“If you are on your own, who were you living with? How have you survived?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“I am one of the lucky ones,” Chaim said easily. “Some of my parents’ friends took me in, and since I am the youngest member of the household, they let me sleep in the bathtub all by myself. I live like a king.”
“And food? Money?”
“I took what I could when they moved us here. And I’m resourceful. I make do.”
“What you said about Chełmno,” I blurted, “is it true? Do you know any more?”
“Everything I told you is true.”
“This isn’t the first time my stepfather has heard rumors.”
“I’ve also heard rumors that come to nothing so I understand why you are skeptical. But I’m certain of this information. I have mutual friends with the man who escaped Chełmno. It’s true that what I’ve heard is secondhand, but it is only secondhand, and I trust the man who shared it with me.” He dropped his voice. “If what you’re really asking is what we do about all of this, I can help.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Don’t you want to fight?”
“Of course I do,” I said and abruptly stopped walking. Chaim turned back to face me, eyebrows high. “But I also have to protect the most important thing—the one thing I have left.”
“Your family,” he surmised.
“Exactly.”
“I respect that,” he said easily, then he motioned to the sidewalk and began walking again, as if I hadn’t just refused to take the bait he’d dangled in front of me. “Come on, friend, keep up. If I’d known you were as slow at walking as you are at sewing, I’d never have allowed you to walk me home.”
5
Emilia
Almost everything about life in Warsaw was different to life in Trzebinia, but I only allowed myself to think about those differences at night. It had been three years since my father’s death, but I still clung to a memory of resting in my beautiful bedroom in my father’s apartment at the back of the clinic he owned. I remembered the soft pink curtains the mother I never knew had crafted before my birth, the white-and-green wallpaper and fluffy brown rug, and best of all...my father snoring in his bed, right across the hall. I even missed the room I’d had at Truda and Mateusz’s beautiful, lush home—although I never thought of it as mine until we had to leave it.
The apartment Uncle Piotr rented for us was quirky: most of the rooms were on the third floor, but my room was on a kind of half floor, up a flight of stairs and built into a small attic space. No matter what I did, my bedroom always smelled faintly of dust, and my woolen blanket was always musty. My mattress was soft, but the blankets were scratchy, and the bombing raids in the early days of the war had damaged the roof of the building and the lancet window that illuminated my room. Uncle Piotr patched the ceiling and window frame when we moved in, but building supplies were not easy to come by. He had been forced to reuse mismatched bricks, and the mortar he packed them with was fortified with hay, which stuck out here and there. Sometimes I stared at that hay, wondering if, on the other side of the roof, rats were pulling at it. Maybe the roof would cave in on me, and the last thing I’d see would be those rats.
Despite my overactive imagination, I was relatively safe there, but every breath reminded me that I was not at home, and that thought would always be followed by worse ones—that home was gone forever, that I was the last surviving member of my real family. Sometimes, I’d wake in the night, and even before I remembered where I was, the scent of my bedroom would remind me that my new, permanent status was lost.
The sounds were different, too. The long-standing curfew in Trzebinia meant that our sleepy village became deathly calm at night...for the most part. Occasionally, there’d be shouting or shooting or other signs of trouble.
Warsaw was never quiet, not even at night. Between gunshots or crying or dogs barking, the constant soundtrack of noise kept me awake when we first arrived. I’d grown used to it, but the night before my fourteenth birthday, sleep completely eluded me.
It wasn’t excitement keeping me awake; I knew what my birthday would bring. Uncle Piotr was taking a day off work, and he’d made vague promises about an exciting outing, but I knew exactly what he was planning because I’d overheard Truda and Mateusz discussing whether I should be allowed to go after the lies I’d told. That deception had only come to light the previous week, and their hurt was still fresh.
I wasn’t excited about Uncle Piotr’s planned trip to Krasin´ski Square to join in Palm Sunday festivities. I had no idea what exactly these festivities would look like, but I knew that anything sanctioned by the Germans was not likely to be fun for us Poles. Even so, I found myself outraged at the idea that Truda and Mateusz might refuse me permission to participate.
My father used to say that people don’t always make sense, and the older I got, the more I knew this to be true, even about myself. It seemed that the very act of Truda and Mateusz prohibiting an activity now had the power to make that activity unbelievably tempting to me. That troubling pattern was becoming quite clear.
So I tossed and I turned and I huffed and I groaned in frustration, and I thrashed my limbs against the mattress, irritated that I could not shut my mind down. Perhaps that’s why it took a long time for the sound to register in a meaningful way. Exhausted but also wide-awake, I gradually noticed a new noise in the usual cacophony. Was it a kitten? I crawled out of bed and went to the window, excited by such a possibility. Of course, we couldn’t keep a cat, but maybe if it was a stray on the rooftop, I could find a morsel of food and try to pet it. I carefully, gingerly opened the window. The sound was still muffled, but it did seem louder, although sadly, it no longer sounded like a cat. I paused, straining hard to identify both the sound and the direction of its origin, until it struck me: the sound was coming from Sara’s spare bedroom, upstairs in her apartment, on the attic floor adjacent to my room.
I pulled the window closed and pressed my ear against the wall. When this had no effect, I stood staring at the tattered wallpaper for a long moment, listening as the muffled sound ebbed and waned.
My curiosity finally won out. My heart had never beaten so loudly as I edged along the hall, then stepped down one stair at a time, trying to will my footsteps into a lightness that wasn’t physically possible. But it was so late, and the city was so noisy. Uncle Piotr, Mateusz and Truda all slept on the lower floor, and no one stirred. In the foyer, I slid our apartment key from its hook and dropped it into my pocket, then I rummaged through the hall table drawer as quietly as I could manage, seeking Sara’s spare key.
I held my breath as I pried open the front door, cursing the whine of the hinges, and as soon as I stepped into the hallway, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I reached for the light switch, and the hanging bulbs in the hallway burst to life—so bright for a second that it made me squint. But as my eyes adjusted, I saw a figure moving swiftly toward the communal stairs: a young girl, my age or maybe younger. As she reached the railing, she looked back at me, and for the briefest of moments, our eyes met. Hers were bright with a kind of terror I’d only ever experienced once—the night I’d stared into my dead brother’s eyes and wondered how on earth I was supposed to survive in a world that no longer made sense, the night we fled Trzebinia.