“No! No! My Lord, I can’t bear any more of your tests,” Ewa said, grief-stricken. Urjasz sat on their doorstep, clutching Leah and her wailing brother.

“Mama! Mama!” Leah and her brother saw their mother, ran to her, and embraced her.

Ewa walked towards her house. Urjasz stopped her, holding her arms, and said in a gentle voice, “They killed Symeon.”

The ghetto police had come to their house to take Symeon away and send him to the extermination camp. The first wave of deportation aimed to round up the troublemakers on Szymon’s list. It sought to stop them from campaigning against the Nazis.

A heavy contingent of Nazi police accompanied the Jewish police during the first week of the process. There was a risk that the youth leaders might resist their capture.

Seeing that Symeon might not be able to walk to the holding area, the Germans shot him dead on a nearby street. Once the crowd had left, someone informed Urjasz, who retrieved his body and laid it in his bedroom.

The children felt devastated, and Urjasz took them outside.

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The authorities continued the deportation as they hoarded thousands, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, daily. After that, the residents marched to the holding site, from where they moved by train to the extermination camp in Treblinka.

A few days later, Leah confronted her mother. “Papa did not harm anyone. He was a loving man. Why would someone do this to him? Why, Mama? Why?” she asked, serrated, trying to hold back her tears.

Taking a deep breath, Ewa revealed the cruel truth to her daughter, “They killed him because he was a Jew.”

“No! They are sending Jews to farms in the east. They are to raise livestock, dogs, vegetables, and fruit trees. For what reason did Papa die? Why couldn’t he accompany us to our new home?”

“They send our people to other places to die, not to new places where they can live.” Your father died a day or two before the rest,” Ewa said in a cold tone.

At that moment, the bond between mother and daughter manifested when Ewa grabbed her daughter and hugged her just as Leah let out a loud wail.

She wondered why her people continued to endure some of the worst atrocities in humanity’s history. She believed that, deep down, every Jew in the ghetto knew that the Nazis did not tolerate their existence, even after they had diminished themselves so much that they had become invisible to the rest of the world.

Ewa decided that day that she had to send her children out of the ghetto, and then she would get her revenge on the Nazis and their collaborators.

“I am the daughter of my mother………a woman, a tigress, who stood up against odds; who supported the weak irrespective of caste or creed.” Clenching her fists, she said to herself