In the summer of 1944, we sensed that the war was almost over. Stashik was appearing more frequently with updates that the Allies were closing in on the Nazis or that the Russians were approaching. The adults continued to pray, but they were afraid to get their hopes up. One morning we were awakened by a commotion outside: people shouting, bombs exploding, and bright flares flying over the attic.
“Could it be over?” Aunt Tsivia asked.
My father crawled over to peek out through the wooden slats. He could see soldiers from the Russian army. “They’re running around like crazy out there,” he observed. Then we heard more bomb blasts and felt the attic shaking. “Duck down!” he shouted.
“This whole place will be set on fire!” Uncle Libish said.
The noise and rumblings seemed endless. Terrified, I covered my ears. At some point, Stashik appeared, dressed neatly, in clean overalls.
“The war is over,” he announced, smiling.
Everyone stared at him, in shock. It was like waking up from a nightmare.
“The Russians won! They chased out the Germans. You’re free to go,” he said.
“I cannot believe it!” Uncle Norman finally exclaimed. The realization was sinking in. The adults became more animated and had tears in their eyes. They probably wanted to jump for joy, but after two years of immobility, most couldn’t even stand up.
“This is the day we’ve been praying for!” Aunt Tsivia said. She couldn’t manage to walk, so she settled for crawling over to hug her daughters.
“It’s a miracle! It’s over!” said Uncle Benny. He held out his hand to help up his brother Henry. “Let’s leave this stench and go into the light.”
“I never thought we’d survive,” Uncle Libish said.
“Can we get out of here?” Cousin Sally asked. She was the only child who could walk on her own.
“Yes. Let’s go home. Live again as free people,” my father said. I barely recognized his voice after only hearing him whisper for so long.
The adults, pale and bent over, gathered up their few possessions. My sister and I felt bewildered. We could not imagine what it would be like to be free, or to go home without our mother.
“What’s the matter, Sara?” I whispered when I saw tears streaming down her cheeks. I had not used my voice in so long I did not really remember how to speak.
“My legs hurt too much to walk. Look how bent they are.” She stood up, and I noticed her bowed legs.
“Don’t worry. Someone will carry you down.”
“But I don’t want to go out there,” my sister confessed.
“Why not? You’ll see your bed and our beautiful garden.”
“I’m afraid to go outside. It’s safer in here, as long as we’re quiet.”
“Oh,” I said. Now I was having second thoughts, too.
We were dressed in the same clothes we had worn into the attic two years earlier. They were filthy and reduced to shreds. My shoes didn’t fit any longer, so my father wrapped my feet in some sort of fabric to protect them. Somehow, we still managed to look decent. We brushed our hair with a brush Stashik had given us, and the men shaved.
Uncle Max carried me down in his arms. I felt like a piece of baggage that had been warehoused for two years. When we got to the front door, Stashik and Maria Grajolski were waiting.
“May God love you and always be with you,” my father told them. The other adults each said their own thank-yous on the way out.
“Go with God,” the farmer said. Then Stashik grew serious. “You must get away from here as quickly as possible. Don’t forget, no one can ever know I hid you.” He opened the door and we tentatively stepped outside, making sure the coast was clear. We would never see him again.
“We have to be careful,” my father cautioned the minute the door closed behind us. “We don’t know who’s out here, or if anyone is searching for us.” We left as quickly as possible, in small groups, just as we had arrived. The difference was that many of us, even the adults, had to crawl.
When the Grajolskis’ farm was out of sight, Uncle Max set me down and told me to try to walk. Others tried to stand on their own as well. I took a tentative step or two and then fell. Soon, we heard shouting and gunshots from all directions.
“I knew it was too soon,” Uncle Libish said. “The Germans are still fighting.”
“We have no choice at this point. We’re heading home,” my father said.
We had assumed that because the war was ending, that was that. But as the German forces withdrew westward and the Red Army advanced from the east, they were still battling. It was a sunny summer day, and as we slowly walked through the cornfields, making our way down to the river, the Germans and Russians fought on either side of us. Flares and bullets flew overhead. Polish farmers stood out in their fields, confused as to what to do.
My father began shouting directions. “Let’s move quickly!” he said. “Quick, hide!” he was saying a minute later. “No, keep going.”
I took a few steps, in between being carried.
“Be careful where you walk,” someone said. We had no idea where land mines might be placed. Soon everyone was exhausted. We were also starving. We had sat down in the reeds along the riverbank to eat some raw corn we had picked when my father bounced up, like a rusty spring.
“Who’s there?” he gasped.
“What is it?” Aunt Tsivia shrieked.
I hadn’t heard anyone approaching, but I was afraid to open my eyes. When I dared, just a crack, I saw another refugee in the reeds. He was a tall, skinny teenager with straight, sandy brown hair. He looked up at us.
“Uncle Iche?” he said after a couple of seconds.
A look of recognition came to my father’s face. “David? Is that you?”
“Yes. I can’t believe I found you! I was afraid that none of you had survived.”
“Look,” my father told all of us, smiling. “It’s my nephew David!”
“Of course! Thank God, David,” Uncle Max said.
By then, I realized that David was my cousin. His mother, Aunt Masha, was my mother’s sister. His father and sister were the pair we had watched run by the attic window, just before they were shot. But nobody mentioned this.
“Where were you hiding?” my father asked.
“First I was in the forest. Then on a farm.” David went on to tell us that his mother had been murdered, and confirmed what we had witnessed, that his father and sister had, too.
My father told David to come stay with us. At first, David resisted. He thought it would be safer to remain on his own. Things were still precarious. But my father insisted.
As one group, we slowly resumed our trek home to the background cacophony of gunshots, explosions, dogs barking, and loud Russian soldiers. I was terrified, sensing that at any moment something terrible would happen. Amid the chaos, a Russian soldier in a khaki uniform and triangle-shaped hat approached, his rifle pointed at us.
“I am Jewish!” Uncle Max shouted, lifting his hands into the air.
“I am also Jewish,” the Russian said. Then he lowered his rifle. “Where are you headed?”
“Home,” my father said.
“I will take you there.”
“It’s like God would send him,” my father said quietly to Uncle Max.
Hours after we had left the attic, we finally arrived home. Once inside, I looked around in shock. The lace curtains had vanished. The brand-new wooden furniture was gone. Apparently it had been burned for fuel, the adults surmised, based on the remnants scattered around. And there was trash everywhere. We were standing in a cold, empty shack. It didn’t look or feel anything like the home I remembered. My sister and I started crying.
“We’ll just have to make the best of it,” my father said sadly, surveying the ruins.
There was a knock on the door. The soldier had returned, with an elderly Russian doctor in tow. “My friend will explain to you how to reacclimate,” he said.
We stood in our empty kitchen listening to the doctor’s recommendations.
“You need to slowly expand your lungs. They’re congested because you haven’t breathed normally for such a long time,” he said, pausing to demonstrate with a slow, deep breath. “And be careful to stay out of the sun.”
“What’s wong with the sun?” I asked. I seemed to have lost the ability to pronounce r’s and l’s.
“Our skin is so pale that it will burn very easily,” Uncle Norman explained.
“We can never go out in the sun again?” I asked.
“No, just for a little while,” he said, smiling.
Finally, the doctor advised us to eat only small amounts at first, since we had gone for two years without real food. He wished us luck and left with the Russian soldier.
That evening, we all plopped down on the floor to sleep. The next night my father decided we should sleep down in the basement.
“The basement? But that’s where Mushe stores our crops in the winter!” I said.
My reference to my mother brought a pained look to my father’s face. To my disappointment, however, he skirted any mention of her. “There are no windows down there, so it will be safer,” he explained. He had heard rumors of spontaneous pogroms by anti-Semitic Polish neighbors. In nearby towns, as the Germans retreated, local Poles were attacking Jews who returned to reclaim their homes and possessions.
We thought that we would return to normal circumstances and that no one would believe what terrible things we had endured. But we quickly discovered that things were far from normal, and that there was no one around to hear what we had been through. In fact, only one in ten Polish Jews had survived the war. My mother’s stepmother, Grandma Simma, who had lived next door, had been killed in one of the Jewish ghettos. Even our Polish neighbors seemed to have vanished. Perhaps they were afraid to be seen with us. Grandpa Aharon’s home, where my single uncles had lived before the war, was torn apart, uninhabitable. Uncle Max could not locate even the treasured family Torah that his father had buried behind his home.
Despite the danger, my father and some of my uncles attempted to transact some business. Eager to again earn a living, they took sugar from a bombed-out factory in town and bartered it for unreclaimed clothing and textiles that sympathetic Poles had hidden for Jews. Then they resold the clothing and fabric.
My sister and I stayed home, often with Uncle Norman, when my father was out, trying to work. We were still in hiding. Not only was it unsafe for us to walk around alone, but we were still in shock. We were not remotely ready to socialize or attend school. I was weak and thin as a rail. My legs were bent, and my chest hurt when I took deep breaths. With Uncle Norman, we drew pictures and talked. Sometimes he would braid our hair or help wash our clothes.
Our house never returned to being the warm home I remembered. My father was more preoccupied than before the war. I felt a huge void from my mother’s absence, which I longed for my father to fill. Instead, the distance between us expanded as he avoided any discussion of my mother, or of my feelings about her death. Even if my father had been able to talk about those things, it seemed impossible to have a private conversation. There were always other relatives around.
Our lives at least had a daytime and nighttime once again. We brushed our teeth, washed up, and celebrated some semblance of Shabbos. In the evenings, we sat on stools around a makeshift table and ate modest dinners that everyone pitched in to prepare. Over boiled eggs, potatoes, and vegetable soups, my father and uncles discussed business opportunities and the latest rumors.
“Can you believe a Pole asked me today where our family hid during the war?” Uncle Max said at dinner one night.
“You didn’t tell him, did you?” my father asked.
“I didn’t say a word,” Uncle Max said. “But he said to me, ‘Never mind, I’ll tell you where. The Grajolskis’ farm.’ I was shocked, but very casually I said, ‘Why do you say that?’”
“With a strange, knowing smile, the Polish man said, ‘During the winter, all the homes had snow on their roofs—except for the Grajolskis’. And what would explain that? Heat—generated by bodies in the attic.’”
My father’s and Uncle Max’s eyes met. They looked worried.
“What could I say?” Uncle Max asked, dunking some bread into his bowl of soup.
“You couldn’t have lied?” Uncle Benny asked. “You know that Armia Krayova still wants to kill the rest of the Jews here.”
“They’re not going to touch us. We are five men with guns and grenades,” Uncle Henry said. Since he spoke so rarely, when he did, I figured it was important.
“Guns in our house?” I asked.
“No. Neighbors just think we do,” my father said gently to me. Then he turned to his brothers and more tersely said, “That’s enough in front of the girls.”
“What’s Armia Krayova?” Sara asked. She was absentmindedly pulling her bread apart, sending crumbs cascading onto the table.
“They’re Polish thugs who want to kill the rest of the Jews. During the war, they helped the Germans fight against the partisans,” my cousin David explained. He told us that he had befriended Jewish partisans in the forest. They had hidden in underground bunkers and strategically struck at the Nazis.
“I heard that just last month, not far from here, Armia Krayova barged in on a family during Shabbos dinner and killed all of them,” Uncle Benny added, dramatically.
“That’s enough!” my father said. He looked at my sister and me and could tell we were scared. “Every country has good and bad people,” he said, putting his hand over mine. “Some Poles helped us, like Stashik. Others did not. We just have to know who to trust.”
That ended the conversation for the night. But the truth was, we did not know whom to trust. Poland had been a center of Jewish life for nearly a thousand years. Now, it seemed, we were despised in our own country. Soon the situation grew more precarious.
One morning, a few months after we had left the attic, my sister and I were sitting on our front porch when Uncle Max raced over, looking pale. We followed him inside.
“Everybody! Come quick!” he yelled.
“What’s going on?” my father asked.
“You won’t believe,” Uncle Max said. “Thank God they were alive.” He told us that early that morning, when he had gone over to Aunt Tsivia’s home, he found the entire family lying facedown, crying hysterically, with rags pushed into their mouths. As he worked quickly to untie them, one by one, he pieced together what had happened.
“Masked men came with rifles,” Tsivia said, trying to catch her breath. “They were screaming about not wanting Jews in Poland. That we should go to Palestine. Then they fired a shot right past my head.” At the mention of the gunshot, all three girls, Sally, Miriam, and Lola, burst into tears again.
“They shot at you?” Uncle Max asked his sister.
“Yes, Max, honest to God. To prove that they were serious about killing us if we didn’t leave Poland.”
“They called us ‘Christ killers’ and said they would kill all of us,” ten-year-old Sally said as she sobbed. “But they didn’t.”
“Thank God,” Uncle Max said, looking to his sister to explain.
“God was good. There was one man who showed mercy and convinced his partners to rob us but not kill us,” Aunt Tsivia said.
Standing in our kitchen, Uncle Max breathlessly retold the story and then raced ahead to his conclusion. “We can’t stay here any longer. It’s absolutely not safe. You should have seen the looks on their—” He was interrupted by a knock on the door. When my father opened it, a young Polish man around the age of twenty stood there with a machine gun. No one moved. My heart was pounding so hard it hurt my ears. Then our cousin David broke the silence.
“Don’t worry. This is an old friend of mine.”
David turned to his friend. “Don’t tell me you belong to Armia Krayova.”
The man ignored the question. Instead, he looked directly at David. “I promised when I saw you last that I would do you a favor if I could. Well, this is the favor of your life.”
“I’m listening,” David said calmly.
“Whoever sleeps in your uncle Isaac’s home tonight will not be alive tomorrow morning. I’m sorry to tell you this.”
By evening, my father had made arrangements for us to leave home once again.