2
The wall the Jewish slave workers had built—it’s true, the Jews were forced to build their own prison—was three meters high. It was topped with broken glass and another half a meter of barbed wire. It was guarded by three different units: German soldiers, Polish soldiers, and the Jewish ghetto police on our side of the wall. Those pigs did anything the Germans wanted, just to have a slightly better life than the rest of us. They weren’t to be trusted, not even my charming older brother.
Professional smugglers bribed the guards at the few gates that led into the ghetto—guards were always prepared to take money, no matter which group they belonged to. Once the guards had been paid, the carts with the smuggled goods could pass. Often these were stowed under false floors, but sometimes the animals pulling the carts were the goods themselves. Carts could be pulled into the ghetto by horses and back out again by men.
It wasn’t as easy for me to get in or out of the ghetto. I didn’t have enough money to bribe the guards, and although I was slim, I was too big to fit through one of the gaps under the wall used by the smaller children who had to help make ends meet. These ragged little creatures were the unsung heroes of the ghetto. They forced their way through cracks and holes, crept through sewers, and even climbed over the wall, cutting their hands open on the broken glass. Most of them were under ten years old, and some no more than six. But if you looked into their eyes you’d have thought they’d roamed the earth for a thousand years. Whenever I saw one of those poor old-young creatures, I thanked my lucky stars that I could give Hannah a better life.
The little smugglers were all doomed. Sooner or later, they got caught by someone like Frankenstein. Frankenstein was our name for one of the more brutal German guards. He enjoyed shooting the small smugglers down off the wall with a cold smile, like sparrows.
In order to get into the Polish part of the city without ending up like a dead sparrow myself, I used the one place that had actually been designed to transport people from one world to another: the graveyard.
We are all the same in death—even if the different religions don’t think so—and the Catholic and Jewish cemeteries lay side by side, separated by just a wall. Ruth had told me how to get through. One of her favorite customers, a notorious ghetto gangster called Shmuel Asher, had boasted to her about his smuggling tricks.
I left the market, walked along a couple of streets, and went into the Catholic cemetery. There was hardly ever anyone here, and today it was deserted. The Poles didn’t have much time for their dead at present. Maybe people never did.
I headed straight toward the wall. I looked at the graves on the way and was surprised how luxurious some of them were. Some of the tombs were larger than the room I occupied with my family. And they probably had fewer bugs, too. I was thinking about this when I noticed a blue policeman on patrol in the distance. Whatever happened, he mustn’t speak to me or ask for my papers. I couldn’t afford a forged passport like the professional smugglers, and I’d be caught at once.
I went on my way without hurrying and stopped at the next grave. I put down my bags, laid my rose beside a wreath, and started to pray quietly. I was a good Catholic girl taking a moment to remember the dead after visiting the market. The man who was buried here was called Waldemar Baszanowski, born on the twelfth of March 1916 and dead on the third of September 1939. He was probably a soldier in the Polish army, shot by the Germans in the first days of the war. I was Waldemar’s little sister now. God rest his soul.
The policeman walked past without speaking to me. He left me alone to say my prayers for the dead. Once he’d gone, I let out a sharp breath. I was sorry that I’d have to leave my rose on this stranger’s grave. Stefan had used it to save my life, after all. I picked up the rose and toyed with the idea of taking it back to the ghetto. But that was unwise. If I met the policeman again, the rose would give me away. I’d never be able to explain not leaving it on the grave. I could hardly say, “Oh well, the dead man won’t mind.”
I told myself I had to stop getting distracted by that boy. I left the rose on the grave. “Thank you, Waldemar,” I said, and went up to the wall bordering the Jewish cemetery. I looked around, but I couldn’t see any soldiers or police, and so I hurried over to a certain spot where the carefully arranged stones could be removed to make a passable hole for the professional smugglers. This was where they brought tons of smuggled goods into the ghetto, including cows and horses. I took out the smallest stone and peered through the hole. As far as I could see, there was no one on the other side, so I started to pull out more stones, as quickly as possible. This was the most dangerous part. I could be discovered on either side as I removed the stones. And there would be no chance of explaining myself or escaping.
My heart beat wildly, and I started to sweat again. I could be caught and shot at any moment. Well, at least I’d be close to my grave.
As soon as the hole was big enough, I squeezed through and started to put the stones back, as fast as I could. I didn’t want the guards to notice the hole while they were patrolling the wall and close it for good. And I didn’t want the smugglers to suspect that someone was using their secret passage, or they’d pounce on me the next time I went over to the Polish side. Ruth had warned me that they were a nasty bunch of people.
My hands shook. I was more nervous than usual, probably because of my encounter with the szmalcowniks. I dropped a stone on my foot and gritted my teeth, so as not to make a sound. I wanted to be gone, but I had to seal the hole in the wall.
To calm myself, I touched the moss growing in front of the wall. It was soft and damp. Once again, I could sense that there was more to the world than just my fear. A bit calmer now, I picked up the stone from the ground—my hands weren’t shaking quite as much anymore—and put it in the gap. Only five stones left: In the distance I could hear prayers being chanted loudly all of a sudden. Somewhere, there was a funeral going on. People died all the time in the ghetto. Only four stones left: One of the mourners sneezed. Only three stones: I could hear heavy steps coming from the other direction. Guards? I didn’t dare look. Looking would take up invaluable time. Only two stones left: Were the footsteps getting closer? One more stone left: No, they were moving away. The hole was closed. At last.
I turned around and saw that the footsteps came from two German soldiers. They were heading toward the funeral party about two hundred meters away from me. Maybe to torment the mourners. They liked to do that.
I ducked away from the wall, taking my bags with me. Two graves to the left, then two to the right. I stood still to take off my chain with the crucifix, and threw it in with the things I’d bought. Then I reached into a bush, felt for a little piece of cloth, and pulled it out. It was my armband with the Star of David. I put it on.
Now I wasn’t Dana the Pole anymore; I was Mira the Jew.
The Germans could do whatever they wanted with me. So could the Poles, and even the Jewish police.
Whenever I put the armband on, I was reminded of the very first time we had had to wear them. I was thirteen then; the ghetto didn’t exist yet, but there were other cruelties toward Jews. In 1939, the Nazis had ordered that every Jew had to wear the star.
Of course, the armbands weren’t handed out. The Jews had to make them themselves or buy them. On the very first day of this order, I was walking through the freezing November rain with my father and brother, on our way to the market. We still had our good coats, so the cold couldn’t get to us.
Until the German soldier appeared.
He walked toward us on the pavement, and we children didn’t know what to do. Should we walk past or stop and say hello? A friend had told my father how he had been beaten, just the night before, because he had dared to pay his humble respects to a German soldier. So Papa said, “Lower your eyes.” We walked on, staring at the ground, past the German soldier. But the soldier stopped and started shouting, “What’s wrong, Jew, you refuse to greet me?”
Before my father could say anything, the soldier hit him. He hit my father! This honorable man, a respected doctor, the father we looked up to and who seemed so powerful and almighty to us—was beaten.
“Forgive me,” he said, while he tried to get up and the blood dripped from his lip down onto his gray beard.
My strong father was apologizing for being hit?
“And what are you doing on the pavement. Your place is in the street!”
“Of course,” Papa said, and pulled us into the road. “Barefoot!” the soldier ordered.
We looked at him in disbelief. He took his gun off his shoulder to underline his order. I stared at the enormous puddles in front of us.
“Children, take off your shoes,” my father insisted, “and your socks!”
He did so himself and stood barefooted in a freezing puddle. I was too shocked to react at all, but Simon, my brother who was seventeen, got angry. Papa’s humiliation made him go red in the face. He went up to the soldier, even though he was small like everyone in our family, and shouted,
“Leave him alone!”
“Shut up!”
“My father saved a German soldier’s life!”
Instead of an answer, the soldier took the butt of his gun and struck Simon in the face. My brother fell to the ground, and Papa and I ran to him at once. His nose was broken and a tooth knocked out.
“Take off your shoes!”
Simon couldn’t move. He was crying in pain. It was the first time my brother had ever been hit. And it was so brutal.
My father took off Simon’s shoes and socks to prevent the soldier from hitting him again. I was terrified and took off my shoes and socks, too. We helped Simon, who was still crying, to get up. Father took hold of each of us by the hand and squeezed our fingers tightly. As if he hoped to give us strength, somehow. We walked through the freezing puddles.
And the soldier shouted, “I hope you have learned your lesson.”
We had. Father realized that the Germans weren’t making rules anyone could rely on: Greeting, not greeting, it didn’t matter, the rules were only there to torment us. And Simon knew from this moment on that he was never going to stand up to the Germans again. One blow, a knocked-out tooth, a broken nose, and his will to fight had disappeared. I had also learned something. As I walked through the icy puddles in my bare feet, and my toes ached with pain and then slowly went numb, my father, full of shame, watched me, and I realized that the grown-ups couldn’t protect me anymore.
Papa knew, too. I could see it in his sad eyes. He was suffering far more than I was. I would have liked to cuddle him like he used to cuddle me if I had a nightmare. But this wasn’t just a bad dream we could wake up from. The German soldier made us march through the puddles, back and forth. We were a spectacle for everyone to see. The Polish pedestrians looked away, embarrassed, or most of them did. But some laughed, and one man bellowed, “The Jews are in the gutter at last.” While we were being humiliated, I pressed Papa’s hand and whispered, “I love you, no matter what happens.”
Of course, I had no idea what was going to happen.
I could hear the Germans’ laughter coming from the funeral. Apparently, they really were having a bit of fun with the mourners. Maybe they were making them dance. I’d heard about awful jokes like that.
Whatever was going on, I couldn’t waste any more time. I grabbed my bags and ducked from one gravestone to the next, in the direction of the exit.
One of the soldiers shouted, “Laugh!” And then I heard the tortured laughter of the people by the graveside. I couldn’t help them.
This was the ghetto. This was my home.
3
Ignore, ignore, ignore.
I hurried through the streets of the ghetto and tried to block out everything, like I always did, so that I could bear it all—the lack of space, the noise, the smell.
Many, many people lived here. We constantly jostled one another, even though I tried to avoid physical contact with anyone. All the ghetto inhabitants did. The fear of catching typhus was painfully real.
And it was so loud, not due to traffic—cars weren’t allowed in the ghetto—but because of the sheer number of people living here, talking to one another, arguing. There was always someone shouting. Either they’d been robbed, or conned, or they had simply gone mad.
The stench was the worst thing of all. There were bodies lying in several doorways. This was something I never got used to. Many people didn’t have the money or the strength to bury their dead. They simply put them out on the streets at night, so that they would be disposed of like rubbish the next day.
The corpses were stripped of their clothes overnight. I understood why: the living needed coats and trousers and shoes far more than the dead did.
I ignored all the begging children I passed. Some were sitting listlessly on the curb. Others with a bit more strength tugged at my clothes. They’d have clawed one another’s eyes out for a single piece of bread out of my pocket.
I wasn’t going to let Hannah end up like them.
Ignore. I had to ignore the screaming injustice of it all.
Apart from all the poor and desperate people in rags, there were rich people being carted to the delicatessen shops in bicycle rickshaws. A woman passed by, yelling at her driver to go faster. She was actually wearing a fur coat on a warm day like today. Still, despite the smell, I could breathe more freely here. Despite the cramped conditions, I could move without being terrified the whole time. There were no hyenas lurking in these overcrowded, stinking streets, waiting to hunt me down. I was among my own kind. People who were trying to keep their dignity somehow, despite everything.
They wore decent clothes, kept themselves clean, and walked through the streets with their heads held high. They existed without hurting anyone. Without turning into animals.
The ghetto had not managed to break all of us yet, not by a long shot. There were still good people. I wasn’t one of them, of course. The good ones were the teachers, volunteers working in the soup kitchens, and people like Daniel. Especially people like Daniel.
I made my way through the masses and headed toward the little shop belonging to Jurek. The bearded old man was one of the few people who managed to endure the circumstances. He was often in a good mood, not necessarily because he made a living buying goods from me and the other smugglers, but because he had lived his life already.
“I have had sixty-seven great years on earth,” he’d told me once. “That’s more than most people will ever get, be they German or Jew or Congolese. Even if the last years are more of a struggle, they don’t count for much.”
As I entered his shop carrying my bags, the broken doorbell rattled instead of ringing and he was glad to see me.
“Mira, my darling!”
I liked the way he called me darling, although I knew very well that he called everyone a darling who brought him decent goods. I took a look at his display counter and made a mental note of the current food prices: An egg—three zlotys, a liter of milk—twelve zlotys, a kilo of butter—115 zlotys, a kilo of coffee—660 zlotys … If only I could smuggle coffee. The profits were incredible. But I needed more money first, to be able to buy some on the Polish side. The goods in Jurek’s shop were too expensive for ordinary people. Someone working in the German factories within the ghetto earned about 250 zlotys a month. So he could only afford about two kilos of butter and a liter of milk.
Jurek looked into my bags and said, “You really are my darling!”
This time he said it in a way that sounded different. Perhaps it wasn’t just meaningless chitchat. Perhaps he really did care for me the most.
After we’d sorted out what I would keep for my family—eggs, carrots, a little bit of jam, and a pound of butter—he took a bite of puff pastry and decided what he was going to pay me. Normally, he gave me half the amount he would get by selling the goods himself. I hadn’t found anyone who would pay me more. I was no good at selling anything myself, and the longer I held on to the goods, the more likely they were to be stolen.
Jurek took some money out of the till, which was covered in a thick layer of dust—he didn’t care much for cleaning—and put the banknotes into my hand. I counted them to make sure he hadn’t slighted me and was surprised: He’d given me far too much money. At least two hundred zlotys too much. I would be able to buy coffee next time, after all. Had Jurek made a mistake? Should I ask? I decided not to. I needed every zloty I could get. If he’d got his sums wrong, then it was his own fault. And he could absorb the loss, anyway.
“I didn’t get it wrong,” he said, laughing. “It’s all right.”
Damn! My face was like a book; everyone could see what I was thinking. Or at least crooks like Jurek or the leader of the szmalcowniks could. I needed to do something about that!
“You wanted to give me more?” I didn’t understand.
“Yes, because I really do like you, Mira…,” the old man replied, and stroked my cheek. It wasn’t an indecent gesture. It was kind, almost fatherly. He wasn’t expecting anything in return for his money. I’d heard a rumor that Jurek had never been interested in women. He preferred men.
“Anyway, money is not going to be worth anything, soon.”
Why did he say that? “You mean because of inflation?” I asked, confused.
The prices kept going up in the ghetto, month by month. An egg had cost a zloty at the beginning of the year, and it was worth three times that now.
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Jurek laughed, and then he said something that frightened me. “You should enjoy life while you still can.”
What did he mean? Of course I risked my life every time I went over the wall and it had been a close shave today—close wasn’t the right word—but I wasn’t going to get killed. I was going to be even more careful and better prepared.
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
“I’m not talking about that,” he sighed. “Things are going to get pretty nasty around here soon.”
“What do you mean? What did you hear?”
“Oh, I have been hearing things, bad things…” Jurek didn’t want to say any more.
“What things?” I asked again. “Who from?”
“From an SS man I do business with.”
Although I liked Jurek, I hated the fact that he did business with the SS. “What did he tell you?”
“He was dropping hints, saying that our peaceful life here was going to be over tomorrow.” Jurek’s laughter turned bitter. “As if you could call this a peaceful life.”
“What do you think he means?”
“I’ve no idea. But I’m expecting the worst.”
I was worried. Jurek was usually so optimistic. It wasn’t like him to take gossip seriously. There were often rumors that the Germans were about to murder us all. That it wasn’t enough if half of us starved to death. But they were just rumors. And Jurek didn’t normally pay attention to stuff like that.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” I said. “The Germans need us to work.”
Thousands of Jews worked as cheap labor in the ghetto factories and produced all sorts of things for the Germans: furniture, airplane parts, even German Wehrmacht uniforms. It would be foolish to do without them.
“Ah yes, they need us for slave labor,” Jurek agreed. “But do they need four hundred thousand of us?”
“And they keep bringing in Jews from all over the place,” I continued to argue. “If they’d wanted to kill them, they’d have done it before they left home.”
Thousands of Jews from Czechoslovakia and Germany had been brought into the ghetto over the past few weeks. The German Jews wanted nothing to do with us Polish Jews. They thought they were something better. A lot of them were tall with blond hair and blue eyes and looked German; some were even Christians who were simply unlucky enough to have a grandfather they might not have ever known who happened to be a Jew. The Germans had allowed these Christian Jews to bring a priest along, to hold services for them in the ghetto. What must this be like for them? They had gone to church every Sunday, and then they were chased out of their homes, had to wear armbands with the star, and were dragged to this hell, simply because they’d had a Jewish grandfather or grandmother! The God they still believed in had a very strange sense of humor.
“It would make sense,” Jurek agreed, “to kill the people where they live.”
“But?” I asked.
“The Nazis have their own special logic.”
Suddenly, I remembered the soldier beating my father because he had not greeted him. How he would have been struck just the same if he had greeted him. Yes, the Nazis had their own sick logic all right.
And yet, it didn’t feel as if something catastrophic was about to happen. “It won’t be so bad,” I said to myself as much as to Jurek.
Jurek forced a smile. “Does that mean you’ve decided to give me my money back?”
“I can buy coffee on the Polish side,” I said, and sidled toward the door.
That made him laugh properly, again. “Mira, you are my one and only darling!”
I left Jurek’s shop and joined the crowds outside. For all the stink and lack of space and noise, the ghetto was so alive that I couldn’t imagine it ever dying. For each person who died now, three new ones were forced into the ghetto. As long as there were Jews, there would always be a ghetto.
I decided to let the rumors lie and concentrated on life instead of death: I was on my way home to cook my family a lovely omelet with fresh eggs.