The Island on Bird Street

Alex gets paper from the apartment next door and tries to start a diary: “Day Eight: ‘I’m getting hungry’ (50), but he does not continue it. He tries again to find food, this time taking Snow and traveling the “lofts” (likely, attic spaces), which are interconnected by building to building down the street. He crosses to the other side of the street and whistles for Snow to find food, but Snow finds none. He returns and spends the day growing hungrier. The next morning, he tries again. He finds a food stash hidden behind panels. He eats sugar, potatoes, crackers, and jam. A Jewish family creeps through the lofts and finds him; though Alex insists he found the food, the father, Marek, begins taking it all. He slaps Alex when Alex shouts in protest. The father tells Alex to go away, but Alex follows them as they try to leave the loft. The mother and daughter, Martha, tell the father to give Alex some food. Marek finally relents. They give him enough for only three or four days.

The next day, German soldiers and Polish policemen search the buildings on Bird Street. Alex waits in the cellar as they try to get down the hole; they cannot. He decides he should try to make the third- and fourth-floor apartments his hiding place. He can make rope ladders to climb up and use the third floor’s back window that overlooks the ghetto wall for a second route of escape. No one would see him or be able to get to those floors. He thinks about building a wooden ladder first to get up to the third floor; then he would fashion a rope ladder and make it secure enough to take up and down. But finding wood and hammering pieces is too problematic. Then, he works out a complex plan: Take the rope from the rope factory and short boards from the apartment to build a rope ladder, tie a rock to a long thin rope, throw the rock up to the third-floor apartment and through the back window, attach the new rope ladder to the thin dangling rope, pull the thin rope’s rock end till the rope ladder reaches the third floor, secure the rock end behind the building, and climb up.

Alex finds tools first and then heads through the lofts to the rope factory. He encounters a man laughing and cruelly trying to drag Martha. Alex orders the man away in a deep voice and fires the pistol. He is surprised that it works. Martha and Alex talk for a while until she leaves to return to her family’s hiding place.

When Alex gets to the rope factory, he worries about how he will gather the needed rope with a guard nearby. Then he witnesses thieves placing bagged-up rope near the gate to collect after dark. They walk off, and Alex takes one of their bags that has the perfect thick and thin rope for his ladder plan. On the way back, he stops at his old apartment. It has been looted; the Gryns are gone. Alex finds some candles, matches, and a backpack with some food that had belonged to the young son of the Gryns, Yossi.

Alex encounters a looter hiding from two other thieves arguing over jewelry. One thief knives the other. Alex and the looter chat; the man, Bolek, says he cannot share his secret way out of the ghetto. If Alex escapes, however, Bolek will try to help him. He gives Alex an address where he says he is a doorman.

Alex knows rope knots because Boruch taught him; this comes in handy as he constructs a rope ladder from the thick rope and wooden rungs he saw. It takes him only three tries to throw the rock through the third-floor window and tow the new ladder up by pulling on the rock end by way of the second-floor window. He secures the rock end and climbs up the new ladder; then, he fixes it in place by tying it to an exposed pipe. This apartment has a larder (a small food storage room, like a pantry) he can use to hide in; he covers small holes so he can light a candle inside it even at night without being seen. Triumphant, he returns to the cellar and tells Snow they will move the next day, which makes him recall the night before he and his parents moved to the ghetto. But Alex cannot sleep, thinking about his exposed ladder hanging in the ruins. So he moves some of his possessions, Snow, and Snow’s box up to the larder and pulls the ladder up before going to sleep.

The next morning, Alex moves the rest of his things. He tries the water in the third-floor apartment, and it runs. Thinking ahead to when he will need to leave for food and supply runs, he solves the problem of the exposed rope ladder by tying old, ruined electrical wires to it—one to hoist it up to the third floor by a metal ring that serves as a pulley and another wire to yank the ladder back down. Exhausted from solving problems, Alex shuts himself and Snow into the larder. Through an air vent hole he can open in the back of the building, he can see the Polish neighborhood, including a tavern with voices and music.