Page 182 - LEIBY

182 Leiby – Border Smuggler

“But where’s the whole group that you came here with?”

“They all left, but I stayed behind. I refused to go without
Mirushka.”

Hersh was busy at work in the hotel kitchen. He lit a small
primus stove and boiled up some water, and finding some
old, forgotten sugar cubes and a jar of jam in the pantry, he
prepared a warm, sweet drink for everyone. The streets outside
the hotel teemed with people and Yosef and Leiby ventured
outside. They walked around and about and asked the passersby
if they had seen a young girl wandering around by herself. They
knew no Slovakian, and the people they met didn’t understand
Polish, but they tried their best to make themselves understood.
They even tried their luck with Yiddish, but the local German
speakers, who may have been able to understand, pretended to
have no idea what they were saying.

If the truth be told, their search was bound for failure from the
outset. They had no picture of the missing girl, they had no way
of communicating with the townspeople, and way too much
time had passed since Mirushka had disappeared for there to
be any realistic chance of anyone remembering having seen her.

When they returned to the hotel, exhausted and disappointed,
they found that the new group of refugees had just arrived.
The hotel was full to bursting point, and Leiby wondered how
the border smuggling organization had succeeded in putting
together such a large group so soon after the previous one, and
if the Greek Red Cross authorization scam was still feasible.

Akiva, the breichnik who was accompanying the group,
smiled broadly. “Leiby, you’re behind the times,” he laughed.
“Everything has changed, and we border crossers have it so
much easier than it used to be. There’s no more sneaking along
mud paths in the dead of night, and we don’t even have to
bother forging any documents…”

“So how do you get everyone over the border?” Leiby was