It was a journey Sarah had been meaning to take for a long time, but with her book accepted for publication, she knew she had to make it now. Since Irena’s death, she hadn’t been able to face coming back.
Over the years she’d visited Poland and in return Irena had come to stay with them in Edinburgh. The children had loved her. She’d never spoken much about the time after she’d been captured by the Germans, only given Sarah the barest details, but she’d entrusted her with her notebook. To be read only on her death.
Reading it had been the hardest thing Sarah had ever done. When she’d finished she’d immediately started writing. The title of her book was The Silent and the Unseen, the English translation of Cichociemni, the name given to the Polish SOE agents. It was Irena’s story, but as Sarah had promised her, it was much more than one woman’s story – it was the story of Poland, of those who could no longer speak for themselves, the story of every brave woman and man who had risked their lives for others. It was also Sarah’s story.
She shivered, huddling deeper into her coat as the taxi swung into the hotel parking bay. Neil had offered to come with her but she’d said no. This was a journey she had to make alone. Besides, she didn’t want to leave the children with anyone except their father and their grandmother. It was the first time she’d been away from them for more than a few nights and she forced away the images of all the disasters that could befall a four- and five-year-old. But what harm could possibly come to her children under the eagle eyes of their grandmother? Mum had almost completely regained her speech and was even painting a little again. Most of the time she lived alone, often coming to the house Sarah and Neil had bought to visit. Sarah’s youngest daughter was the same age Lily had been when she’d been taken from her mother. As a mother herself she couldn’t begin to imagine what courage it had taken for her grandmother to have let her child go.
She was here for six days and had it all planned: Warsaw for three days, a train to Krakow for the final three days and then flying home from there.
There wasn’t much of the day left by the time she checked in and unpacked, but just enough to visit Pawiak prison.
She took a tram from outside the hotel to the nearest stop and walked the remainder of the way. It took her a while to find it, but there it was – an innocuous-looking building, more like the shell of a factory than a prison. She knew from her research that over a hundred thousand Poles had been brought here, most of them tortured before being taken away and shot. Irena had been taken to a similar prison in Germany.
Sarah paid for her ticket. The museum was empty, apart from the ticket collector and young couple with small rucksacks.
‘Not many come here,’ the ticket collector said.
She wandered amongst the exhibits, the whips the guards had used, the inscriptions on the wall, the old service revolvers.
The women had been blindfolded and their mouths filled with plaster before they’d been executed – to stop them shouting the Polish freedom slogan. How did these women feel knowing they were going to their deaths? What about those who were leaving children behind? On a board, behind some glass, were some of the farewell letters the women had written on scraps of paper, the handwriting so tiny it was impossible to read from where she was standing. The letters were to their children. What do you say to a child you know you’ll never see again? How do you find the right words? What would she say to hers if she knew she was to die? She forced the thought away as well as the impulse to speak to them.
When she was finished, she took a taxi to the Gestapo headquarters. This was the same route that the women and men would have taken from Pawiak prison, in the back of a truck, knowing they were going to be tortured and probably wondering whether they’d have the strength not to betray their contacts.
Here was the office where they would have been interviewed by a Gestapo officer, some taken out into the courtyard and shot immediately; others, returned to Pawiak to await their sentence.
She was nauseous and frozen by the time she returned to the hotel. While she ran herself a bath she phoned Neil.
‘How are the girls?’ she asked.
‘Irene is on a playdate and Annie is in the kitchen making figures out of Play-Doh. Considering it’s approximately only eight hours since you’ve left me in charge, I haven’t managed to lose one yet.’
‘Don’t joke,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Hold on a moment.’ She went to the bathroom and turned off the taps. ‘I’m back,’ she said. ‘About to take a bath then get something to eat. I might order room service; I don’t think I can face the hotel dining room tonight.’
‘You should have let me come with you.’ His voice was soft, concerned. He still travelled all over the world as a photo journalist. How could she stop him? He was doing what needed to be done and she was proud of him. She’d learned to live with her terror that one day his luck would run out. She’d learned that courage from Irena.
‘I had to do it on my own, you know that.’
‘Say the word and I’ll be there.’
Her throat tightened. Right now she wanted nothing more than to feel his arms around her. But she didn’t want him to leave the children. Especially not now. She needed to know he was there, the only person, apart from Mum, she trusted completely to watch over them.
She lightened her voice. ‘I know, but I’ll be all right. I’m tired. You know I don’t do well when I don’t get my full eight hours.’
‘I’ll get Annie for you. Take care, honey. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
She spoke to her youngest child for a while, feeling the tension drain from her as Annie explained she was making a farmyard from her Play-Doh. She loved her children with an intensity that frightened her sometimes. This was, she now knew, how her mother had felt about her, but tenfold.
The next day she walked to the street where her mother’s family had been killed. This was perhaps the hardest bit of her journey. She walked under the archway, just as her grandmother, mother and Irena would have done. She could feel the sadness, the abject terror of the thousands as they were led to their deaths. Why didn’t more try to run? From what Irena had told her it was clear that they’d known they were going to die.
In here, in this space, this piece of scrub ground with weeds, was where the patients and staff were shot and burned.
Although she couldn’t believe in a God who could have let this happen, she knelt and lit a candle for the dead. After that she visited the house where her mother had been hidden as a child.
Nothing about the streets of Warsaw hinted at the terrible events of the war.
She knew from her research that over 5,500 kilograms of ash, all that remained of most of the people killed in the Warsaw Uprising, had been collected and buried – 5,500 kilograms! How many people was that?
The pictures of Warsaw after the Germans had destroyed it made her think of a science fiction film about an apocalypse. Barely a building had remained intact. It must have been how Hiroshima had looked after the atomic bomb. In these ruins, Irena and others had fought and died, while the Red Army had waited and watched.
The next day she took the train to Krakow, buying a first-class ticket for a few extra zloty. The carriage was much the same as it must have been when Irena lived here. The same deep velvet seats, the same overhead rails for luggage where Irena had once placed her suitcase under the eyes of the Germans sharing her carriage. Was it on a train like this that her mother had been taken from Warsaw and to a place of safety?
She wrote up her notes, pausing periodically to stare out of the window as field upon field dotted with villages and farms, at this time of year barren and brown, rushed past.
Her hotel was close to the Jewish Quarter and not far from the Schindler Museum and the ghetto and she spent the next day visiting the museum, wandering the streets of the old Jewish Quarter. Just before darkness fell she found the townhouse where Irena had lived with her father as a child.
Tomorrow she was going to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She wasn’t sure about the morality of visiting a place where so many had died; there was almost something ghoulish about it, but she owed it to the memory of her unmet grandmother’s family – her great uncles and aunts who along with her great grandparents had lost their lives there – to go.
She had decided not to take a taxi, or one of the organised tours. Neither did she want to go by train. Instead, she took one of the regular buses.
It dropped her and her fellow tourists at the end of a long drive leading towards the museum. Auschwitz itself was a small nondescript village with nothing to suggest that it had once been the final stop for millions of Jews, Poles and other so-called Untermenschen.
It would have been a similar sort of day when Sarah’s grandmother’s family had been brought here. Cold, so cold that even through her layers, Sarah could feel the biting wind. How did the internees survive with only the thin striped pyjamas they were given to wear? But of course they didn’t. Most of those not sent to be gassed died of cold or starvation or other diseases within three months.
Although she’d read extensively about the camp, nothing – no book, no film – could have prepared her for the reality. She joined an English tour guide and trailed after him as he described the horrors as he must have done thousands of times: the places where the internees were made to stand for hours in the freezing wind for roll call, the place where they were hung, the cells where they were made to stand upright while slowly starving to death, the hospital block where the experiments were carried out – all of it.
But it was Birkenau that chilled her most. This is where the trains of prisoners were taken and selected. Right to survive; left to die.
Irena had been in Bergen-Belsen, which although not an extermination camp, was in every other way as horrific as this one. Like the inmates here, she had been billeted in a hut, where the women slept, four or five to a bed, the ones on top leaking pus from suppurating wounds as well as other body fluids onto those below as rats scuttled and gnawed at the corpses of those who had died in their sleep. Like the women here who hadn’t been sent straight to the gas chambers, Irena had to endure unspeakable conditions. Had she not been taken to Bergen-Belsen just three months before the Red Army liberated the camp, she too would have almost certainly died.
They were shown the remains of the gas chambers, the tunnel where those condemned to death would take their final walk, the passage where the prisoners who’d been given privileged roles would come to collect the corpses to shave their hair and remove their gold fillings before taking their bodies to be burned.
There was one place of which Irena never talked, but had written about in her notebook. A fellow inmate – one who’d been marched from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in the last weeks of the war, had told Irena about it. Sarah left the group and crossed over to an innocuous looking building, a little hut near the entrance of the camp. This was where the children – babies mainly – of the women who had been incarcerated were taken to be drowned in a bucket of water. The other women tried to hide them, tried to feed them with what little food they could scavenge, but it was hopeless. Not one baby survived.
When the tour had finished, Sarah felt drained. She walked away from the rest of the visitors. She needed to be on her own. Doubts were running through her head. Could her book really do justice to the horror that had happened? Could her book do justice to the courage of so many?
She smiled to herself. She was being Chicken Licken again. Hadn’t Irena’s story taught her anything? Hadn’t being with Neil taught her anything? Life was filled with risks. Besides she’d promised Irena that she would tell her story.
She looked towards the sky where the setting sun painted it in shades of orange.
‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, I shall remember,’ she said out loud. ‘I promise you, Irena.’