The man’s voice was different from the voices that usually came out of the radio. It was calmer, less aggressive. He wasn’t shouting or proclaiming. Mother and Granny sat frozen, their hands holding up their chins and covering their mouths. I tried to concentrate like them, but I didn’t understand much of what was said. He used many words I didn’t know, acronyms that meant nothing to me. It was like another language. At one point he mentioned “Israel,” those jagged syllables that had become so potent in only a day. I tried to guess the meaning of it all but only saw blanks. When the program was over, Mother moved the indicator back to another station and turned up the volume. This, I discovered, is what she would do every night, so no one would ever know they had listened to the forbidden station. And while the music played, they began to explain. They explained about the Jews, that there had been many in Poland before. For a thousand years. That most had been killed in the camps that the Germans had set up during the war. Granny recalled seeing her neighbors forced onto trains, never to be seen again. Of course we weren’t really taught this at school. We were taught that the Germans had suppressed the Poles and how our Russian brothers had saved us. Jews weren’t Polish, of course. Some Poles still blamed them for the war. That year, Mother said, there had been unrest, student strikes all across the country. So the Party had turned on the Jews. They had called them traitors, dismissed them from their jobs. This was why Beniek’s family had left. Once they were gone, no one ever spoke about them again. One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.