He took the egg, tried to resist, then turned and cracked it against the side of the cart just as Karl was pulling Sophie from her barrel.
Sophie was limp but shuddering, so Chaim knew she was alive. He tried to say her name to comfort her, but his mouth was so full of the crumbles of egg he couldn’t speak. He took a big slurp from the wine bottle, surprised to find it was just water. Surprised—and relieved. He needed a clear head to figure out what was going on.
“And after . . .” Irena was saying, so Chaim turned to listen. “After, you’ll change those stinking clothes.”
He knew he smelled awful, like herring that had gone off. He supposed the others did, too.
“Here,” Irena said, handing him a pair of pants, a sweater. “Go around the other side of the cart and change.”
“No star on the sweater,” he said.
“For now, you’re not Jewish. Lucky for you, you look more like a Gypsy. Though that’s not so safe either. Use the rest of the water to wash off as much of the dirt as you can, your face and hands, get some of the herring stink off.”
Not Jewish? He had to think about that. How could he suddenly become not Jewish? By a wave of a magic wand? By his own choice? By hers? All he answered, though, was “In cold water?”
“You want me to build you a fire?” Irena asked.
Big Karl howled at that.
“And you, too,” Irena said, pointing at Sophie. “This other side.”
She looked at Karl and Chaim. “Either one of you spy on the girl when she’s washing or changing, I shoot. And I have very good aim.” She turned to Karl. “For God’s sake, get the next one.”
Karl laughed again. “She does have good aim.” He started singing a song, in English. “I only have eyes for you, dear.”
Papa sometimes sang that to Mama—an American love song, Papa said, which made him wonder about Karl and Irena. Were they more than just two people on a job?
“I may just shoot you for being off-key,” Irena said, and drew out a sleek black pistol.
Chaim began to get even more worried about Irena and where she might be taking them. He wondered if Papa knew she carried a gun.
Karl dove arm first into the next barrel and pulled out a wriggling Gittel, who twisted around and was about to bend Karl’s thumb back when she spotted Chaim. He was shaking his head, his lips forming the word no, and making the luck sign despite having an egg in one hand the wine bottle filled with water in the other.
She got the message and relaxed, letting Karl put her on the ground.
The minute her feet touched the ground, she ran over to Chaim and put her arms around him. She kissed him on the forehead. “You’re alive. You’re—”
“Stop!” he whispered. “Friends. Don’t give anything . . .”
“Away?”
He nodded.
“I get it. We don’t know enough about them. Yet. We—”
Irena called, “Come here, child.”
Gittel went over docilely, collected her water bottle, egg, and new clothes. Then she joined Sophie on the far side of the wagon to wash and change.
Irena again admonished the big man. “That last child must be perishing. Get him out, and now!”
While the girls cleaned up, Chaim did his own washing and re-dressing on the other side of the wagon. Unbelievably, the clothes Irena had handed him fit perfectly. He wondered if someone had gotten word of their ages to Irena—Fajner, perhaps, or Samson before the fire or . . . Maybe it was just some sort of lucky guess. What she’d given him was a kind of school uniform, long pants, a shirt, a jacket with a crest on the left pocket. Only his boots gave him away. They were encrusted with dirt. He upended the bottle and let the rest of the water run over the tops of the boots so they, at least, had a bit of a shine and less herring.
Then he took a few moments to assess where they were. Off the road, in the middle of a copse of trees, though the wagon had left ruts in the tall grass, deep enough to be an easy trail if someone was looking for them.
Mama! he thought. Papa! Maybe Irena had left that trail on purpose.
He wondered when she would go back for them. He hoped it would be soon.
The trees were similar to others he’d already seen, though he’d no idea if they were still in Łagiewniki Forest or had traveled into another one. He didn’t actually know if there was another forest nearby.
Think, Chaim, think, he told himself. But he was too exhausted and scared, and his brain didn’t seem to be working right. It just wanted him to eat and stay in one safe place for at least a week. Maybe more. But of course there was nothing safe about being outside in the forest, in an open wagon.
He looked around. Every tree could be hiding a soldier, a marksman, a Nazi.
Just then, Bruno was lifted out of his barrel, shouting and cursing at Karl.
Chaim jerked around to stare at Bruno, thinking angrily, If he keeps that up he’ll get us all killed. And then he immediately resolved not to worry about Bruno’s welfare anymore. Only his own.
And the girls’.
* * *
• • •
Once all four of them were washed and into their new clothes and sitting on the back of the wagon, legs swinging out across the void, they could have been taken for scrubbed-up Polish children off for a picnic with their older cousins. In hair ribbons supplied by Irena, the girls especially looked the part.
Karl had buried their old clothes under a tree deep in one of the stands of pine. When asked by Gittel, he’d answered, “Not the first time we’ve done this sort of thing.”
Sophie and Gittel were singing softly to each other, Gittel teaching her a song about a magpie that began, “Tu sroczka kaszkę, warzyła,” which made them both giggle, acting as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
Bruno was busy being Bruno, tossing stones he’d collected, white and gray pebbles, off the back of the cart. “So we can find our way home,” he confided in Chaim.
Chaim shook his head. They were already miles away from where they’d started, and he wanted to say witheringly, How are those pebbles any different from any others on the forest road? But he kept silent, thinking bitterly instead, As if there’s a home to go back to.
As the cart rolled along, only Chaim seemed to worry about where they were heading, or whether Irena and Giant Karl were to be trusted. He strained to hear what the two of them were talking about, seated in the front, but with the cart wheels squeaking and protesting as they made their way over the forest path, the girls giggling and singing, and Bruno’s seemingly endless supply of pebbles that kept hitting the ground with soft plops, it was almost impossible to make out the conversation in the front.
Chaim scrambled back to the middle of the cart and ostentatiously yawned, stretched, and lay down, head toward the two speakers. Then he closed his eyes and pretended to fall asleep. But all the while, he was listening to Irena and Karl, both speaking in Polish but with very different accents. She sounded like a woman from the countryside. Karl sounded more like . . .
For a minute Chaim couldn’t put his finger on it, then he realized Karl sounded like their old neighbor, the professor, the father of Gittel’s friend Ilka.
“. . . never lost one yet,” Irena was saying.
Chaim thought she might mean rescued children.
“And how many is that?” Karl’s voice boomed.
Everything about the man is big, Chaim thought, his admiration laced with a lingering fear that the sound of that voice would give them away.
Whatever Irena said next was lost in the cart noise, but Karl repeated the number.
“Twenty-one?” He laughed. “And this is supposed to impress me? I’d heard better of you.”
“Maybe twenty-two,” Irena said, as they slowed to go around a bend in the road.
“Boast to me again when you reach a hundred,” Karl
told her. “You’re not Jolanta, you know.”
“Every one I save is a star in heaven.”
“Ah—a good Catholic. And every one of them a coin in your pocket, too.”
Anger raised her voice. “I don’t do it for the money,” she said. “I give the money to the church. I do it because we’re told by God to nurture the poor, save the sick, and care for the children.”
“I thought . . .” Karl said. He deliberately lowered his voice.
Chaim lay very still so he could hear better.
“I thought,” Karl said again, and Chaim couldn’t tell what the strangeness in his voice meant, “that you Catholics were to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”
“How do you know the New Testament? I thought you were a Jew,” Irena said, surprise in her voice. “That’s what they told me.”
Suddenly the cart seemed make a turn and to ride differently. Wanting to know what that turn meant more than he wanted to listen to their odd conversation, Chaim stretched, then he rubbed his eyes as if he’d been asleep all that time, and sat up.
The cart was coming through the last of the trees and onto the shoulder of a broad meadow.
It was dusk, the sun already down behind the trees. A large bird flew out of those trees and across the meadow: an owl on silent wings.
But Chaim hardly saw the owl. Didn’t wonder why it was flying at this time of day. Instead, his mind was replaying what he’d just heard, trying to make sense of it. Clearly the two of them hadn’t met before. Irena was being paid for carting them somewhere. And Big Karl was a Jew? How could I not have known? How could I not have guessed? He thought of Karl’s size. Maybe, Chaim thought, he should be called Samson. Maybe he is Samson! He was remembering a Bible story Mama had told them.
“A Jew?” Karl laughed again, not caring in the slightest that he might be overheard by the children or anyone else. “Only because I had a bris and a bar mitzvah. But at the university I studied philosophy and religion. Now I’m officially an atheist, not the rabbi my poor old mother wanted me to become.”
“You mean a Communist,” Irena said. “This doesn’t surprise me.”
Karl boomed another hearty laugh. “That, too!”
Chaim had barely taken this all in when Bruno gave a sudden shout.
“Soldiers!” he cried, pointing to the right side. He jumped from the wagon and started to run, as if toward the safety of the copse of trees they’d left miles back.
Karl was off the front of the wagon and caught up with him in five giant strides, picking him up and hugging him close to his chest.
“You stupid, stupid boy. Another few steps, and they would have shot you first, asked questions later. Those aren’t soldiers. Look—they’ve no uniforms, only a few weapons. Soviet made. Mosin-Nagant.” He chuckled. “Model 1891/30. I can see that from here. Because I use my eyes! Best damned sniper rifle in the world, boy. You wouldn’t get far running from those. And look—they’re on foot. No jeeps, no trucks, no motorcycles. Use your eyes. You’ve got to be able to think, not just react, if you want to stay alive. Those people aren’t the enemy. They’re ours. Polish partisans. We call them leśni ludzie, the forest people. Finest warriors in the world. And these are the finest in Białowieża Forest.”
Chaim shivered. They must have crossed into this other forest when they were in the barrels. How would Mama and Papa find them now? He looked at Gittel, signed that he was worried. She knew immediately why.
Bruno snorted. “There are only six . . . no, seven of them.”
“They stay in small bands throughout Poland’s forests. Nearly forty groups of them. This is probably one of the smallest. They’ve been fighting since thirty-nine. One group even brought down an entire German battalion.”
“I don’t believe it,” Bruno argued. “Battalions are huge.”
“Believe it,” Karl said, his voice sounding like a curse. “I was there. Don’t ever underestimate them, boy.” He spat to one side. “They will take you to safety.”
“Safety.” Chaim rolled the word around in his mouth. But it meant little without Mama and Papa. Suddenly his eyes filled with tears. When would he see them again? Where would they meet? There were no white pebbles to lead them to this place, wherever this was. He’d have to ask Karl. In a bit. Surreptitiously, he rubbed his sleeve across his eyes.
Only then did he turn and look at the partisans himself. He saw the seven figures standing on the perimeter of the meadow, not so close to one another as to provide a single target, but a fighting force nonetheless. Each seemed to be carrying one rifle with another strapped across his back. The two men on the leftmost and rightmost sides of the line were already sighting down their rifles at the cart.
Partisans! Chaim thought, suddenly happy. Oh, Papa, partisans! We’re saved. He repeated the last, only this time aloud. “We’re saved!”
Gittel Remembers
I’d never seen a gun before the Nasties moved into Łódź. Didn’t know a pistol from a rifle. Of course I’d heard about hunting grouse and deer. About target shooting. About the Great War.
But such objects as guns didn’t touch the consciousness of a girl then. They were considered items of interest only for men. Sometimes brutal men. We girls were made for finer things.
What I read about, what I dreamed about, were the heroes of Old Poland and the Torah. Heroes with slingshots, with swords. Samson bringing down the pillars. David slaying the giant Goliath, King Krakus destroying the Wawel dragon. And amazing women heroes—Jael and Judith killing with a tent peg and with a sword to save their people. Esther outmaneuvering Hamen. The judge Deborah leading the Israelite troops. They came from the untouchable past, made magical and larger than life.
How could guns compete with that?
If I’d thought about my future then, it surely didn’t include weapons. It held school and university, work as a teacher like Mama, until marriage and family laid claim to my time and my love.
Guns? Never.
Now I could probably shoot you where you stand. I’m an excellent shot. At least when aiming at a target.
If you threatened someone I love, yes, I suspect I could shoot you.
If I had a gun.
17
It turned out that the seven were not all men. Two were women, one as old as Mama, the other a teenager. The older woman had been one of the two aiming a rifle at the cart. But in their camouflage pants and shirts, with their cropped hair, their rough speech, it was hard to tell the women from the men.
The partisans spent little time introducing themselves, though they knew Karl at once.
Well, who could miss him? Chaim thought.
They called him Karl Vanderer, which turned out to be his name, not Karl the Wanderer, as Papa had thought. And they saw Irena off with a quick wave of their hands.
Almost dismissively was how it looked to Chaim. As if she weren’t their kind. He remembered Karl saying she got paid to rescue them. Well, maybe that was what the partisans were thinking, too.
He’d wanted to ask if she was going now to get Papa and Mama, but she left so quickly, without a backward glance, he hadn’t had the chance. Though she’d had time for Karl to take a large backpack and a huge rifle from a hidden compartment in the wagon. As the cart left, it made more noise than all the partisans put together, rumbling out of sight.
“Only four,” one of the men said. “So much trouble for only four. And her making enough of a fuss to bring out every Nazi in the neighborhood.”
Suddenly Chaim worried what might happen if the four of them—and especially Bruno—became too much trouble. It made him feel hot, then cold, in quick succession.
The older woman was put in charge of them.
“Always the children,” she groused, her pinched face made plainer as her eyes squinted in anger. The gray in her hair curled like wires ready to explode. She spoke grum
pily, but in a whisper, which somehow made it more threatening.
“You have a certain je ne sais pas, Klara,” one of the men said, laughing soundlessly. “It works wonders with children.”
She spat on the ground in his direction, though of course it never got that far.
A few of the other men grinned mirthlessly, but no one else spoke.
Nothing, it seemed, was loud about the partisans. Except Karl.
Klara herded the children like a dog with tired sheep, and they trotted before her toward the far side of the meadow.
“Always the children,” Chaim heard her mutter again, “when I’m the best shot of them all.”
“We don’t mind,” Gittel told her, almost skipping along. “We won’t get in your way.”
“Shut up!” Klara said. And then added, as if she thought children needed an explanation, “We need quiet. None of you must speak another word. We have many miles to go to get to our target. We don’t want to become targets ourselves. So you must say nothing. Do you understand? Nothing.”
She seems—Chaim thought—absolutely unaware of the irony of her statement, because she goes on and on and on about being silent. But at the same time, he was worried: If they left this place to get to that mysterious target, how would Mama and Papa ever find them?
He turned, signaled Gittel with the trouble sign. She came over to him at once.
“Mama, Papa,” he whispered. “How . . .”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ll ask Karl when I can.”
Klara saw the two of them whispering, put a finger to her mouth, and hissed.
It wasn’t a good start.
* * *
• • •
In fact, that hiss was the last thing Klara was to say to any of them until they were deep in the middle of a new part of the forest, which looked denser and darker than anything they’d ridden through in the cart. Entirely wild rather than tamed by roads and wheel ruts, by lean-tos and small copses of planted trees.