The Book of Aron (5 page)

On some of the narrower streets pushcart owners who hadn’t found apartments went from house to house calling up to the windows to ask if there were any spare rooms. Anyone who had a cart charged whatever he liked, and everyone was a porter, so Lutek’s father and the others made money by taking over the sidewalks in front of their buildings. People moving in unloaded feather beds and laundry baskets but the porters threw them over the fences into the courtyards and the families had to pay to get them back. On every street, children were lost and crying and milling around. Everything Lutek and I carried off we stored in the cellar of his father’s building, alongside what his father had collected.

We were separated the day before the deadline and I was knocked to the pavement trying to get closer to a cart. I crawled to the entryway of a building and tried to get my breath back. A kid jerked at my satchel while I was crawling and I kicked at him and drove him away. I lost my balance getting back on my feet and almost put my hand on an SS officer. He and three of his men were watching a Polish policeman whose papers had fallen out of his leather pouch. The policeman was in
the road shouting for the crowds to go around him but every time he crouched his pouch slid down off his shoulder and spilled more paper. The SS officer laughed with his men about it. Even I could see that they were afraid of him. His hairline under his cap stopped high on the back of his neck and there was something about the stubble that looked dangerous.

My knees still hurt from where I’d fallen and I put my hands on them. The officer did the same, and his men noticed and smiled. He squinted at me as though he’d said something funny and then straightened up and gestured to his men and they left, one of them looking back and winking before the crowd swallowed them up.

O
N THE DAY OF THE DEADLINE LUTEK AND I SPOTTED
a wagon filled with magical loot—a gilded birdcage, a set of knives in a sunburst pattern in an open display case—and followed it until we had to give up because the crowds were so impossible. Lutek got mad and climbed a lamppost to search out other opportunities while I hung on to it below him. Then we heard a fanfare of horns and pie pans and the gates of the courtyard opposite us opened, and two old janitors somehow managed to part the mob on the sidewalk
and a row of kids with horns and tin pans and wooden spoons turned onto the street in a line. A boy in the center held a staff with a bright-green flag and a Jewish star in a harness around his waist. More lines came out of the darkness behind them, kids of all sizes holding toys and books against their chests and singing.

“What is it?” Lutek asked. We couldn’t hear what they were singing but the kids kept coming, at least twenty rows of them, followed by wagons piled high with wicker baskets tied with cords and cast-iron pots and floured breadboards and trunks tied with rope, crates of books and ladles and strainers, and then a wagon mounded with coal and another with potatoes. Other kids and adults wrestled over the coal and potatoes that scattered onto the cobblestones when the wagons turned onto the street. All of the wagons had red geraniums in window boxes along their sides, and beneath them decorations made from streamers. The wagon drivers were wearing homemade bird masks with plumes and feathers. We pushed closer and heard someone say it was Korczak’s orphanage that had been forced to move. And then there he was with his bald head and yellowish goatee again, the last one out before the courtyard gates swung shut behind him. He was pulling a heavy woman along by the arm and struggling to keep up with the last wagon. She
was as tall as he was and seemed more frightened by the crowds.

They were pushed into our path and for a while we were carried along behind them. I wondered if he would recognize me but he didn’t. He and the heavy woman had to shout at each other to be heard. She asked how long he thought he could go without sleeping and he shouted back that when he was a young man his mother had come into his room in the midafternoon and dragged him out of bed by his feet. “She asked if that was how I wanted to become a doctor,” he shouted. “By staying out all night long. And I told her, ‘A
doctor
? I thought I was studying to become a lush.’ ”

We followed them to the gate of the small ghetto at Chłodna, where the German and Polish police were checking identification. All of the orphanage wagons had passed through except the one with the potatoes, which sat still next to the guard hut. The driver had his hands on his hips and was watching two Polish policemen unhitch his horse. He’d pulled his bird mask down and it hung below his chin. A feather fluttered alongside his ear.

“What’s happening?” Korczak asked the Polish policeman in front of us. “Why has my wagon not gone through?”

“This isn’t your wagon,” one of the German policemen told him. “It’s my wagon.”

They argued in German about it. The heavy woman was terrified and tried to pull Korczak through the gate but he knocked her arm away. He shouted something at the German and then repeated it to the Polish policeman: that if the German didn’t release the potatoes he would report the theft to their superiors. The German’s bored expression disappeared and he said in Polish, “So you’re trying to frighten me, Jew?” and Lutek gave my shirt such a pull from behind that he ripped it.

“Are you with him?” a Polish policeman said, stepping in front of us. He pointed a baton at Korczak. “Is he drunk?”

“I don’t know what he is,” I told him, and Lutek pulled me again, and a woman with a chicken in a straw cage shouldered forward and almost knocked the policeman off his feet. He clubbed her once and then twice and Lutek shouted into my ear, “What do you think this is? A
show
?” and yanked me so hard that I fell to my knees, and then he pulled me to my feet and dragged me down the street.

F
AMILIES SQUATTED IN THE HALLS AND FOUGHT
over sidewalks. One took over our stairwell near the top floor. They aired out their clothes and bedding on the railings. No one had said the ghetto would be closed and the markets outside the walls declared illegal. There were long lines in front of the food shops and everything was bought up. Our family of course wasn’t prepared and hadn’t saved any money. Two other families moved in with our neighbors across the hall and my mother said it was only a matter of time before someone moved in with us. When she complained about it my father reminded her that the Christian who owned the building had lived here thirty-seven years and then had to leave nearly all of her furniture behind. He cheered himself by reading the German casualty lists in the newspaper. He called it his Happy Corner. He also paid ten groszy extra for a German paper that showed photos of their cities after Allied bombing.

The small ghetto across Chłodna we heard had attracted the well-to-do Jews and was less crowded. Our neighbor told us that across the hall they were nine to a room. The family on our stairwell took in some extra relatives and bartered old clothes and saccharine on the street in front of our building and screamed and fought in the middle of the night. In the mornings we had to step over them when going down the stairs.

My parents fought too. My mother said we were living like castaways and the apartment was filthy and my father said if we didn’t have money for bread we didn’t have money for soap. She said that once we got the typhus we wouldn’t need money for soap and he said that once we got the typhus he’d never have to hear her complain again. My older brother told them that he didn’t think married couples should argue the way they did.

Sometimes if the fight was bad my mother would lie down next to me and weep. I’d put my hand on her head and tell myself I didn’t care what they did because I was going wherever I wanted and doing what I wanted.

But I wasn’t sleeping because of the lice. My mother finally boiled my sweater, which was so infested we could see it moving, but the nits survived boiling and
could only be ironed out. They made gray oily stains when they melted under the iron, and were only gone for a while, since whatever we disinfected just got reinfested by everything else. It was so bad around my waistband that I looked like I was always adjusting my pants. I woke up scratching. In the morning I ran my fingernails through my scalp and dropped what I pulled out onto the hot lid of the stove so I could see them sizzle.

I got on the trolley still scratching and a Polish policeman told me to give him my coat. It was far too small to fit him and I showed him the elbows, which were worn through, and he said, “Give it here anyway.” I said sure and added that I’d just come from the hospital and had the typhus. I combed my hair with my hand and wiped the lice on my sleeve and stepped closer to him and he moved to the rear of the car and got off at the next stop.

My father came home from the fabric factory with what he said was good news. His cousin had converted part of the factory floor into a dormitory for refugees who could pay and so he had to let some workers go but my father hadn’t been one of them. He’d been worried about it because he and his cousin hadn’t been getting along. To celebrate he brought home bread and onions and marmalade, which we
hadn’t seen since the rationing began, and which my brothers finished before I got back. We had the rest of the bread and onions with some kishke my mother made with steer intestines and some seasonings. My father didn’t read from the newspaper. A German truck went by with a loudspeaker and its only message in Polish was that it was now forbidden to speak of “the Jewish ghetto,” and the proper term was now “the Jewish quarter.” “How do you like it here in the Jewish quarter?” my father asked my mother. “I find it confining,” she told him.

L
UTEK HAD ARRANGED A WAY OUT OF THE GHETTO
even before it was sealed up. He showed me one morning in a downpour that had driven everyone else inside. Down an alley near Przejazd Street an apartment owner had built a cooplike shed with chicken wire and wood against the wall to keep people from stealing his trash bins, and inside the shed and behind the bins Lutek had chiseled out a passage that had started as a sewage drain. The smell was suffocating and when I first saw it I thought I’d never fit through. I had to go onto my back and push with my heels and squeeze one shoulder through at a time. I asked why he hadn’t made it any bigger and he said it was a lot of
work and that the smaller the better and easier to hide and he liked that only we could fit through. The shed had a roof, so once we were inside no one could see us. And he’d nailed a piece of tin over the gap so even someone inside wouldn’t necessarily see it. I asked when he’d done this and he said after curfew. I said that it was amazing and he said yes, it was. I said he’d done all the work, and he agreed and said in honor of that our split would be seventy-thirty.

So for a few weeks we made out. He made a deal with some Polish boys, a gang from Łucka Street, and for five złotys a load they kept the blackmailers away. His father’s friends brought us what they wanted to barter on the other side, and we took out linens and silverware and tools and pots and pans and whatever would fit through, and brought back flour and potatoes and milk and butter and onions and meat. Lutek could drag in twenty kilos of potatoes or onions in one go. Sometimes on the other side there were kids we recognized haggling and filling their sacks. Smaller kids hopped onto the wall and waited there like squirrels. When the police showed up everyone disappeared into their holes.

Other gangs heard about it and started using it. When we tried to stop them they beat us. When we came back with metal pipes they outnumbered us
and were bigger besides. Once they’d taken it over they made such a racket going through that one kid got caught by the Jewish police and was turned over to a German who shot him in the face. We saw him later, still in the street, with his cheek open and his back on a sewer grate. I didn’t want to look but Lutek stood over him with his hands on his hips like killing him had been his idea. Our hole had been sealed up with cement, and Lutek told me, “Three weeks, every night I worked on that.”

First we were discouraged and then he said we’d been doing it the hard way and that one of his father’s friends was now in the Jewish police and working the gate at Leszno Street. We watched him for a day or two. All three police forces had their sentry posts, German and Polish on one side and Jewish on the other. We called the Jews the yellow police because of their armbands and the Poles and Germans the blue and green police because of their uniforms. Lutek said the Jews were watched by the yellow police and the yellow police by the blue police and the blue police by the green police and the green police by the Gestapo. And where was the Gestapo? I wanted to know, and he said “Aha!” as though I’d said something very smart. Everyone was always calling on everyone else
to come over and translate for soldiers or work details passing through the gates, and during one shift the green and blue police had set up a business with Lutek’s father’s friend. “So it’s just a matter of everyone getting their taste,” Lutek said. Yellow took five, blue took ten, and green took twenty złotys per parcel. A good time to go through was when the guards had to search a lot of autos that were backed up. We just had to stand where we could see everything and then learn to wait, wait, wait. When it was safe to deal the friend would gesture for the blue policeman to come inside the gate and off we could go.

Lutek’s father also told him about a new system for dealing with the blackmailers: once they surrounded us on the other side of the wall we called over the blue police and told them we were being robbed and that we wanted everyone taken to the station to sort things out. That was the code for the blue police to arrest us, and the blackmailers ran away. At the station we gave the blue police their cut and they let us go when the coast was clear.