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“They tore up her papers.”Julie sobbed loudly.“They didn’t care.I only managed to escape because the guard was distracted by a man falling down.”
He didn’t know what to say.Julie’s tears made him uncomfortable.He shifted from one foot to the other in the darkness, his thoughts on his sister.
“Come on—I’ll take you home.I’ve got to find Jadzia.”
He took Julie to her street and watched as she slid through her apartment door and inside.Then he sprinted home to tell Mama what he’d learned.
Mama listened with a stern look on her face.“I have a friend who is dating an SS officer.I will drive over to her place to ask if he will help us get her back.You see if you can discover where they’ve taken her.”
A few minutes later, Mama was in the neighbour’s borrowed car.The same one she’d used to pick him up from Gestapo headquarters.She drove off with a wave, leaving Jan with Danuta.He gave her instructions to lock the door and go to bed.Usually his little sister would argue with him and tell him he couldn’t give her orders, but this time she gave a solemn nod, her eyes wide.
He added a scarf and gloves to his outfit and tugged his woollen cap down low to stave off the cold.Then, with a quick prayer to Saint Sophia for wisdom, he ran back the way he’d come earlier.
When he reached the place where the Gestapo was dragging people from storefronts and churches and pushing them in groups along the street in the direction of the ghetto, he followed them at a distance, sliding into shadowy doorways and crouching behind piles of rubbish or the remnants of dark, brittle shrubbery that’d somehow survived the violence of war.
They herded the crowds of prisoners to theUmschlagplatz,where a train awaited them.Half of the cars were already packed with human cargo.The sounds of their cries and shouts echoed through the still night air.Jan wanted to cover his ears, wanted to be anywhere but there.He hated the sound, hated thinking of his sister shoved into that cramped car between desperate strangers and gasping for air.
He lingered closer to the gate and listened to the guards.They spoke of the ledger and what they’d recorded there—how many men, women and children were already on board.How many more they could fit.
“Some of them are not Jews.”
“We have a quota to fill, and we will fill it.”
Rage formed a knot in Jan’s gut.His sister had been taken to fill a quota.She would die because of the greed and corruption of an evil government.In that moment, he wanted to kill them all.If he could have, he would’ve pushed them into a pit of lava, or mowed them down with a machine gun.
He’d never been violent, never felt the urge to harm another human being until this very moment.But he’d do it.He’d kill them all if he had the chance, to save Jadzia from the Nazis.
Then came the revelation Jan was waiting for.
“These are going to Majdanek Vernichtungslager.”
“Not to Treblinka?”
“Not today.See to it that every person is accounted for.I won’t have Meisinger say I’m bad at my job.”
Jan hurried away without looking back.He’d heard of Majdanek only recently.It was originally a prisoner of war camp in Lublin, but lately they’d been sending the Jews from the ghetto there rather than to Treblinka.From everything he’d heard about the camp, the SS who ran the place were particularly brutal.
The guard had referred to it asvernichtungslager, which in German meant extermination camp.He had to get home to wait for Mama so he could tell her what he’d discovered.If Jadzia was at Majdanek, they could rescue her.He didn’t know how, but together they’d find a way.Mama would know what to do.
