the street below, offering a game of cards outside, and the whole family charged down the stairs. Mrs. Liebman and I and the baby, whom I now saw for the first time asleep on a rug in the corner of the room, were the only ones left. I thought about what Mrs. Liebman had said. We were all family nowâall of us together, living on top of one another, crowded into one section of the city, all Jews, all hated, but all a family. I knew this was important. I needed to remember this. I needed to save my own anger and hate for the people on the other side of the fence. The woman who vomited so ungraciously on my dress was my family, and I vowed to be nicer to everyone I saw, everyone I came in contact with. And I vowed to remember this day, and this thought, and this moment alone with Mrs. Liebman, always.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chana
MY WORLD SPUN FORWARD, flinging me headlong into the midst of ghetto life. I felt my life before the ghetto, with Tata, and our home, and being warm and well fed, had been but a fantasy. I could hardly remember anything outside of the ghetto. Surely I had lived here all my life, gone to school here always, scraped for food alwaysâalways starving, always dirty, always sick.
Anya, little Anya, had proved to be the strong one. She was cheerful, resourceful, and generous. Beside her, I felt mean and greedy.
It already seemed a long time ago, the late spring of 1940, when they sealed off the ghetto and I joined the
Hachschara,
a special training group. Back then, still the early days, I was determined to ignore the barbed wire that wrapped around our packed and dirty city like sausage casings, guarded by Nazis at every post, and become a part of this clean-up crew. A man named Jakub Poznanski divided us into small groups and showed us how to work the soil and plant grass and flowers. We even managed to find some benches to dot about our little parks. My hopes were high back then, and no one was prouder than I when on one sunny Sunday afternoon all of us in the various
Hachschara
groups paraded before the Chairman, some three thousand of us, chanting and singing and marching to the Hebrew commands.
Of course, back then we were not yet starving. Things changed quickly, though, and soon we found ourselves without potatoes and other vegetables, without meat, with little more than some stale black bread, soup, coffee, and butter. For these we waited in long lines that straggled down the block and around the corner. We were tired, angry, and irritable. My resolve to treat everyone as my family faded, then disappeared with the food, as did the muscles in my arms and legs, and the belief that I would survive all of this, that everything was going to be all right.
Zayde and Jakub worked on Brzezinska Street in the new shoe factory. They worked with the finest leather, fashioning it into high-quality shoes for men and women and boots for the soldiers. The shoes were all taken and sold outside the ghetto. No one inside could buy them. We walked around in the same old shoes with the soles worn through.
Each day, Zayde returned from the factory looking a little shorter, a little thinner, and complaining of sore toenails and back pains. We laughed at first. Zayde and his toenails. If that is the worst of his problems, he will be all right, we told each other. We did not know then that it was a sign of the body deteriorating, of starvation. It wasn't until the Krengiels, a couple transported from Russia, moved in with us that we learned all the signs and symptoms of every disease imaginable.
Mr. Krengiel was a tall, heavy man in his forties who wore a beard, had a balding head, hypochondria, and a whine that drove me crazy in any language.
Mrs. Krengiel was neither short nor tall, fat nor thin. She would have been nondescript right down to her personality if it were not for her bright silver hair and the chocolate, egg-shaped mole on her left cheek.
Mama had said that we had to be nice to them.
"They are, after
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chana
MY WORLD SPUN FORWARD, flinging me headlong into the midst of ghetto life. I felt my life before the ghetto, with Tata, and our home, and being warm and well fed, had been but a fantasy. I could hardly remember anything outside of the ghetto. Surely I had lived here all my life, gone to school here always, scraped for food alwaysâalways starving, always dirty, always sick.
Anya, little Anya, had proved to be the strong one. She was cheerful, resourceful, and generous. Beside her, I felt mean and greedy.
It already seemed a long time ago, the late spring of 1940, when they sealed off the ghetto and I joined the
Hachschara,
a special training group. Back then, still the early days, I was determined to ignore the barbed wire that wrapped around our packed and dirty city like sausage casings, guarded by Nazis at every post, and become a part of this clean-up crew. A man named Jakub Poznanski divided us into small groups and showed us how to work the soil and plant grass and flowers. We even managed to find some benches to dot about our little parks. My hopes were high back then, and no one was prouder than I when on one sunny Sunday afternoon all of us in the various
Hachschara
groups paraded before the Chairman, some three thousand of us, chanting and singing and marching to the Hebrew commands.
Of course, back then we were not yet starving. Things changed quickly, though, and soon we found ourselves without potatoes and other vegetables, without meat, with little more than some stale black bread, soup, coffee, and butter. For these we waited in long lines that straggled down the block and around the corner. We were tired, angry, and irritable. My resolve to treat everyone as my family faded, then disappeared with the food, as did the muscles in my arms and legs, and the belief that I would survive all of this, that everything was going to be all right.
Zayde and Jakub worked on Brzezinska Street in the new shoe factory. They worked with the finest leather, fashioning it into high-quality shoes for men and women and boots for the soldiers. The shoes were all taken and sold outside the ghetto. No one inside could buy them. We walked around in the same old shoes with the soles worn through.
Each day, Zayde returned from the factory looking a little shorter, a little thinner, and complaining of sore toenails and back pains. We laughed at first. Zayde and his toenails. If that is the worst of his problems, he will be all right, we told each other. We did not know then that it was a sign of the body deteriorating, of starvation. It wasn't until the Krengiels, a couple transported from Russia, moved in with us that we learned all the signs and symptoms of every disease imaginable.
Mr. Krengiel was a tall, heavy man in his forties who wore a beard, had a balding head, hypochondria, and a whine that drove me crazy in any language.
Mrs. Krengiel was neither short nor tall, fat nor thin. She would have been nondescript right down to her personality if it were not for her bright silver hair and the chocolate, egg-shaped mole on her left cheek.
Mama had said that we had to be nice to them.
"They are, after
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