Authors: Alan Gratz
German soldIers fIlled the streets of
Kraków. They marched in their smart gray uniforms
with their legs locked straight and thrown out in front
of them the way ducks walk. It was silly, but eerie at
the same time. There were so many of them, all marching in time together, their shiny green helmets and
polished black jackboots glinting in the sun. Each of
the soldiers wore a greatcoat and a pack on his back,
and they carried rifles over their shoulders and bayonets at their sides. I felt small in my little blue woolen
jacket and pants and my simple brown cap. There were
tanks too — panzers, they called them — great rumbling things with treads that clanked and cannons that
swiveled on top.
We came out to watch. All of us: men, women, and
children, Poles and Jews. We stood on the street corners and watched the Germans march through our
city. Not all of Poland had fallen, the radio told us —
Warsaw still held out, as did Brze´s´c, Siedlce, and Lodz.
But the Germans were our masters now, until our
allies the British and the French arrived to drive
them out.
“The Nazis won’t be so bad,” an old Polish woman
on the sidewalk next to me said as I watched them. “I
remember the Germans from the World War. They
were very nice people.”
But of course she could say that. She wasn’t a Jew.
For weeks we tried to live our lives as though nothing had changed, as though an invading army hadn’t
conquered us. I went to school every day, my father
and uncles and cousins still went to work, and my
mother still went to the store. But things were changing. At school, the Polish boys wouldn’t play soccer
with me anymore, and no Poles or Germans bought
shoes from my father’s store. Food became scarce too,
and more expensive.
Then one morning I walked to school and it was
canceled. For good, I was told. No school for Jews.
The other children celebrated, but I was disappointed.
I loved to read— any and all books. But especially
books about America and books about doctors and
medicine.
I wandered the streets, watching the German soldiers
and their tanks, the breadlines that stretched around
the block. Winter was coming, and the men and women
in line held their coats tight around them and stamped
their feet to stay warm. When I went home at lunchtime, my father was there, which surprised me. He
usually ate lunch at work. Uncle Moshe was with him
at the table. My mother came out of the kitchen and
worried over me.
“Are you sick, Yanek?” She put a hand to my forehead. “Why are you home early from school?”
“It’s closed,” I told her, feeling depressed. “Closed
for Jews.”
“You see? You see?” Uncle Moshe said. He turned
to my father, looking worked up. “First they close the
schools. Next it will be your shoe store. My fur shop!
And why not? No one will buy from us with Nazi
soldiers telling people ‘Don’t buy from Jews.’”
“But if they close the shoe store, how will you make
money?” I asked my father.
“Jews are not to make money!” Moshe said. “We
have ration cards now for food. With
J
s all over them.
J
for Jew.”
“This will pass,” my father said. “They’ll crack
down for a time, and then things will get easier
again. It’s always the same. We just have to keep our
heads down.”
“Yes,” Moshe said. He tapped the open newspaper between him and my father. “Jews must keep
their heads down and not look Germans in the
face. We can’t speak unless spoken to. We can’t walk
on the main streets of our own city. We can’t use
the parks, the swimming pools, the libraries, the
cinemas!”
Jews couldn’t go to the movie theaters? No! I loved
the movies! And the library too? Where would I get
books to read if I wasn’t allowed to go to school either?
I hurried to Moshe’s side to see what he was talking
about. There, in the paper, were “New Rules for the
Jews.” My heart sank. It was true: no more parks, no
more libraries, no more movie theaters. And there
was to be a nightly curfew for all Jews, young and old.
We were to be in our houses and off the streets by
9:00 p.m.
“And armbands. Armbands with the Star of David
on them!” Uncle Moshe said. “They are marking us.
Branding us like the cattle in those American pictures
Yanek likes so much! Next they’ll be taking all our
money. Mina, tell your husband.”
“What would you have us do, Moshe?” my mother
said, putting her hands on my father’s shoulders. “We
haven’t the money to leave. And even if we did, where
would we go?”
My father reached up to hold my mother’s hand.
“We must not lose faith, Moshe.”
“See how easy it is to keep your faith when the
Nazis take it away along with everything else,” Moshe
told him.
My father smiled. “Let them take everything. They
cannot take who we
are
.”
I sat down at the table to eat, and my mother brought
out a small tureen of tomato soup, a loaf of bread, and
a wedge of cheese.
“So little?” I asked.
“It’s the rationing. The groceries are all closed,”
mother said.
“We’ll make do,” my father said. “We were spoiled
before anyway.”
I hadn’t felt spoiled, but I didn’t say anything. I just
wished the Germans hadn’t taken my lunch.
I ran from my bedroom, frightened. “What is it?” I
cried when I saw my parents in the living room. “Is
our building on fire? What do we do?”
The synagogue was the place where we worshiped
every Sabbath and where I was studying for my bar
mitzvah. I leaned out the window and saw it down the
street, engulfed in flames. My father hurried to put his
coat on over his pajamas to go and help put out the
fire, but a loud
crack!
from the street brought me and
my parents to the window again. Another man wearing a coat and pajamas like my father lay dead in the
middle of the street, a pool of darkness spreading
beneath him, glinting in the streetlights. A German
officer stood over him, his pistol still aimed at the
dead man.
“Jews are reminded that under the new rules, anyone caught outside their homes after curfew will be
shot on sight!” the officer yelled.
My father stood in the sitting room, his eyes on the
door. My mother put a hand to his chest, then her head
to his. Some unspoken communication passed between
them, and in a few moments my father took his coat
off again and sent me back to bed.
Podgórze, our neighborhood, was being walled up.
From Zgody Square to the Podgórze market and down
along Lasoty Place. The Nazis were walling us in.
I went out to see it. It was nearly three meters tall
and made of brick. At the top it had rounded caps like
the tops of tombstones. The wall stretched from one
building corner to another, right across the street, cutting us off from the rest of Kraków. In the buildings
that were part of the wall, they bricked up the windows and doors so no one could escape. There were
only three ways in: a gate at Zgody Square, another at
the market, and another on Lwowska Street.
I ran from gate to gate to gate, taking it all in.
Podgórze was now the Jewish ghetto. All the Poles
there who weren’t Jews had to move out, and all the
Jews who lived outside the ghetto in Kraków had to
move
in
.
I watched them moving in. Wave after wave of them.
Huge groups of Jews climbing out of trucks and going
down Lwowska Street. There were men and women
and children, families, teenagers, grandparents. They
all wore Star of David armbands like us. Some of them
wore the uniforms of the jobs they’d had too: policemen, postmen, nurses, trolley conductors. There were
no jobs for Jews anymore. No jobs besides cleaning
the toilets of German soldiers. My father and uncle
had lost their shops, had their inventories seized by
the Nazis, just as Uncle Moshe said they would.
The new Jews carried their luggage with them—
everything they owned in the world— and they
looked around with big, worried eyes at the buildings
and streets of their new home. They were probably
hoping that things would be better here than wherever
it was they came from, but everything that had happened over the last year had taught us that things
always got worse.
There were a few empty flats left by the departing
Poles, but not nearly enough for all the new people.
My parents came out onto the street and invited a family to come and live with us: the Laskis, a family of
three with a seven-year-old boy named Aron. We gave
them my bedroom, and I slept in the sitting room.
Other families did the same.
Then, as the days went by and more and more Jews
poured into the ghetto — not just from Kraków now,
but from the villages and towns outside the city — we
took in a second family, the Rosenblums, and a third,
the Brotmans. The Germans even made it a rule: Every
flat must hold at least four families. I no longer had my
own bedroom, nor did my parents. The children had
one room, and the adults were divided between my
parents’ bedroom and the sitting room, which became
another bedroom. Only the kitchen was shared by all.
There were fourteen of us in a flat that had been cozy
for three.
All I ever wanted to do was get out of the house and
go play with my friends. It was far too crowded at
home. But my parents wouldn’t let me go outside for
fear I’d be taken up in a work gang. Any time the
Germans had work to be done — like scrubbing toilets
or helping build the wall — they grabbed Jews off the
street to do it. Father was taken all the time. Sometimes
mother. The Nazis even took people outside the ghetto
to work elsewhere in Kraków. Sometimes they never
returned.
“This will all be over by summer,” my father told
us. “We’ll just have to make do until then.”
He was my father, and I wanted to believe him, but
I wasn’t so sure anymore. It was January 1941. The
Germans ruled Kraków. I was twelve years old. And
for the first time in my life, I had begun to doubt
my father.
I had always thouGht It would be fun to
have a brother or a sister. That is, until I spent a few
months living in my little apartment with five other
kids. The bickering, the fighting, the whining —
you’d think that soldiers in the streets, and synagogues
burning, and days with nothing more to eat than
moldy potatoes would be more important than who
got to play with the doll or who got to sleep by the window, but you’d be wrong. The nights were the worst.
So I pulled my pillow and blanket out into the hall
whenever the Rosenblum girls were arguing, which
seemed like all the time now. I had to sleep on the
floor, but I didn’t mind so much. I would be sleeping
on the floor here or there, and at least for now I had
the whole hall to myself. If we had to take in another
family, I thought bitterly, I’d probably have to share
the hall too.
I was sound asleep one night when a creak in the
hall woke me up. In the darkness, I saw the shape of a
person.
“Who’s there?” I asked, feeling my heart in my
throat.
“Shhhh, Yanek. It’s me,” my father whispered. “I’m
sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
Father had his coat on. He was going outside.
“Where are you going?” I asked him. “I want to go
with you!”
“No. It’s dangerous to be out after curfew.”
“Then why are you going?” I was scared. I scrambled out from under my blanket. “Are you going to
leave the ghetto?” Anyone caught trying to escape the
ghetto was shot on sight.
“No, no. Go back to sleep, Yanek.”
“No!” I wanted to help. My father had begun to
look so tired lately. The work gangs and the lack of
food made him look like he’d aged ten years in two. “I
can help be your eyes. To look out for guards. I want
to come with you!”
“Shhhh, Yanek. You’ll wake everyone else.” My
father sighed. “All right. But not another word. We
must be silent, you understand?”
I nodded and hurried to put on my coat. When I
was ready, we slipped out the door and down the
stairs. I had never been out this late before. The stairwell was dark and full of shadows. My heart still
leaped at every little sound, even with my father there.
My father led me down the stairs like we were going
to the building’s furnace in the basement, but instead
we went out through the back door, into the alley
behind our building. Snow fell in big, thick flakes,
muffling everything. It was so quiet you could hear
the flakes hitting the snow that was already on the
ground.
Tick. Tick. Tick tick.
I followed my father through the silent alley. Our
footprints left tracks in untrodden snow. I looked
behind me, suddenly worried that we were leaving a
trail that would be easy to follow. But the falling snow
was already covering our tracks. I prayed for more of
it, even though more would mean new work details —
for my father and other Jewish men — to clear it in the
morning.
We had to cross at Krakusa Street, which meant we
would be out in the open. Down the block, a German
soldier in a greatcoat, scarf, and hat cupped his hands
to his face to light a cigarette. My father put a hand to
my chest, and we flattened ourselves against the wall
in the shadow of an apartment building. I watched the
German soldier breathe out a long cloud of smoke.
The red ember of his cigarette glowed in the darkness.
Where was he from? What was his name? Did he have
a family? Children, like me? Did he hate Jews the way
Hitler did? Had he ever killed a man?
The Nazi rubbed his hands together, stomped his
feet to clear the snow and cold from them, and walked
around the corner, out of sight.
“Now,” my father whispered, and we hurried across
the street, our feet crunching so loudly in the quiet
night air I thought everyone on the block must hear
us. I’d crossed that street a hundred times — a thousand times — but it had never felt so wide, the other
side so far away. When we reached the alley across the
street we stopped, leaning against a wall again while
we caught our breaths and listened to see if anyone
had heard us. The only sound was the falling of the
snow.
Tick. Tick. Tick tick.
My father led me a short way on, and I began to
realize where we were going: Uncle Abraham’s bakery! The Nazis had let them keep it to bake bread for
the soldiers. As we pushed on the door to go inside,
something caught: A towel was stuffed into the crack
along the floor. As soon as we were inside, I understood why.
Bread
. The wonderful, beautiful smell of bread!
The aroma alone made my stomach growl. I had
learned to live with hunger, but now that my body
knew there was fresh baked bread to be had, it could
barely contain itself. I shook with anticipation. My
father replaced the towel under the door, and we made
our way down the dark corridor to the ovens. Uncle
Abraham and Aunt Fela had covered every window
and door with towels, sheets, blankets, anything that
would block out the light — and the smell.
“Oskar!” Uncle Abraham said to my dad when we
found them. He hugged my father, and I ran to where
Aunt Fela was pulling racks of bread from the oven.
“And I see you brought a helper,” Aunt Fela said.
“Hello, Yanek.” She smiled at me, but I only had eyes
for the bread. Golden brown loaves that glistened and
steamed in the cool air. I felt my mouth water.
Fela laughed. “Take one.”
“
After
we work,” my father said, and my heart burst.
How could I possibly wait? He turned to my uncle.
“What can we do? Are you firing both ovens?” my
father asked.
“Only one for bread,” Uncle Abraham said. He
opened the second oven to show it was empty. “In this
one, we’re burning wet wood, to help cover the smell
of the bread with the smoke. We weren’t able to save
enough flour to bake in both ovens all the time anyway. We must make it last. Another month? Another
two? Another year?”
“Spring,” my father said. “The British and the
French will be here by then.”
Uncle Abraham shrugged. “It may be the Russians
get here first. The peace can’t last.” Seventeen days
after Germany had invaded Poland from the west, the
Soviet Union had invaded from the east. Poland was
split right down the middle, and the Germans and
Russians had promised not to fight each other. For
now. “In the meantime, we’ll bake when we can. But if
the Nazis find out . . .”
“Come, let’s get to it,” my father said. “Yanek and I
will feed the fires.”
We worked into the wee hours of the morning—
Father and I feeding wood and coal into the ovens,
Uncle Abraham making dough, Aunt Fela pulling
those delectable loaves from the racks and putting
them in sacks.
“We must get you back before light,” Uncle Abraham
said at last. “Here. Take three sacks apiece. That should
be enough to sell on Krakusa Street, plus one sack for
yourself.”
A whole sack of bread, just for us! I almost moaned
at the thought of such a feast.
“Moshe is coming by tomorrow to pick up sacks to
sell to the families on Wegierska Street,” Abraham
said. “And Dawid and Sala tomorrow night, to sell to
Rekawka Street.”
“How much per loaf?” father asked.
Abraham shrugged. “Five zloty, perhaps.”
Five zloty! A loaf of bread usually cost no more
than half a zloty!
“I hate to be so mercenary, but the price of flour has
gone up too.”
“You can still buy flour?” Father asked.
“There are boys who have already found holes in
the wall, ways to get out. They can buy things on the
other side. For a price,” Aunt Fela said.
“These new Jews, they have more money too. They
can afford it,” Abraham said. “Now go, before it’s light.”
“Enjoy your bread, Yanek,” Aunt Fela said. She
kissed my forehead, and Abraham and my father
hugged each other good-bye.
When we left, it was still dark outside, and still
snowing. There would be more patrols soon, and the
ghetto would soon be waking. There was no time to
waste.
“Once more then, Yanek, to home. And then we
shall have fresh bread for breakfast. How does that
sound?”
“Delicious,” I said.
Father put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.
“We just have to survive the winter, Yanek, and then
everything will be better. You’ll see.”
I still worried he was wrong, but fresh bread made
me forget all my troubles. For a little while, at least.