A spray of gunfire rattled closer to our building than I had ever heard it. Mama pulled me away from the window and onto the floor, whether to shield me from seeing or being hit, I did not know.

When the gunfire had ceased for several seconds, she stood and pulled me to my feet, then led me away from the window and ushered me into my coat. “Come, now!” She started for the door, carrying a small satchel.

I looked over my shoulder. For so long, I had hated living in the filthy, cramped space. But the apartment that had seemed so grim was now a sanctuary, the only safe place I knew. I would have given anything to stay.

I considered refusing. Leaving our apartment now with so many police on the street seemed foolish and unsafe. Then I saw the look on my mother’s face, not just angry but afraid. This was not some outing to be taken or skipped. There was no choice.

I followed Mama down the stairs, still not quite understanding. I guessed that we were going outside and joining the others to avoid risking attention or having the Germans come and order us out. When we reached the ground floor, I started for the front door. But Mama turned me squarely by the shoulders, nudging me farther down the hall. “Come,” Mama said.

“Where?” I asked. She did not reply but led me back to the bathroom, as if asking me to go use it one last time before a long journey.

As we neared the bathroom once more, I heard my father arguing with a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. “Things aren’t ready,” Papa said.

“We have to go now,” the strange man insisted.

Going anywhere would be quite impossible, I thought, remembering the blockade on the street. I stepped into the bathroom. The toilet was still shoved to one side, revealing a hole in the floor. I was stunned to see a man’s head stuck up through it. It looked dismembered, like some oddity at a freak show or carnival. He had a wide face, cherubic cheeks rough and raw from working outdoors in the cold Polish winter. Seeing me, he smiled. “Dzień dobry,” he said politely, greeting me as if all of this was perfectly normal. Then he looked at Papa and his expression turned somber once more. “You must come now.”

“Come where?” I blurted. The streets were teeming with SS and Gestapo and the Jewish Ghetto Police, who, God help us, were nearly as bad. I looked down at the hole in the floor, understanding. “Surely you don’t mean...”

I turned back to Mama, waiting for her to protest. My elegant, refined mother was not about to lower herself through a hole beneath the toilet. But her face was stony and resolved, ready to do what Papa asked.

I, however, was not ready. I took a step back. “What about Babcia?” I asked. My grandmother, who was in a nursing home on the other side of the city, having somehow escaped deportation to the ghetto.