The Storyteller (35 page)

I threw myself in front of my father. “Please,” I begged in German. “He isn’t thinking clearly.”

The second soldier stepped forward and put his hand on his comrade’s arm, lowering the gun. I started to breathe again.
“
Was ist los?
”
he asked. What’s the matter?

My father looked at me, his expression so raw that it hurt to stare into his eyes. “Ask them where they took her.”

So I did. I explained that my mother and my uncle had been collected from our home by soldiers, and that we were trying to find them. Then my father spoke in a universal language, pressing the gold coins into the gloved hand of the soldier.

In the light from the streetlamp, the soldier’s response had a shape. The words swelled in the space between us.
“
Verschwenden Sie nicht Ihr Geld,
”
he said, dropping the coins onto the pavement. He jerked his head toward our apartment, a reminder again that we were breaking curfew.

“My gold is as good as anyone else’s!” my father called after them angrily as the soldiers moved down the street. “We will find someone else, Minka,” he promised. “There has to be a soldier in the ghetto who is willing to be paid for information.”

I knelt, picking up the coins that winked against the cobblestones. “Yes, Papa,” I said, but I knew this wasn’t true, because I understood what the soldier had said.

Don’t waste your money.

 • • • 

The day after my mother disappeared, I went to work. There were several girls missing; others cried as they embroidered. I sat at my typewriter, trying to lose myself in requisition forms but failing miserably. When I had messed up for the fifth time in a row, I finally banged my fist on the keys so that they all flew up at once, printing a line of nonsense, as if the whole world had started to speak in tongues.

Herr Fassbinder came out of his inner office to find me sobbing. “You are upsetting the other girls,” he said, and sure enough, I could see some of them staring at me through the window that separated my desk from the factory floor. “Come here.” I followed him into his office and sat down the way I did when I took dictation.

He did not pretend that he didn’t know about the
Aussiedlung
of the previous evening. And he did not tell me to stop crying. Instead, he gave me his handkerchief. “Today, you will work in here,” he announced, and he left me, closing the door behind him.

For five days, I moved like a zombie at work and then like a ghost at home, silently picking up after my father, who had stopped eating and speaking. Basia fed him spoonfuls of broth the way she fed Majer. I had no idea how he made it through his bakery shift, but I assumed his men were covering whatever labor he could not do on his own. I was not sure what was worse: having my mother vanish in an instant, or losing my father by degrees.

One night as I walked home from the
Fabrik
I could feel a shadow behind me, breathing on my neck like a dragon. Every time I turned around, though, I saw nothing but haggard neighbors trying to get home and close their doors before any misery could slip over the threshold. Still, I could not shake the feeling that I was being followed, and the fear rose, doubling, quadrupling, filling every last space in my mind the way my father’s dough swelled if given enough time. My heart was pounding by the time I burst through the door of the apartment, which felt wrong now that both of my cousins were gone, as if we were squatters instead of guests. “Basia?” I yelled out. “Papa?” But it was just my dumb luck: I was alone.

I unwound my scarf and unbuttoned my coat but left them on because
there was no heat in the apartment. Then I slipped a paring knife into my sleeve, just in case.

I heard something break in another room.

The noise had come from the only bedroom in the apartment—the one that had been occupied by my cousins when we first moved in. I crept down the hallway as quietly as I could in my heavy boots and peered through the doorway. One of the windowpanes had been broken. I looked around to see if a rock had been thrown, but there was nothing on the floor but glass. Kneeling, I began to sweep it up carefully with my palms, using my skirt as a dustpan.

There. I hadn’t imagined it, that shadow that flickered at the corner of my eye.

Leaping to my feet so that the glass spilled back onto the floor, I yanked aside the bedroom door to find the tall, thin boy who had broken the window to hide inside. Brandishing the knife from my sleeve, I held him at bay. “We have nothing for you,” I cried. “No food. No money. Go away.”

His eyes were wide, his clothes torn and ragged. Unlike the rest of us, who were starving, he had visible muscles bulging beneath his shirt. He took a step forward.

“Stop, or I’ll kill you,” I yelled, and in that moment, I believed that I could.

“I know what happened to your mother,” he said.

 • • • 

I, who had dreamed up a novel about an undead
upiór
who fell in love with a human girl, could not believe the fantasy this boy spun with words. His name was Hersz, and he had been with my mother on the freight train that left the ghetto. The train had traveled forty-four miles from Łód
to Koło. Then, everyone was taken to another train, this one running on a narrow-gauge track to Powiercie. By the time they arrived it was late in the day, and they spent the night a few kilometers away in an abandoned mill.

It was there that Hersz met my mother. She said that she had a daughter about the same age he was, and she worried about me. She hoped that there would be a way to get word back to the ghetto. She asked Hersz if he had family there, too. “She reminded me of my mother,” Hersz said. “My parents both went with the second roundup. I thought that maybe we were being taken to the same place to work, that I would get to see them again.”

We were sitting down now, with Basia and my father, who were hanging on every word Hersz spoke. After all, if
he
was here, didn’t that mean my mother might soon follow? “Go on,” my father urged.

Hersz picked at a scab on his hand. His lips were trembling. “The next morning, we were divided into small groups by the soldiers. Your mother went with one group into a truck, and I went with another that held ten young men, all tall and strong. We drove up to a big stone mansion. We were brought to the basement of the manor house. There were signatures all over the walls, and one sentence written in Yiddish:
He who comes here, does not walk away alive.
There was a window, too, nailed shut with boards.” Hersz swallowed hard. “I could hear through it, though. Another truck pulled up, and this time one of the Germans told the people who had been transported that they were to be sent east to work. All they had to do was take a shower first, and put on clean clothes that were disinfected. The people in the truck, they started clapping their hands, and then a little while later, we heard bare feet shuffling by the basement window.”

“So she is all right,” my father breathed.

Hersz looked down at his lap. “The next morning I was taken to work in the woods, with the others who had spent the night in the basement. As I left, I noticed a big van parked up against the house. The door of the van was open and there was a ramp to get inside. There was a wooden grate on the floor, like the kind you might see in a community bathhouse,” he said. “But we didn’t get into this van. Instead, we went in a truck that had tarpaulin on its sides. About thirty SS men came with us. There was a huge pit that had been dug. I was given a shovel and told to make it bigger. Just after eight in the morning, the first van arrived. It looked like
the one I had seen at the manor. Some of the Germans opened the doors and then ran quickly away from it, while gray smoke poured out. After about five minutes, the soldiers directed three of us inside. I was one of them.” He sucked in his breath, as if it were coming through a straw. “The people inside, they had died from the gas. Some were still holding each other. They were wearing their underwear, but nothing else. And their skin was still warm. Some were still alive, and when that was the case, one of the SS men would shoot them. After the bodies were taken out, they were searched for gold and jewelry and money. Then they were buried in the pit, and the towels and bars of soap they had been given for their
shower
were gathered to be brought back to the manor house for the next transport.”

As I stared at Hersz, my jaw dropped. This made no sense. Why would you go to so much trouble to kill people—people who had been manufacturing items needed for the war effort? And then I began to do the arithmetic. Hersz was here, my mother was not. Hersz had seen the bodies being unloaded from the vans. “You’re lying,” I spat.

“I wish I were,” he whispered. “Your mother, she was on the third truck of the day.”

My father put his head down on the table and started to weep.

“Six of the boys who had been picked to work in the woods were killed that day, shot because they weren’t doing their job fast enough. I survived but didn’t want to. I was going to hang myself that night, in the basement. Then I remembered that even if I didn’t have family left, your mother did. And that maybe I could find you. The next day on the transport to the woods, I asked for a cigarette. The SS man gave me one, and suddenly everyone in the truck was asking for a smoke. While he was being swarmed, I took a pen from my pocket and used it to poke a hole in the tarpaulin, and tear a long rip. Then I jumped out of the truck. They started shooting, but didn’t hit me, and I managed to run through the woods until I found a barn, where I hid underneath the hay in the loft. I stayed there for two days, and then sneaked out and came back here.”

I listened to Hersz’s story, although I wanted to tell him he was a fool, trying to break
into
the ghetto when all of us wanted to get out. But then
again, if getting out meant dying in a van full of gas, maybe Hersz was the smart one. There was a part of me that still could not believe what he said, and continued to dismiss it. But my father, he immediately covered the only mirror in the house. He sat on the floor, instead of in a chair. He tore his shirt. Basia and I followed his example, mourning our mother the way our religion told us to.

That night when I heard my father crying, I sat down on the edge of the mattress he had shared with my mother. We, who had been so crowded in this apartment, now had more room than we needed. “Minka,” my father said, his voice so soft I may have imagined it. “At my funeral, make sure . . . make sure . . .” He broke off, unable to tell me what he wanted me to remember.

Overnight, his hair went snow white. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.

 • • • 

It is probably the hardest thing to understand: how even horror can become commonplace. I used to have to imagine how you might look at an
upiór
sucking the blood from the neck of a freshly killed human and not have to turn away. Now I knew from personal experience: you could see an old woman shot in the head and sigh because her blood spattered onto your coat. You could hear a barrage of gunfire and not even blink. You could stop expecting the most awful thing to happen, because it already had.

Or so I thought.

The first day of September, military trucks pulled up to the hospitals in the ghetto, and the patients were dragged out by SS soldiers. Darija told me that at the children’s hospital, people reported seeing babies tossed from the windows. I think that was when I realized Hersz could not have been lying. These men and women hobbling in their hospital gowns, some too weak or too old to stand on their own, could not have been going to work in the east. The next afternoon, the chairman gave a speech. I stood with my sister in the square, bouncing Majer between
the two of us. He had another cough and was fussy. My father, who had become a shadow of his former self, was at home. He dragged himself to the bakery and back, but he did not go out in public otherwise. In a way, my little nephew could take better care of himself than my father could.

Chairman Rumkowski’s voice crackled over the loudspeakers that had been erected at the corners of the square. “A severe blow has befallen the ghetto,” he said. “They are asking for the best it possesses—children and old people. I have not had the privilege to have a child of my own, and therefore I devoted the best of my years to children. I lived and breathed together with the children. I never imagined that my own hands would have to deliver the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg . . . Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children.”

There were gasps and shrieks, shouts from the crowd around us. Majer was in my arms at that point; I pulled him tighter against me, but Basia ripped him from my grasp and buried her face in his hair. Red hair, like Rubin’s.

The chairman went on to talk about how twenty thousand people had to be deported. How the sick and the elderly would only tally thirteen thousand. Beside me someone shouted, “We’ll all go!” Another woman cried out her suggestion, that no parents lose an only child, that those with children to spare be the ones to give them up.