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down and pressing my ear to the
     ground, I would be able to hear it much better. I had a lot of fun playing this game. More and more Polish soldiers and their
     equipment could be seen on the road and in nearby fields. After a while, the entire road was taken up by retreating troops,
     at which point all civilians were ordered off the road. We waited and rested in a ditch nearby. It seemed to take hours before
     the last of the Polish soldiers had passed. Then suddenly, we heard the roar of approaching engines and saw walls of dust
     in the distance. “Tanks! German tanks!” I could almost touch the fear that swept over our little group. But then I heard my
     father’s reassuring voice, “Stay calm! Don’t anybody run! Don’t say anything unless spoken to.”
    As the tanks approached — they advanced toward us on the road and across the fields — we were enveloped in dust and smoke.
     One of the tanks stopped near our group, and a young soldier, his body protruding from the open turret, his face covered in
     soot, yelled over to us in German, wanting to know who we were. After some hesitation, somebody answered that we were Jews,
     and another added, “German Jews.” “Nothing to worry about,” he yelled back. “The war will be over soon, and we’ll all be able
     to go home again.” He waved at us and the tank moved forward. These very reassuring words brought us temporary relief. People
     began to joke and laugh again. But as fate would have it, they turned out to be the kindest words any German would address
     to us for a long time to come.
    Notwithstanding what the young soldier had said, for us the war had really only just begun. We continued toward Kielce. Near
     Opatów, some thirty kilometers west of Sandomierz, a wealthy Polish farmer allowed us to stay in one of his barns. He and
     my father would go off to talk for hours at a time. My mother would always worry until my father returned, and then the two
     of them would whisper a lot. I later learned that the farmer and some of his friends were in the process of forming a Polish
     resistance group to fight the Germans. They wanted my father to join them; they needed people who spoke German and Polish
     and had military experience. We would not have to worry about food or a place to stay, and a way would be found to get us
     false identification papers. My father and mother talked about this offer for days. Eventually, my father turned it down.
     They were both very sad that they had to make this decision. The problem was that my father and I, because of our features
     and light hair color, could have passed for Poles. But my mother spoke no Polish, and her wavy dark hair and brown eyes would
     have given her away as a Jew. “Poles can smell a Jew a mile away,” my father said, “and sooner or later somebody will denounce
     us to the Germans.” As a family, we could not pass ourselves off as Poles and expect to get away with it for long, and breaking
     up the family was out of the question. We continued our trek west to Kielce.
    It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect. We could do little more than
     hope that things would get better. That hope never left us, and it sustained us in the years to come, despite the fact that
     we had no good reason to expect our situation to improve. But what else could we do but hope? That, after all, is human nature.

CHAPTER 3
The Ghetto of Kielce
    WE LIVED IN KIELCE for about four years until we were transported to Auschwitz in early August of 1944.
Lived
is probably not the right word to describe our incarceration in that bleary Polish industrial city, its ghetto, and two different
     work camps. Had our train not been bombed in an area where Kielce was the nearest Polish city with a large Jewish population
     — it numbered about twenty-five thousand at the time — we would not have gone there; although, in retrospect, it made little
     difference that we did