The Old Brown Suitcase Read Online Free PDF Page A

have helmets and rifles. Others wear caps and carry pistols in black leather holsters. They have high, very shiny black leather boots. The worst wear black uniforms and caps with the skull and cross-bones on them. They look sullen and angry.
    Father doesn’t seem afraid, but he avoids main streets and we walk down the smaller narrow ones.
    Through a space between two buildings I see men building a brick wall.
    “What are they doing, Papa?” I ask.
    “They are making a Ghetto,” Father replies. “The wall will close off a portion of the city and all the Jewish people of Warsaw will be forced to live there.”
    A bearded man in a black coat passes by. He wears a white arm band with a blue star on it. He is not the first person I have seen wearing the star. After the man has gone by, I ask Father about it.
    “These arm bands have been forced on the Jews. The star is the Star of David. Your mother and I already have ours, but we don’t always wear them. If you don’t, and you are caught, you are badly punished,” he explains.
    “Will I have to wear one?”
    “No, children under twelve don’t have to wear them.” Father sounds tired and irritable.
    I still don’t know what a Star of David really is, so I ask.
    “David was the king of the Jewish people a long time ago …” Father doesn’t finish.
    A motorcade of Germans is passing by. Father takes my arm and quickly steers me into another side street. His step quickens, and I run to keep up.
    Later at home, I think more about the blue star. The Star of David. I like the sound of it. Anyway, it looks much better than the swastikas, those twisted crosses the German SS wear on their uniforms. They are black and ugly.
    In the months to come, the wall grows higher. Father says that in some places it is already eight feet high, topped with barbed wire and jagged pieces of glass, to prevent people from climbing over to escape.

CHAPTER 5

Sunlight
    (MONTREAL AND STE. ADÈLE, QUEBEC, 1947)
    “
LA PETITE PAUVRE
,” said an old man. People bent over me, exclaiming in French as I sprawled hot and breathless on the steps of a church. Father had finally caught up with me. He picked me up and took me to a nearby coffee shop. While I sipped a cold drink, he tried to assure me that the war was in the past, that there was peace now in the world, and I mustn’t be frightened by the memory. But my memory of war lingered on the way home. I felt dazed. The past and the present had melted together.
    The next day, Mother took me to a Polish doctor recommended by Mrs. Rosenberg. The doctor felt my stomach, listened to my heart and lungs, took a blood sample from my finger, and told my mother that I was anaemic. He recommended vitamins and liver.
    That evening I sat down to a plateful of liver and onions. Ina grimaced at the sight of it. “It’s like a blob of mud topped by browned weeds,” she said.
    I couldn’t eat it and my parents didn’t force me to. Instead, they gave me some tablets which felt like cement stuck in my throat.
    I forgot all about the tablets when dessert came, a banana split prepared by Mr. Rosenberg.
    “Try
that
, young lady,” he said, bowing, as he placed it in front of me. I had never seen anything like it: a glass dish full of vanilla ice cream, topped with whipped cream, chocolate sauce, cherries and cut-up bananas. The mixture was unbearably delicious, and I couldn’t stop eating. Before long, Ina and I had our faces messy with ice cream. It seemed to me that Ina ate her banana split just as greedily as I had eaten my orange the night before.
    Soon after this, my parents decided to leave Montreal. Lodgings in the city were too expensive, and we couldn’t stay on at the Rosenbergs’ indefinitely. The Rosenbergs suggested a moderately priced
pension
in the village of Ste. Adèle and offered to drive us there.
    I was glad to leave. Ina didn’t want to come with us, so we said a polite but stiff goodbye in Montreal.
    Soon we had left the city’s hot