At first, the Kukielkas were allowed to leave the ghetto in order to work and buy food; likewise, Poles could enter the gate and bring bread to trade for valuables. But soon, as in all ghettos, access was shut down. Jews could leave only with a passage certificate issued by the Judenrat. From 1941 on, no movement across the ghetto boundary—for Jew or Pole—was permitted. A physical fence sealed off part of the area, a river another. Eventually, stepping out meant nothing less than execution.
*
And yet . . .
Renia put on layer after layer: stockings, another pair, a dress on top, thick as a Polish peasant would wear. Esther wore two coats and a kerchief. Fumbling in the dark, Bela helped fasten her sisters’ outfits before folding several shirts into to her waistband, feigning a pregnant belly. They all stuffed small articles into their pockets, fabric inside fabric; a palimpsest of merchandise and disguise, everything on the body. This, Renia reminded herself, was how she could help her mother, her little brother, the family.
For a second, the teenager flashed to a land far away, which was really just a few miles over and a few months past—before her middle-class life disintegrated. She daydreamed of how her mother, a force of nature, had taken care of everything: cooked, cleaned, managed the money. Their Polish neighbors used to approach Leah in disbelief. “How can you clothe seven children on your wages and make them look so rich?” In Yiddish, Leah was a balabasta: a virtuoso homemaker who always had a house filled with educated, well-behaved kids and their friends yet kept it miraculously tidy and ordered. She had her answers ready: “Buy expensive clothing because it keeps. Then pass it on. And get each child a pair of handmade shoes—a size too big. Room to grow.”
What you wore, how you wore it. Now the girls were wearing it all as both costume and livelihood. It was almost nine o’clock at night—time to go. They waved a quick good-bye and together made their way down the street, out of the ghetto. Renia never revealed how she exited this ghetto, but she may have bribed a guard, squeezed through a loose slat or grate, climbed over a wall, through a cellar, or across a roof. These were all ways that smugglers—mostly women—came in and out of Poland’s Jewish confines.
Because Jewish men were often kidnapped, they stayed home. Women, from impoverished to high society, became the foragers, selling cigarettes, bras, objets d’art, even their bodies. It was also easier for children to creep out of the ghetto and seek food. The ghettos created a whole cascade of role reversals.
The Kukielka sisters made it to the village and began walking up and down the streets. Stepping quickly, Renia thought of how she used to go with her mother to the bakery every Friday, picking out cookies, all colors and shapes. Now, bread ration cards: ten decagrams a day, or a quarter of a small loaf. Selling bread beyond the allowed quantity or price meant execution.
Renia approached a house. Every step was a risk. Who knew who could see her standing there? Poles? Germans? Militiamen? Whoever answered the door could report her. Or shoot her. Or the person might pretend to buy, then simply not pay and threaten to turn her in to the Gestapo for a reward. Then what could she do? To think that Renia used to work in the courthouse with lawyers, justice, laws that made sense. No longer. Night after night, women went out like this, mothers, too, trying to feed their families.
Other girls helped their families by performing forced labor for municipalities or private enterprise. All Jews aged fourteen to seventy-five were supposed to work, but sometimes younger girls wore high heels to look older because they wanted food. Some Jews were forced to be tailors, seamstresses, and carpenters; others were put to work dismantling houses, repairing roads, cleaning streets, and unloading bombs from trains （which sometimes went off and killed them）。 Even though Jewish women walked miles to work to break rocks, often in knee-deep snow and bone-chilling slush, starving, their clothes torn, they would be beaten mercilessly if they asked for a rest. People hid their injuries, dying later of infection. Body parts froze. Bones were broken in beatings.
“No one says a word,” described one young female laborer about her four-o’-clock-in-the-morning marches to work, surrounded by Nazi guards. “I take care not to step on the heels of the person in front of me, trying in darkness to estimate his pace and the length of his strides. I pass through the vapor of his exhalation, the odor of unwashed clothing, and the stench of the overcrowded nighttime homes.” Then there were the late arrivals home covered in bruises, stiff, disappointed that they hadn’t been able to sneak even a carrot for their families because of ghetto gate searches. Despite their terror of being beaten, the workers went back to their job sites the next day, including mothers, leaving their children to take care of themselves. What else could they do?