Krysia

by Krystyna Mihulka

  The feast ended, and we thanked our hosts, bowing to them, and went back to our room.

  That night, a scream woke me up. Babcia cried, “Look! Look at the walls!” I gazed at them in horror; they were covered with crawling cockroaches.

  “Let’s leave! Let’s leave!” shouted Lala.

  “We can’t leave in the middle of the night and wake up those kind people,” my mother replied.

  Luckily Antek and Janek did not wake up. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. By the light of the dim oil lamp, I watched, petrified, as hundreds of shiny brown cockroaches scurried across the walls. I shook them off me and brushed them off my sleeping brother when some of them fell onto him from the ceiling. In the morning we gathered our belongings, shook out all the cockroaches, and left. We moved back into the cold hut.

  7

  Traveling by Oxcart

  We lived in the freezing dwelling for a week. Then one morning we were awakened by a loud knock on the door.

  “Open up!” The commissar was standing there with a notebook in his hand. He called out the names of three families, and one of them was ours. The other two were Lala’s and Pani Irena’s.

  “Pack up,” he instructed. “You’re leaving.”

  Three carts, the kind that transport vegetables to the market, each pulled by an ox, were waiting for us outside.

  “Why us, why us? Where are you taking us?” Babcia cried.

  “We are going to be shot!” wailed Pani Irena.

  “Don’t say that in front of the children!” my mother scolded.

  But it was too late. I had heard her, and I was afraid.

  We climbed into the carts. There was one for each family plus a Kazakh driver wearing a short gray quilted coat and a round fur hat. We were political prisoners, but we didn’t need any guards, because we were just women and young children. Where could we go if we escaped? Into the vast, empty steppes?

  Marysia and Graźyna rushed out of the dwelling toward our cart. I could see tears running down their cheeks. I tried hard not to cry myself. It was all I could do to call, “Źegnajcie! Good-bye!” I wondered if we would ever see each other again. They stood in front of the open door, waving, as we drove away in the carts. Eventually they disappeared in the distance and our slow journey into the unknown began.

  It was late April, and the spring air was clear but very crisp; patches of white snow were still scattered across the land. Purple and yellow flowers covered the steppes like a carpet. A few low bushes of grayish green dotted the empty fields.

  Lala, Babcia, and Janek were in the first cart, my mother and Antek and I were in the middle one, and Pani Irena and her daughters were behind us. After many hours of traveling, we suddenly heard the driver of the cart behind us shout. We looked back and saw his ox sitting in the middle of the road. The driver screamed, “Hula, hula!” and hit the ox with a whip. Antek started to cry; he couldn’t stand seeing somebody being cruel to animals. The ox didn’t move. The other drivers decided to wait for it. They let us get out and stretch our legs while they smoked their pipes and chattered in their language. After about an hour the ox stood up and we moved on.

  The sun, a huge orange ball, was sinking into the horizon. Night was coming. The sound of water reached our ears, and soon we came upon a small stream. The carts stopped. The drivers untied the oxen and let them graze. They gathered a few stones, cut some branches from a small bush, and made a fire. Producing an iron kettle, they boiled some water, into which they dropped tea leaves. We each had a mug, and the drivers offered us the tea, which they called hot chai, and some pieces of dry meat. We slept in the carts with the moon shining on us.

  An early spring landscape like this one surrounded us as we continued our journey by oxcart. © Maxim Petrichuk/Dreamstime.com

  “Hula, hula.” The voices woke me up. The carts were moving again. The steppes gave way to small grassy hills with low bushes. Goats, followed by Kazakh shepherds, appeared. The drivers and shepherds exchanged greetings: “Salem, salem.”

  After a few more hours of travel, we heard sounds of knocking and grinding in the near distance. Soon we passed some houses made of clay, all identical, with sloping roofs and small windows. We stopped at a long, rectangular building. The smell of roasting meat and freshly baked bread filled the air. Men in yellow helmets and muddy gray clothes marched into the building; their tired faces hardly glanced in our direction. Our drivers left, too, to enter the building.

  “Wait here, everybody,” my mother said. “I will go see if we can buy some food.” Pani Irena went with her, but they soon returned empty-handed.

  “We are near a gold mine,” my mother explained. “The cafeteria is for miners and people who have work permits. They wouldn’t sell us anything.”

  We sat in the carts, disappointed and hungry. A middle-aged Russian woman came around the corner of the building, wearing the gray quilted coat I had seen on most of the people. She was holding something tightly under her coat, and as she approached our carts, she looked furtively around. Seeing nobody but us, she pulled some loaves of bread out from under her coat and threw one into each of our carts. “Dieti, dieti. Children, children,” she exclaimed.

  As she turned to leave, my mother called out “Spasibo, spasibo! Thank you, thank you!” Then my mother took out a knife and cut three slices from the round, golden-crusted loaf. “We have to leave some for later,” she said. “We don’t know when we will next have any food.”

  As I ate slowly, enjoying the warm bread, I remembered one day in Poland when I gave some of my money to a beggar woman sitting on the step of the church. I had felt very sorry for her. Now were we the homeless beggars arousing pity in others? The gnawing hunger that the bread barely satisfied stifled any other feelings I might have had; I was only grateful to our angel of mercy.

  At nightfall we reached our final destination. After passing through a Kazakh village with the usual flat roofs and walled huts, we came to a row of square huts with windows. At the end of the street the carts stopped in front of a long building. A stout, young, blond Russian woman in that same gray coat, with a long black skirt and brown boots underneath, ordered us to unload the carts.

  “Zdravstvuyte,” she barked. “Greetings. I am Natasha, and I am in charge here. You are in Akbuzal. You are not allowed to go out of the village further than one kilometer or you will be arrested.”

  We were already arrested, I thought.

  “The workers’ meetings are held every week in the main building by my office. Long live Sovietskiy Soyuz and our glorious motherland.” She turned and marched briskly and decisively away.

  Let Sovietskiy Soyuz die and to hell with the motherland, I silently wished. I tried to suppress these bad thoughts, but could not. The happy, trusting child I had been was gone. I was acquiring adult language, and, unfortunately, I was learning to hate.

  PART III

  Life in Captivity

  8

  Settling In

  The door of the long, rectangular building opened, and a Russian man, also wearing a gray coat and a round fur hat, came out. “Zdravstvuyte,” he greeted us in a loud voice. “I am Ivan, assistant to Natasha, who is in charge of this kolkhoz, communal farm. Get out of your carts and bring your belongings with you.”

  We did as he ordered. My mother, Antek, and I, along with Lala, Babcia, Janek, Pani Irena, Danusia, and Ewa, followed him into a long, dark shack. Rows of wooden bunks ran along two sides of the walls, facing each other, supported by wooden legs that were sunken into the clay floor. In the center, two heavy, long tables stretched from one end of the room to the other. On the wall opposite the doorway was a small window, the only source of light. A smoky wood-burning stove stood in one corner. I didn’t see any chairs. We picked our bunks, and my mother spread a blanket over the rough wood and put our suitcases underneath.

  Before we had time to settle down, another group arrived, also via oxcart. They joined our group of three families. A middle-aged, heavily built woman
and a young girl introduced themselves.

  “I am Kulakowska, and this is my daughter Litka.”

  Behind them came an elderly woman with short gray hair and a kind smile, accompanied by a tall, slim, and pretty young woman with large blue eyes, who carried two suitcases.

  “Dzień dobry,” they greeted us. “I am Rzewuska, and this is my daughter Lila,” said the older woman. “My daughter is a ballet teacher.”

  I was interested only in Litka, a blonde girl a little taller than me, who wore a friendly expression. I needed a companion. We exchanged glances and were immediately drawn to each other. I walked over to her and introduced myself.

  “I am Krysia, and I know that you are Litka. I’m almost 10.”

  “I’m 14,” she answered. “Let’s go outside.”

  We walked onto a dirt road lined with square mud huts with small windows and slanting roofs. There were no people outside. Where was everybody? I wondered. One of the buildings bore a sign reading KANTOOR (office). The door to the next building was open, and we went in. It looked like a store, but the shelves were empty except for tubes of toothpaste and pink bottles of perfume. A stout, gray-haired man stared at us from behind the counter.

  “Why do they sell toothpaste if there is nothing to eat?” Litka exclaimed. The man didn’t understand her and just sat there in silence, a bored look on his face.

  Walking back toward our shack, we noticed two long buildings in the distance, on a hill. The strong smell of cow manure drifting in the air made me think they must be barns. We were surrounded by small treeless hills; very low bushes grew here and there. In the fields stretching around the buildings, we saw people working: bending, carrying heavy bags, and stacking them into piles. We were too far away to see what they were gathering into the bags.

  The next day Ivan and Natasha came to our shack together. “We are taking you to do farmwork,” Natasha commanded in her unpleasant, shrill voice. “Only elderly people and children do not work. Afterward, the workers’ meeting will be held in the office.” Babcia, Pani Rzewuska, Litka, Danusia, and Ewa stayed in the shack with Janek, Antek, and me. My mother walked out the door with the other adults, but soon returned.

  “I have permission to see a doctor in the town of Georgiewka, and I have to leave as soon as possible. Look after your brother,” she said to me. The next day a hired cart pulled by an ox took her away. Four days passed before she came back with permission not to work. I didn’t understand why, and she didn’t offer any explanations.

  During the days that my mother was gone, Litka and I were very curious to hear what was said at the workers’ meetings. We were not allowed into the office, but we sneaked behind the building, where we could hear Natasha’s voice very clearly.

  “You Polish svoloch—animals—you fed on the blood and sweat of the underprivileged for too long. Your time of punishment has come. Work hard for the glory of our country. In time you will become Communists.” My Russian was not very good, so I couldn’t understand everything, but I did understand the insults, and was shocked. I looked at Litka and saw how outraged she was, too. We walked away before anybody could come out of the meeting and see us.

  When Lala, the pianist, came back from the meeting, she cried bitterly and complained to her mother, Babcia. “What is going to happen to my hands? They will be ruined by the hard labor in the fields. I will never be able to play the piano again.” I felt very sorry for her as I watched Babcia, tears in her eyes, embrace and try to console her daughter.

  We were issued coupons for food, which was in short supply. On some days a line formed in front of the store where bread, rationed to one slice per person, could be obtained. I would wait in the line with my mother, watching the government shopkeeper cut thick slices of dark bread that had the consistency of a wet rubber sponge. Extra water had been added to the dough to make it heavier, but it also made the bread soggy, sticky, and chewy. Each slice was dense and tasteless, but anything edible meant the difference between life and starvation.

  The worst days were when we waited in vain; those days, when we got close to the counter, the last piece of bread would be given to somebody in front of us and the shopkeeper would proclaim the two dreaded words “Ne khvataet. There is none left.”

  The communal farm had milk from the cows and potatoes and sometimes tomatoes and corn from the fields, but everything was reserved for the NKVD police and the Soviet army. The workers could buy potatoes that were the size of plums and considered not good enough for the army. The consequences of stealing could be harsh—the usual punishment was to be sent to a concentration camp, where you were always surrounded by guards—but everybody did it anyway. Everybody who worked in the fields, that is. Since my mother didn’t work, she resorted to bartering. She had sewn golden coins and jewelry into her clothing, exchanging the gold for stolen food and opium—a sedative and narcotic drug made from poppy seeds—which my mother would trade to the Kazakhs for food. The opium slabs looked like chocolate bars wrapped in brown paper. The Kazakhs loved to smoke the opium in long pipes.

  An old Kazakh, Kuran, used to bring my mother the opium, but he was very secretive about it. Usually they would meet behind the shack, away from prying eyes. I was not allowed to listen to his and my mother’s conversations.

  I was very curious about Kuran and the exchanges between him and my mother. One day I asked her, “How does he get those brown slabs? Who gives them to him?”

  She replied, “The mine sells an allotted quantity to mine workers in the town that we passed on our way here. Kuran buys them from them and then comes here to exchange it for gold and clothing. The Kazakhs who need more opium and have no way of getting it bargain with me for milk or sometimes a piece of meat or freshly baked flat bread. This is the only way that I can get food for us since I’m not working in the fields. It’s not legal,” she warned me, “so remember never to say anything to anybody about it! We have to survive the best way we can manage.”

  Even though I was not allowed to be present during my mother’s bargaining, I learned how to barter myself.

  I made friends with a Kazakh girl named Ashana, who was about my age. Her thick, dark, braided hair hung down to her waist, and whenever we met she always wore a broad smile. Sometimes she would invite me to her home. She showed me the dolls that her mother had sewn for her from scraps of colorful material and stuffed with something that might have been beans. I couldn’t ask what it was because I knew only a few words of the Kazakhs’ language. Somehow we managed to communicate with sign language and a few Russian words.

  Ashana was also my source of information. My mother would give me a blouse, a scarf, or a pair of gloves to barter for eggs or milk—mostly for eggs—and Ashana knew where I could get them.

  The Kazakh village was near the Russian houses where we lived. The flat-roofed mud houses were windowless, with long, dark corridors. One day, as I entered the total darkness of one of the huts, I heard a dog barking. I froze. Then a female voice shouted at the dog and a woman appeared, carrying an oil lamp. In the dim light I saw her holding a large black dog by the neck. It was still snarling at me.

  “Salem, jumurdka bar?” I greeted her, asking if she had any eggs. She nodded. She pushed the dog into a room and locked it in, then motioned me into another chamber and looked at the pink blouse I was carrying. She showed me six of her fingers—six eggs.

  “Nyet, nyet,” I protested. I counted to 12 using my fingers.

  She shook her head. She displayed nine fingers.

  “Da, da,” I nodded. I was very proud of myself as I walked home.

  But when I told my mother the story of how I obtained the eggs, she scolded me. “I forbid you to walk alone into the dark corridors again. Next time I will come with you.”

  I knew that, being a child, I could get more than she could, because the Kazakhs were kind people who liked children. But I was also afraid of dogs.

  9

  Strange Happenings at Night

  When we had first
arrived in Akbuzal, each family had been allowed to write one letter to Poland. My mother wrote to her oldest sister, Hala. Every day Antek and Janek watched for trucks arriving at the office in hopes that one of them would carry mail for us.

  After several weeks of waiting, I heard a knock. Lila jumped from her bunk and rushed to open the door of our shack. Ivan announced, “Here are some letters for you.”

  “Spasibo,” Lila thanked him as she grabbed the correspondence.

  “Pani Zosia,” she called to my mother, “this is for you. And this one is for Pani Kulakowska. Nothing for me.”

  Her hands shaking, my mother opened the envelope Lila had handed her.

  Dear Pani Zosia,

  I am well and thinking of you. I am sending you two parcels. Hoping you will receive them. Stefa, Nina, and Zosia are in a village near you and are doing well.

  Everything else above the signature was censored in black ink. The letter was signed “Mila.”

  My mother’s voice was choked with emotion. “This is your father’s writing. I recognize it. He couldn’t sign his name, but he is trying to let us know that he is alive. Thank God for that.”

  I was so happy to hear her words. I missed my father very much and prayed every night for his safety.

  A week after we received my father’s letter, a knock on the door awoke me in the middle of the night. I heard Ivan’s voice shouting, “Tovarisch Mihulka, come to the kantoor!” The Russians always addressed the adults as tovarisch rather than the friendlier comrade.