21
I didn’t even bother to turn around to see who was shouting. I didn’t care. And I didn’t stop to think that it was probably a bad idea to go to Korczak’s orphanage when it was about to be evacuated. Because I was so young, they might mistake me for one of the inhabitants and deport me, too, but all I wanted was to be with Daniel. I wanted him to be spared. I hoped that all of Korczak’s foreign supporters had been able to raise enough money to save him and all his children from the Nazis’ claws.
I was panting when I got to the orphanage. There were no soldiers anywhere. This meant that I was too late …
Oh please, don’t let it mean that!
The children couldn’t be at the Umschlagplatz yet, surely!
Daniel wasn’t at the Umschlagplatz.
Or that’s what I kept telling myself as I walked up to the entrance. I was terrified that there would be no one there when I opened the door, just knocked-over furniture, smashed plates, scattered toys, and a teddy bear torn to pieces, maybe, whose stuffing had been ripped out like some gutted animal.
No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that Daniel was not at the Umschlagplatz, my fear got the better of me.
I shuddered as I pressed down the door handle and opened the creaking door. When it stopped making a noise, all I could hear …
… was nothing.
It was deathly still. Deserted.
Deathly still. I had never thought about what that really meant before.
I held my breath. I hoped I’d been breathing too hard to be able to hear properly. But I still couldn’t hear anything. Desperately, I let out my breath. I was just closing the door, about to sit down on the street and start to cry, when I heard a boy calling, “She is going to die.”
I dashed up the stairs. Had children been left behind? With Daniel?
I threw open the door to the hall, and there were all the orphans with their backs to me, watching a little play on an improvised stage. Their caregivers were all there, too, and Korczak and Daniel! Daniel!
I burst into tears.
The children closest to me stared, confused. The little girl with the red polka-dot dress who had stuck her tongue out at me last time was one of them, and she stuck her tongue out again. I needed quite a while before I was able to stick out my tongue back.
Onstage, a girl was acting that she was dying of a fever. The boy whose voice I had heard from downstairs was dressed up as a rabbi with a false beard and wearing a black cloak and white prayer shawl. They were surrounded by children of all shapes and sizes who had come to say goodbye to the little girl. “Her suffering will end,” the rabbi said. “No more pain or sorrow. She will go to a better place.”
The mourners were consoled. The dying girl closed her eyes peacefully and passed away forever. Everyone kissed her on the cheek or eyes or even on the mouth. There were probably a couple of boys who took the opportunity to kiss a girl on the lips at long last.
When the play was over, Korczak started to clap and the whole audience joined in. Especially Daniel.
I wiped away the tears on my face with my sleeve and walked through the crowd of applauding children to my boyfriend. When he saw me, he was startled. Ever since the Aktion had begun, we’d only seen each other in our would-be haven in my room. We hadn’t met anywhere else since the Germans had started carting Jews off like animals. That was eleven days ago—an eternity.
Daniel stopped clapping only after the little actors had taken the fifth or sixth bow. Korczak stopped just before him and looked at me. He had aged years again. But his eyes still sparkled merrily when he smiled. He said, “It is so nice to see you, Mira,” which of course really meant, “It is so wonderful that you are still alive, Mira.”
“And you,” I said. “And you.”
A little girl ran up to us calling, “Dr. Korczak, Dr. Korczak! Elias stole my donkey.” She was missing two front teeth, one top, one bottom, which looked adorable, but she was almost in tears.
Korczak smiled. “A donkey needs more donkeys,” he smiled. And the little girl had to laugh, even though she felt so angry.
He took her hand in his and said, “Let us go find those two donkeys, eh?” And the pair of them went off.
Now there was just me and Daniel standing looking at each other, while some of the children started putting out tables and chairs ready for lunch. No one had needed to tell them to do this. The children understood their responsibilities within the community.
“Why are you here?” Daniel asked. He didn’t know whether he should be pleased or worried.
I wasn’t sure what to say. There were children all around us, and I would scare them if I told him that the orphanage was about to be evacuated. Perhaps it was just another ghetto myth, and I had overreacted.
“I’ll tell you on the roof,” I decided to say.
Daniel looked unsure. It was his job to help the children set the tables.
“It won’t take long,” I promised, and he nodded.
As we climbed the stairs to the attic, I thought about what I was going to say. When the orphanage got evacuated—even if it didn’t happen today—I didn’t want Daniel to be there. He had to stay with me. Stay alive. But would he be willing to abandon the children? Korczak never would. He had already turned down any help to escape. And Daniel adored him. How would he be able to stay behind while his surrogate father and family were loaded into the cattle trucks? How could I make Daniel stay with me?
Love! Surely he loved me more than Korczak, didn’t he?
“The play you just saw is called Goodbye to Sarah,” Daniel said as he opened the skylight in the attic.
He tore me away from my thoughts.
“Korczak wrote it. He is preparing the children for death. He doesn’t want them to be frightened, and he wants them to see the end of life as something all-redeeming.”
It was the saddest thing I had ever heard.
Daniel climbed through the skylight, and I followed him. The sun was beating down on our roof. It was good that we were wearing shoes. You could have fried an egg on the hot roof tiles. If you had the luxury of having an egg, that is. It was too hot to sit down. Unless we sat on one of the old planks still lying around. Daniel had been going to build us a little shelter from the rain, but then the Aktion started.
“So, why are you here?” he asked.
“Move in with me at Miła Street!” I said, and was as surprised by my words as Daniel was. He stared at me as if I had lost my mind.
“They are going to clear out the orphanages,” I explained desperately. But I already knew what he was going to say, “My place is here with the children. With Korczak.”
And because I knew, he didn’t need to say it.
“I just heard someone shouting that the SS are on their way to get you!”
Daniel looked alarmed. He was more worried about the children than about himself, but of course he feared for his life, like anyone else. He wasn’t a saint.
“Come with me,” I begged.
“I can’t, you know that.”
I was furious.
“I don’t understand you,” I said sharply. “What do they get out of it if you die?”
“My place is by their side.”
“That’s not an answer,” I said. “I asked what good it will do anyone if you die with them.”
“They are my brothers and sisters. They need me!”
“I need you, too!”
He realized how desperate I was and put his arms around me.
“Don’t…” I held up my hands to stop him.
He stood still.
“Unless you come with me…”
He didn’t move.
My eyes welled up, but instead of giving in to tears, I started yelling,
“Korczak is an old man. He can die if he likes, but not you!”
Daniel was shocked. But I didn’t care. “He has no right to take you with him.”
“It is my decision.”
“That’s the point!”
We stared at each other, and my lips trembled because I was trying so hard not to cry.
“It really is your decision,” I said quietly, “choose…”
I should have said “life.”
But instead I whispered, “Me!”
Daniel didn’t say anything.
I could see that he was torn.
But not enough to change his mind.
He’d known Korczak all his life. He’d looked after most of the children for years. They were a family with two hundred members; I was just his girlfriend. How could his love for me ever compete with all the bonds he had here?
Before Daniel managed to tell me that he would never choose me, and before I had time to cry, we heard the trucks coming.
We dashed to the edge of the roof. Two trucks had stopped in front of the orphanage. Jewish policemen, SS men, and the Ukrainian monsters jumped down and charged into the house.
“I’ve got to get to the children,” Daniel said without a moment’s hesitation.
He tried to get to the skylight, but I jumped in his way. “Maybe they won’t look up here! Maybe they won’t get us!”
Daniel wanted to push me aside, but I grabbed his arms and yelled at him, “They’ll kill you!”
He knew.
“My place is with them.”
I now hated this sentence with all my heart.
He got away from me and opened the skylight.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t let Daniel go back down there! He’d die!
I grabbed one of the wooden planks … and knocked him out.
22
It took a moment for me to realize what I had just done. Daniel lay unconscious on the baking roof. The back of his head was bleeding.
Oh God! Did I kill him?
I knelt down beside him to see if he was alive. He was still breathing. And suddenly I was glad that I’d knocked him out. He couldn’t go back to the children now. He was going to survive—if the Germans didn’t find us up here.
I quickly closed the skylight. Then I lay down, too. Even though the hot tiles burned my skin, I crawled to the edge of the roof to see what was going on. I expected the children to be forced out of the house brutally, but nothing happened. The Germans and their helpers came back out onto the street. Without Korczak. Without the children.
Were they going to spare the children’s home? Had I knocked Daniel out for nothing?
On the other hand, the eviction squad showed no signs of leaving. No one climbed back into the trucks. They all waited in front of the house. The soldiers lit cigarettes and chatted among themselves. Jewish policemen wiped sweat off their foreheads. Even now, I couldn’t stop myself looking to see if Simon was one of them. And I was relieved to see that he wasn’t standing down there.
I looked over at Daniel. He was still unconscious. He was probably going to stay that way for a while. I hoped he didn’t have a concussion. I had never attacked anyone, and then it had to be Daniel of all people!
There was nothing I could do for him at that moment. I stayed lying on the roof, so as not to be seen, and watched what was going on below. The Jewish policemen looked like nervous wrecks, but the SS men just seemed bored. One of them told a joke, and the other men laughed. The way they laughed made me think it must have been something indecent.
What on earth were they waiting for? Why didn’t they leave? It was all very strange. And it was never a good thing when the Germans started acting strange.
It took almost a quarter of an hour for the door of the orphanage to open again. Korczak stepped out. He had been a member of the Polish army, and he was wearing his uniform. On each side he was holding the tiny hand of a small child. The boy on his left was clutching a worn teddy bear tightly in his other hand. A little blond girl with braids was on his right. She was carrying a doll with a missing leg and was talking to it, as if she were comforting the doll.
Behind Korczak, an older boy stepped out into the street. He was about thirteen years old and was holding a huge flag with both hands. It was King Macius’s standard. King Macius was Korczak’s most famous creation. The flag was green, with the blue Star of David on a white background on one side. The armbands we were all forced to wear had the same star on them as a sign of shame, but this flag was a sign of pride.
In any other situation, the SS soldiers would have taken the flag away from the boy. But they let him be. Korczak emanated such dignity, even they were impressed.
One after another, all two hundred children left the house. They were wearing their best clothes. Some of them had little knapsacks on their backs, as if they were going on a school outing.
Apparently, Korczak had persuaded the SS men to give the children enough time to get ready. And made sure that they wouldn’t be hounded into the streets by shouting soldiers and be even more frightened.
The orphans lined up in rows of four, taking one another’s hands, and set off with their caregivers. Korczak walked ahead with the boy who was hiding behind his grubby teddy bear now, and the little girl who talked to her doll kept kissing it over and over again.
The SS and the Jewish police stayed back. Normally they yelled at the people to move, chasing them to the Umschlagplatz and beating them if they didn’t move fast enough. Or whenever they felt like it.
But these children didn’t need to be forced along. Led by Korczak, they headed off in an orderly fashion, along the ghetto streets in the midday sun.
The flag of King Macius fluttered gently in the breeze.
And they reminded me of the little king who strode to his execution with his head held high.
Did the children remember the story, too?
Because they were walking with heads held high.
And singing a song:
“And though the storm engulfs us,
Steadfast we remain.”
Some of the Jewish policemen started to cry.
And I cried, too, as the children sang.
23
Daniel woke up in the late afternoon. I was afraid. I’d done the right thing. I knew I had! But would Daniel think so, too?
He sat up and fingered the back of his head. It must have hurt terribly, but Daniel showed no reaction. He just looked at his fingers, which were sticky with blood.
It took forever before he even looked at me. His eyes told me that he could not believe what I had done. But he didn’t even ask for an explanation. He got to his feet too fast, and swayed. I went to help him, but he pushed my arms away roughly. I was stunned and moved back.
Daniel had no idea how many hours had gone by, hadn’t noticed that the sun was much lower now. He walked to the skylight.
“They are all gone,” I said quietly.
He opened the skylight anyway. He hadn’t heard me. Or else he didn’t want to hear me.
“They are all gone,” I repeated a little bit louder. And when he still didn’t react, I said, “They … they’ll be on the trains by now.”
Daniel turned back to me slowly. He fought back tears. Tears of rage.
“You had no right!”
“I … I,” I stammered, and tried to tell him that he had left me no choice.
“You had no right.”
“You would be dead…,” was all I could say.
“My place was with them.”
“I couldn’t bear it,” I whispered.
His eyes glistened with hatred. As far as he was concerned, it was my fault that Korczak and the children were gone. Nothing to do with the SS. It was my fault that he would have to live without his family from now on instead of going with them to what Korczak had termed a better world.
“I love you,” I said to him for the first time.
No one ever hated me more than Daniel did at that moment.
24
I walked through the streets of the ghetto in a trance. I didn’t feel a thing. No heat, no thirst. I didn’t look where I was going, not even to see if there was a roadblock round the next corner. My heart was full of emptiness.
I knew I’d lost Daniel forever.
I only remembered that I had set out to find Simon when I finally reached our door. And I only remembered because my brother was walking toward the house from the other direction, carrying a basket loaded with bread, ham, and cheese. I had no appetite left, although my body must have been craving food.
“We need to talk,” Simon said as soon as we met in front of our house.
I didn’t answer.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said again.
“You are talking,” I answered bleakly, and sat down on the steps. On the opposite side of the street, you could see the sunset behind the houses. A fiery burst of colors. I wanted to drown in it forever.
“We need to find you a hiding place,” Simon urged.
I didn’t say anything. I was watching the fiery sky.
“God, Mira!” Simon grabbed hold of my shoulders and made me look at him.
“No one is safe. They are going to get everyone!”
His breath stank of cigarettes. When did he start smoking? Why did I care?
“They’ll keep searching the houses, again and again,” he ranted. “There aren’t enough people going to the Umschlagplatz voluntarily, not even for the jam, so they are threatening the police now. If we don’t catch five Jews a day, we’ll be deported.”
He got my attention at last. “You … hand over Jews?”
“What else am I supposed to do?” he asked in despair.
Daniel wanted to die together with his orphan brothers and sisters, and my brother sent people to death in order to save himself.
What kind of human do you want to be?
“But,” he tried to defend himself, “I only take people I don’t know to the trains.”
What was that supposed to mean? What sort of excuse was that for what he was doing?
“I’ve seen policemen chase their own parents to the Umschlagplatz…”
“What?”
“Those pigs said that their parents had lived their lives already,” Simon explained, “and that they had their lives ahead of them.”
He was calling his own colleagues pigs, as if it made him look better somehow.
“I would never send my own family to death,” he said in desperation. “You’ve got to believe me.”
Wouldn’t he? Why couldn’t I trust my own brother?
“Do you believe me, Mira? Do you believe me?” Simon kept shaking me.
He wasn’t going to calm down until I lied.
“All right, I believe you.”
He let go of me and insisted, “We have to hide you.”
Simon wanted to help us, to convince himself that he wasn’t a pig like the others. So this was why he’d turned up again after all this time. To ease his conscience. To prove that he was a good person who was only forced to do evil.
We went into the house, and he explained as we climbed the stairs, “I’ll bring food every day. I can get hold of plenty.”
“Do you have that much money?” I asked, and then regretted it. I had a pretty good idea where the money was coming from. From desperate Jews who paid bribes to be spared.
“I got married,” Simon answered.
I didn’t understand.
“She’s called Leah; she’s a rich Jew’s daughter. He gave me money to do it. A lot of money.”
And as a policeman’s wife she wouldn’t be deported. Love in the ghetto had come to an end.
When we reached our flat, Simon put the basket of food on the table. Mama tried to hug him to thank him, but he warded her off. He wanted to stop her asking questions about where all the wonderful food had come from, and he didn’t want to have to explain that she had a daughter-in-law now, too.
He didn’t want to speak to Hannah, either. He wanted to be our hero.
Instead of talking, Simon ran into the kitchen, to the little pantry. Its empty shelves were a silent reminder that we had never really appreciated the times when they were full until it was too late.
“This is a good hiding place,” Simon said.
“We won’t all fit in there,” I answered.
“You will if I take out the shelves. All three of you can sit down then.”
“Only with drawn-up knees.”
“But you can do it.”
“The Germans will look in the pantry,” I said.
“Not if something heavy is put in front of it, and you can’t even see the pantry in the first place…”
He ran into the living room. I followed him over to a huge kitchen dresser. Its glass doors were filthy and cracked, and there were a lot of not very clean cups and plates inside, left behind by the family from Kraków.
“This dresser is big enough to hide the pantry,” Simon decided. “You go in there early in the morning before the sun comes up, and I’ll push the dresser in front of the door. And when the Germans stop looking after dark, I’ll push it out of the way and you can come out again.”
“What about air? Won’t we suffocate in there?”
“I’ll take out the door. That way enough air can get in through the space behind the dresser.”
“And what if the Germans see the door and shelves lying around?” I didn’t like this idea.
“I’ll break them up, so you can’t tell what they’re supposed to be and take them down to the cellar.”
“And what happens if you don’t come back at night?”
“You’ll be able to push away the dresser from inside. So you can always get out. You just need me to push it back again when you are all in there.”
I still didn’t want to agree to any of this. It wasn’t because I couldn’t see the need for a hiding place. And I wasn’t worried about spending hours cramped in the dark. Something else was bothering me.
“So we are to put our lives in your hands?”
“I’ll bring you food and water every night.”
“I just asked you something.”
“Do you have any choice?” Simon answered, insulted.
I had no choice. But I didn’t want to admit it. So I replied, “There is always a choice.”
“The trains,” Simon said. “There’s your choice.”
There was nothing left to say. But I still wasn’t ready to agree to all this.
“What happens when you can’t fulfill your quota?” I asked him. “Will you give away our hiding place so that you can stay alive?”
Simon was furious. “You think I would do that?”
“Be realistic!”
“That will never happen!” He was almost frantic.
“I find that hard to believe,” I retaliated.
“I swear,” he said in a trembling voice. Above all, I think he was trying to convince himself. I stopped arguing. Because there was no point. I really didn’t have any choice. But for Simon this meant that I trusted him at last. He gave a sigh of relief and started to get the pantry ready. I helped. It was the first time for ages that we did something together. The last time was when we had put on a play for Mama’s fortieth birthday. Hannah had written it and called it Brothers and Sisters Stay Together Forever—Even If They’re Idiots.
I wish!
We didn’t say a word while we broke the shelves off the wall: Simon was determined to get this right, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel.
I’d saved his life. I held on to that thought. It was all I had. It would have to do for now, to give me strength. I had lost the support Daniel had given me forever. I would have given up when my father killed himself if it hadn’t been for Daniel. How long could I cope without him before I gave up now? Let myself be dragged to the trains for a jar of jam? How long would my strength last if no one was sharing theirs with me? How long could I be strong for my sister?
It took several hours to clean out the pantry, demolish the shelves and door, and take everything down to the cellar. Then we moved the dresser into the kitchen. It was past midnight when we were finally done and Simon and I started talking again.
“Where can I stay tonight?” he asked. It was too dangerous to run around in the ghetto at night, even if you were a Jewish policeman.
“Take my mattress,” I offered. I didn’t want to stay in the room that had been Daniel’s and my retreat the past few days. I went to share with Mama. She turned away from me in her sleep. I closed my eyes. I held on to the fact that Daniel was still alive with all my might, even though I’d managed to lose him. There were worse comforts in the world.
A few hours later, Simon woke us up. It was still dark. Of course. We took food and water into the pantry and sat down on the dirty wooden floor. It was too cramped to lie down, and we had to sit with our legs bent. Simon pushed the dresser across the doorway, and we lit a small candle so that we didn’t have to stay in the dark. Of course, we would blow it out at the slightest hint of someone coming into the flat.
“I’ll let you out tonight,” we heard Simon say, “and bring something more to eat.”
“You are a good person,” Mama said to him.
I laughed scornfully.
Neither my mother nor my brother reacted.
The sound of Simon’s footsteps disappeared, and Hannah sighed, “So this is our new home. Smells pretty bad.”
The candlelight lit up her sad little face. The rest of our “new home” was hidden in darkness.
“I’m going to miss the daylight.”
I would have liked to comfort Hannah. Help make her time in the cramped dark space more bearable, but I simply couldn’t. I didn’t have enough strength left.
Instead, it was Hannah who stopped me from going mad in the weeks to come. As the world outside in the ghetto got more and more terrible—Simon told us on his evening visits that no one was safe anymore, not the people in the workshops or the members of the Jewish council—Hannah whisked us away to the world of the 777 islands. Really, she only took me with her. Mama disappeared into her own world, to her memories of Papa. Day by day, she became less aware of us, and after five days in the dark pantry she stopped talking altogether.
There were times when I envied her. It would certainly have felt better to live just in my memories of Daniel instead of knowing that I was in a hiding place that could be discovered by the SS at any moment.
In the world of the 777 islands, Hannah had the wildest adventures. Together with her dear friend Ben Redhead, Captain Carrot, and his werewolf sailor, she set off to find the three magic mirrors that would make it possible to defeat the evil Mirror King who already held 333 of the 777 islands in his power. The Mirror King was terribly cruel to his enemies. He locked them away in distortion mirrors where they had to stay forever as twisted mirror images. And this happened to many innocent creatures, too. No matter if they were children, living lanterns, or singing squirrels—the tyrant didn’t care.
And all the time, Hannah brought the beauty of the 777 islands to life—the sea was so wide, the sunsets lasted forever, the flowers were every color under the rainbow. I longed to live there. Why wasn’t that the real world and ours the imaginary one? Why couldn’t our world have been invented by a storyteller living on one of the islands? Someone who told horror stories about the ghetto to the members of his tribe sitting round the fire before they went to sleep? A storyteller would have been able to make up a happy ending for us, and we’d get to live happily ever after once the suffering was over.
Or maybe we were invented, and our storyteller was a very nasty man.
When Hannah’s heroes met the Scarecrow Dread on the Island of Fear to get their first magic mirror, Dread used a terrible charm made from straw. It was a charm that forced you to face your greatest fear. Once the fear filled someone’s mind, they were usually lost.
Captain Carrot watched his beloved ship, the Longear, sink beneath the waves. The werewolf saw his teeth falling out, one by one. Hannah and Ben Redhead had to face the worst fear of all: Hannah saw that Ben Redhead was going to die. And Ben Redhead saw that Hannah was going to die. And they learned that love and fear were very closely linked together.
But they were the first to resist the power of the straw charm because there was something Dread didn’t realize. The love they shared was greater than any fear.