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For six long months keeping that promise was to prove a simple task, for that entire time we spent as guests of Izabella and her husband, Wojciech.
Certainly it was not our intention to stay so long. If the first week was unavoidable, until my bandages were removed and my sight restored, that weeks became months was very much at the insistence of our hosts.
I had correctly surmised they were but peasants eking out an exiguous subsistence from the forest, and though they spoke no language beyond their native Polish the problem of communication proved quickly surmountable. Even in the first week we began to pick up occasional words, the better to make ourselves understood, and as the months passed all three of us began to develop a command of the language, perhaps Elone most of all.
Spring turned to summer almost unrealised in the sylvanian cocoon of the forest’s depths, and by the time autumn beckoned we were, if far from fluent, certainly competent to converse of simple subjects with our hosts.
In the latter months of our stay I was to learn much about our situation. My early fear that we might be turned over to the Nazis, especially when Elone’s Jewish background became known, was quickly banished, for Izabella and Wojciech were among the kindest people one could wish to meet, devoted selflessly to our welfare.
If their lifestyle was unfamiliar to us, both for its pastoral nature and its senescence, still we fell quickly into the diurnal routine of forest life.
The first month was one spent resting and re-nourishing our bodies, building up our strength after our harrowing ordeal, but once my bandages were removed I was able to help Wojciech about the forest and later even to accompany him to a nearby town where he bartered chopped wood and mushrooms for other goods.
Elone too made herself helpful, assisting Izabella about the house, always to be seen besom in hand, and even taking on a maternal role to my little brother, caring for him when I was unable to.
Somehow this remarkable child played the roles of juvenile friend and substitute mother simultaneously, at once a laughing, giggling little girl playing silly games with Nicolae, yet also tending his needs and caring for him in a manner that entirely belied her years and left me eternally indebted to her.
As my command of the language developed, I began to piece together the nature of our Polish hosts’ lifestyle, and soon came to realise it was not quite the epitome of rustic innocence it first appeared.
Early into our stay Nicolae had, in the course of a game of hide and seek with Elone, stumbled across a cache of weaponry that stood in stark contrast with the peasant shotgun Wojciech carried about the forest to procure our meals and fend off wild beasts.
I urged the children to ignore their find and play elsewhere, but my suspicions were now aroused and for several weeks I was fearful that my first impressions were in error and that our hosts were indeed Nazi sympathizers, perhaps awaiting the opportunity to turn us over to the authorities for some indecent reward.
But in the second month of our stay all was to be explained and my mind put at rest.
We woke one morning to find new guests, one a badly wounded soldier wearing a uniform instantly recognisable by the hammer and sickle insignia as Russian. The others were clearly Polish partisans, dressed and armed much as those who had dragged us from the train after the derailment, and though at this stage my Polish was not up to conversation it became apparent Izabella and Wojciech were fierce patriots to their country, ready to risk their life to take in and tend the needs of wounded men leading the fight against the Nazi occupation.
The Russian spoke no Romanian but was competent in Polish and so able to inform our hosts of the latest developments in the war, which in due course Izabella would impart to me. I was heartened to learn advances were being made on both the eastern and western fronts, and that the wounded Russian believed the war to have reached a turning point.
That said, there was no hope of a cessation of hostilities in the near future and the fate of the occupied countries, Poland and my native Romania among them, hung in the balance.
I was fired with inspiration by this news, wishing I could do something constructive to help, but knew my immediate duty was to my little brother and Elone, and the reuniting of our families.
In the last month of our stay, in my broken Polish, I put my concerns to Izabella and Wojciech as we sat around a log fire one autumn evening, soon after the younger children had retired for the night.