Life and Light
Published in Issue #5 Translated from Yiddish by Faith Jones subscribe to unlock the full storyShe came in, looked around with her narrow, uneven black eyes, and said to me:
“Don’t take this amiss, but could you open the curtains? I can’t stand covered windows. I love to see the light coming in . . . . That’s better! I’ll try these. Vilna cream cookies practically eat themselves, don’t they? You’re looking at me wondering how I managed to survive. Believe me, I don’t really understand it myself. But I have to tell you, that in each of us dozens of hearts were beating, we breathed with dozens of lungs. One heart stopped, another kept going. One breath was cut short, another started up again. There were twenty of us lying in the pit they had cleared out under the cellar near a burnt-out wall. Three died . . . yes, three. Old Dr. Feinberg, Khonen Fridman’s mother, Leah Shapiro’s father. But if the ventilation hadn’t gotten plugged, we would all still be in that pit. See, when the ventilation got stopped up, we drew straws for who would go out to clear it out. It fell to Khonen Fridman. That very day we had eaten the last crumb of our hoard of rusks. We were sitting there slowly suffocating. Suddenly, Khonen tumbled down the stairs. His lips were blue, his face like chalk, and he couldn’t get a word out. Leah Shapiro poured a quart of water over him—that’s as much as we used to share for a whole day. And he shouted, ‘We’re saved!’
“And then, how we got...
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