We Must Not Think of Ourselves: A Novel

Adam arrives at his basement classroom one day to find a Nazi guard having sex with a blank-faced Szifra there. Alarmed at what the teenager is doing to help her family survive, Adam heads to inform her mother. Outside Szifra’s place, Adam finds her brothers crying on the street; their mother died of typhus that morning.

Adam takes Sala up to the rooftop of their building to tell her what he witnessed. He stayed with the boys until the coroner came and collected their mother’s body. The rabbi arrived shortly after to offer prayers for the dead, and just as Adam was leaving, he spotted Szifra running to join her brothers.

Adam remembers Kasia’s funeral, which took place in the Saint Krzysztofa’s Chapel. Her mother and sister cried in the pews, but Adam could only think about how her sister never visited the entire time Adam and Kasia were married and how her mother constantly opined that there was a place in hell for Kasia and Adam because of their union. When it was time for the casket to be buried, Henryk cried hysterically and clung to Adam.

Back at home, with no real rituals, Adam turned the mirrors around and removed all the cushions, remembering the message after his father’s death: “We must not be comfortable. We must not think of ourselves” (168). Henryk arrived at Adam’s that evening to commiserate with him. Henryk wallowed in regret and sorrow over Kasia’s death, discussing all the doctors he should have taken her to. He promised to always be there for Adam as a tribute to Kasia.

A year later, Kasia’s sister passed away in a drowning accident. Adam attended the funeral, and Henryk cried to him about his lot in life, claiming that no one but Adam understands. He came to Adam’s place again that evening and drank himself to unconsciousness.

Filip trades something for a bag of chicken feet outside the ghetto and sells some to Adam. Upon closer questioning, Filip reveals that he scavenges and finds things left behind when people die in the ghetto and uses these to barter on the outside. Adam attempts to cook the chicken feet, but Filip’s mother, Mariam, interrupts his subpar attempts and offers to do it herself. Watching her cook, Adam asks her about her life and records her story for the archive.

Mariam’s father was a fishmonger and ran his own store called Gabreski Fish. He employed a Polish boy, Piotr, to help handle the non-kosher fish, and Piotr soon became like a son to him. After Mariam’s father retired, he left the store to Piotr. He would occasionally return to visit and work behind the counter again, but Piotr never minded.

Things began to change once the government did. Piotr asked Mariam’s father to stop coming to the store, as it interfered with the way he ran things. He changed the name to “Riba Piotr,” meaning “Peter’s Fish,” referencing a New Testament story. After the German invasion, Piotr stopped even acknowledging Mariam’s father whenever he ran into him on the street. Mariam’s husband thinks that Piotr always had such antisemitism in his heart, but Mariam believes that Piotr once loved her father and grew scared of associating with Jews over time.

Mariam’s parents both passed away a few months after the invasion. Upon her father’s death, Mariam left Piotr a note so that he could send his condolences. He never did, but a few weeks later, Mariam received an anonymous delivery of a few whitefish. Although once her favorite, she discovered that she had entirely lost her taste for them.

In September, Adam runs into Eli at the soup kitchen. Eli has not been to class in a while and tells Adam that he has been busy taking care of Jakub. The siblings will leave the ghetto soon; Szifra is organizing papers for them. Eli asks Adam to teach him some German in case they get German papers instead of Polish ones. He also asks Adam not to tell anyone else; their escape plan is a secret.

Adam takes an expensive silk and linen pillowcase to Nowak, hoping to trade it for something. Nowak pockets the pillowcase but refuses to give Adam anything in return. He notes that Adam has not yet given Henryk the necklace he requested. To Adam’s questions, Nowak reveals that things are not going well for Henryk, as he has been playing both sides for years. Adam denies having the necklace and dismisses Henryk’s supposed promise of papers in exchange, as there has been no progress for a while.

October arrives, marking almost one year since everyone arrived in the ghetto. The oldest Lescovec boy, Jerzy, falls in love with a girl from the neighboring street and declares his intention to propose marriage. Outside, the news continues to worsen, and by November, Adam gives up any hope that he will ever get out. He has not traded the necklace yet, as he doesn’t know whom to trust to organize a kennkarte. He believes that if he loses the necklace, he will lose himself, too. In December, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and the Americans finally enter the war. Adam believes for the first time that “perhaps salvation [is] on the way” (203).

Adam wakes up one day to a loud sound and panics, thinking it is an explosion. Sala calmly reassures Adam, showing him a small crack in the window where a starling seems to have flown into it. Adam kisses Sala, and she does not resist.

Jerzy and his girlfriend get married, and Adam reports on the wedding in the next Oneg Shabbat meeting. One of his fellow archivists confesses that she watched the wedding from her apartment window and painted some watercolors of it; she gives one to Adam as a gift for the couple. Ringelblum reports on the mass exterminations of Jews in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and Adam wonders whether it is more important to focus on simply surviving than recording their stories.

After the meeting, Adam sees a blond girl who looks like Szifra in the street and attempts to follow her, wanting to see how she is doing. She disappears, but Adam suddenly hears the sound of a machine gun, followed by a host of children running away, chased by soldiers. He approaches the source of the sound to find two boys lying bloodied and dead in the snow. There are holes under the boundary wall through which young children routinely smuggle things in and out. One of the dead boys is Filip.

A crowd gathers, and a dumbstruck Adam watches Mariam scream in horror and throw herself upon her dead son. She turns and runs toward the German guard nearby who shot Filip, as if to throttle him, and he unhesitatingly shoots Mariam dead. Adam returns to the apartment. The surviving Lescovecs never return, and after a week, Adam moves his things into the room they once occupied. He hangs the watercolor painting of Jerzy’s wedding on the wall, but the paint fades away within days.

Sala begins coming to Adam’s room soon after. It is unclear whether Emil knows about their affair, as he doesn’t treat Adam any differently. In the strange circumstances they currently live in, the rules of right and wrong don’t seem to apply anymore. Adam tells Sala that he loves her in all the languages he knows. She acknowledges this but doesn’t say it back.