Yellow Star Read online

  To my mother, Robin Rozines

  Text copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Roy

  Jacket photo © 2006 by George C. Beresford/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Marshall Cavendish Corporation

  99 White Plains Road

  Tarrytown, NY 10591

  www.marshallcavendish.us

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roy, Jennifer Rozines, 1967-

  Yellow star / by Jennifer Roy.

  p. cm.

  Summary: From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half years old, to 1945 when she has just turned ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland’s Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7614-5277-5

  ISBN-10: 0-7614-5277-X

  1. Jews—Persecutions—Poland—Lódz—Juvenile fiction. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Juvenile fiction. [1. Jews—Poland—Fiction. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Fiction. 3. Family life—Poland—Fiction. 4. Poland—History—Occupation, 1939-1945—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R812185Yel 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2005050788

  Book design by Alex Ferrari

  First edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to my twin sister, Julia DeVillers (an amazing author), and my sister Amy Rozines. Also, thank you to my editor, Margery Cuyler, and to Michelle Bisson.

  This book would not have existed if it weren’t for Sylvia Perlmutter Rozines and her courageous testimony. This work also honors the memory of Samuel Rozines, David Rozines, Rachel Rozines, and Isaac and Dora Perlmutter.

  Many thanks to Gregory Rozines, Harriet Diller, Gwen Rudnick, Gail Aldous, Karen Hesse, Jane Yolen, Sharon Aibel, and Quinn and Jack DeVillers.

  Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my husband, Gregory, and son, Adam, for bringing me so much joy.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Part One

  FALL 1939

  FEBRUARY 1940

  SUMMER 1940

  FALL 1940

  WINTER 1940

  Part Two

  SPRING 1941

  SUMMER 1941

  FALL 1941

  WINTER 1941

  Part Three

  WINTER 1942

  SUMMER 1942

  Part Four

  WINTER 1942–SPRING 1944

  Part Five

  SUMMER 1944

  LATE FALL–WINTER 1944

  WINTER 1945

  Author’s Note

  Time Line

  Prologue

  “In 1939, the Germans invaded the town of Lodz, Poland. They forced all of the Jewish people to live in a small part of the city called a ghetto. They built a barbed-wire fence around it and posted Nazi guards to keep everyone inside it. Two hundred and seventy thousand people lived in the Lodz ghetto.

  “In 1945, the war ended. The Germans surrendered, and the ghetto was liberated. Out of more than a quarter of a million people, only about 800 walked out of the ghetto. Of those who survived, only twelve were children.

  “I was one of the twelve.”

  —Excerpt from interview with Sylvia Perlmutter, March 2003

  Introduction

  This is the true story of Syvia, now called Sylvia, Perlmutter. When World War II began, she was four and a half years old. When it ended, she was ten.

  For more than fifty years after the war, Syvia, like many Holocaust survivors, did not talk about her experiences.

  But as she grew older, it was time. Time to remember. Time to share. Memories were coming back to her in dreams. Details popped into her head during the day. Syvia’s story was bursting to the surface, demanding to be told.

  So she told it to me, her niece.

  For the first time, I heard a survivor’s story from start to finish.

  When I learned that my aunt, now called Sylvia, was one of the twelve children who survived the Lodz ghetto, I was stunned. How come we didn’t know this about her?

  I asked my aunt to tell me a little about it. And I asked if it would be all right if I tape-recorded her. She agreed. So over the telephone, long-distance from her apartment in Maryland to my house in upstate New York, Sylvia talked. The more she spoke, the more she remembered. That got me thinking.

  I was a published author, and I wondered if I could narrate her story. But was I the right person to write it? I have always been afraid of anything relating to the Holocaust. As a Jewish child I grew up aware of it, because every year in Hebrew school I saw films of Holocaust atrocities. Piles of dead children’s shoes, mass graves of bones, skeletal survivors being liberated. But the teachers never explained these in a historical context so that we could understand it. No Holocaust curriculum or discussions back then. Just images of one of the worst periods in modern history. The murder of 6 million Jews.

  As an American Jewish girl, I grew up knowing that the world was not always a safe place, that people could turn on you, even in a civilized society. The Holocaust was something huge and unimaginable. Terrifying and traumatic. But it was also something nobody talked about. Ask a Holocaust survivor a question about it, and he or she is likely to change the subject. When I was growing up in the suburbs of upstate New York, my family talked about everything but the war. The survivors’ motto was “Never forget!” But the survivors I knew didn’t tell me what to remember. Even my dad.

  My father, Sam, lived through the Holocaust. Along with his mother, sister, and three brothers, he narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp in Poland. My grandfather, my father’s father, was separated from his family and killed in the Black Forest massacres in Germany. The remaining members of the family fled to a refugee camp in Siberia. My dad spent his childhood in that camp, struggling to survive until the war ended. My father rarely discussed it. When he died, his story was lost.

  Aunt Sylvia was my father’s brother’s wife. It seemed an honor to listen to her, to be trusted as the guardian of her memories. I vowed to do her story justice.

  And then…I ran into trouble. First I tried to write the story as a straight nonfiction account. Too dry. Next, I rewrote it in the third person narrative. But that didn’t quite work, either. Frustrated, I went back to the tapes and listened again to my aunt’s lilting, European-accented voice. Suddenly, the voices of all my Jewish relatives came flooding back to me. American English tinged with Yiddish and Polish, with anxiety and resilience. The voices of my grandma, my uncles, my dad. All now deceased. And that’s when I knew that I would write my aunt’s story in the first person, as if she were telling the story herself.

  This book is written for all my relatives—for my grandmother, Rachel, who left Siberia after the war. She split up her children—sending the oldest to the new Jewish homeland, Israel. She took the other three to America, settling in upstate New York. The baby of their family was Sam, my father. The next youngest was Nathan. Then came David, who fell in love with and married Sylvia Perlmutter. My aunt Sylvia, known when she was younger as Syvia. One of the twelve surviving children of the Lodz ghetto. When my aunt recounted her childhood to me, she spoke as if looking through a child’s eyes. She made her experiences feel real, immediate, urgent. In the poetry of a survivor’s words, this is Syvia’s story.

  Part One

  Before the Second World War, 233,000 Jews lived in the city of Lodz, Poland. They made up one-third of the city’s total population and were the second largest Jewish
community in Poland.

  Many of the Jewish people in Lodz were educated professionals. They were businesspeople, schoolteachers, scientists, and artists. Parents raised their children to be productive citizens.

  Meanwhile, in Germany, Adolf Hitler had risen to power. Hitler believed that certain people he called Aryans were superior to others of “inferior” races. Although Judaism is a religion, not a race, Hitler claimed that Jewishness was in a person’s blood. His plan to create a “master race” did not include Jews.

  On September 1, 1939, the German Nazis invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. The Nazis prepared to isolate Poland’s Jews in designated areas called ghettos. One of the ghettos was Lodz. It had 31,721 apartments—most with just one room and no running water. In the spring, 160,000 Jewish men, women, and children walked into the Lodz ghetto. On May 1, 1940, the ghetto was sealed off by a barbed-wire fence. The Jews were isolated from the rest of Poland and cut off from the outside world.

  FALL 1939

  How It Begins

  I am four and a half years old, going on five,

  hiding in my special place behind the armchair in

  the parlor,

  brushing my doll’s hair,

  listening.

  The worry of grown-ups fills the air,

  mingling with the lemony smell of the just-baked

  cake cooling on the serving platter.

  Clink, clink, Mother’s teacup trembles on its saucer.

  “Must we go, Isaac?” she says to my father, who has

  come home from work

  unexpectedly,

  interrupting the weekly tea.

  “We must leave Lodz right away,” Papa says. “This

  city is unsafe for Jews.”

  Stroke, stroke, my hand keeps brushing

  my doll’s hair.

  My mind freezes

  on one word—

  Jews.

  Jews.

  We are Jews.

  I am Jewish.

  We observe the Jewish holidays

  and keep kosher,

  but that is all I know.

  What does it matter that we are Jews?

  I whisper the question into my doll’s ear. She just stares back at me.

  Questions

  I do not ask Mother or Papa until later,

  after the aunts leave,

  the lemon cake untouched.

  I am too shy to speak in front of visitors,

  even the aunts

  who pinch my cheeks

  and give me hair bows for my braids.

  My aunts are Jewish, my uncles and cousins, too.

  Is my doll Jewish?

  No one responds to my questions.

  They are too busy putting things into suitcases—

  forks, knives, cups,

  the photo of my parents on their wedding day,

  items of clothing,

  some for me and some for my older sister, Dora.

  “Hush, Syvia,” Mother tells me

  when I ask more questions,

  so I go back to my hiding place

  behind the armchair…

  and wait.

  The Journey

  It is midnight, but

  no one in my family

  is sleeping.

  We are joggling up and down,

  side to side,

  traveling to Warsaw

  under cover of darkness and forest

  in the back of a buggy

  pulled by a horse.

  Even huddled near me, Mother,

  Dora, Aunt Sara, and my two little cousins

  cannot keep me warm.

  My fingers are icy sticks.

  I’m afraid they will snap

  like the twigs that are

  crackling into pieces under the wagon wheels.

  When I say War-Saw,

  two clouds of cold air puff from my mouth.

  My father and Uncle Shmuel sit up front

  and take turns driving.

  The trip is long.

  When we arrive in Warsaw,

  for a couple of days

  we search for a place to live.

  No one will rent to us.

  Sorry, no jobs.

  It is wartime.

  We are Jews.

  We return to our home in Lodz.

  The trip back

  seems even colder.

  The Star of David

  Orange

  is the color of my coat

  with matching muffler

  that I got as a present

  before the war.

  Dora got the same set,

  only larger and in blue.

  Yellow

  is the color of

  the felt six-pointed star

  that is sewn onto my coat.

  It is the law

  that all Jews have to wear the

  Star of David

  when they leave their house,

  or else be arrested.

  I wish I could

  rip the star off

  (carefully, stitch by stitch, so as not to ruin

  my lovely coat),

  because yellow is meant to be

  a happy color,

  not the color of

  hate.

  Ghetto

  The Nazis closed down

  a small section of the city.

  They said it is swarming

  with infectious disease,

  but still,

  they ordered all Jews of Lodz

  to leave their homes

  immediately

  and move into that space.

  It is called a ghetto.

  All the Jews?

  That must be more than one hundred!

  (One hundred is the largest number I know.)

  Papa corrects me.

  “Over one hundred thousand people,

  maybe twice that.”

  The Rest of Poland

  There are many more people

  in Poland

  who are not Jews.

  They are staying in their homes.

  That doesn’t seem fair.

  Dora says they were our neighbors,

  but they aren’t our friends anymore.

  Many of the Polish people have been

  saying mean things and

  beating and tormenting Jews.

  “They hate us,” says Dora.

  “They are happy we are leaving.”

  FEBRUARY 1940

  Relocation

  I am walking

  into the ghetto.

  My sister holds my hand

  so that I don’t

  get lost

  or trampled

  by the crowd of people

  wearing yellow stars,

  carrying possessions,

  moving

  into the ghetto.

  New Home

  The first time

  we enter the small apartment

  on the second floor,

  we look around the two rooms.

  Mother raises an eyebrow and frowns.

  Papa shrugs.

  “Nu,” he says,

  “what can we do but make the best of it?”

  My sister says,

  “Our real home is much nicer.”

  I want to know where the toilet is.

  “Outside the apartment building,

  in the courtyard,” says Papa.

  We will have to share it with all the other families.

  The Toilet

  The bathroom is tiny.

  There are no windows.

  I’m careful to lock the door

  behind me.

  I peel off my mittens,

  my coat,

  my layers—

  I have to go so badly!

  I sit on the toilet just in time.

  It is so dark in here.

  I feel so alone.

  What if I can’t get out?

  What if I’m trapped in this toilet, and no
body hears me?

  At home they would hear me and rescue me,

  but here it is different.

  Why does everything have to be

  different now? Why won’t they let us go home?

  I finish up and push open the door,

  holding my breath.

  It opens.

  I exhale with relief and walk back

  into the building,

  through the hallway,

  to our new life.

  Relatives

  Papa’s and Mother’s parents, my grandparents,

  are dead,

  but I have many aunts and uncles.

  Mother’s sisters—Sara and Rose and Malka.

  Her brothers—Label and Herschel.

  They are all living in the ghetto now

  with my cousins.

  Papa’s brother Haskel and his half sisters—

  Edit and Esther and Sura—

  are in the ghetto, too, with their children.

  Papa’s brother Luzer lives in Russia

  and his half brother, Joseph, lives in Paris, France.

  I have many cousins, too.

  Everybody is very busy now

  or far away

  so I don’t see my relatives much.

  But it is good to belong to a large family,

  even when we can’t be together.

  The Flour Man

  In the ghetto

  Papa has a job

  delivering flour

  to stores and bakeries.

  Of course, now,

  most of the baked goods

  go to the Germans,

  since our rations

  allow only brown bread.

  Before the war, Papa worked as a salesman.

  He worked hard

  and made a good living.

  We were not rich.

  “Comfortable,” Mother called our family.

  My parents dressed up

  and went out to the theater and to movies.

  Now when Papa arrives home from work,

  he and Mother don’t go anywhere.

  Papa is very, very tired.

  I sit on his lap and comb his hair.

  I kiss his flour-dusted face

  and taste his sweetness,

  imagining cookies and pastries.

  Then Mother gives Papa a

  cloth so he can wash up

  for dinner.

  Plain round bread again.

  Women’s Work

  Mother and Dora

  work in a factory

  that makes ladies’ underwear.

  Dora says Polish women outside the ghetto

  must eat very well,

  because some of the underwear