“Oh, Sara...”
“The worst of it was that I know that part of Warsaw was flooded with people in the days he lay dying, because the building was on a major arterial road. Thousands of people walked right by him as they evacuated. Someone heard him crying—maybe many people did. I understand that the people who happened past were all rushing out of the city. I know that they were probably terrified and trying to save their own lives and their own families...but no one stopped. No one would put themselves at risk. And my baby died alone and terrified.” The tears in her eyes spilled over. She let them roll down her cheeks, but she met my gaze, daring me to face the full force of her pain. “He always cried for me when he hurt himself, Elz·bieta. In my heart, I know that he was crying and calling for me as he died. Maybe his very last thoughts were of the abandonment...wondering why I wasn’t coming to help him.”
“I am so sorry,” I said because, as useless as the words were, they were surely better than the stunned silence I was tempted to sit in.
“To know that my son suffered and he was alone and no one did anything to help him has changed me. It has driven me not just to madness but beyond it. I make foolish decisions every day because I cannot rest my head on a pillow at night unless I’ve done everything in my power to help children like my son. That is why these children are here tonight. One day, I will likely die for a child like one of those precious souls upstairs, and I am at peace with that. I’m at peace telling you this story, even though just a minute ago, you made me wonder for the first time if you are the kind of person who would believe the German lies that the Jews are somehow less than anyone else.”
“I don’t believe that,” I blurted, shaking my head desperately. Her disapproval was much more frightening than even death seemed to be in that moment. “I was scared. I am scared. I thought you were trying to trap me.”
“Trap you?” she repeated, frowning.
“The Germans are so wily,” I said, my throat tightening. I suddenly felt foolish to have doubted her. “I thought it might be a ruse. That if I didn’t say or do the right thing, you’d turn me in.”
Once again, Sara’s expression softened.
“These are hard times. Knowing who to trust is never an exact science, not in a place like this, not when there is so much to be gained from betrayal. It is late, and I’ve had a long day—but so have you, and you need to go home to bed now.”
I sat my now-empty teacup on her coffee table, then paused.
“Your husband,” I said. “Where is he?”
She sighed sadly.
“They bombed the hospital, too. I was there at the time, but I was in the shelter in the basement and was uninjured. Wojciech was in surgery upstairs—he died instantly. I lost him the day after I lost Janusz and my mother. And now,” she said shrugging, “now it’s just me.”
I looked around her apartment, suddenly realizing why I’d assumed she’d never married.
“You don’t have any photos of them.”
“All our photographs were in the apartment when the building was destroyed,” she whispered.
I slipped back into my bed a few minutes later, Truda and Mateusz and Piotr none the wiser. I lay awake for hours, thinking about Sara and her loss and the wall around the Jewish Quarter and all of the people trapped within, wondering for the very first time about the other stories taking place in Warsaw while I had been so focused on my own.
6
Emilia
Our apartment building lay in Warsaw’s Old Town, exactly in the middle between two definitive Warsaw landmarks—Krasin´ski Square to the west and the Vistula River to the east. The location of our neighborhood had been almost irrelevant to me until my fourteenth birthday, in part because I so rarely left the building—we could have lived on the moon for all I cared. I had passed but never visited Krasin´ski Square, and as Uncle Piotr led the way that morning, I was startled to see a fair looming before me. Street stalls and performers were scattered all around the square, but my gaze was drawn to two massive Ferris wheels towering over everything else. One was marked out of order, but the other was turning slowly while a long line of revelers waited for their turn in the spring sunshine.
It was a beautiful, jubilant sight—painted against a horrifying background. The unmistakable shape of a wall loomed just behind the merriment. At least ten feet tall, constructed from a chaotic mix of unmatched bricks, it was topped with a line of wound barbed wire. I stopped dead in my tracks as I recognized it, realizing that the buildings I could see beyond that wall were the rooftops of homes in the Jewish Quarter.
I had seen that wall before, from different angles, in different parts of the city. But I’d never seen it like this; it was as if the events of the night before had removed scales from my eyes. I tried not to gape as I gazed around the square. Hundreds of people were mingling, and almost every person was wearing clean clothes and a smile. My gaze flitted between the revelers and the wall.
“Come, then,” Uncle Piotr said cheerfully. “What should we do first? Should we buy some flowers? And of course, we need to stop for food—sweets, perhaps? I know how you like candy. And—oh! We must take a trip around the Ferris wheel. Have you ever been on one? I have to say, it’s a lot of fun.”
I couldn’t drag my eyes from the wall. I wanted to clutch at Uncle Piotr’s arm and to point to it and to scream Don’t you see it? It’s right there. What are all of these people doing out here in the sunshine having fun when there are children starving behind that wall right there?
“What is this?” I asked him, through numb lips. Uncle Piotr frowned.
“What do you mean?” he prompted, then comprehension seemed to dawn. “Ah, we have kept you locked up in that apartment too long. This is Krasin´ski Square.”
“But it’s not always like this.”
“No, your birthday falls on Palm Sunday this year. The Germans don’t allow us much freedom to celebrate our faith, but every now and again, they do allow us a glimpse of joy.” Uncle Piotr gave me a bright, radiant smile, and then he chuckled at what he was probably misinterpreting as delighted shock. “Come on, then, little one. Let’s go have some fun.”
* * *
I went along with it. I ignored the steady pull of the wall, and I walked from street stall to street stall, behind Uncle Piotr, who seemed determined to spoil me beyond even my wildest dreams. I laughed when I knew he was expecting me to laugh, and I even feigned impatience as we lined up for the Ferris wheel. As the line began to snake its way forward, I told myself the buzzing butterflies in my stomach represented excitement rather than anxiety.
I was nervous about the height—but not because I feared I would fall: I was nervous about what I might be able to see from way up there. The ride was close enough to the ghetto wall that it towered over it, and knowing that the Germans had sanctioned this festival, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was intentional. I could easily imagine some commander delighting in the idea that the Jews trapped within the ghetto might see the huge wheel representing freedoms they had long lost. Life for those of us on the Aryan side was neither comfortable nor free, but I was starting to suspect that comfort and freedom might be highly relative terms.