Helen Zelon

The father and the daughter soon settled into a new, confined routine. Cesia, eighteen at last, registered for compulsory factory work at Derringwerke. The false papers stayed hidden in their room, wedged into a small hollow space behind a row of ceramic tiles, padded by a thick cover of old newspaper. Just as some of their neighbors hoarded cyanide tablets - also available on the black market, for the right price - Cesia and her father safeguarded her papers. Let the neighbors find their way to death, she thought. She would fight, even shoot, or so she imagined. She had no gun, of course, and no chance to fight, only to work and to sleep and to barter her mother’s empty leather shoes for carrots and parsnips.

She heard talk of resistance among the youth. Natter was not the only small arms merchant in the Ghetto, and the boys especially bragged of stockpiles of pistols, grenades, gasoline for firebombs buried deep in earthen bunkers. Cesia never knew what to believe, but she listened. Perhaps one in five were telling the truth, she thought; perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Day by day, she worked, she lived, and she listened.

Occasionally at night, her father’s breathing a wheezing metronome, Cesia pried the tile hiding place open to study the papers. Now, her papers. He had forbidden this, fearful that even the smallest sound after curfew could raise suspicion, that the slightest movement could attract attention, a search, arrest. He had changed, her father. Though hardly 40, he had become frail and remote, an old man stooped with sorrow. Cesia had always listened to him but now she didn’t. She had to see who she might become. …

Read the rest of Part II at ducts.org.

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