My mother and father fought more about what I was doing. He said having a macher at a time like this wasn’t such a bad thing and she said the big macher was dragging the little macher around on a string. He said she didn’t complain when the soup was hot in front of her and she said I was going to get killed or bring the typhus home.
Every morning she searched my clothes for lice and doused my head over the sink with kerosene. She rubbed my neck and behind my ears with a kerosene-soaked rag and scrubbed at my scalp like my hair was the problem. She reminded me she had thought we were partners. I told her that hadn’t changed. So where was her partner, she wanted to know. Her partner was off at his own business, I told her.
She rinsed and toweled my head and I got my satchel. Later I felt guilty and told her we could work together all day tomorrow, but she told me she’d already learned not to get attached to anything. She asked if I missed my younger brother. She said that if she hadn’t been self-centered she wouldn’t have survived either. I repeated that we could spend the whole next day together and she said that the day after that we could visit the Promised Land, where everyone ate figs and honey and fish with noodle soup.
NOTICES WERE HUNG OVER THE GATES TO THE ghetto warning that it was threatened by an epidemic. My mother and father stopped visiting neighborhoods outside the walls and asked me to do the same. I told them I would and went on doing whatever I wanted wherever I wanted to. My mother said that seven people had died across the street, including Mrs. Lederman and the Globus twins, and wondered if we were just going to be walled in with all the sick people until everyone was dead. My brother said he’d heard that after the peace the Jews would all be sent to Madagascar, and my mother asked what we would all do in Madagascar. “Let’s get there, first, and then we’ll find out,” my father told her.
A week later she heard from the woman who sold her soap that all Jews were to be expelled from the streets crossing Ujazdowskie Avenue and the area adjoining the Vistula. My father asked why we should believe her and my mother reminded him that the woman was Czerniaków’s sister-in-law. Two days later he read the same news aloud to us from the paper, as though we’d been arguing with him. Jewish residents in the German quarter had to move out immediately; those in the Polish district could remain for the time being; and all new Jews arriving in the city had to go straight to the walled Jewish district.
Where were they going to put everyone, my brother wanted to know.
“I think they believe that’s our problem,” my father told him.
Lutek reported the next day that his father and the rest of the porters had been told it would soon be forbidden in our district to rent to Aryans, and that Christian families were already negotiating to exchange apartments with Jews from other parts of the city. “So?” I said, and Lutek said, “You’re an idiot,” and that we would have a field day what with all the carts and wagons going back and forth, and he was right.
Proclamations kept appearing in the newspapers and my father kept reading them to the family, always first announcing, “And under the heading of Things Get Worse …” Each proclamation listed new streets that were to be cleansed of Jews. Pages advertised Aryan-owned apartments inside the walls to be traded for Jewish-owned ones on the outside. Finally in October all Jews were given two weeks to move into the district and told that it had been shrunk by an additional six streets, which meant that those who had already exchanged apartments to get onto those streets now had to exchange apartments again. This was necessary to protect the health and well-being of the soldiers and the general population.
The result was like the worst street bazaar of all time combined with an evacuation. Every road we looked down was a sea of heads and all we heard was a terrible clamor and shouting. Lutek and I spent most of our time at the Leszno Street gate. Jews were hauling overloaded pushcarts and wagons in while Poles tried to haul the same out and the arguments about who could proceed and who had to wait meant that it took hours to get anywhere. Collisions spilled tables and chairs and stoves and pans onto the cobblestones, and half a family’s load got snatched away before they could reassemble the other half. Lutek and I rode the crowds up to the wagons and carried off whatever we could. Sometimes kids or old people on the wagons saw what we were doing and shouted to those in front, but in the crush the fathers or older kids could never get to us in time. I got a mantel clock and Lutek pulled away a whole Oriental rug. The German and Polish police ignored the Polish carts but grabbed anything they wanted off the Jewish ones. One of the Jews complained, so they overturned his.
On some of the narrower streets pushcart owners who hadn’t found apartments went from house to house calling up to the windows to ask if there were any spare rooms. Anyone who had a cart charged whatever he liked, and everyone was a porter, so Lutek’s father and the others made money by taking over the sidewalks in front of their buildings. People moving in unloaded feather beds and laundry baskets but the porters threw them over the fences into the courtyards and the families had to pay to get them back. On every street, children were lost and crying and milling around. Everything Lutek and I carried off we stored in the cellar of his father’s building, alongside what his father had collected.
We were separated the day before the deadline and I was knocked to the pavement trying to get closer to a cart. I crawled to the entryway of a building and tried to get my breath back. A kid jerked at my satchel while I was crawling and I kicked at him and drove him away. I lost my balance getting back on my feet and almost put my hand on an SS officer. He and three of his men were watching a Polish policeman whose papers had fallen out of his leather pouch. The policeman was in the road shouting for the crowds to go around him but every time he crouched his pouch slid down off his shoulder and spilled more paper. The SS officer laughed with his men about it. Even I could see that they were afraid of him. His hairline under his cap stopped high on the back of his neck and there was something about the stubble that looked dangerous.
My knees still hurt from where I’d fallen and I put my hands on them. The officer did the same, and his men noticed and smiled. He squinted at me as though he’d said something funny and then straightened up and gestured to his men and they left, one of them looking back and winking before the crowd swallowed them up.
ON THE DAY OF THE DEADLINE LUTEK AND I SPOTTED a wagon filled with magical loot — a gilded birdcage, a set of knives in a sunburst pattern in an open display case — and followed it until we had to give up because the crowds were so impossible. Lutek got mad and climbed a lamppost to search out other opportunities while I hung on to it below him. Then we heard a fanfare of horns and pie pans and the gates of the courtyard opposite us opened, and two old janitors somehow managed to part the mob on the sidewalk and a row of kids with horns and tin pans and wooden spoons turned onto the street in a line. A boy in the center held a staff with a bright-green flag and a Jewish star in a harness around his waist. More lines came out of the darkness behind them, kids of all sizes holding toys and books against their chests and singing.
“What is it?” Lutek asked. We couldn’t hear what they were singing but the kids kept coming, at least twenty rows of them, followed by wagons piled high with wicker baskets tied with cords and cast-iron pots and floured breadboards and trunks tied with rope, crates of books and ladles and strainers, and then a wagon mounded with coal and another with potatoes. Other kids and adults wrestled over the coal and potatoes that scattered onto the cobblestones when the wagons turned onto the street. All of the wagons had red geraniums in window boxes along their sides, and beneath them decorations made from streamers. The wagon drivers were wearing homemade bird masks with plumes and feathers. We pushed closer and heard someone say it was Korczak’s orphanage that had been forced to move. And then there he was with his bald head and yellowish goatee again, the last one out before the courtyard gates swung shut behind him. He was pulling a heavy woman along by the arm and struggling to keep up with the last wagon. She was as tall as he was and seemed more frightened by the crowds.