says. Anna is used to spending lots of time by herself or with other adults, so she doesn't think anything of it. It never even occurs to her that he may never come back. (Readers learn, but Anna never finds out, that her father was taken by Germans in Kraków's 1939 purge of intellectuals, imprisoned in a concentration camp, and eventually killed.)

Papa doesn't come back that evening, but Herr Doktor Fuchsmann won't take Anna home with him. The next morning, after she spends a chilly night under his pharmacy counter, he apologetically asks her to leave his shop. She waits outside the locked door of her father's apartment for hours, then goes back to the street where the pharmacy is, because she doesn't know where else to go.It's there on the cobblestone street that Anna meets a curious, "more than a little frightening" gentleman--a tall, bespectacled, "exceedingly thin" man in a three-piece brown wool suit--who seems to speak all the languages of the world, even bird. When he speaks a "chirping, bright whistle of a phrase up in the direction of the sky," a swallow dives straight to him, landing at his feet. Anna knows instinctively that she has found another person in her "rare tribe," and she decides then and there that he, the mysterious character she later names the "Swallow Man," will be her new guardian.

In the growing darkness, Anna and the Swallow Man walk out of Kraków--he in his city finest, she in her shiny red shoes and pretty red-and-white dress--on what