Roman
“I feel your hatred sometimes, Roman. I want you to know that I understand why you feel that way, and I forgive you for it.”
Samuel had found himself with a free afternoon, and he and I had decided to call upon the street vendor on Zamenhofa Street, to thank her for her help over the past few weeks. She had saved vegetable scraps for us consistently since that first day I visited her, passing them to Dawidek or me when we came after work, but this was the first time Samuel had been able to speak with her personally. While they were hardly thriving, Mother and Eleonora were both alive, and I had a feeling that might not be the case but for those scraps.
Now, Samuel and I were returning to our apartment, running a little later than we should have and scurrying to make it back behind our door before the seven o’clock curfew. We had been walking in silence until Samuel’s breathless statement. I looked at him in alarm. His expression was set in a stiff mask, and he stared ahead, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me.
“Samuel, no! Why would you say such a thing?” I protested.
“We both know exactly why.” He shrugged. “It is my fault you are here.”
“It is their fault we are here,” I said flatly.
“Yes and no.”
We walked in silence again for almost a block while I tried to understand how to talk about this. It was not something he and I had addressed before—an unspoken truth that I did not even think about unless I could find no way to avoid it. As such, I hadn’t collected or sorted my own thoughts on the matter, and now that Samuel had brought the murky issue from the shadows into the light, I was too confused to reply.
“Your mother wanted to flee,” Samuel reminded me. “I convinced her to stay.”
“You did what you thought was best.”
“Then she wanted to get you false papers. She wanted you to go into hiding with your school friends. But I dismissed that idea, too. I was so sure we were best off staying together.”
“I wouldn’t have gone anyway, Samuel. The only blessing in our current situation is that we are together.” We were still scurrying along the streets, both studiously avoiding eye contact. “I don’t blame you for any of this,” I said unevenly. “I could never blame you.”
“You could have escaped, Roman. You don’t deserve to be here.”
“No one deserves to be here!” I exclaimed, stopping abruptly as my hands curled into fists. Samuel turned back to me, first to look around in alarm that I might have drawn attention to us, and then to give me a pained, miserable frown.
“I just meant...” Samuel, so wise and calm and hardly ever lost for words, trailed off. He raised his hands in defeat, then shrugged sadly. “I just meant to say that you could have avoided all of this. You could have hidden in plain sight outside of these walls.”
For once, the ghetto seemed silent all around us. I stared at him, desperately trying to figure out both how to end the conversation and how to resolve it. I hated talking about this, almost as much as I hated that Samuel had been suffering from this incorrect assumption.
“It breaks my heart that you think I...” I drew in a sharp breath, then, almost squirming with awkwardness, I said, low and fast, “I love you. I do hate, but it’s not directed at you. Never at you.”
“You are my first son, Roman. You are the boy who taught me how to be a father. I love you, too.”
My eyes were stinging with unshed tears. We were late, and we needed to run, but after a moment I’d been squirming through and desperate to end, I found a moment I was desperate to linger in. I wished I had the words to express so much to Samuel—how much he meant to me, how grateful I was to him—but my throat felt tight, and I knew that if I tried to say those things, I’d wind up weeping. Instead, I kept my gaze fixed on the pavement ahead of us as I admitted hoarsely, “I don’t know how to keep going sometimes. This is all too much. I worry that I’m not strong enough.”
“We just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, son. When everything else has been taken from us, all we have left is each other, so we remain true to ourselves and look after one another.” He cleared his throat. “What else is there to do? The bitterness would kill us, otherwise.”
Bitterness. I tasted it on my tongue even as he said the word. That captured the toxic feelings in my gut perfectly, but the worst thing was Samuel was more correct than he knew.
The bitterness was killing me, and every day the poison became more potent.
My mother met Florian Abramczyk in a park on a hot summer’s day when she was nineteen, and the way she told the story, she laughed in his face when he asked her out on a date. She was certain her parents would kill her for dating a Catholic boy, but Florian was charming and persuasive, and by the time she and her friends left the park that day, she’d agreed to meet him the following weekend.
Their romance bloomed over summer, and by the time her parents found out about Florian in early autumn, Mother was already besotted. But my grandparents were every bit as horrified as she had feared they would be, and they threatened to throw Mother out of the family home. The story goes that she broke up with Florian but fell into such a black mood that after several weeks, her friends convinced her to reconnect with him. My father proposed the minute he saw her again. They married soon after, and I was born twelve months after that.
My grandparents were livid right up until they held me in their arms, at which point all was forgiven, even if it was never forgotten.
I was four years old when Florian died after a short bout with what was probably stomach tumors. My memories of him faded with time, but I always knew the legend of him—mostly because, for years after his death, my mother spoke about him so often I took the threads of those stories and stitched for myself new memories of our family life together. Florian was strong and brave and handsome and so clever: a lawyer and a self-made man who had risen above his circumstances as an orphan and supported himself with part-time jobs even as he studied at university. His commitment to the Catholic faith was absolute—sick or well, busy or free, he never missed Mass or confession or finding some way to volunteer in support of his congregation at St. Kazimierz each week. Mother used to tell me that the most important things in Florian’s life were her, me and anyone or anything associated with that church.
Florian died at twenty-five years old, just months after he had put a down payment on a house for us and just as his career began. It wasn’t long before my mother and I were in dire financial straits. My grandparents tried to help, but my mother was also from a humble background. There was only so much they could do.
The only person in our lives who had the means to help us was Samuel. Mother and Samuel had been friends since childhood, and he’d been on the periphery of our family for as long as I could remember. When Florian first fell ill, Samuel had promised him that whatever happened, Mother and I would be cared for.
Samuel was a man of his word.
At first, I was comforted by the reliability of his visits. If Mother was sad, Samuel knew how to cheer her up. If she was worried, he knew how to ease her fears. If the pantry was empty, he would often visit with a box of food, and he’d always include sweets for me.
I had a front-row seat to the shifting tone of their relationship over time. At first, I was confused when their gazes began to linger or when Samuel was suddenly giggling like a child when my mother made little jokes intended to amuse me. One evening I found them sitting on the couch together holding hands as they listened to the wireless radio. I climbed up onto Mother’s lap and pushed them apart so I could sit between them.
When I was six, my mother told me she and Samuel were going to marry. We moved into Samuel’s apartment in the Jewish Quarter, but I continued to attend a Catholic school, and she and Samuel went out of their way to ensure I was still active in my father’s congregation at St. Kazimierz, just as Florian had wanted.
Even once we were walled into the ghetto, I still periodically attended Mass—there were thousands of Jewish Catholics trapped within the walls, and many still worshipped in one of the three Catholic congregations that operated inside. And, back when we were allowed, my family would observe the Jewish holidays, and I’d join in those occasions, too. I liked the diversity of our family life. I loved that my mother and Samuel had chosen to honor Florian’s wishes to raise me in his faith’s tradition, but I loved the richness and the rhythms of Jewish culture and religion, too. I took Communion, but my Kennkarte identity card was yellow and stamped with a J to indicate that I was a Jewish man. I wore the compulsory Star of David armband on my arm with pride, not the shame the Germans would have had me feel.
Samuel was right that Mother wanted us all to run before the wall went up, and even once we were trapped, she argued fiercely for me to try to escape on my own. If a German soldier saw me walking down the street on the Aryan side of Warsaw, they might never have looked twice, and even if they did, their first likely action would be to check that I was circumcised. I wasn’t, simply because my mother and Florian had decided to raise me in his faith’s tradition, rather than hers.
But Samuel and I had been determined that I should stay with the family, and even as conditions worsened within the ghetto, I never regretted it. In one sense, I was a prisoner by choice, perhaps out of stubborn pride, perhaps out of loyalty to my family but, mostly, out of sheer terror at the thought of being separated from them.
At the end of the day, that was my worst nightmare—not the trials of the ghetto.
I would endure torture and starvation and even death if it meant I could stay with my family. There was nothing more important to me in the world.