“Let Mira sleep,” was the next thing I heard. It was Simon.
“Don’t you want to talk to her?” my mother asked.
“I don’t have much time,” Simon answered.
This wasn’t a dream. My brother was here, in this room.
My eyelids felt so heavy. I couldn’t manage to force them open just yet. Part of me didn’t want to make the effort. I’d much rather fall back into the depths of dreamless sleep than see Simon. But I needed to know why he had come and whether he could help us or not. I ordered myself to open my eyes. But they refused to obey.
“Mira would love to see you,” Mama said.
She didn’t even believe that herself. She knew what I thought of Simon, although obviously she didn’t have a clue that he was the person who had beaten me up.
“No, she wouldn’t,” Hannah said. She hadn’t forgiven Simon, either, for having deserted us in the past few months.
“No, she wouldn’t,” Simon agreed. And I could tell that he wanted to be gone.
“Well, she will,” Mama insisted. “As soon as she hears what you have done for us.”
Now I did open my eyes. What had he done?
Simon was standing beside my mattress holding his policeman’s hat in his hand. He hadn’t even bothered to sit down. As if every second he had to spend with his family was a nightmare. What on earth had we done to be treated like this? Or were we too strong a reminder of all the things he had failed to do for us? Was that what bothered him?
“Mira’s eyes are open.” Hannah had noticed.
Simon looked at me, startled. He was worried that I’d tell the others about him beating me up.
I was eye level with his boots. The leather was covered in blood. It wasn’t mine. He had “only” given me swellings and bruises. He hadn’t beaten me until I started to bleed. My eyes moved up his leg, and I saw that his trousers were caked in blood, too. His coat was buttoned the wrong way—he’d always done that, even as a small child—his dark hair framed his face, which was very pale, indicating that he had been through a lot in the past few hours. He wasn’t injured, as far as I could tell. So where did the blood come from? Who else had he clubbed for the SS besides me?
I didn’t want to be lying on the floor in front of him. Not again. I managed to get up. Everything hurt. My shoulders, ribs, and—most of all—my ankle, which was very swollen. For a moment, everything went black, but I managed to stay upright. Now that I was standing on the mattress, I was level with Simon’s eyes. He was a little man in every sense of the world.
“Hello, Mira,” he said cautiously, waiting to see how I was going to react.
“Hello, Simon,” I answered, and could hardly disguise my anger.
“Tell Mira what you have done for us,” Mama said eagerly.
Whatever Simon had managed to do, she felt sure that it would make me forgive my brother. But he’d have to chase the Nazis out of Poland first.
“Yes, Simon,” I said provokingly—“why don’t you tell us all what you did?”
He looked away from me, ashamed that he had hurt me.
“I got Mama a work permit for Többens’ factory.”
Többens was a German manufacturer making a fortune with the cheap ghetto workforce. He produced coats for German ladies and children and elegant gowns. The firm even made artificial flowers from leftover material to decorate the dresses. No one earned any money at Többens, or anywhere else in the ghetto. All you got in his factory was a cup of watery coffee and a slice of bread in the morning and another piece of bread at night. But as long as you had a job there, you wouldn’t be resettled. Slave labor had suddenly become the best way to survive in the ghetto! Seeing as we were all Mama’s children, the work permit would save our lives, too, according to paragraph 2g).
But there was one thing that made the whole idea impossible: Mama would never be able to stand the conditions at Többens. Working a sewing machine for eleven hours would be too much for her. I should tell him. But would Mama be hurt? On the other hand, we wanted to survive. It didn’t matter if I hurt her feelings.
Simon had noticed me looking at Mama doubtfully, and knew what I was thinking. “The work permit is forged,” he said.
“What?” I was amazed.
“Mamel, a friend of mine, did it,” Simon said. “He is very good. He draws maps for the Germans at their command post.”
“Oh, I bet he’s proud of himself, then,” I said bitterly.
“This pass will save your life,” he said, “and he has asked for nothing.” He said this with a biting undertone.
“So he normally gets paid for this?”
“Of course he does.”
“Oh, of course he does,” I answered coldly.
“And not badly, either.”
“What a nice person,” I replied even more coldly.
“If I hadn’t got us this,” Simon was starting to get angry now, “then we’d all end up…,” he took a quick look at Hannah and decided to hide behind the official German term, too.
“… being resettled.”
He seemed to doubt that the Germans were looking for cheap labor for their fields in the East. Or did he actually know something about the Germans’ real plans? No. No Jew could possibly support a plan to annihilate the Jews. Not even a member of the Jewish police. Take bribes, beat Jews, and follow nasty orders—those traitors could do all of that, but it wasn’t the same as sending our own people to death. If Simon was really sure that the Germans were going to kill everyone they deported, he’d have stopped wearing his uniform ages ago. Or so I hoped.
“Simon is helping us,” Mama confirmed, pointing at the forged work permit lying on the kitchen table. And she was letting me know that we should be grateful and stop accusing him.
She was right. Just now, the best thing that could have happened to me, Hannah, all of us, was Simon being a Jewish police pig. So Papa had been right when he spent the last of his money to get Simon into the police.
If I was benefiting from having a brother who was a pig, didn’t that make me one, too? I felt so ashamed. And I hated it. I wanted Simon to feel at least as ashamed as I did about all the evil things he did to save our skins and his. So I attacked him. “Where did you go with the Germans?”
He looked at Mama and Hannah uneasily.
“Where?” I pressed.
“They have closed my department,” he said. “We are no longer responsible for liaising with the Polish police. We have to help with the resettlement…”
He faltered.
I gave him a challenging look. He still hadn’t given us a proper answer.
“We were rounding up homeless Jews,” he confessed quietly.
I could picture German soldiers and the Jewish police, including Simon, beating the weakest of the weak. The sick, the old, and children. The blood on his boots came from those people.
I started to pray. Yes, suddenly I was praying that this blood hadn’t come from a homeless child. For the child’s sake, but more for Simon. And for me, as well.
Simon swallowed uneasily. I’d managed to shame him.
But it didn’t do me any good.
Simon was suffering because of what he had to do. He was still the poor frightened child. But one armed with a truncheon now.
I didn’t feel sorry enough to want to hug him or anything. I was too disgusted by what he had done. But I stopped feeling angry.
“What work could homeless people manage to do in the East?” Hannah asked suddenly, breaking the silence. “They are far too weak.”
Mama sat down at the table in dismay. She had finally realized that the resettlement was one big lie.
“They…” Simon tried to find an explanation that would save his face somehow without scaring Hannah. “They…”
“… get fed first,” I lied. “There is more food out in the fields for them to eat.”
“They are right at the food source,” Simon confirmed.
Together we fabricated a story for our sister, to stop her being afraid. We lied to her, just the way the Germans lied to all of us Jews to make us behave like obedient children.
Hannah wasn’t completely convinced. I’d never lied to her before today. I didn’t always tell her everything, but I’d never lied. I didn’t want to start acting like a grown-up, but the Germans had turned me into a liar, too. And that drove us apart. I could tell by the way she reacted: She hunched her shoulders and looked away.
“I have to go,” Simon said, and put on his hat. He turned back to Mama. “It won’t be safe to leave the house in the next few days. I’ll bring food.”
“Thank you,” she smiled and stroked his cheek just like she used to do when he still lived with us. He flinched, waved goodbye to Hannah, and nodded at me as he was going out, in a sad, apologetic sort of way. He was sorry about what he’d done to me. And maybe he was sorry about neglecting to help us all these months. He was about to turn away when I said, “Don’t go too far.”
His eyes looked even sadder. They filled up with tears, and he said, “I already have.”