When Uncle Piotr and I finally took our place in one of the gondolas, and the giant ride lurched to life, he suddenly placed his hand over mine. I looked into his eyes, expecting him to make some joke about holding his hand if I became too afraid, but instead, I saw that he was, for once, deadly serious.
“Please do something for me.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t look that way, okay?” he said lightly, pointing toward the wall. “The ride is fun, but its location is unfortunate. Enjoy the views of the square and any other parts of the city you can see, but don’t look over the wall.”
I searched his gaze. Uncle Piotr, at least within the privacy of our home, had made no secret of the fact that he despised the Germans—but I had known plenty of other people who despised the Germans and still somehow managed to hate the Jews, or who even managed to blame the Jews for the occupation, through some convoluted logic I’d never quite understood.
It occurred to me on that ride that I simply could not bear it if Uncle Piotr revealed himself to be that kind of person, so I refused to give voice to the dozens of questions that immediately popped into my mind. I knew that at least when it came to me, Uncle Piotr had the best of intentions. I had been a stranger to him only months earlier, but I was now part of his family. He wanted to give me a glimmer of hope and, on my birthday, just a tiny glimpse of the childhood I should have been enjoying.
Try as I might to respect his wishes and to keep my eyes focused on our side of the wall, they were drawn back to the Jewish Quarter again and again. I didn’t want Uncle Piotr to catch me looking, and he seemed determined to distract me with a constant commentary on the various landmarks we could see from the Ferris wheel, so I could only steal glimpses here and there.
I saw buildings, not so different from the ones on my side of the wall, but I could also see crowds of people on the street. So many people. I wanted to see those crowds as one mass—one entity I could turn my back on. I told myself I was just a child and that group of people was not my problem at all. I had enough problems, and besides, what could I do for them? I had nothing to offer the Jews trapped behind that wall.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that God was trying to tell me something, because the visual contrasts were a slap in the face. I saw the gray of the cobblestone streets, the black of the tar rooftops, the brown bricks and beige mortar. Even their clothes were dull.
But my side of the wall was a rainbow of color and life. The stalls around the Ferris wheel were bursting with the flowers of early spring—white snowdrops and yellow and purple crocuses, willow twigs with their yellow and white buds, all speckled beneath and around the vibrant green of new spring growth of mature trees. Women wore cornflower blue dresses, and the men wore crisp white shirts, and little old ladies carried umbrellas in shades of green and gold and pink.
As the ride stopped, and as Uncle Piotr stepped off our gondola and extended his hand to support me as I followed, there was a shout and the sound of a gunshot, and then a blood-curdling scream of pain, and another gunshot, and then just a single heartbeat of utter stillness and silence.
And then, a split second later, everyone in Krasin´ski Square went right back to what they were doing. The ride operator encouraged us to enjoy our day. The street vendors went back to selling their wares. The revelers went back to enjoying the spring sunshine.
“I think it’s time for some flowers, don’t you?” Uncle Piotr asked me, his tone forcefully bright. He led me away from the ride to stop at a nearby flower peddler. While Uncle Piotr tried to draw my attention to various flowers, I turned away from him, back toward the Ferris wheel and beyond it.
I did not make the decision to walk toward the wall. But my fingertips soon touched the roughhewn bricks, and I closed my eyes for what surely must have only been a single moment. Sounds swam into focus, sounds of horses and carts against cobblestone, quiet conversations in Yiddish and Polish. I inhaled and caught just a hint of something oppressive. Was it death or sewage or some other hallmark of masses suffering?
I didn’t decide to get involved in helping the Jews. No, it was decided for me, the minute I was born into a household that knew our Polish neighbors, regardless of religion or heritage, were an extension of our family. Perhaps I’d had valid reasons for my inaction before that moment: I was young, traumatized, lost, utterly ignorant. But children younger than I had been involved in both resistance and relief efforts, and I’d seen proof of that the previous night.
“Elz·bieta!” I heard Piotr’s frantic cry behind me, and when I turned to him, his eyes were wild. He took a hesitant step toward me, then stepped back, motioning frantically for me to come away from the wall. I startled out of my reverie and walked briskly back toward him, but I could still feel the rough brick beneath my palms, as if the shapes of the stone were imprinted into my skin.
“What were you thinking?” Piotr hissed under his breath, and when his hand caught my elbow, I felt that he was shaking. “What possible reason would you have for touching it? If a soldier had happened past, they would have assumed that you were trying to help someone get out or were throwing food over the top. You would have been shot. You would have been shot!”
He kept his voice low enough that the bystanders just a few feet away couldn’t hear us, but there was no mistaking Uncle Piotr’s fury and shock at what I had done. I apologized profusely and assured him I didn’t know what I was doing, and then I promised him I would be more careful.
And all the while, in the back of my mind, I began planning my next steps.
* * *
“Sara,” I called, as I let myself into her apartment later that evening. With a fat slice of a relatively indulgent poppy-seed cake in hand, I was ready to go to battle with my friend.
“In here, Elz·bieta,” she called back. “Come through, please.”
I found Sara in her living room sitting beneath a lamp. She rested her knitting in its basket, then reached down beside the sofa.
“The birthday girl arrives,” she announced playfully, as she lifted a small box and extended it toward me. I gasped in delight, then swapped the plate of cake for the box as I sat beside her. The box was surprisingly heavy, and I rattled it, trying to draw out the anticipation of what might be inside. I glanced at Sara and found her staring down at the cake, a look of glee in her eyes. She looked back at me, and we both laughed.
“Go on,” she said.
“You, too,” I said, nodding toward the cake.
Sara broke off a piece and popped it into her mouth, then moaned in sheer joy.
“Truda is a wonder,” she said, her eyes alight. “How did she manage this miracle?”
Having eaten two slices of the cake already, I knew it wasn’t all that extraordinary. It was dry and bland and, by prewar standards, barely deserved the title of cake at all. Even so, I understood the lengths Truda had gone to in order to make me a birthday cake, and I well appreciated how rare such a thing was. It had been a day of small miracles. Cake and cut flowers and candy and even a carnival ride, not to mention a calling from God.