The Book of Aron

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THE REAL ORPHANAGE WAS NICER THAN THE shelter but the kids were the same. It was on Sienna Street facing the wall, as far south as you could go. One of the kids said they’d had to move again in October when the ghetto had gotten even smaller. Korczak and the heavy woman Stefa washed me. He said while they were doing it that he’d never seen such a dirty chest and armpits.

Everyone slept on the first floor in one big room and in the morning wooden chests and cupboards were dragged around, mostly by the heavy woman, to make areas where we could eat and study and play. She told the kids to help and some would and some wouldn’t. All of this went on while I stayed in bed, watching. “Who is he, the Prince?” another kid asked, and Korczak told him I was recovering from frostbite.

My feet were burning and while she was sliding a cupboard over near me the woman said I should set them in a pan of cold water, but she didn’t make me so I didn’t. I only got up for lunch and dinner and when I did it made my feet burn even more. Lunch was a wheat porridge ground up in a meat grinder and then steeped in boiling water and dinner was potato skins mushed into patties and pigweed with turnips. While the kids at my table ate they sang Julek and Mańka went out of town and kissed so hard the trees fell down.

“Who weeps at turnips?” a kid said when he saw what I was doing. But I was seeing Lutek still hanging onto his sack in the back of the blue policeman’s car.

“My eyes do this,” I told everyone at the table. “I don’t know why.”

After lunch there’d been a class in Hebrew in a corner of the room near my bed. I pulled the covers over my face. Korczak asked questions in Polish and the kids answered in gibberish. Sometimes he corrected them. His last question was “Are you happy here in Palestine?” and it sounded like everyone had the right answer. The woman said it was time for chores and I could hear everyone getting to their feet and when I pulled the covers down kids were sweeping the floors and washing the walls and wiping the windows. Everyone was calling for something and banging around and knocking into things. When that was finished they all came back near my bed again, and Korczak said it was time to read his column in the orphanage newspaper. This week’s column was called “Take Care with the Machine.” “The machine doesn’t understand; the machine is indifferent,” he read. He had his glasses on the end of his nose and used his finger to follow the print. “Put your finger in, it’ll cut it off; put your head in, it’ll cut that off too.” I got up to pee. My feet weren’t burning so much.

The toilet was in the back behind the kitchen. There were eleven kids in line for it. “Is this the only toilet?” I asked.

“This is the only toilet,” the kid ahead of me said without turning around.

Going back to bed I stopped at the window. It was bright outside. The sun had dried dead flies on the windowsills. The bricks under the sills moved like loose teeth where the mortar was gone. Magazine photographs tacked below were so speckled with holes they must have been targets for wall games.

The kid who’d been in front of me in line spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping the top step of the landing. I watched him. He kept his eyes on me while he worked. When he wasn’t sweeping he waved a hand around his face like a horse shoos flies away with its tail.

He had the cot next to me and shook me awake for breakfast the next morning. We had hot water and saccharine and bread. You could eat three pieces if you wanted. We got in line to be weighed and measured afterwards. While I waited a cripple in front of me waved his stump at me like a fin.

I was back on my bed looking at my feet when the kid with the broom carried over a pan of water filled to the brim and spilled some of it setting it on the floor next to me.

“Madame Stefa says to soak your feet in this,” he said.

“What’s floating in it?” I asked.

“How would I know?” he said.

I asked his name and he said Zygmuś. He said he’d banged his hand. While I soaked my feet he watched the blood swell along his fingernail and wiped it off on the floor, leaving red smears.

The heavy woman asked from across the room if there wasn’t something he was supposed to be doing and he told her he was helping me.

He introduced me to the kid two beds over. The kid was Mietek from the Chłodna Street gate but he acted like he’d never seen me. Zygmuś said they were best friends but the kid didn’t look up and just sat on his bed staring at his rotten boots.

I asked what was wrong with him and Zygmuś said the kid’s mother had been sick but had promised him she wouldn’t die until he was safe in the orphanage. Then she died as soon as he got there.

“Pan Doctor says he’s suffering from pangs of conscience,” Zygmuś said. The kid didn’t seem to hear.

The joke around the orphanage was that no one had ever seen the kid smile, Zygmuś said. The kid said without smiling, “That’s not true. I smile all the time.” Then he turned away from us.

“What’s he holding on to?” I asked.

“That’s his dead brother’s prayer book,” Zygmuś said.

The heavy woman finally got him working and I sat there soaking my feet. I was happy I was warm and not on the street. Later Korczak stood over me and gestured at the pan and asked to take a look. He had this expression like he knew what needed to be done but was being prevented from doing it. His glasses had thumbprints on the lenses. A kid who was six or seven kicked down some girls’ toy city in the play area and they all started yelling and crying.

“Is that Jerzyk?” the heavy woman asked him from across the room.

“That’s Jerzyk,” he said to me like we were sharing a secret. He lifted my foot out of the pan and squeezed my toes. He said, “For two years he’s been making my life miserable. He made everyone miserable in kindergarten. I wrote an article about him that advocated penal colonies. And he’s so young, yet! Imagine what’ll happen when he’s grown.”

Two of the older kids took Jerzyk by the arms and pulled him away from the girls. Korczak decided my feet had healed enough for me to work and told the heavy woman so and she came over and gave me the job of the chamber pots, which she said had to be rinsed with ammonia. She called it starting at the bottom. I asked why they needed chamber pots when they had a toilet and she said that one toilet served a hundred and fifty children and twenty staff members. She also said that if I was finished asking questions, then this might be a good time to start earning my keep.

AFTER THE LIGHTS WERE SWITCHED OFF THAT NIGHT and we were settled on our cots Korczak appeared out of the darkness and sat on mine. “I saw you at the window this afternoon,” he said. He was being as quiet as he could. “It’s annoying to have to stand on tiptoe and barely see out, isn’t it? Like not being able to see in a crowd.” I agreed with him. “Tomorrow is Thursday and Thursday is when the admissions committee meets to review the new applicants,” he added. “Has Madame Stefa talked to you about the application?” After I shook my head he asked, “Can you write?”

“A little,” I told him.

“Do I intrude on your business?” he asked Zygmuś. Zygmuś rolled over on his cot.

“She’ll help you with it tomorrow,” he told me. “Do you have any family at all?”

I cleared my throat and had nowhere to spit so I swallowed it. “You’ll be fine,” he said, after he put a hand on my face and felt my tears.

My weeping seemed to tire him out. “The whole thing’s become just a formality anyway,” he said. “Someone mentions the candidate, no one says anything, we all stare into space, and then after a few minutes someone else asks who it was we were talking about in the first place. Someone makes a motion to accept, someone else complains about lunch, and the discussions slide around like a drunk on an icy hill.”

A few other kids rolled over or made other noises. At the far end, one snored like a snuffling pig. “Everyone starts out with big plans,” I told him. “Then they figure out that’s not how things are going to be.”

He laughed to himself. “The Book of Aron, chapter 2, verse 2,” he said. “And mostly what they achieve is weakened eyesight and tired feet.”

His ears looked even wider and his neck even thinner in the dark. I didn’t know what he wanted. “When I think about all the strength I squandered in just blundering around,” he said.

He asked if I did a good job on the chamber pots. I told him I did. He told me their condition would often let you know the quality of an orphanage.

He stayed where he was sitting. He seemed to be listening to everyone’s breathing.

I asked if he remembered that boy he was carrying after the city surrendered. The one who needed the shoes.

“That boy,” he said. “Of course. The morning the British entered the war we joined a crowd outside their embassy. Poles and Jews rubbing shoulders like brothers again! Everyone singing ‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost!’ That same afternoon seven shells hit the orphanage. One blew out the windowpanes of the dining hall and another blew my hat off. I remember telling him we had to leave the street because my bald head was too clear a target for the planes.”

“Did he ever get his shoes?” I asked. But even in the dark I could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“He used to go with me on my rounds,” he said. “After the bombing we got a storekeeper to donate her lentils by arguing that the Germans would confiscate them anyway. I always remind those I’m asking that it’s Jewish honor I’m upholding and they can either give to my orphans or the Germans. He was a lot like the boy who got into trouble today,” he said. “Wherever a bruise or a bump on the head was involved, there he was.”

“Bad luck,” I said.

“There are people who just don’t think,” he said, “just like some don’t smoke.”

I didn’t answer. I wanted someone to miss me like that.

“But you couldn’t get angry with him,” he said. “It’s like Słowacki said: God loves power the way he loves wild horses.”

He patted my leg like he thought I was the boy who was gone. “A lot of people are afraid to sleep during the day because they worry it’ll spoil their night,” he said. “It’s the reverse with me.”

I took his hand and he didn’t move it away. Something about that made me start weeping again.

“Lately I’ve been smelling schmaltz at night,” he told me. “Do you smell it?”

I shook my head.

“It drives me crazy,” he said.

“I don’t smell it,” I said.

“I think about Europe in Polish,” he said. “And I think about Palestine in Hebrew. But I think about eating in Yiddish.”

“I just think about eating,” I said. It made him chuckle again.

He told me the next day I should help with the coal delivery and I said I would. He started talking to himself about it. He said now you had to give the coal man twenty złotys extra to get whole pieces and not just chips. He said if the rumors about the Germans requisitioning even more were true, then we could all start burning furniture. Of course, he said, if you gave the Jews a single quiet day, each one of them would start producing rumors.

“Everyone wants to figure out what to do next,” I told him.

“We can’t even see to the bottom of the cup we hold in our hands,” he said, then blew his nose into a handkerchief and wished me a good night.

“Good night,” Zygmuś said.

“My apologies for having disturbed you,” Korczak told him.

“What was that all about?” someone else said out of the darkness after he’d left.

“Pan Doctor isn’t doing so well,” Zygmuś said. I could hear his yawn.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Go to sleep,” he answered.

I TURNED OUT TO BE GOOD AT UNLOADING COAL, which meant I was covered in coal dust from the waist down and not head to toe. I also helped with a shipment of groats that the heavy woman mixed with horse blood for our breakfast. I was invited to join the choir and told them I couldn’t sing, and invited to join the drama club and said I couldn’t act. The heavy woman talked to me about my application and seemed to think my situation was more than pathetic enough and I needn’t worry about being kicked out onto the street. And she told me to please start calling her Madame Stefa.

The Germans told Korczak the windowpanes now needed to be covered with black paper at night and so she sat me at a worktable and carried over a crate filled with paste and scissors and rolls of black paper and put me in charge of four other kids in making the shades. When they wouldn’t listen to me she told Zygmuś to help out. He asked why it was his job but she only gestured to where she wanted him to sit and then left. He gathered up his friend Mietek and two others and told them that it was the health officer’s orders and when Mietek asked why he called her the health officer, Zygmuś said that the real health officer wouldn’t speak to Jews but just pointed at the pots he wanted lifted in order to see whether the bottoms were clean.

He had me measure and the others do the cutting and pasting. The kids talked about nothing but eating. One said that when he was young he could go all day without eating but now he was an empty pot. He said that the soup was no sooner poured down into his stomach than he was hungry again. He had the same blank and accepting expression as my little brother and I had to stop looking at him. I moved a stepstool over to the windows and did arm lengths to estimate sizes.

One of the other kids asked Zygmuś if he had any brothers or sisters and he said he had three sisters. He said his parents used to have a mill that ground buckwheat flour and one day he and his sisters had gone to get milk and when they returned, people were robbing the mill and a neighbor was saying, “You people are robbing these kids and they’re orphans,” and that’s how they found out their parents had been killed. He said his older sister had then been attacked by some German soldiers and had run away over the Russian border and that really put them out of business as a family since she’d been the only one left who could cook.

Madame Stefa was in charge of the daily routine. Her scoldings always began with “Let me tell you” and when she was asked a question she didn’t want to answer she always said, “Let’s not worry about it.”

Korczak spent two days a week arranging for help for other orphanages and the rest of the time he went begging for us. On those days he left early and returned late and always took a different boy. He begged at the Jewish Community Office and the homes of the rich or the collaborators and outside the cafés. The heavy woman worried about him. She said when he was gone that he came back in the evenings worn out from having had to raise hell over a barrel of sauerkraut.

Zygmuś said the kids he picked to go along were the ones who’d been with him since they were small, that he liked the kids he’d raised more than the rest.

I watched him late at night when he got back. With only one light on, he looked ancient. His hands shook and he rationed his cigarettes and vodka with saccharine and every few minutes he cleared his throat.

“So you’re up again,” he said one night when he finally saw me watching. “Aren’t you tired? Don’t we give you enough to do?”

I was always tired, I told him. And whatever I had to do I couldn’t handle.

“So you’re not one of my fire-eaters?” he asked. “Like your friend Zygmuś? Whose mother rode stags through the forest and ate horses?”

My mother took in washing, I told him.

“I remember you from the gang at the gate,” he said. And when I apologized he told me it was all right. I hadn’t been the cruel one and everyone had to do what they needed to in order to get by. All doors opened before the hungry.

He shook me awake on my cot the next day and told me to get dressed because I was coming with him.

When we got outside it was still dark. I didn’t want to be back out on the streets, I told him. He said he understood.

He talked nonstop as he walked. He said maybe today we’d visit the Germans. He said the officer assigned to supervise the orphanage had been a pediatrician himself and always referred to Korczak as his “respected colleague” and thought that was hilarious. He said the officer called the orphanage his “republic of swindlers” and said the Jews managed to adjust to every situation but never knew how good they had it, like the man who complained he had no golden shoes but didn’t realize that he was soon to lose his legs.

It was windy and muddy and cold and everyone who was out early moved around as if fed up with his own exhaustion. Most were beggars who’d been out all night. We stopped next to a girl with bare arms squatting in front of a little wagon carrying frozen and rotted rutabagas. A younger girl was curled up under the wagon with her feet covered in newspaper wrapped and tied into the shape of shoes. Korczak knelt next to her and put something in her hand. Both girls did everything slowly.

“Enough about the Germans,” he said, once we started walking again. He blew on his hands. He talked about how some of the orphanage girls had surprised him with a movie they made with a waxed paper box and electric bulb.

I asked where we were going and he asked if it mattered. He said that given one circumstance or another we were all tied up like dogs on a chain.

After I didn’t answer he apologized for saying something so unhelpful.

His apology made him quiet. In the darkness we passed Przejazd Street and the Immortal Hole and the building with the slanted roof and the dormers.

He said that in one house the previous week he found six children on a wet and rotting mattress. And when I still didn’t say anything he asked who wasn’t sad? He said the world was one great sadness. He said what we needed to do was tell ourselves that we weren’t living in the worst place in the world but instead were surrounded by grasshoppers and glowworms.

From his expression it didn’t look like he was being ironic. I told him again that I didn’t want to be out on the street and when he didn’t answer I said I didn’t want to be at the orphanage either. He said I was free to leave and I hated him for making me feel the way I did and hated myself even more for not just being dead somewhere.

The sun came up and he asked if I was at least happy to be out in the sunshine. I rubbed my arms and face and he asked if I’d heard him. I told him that whether I was happy or unhappy, I took things as I found them. He said his mother used to say when it was sunny and he was particularly gloomy that not even a Jew could suffer on a day like today.

Every few steps now someone was begging or selling or had come out of a hole and was trying to keep warm. One was wrapped in a quilt that was losing feathers in the wind. Someone was selling milk out of their house and we got in line for some. “Wherever there’s a line I stand in it, no matter what they’re selling, because I know I’m going to get something,” he joked.

We began our begging at a rich man’s house. He rang the bell. The man when he answered the door said, “Oh, Pan Doctor, you’re killing me here,” instead of hello, and Korczak asked him what was worse than being an old man and then answered being an old Jew. And what was worse than that? An old Jew who was penniless. And worse than that? An old Jew who was penniless and unresourceful. And worse than that, an old Jew who was penniless and unresourceful and who bore the burden of a large family. And worse than that, someone whose large family were all children. And worse than that, children who were starving.

The man disappeared from the door and returned with some money and dumped it into a sack Korczak held out. Then he excused himself and said good morning and shut the door while Korczak looked into the sack.

He led me to the next house. He said he himself had been well-to-do until his father had to be put into a mental hospital. And that’s when he learned what it meant to have to turn to adults for help. Adulthood was a privileged position against which he’d had to struggle. He’d heard a lot about the proletariat as a teenager, but the world’s oldest proletariat was the child. The child was hounded even by those who loved him. He’d decided then and there that he’d become the father of orphans and would always work for those who should come first but always came last.

“Like you, I was always slow doing everything,” he said. “When my grandmother would watch me at a chore she’d always say, ‘You. Philosopher.’ ”

“When my father called for my help he always said, ‘Hey! Bungler!’ ” I told him.

“And you always helped him,” he said.

“I didn’t like to work,” I told him.

“The laziest person I ever knew was a man named Krylov who spent the entirety of his adult years on his couch, with all of his books beneath it,” he said. “He would just reach down and read whatever came to his hand.”

We walked to other houses and when the people who answered the door said no he wouldn’t go away. He just repeated, “But my children. My children.” I thought about my mother. “Stay still while I’m talking,” he told me between houses.

At lunchtime we stood inside the door of a café and he shouted, “Is there someone here who can get my children through the winter?” And a man called him over and he approached some others, thanking those who gave and saying about what went into the sack, “Not enough, not enough.” In the afternoon we stopped at the post office to go through the packages that were undeliverable after the German soldiers had opened them.

Walking back to the orphanage we passed Mrs. Melecówna’s parlor. The sidewalk was blocked by kids standing with their hands out and weeping. He gave something to each.

After we’d gone a few blocks I asked if he wanted to rest because he looked so tired. He said we’d gotten to the point where dead children no longer impressed us. He said that if a man couldn’t look on calmly at the death of another then his own life was worth a hundred times more. He was having enough trouble walking that he leaned on each house railing we passed. He said it was like how some people still went to visit relatives who’d been taken to the hospital.

A pack of kids ran by us and almost knocked him down. He half-sat against a post. His breathing sounded like my mother’s and I thought I would have to run away and leave him on the street if he kept making those sounds. He said to himself that the smugglers lived a little longer and the unenterprising died in silence.

Then he didn’t speak again until we turned onto Sienna and could see the orphanage. I thought if he died on the street, where would I be then? He took my hand to stop me and looked at where we were going like the building itself could kill him.

Jerzyk and some other boy were playing in the street with some rope, taking turns whipping each other. We could hear their laughter. “You know what I dream of?” Korczak said. “A room in Jerusalem with a table and something to write on. Transparent walls so I wouldn’t miss a single sunrise or sunset. And I’m just the silent Jew from who knows where.”

We stood where he’d stopped us. He held the lamppost to keep himself steady. Then he made an after-you gesture with a bow and cleared his throat behind me all the way down the block.

“DID YOU THINK YOU WERE GOING TO HIDE IN THAT orphanage until the war was over?” Lejkin asked. I hadn’t realized he was behind me on the street. I’d been sent out with Zygmuś and a handcart to pick up a barrel of pickles someone had told Korczak he’d donate.

“Let’s have a talk,” Lejkin said. “Your friend can handle the stolen goods.”

I stopped and Zygmuś kept pulling. He rattled the cart over the trolley tracks and around the corner and out of sight.

“They’re not stolen,” I said.

“Our friend Obersturmführer Witossek thought I should remind you that you’re still a member of the anti-crime unit,” Lejkin said. “It’s not as though our problems have gone away while you’ve been settling in at your new home.”

I shoved him as hard as I could. “You said they weren’t hunting smugglers,” I said.

He straightened his collar and stuck out his chin. “The Germans do what the Germans do,” he said. “What you want to remember is how to keep them from doing it to you.”

He said I should let him buy me a hot chocolate and pulled me to a café down the street.

The café was full and warm enough from its stove that its windows ran with condensation. Outside of it a boy sat cross-legged with a baby next to him on a spread handkerchief, the baby on its side and panting like a pigeon. Inside we sat there looking at each other and he handed me a napkin for my eyes. “You cry more than any other person I know,” he said. A woman approached our table and he said, “Watch: this one carries a photograph of herself from happier days to show what a wreck she’s become.”

When the waiter came he ordered for me. He asked if I’d heard about Lübeck and when I said no he told me, after making certain no Germans were near, that the British had bombed it flat. When I didn’t say anything he said that everyone in the Order Service, optimists and pessimists alike, believed Germany would lose in the end, but the pessimists claimed that before that happened Germany would gain control of the world. The optimists said Germany had waged total war in Poland, lightning war in France, an installment war in England, and a fatal war in Russia. He said people had started writing 1812, the year of Napoleon’s defeat, on the walls.

He said he’d asked Witossek when he thought the war would end and Witossek had answered when Germans were eating once a day and Jews once a month.

When the hot chocolates arrived he toasted to good fortune and when I asked what good fortune he said he was moving up in the Order Service and was now Szeryński’s deputy. So you could say he was second in command of the entire yellow police.

He was just making conversation, he said finally, when I still hadn’t answered.

I told him I needed to get back.

He said they would like me to tour certain areas with them in case I might have some hard-won knowledge that would come in handy.

“You want me to help you kill someone else?” I said.

He asked if I wanted my hot chocolate and when I didn’t answer he drank it. “The requisitioning is about to get more extreme,” he said. “No potatoes. No bread. No coal for the orphanages but plenty for the coffeehouses.”

What could any of us do, I told him. None of us had any luck.

“Think of it like this,” he said. “Are we to dole out spoonfuls to everyone, with the result that no one will survive? Or give a fuller measure to the few?”

“I need to get back,” I said.

“I’m going to talk to you as though you can understand,” he said. “Shyster to shyster, as it were. Those with no talent for swindling always suffer.” He gestured outside. “You and I both know that no compassion can be expected from the Germans. Whether we live or die depends on how long they’re in power. If they have enough time, they’ll kill us all. If not, some can be saved.”

I stood up and he didn’t try to stop me. “We won’t need you until the end of the week,” he said.

“Why do you need me?” I said. “Why can’t you get someone else?”

He ran his finger around the inside of my cup. “It’ll help to think about others the way my boss Szeryński does,” he said, then stood up himself and made an after-you gesture like Korczak’s. “He says that refugees are like autumn leaves.”

He followed me out onto the sidewalk. It had begun to snow and he pulled up his collar and then pulled up mine. Then he cleaned off his seat and got on his bicycle and rode away. Because of the snow it slipped and slid all over on the cobblestones and he had to put his foot out every so often for balance.

THE OTHER STAFF MEMBERS SLEPT IN A BUILDING next door but Korczak had his office and bed on the floor above us in what everyone called the isolation ward for the kids who were the sickest. His bed and night table were in the middle of the room with the kids’ beds arranged around them. Each bed had a pail next to it on the floor and all the kids had compresses on their heads. Korczak looked to be asleep, even though his lamp was lit and his clothes were still on. The kids were asleep. It was after four in the morning.

There was a heel of black bread on the table and another piece in his hand, as if he’d fallen asleep eating.

I had crept up the stairs to talk to him. I heard a noise and hid behind his desk and then Madame Stefa appeared in the doorway and watched him sleep before moving over to the side of his bed.

“I always try to nap for an hour before the beehive starts to buzz,” he told her, and I realized he was awake though his eyes were still closed. “When I was a child, I pretended to be asleep and then opened my eyes suddenly so I could see my guardian angel before he could hide.”

She lowered herself to sit on the edge of one of the kids’ beds. She looked as tired as he did. “How was your day today?” she asked. “We didn’t get a chance to talk.” And I could hear in her voice what I’d heard in my mother’s when she’d asked me for news.

“Ten hours and seven calls,” he said. “Fifty złotys and another promise of five a month.”

She said no one expected him to spend ten hours tramping around in the cold and that his ailments were not going to allow it.

“Which ailments are those?” he asked. He was still on his back but his hand was now over his eyes.

“Your weakened heart muscle. Your pleurisy from pneumonia. Your bladder trouble. Your swollen legs and feet,” she said. “Your hernia.”

They were quiet. “It’s not funny,” she said.

“How did the doctor who refused to perform the hernia operation put it?” he asked. “My health is in ruins.”

Go downstairs, I thought to myself. I needed to talk to someone about Lejkin. But what would I say?

“You cough and you complain and then you go out without your sweater,” Madame Stefa said.

“What about you? One can’t give you anything,” Korczak said.

He lifted his hand from his eyes and saw her looking at the vodka and water on the table. “Have you noticed that bread and water taste better at night?” he asked.

“And what happens when someone takes you off the street?” she asked. “Where will we be then?”

Her anger made him angry too. “Who says that when I go out the Germans will be about?” he said. “And if they are, who says they’ll be on my street? And if they are, who says they’ll choose me? And if they do, who says they won’t be persuaded by what I have to tell them?”

“I’m just asking if it’s worth the risk for such a little bit of money,” she said.

He made a noise with his mouth. Then he said, “You know, when I was a child I told my teachers that I knew how to remake the world. Throw away all the money was always step one. My plan always broke down at step two.”

She closed her shawl around her neck with one hand. It was cold. The janitor’s son called up from the courtyard to complain about the light. He said it looked like Hanukkah and he didn’t want to have to tell them again. Madame Stefa went to the windowsill and refastened the blackout paper.

“I have a recurring dream in which one of my boys says about me, ‘He went to sleep when we needed him most,’ ” Korczak said.

“You can’t do everything,” she said.

“How much land have I tilled?” he said. “How much bread have I baked? How many trees have I planted? How many bricks have I laid? How many buttons have I sewn, how many garments have I patched?”

“Sssh,” she told him. “Don’t work yourself up.”

“My father called me a clod and an idiot and a crybaby and an ass,” he said. “He was right. And so were those who believed in me.”

I realized they were talking about something else completely and that I didn’t know how anyone’s mind worked, including my own.

“I know you never promised me anything,” she said. “And I lie awake telling myself, Stefa, you old fool, you got what you deserved.”

“The most splendid assumption still needs verification,” he told her.

“I just always believed that one receives in order to nourish,” she said.

“So what is love?” he asked. “Is it always given to those who deserve it? How do we know if we love enough? How do we learn to love more?”

The room smelled of cigarettes and feet. The blackout paper came loose again and outside the window it was starting to get light.

“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.

“From seven to fourteen I was permanently in love,” he said, “and always with a different girl.”

The windowpanes rattled and it looked like he was listening to the wind. He gave a big sigh.

“I always think that maybe if I hadn’t been so ugly,” she said.

“I tell everyone, ‘Stefa always reminds me that I’m a miserable human being who makes everyone else miserable,’ ” he said.

She said something so quietly as an answer that he asked her to repeat it. “It’s just hard always feeling alone,” she said.

He didn’t answer so she looked at her hands. My legs cramped from having been in one position for so long.

“I’ve gotten back what I paid in,” he finally told her. “Loneliness isn’t the worst thing. I value memories.”

She stood up and crossed to the door and stopped. “I remind myself that it’s not my place to ask for things,” she said. “But even now my ego gets in the way.”

Even I could see her unhappiness in the lamplight, but he ignored it. “Nothing I can say or do can spare you or spare myself,” he said.

“Always you give up, you postpone, you cancel, you substitute,” she told him.

He sat up on his elbows. “I see my feelings through a telescope,” he said. “They’re a little gang huddled on a polar plain. When someone coughs, first I feel pity and then its opposite: maybe he’s contagious. Maybe he’s going to cause us to use up the rest of our medicine.”

She said she was sorry and that she’d let him sleep.

“I exist not to be loved but to act,” he told her.

“The saint orders and God executes,” she said.

“I’m doing what I can,” he said. “Our God may not have the will to enforce the Law, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey it.”

“Whom do we sue for breach of contract?” she asked.

“Rabbi Yitzchak of Berdichov is supposed to have summoned God to a rabbinic court,” he told her.

“I suppose we were never going to find a place where we’d enjoy perfect digestion and eternal peace,” she said.

“Sometimes I think: don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Just listen for another ten minutes to their breathing. Their coughing. Their little noises.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I do.”

“We’re living tombstones,” he told her. “Israel is where they have the baby carriages and the green growing things.”

She made a noise like he’d slapped her and he fell back onto his bed once he heard her going down the stairs.

A BOY EVERYONE CALLED MANDOLIN BECAUSE HE never let go of his instrument, even holding it above his head during his lice bath, died in his bed with both arms wrapped around it. We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it. If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew. All anyone could think about was the table’s next loaf of bread. In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds. We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan. It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand. On the Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard.

Though there was no food, Korczak had us all address and mail invitations to our Passover seder on April first. We divided up his list of benefactors. When the day came, fifty guests arrived and sat near the door. The long tables were covered with tablecloths. I sat next to a kid whose blisters and scabs were so thick his neighbors called him Fish Scales. We had no eggs or bitter herbs and only a bit of soup and a matzoh ball each, and the smaller kids were excited because it was announced that Madame Stefa had hidden an almond in one of the matzoh balls. Our holiday starvation, Zygmuś joked, would be like the rest of our week. But Korczak told the guests that no child at his table had been abandoned and all were joined by the loving spirits of their absent mothers and fathers, and when he said that many of the kids started crying. Most of the audience did too. Mietek got the almond.

For a week no one came round to bother me. Then someone pounded on the orphanage door late in the evening, and Madame Stefa answered it and came over to my cot and said a Jewish policeman wished to see me.

At the door Lejkin said that he needed to find the apartment where my friend, the pretty one, had stayed before she’d left the ghetto. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said if I refused then the Germans he was with would take ten kids from the orphanage and shoot them. He said the Germans would be happy to tell me which ones they would shoot. He waited while I got dressed and then walked me down the stairs and we got into a car with Germans in the back. One of them asked him in Polish why I was crying and Lejkin said, “That’s what he does.”

At first I gave them the wrong address but once we stopped there I panicked and told them I’d been mistaken and gave them the right one. That was only seven blocks farther on. Something was caught in the heater in the car’s dashboard and made a fluttering sound. While I waited in the front seat, Lejkin and two Germans went up to the door and knocked and asked the woman who answered to step outside. She was in her red flowered bathrobe. She looked over at me in the car. One of the Germans shot her where she stood and they left her there outside her front door.

The next day the kids were talking about how many people had been shot all over the ghetto. Korczak told Madame Stefa to let me sleep, so the room was set up for the day around me. I told myself I wasn’t going to move and if I cried until I dried out that was fine too. No one knew how many people had been killed. One of the staff members finally told Mietek that she’d heard they’d all been connected to an illegal newspaper. Korczak said this didn’t need to be discussed with the children within earshot. The next day I was made to get up and do some chores and when I was washing dishes I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Jewish Council had circulated a memorandum saying that the Germans said the executions had been a singular event and wouldn’t be repeated.

After that there were daily roundups at barricades the Germans set up on different streets with a few sawhorses and signs. Once the barricades went up you only had a few minutes to get away before the cross streets and alleys were blocked too. “Now the day’s a success if you just manage to get where you’re going without an incident,” Madame Stefa said.

Korczak’s solution to all of this was letter-writing. Just because things were as bad as they could be, he said, that didn’t mean we had to accept that action was useless.

All of those with acceptable penmanship were set to writing Please if possible send packages to the Orphans’ Home at 16 Sienna Street for the sick children. He said there was more and that he would dictate the rest. He said to write that peaceably they run around and play, these children who so recently arrived wounded, frozen, abused, hungry, and hunted. Some of the kids asked how to spell peaceably and he told them it didn’t matter. He said to write that there was no food for them and a lot of the smaller children had stopped growing. That nightmares and weeping were their permanent experiences. And yet his teaching had been borne out, since when the adult community wouldn’t provide a stable or rational environment the children could create for themselves a world that was functional and tender. I wrote that sentence twice, I was so taken with it. He said to write that there were always more children imploring him to be admitted, coming to him in groups on the street and making their proposals like little skeletal aldermen. He said to sign the letters with our names and then for Dr. Henryk Goldszmit/Janusz Korczak/The Old Doctor from the Radio.

FOR THREE DAYS I DIDN’T LEAVE MY BED EXCEPT FOR meals and Korczak again told them to leave me alone. The bedbugs spared only the bottom of my feet. During the day, before the kids hung the blackout paper, a new rule said they had to stand to the side of the windows to watch the street, because now the Germans were firing at any movement indoors. A policeman the staff members called Frankenstein because he looked and acted like the monster in the film never missed an opportunity, they said, to break a window if he saw a silhouette.

The kids watched the roundups at the barricades. They could hear them starting with the whistles and the shouting. Sometimes they saw someone they knew. Jews went by carrying all sorts of things: cages or bowls or horns. One had a pot with a seedling in it. They were all going to the depot the Germans called the Umschlagplatz where the trains took them away.

On the fourth day Korczak again got me up to go on his rounds with him. Madame Stefa insisted he wear a warmer shirt and he had to struggle into it. She had to help him with his suspenders.

Out on the street he couldn’t remember where he was going. In one doorway he rang the bell and said to me, “What did I come to see him about?” In the gloom of another he said, “What is it I’m looking at?” The instep of his shoe came loose and flapped when he walked. The coal smoke in the air left grit on our teeth. Everyone moved as if in a daze and looked at me like I was a piece of bread. A woman ahead of us in a shop complained about the price and Korczak said to her, “Listen. These aren’t goods and this isn’t a store. You’re not a customer and he’s not a shopkeeper. So you’re not being cheated and he’s not profiting. This is just what we’ve decided to do, given that we have to do something.” On the way back his legs were so swollen he had to hire one of the bicycles with seats attached for passengers. He asked me to choose the strongest-looking driver and while we rode he leaned over to me and said in a hoarse voice that he was always moved by how gentle and quiet the drivers were, like oxen or horses.

MORE KIDS GOT SICK BUT MADAME STEFA STILL slept downstairs with the healthy ones and Korczak upstairs in the isolation ward. “It’s cold for May,” he said to me one night when I came up to sit with him. He was writing something while everyone else slept.

“What’s that smell?” I asked.

“The carbide in the lamp,” he said.

The vodka bottle was gone. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Raw alcohol I mix with water and a dissolved hard candy for sweetener,” he said. He asked why I hadn’t eaten dinner and when I told him I hadn’t wanted to, he said fatigue and apathy were symptoms of malnutrition. I asked why he hadn’t eaten dinner and he said eating was work and that he was tired.

I sat next to him on Jerzyk’s bed. Jerzyk was sweating and his eyes were open. “Alcohol mixed with warm water takes away the ache and sore eyes,” Korczak said.

While he wrote he kept his face close to the paper. “What are you writing?” I finally asked.

He said it was to the Judenrat, requesting he be allowed to take over the public shelter that housed a thousand children on Dzielna Street. He said on his application he was spreading rumors that he was a thief who would let children starve so he could qualify for the job. He’d said he was unbalanced and excitable and his health had passed the test in the Gestapo’s prison the year before: that despite the exacting conditions there, not once had he reported sick, not once had he requested a doctor, not once had he absented himself from work in the prison yard. He said he told them that he presently ate like a horse and slept soundly after ten shots of vodka and that experience had now endowed him with the ability to collaborate with criminals and born imbeciles.

“What does the job pay?” I asked him.

He said he’d requested a trial period and a minimum of twenty thousand złotys for the children’s upkeep.

“Do you think you’ll get it?” I asked.

“I already got it,” he said. “I was handed the job permanently and given one thousand złotys. Who’s going to deny the Old Doctor from the Radio the privilege of overseeing kids who are dying at the rate of ten a day?”

“So then what are you writing?” I asked him.

“I had imagined the criminal types among the personnel there would voluntarily leave since they obviously found the place so hateful,” he said. “And they were bound to it only by cowardice and inertia. But instead they closed ranks against me. I’m the stranger. The enemy. The one good nurse died of tuberculosis. I’m trying to get the rest sacked.”

“The salt of the earth dissolves and the shit remains,” I told him. It was something Lutek always said.

“That describes it,” Korczak said.

Jerzyk told us he was thirsty and Korczak pulled himself off his bed and went down to the kitchen and returned with a cup of water. “Here I have four ways of dealing with undesirable newcomers,” he said to me. “I bribe them; I agree to anything; I lie low and mark time, waiting for the moment to strike; or I wear them out. There, none of these will work.”

“Thank you,” Jerzyk said, and Korczak told him he was welcome.

“Today everyone will be restless because I’ve got a headache,” he said. “Or because it’s cold. Or because they want an outing.” Jerzyk drank his water.

“Oh, listen to me,” he finally said, and put his hand on Jerzyk’s head. “I remember an old teacher who got indignant with us because our hair grew too fast.”

THE NEXT DAY HE WAS TOO WEAK TO GO ON HIS rounds but the day after I heard him exclaiming, “I’m up! I’m up! I’m on my feet!” even from the floor below where I was sleeping.

“This one again?” Zygmuś said when he saw us getting ready to leave. “I think Pan Doctor has a new favorite.”

We went to a butcher shop Korczak had heard would be open for the day. “Is this made from people?” he joked when the woman told him the price. “It’s too cheap for horsemeat.”

“How would I know,” she said. “I wasn’t there when they made it.”

On Twarda the road was blocked by Lejkin and a line of yellow police. He called to us and left his spot in the front to come over to talk.

“I understand you’ve been given new responsibilities,” Korczak told him. Lejkin bowed, and Korczak turned to me. “Mr. Szeryński was arrested for black marketing in furs.” I told him I didn’t care and he explained that it meant my friend was now in command of the Order Service. I said he wasn’t my friend and Lejkin said, speaking of that, one of the new imperatives was a daily quota for deportation and Service members who failed to fill their quotas would be departing themselves. And some of his men would prefer not to select their neighbors and maybe they could use the rest of my old gang since smugglers were always a good place to start.

“Leave the boy alone,” Korczak told him.

“I’m giving him fair warning,” Lejkin said. “About business we’ll be transacting in the future.” Korczak pulled me away.

“You needn’t hide behind him,” Lejkin called. “I can see you.”

But then he left us alone and Korczak told me after a few days that I could stop hiding. “Mr. Lejkin has other things to worry about,” he said.

It got hot again on Shavuot, the Feast of First Fruits, and the fly problem got so bad that Korczak finally set up a toilet-fee scale: you had to kill five flies to piss and fifteen to shit. Whoever was next in line was the one who checked. Mietek asked me one morning if he could kill them later because he couldn’t hold it and I told him I’d do it for him.

Then at the beginning of June everyone had diarrhea and the chamber pots boiled over. Korczak and Madame Stefa figured it was something that had been in the bread. The Children’s Home was now a home for the aged, he told her one night, and the whole group was worn down and mutinous and resentful. You could hear kids moaning on the chamber pots and on the toilet.

She said maybe the Germans would stop and he told her the Germans were running the world’s largest enterprise and its name was war and they weren’t playing at it and it wasn’t clean or pleasant or sweet-smelling. He said that We are the Germans meant We are the steel roller. And then when she started to cry he said without sounding sorry that this was how he felt as well.

THE NIGHT THE YELLOW POLICE CAME FOR ME I WAS able to hide. There was shooting all night and Madame Stefa was weeping the next morning and wouldn’t stop until Korczak had two of the staff members take her upstairs. He gathered the kids around him and told them that Madame was distraught because one of her favorite boys had been killed. He named the boy and no one knew him and he explained that he’d already graduated. One kid asked what was happening and he said no one knew but that night I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Germans were exterminating all of the smugglers. Soldiers with dogs broke down doors and dragged people out of houses. The Order Service now patrolled the ghetto wall. They’d painted white numbers every fifty meters, with every policeman responsible for his own numbered area. The plan was apparently to use those Jews to starve all the other ones to death.

Madame Stefa remembered when the boy who’d been killed had helped bring in half a cow in six valises over the roof of a building that had been emptied by typhus and how much the beef had thrilled all the children. She remembered that after the city surrendered he broke into a warehouse of army stores and came away with two pillowcases filled with rice and sugar.

She asked Korczak if he wanted tea and he told her that if she wanted to make tea she should make some for Jerzyk, whose fever was worse. She asked if he wanted saccharine water and he said that if she wanted to make some saccharine water she should make it for a staff member who’d given his portion at dinner to one of the weeping little girls.

The next morning I was assigned the coal chute in the cellar and while I was down there Zygmuś came down the stairs with a carbide lamp. The carbide hissed. He said first that I looked like a chimney sweep and second that a boy had come to the door with a message for me and said that I’d know who he was. The boy said to tell me that Adina had come out of hiding because the Germans had called to her and told her they would kill her friends if she didn’t. And that once she did, the Germans hung her in her apartment in front of her mother. And the boy wanted me to know he was going to find me and kill me. When he finished, Zygmuś made a face as if to say that was that, then kicked at some loose coal and took his lamp back up the stairs.

“YOU KNOW ABOUT MY OTHER LATE-NIGHT COMPANION, I assume,” Korczak told Madame Stefa when she appeared in his doorway and saw me sitting on Mietek’s bed. Mietek had the fever now as well.

“You can’t sleep?” she asked, and gave me a sympathetic look. The whole house was quiet. Only a few kids were having noisy trouble breathing.

“There was so much wind and dust yesterday,” Korczak said, once she sat at the foot of Jerzyk’s bed.

“For a while I thought the storm had cleared the air and it would make breathing easier,” she told him. It was so hot that kids had pitched their sheets onto the floor. Everyone who could walk had spent two days washing and washing the floor and it still smelled everywhere of the diarrhea.

I was with him because now each time the lights went out I remembered my mother when she woke and couldn’t find me in the hospital and then her surprise at her inability to make a fist. I saw Lutek’s face when his rabbit-skin cap flew off.

“While I was lying here I invented a machine,” Korczak said from on his back. “It was like a microscope that could look into you. It had a scale that ran from one to one hundred and if I set the micrometer screw for ninety-nine, then everyone who hadn’t hung on to at least one percent of his humanity would die. And when I ran the machine the only people left were mostly beasts. Everyone else had perished.”

“You’ve had a hard week,” Madame Stefa said.

“And after I set the screw to ninety-eight I was gone too,” he said.

“Yes, well, that would be terrible,” she said, and he let it go. Mietek flailed his arms in his sleep.

“The children now say even birds won’t fly over us,” Korczak said, and she rubbed her face, tired or impatient. He said reading had begun to fail him and that this was a very dangerous sign.

“I saw Bula yesterday,” she told him. He smiled at the name and she went on. “Can you imagine he’s forty now? Not long ago he was ten. He asked me in for cabbage soup. He’s still smuggling. He said each morning he gives his boy a half a pint of milk and a roll. I asked why he never visited and he said when he was well off there was never time and when he wasn’t how could he come by looking so ragged and dirty?”

“Bula,” Korczak said, and they were quiet.

“Did you tell him that now he has to stop?” he finally asked.

“You know Bula,” she said.

“Do I have to do everything?” he said. “Do I have to go and find him?”

“He’s not going to listen,” she told him. And he closed his eyes and didn’t answer.

“I have no idea what we’re going to do with Balbina,” he told her instead. “If you want to measure your resistance to going crazy, try helping a shlemiel.”

“She’s still getting her bearings,” she said. “She didn’t have as much responsibility at the other orphanage.”

“You put the paper in her hand. She has to deliver it today; here is the address and the hour,” he said. “But she’s lost the paper or forgotten to take it with her or got frightened or the porter told her to go somewhere else. She’ll go tomorrow. She’ll go the next day. She’ll go when she finishes the cleaning. And was it so important anyway?” He put his hand over his eyes and Madame Stefa told him that he was being unkind.

“I am unkind,” he said. “To work here you have to be unkind. You have to be smeared with crap, you have to stink, you have to be crafty.”

“You seem presentable enough when you make your calls,” she said.

“I don’t make calls,” he said. “I go to beg for money and food. It’s hard and degrading.”

“I know that,” she said.

“You,” he said to me. “You never read. Do you want to sink into idiocy?”

“Leave him alone,” Madame Stefa said. “He’s making progress in his schooling.”

“His schooling?” he said. “This is a prison. A plague ship. An asylum. A casino. A sprung trap. Bodies you clear from the street in the morning have piled up again by the evening.”

“That’s no reason to frighten children,” she told him.

“Everyone’s been tainted by this,” he said.

“You have a lot to do tomorrow,” she told him. “You need to rest.” She filled his glass from the pitcher beside it. He took it and had a long swallow.

“Do you know how Jerzyk got here?” he asked. She took a deep breath and told him no. He said Jerzyk’s whole family had died in quarantine and he’d dug up his father’s body to get a golden dental bridge to sell for food but then had to use the money to buy his way out of the Umschlagplatz. “Do you understand what I mean?” he said. “He had to dig his father’s head out of the dirt and then pull the bridge out of his father’s mouth. And then he didn’t get the food he needed anyway.”

Someone cried out downstairs and Madame Stefa left to investigate. Korczak was so still afterwards that I thought he’d fallen asleep.

He didn’t open his eyes when she came back. “I always think that the relief we feel after the roundups tells us something,” she said. “Why are we relieved to be left here? And why are they starting with old people and children? Why would you begin by resettling those who’d have the most trouble in a strange place?”

Korczak sat up and poured himself another glass from the pitcher. Then he lay back down and closed his eyes without drinking it.

Dora had been rounded up twice and made it back each time, Madame Stefa told him. Dora said if they were ever taken to the Umschlagplatz to hang behind at the tail end of the march because when the trains got filled up they sometimes let the other people go.

Korczak said that was good advice.

“We shouldn’t be speaking like this in front of the boy,” she said tiredly. Korczak agreed.

“Are you ever going to go to bed?” he asked me. I shook my head.

He seemed unsurprised. He said Korczak the dreamer was already far away. Outside of the city. Already in a desert and walking all by himself. He sees an unfamiliar country, he said. He sees a river and a bridge. He sees boats. And over there: small houses, cows and horses. He hadn’t realized everything in Palestine was so small. He keeps walking, he said, until he can’t walk anymore. He keeps walking, until the moment before he just falls down.