I started fishing in the early evening in late May, on a quiet bend in the River Wisłoka guarded by dense, leafy woodland – mostly paper-barked birches and tall, broad oaks, but also curlicue-branched hazel bushes near the water. Noc would tag along, his tail twirling. He’d try in vain to catch dragonflies in his snapping jaws and watch the dark water around my line as if expecting a river sprite to surface at any moment.
On two occasions, I caught trout big enough to eat.
Izzy and Liza planted a kitchen garden, so that by early June we were able to begin harvesting fresh vegetables. The sweet, earthy smell of our beets carried me back to the days of my childhood when I’d go marketing with my mother. Liza, on sniffing at our perfumed trellis of pink and blue sweet-pea blossoms, would always fake a swoon, like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel overcome by love.
Food had never tasted so good as the meals we ate on Liza’s small patio, listening to the Polish trees and fields speaking in the language of wind from the Ukraine. But no matter how much I ate, crabs of hunger would still sometimes scuttle through my belly during the night. I’d light a candle and creak down the stairs into the kitchen. Often, Izzy would accompany me. We’d sit in our underwear at the kitchen table – little kids gorging on cheese and pastry while their parents lay sleeping.
One warm dawn in late June, I took off all my clothes and lay next to Noc in a potato field. The ground seemed solid below me – incapable of giving way – for the first time in a year.
Izzy and I were in the cellar on 7 July, helping Liza stack her freshly fired pottery on her shelves, when we heard two cars approaching. By now, we knew the routine. We crept behind the kiln, out of view. She rushed upstairs and closed the cellar door behind her. Two men soon entered through the front door, and Liza began talking German, but we couldn’t make out her words.
After a few seconds, she shouted, ‘Get out of my house!’
I listened for a gunshot. Instead, a German yelled, ‘Where are you hiding him?’
When Liza screamed, I jumped up.
‘Stay here!’ I whispered to Izzy.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, gripping my arm.
There was no time to explain. I leaned down. ‘Go to Louis when you get out of here.’
When I kissed him on the lips, he held me for a startled moment, then kissed me back.
‘Erik, no!’ he whispered desperately as I stepped away.
I meant to say with my eyes that our time was over, and I meant my smile to mean that I had no other choice. Did he understand?
When the cellar door opened, I started up the stairs with my hands extended high over my head.
‘I’m coming up!’ I called out in German. I didn’t dare glance at Izzy, because I was sure that his darkly shadowed eyes – and everything in them that I wanted to live for – might steal my courage, though I wished I could have reassured him that I’d be all right.
Three SS officers had come to the farm. Though I put up no resistance, the two younger ones knocked me down and kicked me. Liza stood by, shouting curses at them, until the one in command – forty-ish, with greying hair around his temples and black eyebrows – grabbed her and threw her to the ground.
‘I didn’t tell them!’ she shouted to me as I was dragged away. ‘I swear!’
The Germans shoved me into the back seat of their car.
Before I was able to holler out the window that I knew she could never betray us, the older Nazi raised his gun and fired. Liza fell over with a guttural cry, clutching her arm.
I shoved open my door and got out. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at him. ‘She only hid me to make money!’
He never even turned to me. He put the barrel of the gun up to Liza’s ear.
She showed him a bewildered look.
I can still hear the explosion of the bullet; it’s the sound of all the best people I ever knew being murdered.
The German in command got in the back seat beside me, demanding to know my name and where I was from. He slapped me across the face when I made no reply. Struggling for breath, I told him my name was Izydor Nowak and that I was a clockmaker from Warsaw; I appropriated my old friend’s identity because he’d be able to disappear more completely if the Nazis believed that they had captured him already.
I also told him that he had murdered a wonderful woman who had not deserved to die.
I next remember entering Puławy, where my captors made me stand in a town square with a group of about fifty other Jewish men for the rest of that day and all through the night. The Christian residents – thousands of them, it seemed to me – passed us on their way home from work, but none of them offered us a crust of bread or a cup of water. The Germans wanted to prove to us, I think, that we were nothing – less important to our Polish neighbours than dogshit on the sidewalk. And it was true.
