The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

knit for me last winter and my lone pair of woolen trousers. I was surprised; I preferred pants to skirts, but Mama thought them unladylike and before the war she used to let me wear them only on the weekend when we weren’t going out anywhere. When I had finished changing, she pointed to my feet. “Boots,” she said firmly.

My boots were from two winters earlier and too snug. “They’re too small.” We had planned to buy a new pair last fall, but the restrictions on Jews going into the shops had come.

Mama started to say something and I was sure she was going to tell me to wear them anyway. Then she rummaged in the bottom drawer of the armoire with effort and pulled out her own boots. “But what are you going to wear?”

“Just put them on.” Hearing her firm tone, I obeyed without asking further. Mama’s feet were birdlike, narrow and small, and the boots only a size larger than my own. I noticed then that despite dressing me for colder weather, my mother still wore a skirt—she didn’t own pants, and even if she had, they would not have fit over her belly, which seemed to grow rounder by the day.

As Mama finished shoving some belongings in a bag, I looked out the window to the street below. In the faint predawn light, I could see men in uniforms, not just the police but SS as well, setting up tables. Both ends of the street were blocked. The Jews were being forced to gather on Plac Zgody as they did each morning. Only there was none of the order of roll call from when we lined up to go work in the factories. The police were pulling people from buildings and trying to corral the crowds into lines with truncheons and whips, herding them in the direction of a dozen trucks waiting at the corner. It looked as though they were taking everyone in the ghetto. I let the curtains drop uneasily.

A spray of gunfire rattled closer to our building than I had ever heard it. Mama pulled me away from the window and onto the floor, whether to shield me from seeing or being hit, I did not know.

When the gunfire had ceased for several seconds, she stood and pulled me to my feet, then led me away from the window and ushered me into my coat. “Come, now!” She started for the door, carrying a small satchel.

I looked over my shoulder. For so long, I had hated living in the filthy, cramped space. But the apartment that had seemed so grim was now a sanctuary, the only safe place I knew. I would have given anything to stay.

I considered refusing. Leaving our apartment now with so many police on the street seemed foolish and unsafe. Then I saw the look on my mother’s face, not just angry but afraid. This was not some outing to be taken or skipped. There was no choice.

I followed Mama down the stairs, still not quite understanding. I guessed that we were going outside and joining the others to avoid risking attention or having the Germans come and order us out. When we reached the ground floor, I started for the front door. But Mama turned me squarely by the shoulders, nudging me farther down the hall. “Come,” Mama said.

“Where?” I asked. She did not reply but led me back to the bathroom, as if asking me to go use it one last time before a long journey.

As we neared the bathroom once more, I heard my father arguing with a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. “Things aren’t ready,” Papa said.

“We have to go now,” the strange man insisted.

Going anywhere would be quite impossible, I thought, remembering the blockade on the street. I stepped into the bathroom. The toilet was still shoved to one side, revealing a hole in the floor. I was stunned to see a man’s head stuck up through it. It looked dismembered, like some oddity at a freak show or carnival. He had a wide face, cherubic cheeks rough and raw from working outdoors in the cold Polish winter. Seeing me, he smiled. “Dzień dobry,” he said politely, greeting me as if all of this was perfectly normal. Then he looked at Papa and his expression turned somber once more. “You must come now.”

“Come where?” I blurted. The streets were teeming with SS and Gestapo and the Jewish Ghetto Police, who, God help us, were nearly as bad. I looked down at the hole in the floor, understanding. “Surely you don’t mean...”

I turned back to Mama, waiting for her to protest. My elegant, refined mother was not about to lower herself through a hole beneath the toilet. But her face was stony and resolved, ready to do what Papa asked.

I, however, was not ready. I took a step back. “What about Babcia?” I asked. My grandmother, who was in a nursing home on the other side of the city, having somehow escaped deportation to the ghetto.

Mama faltered, then shook her head. “There’s no time. Her nursing home is not Jewish,” she added. “She’ll be fine.”

Through the window over the sink, I glimpsed crowds of people being herded from the buildings onto trucks. I spotted my friend Stefania in the crowd. I was surprised to see her so far from her own apartment on the other side of the ghetto. I had imagined, too, that because her father was one of the Jewish Ghetto Police, she might somehow be spared, safe. Now she was being taken, just like everyone else. I almost wished I could go with her. But her face was white with fear. Come with us, I wanted to shout. I watched helplessly as she was pushed forward and disappeared into the crowd.

Mama stepped around me. “I’ll go first.”

Seeing her belly, the man in the hole looked surprised. “I didn’t know...” he murmured. The man’s face wrinkled with consternation. I could see him