Everyone was shoved through and funneled across trolley tracks that opened onto a dirt field by a railway siding. Barbed wire wrapped around a cement post tore my sleeve. Jews already there were weeping and sitting and standing in the hot sun. Clothes and soup spoons and toys and throw-up were spilled around us. People shouted and hugged when they found someone. Some sat in circles facing one another and others wandered around spattered with blood.
Korczak led us to the far end and sat the smallest kids against the wall for shade. He got some men to move to make room.
He sat with the boys and Madame Stefa with the girls. One of the boys asked what would happen next and I heard him say, “Now we’re going on a trip to the forest.” A yellow policeman took the flag from Jerzyk and tossed it over the wall. Ukrainians came by saying that whoever had good boots should give them up since they’d be taken later anyway.
Mietek was still holding my shirttail. The German Witossek stood over us and reintroduced himself to Korczak. His uniform was soaked with sweat even through the empty sleeve that was pinned up and he said that wool was unsuitable for this kind of heat. He took off his cap and wiped his forehead with his sleeve and Korczak turned his attention to the children.
Witossek apologized for the necessity of what had to happen and said he hoped Korczak understood the necessity was one thing and the people who had to carry it out were another. He said he wanted the good doctor to know that what was going to happen was going to happen and that how everyone chose to face it would be the point.
“I agree with you,” Korczak said.
I heard someone singing a song about the king of Siberia. “Pisher!” I shouted. “Pisher!” I stood up and looked around.
The Ukrainians and the yellow police began loading those closest onto the train cars. People were screaming as they were pulled to their feet. Germans lounged against the wall and watched. Some teased the kids nearby. Witossek put his cap back on and walked over to join them.
The Ukrainians and the yellow police kicked and pushed everyone they could into the open doorways. The Ukrainians used their rifle butts as well. Arms and hands stretched out the little window through the barbed wire. When it looked like there was no more room in a car a German walked over with his pistol and fired into the crowd and everyone near who was shot fell backwards and another six or seven people were shoved into the space.
The train was filled and the doors banged shut and the Jews inside screamed until it left. Dust hung in the air from where the ramps had been kicked down.
Korczak put his hands on Abrasha’s shoulders and told him something and other boys leaned in to listen. Madame Stefa put her arms around two girls. A Ukrainian bent over Gieńa and fingered her beads as she sat there with her hands in her lap.
The yellow police gathered around a white enamel pail and took turns cooling off with ladles of water, some pouring it over their heads. Lejkin took the ladle and I put Mietek’s hand on Zygmuś’s shirttail and worked my way over to him.
“Look who’s here,” Lejkin said.
“I know where all the smugglers’ holes are,” I told him.
“So do I,” Lejkin said. The headband of his cap was so soaked you couldn’t read the lettering. He poured water down his shirtfront.
“I know where all the smugglers are,” I told him.
“So do I,” he said.
“No you don’t,” I said.
He looked at me like he’d been swindled before. “So I get you out of here and you’ll deliver those people to me?” he said.
I pointed to Korczak and Madame Stefa and said, “You get them out of here and I’ll deliver those people to you.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, a lot of people would like to get him out of here.” He said something to the policeman beside him and we walked over to Korczak.
“Pan Doctor,” he said.
“Mr. Lejkin,” Korczak said. He didn’t have his glasses and the sun made him squint.
“Another train is on its way,” Lejkin told him.
“Another train is always on its way,” Korczak said. He was shaking.
“This young man seems to think you should be saved,” Lejkin told him.
“I think we all should be saved,” Korczak said.
“It’s possible that could be arranged,” Lejkin told him.
Korczak looked up. “And how would that happen?” he said.
“You’d have to come with me and ask the commanding officer,” Lejkin said.
“And where is he?” Korczak asked.
“Not far,” Lejkin said. “A ten-minute walk.”
“Will you guarantee they won’t be taken away while I’m gone?” Korczak asked.
“You’re joking, yes?” Lejkin said. “You’re making a joke?”
“Then no,” Korczak told him.
“You might be able to get everyone out,” I said.
“So I should leave them here, all by themselves, in this place?” he asked me.
“I’ll watch them. You could hurry,” I said.
“You’ll watch them,” he said.
“I’ll watch them,” I said.
“And can you imagine what it would be like for them if the next train comes back while I’m gone?” he said.
“Please,” I said.
“Please what?” he said.
“Listen to me,” I shouted. But the truth was I couldn’t imagine anything. I always imagined myself, put upon. I never imagined anything else. And the next train sounded its whistle and ground around the curve into view and there was more screaming and calling out of names until its brakes drowned everyone out.
Korczak turned his attention back to his boys and Madame Stefa stood up and walked over to him. Girls hung on to her skirt. Korczak held out his hand and she squeezed it. Zygmuś and Mietek squatted wet-eyed and miserable. “I pissed myself,” Zygmuś told me as though that were the worst of all. By the train cars the shouting started up again.
“Everyone up,” Korczak said. “Rows of four.”
I wailed and shook and jabbered until someone took my hands from my face. It was Korczak. “Stop,” he said. But I wouldn’t.
“I never showed you my Declaration of Children’s Rights,” he said. Behind him the kids had collected their things, boys and girls together, and had gotten into their rows. Zygmuś was pulling at the back of his pants. A yellow policeman beside him started to weep.
“There isn’t a bit of me left in sound health,” Korczak said to himself.
He bent farther down until he was close enough for me to smell him. He put his hands behind my head and lowered his forehead to mine. I was blubbering and got his face wet but he only drew closer. “ ‘The child has the right to respect,’ ” he said. “ ‘The child has the right to develop. The child has the right to be. The child has the right to grieve. The child has the right to learn. And the child has the right to make mistakes.’ ”
~ ~ ~
NOTHING IS DEFINITIVELY KNOWN ABOUT THE last hours of Janusz Korczak and his staff members and his children, and for some time after the war it was said that he and Stefa and some of the orphans had been saved and that they had been seen in villages throughout Poland. Accounts vary, but most likely they were deported to Treblinka on the afternoon of August 5, 1942. Dr. Imfried Eberl, the commander of the camp, reported to his superiors that at the time Treblinka was in such a state of overtaxed chaos that mountains of corpses confronted the new arrivals, and therefore maintaining any kind of deception on the way to the gas chambers was nearly impossible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My main object here, to quote Marguerite Yourcenar in her Bibliographical Note to her Memoirs of Hadrian, has been “to approach inner reality, if possible, through careful examination of what the documents themselves afford,” and so this novel could not have existed, or would have existed in a much diminished form, without critically important contributions from the following sources: Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary; The Selected Works of Janusz Korczak, Martin Wolins, ed.; Aaron Zeitlin’s prose poem “The Last Walk of Janusz Korczak”; Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, Jacob Sloan, ed.; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak’s The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City; Marta Markowska’s The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation — Day by Day; Bogdan Wojdowski’s Bread for the Departed; and Dawid Rubinowicz’s The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz. I’m also hugely indebted to To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives O. S. (Oneg Shabbath), Joseph Kermish, ed.; The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg-Ringelblum Archive Catalog and Guide, Robert Moses Shapiro and Tadeusz Epsztein, eds.; The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, Alan Adelson, ed.; The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust, Guy Miron and Shlomit Shulhani, eds.; Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, Michał Grynberg, ed.; Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust, Jeffrey Shandler, ed.; From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds.; The Last Eyewitness: Children of the Holocaust Speak, Volume 1, Wiktoria Śliwowska, ed., Volume 2, Jakub Gutenbaum and Agnieszka Latała, eds.; Hunger Disease: Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, Myron Winick, M.D., ed.; The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia, Wendy Lower, ed.; The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staroń, and Josef Kermisz, eds.; and Betty Jean Lifton’s The King of Children. I also found crucially useful Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych’s article “The Last Journey of the Residents and Staff of the Warsaw Orphanage”; Lucjan Dobroszycki’s The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944; Leni Yahil’s The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry 1932–1945; Kurt Grübler’s Journey Through the Night: Jakob Littner’s Holocaust Memoir; Adina Blady Szwajger’s I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance; Abraham Lewin’s A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Antony Polonsky, ed.; Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews; Günther Schwarberg’s In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Heinrich Jöst’s Photographs; Hanna Krall’s Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; Naomi Samson’s Hide: A Child’s View of the Holocaust; Willy Georg’s In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941; Jürgen Stroop’s The Stroop Report; Larry Stillman and Morris Goldner’s A Match Made in Helclass="underline" The Jewish Boy and the Polish Outlaw Who Defied the Nazis; Manny Drukier’s Carved in Stone: Holocaust Years — A Boy’s Tale; Bernard Gotfryd’s Anton the Dove Fancier and Other Tales of the Holocaust; Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food; Joseph Ziemian’s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square; George Eisen’s Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows; Rubin Katz’s Gone to Pitchipoï: A Boy’s Desperate Fight for Survival in Wartime; Rochelle G. Saidel’s Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp; Aviad Kleinberg’s article “The Enchantment of Judaism: Israeli Anxieties and Puzzles,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (spring 2009); Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah; and Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.