“Papa?”

He did not look up. “Get dressed quickly!” he ordered more sharply than I had ever heard him speak.

I considered asking another of the dozen questions swirling through my brain. But I had been raised an only child among adults and I was wise enough to know when to just go along. I went back upstairs to our room and opened the rotting wood armoire that held our clothes. Then I hesitated. I had no idea what to wear, but I didn’t know where Mama was and I didn’t dare bother my father again to ask. Anyway, we had come to the ghetto with just a few suitcases between the three of us; it was not as if I had so much to choose from. I pulled a skirt and blouse from a hanger and started to dress.

My mother appeared in the door and shook her head. “Something warmer,” she instructed.

“But, Mama, it’s not that cold.” She did not answer. Instead, she pulled out the thick blue sweater my grandmother had knit for me last winter and my lone pair of woolen trousers. I was surprised; I preferred pants to skirts, but Mama thought them unladylike and before the war she used to let me wear them only on the weekend when we weren’t going out anywhere. When I had finished changing, she pointed to my feet. “Boots,” she said firmly.

My boots were from two winters earlier and too snug. “They’re too small.” We had planned to buy a new pair last fall, but the restrictions on Jews going into the shops had come.

Mama started to say something and I was sure she was going to tell me to wear them anyway. Then she rummaged in the bottom drawer of the armoire with effort and pulled out her own boots. “But what are you going to wear?”

“Just put them on.” Hearing her firm tone, I obeyed without asking further. Mama’s feet were birdlike, narrow and small, and the boots only a size larger than my own. I noticed then that despite dressing me for colder weather, my mother still wore a skirt—she didn’t own pants, and even if she had, they would not have fit over her belly, which seemed to grow rounder by the day.

As Mama finished shoving some belongings in a bag, I looked out the window to the street below. In the faint predawn light, I could see men in uniforms, not just the police but SS as well, setting up tables. Both ends of the street were blocked. The Jews were being forced to gather on Plac Zgody as they did each morning. Only there was none of the order of roll call from when we lined up to go work in the factories. The police were pulling people from buildings and trying to corral the crowds into lines with truncheons and whips, herding them in the direction of a dozen trucks waiting at the corner. It looked as though they were taking everyone in the ghetto. I let the curtains drop uneasily.