Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  “Fathers were separated from families,” the man said. “Children crying, women screaming. They packed too many people. Locked them in like animals. I heard them pleading for a sip of water, for more air. Soldiers chased away anyone who tried to help.”

  “What were they arrested for?” Eric Zehngut asked.

  “What do you mean what for?” Henry said. “People are arrested for nothing.”

  In the territories of the Soviet Union, border crossings were considered a crime, though the many people convicted of such transgressions were traveling from what had been, not so long ago, one part of Poland to another formerly Polish place. Membership in a resistance organization was a crime. Smuggling was a crime. Possessing private property was a crime. Refusing to accept a Soviet passport or a job in the new regime were crimes. Unexcused absence from work was a crime. Taking bread from a restaurant to feed one’s children was a crime. Applying to relocate in the German-occupied part of Poland was a crime. And then there were the accusations of participating in anti-Soviet agitation (criticizing Communism or Stalin; praising the Germans; being in the wrong room listening to the wrong person at the wrong time), or being a “socially dangerous element,” which included working in a position of authority or being the spouse or child of an enemy of the state.

  “They were osadnik, settlers,” the man from Białystok said. “But the Soviets call them kulak, after the Russian word for fist. They’re considered an enemy of the people.”

  Enemy of the people. This was also the charge made against Julius. Because he was a factory owner, in the eyes of the Communists he was considered a capitalist, and thus an enemy of the proletariat. Josefina despised the term.

  “Where are they taking them?” Eric asked.

  “No one knows exactly,” the man said, “but from rumors we’ve heard, they’re being sent far away, to work camps in Siberia.”

  At that, the group at the table fell silent. They had all heard the talk among the refugees, listened carefully to those who had received letters from relations or friends sent to the work camps. In their missives, the deportees described their labors—often with inadequate tools and almost always without proper clothing—from sunrise to sundown. They asked for money, food, clothing, medicine. They had nothing. Any complaint they might have registered was blacked out by the censors.

  Siberia: when Josefina heard the word, she told herself stories in order to live through her fears of being exiled there. Of dying there with nothing to say about having lived. Or, of Julius being sent to its easternmost edge. The name summoned a remote and rugged land, ice, blizzards, a pale silvery sun in a flat and immense sky. It was a place where bears lumbered in dense woods, where wind howled across the steppe.

  “Well, well, enough sad talk,” Henry Zehngut said after he registered Josefina’s glance from across the table. The man from Białystok excused himself.

  Eric’s uncle had always admired Julius. Josefina appreciated Henry’s kindness in stopping the conversation. She was usually able to contain her feelings at such moments, but the news about the deportations had loosened from the steel trap of her resolution a fear that gripped her gut from the inside and made it difficult to swallow.

  ON APRIL TWELFTH, they celebrated Suzanna’s fourteenth birthday at Henry Zehngut’s place. The party was modest, but the railway-hostel flat had a real kitchen. There Henry served up soup, fish, meat, and potatoes, which he did each Friday night. The mood was festive. Suzanna lit the Shabbat candles, and Josefina was gladdened to see her daughter smile. The ever-resourceful Eric managed to obtain flour, eggs, and lard, and Josefina made a small cake. As gifts, Suzanna received soap and pencils and socks. Peter, along with Eric’s brother Fred, recited poems by the famous Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. One of Eric’s cousins played melodies on a guitar.

  At Henry’s urging, Josefina, Ernestyna, and the children stayed the night at his place. “It’s too late,” he said. “There’s a curfew. And besides, even without a curfew, it’s too late for women to be out and about.”

  Later, Josefina understood that something—coincidence? luck? divine intervention?—had been operative the night of the party. As everyone slept, snugged together in Henry’s small flat, the NKVD men and Red Army soldiers were busy rounding up thousands of Lwów’s residents, mostly the wives and children of men who had already been arrested. At four in the morning, everyone in Henry’s flat woke to the sounds of commotion coming from the nearby train station—children crying, soldiers shouting orders in Russian, lorries and carts going to and fro.

  “I think a deportation is happening,” Henry said. “Best if we were very quiet.”

  Everyone in the flat put on their coats and gathered their belongings and sat silently in the dark. They were solemn and still as the pale light of a spring morning brightened and brought their faces into focus. By seven, the hubbub coming from the train station had subsided, and the sounds of a regular day began—trams, carts, boots on pavement, a dog barking, a rooster crowing in the distance. If one were just waking now, one might think it an ordinary day, Josefina thought.

  When the Kohns returned to their room at the Kotlyarska Street apartment, Lyudmyla the landlady told them the people on the second and third floors had been taken in the early morning hours.

  “They searched your room, too,” she said.

  DEPORTATION BECAME A WORD repeated often in those days. If you talked to anyone who had survived the Great Terror of 1937–1938, in the Soviet Union, arrest, deportation, and execution were all familiar words. One in every twenty people was arrested and 1,500 people killed every day. Josefina heard one refugee after another from German-occupied Poland say how Jews and Poles were equally despised by the Nazis. In Lwów, Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians were the targets of the Soviets. The threat of being sent away lurked in one’s thoughts and compelled people to wariness, secrecy, and denunciation. It used to be that if you broke bread with someone, trust was likely at the table with you. Now, if anyone had enough bread to share, they shared it only with those they trusted.

  No matter what she did, Josefina was unable to dispel the menacing thought of being sent to an unknown destination. Was it not enough that her husband had been taken away? That she and her children and mother-in-law lived just slightly better than the poorest souls on whom she had once bestowed charity? When she started down that road of thinking, despair was the only end result. And because Josefina Kohn did not indulge self-pity and because she was not a woman who entertained hopelessness, she resolved to ready her family for the worst.

  Just after the mid-April wave of deportations, she relocated her mother-in-law. Ernestyna would never survive a deportation, of this Josefina was certain. She took her to Brzuchowice, a district about four miles from the center of Lwów. A group of nuns at a small convent there, who belonged to the Order of St. Basil, agreed to take in and care for Julius’s mother.

  When the nuns greeted Josefina and her mother-in-law, Ernestyna was confused one instant, smiling the next. It broke Josefina’s heart to see Julius’s mother so frail, forgetful, and in such decline. Ernestyna had been a woman respected in her family and community. She was resourceful, intelligent, good-humored, hard-working, kind, and charitable. The first time they had met was for tea, on a late Sunday afternoon in winter. Josefina had been skiing early in the morning, her cheeks kissed with sun and cold. They talked animatedly about bread and leather, opera and theater, Viennese pastries, skiing and tennis. “I can see why my Julek finds you so charming,” Ernestyna had said afterward. “You are not afraid to enjoy life.”

  And now here they were, far from home. Ernestyna was the last remnant of Julius, and here Josefina was leaving her with strangers.

  “Mama,” she said softly, “I will write to you. You’ll be safe and warm here.” Josefina kissed her mother-in-law on the cheek and patted her hand. She let go as one of the nuns took Ernestyna and guided her inside.

  The sisters of the Order of St. Basil asked for no money. The truly fai
thful, thought Josefina, are always the most charitable. She wondered if among the good sisters there might have been any Lamed Vav, the unknown thirty-six saints who hold the fate of the world on their shoulders. Her mother had told her the tale of the hidden Tzadikim, but in Mama’s version, the righteous were always men. No one was supposed to know who they were, not even themselves, and this is why they were called nistarim. Josefina liked to imagine them as being anyone—male or female, old or young, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile. To her, the only way for a quality or trait to be completely hidden was if it were possible for it to be manifested in everyone.

  Josefina wrote the letters she had been reluctant to write months ago when they were in Warsaw and then fleeing that city. “In spite of everything, we remain hopeful,” she told her father and Milly, “that come spring, this whole business shall be ended and we will return home. You would be proud of Peter and Suzi,” she wrote, “both who are now so grown up.” She didn’t tell her family that Suzanna’s hair was cut like a boy’s, or that Peter’s clothing had loosened and become too short or that Julius’s mother no longer remembered anyone’s name. She didn’t mention either her own troubles, the constant pain in her gut, the gums that bled. As for Julius, she simply told them he was, as far as she knew, in good health and receiving the parcels she sent each week with Eric Zehngut. She didn’t say that not very long ago, the guards had stopped accepting the packages at Brygidki Prison, or that she feared her husband had been deported or, worse, executed. She couldn’t know, either, and thus couldn’t tell anyone, that Julius was still in Lwów, being held at Zamarstynivska Prison. “I wish I could be droll and tell you that we are so happy to spend time in this lovely city,” Josefina wrote in one letter to her sister, Elsa, “but this is no holiday.”

  Like all the other refugees, they were short on money. Eric Zehngut, who was selling soap and whatever else he could make or find on the black market, offered to introduce Josefina to someone who would buy her valuables.

  Eric arranged for a meeting with a Russian functionary he had encountered, a man whose wife had a taste for finery. The man was some sort of Communist Party bigwig who somehow managed to have money to spend. He was positioned to resell on the black market things he bought, steeply marking up the prices. Josefina speculated he took bribes. In this new world order, corruption was rampant.

  Josefina waited for him at the Café de la Paix. She sat at a corner table, conveniently in the shadows. The man’s name was Leonid Petrov. He was everything Josefina disdained: a rumpled, petty bureaucrat, unshaven and foul-breathed. His fingers were fat, his expression greedy. Into his moist palms, which were open and hidden under the table where no one might see them breaking the law, she placed Suzanna’s Star of David, gold bracelet, and ruby ring. Petrov grinned at first and then narrowed his eyes.

  “Isn’t there something else?” he asked. His German was flawed, and his cheek twitched when he spoke.

  Josefina reached inside her coat where she had sewn a special pocket. She felt the pearls nestled there, their comforting smoothness. Originally two opera-length strands with a sapphire clasp, the necklace first belonged to Josefina’s mother’s great-great-grandmother and had been passed down from each woman to her eldest daughter. Josefina’s mother did not believe in playing favorites between her girls. She divided the necklace, had a second identical clasp fashioned, and gave each daughter one strand when she married. Josefina had worn those pearls to the opera, the symphony, the theater. With the weight of the necklace against her chest, the clean, cool pearls against her neck, and her gloved hand on Julius’s arm, she felt as if nothing were out of place.

  Sitting in the Café de la Paix in Soviet-occupied Lwów, with a strange, uncouth man whose sweaty hands were holding her daughter’s jewelry, Josefina felt acutely how askew the world had become. This pearl necklace was not an extravagance. Rather, it was a token that allowed the girls of her family to remember the women who preceded them and later, when they became mothers themselves, to impart the legacy of memory. Where would the memories go? she wondered. Would Petrov’s wife have access to them? Would they disappear with the necklace?

  When they lived in Teschen and she had occasion to take the pearls from their velvet box, Josefina liked to imagine Suzanna, dressed in matrimonial lace and silk, ivory satin ribbons woven into the dark, glossy braids coiled against her head, a wry yet demure smile playing across her mouth. Here in the café, as she pulled the necklace from the hidden pocket of her coat, Josefina could see only her own mother, and her mother before that. This is no time to dwell in the past, she thought, deliberately erasing any notion of sentimentality. Their future—uncertain as it was—depended on these pearls. She dropped the necklace into Petrov’s waiting hands.

  He did not pay her the price Eric Zehngut had negotiated beforehand, but Josefina did not know this until she returned to her room and, in the waning light of a winter afternoon, counted the damp ruble notes he had pressed into her palm under the table. His hand lingered just long enough for Josefina to coldly smile at him. But Petrov was not the only one to deceive in this transaction. Before arriving at the café, Josefina had slipped into a shoe her wedding band, which was to be included in the lot she was selling, and which she had decided at the last minute to keep.

  Afterward Josefina and Suzanna sewed the money into their coats. They darned socks. Peter polished and resoled their boots and packed their rucksacks with small tin cups, spoons, their comets, woolens. They squirreled away sugar cubes and sausage and tea and matches and thread and iodine and aspirin and soap. When they went to bed, they wore two of everything: undergarments, shirts, pants, sweaters. Into the pockets of their coats, which lay across them as they slept, were tucked their gloves, secured with a length of cord. Josefina told herself that she and her children would be ready when the soldiers came.

  BUT NO ONE, SHE THOUGHT, when the knock on the door finally came in the dark hours of June thirtieth 1940, is ever really prepared for such a thing. Though every day after Julius’s arrest five months before had seemed incredibly long, it felt as if it were only days ago, not months, that Josefina had taken Ernestyna to Brzuchowice. Time eluded her at every turn, and she was having trouble keeping track of when things had taken place.

  The Red Army soldiers smelled of vodka and tobacco. They were unshaven.

  “Dvadtsat’ minut,” one of them barked. “Twenty minutes.”

  Josefina and the children were ready in five. The soldiers eyed Suzanna, but Josefina dropped a glass to distract them.

  “Glupaya zhenshchina,” one said. “Stupid woman.” Josefina picked up the pieces of the glass. “Izvinite,” she muttered under her breath. “Excuse me.” But she knew she had diverted their attention, and her ruse had worked. Smarter than you, she thought.

  Outside, a lorry was waiting, almost filled. Josefina, Suzanna, and Peter squeezed into a space made for one person. Some of the women appeared terrified. Others looked resigned. The girls’ faces were vacant, their gazes alarmed. The men were mostly old. Some of the boys were young and others, like Peter, were becoming men. The women with small children tended to them, shushing and rocking and gently scolding.

  Long Days’ Journey into Long Nights

  END JUNE TO MID-JULY 1940, IN A TRAIN HEADED EAST, INTO THE SOVIET UNION

  JOSEFINA HAD HEARD THAT THE RUSSIAN TRAINS were long and ominous, their wagons overfilled. But she was unprepared for what she saw upon arriving at the railroad station. Dozens of boxcars—most of them used to transport cattle or freight—stood on the rails, some of them already loaded. The platform was crowded with people, carts, and packages. Women wailed and children cried as the NKVD separated husbands and fathers from their families. Soldiers shouted, randomly seizing people’s bags, food parcels, and sometimes their shoes. Into this chaos, Josefina and her children were thrust forward. She gripped their hands so tightly one of her fingers went numb. They were made to stand in front of one of the boxcars whose doors were bolted shut. When the s
oldiers opened it, at least twenty people—men, women, and children—were already inside. They pressed toward the entrance to take in the air, begging for water, pleading to be let out. The stench was nauseating. Bystanders and railway workers threw bread and sausages and cigarettes and aspirin into the cars when the doors opened to admit the new batch of deportees. Josefina felt the soldiers lifting and pushing her up and into the car. The children followed. Ten more people were shoved inside before the doors were shut and locked.

  Some minutes passed before her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the boxcar. In the middle of the floor was a hole, and Josefina understood this was where one relieved oneself. At the very top of the car, two small, grated windows promised no respite from the heat and airlessness to come but through which cold air entered at night. The odor was dense and rancid.

  “Mama …,” Suzanna said in a small, dry voice. But she did not finish her sentence. And what could one really say? Josefina couldn’t come up with words that made sense. She thought back to the beginning of it all, sitting in the cellar of the Hotel Angielski, and yearned for her companions there. How different that moment had been, her senses sharpened by adrenaline’s dangerous rush. How direct: an invasion, planes dropping bombs, the luck of adequate shelter where they could at least sit and breathe. This: She looked around, ribbons of the day’s early light falling through the grated window and illuminating the morose faces of the others in the boxcar … this was a taste of hell. To be confined so closely to strangers in the dark airlessness. Locked in without water. You could lose your mind here. But just as quickly Josefina dismissed that idea. Not me, not now, she told herself.