We Were the Lucky Ones

by Georgia Hunter

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘This is good. This will work.’ She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mila breathes, wrapping her arms around her mother, holding her close.

  The next day, Mila hurries home from the workshop at five-thirty. She is dressing Felicia in the foyer when Nechuma returns from the cafeteria.

  ‘Where is Father?’ Mila asks, slipping a third shirt over Felicia’s head. She worries when her parents are more than a few minutes late returning to the flat.

  ‘He was put on dish washing duty today,’ Nechuma says. ‘Had to stay a few minutes to clean up. He’ll be here.’

  ‘Why do I need so many clothes, Mamusiu?’ Felicia asks, looking up at her mother, her eyes curious.

  ‘Because,’ Mila whispers, squatting so her face is level with her daughter’s. She brushes a few fine strands of cinnamon hair behind Felicia’s ear. ‘We’re leaving tonight, chérie.’ She’d purposefully waited to share the details of her plan with Felicia – she herself was nervous enough about it, and she didn’t want Felicia to be nervous, too.

  A flash of excitement spreads across Felicia’s face. ‘Leaving the ghetto?’

  ‘Tak.’ Mila smiles. And then her lips tighten. ‘But it’s very important you do exactly as I say,’ she adds, even though she knows that Felicia will. Mila buttons a second pair of pants around her daughter’s narrow waist, helps her into her winter coat and pulls a pair of her socks over her hands as mittens. Finally, she tugs a small wool cap over Felicia’s head, tucks the ends of her hair underneath it.

  Nechuma hands Mila a handkerchief lumpy with her day’s ration of bread. Mila slides it down her shirt. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers. In the kitchen, she retrieves the ID Adam made for her from the drawer with the false bottom and tucks it into her purse. Returning to the foyer, she slips into her new coat, her scarf, her hat, her gloves. Finally, instead of securing her armband around her sleeve as she normally would, she holds it between her teeth and forefingers and tears it at the seam. Felicia gasps. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mila says. Even though she’s too young to wear one, Felicia knows what happens to Jews in the ghetto if they’re caught without their armbands. Mila holds the white strip of cotton to her arm so the blue Star of David faces out, and lifts her elbow. Nechuma sews the ends back together with two small stitches and snips the thread without knotting it. As Mila adjusts the band, she hears her father in the stairwell.

  ‘There she is!’ Sol beams, arms outstretched as he lumbers through the doorway. He bends to pick Felicia up, and swings her around, kissing her on the cheek. ‘My goodness,’ he says, ‘you feel like an elephant with all of these clothes on!’ Felicia giggles. She adores her dziadek, loves it when he hugs her so tightly she can barely breathe, when he sings her the lullaby about the kitten with the blinking eyes – the one his mother sang for him when he was a boy, he told her once – when he swings her in circles until she’s dizzy, and tosses her into the air and catches her so it feels like she’s flying.

  ‘You won’t need that, will you?’ Sol asks as he sets Felicia down, his eyes suddenly serious, pointing at Mila’s arm.

  ‘Just until I get to the gate,’ Mila says, swallowing.

  ‘Right. Of course,’ Sol nods.

  Mila looks at her watch. It’s a quarter to six. ‘We have to go. Felicia, give your babcia and dziadek a hug.’ Felicia looks up, suddenly disappointed. She hadn’t realised that her grandparents would be staying behind. Nechuma kneels, pulls Felicia to her chest.

  ‘Do widzenia,’ Felicia mumbles, kissing her grandmother’s cheek. Nechuma closes her eyes for a long moment. As she stands, Sol bends down and Felicia wraps her arms around his neck. ‘Do widzenia, dziadku,’ she says, her nose tucked into the hollow over his collarbone.

  ‘Goodbye, pumpkin,’ Sol whispers. ‘I love you.’

  It is all Mila can do to keep from bawling. She throws her arms around her father, and then her mother, clutching them to her, hoping, praying it is not the last time they will be together.

  ‘I love you, Myriam,’ her mother whispers, calling her by her Hebrew name. ‘God be with you.’

  And with that, Mila and Felicia are gone.

  Mila scans the street for SS. With none in sight, she takes Felicia by the hand and together they begin making their way toward the ghetto gates. They move quickly, the wind biting at their cheeks. It’s nearly dark, and as they walk, their breath, translucent grey, evaporates into the night.

  When they are a block away from the gates and the guards are in sight, Mila opens her coat. ‘Come,’ she says quietly, pointing to her shoe. ‘Stand here on my foot and grab hold of my leg.’ Mila can feel Felicia’s tiny frame push against her, her arms wrap around her thigh. ‘Now hold on.’ Felicia peers up and nods, eyes wide as Mila closes her coat around her. They make their way, more slowly now, toward the gates, Mila doing her best to walk without a limp despite the extra eleven kilos she’s carrying on one leg.

  There are fifteen, maybe twenty guards stationed at each of the two pedestrian arches at the ghetto entrance, each with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Several of them count aloud as a throng of Jews shuffles in through the gates, blind with exhaustion from their day’s work outside the ghetto. ‘Hurry up!’ one of the guards yells, waving a baton over his head like a lasso.

  Mila cranes her neck, scanning the weary-eyed Jews moving past, as if she were there to greet one in particular – her husband, maybe, or her father. No one seems to notice as she weaves her way slowly through the crowd, toward the ghetto gates. Soon, she’s but a few metres from the large vehicle gate in the centre, where, as she’d anticipated, a dozen or so German wives have begun to gather, bundled up in overcoats, their rosy-cheeked children in tow.

  Her leg aches from Felicia’s added weight. She stops to check her watch. Seven minutes to six. Shivering, she contemplates for the thousandth time the consequence of a failed escape. Have I lost my mind? she wonders. Is this worth the risk? And then her world goes dark and she’s back at the roundup, huddled in an empty train car, her arms wrapped around Felicia’s head in a futile attempt to protect her from the atrocious scene, even though they both heard the gunshots, the thump of frail, naked corpses collapsing to the frozen earth just twenty metres from them.

  Mila’s upper lip is damp with sweat. You can do this, she whispers, shaking off her doubt. Just count, she thinks. It’s her father’s technique, one he’s used since she was a child. ‘On three,’ he’d say, and whatever the daunting challenge – pulling a tooth, yanking a splinter from under a fingernail, pouring peroxide over a bloodied knee – the counting somehow made it easier.

  To her right, a horse and wagon carrying food from the Jewish Council clatters through the vehicle entrance and halts as half a dozen SS search the carriage contents, shouting, the entranceway din suddenly swelling. This is it, Mila realises – the distraction she needs.

  On three. Mila holds her breath and counts. One … two … On three, she turns her back to the gates, opens her coat and reaches down, touching Felicia’s head. In a second Felicia is by her side, holding her hand. Mila reaches up with her free hand and rips the white band off of her arm, feeling the electrifying pop pop of Nechuma’s two stitches giving way. She crumples the band into her fist and stuffs it quickly into her pocket. No one saw, she tells herself. From this point on, you are a German housewife, here to meet one of the guards. You are a free person. Think like one. Act like one.

  ‘Stay right by me,’ Mila orders coolly. ‘Look straight ahead, into the ghetto. Don’t look behind you.’ In her periphery, Mila can see that several of the German women to her left have found their husbands. They stand chatting in pairs, their arms folded over their chests to stay warm. She squeezes Felicia’s hand. ‘Slowly,’ she whispers, and together they begin inching their way, backward, toward the gate, moving as if in slow motion so as to remain unnoticed. Mila tries to force some slack into the rope-tight muscles of her neck and jaw, to imitate the easy-going expr
essions and mannerisms of the German women around her. But as they move closer to the gates, she’s thrown off by the sensation of a body too close to hers. She turns just as a young wife, her head craned in the opposite direction, knocks into her from behind.

  ‘Entschuldigen Sie mich,’ the woman apologises, adjusting her cap. She smells of shampoo.

  Mila smiles, waves her free hand in the air. ‘Es ist nichts,’ she says quietly, shaking her head. The woman peers at Mila through crystal blue eyes for a moment, glances down at Felicia. And then she’s gone, lost in the crowd. Mila exhales and squeezes Felicia’s hand once more. They continue on, shuffling backward toward the vehicle gate. More wives stroll in from behind them – they tilt their chins now and then in Mila’s direction, but seem to look through her. You are one of them, Mila reminds herself. As long as they keep their backs to the entrance and move discreetly enough, she prays, they’ll blend in. Slowly, now. Right foot, left foot. Pause. Right foot, left foot. Pause. Not so tight, she tells herself, loosening her grip on Felicia’s sock-clad hand. Right. Left. Right. Left. Steady, almost there.

  The last of the Jews has made his way into the ghetto, and Mila watches from the corner of her eye as the pedestrian gates are closed and padlocked. When a body suddenly brushes by, bumping her elbow with something hard, she presses her lips together just in time to silence a yelp that nearly escapes her throat.

  ‘Move!’ the guard yells, but marches by without stopping.

  Finally, Mila senses a structure overhead. They are beneath the main entrance – the arched vehicle gate. A gust of wind lashes at their backs and Mila reaches for her hat to keep it from blowing away. She tugs its brim low over her brow and glances down at Felicia, who is white in the face but whose expression is remarkably calm. Stay focused, Mila reminds herself. You’re so close! Count your steps. One … two … They creep backward. Three … four … On her fifth step Mila can see the outer wall of the entrance and the sign that reads DANGER OF CONTAGIOUS DISEASES: ENTRY FORBIDDEN.

  She can hardly believe it. They’ve made it outside the ghetto walls! But these next few steps, she realises, are the most important. This is the moment she’d replayed, in her mind, over and over again like a scene out of a movie, until she’d convinced herself her plan could work.

  Summoning the last ounce of her courage supply, Mila inhales sharply. This is it. ‘Come!’ she whispers. She swivels 180 degrees, pulling Felicia with her.

  And then, with the ghetto behind them, they walk. Right, left – slowly, not too fast, Mila thinks, resisting the instinct to run. Right, left, right, left. She tries to pull her shoulders back, to carry her chin high, but her heart is a jackhammer, her stomach a ball of barbed wire. She waits for the shouts, the gunshots. Instead, though, all she can hear is the sound of their footfall, Felicia’s three steps for her two, the heels of their shoes clicking lightly on the pavement of Lubelska Street, moving slightly faster now, away from the guards and their wives, away from the workshop and the filthy streets and the so-called contagious diseases.

  Mila makes her first right onto Romualda Traugutta, and they walk in silence for another six blocks before ducking into an empty alleyway. There, in the shadows, Mila’s heart begins to slow. The muscles in her neck loosen. In a moment, once she’s gathered herself, she’ll make her way back to Warszawska Street, to her parents’ old building, where she will knock on the door of their neighbours and friends, the Sobczaks, and, if they’ll let her, spend the night. Tomorrow, she will use her false ID to try to arrange travel to Warsaw. They are far from safe – if they are caught, they will be killed – but they have escaped the prison of the ghetto. Her plan, the first phase of it at least, has worked. You can do this, Mila tells herself. She glances behind her to be sure she hasn’t been followed and then stops and bends down to cup a palm around Felicia’s cheek and presses her lips against her daughter’s forehead.

  ‘Good girl,’ she whispers. ‘Good girl.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sol and Nechuma

  Radom, German-Occupied Poland ~ May 1942

  Nechuma and Sol lie awake on their mattress, their fingers entwined. They stare at the ceiling, too distressed to sleep. There are whispers in the ghetto that Wałowa will soon be liquidated. No one is entirely sure what this means, but the rumours, each more terrifying than the last, have recently been compounded by news of what happened in Łódź. There, according to the Underground, the Germans deported thousands of Jews from a ghetto far bigger than Radom’s to a concentration camp in the nearby village of Chełmno. The Jews thought they were being sent to a labour camp. But then a few days ago a pair of escaped prisoners surfaced in Warsaw with tales so chilling that Nechuma can think of little else. There was no work at Chełmno, they reported. Instead, the Jews were piled, up to 150 at a time, into vans and asphyxiated with gas – men, women, children, babies – all within a matter of hours.

  Nechuma used to reassure herself that they had lived through pogroms before, that in time, the fighting, the bloodshed would pass. But with the news from Łódź she’s come to understand that the situation they are in now is something entirely different. This isn’t just being subjected to profound hunger and poverty. This isn’t persecution. This is extermination.

  ‘The Nazis will not succeed in this,’ she says. ‘They will be stopped.’ Sol doesn’t answer.

  Nechuma exhales slowly, and in the suffocating silence that follows she realises how entirely she aches. Even her eyelids are sore, as if begging for rest. Her own body confounds her. She often wonders how she and Sol still have the strength to go on at all. They live in a state of perpetual pain and exhaustion and hunger – depleted by their long days at the cafeteria, by their pathetic rations, by the mental tricks they play to ignore the daily horrors that surround them. They are almost numb now to the constant cracking of rifles within the ghetto walls, to stepping around the bodies of the dead and dying on the streets, to shielding their eyes when they pass the ghetto entrance, where the SS have taken to stringing up rows of Jews by their necks and hanging them slowly, prolonging their agony as long as possible so that others will see, will understand: This is what happens when you break the rules. This is what happens to those who are insolent, defiant, or simply unlucky. Nechuma once saw a boy as young as five or six hung up this way, minutes, it seemed, from death, and though she couldn’t bring herself to look into his eyes, she did allow herself to glimpse his shoeless feet, so small and pale, his ankles flexing in pain. She wished she could reach over and touch him, to comfort him in some way, but she knew doing so would mean a bullet in her brain, or a rope around her own neck.

  ‘At least the Americans have entered the war,’ she says, repeating the shred of hope that has been circulating among the others in the ghetto – a glimmer of possibility, something to hold on to. ‘Maybe the Germans can be stopped.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sol acquiesces. ‘But it will be too late for us.’ His voice cracks and Nechuma can tell he is holding back tears. ‘If they start in on the Radom ghettos, we will be two of the first to go. They might spare the young. And who knows, maybe not even them.’

  Nechuma knows in her soul that her husband is right, but she can’t bring herself to admit it, not out loud at least. She takes Sol’s hand and kisses it, presses his palm to her cheek. ‘My love. I don’t know any longer what is going to happen, but whatever is in store for us, at least we will have each other. We will be together.’

  A month ago, one of their children might have been able to help them. But they are alone now in the ghetto. Jakob is with Bella at the AVL factory near the Glinice ghetto, and Mila, Nechuma prays, is on her way to meet Halina in Warsaw. She and Felicia had not returned to Wałowa since attempting to escape, but that could mean anything. Now, with the situation growing ever more dire by the day, their only real hope is Halina. But Halina hasn’t had any luck yet securing them jobs at the Pionki arms factory, and their time is running out. ‘I’m still working on a transfer,’ Halina promised i
n her last letter. ‘Stay strong, do not lose faith.’

  They are in contact with Halina, at least – able to communicate through letters sneaked into and out of the ghetto with Isaac’s help. Nechuma can hardly bear to consider the fates of her children who are missing. She hasn’t heard a word from Genek since he and Herta disappeared from Lvov two years ago, and soon it will be four years since she last saw Addy. She would give anything, even her life, to know that they were alive, and unharmed.

  Nechuma brings a hand to her heart. There is nothing worse, not even the daily hell of the ghetto, than for a mother to live with such fear and uncertainty about the fates of her children. As the weeks and months and years tick by, the torment inside her builds and burns, a crescendo of misery threatening to crack her open. She’s begun to wonder how much longer she can bear the pain.

  Beneath her fingertips, Nechuma can feel the faint tap of her heart. She wants to cry but her eyes are dry, her throat like paper. She blinks into the darkness, her daughter’s words echoing through her. Stay strong. Do not lose faith. ‘Halina will find a way to transfer us to the factory,’ she says after a long while, almost in a whisper. But Sol doesn’t answer, and from the slow draws of his breath she knows he is asleep.

  Our destiny, she thinks, in Halina’s hands. Nechuma’s mind darts to her youngest as a child – to how, even before she could talk, Halina would demand attention, and when she didn’t get it, her solution was to find something fragile and break it. Or simply scream. To how, when Halina was at gymnasium, she would often claim she was too ill to go to school; Nechuma would hold a hand to her forehead and every now and then let Halina stay home, only to watch her trot down the hallway to the living room a few minutes later, where she would lie for hours on her stomach, flipping through one of Mila’s magazines, tearing out pictures of dresses she liked.