Every night Nate developed his negatives with chemicals he’d hidden away. The film was carefully sealed in tin cans and hidden behind the bricks of the converted closet where he slept. Sometimes I walked the streets with him after sunset. Once we saw two naked children shoveling handfuls of offal into their mouths. I turned away. Nate grabbed me roughly by the arm.
“No, Mia, you must look,” he urged, pressing the shutter lever. Click. The children’s image was preserved.
Next a sanitation cart rolled up the unpaved street, pulled by human horses with stringy sinews bulging from their skeletal frames. It moved along the twisting alley; even the naked boys ran from its stench. People darted in and out of their doorways to empty their bedpans and chamber pots into its bed. A few clicks, and everything was recorded.
Nate looked satisfied as he concealed his camera under his coat. It infuriated me. “How can you bear it?” I asked. “It’s as if you enjoy watching their misery.”
He shrugged. “I’m not the cause of it.”
“But it’s wrong to take their pictures. You could let them hide their shame instead of documenting every bedpan and bloated belly in this hellhole.”
“Someone has to do it,” he said urgently.
“Why?”
“Because we’re sealed off. With the smugglers gone, nothing enters from the outside and we are kept in. If we have no idea of what’s beyond the barriers, what do you think they know about us? Take a look. Tens of thousands of people are walking around like they’re already dead. Skulls are crushed over a piece of bread, families live twenty to a room, children eat shit. Now tell me, without photographs who would ever believe what the Germans have done to us?”
I shook my head.
“Do you remember how I used to devote my time to painting?” he asked.
“Of course. Jozef said you had tremendous talent.”
“Will that talent get me a piece of beef fat to throw into the ditch water they serve us for soup in the factories? No. The paintbrush made me too romantic. The camera keeps me honest, even if I’m the only one to see the pictures.”
It wasn’t that simple, I thought. It couldn’t be. Once a person gave up romance, beauty, music, color, and light, his soul atrophied and he might as well be dead. I started to tell this to Nate but held my tongue. The changes the ghetto had forged in him made him unapproachable, though I believed he wanted to be approached by me. I think he might even have been a little in love with me. If photographs of the demonic allowed him to escape the demons, so be it. But he frightened me.
“Listen to your father,” Mama begged, staring into Jozef’s rage-filled eyes.
He shrugged off her hand. “I’m fine without a lecture.”
“You’ll listen,” she said sternly. “You’re physically well at last, which means you’ve got to be all the more careful. That temper of yours isn’t healthy. Especially with the militia patrolling the streets. And the informers—your friends and neighbors.”
Jozef blazed like a flare. “Who wouldn’t be angry, with Führer Rumkowski marching around his Summer Palace in jackboots? And his announcements—in Polish, yet—‘my Jews’ this and ‘my Jews’ that. The bastard’s a disgrace to the Jewish race.”
“There’s no such thing as the Jewish race,” Papa said wearily. “There are only Jewish people, and we have real problems here. People are dying every day. The Mieckiewicz State Hospital is overflowing. We need doctors, disinfectant, drugs.”
“And you expect to get that from King Chaim?”
“He’s our only hope.”
“He’s an ignorant swine. It’s the dregs of humanity like him who give the rest of us a bad name.”
“No more!” Papa thundered, and I was glad to see he had passion left. “Don’t you understand? If the Jews weren’t brothers before, the Master Race has made us indistinguishable. Do you think only the uneducated starve, or that typhus will spare you just because you’re gifted?”
“Don’t tell me that I have anything to do with the rabble over on Miehlstrasse. They’re animals! Half of them can barely speak Polish, let alone German. And even their Yiddish—”
“That’s precisely why I’m going to the Summer Palace to see Chaim alone,” Papa interrupted.
“Why? So he can walk all over you? Show how much he hates educated Jews?”
“To ask him to save his fellow Jews in this rotten ghetto. I’ll kiss his feet. Get down on my knees and beg, dance naked through the streets if I have to. One life saved on the Miehlstrasse is worth more than all the pride in the universe.”
Jozef applauded. “Bravo. In the meantime, I’ll go and commune with my fellow Jews at the button factory, where I’ll listen to their ignorant prattle for six hours, then stand in line and pray for some carrot leaves or a bit of mealy potato to flavor my soup. Give my regards to the Summer Palace.”
But Jozef’s words were wasted. I watched Papa leave, back straight with a new resolve, and prayed he would succeed.
A depressed and discouraged man returned. For a long time, he sat slumped at the kitchen table, head resting on his folded arms, saying nothing; I could not tell if he was weeping. At last Mama persuaded him to take a glass of tea, and its warmth seemed to revive him, for he was able to look at us now, shame and sorrow in his expression, and tell us what had happened.
“They made me wait a long time in the outer office,” he said. “I could hear him yelling about a postage stamp. Seems Berlin had refused to issue one in his honor—said no Jewish face could be pasted next to an Aryan one—and he was furious, even though the stamp would only be issued in the Baluty. It would have been farcical, only I worried that he’d take out his bad mood on me.
“Finally, I was allowed in. Chaim was standing at the window, his back to me, muttering to himself. There was a massive desk in his office cluttered with papers, and at the side of the room a table on which lay a bowl of fruit—apples, pears, oranges. My darlings, how I wanted to ask for that fruit! To be able to bring it home to you, to let us share for even one day God’s bounty—”
He clutched his stomach and his eyes filled with tears. “Go on,” I said softly, knowing that I could offer no comfort.
“Chaim turned and greeted me. He’s grown fat—fat, while the rest of us starve! His chins hung over his collar like udders, and it was hard to see his eyes above his cheeks. I told him he was looking well, and he told me he exercised every day—yes, I thought, by chewing. ‘Can you imagine,’ he told me, ‘yesterday a bum on the street tried to attack me.’ I sympathized. ‘It’s always the Bundists, the rabble. Hiding like rabbits. Thinking I don’t know where their lairs are and who’s sneaking out at night to scrawl on our factory walls: OPEN THE GATES. KILL CHAIM. But I know everything that goes on with my Jews. These thankless ones—the labor camps are too good for them. Instead of working, they spread rumors, lies. Don’t they realize what I’m doing for them? The new trolley lines, the road improvements, a brand-new railroad depot. Do they think these things are easy for the Eldest? Don’t they realize I’m keeping them alive?’
“I coughed, otherwise he’d have gone on for another five minutes. ‘Ah yes, Levy. What’s so urgent that it necessitates a personal interview?’”
It was a wicked imitation, and I laughed. My mother glared at me, as though I had made a joke in temple.
“‘It’s the typhus, Eldest,’ I said. ‘We are facing an epidemic.’
“‘Don’t you doctors have a treatment?’ he snarled.
“‘Yes, but we can only do so much without medicine. Sanitation has to be improved. The dead have to be buried immediately. We need more supplies. And staff.