Witold Trzeciak and Chaim Zachariasz's childhood bond, broken by persecution

Witold Trzeciak and Chaim Zachariasz’s childhood bond is remembered as an unusually close companionship, made tangible by weekends spent in one another’s homes and by the ease with which the boys shared a bed. Its later force comes from the contrast between that ordinary intimacy and the ruptures around them: their families are displaced, Witold searches for Chaim, and Witold’s own life ends in sudden violence. The novel preserves the friendship not as a complete account of both boys’ lives, but through a few precise memories and a desperate question about whether Chaim is still there.

Childhood Intimacy

From 1934 to 1937, Witold and Chaim were described as close as twins. They spent every weekend together, sometimes at Witold’s house and sometimes at Chaim’s. The friendship was not confined to visits or daylight play: at the slightest excuse, the boys slept in the same single bed. A frightening story, a black cat seen beneath a ladder, Halloween, or Walpurgis Night could each provide the reason. The list makes their closeness concrete. It suggests a shared childhood rhythm in which small fears and superstitions became occasions for seeking one another’s company.

The image of the single bed is especially telling because it condenses the relationship into a recurring, domestic act. The boys’ attachment is conveyed less through declarations than through the way they spend their time and arrange their nights. Calling them close as twins describes an affinity; the repeated weekends and sleepovers show what that affinity looked like. The evidence offers no account of rivalry or estrangement between them in these years. Instead, it gives a pattern of frequent presence, reinforced by homes that both boys treated as places where the other belonged.

Family Separation and Displacement

That childhood pattern unfolds alongside changes the boys did not choose. In 1938, Witold’s parents divorced, and he became a commuter between his father in Litzmannstadt(Łódź) and his mother in Warsaw. He continued making the journey until well after the invasion. The account gives the arrangement a plain, practical shape: a child moving between two cities because his parents no longer shared a home. Witold was twelve in 1939, so this divided routine began while he was still young and continued into the period of invasion and persecution.

The text does not say that the divorce ended the friendship. Rather, the detail establishes that Witold’s life was already organized around separation and travel before his wartime search for Chaim. The later upheaval is therefore not simply a first break in an otherwise stable world. The boys’ closeness belongs to a childhood increasingly interrupted by adult decisions, distance, and the conditions imposed by persecution. What had once meant alternating weekends between two family homes becomes, in the later scene, a search through closed or emptied places.

Witold Searches for Chaim

When Witold reappears, he is looking for Chaim. He tells Chaim’s family that he went to the bakery, found it shut and boarded up, and asked next door where Chaim had gone. The answer he received was that Chaim had left long ago with the people he addresses as Mr Zachariasz and Schol. Witold also asks about Chaim’s mother. He learns that she has gone too, not on a transport, but on foot, taken by her brother. The scattered information conveys separation through the particular signs Witold encounters: a boarded bakery, a neighbor’s account, and a family member who has departed by another route.

Witold then explains his own absence. He has been arrested at the station for vagrancy and taken to Pawiak Prison. He says that he and the others thought they would be shot, but that their captors changed their minds. His account makes the search more than a visit between old friends: he has passed through arrest and the expectation of death before asking whether Chaim is there. The question remains direct and urgent. The reply confirms that Chaim is present, and Witold is told to come along. The scene establishes that the search has reached its immediate destination, though it does not recount what the boys say or do after they meet.

Death and the Fragility of the Bond

The memory of their closeness is placed beside a later account of Witold’s death. He falls as if in a swoon; Krebbs steps back, and Witold dies in less than a minute. The narration marks the brevity of the end, then turns to what death leaves behind: fewer things to say goodbye to, less life, perhaps less love, and less memory to scatter. The passage does not describe Chaim witnessing the death or establish what he learns of it. Its significance for their relationship lies instead in the stark contrast it creates between the boys’ shared bed and the sudden, solitary finality of Witold’s collapse.

The friendship thus survives in the narrative through unequal fragments: a sustained childhood pattern, a wartime search, a brief confirmation that Chaim is present, and the account of Witold’s death. Those fragments do not supply a complete history or a settled ending for the pair. They do show what persecution and violence threaten and break apart: the ordinary certainty of being able to find a friend at home, and the shared memories accumulated through weekends, journeys, fears, and sleepovers. Witold’s question about Chaim carries the old closeness into a world where familiar places are boarded up and people have gone.