Kovno was quiet. We were far from the fighting, deep in the Lithuanian section of Poland, near the border with the Soviet Union. We were about two hundred altogether, soldiers, officers, and medical staff. We huddled in our coats outside one of the military warehouses. I had no gloves, and had to blow on my hands in the early-morning chill. We had left summer behind us. One of my nails had been torn almost to the quick, and it stung sharply as I blew on my fingers.
I had no idea what was going on or what would happen. I was the youngest member of the group, and nobody bothered to explain anything to me. There was a general, whose name I never learned. I knew we were waiting for him to make an announcement. The soldiers were waiting to hear how the Polish army would make its stand. We only had to regroup and resupply, the officers were assuring their men, and then we would be ready to confront the Germans. We would show the Wehrmacht what the Polish army was made of.
One man jerked his chin toward the door, and we all turned to see the general coming out with an aide by his side. They stood on the steps. In the crowd, the soldiers stood at attention. The walking wounded tried to square their shoulders or hold themselves straight, but too many of them were weak and fell back on their crutches. I and the other nurses stood in a group, hugging ourselves for warmth, waiting for the general to speak. I could see he had not shaved in a few days, and the stubble of whiskers on his chin and cheeks was white, making him look like a tired old man.
At last he cleared his throat. “God will surely bless you all for the courage and strength you have shown. You have fought bravely for our beloved country. Your grandchildren will bless you for it.” Here he paused, and cleared his throat again. “But the Polish army is through. I have just learned that the Germans and the Soviets have divided Poland between them. Even now, we are standing in Soviet territory. We are not a country any longer. There is no more Poland.”
Moans of dismay and cries of denial rose from the crowd. I looked at the nurse standing next to me. Tears were running down her face. I could not understand what the general meant. How could there not be a Poland anymore? My feet were on the ground, Polish ground. How could the land not be?
“The Polish government has reached England, and from there they will do everything possible to regain our country. In the meantime, you are free to go—to fight in the forests, to return to your homes—” His voice broke. Men throughout the crowd were crying now, cursing and sobbing at the same time. A colonel ripped the insignia from his uniform and crushed it in his hand, shaking with tears.
The general indicated the warehouse door. “Take what you need. Take it all.” He pulled himself upright, and saluted the company. His chin was trembling. Then he strode down the steps, the aide hurrying behind him.
At once, there was pandemonium. Everyone began talking, cursing the Germans and the Russians, trying to decide what to do. Some of the soldiers flung open the warehouse door, and within minutes, there was a steady stream of people going in and out. Blankets, guns, clothes, bottles of vodka, bags of flour, canned meat, cartons of cigarettes—anything useful was loaded onto the trucks we had commandeered. Someone dropped a bottle, and it smashed on the steps; a truck engine backfired as it roared to life. People were heading for the forest with everything they could carry.
And I was going, too. Somehow, I was going with the ragtag army-without-a-country into the Lithuanian forest. It seemed unreal to me, as though I were only acting a part in a play. This could not be me, climbing into a truck and sitting on a crate of ammunition. The real Irena belonged at home, not here, unwashed, hungry, shivering. I watched a louse crawl out of my coat sleeve. This was not really me with lice. It could not be.
The first night in the forest, we rigged blankets into tents. Some of us slept in the trucks, and some on the ground. Some didn't sleep at all, but stayed awake in the dark, smoking, plotting revenge. A few men got very drunk, and I heard them cursing and sobbing, or stumbling through their prayers. In the morning, we discovered that eight soldiers and officers had killed themselves during the night: guns in the mouth, knives across the throat.
That was how our first day as exiles in our own land began. Someone offered a plan; some of the men formed a committee of leadership, but I didn't know them and they never asked my opinion. We would head south, toward Lvov, over five hundred kilometers away.
Rumors constantly passed back and forth across our camp as we prepared to move: There was a general in Lvov—no, but there were five army units there and they were preparing to move against the Germans—no, but in Lvov there was an undersecretary of the Polish government and he was rallying the troops around him on orders from the exiled government in London—no, but in Lvov there would be an airlift of weapons and ammunition from the French—no, I never knew exactly why we were going to Lvov. Perhaps several of the men in charge had families there, and wanted to go home. I was put in a truck with the rest of the baggage, and we began our move.
We didn't know what to expect from the Lithuanians, who were closer in culture to the Russians than to the Poles. Now that we were an illegal army in Russian-held territory, we did not know if we were safe or no, if we would be welcomed by the locals. We made our way from one village to the next through the massive forest, trading our supplies for theirs: vodka for potatoes, tobacco for sausages, sugar for eggs. Some of the villagers met us with suspicion. Some shut their doors in our faces. Some made hard bargains. Others were good to us, and told us when there were Soviet troops nearby. We crossed into the Polish Ukraine, and I gathered nuts and mushrooms, as though in a caricature of my school outings. I found grapevines draped shroudlike over a tree, but the grapes were shriveled and rotten from the frost. One afternoon as I walked the edge of a wood, there was an explosion of wingbeats at my feet, and a fat bird toiled upward, disappearing for a moment against the sun. Then there was a gunshot, and it fell to earth. One of the soldiers ran past me, grabbed up the bird, and wrung its neck for good measure. As he turned he saw my look, saw how I stared at him, saw me clutching the lapels of my coat together at my throat and breathing hard with surprise and remorse at having flushed the bird.
The fall turned into winter, and we drove past frozen marshes, along rivers crusted with ice, always taking refuge in the forests. We were like animals, scavenging to survive. We lived however we could, growing sick, shivering, huddling ourselves against the snow. I was anemic, I knew; often I was so weak I felt faint if I stood up too quickly from scooping a handful of nuts from the ground. Sometimes we camped in one area for days, casting about like so many blind people, trying to learn what news there was. Other times we moved every day, testing first one Ukrainian village and then another for haven, without finding any.
Every hour, every minute we spent on the roads in our trucks, we were in danger. Members of our group developed strange rituals and superstitions, or carried good-luck charms. Our existence was so precarious that we had reverted to the ways of a more primitive time. Our fires were small, for fear of giving away our position to Russian patrols, and for the same reason we could not rally ourselves with singing. I stayed with the women, sunk in despair of ever seeing my family again. Christmas came and went without comment, and we entered 1940 without hope. The great reason for going to Lvov never materialized. I had no idea what we were doing or where we were going, and I don't believe anyone else did, either. We seemed to be caught in a useless orbit around Lvov, never making any definitive move.
In early January, I was chosen to go on a bartering mission with four soldiers and two other nurses. It was night, and the wheels of our truck churned through a dense layer of new snow. We parked in the woods at the edge of a village near Lvov and proceeded on foot. There were always Russian patrols around, so these missions were dangerous. My companions left me standing watch on a street corner while they entered a dark house.
I pressed my back against the building. The wind shoved against me, seeping through my thin coat. The cold came up through the soles of my boots, gripping my feet hard. I was so full of fear that it was hard to think. The Russians were Communists—they did not believe in God. I had no idea what they were like, or what it meant that they were now our masters, or what they would do if they found us. Overhead were stars, thousands of stars like a field of snowdrops in spring. I had the sensation that I sometimes had in the spring when I looked out over a meadow full of flowers—that if I could only run fast enough I would rise up and fly. I wanted to run. I wanted my mother.
Through the clear, cold air came the sound of a truck, and I saw the beams of headlights bouncing down the street: a Russian patrol. My eyes turned toward the stars again for a moment, and then I was running from cover, trying to run fast enough to rise up into the night sky. I heard the voices of the Russian soldiers as they chased after me, their boots crunching in the snow. Ahead of me was the dark edge of the forest. My breath burned my throat, and I felt the sting of snow as it sifted into the tops of my boots. The Russian soldiers were behind me, yelling and laughing. I was a bird, and I was trying to fly off, and they were going to shoot me. I was almost fast enough. I was almost fast enough.