The Book of Aron (12 page)

T
HE NEXT TIME WE GOT TO THE IMMORTAL HOLE A
German soldier was standing in front of it while a Jew in a smock unloaded a handcart filled with metal sheets. The building alongside had a slanted roof with dormers that hid you from the street so we went up to watch. We’d found the spot a week earlier. You got there through a hatch on the ceiling of the janitor’s closet on the top floor. We could all fit between the dormers and every so often one of us could keep an eye on what was going on below.

The tradesman held the sheets over the hole and pounded in masonry nails. His hammer on the metal was so loud that Zofia put her fingers in her ears.

“Those will pull right out,” Boris said after he took a look. He had one of his cigarettes going. He
collected them off the streets and used a pin to smoke them down to the very end.

“This breeze is nice,” Adina said.

We stayed up there to celebrate Zofia’s birthday. Lutek said he’d be thirteen soon too and Adina had made each of us write Zofia a note with good wishes and give her a present. Zofia read each note that was handed over, then folded it into the sack in her waistband. Mine said
You Are the Kindest Person I Know
and
Thank You For Making Us Happier
.

Then came our gifts. Boris gave her candied cherries in a folded packet of newspaper. Lutek gave her a scarf with the constellations. Adina gave her a tin of jam. I gave her a miniature black book that said
My Diary
on the front.

Zofia thanked us and said we should share the cherries and that this was one of her best birthdays ever. “I know that’s hard to believe,” she said.

She said when she was young and they still lived in their nice apartment her mother hadn’t let her play with other children in their courtyard, so instead she’d had to content herself one birthday with going out on her balcony and tossing down cutouts and handmade toys and calling out, “Here, you kids, take these!” and watching them play. And one kid had written in chalk
Zofia is crazy
on their stairwell.

“That’s a nice birthday,” Adina said, then asked again how Salcia was, and Zofia said that she might do better if they could cheer her up somehow. She’d left her favorite stuffed bear behind when they moved to the ghetto because while she didn’t know where they were going she knew it would be a bad place.

“Well, that’s another good birthday story,” Lutek finally said.

“She has another bear now,” Zofia told him.

Adina said that she got caught on her last birthday. A Polish woman had grabbed her on the Aryan side and had told the whole street that she had a Jewish nose. Zofia asked what happened then, and Adina said no one had cared and that Adina had answered, “What kind of nose do
you
have? Look at yourself in the mirror!” and that had made the woman let go and run away.

Lutek said he was hungry. Zofia said now when her family finished their soup her brother Leon put the pot over his head so he could lick the bottom clean.

Adina said people in France cooked potatoes in oil, not water, and Zofia said oil-fried potatoes must taste amazing and Boris said that was probably true but good oil could be put to better use.

Boris and I looked back over the edge of the gutter. The Jew with the smock had finished and he and the
German soldier had left and one of the other gangs was already around the hole. A kid with a crowbar levered the metal sheet away from the brick and the masonry nails came out as easily as Boris said they would. The sheet was bent aside but then a German officer and three yellow policemen appeared like magic. When two kids tried to scramble through the hole there were shouts on the other side and they were dragged back. They all lined up against the wall on the German officer’s orders. He had only one arm.

“That’s him,” Boris said.

“I know,” I told him.

Witossek told them each to hand over their money and after counting it he said that he was going to fine them that amount for smuggling. They stood along the wall. He caught sight of an old Jew hurrying across the street a block away and called him over. One of the yellow police had to cross over to get him to come. We could see him trembling from where we were.

“How old are you?” Witossek asked. Sixty-six, the old Jew told him and Witossek counted out sixty-six złotys and stuffed them in the old man’s shirt pocket. “Now be on your way,” he said.

He said something else to the same yellow policeman, who walked off and came back with three other Jews. Witossek asked their ages and paid them that
amount of złotys. The last woman said she was fifty and he counted out his last forty-eight złotys and said that was now her age instead. Once she left he turned to the smugglers and said, “I’m a good German, aren’t I?” They said he was and he led his yellow policemen away and as soon as he was out of their sight the three of them scattered.

O
N FRIDAY I WAITED AGAIN FOR THREE HOURS AND
then Ajzyk the shoeshine boy came out and told me that Lejkin said I should come back on Monday. On Monday Lejkin finally showed me into his office, which was a room next to the toilet. He spread his arms like he was taking in all of Poland and asked what I thought. I told him the house had a nice front hall.

He said Witossek and other Germans in the Security Police were putting together an anti-crime unit and that Lejkin had picked me to be a part of it. “They’re not hunting smugglers as much as wanting to regulate them,” he said. “You know how the Germans like to keep track of everything.”

“I don’t know anything about anything,” I said.

“Yes, that’s been your position,” he told me. “But
you do know the old joke that’s now going around again. If two Jews meet, one says to the other, ‘Statistically, one of us must be reporting to the Gestapo!’ ”

“I have heard that joke,” I told him.

“There’s no salary, of course, but there are other advantages,” he said. “Including influence in the work camps.”

“I still don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” I said.

“Nothing for the time being,” he said. “Maybe some minor reports. Maybe not even that.”

I sat in my chair and he looked at me. He was so small behind his desk that it looked like he was kneeling on the floor. I could hear an accordion player outside his window.

“So can I go now?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

He gave his attention to some papers in front of him. He signed two and made a mocking noise at a third. He stood up and came around the front of his desk and said he’d traded for new boots, then walked around and did knee bends to break them in.

“Have you heard that the Germans are already in Leningrad?” he asked. I shook my head.

“So Hitler sees Jesus in Paradise and says to
St. Peter, ‘Hey, what’s that Jew doing without an armband?’ ” he said. “And St. Peter tells him, ‘Leave him alone. He’s the Boss’s son.’ ”

“That’s a good joke,” I told him, after we were quiet for a while.

“You’re like those shopkeepers who hold goods under their coats and go over to customers only when they recognize them,” he said. “I like that about you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“We have to stick together,” he told me. “It’s a terrible thing to see how the Germans have divided us.”

“So can I go now?” I said.

“Do you remember how you felt the first time you saw a Jews Not Wanted sign in the window of a Jewish shop?” he said.

Another policeman swung the door open and told Lejkin that one of the Czapliński brothers was finally there. Lejkin tossed him two packs of cigarettes and the policeman said that the Czaplińskis smoked too. Lejkin tossed him two more. “Weren’t they both lawyers, as well?” the policeman wanted to know.

“I think they were, yes,” Lejkin told him. “Back in Lódz.”

“It’s like a bar association around here,” the policeman said. He said that Mayler was a lawyer too and by
the way he was still trying to find out where his wife’s family had been sent. “The Poles complain that we’re privileged because they all got sent abroad and we at least got to work at home,” he told Lejkin.

“Tell the Organ Grinders,” Lejkin told him, and the policeman left.

“Who are the Organ Grinders?” I asked.

“That’s what they call the Judenrat,” he said. “You know: throw a coin to the organ grinder and he plays along with his monkey.”

He bent to fix his boots and once he was happy with them went back behind his desk and sat down again. “So what’s your decision?” he said.

We both listened to the minute hand of his clock click over into the next position. “I think I’ll do what I can to help,” I told him.

He said I’d be hearing from him and dismissed me. When I was heading down the front steps a long black car pulled up with two Germans in the front and three bearded Jews with terrified eyes in the back. When I told Boris that evening he clapped me on the back for having done the smart thing and said maybe now we’d get some word in advance as to what was going on.

H
ANKA NASIELSKA GOT THE TYPHUS AND DIED. SO
did Zofia’s Uncle Ickowicz. For a few weeks Lejkin passed along messages from my father and brother and then he said they’d been transferred and he didn’t know where. My mother asked me to find out and told me to spend more time with him until I did. There were more soup kitchens on the street. In September Lejkin said the ghetto would be further reduced in size but that in October some schools could open again. He had our gang hang some new placards forbidding Jews from leaving the housing districts designated for them.

“What does it mean?” Zofia asked the day we got them, though after we finished hanging them we found out: German soldiers and blue police surprised us at the Immortal Hole and the gang got away but a Pole grabbed me by the back of the neck. Three older kids from another gang also were caught. The Pole gave me a kick in the behind, let me go, and said, “This one’s too short to shoot.” The other kids were told to empty their pockets and stand against the wall. I ran away and after I rounded the corner I heard them shooting. Later the dead kids were still there on top of one another against the wall.

G
OING HOME FROM A SHOP WITH MY MOTHER WE
heard more shots and she dragged me to the pavement and covered me with her arm. At dinner she told us that four bodies had been found beside the wall at Nowolipke.

“A lot of people have typhus,” Boris said.

She told him they’d been shot for smuggling.

“That’s why we’re not going to do that anymore,” he told her.

“Is that the truth?” she asked me.

“We already decided not to,” I told her.

Boris told her smuggling had gotten too dangerous and that a housepainter on his way to a job had been ordered by a German to fill in the Immortal Hole one more time and then when that German wandered off, another came along and, seeing a Jew working on a hole in the wall, shot him dead. Boris’s mother asked what the Immortal Hole was and we told her.

Two days later it was open again. We gave up on it but heard that a German with a bullhorn had announced to the neighborhood that thirty Jews would be shot if it wasn’t permanently closed by noon the next day. We also heard the smuggling went on as before after he left and that he never came back.

B
ORIS GOT CAUGHT. HE SAID THAT WHEN THEY WERE
about to shoot him a cloud of gnats flew into his eyes and nose and also bothered the Germans, who argued with one another while he stood there against the wall and then for whatever reason just left him there.

Adina and Zofia embraced him and Lutek said he’d had some close scrapes of his own and the only reason he hadn’t been killed was he was so short that all the bullets went over his head.

Zofia said, “I think we have to stop.”

And Boris said, “What’s the difference how you’re done for. You have to eat.”

“It’s time to think of something else,” Adina told him.

“Yes,” Boris said, as if he was talking to small children. “Let’s do that.”

We liked to meet outside Mrs. Melecówna’s matrimonial introductions parlor because she let young people in the courtyard and it had an awning besides. One morning Adina and Boris and I waited an hour before Lutek finally arrived. He was sweating so much from running that the bill of his cap was soaked through. He said Zofia had popped up at his window at midnight the night before. Her family had been getting ready for bed when they heard boots on the stairs, which was always bad news after curfew. Her
mother tucked Zofia and Leon into a space she’d made under the bedframe before going to the door. The Germans searched but had been distracted by all of the valises they’d dragged out from under the bed and emptied. Zofia and Leon didn’t make a sound though they heard Salcia crying and Jechiel and their father protesting and their father telling the Germans about his broom factory. Their mother told the Germans, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” as if saying goodbye to Zofia and Leon. They stayed quiet after everyone left, climbed out, and then in the street walked into more Germans. While they were being chased she shouted to Leon to run in one direction and she’d go in another and he was shouting back “Why should I run that way?” when the Germans caught him. She spent the night weeping that this had been the last thing he’d said to her.