The Puppet Boy of Warsaw Read Online Free PDF

ghetto, a sad reminder of the past, carried troves of people hanging on to its sides like refugees on a boat. Instead of a number at the front the tram displayed the Star of David. It was the only line left for us to use.
    In those early days everyone was flogging something: ragged street children sold the dreaded white armbands; women vendors squatted over tiny potatoes, carefully displayed in groups of four as if they were precious stones, competing with men who sold coarse brushes or other treasures; a bundle of shirts here, a coat, a precious pair of boots there. A young man guarded a baby carriage filled with books, while others sat on the ground selling whatever they could spare – a pot, a dress, tableware – hoping to bring home a few zlotys for bread, for some stinking dried fish or shrivelled vegetables.
    Some shops were still open in the ghetto and the black market thrived. In fact, if you did have money you could still buy everything. There was even a sweet shop to taunt us. Beggars, thin as skeletons, squatted outside bakeries and grocers, stretching out their fragile arms, while inside the shop window displayed white bread, or even cakes. What had happened to us, to our beautiful city? People were starving right in front of our eyes, living corpses leaned against walls or simply sprawled on the ground, while passers-by tried to ignore their fate.
    Some beggars played music, with a violin or small pipes. Old Marek, a man as huge as a bear with a wild grey beard, dragged around a whole little orchestra in a baby carriage. He always drew a small crowd, but very few zlotys .
    Worst were the hordes of orphaned children sitting on the pavements, staring with their too-big eyes. They had even given up trying to steal anything. I tried not to look at them.
    Then Mama started to build her gardens. After they locked us in, small ghetto gardens began to spring up everywhere. Defiant gardens, we should have called them, spaces where people grew flowers against all the odds, vegetables against despair.
    You couldn’t see them at first in the overwhelming greyness, but then they appeared everywhere: little patches of carefully tended earth, small cleared pieces of land, protected like babies. People traded seedlings and planted, watered, sheltered, even prayed over them. The ‘Toporoal Society’ encouraged agriculture and the little gardens managed to keep people alive that bit longer: a cabbage could feed a whole family for days and a few beets would keep you breathing for a while. At one point the former Skra sports stadium was transformed into one big field of cabbages – what use was sport now when we were all starving?
    Mother insisted we create some window boxes. Grieving for Grandfather, she needed the earth more than anything to comfort her, to reassure her that life would continue. Slowly against the backdrop of the ghetto’s greyness, beautiful flowers emerged. How did she manage to get those seedlings?
    ‘I packed some seeds in October, when we had to decide what to take into the ghetto. Weren’t they just as important as pots and pans?’ she said when I asked.
    After the window boxes Mother built a little garden on our balcony. I laughed at her: a garden on a balcony on the third floor? But she carried up bucket after bucket of soil from the back yard, slowly covering the stone floor with a nice thick bed of earth. And I didn’t laugh a few months later when we had green salad and small red radishes to eat.
    Word of my grandfather’s death and of his pocket-coat spread fast, and soon many requests for alterations found their way to Nathan. He had brought his sewing machine into the ghetto, and night after night he worked in his tiny room in the next street, fitting the inside of coats, shirts and trousers with secret pockets to hold people’s most precious things, the tokens of their lives.
    One day as I was searching my way around the coat, fingering its secret passages, I grasped something unfamiliar