A hidden child’s First Communion card revealed a private message between two Jewish sisters hiding as Catholic girls.

The card is small enough to lose. It has been folded, softened, stained by time or water or hands. Its die-cut edges are worn to felt. On the front is a First Communion image: Jesus with the chalice, framed by the swooping lines of Art Nouveau, the kind of card pressed by the thousands into the hands of Polish children on the day they first took the host. A small hole at the top suggests it once hung somewhere. On a wall. Over a bed. Near enough to see every day.

For seventy years it lived in my mother-in-law’s bedroom drawer, among the rosary prayers and holy cards of a Catholic girlhood. Edna called them the paraphernalia of the faith that saved her life. When I began cataloguing her collection, I assumed this card was like the others: a blessing given to her. A kindness extended to a Jewish child by people who never knew who she really was. The nuns who taught her. The classmates who loved her. The Pope who decorated her. Sister Joanna, whoever she was, who gave a twelve-year-old a keepsake of the Queen of Poland. All of them blessing a girl who, on paper, did not exist.

Then I turned the card over.

“This was not a blessing given to the hidden child. It was a blessing written by her.”

The reverse, in Stefcia’s hand. Green ink, Polish, wartime. Brill family collection.

Green ink. Polish. A child’s careful, looping hand:

Mojej ukochanej Marylce — aby Cię Pan Bóg miał w Swej opiece. Od Twojej kochającej siostrzyczki, Stefci — “Kajtusi.”

To my beloved Marylka: may the Lord God keep you in His care. From your loving little sister, Stefcia. And then, in quotation marks, a code name. Softened, if the letters read as I believe they do, into its tender Polish diminutive: Kajtuś. Not the hard nom de guerre the Home Army knew, but the storybook form of it, the wizard-boy’s name from Janusz Korczak’s Kajtuś Czarodziej.

Every other object in that drawer seemed to........

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