Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  Refugees continued to arrive in Lwów every day, and the Kohns saw familiar faces from Teschen. They brought stories from their hometown: the Nazis had deported able-bodied Jewish men to a labor camp on the San River. Jewish families were evicted from their homes, their businesses taken over by Germans and Poles. The synagogues were destroyed. The Nazis had even desecrated the cemetery, where Julius’s grandfather, the patriarch Sigmund Kohn, was buried. Jewish life in Teschen, they reported, was being erased.

  Autumn quickly subsided into winter. And just as soon, a new year—1940—came. With each passing week, the opportunities to leave this newly annexed Soviet territory faded. Josefina adjusted her hopes and focused on surviving one day to the next. She was growing accustomed to seeing her daughter with cropped hair, wearing trousers and a loose jacket. The three women took in sewing work, repairing uniforms for Soviet officers and embroidering dresses and blouses for their wives. They sat for long hours at the little table in their small room. Ernestyna hummed bits of operas—mostly Mozart—as she worked. Sometimes she recited a poem—Rilke or Goethe. Suzanna cooked soup on the tiny stove and cleaned. Josefina delivered the finished garments and retrieved new orders.

  Peter worked at odd jobs with Eric Zehngut’s brother Fred. Julius enlisted Eric to help him with potential business opportunities. They arranged to ride in a truck with an acquaintance of Eric’s, to see Mr. Salczman, who owned a tannery in Złoczów, a town forty-five miles east of Lwów. Travel was made complicated by the ever-increasing numbers of people moving about and the lack of petrol. And by Red Army soldiers stationed along the roads to question and arrest those people who attempted to circulate from one part of the newly annexed Soviet territories to another.

  “Where are you headed?” one of these soldiers asked when Julius and Eric were just beyond the city limits of Lwów.

  He was tall and his uniform was too short at the ankles and the wrists. His voice was deep and his sandy-blonde hair was cropped short. He hadn’t shaved in several days. Julius, who knew to defer to this young soldier, looked at his own shoes as he answered. Later, he told Josefina how surprised he was to see that his fine leather footwear had withstood the dusty wear and tear of their recent travels.

  “Papers, now,” the soldier said, his tone a mixture of disdain and newly conferred authority.

  Julius and Eric handed him their respective identification cards. Julius watched the soldier examine them and realized the papers were upside down. The man was illiterate, pretending not to be. Which made him even more dangerous than someone who could read; at any moment, he could take out his frustrations on people who were better educated. Julius held his breath.

  Eric had noticed the upside-down papers, too, and quickly extended a small wad of rubles.

  “You may pass,” the soldier said. “But make sure the next time you have proper authorizations.” His unshaven face and light blue eyes combined to lend his otherwise serious expression an incongruous youthfulness.

  Although there were no business prospects in Złoczów, before they departed, Eric Zehngut, eldest son of the kosher butcher in Teschen, bought a case of lard from the bacon factory in Złoczów, which he sold for a profit once they were back in Lwów. Eric made no excuses, he simply did what he could do to survive, and though Josefina was saddened to hear about the dilution of Jewish values and practices when Julius told her about Eric’s transaction, she believed daily survival was more important, not only for her family, but for the continuation of the Jewish people.

  THE OCCASIONAL LETTER came from Josefina’s sister-in-law Milly, who remained in Teschen under Nazi occupation. Her husband, Arnold, she wrote, had ended up as a civilian refugee in Hungary, where he went at the end of August when it became clear he’d never reach Kraków where the Polish Army’s division headquarters were located. With the rapid advance of the Nazis into western Poland, Arnold and some other men had been diverted and were forced to cross the Carpathian Mountains. He was holding up as best as possible, Milly wrote. At least Arnold was not at the front. Between the lines, Josefina understood her sister-in-law’s suggestion that things might have been much worse had Arnold made it to Kraków. Hermann was in good health, Milly added, walking to the mill every day. Neither Ernst nor Greta had sent any news. Little Eva was chubby, which meant she was healthy and well fed. Helenka and her nephew Kasimierz were taking very good care of Helmut, no one should worry. And then Milly wrote out the lyrics to the first stanza of “Solveig’s Song,” by Edvard Grieg, which both she and Josefina liked so much:

  The winter may pass and the spring disappear

  The spring disappear

  The summer too will vanish and then the year

  And then the year

  But this I know for certain: you’ll come back again

  You’ll come back again

  And even as I promised you’ll find me waiting then

  You’ll find me waiting then.”

  LIFE WENT ON. Josefina wrote letters. When she was unable to sleep, she lay still and listened to the sound of her family’s breathing. Julius shaved every morning and went out into the city and tried to make a living. The children were obedient and helpful. They managed to eat dinner together as a family, cramped as it was in the small room at Kotlyarska Street. Her mother-in-law did all she could, though Ernestyna was beginning to show signs of suffering caused by the constant strain of living far from home with dwindling resources. At least under an occupation, Josefina told herself, in an attempt to accept her new life, no bombs were falling.

  The illusion of normalcy afforded by such routine was shattered on a night in late January. Josefina had just drifted off to sleep. When the vehement banging came on the front door, she awoke breathless, as if her heart had clutched her chest from within.

  “You’ll raise the devil with that knocking,” called Lyudmyla, the Kohn’s Ukrainian landlady. Her annoyed tone belied her grandmotherly appearance. “I’m coming already,” she said.

  “Julius,” Josefina said in an insistent whisper. “Wake up.” He opened his eyes. “Someone is downstairs, at the door,” she said, hoping she wasn’t speaking too loudly. By a small miracle, the children remained asleep. Ernestyna, however, had sat up and gathered the blanket around her shoulders. Her eyes seemed larger than usual because her face had thinned considerably. Julius rose from the small bed. Josefina stood and watched as he dressed quickly.

  Julius pulled her close. “Finka …,” he said into her ear, but he stopped when they heard the men’s voices, speaking Russian, echo up from the entryway. Next, Josefina supposed, they would hear the sound of boots on the stairs.

  “Kohn, Ilia Emiritovich,” a man’s voice called loudly from below.

  “He’s calling for me,” Julius said to his wife. “I am coming,” he said in Russian, and the sound of their footsteps ceased.

  She suddenly felt grateful these soldiers were too lazy to climb the stairs.

  “Latch the door,” Julius said, squeezing Josefina’s hand, “and hide Suzanna under the bed if you hear them coming up the stairs.” He kissed his mother’s cheek and left the room.

  The soldiers led Julius out of the house. Lyudmyla scolded them under her breath in Ukrainian, and Josefina thought she heard the landlady spit before she closed and locked the front door.

  Josefina had imagined and feared her husband’s arrest after she and her family first settled on Kotlyarska Street almost four months ago. Along with contemplating worst-case scenarios, she had grown accustomed to many other new things since fleeing Teschen: falling bombs; razed buildings; and an endless dust made of plaster, stone, ash. People in bandages and pain, bleeding, screaming, crying. Shortages and long lines; small spaces and worn clothing. Soldiers patrolling the streets. People being taken away. The rank smell of fear. But the arrest of her own husband? She had considered it happening and was frightened he would be arrested, but she couldn’t know how she’d react when her husband was actually taken in the middle of the night. And just as soo
n as he was gone, she felt what she could name only as a dark foreboding. She might never see Julius again. This sensation expanded in her chest and tightened in her throat. Josefina warned herself not to succumb to the full weight of the intertwined fear and sorrow.

  Still, how was she to continue without Julius? He had been the man who weighed options, who never raised his voice, who tried to stay three steps ahead of disaster and had, up until this night, succeeded in keeping his family intact and safe. He had promised her they would survive and convinced her they were lucky. He had made her believe that this life—in which penury, displacement, and suffering were becoming the only certainties—would eventually improve. He had persuaded her that rationality would stop Hitler, that the Soviet invasion of their country was some kind of miscommunication. His belief in the good of humanity had buoyed her.

  Before the noises of the soldiers subsided, Josefina locked the door. She stood still, waiting for the silence to return. Her husband had been taken, but it was as if he had vanished. The room was cold, the blankets thin, but she was dressed, as they always were, in layers. Neither cold nor warm, her hands were weak, and her knees almost buckled. But there she stood while her mother-in-law whimpered lowly and stared vacantly into the room, and the children slept. She listened to their breathing, in, out, in, out, and Josefina’s own heartbeat slowed as she began to purposely breathe. She scanned the room, her eyes now fully adjusted to the darkness and able to discern the fuzzy outlines of the people and things in the room. Peter and Suzanna were nested in their respective beds. Dreaming, Josefina hoped, of something other than this nightmare life in which they found themselves. In a corner nearest the tiny stove, three thin blankets covered Josefina’s mother-in-law, Ernestyna, who had finally lain down. Beside her was the small table under the window where the three women sat and sewed. Josefina saw a bucket on the floor, the wooden crate filled with root vegetables. Rucksacks packed with essentials were placed next to the beds where she and Julius and the children slept. At the sight of her husband’s rucksack, Josefina felt faint, and she sat on the edge of the thin mattress. She could still smell Julius’s warmth. She gathered his pillow in her arms and settled into the dip in the mattress where her husband had just been. She pulled the blanket around her. In time, she would learn to sleep without him next to her. In time, she would learn to dwell alternately in two states of mind: one overly aware and distrustful, the other muddled and deliberately unemotional. These states of mind were protective and both born of this moment and its utter and unrelenting despair. But tonight Josefina couldn’t understand any of what would come later. Tonight she had only the quickly evaporating scent of her husband and a hollow place in her gut.

  SOMEONE MUST HAVE DENOUNCED JULIUS. There was no evidence of his having committed any crime, but the Soviet secret police, NKVD they were called, had guns and orders. They required no evidence. This is what Josefina was thinking the morning she dispatched Eric Zehngut, some weeks after her husband’s arrest, to Brygidki Prison to deliver to Julius the shirt and pants she had washed and ironed.

  She pictured Eric walking along the cobbled Kazimierzowska Street to the long, stone building that had been a convent and was now a jail. He’d keep his coat collar pulled up to his ears. She supposed he thought this errand was futile. As futile as the day Josefina had spent before the examining magistrate requesting a visit with her husband.

  “In our country,” the Soviet judge had said, “when the husband is arrested, the wife sues for divorce and looks for another one.” Josefina felt his gaze take in the sweep of her unwashed but still dark and tidy hair. He saw a woman, she knew, who had seen much, much better times. Perhaps he resented the life of comfort she had enjoyed not that very long ago. “After all, Madame,” the magistrate said, “this begging and pleading on the prisoner’s behalf can only result in your getting sent away yourself also.”

  Her son had sensed that her effort on behalf of his father might have endangered the family. Like the twenty-year-old Eric Zehngut, Peter, at seventeen, had become a man overnight. All the refugees—and there were thousands in the once majestic, formerly Polish city—knew the Soviet soldiers could come and arrest them in the middle of the night. When they were supposed to be sleeping soundly but could no longer. Everyone knew the NKVD made arrests for absolutely no good reason. It was Peter who suggested that Eric, not Josefina, bring the laundered clothing to the prison gates. Into the hems, she sewed precious currency notes, which she had folded and ironed to flatten. Her hands worked quickly and steadily. Later, these skills served Josefina Kohn well.

  The clothes and the money never reached Julius. Regardless, Josefina sent Eric with the little parcels twice a week. She knew that if she pretended her husband were receiving these provisions, she’d remain more focused and capable of enduring whatever was next. Thinking about what came next was a pressing mystery for everyone. This quality of the unknown future—be it the next hour or the next year—soaked into each day. People were nervous all the time, more likely to say things that brought the unwanted attention of the NKVD on themselves or others.

  Anxious whispers, though, had not been the reason for Julius’s arrest. Eric told Josefina he suspected Gugik, the Communist organizer who had worked at the Kohn leather factory in Teschen. He had been in Złoczów when Julius and Eric went to see Mr. Salczman’s tannery there. Gugik, with his big eyebrows and loud laugh. A man who would have simply irritated them all had the war not upended their lives. When everyone was still living in Teschen, Communism, though illegal in Poland, was just an idea in the back of some people’s minds. Gugik was nothing but a coward, Eric told Josefina. And he was right—only someone who is very frightened denounces another person for no reason.

  In the dark chill of the Lwów morning, Josefina considered this Gugik. How had he decided to inform on Julius to the Soviet secret police? Did envy motivate him? Had he realized the trouble his action would cause? Josefina couldn’t imagine what kind of character was required to present oneself to the NKVD and tell them your former employer was an enemy of the state. She shook her head, as if to shake loose a memory. Had it been Gugik’s father who had led the residents of Przykopa Street in Teschen to protest, years ago, a new building at the tannery? What did it matter now? Just the other day, an old acquaintance from Teschen sat shivering in the Café de la Paix. He told Josefina the Nazis planned to remove all the equipment from the Kohn tannery and send it to the Spitzer-Sinaiberger tannery in Skoczów. “They call it rationalization,” the man explained. “Sometimes Aryanization.”

  “I call it theft,” Josefina said bluntly. For a brief moment she felt sure about the caliber of her strength, that it would ensure her family’s survival. The vigor—both physical and mental—required to ski or play tennis or swim for hours was a thing she had once taken for granted. It was being eroded by the long, harsh winter and the endless uncertainty. But when the man said the word rationalization, Josefina felt her mind sharpen with a combination of anger, pride, and common sense. If someone had invited her then—though the idea was ludicrous—to play tennis, she would have won the match. She couldn’t be certain what was fueling this sudden rage—panic or numbness, both states of being which had permitted her to bear the long, long hours of Julius’s absence. But she seized on the anger just then and held on for dear life.

  Destination Unknown

  30 JUNE 1940, LWÓW

  AFTER HER HUSBAND’S ARREST, Josefina knew her family’s existence in Lwów was precarious. She barely slept. When she did, nightmares jolted her awake. Suzanna, whose hands were usually steady, kept pricking her fingers as she sewed. Dark circles underlined Peter’s eyes, as if someone had smudged charcoal on his face. Winter, which gripped their minds along with their bodies, was made ever more vicious for a shortage of good food and fuel. It passed, subsiding with a burst of spring, and now it was early summer. There was no news of Julius, and after several months, they expected none. In Soviet-occupied territories, information about prisoners
was not forthcoming. Rules and regulations were inconsistently enforced, and entreaties on behalf of prisoners went unheard.

  Julius’s mother, Ernestyna, who had grown ever thinner and paler, barely spoke. She sat on her bed, cowering under the blankets. When Josefina looked at her, she wished she and Julius had retrieved the furs in Warsaw.

  To keep warm, they used the “comets” they had made out of the quart-size tin cans packed in their rucksacks when Julius was still with them, and they were in Warsaw.

  “Country people use these to keep warm and to cook,” Julius had explained as he punched holes in the cans with a nail and attached a three-foot loop of wire to the top. “If you hold the handle and swing the can energetically,” he said, “air will come through the holes and feed the fire.” Different sorts of fuel could be used—twigs, leaves, peat, hay, plant stalks, even dried dung. Damp moss collected from the base of trees would keep a comet’s fire alive at night. The smoke such moss made, he promised, would repel snakes and insects. “In case you ever have to spend a night outside,” he said, winking at his daughter. “Swing it vigorously, and your comet will come alive.” As he spoke, Peter and Suzanna had smiled in the way they used to smile when they were younger and still believed in things like magic.

  Another time, another country, Josefina thought now. It seemed that her husband had been gone for years, though a faint reminder of his scent remained on the pillow into which she cried, as noiselessly as she could, each night.

  IN LATE FEBRUARY, Josefina learned about the first deportations from Soviet-occupied Poland into the eastern regions of the USSR. A man recently arrived from Białystok spoke to the refugees gathered round a table at the crowded Café de la Paix, where Josefina, Eric Zehngut, and, often, his Uncle Henry, gathered to exchange news. The NKVD, the man told them, had rounded up thousands of people in the middle of the night and loaded them into the boxcars of the long, green Russian trains.