Emilia
Every time they visited, Truda and Mateusz brought me a letter from Roman. I always read them, even if it sometimes took me a few days to find the courage to do so.
Dear Emilia, I am staying in your room, and morning and night I stare at your mural. Have I ever told you how breathtaking I find your talent? Every day I find new details to marvel at. Every day I try to find the dance of the light and the shadow, and when I think I feel it, I feel you with me...
Dear Emilia, I have exciting news—I’ve found a job. I’m working on the same road crew as Mateusz. I can’t wait until I can tell you all about it. Warsaw is coming back to life, Emilia. We are sorting through the rubble and rebuilding what we can. There is work to be done, and the fight isn’t over, but it feels good to be helping people find homes again...
Dear Emilia, Mateusz is applying for a grant to start a new textiles factory. I’m sure he will tell you all about it, but I’m helping him with the paperwork. Remember when you asked me if I wanted to be the kind of lawyer who does boring contracts? Maybe I should reconsider: it seems I’m pretty good at this. I miss you, and I can’t wait to see you again. I hope you are growing stronger. Poland needs you, and I need you, too.
“We could stop bringing them,” Truda offered uncertainly. She visited me alone in mid-October, on a weekday when Mateusz was working. “I don’t think we could convince him to stop writing them, but there’s no reason we should bring them if you don’t want them.”
I didn’t know how to explain that I looked forward to those letters as much as I looked forward to her visits. I poured over the words again and again, trying to absorb his love for me right off the page.
“He can write,” I said carefully. “I’m just not ready to see him or to reply.”
I knew the sharpness of his pen and the pattern to his words. They always spoke of longing and affection and of feelings for me that had not changed, despite what I had been through. I often cried as I read them, wondering if he’d feel the same if I let him visit or if he’d be repulsed by my monstrous belly and the sadness and exhaustion I just couldn’t shake.
But the letters always ended on a war cry. Every single time.
...while they are on our streets, we are not yet free. The fight has only just begun.
...so many seem resigned to a further occupation of Poland, but I cannot and I will not accept it.
...I am meeting people, making connections, just trying to figure out the best way to mobilize.
And every time I read that war cry, I was reminded of the violence in him—of the bloodlust and the desperation for revenge and freedom. It was completely understandable after everything he had seen and everything he had lost. Maybe I even loved that part of Roman, just as I loved the rest of him. His passion for justice and for a liberated Poland knew no bounds.
I just wasn’t sure I could deal with his aggression in the way I always had. Every morning, I woke and hoped to find I felt differently. Every night, I prayed to God to make me stronger, so that we could be reunited.
I wanted to find peace, but I realized peace could only be found if I accepted my life would never be what it once was. That might mean accepting that my country would never be what it had been. Such an attitude, even if I could achieve it, would mean putting my life’s path at odds with Roman’s, because I knew he would never rest until Poland was governed once again by the Polish.
The rest of that mid-October visit with Truda unfolded as they always did. Her eyes dipped to my belly, and her questions would come rapid-fire, soothing and smothering me in equal measures.
“How are you feeling? Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you eating? Sleeping well? Are the Sisters still taking good care of you?”
“Truda,” I said, as gently as I could, “I promise you, I’m fine.”
“You look so tired.”
“I am so tired. It never stops moving,” I muttered, rubbing my lower back. I felt like I was awake all the time now, the squirming and wriggling beneath my heart constant, as if the baby were determined to make sure I couldn’t forget about it, even just for a moment of peace. As if it had consciously decided to torture me with its very existence.
Worse than that, I finally realized that even once I gave birth and the baby had gone to live with some other family, I would never forget it. Sometimes I would touch my belly with one hand, wanting to send thoughts of kindness, as if that would help it grow up to be a good person, as my other hand curled into a furious fist, resting on the sheet beside me. The balance of loving and hating the intruder in my belly was exhausting. It gradually dawned on me that even when the pregnancy was over I would be torn between relief and grief. It seemed that life wasn’t finished with its cruel tricks.
When Sara came for her next visit, she was buzzing with excitement. She’d taken a job as a nurse at the newly reopened Warsaw Hospital. With a reliable income, she’d been able to rent a small apartment and had at last moved out of the orphanage.
“Sara, what happened to the records of the children we rescued from the ghetto?”
“I went and retrieved the jar, just after we moved you here. A woman named Miriam Liebman is now leading the project to restore the children to their families. She’s a widow, the wife of a well-respected rabbi who died during the war. I check in on her every few weeks. So far she has managed to reunite only a handful of families.” Sara bit her lip. “You and I both know that those deported on the trains will not be found.”
“And... Eleonora Gorka?”
Sara smiled faintly.
“Roman asked after her, too, the moment he returned. Miriam has tried to make contact with Eleonora’s foster family but has had no luck. We think they may have moved since we were last in touch with them.” At my look of alarm, Sara hastened to reassure me. “This does not mean Eleonora is lost—it might just take a little while for Miriam and her team to track her down.”
We sat in silence for a while, before Sara told me she had to go so she could be home before dark. As she got up to leave, she passed me a letter, and I knew it was from Roman. I tucked it into the pocket of my maternity smock without opening it. Unexpected tears filled my eyes, and I looked away from Sara, to the bookshelves behind her.
“I wish you could stay.”
“Only a few months left to go,” she said gently.
“Fifty-seven days,” I said. She smiled.
“You know that babies don’t come exactly when we want them to. He or she might be born anytime from mid-December all the way through to mid-January.”
I groaned in frustration.
“Mid-January? God. This is never going to end.”
“You seem out of sorts today.”
“I feel it,” I admitted, then sighed. “I don’t even want to see Truda and Mateusz. I just don’t know how to ask them to stop visiting me.”
“But why?” Sara asked, eyebrows rising. “They are so worried about you.”
“They look at my... Truda constantly looks at my...” I closed my eyes, struggling for words. Instead, I pointed out my stomach. “She constantly stares at it, and she bombards me with questions. Why can’t I feel one way about anything anymore, Sara? I hate the baby, I worry about the baby. I miss Truda desperately, I hate it when she visits. It’s all so hard.” I opened my eyes, then gave Sara a half smile. “Yes, I know. I complain so much these days. It is tiresome.”
Sara laughed softly.
“Pregnancy is a difficult thing under your circumstances. But I want to talk to you about Truda. For half of her life, she has been married to Mateusz. For half of her life, they have been hoping for a baby, and she has never fallen pregnant. And now, this awful thing has happened to you, and you have to suffer through a pregnancy. Surely you can see how complex that must be for her.”
“She is jealous?”
Sara shook her head hastily.
“Not jealous. No one would want to be in your shoes. But...please don’t be so hard on Truda. That’s all I’m asking. The one experience she has dreamed of her whole life has been forced upon the very person she loves most in the world.”
I hadn’t thought about it like that. Not at all.
I was awake again all night, but now I was trying to ask myself hard questions—finally feeling courageous after months of feeling like a victim. Instead of avoiding thoughts of the baby, I forced myself to stare them down.
I am pregnant. I am going to give birth to a baby. That baby was conceived in violence. That baby will always be a reminder of the worst moments of my life. That baby has forced me to endure these months when my body is not my own.
But it is not that baby’s fault, and the baby is also part of me. Even when it is gone from my body, it will have a part of my heart. How do I learn to live not knowing if it is well? How do I know that I am handing it over to the right people? Who in Poland has the resources to care for a baby? Sara assured me she would find just the right family, but what if just the right family doesn’t actually exist?
I tossed these thoughts over in my mind, turning them this way and that, trying to understand the right way forward. One night, tortured by insomnia, I walked to the chapel. The convent halls were freezing at night, so I wrapped myself in robes, but my belly jutted out. I walked slowly, thinking about how, when the warm weather returned and winter was over, I would have parted from the baby and would never see it again.
I lit a candle in the chapel and then knelt at the altar to pray.
I don’t know why You let this happen to me. I don’t know how You could have brought life out of such an ugly situation. You have to give me wisdom because I don’t know the way forward, and I don’t know how to survive this.
I heard the door to the chapel open, and I looked up to see Sister Agnieszka Gracja. She knelt beside me at the altar and lit another candle. When I rose, she rose.
“What were you praying about at this strange hour?” I finally asked her as we walked back to our cells. She smiled.
“I was asking God to ease your torment.”
The next day was Saturday, and Truda again came alone. For the first hour of her visit, we made small talk about her week—the food she’d prepared, the chores she’d done, the curtains she was trying to sew with some fabric she found.
“Mateusz is trying to complete the grant application for his new business, but I know he is so sorry to miss you again,” she told me. “He said he will come tomorrow if you want him to.”
“Why are you two so good to me?” I asked her suddenly.
Truda looked at me, confusion in her eyes. She thought about this for a moment and then said softly, “You are the answer to more than a decade of prayer, Emilia. You are the ray of sunshine that came out of the darkest years of our lives.”
“Will you adopt this baby?” I blurted, before I could change my mind. But as soon as the words left my mouth, I felt my tension ease. This was the answer to my prayer, and the answer to Sister Agnieszka Gracja’s prayers, too. This was the way forward. Truda recoiled as if I’d struck her.
“What? Emilia, why?”
“I want the best for it.” My voice began to waver. “And you and Mateusz are the best.”
“But that will mean that you will need to see it,” Truda said. She spoke carefully, but her voice was strained. “I couldn’t do that to you. It is better that the baby goes to another home, so that you can forget about it.”
“I thought that, too. I really did, but I will never forget about it. I hate the way that it was conceived, but I will always care about it.” I stopped, and my gaze fell to the table as I whispered, “Plus, I want you to experience motherhood. You have waited so long.”
“Silly girl.” She sighed, shaking her head at me. “For half a lifetime I prayed for a child, and God heard those prayers and gave me a chatty, inquisitive eleven-year-old who has almost driven me crazy in the six years since. I have plenty of experience with motherhood. Don’t do this for me.” Her gaze softened, and she added gently, “Emilia, if you love this baby, you should raise it yourself.”
“It was conceived in rape,” I said stiffly. “How could I possibly love it enough?”
“The next time you leave this place, I want you to look closely at the children you see,” Truda said. “See if you can identify which children were conceived in rape and which were conceived in love. There will be an entire generation of children in this country who were forced upon their mothers, and the lucky ones will grow up in love just the same.” I hesitated, and Truda reached to take my hand. “Don’t think of this as a child of war. Every child is simply born good, and as long as they grow up in a family who can raise them that way, the circumstances of their conception are irrelevant. You, Emilia Rabinek, are plenty capable of handling this challenge if you want to raise the baby yourself.”
“But I want you and Mateusz to—”
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“Do not do this for us, Emilia,” she said flatly.
I exhaled shakily.
“I think I’m doing this for me,” I said slowly, tears filling my eyes. “I can’t raise it, Truda. I’m not ready, and I still have so much healing to do. But I’m going to see this child for the rest of my life, either with my eyes or in my dreams. I love it enough to know that I can’t raise it and too much to give it away. Could you love this baby as if they were your own?”
My voice trailed off by the end of the question because I already knew the answer. She had taken me into her life in a heartbeat, as if I had already lived in her heart forever, even at the most tumultuous time of her life. While our entire world changed, the fierceness of her love had never wavered. Not once.
Truda was not soft, and she was not always warm, but she loved in a way that was as constant as the rising and setting of the sun.
“You know I could,” she said quietly.
“Please,” I choked out. “Please, will you be this baby’s mother?”
“If you are sure that this is what you want...”
“I am sure. Talk to Mateusz about it?”
“I already know what he’ll say,” she whispered, then she hesitated. “You can always change your mind. We can plan this, but if you decide to keep it—”
“Truda,” I said, “I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything in my life.”
At the end of her visit, I walked her to the entrance to the convent, then I hesitated.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just do me one favor.” I drew in a deep breath, then said, “Please let me be the one to tell Roman.”