THEIR CAPTORS PROVIDED only the most meager rations of gray soup—if it could even be called that—delivered in a small, oily pail. Water was almost nonexistent despite the urgent pleas of the car’s inhabitants. These entreaties were met with blows from the guards or derisive comments. The lack of air or room inside the wagon was stifling. The latrine was an exercise in humiliation. At night any relief from the cooler air that came into the boxcar was trumped by the inability to lie down to sleep.
Josefina considered all the other cars on this train, each of them filled, she supposed, with men, women, and children who had been stripped, as she was, of any ideas they might have had about resistance. Or dignity. All of them fighting to not give in to despair, as she felt she might at any moment.
Some hours into their imprisonment in the boxcar, Josefina decided it was critical to mind the passage of time. She loosened a longish thread from her coat and resolved to knot it with the start of each day. Thus, when the train started moving, she knew two days had passed. She knew they were headed east because she had also been paying attention to the quality of light from the small, barred window at the top of the boxcar.
As the train picked up speed, the deportees in the wagon came out of their collective stupor. “We’re moving,” one or two murmured. “We’ll be there soon,” a woman said softly to a child. Occasionally, some of the women could be heard moaning. Josefina listened to the whispered prayers, recognizing both her mother’s and Helenka’s respective grammars of God. The words soothed her but she remained silent. How could the divine exist, she wondered, with all sacredness vanished in the world remade by war?
A baby cried; its mother begged the occupants of the wagon for food.
“I want to give her some sugar,” Peter whispered.
“Yes, Son, yes,” Josefina said, “of course.”
Suzanna had already befriended a little girl of six or seven, whose older sister, herself a girl of only fourteen, was exhausted and had fallen asleep leaning against her neighbors. The two girls were traveling alone, separated from their parents at the railway station.
“Once upon a time,” Suzanna said softly to the child, “there was a princess named Kasia. Just like you.” The girl’s eyes widened. “And she made friends with a magical stork under whose wing she slept.” Suzanna opened her arms as wide as possible to enfold Kasia. With her thumb, she rubbed off a smudge on the girl’s cheek.
TWO KNOTS IN THE THREAD LATER, Peter proposed making, with utmost precaution, a hole in the top of the car into which a rag could be stuffed. “It will rain,” he said, “and we can suck the rag when it swells with water.” The deportees did not yet know the soldiers would have shot them for this trespass should it be discovered. And even if they had known, their thirst-driven anguish would have impelled them to take such a risk. How lucky to be the mother of a boy whose ingenuity will save us, Josefina thought.
Five knots in the thread later, she realized the worst is always yet to come when one is locked inside a crowded, airless Soviet cattle car, en route to an unknown destination. Two of the older women in the wagon succumbed to heart attacks. Three days passed before their bodies were removed by their captors, stripped of any valuables, and thrown into the fields beyond the train tracks. As one might discard a useless object, Josefina thought. The babies in the car, tormented by a hunger, thirst, and wetness that went unabated, cried and cried and cried; after ten knots in the thread, they went silent. On day eleven, a man started to rave, hitting his head with his fists and screaming, and only after the train had stopped and those in the wagon had protested loudly and for hours, did the soldiers come and take him away. To where no one could know. When she tied the fourteenth knot, Josefina wondered if her determination—to stay alive, remain sane, count the days—would wane or deepen. There had been a different tragedy for each knot in the thread. She watched the light extinguished from the eyes of the men, women, and children who shared these miserable quarters.
Knot number sixteen corresponded to the fifteenth of July by Josefina’s reckoning. On this day, the train stopped.
PART II
No Man’s Land
The Dark Side of the Moon
MID-JULY 1940, SOMEWHERE ON THE TAIGA
AS THE TRAIN CAME TO A STOP, a sound of grinding, squealing metal woke the ragged deportees. Inside the boxcar, they felt the warm night and its suggestion of the persistent, late-summer days, hot and airless. They couldn’t know yet that the November winds heralding winter are a force to be reckoned with. All they wanted, as the long, high train stilled, was fresh air. This land would teach them all about weather and its pitiless extremes, but those lessons would come later.
The prisoners got off the train. Suzanna had been sure she’d be relieved to leave the confines of the boxcar, the stench and cramp and darkness. Instead she felt an odd desire to remain in the car because it had become so familiar. And besides, there was no good reason to be standing in the dark on this vast and lawless land. Her movements were mechanical and flimsy with hunger and fatigue, both of which had eroded the initial shock of the deportation. Everyone else who stumbled out of the car was stunned and light-headed. Though she couldn’t see them because her eyes were still adjusting, Suzanna heard them moving and groaning and she could smell them, an odor she would recognize anywhere.
The little girl Kasia and her sister were positioned near Suzanna, who stood close to her mother. Close enough to hear Mama start to say Don’t …, but her mother’s lips and throat and tongue were too dry to form any real words.
Suzanna heard each barked command issuing from a soldier, every thirst-strangled sob and gasp and whisper coming from the deportees, and she watched their faces as they came into focus: hundreds of men, women, and children exiting the boxcars, sodden and grimy and weak, each one of them like her, wondering what was coming next.
Her mind turned, inexplicably it seemed to her, to Helenka. I never bought the chocolates I promised, Suzanna thought and just as quickly she scolded herself: You mustn’t think of sweets. You mustn’t think of home. Helenka’s comforts were in the past, to be fondly remembered, but at another time. Papa Hermann’s pockets would no longer be a source of candies or coins; his rough but gentle baker’s hands would not be holding Suzanna’s anytime soon. There would be no carriage rides or Sunday dinners or warm loaves of bread. No linens crisp with the smell of sunshine and mountain air ironed into them. No clean and pretty dresses. No lessons at the piano with Madame Camillia, who smelled like lavender and whose posture was perfect. No strolls with girlfriends and their older sisters to the river or the Well of the Three Brothers or the fountain in Rynek Square. No more family visits or outings or cousin secrets or the sweet feeling of laughter with her kin. Teschen, the town of her birth, was gone, and home was merely a memory, subject to erosion and, ultimately, loss.
Suzanna had spent the past ten months thinking about all she had known which was now gone. The most important thing to have been destroyed was her sense of belonging to a large and ever-present family whose love sustained her. These thoughts she kept to herself, vowing to never tell them to anyone. She understood why it was more important to think only of what she must do as each new hour unfolded. Danger, danger everywhere complicated the smallest task. Later, yes later … there would be her own family, the quotidian would become peaceful once more, and she would enjoy her life. There will be an after, she thought, pressing her feet into the ground. Someone said the word taiga, and Suzanna realized she was standing on that almost limitless, forested territory she had once seen on a map in school. She recalled learning about the thick, boreal Russian forest, the world’s largest taiga, which stretched about 3,600 miles, from the Pacific Ocean past the Ural Mountains.
In her weariness, Suzanna repeated the syllables: taiga, taiga, taiga, and before she knew it, a melody whispered through her mind. One of Chopin’s mazurkas. “If the violin is the instrument most proximate to the human voice,” Madame Camillia liked to say, the piano captured
the sound of water. “And Chopin—now he was a composer of rain.” Her piano teacher had been thinking of rainfall in Poland, Suzanna realized now as she toed the ground and replayed the notes in her mind. Madame Camillia was surely thinking of raindrops—on cobblestones and rooftops and in the trees and on the surfaces of rivers. Those watery notes of the nocturnes were like rain heard at night when the windows were open, and Suzanna dreamt of all the great music she might one day learn to play. She looked around but saw no buildings, nothing but a dirt path in a landscape that swallowed rain in its great, dry mouth. How she missed the mountain air of home, the summer showers, thunderstorms, even the soaking downpours.
ONCE SUZANNA’S EYES FULLY ADJUSTED, she saw clearly where she stood. Mama and Peter were behind her. She, her mother and brother, and all the others from the train were in the middle of nowhere: the dark side of the moon, someone would call it later. Shadowy forests surrounded them. She breathed in the piney scent of shade, the kind that promises mushrooms.
One of the Soviet men ordered everyone to sit down. “A transport will come for you,” the soldier announced. When someone asked when, he replied with a vacant tone. “Tomorrow or the next day.” He was thoroughly unconcerned with the deportees. Suzanna wondered what sort of life he had, if there had been kindness in it. If there was kindness in it now. And if he had children, did he not care about them? How could you have babies and become a person who didn’t cry when an infant was starving, or when it died, or when its mother crumpled in despair?
The people from the train scrunched together as if they were still shut inside the boxcar. We are no longer refugees, Suzanna told herself, thinking of how, before this horrendous train ride, people had referred to her, her family, and all the other Jews who had fled Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. On the wireless, or in the newspapers—before the Nazis or the Soviets took over what was broadcast or printed, news was often concerned with the refugee problem, referring to the Jews who had been forced to flee Hitler’s Germany and the newly Nazi-occupied territories. But now they were deportees, without any refuge, stripped of a port, standing beneath an unending sky, stars and the glow of moonlight through the clouds their only sources of light. She took Mama’s hand. Suzanna knew her mother had already sized up the surroundings and was now unobtrusively assessing what might come next. She had been observing her mother, watching how she negotiated the steady stream of strangers and the odd, often horrible, exchanges with them. Suzanna took note of how to act when the adults around you behaved with cruelty or in ways you couldn’t explain. Which is how the soldiers—grown men, most of them, though some were not much older than Peter—had behaved during the train ride to this place.
In Teschen, Suzanna’s parents were the most important people she knew. Papa was in charge of a factory and the men who worked there. Mama was in charge of the house, the family, the children and the dog, and even other grown-ups such as Helenka, her nephew Kasimierz, and the other people who worked in their home. Her parents instructed everyone what to do and how to do it, and people complied. But here, in the world at war, Suzanna had seen her parents lose everything. Aside from her father’s arrest and imprisonment, the end of their freedom was the greatest of their losses.
Mama and Papa hadn’t noticed, but she had peeked out from underneath the covers as her father dressed the night the soldiers arrested him. She had seen the way dread made his face look hard and defeated at the same time. She heard Mama crying into her pillow in the late hours afterward. And she observed closely when her mother answered to other grown-ups—soldiers and party officials—looking to the floor as these rough Soviets told her what to do. They never discussed it, but Suzanna knew Mama was acting. She understood, too, that her mother’s expertise at pretense would protect them. Her father, held in a Lwów prison, probably answered to the same sort of people in the same way. These theatrics confused Suzanna, and she remained quiet, a girl who listened and watched and thought carefully about words and tone.
The men in charge spoke Russian. They carried weapons. Some had dogs, not friendly little dogs like Helmut, but large, hungry dogs who barked and showed big, sharp teeth. Most of these men were unkempt, their uniforms in need of repair, and many smelled like vodka and damp wool.
“Don’t judge people who have less,” Suzanna’s grandparents always said. So even though the soldiers were coarse and dirty, even though they were not respectful of her mother or other adult deportees, who were, for the most part, their elders, even though they were nicer to their vicious dogs than they were to people, Suzanna tried to not disdain them. And anyway, as Peter said, the ones who didn’t smell—those who wore pressed trousers and coats with shiny buttons, the ones who smoked expensive, pre-rolled cigarettes—they were the most dangerous.
Suzanna’s brother had become a man, overnight. He held opinions now—about the war, armies, Nazis and Communists, and the two men everyone always talked about, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. When Peter spoke, his voice was urgent, his hands animated. He sounded almost like their father when Papa and Uncle Ernst talked about business or politics after dinner. The two men smoked cigars and drank brandy in the study. Mama and Aunt Greta sat in the parlor sipping sherry from tiny glasses, with Helmut curled up on a little cushion in front of the fire. On such nights Suzanna played piano. Peter looked at atlases or photographs of faraway places, something he often did with their grandmother Ernestyna. They sat together on her deep-cushioned sofa on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Suzanna often stroked the soft fabric of her grandmother’s shawl. Peter loved the pictures of bridges and big, wide rivers and snow-capped mountains. Now, her brother wanted to be a soldier, like Papa had been. But their parents wouldn’t let him join the army as Uncle Arnold did, or run off with the Armia Krakowja in Warsaw like other young men. One morning Papa had taken him aside and talked to him with a stern voice and a serious face. “You are to look out for your sister and mother,” Papa had said.
Suzanna pressed her feet into the ground. She straightened her back and slowly inhaled the cool night air dense with pine. What was her brother thinking just then? Was he, like her, making a list in his mind of all the things he must try to not remember? He stood on the other side of their mother. He was tall and lean, as if sculpted out of one long, firm muscle. A dark beard shadowed his face, which was defined with a little of Mama’s angularity and softened with Papa’s broad smile, the invitation in it to laugh and enjoy the moment, a smile he had before the war, when tensions didn’t tighten her father’s brow or mouth into an expression of constant caution. From beneath his cap brim, Peter watched the soldiers, gruff men carrying guns, spitting between the words they shouted. From the way his eyebrows were scrunched, he was clearly concerned about what would happen next. He was studying the soldiers and anticipating, as Suzanna did, the inevitabilities contained in the immediate though uncertain future: More hunger and thirst, greater discomfort, harsh treatment, no protection from the elements. Death was sure to visit this collection of downtrodden and miserable people to which she and her immediate family now belonged. And then she somberly realized that if they had been anywhere else, she’d be giggling at her brother’s expression and telling him he looked silly. But here, there wasn’t—nor would there be—anything to find funny. How Suzanna ached to laugh again, to feel free and safe enough to joke, light enough to smile.
“The soldiers are talking about a transport,” Peter whispered. He was the first of them to understand and speak Russian. This facility with language would contribute to their survival.
Mama squeezed Suzanna’s hand. Suzanna squeezed back, something she did as a little girl, even though standing here in the dark in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the Russian wilds, she felt much older than fourteen years old.
A small breeze carried a sudden, fruity scent, reminding Suzanna of the forests at home. Her memory flooded with a recollection, of the last fête she attended with her parents and brother. They were in Teschen. It was June, the
magnolia blossoms gone, the lilac fading. The war hadn’t yet started.
Peter had also attended the party. Dressed in a suit and tie, he had looked handsome, older than sixteen going on seventeen. The girls his age blushed enchantingly whenever he spoke to them. Suzanna wore a crisp, white blouse and a long skirt cinched at the waist. Her mother had let her dab a bit of Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit behind her ear. The scent of the perfume blended with the damp air of early summer of the mountains, and that smell was the one she could never have guessed she’d miss so much. Her hair was braided into two plaits. An older boy named Fritz smiled at her from across the room, and when he caught Suzanna’s attention, she ran her fingers over the gold bracelet on her wrist and felt very pretty. The bracelet had been a gift from Great-Aunt Laura. The box it came in was filled with pale pink tissue paper.
Suzanna touched her wrist as she recalled the party … school had recently ended, and even though everyone was talking about Germans this and Czechs that, and how Poland would never fall, Suzanna was dreaming about things that now seemed absurd to her: a summer trip to the mountains; a recital Madame Camillia was planning; that boy Fritz; making cherry preserves and the cherry-filled crepes called palachinki with Helenka; weekends helping Papa Hermann at the bakery. Now her hair was short and she wore pants and bulky clothes that didn’t fit. The only music she heard were melodies she summoned in her mind. She wondered if she’d ever again open a box or unwrap a gift in tissue paper. Such trifles now seemed so out of reach as to be luxury … yet this was once the normal way things were. Suzanna didn’t dare to think of how good jam tasted folded inside Helenka’s palachinki or spread on Papa Hermann’s warm bread, or of the butter her grandfather liked to buy from a farmer friend. The memory of those simple pleasures brought tears to her eyes on this first dark night in the Russian wilderness. No walls save the bodies of deportees, pressed together so closely they trembled as one. No floor save the earth. No roof save the great canopy of uncountable stars in the darkest of skies. No beds, no pillows, no clocks, no bread.
Six Thousand Miles to Home Page 10