Vladek most of all. Firstly, someone had dared to give this little Russian bastard a good Polish name. Secondly, Vladek was strange. He could not be cowed. He seemed to live in a world of his own. There was a hard shell about him that no amount of physical pain could crack.

But Kovec liked to try.

“Get up here,” he snarled. “Put out your palm.”

Some of the children winced. One little girl whimpered—Kovec glared at her, and she subsided. A few of the larger boys jeered. Like any prison, there was a hierarchy in here, and the rules were strictly enforced. Yet Vladek refused to go along with them. He kept to himself, and the playground thugs, unsettled by his large eyes and fixed stare, left him alone.

Kovec reached behind him and took out the larger of his two rulers. He struck it menacingly hard, on the desk.

Vladek slipped out from his chair and came up to the front of the room. He didn’t say a word; he merely extended his little palm.

Kovec felt a momentary pang of shame. But he ignored it. He slammed the ruler down, hard, on the boy’s open hand. A white pressure mark appeared on the palm, to be replaced by a red welt. Viciously, Kovec hit him twice more.

He was about to tell Vladek to extend his other palm. But then his eyes met the boy’s.

Vladek was staring at him. The hate was to be expected. But there was something else in those eyes. Something so cold, so terrible, that Kovec physically flinched. The evil eye—that was something they still believed in, in the East, when the fires sunk low in the evenings.

“You may return to your seat,” Kovec blustered, to cover himself. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson,Vladek.”

The boy sat down again, but did not reply.

“Tell me about diamonds,” his teacher said.

“Nothing but a diamond can scratch or cut a diamond, because a diamond is the hardest thing known.”

“Yes. And what else do you know?”

Mother Russia was not very good at providing warmth, or food, or medicine. But knowledge—she offered that, and lots of it, to her children. And Kovec had an inkling that the boy Vladek was highly intelligent.

“They are made of carbon; coal, under great pressure. They are cut from rough. They are very beautiful.” The seven-year-old was solemn. Kovec glanced at his hand; it was swollen from the beating, yet the child acted as if nothing had happened; his young voice did not quiver or shake. “Rich people own them.”

“Yes.”

“And when I am grown I will have many diamonds,”Vladek said.

The class erupted with laughter and derision.