Though there was no food, Korczak had us all address and mail invitations to our Passover seder on April first. We divided up his list of benefactors. When the day came, fifty guests arrived and sat near the door. The long tables were covered with tablecloths. I sat next to a kid whose blisters and scabs were so thick his neighbors called him Fish Scales. We had no eggs or bitter herbs and only a bit of soup and a matzoh ball each, and the smaller kids were excited because it was announced that Madame Stefa had hidden an almond in one of the matzoh balls. Our holiday starvation, Zygmuś joked, would be like the rest of our week. But Korczak told the guests that no child at his table had been abandoned and all were joined by the loving spirits of their absent mothers and fathers, and when he said that many of the kids started crying. Most of the audience did too. Mietek got the almond.
For a week no one came round to bother me. Then someone pounded on the orphanage door late in the evening, and Madame Stefa answered it and came over to my cot and said a Jewish policeman wished to see me.
At the door Lejkin said that he needed to find the apartment where my friend, the pretty one, had stayed before she’d left the ghetto. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said if I refused then the Germans he was with would take ten kids from the orphanage and shoot them. He said the Germans would be happy to tell me which ones they would shoot. He waited while I got dressed and then walked me down the stairs and we got into a car with Germans in the back. One of them asked him in Polish why I was crying and Lejkin said, “That’s what he does.”
At first I gave them the wrong address but once we stopped there I panicked and told them I’d been mistaken and gave them the right one. That was only seven blocks farther on. Something was caught in the heater in the car’s dashboard and made a fluttering sound. While I waited in the front seat, Lejkin and two Germans went up to the door and knocked and asked the woman who answered to step outside. She was in her red flowered bathrobe. She looked over at me in the car. One of the Germans shot her where she stood and they left her there outside her front door.
The next day the kids were talking about how many people had been shot all over the ghetto. Korczak told Madame Stefa to let me sleep, so the room was set up for the day around me. I told myself I wasn’t going to move and if I cried until I dried out that was fine too. No one knew how many people had been killed. One of the staff members finally told Mietek that she’d heard they’d all been connected to an illegal newspaper. Korczak said this didn’t need to be discussed with the children within earshot. The next day I was made to get up and do some chores and when I was washing dishes I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Jewish Council had circulated a memorandum saying that the Germans said the executions had been a singular event and wouldn’t be repeated.
After that there were daily roundups at barricades the Germans set up on different streets with a few sawhorses and signs. Once the barricades went up you only had a few minutes to get away before the cross streets and alleys were blocked too. “Now the day’s a success if you just manage to get where you’re going without an incident,” Madame Stefa said.
Korczak’s solution to all of this was letter-writing. Just because things were as bad as they could be, he said, that didn’t mean we had to accept that action was useless.
All of those with acceptable penmanship were set to writing Please if possible send packages to the Orphans’ Home at 16 Sienna Street for the sick children. He said there was more and that he would dictate the rest. He said to write that peaceably they run around and play, these children who so recently arrived wounded, frozen, abused, hungry, and hunted. Some of the kids asked how to spell peaceably and he told them it didn’t matter. He said to write that there was no food for them and a lot of the smaller children had stopped growing. That nightmares and weeping were their permanent experiences. And yet his teaching had been borne out, since when the adult community wouldn’t provide a stable or rational environment the children could create for themselves a world that was functional and tender. I wrote that sentence twice, I was so taken with it. He said to write that there were always more children imploring him to be admitted, coming to him in groups on the street and making their proposals like little skeletal aldermen. He said to sign the letters with our names and then for Dr. Henryk Goldszmit/Janusz Korczak/The Old Doctor from the Radio.
FOR THREE DAYS I DIDN’T LEAVE MY BED EXCEPT FOR meals and Korczak again told them to leave me alone. The bedbugs spared only the bottom of my feet. During the day, before the kids hung the blackout paper, a new rule said they had to stand to the side of the windows to watch the street, because now the Germans were firing at any movement indoors. A policeman the staff members called Frankenstein because he looked and acted like the monster in the film never missed an opportunity, they said, to break a window if he saw a silhouette.
The kids watched the roundups at the barricades. They could hear them starting with the whistles and the shouting. Sometimes they saw someone they knew. Jews went by carrying all sorts of things: cages or bowls or horns. One had a pot with a seedling in it. They were all going to the depot the Germans called the Umschlagplatz where the trains took them away.
On the fourth day Korczak again got me up to go on his rounds with him. Madame Stefa insisted he wear a warmer shirt and he had to struggle into it. She had to help him with his suspenders.
Out on the street he couldn’t remember where he was going. In one doorway he rang the bell and said to me, “What did I come to see him about?” In the gloom of another he said, “What is it I’m looking at?” The instep of his shoe came loose and flapped when he walked. The coal smoke in the air left grit on our teeth. Everyone moved as if in a daze and looked at me like I was a piece of bread. A woman ahead of us in a shop complained about the price and Korczak said to her, “Listen. These aren’t goods and this isn’t a store. You’re not a customer and he’s not a shopkeeper. So you’re not being cheated and he’s not profiting. This is just what we’ve decided to do, given that we have to do something.” On the way back his legs were so swollen he had to hire one of the bicycles with seats attached for passengers. He asked me to choose the strongest-looking driver and while we rode he leaned over to me and said in a hoarse voice that he was always moved by how gentle and quiet the drivers were, like oxen or horses.
MORE KIDS GOT SICK BUT MADAME STEFA STILL slept downstairs with the healthy ones and Korczak upstairs in the isolation ward. “It’s cold for May,” he said to me one night when I came up to sit with him. He was writing something while everyone else slept.
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“The carbide in the lamp,” he said.
The vodka bottle was gone. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Raw alcohol I mix with water and a dissolved hard candy for sweetener,” he said. He asked why I hadn’t eaten dinner and when I told him I hadn’t wanted to, he said fatigue and apathy were symptoms of malnutrition. I asked why he hadn’t eaten dinner and he said eating was work and that he was tired.
I sat next to him on Jerzyk’s bed. Jerzyk was sweating and his eyes were open. “Alcohol mixed with warm water takes away the ache and sore eyes,” Korczak said.