Authors: Alan Gratz
1942 came, but the brItIsh dIdn’t. nor dId
the French. They were too busy fighting the Germans
in the west. The radio talked about the fighting in
Denmark and Norway and Belgium and the Netherlands, but since it was a German station, they always
said they were winning. Uncle Moshe said we couldn’t
trust anything we heard, but he listened to every word
anyway, just like the rest of us.
All I cared about was getting out of our crowded
house for some freedom and fresh air, but my parents
were still worried I’d be snatched up by the Nazis.
The snow was still thick on the ground, with more
falling every day, and Jews were put to work shoveling
it off the streets. The Nazis also took Jews away to
work in Kraków’s factories . Rumor had it some of the
truckloads of Jews never came back, but nobody knew
what happened to them. My parents didn’t want to
take any chances one way or another, so I had to stay
in our building at all times.
I took my ball into the hallway outside our apartment and practiced kicking it against the wall until
mean old Mrs. Immerglick across the hall came out
and yelled at me to stop. I was just about to go downstairs to the basement to play when I heard a scream
from one of the lower floors. Then footsteps. Lots of
footsteps. A door smashing. More screams.
I ran back inside our flat. “Mama! Mama!” I called to
my mother. “Something is happening in the building!”
Everyone staying in our apartment came together in
the sitting room. We listened as the screams and
crashes grew closer. I felt sick. I wished my father were
there with us, but he had gone out to stand in line for
our vegetable rations.
THUMP THUMP THUMP
. Someone pounded on
our door, and we all jumped.
“Open up, on authority of the Judenrat!”
Everyone looked to my mother. It was our flat, after
all. But she just watched the door with big round eyes.
My heart was racing. What should we do? What
could
we do?
“Mama?” I said.
THUMP THUMP THUMP.
“Open the door or we’ll break it down!” said
another voice, this time in German. A Nazi.
“Mama,” I said, “if we don’t open up, they’ll
shoot us!”
My mother stared at the door. None of the other
parents made a move.
I had to do something. I hurried to the door and
unlocked it, and a German officer and a Judenrat
police officer pushed past me down the hall. The
Judenrat were the Jews the Nazis put in charge of
the ghetto, and they had special police officers who
had to take orders from the Nazis.
“When we tell you to open the door, open the
door!” the German officer told the adults. The families huddled together, hugging one another tight. “Do
you have jewels? Gold? A radio?” he demanded.
My mother didn’t answer. She just stared at the
Nazi and trembled. He was getting madder, I could
tell. The officer took a step toward my mother, and I
spoke up.
“In the kitchen!” I said.
The German turned to look at me with his cold blue
eyes, then nodded to the Jewish policeman, who carried a sack.
“Your valuables,” the officer said. “Now. Or you
will all be taken away.”
Someone screamed across the hall. Old Mrs.
Immerglick and her family were being dragged away
by German soldiers. Her son, a man my father’s age,
had blood running down his forehead.
“Give it to them!” I yelled. “Give them anything
they want!”
The other families in our flat scrambled to give the
Nazi officer everything they had squirreled away: little
bits of jewelry, a pocket watch, a handful of zloty. The
member of the Judenrat came out of our kitchen with
his sack stuffed with more than just our radio and went
into the bedrooms, looking for anything more of value.
The German officer pulled the necklace from my
mother’s neck, and twisted her wedding ring from her
finger. She flinched when he did it, but she didn’t say
a word.
“This flat can stay,” the German officer said, pocketing my mother’s jewelry. “But next time, open the
door more quickly, or we will send you to the east
with the rest.”
“Yes, sir. We will, sir!” I said.
The two men left, and we all stood frozen, listening
to the shouts and sobs above us and below us. Out on
the streets, two big gray military trucks pulled up, and
Jews from our apartment building and all the buildings around us were herded into them by German
soldiers. They carried nothing with them. No suitcases, no extra clothes, no food, no personal belongings.
Wherever they were going, they would have to do
without.
Something clattered in the hall outside. The doors
to our flat and the Immerglicks’ apartment were still
open. I could see an overturned table and lamp in their
flat, but nothing more. Why had the Immerglicks and
the families living with them been taken, and we
hadn’t? The officer said it was because we gave them
our valuables, but the Immerglicks had a radio and
jewelry and zloty, just like us. The Germans had taken
the Immerglicks for no more reason than that they felt
like it.
A shot rang out in the street, and we all jumped
again.
“Yanek,” Mr. Rosenblum whispered. “The door.”
I glanced at my mother, but she was a million miles
away. Her eyes were focused on the rug at our feet, her
face empty of emotion. I don’t know if she had even
heard the shot. I tiptoed down the entrance hall and
closed the door, flipping the lock with a
click
. It didn’t
When the trucks in the street were full, they pulled
away. We never heard where they went. My father
could have been on one of them, for all I knew.
My mother sat at the table, her mind still elsewhere.
At this time of day, she would usually be in the kitchen,
preparing whatever rations we had for lunch, but that
was no use now. Our cupboards had been cleared out
in the raid. We had nothing to eat.
The other families retreated to their rooms to see
what had been taken, and what was left. The Rosenblum
girls wailed like they were trying to outdo each other
in volume, so I slipped out into the hall. The door to
the Immerglicks’ flat was still open, and someone was
inside. It was Mr. Tatarka, from down the hall. When
he heard the
click
of the door behind me he whirled.
One of the Immerglicks’ nice cushioned sitting-room
chairs was in his hands. He opened his mouth to say
something, got flustered, then hurried out past me. He
took the chair with him.
I walked the hallway on my floor, looking in at the
empty rooms. Four flats, sixteen families, all gone.
Only two had their doors shut — us, and the Tatarkas.
Five flats were empty on the floor above us, but only
three on the top floor. Maybe the Germans got tired
of walking up all those steps.
I went back to the stairs, and realized for the first
time that there was another set of stairs going up, even
though this was the top floor. I’d never had any friends
on the top floor, so I had only gone up once or twice
in the past to run an errand. I stared down the stairwell, listening for a new invasion of Germans, but
everything was quiet and still. I climbed the extra
flight of stairs.
There was a big steel door at the top. I opened it a
crack and looked outside. The roof! This door led out
onto the roof! How had I not known this was here?
But then, even if I had known, my parents would
never have let me come up here. Not in the past, when
things like bedtimes and homework and safe places to
play had been important. None of that mattered now,
and I pushed my way outside and stood on the roof of
our building.
It was flat and covered with gravel. Pipes and conduits stuck up out of the roof here and there. The
roof’s edges, about two feet tall all the way around,
were plastered with black tar. Strangest of all was a
small wooden shack built up against the big brick
chimney. It had a thin wooden door, and when I went
inside, I found heaps of garbage and feathers and bird
droppings. A pigeon coop! Mr. Immerglick’s pigeon
coop, probably. When I was a little boy, all I knew
about the old man who lived across the hall was that
he loved pigeons, but I had never imagined he kept a
coop on the roof. The pigeons were all gone now, just
like Mr. Immerglick; he died a year before the Nazis
came. But this shack on the roof . . . if it was repaired
a little, cleaned up, maybe had some electricity running to it from the power lines that came into the
building from the roof . . . My mind was racing.
I ran back downstairs as fast as I could and burst
into my flat.
“Mama!” I cried.
I found my mother in the kitchen, hugging my
father. He was alive!
He broke away from her when I came running in,
worried.
“What is it, Yanek?” he asked. “Are they coming back?”
“No! No. I want to show you something I found.
Come quick!”
My parents followed me up the stairs, walking when
I wanted them to run. Finally I pulled them out onto
the roof and showed them the pigeon coop.
“Don’t you see? With a little work, we could
live here!”
“Leave our flat?” father asked.
“Just the three of us,” I told them. “It’s so crowded
downstairs. Here we can have a space all to ourselves.
We can scrub the floor and the walls, clean it up. And
I can wire up a light— the light from my projector!
And a hot plate, for cooking on. There’s no bathroom,
but we could always go back downstairs for that.
And in the winter, we’ll have the chimney to keep
us warm.”
“I don’t know, Yanek,” my father said.
My mother hadn’t come inside the coop. Instead,
she stood just outside, staring back at the big steel
door that opened onto the roof.
“We can bring up chairs,” I told my father. “And a
mattress, and —”
“Bars,” my mother said. It was the first thing I’d
heard her say since the Nazis burst into our flat. “Can
you put bars . . . on the door?” She stared at it, but I
could tell her thoughts were still downstairs, reliving
the invasion of our home.
My father came out of the coop and put his arm
around my mother’s shoulders.
“Yes, Mina. We will fix up the coop and live here,
and we will put bars on the door. Yanek and I will
see to it.”
We gave our flat to the Rosenblums. The Brotmans
were already moving into the Immerglicks’ apartment
across the hall. All the empty flats in our building
would soon be overflowing with families again as
more Jews were marched in through the gates. But
for a short time at least, we would all live like normal
people
again.
While my father and I worked to clean the coop,
my mother sat on the roof and sewed hidden pockets
into the linings of our coats. Inside them, she hid all
the money and valuables we had left. She never said
another word though, all that day.
Father and I found four heavy steel bars in the basement. By sundown, we lifted the last of them onto the
door to the roof. They slid into place so we could take
them off to go out, but so that no one from inside the
stairs could push through.
“There,” I told my mother. “No one will be able to
break in ever again.”
We still stood in line for our rations and my father
and I were sometimes pulled off the street to work outside the ghetto. But each day we returned to our little
sanctuary on the roof and slid the steel bars down tight
to protect us. Mother began to talk again, and to smile,
but every now and then I would catch her staring at the
door to the roof, and I knew what she was thinking.
The home invasions continued without warning,
slowly bleeding everything of value the ghetto still
hoarded. And once a week— on the Sabbath— the
Nazis would conduct “Resettlements,” when they
came and took more people away. Thousands at a
time, pushed into trucks and taken to villages “in the
east.” Some who were taken escaped and sneaked back
to the ghetto, and they told stories of camps where
Jews were worked to death. My father told me not to
listen to the rumors, but we were still careful to bar
the big steel door at the top of the stairs every night,
and every time we heard the cries and screams of a
new Resettlement we huddled in fear.
I was almost thirteen years old now, and it was hard
to remember any other life— except for my daydreams of food.
Bigos
stew, with meat and mushrooms
and cabbage. Roast chicken. Cucumber salad. Pierogi
filled with potatoes, cheese, and onions, fried in butter. Cheesecake, apple tarts. I would have traded a
week’s worth of rations just to have another pot of my
mother’s delicious tomato soup. With each passing
day I grew thinner and thinner, until hunger was my
constant companion. I longed for nighttime, and the
blessed relief sleep brought. The only time I didn’t
think about eating was when I was asleep.
One cold February day, the director of the Judenrat
called for a ghetto-wide meeting in Zgody Square, and
my father and I went to hear what he had to say. The
director was not a popular man. The Judenrat was
hated throughout the ghetto for working with the
Nazis. But any man the Nazis assigned to the Judenrat
who refused was shot or hanged, so I didn’t see
what choice they had. Some of the Judenrat police
enjoyed their new jobs too much, it was true, but
there were others who tried to do what the Germans
told them without making things worse for their fellow Jews.
The square was crowded, but not everyone in the
ghetto was there. Not nearly. The director could tell
this too. He checked his watch one last time, and bent
forward to speak into the microphone. “When I call
for a meeting, all of you must come!” he told us. “Tell
your neighbors. Hiding away will not help!”
I glanced nervously at my father.
“We’re afraid we’ll be taken away!” someone yelled.
“Or shot and killed in the street!” someone
The director signaled for everyone to settle down.
“My friends, I come to you with a terrible request, but
one which I have no choice but to accede to. The
Nazis have ordered me to give them seven thousand
Jews, to be deported from the Kraków ghetto tomorrow morning.”
The crowd came alive with murmurs and sobs and
shouts. Seven
thousand Jews!
I thought, trying to
comprehend a number so big. There had been Resettlements going on all the while, but nothing on this
scale. Never so many people.
“We can do nothing about this! Seven thousand
people
will
be deported! But we can choose who will
go and who will remain.”
“The Germans need good, healthy workers here in
the ghetto,” the director said.
“You call this healthy?” a man cried. “I haven’t
eaten meat in a year!”
Others in the crowd shouted angrily that they were
starving. I nodded, feeling my own hunger pangs.
“If we prove ourselves useful to the German war
effort, they will take fewer of us away. They will keep
us here, and keep us alive!” the director said. “We
must therefore think carefully about who we send
away, and who remains. We must give them those who
cannot work.”
More murmuring among the crowd. “Who can he
mean?” I asked my father. Everyone in the ghetto
worked. Even my mother had been taken to the factories when she was caught out on the streets.
“My friends,” the director said, “I must reach out
my arms and beg: Mothers and fathers, give me your
children!”
The crowd in the square erupted with rage. Angry
shouts were raised from every mouth. Fists shook in
the air. An empty green bottle flew through the air
and shattered at the base of the stage where the director stood. I was scared but I felt angry too. I held on to
my father’s arm.
“They go to a better place!” the director said, ducking a rock. “The children will be sent to resettlement
camps!”
“Work camps!” someone near me yelled.
“Death camps!”
another person cried.
“I am trying to save lives!”
the director roared. “Do
you understand? Which is better, that forty thousand
of us remain, or that the whole population perish? We
must choose!”
“They can’t do this,” I told my father. “Why does he
get to choose who goes and who stays?”
The reality was starting to hit me: I was going to be
sent to a camp. I was going to be sent away from my
mother and father. Away from my home!
The crowd yelled and argued with the director,
surging toward the stage. My father put his hands on
my shoulders and steered me away. “Come, Yanek.
Let’s go.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “
Tato
, how can he
ask such a thing?”
“Because the Nazis have promised not to take him
and his family, and people will do anything to protect their families. He should know that better than
anyone.”
“I don’t want to go! Don’t let them take me,” I said.
I could feel myself trembling, but I didn’t want to let
on just how deeply terrified I was.
“They won’t,” my father told me. “I’ll protect you.”
He smiled. “Besides, tomorrow you will no longer be
a child, will you, Yanek? Do you think I’ve forgotten
it’s your birthday?”
To be honest, I had thought he would forget. Mother
too. There was nothing to mark the days now except
the Sabbath, and we had to observe it in secret, anyway. But I knew. Tomorrow was my thirteenth
birthday — the day I would officially become a man.
“Your mother and I have said nothing because how
can we possibly hold a bar mitzvah for you? If we’re
caught celebrating it, we’ll be killed.”
I nodded. I’d been looking forward to my bar
mitzvah for as long as I could remember, but now it
wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t.
“Still,” my father said like he could read my mind,
“we will celebrate it.”
“But how?”
“Tonight,” Father told me, “go to sleep in your