‘Up we go,’ Bella whispers. ‘Got him?’ she asks, before loosening her grip.
‘Got him.’
Jakob kisses Victor’s cheek, and then tucks him into his elbow and holds out his free hand for Bella. When all three are inside, the others in the car immediately gather around. There is something about Victor, his malted-milk scent and his satiny skin, that breathes hope into the harried survivors around him.
A whistle blares. ‘Dwie minuty!’ the conductor hollers. ‘Two minutes! Train departs in two minutes!’
Their car is full, but not overcrowded. Jakob and Bella know most of the faces on board – several from Łódź, a few from Radom. Most are Jews. They are destined for a Displaced Persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany. There, they’ve been told, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which everyone refers to by its acronym, UNRRA, and the Joint have set up shop to provide the refugees with hospitable living conditions and, for the first time since most can remember, an ample food supply. At Stuttgart, Jakob and Bella hope, they’ll be better able to communicate with Bella’s uncle in Illinois. And if all goes well, in due time they’ll be allowed to emigrate to the United States. To America. The word sings when they speak it – of freedom, of opportunity, of the chance to start anew. America. Sometimes it sounds too perfect, like the last note of a nocturne that hovers, suspended in time, before inevitably growing faint and disappearing. But it’s plausible, they remind themselves. Their sponsorship, they hoped, would soon be approved, and then all that would be required were three visas.
Jakob and Bella talk frequently about the idea of their son, should their plan come to fruition, growing up American. About what it will mean to introduce Victor to a lifestyle, a language, a culture completely foreign. Surely, he’ll be better off, they say, even though they have no concept of what growing up American entails.
A second whistle sounds, and Bella jumps.
‘Oh!’ Jakob cries, ‘I nearly forgot!’ He transfers Victor into Bella’s arms, reaches for his camera, and lowers himself quickly back down to the platform.
Bella shakes her head, peering down at him from the car door. ‘Where are you going? We’re about to leave!’
‘I meant to take a photo,’ Jakob says, waving his hand. ‘Here, quickly, everyone, look this way.’
‘Now?’ Bella asks, but she doesn’t argue. She motions for the others to join her and they gather quickly at the door. Together, they stand tall and smile.
Through the lens of his Rolleiflex, Jakob studies his subjects. Adorned in collared trench coats, wool dresses that hang just below the knee, tailored blouses, and closed-toed leather shoes, the group appears, he realises as he brings it into perfect focus, much better than it should, all things considered. Exhausted. But also – Jakob glances up and smiles – proud. Click. He snaps the photo just as the train’s wheels begin to turn.
‘Hurry, love!’ Bella calls, and Jakob pulls himself back up into the car.
The Home Army soldier struts by and slides the bottom door to their car closed. ‘Open?’ he asks, pointing to the top door.
‘Open,’ the passengers in the car quickly agree.
‘Suit yourselves,’ the soldier says.
The train begins to crawl. Jakob and Bella stand at the door, watching the world outside slide by, slowly at first, then faster as they pick up speed. Jakob grips the wooden door with one hand and wraps the other around Bella. She leans into him for balance, bending to kiss the top of Victor’s head. Victor stares up at her, unblinking, holding her gaze.
‘Until next time, Polsko,’ Jakob says, although he and Bella know well there very likely won’t be a next time.
As the train accelerates, Bella looks up at the fleeting Polish cityscape, taking in the seventeenth-century stone facades, the red-tiled roofs, the gilded dome of the Katedra Świętego Aleksandra Newskiego. ‘Goodbye,’ she whispers, but her words are lost, swallowed up by the rhythmic clack of the train rattling along its tracks, speeding west, toward Germany.
The Displaced Persons camp at Stuttgart West isn’t so much a camp, but a city block. There are no fences, no boundaries, just a two-lane hilltop thoroughfare called Bismarckstrasse, lined with a row of buildings on either side, three and four stories tall. Jakob and Bella’s apartment is fully furnished, thanks, they learnt, to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had paid a visit to the neighbouring Vaihingen an der Enz concentration camp just after VE day. Shocked and infuriated by what had occurred there, Eisenhower asked the locals in Stuttgart to provide some shelter for the Jews who’d lived to see the end of the war; when they refused, he lost his patience and demanded an evacuation. ‘Take your personal belongings, but leave the furniture, the china, the silverware, and everything else,’ he ordered, adding, ‘You have twenty-four hours.’
Though most of the Jews who landed in Stuttgart West were left with virtually nothing – no home, no family, not a possession to their names – the camp embodies a welcome sense of renewal. It helps that Bismarckstrasse is home to a handful of survivors from Radom, including Dr Baum, whom Bella had seen for tonsillitis as a child and who now performs check-ups for Victor every month. It also helps that the DPs are able, finally, to honour the traditions and holidays that for so long they were banned from celebrating. At the end of November, when they were invited by the Jewish chaplains of the US Army to a celebration in honour of the first night of Hanukkah at Stuttgart’s opera house, they were elated. Jakob and Bella, along with hundreds of other DPs, had ridden by trolley car to the city centre for the standing-room-only service. When they left, they were struck, for the first time since they could remember, with an overwhelming feeling of belonging.
No one in the camp talked about the war. It was as if the DPs were in a hurry to forget about lost years, to start fresh. And that they did. In the spring, romances at the DP camp popped up with the fire lilies. There were weddings to attend on the weekends, and each month, half a dozen babies were born. There was also a push to create an educational system – another luxury that had for the most part been discarded during the war – for the camp’s youth. Apartments were converted into classrooms where the children took classes in everything from Zionism to mathematics, music, drawing, and dressmaking. There were classes for adults, too, in dental mechanics, metalwork, leatherwork, goldsmithery, and needlework. Bella led a class in undergarment, corset, and hat making.
Jakob and Bella spent most of their days those first few months in Stuttgart hopping between the UNRRA’s office, where a group of Americans rationed out food, clothing, and supplies, and the US Consulate General’s office, where they checked daily on the status of their emigration papers. ‘Anything from my uncle, Fred Tatar?’ Bella asked, at each visit. They’d received just one telegram so far, back when they first arrived at the camp: Working on sponsorship, Bella’s uncle wrote. But they hadn’t heard from him since.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, Bella and Victor sit on a blanket at the edge of a makeshift soccer field a short walk from Bismarckstrasse.
‘See your Papa over there?’ Bella asks, leaning her head close to Victor’s and pointing. Jakob stands with his hands propped on his waist near the opponent’s goal. He glances in their direction and waves. Jakob had helped create the camp’s soccer league; it was good exercise, and it offered the perfect distraction from the emigration paperwork waiting game. He and his teammates practise daily and compete twice a week, mostly against teams of other Jewish DPs but occasionally against one of Stuttgart’s local squads. The matches against the Germans are held on a much nicer field than those of the Jewish league, but Jakob is used to that from his days playing against the Polish leagues in Radom. He’s also aware of how quickly a match can turn sour, and he can pick out the Germans who are in it for the fun of it and those who still harbour an obvious sense of resentment toward the Jews, from the moment they step onto the pitch. When he faces off against the latter, it’s usually a matter of minutes before the insults are hurled – dirty Jews, conniving
thieves, pigs, you deserved what you got. The men on Jakob’s team have grown used to the hostility, and though often fully capable of beating their opponents, they inevitably decide at the half-time huddle that it’s in their best interest to go ahead and let the bastards win, for there is no denying what a group of enraged Germans is capable of, on or off the field.
A whistle blows. The match is over. One of Jakob’s knees is skinned and his shirt is streaked brown with dirt, but he is beaming. He shakes hands with the opposing team (a friendly one – Bella attends only the matches played among the Jewish teams), and trots over to the sideline.
‘Hello, sunshine!’ he says, planting a sweaty kiss on Bella’s lips, and then reaching for Victor. ‘Did you see my goal, big boy? Shall we have a victory lap?’ He trots off with Victor in his arms.
‘Be careful, darling!’ Bella cries after him. ‘He can barely hold his head up!’
‘He’s fine!’ Jakob calls over his shoulder, laughing. ‘He loves it!’
Bella sighs, watching Victor’s near-bald head bobble as Jakob jogs a circle before returning to the blanket. Victor is grinning so widely that Bella can see all four of his teeth.
‘When do you think he’ll be old enough to kick a ball?’ Jakob asks, once his victory lap is complete. He sets Victor gently back down beside Bella on the blanket.
‘Soon enough, love,’ she replies, laughing. ‘Soon enough.’
CHAPTER SIXTY
Addy
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ~ February 1946
Addy walks the black-and-white mosaic promenade of Copacabana’s Avenida Atlântica, chatting with one of the few Poles he’s kept up with from the Alsina – Sebastian, a writer, originally from Kraków. Sebastian, like Addy, had managed to hitch a ride across the Strait of Gibraltar and onto the Cabo do Hornos – ‘by selling my grandfather’s gold cufflinks off my wrist,’ he said. He and Addy don’t see each other often in Rio, but when they do, they enjoy the chance to slip back into their native tongue. Speaking the language they grew up with is comforting, in a way – a nod to a chapter of their lives, a time and a place that exists now only in their memories. Inevitably, their get-togethers lead to discussions of the trivial things they miss the most about Poland: for Sebastian, the smell of poppies in the springtime, the sweet, rose-petal-jam-filled goodness of a pączki z różą pastry, the thrill of travelling to Warsaw to take in a new opera at the Teatr Wielki; and for Addy, the pleasure of walking to the movie house on a summer night to catch the latest Charlie Chaplin film, pausing along the way to listen to the melodic rifts of Roman Totenberg’s Stradivarius floating from the open windows above, the irresistible taste of his mother’s star-shaped biscuits dipped in a hot mug of thick, sweet cocoa after a day spent ice skating the pond at Stary Ogród park.
Of course, more than missing pączki and pond skating, Addy and Sebastian miss their families. For a while, they spoke at length about their parents and siblings, comparing endless scenarios of who may have ended up where; but as the months and then the years passed with no news from the relatives they’d left behind, wondering aloud about their fate became too difficult, and they kept family talk to a minimum.
‘Heard anything from Kraków?’ Addy asks.
Sebastian shakes his head no. ‘You, from Radom?’
‘No,’ Addy says, clearing his throat, trying not to sound deflated. Since VE day, as American president Harry Truman called it, Addy has doubled his efforts in communicating with the Red Cross, hoping, dreaming, praying that with the war finally over, his family would surface. But so far, the only news he’s learnt is of the staggering number of concentration camps discovered throughout Europe, in Poland especially. Every day, it seems, Allied forces stumble across another camp, another handful of near-death survivors. The newspapers have begun publishing photos. The images are horrifying. In them, survivors appear more dead than alive. Their complexions are practically translucent, their cheeks and eyes and spaces over their collarbones hollow. Most wear prison-striped pyjamas that hang pitifully from too-sharp shoulder blades. They are barefoot, their heads bald. Those without shirts are so emaciated their ribs and hip bones jut out a fist-width from their waistlines. When Addy comes across a photo, he can’t help but stare, boiling with anger and despair, terrified of finding a familiar face.
The possibility of his family perishing in one of Hitler’s camps is all too real. His brothers in stripes. His beautiful sisters laid low, shorn of their hair. His mother and father, holding each other as they take their last breaths, their lungs choked with toxic fumes. When the images creep into his mind, he refuses them, thinking instead of his parents and siblings just the way he’d left them – of Genek reaching for a cigarette from his silver case, of Jakob smiling with his arm looped snug around Bella’s shoulder, of Mila at the keys of the baby grand, of Halina throwing her blonde head back in a fit of laughter, of his mother with a pen in her hand at her writing table, of his father at the window, watching the doves as he hums a piece from Różycki’s ‘Casanova’, the opera he and Addy saw together in Warsaw for Addy’s twentieth birthday. He refuses to remember them any other way.
Sebastian changes the subject and the men walk on, squinting into the reflection of the afternoon sun boring into Copacabana’s frothy surf.
‘Shall we sit for a snack?’ Addy asks as they approach Leme Rock at the north end of the beach.
‘Absolutely. All this talk of pączki has made me hungry.’
At the rock, they turn left on Rua Anchieta, and Addy points out Caroline’s apartment overlooking Leme Beach.
‘How is Caroline?’ Sebastian asks.
‘She’s well. Although talking more and more about returning to the States.’
‘She’d bring you along, I presume?’ Sebastian asks, smiling.
Addy grins sheepishly. ‘That’s the plan.’ Addy had decided over the summer that he couldn’t wait any longer to ask Caroline to be his wife. They were married in July, with Sebastian and Caroline’s friend Ginna by their sides. Addy’s smile fades as he imagines what it will feel like for Caroline to return to the States without her parents to welcome her. Her father, she’d told him, had passed before the war. Her mother had died not long after Caroline moved to Brazil. Which is worse? Addy wonders – losing your parents without saying goodbye, or losing touch with your parents without any indication if – when – you’ll see them next? He digests the quandary as he walks. Caroline, at least, has answers. He doesn’t. What if he never does? What if he’s left, for the rest of his life, wondering what happened to his family? Or worse – what could have happened, had he stayed in France and found a way to return to Poland.
Addy’s memory jogs to the day he last saw his mother, at the Radom train station. It was in 1938. Nearly a decade ago. He was twenty-five. He’d been home for Rosh Hashanah, and she’d accompanied him to the station on the morning he left. Reaching a hand into his pocket, he runs his fingers over the handkerchief she’d given him on that visit, remembering how she had held him close as they awaited his train, her elbow tucked into his; how she’d told him to be safe, and kissed his cheeks, hugged him tight as she’d said goodbye, then waved her own handkerchief overhead as the train departed – waved and waved until she was just a speck on the platform, a tiny silhouette, unwilling to leave until the train was out of sight.
‘Let’s sit at Porcão,’ Sebastian suggests, and Addy blinks as he’s brought back to the present. He nods.
It isn’t yet five and the plastic tables scattered outside Porcão are already full of Brazilians chatting and having a smoke over plates of flash-fried cod croquettes and bottles of Brahma Chopp. Addy glances at a table of three attractive couples. The women, gathered at one end, appear engrossed in riveting conversation; they talk quickly, their eyebrows bouncing and dipping to the rhythm of their banter, while opposite them, their dark-haired counterparts lean back in their chairs, taking in the scenery, their jaws slack, cigarettes dangling from between their first two fingers. One of the men a
ppears so relaxed Addy wonders if he might fall asleep and topple over.
Addy and Sebastian motion to a server, who indicates with fingers spread wide that it would be another five minutes for a table outside. As they wait, they talk about their plans for the weekend. Sebastian is leaving that evening to visit a friend in São Paulo. Addy’s only plan is to spend time with Caroline. He checks his watch – it’s nearly five. She’ll be home from the embassy soon. Addy is about to ask Sebastian of his impression of São Paulo – he’s never been – when he feels a tap on his shoulder and turns. The young man beside him looks to be in his mid twenties, clean-cut with pale green eyes that remind him immediately of his sister Halina’s.
‘Excuse me, sir?’ the stranger offers.
Addy glances at Sebastian and smiles. ‘A Pole! How about that!’
The young man looks embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I couldn’t help but overhear the two of you speaking Polish, and I have to ask …’ He looks first to Addy and then to Sebastian. ‘Do either of you by chance know of a gentleman called Addy Kurc?’
Addy tilts his head back and emits a Ha! that sounds more like a yell than a laugh, startling the people sitting at the tables closest to them. The young man glances at his feet.
‘I know, unlikely,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘But there aren’t so many Poles in Rio, and I’ve been having trouble tracking down this Mister Kurc, is all. Seems the address we have on file is an old one.’
Addy had moved into a new apartment on Carvalho Mendonca three weeks earlier. He holds out his hand. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’
We Were the Lucky Ones Page 38