CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DZIKA AND STAWKI STREETS. OTHERS FEARED THE umschlagplatz, but it was all right with him. He was going to meet the train. Like the parallel metal bands of track that connected the distant horizons, trains seemed to run through the great moments of his life, from the station at Sufnitz to the umschlagplatz here in the Warsaw ghetto.

And he met the train.

The German hosts herded their parasitic guests through a gate in the barbed wire to an adjacent compound and from there into the cattle cars. Having overstayed their welcome, the guests did not resist; indeed, rather apologetically they accepted their hosts’ impatient directives to terminate their loitering at Dzika and Stawki Streets. Even after the carriages were full, they assented to their hosts’ insistent wish that they continue to enter. For their part, to communicate their seriousness, the hosts shoved, beat, and kicked them. Considering the duration of the guests’ stay, a millennium give or take a century, their forced removal went very well.