Mapping the Bones Read online

  Also by Jane Yolen

  The Devil’s Arithmetic

  Snow in Summer

  Girl in a Cage

  Queen’s Own Fool

  Curse of the Thirteenth Fey

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Jane Yolen.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Yolen, Jane, author.

  Title: Mapping the bones / Jane Yolen.

  Description: New York, NY : Philomel Books, [2018] | Summary: In Poland in the 1940s, twins Chaim and Gittel rely on each other to endure life in a ghetto, escape through forests, and the horrors of a concentration camp. | Identifiers: LCCN 2016059474 | ISBN 9780399257780 | Subjects: | CYAC: Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | Jews—Poland—Fiction. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Fiction. | Concentration camps—Poland—Fiction. | Poland—History—1918–1945—Fiction. | Classification: LCC PZ7.Y78 Map 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 | LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059474

  Ebook ISBN 9780698175112

  Edited by Jill Santopolo.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Jill and our breakfast where the idea came up.

  To Debby and Bob, aka The Plot Plumbers, where things happened.

  To Heidi, who spent her summer vacation reading the manuscript.

  To my cheering squad, also known as my writers’ critique group.

  To Amelia and Caroline, who helped me find the title.

  And to Elizabeth, who kept me on the path.

  —Jane Yolen, written at Wayside and Phoenix Farm, 2013–16

  Contents

  Also by Jane Yolen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Gittel Remembers

  Part I | Łódź GhettoChapter 1

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 4

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 7

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 8

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 9

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 10

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 11

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 12

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 13

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 14

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 15

  Part II | Into Białowieża ForestGittel Remembers

  Chapter 16

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 19

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 20

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 21

  Part III | Sobanek CampGittel Remembers

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 26

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 27

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 28

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 32

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 33

  Gittel Remembers

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Gittel Remembers

  Author’s Note

  Map

  About the Author

  Gittel Remembers

  My brother Chaim and I came out of the womb almost at the same time, though he emerged a few minutes before me. He was so silent that—even after the overwhelming light, even after a slap on his back—the young nurse thought he was dead. She wrapped him tightly and set him aside, for there was no time. I was already squalling as I came hurtling out.

  Everyone ran to see me—the doctor, the two nurses, and the doctor’s assistant. Everyone wanted to be in on the birth. Twins were not as ordinary an event as they have become these days. So Chaim was left all alone on the tabletop; in the minds of everyone in the surgery, he was dead.

  But the minute he heard me cry out, he mewled a response and began to wiggle about. The head nurse turned, gawked at him, and cried out sternly to the young nurse, “Get the boy!”

  Even as a toddler, he was a miser with his words. That did not make me love him any less. Only more. We invented a twin language that our parents never parsed and we never revealed. It consisted of secret hand signs. Quick, short bursts of finger talk. We used it throughout our lives, especially the dangerous parts. That way I always knew his mind. And when necessary, I interpreted for him. Chaim once told me that when I spoke for him, even when we were small children, my whole body changed. I leaned forward aggressively, and my voice got lower. “Fierce,” he called me. “You put on your fierce voice. Like a cloak.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Papa’s father, also a Chaim, had chest problems and had died in the hospital just a month before Chaim and I were born. He died in the midst of coughing.

  Papa’s mother cried for months, or so Mama told me. She would sit in the big rocker by the window of their bedroom and weep for an hour, sleep for an hour, and then weep again. She only lasted two months after that, though long enough to hold Chaim and me, long enough to say I was a good little girl, no trouble at all. Long enough to ask Mama and Papa to name me after her. Her name was Gittel. It means “good.” And I guess I have always tried to be a good girl, though the definition of that has changed over time.

  Usually in our tradition, a child is named after a dead relative, but we were never tied to Jewish tradition that closely. Besides, Bubbe was clearly on her way out, which is how I was given her name.

  Chaim wasn’t named right away. He was smaller, weaker than I was, and so silent, they were afraid that by naming him, they might invite Death to his crib. For a couple of nonbelievers, Mama and Papa sometimes had odd ideas.

  As Mama once told me, “We called him Boy for the first two months of his life, bu
t when his third-month birthday came around and we saw that sweet smile—especially when you were close to him, reaching out for him—we realized that he had chosen life. So we named him Chaim after your zaide, your grandfather, but also because ‘chaim’ in Hebrew means ‘life.’”

  I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without my twin.

  Part I

  Łódź Ghetto

  Photograph of a Dead Child on the Street

  Such an ordinary sight, thirteen people walk by,

  hardly giving her a glance

  as if she were a rabbit dead in a field,

  or an old dog who died by the fire.

  Just another piece of drek on the cobbles

  to be taken away by the garbage collector.

  Three hundred calories a day, such rations

  could not sustain a growing child,

  so she stopped growing.

  Her feet, her legs, her face stiff and cold

  like pavement, and as gray.

  This child who once danced

  about in her mother’s kitchen,

  a bit of afikomen in her hand,

  the four questions so lately in her mouth.

  Dance, little Hannahleh, Chaya, Gittel, Rachael.

  Whatever your name was when you were alive,

  dance on the streets of Heaven,

  for you shall never dance here again.

  —Chaim Abromowitz

  1

  Chaim was the one who heard the knock first. He’d been sitting in the hallway, back against the door, writing in his journal, the letters small and cramped because living in the Jewish ghetto under the rule of the Nazis meant everything was in short supply. He doubted he’d ever get another journal. He’d have to make do, as Mama often said.

  The knock at the door was feather light, because it was getting on toward eight P.M., the Nazis’ curfew. The people in the other apartments would all be at home. No sense alerting anyone to something out of the ordinary. Anyway, if it had been soldiers, the knock would have thundered down the hallway.

  Papa always said, “The Germans are not a quiet people, nor are their hirelings.”

  Chaim went to stand by the door, waiting till the knock came again. Only then did he take a quick look through the peephole.

  A brown eye peered back at him.

  A year ago, he would have had to hop up on the box kept near the door to be able to see through the peephole, but he’d gotten taller. A growth spurt, Mama called it, as if Chaim were some kind of fountain.

  Two years earlier, he wouldn’t have had to check who might be knocking on the door. In their old house, they knew everyone on their street, everyone in the neighborhood.

  Then soldiers had come and made them leave. They’d been told that the move to the ghetto was a temporary resettlement. For accountability only. A hardship but not a life sentence. The state required it. Poland required it. God required it. The rabbi who met them at the ghetto gates spoke to them in Polish and Yiddish. His welcoming speech was brief, but it felt—to Chaim—that it was one the rabbi had given so often, he no longer believed it himself.

  Chaim had turned to Gittel, flashed her the hand sign that meant “lies.” His left pointer finger down, his right pointer finger up.

  “Possibly,” she whispered. Then shook her head and let her three middle fingers tremble, meaning “afraid.”

  He whispered back, “Same thing,” using up two of his few words.

  “Sometimes.” Her voice seemed to shake a little.

  That gave him pause, because Gittel was never afraid of anything. He counted on her. “Gittel . . .” Her name was forced through his closed teeth.

  She reached over and squeezed his hand.

  Mama had shushed them both.

  For their family, like families before them, it had been easy to believe things would be okay, if a bit sparser, sparer. The move necessary. Hope required it.

  But now the slow drip, drip of despair, like acid on iron, had begun to eat away that hope.

  “Belief,” Mama often said, “is the first thing to come, and the last thing to go.”

  “Belief,” Papa always countered, “is for children.”

  At just fourteen—their birthday had been two weeks earlier—Chaim no longer felt like a child.

  “Today we are adults,” Gittel had said on the day.

  But he didn’t feel like an adult either. “Between,” he’d said to her.

  She nodded, knowing—without further explanation—what he meant. She always knew. They were both children and adults at the same time, still clinging to mother and father, but with one foot each out the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  At first he and Gittel had accepted the move to the small five-room apartment as some kind of adventure. Papa had called it camping, as if they’d planned a week to rough it in Łagiewniki Forest, a place the family had biked to in the past on school vacations.

  So it made sense that when they first arrived in the Jewish ghetto, Chaim and Gittel often asked when they would be going home, Gittel with impassioned pleas, as if speaking for the two of them, and Chaim a bit plaintive, parceling out just two words over and over—“Going home?”

  Home to Chaim still meant their big old house on the other side of the city, with its swing hanging from the arm of the great oak tree. Zaide Oak—Grandpa Oak—they called it.

  Home meant their quarter-acre yard, where Chaim and Papa had kicked the football back and forth most soft summer nights. Sometimes Chaim even dreamed about being on the national team.

  Home was where he and Gittel had slept out in the sukkah, erected for the holiday in the back garden. If either of them became scared of the dark night, they’d make the “OK?” sign, crooking their little fingers at each other. Then they’d huddle together on one cot. But they never told Mama or Papa about their fears.

  “Such fears,” Gittel had whispered, “are for babies. And we’re no longer babies.”

  Home was where they ate in the big kitchen on weekdays, but on Friday nights, they feasted in the dining room with the white tablecloth and candles welcoming the Sabbath Queen. Even though, as Papa said, “We don’t actually believe in such a queen,” and Mama would shake her head and make that tsking noise with her tongue at him.

  Home was not this small apartment, a fifth-floor walkup in an apartment house where the sounds of other people’s arguments filtered through the walls, along with the smells of whatever they were cooking.

  Though lately, Chaim mused, there’ve been lots of arguments, but very little in the way of cooking smells.

  At his old house he’d known everyone by sight, even if he couldn’t speak to them. But here they knew hardly anyone. How could they? Hundreds of people were bused or trucked in every few weeks, moved in and out of apartment houses without warning.

  “Strangers coming and going,” Gittel told him.

  “Mostly going,” he said back.

  According to Mama, the family was lucky when they moved into their apartment. “Yes, it’s small, but the children each have a bedroom—”

  “Tiny, tiny,” Papa reminded her.

  “We’re lucky we don’t have to share. Lots of people have to—you told me so yourself.”

  “Share?” Gittel had looked appalled. Chaim remembered the face she’d made at the time, adding, “Papa, we have so little, how could we possibly share?”

  He’d looked at her, shook his head. “Many people have far less, and that you must never forget.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Pssst?” Mama whispered from behind Chaim, and when he turned, he could see her hands wrangling together. Her hair was golden, though now streaked with bits of gray. Chaim was sure all that gray had appeared since they’d been res
ettled.

  He shrugged, meaning visitors in the evening were always a bad sign. Gittel would have understood.

  Turning back, he looked again through the peephole. This time the brown-eyed person had moved far enough away so he could be identified.

  “It’s the rabbi,” he whispered to Mama. He hated saying more than five words at any one time. More than that, and he tended to stutter. Even within the family.

  “The rabbi? But it’s almost curfew.”

  After curfew, all Jews—indeed everyone but the Nazi soldiers—had to be indoors, or they risked imprisonment.

  Or being shot.

  Maybe both, Chaim thought.

  As Papa said, “The Germans are very thorough. They can kill you twice in one day.” And Papa should know—he’d worked a while for the Łódź ghetto Jewish committee and knew things the ordinary ghetto-ites only guessed at.

  Chaim wondered what kind of trouble the rabbi was bringing them. Without thinking about it, he made the trouble sign, the thumb and forefinger of his left hand pulling on the right hand’s forefinger, as if hauling it away or hanging it.

  “Open the door,” Papa said, coming from the living room. For once his voice was clear of the cough that had been bothering him. Then, as if doubling its efforts to defeat him, the cough returned, and he bent over with the spasms.

  Chaim opened the door carefully, though it still squeaked, announcing its intentions to everyone on the fifth floor.

  The rabbi stood there looking stranded, a small man with a very large, bulbous nose and a scraggly gray beard.

  “Nose like a parachute,” Papa had once said about the rabbi before Mama shushed him, spitting between her fingers to ward off any evil that might come from saying something like that. Especially about a rabbi.

  The rabbi rarely visited them. In fact, this was only his third time. Five floors up was a long hike for an old man. He was not alone. A man and woman, both tall, or at least taller than Papa and Mama, were by the rabbi’s side. Each one was carrying a medium-sized valise.

  The man wore an undistinguished dark suit with a pale blue handkerchief peeking over the pocket. He had on a brimmed hat. The oddest thing about him was that he was wearing a single-glass spectacle in his right eye that somehow stayed balanced there, anchored by a black ribbon.