Free If I Should Die Before I Wake by Han Nolan

block we separated as usual, but as Anya made her way down a narrow side street, I turned back around and followed her. She scurried along the streets, her body swaying, her hair swinging side to side, the way it did whenever she felt especially important or grown-up. She seemed so small, retreating down yet another street and turning right, small and fragile and innocent. I wanted to rush up and cover her with my arms, wrap my coat around her delicate body, and keep her warm, but I knew she would have none of it. Despite her appearance she was feisty and strong, and more apt to be putting her arms around me or wrapping her coat around some poor
shlepper
passed out in the mud than accepting help for herself.
    She stooped before a broken window located at the base of a crumbling building and pulled out something stashed inside. It was a large iron hook, rusty and heavy, judging by the way she was carrying it. She left her books inside the window and hurried away. I followed her out toward the cemetery and, worse yet, toward the large, foul-smelling garbage fields, crowded now with people dressed, partially dressed, or completely naked, down on their knees digging. As she climbed one of these heaps of refuse, ignoring the rats and discarding her coat and dress in a pile with the others, she was greeted by those of her friends who had arrived there before her. After hugs of hello they returned to work, Anya beside them with her iron hook, as intent and solemn as a little old man panning for gold.
    I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Here was a whole other world that I had never seen, or perhaps had chosen not to see. Observing them now, I saw them perhaps as an outsider might see them, as the Germans would see them—filthy Jews, digging around in their own garbage, their own excrement.
    One woman gleefully held up the tiniest bit of coal, another an old rag, and still another a sliver of wood, all gold to them, almost priceless. It was, for most of them, their lifeline.
    Men trudged by with thick bands of rope wrapped around their waists or over and around their shoulders, their bare feet pushing against the ground, leaning forward, heaving and pulling giant wagons of excrement. They were the fecal workers, the ghetto's beasts of burden. They came through our gutterless streets once or twice a week, cleaning up, helping us to keep typhus and other deadly diseases at bay. Perhaps, I thought to myself, standing there in front of the "fields," I owe my life to them, my health—and yet I had ignored them. They were, in my mind, the excremerit they cleaned up. They were the people we pretended did not exist, the same way we pretended not to see our neighbors and friends squatting down in the streets to relieve themselves, the same way we pretended not to be doing it ourselves.
    As I looked at them now, sweating on this cold, windy day, their overalls flapping against their emaciated bodies, I whispered, "You, I will remember. You are important to me."
    Mama was not happy to hear about Anya skipping school to go digging up coal and selling it to people only slightly better off than we were. She had planned to have it out with her when Anya returned home, but Zayde got there first. He was home early from the shoe factory, claiming it was too painful to sit.
    "My bones, they must be dissolving," he said, and then tried to laugh it off. "Chana, it is magic. I sit down one day and my bones are there, another day,
pfft!
They are gone."
    I helped Mama lower him onto the cot. He was shivering. I ran and grabbed up all the blankets we had and began placing them one by one on top of him.
    "No! It is too painful. It hurts, Chana. Please, no blankets."
    I looked at Mama. What were we to do? He was freezing and yet the blankets were too heavy for him.
    "Lie down next to him," Mama said.
    I stared down at Zayde quivering on the cot, his skin shiny, waxy, almost colorless. I decided I had heard Mama wrong and looked up at her,