Authors: Lois Ruby
“⦠a pass just to go to school.”
I leaned toward him, covering my mouth, and whispered, “What about our REACT assignments? How will we manage?”
“I'll smuggle and lie and sneak and bribe my way out of the ghetto. You, my sister, will stop the work.”
“I won't! I can do all those things just like you can.”
Erich studied me closely for a few seconds and took a sip of the tea we shared. Secondhand tea leavesâfree at Mr. Bauman's café. “For once in your life, listen to me, Ilse. I'm your big brother.” Why couldn't he say,
I love you
? Instead, I heard, “I know what's best for you. They'll have guards planted at every entrance. They're saying that our own men will be drafted as Pao Chia guards. Tell me, Ilse, how is it different from a prison?”
“But our own men, won't they be more lenient?”
“Don't count on it. You've heard the rumors like I have, about the camps in Germany, in Poland, with our men as
kapos
? Who can blame them? They do what they must to survive.”
Yes, I'd heard. Terrible stories trickled down to us. Just rumors, we reassured ourselves. Also, we got news through REACT, which had ears in the German consulate. We knew about the horrible gassings at Chelmno and Sobibor but the rest of those places in Germany and Poland were just
concentration
camps, where many people were crowded together. True, some families were split up and a few people died of hunger or exposure and disease and sheer exhaustion from hard labor. This
was
wartime, after all, but the strong survived. We believed that our concentration in the Hongkew ghetto would be very much like what was happening in the camps of Europe, and that all we had to do was stay healthy, and we'd make it to the end of the war. “At least here in China,” we murmured to one another, “families can stay together for strength.”
At least people still fell in love.
“Erich, do you ever think about being in love, maybe with Tanya?”
“Certainly not Tanya! She's as lovable as a ball of barbed wire. Even her cat has more sex appeal.”
“Somebody else, then. Do you ever daydream about marrying the person you adore most?”
Erich laughed cynically. “Never. We're too young to be in love.”
“We are not!”
“Anyway, love is a luxury we can't afford, like chocolates.”
I lowered my eyes and kept still, but I
knew
that love in wartime wasn't a luxury like chocolates. It was a necessity, like bread, like breath.
And my work for REACT would continue, as long as I drew breath.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1943
Bored and restless after school, we needed something,
anything
, to do before the Hongkew gates were to slam in our faces. Mr. Bauman was kind enough to let us young people twiddle the hours away in his café without spending a fen.
Tanya and the other girls and I looked over the crop of boys who crowded around the table across the room. We had a capsule summary for each one: “Buck-toothed.” “Looks like a rabbit.” “Ugly yellow shirt.” “Never stops talking.” “Name's Hershel, bad name.” “So dumb in school that Miss Klein acts like she doesn't see his hand waving in the air.” “Midget.” “He'll be bald in a couple years.” We giggled with each pronouncement.
And then one day Dovid came into the café, and my heart leapfrogged. Despite the spring warmth he wore a mothy tweed sweater and patched, shiny trousers. An American-style baseball cap, too small for his head, perched atop a mass of dark curls. One curl endearingly fell over his forehead. He needed a haircut; well, didn't we all? Although he sat at the table packed with other boys three-deep, he seemed to be alone, drawing something on little scraps of paper.
All us girls perked up at the scent of fresh blood across the room. We bunched up to compare notes. “Nice hair.” “Funny clothes.” “A melancholy artist.” “Very intense.” “Looks like he hasn't eaten since a week ago Tuesday.”
“But he's a little bit cute,” Tanya said. “Ilse, you're falling out of your chair. You know this boy?”
“He used to be my mother's student,” I whispered.
“Well, he keeps looking over here. Go on, pretend you want to admire his artwork.” The other girls agreed, and Tanya shoved my chair away from the table with her sturdy legs.
He sat at the corner of the table, outside the ring of boys. I passed him with my cup for Mr. Bauman to refill with boiled water. Those eyes, brown as polished wood, recaptured my heart after months of seeing them only in my memory. Slowly inching past him on the way back to my table, I noticed the little tuft of beard had given way to clean-shaven cheeks that were pinkish balls above hollows inflating and deflating like a balloon while he sketched on tiny stubs from Mr. Bauman's cash register.
My teacup clattered as I lowered it to the girls' table with shaky hands.
“Well? Well?” Tanya demanded. The girls all leaned into my circle for the report.
“His eyelashes curl back like with mascara,” which, of course, we couldn't get even if we'd had the money. “I can't tell what he's drawing.”
“Go see,” Tanya said.
“I can't go back. It would look too obvious.”
“You want to end up an old maid? Go.”
The girls all poked and urged me on, but I shook my head.
“Tomorrow, then,” Tanya conceded, in a bargain I was only too willing to accept.
The next morning early, before the rowdy boys' table filled up, I gathered my courage and scraped my chair across the café. Talk about obvious! But I was determined. “Hello, Dovid, remember me, from Mrs. Shpann's?” He nodded and kept on sketching. “We still have your charcoal on our bookcase.” Another nod, no words. “I'd love to see what you're drawing.”
His smile carved a dimple in those sweet, smooth cheeks. He slid one of his drawings across the table and spun it around.
“Amazing!” It was a tiny rendering of the café, down to the curlicues on the ornate coffee urn and the label on a small tin of sugar. “Every detail, just right.”
Dovid slid a square of paper out of the little pile of his work and advanced it toward me, studying my face as I reached for it.
I recognized myself, but the face looked like the
me
I remembered, before the sallow skin, the sunken cheeks, the thinning hair, headaches, a nose too beaked. Before starvation. “I don't look like that anymore, Dovid.”
He snapped it away from me and buried it in his pile.
I'd wounded him. “No, no, I love it!”
“It is the artist's job to see what is not there,” he said.
Then
I
was insulted. So, it was confirmed: I was just as ugly as I suspected.
Dovid Ruzevich played in my mind all that day and half the night. Every scrap of warmth or food or news had to be shared with my friends, of course, but Dovid was an indulgence that was mine alone, better than ice cream. The next morning, even before Erich was awake, I quickly dressed, stole past Tanya's door, and returned to the café.
“So early?” Mr. Bauman teased. “Sit. You're my first customer, so for you I have fresh tea leaves. Someone else can enjoy the leftovers.” He poured steamy water over dry, fragrant jasmine leaves. I watched them swell and drift lazily through the yellowing water. Ah, luxury! I pulled the cup to my face, inhaling the heady aroma.
The door opened, and there was Dovid, in the same clothes despite the gathering heat and with just a hint of stubble on his cheeks, as if he'd been in such a hurry to get to me that he hadn't bothered to shave. My face flushed, and I quickly lowered the teacup. He sat down across from me. Mr. Bauman gave me an encouraging nod as he brought us a second cup of hot water. I spooned tea leaves into Dovid's cup, already mourning the loss.
And so during our last week of freedom, I began coaxing his story out of him. It's what refugees did; it's how we stayed sane. I spoke no Yiddish, or even Polish, but his English had improved enormously, as if he'd been practicing. With an English girl?
“The last time we were together, you told me you're alive because of soccer and some other word I don't know.”
“Yes, Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat.”
“What?! Tell me everything.”
“Be patient,” he teased. “So ⦔ Dovid started slowly, then began racing through the worst of the story, waving his sketching pencil like a baton. “We are millions of Jews in Poland in nineteen thirty-nine. One minute we are under Russian occupation; the next, under German control. Suddenly in our own homeland we are not welcome.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you?” He looked at me crossly. “But you are here with your family.”
“That should make me feel guilty?” I immediately regretted the words.
“Not guilty. Lucky,” he said with a sigh, then jumped up and began pacing the empty café. Mr. Bauman discreetly stepped into his back room and pulled the threadbare curtain. “Nearly every Polish Jew is gone, or crowded into ghettos. The lucky ones, they escape to Russian Lithuania, with Germany pounding at their door.” From the windows: “In Lithuania we cannot live, either, but what choice do we have?”
My tangle of hair was escaping the red ribbon I'd worn for Dovid.
“There we are, trapped in Lithuania,” Dovid said, “maybe ten thousand of us. The Russians do not understand why we want to leave, and the Germans, they do not yet have Lithuania, thank God.”
“Why
did
you want to leave, Dovid?”
“Why? Because survival is better than death.” His words were slow, careful. “Who knows what is the right thing to do? The Russians say we are crazy to want to leave, and since we are crazy, what will they do to us? They will send us to Siberia for the cure.”
“The cure meaning what? Exile?”
“If we live long enough. Death in the frozen land otherwise.”
“And I thought we were miserable here in the damp winters? Human beings can't survive in temperatures like that, can they?”
“Outside, not for more than a few minutes at a time. So night and day we Polish Jews argueâis it better to try to leave? The Russians call this treason. For treason also they will send us to Siberia. Or is it more dangerous to stay in Lithuania and take a chance Hitler will not find us?”
I felt my chest tighten, and to cover up, I scooped some of the tea leaves back into my own cup and got up to pour hot water onto the soggy leaves. I returned to the table, and Dovid went on with his tale as if I'd not even moved.
“If we can scratch together the money, and I can sneak it into the Soviet Intourist office, and if the Russian official does not steal the money and send me anyway to Siberiaâ”
Just then Erich burst into the café. He always arrived like a freight train rumbling into the station. “Thought I would find you here.” He jumped back, startled to see Dovid and me with our heads leaning toward one another across the table, nearly touching, and my finger hooked through the handle of Dovid's teacup. Such an intimate picture we must have painted, like the sophisticated man and woman who'd captivated me in that café so long agoâbut younger, hungrier.
Erich glared at Dovid. “Come, Ilse, we have work to do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1943
Erich and I ducked into the doorway of Ping Low's Apothecary, and he pulled out another letter on the familiar creamy stationery.
May 12, 1943
Mr. Wang Choi Sing
International Agriculture Cooperative
Shanghai, China
Dear Sir
,
I trust my name is known to you, as my late husband maintained vast farmlands in our home province of Hunan. He has recently joined the ancestors, and I am left a widow in my declining years
.
An associate of my husband's has assured me that we might jointly prosper in the enterprise of producing sunflower honey. I, myself, shall not soil my hands with such labors, but those in my employ are loyal trustees. Thus, I should like to order a Shanghai Beehive sent to me immediately at my Foochow Road address for careful perusal. If we are satisfied, we shall increase the order to our mutual advantage
.
As my resources are diminishing, I remind you that time, as always, is of the essence. I shall expect the package by Saturday, latest
.
Cordially yours
,
MADAME LIANG
“Translate?” I said to Erich.
“I have your instructions.” He stuffed the envelope under his shirt. “This letter is the go-ahead that says now's the time to REACT. You're to tail a woman called Beehive.”
“But, why?” I asked Erich as we walked back to our apartment.
“For once, can't you just do as you're told without a bunch of questions?”
“Okay, but I won't even know what to look for unless I know why they want me to follow her.”
“No more questions until we get home. The streets have ears.” So like Erich, suspicious of everyone and everything.
It was a week before we'd have to move, and Mother was in Hongkew still scouting out a place for us to live. At home, Father practiced in his studio-closet. Erich leaned close to me in case Father should stop playing. “She's a REACTor, but they suspect she's also an informer. I don't know any more, so don't ask.”
“Double-crossing us?”
“Don't look so shocked. You can't trust anyone.”
“Not even you?”
“You can trust me.” He handed me a scrap of paper. “Her address. She has a REACT assignment on Saturday, eleven o'clock. Follow her. Get as close as you can, until you're her second skin, but don't let her know you're on to her. Understand?”
“But Iâ”
“
Understand
?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, but I didn't really get it.