"Do you smoke?" Moishele asked Srulik.
"No."
"You have to if you want to join the gang."
His brother Duvid had once tried getting him to take a drag on a cigarette. It was bitter and made him cough and choke.
"I'd rather not," he said.
"Leave him alone," Yankel told Moishele.
A well-dressed man passed by. One of the boys approached him and said, "Please, mister, can you spare some change? We're hungry."
The man looked at them and snapped, "You bums! How come you have enough money for cigarettes?"
The street was soon deserted. It was time to go into action. The store they planned to break in to faced an alleyway. The window was very small.
"Start shouting," Yankel said.
All the boys began to shout as if they were fighting. Under the cover of the noise, Yankel took a stone and smashed the window. Someone looked down from a top floor and yelled, "You bums! Get out of here!"
"All right, ma'am," Moishele said.
They moved off and came back a few minutes later. Yankel stuck his hand through the window and removed the broken glass. Then Srulik was tied to a rope. He wriggled through the window and Yankel lowered him carefully.
"Hey, Red," he called softly. "Leave the rope on and coil it around you. Tell me what you see down there."
Srulik tried to make out his surroundings, but it was too dark to see anything.
"Nothing," he called up.
"Moishele," Yankel said, annoyed, "why didn't you give him a box of matches?"
"Why didn't you give him one yourself?"
A box of matches landed on the floor. Srulik groped for it, found it, and lit a match.
"Do you see any sausage?"
"No," he said. "Just bottles."
"Vodka?"
"How can you tell?"
"It says."
"I can't read."
"Pass one up through the window."
He found a chair, put it beneath the window, stood on it, and reached as high with the bottle as he could.
"Great! How many more like these are there?"
"I see two. There might be more in the closet, but it's locked."
"Look for cigarettes."
It wasn't very different from going through the garbage with his mother. But the results were better: cigarettes, matches, several bottles of vodka, and two whole sausages hidden under the counter. Yankel told him to put the cigarettes and matches in his pockets and pass up the end of the rope.
"Quick!"
Srulik was yanked upward just in the nick of time. The footsteps of the night patrol were approaching. The gang took to its heels.
The boys knew the neighborhood and the buildings that had no gatekeeper. At night they slept in empty lofts. The best lofts were the ones with old rags or discarded mattresses that they could sleep on. If they couldn't find a loft that wasn't locked, they bedded down on the stairs.
They found a loft that was open. A match scratched and a candle was lit.
"Moishele," Srulik said, "I have more matches in my pockets."
"Hold on to them," Moishele answered. "My pockets are stuffed full."
Moishele took out some bread and they sat down to eat. The menu was more sausage, bread, and water. Then they lay down to sleep. Srulik found a beat-up old mattress and dragged it over to Yankel's. One of the boys tried grabbing it from him.
"Hey, Red, that's my mattress," he said.
"Leave him alone," Yankel threatened. "It's his now."
Yankel went to a crate in the corner of the loft and pulled out the remains of an old army coat. "Here," he said to Srulik. "Use it as a blanket."
Srulik felt grateful for being taken under Yankel's wing.
"Lights out!" Moishele announced.
"One more minute ... just a minute..." voices called.
"Put out the candle,"Yankel said.
Moishele wet his two fingers in his mouth and snuffed out the flame. It was pitch dark.
Darkness covered the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. Since the German invasion of Russia, there was a blackout every night. In winter, when the skies were cloudy and it got dark before the curfew, people bumped into each other in the street. Someone had had the idea of coating pins with phosphorus, and whoever could afford one wore a pin that glowed in the dark. The pins came in human and animal shapes—dogs, cats, butterflies, birds, even chimney sweeps. Srulik envied whoever had one. Although he begged his father for one, there was no money. And then one day he found a butterfly pin in the garbage. The more he left in sunlight during the day, the more it shone at night. He would put it on the window sill, where it caught the sun's rays peeping over the roofs of the houses. At night it gave off a greenish glow. He could even see the tips of his fingers if he held them close to it.