Emilia
Sara returned from her visit to the ghetto one day, hours earlier than expected, and she was obviously distressed. Her shoulders were slumped forward, and her gaze seemed fixed on the floor. She took her seat on her side of the desk and began to sort through paperwork, but I knew her routine well enough to know she wasn’t doing anything productive. She was mindlessly going through the motions, and I knew her mind was entirely elsewhere.
“Bad day?” I asked after a while. She looked at me as if I’d materialized out of nowhere.
“Sorry, Elz·bieta. I didn’t even greet you.”
“That’s okay. You look...tired.”
Tired was a polite word for how she looked. She was visibly wrecked, but she’d only share why when she was ready. To my surprise, her eyes filled with tears, and she looked back to the desk. I looked away, unsure of what I should do or say.
“I was going to evacuate a child last week,” she whispered. “He was four years old, and he had the cutest little smile you’ve ever seen. I sent his little brother out first. The little one was unwell, and I figured the older child could have some more time with his mama before...well, before. But today, I went back for the boy, and he was—” Sara broke off abruptly. She reached to retrieve a small handkerchief from her handbag, wiped her eyes and blew her nose, then finished weakly, “I was too late.”
“He died?”
“He is gone.”
The familiar sound of Matylda’s heels against the hardwood floor in the hall grew louder, and I looked up to see her there, with a small folder in her arms.
“Those documents you asked for,” she said quietly, but then she closed the door behind herself, and her carefully neutral expression slipped into one of desperate grief. “Oh, God, Sara. You’ve heard?”
“Yes. The little boy on Dzielna Street was deported this morning,” Sara murmured.
After that, it was as if the two women forgot I was in the room. I sat in silence as they talked, shocked and bewildered by what I was hearing. Their words washed over me—words that should have made sense, but in context, they seemed impossible. Roundup. Umschlagplatz. Thousands upon thousands. Loaded onto trains and then gone.
“Andrzej said that it was mostly random today—anyone who appeared incapable of significant labor...those who don’t have a work permit, the sick, the weak or infirm or elderly or...” Matylda’s eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head fiercely. “The young. So many of those deported today were street children. They were easy to find and incapable of resistance.”
Those last words hung in the air, and I tried to imagine what it all meant. I still knew so little about the ghetto. But I could tell by the gravity in Matylda’s and Sara’s voices that whatever happened that day was horrifying on a new level.
“Where did the trains take them?” I asked uncertainly.
“No one knows for sure yet,” Matylda said abruptly. “But there have been rumors for some time that the Germans planned to deport all the Jews from the ghetto to execute them.”
“What?” I whispered, looking to Sara frantically, hoping she’d protest this, but she simply looked to the floor. “All of them? But...”
“It is too terrible to believe, I know,” Sara murmured.
“If the rumors are true, this will happen more and more,” Matylda said. “We will go to rescue children and find that those children are already gone. What happened today was a nightmare, but it is going to be a daily nightmare, and you are fooling yourself if you do not believe it will escalate. And who knows how long they will allow us to use our permits to come and go? Sooner or later, they will seal the ghetto off completely—it is a miracle we’ve had access for this long. Mark my words, every risk we do not take now will be a stain upon our conscience for the rest of our lives. We need bolder action.”
“What more can we do?” Sara asked unevenly. “There is so much to balance. We have exploited every excuse we can. Our team simply cannot make more trips past those checkpoints. It will arouse too much suspicion.”
“Do you agree with me that every child counts?” Matylda asked Sara, her voice low and steady.
“You know I do!” Sara exclaimed.
“Do you?” Matylda pressed, then her gaze shifted to me.
“She is too young.”
“Many of the couriers are even younger, and yet we rely on them every day.”
“This is different! Elz·bieta is...”
“Is what? Is not Jewish, so is not expendable?”
“How can you say that to me, after everything I’ve done?”
“It is one thing to risk your own life. I know that you would welcome death because it feels to you as though you have nothing left to live for. No, the greatest sacrifice for you would be to risk your friend. That’s why I am asking you—how much do you want to help the children in the ghetto? Because you allow her to sit here with your busywork when she could be making a real difference in the field.” Matylda raised her eyebrows at me. “Well, Elz·bieta?”
“I don’t understand what you want me to do,” I said uncertainly.
“The couriers are already in danger,” Sara blurted, pressing her palms down onto the desk and leaning forward, as if to convey the urgency of her argument. “Whether or not they are leading children through the sewer or sleeping in their beds in the ghetto, their fate is already sealed. It is different with Elz·bieta. She is a child, and she is already safe.”
“No one is safe in this country,” Matylda said dismissively.
“I’m not a child. I’m fourteen,” I started to protest, but my voice was weak and wavering. Sara waved her hand to silence me.
“I will not betray your parents by allowing you to join us in the field!”
“How noble of you,” Matylda said bitterly. “You value the opinion of this Catholic couple more than the lives of potentially dozens of Jewish children.”
“That is so unfair.”
“You want me to smuggle children through the sewer?” I asked. Wasn’t it exactly what I had wanted in the beginning? Now, the very thought of putting my life on the line for strangers left me feeling physically ill. I went weak with relief when Matylda shook her head.
“That would be a waste. You have more valuable skills that we could utilize. You are Catholic, no?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know your prayers?”
“Of course I do.”
“If you could spend a little time with each child, getting a head start on their Catholic lessons and practicing their Polish, perhaps we could shift at least a few more straight into foster homes to avoid the bottleneck in the convents.”
“But I would still go into the ghetto with you?” I said uncertainly. Matylda nodded.
“With Sara, I think.”
“But how?”
“My contact will issue you a permit. You will march right through the checkpoints. It is almost as safe for you as sitting at this desk.”
“Don’t lie to her, Matylda,” Sara said fiercely. “If you’re going to ask this of her, then at least tell her the truth.” I looked to Sara in confusion, and her gaze pleaded with me. “Walking through those checkpoints will be the most terrifying moments of your life, Elz·bieta. Every day brings new danger, especially now. And if our mission is ever discovered, you could be captured and tortured...even killed. I can’t ask you to do this.”
“Every other person who knows our real mission is contributing and active in the fight. Elz·bieta here discovered your secret and proved she can be trusted.”
“She is fourteen years old,” Sara said defensively. “Besides, the work with the soup kitchens is important, too.”
“Of course it is. But it is not urgent in the same way that thousands of children at risk of being murdered is urgent,” Matylda said fiercely. Both women fell silent, and the only sound in the room was Matylda’s ragged breathing. Her face was red, her eyes wild and her fists clenched against her thighs. She drew in another sharp breath, and then she said, “She could sit at the youth center, in the back room Andrzej uses for his meetings. You could accompany her in and out, but while you do your home visits, she could sit with children to help prepare them. Besides, could she not smuggle in just a handful of bread beneath her clothing that might keep a child going for a day or two more? Could we not fit her with one of your brassieres and have her smuggling more typhus vaccine in or, for God’s sake, cyanide pills?”
“Cyanide pills?” I repeated, feeling the color drain from my face. “Why would the Jews want cyanide pills?”
“Sometimes, the only mercy one can offer is a quiet death,” Matylda murmured. My stomach dropped as I considered this. My father had not died a quiet death. My brother had not died a quiet death. Would I have had the courage to help them achieve this, if I’d had the power? I pictured myself sneaking into the ghetto with Sara, my pockets stuffed with precious pills. My father and my brother would have been so proud.
“I’ll do it,” I announced.
“I knew you would,” Matylda said, and she patted my hand, pleased. She glanced at Sara. “I’ll organize the permit. Please find her some more suitable clothing to wear.”
Matylda closed the door behind her, leaving Sara and me alone at the desk. I glanced across a stack of paperwork and found her staring at me, her eyes filled with tears.
“To do this would be to betray your parents and your uncle. To do this would be to betray their trust in me.”
“What is the worse sin?” I asked her carefully. “Betraying their trust or allowing children to die?”
She pursed her lips, then shook her head in frustration.
“You will probably die if we do this. Do you understand that? To Matylda, it is a simple case of math because she has reduced the complex morality of what we do down to its most basic form. She would do anything to save more lives. There is no risk that is too great for her to take because she has nothing to lose. I am in the same boat—my family is already gone. I do this because when I am caught and when I am killed, there is no one left to grieve me. That is not the case with you! Even if you do survive, the things you would see inside that ghetto would haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“I have seen the cruelty of the Germans with my own eyes,” I said bitterly. “Nothing you could show me would surprise me.”
“Darling child, I am sure your journey has not been easy, but there is a depth of suffering in the ghetto that even I did not realize was possible.”
“Isn’t that all the more reason that you should let me help?”
I could tell that Sara was still deeply disquieted by the idea, but in the end, she agreed to take me in with her. That afternoon, I received my first dose of the typhus vaccine, and Matylda contacted her friend to arrange my pass.
A week later, I left home at seven with Sara as I always did. We made our journey across Warsaw in silence, and then when we arrived at the offices, I followed her into Matylda’s office.
As I often did, I wore my hair in a braid that day, but the first thing the women did was unwind the braid, leaving my long hair wavy. Matylda teased the hair at the front of my head and pinned it high above my crown, fanning the rest out around my shoulders. I had never worn makeup before and was so excited I could barely sit still as she drew around my eyes with a dark pencil and then filled in my eyebrows with a lighter shade. Finally, she painted my lips with a soft red lipstick, and Sara handed me a bag.
“Get changed in the bathroom,” she said heavily. “And then we will go.”
The outfit Sara had found for me was more grown-up than any of my clothing. There was a brassiere, with thick padding sewn into the cups, and a black-and-white polka-dotted shirt with large buttons down the front, paired with a neat gray skirt that fell to my knees, and a pair of flat leather shoes. I could barely believe the woman looking back at me in the mirror was really me. I looked several years older, but that wasn’t the only transformation. I looked like a proper professional woman, like Sara or Matylda or any of the other social workers in the department. When I walked back into Matylda’s office, she nodded in satisfaction.
“Perfect. You could easily pass for seventeen or eighteen. If anyone asks, you explain that you are Sara’s apprentice. Understand?”
Sara stood reluctantly and slipped her bag over her shoulder, then took a step toward the door.
“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked them frantically. “Are you going to tell me what to say or do?”
“The main thing to remember is that when we are walking to and from the youth center, do not leave my side. Hold on to me if you must,” Sara said and sighed. “It is very crowded in there—incredibly crowded. If you lose me, you will never find me again, so make sure you do not lose me.”
“That’s it?”
“When you get to the checkpoint, hold yourself with confidence,” Matylda murmured. “The guards will check your papers and your permit. If you are confident, they will wave you through. You mustn’t look nervous, and you must be very careful not to panic.”
“Don’t panic,” I repeated, suddenly aware that my palms were beginning to sweat. I wiped them on the skirt Sara had given me. “Okay. What else?”
“Everything else you will have to see with your own eyes,” Sara said flatly, then she glanced at Matylda one more time. “I hope to God you know what you’re doing.”
As we walked toward the checkpoint, I fixed my gaze on the sign above it. Typhus Infection Area. Authorized Passage Only. I had been nervous as Sara and I made our way there from the office, but it was quite a pleasant kind of anxiety; a mild adrenaline rush, combined with curiosity and excitement that I was finally—finally—about to do something brave. I wondered if my father and brother were looking down on me, chatting with the saints about the extraordinary young woman I had become. I wondered how Alina would react when I one day traveled to England to find her and told her about my courage.
“Get your pass ready,” Sara said, dropping her voice. “And your papers.”
My papers. I had them with me as I always did, but I so rarely left the apartment and I’d never had to show them. But in all of the excitement about my epidemic-control pass and this trip to the ghetto, I had completely forgotten that I was living under a false name, and that my identity papers were false identity papers. They looked realistic enough, but would they pass intense scrutiny? The worst thing was I had honored my parents’ insistence that I not trust Sara with this information, and she had no idea that we were about to pass through a German checkpoint with false paperwork. I made a sound of pure panic in the back of my throat, and without breaking stride, Sara whispered under her breath, “Head high. Be confident. You insisted you could do this, and if you panic now, I swear to God I will throttle you.”
I sent up a series of increasingly frantic prayers as I walked, but by the time we reached the checkpoint, my hand was shaking violently.
“Sara,” one of the guards said, his voice warm in a way that made my stomach flip over unpleasantly. “You have brought a friend today.”
“Good morning, Captain Fischer. This is my apprentice, Elz·bieta,” Sara said. She was polite but firm and surprisingly cool with the guard. “Elz·bieta, show Captain Fischer your pass, please.”
I moved to extend my hand, but then Sara snatched the pass and my papers from it and handed them to the guard.
“She looks nervous,” he said mildly, glancing between my paperwork and my face. At this, my stomach dropped, and I felt the blood drain from my face. I couldn’t believe I had already aroused suspicion. Suddenly, the guard barked out a laugh. “I’d be nervous, too, going in there with those filthy animals.”
He handed the papers directly back to me, then turned his attention to Sara.
“Let me check your bag, Mrs. Wieczorek,” he said, and Sara fixed a tight smile on her face and handed him her medical bag. He seemed to delight in delaying us, shifting through the contents of her bag piece by piece, checking every item, regardless of how innocuous it was. This whole process could have been completed in seconds—her bag was mostly empty—but somehow, Fischer drew it out, and given that my anxiety was already bending time, I soon felt as though we had been standing there for hours. Sara waited patiently, not so much as breaking a sweat. When he finally returned the bag, he turned his attention back to me.
“Will you be visiting us again?”
“She will,” Sara answered for me.
“Let her speak, Sara,” he said, taunting her almost playfully without breaking eye contact with me.
“I—” My voice was so hoarse that the word escaped as a squeak. I cleared my throat, then remembered Matylda’s words. I raised my chin and squared my shoulders. “Yes, I will be, sir.”
He waved us through, without another word. We walked a few feet past the checkpoint, and a sensory wave crashed over me. The scent of human waste and body odor and rotting flesh was so thick I could barely believe anyone could breathe it and survive. On the other side of the road, an elderly woman lay flat on her back. Her skin was yellow and gray, her mouth slack, her eyes closed. People stepped over her body as if it wasn’t there.
“Eyes forward,” Sara said briskly.
“But—”
“Keep your damned eyes forward.”
I was seeing a whole new side to Sara: hard, focused and determined, her strength evident in every aspect of her posture and her expression. I had never before thought about the kind of courage and strength it must have taken her to risk her life every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Regardless, it immediately made sense to me that she would become hardened. To face the inhuman, one must become superhuman. I had wanted to be heroic, just like my brother, just like my father, just like Alina. As my eyes drifted back to that woman’s corpse, I realized how foolish I had been and how utterly, horrifically out of my depth I was.
I was about to confront a level of suffering that could not be aided by any of my efforts, and no matter how successful my attempts were, it would never be enough. To achieve anything at all, I would now have to pass that checkpoint twice a day and look right into the eyes of people who were damned and knew it.
“I don’t think I can do this.”
The words were hoarse and uneven, and my stomach turned over as I said them. Sara grabbed my upper arm and pushed me backward, steering me around several people. She pushed me hard up against the glass door of an apartment, and it rattled with the impact.
“You have a pass,” she hissed, her face close to mine. “You wanted to help. Now you have a moral obligation to follow through.”
“What if I can’t?”
At that, she pulled me away from the front of the building and pushed me to face the street. Sara’s hands gripped my arm so tightly I knew I would bruise, and she shook me. She stood close behind me and whispered in my ear. “All of these people are going to die. Every child you can see right now is going to die. You are one of a handful of people who can do something for at least one of these children. I am telling you right now, Elz·bieta—they are trapped here, but you can leave. I can march you right through the next checkpoint, and you can go home and pretend you were never foolish enough to insist that you could help us.”
That sounded perfect. I stared at a passing child, and my conscience prickled at me. Sara released me, then turned me gently to face her.
“But if I do, I know that you will never live with yourself. Not now that you know.”
I blinked at her, trying to shake off the fog of shock settling over me. Images flicked through my mind of that terrifying encounter with the guard, and I wondered if Sara’s entry to the ghetto was that tense every single time.
“The guard,” I blurted. “Do you know him? Did you know he would search your bag?”
“He is a vile sociopath,” she said, releasing me. “He has taken a special interest in me, and I go to great lengths to avoid encounters with him. We rotate the checkpoints we use to enter and exit and generally I manage to avoid him, but every now and again, like today, I am unfortunate enough to meet him.”
“Do you have anything in your bag that you shouldn’t?”
“There is a hidden compartment in the bottom,” she admitted. “Today, there is a loaf of bread and six vials of the typhus inoculation.”
“I’m glad I didn’t know that when we came in,” I whispered, my stomach churning again. Sara sighed and pulled me close for a hug.
“Are you okay?” she asked me.
“Not really.”
“Well, pull yourself together. We have work to do.” She reached into her bag and withdrew two small fabric bands. It took me a moment to recognize the shape embroidered upon them, but when I did, my eyes widened.
“The Star of David?”
“Yes. When we come into the ghetto, we wear the armband.”
“But we aren’t Jewish.”
“We wear it in solidarity with those who are. It shows that they can trust us.”
She extended the armband toward me. I stared at it anxiously.
“What if the Germans see us wearing these?” I whispered.
“You are scared to wear it, aren’t you? In case someone thinks you belong in here?” Sara asked me. I nodded, and she shrugged and pointed to the street behind us. “Good. It gives you a taste of how they must feel. Now, let’s go.”