she cooked like a washerwoman. “Go to a restaurant,” she said in response. She later told me that when she was young she never complained, so her mother would always know who her best child was and keep her near. So I became myself only once the lights went out, and in the mornings went back to pretending things were okay.

AT OUR NEW SCHOOL WE SAT NOT AT ONE FILTHY table but on real school benches. I wanted more books but had no money for them and when I tried to borrow them from my classmates they said no. I dealt with bullies by not fighting until the bell for class was about to be rung. When my mother complained to my teacher that a classmate had called me a dirty Jew, my teacher said, “Well he is, isn’t he?” and from then on she made me take weekly baths. I stayed at that school until another teacher twisted a girl’s ear until he tore it, and then my mother moved me back to a kheyder where they also taught Polish, two trolley stops away. But I still shrank from following instruction like a dog from a stick. My new teacher asked my mother what anyone could do with a kid who was so full of answers. He’s like a fox, this one, he said; he’s eight going on eighty. And when she reported the meeting to my father he gave me another hiding. That night she came to my bedside and sat and asked me to explain myself and at first I couldn’t answer, and then I finally told her that I had figured out that most people didn’t understand me and that those who did wouldn’t help.

My two older brothers got jobs outside of town driving goats to the slaughterhouse and were gone until after dark, and like my father they thought my mother should stay at home, so she confided in me about her plan to expand her laundry business. She said it was no gold mine but it could be a serious help, especially before Passover and Rosh Hashanah. She told me she used some of their hidden savings to buy soap and bleach and barrels and that every time my father passed the money’s hiding place she had a block of ice under her skull and could feel every hair on her head. I said why shouldn’t she take the money, and she was so happy she told me that once I turned nine she would make me a full partner. And this made me happy, because I knew that once I had enough money I would run away to Palestine or Africa.

The week before Passover we set giant pots of water to boil on the stove and we pushed all the bed linens and garments we’d collected from her customers into two barrels with metal rims and she lathered everything with a yellow block of soap before we rinsed it all and ran it through the wringer and dragged all that wet laundry in baskets up to the attic, where she’d strung ropes in every direction under the rafters. Since we opened the windows for the cross-breezes, she couldn’t rest that night and whispered to me about the gangs that specialized in crossing rooftops to steal laundry, so I slept up there so that she could relax.

“See? You don’t only care about yourself,” she whispered when she came to wake me the next morning. She put her lips to my forehead and her hand to my cheek. When she touched me like that, it was as if the person everyone hated had flown away. And while he was gone, I didn’t let her know that I was already awake.

I DIDN’T NEED TO PLAY WITH ANYONE, SO AFTER school I came home and helped her instead. While my younger brother napped, we talked about our days. I told her about a soldier on a horse near the trolley stop on Gęsia who took some coins from his saddlebag and handed them to me, and she asked if I’d thanked him and of course I hadn’t. She agreed it was a strange thing he’d done and wondered if he’d been thinking of his own little boy. We listened to our neighbors arguing across the hall, and she said the father spent his days in the synagogue securing himself a place in the next world while the mother wore herself out seeing that everyone was fed. She said that the mother had had fourteen children and only six had survived. I said maybe they were finished having children, and she said that for the mother’s sake, may a six-winged angel descend with the news.

I did kindnesses for my mother but she always wanted me to do them instead for my little brother. He was afraid of everything. She kept a lit candle near his bed to drive shadows out of corners because his window had no shutters and at night he always thought someone was standing beside it outside or knocking on the wall, and he cried himself to sleep about it. When she went to comfort him his eyes were so full of fear it scared me to look at them. Our father shouted at him to stop, which made things worse. He reminded my brother that everyone in the building understood that parents didn’t need to hold back and could give rule-breakers what they deserved. He’d work himself up about it and then our mother would placate him in the other room after telling me to stay with my brother and do what I could to quiet him down.

My brother had all sorts of medicines and drops and inhalerpots on his bedside table and my mother taught us how to grab his head and tilt it forward when he had trouble breathing and started to choke. He hated being inside all the time and finally ran away and left a note saying he’d had enough of this life, and he was missing for two days. Once he was back my mother locked him in the apartment and he pulled his chair to the window so he could see outside.

I didn’t understand him but liked the blank way he didn’t complain. He cupped any treat he was given in his hands and peeked at it before passing it along to one of us. If he wasn’t napping or staring out his window, he stayed near my mother. When he got angry he didn’t hit anyone or shout but instead went for days without speaking. My mother had a saying about how quiet he got, that his wisdom died inside of him, something her own mother had said about her. She told the neighbors that as a toddler he’d once laid himself spread-eagled on the trolley tracks to prevent her from leaving, and she’d had to carry him home, and that when she asked him about it afterwards he’d put his hands over her mouth.

HE LOVED THE RADIO AND IT WAS BECAUSE OF HIM that I first heard Janusz Korczak’s show. Thursday afternoons I had to sit with him and we could hear it through the wall, since our neighbor’s wife was hard of hearing. The show was called The Old Doctor and I liked it because even though he complained about how alone he was, he always wanted to know more about other people, especially kids. I also liked that I never knew what to expect. Sometimes he interviewed poor orphans in a summer camp. Other times he talked about what he loved about airplanes. Or told a fairy tale. He made his own barnyard noises. When I asked my mother why the show was called The Old Doctor she said there’d been complaints about allowing a Jewish educator to shape the minds of Polish children.

That was also the year I first ate in a restaurant. My father took me to celebrate some good fortune he never explained. It was the first time I was able to choose my own food. He quizzed me on Jan Henryk Dąbrowski while I ate since he considered himself an amateur historian. While I was eating dessert he made me laugh by breaking walnuts with his teeth. That night I dreamed that a raven was sitting on my shoulder in the wind and a black cloak was streaming out behind me. When my father was getting dressed the next morning I put my arms around him. “What’s the matter with him today?” he asked my mother before he left.

THE KIDS ON MY BLOCK REACTED TO MY LACK OF interest with their own. Sometimes they threw stones at me. Another whole summer came and went. I wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle, so I went to a boy who owned one and he said he would teach me. I could get on by myself after the first lesson but then he wouldn’t teach me anymore. I met Lutek one evening when I sat near some kids I didn’t know and they told me to leave but I didn’t. He had a rabbit-skin cap with earflaps and when one of the kids asked where he got it he said that he’d found it between the kid’s mother’s legs, so they started pushing him around. They knocked him into me, so I shoved the kid who’d done it and he landed on his back and head on the paving stones. The other kids chased us and Lutek led me into a cellarway hidden by a coal chute and they all ran by. I asked how he’d found it and he said he’d been hiding since before I was born. While we sat there in the dark I asked him more questions but he stopped answering and just sniffed at the air like a dog.

He was even smaller than me. He was so small he said he had a younger sister who everyone thought was older. He said the village he was from was pitiful. It didn’t appear on maps and it was just three lanes of cottages, fences, and mud. He’d gone to school for a year at one at the Talmud-toyres on Miła Street, which he said was famous for graduating ignoramuses. He said his father was the strongest porter in the city and pulled a handcart he harnessed to himself like a horse. He was especially good with the huge machinery crates from Lódz that three men had trouble budging. Otherwise he sat in a tavern. He worked at the railroad station near Jaruszewski’s courtyard. That neighborhood scared me. Smoke from the slag heaps always darkened the air over the loading docks.

My mother was happy I’d made a friend but soon upset that I was never around to watch my younger brother once Lutek took charge of my education. He showed me how to steal from the vegetable carts, and how one of us by making a commotion could hide what the other was doing, even when the peddlers were watching out for one another. With a French pamphlet he took from a bookstall he proved I didn’t know anything about girls, and discovered I knew so little that I didn’t even know what he was talking about. After he had cursed some filthy Russians he also said I didn’t know anything about politics, which was also true.

He taught me that no one else’s problems should get in the way of our having a good time. I told him about all the trouble I’d gotten into with Yudl, including the broken school windows, but he was unimpressed. His family had moved three times since coming to Warsaw and in one neighborhood he’d been hauled in by the police for breaking down the door of a boy who’d stolen his cap, and in another for having put a hole in a kid’s head with a jeweler’s hammer. He said the kid was okay after a while, though he’d had to wear a head-bandage and everyone had called him the Sheik.

I asked if his father beat him for such offenses and he said he’d had more luck with his father’s strap since he’d learned to rub garlic and onion onto the welts. And that he was lucky that his father was more upset about his sister’s stutter. His father tried to cure it by mimicking her, to shame her into getting over it. She liked me because when I had to wait for her to finish what she was saying I never got impatient. She told Lutek that I was kind and he should bring me around more often, so he had me talk to her while he slipped money from her secret hiding-spot. He said she knew he stole from her but she never complained about it. When he took enough we would buy sausages and ride the trolley.

ON THOSE DAYS I WAS AROUND AND MY YOUNGER brother was feeling better my mother ordered me to take him to the park so he could get some fresh air. He was always thrilled to go. The back courtyard with the garbage bins got no light and was deserted except for the occasional stray cat. Lutek always found us wherever we went. He said that being saddled with a consumptive wasn’t the end of the world and we could always find some uses for him, so one day we persuaded him to steal a jar of jam and on another to sing to a policeman. Or else we went about our business and he followed along. Whenever Lutek saw his blank look he asked him, “So how’s the weather in Wilno?” a joke my younger brother never understood.

On our way home I told him not to tell our mother about whatever we had done, and then she said he had to, and so he did, and I wouldn’t get supper that night. Then after he went to sleep she would sit at the foot of my bed and we’d look at each other. Neither of us would speak until she finally asked me to try to remain a decent human being and then kissed my cheek before wishing me a good night. And I would look up at my ceiling in the darkness and remember that I gave her nothing in return for what she gave me, and almost never had. Then I would plan my next day with Lutek.

SHE GAVE ME A PARTY FOR MY NINTH BIRTHDAY. THE day after the party Lutek’s sister asked how it had been, and he said what was there to tell about it. We had raisin cake and the guests were my younger brother and Lutek. My younger brother gave me a book of his drawings and my mother sewed me a leather satchel.

That whole winter my younger brother’s health improved until it got worse and he had to go to the hospital. Before he got sick my mother had pneumonia and took to her bed for a week, and he spent the whole time on the end of her blanket, staring. When she woke up she would ask me to get him a sweater and I’d ask if he was cold and he would say no. He was starting to cough too, and she finally got out of bed to drape a muffler around his neck. Then after she said she was feeling better he got so excited he ran around the back courtyard in a rainstorm and came in soaked and shaking.

For a while she tried to take care of him herself at home. She had me read to him in the afternoons, and he always chose a book called Jur about two brothers, one sickly and in constant need of looking after and the other a picture of health who ended up dying. My younger brother always liked the end in particular, when the sickly brother stood over the healthy brother’s grave and talked about how much he missed him.

Finally it turned out that he had pneumonia too and had to go to the hospital. By then he had to be carried through the streets in an ambulance.

My mother and I sat with him when we could. My older brothers and father visited once, all together. They brought him a big tin of sweets that they opened and sampled.

He hated being left at the hospital at night and screamed at our leaving. My mother always wept all the way home. After three days his fever was so high he didn’t recognize us. The nurses brought him compresses but he was so hot they couldn’t keep them cold. They brought him bread soaked in milk and we helped him open his mouth to eat it.

The day he died I told him that he was acting like an older boy, being brave. My mother had brought him home and he said he wished he could buy me the tailor shop’s miniature uniform of the Uhlans Regiment, which was my favorite. My mother was at the pharmacy and he asked when she was coming back. He said she’d been telling him how much better he was getting, but that now she sounded less sure. He breathed like someone was sitting on his chest, and it was hard for him to say even that much.

When my mother returned she found him out of bed and standing in his nightshirt on a chair to look out his window. She warmed his feet and got him back into bed and told him that if he looked outside when he woke, then all of his dreams would escape. She sent me to the kitchen to make him some tea and asked if I thought I could do that much. While I was filling the kettle I could see them both. She took his hands and called for him to look at her. She said she wanted to tell him a story, that it was going to be a long story, and he needed to stay awake for it. He seemed to come out of a daze and smiled at her. The story was about a poor Jew and a sultan. She said about one of the sultan’s decisions, “Isn’t that amazing?” and while she was asking him, he died.

SHE STAYED IN BED FOR TWO WEEKS. I DID WHAT housework I could. My father and brothers ate at taverns. I made my own dinners. Lutek stayed away. Once the sun had set my mother took to talking to me in the dark. She wouldn’t let me light any lamps until my father and brothers came home. After my brothers went to sleep, my father would sit up at the kitchen table with vodka and weep without making any noise.

She said she forgave me. She said none of us had done all we could for my younger brother. She said she still remembered when she’d been a little girl and a teacher had said, “I predict that someday you are really going to amount to something.” She said this teacher had told her favorite students, “Well, you’re sitting on the wagon. Let’s see how far you can travel down the road.” She said this teacher had awarded her with a book inscribed For your good conduct and many talents.

She said she’d lost all of her energy for work, but that maybe it would return in time. She said her feelings were like a coin in a strongbox and that from now on maybe I alone would have the key. She said she knew that my father was spending what little money they had saved. Let him take it and choke on it, she said. Maybe then he’d leave her in peace.

She said that when she was ten she’d had to care for her infant sister, who screamed when she was wet, screamed when she was hungry, and screamed when she was poorly diapered. She said she used to run all over the house holding her sister, not knowing what her sister wanted from her. She said she’d lived for the day when her mother would come home and take her sister back, and everyone would be happy with the good work she had done.

When it got warmer, she started cooking again and doing a little cleaning. She went outside. My tenth birthday came and went without raisin cake. One morning when I thanked her for my breakfast she said that the older she got, the more of an infant she became. I asked if she was feeling better and if she wanted to walk in the park when I got home from school, and she said that yes, she did. She said that sometimes it felt as if everything had been taken from her, and that all she wanted was to take something back.

THE NEXT MORNING MY FATHER TOLD ME TO GET up because it was war and the Germans had invaded. I didn’t believe him, so he pointed at the neighbors’ apartment and said, “Come to the radio, you’ll hear it.”

People had spent the day before taping up windows and running through the streets buying up food. In the morning our teacher told us that as of the next day our school, which had had an anti-aircraft battery moved onto its roof, was under military control, that we should leave our registration books to be signed, and that he would see us after the war. We wanted to go to the roof to view the anti-aircraft guns but a soldier wouldn’t let us on the staircase.

When I got home, my father and older brothers were taping our windows and one of my brothers showed me a blue glass filter that would fit over our flashlight.

That afternoon we saw an airplane with smoke coming out of its tail and two others chasing after it. Another plane flew over very low and a soldier took his rifle and started shooting at it until people on the street screamed that he was endangering everyone, so he stopped.

There were air raid sirens at night but for a few weeks nothing happened. Lutek would tell me the next day how much he liked the sirens because everyone had to get out of bed whatever time it was and the kids in his building would meet in the basement and play. He said all of the kids in his building liked the air raids except one whose mother was crazy and caused a lot of trouble by running out into the street and uncovering the windows while the sirens were still going.

For a few days in the afternoons we went to our neighbors’ apartment to hear the news. It was all bad.

The bombardment of the city lasted all day and night without stopping and went on into the next day and night. We stayed in the cellar and the wailing and crying and praying drowned out the explosions if they were far away. My mother sat against the wall with her arms around me and whenever I stood to stretch my legs she asked where I was going. My father and brothers sat against the opposite wall. After three days things quieted and someone came down the stairs and shouted that Warsaw had surrendered. My mother told us not to leave but my brothers and I climbed out into the street.

Dust and soot hung in the air. There were giant craters in the intersection. The big tree on the corner had flown all apart. Our back courtyard was covered with broken glass. Down Gęsia Street something was still burning.

My mother led us back up to our apartment, which only had some broken windows. She sent us out to look for planks to board them up, so I walked over to Lutek’s neighborhood. He threw his arm around me and grinned and said, “Well, we survived the war.” I told him what we were looking for and he led me to an alley fence that was blown apart. Together we brought home so many planks that my father told my mother to leave me alone whenever I wanted to go out during the day. We especially needed water since nothing came out of our faucets, and Lutek showed me how to steal from his building’s cistern.

We gathered anything we might need. Sometimes we were chased off but not often. The destroyed buildings were a great playground and we always found something surprising in the rubble. One building’s entire front had been sheared away and we could see into every apartment up to the roof, and near the top a family was still living there. They looked like a store display. One leg of an iron bedstead hung out into space. In the attic, sparrows flew in and out of the holes made by the artillery shells.

On the way home with my water I was stopped by a bald-headed man in a filthy green surgical apron who was carrying a little boy. The man had eyeglasses covered in dust and a yellowish goatee. “Where’s the shoe store that was here?” he asked.

“There,” I told him, and pointed.

He looked at the smashed walls that had fallen in on one another. “I just found him in the street,” he said. The boy looked asleep. “He can’t walk on all this glass without shoes. I have to carry him until I find something for his feet.”

I recognized his voice and said, “You’re the Old Doctor from the radio.”

“Would you have shoes at your house that might fit him?” he said. But then someone else called, “Pan Doctor! Pan Doctor!” and he turned and carried the boy off in that direction.

WHEN THE GERMANS MARCHED IN, THE CROWDS were so quiet I could hear a fly that was bothering a woman a few feet away. Lutek said there was more noise at the parade on his street and that some people waved little flags with swastikas on them. At the market square the next day no vegetable stalls were set up and instead more Germans unloaded crates from trucks. One talked to me in Polish. “Bring us something to drink,” he told me, and then he and his friends straddled the crates and waited.

Later that week they set up a soup kitchen and handed out free bread. The soldiers seemed to never be sure where they wanted everyone to line up. They enjoyed herding people from place to place. A little girl with big ears waited three hours in line with us and when she got her soup she handed it to Lutek and said she wasn’t hungry. After she left he told me she was a neighbor and that her parents and sister had been buried in their building during the bombardment. He said that when you saw the building you knew they wouldn’t be dug out until Christmas.

That night two Germans showed up at our door looking for furniture. They roamed around our apartment before deciding we had nothing they liked. They went next door to our neighbors with the radio and took two chairs and a soup tureen. The husband told us after they left that they’d pulled him around by the nose with pliers because he hadn’t said a courteous enough hello.

The next day the Polish police had taken over the soup kitchen and the soldiers were gone. Then the day after that the Polish police were gone and so was the soup kitchen.

THAT WINTER WE DID ALL OF OUR SCROUNGING IN heavy rain. Streets were like marshes because of the big dirty puddles between the cobblestones. We had to be careful because everything was extra slippery. It didn’t help that in January Jews could no longer be on the streets after nine and before five. Lutek’s father sometimes had to leave his crate where it was and get it in the morning. Most were so heavy that no one could steal them anyway. He told us about one of the other porters who claimed that because he was so ugly the Germans constantly interrupted his work to take pictures of him.

All Jews had to wear yellow armbands. Lutek said that the extra layer would help keep us warm.

There was always a new rule. My mother was upset about the one that made Jews show a delousing certificate to ride the trolleys. Then she was upset that we could no longer ride certain trolleys. Then she was upset that we had to declare our possessions and said it would be the first step in stripping us of everything we had. My father reminded her that the Germans had already been in our apartment and had found nothing worth taking.

Lutek and I rode whatever trolleys we wanted because he taught me how to wear a half-sleeve over a long-sleeved shirt so we could roll it down to cover our armbands. And he showed me how you had to jump off if the trolley drivers slowed in a certain way because it meant that Germans were waiting at the next stop. Once we jumped off right into some German police but they only took us by the collars and told us to help a doctor who was being made to empty all of the silver from his sideboard into some waiting cars. The doctor kept asking us to be careful with everything. After the last load he asked a German if he could keep his grandmother’s saltcellar, a little boat he showed us because it had great sentimental value for him, and the German said no.

“Who leaves so many things lying around?” my mother asked at dinner about the loot I brought home, and my father said what did she know about it, that she should be quiet and count her blessings.

“It’s a blessing he’s safe and I want to keep him that way,” she told him.

“Does he look like he’d do anything dangerous?” he said.

Lutek agreed this really was the best thing about me: that I didn’t. We specialized in pantry and bathroom windows that you wouldn’t think a cat could fit through. I’d give him a boost and then wait at the end of the alley for his whistle. If all was clear I’d whistle back and he’d dump whatever he’d found down to me and off I’d go, to meet up with him later on.

When it came to tools he had an eye for things you couldn’t find a use for at first. He lifted a thick short wire off the flatbed of a truck and it turned out to be perfect for working through a sash and casement, because once it was through it was rigid enough that you could tap the hook until it popped from the eyelet.

He had found someone who would trade most of what we got for most of what we wanted, so some days I’d bring my mother coal and some days flour and some days something else. One night I brought home almonds, but it didn’t matter because some women in fur coats had been ordered to wash the pavement with their underwear and then to put the underwear back on again, wet, and my mother and everyone else had been forced to watch, and she was still upset.

I told Lutek about it and he told me about having come across an old Jew atop a barrel with some German soldiers cutting his hair, with a crowd gathered around laughing. He said all they were doing was cutting his hair and he couldn’t tell how upset the old Jew was but that he’d told himself then and there he would never let himself end up on top of that barrel. So whatever else happened to him he could always say to himself, well, you’re not on top of that barrel.

We celebrated our big talk by stealing two expensive fountain-pen sets from a shop and hid them under our shirts while we waited for the trolley. The trolley was only two blocks away but it hadn’t moved for ten minutes and men were standing around the front of it.

We debated whether or not to just walk home. My shoes no longer fit and my blisters had broken, so I argued we should wait.

There was a girl sitting next to us and Lutek asked her who she was looking at. She asked him who he was looking at. “What kind of hat do you call that?” she asked.

He told her to go screw herself with an onion. An onion would be better than him, she said. Then she said those were Lamy pens we thought we were hiding. She recognized the cases.

I buttoned my top button and Lutek rubbed his eyes.

She suggested we take them to Siekierska’s in Wilanów. She explained when we didn’t answer that no one else would buy such expensive pens.

“Let’s just walk,” Lutek told me and then stood up. When I hesitated he went off without me.

I stayed beside the girl for another few minutes. “Your friend Rabbit Hat doesn’t take chances,” she said.

I asked what she thought had happened with the trolley and she said it was a good question. I told her my name was Aron and she said she hadn’t asked. I asked what her name was and she said Zofia, then turned and looked at me and shook my hand. I asked where she’d gone to school and she said over on Third of May Avenue. She said she’d been picked on as the only Jewish girl. I said she didn’t look Jewish. She had light hair and a small nose. She thanked me and then said that I did.

She asked if I knew Mańka Lipszyc, and I said yes. She asked if I was the one whose brother had just died and then was quiet at my answer.

The trolley never came. She told me she had a younger brother named Leon and an older brother Jechiel and a younger sister Salcia who was only ten months old.

She knew about the pens because her father had owned a stationery store. People came from all over the city for the quality of his paper. He supported their family, their grandmother, the unmarried Brysz girls, their Uncle Ickowicz, and Hanka Nasielska and her parents. For a while her family had so much money that she’d gone to the kind of preschool where you paid tuition. Her father had a sister in America who begged him to emigrate but he told her that he’d stay where he was in order to mind the shop.

After the Germans arrived they beat him severely and smashed around their apartment hunting for gold. They ended up taking only five meters of dress material from her mother. Even so, her family had been luckier than friends across the street who’d been thrown out of their house and told that their kind of people had slept far too long on soft beds. But then a week after that an SS officer stopped by the shop and was so impressed that he’d instructed her father to arrange to transport the shop’s entire stock back to the officer’s hometown. Her father had been given a receipt.

They’d lived on Żelazna Street in a big apartment but they’d since had to move and their new neighborhood was so backward that some of the streets weren’t even paved and so muddy there were wooden footbridges to the front doors. She said it was sad to watch her mother wade through the mud. She said that her mother had wept for three days and her father had assured them they’d move again soon, that he’d told them that he was starting a broom factory and that the Germans were very fond of brooms.

She said her brother had told her that even before she was born their parents had been to the rabbi twice for a divorce, that her grandmother had insisted on the marriage and told anyone who would listen that her daughter had married an educated man.

I told her I should get going. “Don’t let me keep you,” she said.

But after I didn’t get up she said she remembered thinking to herself that maybe their family’s move would change everything, even her, and things wouldn’t be so bad. She said the years before school that she couldn’t remember had probably been the happiest of her life. I didn’t know what to answer. Finally she stood up and stretched and said she was late. Then she bent down with her hands on her thighs and said that if I carried the pen case under my belt in the back it might be harder to spot.

WORK ON THE WALLS BEGAN AS SOON AS IT GOT warmer. My mother at first celebrated the news that the Judenrat had been ordered to quarantine the Jews who were sick. Then she realized we might be part of the area to be sealed off. She went with our neighbors to report there was no typhus in our building, but that only meant she spent days waiting to talk to an official who wouldn’t listen and couldn’t do anything.

All day long outside our window we heard wheelbarrows squeaking and trowels scraping and the clink of bricks. It started and stopped, so for days there might be just a few rows and then suddenly something you couldn’t see over. As far as Lutek was concerned, for the time being it was another opportunity. After the workers quit for the day at a dead end near Niska, we carried off two big bags of cement.

In the evenings my brothers argued about what was happening. I had other things to worry about. Whenever there was big news our neighbors with the radio knocked on our door. Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg had all been invaded. I asked Lutek if he thought Belgium would surrender and he said that it didn’t matter, since the way things went for us either one bad thing or another would happen.

No one wanted linens or floors washed anymore, so what I brought home was more important than ever.

In May it got warm and we worked later. Lutek and I got into a scrape, so I ducked into an entryway and waited and was about to leave it when Zofia took my sleeve. She gestured with her head and we stood there quietly as the shopkeeper and his sons passed by. One had a mallet and the other two had nightsticks. Lutek was somewhere on the other side of the street and might have been long gone. The shopkeeper stopped on the corner in a dry spot and his sons started searching door by door.

“I think you’d better come to dinner,” Zofia whispered into my ear. She was watching through the entryway’s frosted glass with me, her cheek close to mine. “We’re right upstairs. You can bring what you have there as your gift.”

Her parents were polite and pleased by the honey, and her mother told their baby it was rare and expensive. They introduced me to her older brother Jechiel, a yeshiva student. He seemed to think I was standing too close to his sister. He said that for looking too often at a woman one was hung by the eyebrows in Hell. Zofia laughed and told me that because his morning prayer, “Let our days be multiplied,” sounded like “cheap fish,” it had become his family nickname.

She introduced me to her younger brother, Leon, who seemed unhappy and had little to say. His brother talked about him as if he wasn’t in the room, then said that while their parents had hopes for him he’d turned out to be a real dunce, already kept back a grade twice before school had been suspended. Now getting his certificate was going to be like making it to the North Pole at a snail’s pace.

Zofia’s mother made what she said was a hometown dish, a pudding of buckwheat meal sautéed with onions. She fed it in spoonfuls to the baby, Salcia, who was wedged into a high chair beside her.

Someone rang the bell and Zofia answered the door and stepped out into the hall and talked in a low voice before returning to the table. When her father asked about it she said that the shopkeeper Lebyl was looking for a thief.

They asked about my family and since I had nothing to say I told them about Lutek. I told them that he liked to climb utility poles just to look down on people. I told them that on crowded trolleys he liked to recite details about what happened between a man and a woman. Zofia’s brother was appalled but her father found it funny. She asked if Lutek had ever had a girlfriend and I told her there’d been a girl he admired and that he’d waited every evening for an entire month beside her gate with a letter explaining his feelings but that whenever she came out he’d panic and walk away.

Her father talked about the broom factory and where the money for it would come from. He talked about Zofia’s grandfather, who had never heard a kind word from anyone and at the age of ten had been sent away every night to eat his evening meal at another family’s house, and once he had his own children he always preferred scrimping on the family’s food to working harder. He said he thought that Zofia took after him. She said she agreed and that as a rule she disliked everyone. He told about how he’d had to throw her out of his shop when she was six years old and had ventured the opinion in front of one of his biggest customers that the price he’d quoted was far too high.

Salcia didn’t like the pudding, so her mother cleaned it from her face with a spoon and then offered it to her again and asked if this Lutek I was describing was despite all of that a good boy. I said yes and Zofia said no. Her father laughed and her mother made a face. They never looked at each other but still the family seemed to get by.

It got quiet. Jechiel looked at me as though I was missing something. Zofia’s father reminded me about the curfew and her mother thanked me again for the honey, which she hadn’t served. Zofia showed me to the door and I didn’t know what to make of her look before she closed it and left me in the hall. I told myself as I went down the stairs that there was nothing wrong with having friends, but that there’d be no butting in where I wasn’t wanted.

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY WAS EXCITED ABOUT THE news that the Germans were fighting in France, and then miserable about the news that the Germans had taken Paris. One of my brothers said it was because they had an airplane that converted to a tank when it set down on the battlefield. My other brother said it was because they had something called a heavy-air bomb that surrounded their parachutists with a shield that no bullet could penetrate. My mother said that one believed this and the other believed that but what was fated to happen always will. My father said that one way or another the joke he’d heard at his cousin’s factory was that thousands of hammers had arrived from America to pound dreams of salvation out of our heads.

When it was finished the wall was three meters high with another meter of barbed wire on top. I still helped my mother with her chores and each morning she went out to look at it. I asked if she was hoping to find it taken down. They built a wooden bridge across Chłodna Street near St. Karol’s Church to connect the two ghettos that were separated by the street and trolley line. Farther down a gate sealed off Żelazna and all the traffic stopped so the trolley could run through.

And now there was typhus in the building across the street. Packages were left on the sidewalk outside the front entrance because the porters refused to carry them inside.

My mother and father fought more about what I was doing. He said having a macher at a time like this wasn’t such a bad thing and she said the big macher was dragging the little macher around on a string. He said she didn’t complain when the soup was hot in front of her and she said I was going to get killed or bring the typhus home.

Every morning she searched my clothes for lice and doused my head over the sink with kerosene. She rubbed my neck and behind my ears with a kerosene-soaked rag and scrubbed at my scalp like my hair was the problem. She reminded me she had thought we were partners. I told her that hadn’t changed. So where was her partner, she wanted to know. Her partner was off at his own business, I told her.

She rinsed and toweled my head and I got my satchel. Later I felt guilty and told her we could work together all day tomorrow, but she told me she’d already learned not to get attached to anything. She asked if I missed my younger brother. She said that if she hadn’t been self-centered she wouldn’t have survived either. I repeated that we could spend the whole next day together and she said that the day after that we could visit the Promised Land, where everyone ate figs and honey and fish with noodle soup.

NOTICES WERE HUNG OVER THE GATES TO THE ghetto warning that it was threatened by an epidemic. My mother and father stopped visiting neighborhoods outside the walls and asked me to do the same. I told them I would and went on doing whatever I wanted wherever I wanted to. My mother said that seven people had died across the street, including Mrs. Lederman and the Globus twins, and wondered if we were just going to be walled in with all the sick people until everyone was dead. My brother said he’d heard that after the peace the Jews would all be sent to Madagascar, and my mother asked what we would all do in Madagascar. “Let’s get there, first, and then we’ll find out,” my father told her.

A week later she heard from the woman who sold her soap that all Jews were to be expelled from the streets crossing Ujazdowskie Avenue and the area adjoining the Vistula. My father asked why we should believe her and my mother reminded him that the woman was Czerniaków’s sister-in-law. Two days later he read the same news aloud to us from the paper, as though we’d been arguing with him. Jewish residents in the German quarter had to move out immediately; those in the Polish district could remain for the time being; and all new Jews arriving in the city had to go straight to the walled Jewish district.

Where were they going to put everyone, my brother wanted to know.

“I think they believe that’s our problem,” my father told him.

Lutek reported the next day that his father and the rest of the porters had been told it would soon be forbidden in our district to rent to Aryans, and that Christian families were already negotiating to exchange apartments with Jews from other parts of the city. “So?” I said, and Lutek said, “You’re an idiot,” and that we would have a field day what with all the carts and wagons going back and forth, and he was right.

Proclamations kept appearing in the newspapers and my father kept reading them to the family, always first announcing, “And under the heading of Things Get Worse …” Each proclamation listed new streets that were to be cleansed of Jews. Pages advertised Aryan-owned apartments inside the walls to be traded for Jewish-owned ones on the outside. Finally in October all Jews were given two weeks to move into the district and told that it had been shrunk by an additional six streets, which meant that those who had already exchanged apartments to get onto those streets now had to exchange apartments again. This was necessary to protect the health and well-being of the soldiers and the general population.

The result was like the worst street bazaar of all time combined with an evacuation. Every road we looked down was a sea of heads and all we heard was a terrible clamor and shouting. Lutek and I spent most of our time at the Leszno Street gate. Jews were hauling overloaded pushcarts and wagons in while Poles tried to haul the same out and the arguments about who could proceed and who had to wait meant that it took hours to get anywhere. Collisions spilled tables and chairs and stoves and pans onto the cobblestones, and half a family’s load got snatched away before they could reassemble the other half. Lutek and I rode the crowds up to the wagons and carried off whatever we could. Sometimes kids or old people on the wagons saw what we were doing and shouted to those in front, but in the crush the fathers or older kids could never get to us in time. I got a mantel clock and Lutek pulled away a whole Oriental rug. The German and Polish police ignored the Polish carts but grabbed anything they wanted off the Jewish ones. One of the Jews complained, so they overturned his.

On some of the narrower streets pushcart owners who hadn’t found apartments went from house to house calling up to the windows to ask if there were any spare rooms. Anyone who had a cart charged whatever he liked, and everyone was a porter, so Lutek’s father and the others made money by taking over the sidewalks in front of their buildings. People moving in unloaded feather beds and laundry baskets but the porters threw them over the fences into the courtyards and the families had to pay to get them back. On every street, children were lost and crying and milling around. Everything Lutek and I carried off we stored in the cellar of his father’s building, alongside what his father had collected.

We were separated the day before the deadline and I was knocked to the pavement trying to get closer to a cart. I crawled to the entryway of a building and tried to get my breath back. A kid jerked at my satchel while I was crawling and I kicked at him and drove him away. I lost my balance getting back on my feet and almost put my hand on an SS officer. He and three of his men were watching a Polish policeman whose papers had fallen out of his leather pouch. The policeman was in the road shouting for the crowds to go around him but every time he crouched his pouch slid down off his shoulder and spilled more paper. The SS officer laughed with his men about it. Even I could see that they were afraid of him. His hairline under his cap stopped high on the back of his neck and there was something about the stubble that looked dangerous.

My knees still hurt from where I’d fallen and I put my hands on them. The officer did the same, and his men noticed and smiled. He squinted at me as though he’d said something funny and then straightened up and gestured to his men and they left, one of them looking back and winking before the crowd swallowed them up.

ON THE DAY OF THE DEADLINE LUTEK AND I SPOTTED a wagon filled with magical loot — a gilded birdcage, a set of knives in a sunburst pattern in an open display case — and followed it until we had to give up because the crowds were so impossible. Lutek got mad and climbed a lamppost to search out other opportunities while I hung on to it below him. Then we heard a fanfare of horns and pie pans and the gates of the courtyard opposite us opened, and two old janitors somehow managed to part the mob on the sidewalk and a row of kids with horns and tin pans and wooden spoons turned onto the street in a line. A boy in the center held a staff with a bright-green flag and a Jewish star in a harness around his waist. More lines came out of the darkness behind them, kids of all sizes holding toys and books against their chests and singing.

“What is it?” Lutek asked. We couldn’t hear what they were singing but the kids kept coming, at least twenty rows of them, followed by wagons piled high with wicker baskets tied with cords and cast-iron pots and floured breadboards and trunks tied with rope, crates of books and ladles and strainers, and then a wagon mounded with coal and another with potatoes. Other kids and adults wrestled over the coal and potatoes that scattered onto the cobblestones when the wagons turned onto the street. All of the wagons had red geraniums in window boxes along their sides, and beneath them decorations made from streamers. The wagon drivers were wearing homemade bird masks with plumes and feathers. We pushed closer and heard someone say it was Korczak’s orphanage that had been forced to move. And then there he was with his bald head and yellowish goatee again, the last one out before the courtyard gates swung shut behind him. He was pulling a heavy woman along by the arm and struggling to keep up with the last wagon. She was as tall as he was and seemed more frightened by the crowds.

They were pushed into our path and for a while we were carried along behind them. I wondered if he would recognize me but he didn’t. He and the heavy woman had to shout at each other to be heard. She asked how long he thought he could go without sleeping and he shouted back that when he was a young man his mother had come into his room in the midafternoon and dragged him out of bed by his feet. “She asked if that was how I wanted to become a doctor,” he shouted. “By staying out all night long. And I told her, ‘A doctor? I thought I was studying to become a lush.’ ”

We followed them to the gate of the small ghetto at Chłodna, where the German and Polish police were checking identification. All of the orphanage wagons had passed through except the one with the potatoes, which sat still next to the guard hut. The driver had his hands on his hips and was watching two Polish policemen unhitch his horse. He’d pulled his bird mask down and it hung below his chin. A feather fluttered alongside his ear.

“What’s happening?” Korczak asked the Polish policeman in front of us. “Why has my wagon not gone through?”

“This isn’t your wagon,” one of the German policemen told him. “It’s my wagon.”

They argued in German about it. The heavy woman was terrified and tried to pull Korczak through the gate but he knocked her arm away. He shouted something at the German and then repeated it to the Polish policeman: that if the German didn’t release the potatoes he would report the theft to their superiors. The German’s bored expression disappeared and he said in Polish, “So you’re trying to frighten me, Jew?” and Lutek gave my shirt such a pull from behind that he ripped it.

“Are you with him?” a Polish policeman said, stepping in front of us. He pointed a baton at Korczak. “Is he drunk?”

“I don’t know what he is,” I told him, and Lutek pulled me again, and a woman with a chicken in a straw cage shouldered forward and almost knocked the policeman off his feet. He clubbed her once and then twice and Lutek shouted into my ear, “What do you think this is? A show?” and yanked me so hard that I fell to my knees, and then he pulled me to my feet and dragged me down the street.