“Did you always talk this much?” I asked. A flush swept over her cheeks.
“Sorry. I’m excited.”
“Don’t apologize. This is wonderful,” I said, laughing in spite of myself. I, too, was excited to see her, glad for the company and the opportunity to thank her, but now that I had seen those books, I was excited for her to leave so I could read. It had been years since I had read a book for the first time. I cautiously reached to pick one up and was surprised to find it was a Bible.
“Sara...she mentioned that you’re actually Catholic,” Elz·bieta muttered, the flush intensifying.
“I’m not really any one thing,” I admitted, staring at the book. “My mother was Jewish. My father Catholic.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
I looked up at her and frowned.
“Tell you that I’m not really any one thing?”
“Well, I just mean why didn’t you tell us that you weren’t Jewish,” Elz·bieta clarified.
“But I am Jewish. My mother was Jewish, and I’m her son.”
“I...” She cleared her throat. “I think you know what I mean, Roman.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“Not to me,” she said firmly, but then she winced. “But...we may have been able to help you try to escape if we had known that you would pass on this side of the wall.”
I sat for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain, and then I pointed to my injured arm.
“You were there the first morning, when I came here, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You saw my blood.”
“Yes.”
“If you saw my mother’s blood, it would have looked the same. Her blood is in my veins, and her blood is Jewish blood. To the Germans, this was enough for them to decide that I was worthless. But I know that if there are any good parts in me at all, they came from my mother. To deny her heritage is to deny my heritage, and I would rather die than do that,” I said, then I shifted awkwardly. “But my father and my mother decided I would be raised Catholic. I went to a Catholic high school. I take Communion and I go to confession. So I am comfortable with Catholic identity papers. But if the only way to get those papers would have been to leave my family behind? I would have faced death proudly before I considered it.”
Elz·bieta listened, watching me intently, and then nodded. “I respect that.”
“God, it is so good to see you,” I said, and then I laughed in spite of myself. “I was so sad when you stopped visiting us.”
“It’s a long story,” she said, looking away. “Maybe I will bore you with it another day.”
“What have you been doing now that your work in the ghetto has finished?”
“Reading. Knitting. Cooking. Drawing. And repeat,” she said with a sigh. “Your arrival was quite a shock, and I’m stuck on this floor until my parents learn to trust me again, especially since the ghetto rebellion. The Germans seem paranoid that the rest of us Poles will be inspired by your battle and try to fight back, too. So they are coming down on us harder than ever, and my parents don’t let me out of their sight. But I’m actually relieved that they know the truth. It was hard lying to them.”
“Why did you help us?”
“Every role model I have ever had in my life would have done the same,” she said and shrugged. “Besides, I don’t know how other Christians can sit by and look the other way. My conscience would have been unbearable if I hadn’t at least tried to help.”
When I yawned, a soft smile covered her face.
“You need to rest.”
“You’ll come back and see me?”
“I can’t think of anything I’d like more.”
And she left, leaving a sweetness in the air and a brightness in the room. And it struck me that living next door to Elz·bieta indefinitely was not going to be unpleasant at all.
24
Emilia
With false identity papers courtesy of Uncle Piotr’s mystical network, Roman was a freer man than he’d been in years. These days, it was only his health that kept him prisoner.
Just as he’d seem to improve and begin moving slowly around Sara’s apartment, he’d suffer a setback. Several times, the infection in his arm appeared to clear and the wound healed over, then swelled again overnight. With his new set of papers, he might have been able to visit a hospital, but Sara decided it was better to avoid any questions about how he got the wound. So every time his infection flared up, she would call one of her doctor friends to perform another agonizing debridement to clean out the wound. And while Sara tried to build his gut up slowly to handle consistent food, several times he was stricken with bouts of violent vomiting or diarrhea, and then he was all the way back to sipping spoonfuls of broth.
“Why is this taking so long?” I asked Sara one day, when I visited to find Roman was once again in bed, resting after a night of intense illness.
“He came to us very near death, Elz·bieta,” she said gently. “A person does not recover from that kind of physical trauma overnight.” Her face grew sad, and she added carefully, “Nor the mental trauma. Just remember that.”
I could sense how frustrating it was for him to have freedom within his grasp, only to be held at bay by his own body. Roman was never one to complain, and at times it was hard to even get him to acknowledge his pain.
“How are you feeling today?” I’d ask him, even when he was positively green or Sara told me that he’d been awake all night in pain.
“Just fine,” he’d always say and shrug.
But for all of the challenges, those months became a magical interlude for me. The war raged on outside Sara’s apartment, but inside her spare room—the room that was now Roman’s room, right on the other side of my wall—all was quiet, except for the beating of my heart and the quiet rhythm of our chatter.
“You’re so smart,” I said, shaking my head as he told me about how he’d been unable to sleep the night before, so he’d read through one of Sara’s nursing handbooks. Now, he was full of all sorts of information about how the typhus inoculations worked and why soap was so useful for preventing the spread of disease. He seemed to possess an uncanny ability to absorb information, even if he’d only read it once.
“You’re smart, too,” he said.
“Not book-smart like that.”
“Well, I was good at school.”