The odd numbers were on the other side of the street, where Mama and Gittel were walking. But they were far enough back that it wouldn’t look strange if he crossed over.
He could hear his feet crunching on the broken roadway, but he was careful not to look around, not to be seen checking out the house numbers or looking warily for soldiers.
Tired worker going home, he reminded himself again, letting his shoulders slump dramatically.
The first house number he saw was 223, and so he knew there was still a number of blocks to go. But at least they were getting close now.
Dark clouds were gathering overhead as if to shield them. Evening was fast coming on, and the air felt close and smoky and drear. There was a small wind stirring up grit from the street. He closed his eyes for a minute to keep the grit out but kept walking.
He wasn’t the sort of boy to read signs in the weather, but he had to be on the alert now, his whole body ready—though for what he didn’t know.
Be the knife, he told himself. Honed on the whetstone. Ready for anything.
And then he reminded himself, If you take great care, luck will follow.
Five steps later, the wind had gone past, like a traveler heading in another direction, and he opened his eyes.
He realized suddenly that he had a pebble in his right boot. How it had gotten there was a mystery. If this had been at their old house, back before it was dangerous to be out on the street in the evening, he would simply have stopped, taken off his boot, and shaken the pebble out. But not here, not in this perilous time and place.
Between pebble and bullet, there was no choice. He kept trudging on.
* * *
• • •
When he found number 87 out of the corner of his eye, some five streets along, he began to get excited. There would soon be somewhere to be away from the danger of the street, somewhere to sit, to relax, to sleep. Mama had a tiny bit of food in her knapsack. They’d even be able to talk out loud. Maybe Samson, the man who was to lead them to safety, would tell them stories, give them warnings, issue new maps. Hopefully, he’d have extra food for them.
The streets seemed incredibly quiet, though. Too quiet. As if they were walking in a ghost town. Perhaps they’d need to remain silent, even in the safe house. That will be a disappointment, he thought, but we know how to do it. Then he began to worry about Mrs. Norenberg. How quiet would she be?
He resisted turning around to be sure that Gittel was right behind. He would ordinarily have known if she wasn’t.
However, this was not an ordinary outing. Maybe she was behind him. But what if she’d already been stopped, taken by some Nazi soldier? He almost turned to look, then remembered just in time the story of Lot’s wife, who—though warned not to look back—did, and was turned into a pillar of salt. He wondered how such a tale could come to him now.
No salt here, he warned himself as he crossed the last street, which bent around slightly, the house numbers into the fifties now.
He was so engrossed in the walking, he wasn’t paying attention to the houses, simply following the road, when he suddenly realized something had gone terribly wrong on the block.
He took a deep breath, started to cough. The very air seemed to have hardened around him. It lodged in his throat like a piece of cement. He stopped, looked up.
(Never look back!)
The entire block was a ruin, a shell, as if a bomb had landed there. Or had been planted in its midst.
Maybe number 13 is on the next street, he thought wildly, starting to walk again, picking up his pace, though he knew that he no longer looked like a worker tired from a day’s hard labor.
But even before he got to the street’s end, he saw a house number posted on a partial wall. Number 7.
He said the number aloud.
And then he couldn’t deny it anymore. If this was 7, then number 13 was gone, part of the bombed-out block.
The safe house. Safe no more.
Chaim didn’t know what to do. Numbers. It’s all numbers, he thought wildly. Numbers had always been good to him. But not today. Not now.
A hand grabbed his shoulder, and he was afraid to move. Only a single word fell out of his mouth. “Not . . .”
“Not here,” whispered Gittel in his ear. “The house is gone. Gone.”
He nodded, relieved it wasn’t a Nasty’s hand on his shoulder.
Mama arrived right after, a bit out of breath, as if she’d been running, but of course running was absolutely forbidden. She said softly, urgently, “We’ll see if there’s still somewhere to shelter. Hashem! God! That smoke smell is awful. And pretty fresh, too. This couldn’t have happened any more than a day or two ago.” She took a breath, coughed it back out. “We daren’t wait outside for your father.”
She looked around, counted the fallen building sites, and whispered, “Quickly! To your right, over there. An open door.” She pointed, but carefully, hardly a movement in the growing dusk. Then she started toward it.
Not open, Chaim thought, blown off. But he followed Mama anyway, Gittel right behind him. He saw Mama take off her scarf and bury it under the rubble with only a tiny piece showing to mark the way.
* * *
• • •
The house had been made of wood, so there must have been a huge fire. The smell was dark, heavy. But at least the ruins weren’t still smoldering. The rainstorm had taken care of that.
They tiptoed through the ruins, heedless of whether anyone could hear them, desperate to find somewhere to shelter right away.
Some of the flooring was still intact. Chaim wasn’t sure whether he trusted any of it.
They picked their way carefully around to the back end of the house, the wood creaking ominously as they went. Without needing to argue about it, they fanned out so as not to stand on the same boards at the same time.
Finally, Gittel found a staircase that went down into the ground.
“Maybe the cellar?” she whispered, then added what they were all thinking: “We won’t be seen there.”
We could be buried there, Chaim thought, one of the few times he and his sister were not thinking alike.
Mama led the way, holding on to the part of the banister that was still nailed to the wall. Halfway down, the banister disappeared, but the stair seemed solid enough.
Chaim went down after she’d gotten to the bottom.
Gittel came last.
At the bottom was a room made of stone, with one dirty window and the remains of a coal bin. But at least the cellar was dry.
There were even two old chairs that Gittel tried out gingerly. “They hold,” she whispered.
“Take the chairs,” Chaim said, as he first sat on the floor and then lay down flat on his back with the knapsack under his head as a pillow. The floor wasn’t as cold as he’d feared. He closed his eyes to keep from weeping with relief.
* * *
• • •
They were there less than an hour, or perhaps a little bit more. Hardly moving, saying nothing, making no attempt to feel around the place.
Like cornered animals, Chaim thought, simply trying to outwait and outwit the predators.
In all that time, there hadn’t been a sound from the street. Though, Chaim warned himself, soldiers are trained to hunt in silence. He was already frightened when the next horrid thought hit him.
He sat bolt upright. Stood. Went over to Mama and Gittel. Whispered, “It’s a trap.”
“Trap?” Mama asked. She leaned toward him. “You think soldiers are expecting us to come here?”
Even in the growing dark, Chaim could see the whites of his sister’s eyes. Like a doe, he thought, who just spotted the hunter.
She said, knowing his mind, “He means maybe not us, exactly, but somebody like us.”
Mama nodded, a slight movement in the dark. “Of course. They burned
down the safe house and now are just waiting to see who else arrives.” She seemed very calm.
“But,” Gittel said, “we must run, get out now.”
“And go where? And in the dark?” Mama’s voice was low, soothing. “We must wait for Papa.”
“What if he doesn’t come?” Gittel said, so Chaim didn’t have to. But he’d thought it at the same time.
Mama held out her arms, and both Chaim and Gittel went into their shelter as eagerly as they had when they were little ones afraid of a sudden storm. “Then, my children,” she said in her lullaby voice, “we will make our way back home and accept the wedding invitation from God.”
* * *
• • •
A thin crescent moon tried to fight its way through the clouds. Staring out of the dusty cellar window, Chaim could see that much. He’d been careful not to wipe the dust away, not to disturb anything that might lead any hunters to them.
They had shared a few dried prunes and a sip or two of Passover wine, sweet and cloying, that Mama had carried in a milk bottle. They left three prunes, the carrots, and the rest of the wine for Papa’s crew. Then Mama and Gittel huddled together under a blanket of their clothes and fell immediately to sleep.
Mama hadn’t said anything more about going home. But—Chaim thought—she hasn’t said anything more about Papa getting here either. And that’s more worrying.
He tried to remember the map and the right roads to lead Mama and Gittel to the first forest, but he was suddenly at a loss as to which way they should go first. Samson, the man at the safe house, was supposed to lead them to a special back way into the woods. So Chaim hadn’t memorized that part of the map.
Though he had a box of matches—well, he thought, a box with a few matches—he knew better than to light them here. Even to read the map. That would bring the soldiers down on them faster than anything. Time enough to check the map in the morning light through the cellar window.
And then, just as he was trying to settle in himself, he heard a noise outside, a kind of scratching. It could have been a stray dog, or Papa, but he knew it was much more likely the Nazis searching the ruins.
Peculiar, he thought, up until now, I thought of them as Nasties. But in this burnt-out place . . .
Swiftly he moved over to where Mama and Gittel slept. He woke Mama first, a hand lightly on her mouth, whispering right into her ear, “Someone’s here.” Remembering the scratching sound, he added, “Maybe with a dog.” In his mind it was a huge, slavering German shepherd watchdog.
Mama sat up at once, woke Gittel the same way, and the three of them crouched against the wall, in the darkest corner near the coal bin.
A moment too late to do anything about it, Chaim realized they’d left their knapsacks and clothing spread about the floor near the stairs for anyone to see.
He heard someone coming down the steps. The footsteps were solid, not the sound of someone afraid of the dark.
He felt his heart beating loudly in his chest and took a deep, silent breath. Drawing his knife from the belt of his trousers, he held the wrist of the knife hand with his other hand to keep it from shaking.
There were whispers on the steps, and then a slight whistle.
Chaim couldn’t believe his ears. The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.
“Papa,” he cried softly, and flung himself across the dark void into his father’s arms.
Gittel Remembers
The smells stick with you the longest. Long after everything is done.
Great-Aunt Aviva smelled of the lemons she used to suck on, and after she died, anytime I smelled something lemony, I could see her face, the white braids fixed tightly on top of her head with pins, like a crown.
Mama always smelled of roses, mostly the white roses she’d grown in the garden of our old house in Łódź: a soft, papery, talcum kind of smell. Even in the ghetto, she managed to still smell like roses, though that might have been memory playing tricks on me. But Chaim said she was always a rose, so maybe it’s true.
Papa smelled of wood shavings, sharp, pungent. He’d been put to work in one of the German factories when we were first resettled (how I hate that word!) in the ghetto, so he kept smelling that same way for the longest time. Eventually his smell became mixed with the greasy oil odor from the factory plus the minty breath of someone who is continually sucking candies because of a lingering cough. And then many weeks after having to leave the factory work, he smelled of failure and sweat and grime.
I’m not sure what Chaim smelled like. I guess because it changed over the years. And because there were times when I couldn’t distinguish between the two of us until, of course, we started to mature.
The smell of the ghetto, though, had such a particular odor. No running water except at the communal pump, no sewer. That stench created the miasma—a word that fully describes such a foulness. Contagion. Funk. Stench. Reek. None of us was ever free of it. The smell was piss and pus and poop, unwashed bodies, sickness, fever, fear, and death all rolled into one horrible, noxious stink.
But I think the two smells I remember the most, smells I can sometimes still feel on my skin, as if I wear a permanent coat of them painted on me, are the stink of herring in a barrel and the oily cloy of smoke that belches from a great chimney.
14
In the quiet of the dark cellar, Papa explained what had so delayed them. “We had the longer route to begin with,” he said. “And then about four blocks after you three had turned off, there was some sort of argument ahead. We heard shots fired. Five or six, maybe more. It happened so fast, we stood for a moment without moving, looking around. Then I grabbed the Norenbergs and funneled them onto a side street. We weren’t alone in doing so.”
“Then?” Gittel asked, as if this were a story and not a history.
It was Sophie who continued the tale of their escape in a voice barely above a whisper. “We found an open doorway and went in.”
“Papa called it a miracle,” Bruno added.
Bruno said Papa. Chaim wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
The only one not listening was Mrs. Norenberg. Instead she had climbed back up two steps of the cellar stairs and was standing silently, staring into the passage above, head cocked to one side, as if listening to something that was beyond hearing.
Chaim could see her because the moon had appeared once again and part of her face was illuminated. He was torn between warning Papa and listening to the unfolding tale.
Papa, his back to the stairs, went on. “We waited until people started passing through our vestibule, saying there’d been arrests and a general roundup of Jews without proper identification papers. Maybe two dozen taken. We were lucky to have gotten away in time. Then I checked the map, figured out a new route. Plan B.”
“Lucky,” Bruno repeated.
“If you take great care . . .” Sophie said, leaving it unfinished.
“Then . . .” Mama whispered, unconsciously mimicking Gittel.
Papa shrugged as if their escape had been luck alone. “And then we went back out onto the side street and continued walking, though our pace was a bit quicker this time, because curfew was coming on and we had some fiddling to do to get back on track and yet still get around the spot where the soldiers were pulling people in. We didn’t know how many streets they were blocking.”
“You should have stayed there in the doorway, asked for floor space to catch a quick nap, found us later,” Mama scolded. “We would have waited.”
“We couldn’t chance being turned in by someone who didn’t know us.” Papa was adamant. “Couldn’t chance not meeting up with you.”
“Well,” Mama said, as if Papa’s response had answered all her other unspoken questions, “you’re here now. Safe.”
“Not so safe, I think.” Papa’s voice was almost shaking. “What’s happened here at number thirteen is a warning
.”
“All of Łódź is a warning,” Mama said quickly. “This is not the only house to burn.”
“But this one was burned on purpose,” Papa said. “And not so long ago, or Fajner would have known.”
“Maybe he did,” Mama said, “and didn’t warn you.”
“Not Fajner.”
“Anyone can be turned,” Mama warned, though her voice was a whisper. “Even you. Even me.”
“Never!”
The argument between them might have continued, but Chaim suddenly burst out, “Papa!” in a harsh whisper. He’d just noticed that Mrs. Norenberg had disappeared up the rest of the stairs, and all he could see of her now were the bottoms of her shoes, and then even those were gone. Chaim pointed dramatically. “Mrs. Norenberg!”
They all hurried to look, but it was Bruno who was up the stairs first. The others followed, but only in time to hear a far-off German voice call out in the gathering dark, “Halt!”
Mrs. Norenberg answered in German, “Meine Kinder, meine Kinder. Tot. Alle Tot.”
And then there was a lot of shouting.
Chaim knew some of those words. They were similar enough to Yiddish. In Yiddish kinder meant “children.” Toyt was the Yiddish word for “dead.”
Papa pulled Bruno back by the tail of his coat, then held him tight in his left arm, his right hand covering Bruno’s mouth. He whispered, “She’s telling them her children are dead, and they think her a crazy lady, but she’s actually leading them away from us.”
Bruno stopped struggling against Papa and lay limply in his arms, so Papa took his hand off Bruno’s mouth. Still whispering, he said, “She’s a hero, your mama. A hero! Let her do what she has to do to keep you and your sister safe.”
Bruno didn’t respond.
Maybe he’s crying, Chaim thought. But if Bruno did so, he did it without sound.
Soon after that, they heard shots fired from far away—seven of them. Chaim counted each one. And each shot seemed to pierce him through, even though they were all hidden in the cellar.