If I Should Die Before I Wake (7 page)

Zayde humphed and turned his head away, falling against the wall of the cart. "Then find someone to help you," he finally said.

At long last we hoisted Zayde over some friendly stranger's shoulder and hauled him and all the belongings we had brought with us up to our new home. I wanted to throw my exhausted body down on a bed or a chair, but the sight of our home—our room—left me standing on my wobbly legs in the doorway.

"I am not going in," I said as my mother and grandmother dragged the load from the cart across the room. "Where are we all to sleep? There is nothing here! How will we live in this place? Even
you
cannot fix this, Mama. Look!"

She looked. We all did.

There was just the one room for all six of us. The walls were so smudged with dirt and soot it was hard to make out their true color. A table with the front legs shorter than the back stood in the center of the room with two green and two brown chairs pulled up to it. Looking beyond the dirt and litter that cluttered the rotting, sloping floor, I spotted two cots, both tipped over on their sides. The ceiling sloped down toward us but showed no evidence of imminent collapse.

Mama rushed to the windows and flung them open while Bubbe helped Zayde over to one of the cots, which Jakub had righted. From my spot in the doorway I caught a glimpse of the view through the windows before Mama slammed them shut again. The back of our room overlooked one of the refuse heaps, which was overflowing and crawling with rats. I shuddered.

"Mama, we cannot live here," I said, thinking that somehow she and Bubbe would figure out a way to get us all back home. "Really, we cannot."

Mama was not listening. She opened the only door in the room besides the entrance and discovered a small, greasy kitchen.

"
Nu,
we are here," she said as she turned and faced us all, her body sagging against the little cookstove. " Jakub, I want you to find us some water. Anya, sweep the litter into a corner, and Chana, run and see if you can find where the Hurwitzes have settled; they cannot be far."

I was glad to get away, to get back outside and see life, such as it was, streaming before me. People were still coming, young and old, laden with unruly bundles bursting with pots and bowls, irons and brushes and blankets.
Droshkies,
horse-drawn wagons, clopped by, carrying sick, gray-faced people, with dogs yapping at the wheels as they wobbled over the cobblestones. I stepped out into the street as an elderly woman leaned over the edge of one of the wagons and vomited. It landed on the lower half of my dress and on my shoes. I cursed her and then, shocked by my own behavior, began to cry as I roamed the street, forgetting what or who I was even looking for. I stumbled along with the crowd, full of self-pity, ignoring the children smaller than I who bravely scrambled along beside their parents without complaint. I hated them. I hated everyone and everything, and if one more person so much as splattered one more clump of mud in my direction I swore I was going to...

"Chana!" I heard someone call. "Chana! Up here, child."

I looked up and saw Mrs. Liebman waving from her window as though she were watching a circus parade passing by, and perhaps she was.

"Hello!" I called up. "I—I am looking for the Hurwitzes. Have you seen them?"

"You will not find them with your face on the ground. A hug and a cool cloth are what you need. Then you find your Hurwitzes."

I suddenly longed to throw myself into Mrs. Liebman's arms and feel her plump body, like so much eiderdown, swallow me, comfort me, protect me. I rushed up the stairs and found her waiting for me in the doorway of her home.

"Chana." Mrs. Liebman held out her arms and I ran to them, sobbing. I let her rock me and soothe me, her voice washing over me like the gentle waves of a lake. "Shh, it is all right now. Shh, it is all right."

Eventually, I became aware of other voices coming from behind her. I opened my eyes and saw her daughter, little Gitta, staring up at me with her head tilted to one side, her left hand tugging at her mother's dress. I pushed away from Mrs. Liebman and rubbed away the remains of my tears with the sleeve of my dress.

"I am sorry," I said as I backed away from them. "You have your own family—sorry." I looked over Mrs. Liebman's head and saw the rest of her family, all nine of them, crowded into a room that looked even smaller than ours.

"We are all of us family now, Chana. You understand?"

"Yes."

"Let us clean you up then. With such a mess the Hurwitzes would not recognize you."

I allowed her to lead me into the room—their home—already scrubbed clean but so crowded with family and belongings there was little space for us to move around. As she rubbed me clean with a cloth dipped from time to time in a bucket of water, we exchanged stories.

I learned that the Germans had chased them from their home just over a week ago. They were almost the first from our neighborhood to arrive in the ghetto. I could not believe it when Mrs. Liebman said that already the ghetto had been cleaned up considerably since they had arrived. I marveled, too, at the high spirits of the whole Liebman family. The younger children were running up and down the stairs while older ones stood around and chatted. Many were laughing, and others were looking out the window to the street below.

Mr. Liebman caught my quizzical glance and smiled. "It is good now, Chana. No more killings and riots. No more chasing us off the streets and rounding us up to clean the walls and dig ditches. We can look after our own again. It is crowded, yes, but they leave us alone. It may not be such a bad thing, this building of a wall around our ghetto, if it keeps the Nazis out. The Chairman, he has already begun plans for rebuilding the workshops and factories, so it is good. Relax and smile, and have some sausage." Mr. Liebman stabbed a chunk of sausage onto his fork and held it out to me.

I could not remember the last time I had eaten. I thanked him and grabbed the sausage, greedily stuffing it in my mouth and smiling as they laughed at my bulging cheeks.

Someone called up from the street below, offering a game of cards outside, and the whole family charged down the stairs. Mrs. Liebman and I and the baby, whom I now saw for the first time asleep on a rug in the corner of the room, were the only ones left. I thought about what Mrs. Liebman had said. We were all family now—all of us together, living on top of one another, crowded into one section of the city, all Jews, all hated, but all a family. I knew this was important. I needed to remember this. I needed to save my own anger and hate for the people on the other side of the fence. The woman who vomited so ungraciously on my dress was my family, and I vowed to be nicer to everyone I saw, everyone I came in contact with. And I vowed to remember this day, and this thought, and this moment alone with Mrs. Liebman, always.

MY WORLD SPUN FORWARD,
flinging me headlong into the midst of ghetto life. I felt my life before the ghetto, with Tata, and our home, and being warm and well fed, had been but a fantasy. I could hardly remember anything outside of the ghetto. Surely I had lived here all my life, gone to school here always, scraped for food always—always starving, always dirty, always sick.

Anya, little Anya, had proved to be the strong one. She was cheerful, resourceful, and generous. Beside her, I felt mean and greedy.

It already seemed a long time ago, the late spring of 1940, when they sealed off the ghetto and I joined the
Hachschara,
a special training group. Back then, still the early days, I was determined to ignore the barbed wire that wrapped around our packed and dirty city like sausage casings, guarded by Nazis at every post, and become a part of this clean-up crew. A man named Jakub Poznanski divided us into small groups and showed us how to work the soil and plant grass and flowers. We even managed to find some benches to dot about our little parks. My hopes were high back then, and no one was prouder than I when on one sunny Sunday afternoon all of us in the various
Hachschara
groups paraded before the Chairman, some three thousand of us, chanting and singing and marching to the Hebrew commands.

Of course, back then we were not yet starving. Things changed quickly, though, and soon we found ourselves without potatoes and other vegetables, without meat, with little more than some stale black bread, soup, coffee, and butter. For these we waited in long lines that straggled down the block and around the corner. We were tired, angry, and irritable. My resolve to treat everyone as my family faded, then disappeared with the food, as did the muscles in my arms and legs, and the belief that I would survive all of this, that everything was going to be all right.

Zayde and Jakub worked on Brzezinska Street in the new shoe factory. They worked with the finest leather, fashioning it into high-quality shoes for men and women and boots for the soldiers. The shoes were all taken and sold outside the ghetto. No one inside could buy them. We walked around in the same old shoes with the soles worn through.

Each day, Zayde returned from the factory looking a little shorter, a little thinner, and complaining of sore toenails and back pains. We laughed at first. Zayde and his toenails. If that is the worst of his problems, he will be all right, we told each other. We did not know then that it was a sign of the body deteriorating, of starvation. It wasn't until the Krengiels, a couple transported from Russia, moved in with us that we learned all the signs and symptoms of every disease imaginable.

Mr. Krengiel was a tall, heavy man in his forties who wore a beard, had a balding head, hypochondria, and a whine that drove me crazy in any language.

Mrs. Krengiel was neither short nor tall, fat nor thin. She would have been nondescript right down to her personality if it were not for her bright silver hair and the chocolate, egg-shaped mole on her left cheek.

Mama had said that we had to be nice to them.

"They are, after all, foreigners who have been plunked down in a strange place, separated from family and friends. It is the least we can do."

We all tried our best to be nice. Jakub and Zayde found Mr. Krengiel a job at the factory, and Mama taught the couple English and German at night. We even offered to give up one of the two cots because Mama believed that each family should have one. They were not thankful.

"It is silly for such a young healthy family to take a cot when it is obvious we are both not well," said Mr. Krengiel.

"You are forgetting Zayde and Bubbe," Mama said, trying to keep her voice level. "Both are older than you."

"Perhaps, but Bubbe is so healthy, and as you can surely see, we are not." Mr. Krengiel sat down on one of the cots and gripped the edge as if to say, You will have to pry me out.

Mama looked tired. She had had enough. Her cheeks were sunken and her eyes so far away, setting back farther and farther in her head, with only brown circles marking where they used to be.

"You may have one cot." She sighed. "But Zayde will have the other. Even you must see that he can barely hold himself up."

"Zayde—pardon my honesty, but Zayde will be dead soon anyway. What does it matter now where he sleeps? There is no comfort for him now except in heaven."

Mama held down her anger. The man was crazy, irrational. We were all just grateful that Zayde, Jakub, and Bubbe were not there to hear this. We knew that this crazy man would have said the same thing in their presence.

"Each family will have one cot, Mr. Krengiel," Mama said through clenched teeth. "You are free to do with yours as you please. However, Zayde will be occupying the other and there is no room for discussion." She turned her back to him and held her head high, her shoulders tense, waiting for the next insane remark. But he was silent.

Instead, every morning and every night, Mr. Krengiel groaned, complaining of the cold, the stiff back he got from lying on the cot and working at the factory, and his swollen feet—"a sure sign of starvation." If he wasn't whining about his body, he was dragging out some old letter from his cousin who had fled to America two years earlier. He would read aloud the same tired passages, and then look up at us with wonder in his eyes as if he were reading them for the first time.

"In America, the sandwiches you can get you cannot imagine," he would then say to us. "Fresh
white
bread thick with sardines, sauerkraut, and three kinds of cheeses, and can you guess how much something like that costs? Can you, Chana?" He'd poke me in the stomach. "Can you, Anya?" Another poke. "A nickel! Oy! A nickel! You know what that is? You know what a nickel is?" Poke, poke.

We could not understand the man. He arrived fat and got no thinner as the days passed, no matter that he ate no more than the rest of us. But one night I watched as he lay on the cot with his wife sleeping on the floor below him. I knew he was awake because his nose was not whistling. The moon shone into the room, a giant beam highlighting his corner of the room, making it glow, making him glow as he rose from the bed, carefully stepping over his wife. He looked like a ghost all silver and white moving in and out of the shadows as he crossed the room. I closed my eyes as he made his way toward me, pausing at times to listen—for what? I waited until I heard him pass and opened my eyes again. He was heading toward the kitchen! I knew instantly what he was going to do. It all made sense now. Every morning we would all say how our imagination would play tricks on us at night and that the remains of our loaves of bread would grow bigger in our minds as we slept, only to grow smaller when we woke. It had not been our imagination at all. It was fat Mr. Krengiel stealing bits of bread from each of our loaves!

I waited until I was sure he was into the bread before jumping up. "Mr. Krengiel!" I shouted. "How dare you! You
chozzer!
Stealing our food while we starve to death."

By this time everyone was awake, and Jakub was about to strike the greedy man when Bubbe came up from behind and gently touched Jakub's arm.

"No, Jakub. Let him explain," she said.