“We lost four,” he said, his voice gruff, his eyes downcast as Rosalia gasped and Chaim grunted as if he’d been punched in the gut. “I’m very sorry. I tried my best to keep everyone safe…”
“Whatever happened, it couldn’t have been your fault,” Yona said. “I am to blame for being so willing to let you go without a fight.” The weight of that realization had sat heavy on her for weeks.
He looked up at her. “Yona, you are blameless. It was the only choice. We couldn’t just protect ourselves if there was a chance to save other lives. All of you survived?”
Yona nodded.
“Praise God.” He sighed and looked down for a long time before raising his head again. “Lazare and Leib were killed by Germans when they ventured out on a food mission,” he said, his voice flat. Yona put her hand over her mouth and blinked back tears. Poor, sweet Leib, only eighteen, a man before his time, who never had the chance to reach true adulthood. Miriam must be beside herself. “I’m sorry. We were starving. I offered to go, but instead I stayed to help protect the group…” He cleared his throat. “We lost Luba, too. An illness. It’s what slowed us down, prevented us from reaching the Bielski group in good time. She became sick only a day after we left camp, and we had to move more slowly. She did not wake up on the third day.” His eyes went to Yona again, and he held her gaze as he added softly, “We also lost Aleksander. I’m sorry, Yona. He died bravely; two Belorussian policemen came upon us in the woods, and he moved to protect my cousins, who were fishing and did not hear them approaching. He saved their lives, but in the gunfight, he was shot, and he perished a day later. He was a hero in the end.”
Tears flowed down Yona’s cheeks, and the depth of her grief confused her; Aleksander had hurt her, discarded her, but she had still shared a season of her life with him. She had loved him, even if that love had been misguided. She wiped her face, drew herself up to her full height, and looked Zus in the eye. “I think he would be proud to know you feel that way.” She took a deep breath. “How is Sulia? She is grieving?”
Zus hesitated. “She seems to be.”
“I’m sorry for her.” Yona meant it. No one should know the pain of such a loss. “You reached the Bielski group?”
Zus shook his head. “We found their settlement, exactly where Shimon said it would be. But it was deserted; it appeared that they had fled a day or two before. It was a whole society in the woods, Yona; there must be a thousand of them there. It was incredible. We’ve been praying since then for their survival; it would be difficult to hide a group that large.”
Yona nodded; it was just as Jüttner had said. “When Rosalia and Chaim ventured into some villages, they learned that the Germans’ mission had not been successful. They did not find the Bielski group.”
“We heard the same. It gives us hope that they are still alive.”
“And the Zorin group? Did you reach them?”
Again Zus shook his head. “We tried. It is what kept us moving for so long in the wrong direction. But we never found them, and then we heard that the Germans had retreated. After we lost Aleksander, we began to move back here in hopes of finding you.” Zus glanced at Chaim and Rosalia before looking back at Yona. “There’s more. We have added to our group. Eight newcomers, six men and two women. They are all heavily armed, and they were wandering the forest alone, looking for a way to fight the Germans.”
“They are Jews?” Chaim asked.
“Yes.” There was awe in Zus’s voice as he added, “They came from the Nowogródek ghetto. Like the Sokolowskis and the Gulniks, they were looking for the Bielskis and did not find them. But they came upon us, and when we told them about our settlement here, they asked if they could stay. They want to help us. They came with machine guns and ammunition, taken from Germans they ambushed in the forest.”
“If they bring their own guns, they are very welcome to stay,” Chaim said, and he and his brother shared a weary smile.
“Come,” Zus said, raising his voice to address the whole group. “There is much to tell all of you, and I want to hear everything about what happened to you, too. Shall we go have a meal?”
Laughing and chattering, with the clouds overhead temporarily parting to let in the light, the group that had followed Yona into the swamps began to walk back toward the place they had come to know as home.
* * *
That night, after meeting the eight newcomers—all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and all bright-eyed with anger and grief for loved ones slain by the Germans—Yona walked a hundred meters away from their camp and found herself alone in the woods for the first time in weeks. It was safe here in the camp, as safe as it could be, and even Chaim and Rosalia had let down their guard and crawled off to sleep. Israel and Wenzel, who had come back with Zus’s group a week before and were well rested, were on patrol tonight, and Yona could hear their distant footsteps moving through the trees. But still she was able to close her eyes and block out the sound as she sat by the edge of a burbling stream.
The soft rushing of the water comforted her, gave her leave to let go, and before she knew it, tears were running down her face, and then she was sobbing, her body heaving with the sudden effort of drawing a breath. The moon shone down, peaceful and quiet, the stars twinkled overhead, and Yona wept at last for all the things that had been lost: for the people who should still be here, for the father she’d never see again, for the death of Aleksander, for the senseless loss of young Leib’s life, even for Jerusza, who seemed farther away than ever. The Germans, they don’t just wipe out our people, Aleksander had said to her long ago. They wipe out our future. Aleksander’s family line, and Leib’s, were forever erased now. How many futures had the Germans snuffed out the same way?
She was crying so hard that she didn’t hear anyone approaching until warm, callous fingers touched her arm. She jumped up, whirling around, and found herself face-to-face with Zus. The scream in her throat melted into a whimper, and without a word, he folded her into his arms and simply held her as her shoulders shook. When she finally pulled away, she knew that her face was streaked with salt and dirt, and her eyes were bloodshot, but when Zus reached out and gently tucked an errant fall of hair behind her ear, she saw herself reflected in his eyes, and she saw none of those flaws.
“I’m sorry about Aleksander,” Zus said, his voice rough as he broke the silence between them. “I know what it is to lose someone.”
“I’m not crying only for him,” Yona said, and there was something about the way that his shoulders sagged slightly in relief that made her heart beat a bit faster. “My tears are for everyone we’ve lost. All the lives that should not have been extinguished.”
Zus nodded, and they looked skyward at the same time. Yona watched as a splash of stars, an infinite galaxy far away, disappeared behind a dark cloud, and then she looked back at Zus.
“They took my wife and daughter,” he said, his voice flat. He was still looking at the space where the stars should have been. “Right in front of me. I—I could not stop it. Did Chaim tell you?”
Yona nodded. “I’m so sorry, Zus.”
She reached for his hand, and he laced his fingers through hers. After a moment of silence, she followed his gaze back to the sky.
“I’m broken, Yona,” he said, still not looking at her. “I always will be, no matter what I do, no matter how many lives I help save.”
She hesitated before moving closer and resting her head on his shoulder. “I’m broken, too. But sometimes it’s the jagged edges that allow us to fit together. Sometimes it’s the breaks that make us strong.”
Zus didn’t reply, and for a moment she was certain she’d said the wrong thing, that in trying to make him feel less alone, she had instead made him feel as if she were comparing her losses to his. But then he placed his index finger under her chin and gently tilted her face up. He studied her eyes for a few seconds, his gaze stormy, and then, wordlessly, he leaned in and kissed her, so softly that at first his lips barely
touched hers. When she leaned in and kissed him back, he turned slightly, angling his body toward hers and pressing her against him.
When he finally pulled away, the light had returned to his eyes. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but there was no need for words. After a few seconds, she placed her head on his shoulder again, and he rested his head against hers, and she wondered if maybe their broken edges had been a perfect fit all along.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For the next month, it was as if the night had never happened, as if they hadn’t held each other in the starlight until dawn and opened their hearts for a moment to let a bit of light in. A thousand times she had replayed it in her mind and wondered if she should have pulled away in those few seconds before he kissed her. He had mentioned his wife and child, and perhaps his grief for them had clouded his judgment for a few minutes. Perhaps it had been up to her to stop him from making a mistake, up to her to stop her heart from suddenly wanting something she shouldn’t.
But she often caught him looking at her, his gaze tender and penetrating, and sometimes, when she looked up and met his eyes, it felt as if they were the only ones in the world. The feeling confused her, as did the way her skin tingled whenever he brushed against her, which had never happened with Aleksander. But she pretended nothing was wrong, for what could be gained from harping on feelings she didn’t understand, when their survival was at stake?
She focused instead on checking on little Abra, who was, blessedly, a quiet baby, and on the eight newcomers: the Rozenberg brothers, Benjamin, Maks, Michal, and Joel; Regina and Paula, who were the wives of Benjamin and Michal; and the two men who had come with them, Rubin Sobil and Harry Feinschreiber. All were young, angry, and ready to fight back, and already, their arrival had changed the mood in the camp. Now there was a restlessness to everything, a feeling of waiting.
The Germans had fallen back for now, leaving in their wake an eerie silence, a feeling that the worst was still to come. The more immediate problem, though, was that winter was fast approaching and the group’s food supply had dwindled to nearly nothing, since they’d taken so much of the preserved food with them when they fled into the swamps. There were more mouths to feed now, and much less food. They would not survive the winter with what little they had left, and when Benjamin and Maks Rozenberg brought up the idea of ambushing a German supply convoy to steal food and weapons, Yona couldn’t dismiss it, though she hated the idea of putting any of them in harm’s way.
“There is no choice,” Zus murmured one day as he sat down in the clearing with Yona, Chaim, and Rosalia. “We must eat.”
“And the villages have been bled dry,” Chaim said. In the time since they’d been back at their camp, several of them had taken turns venturing out to the towns on the edges of the forest to see what had been left behind. They were desperate to find stores of food, but instead they found bodies and burned buildings everywhere they went. The Germans had torched farms and slaughtered livestock to prevent refugees from finding any nourishment. Still, there had been some beets remaining in the ground, and Chaim and Zus had found a small underground bunker filled with potatoes, which they’d transported back to camp in big sacks. It was a start, but the food wouldn’t last the winter; they needed more.
It was Rosalia who replied. “Something must be done. They have forced us into the woods, murdered our people, taken all that we hold dear. It is time they pay.”
Yona didn’t know Rosalia’s history, what had brought her into the forest, but for the first time, she understood that something terrible had happened to her. There was a crack in Rosalia’s cool exterior now, and it made Yona shiver.
“Why now?” Yona asked.
When Rosalia turned to her, her eyes were on fire. “Because it is no longer enough to simply survive. How long are we supposed to go on like this? Our bodies may be enduring, but what about our souls? What about our pride? What about the things that make us who we are beyond our flesh and bone?”
The others nodded, all except Yona. When she looked at Zus, he was watching her. “What do you say, Yona?”
“I thought we were talking about taking food from the Germans, which is dangerous enough,” she said slowly. “But revenge? I think, at best, revenge would be a short-term salve, and at worst, it could be dangerous.” There was no right answer here on earth, so she looked for reason elsewhere. “ ‘You shall neither take revenge from, nor bear a grudge against, the members of your people,’ ” she said at last. “ ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
Zus looked stricken. “Leviticus 19.” He took a deep breath. “ ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart,’ ” he said, quoting the same chapter, his eyes not leaving hers.
“But they are not our brothers.” Rosalia’s voice had grown colder, and Chaim was nodding slowly along with her now, something dark flickering in his eyes. “The German soldiers are not our neighbors. They have invaded our home. They have turned our countrymen against us. Moses himself commanded revenge against those who murdered the children of Israel. ‘Go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them,’ he said.”
“But God spoke to Moses and commanded it,” Yona said. “He has not spoken to us. All we have is conscience to be our guide.”
“I would not lose a moment of sleep over harming those who seek to erase us from the face of the earth.” Rosalia’s eyes were as steely as her tone as she turned to Yona. “You don’t know what it is like to watch your loved ones murdered before your eyes, Yona. You don’t know what it is to carry that anger inside of you for months that become years,” Rosalia said, her voice softening. “You are kind and good, but I think maybe you can never understand if you are not one of us, if you haven’t suffered the things we have.”
“Rosalia, how can you say that?” Zus said at once. “Has she not risked her life for yours a hundred times? For all of us?” But in the silence that followed, Yona’s heart ached. She understood what Rosalia meant, and she wasn’t wrong.
“I’m sorry, Yona,” Rosalia said, bowing her head and then looking up with eyes full of remorse. “I should not have said that.”
“But you were right.” Yona had no place in this choice, for she hadn’t lost the same things they had, and so she looked to Zus, whose expression was troubled. “I will trust your decision.” They held each other’s gaze for a long time, and she could see the anguish in his eyes, the conflict.
“We go after the Germans,” he said at last. “Far from here, so they can’t trace us. Not for the purpose of taking lives, but for the purpose of obtaining the food and supplies we need. It’s not revenge. It is seizing what we need from the people who have stolen it from us, and perhaps letting them know in the process that we have it in us to fight back, that we are proud and free. Are we in agreement?”
Chaim nodded first, stepping forward to shake Zus’s hand. Then Rosalia murmured her assent, and all of them looked to Yona. She knew the forest better than anyone, and if there was to be an ambush, she would need to decide where it would take place.
“The road into the forest from Nowogródek,” she said at last. “It is two days’ walk from here, so they won’t know where we came from. It is one of the transport roads the Germans use.” She had seen their trucks herself when she fled Jüttner’s home and made her way back into the forest. “If we can stop a transport truck, we can take their weapons and ammunition, as well as provisions for our people.”
“Right out of the Germans’ mouths,” Chaim said, nodding in agreement. “Won’t it anger them, though?”
“That’s what the raids this summer were about,” Yona said. “The Bielski group and the Russian partisans have been launching attacks like this one. The Germans tried to strike back, and they failed. I think it is very likely they are still licking their wounds. If we stop only one truck, and if we manage to get away, the impact of it will be so small that they won’t come after us.” She knew she sounded more con
fident than she felt, but she was counting on the fact that the Germans would want most of all to save face.
Zus was studying Yona with a frown. “But it would still be dangerous. We could be killed.”
She looked first at Rosalia, then at Chaim, and then finally back at Zus, who had lost so much. “Rosalia is right, though. We would be fighting back at last. Maybe it is time.”
Zus finally nodded, and turned to his brother, quickly running down a list of who they could take with them and how quickly they could move. As they talked, Rosalia edged up next to Yona and put a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should not have said you are not like us.”
“You were right.” Yona blinked and could see Jüttner’s face in her mind, not his cold, lined face now, but the face of a younger man leaning over her cradle all those years before, looking down at her with tenderness. She blinked again, and the image disappeared. “Who did you lose, Rosalia? I’m sorry I’ve never asked you before.”
Rosalia looked away, and when she looked back, there were tears in her eyes. Yona had never seen the other woman cry. “Everyone. Including my husband and our two sons.”
“I’m so sorry,” Yona said, reaching for Rosalia’s hands, but Rosalia pulled away. “I—I never knew you were a mother.”
“It is in the past.” Her voice was clipped, but Yona could hear it trembling, and she understood in an instant that there had always been far more to Rosalia than she knew.
“How old were they? Your boys?”
Rosalia took a deep breath. “Two and four. Their whole lives were in front of them. And now I am the only one still here. It is no longer enough to merely get by, Yona. This has to end, all of it. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of hiding. I want to salvage a life from the ruins. I want to honor my children.”
The Forest of Vanishing Stars Page 27