“There are no windows left upstairs,” he said, speaking mostly to Julius, and though his voice was barely above a whisper, Josefina heard him. Still, the man’s speech did not waver.
Combust, Spontaneous
FIRST WEEKS OF SEPTEMBER 1939, WARSAW
AS PLANNED, THE KOHNS MOVED to the apartment of Julius’s cousin Friedrich, on Bałuckiego Street. Friedrich was a young officer in the Polish Army and had been dispatched to duty. Before the invasion, when war was still only a possibility, he had offered Julius and his family the use of his apartment, which was tidy and efficiently appointed. No one could predict what would happen to this young man, that he’d be murdered—a bullet to the back of the head—in the series of mass executions of Polish military officers, which would become known as the Katyń Massacre. These murders would correspond to a future Josefina and her husband could not yet imagine, in which they were separated, Julius arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police, or NKVD, the same organization that would be responsible for killing Friedrich.
Had the escape out of Teschen and into Warsaw not been infused with desperation, a brief sojourn in Friedrich’s rooms might have seemed like a cozy, metropolitan retreat. The kind of cultural outing Josefina and her husband made when they were first married, before the Kohn tannery brought them the prosperity which allowed them to stay at fine hotels when they traveled. In those early days of their marriage, they were still adventurous and curious enough to want something different from a quiet life in a quaint Silesian town called Teschen at the foot of the Beskidy Mountains. Now, Josefina—at thirty-nine and a mother of two—looked out the window onto Bałuckiego, a small street, named for a nineteenth-century Galician author who had addressed Jewish themes in several novels. In 1901, afflicted by several diseases, Michał Bałucki committed suicide in a Kraków park. To Josefina, the end of this man’s life seemed to aptly describe the devastatingly somber mood of her country these thirty-eight years later.
After September first, more refugees came to Poland’s capital city. Fleeing the advancing Nazis, they straggled into Warsaw. Across the Poniatowski Bridge they came, on foot; down Elektoralna Street, on bicycles; and atop their possessions on overloaded carts on Filtrowa Street. Many of the pious Jews carried siddurs and Torah scrolls from their synagogues. Automobiles were quickly abandoned—petrol was almost impossible to procure and, as Julius had predicted, cars were handy targets for the airborne Nazi machine gunners. The refugees crowded into the cellars and stairwells with the people in Warsaw who had been displaced and were already occupying such shelters. Each time a building collapsed, people moved to another cellar or stairwell. After the first few days, you stopped carrying very much; things weighed you down and could kill you. And there was, increasingly, little space to accommodate the number of people seeking shelter.
Waiting in a bread queue, Josefina listened as a boy of twelve spoke with Suzi. “My parents died yesterday,” he said, his voice flat, his expression blank. He was sorry, he said, that he had tied their dog to the stove as his father instructed. “Every time a bomb hit, the dog jumped and hit its head,” the boy explained. During a break in the bombing, his mother had asked him to fill their water bucket from the cistern in the neighboring building. He was halfway across the courtyard when the shadow of the German plane darkened the ground beneath him. When he looked up, he could even see the payload, dropping toward the house, and so he ran. “I’m a good runner,” he said, and Josefina turned to look at him. An ordinary enough looking boy, she thought.
“I ran all the way to the Wola district,” he said. He was clear on the other side of town when he decided to run back again. For hours, he did this. He wanted to return to his street. But something—“God, the devil, I don’t know,” he said—told him it was bad luck. “I wish I hadn’t tied up the dog,” he said again.
Everyone had a story about the horrors of the siege: The carcasses of horses rotting in the streets and the relentless burials of the dead. The maternity-ward women with their newborns, moved to the cellar of the hospital, where there was less glass and dust and exposure. “What does it portend,” someone asked, “to be born this way?” The façades of buildings peeled away to shamelessly expose the interiors, whose contents were askew. There a painting in the parlor, crooked on the wall, a sofa beneath it suspended by one leg, ready to fall through a hole in the floor. There a bed hastily stripped, careening ominously toward the missing wall. Entire kitchens in various states of disarray that made no sense: sinks with their legs jutting out of the casings of windows, stoves halved, a pot still on a burner. A bathtub in the foyer.
Two men carried a wardrobe, their surviving possession, over the rubble, headed … well, no one knew where. Long after Warsaw and the siege and all that followed, years after the war had ended, and even when she was safe in England, at home in London, Josefina had nightmares about her reflection in the mirror on that wardrobe’s door. A mercilessly bright, hot sun shone on her in these terrifying dreams, in which she stood atop a mound of gray debris, the remains of buildings intact only hours, two days, a week before. Everything was washed in sallow tones: people’s faces, their clothing, the sky. In the background unfurled images from the siege: A girl, no more than ten or eleven, bending over an older, dead sister whose face was covered in blood and whose hand clutched her chest. Pet dogs and house cats creeping close to whatever shadows they could find. On one street, a small white terrier had taken refuge inside the skeleton of a horse, whose flesh had been removed. Rats and mice and bugs, deprived of their cover, scurrying everywhere in broad daylight. Women, their heads covered, standing in front of the ruin of a church and praying. Children with pillows tied to their heads to protect them from falling debris. Men and boys digging ditches and graves whenever the skies were clear of the flying German terror. An older gentleman, speaking softly. He had the tone of a professor and a comportment reminiscent of Josefina’s father. “Everybody wants to save his own life,” the man said. “All human worth and dignity? Obliterated.”
DURING THE SIEGE, Josefina’s thoughts of the future were limited to surviving each hour, one minute at a time, until the next morning came. And with each day, conditions grew worse. As a Polish poet wrote after the war, in Warsaw, “the worsening really had no end. It always turned out that things could be worse. And even worse.” Thus Josefina approached each new challenge with a focus shaped by letting go—of time, for example, or the simple choices that are part of daily, normal life (what to eat or wear), or the expectation that basic needs would be met (bathing, sleeping, eating). Once she started keeping track, each day was worse than the next. And in the uncertain hours and days and weeks and months and years to come, whenever she heard reports of arrests, news of deportations, rumors of shootings or other unspeakable crimes, she sensed before she knew that the chances of her family remaining intact lessened with each minute.
“We can’t stay in this city,” she murmured, several hours after their arrival at Friedrich’s apartment on Bałuckiego Street. As she was having the thought, she found, folded in her pocket, the newspaper article about Sigmund Freud leaving Vienna, an artifact she had saved—though she no longer could say why she had brought it with her. The day she read the article seemed impossibly distant. She meant to say something to Julius, who stood watch at the window, but instead, she was talking about leaving. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking one thing and saying another. “I know, I know,” Josefina said. “We only just arrived—”
Julius approached her and placed his hand on her cheek. He stood very close, and Josefina could see the smallest fraying in the elastic of his eye patch. “It’s alright, Finka,” he said. “I agree. We must leave Warsaw.”
Julius’s brother-in-law Ernst, felt obliged to remain and offer his physician skills to the city’s growing number of wounded. “I want to stay here with my husband,” said Julius’s sister, Greta.
Josefina admired Greta, though she knew that fear, not selflessness, informed her sister-
in-law’s desire to remain with her husband. She was scared of everything, which was so strange given her brother, Julius’s, fortitude in the face of any adversity, from small inconveniences to life-and-death conditions. Josefina was uncertain, too, if it was a good thing Julius was doing, trying to convince Ernst and Greta to come with them. It was difficult enough having to watch and guide and move as a family of four. Thank goodness, Josefina thought just then, the children are not babies. She had seen some of the refugee women carrying their thinning infants, the women’s faces fallen with the weight of despair.
But Ernst was steadfast in his resolve to help the wounded in Warsaw. A decision was pronounced: Julius, Josefina, and the children would leave. But where would they go? Certainly, they could not travel westward—the Germans now occupied that part of Poland. Many of the refugees were going south toward Bulgaria and Romania, booking passage on ships sailing to Palestine via Turkey. Some went to Hungary, some to Lithuania. The road to the Polish city Lwów, via Lublin, was still open. Josefina thought it might be prudent to go to Lwów and join her mother-in-law, Ernestyna, and some of Ernst’s relatives, who were living there. Julius knew a tanner, Salczman was his name, not far from Lwów, with whom he had done business before.
“Perhaps I can make some money,” he said to his wife. Before they left Teschen, Milly’s sister Margaret had loaned them some cash, and it was running low. Prices were inflated, and basic goods were extremely hard to come by. They had neither currency nor credit. They had jewelry, but only to sell in an emergency. For the first time since she was married to Julius, Josefina found herself worrying about money and thinking about how to contribute to the family’s income.
Rumors were circulating about the Red Army mobilizing. And if the Germans invaded Lwów, Julius said, they would have to head south. Neither of them could have predicted that Hitler and Stalin had made a secret pact to divide Poland. Nor could they have suspected the horrors that either regime planned for the people living in what would become known as the bloodlands.
To complicate matters, petrol had become unavailable, which meant they could not take their car, though luckily they had enough fuel to drive it out of the city.
“Perhaps,” Josefina suggested, “you might exchange it for passage to Lwów?” Julius smiled at her just then, and she could tell he was pleased with her resourcefulness. Later, Josefina would remember this moment. Julius had certainly already thought of the plan she had suggested, which meant he had shown her, even in their most strained hour up to that point, the kindness of giving her credit for an idea that was to him obvious. “I know just the man to ask,” he said.
Fritz Kosinski had worked at the Kohn tannery’s warehouse in Warsaw for years, and had worked with Julius’s father, Emerich. He was old enough to have stopped working, but he wanted to stay busy. Besides, he was loyal, the kind of man Julius always said he wished to encounter more frequently. Honest, trustworthy, and hard-working, he owned a cart and horse. He lived with his wife, Theresa, just outside the city, on the eastern side of the Visła River. He was more than happy to help them, Julius reported after he made the arrangements.
“THE FURS,” JULIUS SAID TO HIS WIFE before they left his cousin’s apartment. He was talking about two coats left at the furriers for repair. “We don’t have time to retrieve them. And besides, there are barricades all over Marszałkowska Street. We’ll never get through.”
Josefina was, uncharacteristically, only half listening to her husband. She was replaying instead a conversation she’d had a day or so before, with a farmer. He was stationed with his cow, in front of the American Embassy on Ujazdowska Street, selling milk. As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. She and Greta and the children were fortunate to have happened upon the farmer before the inevitable queue formed. The lines for food in Warsaw had, during the siege, become notorious; you waited hours for a loaf of bread. Even when the bombers came, you held your place in line. The food would, soon enough, run out. Water, too. But just then, there was a farmer and his cow.
As he milked the animal, the man spoke in a low whisper. Josefina had to bend down to hear him. He told her that the stork’s nest on his barn had been shot off by one of those German airplanes. The night after that omen of ill fortune, his barn had caught fire.
“Combust, spontaneous,” he said in a raspy whisper. “Bad luck, bad luck for a long time, long time.”
Josefina gave him two złoty, and though he expressed his gratitude with a genuine and almost toothless smile, she felt cold and bleak.
So when Julius spoke of picking up the furs, Josefina was not thinking about winter. She was not thinking they might not have much left come February or that the furs might be useful five months from now. Instead she was pondering the farmer’s beliefs about spontaneous combustion. Like Julius, Josefina trusted science. Hay, improperly dried, could catch fire on its own. She knew this. But the farmer, like many of the country folk she had met, subscribed to what Josefina’s mother would have called bubbe-meiseh, old wives’ tales. She wondered if such superstitions were merely self-fulfilling prophecies or whether they were important messages to heed. And if this last were true, who was actually sending those messages?
“FINKA?” JULIUS ASKED, and Josefina realized he was repeating her name. She felt warm, displaced, as if she were coming out of a strange dream. “Finka, I said I’m going to give the ticket for the furs to Margaret.”
She nodded. “Yes, Julek, of course,” she said. Her sister-in-law Milly’s sister, Margaret, who lived here in Warsaw. Somewhere. Josefina couldn’t recall the name of the street.
Her husband sat at the small desk in his cousin’s apartment and took out from his satchel some paper and his good pen. “I hereby entitle Mrs. Margaret Komarek to pick up the furs according to the temporary ticket No. 062,” he wrote in Polish. He dated it and signed his name. From a wallet he extracted the receipt issued by the furrier Maksymillian Apfelbaum, located on Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, where Julius had taken in April his sealskin coat trimmed in otter and mink and Josefina’s astrakhan jacket. He folded the note and the ticket together and tucked them into his billfold. He rubbed his thumb on the leather, a habit he had developed during his twenty years as a tanner.
Almost in Our Laps
SEPTEMBER 1939, OUTSIDE WARSAW
JULIUS DROVE HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN out of Warsaw at night, to the small rural hamlet where the Kosinkis lived. Though none of them could know, it would be the last time they traveled together in a private automobile, the last time their family was intact. Josefina sensed something final about this ride, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Like her husband and children, she sat in the car silently. She knew Julius worried about running out of petrol. Maybe we’ll have another bit of good fortune, she thought, trying to dispel her own anxieties.
Theresa and Fritz Kosinski welcomed them into their small but comfortable, clean home. Mr. Kosinski kept telling Julius he was looking after the car only until this nonsense with the Germans ended, and the Kohns were able to return home. He didn’t need an automobile; he had a horse and wagon, and that was enough. He didn’t need payment, he kept repeating. Gesturing to his wife, he said, “I already have everything I need.”
The Kohns intended to leave the Kosinski’s house as soon as possible, but were obliged by circumstance to stay longer. As the old Jewish proverb goes, “Men make plans. God laughs.” Julius might have raised an eyebrow had he heard the expression. He was not a religious man, though he had learned the basic Hebrew prayers as a boy. As an assimilated Jew, he believed in the promise of empirical proof, which for the most part had not provided him enough evidence as to the divine. Yet because his grandparents had been devout, he yearned for the security that comes with maintaining tradition. He wanted to have faith in God but he didn’t know how to believe. At least that is what he had told Josefina during their courtship. He never spoke of this quandary again until after he returned from a foray into Warsaw after the first bom
bs had fallen on the city.
Josefina knew her husband’s time during the Great War had prepared him to expect the unexpected. Thus, when he beheld the extent of the damage, he was not overly surprised. He knew what kind of wreckage all those bombs and shells could cause. But when he saw the wounds and deaths caused by crushing and burning and asphyxiation, and the destruction of hospitals and residential buildings, Julius told his wife he was so shocked he had stopped when he beheld the ruins and beseeched God, he told Josefina, to not allow such an end to come to his family. “I don’t know whom else to ask for such protection,” he told her. Josefina didn’t know either. The rules of military engagement, as her husband knew them, had radically changed. A new era of warfare had been ushered in on the wings of the Messerschmitts flying over Poland.
Now he was in a cellar, helping Mr. Kosinski repair a leather harness. Josefina was in the kitchen with the children. She washed the breakfast dishes and considered the plight of her nation and her family. At the start of the month, Germany invaded Poland. On September third, Britain and France had declared war on Germany, though their troops had not yet arrived. On the sixth, Julius had sat at the desk in his cousin’s rooms on Bałuckiego Street and written the note permitting Milly’s sister Margaret to collect the furs. Was it the next day that he went with Peter to try and deliver it? Or had two days passed? Josefina could not recall this particular sequence of events.
But she did know that to walk anywhere in Warsaw had meant unpredictable detours and delays. Excursions were interrupted by incendiary bombs and shells. If you were running any kind of errand when the bombs fell, you had to find the closest cellar or stairwell, and if that shelter was occupied, you had to find yet another one. All able-bodied men were obliged at any time to help with the endless digging of ditches and graves. Julius and Peter had been called to such a task as they were on their way to Margaret’s with the note for the furs. The Polish soldier overseeing the makeshift grave handed them shovels.
Six Thousand Miles to Home Page 5