Mysia had become a mother too, and Tysia a father—and I’d given them both girls’ names! Tysia was actually a boy.
How wonderful. What a marvelous surprise!
Another family was hiding with us.
I wanted so much to know how many mice had been born.
My pig in the village had given birth to a lot of piglets. I didn’t know how to count, but I could see that after a while, fewer babies were left, and I didn’t try to find out how many and why.
My father peered into the nest of my wonderful gray mice and managed to count fifteen tiny babies. My father knew arithmetic. Later, I looked inside too. I could barely see anything. The inside of the stove was dark, the nest was lined with straw probably taken from our mattress, feathers from our tattered pillows, and wool threads from our unraveling blankets. A red thread was interwoven with them, a thread I knew very well, my thread, which had come undone from one of the flowers my mother had embroidered on the beautiful pink vest she’d sent to me with Hania Seremet when I was in the village, and the one who gave me that vest was the one who took it from me and obviously sold it, just as she had sold the green satin dress I’d worn only once, when I had my picture taken, proof that I was alive.
I loved that red thread. It was one of my treasures, along with some beautiful stones, a little red rag with white polka dots, and a pine cone that gave off the scent of resin. I used to wind the string around my finger, a different one every time, or tie several fingers together with it, carefully, not too tightly. Grandpa Seremet warned me not to cut off my circulation. He spit up and vomited his own blood all the time.
I loved seeing my fingers with the string around them turning red, then pale.
I’d brought the thread with me from the village, and it continued to be an important item in my treasure, along with the picture of a girl with a ribbon—a picture torn from a newspaper that I’d rescued from the latrine in the hiding place. Until one day, the thread disappeared. I was sad about losing it, and puzzled. How could it have vanished from the hiding place that no one ever went in or out of? My mother said that maybe elves took it. Everyone knows that elves are partial to the color red.
My mother was almost right. The thread had been stolen, but it was my wonderful little gray mice that had taken it. I forgave them instantly. I wasn’t angry. In my heart, I gave them the thread as a gift.
The nest inside the stove had a special smell, the smell of rusty iron, vestiges of the smell of burning pages from the Jewish gynecologist’s library, the smell of frayed cloth the mice used to line their nest, and the smell of damp warmth. I wanted so much to touch Mysia and her sweet babies, but I was afraid that mother and babies wouldn’t like that closeness imposed on them, so I controlled myself and pulled my hand back. As it was, I thought it was almost a miracle that the little gray mice let us peek in at their warm family nest.
A few days later, my father looked in at the nest again. He turned around abruptly, and in a characteristic gesture ran his hands over his head, his forehead and eyes, and with unexpected, unfamiliar firmness forbade me to look inside.
I didn’t try to find out how many babies there were this time either, but I didn’t mold any more wonderful baskets brimming with treats from the breadcrumbs I saved. I just left them on the floor at the door to the black iron stove. Something in my heart had changed.
The heavy bombing started. After the first explosion, we no longer heard the rustling and chirping of the mice.
There were no more mice.
Maybe they’d gone down to the shelter when the first siren sounded, the way everyone else did?
We, of course, didn’t go. We were Jews. No one was allowed to know that we existed. If someone found out and informed the Gestapo, that would be the end of us, and before some Communist bomb managed to blow us up, the Germans would murder us. We stayed in our hiding place.
But the small mouse family didn’t stay with us. Apparently they weren’t Jews. Maybe they were Aryans.
We remained alive, we survived the heavy bombing. My mother, my father, and I, and all of our millions of lice. The Red Army came, Tovarish Stalin sent it, liberated us and saved our lives.
And as Batiushka Stalin said in Russian: We shall celebrate in our streets too.
It was summer.
It had finally happened, but it had taken a very long time.
After the heavy bombing that had driven my non-Jewish mice away but not the lice, the mighty German army began to retreat. That was after Stalingrad, of course, and after the Allies finally opened a second front—those imperialists who waited to see whether the Red Army would win or be defeated, until it was victorious at Stalingrad and showed them just who Stalin and the Red Army were.
The Red Army, with the momentum of their great victory at Stalingrad, could have conquered all of Europe, defeated the Germans everywhere, taken Berlin by itself and turned all of Europe into a just place that had no poor, exploited people, a place where everyone worked according to his ability and received according to his needs.
And what if the Red Army had gone on to capture the whole world? Why shouldn’t there be justice in England? In America? In capitalist America that had no justice?
But they were alarmed then, all those capitalists who sucked the blood of the proletariat, and they opened a second front because they were afraid that lofty Communism would sweep them away too and divest them of all their money.
That’s what I thought.
THE GERMANS RETREATED. A DEFEATED, EXHAUSTED, BROKEN army. Soldiers who were thin, tired, and thirsty. Rozalia Juzakowa told us. She saw them. So young, and sometimes so handsome.
She’d bring them water from the house and give it to them when they were lying down for a short rest, leaning against the walls of the buildings. They also leaned against the wall of the house we were hiding in, the house on Panienska Street. Then too, if we had come out of our hiding place, they would have murdered us, even though they were exhausted and drained. You don’t need much strength to murder a sick, almost dying woman, a starving man barely able to walk, and a not-very-big girl.
The German soldiers, members of the superior race. Lying against the wall of the house we were hiding in, their blue eyes were closed, their blond hair messy and scraggly. How many of them were murderers? How many of them were Nazis who followed Hitler happily, as he wrote in Mein Kampf? Mein Kampf was one of the books left from the Jewish gynecologist’s library, and it survived the war with us. Hitler’s eyes in the cover picture have holes in them. Maybe I did that.
Another great war awaited those soldiers. The road to Berlin would be a long one. They left, they were gone.
The German occupation was over.
Silence.
It was over.
We were saved.
Some of the Jews who survived crawled out of their hiding places, out of the burrows and the pits, into the air of the world, and when they did, they were murdered by the Ukrainians and the Poles. They’d survived the entire German occupation and now, right after the liberation, they were murdered.
There were people like that there too. Murderers. And they weren’t even Germans. They were Ukrainians, they were Poles. They really did hate the Jews. They even hated Jewish children.
Or maybe they were afraid that now, after the liberation, those Jews who’d managed not to be murdered would ask the Ukrainians and the Poles to return their businesses, homes, property, everything that had been stolen from them?
As Juzakowa talked and talked and talked,