Yehoshua and Josef Barbanel

In the Kovno Ghetto, the bond between Yehoshua, a ten-year-old boy, and Josef Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader Dr. Koenig, begins as a practical arrangement and deepens into a relationship of profound trust and surrogate kinship. Barbanel, described as a thickset man of about thirty-five with a good honest face, a thatch of black hair, and a Slavic ski nose, is by far the youngest member of the council. He is the one who formally inducts Yehoshua into the runners, plopping a garrison cap on the boy's head and declaring him a designated runner known to all as Yehoshua, with no last name and no identity card for his protection. This act transforms the orphaned boy's status, giving him a role, a purpose, and a sense of belonging within the ghetto's desperate hierarchy.

The Star Runner and the Archivist

Yehoshua's identity as Barbanel's favorite is established early. Barbanel tells the boy he is his best runner, choosing him for the most important matters, and Yehoshua, wearing his star and garrison cap, comes to think of himself as the star runner. This military self-image is complicated by the boy's awareness that he is secretly admiring the uniforms of the enemy, a perversion he recognizes even as a child. Barbanel's recruitment of Yehoshua is not merely functional; it is an act of care. When the council searches for a family with a dead child whose identity Yehoshua could assume, none is found, and Barbanel steps in, squatting in front of the boy and speaking to him as an equal, joking about his status as a man of mystery and secret agent. This moment establishes the pattern of their relationship: Barbanel treats Yehoshua with a respect and warmth that the boy, orphaned and alone, craves.

The Secret Archive and the Dangerous Runs

Barbanel's true significance lies in his secret work as a historian by necessity. He keeps a diary recording everything that happens in the ghetto—the regulations, execution orders, deaths, council minutes, and orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz—writing in a neat Yiddish script that Yehoshua describes as stitches sewn into the page. This activity is illegal; the Germans have forbidden unauthorized writings and confiscated all cameras. Barbanel, as the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, is able to conceal his diary within his formal duties. When Yehoshua asks if he is a historian by profession, Barbanel smiles and shakes his head, saying, "You are one smart kid, Yehoshua. Yes, I'm a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn't tell anyone, would you." They shake hands on the secret, and from that moment Yehoshua is brought further into Barbanel's confidence.

The boy becomes the courier for the archive's current material. Every week or so, Barbanel hands him a packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine, instructing him to deliver it to Greta Margolin, a nurse in the hospital who is Barbanel's friend and, as Yehoshua realizes only later, his lover. These runs are among the most dangerous things Yehoshua does. He slips the packet under his shirt and runs through the ghetto, knowing that if he is caught he could be tortured and shot. The danger is a feverish feeling, a drug, an amphetamine to the boy, whose drab little mind is brought to life by the excitement. Barbanel, however, ensures the expeditions are reasonably safe. The bulk of the archive, a footlocker's worth, has already been transported over the bridge to the city, and it remains for Yehoshua to smuggle out the current material wrapped in oilcloth and held with strips of adhesive tape to his chest and back. He makes perhaps seven or eight trips over as many weeks, from late summer into the fall, and as the weather grows colder he feels safer, with a shirt, sweater, and jacket covering his contraband.

The Secret Radio and the Morale of the Boys

Barbanel's care for the boys extends beyond the archive. He keeps a shortwave radio, a battered German-made Grundig, hidden inside a wall in the attic dormitory over the council offices. Dr. Koenig, though he knows and approves of the archive, does not know, or pretends not to know, about the radio. Two or three nights a week, Barbanel climbs the ladder to the boys' quarters, and they assist him as he pries open the wall board to expose the radio and plug it into a socket affixed to their one light fixture. They practice closing the radio down quickly, with one boy keeping watch at the window and another stationed beside the door. Barbanel sits cross-legged on the floor with his earphones on, listening with his eyes closed to the late-night British news broadcast. The boys study his face intently, trying to learn from his expression whether the news is good or bad, watching him nod or shake his head or lift his fist in silence. For fifteen minutes he is totally rapt, fearless, and connected in spirit to the rest of the world. The radio brings immeasurable gains to the boys' morale, and Yehoshua feels he can see into the glowing radio as into a living thing.

The Decision to Stay

As the front advances toward the ghetto, Barbanel speaks one night to all the boys in their dormitory. He tells them that neither he nor anyone else can tell them what to do—to stay or to go—and that circumstances have turned them into adults while they are still children. They have the responsibility finally for their own lives. Of the six boys, only two choose to go to the forest with the partisans. For himself, Yehoshua realizes that on all his secret trips into the city, it had never once occurred to him not to return to the ghetto. He could probably have hidden away, perhaps with the help of a priest, found some family that would take him in and spare him the fate of a Jewish child, but he never entertained this idea. He notes that Dr. Koenig cannot go, and neither can Barbanel, because the council must stay in place and keep the ghetto running. Greta Margolin will not leave Barbanel, to say nothing of the little children. And Yehoshua, ambitious as he is to learn to fire a rifle and kill Germans, will not leave the lingering sense of his dead mother's sweet nature, something like Miss Margolin's, or the fleeting sensations of his dead father, who, he decides, had something of the rough, exuberant courage for life of Josef Barbanel. This identification of Barbanel with his own dead father is the deepest expression of their bond.

The End of the Runs and the Liquidation

Yehoshua's courier runs come to an end when, standing with Barbanel at the open cistern in the stone house, he hears distant German voices coming up from the bowels of the viaduct. "Well that is that," Barbanel says, and sets the cistern cover back in place. The viaduct, the boy's secret passage to the city, is no longer safe. Soon after, the liquidation begins. Truckloads of troops come across the bridge, and Yehoshua runs for all he is worth to tell the council. It is his last mission as a runner, and it does not matter. The news is blaring out of loudspeakers in terrible bureaucratic language. They are given fifteen minutes to gather their belongings. Soldiers run down the streets, burst into houses, clubbing people who do not move fast enough. Buildings are set afire, all by the directive of Commandant Schmitz. In the chaos, Yehoshua loses his runner's cap with the military brim, and he is furious that he cannot lift his arms to see if it is still on his head. He does not know where Barbanel is, whether he is in the same boxcar, or Greta Margolin, or Dr. Koenig, or any of the other boys. The car lurches and begins to move, and people are wailing, calling out to one another in the darkness. But Yehoshua knows the meaning of the outrage.

The Legacy of the Bond

The relationship between Yehoshua and Barbanel endures beyond the ghetto's destruction through the archive the boy helped to smuggle. Decades later, Sarah Blumenthal, Yehoshua's daughter, watches as customs inspectors open a chest that is larger than she had imagined, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white with raw lumber showing where the paint has flaked off. The inspectors lift out packages wrapped in oilskin, finding sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. Among them is a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering three years, from 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto is dismantled. Sarah also finds forbidden little black-and-white photos, including one of seven little boys in front of a wood cabin, standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts, unsmiling, underdressed, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah finds her father in the first row. The bond between the star runner and the archivist, forged in the ghetto's desperate days, is thus preserved in the archive's survival, a testament to Barbanel's passion to record indelibly what happened, and to the boy who risked his life to carry it out.