“It’s good.”
“Thank you.”
“Is it to be a happy sketch or sad sketch?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Uncle Piotr looked down at the paper again, then leaned forward and tapped against it with his fingertip.
“The way you have drawn the child’s hand, it’s missing something. It looks almost as though it should be holding a toy, don’t you think?”
I realized then that I had drawn Icchak. His hand was empty, but my subconscious mind had probably intended to fill in the book he’d been looking at when I first saw him. Suddenly, though, I gave in to impulse, and I reached down and quickly placed a little doll in his hand instead.
“Why a doll?” Uncle Piotr asked.
“Maybe this child doesn’t have parents,” I said, my throat suddenly tight. I thought about Truda and Mateusz, who were in their bedroom reading, and I had a sudden urge to rush to them and tell them I loved them. But for their generosity, I’d have been alone like Icchak. “Maybe this child doesn’t have anyone to hold him close at night. Maybe he would appreciate something to cuddle.”
As I finished the toy, I could suddenly see the child’s face in my mind. I shifted my hand to fill in the face, sketching Icchak’s wide eyes and Cupid’s-bow lips, curved into a faint smile. His eyes echoed his sadness, but his lips spoke of finding joy despite his circumstances.
“Wait here a moment,” Uncle Piotr said, and he pushed back his chair and retreated to his room. When he returned a moment later, he had a small chunk of wood in his hand and an even smaller knife. I watched in silence as he began to whittle away at the wood.
“What are you making?” I asked him.
“Your toy,” he told me, nodding toward the page. “Art is generous, you know. Each artwork has its own energy, but it is never self-contained. One piece can be inspired by another piece, and in turn it can inspire, too, and on and on. It’s self-reproducing, each piece spreading a different kind of beauty or thought or lesson to each person who sees it.”
In no time at all, Uncle Piotr had carved the rough shape of a small doll. He pushed it across the table toward me, and I lifted it thoughtfully.
“Your doll needs a face,” I said. Uncle Piotr chuckled.
“That’s your department, Elz·bieta. I can whittle. I cannot draw.”
“Do you have more wood?”
“Rough waste wood like that? Only a little, but I can access it easily enough.”
I picked up my charcoal and sketched a quick face onto the doll, then turned it to show him. Uncle Piotr smiled.
“Would you like to do a little project with me?” I asked him.
“Perhaps.”
“Could you make me more of these?”
Half an hour later, Truda and Mateusz emerged from the bedroom, amused as they looked at the table covered in wood shavings and tiny figurines.
“What’s this?” Mateusz asked, picking one up. Truda also scooped up a doll.
“I thought Sara could distribute them to some of the children at her soup kitchens,” I lied. “They have so little. I know they’d appreciate something to play with.”
“You’re going to give naked dolls to innocent children?” Truda said, then she clucked her tongue. I looked up at her, and she hid a smile. “We can’t have that. I’ll sew some clothes.”
Sara was delighted with the dolls when I showed her the next morning. We had made half a dozen—each with a different face and a different outfit, hand-stitched by Truda from scraps of fabric around the apartment.
“I’m going to take some of these dolls to the children you met in my bedroom that night,” Sara told me. “They are still in the ghetto, although we found room for most of them at the Korczak Orphanage. Still, they need to wait a little longer to be evacuated, which has been immensely disappointing for them. You would be amazed how much a small thing like this can cheer a child up.”
* * *
This soon became the new rhythm of our days. Each night I would craft dolls with the adults in my family, giving us a shared task to bond over and a creative outlet which we all enjoyed. In the morning, I would lie to those very same adults and leave the house ostensibly to go to work with Sara, only I’d actually go to her offices at City Hall to change into other clothes and don makeup.
Soon I was marching through the checkpoint with a bag in hand, the bottom stuffed with a chunk of bread or forbidden medicines and as many dolls as I could fit. Sometimes I’d hand these out to the street children we passed on our way to the youth center, but mostly I saved them. Some of the children I was teaching were resistant to learning with me, and the lure of toys was a powerful motivator.
All day, I’d sit with children in the back room. Most of the time I was teaching them the basic tenets of the Catholic faith, but the older the child, the more in-depth this teaching had to be. The younger children thought it was all a game. The older children understood that this was life or death.
“This is God’s work,” I would whisper to myself, on the days when I felt like I’d be physically ill. And I felt that it was God’s work during the good moments—when Sara announced Icchak’s rescue had been a success and that he was settling into a new home with a family on a farm in the countryside, or when a particularly stubborn child would suddenly get it, and Sara would announce that child was ready to be evacuated, soon to be safe or at least safer, and all because of me.
When there was no way to avoid it, I visited homes with Sara, usually if we were to walk past a particular family’s home on our way to or from a checkpoint. While Matylda was focusing on the street children or going door-to-door trying to find children to evacuate, Sara was investigating referrals through Andrzej and his network at the youth center. In theory, this was much safer than Matylda’s brute-force approach to finding new families to help, but it didn’t feel safe. It didn’t even feel like kindness. Helping make a plan to get the orphans from the Jewish area was one thing; visiting homes and looking into the eyes of desperate parents while we tried to convince them to let us take their children was another.
“I don’t know how you do that every day,” I whispered shakily after a mother and father told us in no uncertain terms to leave their apartment.
“Neither do I,” she admitted, smiling ruefully. “Some days I think I have reached the end of my tolerance, but other days I know that it is not for me to decide when enough is enough. Not while these people cannot simply opt out. The thought of that helps me carry on.”
12
Roman
Chaim introduced me to the manager of the youth center, a social worker named Andrzej Neeman. Once Andrzej heard about my mother’s situation, he proposed an agreement.