LIAM BOARDED THE TRAIN in Chrzanów for the trip to Rogoznica, the very same route that Karolina took with Lena, Muriel and the two babies. He sat on the right-hand side, by the windows, just as Karolina and Lena had. On his lap was an iPad that would tell him the precise GPS coordinates as the train proceeded north. Agnesa, a twenty-year-old college student with long brown hair, a checkered blouse and blue jeans, sat beside Liam chatting with him and telling him about the towns they passed. Liam had hired Agnesa in Kraków to be his interpreter. He knew he’d be traveling through rural communities where he couldn’t depend on everyone to speak English, and he’d quickly come to terms with his limitations—Polish was too tough a language to traverse with a pocket dictionary.
Liam kept a careful lookout for track sidings. Lena had said the babies were thrown soon after they left a siding. In seventy years, one could expect a railroad line to change somewhat, but Liam was confident he could mark the likely spots. Thankfully, the Communists hadn’t wanted to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and the railroad lines appeared to be unchanged.
The trip covered one hundred seventy miles and took about three hours. Unlike Karolina’s trip, which took days, the train traveled quickly with few stops. Liam had to be quick to click and save the GPS coordinates at the precise moments, but he thought he covered it pretty well. Each time there was a railroad siding, he’d save the location.
When he arrived in Rogoznica, he and Agnesa rented a car and retraced the path, stopping at each GPS point to survey the area. Forests covered a substantial part of the journey, and Liam knew that the babies weren’t thrown into a forest. Railroad sidings in those areas were crossed off the list.
Farmlands that sat just beyond a railroad siding, the kind described by Lena, where the babies could have been deposited, were whittled down to four. Only four possible areas to canvass where someone might have found an abandoned baby. In each of the four locations, Liam and Agnesa stopped to knock on doors. How long has your family been living here? Do you know the name of the family that lived here in 1943? Have you ever heard a story about a baby that was found out in the meadow by the train tracks? Do you know of someone in town who would know what went on in 1943?
In the town of Domaniów, in the rural administrative district called Gmina Domaniów, they hit the bull’s-eye. A very old man, the keeper of the town’s post office, nodded his head. “There were two little babies, not just one. One was found over there.” He pointed south, toward the tracks. “One over there.” He pointed north.
Liam’s heart was pounding hard against his chest. “The babies, were they found alive?”
The old man nodded. “Oh, yes. Both of them. No one knew where they came from, but we figured they would have come off of a train. Crazy things happened during the war.” He leaned forward. “Especially to Jews, you know.” Liam nodded. He knew.
“The babies were each wrapped up nice and warm. They even had an address pinned to them, an address somewhere in the middle of Germany. Nobody around here was going to take any baby hundreds of miles into the middle of Germany during the war. No sir.”
“What happened? Who raised those babies?”
“Well, they were found by Ena Wolczyk, but she didn’t keep them. She was getting up there in age. She asked around and, it being the war and all, it was hard to find a family that wanted to take the responsibility of raising two little ones.”
“What did Ena do with the babies?”
“Not really sure. I just know that no one in Domaniów raised them.”
Liam sighed. “How can we find out what happened to them?”
The old man shrugged. “Ena’s long gone. Her daughter’s passed as well. I don’t know.”
“If I write out a notice, like a little sign, one that says if you have any information about the two babies found by Ena Wolczyk in 1943, would you please call the following, could you hang it here in the post office?”
“Sure. Happy to help.”
Liam turned to Agnesa. “Would you make a sign for me, please? Attach a few of my cards to the bottom.”
Liam handed the paper to the old man and said, “I really appreciate your help. You have no idea how happy this is going to make a woman back in Chicago. Those babies were born to a very close friend of hers. A girl named Karolina. Knowledge that the babies survived will set her mind at ease.”
“Karolina, huh? Well, I’m happy to help. If anyone has any information about these babies, I’ll be sure to get ahold of you.”
“One more thing. Is there an orphanage nearby?”
The man nodded. “I think there’s one run by the church in Wroclaw. About an hour straight east. Might not be such a bad idea. Pretty sharp thinking.”
* * *
IN AN OFFICE, IN a two-hundred-year-old gothic church in Wroclaw, Poland, Sister Maria looked through her file cabinet and her stack of note cards. “There were many Jewish children hidden by orphanages during the war,’ she said in perfect English. ‘Including here at St. Stanislaus, all at great risk to the sisters, I might add. From time to time, the SS would barge through here and demand IDs for the children. They’d want to know the ancestry for each of our wards. We forged papers and forged birth certificates for every Jewish child we took in. A child old enough to understand was given a Christian name and told to never speak his Jewish name. Sometimes we were able to place children with a Polish family. At the end of the war, the remaining Jewish children were sent to DP camps. I have the records for 1943 right here.”
She thumbed through the index cards and shook her head. “I don’t see any twins being admitted. There were baby girls that were dropped off, especially in 1942 and 1943, when the ghettos were being cleared out, but none that are noted to be twins. Of course, I wasn’t here back then, so I don’t know all the stories. And though we’re taught never to lie”—she winked—“the index cards didn’t always tell the truth.”
“This would have been in mid-April,” Liam said. “I believe they were brought here by Ena Wolczyk from the village of Domaniów. She wasn’t Jewish.”
Sister Maria nodded and thumbed through the cards again. “There were two babies brought here in April 1943. The notes reflect that neither one was brought in by the mother.”
“That’s it!” Liam said.
Sister Maria continued to shake her head. “They weren’t twins.”
“How do you know?”
“One was five months old and the other was three months old.”
“Do your records show who adopted the children?”
“Certainly.”
“May I know their names?”
“Certainly not. That would be strictly against our adoption rules and Poland’s adoption laws.”
Liam leaned forward in his chair, crossed his hands on the desk as he had in his catechism days, and said, “Sister, may I tell you the story about the woman who hired me?”
When he had finished telling Sister Maria about Lena, he said, “I have a gut feeling that these babies were really twins and when the church drafted forged IDs, they wrote them down as being from two different families, of two different ages. Lena Scheinman made a promise to their mother to find them. How could it possibly hurt to bend the rules just a little bit? It isn’t like Lena would interfere with their upbringing or harm the relationship with their adoptive parents. If these women are still alive, they’re seventy-two years old.”
“I’m afraid it’s quite impossible. Under no circumstances can I voluntarily give you private information protected by law.” Sister Maria looked directly into Liam’s eyes. “Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly.”
“Good. I will take your name and number and let you know if anything turns up. But if you will please excuse me for just a minute, I need to check and see when Mass is served today.”
With that, Sister Maria pushed the two cards to the middle of the desk, left the room and closed the door. Liam quickly copied the information from the cards and replaced them on the desk.
* * *
“CAT, THEY SURVIVED! THE twins! They survived and were rescued by a woman in Domaniów, Poland.”
“Liam, I can’t believe it. Are they still alive?”
“I don’t know. Actually, there’s a lot I don’t know, but I’m much further along than when I started. If Ena Wolczyk took them to the Wroclaw orphanage in April 1943, then I know their last names.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ena Wolczyk, long since dead, lived in Domaniów. She found the two babies alive in the wheat fields by the tracks. She wasn’t able to raise them and she didn’t keep them. No one in Domaniów today knows what she did with them. I figured she might have given them to an orphanage, so I visited St. Stanislaus Catholic Church in a nearby city. Sure enough, the sisters ran an orphanage during the war. Their records show that they took in two babies in April 1943, but the records also say they were different ages. The index cards reflect that one was three months and the other was five months. That might have just been their way of deceiving the Nazis. Anyway, I have the names of the families that adopted the babies after the war and their addresses.”
“How did you learn that? Adoption agencies don’t disclose that information.”
“Ah, it’s me Irish charm.”
“It always worked on me. So what are you doing now? We don’t have much more time. And what about Muriel Bernstein?”
“I have two families and two addresses, albeit from the forties, but I’m going tracking. And Muriel still hasn’t returned my calls. I’ll keep trying.”
“Lena will be thrilled to hear about your discoveries. Do you think I should tell her before we know for sure?”
“We do know for sure. Karolina’s twins survived. They were thrown out of the window of a moving train by two desperate women and they lived. The Domaniów postman even told me they had addresses pinned to them when they were found. I’m just not certain what happened to them afterward. I’ll bet they went to the orphanage, and that’s the lead I’m going to follow. But, Cat, it’s going to take time. My information is seventy years old. You’ve got to get that continuance.”
“I filed the motion. It’ll be heard tomorrow morning.”
“Good luck. Love you. Take care of the little tyke-to-be.”