Mothers are holding their children tightly, handkerchiefs balled up in their hands. Children are whimpering, squeezing a toy, just a single toy. Little Jak, who thinks he’s too big for a stuffed bear, clings to his mother’s arm, squeezing the bear in the other. He peers over his shoulder, looking behind him, catching me in his view. I force a small smile, showing him I’m here, too. He looks down at the stuffed bear then back up at me and smiles faintly before turning to face forward.
There aren’t many men, and I still don’t have answers as to why I’m here and others aren’t. There’s never a clear reason for anything that happens to us anymore.
With the one final corner behind us just minutes from our home, the sight of the brick wall looms ahead. The height of theincumbent wall casts shadows for as far as I can see, and the closer we come, a change of smell—of sweat and dust—fills the air.
“It was right in front of us all this time,” Grandmother says.
“What was?” I ask.
“The wall.” Grandmother shakes her head and wraps her hand around her throat. “This is why no one knew what purpose the wall was to serve. This must be how the soldiers will close us out of the city—confining us to live within the bordering wall like caged animals.”
The circulating questions about why the wall was being built in the middle of Warsaw had never been answered, but it’s been hard to avoid the idea that it’s always had something to do with the Jewish population. As the lines slow, it takes some time before we’re forced to march up the wooden bridge, leading over the train tracks. The bridge complains beneath our weight, the boards groaning with every step.
As we descend the ramp that leads beyond the wall, it becomes clear that we’ve walked into our own trap. It was so easy to capture us. It’s as if none of us have any fight left within us, but that isn’t the case. We just have nothing to fightwith.
We’re led straight into a building, a sign on the door stating:
Administration of the Jewish District of Warsaw
Reception Center
Everyone pauses for a split second to read the sign—it says so little, but it means too much. Each person is carrying their life within their hands or on their backs, and yet no one is prepared for what will happen next.
The line leads to a table where a fellow Jewish man cranes his neck over a logbook, a pen in hand, jotting down our names.Then we’re sent to an overcrowded room where we’re supposed to wait for further instructions. The people around me are quiet aside from a few exchanging words of gossip or guesses as to what’s next for us. The rest sit in silence, staring into a void. That’s all I can do. Stare at the blur of people holding themselves up with a relentless sense of doubt and fear we can’t escape.
Eventually, we hear that Pawia, building eleven in the Muranów neighborhood, is where the Judenrat committee has assigned us to live. We’re herded through the streets once again, except this time, the streets within the foreboding wall are all dark, covered in soot and construction debris, with people lining the roads with no sense of direction. Deeper into the enclosure, the surroundings swallow us up as we reach a tenement overfilled with residents who lived here prior to the merge, and people who have been forced in since. Ten other people live in our unit, a space large enough for only two or three to live comfortably. The windows are to be kept open for airflow, the toilets are across the hall, outside the unit, and there’s no running water. The building reeks of sewage.
A baby is crying, his mother desperately trying to soothe him with a quiet hum as she curls him up in her arms in the corner of the room. I’m not sure who might have lived here first, or sure if it’s appropriate to ask.
Mother, Grandmother, and I find a space amid the room and place our bags down. “They expect us all to live here?” Mama whispers in my ear.
“I suppose we’re all family now,” I speak out. “My sincerest apologies to whoever lived here first. I can’t imagine having your home infiltrated like this. And to the rest, we stand beside you. I’m Luka, and this is my mother, Chana, and my grandmother, Golda.”
A few speak up with their names, but most don’t lift their heads from staring at the ground beneath us.
“It’s nice to meet you,” a man says, walking up to me with his hand outstretched. He might be around my age. “Apollo. I’m here with my mother and little sisters—the three over near the window.”
“I might just call you my one and only friend now. Hope that’s all right,” I say, trying a dose of humor, something that should seem foreign now.
“Same, brother,” he says. “These folks aren’t doing well from what I can see, but as the only two younger men in the room, I suspect we’ll be assigned to work soon enough. Hopefully, we can still help the others out.”
“Did you just arrive, too?”
“Yesterday,” he says. “I wandered around a bit but it’s a grim scene.”
“Is there any way out? Can we come and go from this entrapment—the ghetto?” I ask, praying he says this is only where we live now. I doubt he knows too much more than I do as nothing has been made public knowledge.
“It doesn’t look like we can leave, but non-Jewish Poles seem to come and go…at least from what I saw yesterday.”
My thoughts cycle around Ella. If she finds a way to enter, nothing will stop her—not even warnings of danger. Despite the effort, it would be a waste as it will be impossible to find me among the dense population.
TEN
ELLA
October 1940
Warsaw, Poland
