Emilia
Mateusz and Truda were the kind of people who ordinarily had no tolerance for self-pity, but in the weeks that followed, they seemed bewildered about how to help me and opted to give me space, which allowed me to wallow. I spent days in bed, physically recovering from the trauma, emotionally retreating into a kind of coma. I ate when Truda forced me to. I couldn’t bring myself to look in the mirror in the small bathroom we shared, and so I had taken to covering it with a towel when I went in to use the toilet. I couldn’t imagine ever feeling an emotion like joy again. At one point, I spent a whole afternoon trying to remember the steps between amusement and laughter.
It was as if those soldiers had reached inside me and removed my soul, leaving behind a broken shell. My bruises and my wounds slowly healed, but I still viewed the world through a haze of sadness and confusion. Once upon a time I had been so interested and concerned about the Soviet occupation and what it would mean for my nation. Now, I couldn’t bear to see that uniform, so I didn’t leave the factory at all. And I couldn’t bear to hear them spoken about, so I avoided conversation. I couldn’t focus to read. Mateusz had purchased a wireless radio, and one day, the Lodz station played the Polish national anthem. Prior to the attack, this would have brought me tears of happiness and pride. Instead, even at the lowest volume, the music seemed too loud, and it hurt my ears. Neither Truda nor Mateusz raised a protest when I got up and simply turned it off.
Days ran into one another. It might have been less than a week; it might have been months. One evening, I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling when Truda and Mateusz approached me.
“Emilia, we need to go back to Warsaw.”
Not so long ago, those words would have sounded like music. But I couldn’t bear music now, and the thought of facing Sara and Roman filled me with dread. I missed him desperately, but I couldn’t imagine even looking Roman in the eye. I shook my head.
“I can’t.”
“We must,” Truda said firmly. “We need to find word of our friends, and besides, sooner or later, industry will begin to rebuild, and someone is going to help themselves to this factory. We need to build a proper home, and there are grants for those who return to the city.”
“Grants?”
“Five hundred zloty each,” she said. I gave her a blank look, and she conceded, “I know. It is not a lot, but it will help with the cost of finding food and shelter even if the damage is as bad as people say. Besides, Emilia...we are slowly but surely running out of things to sell here at the factory. Soon we’ll have no money and no way to earn more. We really have no choice but for Mateusz to try to find work, and there will be plenty of work in a city that needs to rebuild.”
“No. I can’t.”
“Don’t you want to leave this city, Emilia?” Truda asked me gently.
I stared at her. Truda’s gentle side was a novelty, but not one I enjoyed. I missed brash Truda, honest and authentic Truda, the version of Truda I had always butted heads with. This careful woman was a stranger to me.
“I won’t go,” I said flatly. I wanted to enrage her. Instead, she just looked away.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Mateusz said softly, and they both rose. But just a few steps from my bed, Truda hesitated, then returned to sit beside me.
“I don’t know how to help you,” she admitted, then she looked at me again, and this time there was deeper concern in her eyes. “I’m going to be honest with you, Emilia. We need Sara. She can help you recover, and I think we will—” She broke off, then cleared her throat and stared at the floor as she said weakly, “We just need Sara.”
“She probably isn’t even alive,” I said bitterly. “She’s probably dead. Or in a camp somewhere.”
“We have to at least try to find her. And Roman, too.”
“I don’t want to see him,” I said angrily. Her eyes widened in surprise, and I felt my face flush beet red. God, the shame was overwhelming. How was I ever going to learn to live with the shame? “I don’t—I can’t. I don’t want either one of them to see me.”
“Emilia,” she whispered, gently touching my forearm. “Surely you know that you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You don’t know that. You weren’t even there.”
She drew in a sharp breath, then her hands tightened around my wrist.
“I wasn’t there for you, and I will never forgive myself for that. But I’m here now, and I insist that you explain yourself to me—how could you possibly blame yourself?”
Her voice shook, with fury or frustration, I wasn’t exactly sure why. But her rage felt good anyway, and I let it wash over me, as if it was directed at me.
“I didn’t run,” I whispered numbly.
“And what else?” she demanded harshly, shaking my hand as she spoke.
“I didn’t cry out for help.”
“And?”
“I didn’t even try to... I just let them... I just... I didn’t even try to fight back.”
Now Truda released my wrist, but she did so only so that she could catch my shoulders in her hands, and she stared into my eyes, her face flushed with frustration and anger.
“If you had run, they would have shot you. If you had cried out, they would have shot you. If you had fought, they would have shot you. You were powerless against those men. You didn’t allow them to do anything. You didn’t invite them to do anything. Nothing you did or didn’t do could have changed what happened to you. It was a combination of bad luck and bad men. I won’t hear you speak like that again, and I won’t sit back and let you blame yourself. Where is the Emilia who has always driven me crazy because she was ready to charge into the fight? You need to fight the shame, because on the other side of the fight there is pride and there is healing.” She shook me gently, but when I still could not look at her, her tone grew sharper. “Do you hear me? We are going to Warsaw. We are going to find Sara and Roman. And you, my girl, are going to grow strong again and become the young woman who has always inspired and terrified me with her spirit. I will not allow those Soviet bastards to steal that spirit from you, Emilia. It has cost us too much to keep you alive only to lose you to their cruelty.”
We sat in ragged silence for a very long time. Truda eventually released me, but only so that she could slide her arm around my shoulders and pull me close. My eyes were dry, but my heart was racing. I would need to process Truda’s words. I would need to turn them over in my mind and consider them, to parse each word and determine what was truth and what I could ignore. I needed time—so much time—and my parents were forcing me to move, and by the sounds of things, they meant for us to do so immediately. Elsewhere in the factory, I could hear Mateusz packing up. Preparing us for the journey.
“I don’t want to walk back to Warsaw,” I whispered eventually. My body had healed, but I remembered Mateusz warning me in the early days that if we were to return to Warsaw, we would be making the trip against an advancing wave of Red Army soldiers. I couldn’t imagine how I would convince myself to walk for over one hundred kilometers against a tide of men in that uniform.
“Mateusz is going to pay someone to take us. Probably in a horse or cart, maybe even in a truck. It will take only a few hours, and then you’ll be home.”
“And what if our building is gone?”
“Home isn’t a building, Emilia,” she scolded me gently. “Your home was never a building. It wasn’t even the city. Home is family. And you were right all along. Our best chance of finding our family is in Warsaw.”
Mateusz found a kindly if opportunistic farmer who owned a rusted but functional truck. In exchange for most of our remaining money, the farmer drove us the hundred kilometers back to Warsaw. When the truck began to slow, I thought perhaps we were lost.
The whispers and rumors we’d managed to hear in Lodz warned us that Warsaw was in ruin, but I didn’t really understand what that meant until we approached. The Germans had gone from building to building and block to block, burning and demolishing almost every structure.
“I can’t take you any farther,” the farmer said hesitantly. I could see why. The road was covered in rubble—huge slabs of concrete and partial brick walls, scattered with smashed glass and thick dust. We had left the city in early October. There had been some damage then, mostly from incendiary devices and fires, but this destruction was all I could see for miles.
“There’s nothing left,” I whispered numbly.
“There are some buildings,” Mateusz said, trying to sound hopeful, but he was entirely unconvincing. He sounded more confused and devastated than optimistic.
“This was a bad idea,” I said. “I know that you did this because you thought it would cheer me up, but there is nothing here for us. How would we ever find Roman and Sara, even if they are alive? How would we even find our old building?”
“We have to make it work,” Truda said flatly, and she opened the creaky door and slipped out of the truck. I looked at her incredulously.
“Truda, how?”
“Get out of the truck, Emilia,” she said, pursing her lips.
Beside me, Mateusz and the farmer exchanged quiet farewells, then Mateusz cleared his throat.
“We really should get going. It is going to be quite the walk across the city.”
“If we stay here, where will we even sleep tonight?” I asked, frustrated, then added sarcastically, “Do you think we will find a hotel? Maybe an empty mansion we can squat in?”
“We must find Sara. Roman, too. Remember? It was all we could talk about before—” Truda broke off abruptly, eyes widening in realization as if the mere mention of the attack was going to traumatize me further. This enraged me. I felt my face heating.
“Before what?” I said.
Truda’s gaze dropped to the road. “We have to find them. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. That sounds like something you would have said to me, once upon a time.”
Mateusz gently nudged me toward the door, and I sighed impatiently and shuffled across. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to return to Lodz, either, but the thought of becoming vagrants living on the streets of a city that had been destroyed was much more unappealing. Still, I could tell Truda was determined, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to counter such a thing. Especially in the state I was in.
I hesitated for another moment, trying to figure it all out, and Truda’s patience finally wore thin. She planted her hands on her hips and leaned forward to hiss at me. “We need Sara. I do not know how to explain it to you yet, so I am asking you to trust me. There is a very good reason we need to be back in the city, so get out of the car, and let’s go.”
I slipped out of the car, planted my shoes in the crushed-concrete dust and glass that covered the entire street and took a reluctant step forward.
“Good,” Truda said, satisfied. She pointed at the back of the truck. “Get your bag. The sooner we start walking, the sooner we will find somewhere to rest tonight.”
Mateusz took my bag from the back of the truck and tossed it to me. I caught it, shot them both a resentful glare and set off toward the city.
Six hours later, we stood in stunned silence at the front of what used to be our building. It had fared somewhat better than many of the others we had passed, but it was still severely damaged. Sara’s apartment was gone—I assumed a bomb had taken it out. Her side of our entire floor and the floor below us had just disappeared, leaving a gaping hole.
Our apartment was still there, but there were no windows, and there had been a fire on the ground floor. The one small blessing was that there were no corpses visible in the rubble around our apartment. I spent much of the trip stopping to gag, composing myself, then repeating the process all over again just steps down the road. Winter preserved the corpses, but spring had arrived, and they were finally beginning to rot.
We had seen dozens of other people on the road as we crossed Warsaw, at least half of them walking back out of the city, having decided they would prefer to go back to wherever they’d come from. But I didn’t have the energy to fight with Truda and Mateusz. I barely had the energy to stand.
“So what do we do now?” I asked them. Truda wiped at her eye, dislodging an errant tear, but we were so dirty and dusty by then that the tear had turned to mud, and she managed to leave only a gray streak of it across her temple. The daylight was starting to fade.
“I’m going to go see how structurally sound the building is,” Mateusz announced.
“You’re no engineer.” I sighed.
He shrugged. “I’ll check that the doorframes are still somewhat square. Check that the stairs still have integrity. Check that I can even get to the top floors. Then I’ll come back and get you girls, okay?”
“And if it’s not safe?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. Instead, Mateusz walked through the smashed door and into the lobby. I saw him check the door to the courtyard, but he quickly abandoned that and walked up the stairs.
“Maybe there is still food in the pantry,” I said hopefully.
“Unlikely,” Truda said abruptly, then she waved her arms around us. “Do you really think there will be anything of value left anywhere when the city looks like this?”
“I wanted to go back to Lodz,” I reminded her. She pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.
After about ten minutes, we saw Mateusz coming back down the stairs. He stuck his head out the front door, then waved to us to enter. As we approached, he smiled.
“The hallway is very damaged, but outside of that, the building hasn’t fared too badly. The windows are all smashed, and some of the furniture has been broken, but our old beds are still there, and once we clean them off, they’ll be fine to sleep on. It looks like the rest of the building was looted, but the looters didn’t go to the top few floors. Best of all, Mr. Wójcik is still on the second floor and he’s been collecting rainwater. He will give us enough for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll walk to the river for more. Sound okay?”
“And food?” Truda asked.
“There’s still cans under Piotr’s bed,” he said, then he beamed. “See? We’re lucky.”
“Lucky,” I said and snorted, pushing past him to make my way upstairs. The gaping hallway and the void where Sara’s apartment had been gave me shivers, so I quickly slipped into our apartment. As soon as I did, my gaze landed on the stairwell that led to my bedroom. I climbed the stairs two at a time, then rushed across the room to the wall opposite the window. I dusted it with my palm, wiping down the whole wall to free the mural from beneath the film.
The city was gone, but my mural was still there—capturing a moment that felt like it had been frozen a lifetime ago. I sank onto the floor by the couple I’d drawn at the last minute and then reached out to trace the boy with the tip of my finger. My characters were strangers now, but they were strangers I was immensely jealous of.
For dinner that night, we warmed up canned beans over a fire Mateusz built out of wood he had salvaged from the rubble on the road. Up high in our apartment, the stench of the city was not so bad, and I managed to keep my food down. Truda had done her best to shake the dust and chunks of debris out of our bedding, and they set my bed up in their old room, right beside their mattress. I wanted to protest and remind them that I was not a child, but I felt far from safe anywhere, and I was shaken by the chaos in Warsaw. We had seen no shortage of Soviet soldiers as we crossed the city, and I didn’t want to be alone.
As soon as we finished eating, I excused myself and climbed into bed, and as I lay staring up at the ceiling in the fading spring light, it occurred to me that when I had lived in this household, I had prayed every night. I hadn’t said a single prayer since the attack, but now, for the first time, I closed my eyes and offered one up.
Thank you for sparing our apartment. Please look after Roman and Sara. Please let them be happy and healthy and safe.
“She seems worse, not better,” I heard Mateusz say. I opened my eyes, suddenly racked by guilt at the concern in his voice.
“We need to find Sara.”
“You really think Sara can help her in some way that we can’t?”
“I know she can.”
“Why?”
“She knows things about...” Truda cleared her throat “...about women.” There was a longer pause, then Truda’s voice dropped further as she admitted, “I don’t even know how to talk to her about this.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll start scouring the city. If she’s here, I’ll find her. But have you thought about what we’ll do if she’s not here? I hate to say this, but there’s a very real possibility Sara didn’t even make it out of Warsaw alive.”
I rolled over then and covered my head with a spare pillow.
For the next few days, Truda and I worked from morning to night, trying to restore order to our apartment. We only left to walk the short distance to the banks of the Vistula River, filling buckets with water for cleaning. Mateusz made the same journey with us each morning, filling an additional bucket for drinking water. Then he would leave and be gone all day. He registered us for the grant the city was offering those who returned, and then he started looking for Sara and for a job.
As the days passed, I found a comfort in the city that I hadn’t expected. Such a thing seemed impossible when we had first returned, but as I settled into life among the ruins, I began to see signs of recovery. They were only baby steps: a family returning here, a determined old woman raising hens on a patch of crushed cobblestones there, a man collecting bricks from the street and stacking them up on the sidewalk, doing what he could to clear rubble so that vehicles could move freely again. But each of these things seemed important, and I gradually stopped focusing on what was gone and started focusing on new signs of life. It made me feel strangely hopeful.
I was sitting in an empty window staring out at the street watching all of this, when a sudden thought struck me.
“Truda?” I called, climbing down from the sill and dusting myself off.
“Yes? What is it? Is something wrong? Are you okay?”
She blew in from the kitchen, flustered. Sometimes, I felt nothing at all; other times, I felt everything at once. In that moment, I felt an irritation so strong it could have knocked me over. It occurred to me that in the twelve weeks since the attack, I hadn’t had a moment alone. Strength surged through me.
If Warsaw could recover, so could I.
“I’m going to get fresh air.”
“Fresh air?” she repeated skeptically, and her gaze skipped to the gaping hole I had just been sitting in.
“I want to go see what’s left of the courtyard,” I admitted. Her gaze softened, and she wiped her hands on her apron, then began to remove it.
“Okay, let’s—”
“Truda,” I interrupted her gently. She looked at me hesitantly. “I want to go by myself.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s safe. I’m just walking down the stairs.”
“But...it’s a mess down there. The rubble...” She gave me a bewildered look. “What do you even want to do down there?”
“I don’t know. I just feel like going for a walk.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Emilia.”
“If you’re really concerned about me, you can stick your head out into the hallway and look down at me through the gap where Sara’s apartment used to be,” I said wryly. Truda sighed.
“Go on, then. But don’t be too long.”
Downstairs, I pushed at the back door carefully and, when it didn’t budge, pressed my shoulder into it and applied more force.
“What are you doing there, Elz·bieta?” Mr. Wójcik called from above.
“I’m trying to get into the courtyard, Mr. Wójcik,” I called back. “The door is stuck.”
“Give me a few minutes, and I’ll come help you.”
After a while, he limped slowly down the stairs with a toolbox in one hand. He set it on the floor beside the door and rummaged around until he found a chisel. I watched him tinker with the lock for several minutes, cursing and muttering. Just as I was about to give up, he gave a shout of triumph, and the door sprang open.
“There,” he said, nodding in satisfaction. He peered out into the courtyard, then winced. “That mess isn’t going to be as easy to fix, is it?”
“Thanks, Mr. Wójcik.” I drew in a deep breath, then climbed over the rubble that partly blocked the doorway. Just as I reached the other side, the clouds parted, and the courtyard was suddenly flooded with golden spring light. I surveyed it all, seeing both the way it used to be and the way it was now. My gaze fell upon the apple tree. One half of it was healthy branches covered in fresh, new growth and pretty white blossoms. The other half was singed, but even so, green buds were emerging here and there.
The courtyard had never been an elaborate garden, but it had been ours. As I looked around the wasteland, I felt a pang of grief in my chest, then a surge of determination.
If every citizen of Warsaw had a part to play in our rebuilding, then I surely had a part to play, too, and I could start with this. Smashed glass, china, twisted metal and singed bits of wood, furniture and clothing, and torn scraps of fabric littered the courtyard. Maybe I couldn’t move it all, but if I shifted a little every day, I could eventually make this space usable.
I made my way over the rubble and toward the apple tree. I sat with my back against it and looked up at our broken building and the glorious blue sky beyond it. I closed my eyes and I breathed in the sweetness of the blossoms. I was glad to be alive, and it was the first time since the attack I’d felt that way.
After a while, I rested my hands on the dirt to push myself up, and my palm collided with an unexpectedly smooth, cold object, partially uncovered in the soil beneath the tree. I rolled onto my knees and scraped the dirt around it until I could lift it.
The glass jar was filthy, but as I rubbed it to remove the dirt, I recognized scraps of cigarette papers inside. Hundreds or maybe even thousands of pieces, each neatly folded into squares.
I unscrewed the lid of the glass jar, wiped my hands on my shirt, then withdrew and unfolded a piece of paper. In Matylda’s distinctive script, it read:
Ala Skibin´ska
Rescued 7 July, 1942
Taken to Franciskan Orphanage, Hoz˙a Street
Placed with Walter and Zenobia Bulin´ski, Szydłowiec
I carefully refolded the paper, then opened several more. Each piece was a trail of bread crumbs, designed to lead a Jewish child home. I remembered that final night before we were captured, when Sara had come to say goodbye and I’d been so fixated on her dirty fingernails. Now, it made perfect sense. She’d been burying Matylda’s records in case the apartment was damaged.
The city had been destroyed—almost every building ruined, most of them beyond repair. But the apple tree had survived, and this fragile glass jar was completely undamaged. It was a miracle.
I considered taking the jar back up to our apartment, but my intense distrust of the Red Army dissuaded me. Instead, I deepened the hole beneath the apple tree. I buried the jar again and carefully covered it with soft black dirt, then covered that with rubble. I knew I would find it again—when I could find Sara, she would pass these records on to the Jewish authorities. The nuns at the convent could help, too. Some of the children we rescued might even still be there—
And that’s when it hit me. If Sara had been captured, she probably would have been released by now, and she would inevitably have made her way back to Warsaw. And if she had nowhere else to stay, I knew a group of women who would not have thought twice before taking her in.
The next day, Truda and Mateusz insisted on walking with me to find the orphanage on Hoz˙a Street.
“The convent might not be there anymore,” Truda warned. “And even if it is, Sara might not be there.”
“I know,” I said. “I just want to see for myself.”
“What will we do with the jar if we can’t find her?” Mateusz asked.
“Leave it where it is,” I said firmly. “Until we know who we can trust.”
I knew that churches all across the city had been destroyed, but somehow in my heart I felt certain that if God had saved that glass jar, he would have saved the women who helped Matylda and Sara fill it. We finally turned the corner onto Hoz˙a Street, and my knees went weak with relief. The facade and roof of the orphanage were still standing.
“I knew it,” I cried, then ran ahead, feeling something like excitement for the first time in months. There were Sisters out front, handing out bread to passersby. I didn’t recognize any of them, but when they saw me, they offered me a loaf of bread anyway. I waved it away. “Is Sara here? Sara Wieczorek?”
The Sister motioned to the door behind her.
“I think she is in the kitchen preparing lunch.”
I ran through the door, almost colliding with a nun coming the other way. With tears in my eyes, I asked her for directions to the kitchen. Truda and Mateusz followed closely behind.
Sara was sitting at the kitchen table, chopping vegetables with a young nun. When I burst through the door, she looked up, startled, and then she dropped the knife and leaped to her feet with an exclamation of joy.
“You’re alive!” she gasped, and then her gaze landed on Truda and Mateusz behind me. “You’re all alive, my God!”
I threw myself into her arms, then I began to weep across her chest. She embraced me, murmuring reassurances into my hair, immediately offering me comfort. Those around her shifted away so that Sara could take her seat on the bench again and pull me across her lap like an infant. I was crying so hard I couldn’t even hear the conversation between her and Truda and Mateusz. War had forced me to become an adult far too soon, but back in Sara’s arms, I was a child. Grief and pain and fear poured out of me, a torrent of tears that I was powerless to stop.
“Let it out, Emilia,” she whispered, rubbing my back. “That’s it, sweetheart. You just let it all out. Everything is going to be fine.”
The busy kitchen gradually emptied, until only Mateusz and Truda and Sara and I were left behind. Truda busied herself making us all cups of coffee, and Mateusz handed me his handkerchief.
“Our clever girl found your jar in the courtyard last night,” he told Sara.
She looked at me in surprise, then she asked hesitantly, “Is it...”
“It is intact!” I told her. “Under the apple tree.”
“Yes!” She beamed. She clasped her hands against her chest and exhaled with visible relief. “When I first came back to Warsaw I went past the apartment building, but I couldn’t get the courtyard door open.”
“The lock was damaged,” I told her. “Mr. Wójcik had to help me unstick it.”
“What did you do with the jar?” Sara asked me.
“I buried it. A little deeper because it was exposed. And I have covered it with rubble. It’s safe there unless you want me to bring it here.”
“Thank you, Emilia.” She smiled sadly. “I’ll need to speak to some people—to try to figure out who in the Jewish community has survived...who can help us sort through those records. I’m not sure how many families can be restored, but the process will not be easy—the sooner we start, the better.”
The four of us ate lunch in the dining hall, catching up on the months that had passed since the Uprising. Sara told us that at the transit camp in Pruszków, she was told she’d be sent to a concentration camp.
“So they loaded me onto the train, and I thought I haven’t come this far to die in a godforsaken camp. Some of the women in my carriage figured out how to get the door open, and in the middle of the night, we waited for the train to slow for a corner and then jumped off it.”
“Where did you land?” I asked her, eyes wide.
“In a puddle, Emilia,” she chuckled. “I hid in the woods for a while, then I was lucky enough to find a farmer and his wife who let me stay with them in exchange for some labor on their farm. I’ve only been back in Warsaw a few weeks.”
When we finished eating, Truda asked me to take the empty plates back to the kitchen, and when I returned, Sara stood, her expression grave.
“Come on, my friend,” she said quietly. “Let’s take a walk to my room.”
I knew instantly that Truda and Mateusz had told her about the attack in Lodz. I glared at them, and they avoided my gaze.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s just stay here and enjoy being together again. We don’t need to talk about anything in private.”
Undeterred, Sara gently slid her arm through mine. I sighed impatiently and let her lead me from the dining hall.
“Truda thought you might want to talk with me,” Sara said quietly, as she sat upon her bed. I stood stubbornly at the door as she patted the space beside her.
“I don’t need to talk about it,” I said, looking away. “But thank you.”
“Emilia, they are very worried about you.”
“I’m starting to feel better,” I said truthfully. “Today has been the best day I can remember for a long time.”
“It’s been a good day for me, too. I’m so happy to see you again,” Sara said and smiled, but then her smile faded, and she cleared her throat. “There’s something else, Emilia. How do you feel? Physically?”
“I’m better,” I said quickly. “I really don’t—”
“Sweetheart,” Sara said softly. I looked at her, then looked away. “Truda is concerned that you may be pregnant.”
My gaze flew back to hers.
“What? No! Why would she—”
But I realized then that I hadn’t had my courses since the attack. I sank onto the bed. Suddenly, Truda’s insistence that we return to Warsaw made a lot more sense. Truda, with her near phobia about frank discussions of human biology, would not have been comfortable broaching this possibility with me, let alone figuring out what to do about such a scenario.
“I can’t,” I blurted, shaking my head in fear. “I can’t be...”
I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word. Surely I would have known if...
“Can I examine you?” Sara asked gently. “It was three months ago, yes? Late March?” I nodded stiffly. She had me lie on the mattress, and she pressed her fingers on my abdomen. After a moment, her hand stilled on my belly. “Do you remember when we talked about my nursing textbook? Do you remember when I told you that we can measure the fundal height of the uterus to determine the gestation of a pregnancy?”
“Please, no,” I whispered. My lips felt numb. Sara touched a spot on my lower stomach.
“I can feel the top of your uterus here. That means that most likely you are around twelve weeks pregnant.”
“I want it out of me,” I said, sitting up and pushing her hands away. I was shaking, trembling in a way that I hadn’t since the day of the attack. I wanted to tear my stomach open with my fingernails. I felt as violated as I had lying on the cobblestones that day.
“Sweetheart, there is nothing I can do. You will have to do—”
“You have to find someone that can help me,” I pleaded. “There has to be someone in the city who can... There has to be some way to stop it. I can’t—You can’t—”
Sara’s hands gripped my shoulders, and she stared into my eyes.
“Emilia, you are strong. You have made it this far. You can do this.”
“I can’t,” I whimpered. “This is too much. It’s all been bad, but this is too much.” A new thought struck me, and I pressed my hands over my mouth, feeling my lunch in the back of my throat. “People will know, Sara! People will see! What will they say?” I started to cry at last, feeling the shame rise all over again. “I don’t know what’s worse...that people might think I am a whore, or that people will know that I’m not.”
“We will find somewhere for you to go,” she said calmly. “Somewhere safe. The Sisters will help us... You can shelter somewhere until the birth, and then you can start afresh. No one will even know.”
“I can’t do this,” I said again, sobs coming in earnest again now. “Please, Sara. Help me. There has to be a way to stop it.”
“You and I have been through a lot, Emilia. That’s how I know that you can do this.”
By the time we left the orphanage that day, new plans were in place. I’d be moving to a Franciscan convent in Marki. The Sisters would take me in until the baby was born.
“And then what?” I asked Sara numbly.
“Then we will find someone to adopt the baby, and you can move back to Warsaw with Truda and Mateusz to figure out what comes next.”