The Storyteller

  Hersz picked at a scab on his hand. His lips were trembling. "The next morning, we were divided into small groups by the soldiers. Your mother went with one group into a truck, and I went with another that held ten young men, all tall and strong. We drove up to a big stone mansion. We were brought to the basement of the manor house. There were signatures all over the walls, and one sentence written in Yiddish: He who comes here, does not walk away alive. There was a window, too, nailed shut with boards." Hersz swallowed hard. "I could hear through it, though. Another truck pulled up, and this time one of the Germans told the people who had been transported that they were to be sent east to work. All they had to do was take a shower first, and put on clean clothes that were disinfected. The people in the truck, they started clapping their hands, and then a little while later, we heard bare feet shuffling by the basement window."

  "So she is all right," my father breathed.

  Hersz looked down at his lap. "The next morning I was taken to work in the woods, with the others who had spent the night in the basement. As I left, I noticed a big van parked up against the house. The door of the van was open and there was a ramp to get inside. There was a wooden grate on the floor, like the kind you might see in a community bathhouse," he said. "But we didn't get into this van. Instead, we went in a truck that had tarpaulin on its sides. About thirty SS men came with us. There was a huge pit that had been dug. I was given a shovel and told to make it bigger. Just after eight in the morning, the first van arrived. It looked like the one I had seen at the manor. Some of the Germans opened the doors and then ran quickly away from it, while gray smoke poured out. After about five minutes, the soldiers directed three of us inside. I was one of them." He sucked in his breath, as if it were coming through a straw. "The people inside, they had died from the gas. Some were still holding each other. They were wearing their underwear, but nothing else. And their skin was still warm. Some were still alive, and when that was the case, one of the SS men would shoot them. After the bodies were taken out, they were searched for gold and jewelry and money. Then they were buried in the pit, and the towels and bars of soap they had been given for their shower were gathered to be brought back to the manor house for the next transport."

  As I stared at Hersz, my jaw dropped. This made no sense. Why would you go to so much trouble to kill people--people who had been manufacturing items needed for the war effort? And then I began to do the arithmetic. Hersz was here, my mother was not. Hersz had seen the bodies being unloaded from the vans. "You're lying," I spat.

  "I wish I were," he whispered. "Your mother, she was on the third truck of the day."

  My father put his head down on the table and started to weep.

  "Six of the boys who had been picked to work in the woods were killed that day, shot because they weren't doing their job fast enough. I survived but didn't want to. I was going to hang myself that night, in the basement. Then I remembered that even if I didn't have family left, your mother did. And that maybe I could find you. The next day on the transport to the woods, I asked for a cigarette. The SS man gave me one, and suddenly everyone in the truck was asking for a smoke. While he was being swarmed, I took a pen from my pocket and used it to poke a hole in the tarpaulin, and tear a long rip. Then I jumped out of the truck. They started shooting, but didn't hit me, and I managed to run through the woods until I found a barn, where I hid underneath the hay in the loft. I stayed there for two days, and then sneaked out and came back here."

  I listened to Hersz's story, although I wanted to tell him he was a fool, trying to break into the ghetto when all of us wanted to get out. But then again, if getting out meant dying in a van full of gas, maybe Hersz was the smart one. There was a part of me that still could not believe what he said, and continued to dismiss it. But my father, he immediately covered the only mirror in the house. He sat on the floor, instead of in a chair. He tore his shirt. Basia and I followed his example, mourning our mother the way our religion told us to.

  That night when I heard my father crying, I sat down on the edge of the mattress he had shared with my mother. We, who had been so crowded in this apartment, now had more room than we needed. "Minka," my father said, his voice so soft I may have imagined it. "At my funeral, make sure . . . make sure . . ." He broke off, unable to tell me what he wanted me to remember.

  Overnight, his hair went snow white. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.

  *

  It is probably the hardest thing to understand: how even horror can become commonplace. I used to have to imagine how you might look at an upior sucking the blood from the neck of a freshly killed human and not have to turn away. Now I knew from personal experience: you could see an old woman shot in the head and sigh because her blood spattered onto your coat. You could hear a barrage of gunfire and not even blink. You could stop expecting the most awful thing to happen, because it already had.

  Or so I thought.

  The first day of September, military trucks pulled up to the hospitals in the ghetto, and the patients were dragged out by SS soldiers. Darija told me that at the children's hospital, people reported seeing babies tossed from the windows. I think that was when I realized Hersz could not have been lying. These men and women hobbling in their hospital gowns, some too weak or too old to stand on their own, could not have been going to work in the east. The next afternoon, the chairman gave a speech. I stood with my sister in the square, bouncing Majer between the two of us. He had another cough and was fussy. My father, who had become a shadow of his former self, was at home. He dragged himself to the bakery and back, but he did not go out in public otherwise. In a way, my little nephew could take better care of himself than my father could.

  Chairman Rumkowski's voice crackled over the loudspeakers that had been erected at the corners of the square. "A severe blow has befallen the ghetto," he said. "They are asking for the best it possesses--children and old people. I have not had the privilege to have a child of my own, and therefore I devoted the best of my years to children. I lived and breathed together with the children. I never imagined that my own hands would have to deliver the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg . . . Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children."

  There were gasps and shrieks, shouts from the crowd around us. Majer was in my arms at that point; I pulled him tighter against me, but Basia ripped him from my grasp and buried her face in his hair. Red hair, like Rubin's.

  The chairman went on to talk about how twenty thousand people had to be deported. How the sick and the elderly would only tally thirteen thousand. Beside me someone shouted, "We'll all go!" Another woman cried out her suggestion, that no parents lose an only child, that those with children to spare be the ones to give them up.

  "No," Basia whispered, her eyes full of tears. "I won't let him be taken."

  She hugged Majer so close that he started to cry. The chairman was saying, now, that this was the only way to appease the Germans. That he understood the horror of his request. That he had convinced the Germans to take only children who were under ten years old, because they would not know what was happening to them.

  Basia leaned over and vomited on the ground. Then she pushed through the crowd, away from the chairman's podium, still holding Majer. "I understand what it means to tear a limb from the body," Rumkowski was saying, trying to plead his case.

  So did I.

  It meant that you bled out.

  *

  At the end of the workday, Herr Fassbinder did not let us leave the factory, not even to go home and tell our parents we would be staying late. He told the officers who demanded an explanation that he had emergency deadlines and was requiring all of us to sew through the night. He barricaded the doors, and he stood at the entrance with a gun I had never seen him carry before. I think that if a soldier had come to take away the little ones he employed, he would have fought his own country. This was, I knew, for o
ur own protection. A curfew had been imposed keeping everyone in their homes, as the SS and the police searched house by house to select the children who would be deported.

  When we started hearing shots and screams, Herr Fassbinder told everyone to remain quiet. The young mothers, on the knife edge of hysteria, rocked their children. Herr Fassbinder handed out candy for them to suck on and let them play with empty spools, stacking them like blocks.

  By the next morning, I was frantic. I couldn't bear thinking of Basia and Majer, wondering who would protect them with my father still an empty shell. "Herr Fassbinder," I begged. "Please let me go home. I am eighteen. Too old to be considered a child."

  "You are meine Kleine," Herr Fassbinder replied.

  I did something incredibly bold then. I touched his hand. As nice as Herr Fassbinder had been to me, I never allowed myself to think that I was his equal. "If I go home tomorrow, or the next day, and find that someone else has been taken away from me while I was gone, I don't think I'll be able to live with myself."

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then directed me to the door. Walking outside the factory with me, he flagged a young German policeman. "This girl must get to her apartment safely," he said. "This is a priority and I will hold you responsible if it does not happen. Do you understand?"

  The policeman could not have been much older than I was. He nodded, terrified by Herr Fassbinder's promise of retribution. He walked briskly with me to my apartment, stopping when we reached the front steps of the building.

  I thanked him under my breath in German and flew inside. The lights were off, but I knew that wouldn't stop the German soldiers from coming inside and looking for Majer. My father was on his feet the moment he heard me enter. He folded me into his arms, stroking my hair. "Minusia," he said. "I thought you were lost to me."

  "Where's Basia?" I asked, and he led me to the pantry, the one whose flooring my poor cousin Rivka had ripped up over two years ago. A small mat made of newspapers was covering the hole that revealed the crawl space beneath. I pulled it aside and saw the gleam of Basia's eyes looking up at me in panic. I heard the soft pop of Majer's thumb in his mouth.

  "Good," I said. "This is very good. Let's make it better." Searching frantically around the apartment, I laid eyes on the barrel that my father had brought home from the bakery. Once full of flour, it now served as our kitchen table, since we had burned the original one for fuel. I hauled it onto its side and rolled it into the pantry, then balanced it over the hole in the floor. It would not look strange to keep a flour barrel in the pantry, and it was one more obstacle to any soldier realizing there was a hidey-hole beneath it.

  We knew they were getting closer because we could hear people in apartments nearby--both those who were taken from their families and those who were left behind--screaming. It was another three hours, though, before they came into our home, slamming the door back on its hinges and demanding to know where Majer was. "I don't know," my father said. "My daughter hasn't been home since the curfew started."

  One of the SS men turned to me. "Tell us the truth."

  "My father is telling the truth," I said.

  Then I heard it. The cough; and a tiny wail.

  Immediately I covered my mouth with my hand. "You are ill?" the soldier asked.

  I couldn't say yes, because that qualified me as one of the sick to be transported. "Just a sip of water that went down the wrong pipe," I said, beating my chest with my fist to prove a point, until the noise disappeared.

  The soldiers ignored me after that. They began to open cabinets and drawers, places small enough to hide a child. They ripped their bayonets into the straw mattresses we slept on, in case Majer was tucked inside. They looked inside the belly of the woodstove. When they reached the pantry, I stood very still while the soldier swept his gun along the shelves, tumbling our meager rations to the floor, and into the empty barrel. He looked down into its gaping mouth.

  The SS man turned around and stared at me without emotion. "If we find her hiding with the child, we will kill her," he said, and he kicked the barrel.

  It did not tip over. It didn't wobble. It just shifted the tiniest bit to the right, pulling the newspaper along with it, and revealing the tiniest black crack along the edge that was a hint of the gaping hole it covered.

  I held my breath, certain he would see this, but the soldier was already calling the others to move on to the next apartment.

  My father and I watched the SS men leave. "Not yet," my father whispered, when I made a move toward the pantry. He pointed furtively to the window, from which we could still see our neighbors being dragged onto the street, marched away, shot. After ten minutes, when the soldiers had left the street and the only sounds were the wails of other mothers, my father ran to the kitchen and pulled the barrel aside.

  "Basia," I cried. "It's over." She was sobbing and smiling through her tears. She sat up, still clutching Majer as my father helped her out of the narrow space. "I thought they would hear the coughing," I said, hugging her tightly.

  "I thought so, too," Basia confessed. "But he was such a good boy. Weren't you, my little man?"

  We both looked down, to where Majer's face was pressed tightly against his mother's neck, the only way she had been able to quiet him. Majer wasn't coughing anymore. He wasn't screaming.

  But my sister, looking down at her son's blue lips and empty eyes, was.

  *

  The children were driven in wagons through the ghetto gate. Some of them were dressed in their fanciest clothing, whatever was left of it at this point. They were crying at the tops of their lungs, calling for their mothers. These mothers were expected to go to their factories to work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  The ghetto was a ghost town. We were a beaten, gray stream of workers who did not want to remember our past and did not think we had a future. There was no laughter, no hopscotch remaining. No hair ribbons or giggles. No color or beauty left behind.

  Which is why, they said, her death was so lovely. Like a bird, she flew from the bridge across Lutomierska Street into the road where Jews were not allowed. They said Basia's unbound hair fluttered behind her, like wings; and her skirts became the fan of a tail. They said that the bullets, as they hit her in midair, gave her bright crimson plumage, like a phoenix that was meant to rise again.

  In the dark, there was a soft growl, almost a purr. The rasp of a match. A scent of sulfur. The torch blazed to life again. Crouched before me in a pool of blood was a man with wild eyes and knotted hair. More blood dripped from his mouth and covered his hands, which held a haunch of meat. I fell back, struggling to find air. This was the cave in the side of the cliff where Aleks had told me he made his modest home; I had come here hoping to find him, after he escaped from the village square. But this--this was not Aleks.

  The man--could I even call him such?--took a step closer. That haunch of meat he was devouring had a hand, fingers. They were still clutching the top of a gilded cane I could not have forgotten if I tried. Baruch Beiler was no longer missing.

  I felt my vision fading, my head spinning. "It wasn't a wild animal," I forced out. "It was you."

  The cannibal smiled, his teeth slick and stained crimson. "Wild animal . . . upior. Why split hairs?"

  "You killed Baruch Beiler."

  "Hypocrite. Can you honestly say you didn't wish him dead?"

  I considered all the times the man had come to the cottage, demanding tax money we did not have, extorting deals from my father that only dragged us deeper and deeper into debt. I looked at this beast, and suddenly felt like I was going to be sick. "My father," I whispered. "You killed him, too?" When the upior did not answer, I flew at him, using my nails and my fury as weapons. I raked at his flesh and kicked and swung. Either I would avenge my father's death or I would die trying.

  Suddenly, I felt an arm around my waist, yanking me backward.

  "Stop," Aleksander cried, his full weight pinning me to the ground. From this angle,
I could see the chains that encircled the upior's bare, filthy feet, the pile of bleached bones beside him. I could see, too, the ragged cuffs of Aleksander's shirt, drenched with blood. Whatever he'd done to free himself from the ropes Damian had trapped him in, it must have been painful.

  "Leave me alone," I shouted. I did not want Aleks to save me, not this time, not if it meant I could not avenge my father's death.

  "Stop," Aleks begged, and I realized I was not the one he was trying to protect. "Please. He is my brother."

  I stopped fighting. This was Casimir? The feebleminded boy Aleks had to stay with during the day, and lock up at night, so that he would not eat what he shouldn't? True, I had never seen his face without the leather mask. And Aleks had said he consumed things like stones and twigs and dirt, not humans. If that had been a lie, how could I trust anything Aleks had told me?

  I shook my head, trying to understand. Aleks had protected me. He had saved my life when I was hurt--by his own brother. And yet, he had the same unearthly amber eyes as this creature beside me; he had the same blood beating through his veins. "He is your brother, " I repeated, my voice breaking. "But I no longer have a father ." I tore away from Aleks and faced Casimir. "Because you killed him! Say it!" I was shaking so hard I could barely stand upright. But Casimir wouldn't speak, wouldn't give me the satisfaction.

  I began to run blindly in the direction from which I'd come, striking against sharp corners, tripping over rocks and ruts in the cavern floor, landing hard on my hands and knees. As I struggled to my feet, Aleksander's arms closed around me. I stiffened, remembering that indirectly, he was the cause of all my pain. "You could have stopped him," I sobbed. "He murdered the only person who ever loved me."

  "Your father is not the only person to ever love you," Aleks confessed. "And you cannot blame Casimir for his death." He turned away so that his face was in shadow. "Because I am the one who killed him."

  MINKA