Run, Boy, Run Read online

  Run, Boy, Run

  Uri Orlev

  * * *

  Translated from the Hebrew by HILLEL HALKIN

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin Company Boston

  Walter Lorraine Books

  * * *

  Walter Lorraine Books

  Copyright © 2003 by Uri Orlev

  All rights reserved. For information about permission

  to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  www.houghtonmifilinbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Orlev, Uri, 1931–

  [Ruts, yeled, ruts. English]

  Run, boy, run / by Uri Orlev ; translated by Hillel Halkin.—1st

  American ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the

  Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied

  Polish countryside.

  ISBN 0-618-16465-0

  1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Poland—Warsaw—Juvenile fiction.

  2. Fridman, Yoram. [1. Fridman, Yoram. 2. Holocaust, Jewish

  (1939–1945)—Poland—Warsaw—Fiction. 3. Poland—History—20th

  century—Fiction. 4. Survival—Fiction.] I. Halkin, Hillel, 1939– II.

  Title.

  PZ7.0633Ru 2003

  [Fic]—dc21

  2003001550

  Printed in the United States of America

  MP 10 9 8 7 6

  1. Food and Freedom

  It was early morning. The streets were empty. Duvid took his little brother by the hand and said, "Come on, Srulik, let's cross to the Polish side."

  "How?"

  "Like the smugglers. I've seen them. They crawl through a hole in the wall in back of the house across the street."

  Srulik was excited. He and his brother, who wasn't much older than him, didn't always agree. But this idea he liked.

  "What's on the Polish side?"

  "Food and freedom."

  Srulik knew what food was.

  "What's freedom?" he asked.

  "That's where there's no wall and you can walk as far as you want and no one stops you," Duvid said. "Some of my friends have left the ghetto through the gate. They wait for a German soldier who looks nice and run to the Polish side."

  "Did you ever do that?" Srulik asked.

  "No. Going through the wall is better."

  "But how do you get food on the Polish side?"

  "You beg for money and buy food with it at a grocery. The groceries have everything, like Pani Staniak's in Blonie before the war."

  "Candy too?"

  "Candy too."

  Srulik was a redhead with freckles, blue eyes, and a winning smile. Even after hard times began in the early days of the German occupation of Poland in World War II, he had secretly used that smile to coax change from his father to buy candy at Pani Staniak's grocery store. But now his father had no more change.

  "All right," he said. "Let's go."

  "There's just one thing," his brother said. "We have to watch out for the tough Polish kids."

  "What will they do to us?"

  "Beat us up."

  "Bad?"

  "Pretty bad. Do you still want to come?"

  "Yes," Srulik said without hesitating.

  They ducked through the hole in the wall. Two grinning Polish boys were waiting on the other side of it.

  "We'd better go back," Duvid said.

  Srulik wished they didn't have to. Not just because of the candy. He missed the other thing even more, the being able to walk all you wanted, the way he could when they had had their own house in the town of Blonie.

  ***

  Duvid and Srulik's parents heard of the route through the wall and decided to escape from the ghetto and return to Blonie. Maybe some Polish friends there would agree to hide them. A year and a half had gone by since they were forced to leave the village. It had been a grim time. Anything would be better than slow death from starvation in the ghetto in Warsaw. It was decided that Srulik, with his father and mother, would go first. If they made it, Duvid would follow with his older brother and sister. They would know their parents were in Blonie because they would get a postcard that said, "We haven't heard from you for ages. Drop us a line. Yacek." Yacek, Srulik's father said, was just a Polish name.

  Srulik remembered the town well. They had lived there together—his parents, his uncle, his grandfather, and his four brother and sisters—in a house with one large room. His uncle and his oldest sister, Feyge, had escaped across the border to Russia when the war with Germany broke out. His grandfather was taken to the hospital one day and never came back.

  Duvid guided his parents and Srulik to the opening in the wall. They said goodbye to him and crossed through it. The morning sun was already high in the sky. The streets of Warsaw looked normal. If not for an occasional German soldier, you wouldn't have known there was a war.

  "Go slow," Srulik's father told them. "Make believe we're just out for a walk. Don't look at the German soldiers. Don't look at the Polish policemen. Make believe we do this every day."

  Srulik couldn't resist looking at everything: the display windows of the stores, the well-dressed mothers with their baby carriages, the cars, the electric trolleys, the horse-drawn coaches—yes, the soldiers and the policemen too. His father and mother looked straight ahead. They forced themselves to behave like any two parents taking a walk with their small son. Finally, they reached the outskirts of the city.

  Srulik was overjoyed. Everything made him smile: the green fields, the flowers growing by the roadside, the cows and horses grazing in the grass, the big blue sky that stretched to the horizon, where a thin black line marked the edge of the Kampinowski Forest. It was just like before the war.

  Suddenly three German soldiers on motorcycles came speeding toward them. Srulik's father jumped into a ditch by the side of the road. He and his mother dived for the other side. His father got away. The Germans caught him and his mother, put them in the sidecar, and brought them to the Gestapo. His mother was given a whipping and they were returned to the ghetto.

  Srulik's mother lay for a long while in bed. His father didn't return.

  ***

  It took two weeks for Srulik's mother to recover enough to go foraging with him again in the ghetto's garbage bins. Removing the lid from a bin, she picked him up and lowered him into it, even though he told her he could do it by himself. He even showed her how, with the help of a running start, he could grab the rim of the bin and vault over. This was easier when it was made of bricks. The metal cans were harder.

  "You don't get as dirty when I help you," his mother answered.

  "Mama, what difference does that make?" Srulik asked.

  Still, he thought, maybe she was right.

  The work demanded concentration. When his arms didn't reach all the way into the garbage, he used a stick or a broken board. He looked for the peels of potatoes, carrots, beets, and apples and sometimes found old, moldy bread. Everything went into a straw basket that he handed to his mother. At home, she picked out what was edible and cooked it. Although each family received food rations, these were too small to keep them alive. And in winter, the garbage froze and was hard to handle. It was better once he found a pair of torn woolen gloves and his mother mended them for him.

  Now, though, it was a hot June day and Srulik was already eight years old. The trouble with the summer was that the garbage smelled bad and the flies kept buzzing around his head. You couldn't tell them that they'd be better off looking in the garbage. It took something unusually smelly to attract their atten
tion. There were ordinary flies and there were green bottles, which his brother Duvid called "death flies." Today nothing smelled that bad, and there was no way of keeping the flies off him.

  The basket was full. "Mama?" he called, ready to hand it to her.

  There was no answer. No hands took the basket. He stood up and peered out of the garbage bin. Some boys were playing soccer near the ghetto wall that cut the street in half. Srulik jumped from the bin and ran along the street, looking for his mother. For a second he thought that a woman sitting hunched on a stoop was her. But it wasn't.

  He ran back to the garbage bin. Perhaps she had run away from a policeman and come back. Someone was standing there, emptying a pail of garbage. It wasn't his mother. She had vanished as though into thin air.

  Srulik stood wringing his fingers, just like his mother did when she was worried or desperate. He didn't know the way home. He looked around as though in a fog. Everything was still the same. The houses and windows on both sides of the street hadn't changed. People continued to walk busily on the sidewalks. The soccer game in the empty lot was still going on. Even he, Srulik, would have looked to someone else like the same boy. Yet inside he felt as though the bottom had dropped out of himself. He pulled himself together and ran to join the boys playing by the wall.

  2. Can You Steal?

  Srulik was an athletic boy with long legs. Soccer was a game he had learned to play back on a muddy field in Blonie. He and his friends had used the same kind of "ball," a tin can wrapped in rags.

  There were eight boys playing. Srulik made nine. One boy volunteered to sit the game out so that Srulik could join it. Though it was hot, the boy was wearing a grown-up's tattered jacket that was too big for him and made it hard to run. After a while, the boys stopped the game and stood looking at Srulik and whispering. Then they formed a circle around him and studied him more carefully.

  "He's thin enough," the biggest boy said.

  "He'll fit," said someone else.

  "Fit where?" Srulik asked.

  "Are you hungry?" the boy in the jacket asked.

  "Yes," Srulik said. He had forgotten that he was.

  "Moishele," the big boy said to the boy with the jacket, "give him a piece."

  Now Srulik saw that the pockets of the jacket were bulging. Moishele glanced up and down, saw that no one was watching, took out a sausage from one pocket and a pocket knife from the other, and cut a thick slab of it for Srulik. He hadn't had such a treat in a long time.

  "Stick with us," the big boy said. "When it's dark, we'll lower you through a basement window into a store that has more sausages like this one. It's too small for any of us to fit through, but you might make it. Can you steal?"

  Srulik shrugged. He could steal. He could do anything for more sausage.

  "I want some more," he said.

  "Should I give him some, Yankel?"

  "Give him some," the big boy said.

  The boys went on playing until it began to get dark. Then they hid their ball underneath a pile of junk and set out on the run, darting around the pedestrians in the street. When they reached a bricked-up doorway, they stopped to wait for the night curfew to begin. From the way the streets were emptying, they knew it would be soon. Meanwhile, Moishele took out the sausage and cut a piece for everyone. When they had eaten, he took out some cigarettes and matches, cut each cigarette in half, and passed the halves out importantly. The two biggest boys each got his own cigarette.

  "Do you smoke?" Moishele asked Srulik.

  "No."

  "You have to if you want to join the gang."

  His brother Duvid had once tried getting him to take a drag on a cigarette. It was bitter and made him cough and choke.

  "I'd rather not," he said.

  "Leave him alone," Yankel told Moishele.

  A well-dressed man passed by. One of the boys approached him and said, "Please, mister, can you spare some change? We're hungry."

  The man looked at them and snapped, "You bums! How come you have enough money for cigarettes?"

  The street was soon deserted. It was time to go into action. The store they planned to break in to faced an alleyway. The window was very small.

  "Start shouting," Yankel said.

  All the boys began to shout as if they were fighting. Under the cover of the noise, Yankel took a stone and smashed the window. Someone looked down from a top floor and yelled, "You bums! Get out of here!"

  "All right, ma'am," Moishele said.

  They moved off and came back a few minutes later. Yankel stuck his hand through the window and removed the broken glass. Then Srulik was tied to a rope. He wriggled through the window and Yankel lowered him carefully.

  "Hey, Red," he called softly. "Leave the rope on and coil it around you. Tell me what you see down there."

  Srulik tried to make out his surroundings, but it was too dark to see anything.

  "Nothing," he called up.

  "Moishele," Yankel said, annoyed, "why didn't you give him a box of matches?"

  "Why didn't you give him one yourself?"

  A box of matches landed on the floor. Srulik groped for it, found it, and lit a match.

  "Do you see any sausage?"

  "No," he said. "Just bottles."

  "Vodka?"

  "How can you tell?"

  "It says."

  "I can't read."

  "Pass one up through the window."

  He found a chair, put it beneath the window, stood on it, and reached as high with the bottle as he could.

  "Great! How many more like these are there?"

  "I see two. There might be more in the closet, but it's locked."

  "Look for cigarettes."

  It wasn't very different from going through the garbage with his mother. But the results were better: cigarettes, matches, several bottles of vodka, and two whole sausages hidden under the counter. Yankel told him to put the cigarettes and matches in his pockets and pass up the end of the rope.

  "Quick!"

  Srulik was yanked upward just in the nick of time. The footsteps of the night patrol were approaching. The gang took to its heels.

  The boys knew the neighborhood and the buildings that had no gatekeeper. At night they slept in empty lofts. The best lofts were the ones with old rags or discarded mattresses that they could sleep on. If they couldn't find a loft that wasn't locked, they bedded down on the stairs.

  They found a loft that was open. A match scratched and a candle was lit.

  "Moishele," Srulik said, "I have more matches in my pockets."

  "Hold on to them," Moishele answered. "My pockets are stuffed full."

  Moishele took out some bread and they sat down to eat. The menu was more sausage, bread, and water. Then they lay down to sleep. Srulik found a beat-up old mattress and dragged it over to Yankel's. One of the boys tried grabbing it from him.

  "Hey, Red, that's my mattress," he said.

  "Leave him alone," Yankel threatened. "It's his now."

  Yankel went to a crate in the corner of the loft and pulled out the remains of an old army coat. "Here," he said to Srulik. "Use it as a blanket."

  Srulik felt grateful for being taken under Yankel's wing.

  "Lights out!" Moishele announced.

  "One more minute ... just a minute..." voices called.

  "Put out the candle,"Yankel said.

  Moishele wet his two fingers in his mouth and snuffed out the flame. It was pitch dark.

  Darkness covered the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. Since the German invasion of Russia, there was a blackout every night. In winter, when the skies were cloudy and it got dark before the curfew, people bumped into each other in the street. Someone had had the idea of coating pins with phosphorus, and whoever could afford one wore a pin that glowed in the dark. The pins came in human and animal shapes—dogs, cats, butterflies, birds, even chimney sweeps. Srulik envied whoever had one. Although he begged his father for one, there was no money. And then one day he found a butterfly pin in the g
arbage. The more he left in sunlight during the day, the more it shone at night. He would put it on the window sill, where it caught the sun's rays peeping over the roofs of the houses. At night it gave off a greenish glow. He could even see the tips of his fingers if he held them close to it.

  It was quiet in the loft once the candle was snuffed out. They could hear the tenants of the building talking in muffled voices, the sounds of pots and dishes being washed, the creaking and banging of doors, and steps from the courtyard below. Srulik took out his shiny butterfly to push back the darkness, as he always did before falling asleep. Even after he shut his eyes, the world was less black then. There was enough light to remember and dream of all the things he had seen during the day.

  "What do you have there?" Yankel asked.

  "A glow pin," Srulik said.

  "Let me see it."

  Srulik groped for Yankel's hand and gave it to him.

  "I found it in some garbage."

  "You did a good day's work, Srulik," Yankel said, handing it back to him.

  "What will you do with the vodka?"

  "Sell it." There was a moment's silence. Then Yankel asked, "How come you joined us?"

  "I was looking for food in the garbage with my mother. She disappeared."

  Yankel sat up. "You have a mother?" he asked wonderingly.

  "Yes," Srulik said. He didn't see anything so special about it.

  Word spread through the loft that the redheaded boy had a mother. All the boys gathered around him. They wanted to hear about her. "What did she look like? What did she give him to eat?

  "Is she pretty?"

  Srulik couldn't say what his mother looked like. He had never thought if she was pretty or not.

  "Yes," he said.

  "She's not dead?"

  "No." He felt sure of that.

  "Then where is she?"

  "I guess at home."

  "Then why aren't you with her?"

  "I don't know how to get there."

  "You don't know the name of the street?"

  "No," he said sadly.

  "You're not from Warsaw?"

  "No. We're from Blonie."

  The Warsaw Ghetto was large, not like the little ghetto in Blonie. It had tall buildings and lots of streets. His new friends, he was told, came from the countryside too. Some had been separated from their parents during their deportation to Warsaw.