Plumb parked his auto and turned the engine off. He was a bachelor, a diamond cutter, and wore three rings on one hand. He used that hand to write out a bank draft for a handsome sum. In that fashion the Hatters’ Asylum solved its financial problems and went on happily, blissfully really, right through the end of the decade. Charity was the same as life insurance: once a few people had made a contribution, everyone else was eager to give.

On a bright afternoon in September, 1939, a small dot, a speck, appeared high in the sky. The children of the Orphanage Number 2 were in the garden, jumping over a little stream that Myer Krystal, with a pump, had forced from the well. A Polish girl was beating dust out of a rug. The gardener boy was clipping the lawn. A sunflower nodded. Walnuts, all on their own, dropped from the walnut tree. Then it became silent everywhere. The housemaid put down her broom. Workmen in Piotrkowska Street stopped their digging. Even the bells in the far-off Protestant steeple, which had been ringing, became completely still. No one, anywhere, spoke. It was as if the entire city were listening to the faint sound of the airplane engine. The children looked up. The distant craft dropped steadily lower, in circles. Its wings, in the sunlight, were silver, then turned dark beneath a cloud. For minute after minute it lazily dropped; then two bombs tumbled from it and, whistling a little, fell all the way to the ground.

Chapter Two

The Elder

I

The sound of bells came down Krzyzanowsky Street first thing one morning. Not church bells, but a bright, cheery noise, like a sleigh. The sound grew louder, and the orphans put their heads out the windows to see. In a moment four white horses pulling a wagon—it was big as a boxcar, with a peaked roof like a house—appeared. They trotted briskly, jangling the bells on their reins and the straps tied around their middles. A brown dog barked at their hooves. The wagon was painted in fresh red, white, and black stripes, and leaned precariously when it went around the corner. The dust cloud behind it rose to the rooftop of the Hatters’ Asylum.

After riding about the streets for nearly an hour, the horse-drawn wagon came to a stop in the Central Square. With its bright stripes it looked like a circus car. Immediately a crowd pushed up close. A man with a large, narrow nose and a handsome suit, gray, double-breasted, asked everyone to step back several paces. Suddenly the front side of the wagon, or the top two-thirds of it, swung down. The Poles, men and women, started to flee, as if the carriage had been full of lions. The tall man in the suit jumped onto the lowered wagon wall, which now formed a platform a little more than a meter off the ground. He held up his hands. “Stop!” he cried. “There is nothing to fear!”