As Emilia and I walked from the square, I realized with a heavy heart that if Mama wasn’t willing to take the little girl on, there was only one other option. There were other families in the town who might accommodate her—but none I trusted enough to care for her the way she deserved.
Truda was much like Mama—kind if somewhat abrupt at times—but Mateusz was gentler, quite jolly and jovial, and he had inherited a textiles factory from his father, so he provided my sister a very comfortable life in the town. They lived in a large house on the best street in town and even had electric lights in their home, something I was very jealous of because we still managed with oil lamps at home. I knew Truda and Mateusz wanted to have children, but even after years of marriage, she was yet to fall pregnant.
They had the resources and space to provide Emilia with a ready-made family, but I was nervous to ask it of them. Truda was eight years older than me, and we were hardly close.
There was just no alternative no matter how hard I racked my brain, so I walked the handful of blocks from the square to Truda’s house with a weeping Emilia in tow. We turned into her beautiful street—a narrow cobblestoned laneway lined with mature sweet chestnut trees. This neighborhood was flush with two-story homes, and flower patches were in bloom all along the sidewalk. Many of the homes in her street had cars—still a novelty to me then—and it had been the very first street in the town to get electricity. Perhaps, with such big homes and such a small roadway, that street might have felt cramped, except that the narrow street spilled into a huge parkland at the end. The park was a paradise of soft green grass and still more chestnut trees, a space centered by an immense square pond where ducks swam and children played in the summer.
I thought my sister would come quickly from the town square, but time began to pass and I started to worry that she’d returned to my parents’ home after all. Emilia and I sat on the steps at Truda’s house and watched as a crowd began to file into a house across the road. That’s when I realized why Truda and Mateusz were standing with the mayor’s wife at the square—they were neighbors. My sister would surely be there at that house—comforting the grieving widow and her large brood of children. I wouldn’t dare to go there myself—so all I could do was to sit with Emilia and wait. She cried endlessly, and sometimes she shook so hard I had to press her against my chest to hold her still.
“Be brave, Emilia,” I said at first, because that’s what I imagined my Mama or Truda would have said if they were there, but it felt like such a cruel request. After that, I didn’t say anything; instead, I cried with her until the sleeves of my dress were soaked with both of our tears.
When Truda finally came along the sidewalk, she stopped dead in her tracks and surveyed the spectacle before her. I drew in a deep breath and prepared to blurt out the sales pitch I had been planning in my mind, but Truda quickly resumed her path toward the stoop. Her steps were falling faster now and her chin was high, her gaze determined. For a moment, I feared she was going to turn us away, especially when she stepped all the way around us and opened the front door.
“Come on then, little one,” she said from the doorway. “Let’s get your bed organized.”
“You’ll take her?” I choked.
“Of course we will take her,” Truda said stiffly. “Emilia is our daughter now. Is she not, Mateusz?”
Mateusz simply bent down, scooped Emilia up and cradled her in his arms like she was a baby, just as he’d done when he rescued her from the town two days earlier. She was far too old and too large to be carried in that way, but she nestled into his large frame anyway.
“Do you need me to take you home, Alina?” he asked. “I can, but you’ll need to wait until we get Emilia settled. Or you can leave now, and you will be home before dark.”
Emilia pressed her face into Mateusz’s shoulder now and wrapped her arms around his neck, and suddenly I felt like an intruder in the early moments of this brand-new family I had somehow helped to create. I shook my head and looked once more to my sister.
“Thank you,” I whispered, but I was completely overcome with gratitude and relief. A sob broke from my lips and I said it again. “Thank you.”
Truda was, typically, embarrassed by my overt display of emotion. She waved my thanks away impatiently, but her eyes greedily soaked in the sight of Emilia in her husband’s arms.
“Go home,” Truda said quietly. “And be careful, please, Alina. This is the last time I want to see you wandering around the township on your own. It’s not safe anymore.”
I ran the entire way home, up the path through the woods to the hill and straight back down to the house. By the time I arrived dusk was falling and I was completely exhausted. My brothers were bringing the animals into the barn, and we shared a glance as I came through the gate. Filipe’s eyes were red, as if he’d been crying all afternoon.
When I threw open the door to our home, Mama and Father were both standing at the dining room table, their hands looped beneath it as if they had been shifting it. That made no sense at all—our furniture had always been in the exact same place for as long as I could remember. I shook myself, as if I was hallucinating one more nonsensical happening in a day that had been the very worst kind of surreal, but the image didn’t fade.
“What are you doing?” I blurted. Mama’s gaze narrowed at me.
“None of your business, child. Where did you take her?” Her tone was stiff, but her gaze concerned.
“Truda,” I said, and Mama nodded, satisfied, and she stepped away from the table back toward the potbellied stove, where a pot of soup was simmering.
“I should have told you to do that... I was too panicked... I didn’t think. Good girl.”
“What did the commander say today?” I asked her, and the softness disappeared from her gaze altogether as she flung a scowl back toward me.
“He is not a commander,” she said flatly. “Don’t ever name those animals as if they are human. Don’t give then the power or the prestige of honored titles. The pigs are invaders, nothing more.”
“What did...what did the invader say?” I asked weakly, and Mama avoided my gaze.
“You need soup. You must eat and stay strong. These months will be hard until we find a way to defeat them.”
“Mama,” I pleaded with her. “I need to know.”
“All you need to know is what you saw today, Alina.” Father said, his voice stiff. “They did not say much more than a whole lot of posturing and warning us that they will be taking the produce...eventually they plan to take the farms for German settlers. This is nothing your mother and I did not expect. We are a tough people—we will ride this out and hope for the best.”
“Take the farm?” I gasped.
“Their plans are immense...unpractical. This displacement will not happen overnight, and as long as the farm remains productive, perhaps we will be spared.”
“But what will happen to us if they take the farm?” I choked. Mama clucked her tongue and waved toward the table and chairs.
“Enough, Alina. We can’t know what’s coming, or even when. All we can do is to try our best to keep our heads down.”
I didn’t want soup. I didn’t want the hot tea Mama made me. I really didn’t want the vodka Father pressed into my hands and eventually forced me to drink. I wanted to feel safe again—but our home had been violated, and Aleksy had died in cold blood right in front of my eyes and every time I closed my eyes, I saw it happen all over again.
That night, I lay in my bed and I stared at the window. Scattered clouds hung low above our house, and I watched the slight curve of the moon when it appeared in the gaps between them. I’d taken the vodka so reluctantly, but once the burning in my throat passed, I felt it loosen my limbs and my mind, and I finally stopped shaking and relaxed into my bed. At last, I let my mind turn to Tomasz, and I wondered how he would hear about Aleksy’s fate. Did the mail still work? Could I send him a letter? Should I send him a letter?
And then, finally, from the fog of shock in my mind the most terrifying thought of all gradually rose and grew louder, until it consumed my thoughts entirely.
Tomasz was in Warsaw, studying at university to become a doctor, just like his father before him.
Aleksy had just been killed because he was a doctor.
What if Tomasz was already dead too?
My heart began to race and the trembling started all over again. I sat up and opened my top drawer, then fished around to find the ring at the bottom. I squeezed it tightly in my palm—so tightly that it left a deep impression in my skin—which was exactly what I wanted.
I needed my hopes to mark me and for my dreams to become a part of my body, something tangible that could not be lost or taken.
After the generalized brutality of the early days of the occupation, the Nazi attention soon took on a narrower focus. There was a thriving Jewish community in Trzebinia, and as weeks turned into months, it was the Jewish folk who bore the brunt of the violence. There was widespread violence and theft against the Jews; both by Nazis and then, to my father’s horror, by gangs of opportunistic locals who operated openly in the daylight—their mission was at least in part to express solidarity with the occupying forces.
Once we learned that Jan Golaszewski had participated in such a gang, Father told Filipe and I that we were no longer allowed to see Justyna. I was too scared to disobey, but Filipe began sneaking out at night to meet with her in the fields. A curfew had been set by the Nazi forces and we weren’t supposed to leave the house after dark, so when Filipe refused to stop his midnight trips to see his love, Father was forced to relent.
“Justyna may visit here during the daylight hours, or you may meet her at the boundaries between the farms. It is not her fault that her father is who he is, but I won’t allow my children to step inside that bastard’s home.”
The situation in Trzebinia continued to deteriorate. Jewish businesses and then homes were confiscated altogether—then whole families were forced to shift into a “Jewish area,” and sent to work for the invaders. There were restrictions on travel and marriage, and then we heard the very first rumors of friends from within the town being shot, sometimes for attempting to flee, but often for no real reason at all. The oppression came in waves, each one more determined than the last—setting a new baseline of “normal” for the stunned Jews in town and those of us watching nearby.
My Roman Catholic family had lived side by side with the Jews in Trzebinia forever—we’d been to school with their children, sold them our produce and relied on goods from their stores. So as the noose around the neck of “our” Jewish community began to wind tighter, the sheer helplessness the rest of us felt affected everyone in different ways. Mama and Father would curse the invaders, but reacted almost violently to any suggestion that we were anything other than helpless bystanders to the tragedy unfolding before us. They were determined that if we kept our heads down, we could stay under the radar and remain safe ourselves. But Stanislaw and Filipe were eighteen-year-old boys—right on the edge of manhood, flooded with testosterone and an optimistic belief that justice was achievable. They’d wait until Mama and Father were out of earshot, then have intense discussions about growing rumors of a resistance. The twins traded hints of hope, spurring one another on, until I was absolutely terrified one or both of them would disappear into the night and get themselves killed.
“Don’t do anything rash,” I pleaded with Filipe at every chance I got. He was the more sensitive of the twins—Mama sometimes said that Stanislaw had been born a hardened old man. But Filipe was softer, vastly less arrogant and I knew if I could convince him to remain cautious, Stanislaw would likely follow.
“Mama and Father think that if we keep our heads down, the Nazis will leave us alone,” Filipe said to me one morning, as we collected eggs together in the chicken yard.
“Is that so foolish?” I asked him, and he laughed bitterly.
“Life doesn’t work that way, Alina. Hatred spreads—it doesn’t burn out with time. Someone needs to stand up and stop it. You watch, sister—when they’re done with the Jews, it will be our turn again. Besides, even if we could ride out the war with our heads down, and we sat back while the Nazis worked all of our Jewish friends to death, what kind of Poland could be rebuilt once they were gone? Those people are as important to this country as we are. We’re better off dying with honor than sitting back to watch our countrymen suffer,” he said.
“The father of your girlfriend would disagree with everything you just said,” I muttered, and Filipe sighed heavily.
“Jan is a bigoted pig, Alina. It is hard enough to be civil to that man even on my good days—I can only force myself to be polite to him because if I wasn’t, I’d lose Justyna, and I love her. But don’t you see? It is because of men like Jan that we must find a way to rise up—we owe it to our sisters and brothers.”
Filipe’s rage only intensified once we had our first direct encounter with Nazi harassment. A group of SS officers stopped Truda and Emilia on the street outside of their home when they were walking to the factory to see Mateusz one day.
“I didn’t understand what was happening,” Truda whispered to Mama and me as we watched Emilia sit sullenly in the corner. Filipe and Stani were trying to make her laugh, but she was too shocked to even react to their antics. “One of the officers measured her height and said she is tall for her age and her eyes are green, so she is close enough to Aryan and they should take her.”
“Take her where?” I asked hesitantly.
“I don’t know,” Truda admitted with a shrug. “But clever Emilia was calling me Mama, and my hair is so dark. They looked at me and said her hair would get darker as she got older, and then they told us to go.”
“Yesterday, they took Nadia Nowak’s daughter,” Filipe murmured from his position on the floor. He looked up at us, rage simmering in his eyes. Nadia was Justyna’s aunt, the sister of her mother Ola, and I’d met Nadia’s daughter, Paulina. She was a tiny slip of a thing, only three or four years old, with a halo of blond curls and bright blue eyes. “It’s called the Lebensborn program. The SS are assessing each child in the township for their suitability to be taken from their families and ‘Germanized.’ The soldiers told Nadia that Paulina will be placed with a German foster family and given a new name so she has a chance of growing up to be racially pure. Nadia refused to let Paulina go, so the soldiers tore her from Nadia’s arms. Ola and Justyna are there today comforting her. Nadia is distraught.”
“Oh, that poor thing,” Mama gasped, clasping her hands in front of her chest. “Her husband was killed in the bombings too. She has suffered so much already.”
“I told you, didn’t I?” Filipe said, looking right at me. His nostrils had flared and his shoulders were locked hard. “I told you it was only a matter of time before they came for us too. This is our punishment because we lay down and let them torture our Jewish brothers and sisters, Alina. Now they steal our children, and God only knows what will happen to that little one now that she’s away from her family.”
Emilia was listening to all of this, her eyes growing wider, her jaw going slack.
“Filipe,” I whispered, glancing at her anxiously. “Please, not now.”
Stanislaw broke the tension—he leaped playfully at Filipe, who cried out in surprise. Just as he went to throw Stani away, Filipe looked at Emilia. A startled smile had broken on her face, and so Filipe went limp. Stani had clearly been expecting a wrestling match and didn’t seem to know what to do with Filipe now that he’d pinned him, so I quickly skipped across the room to join the tangle of bodies on the floor. I grinned at Emilia and locked my hands into claws, then tickled my strapping young brothers. They both looked at me blankly, but then when Emilia howled with laughter, they played along too.
When the time came for Truda and Emilia to leave, Filipe and Stani insisted on chaperoning them. As we watched the foursome walk up into the woods to cross the hill into town, Mama shook her head.
“That boy worries me,” she murmured.
I knew exactly which boy she meant.
After that day, I became Filipe’s shadow. The occupation was months old by then, and I’d heard nothing at all of Tomasz, so I had little to fill my thoughts but fears for him and terror that my brother was about to get himself killed—and only one of those things could I control. I kept myself busy by following Filipe around the farm waiting for any opportunity to convince him to stay safe.
I really thought the biggest risk to Filipe’s safety was the temptation to join the resistance, but he never even got the chance to go seeking danger, because soon enough it came to us. I was blindsided by the sound of a truck rumbling on the road beside our property one morning when I was in the field with Mama, harvesting potatoes. The soldier in the passenger’s seat stared right at us as they passed, and a sound escaped my mouth that was almost a shriek.
“Mama...”
“Stay calm,” Mama said quietly. “Whatever you do, Alina, do not panic.”
The blood was pounding through my body—echoing in my ears—my hands were shaking so hard I had to rest them against the soil to hold them still. In the end, I sat on my heels and I stared in horror as the truck came to a stop right at the gate to our farm. Four soldiers stepped from the truck and approached the barn where Father was working.
I couldn’t hear them speaking—we were just too far away. It was a very quick visit—the soldiers handed Father a piece of paper and left, so I told myself everything was fine. I watched the truck as it continued along the road, toward the Golaszewski house. Mama suddenly stood and began to run to the house, and I set my basket aside to follow her. When we reached Father, we found him reading the notice, leaning heavily against the door frame of the barn.
Father seemed stupefied. He was blinking slowly, and the color had drained entirely from his face.
“What is it?” Mama demanded, and she snatched the paper from his hand. As she read it, she made a little noise in the back of her throat.
“Mama, Father...” I croaked. “What is wrong?”
“Go fetch your brothers from the other field,” Father said dully. “We need to have a talk.”
We sat around the table and each of us took our turn to hold the paper. It was a summons—all families in our district who had children over the age of twelve would be required to send them for labor assignment. I was too upset to read the whole thing, in fact, every time I tried, my vision clouded with tears. Still, I was simply determined to keep a grip on some kind of optimism—or better still, to find a loophole.
“There has to be a way around it,” I told my family. My brothers shared an impatient glance, but I ignored them and pressed harder to find a way out of the mess. “They can’t make us leave our family and our home. They can’t—”
“Alina,” Filipe cut me off sharply. “These are the same people who shot Aleksy and the mayor in front of the entire town. These are the same soldiers who are making the Jewish children in the town work from sunup to sundown—the same pigs who think nothing of beating women and children to death if they disobey. The same men who took little Paulina Nowak just because her hair is blond. Do you really think they are going to hesitate to take a bunch of teenagers away in case we get homesick?”
I went to bed early that night, and I closed the door between my bed and the rest of the house, and I looked around my little room—my little world. My parents had split our tiny house into three rooms—although by today’s standards, two of those rooms would be laughably small, no more than closets. We were farmers—peasants, in the local vernacular—people who made only just enough from our land to support ourselves and during dry years, not a single shaft of wheat we didn’t desperately need.
So many times since Tomasz left, I’d been so desperate to flee that house to run to Warsaw to be with him. But that was when I thought I was walking away from my family into Tomasz’s waiting arms, an entirely different scenario to this one—where I was being torn away and sent to hostile strangers in a hostile land. I was existing here at the farm in a broken world, propelled out of bed each day only by the fact that every sunrise at least had the potential to bring news of Tomasz’s safety. If the Nazis took me away, how would he ever find me? How would I ever know what had become of him? The months that had passed since his last letter had felt close to unbearable. How could I survive if the not knowing became a permanent state?
I lay on my bed and I wrapped my arms around myself and I tried so hard to be brave, but I just kept picturing myself so far away from my family, isolated in a place where I didn’t speak the language and where I would no longer be the beloved and somewhat-sheltered youngest child, but instead a vulnerable young woman on her own. Eventually I closed my eyes, and I fell into an exhausted sleep, but I awoke sometime later to hushed whispers from my parents in the living area. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, so slipped out of bed to stand at the door.
But Stanislaw is the strongest. We must keep him—we cannot run the farm without him. At the very least we keep Filipe—he has no common sense and he will run his mouth off if we let him go—
No! Alina is tiny and she’s weak and too pretty. She is but a child! If we send Alina, she will never survive. We must keep her here.
But if we keep her, the farm will never survive!
I opened the door, and my parents both jumped in their chairs. My father looked away, but Mama turned to me and said impatiently, “Back to bed.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“Nothing. It is none of your concern.”
Hope blossomed in my chest. This was such an enticing sensation that I had to press a little harder, even though I knew I’d likely be shouted at for doing so.
“Did you find a way for us to stay?”
“Back to bed!” Mama said, and as I’d expected, her tone left no room for argument. There was no sleeping after that, and later, when I heard my parents pull out the sofa that served as their bed, I waited a while until they fell silent, then I sneaked past their bed to the boys’ tiny room at the other end of the house. My brothers were wide-awake, lying top-to-tail on the sofa they shared. When I entered the room, Filipe sat up and opened his arms to me.
“What is going on? Can we stay after all?”
He pulled away from me to stare at me in disbelief.
“Didn’t you read the notice?”
“I read most of it...” I lied, and he sighed heavily.
“One of us will be given a permit to stay here and help them run the farm. Mama and Father have to choose,” Filipe told me softly. He brushed my hair back from my face, then added, “But to ask them to choose between their children is a cruelty that we will not tolerate. Stani and I will go. You will have to work hard, Alina—and you are lazy, so it won’t be easy. But it is safer for you to stay here.”
“But I’m going to marry Tomasz soon, and then I’ll move to Warsaw,” I said stubbornly.
“Alina,” Stanislaw whispered impatiently. “There is no university left at Warsaw. I heard that the professors have all been imprisoned or executed, and most of the students joined the Wehrmacht. Tomasz is either in prison or working with those monsters, but it doesn’t even matter which—you’re not moving away.”
I was indignant at the very idea that Tomasz would ever align himself with the Nazi troops.
“How dare you—”
“Hush, Alina,” Filipe said tiredly. “No one knows where Tomasz is, not for sure, so don’t get upset.” Then he glanced at me, and he added slowly, “But if you stay here, he has a chance of finding you if he manages to get out of the city to come home.”
I’d thought the same thing myself. For just a moment, I clung to the idea greedily, but then I remembered what the trade-off was. I tried to imagine my life without the twins, but the very thought of it filled me with loneliness.
“But I don’t want you to go to away,” I whispered tearfully, and Stanislaw sighed.
“So, Alina, instead—will you go to the work farm for us then? Miles away from Mama and Father—all on your own?”
In the end, the boys would not be deterred. When the day came for them to leave, Mama, Father and I walked them into Trzebinia to the train station. Mateusz, Truda and Emilia met us there, and when Emilia saw me, she skipped to my side and smiled sadly.
“This is just like when we said goodbye to Tomasz,” she whispered.
I nodded, but I was distracted, absorbing the shocking scene before me. It was an overcast day, just like Tomasz’s departure, and we were at the train station again—but Emilia was very wrong, because I was immediately aware that this moment was something altogether new.
This time, no one was waiting on the platform to send their loved ones on to some exciting adventure. None of these children were leaving Trzebinia to learn or to explore—they were being stolen from us. To the invaders, they were nothing more than a resource to be exploited, but those of us left behind knew that a part of the soul of our district was being torn away. Even Nadia Nowak, who had already lost her husband in the bombings then had her precious Paulina taken for Germanization, stood on that platform and wailed loudly as she said goodbye to her three oldest teenagers. Nadia joined a sea of other mothers who sobbed with equal grief and terror, and a crowd of fathers who cleared their throats compulsively, and dabbed frantically at their eyes to hide any hint of moisture.
The young people stood woodenly for the most part. Some of the very young ones cried, but it wasn’t the unrestrained emotion we saw in their mothers—these were tears of shock and disbelief. I got the sense that even once the train arrived at the work farms, those young people would take weeks to accept the reality of their situations.
And that would have been me, but for my brothers.
I’d been relieved since the decision was made that I would stay, but as I faced the consequences of my easy acceptance of my brother’s nobility, I was swamped in a wave of grief that threatened to knock me to my knees.
Emilia tugged my hand suddenly, and I looked down at her to find she was staring at me intently.
“Do you think Tomasz is still alive?” she asked me. I blinked at her, surprised both at the question and the resigned tone with which she asked it. I shook myself mentally and forced myself to focus, because there was something not at all right about such a grown-up, pessimistic tone coming from sweet little Emilia. I ruffled her hair and I said firmly, “Of course he is. He’s alive and he’s well and he’s doing everything he can to get back to us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“He promised me, silly. And Tomasz would never lie to me.”
Her sharp green gaze didn’t waver from mine, and it took every bit of strength I had not to look away. I wouldn’t break the stare, because I feared if I did, she’d see right through me. Was I as sure as all that? Not at all. But for all of the desperation in our lives that day, I wanted to save Emilia the one small trauma of doubting her beloved big brother.
She nodded suddenly, abruptly, and went back to staring at the assembled crowd around us. All too soon, announcements came that it was time for the young people to make their way to the train. Filipe stepped toward me and enveloped me in a bear hug.
“Look after Mama and Father, Alina. Work hard.”
“I wish you could stay,” I whispered. My guilt was so palpable in that moment I couldn’t even make myself look him in the eye.
“I couldn’t stay. Not when the alternative was for you to go,” he said gently. Then he kissed my forehead and whispered against my hair, “Be brave, little sister. You are so much more than you know.”
Stani approached me as the tears filled my eyes. He kissed my cheek too, but he was silent, even as he embraced our parents. Father stood frozen, his muscles locked, his teeth set hard. Mama silently cried. Truda was clutching Mateusz’s arm so tightly her fingers were white, but her expression was solemn.
The boys gave a simultaneous nod, and they walked away to join the line to fill the train. They kept their chins high, and they both managed a smile and a wave back toward us just before they disappeared from our view.
I was awed by their courage and bewildered that even that moment didn’t seem to faze them one little bit. Of course, they must have been terrified—they were only boys, and all of the things that had scared me about the forced labor arrangement would have been equally overwhelming to them too. Neither one spoke much German, neither one had ever lived out of home before.
I knew the very act of hiding their fear was one of sacrifice, just like the decision to go in my place. They were good people—the best people.
I still think about my big brothers. I sometimes wonder if I would have done anything different that day, if only I’d known that within a year they’d both be dead—and that those quiet moments by the train station would be the very last time I ever saw them.