We will make it wonderful.
Misha heard “children singing,” and “a familiar voice” calling “Old Man Goose! One! Two! Three!” He knew whose voice it was, so the boy darted across the street to greet his old friend. “Doctor Korczak!” The man “staggered and laughed” as Misha “crashed into him.” The boy couldn’t help but ask, “Doctor Korczak, are you going to the ghetto too?” “Yes,” the man said. He only smiled when Misha – naïve child who couldn’t comprehend what was going on – asked if it was “wonderful” that they were going there. “We will make it wonderful,” said Doctor Korczak, though he knew what was going to happen, he didn’t want to show his fear.
Are you going to tell me why you named her Janina?
“You didn’t know about me, did you?” asked Katherine, the daughter he had never seen before. She did not come empty-handed, the woman had been “saving something” for him. Misha couldn’t believe his luck. Not only did he get a chance to give a middle name to his granddaughter but also was offered a place to live. They came and “took” him “home.” Katherine did not “pester” Misha with questions. She knew everything that the man had told her mother, which meant “everything but Janina.” Though Katherine did ask why he named her daughter “Janina,” Misha “kept his sister” to himself. After all those years he wasn’t ready to talk about her.
I slept in the barn, ate in the barn, worked in the barn.
“One day” Misha was found by a farmer. “What are you doing here?” the man asked. The truth was that Misha was “following the train,” he needed to find Janina and go “to the ovens” with her. He started working on a farm. He “slept in the barn, ate in the barn, worked in the barn.” When he wasn’t working in the barn, he was working in the fields. So he “worked and waited and talked with the donkey and the mice.” Though it was a better place than a ghetto, Misha would trade the farm for the ghetto or even the ovens to be with Janina.
