Free The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard

father wanted to know why the Germans would let Korczak go.
“Maybe they made him an informer,” Boris said.
“Maybe he gave them a pile of gold,” my brother said.
“The Germans know him as the greatest child specialist and educational reformer in all of Europe,” my father said. “They know him even in England and France. He’s probably the safest Jew in the ghetto.”
“A big shot,” Boris said.
“Was he the one with the scandal before the war?” Boris’s father asked.
“What scandal?” my mother asked. Boris’s father held up his hands like he meant no offense.
“He lost his radio program and his position on the juvenile court,” my father said. “He went on a trip to Palestine and then people no longer overlooked that Janusz Korczak the Pole was really Henryk Goldszmit the Jew.”
Shots were fired outside and we all were quiet around the table, listening. The soup was beet shavings and nettle leaves with little lumps of kasha.
“No one wanted a Jew in charge of Poland’s juvenile offenders,” my father added. But I was still thinking about why the Germans would let Korczak go and everyone else had gone on to thinking about other things.
A T THE ORPHANAGE A LINE HAD BEEN PAINTED through the sign for the Roesler Commercial Secondary School and a handmade wooden sign that said The Children’s Republic hung below it from twine. We were escorted into the building and to wooden folding chairs in front of the stage by little girls in costumes made of bits of paper and other scraps. “What are you supposed to be?” I asked the girl leading me in. Her paper was mostly colored green and she said, “I’m a dragon.”
The stage was a platform at the end of the main room on the first floor. Once all of the chairs were filled and people lined the back wall, the heavy woman I’d seen the Old Doctor pulling down the street came through a door in the back and everyone applauded. She was carrying a cactus that she set down on the front of the stage. She welcomed everyone to the Orphans’ Home and said her name was Stefania Wilczyńska and that she was the senior teacher. She introduced the cactus as her favorite orphan and the home’s good-luck charm, and everyone laughed as though they knew what she was talking about. Then she said it was her pleasure to introduce the greatest humanist and intellectual in Poland.
Everyone applauded again and Korczak came through the same door. He was wearing a papercrown, and people laughed at that. The heavy woman took a seat in the front row.
“Someone should give that fat man in the back a chair,” Korczak said. “He looks much too well-to-do to stand.” The smaller children in the audience thought he was hilarious.
“Everyone loves my rude remarks,” he said once they quieted down. “Even the dressed-up ladies and elegant gentlemen. Though they keep their distance and I never hear from them until their children are sick. Then it’s: ‘Please, please, you have to come,’ even if it’s the middle of the night.”
“So he’s a doctor?” Adina whispered to my mother.
My mother told her he was a famous doctor and he’d been an army doctor in the war between Russia and Japan and in the world war, and in the civil war in Russia.
He apologized to what he called the better society in the crowd for his occasional use of Yiddish. He said he would like to present one of his radio talks, called The Loneliness of the Child , before standing aside for the main event of the evening, the home’s production that would showcase the most talented undersized citizens who had been gathered from Warsaw’s attics and basements. “That’s where you find some of the city’s most interesting people,” he said. “Forgotten,in someone’s basement.” He cleared his throat and cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief, taking his time. Then he put his glasses back on and began.
It was funny at first but then got sadder. I stopped listening.
When it was over everyone applauded