by Kelly Rimmer
“What is it?” Mama demanded, and she snatched the paper from his hand. As she read it, she made a little noise in the back of her throat.
“Mama, Father...” I croaked. “What is wrong?”
“Go fetch your brothers from the other field,” Father said dully. “We need to have a talk.”
We sat around the table and each of us took our turn to hold the paper. It was a summons—all families in our district who had children over the age of twelve would be required to send them for labor assignment. I was too upset to read the whole thing, in fact, every time I tried, my vision clouded with tears. Still, I was simply determined to keep a grip on some kind of optimism—or better still, to find a loophole.
“There has to be a way around it,” I told my family. My brothers shared an impatient glance, but I ignored them and pressed harder to find a way out of the mess. “They can’t make us leave our family and our home. They can’t—”
“Alina,” Filipe cut me off sharply. “These are the same people who shot Aleksy and the mayor in front of the entire town. These are the same soldiers who are making the Jewish children in the town work from sunup to sundown—the same pigs who think nothing of beating women and children to death if they disobey. The same men who took little Paulina Nowak just because her hair is blond. Do you really think they are going to hesitate to take a bunch of teenagers away in case we get homesick?”
I went to bed early that night, and I closed the door between my bed and the rest of the house, and I looked around my little room—my little world. My parents had split our tiny house into three rooms—although by today’s standards, two of those rooms would be laughably small, no more than closets. We were farmers—peasants, in the local vernacular—people who made only just enough from our land to support ourselves and during dry years, not a single shaft of wheat we didn’t desperately need.
So many times since Tomasz left, I’d been so desperate to flee that house to run to Warsaw to be with him. But that was when I thought I was walking away from my family into Tomasz’s waiting arms, an entirely different scenario to this one—where I was being torn away and sent to hostile strangers in a hostile land. I was existing here at the farm in a broken world, propelled out of bed each day only by the fact that every sunrise at least had the potential to bring news of Tomasz’s safety. If the Nazis took me away, how would he ever find me? How would I ever know what had become of him? The months that had passed since his last letter had felt close to unbearable. How could I survive if the not knowing became a permanent state?
I lay on my bed and I wrapped my arms around myself and I tried so hard to be brave, but I just kept picturing myself so far away from my family, isolated in a place where I didn’t speak the language and where I would no longer be the beloved and somewhat-sheltered youngest child, but instead a vulnerable young woman on her own. Eventually I closed my eyes, and I fell into an exhausted sleep, but I awoke sometime later to hushed whispers from my parents in the living area. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, so slipped out of bed to stand at the door.
But Stanislaw is the strongest. We must keep him—we cannot run the farm without him. At the very least we keep Filipe—he has no common sense and he will run his mouth off if we let him go—
No! Alina is tiny and she’s weak and too pretty. She is but a child! If we send Alina, she will never survive. We must keep her here.
But if we keep her, the farm will never survive!
I opened the door, and my parents both jumped in their chairs. My father looked away, but Mama turned to me and said impatiently, “Back to bed.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“Nothing. It is none of your concern.”
Hope blossomed in my chest. This was such an enticing sensation that I had to press a little harder, even though I knew I’d likely be shouted at for doing so.
“Did you find a way for us to stay?”
“Back to bed!” Mama said, and as I’d expected, her tone left no room for argument. There was no sleeping after that, and later, when I heard my parents pull out the sofa that served as their bed, I waited a while until they fell silent, then I sneaked past their bed to the boys’ tiny room at the other end of the house. My brothers were wide-awake, lying top-to-tail on the sofa they shared. When I entered the room, Filipe sat up and opened his arms to me.
“What is going on? Can we stay after all?”
He pulled away from me to stare at me in disbelief.
“Didn’t you read the notice?”
“I read most of it...” I lied, and he sighed heavily.
“One of us will be given a permit to stay here and help them run the farm. Mama and Father have to choose,” Filipe told me softly. He brushed my hair back from my face, then added, “But to ask them to choose between their children is a cruelty that we will not tolerate. Stani and I will go. You will have to work hard, Alina—and you are lazy, so it won’t be easy. But it is safer for you to stay here.”
“But I’m going to marry Tomasz soon, and then I’ll move to Warsaw,” I said stubbornly.
“Alina,” Stanislaw whispered impatiently. “There is no university left at Warsaw. I heard that the professors have all been imprisoned or executed, and most of the students joined the Wehrmacht. Tomasz is either in prison or working with those monsters, but it doesn’t even matter which—you’re not moving away.”
I was indignant at the very idea that Tomasz would ever align himself with the Nazi troops.
“How dare you—”
“Hush, Alina,” Filipe said tiredly. “No one knows where Tomasz is, not for sure, so don’t get upset.” Then he glanced at me, and he added slowly, “But if you stay here, he has a chance of finding you if he manages to get out of the city to come home.”
I’d thought the same thing myself. For just a moment, I clung to the idea greedily, but then I remembered what the trade-off was. I tried to imagine my life without the twins, but the very thought of it filled me with loneliness.
“But I don’t want you to go to away,” I whispered tearfully, and Stanislaw sighed.
“So, Alina, instead—will you go to the work farm for us then? Miles away from Mama and Father—all on your own?”
In the end, the boys would not be deterred. When the day came for them to leave, Mama, Father and I walked them into Trzebinia to the train station. Mateusz, Truda and Emilia met us there, and when Emilia saw me, she skipped to my side and smiled sadly.
“This is just like when we said goodbye to Tomasz,” she whispered.
I nodded, but I was distracted, absorbing the shocking scene before me. It was an overcast day, just like Tomasz’s departure, and we were at the train station again—but Emilia was very wrong, because I was immediately aware that this moment was something altogether new.
This time, no one was waiting on the platform to send their loved ones on to some exciting adventure. None of these children were leaving Trzebinia to learn or to explore—they were being stolen from us. To the invaders, they were nothing more than a resource to be exploited, but those of us left behind knew that a part of the soul of our district was being torn away. Even Nadia Nowak, who had already lost her husband in the bombings then had her precious Paulina taken for Germanization, stood on that platform and wailed loudly as she said goodbye to her three oldest teenagers. Nadia joined a sea of other mothers who sobbed with equal grief and terror, and a crowd of fathers who cleared their throats compulsively, and dabbed frantically at their eyes to hide any hint of moisture.
The young people stood woodenly for the most part. Some of the very young ones cried, but it wasn’t the unrestrained emotion we saw in their mothers—these were tears of shock and disbelief. I got the sense that even once the train arrived at the work farms, those young people would take weeks to accept the reality of their situations.
And that would have b
een me, but for my brothers.
I’d been relieved since the decision was made that I would stay, but as I faced the consequences of my easy acceptance of my brother’s nobility, I was swamped in a wave of grief that threatened to knock me to my knees.
Emilia tugged my hand suddenly, and I looked down at her to find she was staring at me intently.
“Do you think Tomasz is still alive?” she asked me. I blinked at her, surprised both at the question and the resigned tone with which she asked it. I shook myself mentally and forced myself to focus, because there was something not at all right about such a grown-up, pessimistic tone coming from sweet little Emilia. I ruffled her hair and I said firmly, “Of course he is. He’s alive and he’s well and he’s doing everything he can to get back to us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“He promised me, silly. And Tomasz would never lie to me.”
Her sharp green gaze didn’t waver from mine, and it took every bit of strength I had not to look away. I wouldn’t break the stare, because I feared if I did, she’d see right through me. Was I as sure as all that? Not at all. But for all of the desperation in our lives that day, I wanted to save Emilia the one small trauma of doubting her beloved big brother.
She nodded suddenly, abruptly, and went back to staring at the assembled crowd around us. All too soon, announcements came that it was time for the young people to make their way to the train. Filipe stepped toward me and enveloped me in a bear hug.
“Look after Mama and Father, Alina. Work hard.”
“I wish you could stay,” I whispered. My guilt was so palpable in that moment I couldn’t even make myself look him in the eye.
“I couldn’t stay. Not when the alternative was for you to go,” he said gently. Then he kissed my forehead and whispered against my hair, “Be brave, little sister. You are so much more than you know.”
Stani approached me as the tears filled my eyes. He kissed my cheek too, but he was silent, even as he embraced our parents. Father stood frozen, his muscles locked, his teeth set hard. Mama silently cried. Truda was clutching Mateusz’s arm so tightly her fingers were white, but her expression was solemn.
The boys gave a simultaneous nod, and they walked away to join the line to fill the train. They kept their chins high, and they both managed a smile and a wave back toward us just before they disappeared from our view.
I was awed by their courage and bewildered that even that moment didn’t seem to faze them one little bit. Of course, they must have been terrified—they were only boys, and all of the things that had scared me about the forced labor arrangement would have been equally overwhelming to them too. Neither one spoke much German, neither one had ever lived out of home before.
I knew the very act of hiding their fear was one of sacrifice, just like the decision to go in my place. They were good people—the best people.
I still think about my big brothers. I sometimes wonder if I would have done anything different that day, if only I’d known that within a year they’d both be dead—and that those quiet moments by the train station would be the very last time I ever saw them.
CHAPTER 6
Alice
Mom has turned Babcia’s retirement home unit upside down but she can’t find the box. Now she’s headed back to her house; she has some of Babcia and Pa’s things in storage. It’s been a few hours and she’ll be a while yet, but Eddie is pressing the lunch button on his iPad dozens of times a minute, and it’s driving me, Babcia and the nurses insane. I turned the sound down, but Eddie turned it straight back up—just like Babcia did earlier. One of the nurses quite gently asked if I could take the iPad off him, but it’s his voice and his ears, so I refused.
We’re actually lucky because now that it’s lunchtime, he’ll eat soup or yogurt—but also supremely unlucky, because given the fiasco in the store this morning, I have neither on hand. Eddie simply needs a can of soup, or better still, some tubes of Go-Gurt if we can find some with the right label. I have to call Wade. I have to convince him to come from work via a store, and to bring something Eddie can eat, or better still, to come and take Eddie home. The reason I don’t want to do it is that I already know how this conversation is going to go.
It’s an emergency, I’ll say. I wouldn’t have asked if I had an alternative, but I can’t leave Babcia alone—she’s distressed enough as it is. And I don’t know how much longer Mom is going to be, but Eddie desperately needs to eat.
Wade will make all the right noises, and then there’ll be some impressive reason why he can’t help. He did say he had meetings, so I imagine he’ll refer back to that premade excuse again.
I think about just putting up with the endless robotic demands for lunch, lunch, lunch and waiting, but Eddie looks so frustrated—like he’s about to explode, actually—and now that I think about it, it’s a bonafide miracle we’ve made it this far today with only one meltdown. I sigh and dial Wade.
“Honey,” he answers on the first ring. “I’ve been so worried. How are things going?”
“Things are terrible,” I admit. “Babcia can’t speak and I don’t think she can understand us. She’s been using Eddie’s iPad and she’s told us she needs a box of photos from home, but Mom can’t find it. And Eddie didn’t get his yogurt this morning because there’s new packaging on the Go-Gurt at the Publix and he had this meltdown and now he’s starving so another one is coming and I can’t do this by myself today. I need your help. I know you said you were busy...”
“I’m so sorry, honey. I have these meetings...”
“There is no one else I can call, Wade.”
I’ve raised my voice, and Eddie and Babcia both look at me in surprise. Even if they don’t understand the words, the volume apparently speaks for itself. I wince as I offer them an apologetic shrug, then take a deep breath to calm myself a little.
“I can’t take him home, Alice,” my husband says, a little stiffly. “I just have too much—”
“Don’t worry, Wade. I’m not asking for anything unrealistic like you spending an afternoon alone with your son,” I say, then I hear his sharp intake of breath, and I realize we’re about to argue. Again. Probably because he’s being an ass, and that comment I just made fell somewhere on the spectrum between “mean” and “bitchy” so it’s guaranteed to get a defensive rise out of him. I close my eyes and aim for a much more conciliatory tone as I say, “I’m only asking you to go pick up some tins of soup or some Go-Gurt if you can find the old packaging. Bring them to me here at the hospital. I’ll handle everything else.” My tone shifts, and now I’m begging him. “Please, Wade. Please.”
He sighs, and in my mind, I can see him in his office on the phone. He’ll be sitting stiffly because I’m irritating him, and he’ll have instantly mussed up his hair because he’s upset at how I just spoke to him. Even now, in the awful silence as I wait for him to speak, I know he’ll be repeatedly running his hand over his hair, and when the exasperation gets too much, he’ll rest his hand against the back of his neck and slump.
But just as I can picture this with perfect clarify after so many years with Wade, I also know he’s going to do what I asked, because if he wasn’t, he’d have snapped right back at me and we’d have wound up this call with one or both of us hanging up in anger.
“I’ll come now.”
“If you go to the store near your office, they might have stock of the Go-Gurt with the old labels.” I hesitate, then ask cautiously, “You know what that looked like, right? I’ll text you the image. Same for the soup. You have to get the right soup.”
“I’m not an idiot, Alice,” he says impatiently, and I hear the sounds of movement at his end. “I’m leaving right now.”
Wade is an excellent father, although if you viewed his behavior only through the lens of his interactions with Eddie, you’d suspect the opposite. He rarely engages with Eddie, he’s constantly resistant
to the therapies that help our son to survive in the world, he’s dismissive and impatient and he’s unsupportive.
But with our daughter, Pascale—or Callie, as we usually call her, Wade is a model parent. He’s genuinely busy with his job, but he finds a way to be at all of the key events in her life—debate club meets, ballet recitals, parent-teacher interviews, doctor’s appointments. Callie and Wade usually do her homework together, though she rarely needs his help. They are twelve chapters into the last Harry Potter book because they have read alternate pages aloud to each other every night without fail over the past three years. She had her first crush last year, and she told Wade about little Tyler Wilson before she even told me.
I can’t even remember the last time Wade and Eddie were alone together.
Wade would say we had a perfectly normal son until Eddie was eighteen months old and I took him to a doctor, who put a label on our boy, and that label tainted everything. Wade would say I was so convinced that something was wrong with Eddie that it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, then I spent so much time trying to “fix” him that I actually made him broken.
And he’s kind of right about the paranoia, because from the moment I realized I was pregnant, I knew that something was different. Even I don’t understand how I knew, so I can appreciate that to Wade it might seem that I made all of this happen somehow—at least at first. Maybe that theory could have been valid, right up until Eddie was two, and the developmental pediatrician said the words Autism Spectrum Disorder. We didn’t yet understand how bad it was going to be, but surely that diagnosis was a clear sign that this situation was way out of my control.
It is beyond me how my brilliant husband, a man with a PhD and an entire research program under his guidance, can fail to understand how utterly helpless I am when it comes to our son. I am a puppet controlled by medical professionals and therapists. They tell me all the things I need to do to engage with Eddie. Some of those things, like the AAC on the iPad, help me to reach him, but most of their therapies don’t reach him at all—they simply enable us to survive. None of those therapies made him different—Eddie just is different. That’s where my opinion and Wade’s diverge.