In the Balance (1994)
“He’d thought lean times and High Holy Days fasts had taught him what hunger meant, but they’d no more prepared him for the Warsaw ghetto than a picture of a lake taught a man to swim.
Long black coat flapping about him like a moving piece of the night, he scurried from one patch of deep shadow to the next. It was long past curfew, which had begun at nine. If a German saw him, he would live only so long as he still amused his tormentor. Fear dilated his nostrils at every breath, made him suck in... great draughts of the fetid ghetto air.
But hunger drove harder than fear—and after all, he could become the object of a German’s sport at any hour of the day or night, for any reason or none. Only four days before, the Nazis had fallen on the Jews who came to the Leszno Street courthouse to pay their taxes—taxes the Nazis themselves imposed. They robbed the Jews not only of what they claimed was owed, but also of anything else they happened to have on their persons. With the robbery came blows and kicks, as if to remind the Jews in whose clawed grip they lay.MoreLess
Long black coat flapping about him like a moving piece of the night, he scurried from one patch of deep shadow to the next. It was long past curfew, which had begun at nine. If a German saw him, he would live only so long as he still amused his tormentor. Fear dilated his nostrils at every breath, made him suck in... great draughts of the fetid ghetto air.
But hunger drove harder than fear—and after all, he could become the object of a German’s sport at any hour of the day or night, for any reason or none. Only four days before, the Nazis had fallen on the Jews who came to the Leszno Street courthouse to pay their taxes—taxes the Nazis themselves imposed. They robbed the Jews not only of what they claimed was owed, but also of anything else they happened to have on their persons. With the robbery came blows and kicks, as if to remind the Jews in whose clawed grip they lay.MoreLess
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