The Night of the Burning (6 page)

“You look just fine, Devorah.”

I blushed furiously; even my ears felt aflame. “Thank you,” I muttered, and hurried back to the classroom. In case he was still watching, I pulled out an old slate board and scribbled a few English words over and over again, as if I were really concentrating on our homework.

Mr. Bobrow spoke nine languages, including English. Every day he found time to give us English lessons. Big and small children were at the same level: we squeezed into the old school desks and repeated the strange words together.

In the evenings before we went to sleep, Mr. Bobrow displayed yet another talent: he played the ukulele. One song was serious rather than lilting and merry. Mr. Bobrow told us it was the English anthem and we should always stand at attention when we sang it. I couldn’t make any sense of the words, but I sang it softly over and over to myself until I knew it by heart.

“God sayr our gracious King …
Long to ray ober us
God sayr our King.”

One day I heard a tremendous knocking on the front
door. I looked around wildly for help. I’d heard that kind of knocking before. When the man in the uniform delivered Papa’s letter from the Czar, the letter that caused such fear in our house, he had knocked just like that. “Mr. Bobrow! Mr. Ochberg!” I shouted.

But the delivery was a happy occasion this time: two big cases and then two more. They kept coming, until sixteen large boxes blocked the entrance. Nechama and her friends leapfrogged from case to case.

“Open them, open them! They must be for us.”

They really were for us, packed with secondhand clothing by the Jews in South Africa. We burrowed into the heaps of clothes, fighting to grab the warmest coats and the prettiest skirts.

“Look, Nechama,” I marveled. “Instead of buttons up the back, this dress has a metal thing that goes up and down.”

“It’s like a tiny train …” Nechama began.

“Racing along tiny greased tracks,” Itzik exclaimed.

“That, children, is a new device called a zip,” Isaac Ochberg explained, laughing at our amazement. But I also saw him wiping away tears as he read to Mr. Bobrow the letters of support he found inside the boxes.

The next time a man came to our door with a big box was different again. The small children watched him with puzzlement, but I just smiled quietly. I know what he’s carrying, I thought. They don’t know, but I do. I fingered the photograph in my pocket, remembering the day long
ago in my village when a man carrying a box had pulled out a smaller black box. He had handled the small box very, very carefully. From it had come a photograph.

“Shoo!” the man in Warsaw admonished some children who had edged closer. “Move away! Don’t bump me.” With great self-importance, he unfolded three tall metal legs into a triangle and attached the small box to the top corner. Then he hung a trailing black cloth over the long-legged box with a grand flourish and, without even a goodbye, climbed right under the cloth himself. His large bottom stuck out the back.

“Hee, hee!” A couple of children giggled. “Peep-oh! We can see you.”

“Be polite,” Mr. Bobrow said reprovingly, nudging his glasses into place as he hurried up to the crowd. “This man is a photographer. He uses that cloth to keep the light out of his camera. He’s going to take photographs of you for your passports. Now, no pushing. I’ll divide you into groups: twenty children in each photograph.”

I searched quickly for Nechama and squeezed my way through the line to reach her. Sisters should be in the same photograph.

Faygele, the little actress from the train, sat in front of us for the photographs. Her straw mattress was next to ours at night. Faygele was a chatterbox. “I love Mr. Ochberg,” she had whispered to me one night after Nechama fell asleep. “Some of us call him Daddy Ochberg now. He’s taking us across the ocean.”

“Yes,” I replied briefly. I didn’t feel like talking, but Faygele was not easily put off.

“I’m frightened of the ocean, Devorah. And of Africa. Aren’t you frightened of Africa?”

“Yes,” I said again. If Faygele was frightened, why was she so cheerful all the time? Her busy chatter was as silly as Nechama’s childish giggles.

“But I said yes right away when he asked me to come with him,” Faygele remembered. She sat up on her mattress and leaned closer to me, her eyes shining. “Don’t you think I was brave?”

“We’re all either brave or crazy,” I muttered. “And there’s no turning back now.” I wasn’t going to tell her that I lay awake for hours at night, bargaining with God, begging my parents, trying with all my might to go back in time to our life before. But when I saw little Faygele’s puzzled eyes, I felt guilty. “Yes, you were brave,” I said.

Each night, Nechama would grow quiet as darkness fell. She refused to lie on her own mattress and would climb under my blanket and curl into my arms. I loved those moments when she’d show how much she needed me. Often she awoke shuddering and trembling from nightmares, her body damp with perspiration.

“Big knife,” she whimpered one night, clinging to me. “He had a big knife … Aunt Friedka, heavy …”

“Shh, shh, it’ll be all right,” I whispered, stroking Nechama’s twining curls. “I’ll sing Papa’s song if you want. Shh, shh.” I sang the old Yiddish lullaby softly, until I felt
Nechama’s tense body relax. Her lips parted in quiet, even breathing. I breathed quietly, too, feeling satisfied for a while. Only I knew how to take care of Nechama, how to soothe my sister. The nights were long, but we were together.

In the mornings, however, Nechama awoke as cheerful as a bird, while I lay heavy and numb. After breakfast we had English classes, and then Nechama went off with Malke from Pinsk and her new little friend, Jente. I felt as if my strength went with her, leaving me limp and drained. Mainly I sat on my little iron cot, feeling tired down to my very bones, staring first at my photograph and then out of the window at the weak sun or the gray rain. Once or twice, Mr. Ochberg came over to lift my chin and look worriedly into my eyes, but I was too weary to wonder why.

The only part of the day I looked forward to was lunch with Madame Engel. Regina Engel was a well-known and generous Jewish widow who owned a large restaurant in Warsaw. She had thick, very wavy hair like mine, strong black eyebrows, and a handsome straight nose. She held herself upright and ruled her restaurant like a general. Every day we received a message from her telling us when it would be convenient for us to come for lunch, either before or after the rush of her usual customers. Then two hundred of us would line up and walk in neat pairs through the tree-lined cobblestone streets to the restaurant.

On our walks, I stared at the grand buildings and
carved marble monuments, which alternated with piles of stone and rubble left by the war. On almost every corner, women and children as thin and sick as Mama had been begged for coins. I remembered Mama’s shrunken thighs, her belly swollen with emptiness, the dry paper-thin skin stretched over her bones. I couldn’t do anything for her. And I couldn’t do anything for these people.

Once or twice we saw people in fur coats, too, stepping from their carriages into stately homes.

“I wonder what they do behind those doors,” I whispered to Nechama.

“Eat, of course. And dance with their friends,” she replied with certainty.

The first time we visited Madame Engel’s restaurant, we were all silent throughout the meal. A weekday seemed like Shabbes in that great, majestic room, with snowy tablecloths cascading to the ground, silver candelabra, and red velvet curtains as soft as the Torah cover before the Night of the Burning. Waitresses in ruffled aprons moved quietly in the hushed atmosphere. Something on the ceiling caught my eye and I stared. Painted up there were fat baby boy angels without any clothes on at all. I quickly looked down again at the food, thick lentil soup and bread. Afterward came rolled-up cabbage leaves stuffed with potatoes and onions. Everything was tasty, and the helpings were generous, too.

One lunchtime, I saw Isaac Ochberg point me out to Madame Engel and then whisper into her ear. I froze.
What had Mr. Ochberg said? What had I done to make myself conspicuous?

A few moments later, Madame Engel glided straight toward me like a ship.

“You will stay at my restaurant a bit longer today, little one,” she said in a firm but kind voice. “Come and sit with me in my kitchen. I want you to taste a new recipe I am trying out. You will help me.”

I flushed red, but found myself standing up and following her. It was not possible to say no to Madame Engel. And somehow I didn’t really want to. I began eating my lunch in the kitchen every day and then staying there for a couple of hours. Madame bustled around, giving the maids rapid-fire orders.

“Quickly, wash all those children’s bowls. Maria, you dry and put them away—not so high up, Maria, we’ll need them again tomorrow. Good, now let’s hurry up with the regular customers’ dinner. We have one large party arriving in thirty minutes. Gerda, set the big table at the back with the best silver. Don’t forget to light the candles.”

The kitchen was many times bigger than my entire old home, scrubbed spotlessly clean, gleaming with copper pots and towering samovars. Two huge stoves made the air warm and steamy. I sipped my soup slowly just outside the bustle, at a tiny table set up especially for me. “What do you think, mamaleh? Too salty? Too much onion?” Madame would ask. Sometimes she would stroke my cheek as she passed.

It was all simple food because there was little to be bought at the market, but everything she made tasted delicious to me.

Why did she choose me? I asked myself again and again. At first Mr. Ochberg pointed me out to her for some reason I don’t understand, but since then she has seemed to like me more than the other girls. She asks my opinion as if she really cares what I think. Even Mama never did that.

Once Madame stopped bustling around the kitchen and looked at me as I watched her. Her heavy dark brows relaxed for a moment and she smiled. “Such eyes,” she murmured. “Huge dark eyes with the whole world in them.” Then she shook her head and strode back to the big stove. I wondered what it was that she’d seen in my eyes.

How good Madame was. How quickly I grew to love her with all my heart. At night I had long fantasies that she would let me stay in her sweet-smelling kitchen forever—with Nechama, too, of course. We would remain in Poland and learn how to help her in the restaurant, and then we wouldn’t have to move to that strange, frightening land: Africa.

1916–19

The bad time in my home began when I was about seven, on the morning Uncle Pinchas came back. That should have been the happiest moment for our family, but it turned out to be the beginning of the end.

One Shabbes in fall, Nechama and I slept at Aunt Friedka’s house.

“Stay with your aunt this Shabbes,” Mama had told us. “She’s lonely.”

Very early on Saturday morning, Aunt Friedka, Nechama, and I were all asleep together in the big bed. Suddenly we were awakened by the loud clatter of a cart stopping outside the door.

“Your man is home,” a rough voice shouted in Polish. “Come and get him.”

I reached for my aunt, but my fingers touched empty sheets. Aunt Friedka was already out of bed, at the door. As if even in her sleep she had been waiting a year for this
moment. I pushed sleepy Nechama aside and jumped out of bed, too. I heard the clopping of hooves and the rattle of uneven wheels as the cart continued on its way.

I stood blinking at the door. Uncle Pinchas? It couldn’t be. Aunt Friedka was leaning over a broken wreck of a man lying on the ground, dirty, gray-faced, and still. Still except for the bubbling, stuttering wheezes that seemed to come from a wet place deep inside him.

“Easy, easy, you’re home now,” Aunt Friedka was murmuring again and again, her voice surprisingly calm and low. But when she turned to me, I fell back a step. Aunt Friedka’s face was white, her eyes empty.

“Send Nechama for your parents and the barber,” she ordered. “Then help me carry your uncle into the house.”

I fled inside. “Nechama! Nechama! Wake up!” I shouted, and pulled her roughly to her feet. “Run home and get Papa!” She stared at me, her mouth open. “Run!” I shouted again, pointing through the open door. “They brought Uncle Pinchas back. He’s— Go get Papa.”

Still in her nightdress, she scampered outside, gaped at the figure lying on the ground at Aunt Friedka’s feet, peered back at me in horror, and disappeared in the direction of home.

“Take his legs,” Aunt Friedka ordered.

I couldn’t touch that filthy, wheezing bundle. I had to. I couldn’t. Then I saw his hand outspread on the ground. It was Uncle Pinchas’s long, slim hand. The last time I saw him, that hand had held hot tea, when Uncle Pinchas was
master in his own home on another Shabbes morning a lifetime ago. I crouched down and lifted Uncle Pinchas’s cracked boots as firmly as I could, while Aunt Friedka carried him by the shoulders. Together, we managed to lift him onto the high bed.

“Chanah’s gone for the barber,” Papa said as he ran in the door. The nearest doctor was more than a day’s journey away and no one in the village could afford his fees, anyway. So we had to rely on the village barber.

Papa and I struggled to take off the boots, while Aunt Friedka began unwrapping something stiff and mud-soaked that had been wound around Uncle Pinchas. One single sob broke from her. “It’s the blanket I gave him. When they took him away.”

There was a cough at the door as the barber announced his arrival. Lifting his bulging leather bag of medicines onto the table, he squinted at the long names on the labels.

Mama followed him in. “Go home,” she ordered me. “Go home and look after Nechama. She’s very scared.”

I’m scared, too, I wanted to whisper. I don’t want to be alone. But Mama was busy boiling hot water to heat the barber’s poultices. I walked out very slowly—maybe she’d change her mind and let me stay with her. She didn’t. Nechama, it was always Nechama who had to be taken care of.

Late that night, I heard Papa talking bitterly to Mama. “There’s no medicine that will help Pinchas. The German
gases eat up a man’s lungs. That’s how they poison thousands of men as they lie in the trenches.”