The Color of Light (52 page)

After a week of parties, each more magnificent than the next, she expected to hear about arrangements for leaving Poland. However, Skip didn’t seem to be in any kind of a hurry. He liked Poland, he told her, liked the relaxed atmosphere, a welcome change from the hustle bustle of the big city. People were making such a fuss about the war. There was plenty of time.

She didn’t contradict him. He was her husband. She was sure he knew what he was doing.

The Holocaust came to the town of Wlodawa in exactly the same way it came to other towns in Poland. When the first German appeared in the middle of September, it was almost anticlimactic. A helmeted soldier putt-putted into the center of the market square on his motorcycle, revved his motor a few times, then stopped at the pump for a drink.

Immediately, the Nazis seized all Jewish businesses. Sofia’s father was forced to hand over the Wizotsky Tea Company, which had brought the family wealth and respect for more than a hundred years, to a smirking stranger.
It’s nothing,
he told his wife and children.
As long as we have a roof over our heads and each other.

The next day, the Germans turned the Jews out of their homes. Sofia’s family moved to a dilapidated house in the ghetto in the smaller, shabbier section of town. Her parents took the parlor apartment, giving Yechezkel and his family the top floor. Sofia and Skip were allotted two dark rooms on the ground level.

Swiftly, they issued a flurry of anti-Jewish laws. Jews could no longer serve as doctors, lawyers, or teachers. Jewish children were expelled from schools. Jews were to wear an armband, white with a blue Jewish star. Jews were forbidden to purchase anything from farmers, from the stores, or to trade in the marketplace. Being out after dark was punishable by death. Leaving town was punishable by death. Baking bread, punishable by death. Sofia’s neighbor, blind old Mrs. Bronshtein, was executed for caning herself along the sidewalk as an SS
Unterscharführer
passed by; Jews had to walk in the gutter.

For a while, things were almost tolerable. A skinny German named Falkenberg ran a land drainage operation, a handsome German named Selinger collected the artisans. They paid their workers
bupkis,
but they seemed like decent men. Doctors, professors, musicians, businessmen went to work in the woods, draining swamps and felling trees, or to nearby towns to build roads and bridges.

This was how she found out that Skip had a mistress. Her brother Yechezkel watched him walk by with his Polish girlfriend as he worked laying bricks in a nearby village. Skip barely gave the slave laborers a glance. At that point, Sofia had been pregnant for six months.

Her father wrote angrily to the connections in New York who had suggested the match in the first place. Now the truth was revealed. Skip had been involved with all sorts of strange women back in Toledo; girls who sold cigarettes in nightclubs, girls he met at seedy bars in the seamier parts of town. A stripper, once. His father had threatened to write him out of the will unless he married a Jew. He agreed to a girl they found for him in Poland. A beautiful girl. An educated girl. A girl who knew nothing about him.

The Wizotskys accepted this news with grim stoicism. There were just too many other things going on, matters of survival.

With no jobs and no income, tradesmen who lived from hand to mouth began to starve. Seven months pregnant, Sofia stood on line in the cold, in the rain, in the snow, for half a loaf of bread, or sometimes, rotten, blackened potatoes. Sofia, who had never had to so much as boil a pot of water, learned to haul buckets of water from the pump at the corner, to peel potatoes, to wash her own clothing.

Six weeks early, she went into labor. On February 14, 1940, Yeshaya Refuel Weiss was welcomed into the covenant of Israel. He had a shock of black hair and eyes the color of a river at midnight. As if he knew they were in danger, he gave one cry and was still. For a moment, he regarded his mother with his wise baby eyes, and then he yawned and went to sleep.

As infants do, Shaya went from sleeping to sitting to crawling to walking to talking in the blink of an eye. He was the sunniest of children, with shining eyes and a sweet disposition, a laughing smile for everyone. Sofia
never knew she was capable of feeling so much love. When he turned his gaze on her, those midnight eyes with those long feathery lashes, when he took her finger and gurgled out giggles, she could feel her heart expand with joy.

Splashing her as she bathed him in the tin tub, he would let loose strings of silvery laughter, like sleigh bells jingling on the horses harnesses in winter. Holding his little hand in hers, she traced circles around his soft baby palm with her finger and chanted a children’s rhyme about a crow feeding kasha to her chicks. On the last line, her fingers would skip up his arm and tickle him under his delicious little neck, all wrinkles and folds, and he would squirm and burst into giggles.
Ah faygala, faygala, faygala, kitch kitch kitch keree!

Rafe was standing by the fireplace, with his back to her. Darkness clung to him, a darkness that had nothing to do with the rumors they whispered about him at school.

“What’s the matter?” said Tessa.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “A little tired, is all. It’s been a long time since I thought about any of this.”

He swung his head up to look at her, the sad, colorless eyes searching through her as if she were completely transparent, and hidden inside her were the answers he sought. He looked as he always did, trousers pressed to knife-edge perfection, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, his hair falling in a soft peak at his forehead just so, but under his eyes there were gray shadows that hadn’t been there before. Something was changing inside of him, she realized, and she wasn’t sure it was for the good.

“Let’s stop this,” she said abruptly. “It’s hurting you.”

The strange eyes coalesced into an ordinary gray. “I’m fine,” he said brightly. “Really I am. Let’s go on.”

He was lying, she knew it, and he knew she knew it. Plainly, this was disturbing him more than he’d expected. As the flames churned and danced, a rhythm of light and shadow chased each other across his face. It was so quiet that she could hear the tick of the grandfather clock upstairs.

“By the time you found her,” she began tentatively, groping for the right words.

Restless, he roved over to the window. He could hear the thoughts in her head as clearly as if she was shouting them. “By the time I found her, she was alone.”

“Where were her parents?”

“Gone. Transported in the first wave. May, 1942.”

Her body reacted as if she’d been punched in the gut. The family she’d never known had taken on flesh, come alive. “What about my grandfather? Sarah Tessa? His children?”

“They went in the next
Aktzia,”
he said to the windowpane. Outside, a plastic grocery bag went skipping down the middle of the street, carried by the wind. “The SS found their hiding place. Sofia never saw them again.”

The last
Aktzia,
the big one, came in the middle of October.

A man ran past the house cursing, then two more, running in the opposite direction. She pushed open the front door, recognizing Yosha Grinstein, the pharmacist. “Haven’t you heard?” he shouted to her, barely breaking his stride. “The Lords and Masters want us to assemble in the sports field by the high school. They say they’re going to distribute new work papers.” He seemed startled to see Shaya playing, building a house out of matchsticks. “Why are you still here?” he called back incredulously.

The screams of women, the barking of dogs, and the tread of marching boots assaulted her ears. Soldiers and SS men were blockading one end of Seminowa Street, flushing people out of their homes, beating them with sticks and truncheons, herding them through the market square in the direction of the school. German Shepherds lunged at screaming children, ripping their clothes, as officers in leather trench coats chuckled. Sofia slammed the door shut and ran to the back room, gathered Shaya up in her arms. Now she knew real terror, the cold knot of dread at the pit of her stomach.

Holding her breath, she opened the door that led to the yard behind the buildings. Surely the soldiers would already be there. Sofia imagined the feel of bullets slamming into her body, the darkness that would swell and overtake her.

Where there is no choice, there is no fear,
she thought. A Yiddish proverb. She ducked through an archway that let out on Blotna Street. Miraculously, it was deserted. She scurried the three blocks to Kozia Street, her head down, Shaya wrapped in her shawl, fighting the flow of the citizens of Wlodawa being driven towards the sports field, where Sofia used to watch her brother and his friends play soccer.

She rounded the corner past the shoemaker’s shop and came to a dead stop. A corpse lay across the narrow road, one side of his head a bloody pulp, blocking her path. His shoes were missing; some desperate soul had taken them.

There was no way around it, she would have to step over him. To her everlasting horror, he stirred and clutched her ankle.
“Oh, mein Gott,”
he whispered
. “Meine shicher, meine shicher.”

She pulled her leg free, and ran the rest of the way to Wishniak Street. With each step she prayed, asking only for a miracle. Since August, Wishniak was in the Jew-free zone, where she could be killed for the unforgivable crime of being a Jew on a sidewalk. Three years living under Nazi rule had changed her. She no longer stopped to consider the lunacy of this decree.

It was raining, a cold, steady bone-chilling drizzle. Shaya was wet, he wanted to walk, he wanted bread and butter. Holding his little hand as she dragged herself along, Sofia broke down and began to sob.

Then, the miracle happened.

A man with a walrus mustache and a checked workman’s cap was leaning against a wall, smoking. He followed her with his eyes as she passed by. “Wizotsky?” he inquired in Polish. “Family Wizotsky?”

Brushing at tears with the back of her hand, she nodded.

“Stefan Zukowski,” he said, introducing himself. “I was the foreman in the tea warehouse. I remember you. You’re the artist.” He shifted his cigarette to the other side of his mouth. “My brother is also an artist. He studied at the Art Institute in Krakow.” The sound of soldiers breaking doors open was getting closer, the wailing louder. “Damned Germans fired me when they took over, gave my job to a Ukrainian. Now I’m a porter.” He crushed out his cigarette. “You shouldn’t be on the streets. Do you have a place to hide?”

She shook her head no.

“Come with me,” he said. Taking a key from a circle of keys he wore on his belt, he inserted it into the door of the rundown house behind him and led them into a dingy ground floor apartment. In the kitchen, he threw back a trapdoor that concealed a root cellar, gesturing at the darkness below. “In here,” he said. “I’ll roll the rug over the opening and put the table on the rug.”

Sofia hesitated. She had never seen this man before, and now she was placing her life in his hands. Seeing her doubt, he smiled. His blue eyes crinkled, but his great mustache looked sad. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I have children, too. We will only get through these times if we help one other.”

She climbed down a creaky wooden ladder into the darkness. It smelled of damp, mold and earth. He handed Shaya into her arms and closed the trapdoor, returning a few minutes later with a loaf of bread and a glass of butter. “Here,” he whispered. “For the little one.”

He closed the door for the last time. Dirt rained down on their heads as he arranged the carpet over their hiding place. She heard the table scraping across the floor, thumping into place. Finally she heard the squeak of the floorboards as he crossed to the door, the ratcheting sound of the key turning the tumblers in the lock, leaving her in utter blackness.

The pounding of soldiers’ fists on doors drew closer, house by house, until it was right on top of them. The sound of many boots booming up the stairs, the crunch of breaking glass and splintering wood, the high-pitched shrieks of frightened children and screaming women grew louder, louder still, until it was over their heads and all around them.

The ground shook, the lock rattled. Now she could hear the steady tramp tramp tramp of hundreds of feet, walking, running, shuffling past the front door, towards the marketplace.

She heard the soft pleading of an old woman, and the sound of blows landing on unprotected flesh. She heard the sound of bodies being dragged across the pavement and the sound of wagon wheels on cobblestones. She could hear the curses of the SS men, the crazed barking of the dogs, the frantic cries of mothers calling for lost children. She recognized the laughing babble of poor Mendel the barber’s son, who had never been right in the head. She could hear Gittel Danielsohn, who’d lost her mind after her husband was killed and her children taken in the first
Aktzia,
singing the
beautiful Danube Waltz and begging the soldiers to dance with her, and the laughter of the soldiers as they encouraged her.

The sounds multiplied, echoing and ricocheting and resounding off the walls of the buildings surrounding the quaint old market square, roiling together into a thunderous whirlwind of noise that rose like one long mourner’s prayer for the Jews of the city of Wlodawa, ascending into the leaden sky.

At the close of the second day, the dim light grew dimmer, slouching toward evening. And in that blue hour when it is dark but not yet night, Sofia heard someone fiddle with the lock, then smash it open.

Heavy footsteps entered the room, leather squeaking. A soldier’s boots. Sofia hardly dared to breathe. Though she couldn’t see Shaya, she could feel him, a warm bundle in her lap, and she shut her eyes and prayed that he wouldn’t choose this moment to speak up in his adorable singsong.

The boots circled the room, opening and closing cupboards, banging on walls to search for concealed openings. They stopped not two feet from her head, stomped on the floor to listen for the echo of hollow spaces. Dust sifted down onto her face. She could feel Shaya stir against her, and her fingers crept across his cheeks and covered his mouth.