Krakow, 1942

We looked for him every day at three. A perilous hour, three o’clock: it was the time when all the tasks I could think of to fill the long day had been completed, but there was little prospect of anything to eat. Every day we waited while the messenger crossed the Vistula on his bicycle from our old district of Kazimierz. It had been so hard for my grandfather, who was nearly blind, to leave our flat on Ulica Miodowa, where he knew the contour of every cobblestone underfoot: in one direction was the Temple Synagogue, where he had been the cantor for thirty years, and in the other was the Jewish Cemetery, where my grandmother was buried. After she died, he used to visit her grave every Sunday.

But here in Podgorze, there was no prospect of grave-tending. There were only hasty burials, bodies carried out on carts. We were fortunate: when we arrived, we were assigned a small flat in a block of buildings on Ulica Benedikta. Others who came after us were simply dumped with their belongings on the curb.

One January night, we were awakened by the shouts of an SS guard. A truck drove off, and we heard frightened voices underneath our windows. My father raised the shutter. All down the street, in the dark, there were clusters of people shivering. Men were negotiating in doorways for shelter; we could see our neighbors counting them, trying to determine how many could share their already crowded rooms.

My mother begged him not to open the door. It wasn’t the thought of taking in strangers that frightened her; there were already three other families living in our flat. Her greatest fear was attracting the notice of the SS guards. They might come inside for any reason at all, and once they were in, terrible things would happen.

My father reasoned softly with her. “We can’t let them pass the night on the street, Helen,” he said. “See? Everyone will take a few more. If we don’t open the door now, we will open it in the morning to find them frozen to death.”

“But are the guards really gone?”

“They’re gone.”

She was shaking uncontrollably, so he signaled to me. I checked to see that the baby was asleep in the center of the mattress before I sat down beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. My father put on his sweater and went downstairs. When he came back, he was leading two children by the hand: a boy of about seven, and a little girl who was four or five.

He brought the boy to my grandfather’s side. “You will sleep here,” he said, and the boy jumped up immediately and lay perfectly still, like a dog who leaps up quietly when his master is asleep. The little girl, Esther, he brought to me. She was wearing only a nightgown. I put her under the blanket and rubbed her arms and feet to warm her while he explained that the childrens’ mother and father were in the room next door with their youngest, an infant. The Lavrovs—that was their name—would share that room with another couple and their two children. Two more families shared the third bedroom. Our family had the room on the south end of the flat, the one with the small window looking out on Ulica Rekawa. On the other side of the street, the people told us that their back windows had been bricked up to form part of the ghetto wall.

There were twenty-three of us in the flat now. I told Esther our names: my parents, David and Helen; my grandfather Chaim; and my own name, Yetta. “I had a brother named Chaim also,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“He died.”

“Hush,” my grandfather whispered from the other bed.

But Esther persisted. “What is the baby’s name?”

I started to tell her; but somehow, I hesitated. There had been no naming ceremony, no kiddush; my father was too ashamed to present her at the synagogue. Her name was a private talisman, known only to a few.

“She doesn’t have one,” I whispered, so my grandfather wouldn’t hear.

“Our baby doesn’t have one either,” Esther said. “My parents have not decided what to call it.” Beside us, my child gave a warning murmur; in a few moments she would be awake, and hungry. “What do you call your baby, if she doesn’t have a name?”

“We call her Bura—troche burakow (little beet).’”

“That’s silly. Why do you call her that?”

“When she cries, she screws her eyes shut so tightly and turns such a shade of red--"

“Hush!”

Esther nodded and curled her body toward me. She smelled as though her teeth had not been cleaned. She was a beautiful child, with dark curly hair, large black eyes and dirty fingernails, and she accepted her situation resignedly, continuing to think her own thoughts. She would become my great companion in the short time we lived together on Ulica Benedikta, talking quietly at night until my grandfather shushed her, saying that she would wake troche Bura. And when she did wake—when I started my nightly vigil, walking the tiny strip of floor between the beds with my colicky baby in my arms—Esther, cowed at last, would communicate with blinks of her eyes.

In the morning, I explained the rules of the flat to her. It was a dark little place with threadbare carpets and scuffed woodwork and newsprint marks on the door frames; every time we lit the stove, the narrow hallway filled with the odor of stale cooking grease. There was only one toilet, so we lined up every morning to take our turn. For the most part, the youngest children went first. My grandfather needed my father’s help, so he went before dawn when no one else was up. Esther nodded at this. But when I took her to the front of the line, she said she would prefer to stay in the back, with me. She waited patiently, tracing the pattern in the wallpaper with her finger, and I made up a story for her about children following the trellis pattern on the wall into a beautiful garden with elves and fairies. I don’t know why I decided to be so kind to Esther, except that her own mother was haggard and exhausted and preoccupied with her sick infant.

Esther’s brother Jakob spent his days roaming around with the other boys, playing with bottles or sticks. Sometimes they got into fights that were soon over. But one morning, two of them managed to slip out under the barbed wire. They scavenged for food outside the restaurants on the other side, squeezing back in by nightfall; the next day they went out again, and the day after that.

Esther and I prepared whatever we had to eat and took it to my mother, who stayed all day in our room. Esther liked to help with the baby; while I nursed, she would fashion little dolls for herself and cradle them in her arms, singing and talking to them. At noon, when she settled herself beside my mother for a rest, I took the baby and walked out to the pharmacy in the Plac Zgody, where I stayed until the bicycle messenger came at three.

Everyone looked at the bicycle messenger with longing because he came from our old home in Kazimierz, with its stately buildings and its cobbled streets in the shadow of the temple wall. How casually I used to sit at the café tables under the archway, a basket of flowers spilling over my shoulder! But I didn’t know if I would ever walk there again. I would listen while the others pestered him: Did you pass my house? Is anyone living in our old flat? And I would trace his route in my imagination, as though he were a bird sent out over the waters to see if the world was still there. I pictured him following the streetcar line on Ulica Lwowska, his gray cap pulled down low over his eyes and a long scarf flying out behind him, until he reached the gate and stopped his bicycle to show his papers to the SS guard.

The clock on the wall said two minutes to three. He was inside the ghetto by now, rattling across the cobblestones of the Plac Zgody, weaving expertly among the people gathered there. He wouldn’t stop to talk to anyone in the square—the guards gave him only fifteen minutes to complete his errand—but the people were patient. They knew that inside the knapsack over his shoulder was a secret compartment where he carried newspapers, and that soon they would be available in the pharmacy for perusal.

The papers he brought were not always very recent, but they came from other parts of Europe and even, once in a while, from America. I rarely get a chance to look at them—I didn’t read English or German, only Polish and Yiddish and a little bit of French—but once he brought a copy of Le Courrier, which was the paper my father used to take when we lived in Geneva. I tore away a scrap with the banner on it for a memento.

Three o’clock: I could see the messenger through the window. He was slowing down, leaning to one side; in a moment, he would jump off the bicycle and prop it against the wall, and then the five minutes of the day when I allowed myself to think about Mieczyslaw would begin.

The bell jangled, and the air coming in from outside had the freshness, the bracing cold of the walks Mieczyslaw and I used to take in the winter in the Planty. Once, he stood on tiptoe in front of the statue of Copernicus to brush the snow off his shoulders; I made a snowball to throw at him, and then we ran along the path and scrambled over the footbridge that spans the frozen surface of the canal. We thought we were safe, meeting there, in plain sight as it were. The Germans had shut down the university. What did it matter anymore that he was an instructor, and I was only a student?

Mieczyslaw was so tall, so very handsome and sophisticated; he mocked me a little for my love of French novelists. “If you like Old Goriot so much,” he would say, “why not try Reymont? His Chlopi is as fine as anything you will find in Balzac, and his Komediantka, to my mind, speaks as eloquently as Bovary or Therese Raquin.” He cherished it so, the literary voice of Poland. We had been to see a revival of Malka Szwarcenkopf at the Slowacki Theater just weeks before the Germans came, and after the performance, we sat outdoors at a café. Though it was still August, there were women with furs around their bare shoulders; the night was cool, with the scent of jasmine blooming in the garden just beyond our little table. We had oysters and champagne and listened to the orchestra playing somewhere inside the hotel at our backs.

Mieczyslaw was surprised when I knew the provenance of the wine we drank. I told him that my mother grew up in Lombardy, in a house with a grand terrace and tennis courts near Lake Como; her family had a fine restaurant, and every summer, she used to make the rounds of the French vineyards with her father: St. Emilian and Medoc near Bordeaux, or Bourgogne, where he liked to buy his pinot noir. She met my Polish father when he came to Geneva just after the Great War to apprentice with his uncle in the manufacture of silk. He traveled to Como to visit his uncle’s main supplier, and one day, he walked into the family restaurant where my mother, who was only nineteen at the time, was waiting tables. She was such a beautiful girl, he used to say, her hair shiny and dark, her skin perfectly white.

“You must take after her,” Mieczyslaw teased, and I blushed. It pleased me to think that he found my mother exotic, though he smiled a little at my thoughts on architecture and wine. But it excited him more to learn that my father’s family had been in Poland for generations. He spoke passionately of a great national future. It was a heady experience for a young Jewish girl like me, only just out of gymnasium. But then came the bombing of Warsaw, and the surrender of Polish troops; the Germans marched through the streets and took over the government, and I thought that everything was over between us.

But perhaps the occupation only made Mieczyslaw more reckless. When the Germans deported more than one hundred professors in November of 1939, he was outraged; and when they closed the university, he was moved to act. As we walked in Planty Park, he told me that he and many others were moving their classes underground, meeting in the back rooms of cafés and private homes. He gave me books, which I consumed greedily in my room at home. And then came that winter day when we walked together in the snow. It was cold, and my coat was wet. That day, he brought me back to his room for the first time.

***

The bell jangled again as the messenger pushed the pharmacy door closed against the wind. He stamped his feet and rubbed his hands together, blowing on his fingers—he had only a pair of thin gloves with holes in them, and his fingers were white with cold. He fumbled in the bag and pulled out a sheaf of prescriptions, which he put on the counter. Then he looked over at me where I sat in the corner with my sewing and smiled.

I leaned down to check on the baby in the cradle on the floor. I didn’t think he remembered me—it had been a year and a half now since our paths crossed on the outside—but sometimes he looked puzzled, as though he couldn’t quite place me. He came around the counter, opened a drawer that ought to have been filled with medicine bottles, and slid the bundle of newspapers inside. The pharmacist came out of the back room, and the two of them embraced and talked eagerly together.

He was only allowed to stay for a few minutes—just long enough to pick up the prescriptions he would deliver to the doctor in Krakow: laudanum for pain, prontosil for infections, Benzedrine and diethylstilbestrol for female complaints. There was nothing there to ward off pregnancy or to bring off an unwanted one. I knew this, because I had asked the pharmacist for something when I first realized she was coming, and he wouldn’t give it to me.

2

By November of 1940, the Germans had taken my father’s business and put him to work in a chemical factory. We were still living in the flat on Ulica Miodowa; my mother was caring for my grandfather as best she could, but he had some strange whims. Once, he asked her to screw a small hook into the case of the grandfather clock. He hid some money there, in a pouch behind the works, in case the flat was ever searched. He hid money in other places, too—under a loose floorboard, or even in the tank of the toilet.

Mieczyslaw and I had been meeting in his room for many months, though by then it was less and less often. I don’t really know how it happened. We were careful. Only Chaim knew. He found me crying in my room one day when he came home from the rabbi’s house, where he used to go to play the violin after the Germans shut down the conservatory. Chaim was a few years younger than me; I could never have imagined telling him such a thing before those days. But he promised to keep my secret, and he did.

The only other person I confided in was my girlfriend Rosa from the university. Rosa’s older sister was a nurse, and Rosa promised to ask her to get one of the doctors at the hospital to give me something to bring it off. “It might be horrible,” she warned, “depending on how far along you are. There will be cramps, and you’ll bleed for days.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want to get rid of it.”

That evening, I went to Rosa’s house for the pills. She met me at the door with a serious expression and led me upstairs, where her older sister was getting ready to go out. “He won’t give you anything unless you come into the office and let him examine you,” she said curtly.

“But Rosa said—”

“I know what she said. She shouldn’t have promised without talking to me.”

I pleaded with her; my parents couldn’t possibly know. She went out to the telephone in the hall, and when she came back, she said that if I was willing to come with her that night, the doctor would open his office and see me.

We took the tram to a dark little clinic in another part of town. The doctor was a tall, stooped man in his sixties who asked me only one question: “How old are you?” When I told him I was nineteen, he nodded, lit a cigarette, and gestured impatiently at me to slide down and put my feet in the stirrups. He did not bother to wear gloves or even put down his cigarette when he cranked the speculum and leaned down to peer inside. I remember the scratch of his ragged cuticles as he inserted his fingers and palpated my cervix. Was this even necessary, I wondered? Wouldn’t a urine test have been sufficient?

When he was finished, he stood up and looked disdainfully at my armband. Neither he nor Rosa or her sister had to wear one. He rummaged in the drawer for several minutes; then, not finding what he wanted, he slammed it shut, threw down his cigarette, and walked abruptly into the hallway, where I heard him speak angrily with Rosa’s sister. I sat on the examining table, unsure what to do. I was more than a little afraid he was going to send me home empty-handed. Rosa’s sister was finally able to persuade him, though, because when he came back into the room, there was a supercilious smile on his face. “My prescription pad,” he said wryly, gesturing at Rosa’s sister and shaking his head as though she were the one who had mislaid it. He scribbled out a prescription for ergo apiol and handed it to me with a stern warning never to get myself into this situation again. I put it in my pocket and rode the tram home alone.

But a problem remained. Where was I to take this prescription to have it filled? Kazimierz was a small community, and we were known everywhere. I carried it around in my bag for days before I finally came up with a plan.

On that morning in November, I told my parents I was getting on the tram to go and visit Rosa, an excuse I had often used when I went out to meet Mieczyslaw. But instead of going to Rosa’s house, I crossed the river to Podgorze. I wasn’t sure why I had chosen this place out of all the districts in Krakow, except that I was certain it was not a Jewish district. I never could have imagined that I would need to come back here again, much less that we would all be stuck here now.

The morning was dark, and there was a threat of snow in the air. I was in agony crossing the Plac Zgody; it seemed that disapproving eyes watched me from every window in the apartments above the square. Later, when I crossed that same Plac Zgody to go to my job at the pharmacy, I could still feel the gaze of every frightened inhabitant. But now, they were saying to themselves: it could be worse. At least we’re not like her.

A young woman stood behind the pharmacy counter that day. She took the prescription from me, stared wordlessly at it, and then turned away to call the pharmacist, who came out a few minutes later wearing a wrinkled lab coat and a silk bow tie. When he bent his head over the slip of paper, I saw that the dark hair plastered with brilliantine was thinning on top.

Suddenly he looked up at me. “Where did you get this?”

“From my doctor. Won’t you please fill it for me?” I was resolved to be bold and confident; but my voice faltered.

The woman behind the counter watched him steadily, a frown between her eyes. He looked pained, even shocked. “This medication is only administered in a doctor’s office, under a doctor’s supervision,” he said, handing the prescription back to me. “I’m very sorry.”

I felt my face turn horribly red.

“Your doctor should have told you that,” he went on. “I’m very surprised he sent you home with this prescription.”

“He gave me the instructions,” I said evenly, though my whole body was shaking. “I’m perfectly able to take it myself.”

The man looked at me solemnly. “I’m very sorry,” he said again, “but I cannot give this medicine to you.”

All the blood drained from my face; after the hot blush I’d just had, I thought I was going to faint. And he must have seen it, because he leaned over the counter toward me. The young woman had turned away to get something from the back room. No one else was near. “I know you think you are in an impossible situation,” he said softly, “but please trust me. This is not the solution.”

In spite of myself, tears streamed down my face. I tried to turn away, but he called after me. “The sisters at St. Catherine’s would help you,” he said. “There are women who long for these children. Someone would love her, I promise you.”

“But I can’t,” I stammered. “My father—”

“He won’t beat you,” the man said. “I can see that you are well taken care of.”

“No, I know he won’t beat me. He would never beat me!”

And with that, I flung myself out of the place, wrapped my coat tightly around me, and walked away as fast as I could. Just imagine—he expected me to go hat in hand to the Catholic sisters and ask them to find parents for my child! Parents who would feed her gentile food and teach her all sorts of idolatrous things! They would look at me as though I had committed the gravest of sins—as though I were nothing but a common whore. Women who lived apart, who did not have to truck with the problems and passions of the world, who grew old with the plainest of faces! I could not endure it.

Only then did I realize I had been made a fool of by Rosa’s sister and the horrible doctor. He must have known that the prescription he had given me was worthless: the name of the clinic did not appear on it anywhere. Of course, he would not have wanted the paper to be traced to him, since it was illegal to prescribe the medication unless my life were threatened by the pregnancy—in which case, I would most certainly have been in a hospital. But he knew I wouldn’t think of that. How it must have pleased him to imagine my consternation when I tried and failed to obtain the drug. Perhaps he even hoped I would be arrested.

In any case, I had been mightily shamed; and nothing my family could say or do to me could possibly be worse. I went home that very same day and told them the truth—everything, that is, except who the father was. I refused to tell them that.

***

I stopped going to the clandestine meetings of Mieczyslaw’s class in the back of the café. It pained me not to see him anymore; but I was determined not to tell him about the baby. And by then, there were strict prohibitions against aiding Jews. I could not expose Mieczyslaw to any risk.

I waited for a message from him, but none came. Perhaps he thought something terrible had happened to me. Joanna, a botany student, had been taken away. Maxim, who studied chemistry, had been shot one day when he would not move off the pavement to make way for a German soldier. Rosa said Mieczyslaw had been asking about me, but she swore up and down that she hadn’t told him anything—only that she hadn’t seen me either, which was quite true.

I stayed in the house as my skirts got tighter and tighter. On the first of January 1941, we had a deep snow, crystalline and sharp in the starlight; by February, it had hardened and blackened on the sides of the streets; and when we were forced to move to Ulica Benedikta under a steady March rain, the melting snow ran into the gutters at last, leaving a crust of gray ice over the stream. I wished desperately then that I had gone walking every day instead of staying in the flat that smelled all winter of noodle soup and damp wool. My pregnancy was not a secret—there was no way to quell the rumors in our small community—but I had not wanted to show myself to people. My father and grandfather had encouraged me at first to take walks in Planty Park as I used to do, to smell the air, to listen to the sounds of the river; but soon they could all see that it was unsafe. Besides, I couldn’t bear the idea of running into Mieczyslaw, perhaps walking along those same paths with some other girl. I said I would go out again after the baby was born. I could not have imagined that even my walks would be taken from me.

My baby was born in the ghetto at the end of May 1941, a healthy girl, and in spite of myself I loved her fiercely the moment I saw her. Those first days were difficult to recollect: she slept very little, and I had confused memories from those dark wakeful nights of pacing the floor with her by the light of a single lamp in the corner of the parlor, of her faint sour smell of diaper and regurgitated milk, of gratefully stumbling on the scalded cocoa and biscuits my mother left on the kitchen table for me one night before she went to bed. My mother was growing attached to the baby in spite of herself. And then the unthinkable happened.

3

Chaim was only sixteen and a student at the conservatory when the war began in 1939. He was the only Jewish student admitted that year; his friend Andrzej said that he did not believe they would see the day when Jews would be admitted to the Conservatory ever again. Everyone was suspicious of us—suspicious of Chaim’s quick mind, his long fingers, his soft voice, his expression of rapture when he played the violin.

Chaim was always dreamy and thoughtful; he was the musician my father had once wanted to be, before he went into business and fell in love. When the conservatory was closed and before we left Ulica Miodowa, Chaim continued his studies with a young rabbinical student who lived on the street next to ours, a short walk from the synagogue. The man was not a music teacher per se; he was a sort of protégé of my grandfather’s, full of religious fervor, and, as it turned out, Chaim was quite receptive to that sort of thing. When he was just twelve years old, my grandfather had invited him to sing the kol nidre with him on the eve of the Atonement; and by the time he was seventeen, he was accompanying the men in the synagogue on his violin. We had the most beautiful Yom Kippur service in all of Kazimierz.

How I wish I had paid more attention to Chaim! I took his playing for granted while I sat at my books every night, trying to study but mostly dreaming of Mieczyslaw and the stripes on the scholar’s gown that had fluttered behind him as he strode through the halls of the Collegium Maius—“plus ratio quam vis”, the inscription read, “reason rather than force.” All evening, Chaim stood thin-shouldered and swaybacked at the music stand in the middle of the rug while my father, seated at the piano, patiently taught him every note of the kol nidre. My grandfather smoked his pipe in his old chair upholstered in scratchy horsehair as he listened. The two of them would make him play it again and again until Chaim had the lightest and yet most mournful technique; only then could he move on to the Mozart or Beethoven that his teacher had assigned him. And I drank cup after cup of tea and bit my nails and stayed up late into the night, and in the morning, I would hand him the lunch my mother had packed him the evening before—a sandwich on rye bread, or a knish saved from last night’s supper—and poke him in the ribs and tell him not to trip over his shoelaces. Chaim was such a careless boy when it came to his appearance; he had very large hands that dangled from his too-short sleeves, and enormous feet.

But in his seventeenth year he grew very tall, tall enough so that his large, slender hands began to make sense at the ends of his long forearms. His hair had grown long—my father overlooked it at my mother’s urging—and there was a knowing insolence in his eyes. Though he could no longer attend the conservatory, he was without a doubt the best student they had seen in many years.

He must have been wearing that look when the Gestapo came.

My father and grandfather were out that night. There was a meeting in the back of the pharmacy, a gathering of men who wanted to share news about the repressive new laws against us. My mother was washing dishes, and I was in one of the bedrooms—we were still the only family in the flat then—feeding my newborn daughter. Mother had refused to accept any help from me in the kitchen once the baby was born. She could not bear the idea that her only daughter was doomed to this life now—cooking and washing bottles and changing diapers in the ghetto, instead of attending the university as I planned.

Chaim was in the small parlor in the center of the flat, practicing. I remembered the sharp knock that stopped the music dead, the snort of exasperation from Chaim, the only person who didn’t share the palpable anxiety that had pervaded the neighborhood for weeks. He had been absorbed in his music; he was practically a child still. He went to the door with a look of annoyance on his face, holding the violin by its fret at his side. The soldier wrenched it from his hand; and when Chaim protested, he shot him.

Chaim fell backward into the hallway and lay lifeless on the bare floor, a pool of blood forming under his arm. My mother, who had come to the parlor door with a towel in her hand, let out a keening wail such as I had never heard before. I huddled in my bed with troche Bura and pulled the blankets over our heads. From there, I heard the boots of the soldiers down the hall as they dragged my mother back to her bedroom with them, and the smack of a gloved hand across her face. I heard my mother whimper as she slumped against the wall. The soldiers yanked out the drawers of her bureau, demanding her jewelry, our money, everything we had smuggled into the ghetto in the hope of trading it for food, and making lewd remarks as they pawed the one silk nightgown they found in her drawer. I heard the rip and tear of fabric and the mocking laughter. Then, when they had taken everything of value that they could find, I heard them clatter down the hall and back out, stepping sickeningly over Chaim’s body. Lastly, I heard one of them draw the bow with a vicious screech across the strings of the violin before he smashed it against the wall.

My mother wrapped Chaim in the sheet from her own bed, and a neighbor had to lead the kaddish because my grandfather could not. It fell to me to wipe away the blood. The water in the bucket quickly turned pink and then brown; and the sweet, sticky smell of it lingers in my nostrils even now.

***

My mother was almost delirious after Chaim’s death, and my father convinced a doctor friend of his to prescribe a sedative. I said that I would go and get it, and since we had no pram, I carried the baby in my arms—right back to the pharmacy on the Plac Zgody that I had visited in desperation all those months ago.

At first, the very sight of it filled me with shame. As I approached, I tightened my grip on the baby, as though someone were trying to hurt her. Even so, it was difficult to credit the reports that the pharmacist had stayed; everyone else who had lived here before us was gone, forced out by the Germans. And yet, when I opened the door, there he was behind the counter, still wearing the same bow tie and the wrinkled lab coat.

He had been talking with another customer, and when he turned to me, he gave no indication that he remembered meeting me across this counter before. I handed him the prescription for my mother and sat down to wait for it. When he gave me the medicine about fifteen minutes later, he warned me that it was very powerful, and that we should use it sparingly. I nodded and was about to leave when I stopped. It had occurred to me that, after everything that had happened, I need not have any secrets from this man.

“She’s hearing things,” I said.

He had been busying himself at the scale, carefully weighing some powder or other, but when I spoke, he turned around. “Who is? Your mother?”

I nodded.

“What sort of things?”

“I hear her talking to someone. She will be sitting on the edge of the bed, talking very animatedly, but no one is there.”

He nodded slowly, a look of sorrow coming over his face.

“She had a great shock,” I went on. “The Gestapo came to the door, and they shot my brother before her eyes.”

“You used to live near the synagogue.”

“Yes, on Ulica Miodowa.”

“I heard about it,” he said. “The violin student.”

My eyes filled with tears. The pharmacist reached across the counter and took my hand in both of his. He looked me right in the face, and then a change came over him. I was sure he remembered me then, because he looked from me to the baby in my arms.

“Does she cry a lot?” he asked.

“She has terrible colic.”

He nodded again, and then he turned to search in the drawer behind him. “If the Gestapo come,” he said, “give her this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s not much, just a small tranquilizer. It will soothe her so you can keep her quiet until they leave.”

A few days later, my father said that the pharmacist needed someone to help him mind the counter in the early afternoons. I did not believe it, but I agreed to go. When I got there, I found a small cradle for the baby on the floor, and a chair beside it where I could sit with some sewing. This was before Esther came, before the baby was too old to lie still and sleep like that. He told me that the messenger would come at three with the prescriptions he was to fill, and I soon grew accustomed to seeing him every day.

One afternoon, the young man said goodbye to me with such a friendly—one might even say a rather devoted—expression that my father, who had come in to see the newspapers, looked hard at me after he was gone. I met his eyes serenely, and he frowned and went into the back room with the other men. In that moment, perhaps he believed that the bicycle messenger might be my child’s father, though of course he was not.

Little Bura was not doing well. Though she was already a year old, she did not babble or toddle around the flat as babies ought to do. She slept too much, and her eyes were listless all the time. One day, the pharmacist leaned over her cradle and said that she must be a busy girl at home to be so tired when she came here. I could not bear to tell him that she often slept the whole morning too.

But she was a beautiful child who looked nothing like me. I often imagined how I would tease Mieczyslaw for not telling me that he had redheads in his family: the baby’s fine hair was a luminous burnt auburn color, and underneath her translucent lids, rimmed with pink from her nightly crying, her eyes were a deep gray-blue.

Sometimes, while I sat in the pharmacy working on my embroidery or tended to the people who came in asking for aspirin or hair dye, I wondered what might happen if I could still reach Mieczyslaw—if I could run away with Bura and hide from the Germans in his rooms. Other people had done it. People here in the ghetto had changed the color of their hair and slipped away among the rest of the population to pass as non-Jews, hiding in plain sight. Maybe Bura and I would have to sleep in a hayloft or cower in a closet in fear that the neighbors would report us. I would do it in a moment if I thought we had a chance.

But then I would put those fancies away. Even if we could escape somehow, my father could not possibly spare us.

4

“No, Esther,” I whispered. “Let my grandfather go first.”

“But I have to go so badly, ciocia.”

“You’ll have to hold it.”

Esther looked grim, but I knew that she would do it. She was the strongest little person I had ever known. She stood outside the door to the toilet, hopping from one foot to the other, until at last my father opened the door and helped my grandfather out.

The hallway was too narrow for them to walk side by side. But instead of allowing my father to precede him, my grandfather started down the hall alone, keeping one hand on the wall and holding the other one out to his side, as though to protect himself from unseen obstacles.

One of the two women who shared the third bedroom was coming in the other direction. She looked up in annoyance at my grandfather and flattened herself against the wall to let him pass. But she was rather large, and as he edged past her, the hand he was holding out for balance brushed against her breasts. “Filthy old man!” the woman shouted and turned abruptly, shouldering past my father, who was directly behind and ready to make an apology. But she would not hear it. She was a coarse Lithuanian who argued with everyone.

Esther went into the toilet, but before she closed the door, she put out her head and said, “Wait for me, ciocia, before you make the soup.”

It was a sort of code between us. A terrible odor was coming from the toilet my grandfather had just used. “Don’t worry,” I said, and Esther nodded and closed the door. She had taken to calling me “ciocia”—aunt—after her parents were deported.

Toward the end of the winter of 1942, my father stood in a long line to register for an identity card. When it was his turn, the SS guard had demanded a list of everyone living in our household. My father, thinking he could protect the weakest among us, had left out my mother and Bura and Esther’s parents, who were still grieving the infant who had died in February. And so, when the spring came and they went walking in the Plac Zgody—it was the first time either of them had ventured out of the flat since they had come to live there—they had had no cards to present to the soldier who demanded their identification.

No one saw them again that day, or the next. Jakob was hopeful that they had found a way out and would send for him and his sister. He was eager to look for them, but my father had warned him strictly not to ask after them outside the ghetto. “If they are hiding,” he said, “you will only expose them. And then not only will they be shot, but the people who helped them too.” That silenced him, of course, but he was certain there would be a note from them the next day when the bicycle messenger came. That day, and every day after that, he was disappointed.

But my father was making private inquiries, and one night, I heard him whispering quietly to my grandfather after Esther was asleep. A neighbor had witnessed an exchange with a soldier in the Plac Zgody, he said. There was shouting. The soldier slapped Mrs. Lavrov hard across the face. Her husband, afraid to defend her, had cowered in expectation of a blow of his own; but instead of striking him, the soldier made the two of them stand on one side of the square with a large group of people who also had no identity cards. They were all taken away. The pharmacist had asked the bicycle messenger to try to find out what might have happened to them, but all he could learn was that those who had no cards had been deported to some sort of camp. It was impossible to keep this information from Jakob and Esther, but Jakob did not give up hope that his parents would try to get a message to them.

It was early June: I had propped the pharmacy door open. A soft breeze was stirring the curtains. It would be more than an hour yet before the messenger came, but already I was beginning to think of Mieczyslaw. It happened earlier and earlier each day.

I remembered sitting with him on a bench in front of the fountain in Planty Park; he told me what a fine mind I had, quick and sharp. “Nothing escapes you,” he said. And while I basked in his praise—if I had to be so young, a mere student, it was good to know that he respected my intellect—he asked me to start listening at every opportunity to the Polish students who stayed behind to smoke in the back of the café after the lectures. “Some of them want to join the resistance,” he explained, “but before I can accept their help, I need to be sure of their intentions.”

“So why don’t you ask them?”

“They’re young; they won’t tell me their real thoughts. But as long as they don’t know our relationship, they’ll speak freely around you.”

I smiled at him then, delighted with our secret and only a little troubled at the idea that he didn’t want them to know about me. That was in June of 1940, shortly before the end of the clandestine spring term.

But by the middle of that November, I had withdrawn to my room. I had only managed to help Mieczyslaw a few times; it was difficult to listen without drawing attention to myself, and the things I heard had frightened me. They were a bit of a rough lot, those young men, unwilling to moderate their conversation for a woman: all of them, that is, except one, who came and went on his bicycle.

A little air began to play in my head now, something Chaim used to play when he was not in the mood for more serious practicing. I tried unsuccessfully to remember what it was. I could probably ask my father, if only I could remember it well enough that evening to hum it for him—he would know. But later, when the baby was awake and other details had chased it from my mind, I would not be able to summon the notes again. The air visited me like a little sprite, unbidden, and when it was gone, I had to wait for it to come back. We had so little music these days. Chaim and his violin were gone, and we had no radio here.

There were no customers, and when I had swept the floor and counted out the money in the cash register, I sat down in my corner and stared out the door, my embroidery forgotten on my lap. I was often bored here, but if the pharmacist ever told me not to come any more, I did not know what I would do. This was the only place where I could get away from the noise and crowding of the stale-smelling flat, where far too often those coarse women fell to arguing, muttering resentfully about my poor grandfather. Each day, when I gathered my things and walked to the pharmacy, I felt as though I had passed the whole morning in a stupor of hunger and boredom.

There was only one thing that tempered my eagerness to come here—well, two things, really. One was the fear that something would happen to Bura or to my mother while I was gone. Every day, I suppressed this fear by telling myself that they would be safe as long as they remained in the flat—as safe, at least, as I could have made them if I were there.

But the other thing was guilt, which was much harder to suppress when every afternoon, Esther begged to be allowed to come with me. I always answered that I needed her to stay with my mother—and with Bura, who was now too old to lie in the cradle. I told her how it would pain me to be separated from my beloved Bura unless I knew that Esther was there watching over her. But truthfully, I didn’t want Esther to come to the pharmacy. If I didn’t get away from her for an hour or two, I feared I would soon be cruel to her, she pestered me so.

I would have liked to stay past four o’clock, which was the hour when the men came in to look at the foreign newspapers and talk about what was happening in the war. But the shop quickly became overcrowded, and the pharmacist had told me politely a long time ago that he wouldn’t like anyone to step on the baby. Perhaps without intending it, he had made it perfectly clear that day that mine was a mercy appointment; and as I turned away, I felt suddenly useless—useless and humiliated, as though even Mieczyslaw, in praising my skills, had only been mocking me. But with my mother the way she was, and my grandfather so dependent—not to mention the baby—I could not afford to lose heart. I could prepare a little food and keep Esther busy. That at least was something.

When the messenger came at last, I noticed that he was still wearing the gloves with the holes in them, even though the weather was warm. He said it was because holding the handlebars gave him calluses on his hands, but somehow, I knew this was not the truth.

Esther was at my heels the moment I returned. Bura had been crying for at least half an hour already, she said, but I needed to go to the toilet and could not take her. A glance down the hall told me it was occupied. Esther bounced the baby on her hip and, reaching out with a grubby little hand, took hold of the edge of the embroidery I’d been working on all the dull afternoon.

“What are you making?” she asked.

I slapped her hand away. “Don’t touch it!” I snapped. “It’s only a handkerchief.”

“It’s pretty,” Esther said, with a pout of her lower lip. But she would not cry; Esther never cried. Instead, she followed me down the hall and pestered me about the name I had embroidered on the handkerchief—“It’s for Bura, isn’t it? Is that her real name?”—until the door to the toilet opened at last and I shut myself inside.

I was ashamed of the way I had acted, but what could I do? Esther followed me constantly. If I pulled out my breast to nurse, Esther peered in; if she was bored or lonely, I had to stop what I was doing and devise a task for her. It had been such a relief when she could finally play outdoors a little. But then she caught a terrible cold and started coughing all night. I had to lend her a handkerchief, and somehow, she managed to lose it.

And yet she was a cheerful little person, always eager to help. When Jakob came home one day with a sack of potatoes he had managed to buy in Krakow, Esther had insisted that I teach her how to peel and boil them. She begged and begged to hold the baby, and when I finally relented, she proved to be very adept. She was meant to be the oldest girl in a huge family, taking care of all the younger children. But when her infant sibling died, Esther told me that her mother had already lost two others, one before Jakob and another when she herself was only two.

“That’s why we don’t give them names until they are six months old,” she said, “in case they don’t live.”

***

My father was spending every afternoon in the pharmacy now, poring over the newspapers and talking with the other men who still had a little access to the outside. One day in September—it was nearly time for Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement—he came home at five, just as I was setting out the last of the day’s bread ration. Esther was holding Bura, who ought to have been squirming to get down instead of watching passively like that. There was something about it that frightened me.

“Esther,” my father said, “could you take Bura into the parlor, please?”

“But Grandfather is napping in there. You know how the baby disturbs his nightly rest.”

“That’s all right,” he said kindly. “He will be waking soon.”

Esther looked over at me, and I nodded. Obediently, she got up and left the room with Bura while I waited, dreading whatever my father was about to say.

“My darling,” he began when they were out of earshot, “I think it’s time we talk about moving Bura to safety.”

I stared at him. My whole body began to tremble, and my face went white. It was all I could do not to run into the parlor and snatch Bura in my arms. “What do you mean?” I asked. Tears were already starting down my cheeks. “How can we get her to safety?”

He looked down at his hands, avoiding my eyes. “There is a church,” he began. “In Kazimierz.”

“What church? You mean St. Catherine’s?” He nodded. “But why there?”

“The priest there is able to take a few children. He will place them with Polish families who are willing to help us.”

“You mean she would be treated as an orphan.” My mind flew back to the day when the pharmacist had suggested this very thing. How haughtily I had rejected the idea then! I had decided at once that if this baby was really going to be born, she would have no mother but me. I could never bear to be separated from her.

But Bura was so sick, so quiet now. She was not learning and growing as she should. Perhaps, in my selfish determination to keep her, I had condemned her to a life of stupidity and suffering.

My father was still speaking in a soothing voice, as though he were dealing with a skittish animal. “We think she could pass,” he was saying.

I looked into the parlor, where Esther was holding Bura face-up on her lap, her legs hanging motionless over the arm of the chair. She leaned over her, crooning a lullaby in her ear, and I suddenly remembered that every now and then, the pharmacist had peered at the child’s sleeping face when she lay in the cradle on the floor of his shop. I had thought it was only out of tenderness for someone so innocent. But all that time, he must have been calculating whether her Jewish heritage would betray itself on the outside. All that time, he had been planning to take her away.

“You want to give her to a Catholic family,” I said.

Esther stopped singing and looked up. “Ciocia?”

“Not now, Esther.”

“Darling,” my father said softly.

I could not bear to acknowledge what he meant. There were rumors that next time, we would be divided: those who were able to work would be placed in one group, the elderly and sick in another, with the children. We had all seen what happened when the Gestapo went into the maternity ward at the hospital not long after Bura was born: babies flung from windows onto wooden carts in the street below. They were taken out of the ghetto, alive or dead, God knows where, deemed useless to the German war machine. As for the rest of us, some people said that in a matter of weeks we would all be sent to labor camps. And then there was my mother, with her shattered nerves and constant muttering, and my grandfather, too blind to do anything at all. What would happen to them?

“I know this man, this priest,” my father was saying now. “He comes to the ghetto at great personal risk. You recall Wladyslaw Jursek. When he died, his children had nowhere to go.”

“But they are living with Bernadette and Josef.”

“No. Bernadette has typhus now. This man intervened. He came in the middle of the night. He tells me now that they are living with families in Lublin.”

“But not together?”

“It would be too risky to place them together.”

I remembered the Jursek children. The oldest was only four, hardly even as old as Esther. Already she must be forgetting her brother and sister as the nuns taught her to say the Catholic rosary.

“But, Father—”

“My darling,” he said softly, “she is already malnourished. If the Gestapo should so much as hear her crying when they come, they will kill her.”

***

I walked out to the parlor where Esther had taken Bura and gathered her up wordlessly in my arms. Esther had been dozing, but she opened her eyes when she felt Bura’s weight lifted from her lap.

“Are we ready to eat now, ciocia?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Very well. I will call everyone.” She stood up dutifully and went to tap on the door of every bedroom in the flat.

Bura stirred only a little and went to sleep again. I sat down in the chair where Esther had been and gazed down at her, stroking her hair. I loved her more than I loved any creature in this world. And now my father’s proposal filled my mind so that I could think of nothing else.

He had been so ashamed of me when she was born. The silk importer’s daughter, pregnant and unwilling to name the father! And then the child with her auburn hair, like a stranger among them! She was six weeks old when the Gestapo searched our flat here on Ulica Benedikta; had she squalled then they would have killed her on the spot, and me with her, but instead that was the day they killed Chaim when he came to the door. And in the midst of all that horror, in my grief for my only brother and my desolate mother, I was secretly glad—so glad—that she had lived. I had borne everything that happened: the loss of my education, the move to the ghetto, the death of my beloved brother, even the loss of my mother, who would never again be as she once was. I had suffered, too, from being separated from Mieczyslaw like this. But I thought my father had ceased to be ashamed of me by now. Why did I have to bear this too?

5

The priest from Kazimierz came to the flat the next day. When I returned from the pharmacy, he had been there for over an hour. Oddly enough, Esther had not been alarmed at his coming. A guest in the parlor must be offered tea and then left to talk with my father and grandfather undisturbed. She had taken care to keep Bura out of the way.

When I came into the room near the end of their meeting, the priest stood up and offered me his hand. He was a large man in a long black cassock and Roman collar, and he wore a gold cross around his neck. I could not fathom how he had passed the SS guards dressed like that. And while he must know that I was an unmarried mother, he treated me with great courtesy, though he continued to address himself primarily to my father.

“As I was saying, I do not baptize the Jewish children without the parents’ permission,” he said, glancing in my direction. “Like yourselves, most of them have been very reluctant to give it. But once we obtained the rabbis’ approval—”

“And why must you baptize them?” my father interrupted.

“If we do not baptize them, they will never survive,” he said simply. “They must believe themselves to be Christians if they are ever going to pass outside these walls.”

“I see.” My father was silent for a long time. “I will give you an answer when you return,” he said at last. “I must take this question to God tonight.”

The priest nodded his heavy head. “I respect your wishes,” he said solemnly as he rose to leave. “But you must not delay. You have only days at most.”

The door closed behind him. My father could certainly see how frightened I was. The color had gone out of my face, and I was trembling.

“We’ve tried so hard,” I stammered, choking back tears. He looked at me lovingly but did not answer.

“It’s the eve of Atonement,” he said. “Do you recall what kol nidre means?”

“Of course.”

“From this day of Atonement to the next,” he said, “our vows are no longer vows, our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths no longer oaths.”

“Yes, I know, Father.”

He leaned back in his chair; he was quiet again for a long time. I could hear the women arguing in the kitchen, and my mother’s plaintive voice. “What is a baptism, after all?” he mused. “It is only a vow.”

***

That night, Jakob was late; we were afraid that something had happened. But just as my father was about to go looking for him, he burst into the flat with a great prize.

When the Lithuanian woman saw what it was, I had to restrain her—she would have stolen the whole thing for herself. No one knew how she managed to remain so fat, and yet she was the hungriest of us all. She looked at me with hatred as she folded her arms across her chest and waited. By then, they could all smell the long-forgotten scent—so heavenly—of fresh-baked bread.

Jakob was so excited he could barely speak. He had been running down an alley when a baker’s assistant beckoned to him from the back door of his shop and hurriedly passed him the loaf wrapped in paper. “Take this back with you,” he whispered, patting the star on Jakob’s armband. “Share it with everyone in your flat—today, while it’s fresh.” Of course, he did not know that we were entering on a day of fasting. And if anyone had dared to remind Jakob, his sobs would have brought the Gestapo to our door. As it was, not a single one of the men said anything about the Yom Kippur fast when they saw that bread.

Jakob had come running back to the ghetto, the loaf clutched tightly under his arm, and he had just managed to squirm back in under the barbed wire ahead of a German guard who came walking rapidly toward him. “He would have killed me,” he announced triumphantly as he pranced around the circle, tearing off a hunk for each of us before he would eat any of it himself. “But he couldn’t catch me!”

The Lithuanian woman, her mouth full, muttered to her neighbor that my father was a fool to let Jakob risk his life like that, while the other woman insisted that God had protected the boy for the sake of that act of mercy.

My father just shook his head. “Their pity is aroused,” he said, “because they know what’s going to happen to us.”

No one listened. We devoured that bread as fast as we possibly could. It was the last time I saw Esther smile.

That evening just before sunset my father put on his kippah, and he and my grandfather sat down to recite the kol nidre together. We sat on the floor around their feet, the children in front and the women behind them to make sure they behaved. I held Bura in my lap and tried to remember the last time I had seen any of the children, Esther or Jakob or any of them, misbehave in any way. They were all dirty and long-faced; they had forgotten how to play. They were practically skin and bones.

My heart ached as my grandfather sang the opening notes. Just a few years ago, before the Germans and the Russians came, my brother Chaim had accompanied him on his violin for the first time. That night of the Atonement the notes, so mournful, had poured forth from his bow with a sweetness, a poignancy I could feel even then, before I knew what was going to happen to him.

Tonight, we had no electricity—no candle, even, for fear of the German police—and we had no scroll; it had been destroyed when the Germans burned down the synagogue. But my grandfather had been a cantor for thirty years, and he knew the words of the kol nidre by heart. He always began with the Bi-Yeshibah shel Ma’alah: the permission to pray with the transgressors. I assumed that was for me.

Bura had ceased to cry much anymore. She was too weak, and I no longer had any milk for her. But I clutched her close to my heart; and as I listened, I prayed that God would not hold me liable for what I must now do. The vows shall not be reckoned vows, the obligations shall not be obligatory, nor the oaths be oaths.

***

That night, I couldn’t sleep. In the morning, as soon as it was light, I tiptoed to the desk where my father kept his precious stock of writing paper. When everyone had gone to the kitchen to eat their ration, I fumbled for my father’s only pen.

But I paused for a long time before I began to write. I had never intended to tell Mieczyslaw; he had never meant to be a father. For a moment, I thought I couldn’t go through with it. And then that little folk air of Chaim’s began to play in my head. I thought now that he might have composed it himself. That gave me courage.

And so now, in the grey dawn, I sat at the desk in the tiny room I shared with so many people and wrote to Mieczyslaw about what had happened, and what I had to do.

It was a poor story, written hastily by a desperate mother, and as I folded it and wrote out his address, I was filled with shame. I saw the pharmacist handing my prescription back to me, and the look on my father’s face when I told him what I had done; I remembered the indignities of giving birth unwed, the constant bleeding between my legs and the sudden hugeness of my breasts, lumpy and leaking. How awful it had been to appear before people like a little hausfrau, a squalling bundle in my arms. Of course, it hardly mattered now that we were all crushed in here with other peoples’ children sleeping in our beds. And yet my own shame stretched forward and backward, telescoping on either end of my small life. I remembered the first time I had to wear the blue armband with the white star: Mieczyslaw had turned away from me and busied himself talking to one of the other students in the back of the café. He told me later that it meant nothing, that it did not change his feelings, but I knew. Chaim had put his on distractedly and gone back to practicing his violin, and that had shamed me, too. I had hectored him; I demanded that he ought to think about the realities of life once in a while, because soon enough the world would split open, and he would have been too busy dreaming to notice. The epithet I shouted at him that night—I could not bear to repeat it even now—gave a special sting to the shame I felt when I huddled terrified under the blankets while the man who had murdered him dragged my own mother down the hall and I did nothing. And I was deeply ashamed of the resentment I felt as I knelt on the floor with the bucket and washed the tiles clean after the men had removed Chaim’s body. I could not have let a stranger do it, or a neighbor, even if anyone had dared to offer. But it had offended me to the roots of my hair and the ends of my fingers to perform that act through my own blinding tears and then through the dry heaving that came after the crying, because no one had thought that the grief of it might be too much for me. With the birth of my child, I had entered into the ranks of the rough women who worked with their hands and thought little of life or death: women who fed chickens with one hand and strangled them with the other. I was not to feel it any more.

And with the writing of this poor story on the last bit of rough paper—and where had all the creamy writing paper that once filled the drawer gone?—I will have completed my transformation, and then I must recede from the life of the mind and heart, from the places where women wear furs and go to the theatre and drink champagne with handsome men in the sparkling candlelight, and into the bare existence of the drudge, soon to be engulfed in the wave of blood that is coming over us all.

At the last moment, I found the banner I had saved from the Geneva Courrier and folded it up inside the paper. My parents had met in Geneva. Mieczyslaw would surely know what it meant.

I heard the baby stir in bed, and Esther rolled over to comfort her. How would I explain to Esther where Bura had gone? Since her parents disappeared from the ghetto, she had clung to me more fiercely than ever. She would be absolutely inconsolable as soon as she knew. And even if I could make her understand, how long would it take for her to realize that the same rescue had not been extended to her? With her dark eyes and Semitic features, she could never pass. Unless there was someone who could take her away, keep her somewhere until the war was over, she could not escape. The Gestapo would come for us, just as they had come for Esther’s parents—just as they had come for Chaim.

I don’t think I had ever fully realized it until that moment—though I could see now that the idea had been sealed on my heart the night before, when Jakob came home with an entire loaf of fresh white bread. I had been too busy savoring it—I hadn’t tasted anything like it in months—to consider what my father meant when he said that the people outside knew what was going to happen to us. One bite of something that tasted so good had brought back all my hope.

But now that I had written my letter, I understood.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and threw my apron over my head, hoping to drown the sound of my dry heaves. When I first knew she was going to be born, I had been so sure my life was ruined that I didn’t think I wanted it anymore. I didn’t think I cared what happened to me.

But now it seemed I was mistaken. And soon, every dream I had ever nursed, every joy and every sorrow allotted to the vast numbers of humanity, was going to disappear suddenly and forever like a dying piece of music.

***

It was foolish, I knew, to let him take the risk. But he was not afraid. He had been the messenger for almost a year now.

When he came that day, I was alone behind the counter. I gave him the medicines as usual, putting the slip of paper with Mieczyslaw’s address on it between two bottles of laudanum. He saw it instantly and looked up at me, but I didn’t flinch. Without speaking, he swept the medicine bottles into the bag; I saw the bit of paper with Mieczyslaw’s address on it between his thumb and third finger. And then I saw it disappear into his glove. I had a sudden idea that he had glanced at the address and recognized Mieczyslaw’s name. Truthfully, I was not surprised to find that he was working in the Polish resistance; he was the one, in the back of the café, that I knew Mieczyslaw could trust. And when he raised his eyes again, his face clear and radiant, I knew that he had recognized me at last. In that moment, he looked ageless—as though he had come not just across the Vistula from Kazimierz but across time, from a future we could not inhabit. How could he have come here otherwise, day after day, without getting caught? In the end, he began to seem like some sort of angel.

He touched his cap, and the door closed behind him. Outside, he gave the bicycle a push and then jumped astride when it was already in motion. I watched until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I didn’t know what Mieczyslaw would do when he received my letter. I hoped with all my heart that he would rescue my little Bura from the Catholic monastery where she would be taken; but even if he did, I knew she would never be Jewish. Already it was as though she had never really belonged to me at all. But perhaps Bura would survive when Chaim and I could not. That would have to be my hope.

And meanwhile, I would have Esther, who had come to mean a great deal to me in the end. Perhaps tonight I would tell her the baby’s real name—though she had probably guessed it already. Here was an idea: I could let Esther be the one to tuck the handkerchief inside her little bodice when it was time to go. She would want to do that.

Oh, Esther. I so hated to grieve her like this; but perhaps she would surprise me. She had always behaved with admirable resignation until now.