He reminded me a lot of Uncle Piotr, with his generous smile and his ruddy cheeks, but this man was half the breadth of Uncle Piotr.
“Andrzej is the coordinator of this youth center, and he is a great asset to our work,” Sara murmured.
“You flatter me, Sara,” he said, winking playfully at her.
“Nonsense.”
“Elz·bieta, we do a lot of good work here, but none more important than connecting families to Matylda and Sara and their team,” Andrzej said, the smile in his eyes remaining even as he grew more serious.
“What else do you do?” I asked him.
“Well, we sometimes house people, and of course there is the soup kitchen, and we also quietly run a few classes here and there. We help families out wherever we can. Speaking of which, let me introduce you to someone.”
Andrzej waved to the little boy sitting in the corner of the room, holding a book. When Andrzej indicated he should join us, the little boy scrambled to his feet and approached us, his book hanging loosely from his left hand.
“Elz·bieta, this is Icchak. His parents are no longer with us, and he has been waiting for a place in an orphanage for a while. I have other groups of children coming later so that you can work with them together, but Icchak’s situation is quite urgent so we thought you could start with him one-on-one.”
“Icchak has no one,” Sara said, her voice low as the boy approached us. “He has been living on the streets. On his own.”
“On his own?” I repeated, looking between them in alarm, then back to Icchak. “How old are you?”
The child opened his mouth to speak, but before he could make a sound, Andrzej interjected.
“And remember, Icchak, when we speak to Miss Elz·bieta, we use Polish, not Yiddish.”
“I am six,” Icchak said carefully as he raised his chin. “But I am very clever. I can learn fast.”
“I’ll bet you can,” I whispered, blinking rapidly. Six years old and all alone.
“He’s very excited to learn from you today,” Andrzej said quietly.
I stared down at the little boy, and as he looked up at me with eyes shining with hope, the last of my nausea passed. I could almost feel my courage returning as I stared at him.
I could do this. I had to do this. Icchak needed me to help him, and even more than that, he trusted that I would.
“In that case, Icchak, we should get to work. Would you like to learn some prayers with me today?”
* * *
I spent most of the day in the youth center, sitting in the back room with Icchak, and then with a procession of other children. They were eager to please and quick to learn, but it would take multiple visits for each to become sufficiently confident with the prayers.
By the time Sara returned for me, I was exhausted—physically and emotionally spent, eager only to bathe and then roll into bed. It was a much longer walk to reach the gate we needed to leave through, but as Sara explained, carefully cycling through the checkpoints enabled the team to continue their work much longer than they had originally expected to. Tired or not, we had to walk, and so in silence, we made our way through the streets. I couldn’t even collect my thoughts enough to explain to her how shocked I was by the things I had seen that day, but I had questions, and eventually I found my voice.
“What will happen to Icchak?”
“Children like Icchak are resourceful. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have survived this long. The sad reality is that there are plenty of adults here who are still alive because children like him have been sneaking onto the Aryan side and bringing back food since the beginning.”
“Wait—so he knows how to get out?”
“He does.”
“So why doesn’t he—”
“In his case, getting him out is not the difficult part. When the time is right, we will tell him to squeeze through a hole in the wall or through a small tunnel and to meet us at a particular checkpoint.” She sighed heavily. “No, the real challenge will be keeping him alive once he’s out here.”
“And how will we do that?”
“Matylda and I will plan his evacuation. Sometime in the next few weeks, we will move him into our network. Icchak is one of the lucky ones—the blond hair, the light eyes—his features are not typically Semitic, which makes things so much easier for us. If he learns his prayers and gets a new name and the right papers, he will pass easily on this side, although his new identity will have to be a female.”
“Female?”
“It is the tradition of the Jewish faith to circumcise boys. If he is placed in a family as a boy and suspicions are aroused, a soldier might ask him to expose himself and then his secret will be revealed. So, for Icchak’s sake, we will dress him as a girl and give him a girl’s name.”
“Does that work?” I asked hesitantly.
“It is not a perfect system, but it’s the best we can do for some of these children. And what is the alternative? We must help him as much as we can and pray that he can do the rest.”
I was suddenly overcome by embarrassment at the way I had panicked that morning.
“I’m sorry about...”
“No,” Sara interrupted me, and she was back to the softhearted, calm friend I was so accustomed to. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I knew this was going to be too much, and I knew that you didn’t understand what it would be like in here. But desperation makes us foolish, and I let Matylda talk me into this, even though I knew it was a bad idea. You see now, though, why she was so determined that you become involved. Even if you can teach some children while I visit other families, or once you are used to crossing the checkpoints, if you can smuggle in a tiny chunk of bread, just a little medicine here or there, you will have made a tremendous difference. I am sorry I was so hard on you. The thought of what those in the Jewish Quarter are enduring is beyond reason. I’m frantic with desperation to do good.”
“I will do better tomorrow.”
Sara slipped her arm around my shoulders and hugged me.
“You did well enough today.”
* * *
“What’s that you’re drawing?”
I was sitting at the kitchen table that night, drawing absentmindedly in the book that Sara had given me. I wasn’t consciously trying to capture anything in that sketch, I was just trying to calm my frantic mind enough that I could turn in to sleep. When Uncle Piotr startled me out of my reverie, I looked down at the page.
“It’s a child,” I said. I had sketched a small child in tattered clothes—a close likeness to Icchak, except that I had yet to draw the face. Uncle Piotr sat opposite me and peered at the drawing.