The Book of Aron

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FAMILIES SQUATTED IN THE HALLS AND FOUGHT over sidewalks. One took over our stairwell near the top floor. They aired out their clothes and bedding on the railings. No one had said the ghetto would be closed and the markets outside the walls declared illegal. There were long lines in front of the food shops and everything was bought up. Our family of course wasn’t prepared and hadn’t saved any money. Two other families moved in with our neighbors across the hall and my mother said it was only a matter of time before someone moved in with us. When she complained about it my father reminded her that the Christian who owned the building had lived here thirty-seven years and then had to leave nearly all of her furniture behind. He cheered himself by reading the German casualty lists in the newspaper. He called it his Happy Corner. He also paid ten groszy extra for a German paper that showed photos of their cities after Allied bombing.

The small ghetto across Chłodna we heard had attracted the well-to-do Jews and was less crowded. Our neighbor told us that across the hall they were nine to a room. The family on our stairwell took in some extra relatives and bartered old clothes and saccharine on the street in front of our building and screamed and fought in the middle of the night. In the mornings we had to step over them when going down the stairs.

My parents fought too. My mother said we were living like castaways and the apartment was filthy and my father said if we didn’t have money for bread we didn’t have money for soap. She said that once we got the typhus we wouldn’t need money for soap and he said that once we got the typhus he’d never have to hear her complain again. My older brother told them that he didn’t think married couples should argue the way they did.

Sometimes if the fight was bad my mother would lie down next to me and weep. I’d put my hand on her head and tell myself I didn’t care what they did because I was going wherever I wanted and doing what I wanted.

But I wasn’t sleeping because of the lice. My mother finally boiled my sweater, which was so infested we could see it moving, but the nits survived boiling and could only be ironed out. They made gray oily stains when they melted under the iron, and were only gone for a while, since whatever we disinfected just got reinfested by everything else. It was so bad around my waistband that I looked like I was always adjusting my pants. I woke up scratching. In the morning I ran my fingernails through my scalp and dropped what I pulled out onto the hot lid of the stove so I could see them sizzle.

I got on the trolley still scratching and a Polish policeman told me to give him my coat. It was far too small to fit him and I showed him the elbows, which were worn through, and he said, “Give it here anyway.” I said sure and added that I’d just come from the hospital and had the typhus. I combed my hair with my hand and wiped the lice on my sleeve and stepped closer to him and he moved to the rear of the car and got off at the next stop.

My father came home from the fabric factory with what he said was good news. His cousin had converted part of the factory floor into a dormitory for refugees who could pay and so he had to let some workers go but my father hadn’t been one of them. He’d been worried about it because he and his cousin hadn’t been getting along. To celebrate he brought home bread and onions and marmalade, which we hadn’t seen since the rationing began, and which my brothers finished before I got back. We had the rest of the bread and onions with some kishke my mother made with steer intestines and some seasonings. My father didn’t read from the newspaper. A German truck went by with a loudspeaker and its only message in Polish was that it was now forbidden to speak of “the Jewish ghetto,” and the proper term was now “the Jewish quarter.” “How do you like it here in the Jewish quarter?” my father asked my mother. “I find it confining,” she told him.

LUTEK HAD ARRANGED A WAY OUT OF THE GHETTO even before it was sealed up. He showed me one morning in a downpour that had driven everyone else inside. Down an alley near Przejazd Street an apartment owner had built a cooplike shed with chicken wire and wood against the wall to keep people from stealing his trash bins, and inside the shed and behind the bins Lutek had chiseled out a passage that had started as a sewage drain. The smell was suffocating and when I first saw it I thought I’d never fit through. I had to go onto my back and push with my heels and squeeze one shoulder through at a time. I asked why he hadn’t made it any bigger and he said it was a lot of work and that the smaller the better and easier to hide and he liked that only we could fit through. The shed had a roof, so once we were inside no one could see us. And he’d nailed a piece of tin over the gap so even someone inside wouldn’t necessarily see it. I asked when he’d done this and he said after curfew. I said that it was amazing and he said yes, it was. I said he’d done all the work, and he agreed and said in honor of that our split would be seventy-thirty.

So for a few weeks we made out. He made a deal with some Polish boys, a gang from Łucka Street, and for five złotys a load they kept the blackmailers away. His father’s friends brought us what they wanted to barter on the other side, and we took out linens and silverware and tools and pots and pans and whatever would fit through, and brought back flour and potatoes and milk and butter and onions and meat. Lutek could drag in twenty kilos of potatoes or onions in one go. Sometimes on the other side there were kids we recognized haggling and filling their sacks. Smaller kids hopped onto the wall and waited there like squirrels. When the police showed up everyone disappeared into their holes.

Other gangs heard about it and started using it. When we tried to stop them they beat us. When we came back with metal pipes they outnumbered us and were bigger besides. Once they’d taken it over they made such a racket going through that one kid got caught by the Jewish police and was turned over to a German who shot him in the face. We saw him later, still in the street, with his cheek open and his back on a sewer grate. I didn’t want to look but Lutek stood over him with his hands on his hips like killing him had been his idea. Our hole had been sealed up with cement, and Lutek told me, “Three weeks, every night I worked on that.”

First we were discouraged and then he said we’d been doing it the hard way and that one of his father’s friends was now in the Jewish police and working the gate at Leszno Street. We watched him for a day or two. All three police forces had their sentry posts, German and Polish on one side and Jewish on the other. We called the Jews the yellow police because of their armbands and the Poles and Germans the blue and green police because of their uniforms. Lutek said the Jews were watched by the yellow police and the yellow police by the blue police and the blue police by the green police and the green police by the Gestapo. And where was the Gestapo? I wanted to know, and he said “Aha!” as though I’d said something very smart. Everyone was always calling on everyone else to come over and translate for soldiers or work details passing through the gates, and during one shift the green and blue police had set up a business with Lutek’s father’s friend. “So it’s just a matter of everyone getting their taste,” Lutek said. Yellow took five, blue took ten, and green took twenty złotys per parcel. A good time to go through was when the guards had to search a lot of autos that were backed up. We just had to stand where we could see everything and then learn to wait, wait, wait. When it was safe to deal the friend would gesture for the blue policeman to come inside the gate and off we could go.

Lutek’s father also told him about a new system for dealing with the blackmailers: once they surrounded us on the other side of the wall we called over the blue police and told them we were being robbed and that we wanted everyone taken to the station to sort things out. That was the code for the blue police to arrest us, and the blackmailers ran away. At the station we gave the blue police their cut and they let us go when the coast was clear.

We were waiting to go through a week later when Zofia and another girl with dark curly hair walked by with two baskets of goods. They set their baskets down, chatting and laughing, and the other girl shook out her hair like she’d just taken off a hat, and they pulled off their armbands and hoisted their loads again and walked right past all three sentry posts and out of the ghetto. The green policeman even said some kind of hello as they went by. Zofia waved and said something in response that he seemed to like.

The next day we visited her apartment to ask if she and her friend wanted to join our group. “What group?” Zofia asked, and seemed unimpressed when I told her what we had going.

The new girl’s name was Adina. She was from Baranowicze and you could tell she was from the east from her singsong way of speaking. She said she was a year older than us. She was pale and thin with sad black eyes. She didn’t like to talk and always got angry when asked a question. She said that one day she’d come home late from dropping off some sewing and the Germans had driven her cousins out of town in a truck and forced them to jump into an open fire. Those who wouldn’t jump were shot. A cousin who escaped into the woods had told her about it. Then her whole family had been herded west with other families through three villages and those who couldn’t keep up were shot at like ducks until finally they were all loaded onto some trucks and driven into Warsaw. She said she’d brought her best clothes but that her mother had managed to bring only her ceramic stew pot loaded with three bottles of cooking oil.

Lutek kept asking her about the fire part of her story until Zofia finally told him that if he didn’t stop she’d throw him into a fire herself.

So I asked about the oil instead. “What are you looking at?” Adina said to me, and made a face. “He’s in love,” Lutek told her. “He worries me,” she told him back. “Why would your mother save oil?” I asked her again.

She said her parents used to have a shop that sold oil her father had produced himself and was very proud of. He died before the war and the shop had gone downhill even before the Germans came. Her mother was bitter about it still and whenever anyone asked for credit or a favor, she always said, “Sure, it’s nice to screw on somebody else’s sheets.” Lutek said that that could be our group motto and Zofia said again what made him think there was going to be a group.

“We might as well do something,” Adina told her. Back home she said that there’d always been something she needed to be doing but that here she went out into the street and then in no time at all she’d go back to their apartment again, since what was there for her to do in the street?

Lutek asked what made them think they could just walk through the gates and Adina told him she’d always had a talent for that sort of thing. When they got to the city and passed through the center for refugees she told her mother that she’d hide their money and made sure she went first when her family had lined up to be searched, and a Volksdeutsche woman felt around in Adina’s hair for a long time, as though she kept her treasures there, then found a bundle in the pocket of her skirt and pulled it free and exclaimed, “And what are these? Diamonds?” and spilled them out onto a table only to discover they were hard candies. The other Volksdeutsche laughed and the woman slapped Adina’s face and threw her out of the room without finding the gold coins she was also carrying.

WE ALL WORKED TOGETHER FOR A WEEK AND THEN an old Polish woman grabbed Adina and shouted “Smuggler! Smuggler!” when they were coming back through the gate, so Lutek grabbed the old woman and started shouting the same thing and his father’s friend had to drag all three over to the green and blue police to work the whole thing out. Zofia and I went a block away before stopping to watch. The rule with us was always if one got stopped the others walked on. The old woman made a racket we could hear from there. Zofia said Lutek had dropped whatever he’d been carrying into her bag.

“This is going to take a while,” she said and I told her she was probably right. Neither of us had anywhere to go. She worried that Adina would be beaten even if they set her free and said she should’ve gone in her place. When she’d been caught, because of her looks the blue policeman had beaten her but not as a Jew.

“What makes old people like that?” she wondered. I told her I didn’t know.

She said that a few days after the city surrendered, someone had told her mother that her father’s father, her other grandfather, wanted to see her. Zofia had never met him. He was a rabbinical scholar, she never knew what sort.

I waited for her to go on. I was happy that we were talking like this.

She said her parents told her that this grandfather had a lot of money, she didn’t know why, and that her mother was excited because maybe this would allow them all to emigrate. Zofia had never met him because when her father married someone non-Orthodox, his father told him that as far as he was concerned, his son had died, he’d already buried him and mourned his passing.

“So what was he like?” I asked.

“The one thing my father told me was that he wrote letters to God,” she said. “That seemed like an interesting idea. I wondered what he did with them.”

“So what was he like?” I said.

“All my mother ever said about him was that he could dig money out of the ground,” she said. Some trolley brakes screeched around the bend on Chłodna and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it made me wish she was somewhere quiet and safe. “So now I was being summoned to see him, alone, and my mother was very excited and anxious and my father was angry with her for getting everyone stirred up. I remember them fussing about what I would wear and then I was delivered to a big dark house and told to go inside. An old woman opened the door and disappeared and I went up flights of stairs. I didn’t know where I was going and I had to feel my way around the landings but I could see a light on the top floor. The top floor was a long dark room with angled ceilings. At the end of it an old man with a beard sat behind a desk piled with books. Some of the stacks reached the ceiling. There were stacks on the windowsills in the dormers. There were spiderwebs everywhere, even on his lamp, so I stopped to wait for him to say something. I finally said hello but for all I knew he was deaf. He looked up and gestured for me to come closer. I ducked under the webs as I went. When I was halfway there he held up his palm and I stopped and he watched me for a while. A clock was ticking somewhere in the room. I said hello to him again, then took a step, and again he held up his palm. So I told him who I was. His face didn’t change and he waved his hand upward for me to go away. I took a step back, to see if that was really what he meant, and he went back to his reading.”

“So after all that he didn’t even talk to you?” I said.

The green and blue police lost patience and started beating Adina and Lutek on their heads. Adina put her hands over her head, so one of them beat her hands. Then he stopped and everyone went back to their posts.

“I shouldn’t even be with you, you’re so unsanitary,” Zofia said to me. I put a hand to my neck, as if I could hide the lice.

Lutek and Adina disappeared down Żelazna Street and the old woman stood there talking to herself for a few more minutes before she finally left. Once she was gone, Zofia stood up and brushed the dirt from her skirt.

“When the war started, when it came to food I was always more sly and would push through somehow, while my father and brother would stand and stand in the lines and get nothing,” she said. “My mother thinks that what keeps me going is a well of spitefulness.” She thumped her chest. “I think she’s right. I can feel it right here.”

THE TYPHUS WAS EVERYWHERE WORSE AND ZOFIA’S building was filled with it. She carried around a tin of oil and paraffin to rub on herself to keep the lice away, and wouldn’t let me sit anywhere nearby. She wouldn’t let Lutek, either, but when she told him that he said, “Who wants to?” We watched the street trading on Gęsia. In front of us a woman was selling children’s underwear and the lining from a coat. When she saw us looking, she held up what she had as though it was a pot of gold and told us she must’ve gone out of her mind because she was giving these items away for almost nothing. A beggar beside her sat on his hands and held his cup with his bare feet. We were waiting there because someone was bringing us orders to fill and he was late.

“Maybe he’s got the typhus too,” Zofia said, and Lutek said that the typhus was now the other subject he was sick of. Were we supposed to talk about nothing but food all day like him, Zofia wanted to know, and he said that he couldn’t decide who was more boring. All the rich talked about was when they were going to get the inoculation and all the poor talked about was when they were going to get the disease.

My mother asked if my friends were clean and I told her I had more lice than anyone. So she dragged me back to the sink and doused my head and neck and chest again with kerosene. My brothers, about to leave for work, held me down and cheered her on.

“You sound good,” she said, once I got free and she listened to my breathing. She told me to stay away from the quarantined streets.

Zofia said that their house sanitary warden told her father that Krochmalna Street was the main incubator in the ghetto and that the Germans had said they’d burn it down if they could.

“I’m glad no one we know lives on Krochmalna Street,” I told her.

Adina said it was fenced off now, anyway, and they were taking everyone in big trucks to the baths on Spokojna. You could see she felt sorry for Zofia, who whenever she found a louse acted like it was the end of the world.

“Do the baths work?” Zofia asked.

Adina said that she’d asked someone that but instead of answering he’d told her children and fish shouldn’t have voices.

“The baths are where you catch the lice,” Lutek said. “Or the delousing queues. And the sulfur they use doesn’t kill anything anyway.”

“Shaved like a goy,” the beggar next to the woman sneered at him. “Where are your peyes? Your family doesn’t wear any? Maybe they’re not the fashion anymore?”

“And what’re you, the Rabbi of Warsaw? Shut your mouth,” Lutek told him.

The man we were waiting for never showed up and it came time for the new business we called Catching the Trolley. We’d worked a deal with the blue policeman who escorted the number 10. Zofia had been the one to approach him. It was forbidden for Aryan trolleys to stop in the ghetto but the 10 had to slow down to make the turn onto Zamenhofa, where Adina kept watch and left her hat on if all was clear, and then Lutek and I ran out for the sacks thrown off.

We got caught one day by the green police and they chased Lutek instead of me and I hid in a shop that sold matches and cigarettes and small bottles of homemade medicine until the owner thought I was waiting to steal something and threw me out. A yellow policeman who’d been standing next to his bicycle with a young woman walked over to me. He was wearing his own jacket and trousers with the yellow uniform cap and armband. He was shorter than I was and had huge ears. He took my sleeve and asked what I had in the sack and I told him I had to leave. He smiled and held up a finger, showing off for the woman. She wasn’t very tall but she was taller than he was.

“You don’t recognize me?” he said, and then I did: he’d been one of the foremen at my father’s cousin’s factory, the one who’d sent me to the cloth-scraping. His name was Lejkin.

“I like your boots,” I told him.

“So does she,” he said, and the woman blushed. “You know what they say: a constable in shoes is only a half constable.”

I told him again that I had to go. He said I didn’t, in fact, and that I could either get on the handlebars and come with him or walk with him over to the next block, where he would tell the Germans he’d found a smuggler.

Come with him where, I asked, and he said he’d give me a ride home. I asked him why and he said that he liked doing favors for people. “We short fellows have to stick together,” he said. He strapped my sack of onions to a rack over his back wheel and tipped his cap to the woman. Then he steadied the handlebars so I could sit on them. I wanted to tell him his bicycle was too big for him but I was afraid he would turn me over to the Germans.

“See you soon,” he said to the woman and she laughed and said, “We’ll see,” as he started pedaling away.

I was so bony the handlebars hurt on the cobblestones. I couldn’t tell if any of my friends had seen what had happened.

He asked if I knew anyone else in the Jewish Order Service. I told him no. He asked if a lot of young men I knew wanted to be in the Order Service. I told him no. He pedaled for a while and then said that it was odd: he’d only gotten the job because his cousin had entered his name on a list. Someone had handed him a hat and a yellow armband and a rule book and just like that he was on duty.

“Of course we had some training,” he added when I didn’t say anything.

“You’re going to find me a bootjack,” he said a few blocks later, after he dropped me in front of my building. “I need a proper bootjack.”

“How would I know where to find a bootjack?” I asked him.

“How does one know where to find anything?” he answered. “Look around. Say hello to your father for me.” Then he flicked my nose with his finger, pushed himself off, and rode away.

GIVEN THE NEWS THAT APARTMENTS WERE GOING TO be requisitioned anyway, my father said he’d gone looking for boarders who could pay a little something, that it’d be nice if a Jew saw a herring on his table even once a week. My mother said she would only agree to it if whoever he found first went through the disinfection units and then presented her with their delousing certificates. She thought this would be the end of that problem, since the lines at those stations made you wait all day and night, but a family of four showed up the next morning and handed her their certificates one by one as they passed into our apartment carrying what they had. They were each wearing many layers, both for the cold and to make it easier to carry other things. They didn’t look clean, but as my father told her, they weren’t any dirtier than anyone else, either. “They probably bought their certificates, instead of waiting in line,” my mother said, which was what my father and I assumed, though we only shrugged.

They brought as an offering overcooked kasha with rutabaga preserves, some stuffed cabbage that was much more appetizing, and a tiny jar of honey that the father said we might want to use as barter.

He was a tall man who made jokes and his wife was short and had angry eyes and looked disappointed by everything in our apartment. She looked at our kitchen and said, “Ice in the pot, frozen faucets, and not a drop of water.” Their daughter said she was nineteen and their son said he was hungry. He was about my age. Once he was eating he told us his name was Boris.

His parents and sister took the kitchen and my mother and father were in the bedroom so the rest of us slept in the hall. It was even colder there. His feet were in my face. In the middle of the night he seemed to know that I was still awake and started talking in a low voice. He said his family had taken over the previous apartment they’d been in, that they’d just stormed the place with another family. Then it had been taken away from them by the Germans. He said in the shelter at the synagogue all of the boys stole bread from one another’s families, and what they didn’t eat they traded for horseshoe spikes they used in games. He said he’d gotten the honey outside the ghetto when an O.D. man had turned his back and pretended not to see him coming or going. I asked what an O.D. man was and it turned out that’s what he called the yellow police, because of the German name for them, Ordnungsdienst, the Order Service. After we listened to my brothers snore he asked if I thought he looked strong.

“Are you talking to me?” I asked. He said he was. He asked again if I thought he looked strong. I told him I guessed so.

He said that that was because he was. “Smugglers eat more than other people because they work harder,” he said. His cheeks had the pockmarks from chicken pox and he had an expression like he was sharing the floor with a sick person.

I told him smugglers didn’t usually tell everyone that they were smugglers, and he snorted. “I don’t think you’re Gestapo,” he said.

“You never know,” I told him.

He asked how long we’d lived there. He said he’d hated his village and that when he and his friends trampled their neighbor’s vegetable garden the neighbor had come out of his house and tried to beat them with a leather strap. Then he turned loose his dog, who bit them. Dogs hate the poor, he added, thinking about it further. He talked with his hands, like a Jew.

He said he’d been thrown out of the Polish Scouting Association after being told that as a Jew he couldn’t be sworn in on a Christian Bible and he suggested to his troop leader that they use a spare-parts catalog instead. He said his only real friend hadn’t shown up to say goodbye on the day he left. He said all of this gave him an advantage because he never felt homesick. And it was better to have no one to miss.

He said his father had a weakness for the bottle and I’d probably already noticed that he never refused a toast. “And why should he?” he asked.

If he was waiting for an argument, he didn’t get one from me. “You’re soon going to have trouble with my mother, too,” he told me. He said it was never long before she was sure she was being cheated and that’s why she was always shouting at someone. I asked if we were going to have trouble with his sister, too, and he said she was so shy she’d told him that if she ever got married she wanted it to be in a cellar where no one would see.

I asked what happened to his sister’s hand and he said that on the way to Warsaw his father had let him take the reins of the wagon and that he had steered the thing so badly when crossing a bridge that he’d turned them over in a ditch.

I asked how they’d managed to get the wagon back on its wheels and he said he told people stories like that because he thought it was important to be clear in your own head on what you could and couldn’t do and this was how he’d grown up to be someone with open eyes. Inasmuch as he’d grown up at all, I said, and he told me he’d show me how much he’d grown up the next chance he got.

I told our group about him and repeated some of his stories and Lutek said I should bring him along tomorrow. Adina wanted to know why and he said she shouldn’t worry about it, since Sh’maya’s friend Boris probably wasn’t going to survive long anyway, given what we were up to.

“Why’re you calling me that?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what your brothers call you?” he said.

When everyone was asleep that night, I told Boris he should come meet the group. He said he looked forward to becoming our leader. I told him that as far as he was concerned school was starting once the sun came up the next morning, so he should get some rest.

MY MOTHER AND FATHER WERE UPSET BY THE NEWS that the three trolley lines for the Jews were going to be shut down and in the worst part of the winter. My mother asked why she had to live to see such awful years and my father told her there were probably worse years to come. The trolley lines were to be replaced with just one that was given no number but only a shield with the Star of David. Lutek said our bigger worry was that they would stop running the Aryan trolleys through the ghetto, and a month later they did.

There was no announcement so we waited for three days before figuring that out for ourselves. Then Zofia asked what we would do now and Boris said we could start by not playing so nice. To show us what he meant he went along when Lutek delivered our last sack from off the trolley and told the men who’d ordered it that they couldn’t have it until we got more money.

“We agreed to what we agreed to,” one of them told him.

“They agreed to it. I didn’t agree to it,” he said and Lutek told us they went back and forth about it and the men made some threats but eventually got scared by all the patrols coming and going. He said Boris held everyone up like he didn’t even notice the police until he got what he wanted: not only an extra bag of potatoes but also some raisin wine. He shared both with the rest of us.

AT DINNER MY FATHER TOLD US IT SEEMED LIKE NO matter where he went, German soldiers followed. My mother got alarmed and asked why and he said he had no idea.

Boris’s family was in the back room talking in low voices, and my father said, “Maybe they’re planning a coup.”

My mother again brought up the idea of getting Aryan papers and told us Czerniaków’s sister-in-law had assured her it could be done and for not much money, but when she said how much it was, my father asked, “For each person?” so loud that she had to shush him. She told him that was what a birth certificate and an identity card cost. She said there were cheaper ones but they looked suspicious even at a glance.

My father asked how she thought we would eat while we saved that much money and who we would contact on the other side to help us, or would we be all alone. He pointed at me and said, “And do you think this one can pass?” He reminded her she’d said about me that the minute I opened my mouth you could hear the Jew in me.

My mother looked at me sadly and said, “Aron, what do you think?”

“I think we’re doing all right here,” I told her. I could feel my ears burning.

“There,” my father said. “Even he thinks we should stay.”

My mother said she would ask my brothers when they got home but I could tell by her voice that she’d already given up.

But they never got home because they were picked up on the street outside our apartment by soldiers and the yellow police for the work battalions. We heard the shouting but didn’t understand what it was. My mother pulled me from the window and then our neighbor rushed in to tell us. She said that another man had pulled money from his pocket and handed some to each of the soldiers and policemen and they’d let him go.

She thought they were taking them to Józefów. At least that was what one of the police had told her. My father pulled all the money we had from our hiding places and rushed off to try to catch them before they got to the police station. I ran after him. It was almost curfew.

The column was being marched double-time and the yellow police were in the back, shouting and thumping with fat sticks the ones who didn’t keep up. The Germans at the front every so often looked back and then there was more shouting and thumping.

“Listen,” my father called when he got close enough to the last yellow policeman.

“Go away or you’ll end up with them,” the man warned him. My father lagged back but I took the money from his hand and passed him because I’d noticed Lejkin up ahead.

“Look who it is,” Lejkin said when I fell into step alongside him. “Do you want to go to a labor camp? Where’s my bootjack?”

“I found a beautiful one,” I told him. “But I also have a deal for you.” I showed him the money I held inside my coat.

“Who’s being saved?” he asked. I pointed out my brothers a few rows up. In their misery they still hadn’t seen us. “And what’s in it for me?” he added.

“More where this came from,” I told him. Though as far as I knew we didn’t have any more.

He let us march another half block just to let me suffer and then said something to the trailing policeman and they both went forward and pulled my brothers from the line and dragged them back to my father, who made such a cry of happiness and relief that he almost gave the whole thing away.

“I NEED A BOOTJACK,” I TOLD LUTEK.

“A bootjack?” he said. “What do you need with a bootjack?” We were standing next to each other to get warm back at our old Leszno Street gate. It was snowing. Lutek was trying to get our old arrangement going again, but his father’s friend had more business than he knew what to do with so he was making us wait. Lutek kept bringing up phlegm and spitting it onto the pavement to watch it freeze. Our shoes were soaked through and coming apart and we were stamping our feet.

“I have a contact that maybe we can use,” I told him.

“Who would that be?” he asked.

“Someone I met. You don’t have to know everything,” I told him.

“Going into business for yourself?” he said.

“You don’t tell me about everyone you meet,” I said. I didn’t know why I wasn’t telling him.

“That’s true,” he said.

“So are you going to help me or not?” I asked.

He blew on his hands and rubbed his cheeks and then gave me the address of a shop on Niska. “Bring something to trade,” he told me. Then something caught his eye across the square. “He’s ready for us,” he said.

MY PARENTS HAD BEEN SO HAPPY AT MY BROTHERS’ return that they celebrated even with Boris’s family. My father suggested we open the honey, but Boris’s father said that we should save it for a bigger occasion. Like maybe the end of the war, my brother said, then added that he’d heard there’d been a recent bombardment of Berlin. He was always talking about new peace proposals he’d heard had been offered through the Swedes or the Swiss or the pope. Everyone sat around the table smoking their cigarettes and telling everyone else what they’d heard. My father always said that if you gave Jews a minute to themselves they produced rumors. Boris’s mother said the rabbi in their village had predicted a year earlier that the war would end this month because his cabalistic calculations had proved the cup of Jewish suffering was now entirely full. Her husband cheered ironically and proposed a toast to the news. He poured a little bit of vodka for himself and my father.

When their toast was drunk he said, “So Hitler asks the governor-general what’s being done to oppress the Jews. The governor-general talks about all the rights and privileges that have been taken away but Hitler’s unsatisfied. The governor-general talks about everything that’s been stolen from the Jews and Hitler’s still unsatisfied. He talks about the ghetto and all the disease and filth and Hitler’s still unsatisfied. Finally the governor-general says, ‘Oh, and I’ve also set up a Jewish Self-Aid Organization,’ and Hitler exclaims, ‘Now you’ve got it!’ ”

My brothers laughed with him. “Here’s to the Jewish police as well,” my father said grimly when they stopped.

We were all quiet. Outside we could hear the street vendor calling out his coke and carbide for sale. “Well, that helped the party along,” Boris’s father said.

My mother had recovered enough by then to smile. “At first I liked the idea of Jewish police,” she finally said. “If you have to take orders from a Pole or a Jew, why not a Jew? And they didn’t turn over the merchants’ baskets and trample everyone’s goods.”

“That was before they started rounding up everyone too poor to buy themselves out of a trip to the labor camps,” my father said.

“Yes, that was before,” my mother said. And then the party really was over. Later she asked my father again if he could get me back into the factory and when he said he was lucky to still have a position there she lost her temper and asked what he was going to do on the day when I didn’t come home. He told her they weren’t rounding up children for the labor camps and reminded her that at my size I looked even younger than I was.

“If something happens to him I will never look at you again,” my mother said.

“You never look at me now,” my father said.

“We’re trying to sleep out here,” one of my brothers called from where we were lying in the hallway.

“They fight like my parents,” Boris said, and in the dark it sounded like he was waiting for me to agree.

“I think he’s asleep,” my brother finally said.

“He’s not asleep,” Boris told him.

BECAUSE MY MOTHER WAS SO UNHAPPY I INTRODUCED her to Zofia and Adina, both of whom she liked more than Lutek, as I knew she would. Adina said, “Why are we meeting your mother? Are we getting engaged?” but Zofia said she understood and told Adina that doing something nice for someone wouldn’t kill her. We met in a café and my mother insisted on buying the girls tea even though I could see how upset she was at what she spent. She asked after their families and made her such a shame face when she heard their sad stories. Then when our visit was almost over she said that her friend who was Czerniaków’s sister-in-law had told her about the performances at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage and would we all like to go?

Adina looked at me and my expression told her I’d had no idea that my mother was going to do this.

“I don’t think the girls want to see children’s puppet shows,” I said to my mother.

“They’re not puppet shows,” she said.

“I saw their parade when they had to move into the ghetto,” Zofia told her. “It was quite the circus.”

“I saw that too,” I said. “Did you see the wagons with the geraniums?”

Zofia said that she’d heard all sorts of rumors about him: he’d been taken into the forest and shot; he’d been taken away to one of the camps; he’d been put on a boat to Palestine. The problem had been that he’d gone all the way to the Gestapo to protest the confiscation of some potatoes and showed up there having refused to wear his armband. It turned out that he’d been beaten and thrown into a cell but then after a month they’d let him go.

“They let him go?” Adina asked, interested in that part. “Why?”

Zofia held her hand up and rubbed her thumb against her fingertips.

“Is he rich?” Adina asked.

“He has rich friends,” Zofia told her. She said she’d also heard that his Polish janitor had been beaten almost to death on the same day because he’d applied in person to go into the ghetto with the rest of the orphanage but Aryans could no longer work for Jews.

The four of us listened to the conversations at other tables. I could see my mother’s disappointment in her eyes. “Working and stealing, working and stealing, that’s what times are like now,” she said. The girls just looked at her and finished their tea. Zofia kept the sugar cube pressed between her lips and her tongue poked out only once it had completely dissolved. My mother stood up and wiped her eyes. Well, she told us, if we were interested, the new orphanage was now on Chłodna Street, in the small ghetto.

“We’ll go,” Zofia said. “Sure. It could be fun.” Adina looked at her. “It could be fun,” Zofia repeated.

My mother was pleased and left before we could change our minds. Adina said, “You’re not going to get Lutek and Boris to agree,” and Zofia said, “I’m not going to try.”

That night at dinner my mother told everyone the good news and Boris’s father wanted to know why the Germans would let Korczak go.

“Maybe they made him an informer,” Boris said.

“Maybe he gave them a pile of gold,” my brother said.

“The Germans know him as the greatest child specialist and educational reformer in all of Europe,” my father said. “They know him even in England and France. He’s probably the safest Jew in the ghetto.”

“A big shot,” Boris said.

“Was he the one with the scandal before the war?” Boris’s father asked.

“What scandal?” my mother asked. Boris’s father held up his hands like he meant no offense.

“He lost his radio program and his position on the juvenile court,” my father said. “He went on a trip to Palestine and then people no longer overlooked that Janusz Korczak the Pole was really Henryk Goldszmit the Jew.”

Shots were fired outside and we all were quiet around the table, listening. The soup was beet shavings and nettle leaves with little lumps of kasha.

“No one wanted a Jew in charge of Poland’s juvenile offenders,” my father added. But I was still thinking about why the Germans would let Korczak go and everyone else had gone on to thinking about other things.

AT THE ORPHANAGE A LINE HAD BEEN PAINTED through the sign for the Roesler Commercial Secondary School and a handmade wooden sign that said The Children’s Republic hung below it from twine. We were escorted into the building and to wooden folding chairs in front of the stage by little girls in costumes made of bits of paper and other scraps. “What are you supposed to be?” I asked the girl leading me in. Her paper was mostly colored green and she said, “I’m a dragon.”

The stage was a platform at the end of the main room on the first floor. Once all of the chairs were filled and people lined the back wall, the heavy woman I’d seen the Old Doctor pulling down the street came through a door in the back and everyone applauded. She was carrying a cactus that she set down on the front of the stage. She welcomed everyone to the Orphans’ Home and said her name was Stefania Wilczyńska and that she was the senior teacher. She introduced the cactus as her favorite orphan and the home’s good-luck charm, and everyone laughed as though they knew what she was talking about. Then she said it was her pleasure to introduce the greatest humanist and intellectual in Poland.

Everyone applauded again and Korczak came through the same door. He was wearing a paper crown, and people laughed at that. The heavy woman took a seat in the front row.

“Someone should give that fat man in the back a chair,” Korczak said. “He looks much too well-to-do to stand.” The smaller children in the audience thought he was hilarious.

“Everyone loves my rude remarks,” he said once they quieted down. “Even the dressed-up ladies and elegant gentlemen. Though they keep their distance and I never hear from them until their children are sick. Then it’s: ‘Please, please, you have to come,’ even if it’s the middle of the night.”

“So he’s a doctor?” Adina whispered to my mother.

My mother told her he was a famous doctor and he’d been an army doctor in the war between Russia and Japan and in the world war, and in the civil war in Russia.

He apologized to what he called the better society in the crowd for his occasional use of Yiddish. He said he would like to present one of his radio talks, called The Loneliness of the Child, before standing aside for the main event of the evening, the home’s production that would showcase the most talented undersized citizens who had been gathered from Warsaw’s attics and basements. “That’s where you find some of the city’s most interesting people,” he said. “Forgotten, in someone’s basement.” He cleared his throat and cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief, taking his time. Then he put his glasses back on and began.

It was funny at first but then got sadder. I stopped listening.

When it was over everyone applauded again and the children set up the stage for the play.

“I liked when he said that loneliness was the port from which he always sets out,” Zofia said.

“I liked when he asked, ‘Do you steer the course or are you just carried along?’ ” my mother said.

“I’m not just carried along,” Adina said.

“You sound like Boris,” Zofia said.

The play was called The Three Journeys of Hershkele. The hero, who wore a headdress he could barely keep on his head and that was never explained, hid on a plane bound for England, where he talked the English king into allowing all the Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Then he hid on a plane to Egypt, where he found a whole roomful of the pharoah’s gold to pay for everyone’s trip. Then he hid on a plane to Germany, where he met with Hitler. The boy who played Hitler was very good. When he saw all the gold Hitler was sorry for what he’d done and invited the Jews back, and the hero told him no thanks but said he’d use the leftover gold to buy milk and butter for the starving German children. At the end just the hero and Hitler remained onstage and Hitler thanked him and asked if there was anything he could do in return for the milk and butter and the hero said yes, that Hitler could make a law that all adults who pass children on the street must bend their heads in shame, and Hitler said that he would. Then the hero sang a song about the Ten Commandments and the whole cast did a dance and the thing was over.

My mother applauded even after everyone else had stopped. She was weeping again. “You liked it too,” she said to me. Korczak came back out to thank the cast of the play and everyone applauded again. He thanked everyone for coming, and congratulated them all on being twice orphaned themselves, since they were stateless and Jewish. He told the adults to remember to approach children with affection for what they already were and with respect for what they could become. He told the children to remember that we couldn’t leave the world the way we found it. And to remember to wash our hands. And to drink boiled water. And to open the windows to get fresh air. He looked out the window closest to him and finished by saying that we should wait until it was warmer, though.

EVEN ADINA THOUGHT THE OLD DOCTOR HAD BEEN worthwhile, even if part of the reason for that had been the cookies afterwards. Later she said she hadn’t seen cookies in she didn’t know how long and Boris got angry that we hadn’t swiped some for him and Lutek. When Zofia told him they weren’t really cookies, Adina said maybe they weren’t cookies but they’d been close enough.

We were all hungry all the time. “I remember Mama fed us vegetables because she thought they were healthy,” Adina told us one morning, like she’d had a dream. We were in front of a shop for hernia belts and someone was shouting at their kids from the building’s roof. Someone behind us on the first floor kept telling his wife to add water to the carbide lamp. Someone else poured dirty oil from a windowsill higher up and it spattered on the sidewalk near our feet.

Boris got us started trading the ration cards of people who’d died or left the ghetto, and he thought the best place was around the distribution shops when the mothers came by with their small children, and he was right. He and Lutek did the haggling because the rest of us couldn’t stand to see the kids’ faces while it went on. Lutek had gotten one boy’s wooden shoes by holding the ration cards under his mother’s nose and saying he was only asking her to throw in one extra item, and that if she wanted to trade she had to be able to imagine herself in another guy’s shoes. She’d taken the cards and used them for rutabagas and her son had gone home barefoot. But it was getting warmer. Zofia said it was already late in May though Boris thought it was still April. Lutek tried on the wooden shoes and said that just as he thought, they fit perfectly.

“What is he contributing?” Boris said to Lutek, meaning me. But the girls told him to leave me alone.

“My sister hated spinach,” Adina said. “But I liked it.”

“Are you still talking about that?” Boris wanted to know.

“My mother used to tell me I had to be so clean that my knees would shine,” Zofia said.

I could see the lice where her hair was parted. “You’re still pretty clean,” I told her.

Lutek told us their apartment was now cleaner because his father and some of the other porters had taken to using sawdust ovens, which were also cheaper than coal.

“Do those keep you warm?” Adina asked.

“Nothing keeps you warm,” he told her.

“The ovens aren’t the problem,” Boris said. “Hello, Mother,” he said to a woman who came out of the shop with three small children, all of them weeping. “Is there any way I can be of help?”

After they left he held up a heavy shawl. “It’s English,” he said, showing us the label. He and Lutek went back and forth over whether he might have given the mother less.

We said goodbye an hour before curfew and I was halfway home when someone grabbed my collar. “I like my bootjack,” Lejkin said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I told him, pulling free. “I have to get home.”

“You always have to get home,” Lejkin said, as though this was some ongoing mystery.

He walked along beside me, eating something that he didn’t offer to share.

“My friends on Krochmalna Street want to keep better track of who’s doing what at the different gates,” he said. He meant the yellow police, who had moved their headquarters there in January. I knew because Lutek now took a different route through the small ghetto.

“What’s that to me?” I asked.

“You seem to be all over the place,” he said. “I just thought you might notice things.”

“I’m bad at noticing things,” I told him.

“Well, whatever you do notice,” he said.

I kept walking. I stopped at the trolley stop but no one was waiting there. I’d probably missed it.

“It’s just a matter of keeping track of things,” he said. “It’s not as though anyone intends to do anything that’s bad for business.”

I waited for a few minutes more and then started walking again. The top of one shoe had come completely loose and flapped with every step.

“There are also opportunities I could let you know about when they arise,” he said. “There are some confiscated onions right now, for example, that haven’t yet been turned in.”

“I think you’re the one who’s all over the place,” I told him.

He shrugged like he was used to those kinds of compliments. “The Jewish Order Service, by the way, also has the responsibility of deciding which apartments to requisition, in terms of the further resettlement of the incoming population,” he said.

“Well, our apartment’s already packed,” I said.

“Oh, some apartments are fifteen and twenty to a room,” he told me. “You can’t imagine.”

I stopped and tried to rewrap the cloth strips around my shoe. I couldn’t believe I was crying about a shoe.

“And of course there’s always the question of what your friends might do once they hear you’re working with the Service,” he said. And when I didn’t answer that either he said, “Or have you already told them?

“Well, think about it,” he said a block or two later, when I still hadn’t spoken. And when I looked back again after another half a block he was gone.

THERE WAS A COMMOTION BY MY BUILDING. A GROUP of Germans were kicking at something between them and screaming in German at whatever they were kicking. I hadn’t heard men screaming like that before. People stopped on the street to watch. I didn’t want to get too close but they were in front of my door.

It was someone on his side on the cobblestones and when he made a noise like he was in pain I knew it was my father. I stopped and then pushed closer like someone in line for the trolley. After a few more kicks the Germans stayed in a circle around him but talked with each other instead of screaming. While they inspected him he crawled around their legs. He saw me but didn’t make any sign. The feeling that I should do something lifted me onto my toes. I wanted to but when the time came to do it I lost my nerve. I stood there in the middle of the street.

He had his knees up and his shoulders hunched and a German gave him one more kick that spun him around. Then he just lay there. I thought a son would go to him or scream at the Germans himself. They exchanged a few more comments with some curious Germans on the other side of the street. Then they all started shoving and haranguing one another and left.

A few people approached him, including me. The sleeves and back of his coat were soaked in mud. “Don’t,” he said when I reached to help him up. He got onto his hands and knees and then his feet, tipping around a little, and then headed off away from our door.

I followed him. His walk got more like his old walk. At the first corner we came to, he turned and I caught up with him. Every so often I looked up at his face. He turned again at the next corner, and then again. When the fourth turn brought us back to our block, he stopped to make sure the Germans were gone. At our door he had me go up the front steps ahead of him.

My mother asked what had happened and he told her he’d been knocked down by a wagon. She got upset and boiled some water to help him clean himself up and said he could’ve been killed. He told her to sew some patches on my coat’s elbows, and that everything was sticking out on me. He washed his face at the sink for a long time. My mother was also upset about his coat, which was not only muddy but also had lost one of its pockets. She moaned and carried on about the lining and finally my father shouted at her to stop going on and on about the coat, and she was scared and hurt enough that she didn’t say anything else.

Boris’s father poked his head in to ask if everything was okay. When no one answered, Boris called from the hallway, “He got hit by a wagon.” My father went back to washing his face.

For a time afterwards whenever I closed my eyes I saw him on the street. I couldn’t sleep at night, such strange thoughts kept coming into my head. I woke with blood in my mouth and my mother said it looked like I’d bitten my tongue.

He was different after that and didn’t go back to work for a few days. He sat at the kitchen table by the window with his back to everyone holding a wet cloth to his head and nursing a cup of tea my mother made him. She said it was all right and that we just needed to give him some room. He looked at me sometimes as if the Germans had kicked the courage out of both of us. When Boris and I left the apartment and I said goodbye, he gave a little wave.