“Every bullet is sacred,” Rose said once.
But Chaim guessed that she’d really meant the bullets were scarce. Besides, she was probably afraid that one owf them—most likely Bruno—would fire a shot that would call down their doom.
I’ll stick with the knife.
Gittel Remembers
Chaim was always the silent one, used to parceling out his words like a miser. But when we were with the partisans, we were all tasked with that same silence. What a burden it was, not to be allowed to speak, not to be able to ask even the smallest questions, to be slapped if you tried to speak about what frightened you.
Like wine in bottles corked up, our fears fermented. So of course they grew. Not sweet, but bitter. Not good wine, but a vinegar brew.
I made up so many hideous scenarios in my head that Edgar Allan Poe would have asked to borrow my plots. Baba Yaga ready to eat children, the hideous Kościej the Deathless, even ordinary Herr Hitlers, with their silly little mustaches, invaded my waking dreams.
I worried about staying in the forest, worried even more about leaving it. I second- and third-guessed everything the partisans did, everything they asked us to do. How could I not when they never told us where we were going, or why? Never showed us a map. Never said when we would meet up with our parents.
And how awfully I missed Mama and Papa. So much it gave me an ache, in my heart and bowels. I felt I would never see them again, for we were marching farther and farther from them with every step. I couldn’t shake a sense of doom. We’d parted so swiftly, so easily, with so many things left unsaid that I spent every footfall remembering what hadn’t been spoken in that parting.
“I love you Mama, Papa,” I whispered to the wind, hoping it would carry my words back to them, wherever they were.
My stomach growled in hunger, but I couldn’t eat, not even the simplest foods the partisans gave us. Sophie worried about me, often holding my hand. Chaim’s hand signals got so frantic, he began to look palsied. Bruno ate the food I left. For the first time, I understood the gray-wool world that Mrs. Norenberg had lived in. All I wanted to do was to sleep.
I think that was when I almost lost my life. Not from engaging in escape, but in escaping from engagement. Not from danger but from fear of danger.
I began to fade.
The Mama in my mind told me she was watching over me, and the Papa in my mind told me to be his brave little girl. But only when I held the Mosin-Nagant in my hand for the first time, cradling its death, did I know I’d been returned to life.
19
There were three and a half weeks when they slept in an actual house, with walls and half a roof.
“Well, not a house,” Bruno whispered witheringly, his jaw jutting out. “A cabin. There’s not enough rooms for all of us.”
Sophie laid a hand on his shoulder as if to comfort him or shut him up. He shook her off.
Chaim knew that Bruno was right in one way—there were only three rooms, one of which was a meager kitchen with only a woodstove for cooking and no wood. But he was wrong in another way. There was plenty of room for them to sleep.
“And no smoke,” Karl remarked. “We don’t cook the food here.” He’d been the first into the cabin, the first to come out and give the thumbs-up signal.
So once again they ate oats soaked in cold water. Uncooked.
The roof of the house had been partially destroyed by wind and rain and snow. There was no furniture in the cabin except for a large built-in desk. They would all have to sleep on the floor.
And there were four strong walls. The worst of the world seemed to be kept out by those.
“It’s ugly,” Bruno added in a whisper.
Chaim whispered back, “Then you can sleep outside.” He had a lot more he wished he could have said.
Bruno shut his mouth, moving away to complain to someone else. But the partisans weren’t interested in Bruno’s carpings. They had more important things on their minds—like deciding on the watch.
Klara and Oskar were chosen for the first watch. They left by the back door, closing it so quietly, Chaim didn’t even hear the expected snick of the latch.
Once the adults were absorbed in their maps and plans and the other children were napping, Chaim took out his knife and whetstone and set to work.
When it was sharpened to his satisfaction, he put the whetstone and oil safely back in his pack. Then he got up from the floor and went over to the built-in desk. Squatting down, he looked at the drawers for a long while. Caution, like silence, had also become a habit, so he took his time trying to decide whether he should—indeed, whether he could—open the drawers.
Maybe there’s food in them. Real food. Knishes. A loaf of challah.
A torte. He knew he was being unrealistic. Well, maybe ammunition. Or a map.
He put his fingers on the top right drawer handle, but before he could pull it open, a heavy hand was on his shoulder.
Karl leaned down and whispered into his ear, “Bad idea, boy.”
Chaim looked up into Karl’s eyes, a cool slate blue. They could have been pools of water. He mouthed the question, did not say it aloud. Why?
The big man grinned and said in a rumble, “Possibly booby- trapped.”
As if the desk had been a hot stove, Chaim immediately withdrew his hand.
“Or not,” Karl continued. His voice at its most quiet was loud enough to fill the room. “The thing is, we don’t know. So we open nothing. Understand?”
Chaim shivered. He hadn’t considered a booby trap. He hadn’t considered anything, really. Slowly, he nodded. Of course, Karl was right. The entire cabin could be a trap. Suddenly the four walls felt as if they were made of paper, no longer safe.
Of course, he hadn’t felt safe for a very long time. All the silence in the world couldn’t save him. Couldn’t save Gittel. Couldn’t save any of them. For the first time in his life, Chaim felt like screaming.
But he kept the silence.
The other children had been woken by the sound of Karl’s voice. As they began to stir, he waved to them to come to him. Once there, he explained why they should not open any drawers. “We must always be alert—for traps and snares. You will not be safe until we get you to the Soviet border. Even a house like this, which can seem so . . .” He hesitated.
“Hopeful?” Sophie offered.
Karl shook his head.
“Peaceful?” Bruno muttered.
Again Karl shook his head.
Chaim said under his breath, “Welcoming.”
Karl grinned. “Welcoming.”
Then Gittel added, her voice low and sorrowful, “Maybe it’s the house of candy. Looks good on the outside, but evil lies within.”
“I’d like to find a house of candy,” Bruno mused.
“You would!” Sophie said bitterly.
Karl shook his head. “Evil lies within. Yes, that’s it, child. But as we cannot know for certain . . .” For the first time, Karl was not his usual brash, upbeat, joking self. He turned to Chaim, saying pointedly, “And that’s why we don’t cook on stovetops or open inviting drawers. Even in a supposedly safe house. For there is no safety for us here. Only a moment between disasters.”
* * *
• • •
Yet even with the warning of possible disaster, they stayed at the cabin for several weeks. Only the scouts went out, silently seeking to discover if there were soldiers anywhere on the far-off roads or the forest paths, or battalions in the route to safety.
Three times, the various scouts were caught up in small firefights with Germans, but the element of surprise was always with them, and they returned to report on their successes in much detail and a kind of unholy glee.
Bruno was impressed, but the rest of the children less so. As for Chaim, he only foresaw disaster in those battles, wondering if or where the bodies h
ad been buried.
Of course, mostly the scouts found no Germans at all but almost always came back with foraged food. Some they found in fields miles away—sharp wild onions, berries, mushrooms, as well as plants like goosefoot, black bindweed, dandelions, and wild sorrel that could be made into salads or soups.
One night Oskar returned with two large bass. It turned out he was what Karl called a fish-tickler.
“He can wade into a stream and catch a fish with his bare hands, a skill”—Karl added—“that I wish I could cultivate. However, I haven’t got the patience.”
On their turn scouting, Klara and the small, wiry man known unaccountably as Big Johanny returned with his shirt knotted into a carrying bag. It was filled with onions and potatoes they’d found in a storage barn beside a burned-down house.
“All of last winter’s crop,” Big Johanny proclaimed with pride, “hidden away and waiting for us!” He grinned, showing his missing front teeth. “And Klara caught a fish.”
“We liberated all . . . or at least as many as Big Johanny’s shirt could carry,” Klara said, her usual sour expression lightened with the prospect of the meal. She didn’t mention the trout.
It was pouring rain outside, which meant they had to squeeze their sleeping space into the part of the house that still had a roof, going down from three rooms to two.
But because of the rain, the partisans voted to chance a fire in the kitchen and boil the potatoes and onions along with Oskar’s bass. They waited till dark and kept the fire low, contained, allowing the smoke to filter out very slowly through three windows, with the rain helping to disguise it as fog.
Afterward, bloated by the soup they’d eaten, along with salad from an earlier scouting trip, everyone admitted it had been well worth the risk.
More important, even Gittel ate. Some fish, some onions, some potatoes. Not a lot, Chaim knew, but enough to keep her going.
* * *
• • •
What was to come next—as Rose had explained it to them at dinner—was that they were to meet up with one of the larger partisan groups in the northwest. While traveling in small groups made it easier to hide from sight, traveling in a larger group meant they could off-load the children to the group going across the Soviet border. It was the first time the children had been included in the plans, so they had lots of questions.
Chaim tried but couldn’t get any of his out before Sophie asked, “Will we be safe in the Soviet Union?”
“Safer than here,” Rose said. “No Nazis there.”
Bruno shook his head. “They’re everywhere, Papa says.”
Chaim glared at Bruno, who looked smugly back at him. That was something his papa said, not Dr. Norenberg.
An arm snaked around Chaim’s waist, and Gittel whispered in his ear, “It’s all right.”
That was when he understood that his Gittel, his strong sister, had returned. Maybe the magic had been in the potatoes, or the onions, or the fish, or the fact that she had needed to understand the partisans’ plan for them, or that the Soviet Union had become her holy destination. Maybe she believed in her heart that things would work out. Or maybe she was putting grief and fear aside and using faith as a shield and the sniper gun as her sword.
It didn’t matter why she was back. Chaim felt it just mattered that she was.
He signed joy with both his hands, thumb and first two fingers silently clapping together, like laughter. “You’re here.”
She breathed a yes into his left ear, adding, “I’m here.”
Gittel Remembers
It was astonishing how the deep forest brought back childhood fears—the lurking monsters—as if the Nazis weren’t enough to worry about.
Each of us frightened ourselves with thoughts of the bogies of our childhoods, even though we were far too old to believe in them anymore. But at least they made sense to us. Not so the Nazis, who were supposedly people like us.
When we were at our old house, Papa used to read us stories about how to defeat trolls. How to escape vampires. How to destroy ogres. How to avoid the witch Baba Yaga, in her house that walks on chicken legs, and how to take down the Golem of Prague. But there were no stories about how to defend ourselves against Nazis. Once we were in the ghetto with the real monsters, he read us no stories at all.
I try not to think of the Nazis anymore. I never dream about them. The therapy I received as an adult helped me. I learned how to move my worst memories to a different room in my head, shut the door, lock them away. Not a house of candy, but a store house.
But sometimes I ask myself why we did so little to help ourselves. It’s something I can’t understand. Most of our people only tried to bargain for another day, to make peace with the Nazis so they would treat us like human beings.
It amounted to nothing. They called us garbage, swept dead children off the streets of Łódź without a moment’s regret. They starved us, beat us, stood us against walls and shot us. Threw us into the hell of ghettoes, camps, barbed wire. They treated us like animals ready for slaughter.
I swore to God that if I ever got free, found peace, could sit under a tree with Mama and Papa again, with my twin at my side, I’d never want for anything more. I’d never ask, only give back.
But I think I lied. And one should never lie to God. You are only fooling yourself.
Terror has a long tail; it’s called fear.
Anger’s tail is longer, and it’s called revenge.
20
That final day in the cabin dawned pearly gray, but bit by bit, the sky turned blue. The leftover onions and salad had been eaten before sunrise, and everyone was fully dressed.
After dinner the night before, Big Johanny had scattered the ashes from the fire and buried the fish bones under piles of dirt. Now he was busy shoving the stove on its side so that it looked as if there’d been a battle in the house a long time ago.
But the rest of the partisans—with the exception of Karl—were over by the door arguing.
“Can we open the drawers of the desk now?” Chaim asked Karl, who was sitting on the floor with the four of them. “With a long stick or a rope pull? Just before we leave?”
“BOOM!” Karl said, pouncing on him.
Chaim scooted back, for a moment actually afraid of the big man.
The others laughed quietly, behind their hands, but they left the desk alone.
They’d taken enough risks in that house already.
Rose broke away from the group and came over to Karl. She looked worried, with pinch lines between her eyes.
Karl stood, his long legs unfolding like a stork’s. He leaned over to hear her, almost bending at the waist. “What? What?” His voice was still loud.
“We’ve been talking about whether we should wait another day,” Rose said quietly to him. They were all so used to the whispers by this time, even that felt as loud as a shout. “I think it’s better to travel when it’s dark and dreary. The Nazis will be under cover then. Eating too much, singing drinking songs. Fair-weather soldiers. Feh! Use that to our advantage.”
But Oskar followed her, arguing otherwise, and he wasn’t as quiet. “We’re close enough to the border now. The Soviets will keep the Nazis busy, and we should be able to slip over with ease. We’ve been here too long already. It’s too dangerous!” His already serious face got even more serious with each word. The final dangerous came out in a snarl.
“We needed the rest,” Rose said. “Word was there were troops massing between us and the border. But now . . .”
“Now we leave,” Karl said. “That’s my vote.”
“See?” Rose said. “The vote is split right down the middle. She shook her head and finger at the same time. She suddenly looked like a scolding old woman.
Rose continued, speaking directly to Karl as if he hadn’t spoken, but of course everyone was listening. “The men are divid
ed, and Klara’s all right with whatever we decide. All she wants is to shoot some Nazis. So we’ve agreed it’s up to you, Karl Vanderer. Should we go now, or go when it gets dark?”
Bruno looked at the three of them and said eagerly, “I say we go now.” He jumped up, though Sophie put out a hand to try to stop him.
Rose looked at him pityingly. “Sorry, Bruno. You kids have no vote in this at all.”
Gittel seemed upset at Rose’s tone, her face darkening, but Chaim understood immediately. We’re simply packages to be delivered. Bulky, awkward, dangerous packages. And packages are never asked where they want to go or when. He bit down on his lower lip, though not hard enough to draw blood. And then the partisans can get back to their real business—blowing up ammunition dumps, killing Nazis, battling battalions. Moving swiftly from place to place, always at night.
A line began to form in his mind: The package has no voice . . . His hand pulled at his backpack so he could get out a piece of paper and the pen.
“No glory in delivering us,” he whispered in Gittel’s ear.
She tried to smile, though it was more of grimace. But she understood now and offered, “Better to be delivered than to be left behind.”
Chaim’s fingers touched the pack, and he inched it toward him.
Meanwhile, standing close to Karl and gazing up as if at a hero, Bruno worshipped in silence, having been warned by Rose.
Chaim observed, He might not like it, but he’s learning to follow orders.
“Worship is blind,” Sophie said, scooching on her bottom to be next to Gittel, glaring at her brother as she went. Then she looked up at Karl and told him, “‘We must not picture you in king’s robes, for you are drifting mist that comes with the morning.’”
Chaim guessed she was quoting Rilke and nodded.
Paying no attention to the children’s whispers, the three partisans were still talking.
“Then if it’s up to me, I say we wait till dusk,” Karl said. “As we always do. Dusk—and with those clouds moving in, it’s bound to be rain. Better for us, worse for the Nazis.”