“We shouldn’t have,” I blurted, throat tightening as I thought of the orphans that morning. “I’m going to convince my parents to reconsider. And, please, could you give this note to the girl? I scared her, and I want to apologize.”
He took the note and slipped it into his pocket.
“It takes strength to apologize, Roman.”
“I don’t know about that,” I muttered. I certainly didn’t feel strong.
“And it takes wisdom to understand that in our current circumstances, every day may be our last, and we cannot let grievances remain unresolved. She’ll be back tomorrow, and I’ll be sure that Elz·bieta gets your note.”
* * *
“We need to send the children away.”
I waited until Dawidek and Eleonora were asleep before I spoke to my parents. The carbide light was off, and we were all lying in the darkness. My parents didn’t react, and I wondered if I had waited too late to speak up: despite everything, Samuel still slept like the dead. After a moment, though, my mother rolled toward me.
“Why do you say that?”
I thought I could tell them about the orphanage children without weeping, but I was wrong. By the time I finished explaining what I’d seen, my face was wet with tears, and my mother and Samuel had risen from their mattress to sit on either side of me. It was hot that night, and the air was still and sticky, but I was so desperate for comfort that I sank into their embrace.
“We keep hoping things will get better,” I croaked when I’d finished sharing the story. “We keep assuming things are going to get better. Things just keep getting worse, and every time I think things can’t get any worse, they do. We have an opportunity to free Dawidek and Eleonora from all of this. We have an opportunity to save them from whatever lies after the Umschlagplatz.” I turned my head to the right and sought Samuel’s eyes in the darkness. My voice broke as I whispered, “Please, Samuel. Please let them go.”
“We need to stay together as a family,” Samuel whispered. He slid his arm around my shoulders, and he squeezed gently. “We can still look after one another.”
“Are you so sure of your optimism that you would gamble Eleonora’s life on it?” my mother asked him bitterly. She shifted away from me, just a little, and angled herself to stare past me to Samuel. “Roman is right. Even if it is a work farm at Treblinka—even if it is another camp with more food and fresh air—it is still a camp. Our children do not belong in prison! Those social workers would place the children in a family.”
“You said you agreed with me,” he said, after a pause. “We talked about this last week after they left. You agreed with me. What changed?”
“I didn’t agree with you. I could just see that there was no point arguing with you,” my mother snapped. “All of my energy is going to surviving, Samuel. Every thought, every emotion, it is all just to get through one more day—to drag the children through one more day of this hell. I keep trying to conserve my energy for making milk, but she’s fading anyway.” I could hear the tears in Mother’s voice, and my own eyes were still wet with tears. I reached down, and my mother took my hand.
“Sending the children with the social workers is a risk,” she conceded hoarsely, “but you are right, Roman. Keeping them with us is even riskier.”
“Do you realize that if we send them away we may never see them again?” Samuel whispered desperately. “Our children are all we have to live for. If they go, how do we go on?”
When Mother spoke again, her voice was strong.
“We go on in the knowledge that we have done the only thing we could do to give the children a fighting chance.”
15
Emilia
No day in the ghetto was a good day, but that day, the day the orphans left, that was the worst of the worst.
We had only just arrived when the shocked whisper ran through the youth center of the procession marching down Smocza Street. Sara and Andrzej suggested we shelter in his apartment in case trouble came knocking at the center, too, but that also gave me a front-row seat to watch the children go.
The dolls. They had my dolls. The children were carrying my dolls.
As soon as the roundups were over, Sara suggested we go. I pulled myself together long enough for us to leave the ghetto and return to our office at City Hall. But the minute Sara and I were behind closed doors, I collapsed in a heap, slumped over her desk. Matylda joined us after a while. We all sat around in Sara’s office, she and Matylda in a state of shock, me completely overwhelmed.
“I was so sure the children were safe there. It is the most famous orphanage in all of Poland. I thought they’d never go near it,” Matylda whispered. She was dry-eyed, but deathly pale.
“We could have done something,” I blurted. “Couldn’t we? Should we have? Maybe someone else helped them. There were still blocks and blocks to walk before they reached the loading platform. Maybe something happened...maybe someone intervened. Maybe they are okay. Besides, there was nothing we could do. Right?”
But the women had fallen silent again, staring into space. I so desperately wanted someone to tell me that it was okay. I wanted someone to absolve me.
After a while, Matylda left but returned with a bottle of vodka. She poured three glasses and pushed the smallest in front of me.
“Matylda,” Sara scolded her, “how will I explain drunk Elz·bieta to her parents?”
“Perhaps tell them that she watched two hundred children marched to their deaths today,” Matylda said sharply, and then she sighed. “Sara, we cannot expect her to assume adult responsibilities without any adult comforts.”
Vodka tasted like poison to me, but I picked it up and sipped it gingerly. Sara downed hers in one gulp, and then rested her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands.
“Sometimes, I still feel like this is all a nightmare. Isn’t it crazy?” I said, again desperate to fill the miserable silence in the room. “After all of these years, this is our normal now, but it doesn’t feel normal. And sometimes when I wake, for the first few seconds I forget. I forget everything we’ve lost. I forget that there is very little hope for us, and I just exist. I love those moments. On a day like today, though, I can’t help but wonder if I will ever have a moment of blissful ignorance again. When you have seen these things, things so horrific that you cannot help but become hardened to them, how can you just go back to existing again? Even if the war ended tomorrow, I feel like I would be broken for the rest of my life, and in ways that I can’t even understand, let alone explain.”
“I hope the children didn’t suffer,” Sara said, almost to herself. “They obviously weren’t afraid, at least not the little ones. I hope that right until the very last minute, they thought they were going somewhere wonderful—”