My mother beamed at us, and from his place beside her on the mattress on the floor of our room, my stepfather smiled proudly, too. I would have to tell him later that I still had the soap, because I knew that as soon as my mother finished the bread, he would immediately turn to worrying about how we would provide for her tomorrow, unless I told him that I had a plan in place. But for now, I just enjoyed the happiness in his eyes.
“A miracle,” my mother declared. “Today, we are blessed.”
Before the war, my family had been the sole occupants of a spacious, three-bedroom apartment on bustling Miła Street, right in the center of the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw. My stepfather was the principal dentist at his very own clinic a few blocks away, and his parents owned the apartment above ours. We weren’t wealthy by any means, but we did enjoy a comfortable existence. I had skipped several grades in elementary school and was traveling to and fro across Warsaw by tram to attend high school, and Dawidek was in the early years of his education at a Jewish school just a few blocks away from home. My mother kept the house and volunteered at a soup kitchen in her spare time.
Today, that same three-bedroom apartment on Miła Street was now home to our family, Samuel’s parents, their elderly friends Mr. and Mrs. Kuklin´ski, and the Frankel and Grobelny families. The Grobelnys once lived in a small apartment on the same floor as Samuel’s parents, right above us. When the first big influx of people came, they made the mistake of coming down to visit us and left their door open. By the time they went back, two other families had invaded their space, and they never got it back. They were a family of five then, but Mr. Grobelny was shot on the street just a few weeks later, and then their two older children died of influenza the following winter. Mrs. Grobelny was so forlorn she barely functioned anymore, and her toddler, Estera, relied heavily on the other adults for care. Mrs. Grobelny and Estera shared the dining room in our apartment, sleeping together on a sofa each night.
The Frankels were a Hungarian Roma family, consisting of Laszlo and Judit, and their seven-year-old twins, Imri and Anna. It had been crowded before Grandfather came home with the Frankels the previous autumn. He apologized profusely even as he laid down the law as the unofficial head of our crowded household. He’d seen Laszlo begging in the street while Judit sat with the children, sheltering behind a trash can to get out of a bitter wind.
“It is not right that those children should sleep on the street over winter while we could find room for them in our household.”
We had done our best to fairly apportion the apartment—the Grobelnys in the dining room, my entire family in what was once Samuel and Mother’s room, the Frankels in my bedroom, and the grandparents and the Kuklin´skis were in Dawidek’s former room. What was once the front room now served as Samuel’s clinic. Every apartment in every building in the ghetto was now crowded with multiple families, as the Germans brought people from all over Europe to cram them in behind the walls with us.
When the ghetto wall had gone up, the water was shut off, and now we could only get water from the station faucet. Given Mother was busy with Eleonora, my grandparents and the Kuklin´skis were old and frail, and everyone else was working during the day, it had fallen to Judit to fetch the household’s water. Morning and night, she would make the trip with a bucket in each hand. It wasn’t nearly enough. Like everything else, water had to stretch, and not a single drop could be wasted. Judit was a master of reuse. Sometimes she’d boil scraps of food to soften them, then use the same water to launder clothes, then use it again to flush our toilet.
How had it come to this? Once upon a time, I’d had hot showers every day and enough food that I didn’t even realize a person could feel a hunger so intense it became a throbbing pain in their stomach. Even after two and a half years of occupation, including almost two years walled within the ghetto, I sometimes managed to convince myself that the complete collapse of our lives was some kind of dream. The nightmarish existence of life within the ghetto sometimes did take on a surreal, dreamlike quality. How could it possibly be real? How could we have slipped from the life we knew to this one in such a short period of time? How could I have taken a chunk of bread from the hands of a dying child to give it as a gift to my mother? And how could it be that my mother would be so hungry that that small, crusty piece of bread could inspire tears of joy?
I tried not to think about the little girl’s vacant eyes and the cracked, bloodied skin at the corner of her lips, but every time I looked at the bread, her face appeared. To help distract myself, I hovered near my mother and then motioned toward the baby that rested in her arms. Mother smiled at me, and Samuel took the bread from my mother’s hand so she could pass me my baby sister.
Eleonora. The miracle child who made our already complicated lives all that much more complex. The streets were rife with stories about women who were forced to end their pregnancies, women who were shot on sight simply for being pregnant, even newborns murdered by the SS, right in front of their families.
Grandmother had assumed the role of family rations collector when Mother’s belly became too big to hide. The rations were a form of torture, too—generally, what was called a family serving of an oatmeal-like sludge, ladled into our kettle by the Kapo under close German guard. We were enduring a slow-motion extermination by starvation. The collective rations of our entire household would barely meet the nutritional needs of a single adult.
Samuel said with Mother’s malnutrition, a successful pregnancy was an actual miracle, a verification that God had wanted to bless us with the child. I loved Eleonora, but I felt so conflicted about her presence. Breastfeeding was draining the life from my mother, besides which it was increasingly evident that she was not producing enough milk to sustain Eleonora anyway. My sister had been unsettled constantly since her birth six weeks ago, but I was noticing that the periods where she was quiet and still were becoming eerily prolonged.
I told myself that this was because Eleonora was getting older and that as babies got older, they just learned how to be quiet. Deep down inside, I knew that I was fooling myself. The so-called miracle bread had probably bought us a little more time, but tragedy was hovering at our doorstep. The thought of Dawidek having to lift Eleonora’s tiny body onto that wagon made me want to tear the world apart.
There was nothing I could do to change our situation, nothing beyond the daily struggle to get just a little food, to buy just a little more time.
“I removed a bad tooth from a woman today,” Samuel told us, as Mother began to nibble on tiny bites of the bread. “She said she’d heard a rumor that we’re all going to be moved to the East, and soon.”
“To the East?” Mother replied, frowning. “What’s in the East?”
“A work camp. At Treblinka, near the forest. She heard that the Germans have built large factories where we will all work to produce goods for the Germans, not just the small number of us with work permits.”
I waited, knowing what was coming next. There were always rumors, and Samuel always heard them first because, like Dawidek, he was friendly and often cheerful, and the nature of his work meant that his patients quickly came to trust him. We had a conversation like this every few weeks, and while the rumors changed, the progression of the conversation did not. Samuel never disappointed. He drew in a deep breath, then his face stretched into a broad smile, and he gave my mother a reassuring hug.