The Stars and the Cookie Jar

So that piece about May Day is finished. I always try for historicity (I swear, it's a word from in print, not a hybrid of my tired brain!) but my chief sources are a diarist who was so ardently political as to sometimes be blind (Kruk), a diarist whose translated work comes up frickin' dry at best (Arad [at least you can disagree with Kruk]), a diarist who was twelve (Rudashevski) and a diarist who was out of her tree (my ancestress). Also the Geto-Yedies, but those are goofy with "please don't stew or boil us, don't fricassee your flock" proportions of pandering, to the Germans, to the Judenrat, bleh. So writing good stuff from pure truth is hard when all the truths I'm offered are subjective... and that's what the paper's for. So I'll shut up. 

Thanks, rymenhild , by the way. This is what I made of Raissa waxin' all Biblical.

It was the first of May. The day might have come from a picture, from before: perfect sunlight, smooth bowl of sky. On Strashun Avenue women were selling red carnations, red anemones, and Raissa had knotted a posy of red into her wild dark hair. She walked with Herr Kruk's hand at her elbow, guiding her steps down the steepest part of the hill. Hirsh was behind, and when she started to sing the Internationale, he had to sing, too, to drown her out.
The street was packed, flooded with schoolchildren though it was not past noon. The crowd, down the sidewalks and in the gutters and between the rickshaw wheels, began to press the three of them, and though people were laughing and some picked up the singing, there was something else now in the air.
Raissa dropped back to speak to him, and the laughing line of her mouth was tempered by anxiety. "Hirsh? Something's going to happen, Hirshke, I don't like it."
Kruk turned, too; the spring breeze flicked his white hair. He stood at a right angle to Hirsh, to keep Raissa from being swept away down the hill, and looked back the way they had come. There was no way up the hill again.
"It'll be all right," he said. "It's May Day."
It defied logic, to Hirsh, but Kruk lifted Raissa onto his shoulder and she laughed again, for surprise, for joy. It was enough to make Hirsh follow them down to the bottom of the street.
The kitchens were closed. The doors were shut. In front of them, a ragged, random three-piece band had come together: an accordion player, a man with a child's drum, and a youth with a violin. They played workers' songs, Bund songs, brave and happy tunes, and if the accompaniment sounded thin, the voices all around them made up for it. The kitchens were closed. There was no prospect of food, and people were singing. Hirsh stood with one hand on Raissa's knee, steadying her, and did not sing; his eyes were on the young man and the violin.
He knew that fiddle, knew the red-gold of its lacquer, knew best of all the faded blue ribbon tied below the pegs. The ribbon had been Raissa's, years ago, and the instrument had been his brother's.
"Mikah," he said, "Mikah."
The youth's fingers slid skilled and lively on the strings, and Mikah was dead. For a moment the cry of grave robber, thief was bitter in Hirsh's mouth.
But Mikah had loved his instrument too well to take it into danger with him, Hirsh thought, and his anger broke. He had left it somewhere safe, in the care of friends, and his friends did him the honor and the fiddle sang again.... That young man, with his wrist-bones sharp as stones, with the daze of hunger in his eyes but the flush of playing to brighten his face, had known Mikah. Hirsh would speak to him, when the music was over, when the crowd thinned.
Too soon, the band stopped playing. The crush of thin bodies around the kitchens' doors had swelled to overwhelming; those who had come expecting lunch, and those who had come to keep the holiday, were pressed so fast together in the courtyard of 2 Strashun that even with the wind off the river, it was growing hard to breathe.
The man with the violin set it back in its case -- Mikah's case, with the gouge down it from being thrown in the river -- and leaned the case in the shelter of the doorway. He stood, and wiped sweat from his hands, and spoke. "Workers! Sisters! Brothers!"
Raissa, up on Kruk's shoulder, cheered and clapped, and she was not alone.
"Raissa." Hirsh tugged on her trouser leg. "Raissa, who is that boy?"
"That's Wittenberg, Isaac Wittenberg," she replied, a little breathless. "He's not a boy, he's commander of the FPO!"
The papers spoke of him, the enemy spoke of him, Mikah had spoken to Hirsh of him. Hirsh had expected a colossus, a real partisan, not a fiddler boy with roses in his cheeks.
"I tell you there will be no peace, not this year, and that we can no longer stand here while they take our lives." Wittenberg had made his voice swell to encompass the whole crowd, or else the crowd had stilled. "Today is the worker's holiday. Look around you and see how few workers are left! This place -- the heart of our people in all of Europe! This city is echoing, and empty, and in the night where there was music once, your murdered children are crying!"
Raissa put a hand down to grip Hirsh's shoulder, because he could not tear his eyes from Wittenberg or the violin.
"Where are the Jews, sisters, brothers? No one will ask it, now, but the Jews! Where are thirty thousand of us who danced in this street last year? Jews, I beg you, fight for what you love! Fight for your lives!"
The people were held hushed, but there was a sound, behind them, thin and strange muffled by all the bodies, but coming closer.
"Jews!" Isaac Wittenberg shouted. "Defend yourselves with arms!"
Horses, the sound was of horses.
"Murer!" Someone screamed, raw, high with terror, and there was the crack of a pistol shot. In the tumble and tumult, Hirsh lost sight of Wittenberg; there were five men on horseback, Murer and Kittel at the fore riding down like death. Death was their coats and their hands and their pistols, their faces and their beasts, and they rode women and the smallest children beneath them as they came on. People fell and were paving-stones, and three mounted men of the Jewish Police were firing straight into the crowd.
Kruk threw Raissa into the crowd, out of harm's way; the second's delay put him in the path of Murer's truncheon, the glass-studded one, and he fell with red blooming through his white hair. In half a second he would end, Hirsh knew, under the hooves of Murer's horse --
"Professor!" Hirsh did the only sensible thing, or maybe the worst thing, but he was doing it before any thought. He grabbed the creature's bridle nearest the bit and pulled. Horse screamed, rider unbalanced, and Hirsh got the horse's jaw hard against his own and went flying. But no one had been crushed.
Hans Murer was down on the cobblestones, his black cloak flung out, his black and silver hat a arm's span away. He did not move.
"Gottenyu," someone muttered, around the blood in Hirsh's mouth; he had spoken, he realized, and Raissa was dragging on his arm. "Wait," he pleaded with her. "Wittenberg..."
"Never mind it," she commanded, and now Kruk was beside him as well. His hair was white, but he was not old; he ran faster than Hirsh would have ever believed. "Run!"
"Wittenberg got away," said Raissa, and handed him a wet cloth for his head. "They shot nine people, Hirsh, and there will be more tonight."
"Murer?"
"Still alive."
"Fuck," said Hirsh. Raissa jumped back. "What does the Geto-Yedies say?"
"That the waste of life is senseless and shameful."
"What does the FPO say?"
Raissa grinned. "The leaflet's just come up, all over the Ghetto."
"And?"
"Sell your goddamned lives dear."
Hirsh nodded, thoughtfully.
Notes:   Hans Murer was assistant to Gebietskommissar Hingst of Vilna, particularly in charge of the Jewish Problem, which was a  large one; eventually Kittel, who had been stationed in Siauliai at the Ghetto there, was sent to help Murer deal with Jewish Vilna. The Kruk who appears in my work is based on the diarist Hermann Kruk, in that he is a Bundist, a professor, the Ghetto Librarian and shares certain biographical details; Hermann Kruk probably knew Raissa through the Bund, and to hound her for fines for her library books. It is certain she knew of him.