Once Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dad, coming in from the bedroom. “We’ll hand him over.”
    I back toward the door.
    The man comes at me.
    I turn and run down the steps. Halfway down I crash into a kid coming up. As I scramble over him, I see his face. He’s older than he was, but I still recognize him. Wiktor Radzyn, one of the Catholic kids from my class when I went to school here.
    I don’t stop.
    I keep running.
    “Clear off, Jew!” yells Wiktor behind me. “This is our house now.”
    They’ve stopped chasing me.
     
    I crouch in my secret hiding place at the edge of town and listen.
    No more yelling.
    The crowd that was after me must have given up. They mustn’t know about this hollow sentry space in the ancient ruined castle wall. When Dad showed me this place years ago, he told me it was our secret, so I never told anybody and he mustn’t have either.
    Thanks, Dad. And thank you, God and the others, that I wasn’t able to fill it up with books like I’d planned, or there wouldn’t be room for me in here.
    Through the arrow slit I can see the townspeople walking back toward their homes. Now they’re gone, I’m shaking all over.
    Why do they hate me and Mum and Dad so much? They couldn’t all have bought books they didn’t like.
    And why is the Radzyn family living in our place?
    Have Mum and Dad sold it to them? Why would they do that? The Radzyns aren’t booksellers. Mr. Radzyn used to empty toilets. Mrs. Radzyn had a stall at the market selling old clothes and underwear. Wiktor Radzyn hates books. When he was in my class, he used to pick his nose and wipe it on the pages.
    I lean against the crumbling stone wall of my little cave and have a very sad thought. Wiktor has my room now. My bed and my desk and my chair and my oil lamp and my bookshelf and my books.
    I think of him lying on the bed, blowing his nose on one of my books.
    Then I have a much happier thought.
    America.
    Of course.
    The visas for America must have come through. The ones Mum and Dad tried to get before I went to the orphanage. That’s why they’ve sold the shop, so they can open another one in America. Dad told me a story about a Jewish bookseller in America once. The bookshelves there are solid gold.
    Oh, no.
    Mum and Dad must be on their way to the orphanage to pick me up. Doesn’t matter. They won’t leave without me. I can be back at the orphanage in two days, two and a bit to allow for walking up the mountain.
    Of course, that’s probably where all the books are. Mum and Dad have taken them up to Mother Minka so she can buy the ones she wants before they ship the rest off to America.
    Phew, I’m feeling much calmer now.
    It all makes sense.
    I wipe the sweat off my glasses, repack my rags and my feet into my shoes, and wriggle out through the thick undergrowth covering the entrance to the sentry space.
    Then I freeze.
    Somebody’s behind me. I just heard the grass rustle.
    I turn around.
    Two little kids are staring at me, a boy and a girl, barefoot in the dust.
    “We’re playing grabbing Jews in the street,” says the little boy.
    “I’m a Jew,” says the little girl. “He’s a Nazi. He’s going to grab me and take me away. Who do you want to be?”
    I don’t say anything.
    “You be a Nazi,” says the little girl, squinting at me in the sunlight.
    I shake my head.
    “All right, you be a Jew,” she says. “That means you have to be sad ’cause the Nazis took your mum and dad away.”
    I stare at her.
    She gives an impatient sigh.
    “All the Jew people got taken,” she says. “My dad told me. So you have to be sad, all right?”
    Relax, I tell myself. It’s just a game.
    But panic is churning inside me.
    “He doesn’t want to play,” says the little boy.
    The little boy’s right—I don’t.
    I stand outside Mr. Rosenfeld’s house, doing what I’ve been doing for hours. Hoping desperately that the little girl is wrong.
     
    Little kids are wrong quite a bit in my experience. There was a little kid at the orphanage who