“Thank you, lady,” the little boy said, around a mouthful of food.
“And look.” I handed them each a doll. “From me and my friend.”
Their gazes were wide with wonder. The smallest child lifted the doll to her mouth as if to eat it, and the twin girl laughed and pulled it away, murmuring to her in Yiddish. The toddler seemed to get the idea after that, and she copied the other children, holding the doll against her chest.
Baby Eleonora was lying on a blanket, staring up at the ceiling not far from where I sat with the other children. Maja picked her up and cuddled her close, then led the way into a bedroom.
“Our friends have returned,” Maja told her husband, as she closed the door behind us. Samuel was lying on a mattress on the floor, reading. He set the book down and looked at me, his dark gaze expressionless.
“We have concerns,” he greeted us, closing the book. “Maja and I appreciate very much your kind offer, but we can only do this if we know that we can find our children when the war is over.”
“My team is careful to audit the placements of our children. My supervisor keeps a strict record of who has been placed where. It is of utmost importance that we find the children when the war is over so that families can be made whole again. We are also financially supporting the host families as much as we can. Your children will be well cared for.”
“We don’t have any money,” Maja said, her face falling. Sara gave her a sympathetic smile.
“Very few Jewish families have money now. No, we’re trying to find other ways to fund our operation.”
“So where would they go? Our Eleonora and Dawidek?” Samuel asked.
I knew this next conversation was going to be delicate. Dawidek didn’t seem to be home that morning, but I had seen him on our last visit, and I knew his placement represented a significant challenge. Dawidek had beautiful, deep brown eyes with dark eyelashes and a thatch of almost-black hair. He looked nothing like his much-fairer brother. In fact, Dawidek looked exactly as I imagined his father would have decades ago.
We couldn’t place him in an orphanage even for an instant: his appearance was too classically Jewish, and beyond that, he was tall and, although emaciated, his bone structure was too broad for him to pass as a female child. We would never be able to hide him in plain sight. He was going to need a family who could truly hide him indefinitely. Finding a safe place like this was going to take some time, and I wondered how Sara would explain this to the family. I expected her to tread lightly, to carefully explain the difficulties, but instead she said bluntly, “We cannot place them together. I’m sorry.”
Maja’s hand covered her mouth in shock.
“You will separate them? But you can’t! They will need each other—”
“We must,” Sara said gently. “Eleonora needs to go to a home where she can be breastfed. We know a foster mother who can do this. In fact, she lost her own daughter only a few weeks ago—even in her grief, though, she is determined to help another child, and she has gone to great lengths to ensure that her milk does not dry up. Even more than that, the woman’s husband is a physician. Eleonora would be in good hands there. She will have lots of space and fresh air and good food and a spacious house. She will be able to leave freely because her foster mother’s neighbors do not know that her own baby has died. Eleonora will have a new name, but she will have a genuine birth and baptismal certificate. I cannot even tell you how lucky we are. It is as though the stars have aligned.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Maja whispered, looking down at her baby, but when she looked back to us, her gaze was full of fear. “But Dawidek. What about Dawidek?”
“He is going to be much more difficult to place. That family simply cannot take him. It would arouse too much suspicion. It pains me to say this, but you must understand that Dawidek’s appearance would give him away, regardless of where we place him. His rescue will not be so simple. We really must think this through and work to find somewhere he can be safely housed. But Eleonora is a much simpler and much more urgent rescue. Mrs. Gorka, you know as well as I do that she needs proper nourishment immediately. Besides which, every day you hide her here is another day of risk to you all.”
“If they cannot go together, they will stay with us,” Samuel said, shaking his head. “I thank you both for your time—”
“Mr. Gorka, please,” I blurted. “Please let us place your children. You must have heard the rumors. You must know where the trains are going—”
“I won’t separate my family because of rumors! And—”
“Samuel,” Maja pleaded. The man’s composure wavered. Tears filled his eyes, and he wrapped his arms around his waist and began to rock gently, back and forth.
“No, Maja,” he choked. “I can’t.”
“We need to let them go. We need to let her go. It is the only way she will survive.”
“How can you ask me to do this?” he whispered. “There must be something more we can do here, some way to get you more food, to help you make more milk—”
“If there was a way, we would have thought of it already. We have to let her go.”
“I can’t.” The man choked on a sob as he shook his head. “Maja, I cannot do this.”
“Then, I will do it for us,” the woman said, and she raised her chin stubbornly. She looked at Sara. “What happens next?”
* * *
Samuel wept in the corner, curled in a ball, a sound so raw and empty it left me bereft. Maja was dry-eyed, though, as she helped Sara prepare the baby to leave, dressing her in her best outfit, wiping clean her tiny hands and face as she whispered gently in Yiddish.
I had never seen this part of the process because Sara had taken great care to leave me out of it. But Eleonora was so ill and so weak, and given the situation, the sooner she was settled with her foster family, the better for everyone. And soon enough, Sara indicated that I should follow her to the other side of the room to give Maja and the baby a moment alone together.
Sara reached into the hidden base of her bag and removed the false bottom, and I did the same with my bag. She passed me her collection of secret medicines—just a few sad vials marked with ink, all of which I hid in the base of my bag. But Sara kept one bottle, resting it on the floor beside her feet as she scribbled onto a piece of paper to calculate a dosage.
“Sedative is hard to come by,” she murmured, as she drew the liquid from the bottle into a metal syringe. “Every single drop counts, and it is easy to give a child too much, which can make her stop breathing. It is better to give too little than too much—but it means we will have to hurry through the gates before she wakes. She will sleep for only one hour. We were supposed to use one of the farther gates today, but we are short on time, so we’re just going to have to hope that Captain Fischer doesn’t happen to be at the gates on Muranowska Street.”