THOSE who first met Irving Milchberg in his old or middle age would not know that he had spent his life running. In middle age he kept a gift and souvenir shop in Niagara Falls, with his wife Renee in the office. When he retired he was the centre of a group of grey-haired storytellers, card-players and kaffeeklatschers in a nice part of Toronto. His English was never too good, though. The words that filled his brain were Yiddish, and the melodies in his head were Hebrew, for in the five-floor building where they had all lived on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, 220 families in a block of thousands of Jews, the sounds of men chanting Torah would float day and night in summer out of the open windows.

He was not a boy for books himself. Like the others he went to shul, and on Saturdays endured being tested on his lessons by his grandfather. But what he keenly remembered was running across the courtyard to his mother’s call. From the downstairs of the building all the way up, life was in bloom: couples courting, Zionists and socialists arguing, parcels being delivered, rugelach cooking. All the doors stood open to let the lives and the smells mingle.

Down in the street it was more a matter of dodging. First the Polish boys, who would try to beat him up. Then, after 1939, the Germans, who built a high wall right in front of his building to close off the Jews and starve them to death. But no one could keep in nippy “Itzi”, pictured on the left, for long. He knew how to sprint out of the ghetto gate with the work patrols every morning and, before the gendarme could raise his rifle or the Polish policeman could catch him by the scruff of the neck, he’d be gone, vanishing into the streets on the Aryan side.

He had business to organise there. He would scavenge carrots, potatoes or a piece of bread—more sawdust than bread—and smuggle it back for the scrubbed-out laundry kettle his mother kept simmering on the stove. Relatives and neighbours would come by for a spoonful, from up and down the building. “Will you have a little bit of soup?” “Oh, bless you.” And bless Irving, the little family-supplier.

To him this was both a game and serious trade. He was glad to escape the ghetto as it shrank, with the people crammed like sardines, and the stench of carbon lamps and sweaty straw mattresses. With his light brown hair and blue eyes, he could pass for Aryan among the market-sellers. He knew which stalls to visit with whatever merchandise he had, to get a good price. Men on the work patrol gave him their extra shirts, and he would sell them or swap them for food which he would carry back into the ghetto, sometimes slithering through the drains. His motto was “Buy reasonable, sell better”.

Three times the Germans grabbed him. The first time, he got away by scaling a fence. The second time, on the very train to Treblinka, he bent the bars on the window and rolled out. The third time, again on the Treblinka train, he climbed off to fill the urine bucket with water, got mixed up with young Polish water-sellers and, with them, was chased back to Warsaw.

He never thought much, he said. He surely had more luck than brains. Far more than his poor father, who in 1942 was ordered to run, and then shot dead, for having a packet of saccharin in his pocket. Irving, walking a little way behind, could not help because he was trying to stay invisible, hiding under his jacket his latest bundle of second-hand clothes to sell. His father’s body was stripped where it lay by market rivals. Soon after this, his mother and two sisters were put on the Treblinka train. In the empty room in the now-empty building he went almost mad with grief.

The only way to survive as an orphan was to move to the Aryan side. The Jews now had nothing to sell; and after the razing of the ghetto in 1943 he had no choice. He quickly became the leader of a small band of Jewish urchin-orphans who sold cigarettes to Germans and Poles outside the tram terminus in Three Crosses Square. Among the children—Teresa with her dirty cardigan and tumble of fair hair, big-nosed Conky (pictured on the right), barefoot Toothy and little Bolusz, who wore a woman’s torn fur jacket tied round with a rope—he was Byczek, “Bull”. They ate in soup kitchens. Sometimes they slept in graveyards. For a year and a half they kept going, ever ready to run away.

He kept on the alert, too, for other skills he could learn. For a while he was sheltered by cobblers; he learned how to mend shoes. In the displaced persons’ camp he landed in at the war’s end, he trained to be a dental technician. In Canada, where he arrived in 1947, he started watch-mending. Thus he made a decent life for himself.

What most needed building up, though, was the family and community he had run back to for much of his life. With his marriage, his son and his daughter he began again, on a small scale. The building in Krochmalna Street had been home to six close relatives, as well as his parents and sisters. None remained. The last to vanish was his uncle, after holding a Passover seder in a bunker as the bombardment began. From somewhere, he had matzoh and a shank-bone; Irving had smuggled in the vegetables and the egg. In a room with 60 people they managed a seder that lasted hours, and their prayers were echoes of those melodies they all unconsciously remembered, floating down from the now-shattered windows on a still summer day.