Tilting the Balance

David Goldfarb indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” as soon as they’d walked a couple of hundred meters past the guard and out of the ghetto.

Whew! did not seem enough to Moishe. “Gottenyu,” he said, and then added, “I thought you’d killed us both when you pulled me into that line with the Lizards.”

“Oh, that.” Now Goldfarb looked jaunty. “No, I knew just what I was doing there.”

“You could have fooled me!”

“No, seriously-look at it. If we go through a line with Poles or those Order Service would-be Nazi shmucks, they’re liable to look at the pictures on the cards-and if they do that, we re dead. No matter what the machine tells them, they’ll see we don’treally look like the pictures on the cards or not enough, anyhow. But the Lizards can’t tell you from Hedy Lamarr without the machine to do it for them, That’s why I wanted them to check us.”

Moishe thought it over and found himself nodding. “Cousin,” he said admiringly “you’ve got chutzpah.”

“Never get anywhere with the girls if I didn’t,” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You ought to see a chap I served with named Jerome Jones-he had crust enough to make a pie, he did.”

Watching the way his cousin smiled put Moishe in mind of his mother. But Goldfarb also had an alienness about him that went deeper than the curious expressions peppering his Yiddish. He wasn’t automatically wary the way Polish Jews were. “So that’s what growing up really free does for you,” Moishe murmured.

“What did you say?”

“Never mind. Where will we pick up Rivka and Reuven?” Russie wondered if Goldfarb had lied to him about them just to get him moving. The man had the gall for it, no two ways about that.

But Goldfarb just asked, “Are you sure you want to find out? Suppose the Lizards catch you but kill me? The less you know, the less they can squeeze out of you.”

“They aren’t as good at squeezing as you’d think,” Moishe said. “They didn’t come close to getting everything I know out of me.” Nevertheless, he didn’t push the question. Mordechai Anielewicz’s Jewish fighters had had that don’t-ask-if-you-don’t-need-to-know rule, too. Which meant… “You were-you are-a soldier.”

Goldfarb nodded. “RAF, actually, but yes. And you were going to be a doctor, before the Nazis came. My father used to beat me over the head with that; all I ever wanted to do was fiddle around with the insides of radios and such. Made me a valuable piece of goods when the war came, though: they put me into radar training straightaway, and I kept an eye on the Jerries all through the Blitz.”

Russie didn’t follow all of that; a couple of key words were in English, of which he knew next to nothing. He was content just to walk along for a while, savoring his freedom and daring to think about staying free a while longer. If his accomplished cousin was from the British military, maybe a submarine like the one Anielewicz had sometimes summoned lay waiting off the Polish coast. He started to ask about that, then changed his mind. If he didn’t need to know, what was the point in trying to learn?

Goldfarb hurried up Krawiecka Street. He looked nervously to the right and left as he did. Finally, he said, “The sooner we’re out of Lodz, the better I’ll like it. Outside the ghetto, a Jew really sticks out around here, doesn’t he?”

“Well, of course,” Moishe answered. Then he realized it wasn’t of course, not to his cousin. Years of living in the ghetto and before that in a Poland that didn’t know how to deal with its three million Jews had made him so used to being the suspected and despised outsider that he took it for granted. Being reminded things weren’t like that all over the world came as a distinct shock. “Must be nice, seeming like everyone else,” he said wistfully.

“You mean, instead of getting slammed down just for being a Jew?” David Goldfarb said. Russie nodded. His cousin went on, “It is, I suppose. There’s a good deal of small stuff left to fret over: people have a way or taking for granted that you’re cheap or not very brave or what have you. But next to what I’ve seen here, what my folks left-blimey!” That wasn’t Yiddish, either, but Moishe had no trouble figuring out what it meant.

If the submarine came, if it whisked him and his family off to England-would he be able to deal with so much freedom? Learning a new language as a grown man wouldn’t come easy for him. Thinking thus, for a moment he was almost paralyzed with dread at the prospect of abandoning everything familiar, no matter how unpleasant it could be.

Then he and Goldfarb strode past a couple of Polish housewives chattering on a front porch. The two pretty women stopped talking and stared at them as if they expected the plague to break out in their wake. They kept on staring until the men had gone a block farther down the road.

Moishe sighed. “No, maybe I won’t be sorry to get out of here after all.”