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

building, then another, silencing our laughter. It was the mothers of the other children who had been taken by the police. There came a thud outside. I started for the window, but my mother blocked me. “Look away,” she ordered. It was too late. I glimpsed Helga Kolberg, who lived down the hall, lying motionless in the coal-tinged snow on the pavement below, her limbs cast at odd angles and skirt splayed around her like a fan. She had realized her children were gone and, like Mama, she didn’t want to live without them. I wondered whether jumping was a shared instinct, or if they had discussed it, a kind of suicide pact in case their worst nightmares came true.

My father raced into the room then. Neither Mama nor I said a word, but I could tell from his unusually grim expression that he already knew about the aktion and what had happened to the other families. He simply walked over and wrapped his enormous arms around both of us, hugging us tighter than usual.

As we sat, silent and still, I looked up at my parents. Mama was a striking beauty—thin and graceful, with white-blond hair the color of a Nordic princess’. She looked nothing like the other Jewish women and I had heard whispers more than once that she didn’t come from here. She might have walked away from the ghetto and lived as a non-Jew if it wasn’t for us. But I was built like Papa, with the dark, curly hair and olive skin that made the fact that we were Jews undeniable. My father looked like the laborer the Germans had made him in the ghetto, broad-shouldered and ready to lift great pipes or slabs of concrete. In fact, he was an accountant—or had been until it became illegal for his firm to employ him anymore. I always wanted to please Mama, but it was Papa who was my ally, keeper of secrets and weaver of dreams, who stayed up too late whispering secrets in the dark and had roamed the city with me, hunting for treasure. I moved closer now, trying to lose myself in the safety of his embrace.

Still, Papa’s arms could offer little shelter from the fact that everything was changing. The ghetto, despite its awful conditions, had once seemed relatively safe. We were living among Jews and the Germans had even appointed a Jewish council, the Judenrat, to run our daily affairs. Perhaps if we laid low and did as we were told, Papa said more than once, the Germans would leave us alone inside these walls until the war was over. That had been the hope. But after today, I wasn’t so sure. I looked around the apartment, seized with equal parts disgust and fear. In the beginning, I had not wanted to be here; now I was terrified we would be forced to leave.

“We have to do something,” Mama burst out, her voice a pitch higher than usual as it echoed my unspoken thoughts.

“I’ll take her tomorrow and register her for a work permit,” Papa said. This time Mama did not argue. Before the war, being a child had been a good thing. But now being useful and able to work was the only thing that might save us.

Mama was talking about more than a work visa, though. “They are going to come again and next time we won’t be so lucky.” She did not bother to hold back her words for my benefit now. I nodded in silent agreement. Things were changing, a voice inside me said. We could not stay here forever.

“It will be okay, kochana,” Papa soothed. How could he possibly say that? But Mama laid her head on his shoulder, seeming to trust him as she always had. I wanted to believe it, too. “I will think of something. At least,” Papa added as we huddled close, “we are all still together.” The words echoed through the room, equal parts promise and prayer.

2

Ella

Kraków, Poland

June 1942

The early-summer evening was warm as I crossed the market square, weaving my way around the fragrant flower stalls that stood in the shadow of the Cloth Hall, displaying bright, fresh blooms that few had the money or inclination to buy. The outdoor cafés, not bustling as they once would have been on such a pleasant evening, were still open and doing a brisk business serving beer to German soldiers and the few foolhardy others who dared join them. If one didn’t look too closely, it might seem that nothing had changed at all.

Of course, everything had changed. Kraków had been a city under occupation for nearly three years. Red flags with black swastikas at the center hung from the Sukiennice, the long yellow cloth hall that ran down the middle of the square, as well as the brick tower of the Ratusz, or town hall. The Rynek had been renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz and the centuries-old Polish street names changed to Reichsstrasse and Wehrmachtstrasse, and so on. Hitler had designated Kraków as the seat of the General Government and the city was choked thick with SS and other German soldiers, jackbooted thugs who walked down the sidewalk three and four wide, forcing all other pedestrians off their path and harassing ordinary Poles at will. At the corner a boy in short pants sold the Krakauer Zeitung, the German propaganda paper that had replaced our own newspaper. “Under the Tail,” people called it in irreverent whispers, implying that it was only useful for wiping one’s backside.

Despite the awfulness of the changes, it still felt good to be out and have the sunshine warm my face and to stretch my legs on such a beautiful evening. I had walked the streets of the Old Town every day I could remember of my nineteen years, first with my father as a child and later on my own. Its features were the topography of my life, from the medieval Barbican fortress and gate at the