By the time Chana and her mother returned, pink burrs and leafy greens clutched in their hands, he was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling under Yona’s palm as she watched the blood around his wound finally begin to clot, beginning the slow work of knitting his body back together.
“Isaac is still alive?” Chana’s mother asked, staring at Yona with a blend of fear and respect. “What do we do now?”
“Now,” Yona replied, “we pray.”
* * *
Yona waited until the blood had stopped oozing from Isaac’s gut before rubbing a mixture made from the leaves, stems, and flowers of the burdock plant on his wound to disinfect it. She gently turned him over, and he groaned in his sleep as she spread it on his lower back, too.
It was two days before he awoke, clear-eyed, and asked for Esta, his wife.
“Will my husband live?” Esta asked in a whisper as she slipped past Yona and into the hut. Yona had given it a roof and walls of spruce bark supported by pine poles, which would withstand the wind and better blend into the trees. They would need to stay here for a week, at least, before Chana’s wounded father would be able to walk on his own again.
“I think so,” Yona said, but as she locked eyes with the other woman, an understanding passed between them. The words were not a promise, but Yona had done her best.
It was enough, though, and eight days later, Isaac, who had worked in a Jewish bank before the Germans forced it out of business, was walking around, albeit with difficulty, laughing with Chana, whose face had been transformed by relief.
The mirth in his smile didn’t reach his eyes, though, and Yona could see pain there, pain and fear. The way they were all living now, focusing on his healing, was just a suspension of reality. They hadn’t gone far enough into the forest to evade those who might be after them.
“Chana told me some things about the ghetto in your town,” Yona said quietly as she examined Isaac’s wounds on the eleventh day, while Esta and Chana waited outside. “Are they true?”
He winced as she rubbed a fresh paste around the large gash in his torso, which was still very much at risk of becoming infected. He didn’t speak for a moment, and when he did, his words were heavy with sadness. “The Soviets came first, three years ago, and took away our right to practice our religion, any religion. That broke my heart, for the yeshiva was such a central part of our lives, of our town. It had stood for over a hundred years, since 1803—and the godless Soviets, they turned it into a bar. We thought it could not get any worse than that.” He drew a trembling breath. “We were wrong.
“Last summer, the Germans came,” he continued, his voice flattening into a monotone. “A month after they arrived, they moved all the Jews of our town into a tiny ghetto, in horrible conditions. We received no more than a piece of bread each day. And then they began to murder us, at random.”
He went silent again, and Yona tried to hold back tears. “I—I don’t understand.”
Isaac’s shrug was heavy, and he avoided Yona’s gaze as he went on. “In October, they killed three hundred Jews for sport. It was no secret. They wanted us to know, to be afraid. They wanted us aware that, to them, our lives held no value, that we lived or died at their whim. But then the killing ceased for a while, and we thought perhaps they have had their fill of our blood. Perhaps we are safe now. Perhaps they wish only to demean us, to humiliate us, to keep us in squalor, which is all terrible, Yona, but at least we were alive.
“Then, just a few weeks ago, I received word, through a Belorussian policeman I have known my whole life, that there was a large Aktion planned. There were plans to kill more of us, thousands, maybe all of us. I told my wife, and she did not believe me. I wanted us to run, to try to escape with our daughter, because to stay seemed to be waiting only for death, now or later. Still, Esta said, ‘It is not true. How could they kill thousands of us anyhow? Where would they put us? What good would it do?’ Then, one day just two weeks ago, I was walking home from a job cleaning the toilets of the Germans when I passed a young mother carrying an infant; she was being teased by a German soldier. I did not know all the words he was saying, for he spoke his language, and it was clear she did not understand, either. He reached for her baby, a little girl, and the mother pulled away, but he reached in to tickle the child, who giggled. I will never forget the sound of that laugh, Yona, for it changed everything. It made the mother relax. It made her think the man was kind. So she reluctantly let him take the baby, who could not have been more than six months old, and, with a laugh of his own, he grasped the baby by her feet and swung her into the wall of the building beside them, smashing her tiny skull.”