1939
It really was Pietrik Bakoski’s idea to go up to the bluff at Deer Meadow to see the refugees. Just want to set straight the record. Matka never did believe me about that.
Hitler had declared war on Poland on September 1, but his soldiers took their time getting to Lublin. I was glad, for I didn’t want anything to change. Lublin was perfect as it was. We heard radio addresses from Berlin about new rules, and some bombs fell on the outskirts of town, but nothing else. The Germans concentrated on Warsaw, and as troops closed in there, refugees by the thousands fled down to us in Lublin. Families came in droves, traveling southeast one hundred miles, and slept in the potato fields below town.
Before the war, nothing exciting ever happened in Lublin, so we appreciated a good sunrise, sometimes more than a picture at the cinema. We’d reached the summit overlooking the meadow on the morning of September 8 just before dawn and could make out thousands of people below us in the fields, dreaming in the dark. I lay between my two best friends, Nadia Watroba and Pietrik Bakoski, watching it all from a flattened bowl of straw, still warm where a mother deer had slept with her fawns. The deer were gone by then—early risers. This they had in common with Hitler.
As dawn suddenly breached the horizon, the breath caught in my throat, the kind of gasp that can surprise you when you see something so beautiful it hurts, such as a baby anything or fresh cream running over oatmeal or Pietrik Bakoski’s profile in dawn’s first light. His profile, 98 percent perfect, was especially nice drenched in dawn, like something off a ten-zlotych coin. At that moment, Pietrik looked the way all boys do upon waking, before they’ve washed up: his hair, the color of fresh butter, matted on the side where he’d slept.
Nadia’s profile was also almost perfect, as was to be expected of a girl with her delicate features. The only thing holding her back from 100 percent was the purple bruise on her forehead, a souvenir from the incident at school, less of a goose egg now, but still there. She was wearing the cashmere sweater she let me pet whenever I wished, the color of unripe cantaloupe.
It was hard to understand how such a sad situation could lead to the prettiest scene. The refugees had fashioned a most elaborate tent city out of bed linens and blankets. As the sun rose, like an x-ray it allowed us to see through the flowered sheets of one tent to the shadows of people inside, dressing to meet the day.
A mother in city clothes flapped open her sheet door and crept out, holding the hand of a child dressed in pajamas and felt boots. They poked the ground with sticks, digging for potatoes.
Lublin rose beyond them in the distance, like a fairy-tale city, scattered with old red-roofed pastel buildings as if a giant had shaken them in a cup and tossed them on the rolling hills. Farther west was where our little airport and a complex of factories once sat, but the Nazis had already bombed that. It was the first thing they hit, but at least no Germans had marched into town yet.
“Do you think the British will help us?” Nadia said. “The French?”
Pietrik scanned the horizon. “Maybe.” He ripped grass from the ground and flung it in the air. “Good day for flying. They better hurry.”
A string of spotted cows sashayed down the hill toward the tents to graze, bells tanging, led by kerchiefed milk women. One cow lifted her tail and scattered a troop of lumps behind her, which those following stepped around. Each woman carried a tall silver milk can against one shoulder.
I squinted to find our school, St. Monica’s Catholic School for Girls, a tangerine flag swaying from its bell tower. It was a place with floors so polished we wore satin slippers inside. A place of rigorous lessons, daily mass, and strict teachers. Not that any of them had helped Nadia when she needed it most, except for Mrs. Mikelsky, our favorite math teacher, of course.
“Look,” Nadia said. “The women are coming with the cows but no sheep. The sheep are always out by now.”
Nadia noticed things. Though only two months older than me—already seventeen—she seemed more mature somehow. Pietrik looked past me at Nadia as if seeing her for the first time. All the boys liked her, with her perfect cartwheel, flawless Maureen O’Sullivan complexion, and thick blond braid. Maybe I was not as beautiful and a miserable athlete, but I was once voted Best Legs and Best Dancer in my gimnazjum class in an informal poll, a first, at our school anyway.
“You notice everything, Nadia,” Pietrik said.
Nadia smiled at him. “Not really. Maybe we should go down there and help dig potatoes? You’re good with a shovel, Pietrik.”
She was flirting with him? A direct violation of my number-one rule: Girlfriends first! Pietrik pulled my wreath from the river on Midsummer Eve, gave me a silver cross necklace. Did traditions mean nothing anymore?
Maybe Pietrik was falling for her? It made sense. Earlier that month the Girl Guides had been selling dances with local boys for charity, and Pietrik’s little sister Luiza told me Nadia bought all ten of Pietrik’s dances. Then there was that awful dustup outside the school gates. Nadia and I were leaving school when street boys started throwing rocks at Nadia and calling her names because her grandfather was Jewish. Pietrik had been so quick to rescue her.
People throwing rocks at Jews was not something unusual to see, but it was unusual for it to happen to Nadia. I’d never known she was part Jewish before that. We attended Catholic school, and she’d memorized more prayers than I had. But everyone knew once our German teacher, Herr Speck, made us chart our ancestors and told the whole class.
I’d tried to pull Nadia away that day as the boys hurled rocks, but she’d stood firm. Mrs. Mikelsky, pregnant with her first child, had rushed out, wrapped her arms around Nadia, and shouted at the bullies to stop or she’d call the police. Mrs. Mikelsky was every girl’s favorite teacher, our North Star, since we all wanted to be like her, beautiful and smart and funny. She defended her girls like a mother lion and gave us krowki, toffee candies, for perfect math tests, which I never failed to get.
Pietrik, who’d come to walk us home, chased the street boys away waving a shovel in the air but ended up with a little chip off his front tooth, which in no way damaged his smile and in fact only made it sweeter.
I was startled from my daydream by a peculiar sound, like the buzz of crickets all around us. It grew louder until the vibration soaked the ground beneath us.
Planes!
They zoomed over us, flying so low they turned the grass inside out, light bouncing off their silver bellies. Three abreast, they banked right, leaving an oily smell in their wake, and headed for the city, their gray shadows gliding across the fields below. I counted twelve altogether.
“They look like the planes from King Kong,” I said.
“Those were biplanes, Kasia,” Pietrik said. “Curtiss Helldivers. These are German dive bombers.”
“Maybe they’re Polish.”
“They’re not Polish. You can tell by the white crosses under the wings.”
“Do they have bombs?” Nadia asked, more intrigued than afraid. She was never afraid.
“They already got the airport,” Pietrik said. “What else can they bomb? We have no ammunition depot.”
The planes circled the city and then flew west, one behind the other. The first dove with a terrible screech and dropped a bomb in the middle of town, right where Krakowskie Przedmieście, our main street, wound by the town’s finest buildings.
Pietrik stood. “Jezu Chryste, no!”
A great thud shook the ground, and black and gray plumes rose from where the bomb had fallen. The planes circled the city again and this time dropped their bombs near Crown Court, our town hall. My sister Zuzanna, a brand-new doctor, volunteered at the clinic there some days. What about my mother? Please, God, take me directly to heaven if anything happens to my mother, I thought. Was Papa at the postal center?
The planes carouseled around the city and then flew toward us. We dove to the grass as they passed over us again, Pietrik on top of Nadia and me, so close I felt his heart beating through his shirt against my back.
Two planes circled back as if they’d forgotten something.
“We need to—” Pietrik began, but before we could move, both planes dove and flew closer to the ground, across the field below. In an instant, we heard their guns firing. They shot at the milk women. Some of the bullets hit the field and sent puffs of dust up, but others hit the women, sending them to the ground, their milk spilling onto the grass. A cow cried out as she fell, and the pup-pup-pup of bullets punched through the metal milk cans.
The refugees in the fields dropped their potatoes and scattered, but bullets found some as they ran. I ducked as the last two planes flew back over us, leaving the field below strewn with bodies of men and women and cows. The cows that could still run bucked about as if half-mad.
I tore down the hill, Nadia and Pietrik behind me, through the forest along pine-needled paths, toward home. Were my parents hurt? Zuzanna? With only two ambulances, she’d be at work all night.
We slowed at the potato field, for it was impossible not to stare. I walked a milk can’s length away from a woman Zuzanna’s age, potatoes scattered around her. She lay on her back across hoed rows of dirt, left hand across her chest, shoulder steeped in blood, face splattered with it too. A girl knelt next to her.
“Sister,” the girl said, taking her hand, “you need to get up.”
“Compress the wound with two hands,” I told her, but she just looked at me.
A woman wearing a chenille robe came and knelt near them. She pulled a length of amber rubber from her black doctor’s bag.
Nadia pulled me away. “Come. The planes might come back.”
In the city, people were running everywhere, crying and yelling to one another, evacuating by bicycle, horse, truck, cart, and on foot.
As we neared my street, Pietrik took Nadia’s hand. “You’re almost home, Kasia. I’ll take Nadia.”
“What about me?” I called after them, but they were already off, down the cobblestones toward Nadia’s mother’s apartment.
Pietrik had made his choice.
I headed for the tunnel, which ran under the ancient Cracow Gate, a soaring brick tower with a bell-shaped spire, my favorite Lublin landmark, once the only entrance to the whole city. The bombs had cracked the tower down the side, but it was still standing.
My math teacher, Mrs. Mikelsky, and her husband, who lived close to me, cycled past, headed in the opposite direction. A very pregnant Mrs. Mikelsky turned as she rode.
“Your mother is frantic looking for you, Kasia,” she said.
“Where are you going?” I called after them.
“To my sister’s,” Mr. Mikelsky shouted back.
“Get home to your mother!” Mrs. Mikelsky shouted over her shoulder.
They cycled on, disappeared into the crowd, and I continued toward home.
Please, God, let Matka be unhurt.
Once I arrived at our block, every cell in my body tingled with relief to see that our pink sliver of a building still stood. The house across the street had not been so lucky. It was razed to rubble, now just a mess of concrete, plaster walls, and twisted iron beds strewn across our road. I scrambled over the wreckage and, as I drew closer, saw one of Matka’s curtains blow gently out the window in the breeze. That’s when I realized every one of our windows had been blown out by the bombs, blackout paper and all.
There was no need to fetch the apartment key from behind the loose brick, for the door was wide open. I found Matka and Zuzanna in the kitchen near Matka’s drawing table, gathering fallen paintbrushes scattered about the floor, the smell of spilled turpentine in the air. Psina, our pet chicken, followed behind them. Thank heavens Psina was not hurt, for she was more like our family dog than a hen.
“Where have you been?” Matka said, her face white as the drawing paper in her hand.
“Up at Deer Meadow,” I said. “It was Pietrik’s id—”
Zuzanna stood, holding a pile of glass shards in a cup, her white doctor’s coat gray with ash. It had taken her six long years to earn that coat. Her suitcase stood next to the door. No doubt she’d been packing to go live at the hospital for her pediatric residency when the bombs had dropped.
“How could you be so stupid?” Zuzanna said.
“Where’s Papa?” I said as the two came and brushed bits of concrete from my hair.
“He went out—” Matka began.
Zuzanna grabbed Matka’s shoulders. “Tell her, Matka.”
“He went looking for you,” Matka said, about to dissolve into tears.
“He’s probably at the postal center,” Zuzanna said. “I’ll go find him.”
“Don’t go,” I said. “What if the planes come again?” An electric eel of fear punctured my chest. Those poor women lying in the field…
“I’m going,” Zuzanna said. “I’ll be back.”
“Let me come too,” I said. “They’ll need me at the clinic.”
“Why do you do such stupid things? Papa’s gone because of you.” Zuzanna slipped her sweater on and stepped toward the door. “They don’t need you at the clinic. All you do is roll bandages anyway. Stay here.”
“Don’t go,” Matka said, but Zuzanna rushed out, always strong, like Papa.
Matka went to the window and bent to pick up shards of glass but gave up because her hands were shaking so badly and came back to me. She smoothed my hair, kissed my forehead, and then held me tight, saying, Ja cię kocham, over and over like a skipping record.
I love you.
MATKA AND I SLEPT in her bed that night, both with one eye open, waiting for Papa and Zuzanna to walk in. Psina, more dog than fowl, slept at the foot of our bed, her head tucked beneath one downy wing. She woke with a squawk when Papa did come home, well before dawn. He stood in the bedroom doorway, his tweed jacket powdered with ash. Papa always had a sad face, like that of a bloodhound. Even in his baby pictures, those creases and folds of skin hung down. But that night the light from the kitchen cast a shadow on his face, making him look sadder still.
Matka sat up in bed. “Ade?” She threw back the blanket and ran to him, their silhouettes dark against the light from the kitchen. “Where’s Zuzanna?”
“I haven’t seen her,” Papa said. “When I couldn’t find Kasia, I went to the postal center and took my files outside to burn. Information the Germans will want. Names and addresses. Military lists. They’ve occupied the postal center in Warsaw and cut the telegraph line, so we’re next.”
“What happened to the staff?” Matka said.
Papa glanced in my direction and did not answer.
“Our best guess is German troops will be here in a week. Chances are they’ll come here first.”
“Here?” Matka gathered her housecoat around her neck.
“Looking for me. I may be useful to them.” Papa smiled, but his eyes stayed dark. “They’ll want to use the postal center for their communications.”
No one knew the postal center like Papa. He’d run it for as long as I could remember. Did he know secrets? Papa was a patriot. He’d rather die than tell them anything.
“How do they even know where we live?”
Papa looked at Matka as if she were a child. “They’ve been planning this for years, Halina. If they take me, hopefully they’ll need me enough to keep me alive. Give it two days. If you don’t hear from me, take the girls and go south.”
“The British will help us,” Matka said. “The French—”
“No one is coming, my love. The mayor is evacuating, taking the police and fire brigade. For now we need to hide what we can.”
Papa pulled Matka’s jewelry box from the dresser and tossed it on the bed. “First, wash and dry any tin cans. We need to bury anything of value—”
“But we haven’t done anything wrong, Ade. Germans are cultured people. Hitler has them under some kind of spell.”
Matka’s mother had been pure German, her father half-Polish. Even woken from sleep, she was beautiful. Soft but not fragile, a natural blonde.
Papa grabbed her by the arm. “Your cultured people want us gone so they can move in. Don’t you see?”
Papa went about the apartment gathering our most valuable possessions in a metal box with a hinged lid: Matka’s nursing certificate, their marriage license, a small ruby ring from Matka’s family, and an envelope of family pictures.
“Get the bag of millet. We’re burying that too.”
Matka pulled the canvas bag from under the sink.
“They’ll probably do a house-by-house search for Polish soldiers in hiding,” Papa said, keeping his voice low. “They’ve broadcast new rules. Poland no longer exists as a country. No Polish will be spoken. All schools will close. There will be curfews. A pink pass is required to violate them, and we are not allowed weapons or ski boots or any food over our ration limit. Secretly possessing these things is punishable by—” Again Papa looked at me and stopped speaking. “They’ll probably just take whatever they want.”
Papa pulled his old silver revolver from the dresser drawer. Matka stepped back, away from it.
“Bury that, Ade,” she said, her eyes wide.
“We may need it,” Papa said.
Matka turned away from him. “Nothing good comes of a gun.”
Papa hesitated and then placed the gun in the box. “Bury your Girl Guides uniform, Kasia. The Nazis are targeting scouts—they shot a pack of Boy Scouts in Gdansk.”
A chill went through me. I knew not to argue with Papa and placed my prized possessions in tin cans: the wool scarf Pietrik once wore that still smelled like him, the new red corduroy shift dress Matka sewed for me, my Girl Guides uniform shirt and neckerchief, and a picture of Nadia and me riding a cow. Matka wrapped one of her sets of Kolinsky sable-hair paintbrushes, which had been her mother’s, and added them to a can. Papa melted wax on the seams of the tin cans.
That night only stars lit our back garden, a patch of dirt surrounded by a few planks of wood held up only by the weeds around them. Papa stepped on the rusty shovel blade to push it into the ground. It cut through hard soil as if it were cake, and he dug a deep hole, like a baby’s fresh grave.
We were almost done, but even in near darkness I could tell Matka had kept her engagement ring on her finger, the one her mother had passed on to her when Papa was too poor to buy her one. The ring was like an exquisite flower, with a big center diamond surrounded with deep blue sapphire petals. It glittered like a nervous firefly as Matka’s hand moved in the darkness. “The diamond is cushion cut—from the seventeen hundreds when they cut stones to react to candlelight,” Matka would say when people admired it. React it did, shimmering, almost alive.
“What about your ring?” Papa asked.
The firefly flew behind her back, protecting itself. “Not that,” Matka said.
As children, when crossing the road, Zuzanna and I had always fought over who got to hold Matka’s hand that wore that ring. The pretty hand.
“Haven’t we buried enough?” I said. “We’ll be caught out here.”
Standing there arguing in the dark would only attract attention.
“Suit yourself, Halina,” Papa said. He flung shovelfuls of dirt into the hole to cover our treasures. I pushed earth into the hole with my hands to make things go faster, and Papa tamped it down smooth. He then counted his steps back to the building so he’d remember where we buried our treasure.
Twelve steps to the door.
ZUZANNA FINALLY CAME HOME with terrible tales of the doctors and nurses working all night to save the wounded. Word was many were still alive trapped under rubble. We lived in fear of hearing the sound of Germans at our front door, our ears to the radio in the kitchen, hoping for the best news but hearing the worst. Poland defended herself, sustaining great losses, but in the end could not match Germany’s modern armored divisions and airpower.
I woke Sunday, September 17, to Matka telling Papa what she’d heard on the radio. The Russians had also attacked Poland, from the east. Was there no end to the countries attacking us?
I found my parents in the kitchen peering out the front window. It was a crisp fall morning, a light breeze blowing in through Matka’s curtains. As I drew closer to the window, I saw Jewish men in black suits clearing the rubble from in front of our house.
Matka wrapped her arms around me, and once the road was cleared, we watched a parade of German soldiers roll in, like new tenants in a boardinghouse with their mountains of luggage. First came trucks, then soldiers on foot, then more soldiers standing tall and haughty in their tanks. At least Zuzanna did not see this sad sight, for she was already at the hospital that morning.
Matka heated water for Papa’s tea as he watched it all. I did my best to keep us all quiet as could be. Maybe if we were silent, they would not bother us? To calm myself I counted the birds crocheted on Matka’s curtains. One lark. Two swallows. One magpie. Wasn’t the magpie a sign of imminent death? The rumble of a truck grew louder.
I breathed deep to quell the panic inside me. What was coming?
“Out, out!” a man shouted. The terrible clatter of hobnail boots on cobblestones. There were lots of them.
“Stay away from the window, Kasia,” Papa said, stepping back himself. He said it in such an offhand way I knew he was scared.
“Should we hide?” Matka whispered. She turned her ring around and closed her hand so the stones hid in her palm.
Papa walked toward the door, and I busied myself with prayer. We heard a good bit of yelling and orders, and soon the truck drove away.
“I think they’re leaving,” I whispered to Matka.
I jumped as a rap came at our door, and then a man’s voice. “Open up!”
Matka froze in place and Papa opened the door.
“Adalbert Kuzmerick?” said an SS man, who strode in all puffed up and pleased with himself.
He was two hands taller than Papa, so tall his hat almost hit the top of the door when he entered. He and his underling were dressed in full Sonderdienst uniform, with the black boots and the hat with the horrible skull emblem with two gaping holes for eyes. As he passed, I smelled clove gum on him. He looked well fed too, his chin held so high I could see the blood through a little piece of white paper stuck on his Adam’s apple where he’d cut himself shaving. They even bled Nazi red.
“Yes,” Papa said, calm as could be.
“Director of the postal center communications?”
Papa nodded.
Two more guards grabbed Papa by the arms and pulled him out without even time for him to look back at us. I tried to follow, but the tall one blocked my way with his nightstick.
Matka ran to the window, eyes wild. “Where are you taking him?”
Suddenly I was cold all over. It was getting harder to breathe.
Another SS man, skinny and shorter than the first, stepped in with a canvas bread bag across his chest.
“Where does your husband keep his work papers?” asked the tall one.
“Not here,” Matka said. “Can’t you tell me where they’re taking him?”
Matka stood, fingers locked at her chest, as the skinny one went about the house opening drawers and stuffing whatever papers we had into his bag.
“Shortwave radio?” the tall one said.
Matka shook her head. “No.”
My stomach hurt as I watched the skinny guard fling our cabinet doors wide and toss what little food we had into his bag.
“All provisions are the property of the Reich,” the tall one said. “You will be issued ration cards.”
Tinned peas, two potatoes, and a sad little cabbage went into the skinny one’s bag. Then he grabbed a rolled paper bag that held the last of Matka’s coffee.
She reached for it.
“Oh, please—may we keep the coffee? It’s all we have.”
The tall one turned and looked at Matka for a long second. “Leave it,” he said, and his underling tossed it onto the counter.
The men stepped through our three little bedrooms and pulled drawers from bureaus, dumping socks and underclothes on the floor.
“Weapons?” said the tall one as the other searched closets. “Any other food?”
“No,” Matka said. I’d never seen her lie before.
He stepped closer to her. “You may have heard that withholding that which is due the Reich is punishable by death.”
“I understand,” Matka said. “If I could just visit my husband…”
We followed the men out to the back garden. The yard, fenced on all sides, suddenly seemed smaller with the SS men standing there. It all looked normal, but the ground where we’d buried our things the week before was still beaten quite flat. It was so obvious something was buried there. I counted the guard’s steps as he walked into the yard. Five…six…seven…Could they see my knees shaking?
Our chicken, Psina, moved closer to our buried treasure spot, scratching near it, looking for bugs. My God, the shovel was there, leaning against the back of the house, dirt still clinging to the blade. Would they take us to Lublin Castle or just shoot us in the yard and leave us for Papa to find?
“Do you think I’m stupid?” the tall guard said, walking toward the spot.
Eight…nine…
My respiration shut off.
“Of course not,” Matka said.
“Get the shovel,” said the tall guard to his underling. “You really thought you’d get away with this?”
“No, please,” Matka said. She held on to the St. Mary medal she wore on a chain around her neck. “I am from Osnabrück, actually. You know it?”
The taller guard took the shovel. “Of course I know it. Who hasn’t been to the Christmas market there? Have you registered as Volksdeutsche?”
Volksdeutsche was the German term for ethnic Germans living in countries other than Germany. The Nazis pressured Polish citizens with German heritage like Matka to register as Volksdeutsche. Once registered, they got extra food, better jobs, and property confiscated from Jews and non-German Poles. Matka would never accept Volksdeutsche status, since that showed allegiance to Germany, but this put her at risk, because she was going against the Reich.
“No, but I am mostly German. My father was only part Polish.”
Psina scratched the soil around the smooth spot and pecked something there.
“If you were German, you’d not be breaking rules, would you? Withholding what is due the Reich?”
Matka touched his arm. “It is hard dealing with all of this. Can you not understand? Imagine your own family.”
“My own family would have handed what they had to the Reich.”
The SS man took the shovel and continued toward the spot.
Ten…eleven…
“I’m so terribly sorry,” Matka said, following him.
The man ignored Matka and took one more step.
Twelve.
How far would he dig before he hit the box?
“Please, give us another chance,” Matka said. “The rules are so new.”
The guard turned, leaned on the shovel, and gave Matka a thorough looking over. He smiled, and I could see his teeth clearly, like little chewing gum tablets.
He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “Maybe you know the rule about curfew?”
“Yes,” Matka said, a tiny crease between her brows. She shifted in her shoes.
“That is a rule you can break.” The SS man took Matka’s medal between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed it, watching her the whole time.
“One needs a pink pass to violate curfew,” Matka said.
“I have them here in my pocket.” He dropped the medal and put his hand over his heart.
“I don’t understand,” Matka said.
“I think you do.”
“Are you saying you will let this go if I come visit you?”
“If that is what you heard—”
“The Germans I know are cultured people. I can’t imagine you would ask a mother of two to do that.”
The man cocked his head to one side, bit his lip, and picked up the shovel. “I am sorry you feel that way.”
“Wait,” Matka said.
The man lifted the shovel into the air above his head.
“My God, no!” Matka cried. She reached for his arm, but it was too late. Once the shovel was in the air, there was no stopping it.