The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (5 page)

But I was the one who sat and finished the tiny dress that afternoon. I chose arms, hands, legs and feet, attached them as best as I could and carefully sewed the head from the coat’s pocket on to the puppet’s delicate body.

I slid my hand underneath the dress and moved the whole puppet, its thin arms, legs and pretty head. Looking at me with her big, dark eyes, the puppet bowed to me.

‘Hello, my boy, and what is your name? Pleased to meet you. I am Princess Sahara,’ I said aloud.

And so began my apprenticeship with Grandfather’s puppets.

I
kept the secret of the puppets to myself and spent more and more time in the workshop. Mother didn’t ask me what I was up to in there, and we hardly spoke. Maybe she even knew about the puppets, but grief had swallowed her whole as a lion would a lamb, and yet each evening she managed to cook us a soup from whatever she could buy or barter.

As I retreated into Grandfather’s puppet world, the situation outside deteriorated further. Houses were marked with a large ‘T’ where typhoid had swept through street after street, and the ghetto overflowed with people dragging their few rescued belongings in search of a new place to settle. Many now flooded in from the countryside, their whispered stories full of a horror I couldn’t imagine: whole villages massacred, everyone taken into the woods, a single woman surviving to tell the tale. I couldn’t look at those refugees who had nothing but emptiness in their eyes.

Before the Germans invaded, we used to have a big apartment in the old town with high ceilings and a large balcony. Our ghetto flat was a mere quarter of the size. After Grandfather was shot I took his room – there was space only for a bed and a small wardrobe, but still it was mine. Three weeks later two families moved in with us.

The first were complete strangers who happened to knock on our door at a time when my mother, utterly exhausted from a day of chasing for food, couldn’t resist the pleadings of strangers any more. They were the fifth family to knock on our door asking for refuge during the time it took Mama to prepare a thin soup. She quietly led them through the flat.

‘Mika, please collect your things, you’re staying with me,’ she said, giving me a look that demanded I stay quiet and obey. I threw my few books and clothes on to Mother’s bed. How dare she give them my room.

And so Marek, Diana and their three children – a baby boy and twin girls of four, Sara and Hannah, lookalikes with black plaits tied with huge pink bows – set up refuge, sharing my tiny room and bed. I refused to talk to them for some days and the crying of the baby kept me awake at night. Sometimes I heard the girls cry, too.

Then, just when I decided to be nice to the twins, more trouble arrived: this time in the form of my mother’s sister Cara, who knocked on our door one afternoon with my two cousins, Ellie and Paul. I remembered them well from a summer we had spent together in the countryside near Cracow, some four years ago. Grandfather, Mother and I had taken a train and bus to meet them.

Back then, Ellie was a small, agile girl of eleven and her cheekiness had me in stitches. Paul, though, despite his six years, had an adult air of melancholy about him that I could make no sense of. Now I wonder whether, somehow, he already knew what lay in wait for him?

That sweltering summer we escaped the city to the lakes. While the adults sat on blankets sipping wine and lemonade, laying out a picnic of delicacies, we built a small wooden raft, dived, splashed and dunked each other. I swallowed lots of water, much more than anyone else, but we had such fun. In my cousin’s company I felt part of a bigger something, alive and tingling with delight.

My uncle Samuel was still alive then. A watchmaker from a long line of craftsmen, he was a large man with a nice pair of gold spectacles, who shared a keen interest in astronomy with my grandpa. I overheard them exchanging new discoveries, pondering whether man would ever make it to the moon, while Cara and Mama put their heads together in sisterly fashion, laughing and giggling like children.

I remember saying goodbye – I stood stiff and formal, shaking hands with everyone, not wanting Ellie to see I would miss her. We promised to write but never did. A year later Ellie was fighting for her life. It started with a headache and a slight fever, before her legs turned to jelly, and after two days she couldn’t walk any more. She found breathing difficult and so they rushed her to Cracow’s children’s hospital where she lay for weeks, pale and thin in a too-large bed, as if sculpted from wax. Polio, they called it.

Ellie fought hard and recovered, ‘a tough girl, your cousin’, my mother said, but we heard she had to use crutches for many months. With great willpower she got back on her feet, but her left leg was weak and so she limped. It would forever be weak, the doctors told her, but she was determined to prove them wrong.

The small girl of my memories disappeared and there in our tiny, dull ghetto apartment, in the summer of 1941, stood a feisty fifteen-year-old, holding a large brown suitcase that was battered and filled to bursting, and grinning at me from ear to ear. For a moment the smile exposed her excellent, straight teeth. I couldn’t see any crutch or stick.

‘Mika! How are you? You’ve grown so much.’ She could talk – she had shot up like a beanstalk and was halfway between the girl of that hot summer at the Rosnowskie lakes and a fully fledged woman. I kept staring at her until she laughed.

‘Cat got your tongue, Mika? It’s me, Ellie, your cousin. Remember?’

‘Of course, silly, come on in. You must be exhausted.’

She moved past me with her brother Paul in tow, who although tall for his ten years, looked pasty and as thin as a candlestick. Except for his constant coughing and a shy hello, he stayed silent. I sneaked a glimpse at Ellie’s legs, which were sticking out from under her blue dress. Her left leg was slimmer than the right and lagged a little behind. Embarrassed, I looked away, glad that Ellie hadn’t caught my eye.

Aunt Cara was just as thin as Paul but didn’t cough. Her pale face, with bruise-like shadows under her eyes and a colourless mouth, showed the strain and exhaustion of trying to understand what had happened to her family and to the world – all our worlds.

The Germans had declared Cracow the capital of their
Generalgouvernement
early in 1940, planning a Jew-free city. Like all Jews from the city, my cousins and their parents were ordered to resettle and had moved to the countryside, not far from the lakes. Later, hunger drew them to Warsaw, in the futile hope that they could turn some of Samuel’s watches into bread. They had tried to find us in the ghetto but without luck. And so, unbeknown to us, they had been living in a tiny room in Sliska Street for some months. So very close to us.

Two weeks earlier Uncle Samuel hadn’t come home. The police arrested him for trading on the black market and had taken him to the Pawiak. And the previous day Ellie, Paul and my aunt had been thrown out of their room.

I overheard the story as Cara and Mother talked that first night.

‘I haven’t heard anything since they took him. I’m so scared, Halina.’ It was strange, hearing my mother’s name; even grandfather called her ‘Mama’.

We had run out of space, so all three of them set up in the kitchen. Their arrival changed everything. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ellie. She had grown so much, stood taller than me and was still full of life and adventure even in such a dire situation. The fire and cheekiness in her green eyes drew me in, butterflies fluttered in my stomach, but if I drew near to this fire, would I be burned? At first, I tried to ignore her.

Once they had settled in, we could see that Paul was terribly sick. He lay in bed most of the time, listless and pale as chalk. No one slept well as his coughing cut the night into shreds.

I stole away early in the morning to the workshop, always locking the door from inside. I longed to be in the quiet world of my puppets, at least for a while, where I could fight my fights, find love and a little peace.

It was Ellie who caught me in the end. She cornered me as I sneaked out of the bedroom one morning. She grabbed at my sleeve and stared at me with her magnificent eyes. I knew she meant business but she smiled. God, I loved that broad smile.

‘Where are you going, Mika? What’s the big secret?’

‘Nothing, no secret, I just need some space.’

‘Aha, the young man needs space. Come on, Mika, let me in, I’m dying of boredom here.’

I don’t think it was the tiny piece of chocolate Ellie offered me that made me give away my secret, but the sudden realisation of how lonely I felt. Although used to playing on my own, growing up among adults, to see the twins play, fight and giggle with each other and observe how gently Ellie cared for her brother left me with a deep yearning. Also, I had only two hands and had grown bored of the same repeating scenarios of two puppets meeting on the little stage. Always two: the king and the girl, the prince and the crocodile, the fool and the horse.

I decided to let Ellie into my world.

‘Close your eyes.’ I took her hand and cautiously she set foot in the dark workshop. I switched on the light.

‘Mika, this is amazing! I thought you were building toy trains, but these are beautiful. Look at that one.’ She grabbed the princess, slipped her hand under the puppet’s skirt and into her limbs and pranced her around the stage.

‘Hello, my boy, why don’t you bow your head in front of me, the Princess of Thebes?’ she said, addressing me.

‘Actually, she is called Princess Sahara.’

‘All right. Look at the donkey, it’s so cute.’

For a moment I felt a surge of happiness spreading through my body. Ellie was so charmed by my puppets. And so, from then on, every play included two important protagonists: Princess Sahara and the donkey, operated by Ellie, while I took charge of all the other puppets. A perfect four-handed duo was born and there was no turning back.

From then on endless opportunities opened up for us, and for the first time since they had locked us in the ghetto, I felt happy. We laughed, giggled and fought in this tiny, dusty workshop. I let Ellie into the coat’s secrets too, and Grandfather’s coat sheltered us both, the puppets’ company helping us forget the adult world for a while. A world where people created ugly things; like a ghetto for Jews. A world we couldn’t understand.

We were an industrious workshop, and Ellie and I spent hours in that little space, building ships and whole forests from papier-mâché, painting landscapes with castles and rivers and stitching tiny costumes from any bits of fabric we could lay our hands on, asking our mothers for yet another handkerchief or napkin. We created more puppets for our troupe – pirates and bandits, a doctor – and let the fool play the tiny violin. Then Kaninkudum, the villain from the deep forest, appeared. His speciality was to kidnap the princess, holding her hostage in the crocodile’s den until the prince – ta-dah – helped by the fool and the donkey, came to her rescue.

We fought battle over battle on that little stage and I even got my first kiss. Well, it was the doctor, played by me, who won the princess’s heart, while the monkey applauded.

In March, the twins’ birthday approached. Through our thin walls I heard them pleading with their parents for chocolate on their big day, followed by muffled sobbing and whispers from the parents. The next morning I took Ellie’s hand and pulled her into our secret room.

‘Ellie, let’s put on a special birthday performance for the twins, they’ve nothing for their birthday. They can be our guests of honour. What do you think?’ She was on fire too and so we wrote invitations, bordered with gold paint, proudly handing them out an hour later. The surprise on the twins’ faces warmed my heart, and even Paul, who struggled more every day, smiled broadly. Tatus would have been proud. We invited the neighbours too, and that afternoon Mother took me to one side.

‘So, this is what you’ve been up to all this time? You clever, secretive boy.’

She wrapped me in a big hug and we stood there laughing.

The day before the performance we mixed papier-mâché and created a second girl puppet so there would be a pair of twins in our show. We excused ourselves for rehearsals for the rest of the day, and slowly, in the sheltered dark of the workshop, the play took shape. We quarrelled a lot over the plot but in the end it worked itself out.

The big day arrived. We chose the kitchen as our theatre and, with flushed faces, running around like weasels, we laid out as many chairs and boxes as we could find. The stage with its red velvet curtains sat on the kitchen table and I wore Grandfather’s coat, sheltering all our precious puppets as they waited impatiently for their big entrance. The room was then plunged into darkness except for two dim lamps illuminating the stage. Ellie crouched behind the curtains. I took a deep breath and stepped forward.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first ever performance of
The Trials and Triumphs of Polly and Holly
– a two-act play in honour of our special guests Hannah and Sara! Happy Birthday. Enjoy the show.’

Much clapping, then silence. You really could have heard a pin drop. I dived behind the set and pulled the curtain. I could hardly make out Ellie’s face but I could smell her: spicy with a hint of lavender. Her arm brushed lightly against mine like a cat’s tail. A swarm of butterflies took flight in my stomach.

I slipped my hand into the crocodile’s body. Ellie made the twin puppets prance around the stage in a sisterly game. Soon we heard giggles, shouts and clapping. Then Hannah shrieked as the crocodile snapped its sharp wooden teeth, then picked up the puppet-twins by their necks and dragged them away. When I stole a glimpse at the audience, Sara was biting her little fists.

What an adventure: we sent the puppet-twins downriver on a raft, into the desert, hid them in a bird’s nest on top of the highest mountain before the Witch of the North took them prisoner and held them in an igloo. But, in the end, they arrived safely back home, helped by the prince and the monkey, and holding a basket with magical treasures they had gathered on their travels: a flower that never withered and granted everlasting happiness; an eagle’s feather which bestowed on the bearer the gift of flying; and an icicle that would never melt and shone brighter than the brightest light.