At the sight of Sobanek, Chaim’s own hoard of five words—stored for so long—disappeared as if he’d just swallowed a sour potion. Though if he could have spoken the words aloud, they would have been smokestack, barbed wire, shadows, cold. There was no poetry there, only a shudder between the hills.
Chaim understood at once that this place wasn’t worth his hope. It wasn’t going to be a home for them. Not a sanctuary. Not even an actual camp, he thought dismally, thinking of the many times the family had gone camping.
“Not a grouse on vacation,” he whispered to Gittel.
“Not funny,” she answered, but then he hadn’t meant it to be.
“Silence,” Mockler ordered. In both Polish and German.
Silence enveloped them like a tomb.
The towering chimney that dominated the place bellowed no welcoming smoke. No warmth or light came from the ten low frame houses that looked like army barracks, though it was difficult to count in the dark where shadows obscured what was real.
A light blinked on and off, like a kind of code. It must have been Akady and Amadeusz signaling an all clear from down below— because Mockler grunted and they began their descent.
* * *
• • •
As they got closer, Chaim could see that the entire place was surrounded by a heavy chain-link fence. The fence stood some fifteen feet high, with tight, rusted links, the openings too small for even a hand to push through. It was topped with a dangerous-looking scroll of barbed wire.
No climbing that, Chaim thought. He wondered if it was meant to keep them inside or the enemy out. He knew better than to ask.
When they came around from the back side of the camp to the front, they saw a group of armed soldiers guarding a closed gate. Spotlights illuminated the scene with their hard glare.
The soldiers all wore Nazi uniforms.
Bruno gave a surprised “Oh!” when he saw them, as if shocked. The girls and Chaim said nothing. Their silence told Bruno that the three of them had already guessed. If Chaim was surprised at anything, it was Bruno’s naiveté.
He’s either stupid, Chaim thought, or not paying attention. Bruno was as much a threat to their lives as a loaded gun.
The soldiers opened the gates, their pistols at the ready.
They spoke quickly in German, which Sophie later translated.
“Give us our money, and we’ll be gone,” Mockler said, holding out a hand. “Four Jews in reasonably good condition. The little one speaks passable German.”
Bruno seemed set to argue. He moved a step forward. “Hey!” And got backhanded by Mockler, the same hand that had been held out for payment.
Well prepared for this demand, one of the soldiers handed over an envelope. Mockler ripped it open and ostentatiously counted out the bills.
“Good,” he said. “Reichsmarks, not those damned zlotys.” He turned and said to the children in his broken Polish, “Follow orders, do not talk back, and you should last.”
Then he and his men turned and went back out the gate. Once outside, Mockler spat at the gate, then grinned at them, and they marched away.
Chaim didn’t need a translation to know that they’d been sold.
But sold into what? That he didn’t know.
* * *
• • •
Right inside the gate was a regular two-story house with a large porch on the gate side, plunked down without any grace. It had a welcome sign over the door—Wilkommen in German and Witamy in Polish.
Not much of a welcome, Chaim thought dismally, with guns at our backs and guards all around.
A few bushes planted at the front struggled to stay alive. However, outside the gates, past the stumps of trees—cut down, Chaim assumed, to give the soldiers sightlines to the entire meadow and woods beyond—there was enough wild grass to prove that growing something in that area was not an impossibility.
Now Chaim looked at the guardhouses. They stood at attention on stilts as upright as soldiers. There were two men in each little building, with multiple machine guns trained both on the inside of the camp and the outside.
There was no longer even a smidgen of doubt in Chaim’s mind. This was a prison, not a camp. Though who was housed here and what he and his companions would be considered—ransom, prisoners, pawns—he still didn’t know. As Papa liked to say, he was prepared for the worst. Though he would do what Mama always suggested afterward: “But pray for the best.”
Of course, he thought, none of our other prayers have been answered. But maybe . . .
The Shema ran through his mind again. Hear! O, Israel, the Lord our G-d, the Lord is one. He hoped that One was listening.
Gittel understood his worry and whispered, “Remember, the morning is wiser than the evening.”
Chaim nodded. Once they had some sleep—in a regular building on a regular bed—the new morning would surely bring them a better understanding of their situation.
Or at least information.
A soldier with blond hair scraped down to his skull led them to one of the long buildings, which was lit by a single lantern at the door. The beam of light made grotesque shadows on the wall.
Chaim noticed that the building had only a few windows, and no lights shone from inside.
Not promising, he thought. But he didn’t let himself make guesses. At least not yet.
On the door, in large, crude white letters, was the word Barracks and the number 3.
Cozy, Chaim thought with bitter irony, but then scolded himself. At least Barracks 3 had a roof and four walls. That was a step up from sleeping on the ground next to strangers with guns.
“Set your packs down,” the soldier said in Polish. And then added in German, “Hinein! Schnell!”
“Inside. Quick,” Sophie whispered.
They went in quickly, and the blond soldier followed with the lantern, which now made the shadows seem to stumble about, though it didn’t otherwise illuminate the enormous room.
The soldier quickly found them two empty bunks, one atop the other, close to the door.
“Hinein!” he said again, this time nearly shouting it.
“In the bed . . . ?” Bruno asked.
“Schnell!” The soldier didn’t lower the lantern or point the gun at them. He didn’t have to. It was the gravel in his voice. The darkness behind him. The oddness of his order. The night itself.
Chaim and Gittel climbed up to the top bunk. Sophie and Bruno scrambled into the lower one.
The soldier put a finger to his lips. “Shhhhhhhh,” he said, adding in a voice like the rumble of a boxcar over difficult rails, “Schlaf wie die Toten.” Then he went out, taking the light with him.
Chaim felt around on the bunk. There was no mattress, no bedding, only the slats, but he and Gittel lay down, and together breathed twin sighs.
Chaim knew it was a sigh of relief. They hadn’t been shot. Or tortured. Or otherwise brutalized. Simply remaining alive, he realized, was a big relief. Even here.
He wondered if he dared go outside and get his pen and journal from the backpack. Decided not to chance it. Yet. Besides, there was no light. The morning, he told himself, is wiser.
Gittel whispered, “Prison.” She caught her breath. “No surprise.”
“No blankets or mattress either,” Chaim responded.
“What does schlaf wie die Toten mean?” Gittel whispered to the bunk below, a tremor in her voice, which arrowed into Chaim’s heart.
There was a small silence from the lower bunk, before Bruno growled, “Sleep like the dead.”
After that Chaim heard only a snuffling from down below, but whether it was Bruno or Sophie weeping, he couldn’t say.
He reached out a hand to Gittel, just as he used to when they were in the little Sukkot hut, frightened because they were outside alone.
And just as she
always did when he reached out for her in the dark, she took his hand, squeezed it three times, and drew a six-pointed star in his palm with her finger. They’d decided long ago that was more comforting than any prayer.
He wasn’t sure now. But at least he knew he would be able to sleep with the memory of the star in his palm.
* * *
• • •
In the middle of the night—or so Chaim assumed since it was still dark—something woke him. A stirring, some movement.
He sat up, at first totally disoriented. And, for a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, but luckily realized he was in a top bunk before trying to get out of bed.
Also Gittel’s hand on his shoulder stopped him. She whispered, “Not a dream—we are high up.”
He nodded, wondering how long she’d been awake. “I heard—”
“I heard it, too,” Gittel said. “And if it’s not Sophie or Bruno, it may be rats. Better to sleep up high.”
Rats, he realized, are probably the smallest of our problems. He didn’t want to think about what the largest might be.
He gave her hand a squeeze, then heard Bruno from below saying rather too loudly, “This is no camp!” as if somehow he felt insulted and fooled.
Gittel said, “Shhhhhh,” and then whispered, “We’re coming down.”
As he climbed down, he was fully aware that they knew nothing about what lay around them. He remembered how quickly the soldier had left after bringing them to the building, as if the last thing he wanted to do was stay in Barracks 3.
Once down in the graying dark, they sat on the lower bunk, and Bruno repeated what he’d just said, this time in a whisper. “It’s not a camp.”
“You think we didn’t know this?” Gittel shot back, but still in a whisper.
“We have to figure out what this place is,” Sophie began.
“And how to get out,” Gittel responded.
Bruno said, “I’ll think of a plan.”
No one seems to be wondering where we’d go if we managed to get out, Chaim thought. Then he added, Except me.
“I’m going to get the backpacks,” he whispered to Gittel.
She squeezed his hand. “Be careful . . .”
There didn’t seem to be any overhead lights. The small windows—there were two on each side of the door—were streaky with dirt.
He opened the door just a slit, enough to peer out.
Their packs were gone.
He shut the door carefully, put his back against it, breathed carefully.
Chaim thought for a minute and then realized the only thing he mourned losing were the pages of his journal. All those poems. He remembered ruefully how he’d decided to forsake poetry just days earlier, thinking poetry was useless.
For a moment he was paralyzed with fear. What if I can’t remember them?
Then he thought, What if I don’t want to remember them?
He made his way back to the bunk beds.
“Where are the packs?” Gittel whispered.
“Gone,” he said. “Those mamzers took them all.”
No longer willing to whisper, Bruno asked for all of them, “What is this place?” The sound of words spoken loudly after so many days of quiet reminded Chaim of Karl Vanderer’s booming voice.
A wisp of an answer seemed to bombard them from every corner of the long, vast, cold room, though none of them could make out any human figures.
It took a moment, but Chaim finally figured out that the unseen presences were speaking Yiddish.
“Hell,” he told Gittel and Sophie and Bruno. Then he gambled five more words, regardless of what the day might bring. “They say we’re in hell.”
“Where are you from?” the voices whispered in Yiddish and Polish to the four children.
There was no reason to dissemble. He’d figured out the voices had to come from other prisoners.
“Łódź,” Chaim said, though with such strength, no one could have told how few words he ever spoke.
“We are . . .” Gittel hesitated. “Brother and sister.”
“And this one and I are brother and sister,” Sophie said, pointing at Bruno, at once distancing herself from him even as she claimed him. “We are from Lublin.”
“Who are you?” Chaim asked the voices.
Another temblor ran around the cloud group before one voice said, “We are Jews.”
Another said, “As we suspect are you.”
“No.” Bruno was adamant. “Not Jews.”
“They’re Mischlings,” Gittel said, as if it excused Sophie and Bruno from some part in a conspiracy. “My brother, Chaim, and I are Polish Jews.”
Bruno hissed at her, “Why tell them anything? Are you crazy? They may be spies. They could report us.”
“Look at them,” Gittel said as a gray light began to filter through the dirty windows. “They’re children. Like us. Who would they report to? Who would believe them?”
Chaim stared into the gloom, and then he began to see what Gittel already saw, that the voices belonged to children—some older than he, some younger, all in oddly similar clothing, like uniforms. They seemed to fade in and out in the dim light.
A third shudder ran through the cloud, and one unidentified soul whispered, “The boy is right. There are people in this place who would report you for a handful of dried-up grapes or a dram of chicken soup, even without the chicken. Just because we are in hell doesn’t make us fallen angels.”
A phrase of poetry, the first in days, made its way into Chaim’s head. Just because an angel falls, he hasn’t lost the gravity of his situation. He could do something with that if he could bear to write again. And had some light to write by. If he still had his journal. All of which, he told himself, sounds like the impossible three tasks given to the hero of a fairy tale.
23
They were still talking when day—gray and dusty—tried to spread its shadow light across the vast room.
By now Sophie was standing as well. But Bruno stayed steadfastly in his bottom bunk, legs crossed, knees to his chest, as if that kept him safe.
Safe from what? Chaim wondered. What stood before them was a scarecrow crowd of young people, thin, wispy, some almost insubstantial, as if a stiff breeze might blow them away. These are children like us. Not ghosts. Not angels. He was both relieved and disappointed.
Quickly they named themselves, some in Polish, some in Yiddish, but in the gray dawn, it was hard to tell them apart, for they each wore the same outfit, like schoolchildren. A dark blue, Chaim thought, though it was difficult to be sure in the dim light. Each uniform had a yellow, six-pointed star over the heart.
Actually, one boy was not in the blue uniform. He was the tallest boy there, long-legged and stork-like, towering over the rest. He had the beginnings of a brindle mustache. But on his head there was no hair at all. His nose seemed too big for his face, as if it had grown first and the face had worked hard to grow around it but missed the mark. He was in a mismatched suit of white striped pajama-like trousers and a lighter-colored coat.
Chaim wondered if that was by choice, or more simply if there were no school uniforms that fit his gangly body.
The boy introduced himself as Gregor, offering no last name, as if that had been stripped from him somewhere along the way. Or, Chaim thought, as if last names are of no importance here.
However, tall as he was, it was clear Gregor wasn’t the one in charge of the children. A slighter girl, nearly hairless herself, with just twists of fuzz all over her scalp like a cap, was the one who did the majority of the talking. Chaim couldn’t make out what color her hair had been. Only the fact that—even in the shapeless school uniform—it was evident she was a girl, with sharp inquisitive dark eyes; a small, sharp nose; and a chin that came to a heart-shaped point. He wondered if some kind of disease had swept the camp, making them los
e their hair, because all the children had either extremely close-cropped hair or no hair at all.
“I am Manya,” the girl said, pointing to herself as if she couldn’t trust that Chaim and his companions knew her language. And indeed, it was a funny kind of Polish, what Papa called country, not the accent of Łódź or other big cities. “I’m what remains of the village of Bielenka.”
There was nothing in her voice to show how she felt about that. And perhaps, Chaim thought, she’s recited that line too often to newcomers for it to have any power over her anymore.
“The Nazis killed all the adults and the sick. The boys had been taken away weeks before. The other two girls, my best friends, lay dying in their beds. Cholera, our rabbi said.” She looked away for a moment, as if seeing the dying girls in their beds as a motion picture on the wall.
Turning back, she continued in that same strong, calm voice. “The Nazis hustled me away, and when I turned for one last look at the village, I saw it was engulfed in flames.” She drew in a breath. “The soldiers gave me no time to mourn. When I wept, they beat me, so I stopped weeping. Then they brought me here.”
Chaim thought, What kind of here is it? He glanced at Gittel, but she hardly noticed him, caught as she was in the horror of Manya’s calm recital.
“They think we children here in Sobanek are malleable. Weak. Too young and too frightened to rebel against them. They need us for our small hands and able fingers.” She held her hands up in front of her face.
Chaim looked down at his own bony fingers. Wiggled them experimentally.
“Maybe they’re right,” a boy two down from her remarked. He was rail thin, and his voice was in the beginnings of change from high to low. “Right about our being young and being too frightened to rebel.”
“Maybe they’re wrong,” Manya shot back. For the first time, she showed some emotion.
Chaim thought, There’s anger there, but it’s controlled. She’s the one to watch.