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gates of the courtyard opposite us opened, and two old janitors somehow managed to part the mob on the sidewalkand a row of kids with horns and tin pans and wooden spoons turned onto the street in a line. A boy in the center held a staff with a bright-green flag and a Jewish star in a harness around his waist. More lines came out of the darkness behind them, kids of all sizes holding toys and books against their chests and singing.
“What is it?” Lutek asked. We couldn’t hear what they were singing but the kids kept coming, at least twenty rows of them, followed by wagons piled high with wicker baskets tied with cords and cast-iron pots and floured breadboards and trunks tied with rope, crates of books and ladles and strainers, and then a wagon mounded with coal and another with potatoes. Other kids and adults wrestled over the coal and potatoes that scattered onto the cobblestones when the wagons turned onto the street. All of the wagons had red geraniums in window boxes along their sides, and beneath them decorations made from streamers. The wagon drivers were wearing homemade bird masks with plumes and feathers. We pushed closer and heard someone say it was Korczak’s orphanage that had been forced to move. And then there he was with his bald head and yellowish goatee again, the last one out before the courtyard gates swung shut behind him. He was pulling a heavy woman along by the arm and struggling to keep up with the last wagon. Shewas as tall as he was and seemed more frightened by the crowds.
They were pushed into our path and for a while we were carried along behind them. I wondered if he would recognize me but he didn’t. He and the heavy woman had to shout at each other to be heard. She asked how long he thought he could go without sleeping and he shouted back that when he was a young man his mother had come into his room in the midafternoon and dragged him out of bed by his feet. “She asked if that was how I wanted to become a doctor,” he shouted. “By staying out all night long. And I told her, ‘A doctor ? I thought I was studying to become a lush.’ ”
We followed them to the gate of the small ghetto at Chłodna, where the German and Polish police were checking identification. All of the orphanage wagons had passed through except the one with the potatoes, which sat still next to the guard hut. The driver had his hands on his hips and was watching two Polish policemen unhitch his horse. He’d pulled his bird mask down and it hung below his chin. A feather fluttered alongside his ear.
“What’s happening?” Korczak asked the Polish policeman in front of us. “Why has my wagon not gone through?”
“This isn’t your wagon,” one of the German policemen told him. “It’s my wagon.”
They argued in German about it. The heavy woman was terrified and tried to pull Korczak through the gate but he knocked her arm away. He shouted something at the German and then repeated it to the Polish policeman: that if the German didn’t release the potatoes he would report the theft to their superiors. The German’s bored expression disappeared and he said in Polish, “So you’re trying to frighten me, Jew?” and Lutek gave my shirt such a pull from behind that he ripped it.
“Are you with him?” a Polish policeman said, stepping in front of us. He pointed a baton at Korczak. “Is he drunk?”
“I don’t know what he is,” I told him, and Lutek pulled me again, and a woman with a chicken in a straw cage shouldered forward and almost knocked the policeman off his feet. He clubbed her once and then twice and Lutek shouted into my ear, “What do you think this is? A show ?” and yanked me so hard that I fell to my knees, and then he pulled me to my feet and dragged me down the street.

F AMILIES SQUATTED IN THE HALLS AND FOUGHT over sidewalks. One took over our stairwell near the top floor. They aired out their clothes and bedding on the railings. No one had said the ghetto would be closed and