The Storyteller

In the town square, Damian whips Aleks bloody. It doesn’t matter whether Aleks is guilty or not; the villagers need a scapegoat to blame for all of their suffering. Suddenly, two soldiers appear carrying the brutalized body of Baruch Beiler’s wife. In the moment it takes for the crowd to realize that Aleks has been falsely accused, he disappears.

Minka narrates her story. She describes her teenage life in Poland. Her father was a baker and her newlywed and pregnant older sister, Basia, sold bread in their shop. One of young Minka’s favorite pastimes is imagining a perfect world run by herself and her best friend Darija Horowicz. Darija thinks a perfect world would be devoid of Germans but Minka believes that lumping all Germans together makes you just as bad as them. Although they have heard distant stories of Kristallnacht and other atrocities, Minka’s mother Hana refuses to move the family and leave behind a lifetime of memories. Slowly, however, things begin to change in town. Minka goes on her first-ever date with Josek, an older boy who is enamored by her writing. Josek tells her that the upióry in her Ania story are a brilliant symbol for how Jews are viewed by the Reich. Their date is interrupted by the arrival of SS soldiers, who shoot dead nearly 50 people in the café. Josek’s family flees the city soon afterward, but before he leaves he gives Minka falsified Christian papers. When Minka’s father hears about the massacre, he gives her a pair of black boots which have a hidden storage compartment containing gold coins to potentially buy her freedom if captured.

In November, several men are hanged in the town square for criticizing Germany, prompting Darija’s family to move to nearby Bałuty. Basia gives birth to a baby boy named Majer. One Friday, Shabbat dinner is interrupted by Wehrmacht soldiers evicting the family. With nowhere else to go, they move in with a cousin of Hana’s in Bałuty, which is sealed off from the rest of the city shortly afterward, becoming part of the Litzmannstadt Jewish Ghetto. At first Minka doesn’t mind because the move reunites with her Darija, but by winter people are starving and freezing in the overcrowded ghetto. In February of 1941, baby Majer falls badly ill. Basia’s husband Rubin is caught buying black-market medicine and slated to be deported. Basia visits the Jewish Chairman of the ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, and performs oral sex on him in exchange for Rubin being allowed to stay in Poland, but by that point Rubin is already dead. Minka and Darija are reassigned to jobs outside the ghetto. Due to her excellent German, Minka is employed in the workshop of a German man named Herr Fassbinder, who treats all of his employees like his children and hires as many people as he can to save them from the increasing deportations.

In March of 1942, German soldiers take Hana away, and Minka soon learns that she was murdered at a concentration camp. On the first day of September, Chaim Rumkowski announces that the Nazis have demanded the ghetto’s elderly residents and children be sent to the camps. When soldiers begin to raid houses looking for children, Basia hides in a crawl space with Majer. Although she successfully conceals him from the soldiers, her attempts to keep him quiet result in his accidental suffocation. Heartbroken, Basia dies by suicide.

Sage continues reading Minka’s story. Ania goes to the cave on the outskirts of town where Aleks lives and sees a man crouched on the ground, consuming the remains of Baruch Beiler. Believing she has found the upiór who killed her father, Ania lashes out at him, but Aleks appears to stop her. Aleks explains that the man on the ground is his brother, Casimir. Ania sobs that Casimir killed the only person who ever loved her. Aleks corrects her, saying that her father was not the only person to love her. He then confesses that it was he, not Casimir, who killed Ania’s father. Aleks, too, is an upiór.

In 1944, Darija disappears from the ghetto. Three days later, Minka and her father are on the deportation list. Wanting to experience as much as she can before she dies, Minka loses her virginity to a boy named Aron. The next morning, she boards a train to Auschwitz. Her father comforts her by spinning a tale of the new bakery they will set up wherever they are going. Minka thinks of Herr Fassbinder and reminds herself that not all Germans are evil.