I knew the ghetto inside and out, and I noticed every detail, even if I had taught myself to ignore what I saw as much as I could. I learned not to react when an elderly man or woman caught my hand as I passed, clawing in the hopes that I could spare them a morsel of food. I learned not to so much as startle if someone was shot in front of my eyes. And most of all, I learned to never look at any unfortunate soul who was prone on the sidewalk. The only way to survive was to remain alert so I had to see it all, but I also had to learn to look right through it. The only way to manage my own broiling fury was to bury it.
But the policeman had drawn my attention to a scene of utter carnage outside what used to be a clothing store. The store had long ago run out of stock and had been repurposed as accommodation for several families. The wide front window was now taped over with hessian sacks for privacy; outside that window, on the sidewalk, a child was lying on her stomach. Alive, but barely.
The ghetto was teeming with street children. The orphanages were full to bursting, which meant that those who weren’t under the care of relatives or kindly strangers were left to their own devices. I saw abandoned children, but I didn’t see them. I’d have passed right by this child on any other day. I couldn’t even manage to keep my own family safe and well, so it was better to keep walking and spare myself the pain of further powerlessness. But I was curious about what the policeman had given the child, and so even as we approached her, I was scanning, looking to see what had caught his attention and to try to figure out what he’d put down on the ground.
Starvation confused the normal growth and development of children, but even so, I guessed she was two or three. She wore the same vacant expression I saw in most children by that stage. Patches of her hair had fallen out, and her naked stomach and legs were swollen. Someone had taken her clothing except for a tattered pair of underwear, and I understood why.
This child would not be alive by morning. Once they became too weak to beg for help, it didn’t take long, and this child was long past that point. Her dull brown eyes were liquid pools of defeat and agony.
My eyes drifted to her hands, her palms facing upward, as if opening her hands to God. One was lying open and empty on the sidewalk beside her. The other was also open but this palm was not empty. Bread. The policeman had pressed a chunk of bread onto the child’s hand. I stared at the food, and even though it was never going to find its way to my lips, my mouth began to water. I was torturing myself, but it was much easier to look at the bread than at the girl’s dull eyes.
Dawidek stood silently beside me. I thought of my mother and then crouched beside the little girl.
“Hello,” I said, stiff and awkward. The child did not react. I cast my gaze all over her face, taking it in. The sharp cheekbones. The way her eyes seemed too big for her face. The matted hair. Someone had once brushed this little girl’s hair and had probably pulled it into pretty braids. Someone had once bathed this child and tucked her into bed at night, bending down to whisper in her ear that she was loved and special and wanted.
Now, her lips were dry and cracked, and blood dried into a dirty black scab in the corner of her mouth. My eyes burned, and it took me a moment to realize that I was struggling to hold back tears.
“You should eat the bread,” I urged softly. Her eyes moved, and then she blinked, but then her eyelids fluttered and fell closed. She drew in a breath, but her whole chest rattled, the sound I knew people made just before they died—when they were far too ill to even cough. A tear rolled down my cheek. I closed my eyes, but now, instead of blackness, I saw the little girl’s face.
This was why I learned to wear blinders, because if you got too close to the suffering, it would burn itself into your soul. This little girl was now a part of me, and her pain was part of mine.
Even so, I knew that she could not eat the bread. The policeman’s gesture had been well-meaning, but it had come far too late. If I didn’t take the bread, the next person who passed would. If my time in the ghetto had taught me anything, it was that life might deliver blessings, but each one would have a sting in its tail. God might deliver us fortune, but never without a cost. I would take the bread, and the child would die overnight. But that wouldn’t be the end of the tragedy. In some ways, it was only the beginning.
I wiped my cheeks roughly with the back of my hand, and then before I could allow my conscience to stop me, I reached down and plucked the bread from the child’s hand to swiftly hide in my pocket. Then I stood and forced myself to not look at her again. Dawidek and I began to walk.
“The little ones should be easier. I don’t have to ask the big kids for help lifting them, and they don’t weigh anything at all. They should be easier, shouldn’t they?” Dawidek said, almost philosophically. He sighed heavily and then added in a voice thick with confusion and pain, “I’ll be able to lift her by myself tomorrow morning, but that won’t make it easier.”
Fortune gave me a job with one of the few factories in the ghetto that was owned by a kindly Jew, rather than some German businessman only wanting to take advantage of slave labor. But this meant that when the Kapo had come looking for me to help collect the bodies from the streets before sunrise each day, the only other viable person in our household was my brother.
When Dawidek was first recruited to this hideous role, I wanted to quit my job so that I could relieve him of it. But corpse collection was unpaid work, and my factory job paid me in food—every single day, I sat down to a hot lunch, which meant other members of my family could share my portion of rations. This girl would die overnight, and by dawn, my little brother would have lifted her into the back of a wagon. He and a team of children and teenagers, under the supervision of the Kapo, would drag the wagon to the cemetery, where they would tip the corpses into a pit with dozens of others.
Rage, black and red and violent in its intensity, clouded the edges of my vision, and I felt the thunder of the injustice in my blood. But then Dawidek drew a deep breath, and he leaned forward to catch my gaze. He gave me a smile, a brave smile, one that tilted the axis of my world until I felt it chase the rage away.
I had to maintain control. I couldn’t allow my fury to destroy me because my family was relying on me. Dawidek was relying on me.
“Mother is going to be so excited to have bread,” he said, his big brown eyes lighting up at the thought of pleasing her. “And that means Eleonora will get better milk tomorrow, won’t she?”
“Yes,” I said, my tone as empty as the words themselves. “This bread is a real blessing.”
2
Roman
“Clever boys. You are so clever,” my mother said, cradling the bread in her spare hand, the other busy supporting my newborn sister, who was suckling desperately at my mother’s breast. “How did you do this? Was it the street vendor?”
“She was very sympathetic,” I said, carefully avoiding both the truth and a lie. Dawidek and I hadn’t discussed the need to hide the origins of the bread. We didn’t need to.