I ran after him. Where would I go if he disappeared? I collided with a group running by and a man with a valise knocked me down. Everyone was running out of the courtyard of the building next door and those in the back were being whipped and trying to push forward. We were carried down the street like a river and collected in a blockade. I couldn’t see if Korczak was with us. We were pulled into lines of four and shoved onto our haunches in the street. One of the Lithuanians demonstrated and clubbed anybody who didn’t obey on the head. We crouched there while more and more people joined us, everyone wailing and calling to friends and relatives in the crowd. They were shouting, “Where are my children? Tell them I’m leaving.” Or that they had a sewing machine or worked at Többens’s. The yellow police took the sides of the column and the Lithuanians the back and they stood everyone up and got us moving again.
I worked over to the closest yellow policeman and everyone was shouting at him at once, giving him their names, asking if there was anything he could do, asking him to tell their wives or sons or husbands where they were. He shouted for them all to shut up and when I got close enough to ask if he knew Lejkin he hit me in the face with his stick.
A little girl helped me up and was crying that they had to send her home so she could take care of her younger sister. I asked why she was telling me and a woman took her hand and pulled her away. People were fished from the mob or jumped into doorways or dropped down cellar stairs when the policemen were distracted or willing to look the other way.
A blue policeman dragged a girl into the crowd from an apartment we passed and I stepped through the door before he slammed it shut. The girl called “Mr. Policeman!” and then disappeared. The inner entry doors were locked but I held the outer ones together with my arm through the handles. I held them tight until everything had passed by and the street got quiet.
I cracked the door open and saw a shoe on its side in the street. My cheek was numb. My arm holding the door was shaking. I heard banging metal and opened the door wider.
A German down the block was hammering the bolt of his rifle with the butt of his bayonet. I could see eyeglasses on the cobblestones near him. Nearer to me a girl lay on her back.
I shut the door but could still hear her cries. The building around me was silent. When I finally looked out the doors again she was dead and the street was empty except for her and her eyeglasses. Even the shoe was gone. The sun hurt my eyes.
The next street over I could follow the trail of suitcases and scattered hats. Window shutters swung squeaking. One banged against a wall. Feathers still floated around from torn-up bedding.
I started back to the orphanage and two looters passed carrying a clothes wringer. On Twarda a German was poking a pile of clothes with a long stick and I hid and waited for him to leave. On Sienna the Ukrainians sat with their backs to the ghetto wall, tired and drinking with their shirts open. I got into the orphanage through the courtyard.
The kids were all in the middle of the upstairs room with the blackout paper still up on the windows. Everyone was together on the floor. Madame Stefa hugged me but Korczak stayed with his arms around Mietek and another little girl who was asleep. Madame Stefa told me to clean my face.
Some kids were whispering but most were listening. There was shouting and whistles and boots running by outside. Every so often someone got up to use the chamber pot.
We stayed like for that a day and a night. There was no dinner. No one lit any lamps. Once it got late Korczak stood up and weaved through the tangle of sleepers and lifted a corner of the blackout paper on one of the windows. He stood over Madame Stefa, who was asleep with her head back and mouth open, and raised a finger to his lips when he saw me looking. We watched each other until the sun came up and it was like the city outside was gone except for the occasional shot or voice calling in the darkness.
AFTER THAT KORCZAK WENT OUT EVERY DAY AND never let anyone else go with him. When he returned he told whoever wanted to listen what was happening as far as he could tell. The smallest kids held the hands of older ones, proud to have been included.
He said members of the Jewish Council had been arrested and their families held hostage. He said a proclamation had appeared announcing that all of the Jews would be resettled outside of Warsaw and only a few workers were to remain exempt and also that those who reported voluntarily would receive three kilos of bread and one of jam. He told Madame Stefa that only the Germans would have chosen to begin this on Tisha B’Av and when a kid asked why he explained that Tisha B’Av was a fast day commemorating Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon’s destruction of the First Temple and the Roman emperor Titus’s destruction of the Second. He said they were going block by block and doors that were locked or bolted were broken down and the streets emptied one day were being revisited on the next to catch those hiding in places already searched.
He told of how he’d saved an old student by pulling her from a Jewish policeman and shouting that he’d saved the policeman’s daughter that afternoon and so the policeman had let them go, but that he hadn’t saved the policeman’s daughter, not that the man could have ever known for sure.
He said he’d been thrown onto one of the roundup wagons and then a block later had been recognized by another yellow policeman who’d helped him down and warned him not to play the hero or it would get everyone killed. If they had to give up an arm or a leg to save the body, so be it. And if the Jews helped out, wouldn’t that mean fewer casualties and less brutality?
Was this how they were all supposed to ride off into the unknown, Madame Stefa asked, with no fresh clothes, no bundles, not even a piece of bread?
So many kids were crying that Korczak said the policeman had assured him that the orphanage was so famous that the Germans would never touch it. Everyone else was running about frantically trying to get work papers and men who’d been captains of industry were now overjoyed to sweep a factory yard and everybody said the brushmakers’ workshops were the best, because they were controlled by the Army, or that Többens’s workshop on Prosta Street was, because he was Göring’s brother-in law, so everyone wanted the green pass from Többens. But no one knew what worked and what didn’t and what seemed secure one day was a soap bubble the next. He said that while he’d been trapped on the wagon a German had told a woman whose papers featured all the proper seals and signatures that she was an imbecile and the best document that she could hope to find was a cellar.
AT NIGHT WE STAYED QUIET AND LISTENED FOR THE patrols. We could hear muffled sounds of people coming out of their hiding places for water and food. When someone cried or called out down below the windows we weren’t allowed to look.
Almost no one was sleeping. Korczak and Madame Stefa talked on the third floor when it was very late. Sometimes I listened from the stairs and sometimes I didn’t. Their voices were so low I couldn’t hear everything. He told her the shooting on Ogrodowa Street had gone on all day to accommodate those who hadn’t been at home earlier. She asked how he knew that and he asked how anyone knew anything. He said if people had survived they’d probably been hiding whenever something happened.