The Book of Aron

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IN JUNE IT GOT SO HOT NO ONE COULD SLEEP. THEN on the one night it got cooler the Germans decided to move their whole army past our apartment.

All night tanks ground through the streets and over the Vistula bridge. Trucks thundered along behind them. We all went to the window to watch; you couldn’t rest anyway. The whole apartment shook and anything that was loose jingled and rattled. We had to take our teacups down from the shelf. Every few hours my mother exclaimed about how long it was going on. At first my father tried to stay in bed but even he had to get up after a while. Once the sun came up all of us except my mother went down to the sidewalk to get a better view.

The procession went on until noon. All the Germans in Germany were being trucked through to somewhere. Boris’s father said that never in his life had he seen such machines as the Germans had, but I could barely hear him because of the noise. Soldiers hung off everything everywhere. No one could cross the street. A stray dog tried it at a run and almost lost its tail.

All sorts of German slogans were painted in white on the tanks’ sides. The one we saw most often was STALIN, WIR KOMMEN.

Some of the smaller kids got excited by the huge trucks that were pulling gigantic cannons. The diesel exhaust was dark brown and gave us all headaches, so we went back inside.

That night we heard explosions in the city and the next morning were told that the Russians had bombed Warsaw. Bombs had fallen on Okęcie, Teatralny Square, and a trolley near the Kierbedź Bridge, killing everyone on board.

“Why do you keep going on about your mother?” Boris asked later that morning. “Do you think we all want to hear about your mother? Don’t we all have mothers to worry about?”

“I certainly have to worry about mine,” Adina agreed.

The streets were full of sick people and everyone said the typhus was still spreading. My father had told my mother that God drowned the mangy to save the rest of the flock and my mother had slapped him. I’d told the gang about it. “And your father just let her slap him?” Boris asked. He thought even the typhus might bring us some business and again he turned out to be right when Lejkin came to my apartment and said the Service was recruiting a special unit that would hang disinfection and quarantine signs for extra ration cards. He let me bring along the whole group and we hung signs for three days. “How did he come to find you?” Zofia wanted to know while we were hanging one over a disinfection station.

“Maybe he likes me,” I told her.

“No one likes you,” Boris said.

“He makes a good point,” Adina said.

I used my extra cards to buy rye flour, kasha, and potatoes. Boris brought a plateful of meat soup home for each member of his family.

My mother checked us all for rashes. She rubbed my hand raw to recheck a spot she was anxious about. “The Germans threw us all on top of one another and turned loose the epidemic they were trying to prevent,” she said.

“Won’t they be shocked to hear that,” my father told her.

Zofia’s mother brought Salcia to the hospital for a blood infection and was told that none of the hospitals had room any longer for other kinds of sick people. All four were now only epidemic hospitals. She said that her father was heartbroken because both of the Brysz girls had died in the Stawki hospital.

“Who are the Brysz girls?” I asked, and she reminded me. “Now I remember,” I told her.

“Sh’maya thinks only of himself,” she said, and Boris and Lutek laughed.

“Aron,” I said. “Aron thinks only of himself.”

“Don’t you ever think about anyone else?” she asked. “In you Moses dies of thirst and the tablets turn to sand.”

“What does that mean?” I wanted to know.

“It’s something my grandfather used to say,” she said. “When someone disappointed him.”

“What did I do?” I said.

“You disappointed her,” Boris explained.

“What does everyone understand that I don’t?” I said. I was tired of being the one that no one cared about. Especially her. I wanted to hit someone.

“You keep acting as though everything is normal,” Zofia said.

“Why do you say that about me and not the others?” I asked.

“Oh, stop pestering me,” she said.

“I’m not pestering you,” I told her.

“And go wash yourself,” she said, then took Adina’s hand and left.

SOMEONE POUNDED ON OUR DOOR THE NEXT MORNING before it was fully light. My mother had to step over me in the hallway to see who it was. When she opened the door a German said to her, “I need twenty people.” His Polish was lousy but we understood him. He looked at us on the floor and then stepped over us and searched the apartment. He switched to German in the bedrooms, saying “Raus, raus.” He took my father and brothers and Boris’s father out into the hall with him. Before they shut the door we could see a yellow policeman out there too. They talked and my mother went from the door to the stove to the door again and then my father came back in and said, “They told us we’re all going into a labor battalion for a few days and that everything’s going to be all right. We’re going to be working and we’re going to be fed.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no,” my mother said, and Boris shouted for someone to shut the door, that there was a draft.

“Stop,” my father told her. “At least with the Germans we know we’ll get a noontime meal. A little hot soup or something.” She argued with him but he told her the work detail was good news since those coming back could smuggle food with them. He kissed her and bent down and kissed me. He looked into my eyes like he was going to say something, then stood up and stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him.

Afterwards my mother looked at us like disaster was coming out of the walls. “Get her out of here,” Boris’s mother finally told me. “I’ll finish the cleaning. Go stand in line somewhere,” she told my mother, and pulled the rag from her hands. “Do something to feed your family.”

My mother sat at the kitchen table with her palms over her face. “Come on,” I told her. “There’s no point in waiting around with folded hands.”

This was one of her sayings and it got her to her feet. She found her hat and bag and led me out the door.

The shops on Gęsia were empty and the cartons on display in the windows were labeled EMPTY BOXES. A woman who was sweeping rubbish back and forth outside one of the shops with an old straw broom told her some meat was being brought in on Grzybowska from one of the slaughterhouses later that morning, so we walked all the way over there.

On Dzielna we passed a crowd around two women ladling out gray milk from a dirty can. My mother read their cardboard sign and then led me away, saying they were asking too much.

She talked to herself while she walked. She said that it didn’t cost us a thing to look. She said maybe they’d put the horsemeat in vinegar and water so it would soften up.

She fixed her shoe in front of a photographic studio in an arcade. The window display said WEHRMACHT SOLDATEN. A rickshaw went by and she complained that everyone who had an arm and a leg had hopped up on a bicycle and made like a Chinese coolie.

“Your poor father,” she said.

“You’re still limping,” I told her.

“They should only be taking single men. At first they were only taking single men for the work details,” she said. “So there were a lot of weddings.”

“Do you need to fix your shoe again?” I said.

“How’re yours?” she asked.

“The twine worked,” I told her.

We passed a boy violinist playing “Ba’al Shem Tov” for coins. He stopped playing until I moved farther away from his cup.

“I don’t know why the Germans always find your father,” she said. “On the Sabbath two of them beat him for not saluting.”

“I saw the marks,” I said.

“Another beat him because he did salute,” she said. “That one told him, ‘You’re not in my army.’ ”

“Almost everyone comes back from the work details in two or three days,” I finally told her.

“I thought they’d stay here a few months, make us work hard and then leave and we’d have our peace back,” she said.

“The Germans?” I said. She didn’t answer.

“Do you think your friend in the Jewish police could help us find out where they took them?” she asked. “The little pisher with the big ears?”

“He’s not my friend,” I said. “How do you know about him?”

“He said he was,” she said. “He came by looking for you.”

“What did he want?” I asked.

“I just said he wanted to find you,” she told me. “Maybe this place,” she said, and stepped into an apartment building. But the shop that had been there was gone. Instead there was a small round table in a bare room with an old man who’d tried to hide his beard by wrapping a rag around his face like he had a toothache.

“Your friend’s one of those smart policemen who don’t like having to order people around and so are always telling you why something has to be done,” she said once we were back out on the street. “You can see in their eyes that they want to show it’s not up to them.”

“He’s not my friend,” I told her. “But if I see him I’ll ask if he knows anything.”

She led us onto the wooden bridge across Przebieg Street and stopped at the top next to other people who were looking out at the Vistula. We watched a barge float down the river. We could see a little green on the other side. She put a hand on my shoulder and I put one on her back.

Finally we came down off the bridge. “When I was a girl and I was hungry I just stood in front of pastry shops,” she told me. “As if just looking would fill me up. One time I ate pickles I stole from a barrel and got diarrhea.”

“I guess that taught you not to steal,” I said.

“Stealing is always wrong,” she said.

“Starving is always wrong,” I told her.

She asked if I knew they now said, “He sold the pot from his kitchen” instead of “He sold the shirt off his back,” since without a pot you have nothing to cook with.

“I did know that,” I told her.

“It’s hard to keep the peace at mealtimes if families have to look at other families’ fuller plates,” she said.

I was sick of everything including her. I walked with her like she was my biggest problem.

She looked at me like she knew what I was thinking. “I’m angry at the rich for not doing their duty for the poor,” she finally said.

“Why should they help us?” I asked.

“You can hear the street children, hungry all night,” she said.

“Who isn’t,” I said.

“The rich people,” she said. “And they should help more than they do.”

On Grzybowska we didn’t see anyone and then two men gestured us into an apartment where two women were already arguing with them around an open barrel.

“It’s meat,” one of the men said. “You grind it up and it’s still meat.”

“You should be ashamed,” one of the women said. “I’m not eating ground up assholes.”

“No one said you had to eat anything,” the man told her.

My mother pulled me back out onto the street. “There’s another shop on Ceglana,” she said. Her face made me ashamed of how I’d been thinking. We took turns squeezing each other’s hand as we walked. When we came to a long line I asked if this was it.

“This is the place,” she said.

Kids went up and down the line selling cigarettes and candy. A yellow policeman was there to keep the street gangs from shoving to the front. A woman my mother knew asked if she was well and how she was managing and my mother shrugged and said, “With us, nothing’s happy.”

The flour was thirty-five złotys per kilo. There was no more of the bread made from green wheat and only a few loaves made from bran and potato peelings. She bought a kilo for sixteen złotys. It was sticky but it smelled dry. She turned it over a few times in her hands. “If they mix in too much sawdust it feels like you’re eating off the street,” she said as we walked. She pressed her face to the loaf when she thought I wasn’t looking. We went a few blocks before she finally packed it away in her bag. Then she thumped it twice for good luck and took my hand again and we headed home.

OUR GANG HAD TROUBLE WITH ANOTHER GANG. They outnumbered us. We sent off two pillowcases of butter beans we stole with Zofia and Adina but outsmarted ourselves because the other gang followed them and took the beans. They also knocked Adina down when she tried to stop them. She got up and slapped their leader’s face and they kicked her.

“Aron and I are going to take care of it,” Boris told the girls.

“We are?” I said.

“You are?” Lutek said. “Why him?”

“Because three people would be too many,” Boris said.

“Why not me?” Lutek said.

“Because it’s time he did something around here,” Boris said.

“What are you going to do?” Adina asked.

“We’re going to impose a tariff,” Boris said.

“What does that mean?” she wanted to know. But he said she’d find out.

The next morning he led me back to the Chłodna Street gate. “That one’s the leader,” he said, pointing out a boy in a plaid cap and suspenders loafing beside a family that was selling something out of a box on the street.

“How do you know?” I asked, but he ignored me. He took the jar of honey his family had brought with them out of his shirt front and handed it to me.

“When I was little I told myself that if I wasn’t going to be taller than anyone else I could at least be meaner,” he said. He told me to wait a half hour and then to let the boy see the honey when I passed him and to lead him to Mirów. He said to make sure I stayed on the left side of the street coming down Mirów and if more than two of them followed me then I should take off my cap once I turned onto Elektoralna. He said not to sweat it and that I wouldn’t lose a hair on my head.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Shut up and carry the honey,” he said.

“We don’t even know what he’s like,” I told him.

“He’s a bandit, like us,” he said.

I waited and then did as he said. At first I thought it hadn’t worked but on Solna when I looked back I saw the kid turn towards a shop window.

On Elektoralna there were fewer people around, and even fewer on Mirów, since it was so short and led directly to the wall. Down that far there weren’t any occupied buildings, only a doorway with half a sign over it standing in the ruins. I could see in a window across the street that the kid had gotten closer. What are you going to do when you run out of street? I wondered as I passed the doorway and saw Boris down in the rubble with a finger to his mouth and a brick in his other hand.

I turned to face the kid and he stopped but he’d already come too far and Boris swung the brick into the side of his plaid cap and knocked him to the sidewalk and then grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into where the cellar had fallen and no one could see us from the street. I followed him. Boris dumped him there and then picked up another brick and hit him again. It sounded like a shovel going into dirt.

“What did you do?” I asked. I sounded like a baby.

“Why did you turn around?” he said. He seemed angrier at me than at the kid.

“Is he dead?” I asked. But I could see that he wasn’t. His head was jerking back and forth and his hands were clenching.

Boris squatted and pulled out a safety pin and a note that said LIVE AND LET LIVE and pinned it to the kid’s shirt.

“Give me the honey,” he said. Then he pulled me back onto the street.

“We’re just going to leave him?” I asked. But we already had.

That afternoon we had Chłodna Street to ourselves. Boris said the other gang was probably still out looking for its leader. We used ten or twelve smaller kids to swarm the gate. They went off shoulder to shoulder running as fast as they could and the blue and yellow police beat and tore at the clothes of as many as they could reach but most got through. We paid each a saccharine candy and told them to wait until the gate was at its busiest. Boris found the whole thing funny. He said that because we’d been paid in money for a recent load he was going to have us split up and buy things in Aryan shops outside the wall. He said the trick was to walk slowly and to pass the police as though they were vendors and not to run even if someone made a first step at us. And to clean our clothes and shoes as much as we could before we left. And when we were in the shops to ask for what we wanted as though we owned the place.

“How’s your sister?” Adina asked Zofia, and I slapped my head for not having asked her myself.

Zofia said Salcia was doing poorly. Adina wrapped an arm around her and Zofia asked if she was getting sick and Adina told her that two more families had moved into their apartment. And while those families had been sitting and chatting with one of their uncles another had arrived. She had no idea where they were going to put them all. “Now we’re six to a room,” she said. “And in the cellar and in one corner the water’s always dripping. Next to my head, all night long. We asked them to fix it but they didn’t fix it.”

In the square one of the blue policemen had a kid by the shirt and tore it off his back. “Did you cut yourself?” Zofia asked me.

“He has bad gums,” Boris told her. “Have you smelled his breath?”

So I told them what Boris had done.

“With a brick?” Lutek said when I finished.

“On the head,” I said.

“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.

“I think he’s dead,” I said.

“He should’ve realized stealing is wrong,” Boris said.

“Do you think they’ll leave us alone now?” Zofia asked.

“If they don’t they’ll get another brick to the head,” Boris told her.

“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.

“You already said that,” Lutek told her. And then I understood why Boris had used me instead of Lutek.

“He might really be dead,” I said again, but they all looked like they had their own problems.

“Why are we still sitting here?” Adina wanted to know.

“We’re waiting for confirmation from the other side,” Boris told her. We had to move an exchange location and had sent one of the smaller kids with a note.

I asked Zofia if her father was still sad about the Brysz girls.

“What do you care?” she said.

“I asked, didn’t I?” I said.

“Poor Sh’maya,” Boris said. “No one thinks he cares.”

She said her father was better but that Hanka Nasielska still wept night and day about it. “Hanka Nasielska saw me with you and called me treyf slops in a treyf pot,” she told Boris. He laughed.

“What were you doing with him?” I asked.

“She told me she’d make my mouth kosher again,” she said to Boris. “She put a stone in a pot with some steam but I screamed that it was too hot so she cooled it down before she put it back in my mouth.”

“So that’s how you make a mouth kosher?” Boris asked.

Zofia looked away and wiped her eyes and Adina punched his arm. “There’s not one good Jew among us,” Zofia said.

“The good Jews buy what we bring in,” Boris said.

“What about your brother?” Adina asked.

“What about yours?” Zofia said. “The oldest one.”

“He prays by himself on weekdays and goes to the public services on holidays,” Adina said. “When they have them. Weren’t your uncles religious?”

Zofia said one uncle went to shul but didn’t daven and just sat there, and that the other didn’t even go to shul. Though he always tried to get them a carp or goose for the Sabbath.

A kid who hadn’t gotten through the gate started to come over for his saccharine candy but Boris warned him away with his eyes.

“Sh’maya here had only four people move in with him,” Adina said bitterly. “We had a village move in with us.”

“It could’ve been a lot worse for his family,” Boris told her. “I had six brothers and sisters and five of them died as babies.”

“Your poor mother,” Zofia said.

“And look at the son who lived,” Lutek said.

“I used to tell my mother I was afraid I wouldn’t have children,” Zofia said. “She used to tell me not to say that and that I’d have children; I’d see.”

“Maybe this year,” Boris said. Lutek laughed.

“Where I come from the girls are tough but not smart,” Adina said. “For a while I thought from a kiss you could get pregnant.”

“From mine you can,” Boris said. Lutek and Adina made fun of him for boasting.

“It’s a miracle I’m normal,” Zofia said. “If I am normal.”

“You’re not,” Lutek told her.

“I know you’re not,” she told him.

A work detail came back through the gate. It took a half hour for everyone’s papers to be checked at all three guard posts. Neither of our fathers were in the group. Neither of my brothers were either.

“Did you ever act in the holiday plays in kheyder?” Adina asked Boris. When she saw his look she said she was just asking.

“What’s wrong with you?” he wanted to know.

The kid who’d had his shirt torn off was shrieking in the square from the beating he’d received. Where he was squatting the traffic had to go around him. He was trying to reach the part of his back that hurt.

“Enough already with the noise,” Lutek said. The kid’s shrieking turned to weeping and he crouched around in the dust without standing up.

“I’ll see what’s going on,” Boris finally said. He stood and crossed the street to the pharmacy.

“Where’s he going?” Adina asked.

“From the second floor you can see over the wall,” Lutek told her.

After a few minutes Boris came back and flopped down so his feet went up into the air. “He’s over there,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s waiting for.”

The squatting kid finally stood up and headed over to us like a little cripple.

“Just what we need,” Boris said.

“Give me my candy,” the kid said when he stopped in front of us. No one at the guard posts was paying attention.

“Give him his candy,” Boris told Zofia. She handed him a piece from a little sack in the waistband of her skirt.

“I should get two,” the kid said. He had a lazy eye that made him even uglier.

“Why should you get two?” Boris asked him.

“Because I took such a beating,” the kid said.

“Well, I should have a roast goose,” Lutek told him. “But we don’t always get what we want.”

“I should get two,” the kid repeated.

“Get away from us or we’ll show you what a beating looks like,” Boris told him.

“I’ll call the police,” the kid said.

Boris stood up and lifted him off his feet by the neck with one hand.

“What are you doing there? Put him down,” someone shouted, scaring us.

It was Korczak, the Old Doctor. “You should be ashamed,” he said. He pulled Boris’s arm from the kid’s neck. Zofia and Adina got to their feet.

“Get out of here, Grandfather,” Boris told him. “I can smell the vodka.”

The old man straightened up. I couldn’t smell it. Then he said, “Pay attention. What I have to say may come in handy.”

“This is the Old Doctor,” Adina told Boris. “He runs the orphanage.”

The old man waited, as though that was going to change something.

“So did you come to lecture us or do you have a suggestion to make?” Boris said.

“I have a suggestion to make,” Korczak said. “I suggest you leave my boys alone. I suggest you leave all these boys alone.”

“Who made you King of the World?” Lutek said.

“I’m sorry for our friends,” Zofia told him.

“Mietek, go home,” Korczak said to the kid. The kid moved behind him. They made quite the pair: the old man with dirty spectacles and the shirtless kid with the lazy eye.

“You have pants like a hobo’s,” Boris said.

“A hobo wouldn’t take them,” Korczak told him.

“You know where I found him?” Boris said, nodding at the kid. “Looking through the garbage. Maybe you should feed your kids.”

“Anyone who’s gotten in my way can tell you I can still kick pretty hard,” Korczak told him.

“This old wreck’s threatening me?” Boris asked Zofia.

“Boris, let’s go,” Adina told him.

“Did we make you do anything, kid?” Boris asked.

“You don’t care what happens,” Korczak told him. “Or who gets hurt. Just so in the meantime you can find a piece of bread someplace. Right?”

“You’re the big shot with your own place, judging us?” Boris said.

“Our own place? What does a Jew have?” Korczak told him. “We’ve never owned a thing.”

“So maybe the houses are theirs,” Boris told him. “But the streets are ours.”

“The streets are yours?” Korczak said. “Look around.”

“We do all right,” Boris said.

“Leave my boys alone,” Korczak repeated.

“Go back to your orphanage,” Boris told him. “Dish out some soup.”

The old man turned to the rest of us. “For each one who acts like that, there’s another who behaves decently,” he said. Then he left, holding the kid by the shoulder. And the kid we’d been waiting for finally made it through the gate to let us know that our new arrangement was going to be okay.

EVERY MORNING MY MOTHER BEGGED ME TO GO TO the Order Service headquarters to see what information Lejkin would give me. Sometimes I waited till noon before he would see me. He told me that my father and one brother were still together and that they’d worked in the SS barracks in Rakowiecka Street, in the cavalry barracks at Służewiec, and spreading coal bricks at a railroad siding outside of town. He said he thought they’d also done some road construction. They hadn’t been paid for it yet since the Judenrat was behind in its wages, but they had been given bread and radishes. He thought they were in a camp in the Kampinos forest. My other brother and Boris’s father he knew nothing about. He said families whose main breadwinner had been selected for the camps were eligible for a small welfare payment from the Judenrat, though he wasn’t sure who to see about that. He also said that since I was now thirteen it was time for me to be registered as well. I left this out of what I reported to my mother.

He said he had little information beyond that. Czerniaków himself had personally intervened about the state of the camps with the SS man in charge of Jewish affairs and the director of the Department of Jewish Labor in the Arbeitsamt, and both more food and better conditions had been promised.

One morning in a downpour I opened our door and Lejkin was standing there in the hall with an SS officer behind him. The officer was tall and had a rain bonnet on his cap. He smiled and shook the water from the arms of his raincoat and moved Lejkin aside with his hand and said, “Guten Morgen.” He sounded like someone who was happy that he’d kept his patience for so long with misbehaving children. He asked in Polish if I spoke German. When I told him no he nodded and wiped the mud from his boots so energetically that he split our old doormat in two.

The left sleeve of his uniform jacket was tucked into his belt and there was no arm in it. He saw me looking and said in Polish, “Wars aren’t much fun. Now don’t you feel like a lucky young boy?”

Lejkin introduced him as Obersturmführer Witossek. I said hello and the German seemed amused by my tone.

Boris pretended to be asleep on the floor near my feet. “I’d ask to come in but perhaps now is not the best time,” the German said.

“His Polish is good, isn’t it?” Lejkin asked.

“You’re Aron Różycki?” the German asked.

“Yes,” I told him.

“Could you step into the hall,” he said.

“Aron!” my mother called from the kitchen.

I stepped out and he shut the door behind me. The window in the hallway was broken and it made the rain louder. A family camped under it had strung up a shelter to keep dry. A bucket caught the runoff.

The German said he wanted me to come to an office he was setting up on Żelazna Street. A dozen Jews were already there, and Lejkin had recommended me.

What was I supposed to do at such a place, I wanted to know.

“It’s a little Jewish concern,” he said. “Your friend here is part of it. He’s the one who recommended you,” he repeated.

“Recommended me for what?” I said.

“Well, there’s always more to discover when you stick your nose into the world,” he said. I looked at Lejkin, who raised his shoulders.

“Or you can serve in a labor battalion,” the German said. “Do you have your card?”

“I’m not registered yet,” I said.

“It’s 103 Żelazna,” the German said. “Your friend can tell you if there’s anything else you need to know.”

“There isn’t anything else you need to know,” Lejkin said.

“Oh, and yes,” the German said as he was leaving. He opened the door and there inside the apartment stood my mother and Boris’s mother, gaping. “Could I ask you for some sort of Jewish holy volume or object?”

We looked at one another. “An object?” Boris’s mother said.

“Something in which you believe,” the German said.

“Something in which they believe?” Lejkin said.

“To serve as a charm,” the German said. While we still stood there, he added, “I had one before from Cologne and you can see what happened when I lost it.”

Boris’s mother left the doorway. My mother just stared. “Good morning,” the German said to her.

“Good morning,” she answered.

Boris’s mother returned with a mezuzah that she handed to the German.

“Thank you,” the German said, once he had it. “Auf wiedersehen.”

BORIS SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY HAPPY BECAUSE ONE OF our contacts over the wall told him that so much bread was being smuggled into the ghetto there was an actual shortage of it on the other side. Lutek’s old chiseled passage in the wall on Przejazd Street had been bricked up and reopened so often that people started calling it the Immortal Hole. The Germans cleared away the shed that covered it. Boris said that the hole proved there were only three invincible forces in the universe: the German Army, the British Navy, and Jewish smuggling.

The guards at Chłodna Street developed a new moneymaking scheme of announcing at twenty minutes to the hour that it was already curfew and charging twenty złotys apiece to fix their watches to the correct time and send you on your way, so we went back to the Immortal Hole. Boris worked out a schedule with the other gangs that let us use it right before and after curfew. We went through and did our buying and selling in pairs, and if we didn’t see the next pair behind us we didn’t wait for them.

In bad weather Zofia went through with her shoes around her neck and the laces tied together. She said her shoes actually fit her and if she ruined them she’d never find another pair that did.

Boris hadn’t mentioned the German or Lejkin after they’d left and he ignored how upset my mother was about it, but after four days he stopped me as we went downstairs and asked if I was just going to act as if nothing had happened. I asked what he was talking about.

“Do you think they’re just going to forget you?” he said. “Do you really want to piss in that one-armed German’s beer?”

“I was going to go,” I told him.

“Try not to always be so stupid,” he said. “These are the people with the whip hand. These are the people who are going to have information first.”

“What information?” I said.

“Whatever information there is,” he said. “Where the jumps will be, what gates will play, what players will be there, who they’re going to move against and when.”

“I know that,” I told him.

“Use your head,” he said.

“I said I was going,” I said.

“Then go,” he said. “Don’t stand here with me.”

But Lejkin wasn’t there and no one knew what to do with me. I was told to wait in the hall. It was a big fancy house so the floor was marble. Everyone’s steps echoed. Yellow police came and went but the only Jew who introduced himself was a shoeshine boy named Ajzyk. He sat opposite me in the front hall along with a few rickshaw drivers who took Germans around the ghetto. All morning laborers carried in what looked like an entire kitchen, and in the afternoon a barber’s chair and other crates and boxes as well. I had no breakfast and asked if there was anything to eat but no one answered. Twice more I went in to ask what was happening and was told to wait. The fourth time I presented myself I was told to come back the next day. Then going down the steps I ran into Lejkin, who said I should come back Friday.

THE NEXT TIME WE GOT TO THE IMMORTAL HOLE A German soldier was standing in front of it while a Jew in a smock unloaded a handcart filled with metal sheets. The building alongside had a slanted roof with dormers that hid you from the street so we went up to watch. We’d found the spot a week earlier. You got there through a hatch on the ceiling of the janitor’s closet on the top floor. We could all fit between the dormers and every so often one of us could keep an eye on what was going on below.

The tradesman held the sheets over the hole and pounded in masonry nails. His hammer on the metal was so loud that Zofia put her fingers in her ears.

“Those will pull right out,” Boris said after he took a look. He had one of his cigarettes going. He collected them off the streets and used a pin to smoke them down to the very end.

“This breeze is nice,” Adina said.

We stayed up there to celebrate Zofia’s birthday. Lutek said he’d be thirteen soon too and Adina had made each of us write Zofia a note with good wishes and give her a present. Zofia read each note that was handed over, then folded it into the sack in her waistband. Mine said You Are the Kindest Person I Know and Thank You For Making Us Happier.

Then came our gifts. Boris gave her candied cherries in a folded packet of newspaper. Lutek gave her a scarf with the constellations. Adina gave her a tin of jam. I gave her a miniature black book that said My Diary on the front.

Zofia thanked us and said we should share the cherries and that this was one of her best birthdays ever. “I know that’s hard to believe,” she said.

She said when she was young and they still lived in their nice apartment her mother hadn’t let her play with other children in their courtyard, so instead she’d had to content herself one birthday with going out on her balcony and tossing down cutouts and handmade toys and calling out, “Here, you kids, take these!” and watching them play. And one kid had written in chalk Zofia is crazy on their stairwell.

“That’s a nice birthday,” Adina said, then asked again how Salcia was, and Zofia said that she might do better if they could cheer her up somehow. She’d left her favorite stuffed bear behind when they moved to the ghetto because while she didn’t know where they were going she knew it would be a bad place.

“Well, that’s another good birthday story,” Lutek finally said.

“She has another bear now,” Zofia told him.

Adina said that she got caught on her last birthday. A Polish woman had grabbed her on the Aryan side and had told the whole street that she had a Jewish nose. Zofia asked what happened then, and Adina said no one had cared and that Adina had answered, “What kind of nose do you have? Look at yourself in the mirror!” and that had made the woman let go and run away.

Lutek said he was hungry. Zofia said now when her family finished their soup her brother Leon put the pot over his head so he could lick the bottom clean.

Adina said people in France cooked potatoes in oil, not water, and Zofia said oil-fried potatoes must taste amazing and Boris said that was probably true but good oil could be put to better use.

Boris and I looked back over the edge of the gutter. The Jew with the smock had finished and he and the German soldier had left and one of the other gangs was already around the hole. A kid with a crowbar levered the metal sheet away from the brick and the masonry nails came out as easily as Boris said they would. The sheet was bent aside but then a German officer and three yellow policemen appeared like magic. When two kids tried to scramble through the hole there were shouts on the other side and they were dragged back. They all lined up against the wall on the German officer’s orders. He had only one arm.

“That’s him,” Boris said.

“I know,” I told him.

Witossek told them each to hand over their money and after counting it he said that he was going to fine them that amount for smuggling. They stood along the wall. He caught sight of an old Jew hurrying across the street a block away and called him over. One of the yellow police had to cross over to get him to come. We could see him trembling from where we were.

“How old are you?” Witossek asked. Sixty-six, the old Jew told him and Witossek counted out sixty-six złotys and stuffed them in the old man’s shirt pocket. “Now be on your way,” he said.

He said something else to the same yellow policeman, who walked off and came back with three other Jews. Witossek asked their ages and paid them that amount of złotys. The last woman said she was fifty and he counted out his last forty-eight złotys and said that was now her age instead. Once she left he turned to the smugglers and said, “I’m a good German, aren’t I?” They said he was and he led his yellow policemen away and as soon as he was out of their sight the three of them scattered.

ON FRIDAY I WAITED AGAIN FOR THREE HOURS AND then Ajzyk the shoeshine boy came out and told me that Lejkin said I should come back on Monday. On Monday Lejkin finally showed me into his office, which was a room next to the toilet. He spread his arms like he was taking in all of Poland and asked what I thought. I told him the house had a nice front hall.

He said Witossek and other Germans in the Security Police were putting together an anti-crime unit and that Lejkin had picked me to be a part of it. “They’re not hunting smugglers as much as wanting to regulate them,” he said. “You know how the Germans like to keep track of everything.”

“I don’t know anything about anything,” I said.

“Yes, that’s been your position,” he told me. “But you do know the old joke that’s now going around again. If two Jews meet, one says to the other, ‘Statistically, one of us must be reporting to the Gestapo!’ ”

“I have heard that joke,” I told him.

“There’s no salary, of course, but there are other advantages,” he said. “Including influence in the work camps.”

“I still don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” I said.

“Nothing for the time being,” he said. “Maybe some minor reports. Maybe not even that.”

I sat in my chair and he looked at me. He was so small behind his desk that it looked like he was kneeling on the floor. I could hear an accordion player outside his window.

“So can I go now?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

He gave his attention to some papers in front of him. He signed two and made a mocking noise at a third. He stood up and came around the front of his desk and said he’d traded for new boots, then walked around and did knee bends to break them in.

“Have you heard that the Germans are already in Leningrad?” he asked. I shook my head.

“So Hitler sees Jesus in Paradise and says to St. Peter, ‘Hey, what’s that Jew doing without an armband?’ ” he said. “And St. Peter tells him, ‘Leave him alone. He’s the Boss’s son.’ ”

“That’s a good joke,” I told him, after we were quiet for a while.

“You’re like those shopkeepers who hold goods under their coats and go over to customers only when they recognize them,” he said. “I like that about you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“We have to stick together,” he told me. “It’s a terrible thing to see how the Germans have divided us.”

“So can I go now?” I said.

“Do you remember how you felt the first time you saw a Jews Not Wanted sign in the window of a Jewish shop?” he said.

Another policeman swung the door open and told Lejkin that one of the Czapliński brothers was finally there. Lejkin tossed him two packs of cigarettes and the policeman said that the Czaplińskis smoked too. Lejkin tossed him two more. “Weren’t they both lawyers, as well?” the policeman wanted to know.

“I think they were, yes,” Lejkin told him. “Back in Lódz.”

“It’s like a bar association around here,” the policeman said. He said that Mayler was a lawyer too and by the way he was still trying to find out where his wife’s family had been sent. “The Poles complain that we’re privileged because they all got sent abroad and we at least got to work at home,” he told Lejkin.

“Tell the Organ Grinders,” Lejkin told him, and the policeman left.

“Who are the Organ Grinders?” I asked.

“That’s what they call the Judenrat,” he said. “You know: throw a coin to the organ grinder and he plays along with his monkey.”

He bent to fix his boots and once he was happy with them went back behind his desk and sat down again. “So what’s your decision?” he said.

We both listened to the minute hand of his clock click over into the next position. “I think I’ll do what I can to help,” I told him.

He said I’d be hearing from him and dismissed me. When I was heading down the front steps a long black car pulled up with two Germans in the front and three bearded Jews with terrified eyes in the back. When I told Boris that evening he clapped me on the back for having done the smart thing and said maybe now we’d get some word in advance as to what was going on.

HANKA NASIELSKA GOT THE TYPHUS AND DIED. SO did Zofia’s Uncle Ickowicz. For a few weeks Lejkin passed along messages from my father and brother and then he said they’d been transferred and he didn’t know where. My mother asked me to find out and told me to spend more time with him until I did. There were more soup kitchens on the street. In September Lejkin said the ghetto would be further reduced in size but that in October some schools could open again. He had our gang hang some new placards forbidding Jews from leaving the housing districts designated for them.

“What does it mean?” Zofia asked the day we got them, though after we finished hanging them we found out: German soldiers and blue police surprised us at the Immortal Hole and the gang got away but a Pole grabbed me by the back of the neck. Three older kids from another gang also were caught. The Pole gave me a kick in the behind, let me go, and said, “This one’s too short to shoot.” The other kids were told to empty their pockets and stand against the wall. I ran away and after I rounded the corner I heard them shooting. Later the dead kids were still there on top of one another against the wall.

GOING HOME FROM A SHOP WITH MY MOTHER WE heard more shots and she dragged me to the pavement and covered me with her arm. At dinner she told us that four bodies had been found beside the wall at Nowolipke.

“A lot of people have typhus,” Boris said.

She told him they’d been shot for smuggling.

“That’s why we’re not going to do that anymore,” he told her.

“Is that the truth?” she asked me.

“We already decided not to,” I told her.

Boris told her smuggling had gotten too dangerous and that a housepainter on his way to a job had been ordered by a German to fill in the Immortal Hole one more time and then when that German wandered off, another came along and, seeing a Jew working on a hole in the wall, shot him dead. Boris’s mother asked what the Immortal Hole was and we told her.

Two days later it was open again. We gave up on it but heard that a German with a bullhorn had announced to the neighborhood that thirty Jews would be shot if it wasn’t permanently closed by noon the next day. We also heard the smuggling went on as before after he left and that he never came back.

BORIS GOT CAUGHT. HE SAID THAT WHEN THEY WERE about to shoot him a cloud of gnats flew into his eyes and nose and also bothered the Germans, who argued with one another while he stood there against the wall and then for whatever reason just left him there.

Adina and Zofia embraced him and Lutek said he’d had some close scrapes of his own and the only reason he hadn’t been killed was he was so short that all the bullets went over his head.

Zofia said, “I think we have to stop.”

And Boris said, “What’s the difference how you’re done for. You have to eat.”

“It’s time to think of something else,” Adina told him.

“Yes,” Boris said, as if he was talking to small children. “Let’s do that.”

We liked to meet outside Mrs. Melecówna’s matrimonial introductions parlor because she let young people in the courtyard and it had an awning besides. One morning Adina and Boris and I waited an hour before Lutek finally arrived. He was sweating so much from running that the bill of his cap was soaked through. He said Zofia had popped up at his window at midnight the night before. Her family had been getting ready for bed when they heard boots on the stairs, which was always bad news after curfew. Her mother tucked Zofia and Leon into a space she’d made under the bedframe before going to the door. The Germans searched but had been distracted by all of the valises they’d dragged out from under the bed and emptied. Zofia and Leon didn’t make a sound though they heard Salcia crying and Jechiel and their father protesting and their father telling the Germans about his broom factory. Their mother told the Germans, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” as if saying goodbye to Zofia and Leon. They stayed quiet after everyone left, climbed out, and then in the street walked into more Germans. While they were being chased she shouted to Leon to run in one direction and she’d go in another and he was shouting back “Why should I run that way?” when the Germans caught him. She spent the night weeping that this had been the last thing he’d said to her.

Adina asked Lutek why she’d gone to his apartment and Boris reminded her it was the closest. Adina said we had to go to her but Lutek said she wasn’t there anyway, that his father had already made her leave. Who knew why the Germans wanted them, or how hard they’d look? He’d walked her over to an old friend of her mother’s, who took her in without enthusiasm.

I spent three days working as a peeler in a comunal kitchen with my mother and then Adina said Zofia wanted to see me. She gave me the address and said she’d already visited and that the family was gone all day at a shoemaking factory and Zofia said I should ring the bell three times and then stand in the street where she could see me.

The apartment had a wash basin in the sink and a rabbit hutch that was locked with a padlock on a high wardrobe.

“The mother puts the bread up there so I can’t get to it at night when they’re sleeping,” Zofia said. “I just stand here smelling it in the dark.”

“They don’t feed you?” I asked.

“I’m so hungry I suck on my knee,” she said. She said that they gave her food like for a dog. She said Boris had brought the family some kasha for her and that the family ate it instead in front of her.

I told her we could bring her more food. She said she helped with the chores and always tried to be calm and quiet and grown-up but found herself waiting for her mother to come and take her away. She was trying not to always be weeping. She asked me to find out through my friend in the yellow police where her family had been taken.

“He’s not my friend,” I told her.

“Please,” she said, then said she kept thinking about how brave Leon had been. She said you couldn’t believe the thunder of the Germans once they were in a room.

At first Lejkin told me he had no information but when I wouldn’t leave him alone he said he’d see what he could find out and the next day he told me they’d been sent to the country as part of a new initiative and wouldn’t be coming back; they were to be resettled out there. Adina told Zofia, whose response was that she was going to go to them and we all needed to help her get out of the ghetto as soon as possible.

Boris surprised us by saying we should help her and Lutek asked what was so hard, we went through all the time, and Boris told him the difficulty was in getting far enough away to avoid the blackmailers. In the meantime she had to find a new place since her mother’s friend was starving her. Boris found it in a day and Adina took her there when the street traffic was the busiest.

The day before she was to leave we all went to say goodbye. The woman whose apartment it was asked us to visit one at a time so as not to attract attention. Boris went first. Adina said she wanted to go last and Lutek said he didn’t need to go at all.

A woman in a red flowered robe let me in and then shut herself in the bathroom. Zofia was wearing three layers of clothes and her shoes that fit. She tried to keep her hands in her lap but they kept flying around. She said this woman had German visitors and so Zofia hid in a recess behind the toilet in a stored washtub. She said that of course the Germans used the toilet all the time.

I asked if everything was ready and she said that Boris had found a man who said because she had better looks he would give her money to get herself and his daughter out of the ghetto. I asked what she meant by better and she said as in not like a Jew.

She said the man’s wife had scrubbed her in a tub and had to change the water three times. She said the man had said his daughter could pass for Zofia’s sister. She said that he was providing papers for both of them and that they’d almost left two days earlier. He’d led them into the cellar of a pharmacy that bordered the Aryan side where they were supposed to wait for someone, but no one came. She said the new plan was that a wagon driver would pull up with his cart at dawn and stuff them under some bedding and drive them through the gate.

“Don’t go,” I said, while she was still talking. “Stay with us.”

She was surprised by how upset I was. “I shouldn’t try to find my family?” she said.

“Who knows if that’s really where they are?” I said.

“Well, if they’re not there, where are they?” she asked. She stared like I was refusing to tell her.

“You don’t know anybody on the other side,” I said.

She said she did. When I asked who, she wouldn’t answer. Then she said some of the kids in the newer gangs were from the youth movements that left when the Germans marched in.

“Why are they coming back?” I asked.

“To help,” she said.

“With what?” I asked.

“You don’t need to know,” she said. “And don’t pull such a face. But they have contacts on the other side.”

I asked if the kid she called Antek was one of the ones she was talking about. She was annoyed I’d noticed, but then said that he was. We sat there like two strangers at a puppet show.

“Do you have to go?” I said again.

She looked at me like I’d said something shameful. “So I should leave Leon wherever he is?” she said. “And Salcia? And my mother?” I didn’t answer.

“I spend my whole life around people who don’t ask me about myself,” she added. She said she was surprised by how much this disappointed her.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?” she asked me. When I again didn’t answer, she said I should go get Adina.

“Why? You’re finished with me?” I said.

“Oh, Aron,” she said tiredly.

“What?” I said.

“You’re a good boy,” she said. “Take care of yourself.” She took my hands and squeezed them.

On the stairs I stopped and turned to go back but decided it wouldn’t be a good idea, since I wasn’t the same person I used to be and she wouldn’t have liked me even then.

THAT NIGHT MY MOTHER WAS SURPRISED WHEN I climbed into bed with her after everyone else had fallen asleep. She smelled like cabbage and the coal from the stove. “Did you have a bad dream?” she said in her sleepy voice. Her finger tickled my ear.

“Don’t cry,” I told her, and she tucked my head under her chin. She called me her beautiful boy when I put my arms around her neck. When I woke in the morning I’d wet the bed.

“Tit for tat, my friend,” Lejkin told me when I came out onto the street. I was looking for Boris, who’d gotten up ahead of me. “I helped you; you have to help me.”

He wanted to know what we had planned for the day. He said he had his quotas to fill, too. I told him I didn’t know what he meant and he said that he was getting tired of everything I didn’t know and could I just answer the question. So I told him where we were likely to be and he thanked me and left and an hour later two blue policemen caught Lutek and me with a burlap sack of turnips and threw us and the turnips into the back of a car.

They drove us to a big building with tall columns outside of the ghetto and took us down into the cellar. A German soldier at a desk asked what they were bringing him and they told him they had two for the Streetcar. We were walked down a long dark corridor and pushed into a room with cement walls and no windows.

There were two rows of hard wooden seats with arms along the walls facing forward like a little classroom and I sat in one and Lutek sat in another behind a tall man with a bloody head and wild hair. The walls were covered in scratched graffiti. Next to my bench someone had carved JEZU. Next to Lutek’s someone had drawn a clock and circled the 6. I wasn’t afraid but I was shaking as though I’d been left out in the cold.

Lutek asked the tall man where we were. He told us this was Gestapo headquarters and they called this room the Streetcar because of its shape and that we should ask for coffee when the woman in uniform came past.

She walked by a few minutes later and Lutek asked her and she came back with a mug of coffee with milk in it and passed it to him through the bars. He shared it with the man with the bloody head.

“You’re shaking your whole chair,” he said to me.

He said Boris had told him he’d been here once and found himself in the same cell with the guy who’d pointed him out to some Germans on the street.

“What did he do?” I asked.

“What do you think?” Lutek said.

“It was like they were waiting for us,” he said a few minutes later. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Did you hear what I said? It was like they knew we were coming.”

“Do you think once they talk to us they’ll let us go?” I whispered.

“How would I know?” he said.

He asked if Lejkin had any more war news. I told him no. He said he heard the Germans were taking a beating outside Moscow and Leningrad. The man with the bloody head told him to be quiet. Lutek told him the joke that when Napoleon invaded Russia he put on a red tunic in case he was wounded, and Hitler put on brown pants. The man with the bloody head got up and moved as far away as he could.

Finally two German soldiers appeared with a list. They mispronounced our names but we raised our hands. They took us out into a courtyard in the back without windows. One soldier took Lutek by the shoulders and pushed his back against the wall.

We couldn’t tell if they understood Polish. Lutek said to them, “Are you really going to kill me over some turnips?” and the German who’d pushed him shot him. His head hit the wall so hard that his rabbit-skin cap landed on the dirt in front of him. Because of his wooden shoes each foot skidded out from under him in a different direction. The other German was so upset by the noise I made that he knocked me to the ground. The two of them picked me up and carried me back through the waiting hall past the rooms with the benches and threw me out onto the street.

ON MY WAY HOME MY LEGS ACTED LIKE I KEPT FORGETTING how to walk and I stopped in the center of the road. I threw my own cap away. A truck honked and someone finally dragged me to the curb.

Three or four times a day my mother asked what was wrong. After a few days she told Boris’s mother there was nothing for her to do but to keep her shoulder to the plow until she fell on her face. Boris’s mother said that was all anyone could do. Boris asked me where Lutek had disappeared to and I told him I didn’t know. His sister was always weeping and he told her to shut up from where he was lying on the floor. She rubbed her crippled hand, which was what she did to calm herself. My mother made a new project of painting the beds with turpentine and ammonia to kill the bedbugs but stayed sad that I wouldn’t talk with her. “Someday you’ll wish you had,” she said.

One night I got up and sat with her in the kitchen. She blew on the fire in the stove and waved a rag near the open grate and watched me scratch at my lice. When I was finished she asked if I was hungry. I asked if there was anything she could do about that and she said no.

Boris’s mother said from her pallet in the dark she’d heard that the refugees were taking over the apartments of those who starved to death or died of the typhus. She said that with the cold they invaded any place they could and chopped and burned whatever furniture they found. My mother said that nowadays they took the roof away from over your head the minute you turned your back.

And who was to stop them? Boris’s mother wanted to know.

No one should look for heroes on our street, my mother told her.

I told her not to get herself worked up and she told me that I always wanted to know why she was so upset and meanwhile here we all were, with everyone either dying or waiting their turn. Boris snickered from the hallway.

She said she wasn’t a young woman and that if it wasn’t for my sake she wouldn’t have had the strength to do this.

Do what? Boris wanted to know. Keep us all awake?

She said my still being here with her was beshert. Did I know what beshert meant?

I didn’t, I told her. I was tired of her talking.

Beshert meant “meant to be,” she said. She said she knew I needed her, even if I didn’t. She was wearing the nightshirt my father liked, though it wasn’t as warm, in case he came home in the middle of the night. I wiped my eyes so hard I blinded myself at first.

“Why do you act like this?” Boris’s mother said from her pallet. “Do you think your mother needs this now?”

“Shut up, all of you,” Boris said. When his sister whimpered he said, “You shut up too.”

My mother and I watched the embers in the stove through the grate. “I work and I worry,” she said. “That’s what I do.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“I know,” she said and then told me I should try to sleep.

I didn’t see Boris for a day and then he came home and stood in front of me, enraged. I asked where he’d been and he knocked me down with a forearm to my face. That night he threw my sleeping pallet into my mother’s room. She asked what was going on and I climbed into her bed.

She fell down the next morning when she tried to wash herself near the stove and we couldn’t get her up. At first Boris wouldn’t help but then finally we carried her to the hospital and a doctor who was sick himself told her she’d gotten the typhus she’d been waiting for. She passed out after he told her. They put her on a cot in the hallway and another patient beside her told her the news about America having entered the war. Her reaction disappointed him. She had such a fever I could feel the heat standing next to her and her chills were so bad the other sick people moved their cots farther away. While I sat with her she wept and tried to keep covered up and apologized for the smell. Her diarrhea meant she had to keep getting up and she no longer had the energy to fully clean herself. She said she didn’t want me to catch anything and told me to leave and then asked me to stay. I told her she’d probably caught what she had from me.

They moved her to the quarantine ward and left her on a pallet in another hallway. No one gave her medicine. I was told I couldn’t stay but no one noticed I hadn’t left. A woman holding her baby shouted, “This is supposed to be a hospital! I should burn it down!” Her baby’s face was blue.

We were outside a separate quarantine room for children. When I looked in they never moved their hands but just lay there in their beds.

She wanted me to make sure Boris and his mother knew which hospital it was so my father and brothers would know where to find us. She sent me home to tell them. She told me to stay there but I went back and forth when she slept. They served her blood soup she liked and spit soup she didn’t. It was spit soup because it used unthreshed grain and the husks had to be spit out.

She was sick for ten days. “I was sad, I thought only of myself, I let you support me,” she told me on one of the days. “The holidays again,” she complained on another. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Her fever got bad and then better and then bad again. She asked if I had any good memories and I told her I did. She asked me to tell her some. I told about things I remembered from before we moved to the city. I told her I remembered a picnic in the woods with blackbirds around me in the thick grass and her standing over me and making a shadow for me in the bright sunlight. She said she knew what happened on the streets and that she saw it for herself. “You get like a little animal,” she said. “You lie, you cheat.”

I asked to see the doctor who’d told her she had the typhus and a nurse said he’d died. My mother was moved to another hallway on another floor and no one said why. “I wanted to be nusik,” she told me. She wiped her cheeks on the pillow to cool her face. She asked if I knew what nusik was and when I told her I didn’t she said that it was something good. Someone useful and smart. She said that if she’d been nusik, then people who couldn’t get along, people with problems, would have come to her. She would have listened. She would have contributed more than she had.

She stayed sick and the weather stayed windy and sleeting. The Hanukkah decorations fell over in the drafts from the door. She had more trouble breathing. Sometimes I slept under her cot but they found me and drove me downstairs so then I slept near the front doors under the portrait of the hospital’s founder.

“You’re like me,” she said one night after her breathing got so bad it woke us up. “You think if you stay quiet you’ll be able to keep going like everyone else.” She sounded so bad I found a nurse who brought her some beet marmalade and a glass of undiluted spirits.

The spirits made her cheeks red. She raised her eyebrows after a few sips as if she’d been given a treat. She asked if I wanted any. I told her that the first glassful was for her. She nodded. By then she was having such trouble breathing it sounded like she was whinnying.

She asked if I was sorry to have to go on without her. She asked if I thought I could do it. I looked into her face and wondered if she was really going to leave me. The thought made me so mad that I told her I could do anything and she set the glass of spirits on the floor and tried to sit up and I couldn’t tell from her expression how bad she felt or if this made it any better.

She said the light hurt her eyes so I went down the hall and switched it off. Some of the patients on the cots and the nurse sitting at the end of the hallway with her paperwork complained, but in the dark I could see my family again, my father in his white holiday shirt and my mother and my brothers and even my younger brother, all of their faces at that point blind to what was coming.

On my walk home the streets were very bad and icy. I slipped and fell more than once. It was after curfew but there was no moon and no one wanted to be out in the cold so no one saw me. I walked like I was part of my own funeral procession. At home I let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.

I WOKE ON MY MOTHER’S BLANKET TO THE SHRIEK OF a window wrenched open and in the kitchen Boris was throwing my clothes into the street. There’d been a knock on the door and he’d answered it but I hadn’t bothered to see who it was.

I stood in my nightshirt, blinking, my feet cold on the floor. His mother and sister were also in the doorway to their room.

“Leave him alone,” his sister said when she saw me. “His mother just died.”

“And now we’re quarantined,” Boris shouted. I thought he was about to kill me, like somebody might cross a street. “Do you know how much I’m going to have to pay to keep us out of that hospital?”

“That’s not his fault,” his sister said.

“How did they know where to find you and Lutek?” he asked me. “They were there waiting, before you were. I saw them.”

I stood at the sink and rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. I couldn’t work out how to get the water going. “Maybe they got lucky,” his sister said.

“They weren’t even keeping watch,” he told her. “And when I asked you where he was then, you said you didn’t know,” he said to me.

He waited for me to answer.

“You just woke him up,” his sister said.

“Well?” he said.

“Sh’maya thinks only of himself,” I told him.

He looked at me. “If it had been my turn to go with you, it would have been me,” he said.

His sister told him she didn’t understand, so he explained it to her. I was an informer. I worked for the Gestapo. His sister backed up a step and looked at me like I had two heads.

“Won’t he tell the Germans if you throw him out?” she asked.

“No,” he told her, looking at me.

I dressed on the street in the snow. People passing by didn’t seem to find it strange. I pulled the sweater my mother had boiled over three of my shirts. My socks were soaked when I put on my shoes but they warmed up after a while.

There was nowhere to go. I spent the day walking around.

When curfew came I climbed down a covered cellarway and moved a trash bin to block the wind but still got so cold I had to move.

I made it to Adina’s building after hiding every few minutes because of the patrols. I knocked on her window and at first she wouldn’t open the shade and then she wouldn’t let me in. Finally, when I stood on the street and called her name, she opened the window a crack and tossed out some bread.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “Do you want to get me killed too?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“This is all I have,” she said about the bread and then told me not to come back again and sent me away sobbing and eating it.

Toward the end of the night I found the block where Boris had ambushed the kid from the other gang and crawled down under the rubble into the caved-in cellar. I felt around in the dark for a place I could lie down. The kid he’d hit with the brick was gone. I stayed there and stole from street vendors or smaller kids when I got too hungry. I was a thief that janitors and porters chased away from their doorways with sweeps of their brooms. I drank snowmelt collected in a can. I lay for days under some blankets. When I went out for food starving people slipped out of dark corners and followed me and when one beggar got hold of something the rest of the pack knocked him down and ripped what he had from his hands and then others stole it from them. Once whatever it was was eaten, everyone went back to begging.

I tried to make myself invisible but kids who had nowhere to go were everywhere and the smaller ones trailed anyone who might have a better situation. I ran away from them but three or four found my cellar and told their friends.

After that I wandered without a plan. I was always without a plan. I slept between the chairs on an old orchestra stand.

It got colder. A woman on the street felt bad when she saw me and gave me an extra pair of stockings to go over my socks but the elastics were broken. I helped another woman carry a milk canister and when we got to her place she gave me an extra coat.

I stole some cooked potatoes and when I finally stopped running and thought I was safe I walked right into Lutek’s sister.

“My God, how you look!” she said. She burst into tears and asked what had happened to her brother. She still had her stutter. She kicked at me and when a yellow policeman came over her friend dragged her away. I found myself on my hands and knees in the slush. The policeman stood over me and nudged me with his foot. Then he left. While I was weeping someone stole the potatoes I had taken.

It warmed up a little so my feet and hands got better. I lost track of the days. I passed a clinic that treated eye infections and started going inside. I let everyone in line get ahead of me so I could sit in the warm waiting room for a few hours. I found one of the buildings where they’d restarted a grammar school and slipped in and took a seat in the back. The teacher noticed but seemed to know why I was there and didn’t throw me out. Then through the window I saw Lutek’s father pass by outside and I never went back.

Near the hospital where my mother died I saw Lejkin and some other police stop someone and hid until they were gone.

I wandered the streets. I spent nights wedged into crannies like a spider. I gave up on thinking ahead. I walked back and forth.

A boy my age caught me trying to steal from his father’s shop while he was watching it and knocked me down with a club he had behind the counter and while I sat there crying and rubbing my head he tied my wrists with a rope and then tied the rope to a cart he had outside. He hefted the cart’s handles and started dragging me. I slipped and stumbled trying to free myself. He was talking about how tired he was of this and how he was going to take me to the Germans himself. But he tied the knot too loose and by scraping it against the back of the cart I got it free. He still didn’t know, dragging his cart along, and the street he turned us onto was empty. I looked at the back of his head. Somewhere he had a mother hoping he’d come home safe. I could take him from her like my mother was taken from me. But instead when I passed an alley I dropped the rope and ran.

I couldn’t even do that right, I thought later. I sat on the sidewalk with my back to the wall. People stepped over my legs.

At curfew someone lifted me off the pavement. I was dozing and shaking from the chill. I was carried many blocks and then down some steps to the basement of a bombed-out house. The room where I was laid down onto a cot was very bright and all around me was noise and confusion. There were bunk beds made from rough boards against the walls. The place was filled with kids on the floor and on the bunks and all of them were dirty and all of them were making noise. Some were playing cards and others were playing with knives. No one seemed to be supervising them.

I couldn’t feel my feet. “This one’s in a bad way,” the man who’d been carrying me told someone else, and I recognized his voice. “This is a satellite shelter,” he told me when he saw that I was awake. “A place people can go who need to get off the streets for curfew. You can have a little soup and warm up and then tomorrow you can go home.”

“I don’t have a home,” I told him, and Korczak looked at me like he’d already known that was what I was going to say.

“Well, then, we’ll have to think about adding you to our little group,” he said. And the kids on the bunks made loud sounds of protest, to make it clear that was the last thing they needed.