“You come here after your job and work in our kitchen—clean the pots and pans for me. If you work until just before curfew, I will give you a small ticket which your family can exchange for a portion of food the next day. You can do this up to four times a week, because I have to be fair to the others who need help. And it won’t always be a hot meal—sometimes it will be vegetable scraps or some flour or oil, but I will always have something to offer her. Deal?”
“Yes. Please,” I said, almost falling over myself in my haste to commit to this arrangement. I didn’t mind the long days, especially when my mother assured me that the extra food was really making a difference.
“I’m making more milk,” she said, beaming as Eleonora suckled at her breast. “I’m so proud of you for figuring out how to do this. My clever, clever son.”
I couldn’t see any difference in Eleonora’s condition, but I took my mother’s reassurance at face value. It felt good to be doing something to help, and my work with Andrzej gave me something positive to focus on each day, a welcome reprieve from the constant anxiety I felt about the deportations, which were now happening every day.
Thousands upon thousands of people marched through the streets to the Umschlagplatz with every sunrise now. Some volunteered after the Germans promised three kilograms of bread and a kilo of jam. And then posters appeared in the streets, instructing us to pack our belongings and our valuables, as we would need them when we resettled at the new, spacious camps. Some people believed this proved we were moving into a less cruel chapter of the occupation.
“I told you!” Samuel said, triumphant. “I told you the Germans would soften toward us. Maybe it is time that we volunteer.”
Mother and I looked at him in disbelief.
“You cannot believe this is true,” I said.
“We have no proof that it is not,” he said, shrugging. “What if we are stubbornly staying here in hell, when we could be comfortable in a beautiful new camp at Treblinka?”
“No,” Mother said flatly, in such a harsh tone that the conversation ended, and Samuel did not suggest it again.
It didn’t matter what golden promises the Germans or the Kapo made us, people eventually saw through them, and within days of these efforts, volunteers stopped coming. But a certain number needed to be removed from the ghetto each day, and so the roundups became increasingly vicious. Sala’s workshop was abuzz with horror stories of on-the-spot executions of those who resisted and of crowds stuck at the loading platform for up to twenty hours without food or water.
“It just doesn’t seem right,” I muttered to Chaim one day. “If they are really taking us to some luxurious camp so that we can work for them at Treblinka, why would they kill those who are hesitant to go or let us sit at the Umschlagplatz until we are half-dead, waiting for the transports?”
“You know my thoughts on the matter. If they were slaughtering Jews at Chełmno, they are slaughtering us at Treblinka, too.”
It seemed that we were damned if we resisted and damned if we went. Thankfully my precious work permit meant I was relatively safe—as much as anyone within the ghetto was safe. But I had to make that walk home every afternoon, and it was harder and harder to convince myself to do it.
Now, I walked straight to the youth center, not even stopping at our apartment when I walked past it, and I worked until the very last second before curfew, sometimes much longer than Andrzej even needed me, and often every day of the week, even though I’d only get the meal ticket four of the days. And when Chaim discovered that we could access the roof above the youth center and then walk all the way along the block to my building, safely out of sight of the patrols, I began staying out with him, later and later and long past the curfew.
“Now you see where my nickname came from,” he winked at me, as we sat on the rooftop one night. “I always liked to sit on rooftops. Up here, everything is better—it’s never crowded or noisy, and the smell is dragged away by the wind. Up here, I feel closer to heaven.”
“Who knew you were a poet?” I teased, and he threw a broken roof tile at me.
We would sit on the roof and talk for hours some nights, and then Chaim would climb down to sleep in Andrzej’s apartment above the youth center, and I would climb across the rooftops, to drop through a window into the internal stairwell of my own building.
“Roman,” Samuel scolded me one evening, when Mother had risen to use the bathroom and Dawidek and Eleonora were sleeping. “You said that you would only be working at the youth center four nights a week and only until the curfew. You are coming home later and later. You’re never here when Dawidek is home, and he’s missing you. Besides, your mother has been so worried about you.”
“What I’m doing is perfectly safe,” I muttered. “I’m just spending time with my friend. I’m not even out on the street.”
“Mother misses you, Roman,” Samuel said uneasily. “Maybe...you could please come home in time tomorrow night so that we could sit down for the meal together.”
“You know I don’t even eat here,” I snapped. Samuel’s eyebrows drew down.
“Do you want to eat here? You are entitled to your rations—”
“That’s not what I meant!”
Defensiveness made our tiny bedroom suffocatingly small. There was nowhere to retreat, no way to sort through my complicated fears and anxieties. I knew that I was hurting my family, but I couldn’t seem to help it. It seemed easier to push them away, to try to start the process of learning to live without them, to delay facing whether they were there or gone. I had no hope of finding the words to explain this to Samuel and Mother, so when she tried to start a conversation with me about my day, I pretended to go right to sleep.
But Samuel’s words played on my mind the next day, so when I finished my shift at the workshop, I walked Chaim to the youth center, then doubled back and went home.
I paused at the door as I always did and let my imagination play out the worst-case scenario: that I would push the door open, and the apartment would be empty. My palms went sweaty, and my stomach churned, but I forced myself to open the door—only to find that everything was wrong.
There was a stranger sitting on the Grobelnys’ sofa. Eleonora was on the woman’s lap, and Dawidek was sitting stiffly beside her.
For weeks, I had feared coming home to find my parents missing, and it seemed that this had finally come to pass. I swept my gaze through the room. This apartment was always crowded, so many of us lived here, but now there is just this stranger and the children and, my God, they are gone! My parents are really gone. Blood began to pound through my body, fear and fury and grief somehow leaving me both weak and unnaturally strong. I could barely hold myself up, but I wanted to tear the world apart, and I was certain that I had it in me to do so.