Jurek was given a whip and told to keep the horses walking steadily. He was proud of his new job and liked to crack his whip from time to time with a sound like a rifle shot, even though it was rarely necessary. For long hours each day he walked behind the horses, who circled on a track of packed dirt. During lunchtime he hung sacks of barley around their necks and joined the other workers for the meal.
On the next-to-last day of threshing, soon after the lunch break, he heard someone shout a warning behind him. There was no time to make sense of it. His whip, trailing behind him, had gotten caught in the cogwheels, dragging his arm into the machine.
"Stop the horses!"
Someone grabbed the horses. Jurek felt an unbearable pain. Someone helped pull his mangled arm from the wheels. He managed to get it into his sleeve before he passed out. From time to time he came to and tried to grasp what was happening. Pani Herman was sitting beside him in a speeding wagon. She tried to keep his arm from being jolted by the bumps. Now and then the black ness that he saw turned to blue and he understood that he was looking at the sky. Then everything was black again.
Jurek was brought to a hospital in Nowy Dwur, a small city on the right bank of the Wisla. He was placed on an examination table and washed by two nurses. Pani Herman went to pay for his hospitalization. When she returned, he was on the operating table. A young surgeon entered. He examined Jurek and said:
"I'm not operating on this boy."
Pani Herman was startled. "Why not?"
"Because he's a Jew."
"He's not a Jew!" she shouted. "I got him from the Gestapo and he's my worker. You'll operate on him at once!"
"He's a Jew," the doctor insisted.
"You don't know what you're talking about!" Pani Herman shouted. "I paid 157 marks and 25 pfennig for him!"
She made a scene, screaming, sobbing, and threatening to call the Gestapo if anything happened to Jurek. Then she drove off.
The doctor refused to back down. He ordered Jurek to be put in the corridor on a stretcher.
Jurek lay there in shock. In the moments when he regained consciousness, he felt as though he and his excruciatingly painful body were two separate things. As soon as they became one again, he passed out. He no longer knew where he was. His lips mumbled words that had no sound.
The next morning the senior surgeon, Dr. Zurawski, arrived. He saw Jurek in the corridor and exclaimed, "What have you done? You could have saved the boy's arm!"
Jurek was taken to the operating room and anaesthetized. His gangrened arm was amputated above the elbow. When he awoke, he rubbed his eyes and tried lifting it. Nothing moved except for a bandaged stump. He broke into bitter tears. And yet by shutting his eyes he could feel the whole arm again, from his shoulder to his fingertips. He could even feel the whip in his hand.
In the first days after the operation, Jurek cried a lot. The nurses fed him and bathed him. They dressed him in a long hospital gown and he spent hours kneeling by his bed and praying to Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Often, trying to support himself with an arm that wasn't there, he nearly fell. Everything was an overwhelming reminder of his condition.
One morning he was woken by a nun. She bent over him and said, "Come, Jurek, sit up. I'm here to help you."
She took him to the shower and taught him how to wash with his left arm. She showed him how to cross himself and hold a spoon with it.
She came to see him every day.
"There's almost nothing you can't do with one arm," she promised him.
"Are you sure, Sister?"
"Yes. It's only a matter of time and patience."
For the first time since the accident, he felt a spark of hope.
In his second week in the hospital, Jurek began to roam its rooms and corridors. He visited the different wards, was met by smiles, and even began to smile back.
Twice a week someone came with a food package from Pani Herman's farm. The packages were full of good things—hard-boiled eggs, meat, even cake. Now and then Pani Hermann came herself. She never found Jurek in his bed. He had made friends with many of the patients, who knew him and joked with him. One old man taught him to play checkers, and they spent hours at it by his bed. Pani Herman laughed when she saw the two of them.
One day Jurek passed the maternity ward, peered inside, and saw a familiar face. For a moment, he couldn't place it. It belonged to the wife of the couple who had turned him in to the Gestapo. The woman saw him, too. Soon the attitude toward him in the hospital had changed. Patients looked away when he passed. A package disappeared before it reached him.
The old patient went on playing checkers with him.
"Why did they amputate your leg?" Jurek asked him.
"I have diabetes. How about you?"