Child of the Forest: Based on the Life Story of Charlene Perlmutter Schiff by Jack Grossman and James Buchanan

Author:Jack Grossman and James Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Jewish
HISTORY / Holocaust
Publisher: SPARK Publications
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kasia

I woke in the middle of the night to the hiss of snow landing on embers. The wood had burned to cinders as I slept, and my body shivered beneath the blanket Paweł had thrown out to me. I placed fresh wood on the embers and blew up a flame, then sat with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders and held my hands over the budding fire to gather its warmth.

The forest beyond the glow of my little fire was a shadowbox fantasy of statuesque pines with little orange galaxies of embers floating within a crystalline mist. Except for the hiss of the fire and the delicate pit and pat of snow falling in the woods, the camp slept beneath the protective watch of sentries scattered among the trees.

Tears welled in my eyes. Come morning, Paweł would send me out into the woods. My mind created elaborate scenes of my corpse lying beneath a cover of snow, my expression frozen in despair or pain as I’d seen on so many bodies. I wanted to hope that Paweł’s heart would change, that he couldn’t send a little girl, even a Jewish girl, out into the woods to die, but hope was an indulgence, a conceit and denial of the reality I’d lived since the day they took Papa away.

My thoughts were broken by the whinny of a horse that carried through the woods in a dull echo.

There are wagons, neshomeleh.

I wiped my eyes and looked toward the paddock at the edge of the camp. The snow was too thick and the night too dark to see anything other than islands of gentle, orange embers.

Watch for shadows moving around the embers, my love.

All was still.

Walk just beyond the edge of light among the trees.

Only a faint wheezing came from Paweł’s hut, no sign of movement. I crept to the fringe of light and passed through into darkness, moving toward trees and snow with the blanket wrapped over me, like a dark, woolen ghost. Powdery snow came up to my calves and deadened the sound of each step to a thin whisper. My eyes adjusted to the dark, but still I brushed against pine trunks and almost tripped over a fallen branch. With each misstep, I paused to look for shadows moving among the embers, then continued until I reached the paddock and the wagons.

Lifting the tarp of one wagon and reaching into it, I found a long, warm, woolen coat. I dropped it on the ground and went deeper beneath the tarp, finding more warm clothing: woolen socks, mittens, pants, and a shawl. Deeper in the wagon were pairs of boots tied together by their shoestrings.

I pulled brown wool pants on over the skirts of my dresses and used a shoestring to tie two belt loops together, so the waist was snug. Then I rolled the cuffs up, so they wouldn’t drag. My tattered socks peeled off like dead skin and were replaced by two pairs of warm wool socks. The boots I pulled from the wagon were two sizes, but they were warm, and the leather was good.

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