Authors: Alan Gratz
A bar mitzvah is the ceremony in which a Jewish
boy becomes a man — the first time he reads aloud
from the Torah. Usually all of my school friends and
aunts and uncles and cousins would have come to see
me read in the synagogue. There would have been a
kiddush after the service, with challah rolls, potatoes,
chicken— my stomach growled just thinking about
it. But of course there was no synagogue anymore,
and no challah rolls or potatoes or chicken.
A few hours must have passed before I heard my
father stir. My mother too. I sat up on my mattress and
waited while my father pulled on his overcoat.
I nodded and stood. My mother came to me and
hugged me tight. “Come back to me a man, my Yanek.
Only come back.”
Mother kissed me on the cheek and walked us to the
steel door that protected our rooftop home. She slid
the metal bars back in place when we were through,
and we made our way quietly down the dark stairs of
our apartment building. Tonight there was no snow,
but it was cold. We could see the breath from our
noses. I pushed my hands down into my pockets as far
as they would go and wished I hadn’t outgrown my
gloves.
Father led me through the back alleys again. Once
we turned a corner to find another night stalker, a
Jewish boy carrying a bag of something over his
shoulder— food, I guessed, smuggled through some
hole in the wall — and all three of us gasped. When it
was clear none of us was a Nazi we all hurried on our
way without a word, but we were more cautious even
than before. Our path took us toward the wall, and at
first I wondered if Father meant to take us out. We
climbed into an old abandoned warehouse building
that stood along the wall at Dabrowki Street. Almost
every window was broken and open to the sighing
wind, and the rotted wooden floor had holes in it.
There were stairs at the back, narrow and rickety, and
occasionally missing a tread, and down we went into
the basement. It wasn’t exactly where I had imagined
celebrating one of the biggest milestones of my life,
but I followed along without a word.
There were men in the basement waiting for us. My
uncles Abraham and Moshe, my cousin Dawid, two
more men I recognized as friends of my father, and
three more I didn’t know. One of them held a set of
Torah scrolls in a burlap sack, saved, perhaps, from
one of the ghetto’s synagogues before it burned to the
ground.
The men whispered hello. Ordinarily my uncles
and cousins would have embraced us and talked, but
everyone was too scared of being out after curfew to
say anything more. My stomach grumbled, loud in the
silent basement, reminding me that now that I was
awake I should be finding it some food.
The stairs creaked behind us, and we all turned. My
heart was in my throat. If we were caught down here,
together, with the Torah in hand, I would never
become a man. I would be shot dead on sight. But the
shoes we saw coming down were not the glistening
boots of an SS officer. They were the brown leather
soles of Mr. Tatarka from down the hall.
“Now we are ten men,” my father whispered. He
smiled at me. “And soon we shall be eleven. I’m sorry
we did not have more time for your studies, Yanek.
Just do your best.”
The Torah scrolls were taken out and unrolled so I
could read from them. My Hebrew was rough. Before
the Nazis, I would have been at the synagogue once or
twice a week ahead of time, practicing for this. But of
course that was impossible now. I muddled through,
and if God or man heard anything amiss, neither of
them called me on it.
When I was finished, my father chanted a blessing
over me in the place of our rabbi, who had been killed
by the Germans. He prayed in Hebrew, then spoke in
Polish.
“Yanek, my son,” he said, looking at me solemnly,
“you are a man now, with all the duties of an adult
under Jewish law. You are now responsible for your
own sins, but also for your own goodness. Remember
what the Talmud teaches: Life is but a river. It has no
beginning, no middle, no end. All we are, all we are
worth, is what we do while we float upon it — how we
treat our fellow man. Remember this, and a good man
you will be.”
“I will, Father,” I said. I had waited for this day,
looked forward to it for years. Suddenly it didn’t matter that we weren’t in a synagogue, that we didn’t have
a feast waiting for us afterward. The smile on my
father’s face filled me with pride.
The men all shook my hand and wished me mazel
tov before hurrying off.
“They’re leaving tonight, most of them,” Moshe
told us. “Trying to escape before tomorrow’s Deportation. Seven thousand! Never so many.”
“We’ll survive,” my father told him. “Come to our
pigeon coop and hide with us.”
“Oskar and his river,” Uncle Moshe said. “You
should talk some sense into him now that you’re a
man, Yanek. The man who falls asleep on the
river drowns.”
“Jews of kraków!” the announcement
blared from speakers. “Get up! Get out! Get moving!
Seven thousand volunteers are needed for the resettlement camps!”
The asked-for volunteers had not appeared in Zgody
Square the next morning, and the Germans were not
happy. Just after dawn they drove through the streets
of the ghetto in trucks with big speakers on them,
yelling at us to come out.
“It will be worse for you if you hide!” they called.
“Come out now, and all will be forgiven.”
I didn’t believe them. None of us did. Uncle Moshe,
Aunt Gizela, and my cousin Zytka were all there with
us. They had decided to come hide in our pigeon coop.
So had the rest of my aunts and uncles and cousins.
There were twelve of us, all crammed inside the little shack on the roof. It was too crowded, but there
was no way we would turn them away. Everyone was
afraid of this new announcement, and we had seen too
many smaller Resettlements to take it lightly. At least
all of us pressed together in the coop helped keep us
warm — we couldn’t start a fire, or the smoke would
give us away.
A gunshot rang out.
Crack!
A woman screamed.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
went a machine gun. I
scrambled to the little window in our coop, where
we’d hung a blanket to hide us.
“Yanek, no,”
my mother whispered, but I had to
see. Across the street was a building that had been
turned into a hospital, and I watched through a hole in
the blanket as the Nazis pushed sick people out the
door and down the steps. Some of them were too weak
to walk and collapsed on the pavement. They cried out
piteously.
“What’s happening?” Moshe asked.
My heart was in my throat but I managed to answer.
“Sick people, old people — they’re taking them out of
the hospital.”
“They can’t be taking them to the work camps or
for resettlement,” Moshe said. His voice was quiet, but
urgent. “They would never take the sick and the old
away to work. They’re taking them to die — and anyone else with them!”
As I watched, the Nazis walked up behind the
sick people from the hospital and started to shoot.
Bodies fell on bodies, a great pile of them in the street.
They fell with terrible screams.
I pulled away from the window, unable to watch
anymore.
“No,” I said. “They’re not taking them away.
They’re shooting them right here.”
Not even Uncle Moshe had anything to say to that.
My mother reached for my hand and pulled me back
to her. We sat like that for hours, listening to the gunshots and the screams in the street, my younger cousins
huddled next to their mothers, weeping on and off
quietly.
I was terrified just like they were, but I wasn’t going
to cry. I was a man now, I reminded myself. I was a
man, and I wanted to
do
something. Something to
stop the Nazis. To save my family. I asked myself over
and over again what I could do to help, but I had
no answer.
Shunk-shunk.
The big metal door to the roof rattled— someone was trying to come through! I held
my breath, listening.
Shunk-shunk
.
Shunk-shunk
.
Would the steel bars hold? Would whoever was on the
other side start shooting? I watched my mother’s eyes
grow wide again, watched her chest heave as she
breathed faster and faster. She looked like she might
scream, which would give us away for sure. My father
hugged her close, holding her face to his shoulder.
Shunk-shunk. Shunk-shunk
. I waited for a gunshot,
waited, waited— but then, for whatever reason, the
rattling stopped and whoever it was went away. We
held still, none of us daring to breathe, waiting for
someone to try to come through again, but an hour
passed, and then another, and another, and no one
came back.
That evening, the trucks drove through the streets
again with a new message for us.
“Jews of Kraków! Unless everyone comes to Zgody
Square for selection, this ghetto will be liquidated! If
you do not come out of your houses by six p.m., every
one of you will be shot on sight when we find you!”
“
‘Liquidated,’
do you hear that?” Uncle Abraham
said. “Liquidated, like it’s a business decision. They
would get rid of us like so many old pairs of shoes.”
“We should go,” Moshe said. He stood. “You heard
them. They will kill us if we don’t.”
“They will kill us if we do!” I said.
“They said they will only liquidate the ghetto if
we do not come out. By hiding, we seal our death
warrant.”
“No!” I said. I could feel my pulse racing. “We can’t
trust them! It’s a trick. I know it is. It’s a trick to get us
to come out of our hiding place!”
“You’re still a boy, Yanek, even if you’ve had your
bar mitzvah. Listen to me, all of you. If we stay here
and are found, we’ll be shot,” Moshe argued. He
opened the door to the coop. “We have to go now. If
we do what they say, they may let us live.”
My uncles and cousins started arguing about it.
Dawid agreed with Moshe. Abraham wanted to stay.
My aunts argued too, and the younger children started
to cry. I looked to my parents to see what they wanted,
but my mother’s face was still buried in my father’s
shoulder, and he was comforting her. Tears welled up
in my eyes. I wasn’t a boy. Not anymore. Not after my
bar mitzvah. Not after a year in the Kraków ghetto. I
knew I had to be a grown-up now, for my parents.
Foreveryone.
I pushed past Uncle Moshe and marched to the big
metal door. I yanked off the steel bars and flung the
door open with a
clang
.
“There!” I said. “Go! If you want to leave so badly,
if you want to hand yourselves over to those killers,
then do it right now! But I’m not. I’ve seen what the
Nazis think of us. How they treat us. We all have. So
they kill us if they find us here. If we go down there
on our own they will most certainly kill us! At least if
we hide out here there is a
chance
they won’t find us.
That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
My outburst shut everyone else up. They all stared
at one another without speaking until my father rose.
“Yanek speaks with the wisdom of the prophet
Isaiah,” he said softly, then quoted, “‘Come, my
people . . . and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.’” He
cleared his throat and looked around. “Mina and I are
staying too.”
One by one, the others agreed, until even Uncle
Moshe sat down and was quiet. I closed the door and
slid the steel bars back in place, making sure they were
tight. Night fell, and with it came more gunshots,
more screams from the streets below. The Deportation
lasted for two days. But on the third day, when the sun
rose, there were no more trucks in the streets, no more
gunshots, no more Nazis. They did not liquidate the
entire ghetto, as they had promised. Once their quota
was filled, they went away again.
Seven thousand Jews had been collected and taken
away to die, but we were not among them.
after the deportatIon, the waIlInG of old
women could be heard from nearly every window
and door in the ghetto. Seven thousand husbands and
fathers, wives and mothers, brothers and sisters
and children had been taken to their deaths — or so
we heard from survivors.
Rumors were whispered in the streets: that shootings in the woods were too much trouble for the Nazis.
Now they were gassing Jews to death in trucks and
boiling their bodies to make soap, or so it was said.
The thought of that made my stomach turn. There
were more Deportations, but for a time they were
smaller selections, like those that had come before,
and my existence in the ghetto — it wasn’t a life, just
an existence — went back to what it was. Those who
could work were not taken away, and so, reluctantly,
my father and I showed up for work details every
morning. I was assigned to a tailor shop, and the work
was manageable, but it seemed as if my former life —
school, friends, time to play and read— belonged to
another world entirely.
One afternoon after work, I made a fateful decision.
I went by a friend’s house instead of going directly
back to my family’s rooftop hideaway. If I had gone
straight home, if I had gone out to get our rations with
my mother and father, things might have turned out
very differently than they did.
The streets of the ghetto were empty when I finally
headed home that day. The emptiness could only mean
one thing— another Deportation. When the Nazis
came looking for Jews to deport, all the people who
lived on the streets found places to hide. They had to,
or they’d be taken. Men and women with homes to go
put their heads down and hurried there by whatever
back alleys and side streets they could. I skirted down
Limanowskiego Street, ready to duck behind a bustedup piece of furniture or hide in a pile of old rags if I
heard the Nazis coming.
I was almost home when I heard the bark of German
officers around the corner and the shuffling of shoes
on pavement. I scanned the area for any place I could
hide, but there wasn’t one. I squeezed myself into a
corner on the other side of a short set of stairs to an
apartment building and tried to disappear into the
shadows.
The Nazi officers marched by in the street in front
of me. All they had to do was turn their heads to see
me, but they kept their eyes forward, followed by a
ragtag group of Jews who were being deported. I
watched them go by, a few hundred or so, their heads
bent low and every one of them silent as the grave.
Wait — there. In the middle of the crowd. I froze.
Was that my mother and father?
I stood on my toes, trying to see into the mass of
people, but the angle had changed. I was standing in
plain sight now, my head and shoulders well over the
top of the short flight of stairs, but I didn’t care. Were
my parents in that Deportation? Maybe I’d just seen a
couple who resembled them.
I wanted to scream. I almost ran to the column of
marching Jews to call my parents’ names, to find out
if that was really them. But the sight of the German SS
officers bringing up the rear stopped me. If my parents weren’t being marched right now, I’d be caught
and never see them again. But if it
was
them —
As soon as the prisoners and their guards were past,
I dashed out from behind the stairs and ran all the way
home. I burst through the door to our apartment
building and raced up the stairs and pounded on the
big metal door to our rooftop hideaway. The bars were
still over the door, which was good news. That meant
someone was still up there. I prayed it was my mother
and called through the door to her as I pounded away.
Behind the door I heard the steel bars being lifted and
I stopped knocking, my heart racing. The door
opened, and my cousin Sala stood behind it, tears running down her face.
My knees went weak, and I closed my eyes against
the truth that was coming.
“Yanek,” Sala said. “Yanek, thank God you’re all
right.”
“Where are they?” I demanded, even though I
already knew. “Sala, where are my parents?”
“I’m so sorry, Yanek. The Nazis grabbed them as
they were coming back from buying bread. I saw them
taken, right there in the street in front of the
building.”
I staggered through the door and into the pigeon
coop that had been our home, our sanctuary, for more
than a year. It was totally empty.
I fell to my knees and sobbed. Sala put her hand on
my shoulder, but I could barely feel it. Mama.
Tato
.
They were gone. My family was gone. I felt like my
heart was being wrenched out of my chest.
The emptiness of the pigeon coop weighed heavy on
me. I was the only one left. How would I survive?
Why
should I survive?
Maybe I should just go and give
myself to the Nazis
, I thought with bitterness, with
defeat.
No
, I thought.
I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my
sleeve. My parents would not want that for me. In the
place of my pain, I felt the stirring of determination.
I would not give up. I would not turn myself in. No
matter what the Nazis did to me, no matter what they
took from me, I would survive.
I was thirteen years old, and my parents were gone.
I was all alone in the world, but I would survive on
my own.