Emilia
Our apartment building lay in Warsaw’s Old Town, exactly in the middle between two definitive Warsaw landmarks—Krasin´ski Square to the west and the Vistula River to the east. The location of our neighborhood had been almost irrelevant to me until my fourteenth birthday, in part because I so rarely left the building—we could have lived on the moon for all I cared. I had passed but never visited Krasin´ski Square, and as Uncle Piotr led the way that morning, I was startled to see a fair looming before me. Street stalls and performers were scattered all around the square, but my gaze was drawn to two massive Ferris wheels towering over everything else. One was marked out of order, but the other was turning slowly while a long line of revelers waited for their turn in the spring sunshine.
It was a beautiful, jubilant sight—painted against a horrifying background. The unmistakable shape of a wall loomed just behind the merriment. At least ten feet tall, constructed from a chaotic mix of unmatched bricks, it was topped with a line of wound barbed wire. I stopped dead in my tracks as I recognized it, realizing that the buildings I could see beyond that wall were the rooftops of homes in the Jewish Quarter.
I had seen that wall before, from different angles, in different parts of the city. But I’d never seen it like this; it was as if the events of the night before had removed scales from my eyes. I tried not to gape as I gazed around the square. Hundreds of people were mingling, and almost every person was wearing clean clothes and a smile. My gaze flitted between the revelers and the wall.
“Come, then,” Uncle Piotr said cheerfully. “What should we do first? Should we buy some flowers? And of course, we need to stop for food—sweets, perhaps? I know how you like candy. And—oh! We must take a trip around the Ferris wheel. Have you ever been on one? I have to say, it’s a lot of fun.”
I couldn’t drag my eyes from the wall. I wanted to clutch at Uncle Piotr’s arm and to point to it and to scream Don’t you see it? It’s right there. What are all of these people doing out here in the sunshine having fun when there are children starving behind that wall right there?
“What is this?” I asked him, through numb lips. Uncle Piotr frowned.
“What do you mean?” he prompted, then comprehension seemed to dawn. “Ah, we have kept you locked up in that apartment too long. This is Krasin´ski Square.”
“But it’s not always like this.”
“No, your birthday falls on Palm Sunday this year. The Germans don’t allow us much freedom to celebrate our faith, but every now and again, they do allow us a glimpse of joy.” Uncle Piotr gave me a bright, radiant smile, and then he chuckled at what he was probably misinterpreting as delighted shock. “Come on, then, little one. Let’s go have some fun.”
I went along with it. I ignored the steady pull of the wall, and I walked from street stall to street stall, behind Uncle Piotr, who seemed determined to spoil me beyond even my wildest dreams. I laughed when I knew he was expecting me to laugh, and I even feigned impatience as we lined up for the Ferris wheel. As the line began to snake its way forward, I told myself the buzzing butterflies in my stomach represented excitement rather than anxiety.
I was nervous about the height—but not because I feared I would fall: I was nervous about what I might be able to see from way up there. The ride was close enough to the ghetto wall that it towered over it, and knowing that the Germans had sanctioned this festival, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was intentional. I could easily imagine some commander delighting in the idea that the Jews trapped within the ghetto might see the huge wheel representing freedoms they had long lost. Life for those of us on the Aryan side was neither comfortable nor free, but I was starting to suspect that comfort and freedom might be highly relative terms.
When Uncle Piotr and I finally took our place in one of the gondolas, and the giant ride lurched to life, he suddenly placed his hand over mine. I looked into his eyes, expecting him to make some joke about holding his hand if I became too afraid, but instead, I saw that he was, for once, deadly serious.
“Please do something for me.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t look that way, okay?” he said lightly, pointing toward the wall. “The ride is fun, but its location is unfortunate. Enjoy the views of the square and any other parts of the city you can see, but don’t look over the wall.”
I searched his gaze. Uncle Piotr, at least within the privacy of our home, had made no secret of the fact that he despised the Germans—but I had known plenty of other people who despised the Germans and still somehow managed to hate the Jews, or who even managed to blame the Jews for the occupation, through some convoluted logic I’d never quite understood.
It occurred to me on that ride that I simply could not bear it if Uncle Piotr revealed himself to be that kind of person, so I refused to give voice to the dozens of questions that immediately popped into my mind. I knew that at least when it came to me, Uncle Piotr had the best of intentions. I had been a stranger to him only months earlier, but I was now part of his family. He wanted to give me a glimmer of hope and, on my birthday, just a tiny glimpse of the childhood I should have been enjoying.
Try as I might to respect his wishes and to keep my eyes focused on our side of the wall, they were drawn back to the Jewish Quarter again and again. I didn’t want Uncle Piotr to catch me looking, and he seemed determined to distract me with a constant commentary on the various landmarks we could see from the Ferris wheel, so I could only steal glimpses here and there.
I saw buildings, not so different from the ones on my side of the wall, but I could also see crowds of people on the street. So many people. I wanted to see those crowds as one mass—one entity I could turn my back on. I told myself I was just a child and that group of people was not my problem at all. I had enough problems, and besides, what could I do for them? I had nothing to offer the Jews trapped behind that wall.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that God was trying to tell me something, because the visual contrasts were a slap in the face. I saw the gray of the cobblestone streets, the black of the tar rooftops, the brown bricks and beige mortar. Even their clothes were dull.
But my side of the wall was a rainbow of color and life. The stalls around the Ferris wheel were bursting with the flowers of early spring—white snowdrops and yellow and purple crocuses, willow twigs with their yellow and white buds, all speckled beneath and around the vibrant green of new spring growth of mature trees. Women wore cornflower blue dresses, and the men wore crisp white shirts, and little old ladies carried umbrellas in shades of green and gold and pink.
As the ride stopped, and as Uncle Piotr stepped off our gondola and extended his hand to support me as I followed, there was a shout and the sound of a gunshot, and then a blood-curdling scream of pain, and another gunshot, and then just a single heartbeat of utter stillness and silence.
And then, a split second later, everyone in Krasin´ski Square went right back to what they were doing. The ride operator encouraged us to enjoy our day. The street vendors went back to selling their wares. The revelers went back to enjoying the spring sunshine.
“I think it’s time for some flowers, don’t you?” Uncle Piotr asked me, his tone forcefully bright. He led me away from the ride to stop at a nearby flower peddler. While Uncle Piotr tried to draw my attention to various flowers, I turned away from him, back toward the Ferris wheel and beyond it.
I did not make the decision to walk toward the wall. But my fingertips soon touched the roughhewn bricks, and I closed my eyes for what surely must have only been a single moment. Sounds swam into focus, sounds of horses and carts against cobblestone, quiet conversations in Yiddish and Polish. I inhaled and caught just a hint of something oppressive. Was it death or sewage or some other hallmark of masses suffering?
I didn’t decide to get involved in helping the Jews. No, it was decided for me, the minute I was born into a household that knew our Polish neighbors, regardless of religion or heritage, were an extension of our family. Perhaps I’d had valid reasons for my inaction before that moment: I was young, traumatized, lost, utterly ignorant. But children younger than I had been involved in both resistance and relief efforts, and I’d seen proof of that the previous night.
“Elz·bieta!” I heard Piotr’s frantic cry behind me, and when I turned to him, his eyes were wild. He took a hesitant step toward me, then stepped back, motioning frantically for me to come away from the wall. I startled out of my reverie and walked briskly back toward him, but I could still feel the rough brick beneath my palms, as if the shapes of the stone were imprinted into my skin.
“What were you thinking?” Piotr hissed under his breath, and when his hand caught my elbow, I felt that he was shaking. “What possible reason would you have for touching it? If a soldier had happened past, they would have assumed that you were trying to help someone get out or were throwing food over the top. You would have been shot. You would have been shot!”
He kept his voice low enough that the bystanders just a few feet away couldn’t hear us, but there was no mistaking Uncle Piotr’s fury and shock at what I had done. I apologized profusely and assured him I didn’t know what I was doing, and then I promised him I would be more careful.
And all the while, in the back of my mind, I began planning my next steps.
“Sara,” I called, as I let myself into her apartment later that evening. With a fat slice of a relatively indulgent poppy-seed cake in hand, I was ready to go to battle with my friend.
“In here, Elz·bieta,” she called back. “Come through, please.”
I found Sara in her living room sitting beneath a lamp. She rested her knitting in its basket, then reached down beside the sofa.
“The birthday girl arrives,” she announced playfully, as she lifted a small box and extended it toward me. I gasped in delight, then swapped the plate of cake for the box as I sat beside her. The box was surprisingly heavy, and I rattled it, trying to draw out the anticipation of what might be inside. I glanced at Sara and found her staring down at the cake, a look of glee in her eyes. She looked back at me, and we both laughed.
“Go on,” she said.
“You, too,” I said, nodding toward the cake.
Sara broke off a piece and popped it into her mouth, then moaned in sheer joy.
“Truda is a wonder,” she said, her eyes alight. “How did she manage this miracle?”
Having eaten two slices of the cake already, I knew it wasn’t all that extraordinary. It was dry and bland and, by prewar standards, barely deserved the title of cake at all. Even so, I understood the lengths Truda had gone to in order to make me a birthday cake, and I well appreciated how rare such a thing was. It had been a day of small miracles. Cake and cut flowers and candy and even a carnival ride, not to mention a calling from God.
“She has been skimming rations for a few weeks, plus...” I understood that a bond of trust between Sara and me existed only by circumstance. She had been forced to trust me the previous night and, as such, I now held her life in my hands. But if things were to progress as I planned, I now needed to demonstrate my trust in return. There was one obvious way to do so. Sara still thought that Truda and Mateusz were my real parents, but I had promised Mateusz that I would not betray that secret, and I intended to keep that promise. Instead, I had to share something else.
“Well, Uncle Piotr occasionally dabbles in the black market,” I said conspiratorially.
“Ah,” she said, but her tone was completely neutral. I scanned her face, expecting to see some kind of reaction, but instead, she pointed toward the gift. “Open it. I’m eager to see what you think.”
I opened the box and drew in a sharp breath as I recognized the objects inside. There was charcoal and oil pastels and pencils and not one but two notebooks—more brand-new art supplies than I’d seen in years. Such a thing would have been impossible to procure in Trzebinia.
“You remembered,” I whispered. I’d mentioned to Sara in passing that I loved to draw but that I hadn’t done so in some time. The truth was I hadn’t been able to bring myself to draw since Tomasz died. Drawing felt like the act of an innocent, childlike version of myself—a girl who had been lost forever with the last remaining member of my real family. But as I opened that gift from Sara, I knew immediately that I would not only use these precious items, I would relish using them. My fingers already itched to pick up the charcoal. “How did you do this?”
Sara gave me a wry smile.
“I, too, occasionally dabble in the black market.”
She set the plate down on her coffee table, and I leaped from my seat to hug her.
“Thank you,” I said, my throat feeling uncomfortably tight. I told myself that I must not cry, that the entire purpose of this visit was to convince Sara that I was adult enough to help her with her secret work. But in this kind gesture, I saw shades of my beloved Alina, who had always encouraged my artistic efforts, and I was almost overcome with relief and gratitude to find that someone in Warsaw finally understood me.
After a moment, though, I pulled myself together to start what I expected was going to be a difficult conversation. I extracted myself from her embrace, moved back to my chair and drew in a deep breath, but as I opened my mouth to ask her if I could help her, I lost my courage at the very last second. My gaze fell upon the half-eaten cake, and my tone was a little manic as I said, “Aren’t you going to finish that?”
Sara laughed and patted her belly.
“I’m stuffed. I couldn’t possibly. You should eat it for me so it doesn’t spoil.”
It was a lie, and an unconvincing lie at that—Sara was so selfless that she seemed determined to share even this rare treat. However, drawing attention to her lie would mean I would have nothing to talk about other than the thing I needed to talk about, and I was suddenly far too anxious to start that conversation, so I picked up the cake and began to toy with it. Then, recognizing that wasting food was an unforgivable crime in our present circumstances, I stuffed little pieces of cake into my mouth to prolong the silence.
This left me in the absurd position of being full for the first time in months, but still eating regardless. After just a few seconds of this, my conscience would not allow me to let the situation persist, and I thrust the plate back toward Sara as I blurted, “You really must eat it. And you really must let me help you.”
Sara blinked at me.
“I told you, I’m full. Really I am. And do you want to help with the knitting? I would love—”
“Not the knitting.” She avoided my eyes, and I drew a deep breath and prayed desperately to sound adult and confident as I said, “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m afraid I really do not.”
We sat there staring at one another in silent battle. For just a moment, I considered the possibility that I imagined the previous night. It had been so late...and it had seemed surreal...
“But...the children?” The words escaped my mouth as a question.
“What children?”
“You...there was a...” I pointed upstairs. “Last night, remember?”
“Last night we unwound this yarn. Then you went home.”
“Yes...but...”
“Elz·bieta, are you well?” Sara’s tone took on a soothing, slightly scolding quality. She went forward and rested the back of her hand against my forehead. “Your cheeks are flushed. You must have had too much sun today. Piotr told me he was taking you to the square. Perhaps it is sunstroke. You really should get home and rest. You’ll feel much better in the morning...less confused.”
She’d almost convinced me, but there was something about her tone that was laden with a hidden depth of warning. My gaze narrowed on Sara’s face as she removed her hand and sat back in her chair. I dropped my voice and spoke again in a rush.
“You had four Jewish children in your bedroom last night. I didn’t dream it and I’m not confused. Sara, I am going to help you.”
Frustration twisted Sara’s features into a scowl. She stood abruptly and caught me by the elbow to drag me up the stairs toward the spare bedroom. Once inside, she slammed the door behind us, and she gripped my upper arms in both of her hands. I had never seen Sara look so fierce, and for a moment I was afraid.
“This isn’t a game! Perhaps you have some fantasy of becoming a heroine here, but that is foolish, childish nonsense. You need to go home, back to your parents, and do exactly as I told you last night and pretend that nothing happened. You’re a child yourself, Elz·bieta. You are too young to get involved in messy business like this.”
I frowned at that.
“How old was the courier? Or was she a guide? The girl I saw in the hallway, I mean,” I said. A raspberry flush stole over Sara’s cheeks.
“Her situation is very different from yours.”
“Was she twelve? Thirteen?” I could see that I was close, if not correct, purely from the guilt on Sara’s face. “Surely you can find some way for me to help?” I looked into her eyes and added bitterly, “I am sitting in that apartment all day, I cannot even go to school. The most interesting thing I’ve done in months has been looking at pictures of bodily organs with you! I am a wasted life, which makes me a wasted opportunity for you and your efforts. I could be doing something...anything. Surely you understand how frustrating that is, given I understand what is at stake?”
“I sympathize with your situation, I really do,” she said sadly, her gaze softening. “But there is no safe way for me to involve you. I hope you understand. I cannot betray your parents’ trust, and I really cannot betray your uncle. He is my friend, and he’s done so much for me over this past year. I know he would never forgive me if I involved you in something like this.”
“I cannot live like this,” I exclaimed. “I cannot live in this nice apartment, living off rations that can be skimmed for cake, in a house that has money, and with my uncle who seems to be able to get any luxury item we can dream of. Not while, just a few blocks away, children are swimming through sewers to avoid starving to death. And I cannot believe that you would ask me to.”
“Things are not so easy for you,” Sara said calmly. “Truda managed to skim enough flour for some cake, but you and I both know that our rations are not generous. But for your uncle, you would only be just getting by, too, and even with his help your family is hardly living the high life.”
“But we are still surviving,” I whispered, as my eyes filled with tears. “Sara, I can’t bear it. Uncle Piotr took me to Krasin´ski Square today, and I saw that wall, and I wanted to tear it down with my bare hands. You must let me help because this feeling—” I pointed helplessly to my chest, trying to explain the outrage that had been boiling away inside me since last night “—it will destroy me if I don’t use it to do some good. Besides, this is not a choice between safety and danger. I’m probably already in danger!” I had said too much, and at her concerned look, I hastily added, “Everyone in this city is. The German cruelty can be so random.”
“All the more reason you should keep to yourself, Elz·bieta.” She seemed to suddenly deflate, her exhaustion from the previous night now written in the deep lines around her mouth and in the gray bags beneath her eyes. “This is a very admirable desire, but it’s impossible.”
“Okay,” I said, feigning sadness. I pulled away and made as if to leave the bedroom. “Well, do you have any suggestions?”
Sara gave me a blank look.
“Suggestions for...?”
“Who I should ask next?” At her frown, I added, “I don’t know anyone else in Warsaw, so if you won’t help I’ll just go down to Miodowa Street, and I’ll ask every passerby if they can connect me with the underground efforts to help the Jews...”
“Elz·bieta!” she groaned in frustration.
“I mean it. If you won’t find a way for me to help you, I will find someone else.”
I could see that Sara was trying to maintain her irritation with me, but in that moment I saw the first glimmer of reluctant admiration in her eyes.
“You must let me think this through,” she said, after a long and careful pause. “And you must understand that if I find something for you to do, it cannot be on the front lines. There is so much to be done, and all of it is heroic, but much of it is behind-the-scenes.”
I had been entertaining fantasies of heroically carrying dying children through the sewers so this was somewhat disappointing, but I would take what I could get.