Chapter Nineteen
Praying for Larissa

The smell of bleaching powder but not misery. No barbed wire. No Nazi soldiers with guns. This refugee camp had taken on a personality while I was being treated at the hospital. Fragments of families had claimed corners of rooms in the various blasted-out convent buildings. Others had built makeshift homes amidst the rubble from what they could find — twisted metal, broken-down doors, half-bricks.

The first thing I looked for was the church. People grinned when I asked about it and pointed me to an area at the back of the camp. Set off to one side was what looked like a long-abandoned barn on the outside, but there was a well-trod path leading up to it. I walked to the door and it creaked loudly as I opened it.

Sunlight poured in from the shattered rafters.

I gasped in amazement at what I saw. An altar neatly made of stacked tin cans with a wooden door laid across as a tabletop. The stolen icon from that German house was propped up in the centre of the altar, a golden candelabra on one side and dirt-filled tin cans holding hand-dipped candles on the other side. On the back wall of the barn hung a handmade wooden cross.

I knelt down before the altar and sobbed a prayer for the souls of my mother, father, grandmother. I hoped that soon they could rest in peace.

I was safe.

I would find Larissa.

I said a prayer of thanks that I still lived, and then another of hope, for Luka … Zenia … Kataryna … Mary … Natalia …

Larissa.

I don’t know how long I stayed in contemplation, but it must have been quite a while. When I tried to stand up, I couldn’t. My legs and feet were stiff and numb.

“Let me help you.”

A voice from a distant dream. I looked up.

The way the light shone through the broken slats in the barn roof made it difficult to see who was standing there, but the silhouette was beloved. The voice was dear. Could it possibly be?

“Luka?”

He stepped forward. His shock of wild hair had grown back but his eyes were circled with shadows of grief. “They told me I might find you here.” He knelt and placed my arms around his neck.

Together we stood. “Dear Lida,” he said. “I promised I would find you.”

“I dreamt of you the night you escaped.”

He smiled. “I was thinking of you as well, praying that you would be safe. I felt guilty leaving you behind.”

“How did you manage to get away?”

We walked out of the makeshift church together — Luka still helping me, although my feet and legs were feeling less numb — and he told me about that night.

“I couldn’t just walk out,” he said. “During the day there were too many people around, and at night the gates were locked and guards with guns were on patrol.”

“So how did you escape?”

“Did you ever see what they did with the dead bodies?” he asked.

I shuddered at the memory. “They piled them into trucks.”

Luka nodded. “There were many trucks. Many deaths at the hospital. I got out on one of those trucks.”

I looked at Luka, not sure that I had heard correctly. “You hid among the corpses?”

“Yes.”

We walked in silence past children playing with makeshift toys, and mothers scrubbing rags in soapy basins of water. What a contrast to be with people smiling and relaxed when in my mind was the image of Luka in a truck of the dead.

“It must have been awful,” I said.

He squeezed my hand and sighed. “I managed to loosen the tarp from the back of the truck and jump out onto the road when we were a good distance from the camp. Thank goodness it was dark out. I hid in the woods and met up with others who had escaped from camps as well.”

“You stayed in the woods all that time?”

He looked at me but his eyes seemed distant. “We moved around a lot. The Nazis hunted us down. Not all our group survived.”

We were each lost in our own thoughts and without realizing it, we reached the end of the refugee camp. I sat down on the tire of an abandoned Jeep and patted the spot beside me. Luka sat as well.

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“A day or so ago,” he said. “I found out that a group of survivors from our work camp had been taken to the American army hospital down the road. I thought that if you were among that group, you would end up here.”

“Have you found any others?”

Luka shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone else I knew from there.”

Luka and I spent as much time as we could together over the next days and weeks. There was much work to do — helping families patch together makeshift homes, assisting with food distribution, playing with the younger children. He was much healthier than most of the refugees, and now that my feet were healing and I was eating more than turnip soup, I had become stronger as well. Luka found a place to sleep with a group of boys his age. I found a cozy spot on my own in the corner of what used to be an office in one of the convent buildings.

Every morning I would check with the people from the Red Cross to see if there was any word about Larissa, but each day the answer was the same.

“I am sorry, dear,” said the kind-hearted Canadian woman whose hair was a mass of red curls. “I hope we’ll have better news for you soon.”

“Is there any way of checking German records?”

“What do you mean?” asked the woman.

“I may have seen her with some Germans,” I said evasively. I didn’t want to admit that I thought I had seen her with a Nazi officer’s family.

“The Germans destroyed records as they abandoned offices,” said the woman, “but we’re doing the best that we can.”

Her words cut me to the heart. What chance did I really have of ever finding my sister? I didn’t even know if she would be using her real name, if she’d been living with that Nazi family I saw in the car.

Later, when I sat beside Luka and we ate tasty buns made with white flour and a faint taste of sugar, he said, “Don’t ever give up hope. All you can do is keep on looking. She’s probably looking for you as well.”

He was right, and I knew it. Every day I checked the fluttering messages, hoping that one day I would see a message from my sister.

Luka checked as well. He had no way of finding his father, who was either still in Siberia or dead by now. But his mother had been a slave labourer. Perhaps one day a fluttering message from her would appear.