I left for Pinkiert’s headquarters, which were next to the Jewish Council building on Grzybowska Street, and scheduled a funeral for the next morning at 11 a.m. At 1 Leszno Street, Abram Piotrowicz invited me into his apartment and repeated to me what he’d told Stefa at dawn: the guard, Grylek Baer, hadn’t seen Adam the day before.
‘Then I’ll need a list of secret border crossings,’ I told Abram.
‘Grylek will help. I’ll have someone bring the list to you this afternoon.’
‘And ask him if he knows who hired Adam to smuggle out an ermine jacket.’
I managed to speak to all of Adam’s neighbourhood friends that afternoon. Wolfi swore that he knew of only the Leszno Street crossing, but Sarah, Felicia and Feivel were able to give me the locations of four other places where my nephew might have snuck out. The little mop-haired boy wrung his hands like an adult when we spoke, and through his tears of misery, he bravely confessed that Adam had twice accompanied him ‘overseas’, which made me realize that my nephew had led a double life. Speaking to me with his stunned mother standing behind him, Feivel explained that they’d wanted to steal food, but their nerve abandoned them at the last minute and all they managed to get were handouts of bread and jam from shopkeepers. I kissed the top of his head to reassure him that I wasn’t angry. Still, the mind can be cruel; I wished that he’d died instead of my nephew.
I showed a photograph of Adam to the guard on Krochmalna Street where he and Feivel had passed through to the Other Side, and though he remembered my nephew, he hadn’t seen him in weeks. At the other crossings, no one recognized the boy. I received only one lead: at the last place I tried, the cellar of a dingy restaurant, a tough-looking teenaged smuggler named Marcel suggested I make enquiries at a warehouse on Ogrodowa Street where a tunnel leading to the sewer system had been dug. ‘The passageway is so cramped that only kids can squeeze through,’ he noted. ‘Try to speak to the owner, Sándor Góra.’
I remembered the time Adam came home stinking and thought I now knew why.
As I neared my destination, four youths standing on the roof of an apartment house on the Christian side of the ghetto wall began calling me names and throwing stones at me. Only a moment after I started to run, I took a blow on my shoulder that brought me down to one knee.
The hooligans shouted – laughing – that I made too easy a target. Luckily, nothing seemed to be broken, and my anger gave me strength. Getting to my feet, I rushed on with my coat shielding my head until a woman coming the other way was hit. Shrieking, she toppled sideways, crashing on the pavement.
‘Die, Jew-bitch!’ one of the louts yelled at her in Polish.
Kneeling, I took out my handkerchief and staunched the blood spilling from a deep gash below her ear. A fist-sized chunk of cement lay beside her. She was dazed from the impact. Getting her breath, moaning, she said, ‘I think my collar bone is broken.’
Polish meteorites continued crashing around us. I held my coat over the woman’s face. ‘Can you stand?’ I asked, wanting to lead her closer to the wall, where we couldn’t be hit.
‘No.’
‘I’ll get you to a doctor,’ I assured her, and to test her mind, I asked her what year it was.
‘I should care about the date with my bones broken by
I grinned at her outrage. So did she, then she groaned and bit her lip from the pain.
A tall young man appeared beside me from out of nowhere. Cradling the woman in his arms, he lumbered off. We found safety in an optometrist’s waiting room.
A half-hour later, after the hoodlums had grown tired of target practice, I got on my way, and I soon reached Góra’s office. He was a paunchy man in too tight a suit, with a polka-dot tie and a pink carnation in his lapel. He made his living these days managing an
After I explained my purpose, I handed him my photograph of Adam. As he studied it, he picked his front teeth with the mandarin fingernail on his little finger. Handing the picture back to me, he said, ‘Sorry, never seen him. But there are other tunnels leading into the sewer system. He must have gone through one of them.’ Anticipating my next question, he added, ‘No, I don’t know where any of them are.’
Back at home, I found a stout, pale-skinned young man standing beside the armchair in my room, a hostile look in his small dark eyes. His hands were locked behind his back, and the smoke from his hidden cigarette was ribboning up into the harsh yellow light of the ceiling lamp, where moths had piled up in the cup of glass below the bulb. His camel-hair overcoat was threadbare and the collar of his white shirt was stained. His thick brown hair was chopped short – it looked like porcupine needles. He was good-looking in a hard, Slavic way.
‘You must be Dr Cohen,’ he began, speaking Polish.
