The woman in the straw hat and Korczak had come in but I didn’t see Boris. They searched each other’s faces and said it was good to meet again. He told her about the play and she told him how she’d gotten into the ghetto. She said she’d brought honey cakes and vitamin B for the children and he thanked her.
They were quiet. He asked why she had come and she told him she’d come to get him out of there and he said he thought it was something like that. He asked how she imagined she would do that and she said she belonged to the Żegota movement, which distributed newspapers calling on Poles to help Jews, and they ferried people in and out all the time. He asked if he would be going alone. She said that maybe as many as three or four others could go with him. Then she was quiet again.
I could hear the kids downstairs. Someone tried the door and found it locked and went back down.
“I ask you to accept my help,” the woman said.
“Those of us who were here, if we ever met up after this,” he finally told her. “How could we look each other in the eye without asking, ‘How is it that you happened to survive?’ ”
The woman studied her hands. “Why shouldn’t some, if even only a few, be saved?” she asked.
Someone dropped dishes downstairs and kids applauded.
What about the rest, he asked. Could she imagine the ones left behind? “ ‘Pan Doctor is gone. Wait here in the dark,’ ” he said.
I couldn’t tell if the woman was weeping. “We put out a newspaper,” she said. “You produce plays. What good does either do? Maybe we should be learning how to handle a rifle instead.”
Korczak laughed. “I’d love to join the underground but what weapons do they have?” he said. “One group has a revolver. They showed me.”
“You can come out now,” he called after they sat there a while longer, and I stood up and walked around the scenery. The woman didn’t seem surprised to see me. “You can help me show Maria out,” he said. “She’s one of my most successful graduates.”
“The boy with her is the one I was talking about,” I told him. But he didn’t answer and we followed him down the stairs. When I hung back he told me to come on and in the front hall he kissed the woman on both cheeks and then she kissed him on the mouth. Boris stood beside the door and watched them and then looked at me as though he’d never seen me before.
“Please think about what we discussed,” the woman told Korczak.
“I wish I could stop thinking about it,” he told her. “Please thank your friends on the children’s behalf.”
“Have you fallen asleep?” he said to me after they’d closed the door behind them. “Are you just going to stand there and squint?”
In the kitchen he was stopped by a little girl. “You’re the tenth person to ask me about the honey cakes,” he told her. “Do you think there are no problems to solve other than the honey cakes?” She went to Madame Stefa, who gave her a hug. “Do I need to have eyes in the back of my head to keep everyone working?” he called to the group.
HE READ HIS LETTERS ALOUD TO HIMSELF IN THE early morning when he thought everyone else was asleep, so that night I stopped on the stairs and watched from the darkness. I had spent the day mystified by why Boris had acted the way he had.
Korczak held his letter up to the light and read. “To the Editor of the Jewish Gazette: Dear Mr. Editor! Thank you for your favorable evaluation of the Orphanage’s activity. But: ‘Love Plato, yet love more the truth.’ The Orphanage was not, is not, and will never be Korczak’s Orphanage. The man is too small, too weak, too poor, and too dimwitted to gather, feed, warm, protect, and initiate into life almost two hundred children. This great task — this herculean task—”
He stopped and cleared his throat and laid the paper down and made some marks on it. “—has been accomplished through the collective efforts of hundreds of people of goodwill and enlightened minds and insight. As well as by the children themselves.”
He stopped again, still looking at the paper. “Not having any confidence, we are disinclined to promise. Nevertheless, we are assured that an hour of a thinker and a poet’s beautiful fairy tale will provide an experience of the highest order in the scale of feelings. Therefore, we all together invite you—” he said. “We take this occasion to invite you …”
He stood and turned from his writing, then sat down on his bed.
Three weeks of rehearsals were scheduled on the posting board and the performance date was listed as Saturday, July 18. Those who weren’t involved were invited to contribute their opinions when not occupied with chores. The night before everyone got food poisoning and those staff members not throwing up or huddled over chamber pots moved through the darkness with jugs of limewater and morphine for the worst off. Mietek had a nightmare about his mother that was so terrible he shrieked and screamed he was burning up and dying of thirst until Korczak shouted into his face that he would throw him down the stairs and out into the street if he didn’t quiet down.
“That seemed to have worked,” Madame Stefa told him later, while they were soaking up the throw-up with rags.
“Our director shouts and therefore is in command,” he told her.
“He was upsetting everyone,” she said.
“I’m the son of a madman,” he said. “To this day the thought is a torment to me.”
The next morning the main hall looked like a battlefield, but by five that evening the performers had pulled themselves together and gotten into costume.
The audience filled the room and even with the windows open it was so hot that everyone fanned themselves with programs. It smelled of the night before.
Korczak welcomed the guests and told them that an author from India would speak through the mouths of Jewish children in a Polish ghetto. The lights went out and whispers and sounds came from behind the curtain and the kids in the front rows pushed and shoved. The play once it started seemed made for the smaller ones. Abrasha played a sick boy not allowed to leave his room. In the lights his one big eyebrow made him look angry. He had conversations with his doctor and his mother and his stepfather and a watchman on the street and with the mayor and with a fakir and with a flower girl. Then somebody named the Royal Physician came dressed all in white and Abrasha told everyone that he no longer felt any pain and when the boy playing his stepfather asked why they were putting out the lights in his room and opening the curtains and how the starlight would help, Gieńa stepped forward as the flower girl and held out her hands and said, “Be quiet, unbeliever.” And it was as if the entire audience had decided to listen. The kid next to me who’d begun to itch himself stopped.
The physician said Abrasha was asleep and Gieńa asked when he would awake and the physician said as soon as the king came to call him from this world. And she asked if he would whisper a word from her into Abrasha’s ear and when he asked her what he should say she said, before all the lights went out, to tell him she had not forgotten him.
Everyone said they were very moved by the play. An old woman in a Chinaman’s hat told Korczak that he was a genius and could work miracles in a rat hole. He told her that must have been why the others had all been given the palaces.
FOUR DAYS LATER THERE WAS NOISE ON THE STREET early in the morning and in the kitchen Madame Stefa congratulated Korczak on his birthday and handed him a cup of something she’d cooked, and then gave a cry when through the window she saw the lines of blue police and Lithuanians and Ukrainians in black with brown leather collars. Boris had taught me the uniforms. A boy who carried messages from the hospital came in gasping and panting. He said the children there were being evacuated to the Umschlagplatz and apparently getting dumped next to the tracks in their hospital gowns. Korczak got some money from a hiding place behind the stove and ran out the door while the boy was still talking.