‘The soldiers had taken everything from her when she first arrived at the ghetto, but when she was waiting in line and realised what was happening, she managed to hide two small scraps of paper in her vest top. She kept them close to her heart and took them out to look at in the moments when she felt most frightened. One of them was a photograph of her mother – they were separated very early on – and the other was my sketch of us sending light signals to each other from our bedroom windows.
‘She said to me: “I often looked through the grimy broken glass of the top-floor window of my room in the ghetto and hoped that there would be a Morse-Code light shining at me from the blackness.”
‘“Maybe there was,” I said to her.
‘“Maybe there was,” Mila agreed.’
*
‘What happened to her?’ Julius asked nervously. ‘Where is she now?’
We’d been listening for what seemed like hours. I wished he hadn’t spoken because it broke the spell. In my head, I was still with the teenage Ania, standing next to Mila’s bed, holding her hand and praying that she would continue to get stronger and stronger.
Ania was crying. There were big, round tears falling down her sunken cheeks, which she brushed away with a paint-spattered hand – but I saw that she was smiling at the same time.
‘Mila, well – sadly she’s no longer here. You have a good phrase for it in English – “passed away”. I think it is a beautiful way to describe someone’s soul, when it slips out of your grasp.’
‘She died after all?’ asked Julius, shocked. ‘Despite you saving her?’
‘Let me show you something,’ said Ania and she stood up, wobbling a bit on the parrot stick. I offered to help her, but she waved me away.
‘Wait here. I will be back in a moment.’
When she returned, she was holding a framed photograph. I remembered seeing it earlier on one of the bookcases in her living room, but I’d never inspected it properly.
Julius and I peered at it closely. In the centre a young, newly-married couple were gazing into each other’s eyes. The beautiful bride was wearing a fitted white dress with a high collar. Her dark hair was plaited around her head in a Grecian style. To the left of her, another woman in a floaty spotted dress was clutching a bunch of flowers and laughing straight at the camera. She had a different hairstyle, and looked quite a bit taller, but there was no mistaking that it was Ania.
‘It’s me at Mila’s wedding. It was a gorgeous sunny day in the most wonderful July. She met her husband at teacher-training college and they were very happy. They had three children who all live in different parts of the world now. To answer your question, Julius, she did die, like we all will one day, but it was only a few years ago. Everybody was shocked that she managed to survive such a severe case of typhus and recover almost completely. She lived many, many happy years with her family near to where we grew up.’
‘But what about before?’ asked Julius. ‘How did you survive the rest of the war, and what happened to Sommer?’
‘Well, we stayed at the bakery for almost two years, which is why I like to think that I am an expert baker now. It was a safe place for us, because we were out of the way in the back rooms, and everyone trusted Roman. Even the soldiers seemed to leave him alone, maybe because a lot of their own provisions came from his ovens.
‘Sommer came to see us every few weeks, always unannounced and always late at night. He was extremely moved by Mila’s recovery and I’m sure that his visits brought him as much joy as they did us. During the time that we were there, he was promoted to the rank of commander. I could sense at first that he didn’t want the new position, but he soon realised that there was one major advantage – colleagues rarely questioned what he did. We never openly spoke about it, but I could tell that he helped other people in the same way that he helped Mila – I overheard him talking to Roman several times about contacts that he had across the city who might be able to take people in.
‘Then, one day in early March of our second year at the bakery, he was moved to another part of the country. We hoped that we would hear from him, but we never did. The peculiar thing is that Mila always said to me that she felt as if he was there during all of the most important events in her life, and I felt exactly the same. I’m sure that he was secretly here, for example,’ she said, tapping the wedding photo with her finger.
‘Eventually, Roman got word that it was safe for us to travel back to our village and organised some transport for us through his friends. So, two and a half years after I set out on that train journey, I finally managed to make my way home. Through some miracle, my whole family managed to survive the war, although my father was missing for many months, and my mother and siblings had gone into hiding. Mila’s mother was sadly never found. Mila was distraught, but I think, deep down, she may have expected it from the moment they got separated on the way to the ghetto. She came to live with us, which I thought was wonderful.’
I picked up the photo and traced the outline of the younger Ania’s face with my finger, trying to get a few last moments with her before she disappeared. I felt strangely empty now that it was all over.
‘Thank you, Ania,’ I said. ‘Thank you for telling us your story.’
‘Thank you, for letting me share it. Do you know that I don’t think I’ve told it to anyone like that – right from start to finish?’ I could see that she too was sad it was over. ‘Now you will not have another part to come back for, will you?’
She plaited her fingers in front of her on her lap and sighed. It was clear that she thought we wouldn’t come to see her anymore and that made me incredibly sad.
‘D’you want to tell your story to others?’ Julius asked quietly. ‘Because if you do, I think that there are heaps of people who would want to hear it.’
She looked up at us.
‘We’re doing the Second World War at school,’ he explained. ‘Miss Seymour would love it if somebody who had lived through it came to visit our class. Would you come?’ he asked hopefully.
A flicker of a smile crossed over Ania’s face.
‘I’m not sure your class will want…’
‘Of course they will!’ I interrupted. ‘Please, let me ask?’
‘Well, you can ask. But I won’t be offended if she says no, honestly. Telling you has been more than enough.’
TWENTY-TWO
Julius and I went to collect Ania from our school reception the following Friday afternoon. I could see that she had dressed up for the occasion especially. It also looked like it was a good-knee day, as the parrot was nowhere in sight.
‘Gosh, I am nervous,’ she said, fanning her face with a school brochure. ‘I haven’t spoken in front of such a large audience in years. I have a bad case of stage fright.’
‘Don’t be,’ Julius told her. ‘They’ll all be gripped. Why don’t you pretend that it’s just Kat and me out there listening? You know that we think you’re grand.’
And he was right, of course. Ania had to tell a much-shortened version of what Julius and I had heard, but everyone was engrossed. I could see that Gem was listening intently, despite telling Ruby and Dilly that I’d invited ‘some boring old bag’.
I’d laughed when I overheard her saying that, and I realised I wasn’t scared of her any more. It made me wonder why I’d allowed her to rule my life for so many years. She saw me laughing and scowled, but there was something in her look that made me certain that she was worried about what life at school would be like now so much had changed.
After what had happened in the hall, the rest of the class had begun to look at Gem differently too. It turned out that Arun had overheard her talking about how to get me and Julius back for what we’d done, and he’d worked out that she’d been behind the maggot incident and the dressing-up day affair. He decided to call off their date and Gem was gutted.
Julius and I had started spending much more time with Arun and his gang, who were all incredibly interesting. Jace was into comics, just like me, and he a
nd another girl in our class, Hannah, decided to start up Comic Club every Tuesday lunchtime, where we’d read each other’s strips and make suggestions of how to make them better.
‘I think you’ll agree,’ said Miss Seymour at the end of the lesson, ‘that history is best learned from the people who lived through it. A very inspirational account today from Mrs Jankowski.’
That afternoon, I walked out of school with Julius. The sky would soon be darkening, there was a gentle breeze in the air, and I linked my elbow through his as we walked over to Dad’s car. I can’t remember when I’d last felt so happy.
Dad dropped us off at Ania’s and we sat round the table in the living room. Nowadays, Ania enjoyed looking through her living room window because Julius had done an amazing job tidying up the bushes and cutting the grass in the front garden – she could finally admire her beautiful dahlias and chrysanthemums.
Julius had brought round some celebratory cupcakes, and after we’d eaten these, Ania said, ‘I have a surprise for you. Shut your eyes. OK, now come forward a couple of steps. Perfect. Now you can open them.’
I gasped when I saw it. In the middle of the main wall of the conservatory, was the breath-taking portrait of Mila in full colour. Her plait was a deep, beautiful brown, each strand defined with a tiny brushstroke. Her cheeks were different shades of blush, her freckles carefully painted in tiny, honey-coloured specks. But the most awesome thing about the painting was her eyes, which were so many wonderful hues of sky, ocean and sapphire – they danced in the beams of sunshine that came through the garden windows and I could see how much they made Ania smile.
Her portrait was next to Sommer’s – the way that Ania had positioned them, it seemed as if he was looking over at her protectively, making sure that she came to no harm.
‘You helped me bring her to life,’ she said. ‘I started working on her again as soon as I began to tell you our story, but I didn’t want you to see this before it was finished. You know now that my secret search for Mila finally paid off. There were so many times when I doubted that it would. But I suppose it wasn’t just a search for her. It was a search for kindness, for a little beam of light in the darkness.’
‘They’re wonderful,’ I told her, as I gazed at the portraits. ‘They are absolutely wonderful.’
‘Don’t forget that you still owe me something,’ she said to me.
‘What’s that?’
‘Girl 38. You promised me the finished edition, as soon as I’d told you my whole story.’
I grinned. ‘You’ll have it tomorrow,’ I told her. There was a final scene that I had to finish. I hadn’t had the time to put it in the copy I’d given to Gem, but I felt it was very important to include.
The Vilks helped Girl 38 to carry the food back to her shipmates, who were all in awe of her. As they sat around the half-fixed spaceship, eating the juiciest berries, they wondered how such a small person had managed to overpower an army of giant wolves. Many of them thought that she must have sent a deadly arrow right into the heart of the Vilk King, which had made the rest of the pack fear her.
But only Girl 38 knew the truth. She’d seen it when she’d first looked into the Vilk’s eyes. There was more light in them than darkness, and that was all that mattered.
She cut the largest of the apples that she could find and offered half to her new friend. They ate together as they watched the brilliant electric blue sunset disappear behind the horizon of Planet U.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly a big thank you to my grandmother, whose experiences as a teenager during the Second World War formed the inspiration for Ania’s story. As a family, we long ago realised that nothing we do quite matches up to jumping from a moving train.
Thank you to Kate, my wonderful agent, for believing in this story from the start and persuading me to tell it.
Thank you to my patient and encouraging editor Fiona, to Lauren and the rest of the amazing team at Head of Zeus for all their hard work in getting Girl 38 into the best possible shape.
Thank you to all my family and friends who believed I had a second book in me and supported me in writing it whilst having two demanding little ladies at home. I am hugely grateful.
Ewa Jozefkowicz,
London, November 2018
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Girl 38 Page 12