he asked, before I could speak.
“I—I …” I stammered.
The guard looked up from his clipboard. “Name!” he barked.
“Gershmann, Emma,” I managed to say.
The guard scanned his list. “Not here.”
“No, but I think my parents are, Chaim and Reisa Gershmann.”
He looked again, turned to another page. “Yes. Twenty-one Limanowa Street, apartment six.”
“Then I want to be with them.” A look of surprise flashed across his face and he opened his mouth. He’s going to tell me I cannot come inside, I thought. For a moment, I felt almost relieved. But then, seeming to think better of it, the guard wrote my name beside my parents’ on the list and moved aside to let me enter. I hesitated, looking down the street in both directions before stepping into the ghetto. The gate slammed shut behind me.
Inside, a wall of human stench assaulted me and I had to fight the urge not to gag. Trying to take only shallow breaths through my mouth, I asked directions from a man, who pointed me toward Limanowa Street. As I made my way through the ghetto, I tried not to look at the gaunt, bedraggled passersby who stared at me, a new arrival, with unabashed curiosity. I turned onto Limanowa Street, stopping before the address the guard had given me. The building looked as though it had already been condemned. I opened the front door and climbed the stairs. When I reached the top floor, I hesitated, wiping my sweaty palms on my skirt. Through the rotting wood door of one of the apartments I could hear my mother’s voice. Tears sprang to my eyes. Until now, I hadn’t wanted to believe they were really here. I took a deep breath and knocked. “Nu?” I heard my father call. His footsteps grew louder, then the door opened. At the sight of me, his eyes grew wide. “Emmala!” he cried, throwing his enormous arms around me and hugging me so hard I thought we would both fall over.
Behind him, my mother clutched her apron, her eyes dark. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. When my father finally released me, she pulled me into the apartment.
Looking around, I shuddered inwardly: did they really live here? Small and dark and smelling dankly of mold, the single room with its lone cracked window made our modest Kazimierz apartment look like a palace in comparison. I could tell that my mother had tried to make the place habitable, fashioning pale yellow curtains to hang over the cloudy, cracked window and hanging sheets to divide the room into two parts, a makeshift bedroom and a tiny communal living area, barely big enough to hold three chairs and a small table. But it was still horrible.
“I came back to stay with you, but you were gone.” I could hear the accusing tone in my own voice: why hadn’t you told me where you had gone, or at least left a note?
“They gave us thirty minutes to leave,” my father said, pulling out two chairs for me and my mother to sit on. “There was no time to get word to you. Where’s Jacob?”
“His work,” I said simply. They nodded in unison, unsurprised. They were well aware of Jacob’s political activities. Aside from the fact that he was not Orthodox, it was the one thing they did not like about him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” my father fretted, pacing the floor. “We are older people. Probably no one will bother us. But it is the young people …” He did not have to finish the sentence. The young people were the ones being deported from Kraków. Those who received deportation orders in the ghetto were trapped, unable to run.
“I had nowhere else to go,” I replied.
“Well,” my mother said, taking my hand, “at least we are all together. Let’s get you settled.”
The next morning, I reported to the Jewish Administration Building to register with the Judenrat, the group of ghetto inhabitants designated by the Nazis to run the internal affairs of the ghetto. I was assigned to work in the ghetto orphanage. My parents had already received work assignments, and by some luck, they had also been given reasonable jobs, my father to the communal ghetto kitchen, where he could once again bake, my mother to the infirmary as a nurse’s aide. We had all managed to escape the dreaded work details, where Jews were forced to perform heavy manual labor outside the ghetto walls under the eyes of brutal Nazi guards.
I began working that afternoon. The orphanage was a small, two-story facility that the Judenrat had established on Josefinska Street. The inside was dark and overcrowded, but a tiny grass enclosure behind the nursery gave the children, mostly toddlers, a place to play. It housed about thirty children, virtually all of whom had lost their parents since the start of the war. I enjoyed watching them. Aside from being woefully thin from the meager ghetto rations, they were still children, oblivious to the war, their abysmal surroundings and the dire situation of having no parents to care for them in an uncaring world.
Yet despite the small amount of pleasure I took in my job, I thought constantly of Jacob. Surrounded by children, I was often reminded of the family we might have started by then, if not for the war. At night I played back our moments together in my head, our courtship, our wedding, and after. The nights had been few and dear enough that I could remember every single one. Staring up at the low ceiling of our apartment, I thought guiltily, defiantly, of sex, of the silent, unexpected joys that Jacob had fleetingly taught me. Where was Jacob? I worried each night as I lay in bed, and whom he was with? There must be girls in the resistance, yet Jacob had not asked me to join him. I wondered with shame not if Jacob was hurt or warm enough, but whether he was faithful, or if some braver, bolder woman had stolen his heart.
I was lonely not just for Jacob but for other company, too. My parents, overwhelmed by the twelve-hour work shifts spent almost entirely on their feet, had little energy to do more than eat their rations and crawl into bed at day’s end. The ghetto had taken a tremendous toll on both of my parents in the short time they had been there; it was as if they had aged overnight. My father, once hearty and strong, seemed to move with great effort. My mother moved more slowly, too, dark circles ringing her eyes. Her rich, chestnut mane of hair was now brittle and streaked with gray. I knew that she slept little. Some nights, as I lay in bed, I could hear her muffled sobs through the curtain that separated our sleep quarters. “Reisa, Reisa,” my father repeated, trying unsuccessfully to reassure her. Her cries unsettled me. My mother had grown up in the small village of Przemysl in a region to the east known as the Pale, which had been under Russian control prior to the Great War and was subject to intense, sudden outbursts of violence against its Jewish inhabitants. She had seen houses burned, livestock taken, had witnessed the murder of those who offered a hint of resistance. It was the violence of the pogroms that had caused her to flee west to Kraków, after her parents had succumbed to illness brought on by the brutal living conditions. She had managed to survive, but she knew just how afraid we all ought to be.
The other women who worked in the orphanage were not much company, either. In their fifties and older, and mostly from the villages, they were not unkind, but the work of bathing, feeding and minding so many children left little room for conversation. The closest I came to a friend at the orphanage was Hadassa Nederman, a heavy-set widow from the nearby village of Bochnia. Round-faced and perpetually smiling, she always had time for a kind word or a joke. Most days, after the children had gone down for their afternoon naps, we would share a few moments of conversation over our watery afternoon tea, and though I could not tell her about Jacob, she seemed to sense my loneliness.
One day when I had been working in the nursery for about two months, Pani Nederman came to me, leading a dark-haired girl with her same thick-waisted build by the hand. “Emma, this is my daughter, Marta.”
“Hello!” Marta cried exuberantly, drawing me into a bear hug as though we were old friends. I liked her instantly.
