“Oh, my God!” his father was mumbling. “What’s going to happen at sunup?”
Samuel looked at him and replied, “We’re going to be pounding on the gates, telling them to let us out.”
At dawn the ghetto was swarming with uniformed police and soldiers. They had had to locate a special key to open the gates at sunrise for the merchants who were yelling to be let out. Paul, the second guard, had confessed to leaving his post and spending the night in Krakow, and he had been placed under arrest. But that still did not solve the mystery of Aram. Ordinarily the incident of a guard disappearing so close to the ghetto would have been a perfect excuse to start a pogrom. But the police were baffled by the locked gate. Since the Jews were safely locked up on the inside, they obviously could not have harmed him. In the end they decided that Aram must have run off with one of his many girl friends. They thought he might have thrown away the heavy, cumbersome key, and they searched for it everywhere, but they could not find it. Nor would they because it was buried deep in the ground, under Samuel’s house.
Exhausted physically and emotionally, Samuel had fallen into his bed and was asleep almost instantly. He was awakened by someone yelling and shaking him. Samuel’s first thought was: They’ve found Aram’s body. They’ve come to get me.
He opened his eyes. Isaac was standing there in a state of hysteria. “It’s stopped,” Isaac was screaming. “The coughing’s stopped. It’s a bracha! Come back to the house.”
Isaac’s father was sitting up in bed. The fever had miraculously disappeared, and the coughing had stopped.
As Samuel walked up to his bedside, the old man said, “I think I could eat some chicken soup,” and Samuel began to cry.
In one day he had taken a life and saved a life.
The news about Isaac’s father swept through the ghetto. The families of dying men and women besieged the Roffe house, pleading with Samuel for some of his magic serum. It was impossible for him to keep up with the demand. He went to see Dr. Wal. The doctor had heard about what Samuel had done, but was skeptical.
“I’ll have to see it with my own eyes,” he said. “Make up a batch and I’ll try it out on one of my patients.”
There were dozens to choose from, and Dr. Wal selected the one he felt was closest to death. Within twenty-four hours the patient was on his way to recovery.
Dr. Wal went to the stable where Samuel had been working day and night, preparing serum, and said, “It works, Samuel. You’ve done it. What do you want for your dowry?”
And Samuel looked up at him and replied wearily, “Another horse.”
That year, 1868, was the beginning of Roffe and Sons.
Samuel and Terenia were married, and Samuel’s dowry was six horses and a small, well-equipped laboratory of his own. Samuel expanded his experiments. He began to distill drugs from herbs, and soon his neighbors began coming to the little laboratory to buy remedies for whatever ills bothered them. They were helped, and Samuel’s reputation spread. To those who could not afford to pay, Samuel would say, “Don’t worry about it. Take it anyway.” And to Terenia, “Medicine is for healing, not for profit.”
His business kept increasing, and soon he was able to say to Terenia, “I think it’s time to open a small apothecary shop where we can sell ointments and powders and other things besides prescriptions.”
The shop was a success from the beginning. The rich men who had refused to help Samuel before came to him now with offers of money.
“We’ll be partners,” they said. “We’ll open a chain of shops.”
Samuel discussed it with Terenia. “I’m afraid of partners. It’s our business. I don’t like the idea of strangers owning part of our lives.”
Terenia agreed with him.
As the business grew and expanded into additional shops, the offers of money increased. Samuel continued to turn them all down
. When his father-in-law asked him why, Samuel replied, “Never let a friendly fox into your hen house. One day he’s going to get hungry.”