The Light in Hidden Places by Sharon Cameron

Author:Sharon Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

I spend the next days sweating at the factory and sweating at Tatarska 3. Someone has talked, and I don’t know who, or why, or who they’ve talked to. Maybe we’ve already been denounced. Maybe the Gestapo will come in the middle of the night and pull me away from my machines. Maybe they’ll come in the middle of the day and break down my door. Or maybe they’re waiting.

For Max and Siunek to come.

And I have no way to warn them.

I can’t sleep. I can barely eat. I tell myself that if the Gestapo knows, then they would know the names of the Jews already. They’d take them from the ghetto, not look for them among the people in the streets. That the SS have never been worried about little things like evidence and proof, so why wait to get it?

If they knew, I tell myself, they would have been here already.

It’s easier to tell yourself things like this than to actually believe them.

I can’t always expect to be arrested and let go.

In five days, I walk past the fence on my way home from work. I see Max there, sitting on a stoop beyond the patrolling guard. I’m so relieved to see him not arrested that I smile. Like it’s Easter and my birthday.

He smiles back.

I hold up six fingers as I walk.

He nods.

I go home and hang the curtains.

And at twenty minutes after six in the morning, I wander past the railroad station on my way home from work. Two men sit on the platform bench. They have caps pulled low on their heads, grease on their faces, lumpy bags that could be full of tools on their backs, and one holds a thermos with a handle. The one with the thermos is Max, and the other must be Siunek, and I’m not sure what kind of workers they’re supposed to be. But whatever they are, they get off the bench and start moving in my direction.

I hold my coat closed tight to keep my hands from shaking, even though it isn’t that cold, and walk at a leisurely pace toward Tatarska 3. And then I quicken my steps. There’s a policeman coming down a side street, turning my way around the corner.

I don’t dare look back. I’m supposed to distract a policeman. That’s why I’m here. To keep the policeman’s attention on me, and not the workers who aren’t workers just a few steps behind.

But my brain is not coming up with the first way to do it.

And then I hear a voice say, “Stefania?”

I stop in my tracks. It’s him. Officer Berdecki. Officer Markus Berdecki of the Polish police, with his blue eyes, his dimple, and a square chin. The man who is everywhere I never want him to be.

Distraction managed.

He takes off his hat.

“I’ve been looking for you, Stefania. Are you coming from your work?”

“Yes,” I say, telling my feet to get moving again. “And I need to hurry home. My sister is by herself, and …”

Officer Berdecki falls into step beside me.

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