The Island on Bird Street

Alex returns to the park after the first snow of the year. The boys accept him into their game again, this time a snowball fight, and he is a captain. His new friend Wlodek is the other captain. As he returns home, he knows he will cry; sure enough, he sobs back in the larder. He stays in the hideout until Monday when he returns to meet with Stashya. Wlodek tries to tease Alex, “Your girlfriend?” (134), and Alex feels anger build, but he talks himself down and agrees that she is. After that, Wlodek sticks up for Alex, and Alex spends the rest of the time with Stashya. Unable to lie to her, Alex soon reveals he is Jewish. He is afraid until Stashya reveals she is Jewish too. They plan another Monday date, and Alex asks her to sit in the window when possible.

Alex waits a week to return to the Polish side, thinking up systems by which he and Stashya can communicate without a telephone. He plans to ask her to use a Morse-Code-style system of moving her arms to the left or right for dots and dashes. He thinks about opening and closing the air vent in the same manner but knows he cannot do this too much. On Monday, he discovers the Number 32 doorman raised his fee to pass from the ghetto. Alex has plenty of money from Henryk. He decides to ice skate in the park and convinces Stashya to try it as well. He pays to rent blades, and they allow the rental man to drill fine holes in their shoes to fit the blades. Alex used to come to this rink, so he knows how to help Stashya learn with a chair. She also holds onto him. They laugh when they fall together. He hears one of his gang of friends say, “They’re like a real married couple” (144).

Alex is filled with happiness. On the way back to Stashya’s, though, Yanek begins to follow them. Stashya departs quickly. Alex keeps up his pretense as a boy who just moved there when Yanek accosts him, but Yanek calls him a slur for Jewish boys, and Alex fears he will tell authorities. Alex punches Yanek in the gut and then the face just like his father taught him; then, he goes back to the ghetto. He knows he will be unable to return to the Polish side.

Stashya sends messages in the code Alex suggested. She says she loves him, and when she asks if he loves her, he signals yes. She tries to arrange a next meeting, but he knows it is too dangerous; soon, she lets Alex know that Yanek told everyone Alex was Jewish. Yanek blamed his injuries on two Jewish boys who beat him. Alex tells Stashya the truth. She says she is crying because she cannot see him again; he admits he is crying too.

Just before Christmas, the Germans tear down the ghetto wall and open the buildings for the Polish people to use. This means Alex must stay put in Number 78 and that Stashya can no longer signal because new inhabitants of Bird Street would see. Alex grows more desperate: Now he cannot use passageways to the other buildings, the heavy snow threatens to collapse the fourth floor onto him, he is running low on food, and the Polish children, new to the neighborhood, start coming into the ruins. He must keep very still; he is painfully lonely.

Bolek visits with treats for Alex on New Year’s Day, but Alex still refuses to go with him, too afraid to miss his father. Days later, Stashya visits. Her family is leaving for the country. They try to plot ways to find one another after the war and agree to try the Red Cross as well as meet at Number 78 on the first New Year’s Day after the war ends. They kiss. When Stashya leaves the next morning, both she and her mother wave from the street. Alex finds it very strange that the street shows no sign that the ghetto was there.

Alex realizes he will run out of food and kerosene before winter ends. One day, as he is closed up in the larder, bricks and roof fall from above and punch a new hole into the basement. Police come and brick over the entrance to the house; at least Alex is rid of the Polish children. He ventures down to his old cellar. Two men enter the ruins. Alex hides in the last storage room. He is amazed to hear a voice like his father’s. He is almost too afraid to leave his hiding place, but when the man talks as if his son is dead and that coming to the building is “like visiting a cemetery” (159), Alex goes to him. They greet each other, shocked. They embrace and weep.

Alex shows his father and friend his hideout and tells his story. They are amazed. His father hugs him when he hears that Alex shot the German soldier. He says the pistol can belong to Alex now. His father and the friend planned to meet someone named Bolek and then return to the forest with the partisans. Alex places a board in the window diagonally so that his father can rendezvous with Bolek there in his hideout.