Our barn was just on the outskirts of the town. It was far enough away from the village that nobody cared much about it, but it was close enough that we could roam the streets to look for food. It had six stalls to each side of the center isle and a hayloft up above. It was probably left behind in haste, because there were still whole bales of hay stacked below the roof. My brother says that our barn had once housed horses.

Now, it housed children.

We were lucky that the barn was still standing. It wasn’t much; part of the roof was flecked with holes and the plaster on the walls was cracked so that you could see the red bricks underneath. But it was better than anything we could have hoped for.

My brother and I slept in the east corner of the hayloft, below the broken section of the roof. I liked it there. On sunny mornings, when the early morning light awoke me, I could sit and watch as it passed through the holes in the roof. The rays made a path through the dusty air and painted a pattern on the opposite side of the barn. For those few minutes, I was in an old, quiet church with stained glass windows. I could feel safe.

There were about forty other children who lived in our barn. Most of them were my brother’s age or a little younger, like me. The oldest was Soto, who must’ve been seventeen. He was a bitter young man whose siblings had all been shot when we escaped from the concentration camp. My brother despised Soto.

When we had first moved into the barn, there was already a girl and her younger brother living there. Her house had been destroyed by a bomb, and her parents were taken by the Nazis. She had managed to salvage a trunk from the wreckage that held bed sheets and a box of silverware. The silverware she sold for food; the bed sheets were handed out to the other children.

The heavy trunk stood forgotten for a while, until Soto caught one of the pesky barn rats and dropped it inside. Before long, all the other children started catching their own rats and putting them in the truck. When there were too many rats, Soto tempted them with a piece of moldy cheese and got them to fight until one was dead. After that, the other children started to train their rats to fight. It became a competition, a form of entertainment. Inside the trunk, the rats lived peaceably together, but once they were placed on the sandy floor of the barn, all they did was fight.

In the fading light of the spring sun, we created a circle in the middle of the barn. I stayed up in the hayloft. I usually didn’t watch rat fights, but my brother was fighting this time. I didn’t want to let him down.

My brother held his black rat by the tail while Soto, his opponent, pulled out his own brown rat. One of the younger boys, Pete, held the piece of moldy cheese. I could smell its sour stench all the way from where I was sitting.

The two rodents pumped their legs furiously against the air as Pete counted off. At three, they dropped onto the dirt and melted together into a hissing, rolling mass.

“Come on!” yelled my brother. He hung over the pair of fighting rats, spit flying from his mouth. “Come on! Fight!”

I could see that the black rat already had his right ear missing, and his tail hung on to his body by its last strip of flesh. The wound was clogged with the sand from the barn floor.

The other kids in the circle cheered as Soto’s brown rat threw itself at the throat of my brother’s rat. The two rats spun around each other again. I couldn’t watch. I buried my face in the scratchy straw and sealed my hands over my ears.

I knew that the match was over when the cheers of the kids reached its climax. My brother’s rat, torn open from its shoulder to its stomach, lay heaving in the arena. Soto’s brown fighter was eating his reward of moldy cheese.

My brother was angry. His blue eyes flashed like lightning.

“You lost, Max,” said Soto matter-of-factly. I knew that my brother hated loosing, but he would not disobey the rules of rat fights. He looked Soto in the eyes.

“I lost,” he said, following the unspoken tradition. The other kids quieted down to hear the response.

“Are you taking up a bet?” Soto asked him.

“Of course!” my brother exclaimed. “I don’t give up that easily!”

The conversations of the other kids started again as Soto gave a moment to think. I was silent. There were always consequences to losing a rat fight. But I knew that my brother wanted to beat Soto, and he could never admit defeat. After six months in the concentration camp, I suppose that he was willing to cling on to every last scrap of pride he could grasp.

My brother was two years younger than Soto. He had shaggy, straw-colored hair and he didn’t wear a shirt because he had given it to me. Each rib rippled beneath his flat chest as he breathed.

My brother was the first to challenge Soto in a long time. Of all the rats in the trunk, Soto’s was the meanest.

“Okay,” Soto said, bringing silence into the dark barn. “I want you to get us some money. Make us all proud.” He grinned hungrily, a wolf with empty eyes. “Steal it from the bank.”

My brother’s mouth hung open like the dead rat’s on the floor. He was quick to close it again. “Of course. I’ll do it.”

“You have until the same time tomorrow night,” Soto demanded. He gathered his brown rat in his hands, set it carefully back into the trunk, and left the arena.

Once he had disappeared in the shadows of one of the stalls, the rest of the children followed suit. They scampered into the corners and up the ladders to where their beds were cradled among the bales of hay. When the ladder was finally clear, I hurried down to stand with my brother in the middle of the barn.

“Brother,” I said, “why won’t you stop fighting rats?”

“Shut up, Mink,” he snapped, still burnt from his defeat.

“But I know that you don’t like to fight, brother,” I continued, hoping to lend him some comfort with my little words. I learned a long time ago that your words were only as big as you yourself. That’s why all of the other children listened to Soto. “You don’t have to fight if you don’t want to. Then Soto wouldn’t be able to make you go do those horrible tasks.”

My brother didn’t answer. He picked up his dead rat by the remnants of its tail and brought it out of the barn, where the sun was nearly gone below the horizon. He dug a little hole in the ground with his free hand and placed the black rat inside, covering it again and pushing it down with the heel of his bare foot. A spurt of blood came forth from the ground. I flinched.

“Are you helping me?” he asked roughly, refusing to look down to me.

“I don’t… I don’t know, brother,” I started. “I’m—“

“Are you coming with me or not?” he broke me off.

“Yes, brother,” I said. Mom had always told us never to get separated.

Then, she was taken to the gas chambers.

My brother awoke me just as the horizon outside the broken roof was turning lavender. I knew that he hadn’t slept much the night before. I had tried to stay awake, too, but the lullaby created by the whimpering of the dreaming children sang me to sleep.

We crept down the ladder and past the trunk of rats. My brother inched the barn door open slowly so that the rusty hinges wouldn’t squeak and closed it again after me. He led the way along the line of trees that paved the path to the village.

I didn’t know what I was doing, trying to help my brother rob a bank. I was only ten. I didn’t want to get caught and sent to the concentration camp again. The further we walked, the heavier each step became.

“Brother, I’m scared,” I peeped softly. “What if we get caught?”

My brother didn’t stop or turn around, but I knew that he was listening to words, even when they were little like me.

“I don’t understand why we need to do this, brother,” I continued. “Being hungry is better than being dead, right? I don’t want to die now, brother. I can be hungry until the war is over.”

“Soto is right, Mink,” my brother said. “We and the other children need the money. If we can pull this off, we might not have to be hungry for a while.”

“But, what good is the money if we get caught? I don’t want to do this, brother.”

“Fine,” he snapped, turning around so that I could see the lightning in his eyes. “If you don’t want to help me, go back to the barn!”

I didn’t move.

“Go on! You aren’t of any use to me if you’re just going to whine the whole time. Go home, I say.”

My brother had never before asked me to leave him. Tears came to my eyes. I could only stand and watch as he turned around and kept walking toward the town. I felt like I had been decapitated.

Only after my brother had disappeared behind the first row of red-roofed houses did I turn and run back to the barn. I curled up against the crumbling wall beside the door and waited for the sun to rise. I didn’t know how to open the door so that it wouldn’t creak.

The wind skipped over the neglected fields of wheat, making waves like those on a lake. It touched my face gently, as if trying to comfort me, the way my mother used to do. The trees along the path sighed and groaned as she passed, waiting for the sun.

I spotted the bloodstained grave of my brother’s rat. Lots of the other children didn’t bother burying their rats. I guess they just forgot that their rats were once alive. It’s easy to forget things like that when you have nothing left.

The door screamed. It was Soto.

I hoped that he wouldn’t notice me, but my luck had long run dry. “What? You didn’t go with your precious big brother?” he scolded in his sharp voice.

I knew that he wasn’t expecting an answer, so I didn’t give him one. “Naughty you,” he commented with a fake gasp of surprise. “Don’t tell me that he abandoned you! Oh, poor poor you!”

I wanted to punch him in his fat nose.

“Well, I guess we can only hope that he doesn’t get caught, isn’t that right?” Soto continued. I could tell that he only wanted to make me angry. I got to my feet. “He probably just got sick of having to take care of you all the time. That’s right, he probably just wanted to get rid of you, that’s all. I’ll bet that he won’t ever return to this barn.”

“You’re wrong!” I snapped. And yet, I knew that I was a big burden to my brother. What if he really did want to get rid of me? “No, my brother’s not like that!”

“You don’t really believe what it is you’re saying, do you?”

“Shut up!”

I hit him in the only good place I could reach: his crotch. While he swore and cowered in pain, I made my escape. I sprinted for the village, hoping that Soto would not come after me.

I took a familiar side path through a section of closely spaced houses. The fences here were lined with rows of blooming lilacs, which created a thick cover that was perfect for hiding someone small like me. I dove in beneath the bushes and wedged myself in close to the fence so that the leaves covered me entirely. The intoxicating scent of the flowers seemed to penetrate all the way through to my heart.

I was so scared.

I must’ve fallen asleep within the lilacs, because the sun was already below its summit when I finally wiggled back out of my hiding spot. Fortunately, there was nobody on the side path. I hurried back through the houses and made my way along the row of lonely trees to the barn.

From the distance, I saw that a lot of the children were gathered outside the front door. As I drew closer, I could hear that they were all cheering.

Nobody noticed me as I merged with the crowd. There was a fight. But it wasn’t a rat fight.

At the center of the circle of children was my brother. His nose was bleeding and one of his eyes was beginning to swell up. His thin chest heaved with each breath. In one of his hands, he held a rectangular wooden box.

Soto delivered him a blow to his stomach. I could feel it hit in my own empty belly. Those punches weren’t meant for my brother; they were meant for me. I wanted to run out and protect my brother, but my legs wouldn’t move. What could I do? There was nothing for me to do but watch.

With a final kick to the middle, my brother sank to the ground and didn’t get up again.

“That should teach you a lesson,” Soto declared, striding back into the barn. The other children, no longer entertained, followed him. I could finally risk coming to brother’s side, although I was afraid of what he would say. His words could hurt more than any physical pain I have ever felt.

He reached out a hand for me and I helped him to his feet. For a moment, neither of us spoke.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out, wishing that my little words were bigger. “Soto did that because of me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” my brother said, ruffling my blond hair with his free hand. “He’s just jealous that I have something that he doesn’t. Look.”

He showed me the wooden box. It must’ve come from a wealthy household, because a detailed pattern of the Star of David had been carefully inlaid in the top. The box itself was probably worth more than both of us.

“Did you steal it?” I asked, caught between excitement and guilt.

“No,” he responded triumphantly. “An old lady caught me running through her yard and asked me to do her a little favor. She gave me this in return. She said it was only worth about fifty mark, but it was a danger to her whole family.” I could tell that my brother was proud of his achievement.

“What was the favor?” I asked, knowing that it was exactly what he wanted me to say.

“See for yourself,” he responded and flipped open the top.

It was half-filled with 5-mark coins. And, sitting on top of it all, was a little black rat.