Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  I became skilled at handing out bowls and worked my way to the teens. At the beginning of the row, a girl of no more than thirteen sat with a toddler on her lap. The child was dressed in a periwinkle blue velvet shirt, its mother-of-pearl buttons still holding fast. Mother’s handiwork. She would be happy.

  “You are taking good care of her,” I said to the girl.

  “No need for two bowls, Mademoiselle. We share.”

  The toddler on her lap watched me go by as a stargazer watches a shooting star, and I continued down the row with my bowls.

  Before long, Madame hurried down one row toward me.

  “You are in luck, Mademoiselle.” She paused to catch her breath, one hand to her lace collar. “We have a few children with that drop-off date, one girl that age.”

  I followed Madame down one row and up the next to a table of four-year-olds eating their soup, the only sound the scrape of their spoons against tin. The noise in the room magnified as I followed Madame. Colors sharpened. Would this be Paul’s child? Finding her would mean extreme happiness for her parents but the opposite for me.

  “A child born on April 1, 1941, would be in our four-year-old group, here,” Madame said, as she checked a child’s tag and presented her with a flourish. “Now, we have Bernadette.”

  She was a towheaded sparrow of a child, her skin almost translucent. She glanced up at me with a wary look.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to say, but I don’t think so.”

  “That is the best I can do,” Madame said. “I will keep an eye out for that birth date. Have the parents come in when they are well.”

  I lingered in the great hall that day and helped serve the rest of lunch. Madame and I ladled fragrant onion soup, thick with carrots and turnips, into the children’s bowls and handed each child a small piece of bread. Their only words, “Merci, Madame,” were tremendous thanks. A plane flew overhead, and some hid under the tables, thinking they were still at risk. Many were shod with wooden blocks tied on with rope. I made a note to send shoes. And money.

  I did my best to peer into the face of every child of about the right age, looking for any familiar sign. As Madame and I finished collecting the empty bowls on a tray, a teenager handed me hers. The child at her hip stopped me short.

  “Madame, could you come?” I asked.

  I set the tray down on the table. “Would you please look up the number of this child?”

  Madame noted the child’s number and went for her clipboard.

  I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the child. She was dark-haired and had almond-shaped eyes like Paul’s and also his coral lips, but everything else about her was Rena. The copper skin, the curve of her nose—down to the ears peeking out from her hair.

  “This child has no drop-off date,” Madame said. “I am very sorry.”

  “This is the child, Madame. I’m certain of it.”

  “Her name is Pascaline,” the teen said.

  Mme Bertillion forced in a quick lungful of air.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I hate to admit it, but your intuition may be right, Miss Ferriday,” Madame said, almost smiling.

  “How so?” I asked. The room closed in on us.

  “The child’s name is Pascaline,” Madame said, as if I had missed something obvious.

  “So what, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Every good French Catholic knows the name Pascaline means born on Easter.”

  1945

  The summer the year that Zuzanna and I came home to Lublin I tried to stay optimistic, but it was hard. Once I learned what had happened during our almost four years at Ravensbrück, I couldn’t understand why the world had never come to our aid. First with Hitler’s invasion in 1939 from the west, then with the Soviet invasion the same month from the east. Though these invasions had caused Britain and France to declare war on Germany, not one Allied soldier had been sent to help us fight. Our first reports of Auschwitz, sent to the Western world by our Polish underground at great risk, had received no response either. Our reports of thousands of our Polish officers murdered in the forests near Katyn, Pietrik’s father possibly among them, were ignored by the world as well.

  So when this world rejoiced at Japan’s surrender and the war was officially over, I did not rejoice. The war continued for us, just under a new dictator, Stalin. Though it was not fully apparent right away, Stalin’s hand was already over us. Many of the leaders of the Polish resistance, several of them Pietrik’s friends, were taken and eventually murdered by the Red Army and the NKVD, Stalin’s brutal law enforcement agency. The NKVD were the nice people in charge of ferreting out “enemies of the people.” They executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners and sent thousands more to the gulags. Instead of a fresh start, Poland got new forms of injustice.

  As a result, we were careful about where we went and spent much time looking over our shoulders. One of the first things I did once I came home was check the secret hiding place Nadia and I had used to exchange books before the war. This was simply a place where teenaged girls had played detective once upon a time. I walked over to Nadia’s old street, and the stone wall was still there, crumbling near the edges but still strong! Would the book Nadia left for me still be there?

  I slid the stone from the spot in the wall, pulled out the book, and brushed the dust from the yellow cover. It was Kornel Makuszynski’s Satan from the Seventh Grade, our favorite book we’d exchanged so many times. How had Nadia been able to leave it after she’d gone into hiding? I looked carefully about, to make sure no one was spying on me, sat with my back to the wall, and held the book. The musty scent of the cover brought back earlier days when life had been simpler, when the worst thing we had to worry about was a bad exam grade or an aching tooth.

  The book opened naturally to chapter five, and Nadia’s gift to me sat there, all ten of Pietrik’s dance tickets she’d bought for me. I was too angry to cry at the wall that day, for the childhood we’d lost came rushing back. We had only wanted to chat with boys and dance and read mysteries. Now Nadia was gone, maybe forever. All I had left of her was a book and the photo buried in the back garden.

  It was late afternoon by the time I made it home, and I brought up the idea of retrieving the photo of Nadia and the other treasures we’d buried at the start of the war.

  “Maybe we should do this another time,” Zuzanna said. This was not like my sister at all, to be standing there in the backyard wringing her hands. “Maybe once we are more acclimated it would be better. This can take an emotional—”

  “Don’t be so nervous,” I said. “Why leave the only valuables we have in the ground?”

  Papa and I shooed away her protests as he paced off the steps.

  Ten, eleven, twelve.

  Had the tin cans kept our most precious things safe?

  Papa stood there for what seemed like a full minute, arms at his sides, the shovel loose in his hand. Was he crying? He then came alive, struck his shovel into the hard-packed earth, and dug like a man whose life depended on what was buried below.

  He didn’t have to dig long before we heard the shovel blade hit tin. All three of us scooped dirt out of the hole with our hands and helped Papa pull out the cans we’d buried so long ago. We sat, out of breath for a while, staring at the cans. Zuzanna cried just looking into that hole. Missing Matka? Part of me was happy to see her cry, since she seldom showed her grief.

  Next Papa lifted out the tin box with the hinged lid. He opened the top, and it let out a little sigh as air was released. He closed it right away, but not before I saw his old silver revolver there. How many guns did we own now?

  The millet was next, still surprisingly dry and maybe even edible, and then we started opening the tin cans. Papa handed one to me, and I scraped away the wax. I pulled the scarf from the can, and it unwound, the scent of Pietrik still there! I opened the next can to find the picture of Nadia and me on the cow. Even my Girl Guide uniform was in perfect shape and t
he corduroy dress that Matka had sewn for my sixteen-year-old body was still bright red. I pulled it on over my skirt and blouse, and it was even loose on me, since I’d still not gained back much weight. None of this caused me many tears, for I was happy to have my precious things back.

  The last can I opened was a biscuit tin. I broke the wax seal and lifted off the lid. I pulled out Matka’s sable brushes, like new inside their flannel wrap, and a surge of sadness rose up and crashed over me there in the yard. Matka was gone, and she would not be coming back to use her brushes. It was my fault too. I deserved to die for killing my mother. Papa and Zuzanna surrounded me with their arms as we crouched there by the hole, all crying by then.

  —

  THROUGH IT ALL, I kept up hope that Nadia and Pietrik would come back and checked the list of returning deportees each morning on the corkboard of the Red Cross Repatriation Center at Lublin Hospital. One especially fine late-summer morning I stopped there first thing to check. The staffers were polite, but I could tell they were tired of seeing me limp in every day. The pain in my leg slowed me up and gave them plenty of time to avoid me. When they saw me approach, they made themselves scarce or busied themselves with shuffling papers. If I did get a response from someone, it was curt.

  “No. No Pietrik Bakoski. No Nadia Watroba either,” the girl at the desk called out that morning before I said a word.

  Next I walked to the postal center, to check the list Papa tacked up in the cool front lobby. By summer’s end, the thick lists posted on the corkboard there had dwindled to one sad page. I ran my finger down the list, first by the W’s and then the B’s. Badowski, Baginski, Bajorek, Bakalar, Bal, Balcer. It felt good to read the names of those lucky few that returned, and I was often at the bottom of the list before I realized the name Pietrik Bakoski was not included there.

  Papa came from his office, saw me at the list, and waved me to him.

  “Kasia, my love, could you come see me in my office for a moment?”

  Why was he being so formal all of a sudden?

  I walked to his office, the same one he’d had for as long as I could remember, with its high tin ceiling and his wide oak desk covered with packages of every sort, all soon to be expertly delivered by Papa or one of his staff. Something seemed to be missing, and it took me a few seconds to realize what it was.

  “Where is the flag, Papa?”

  The Polish flag was one of the first things Papa had put back up in his office, once the Nazis left Lublin, much to the happiness of the postal center patrons. Had the new authorities pressured him to remove the flag? He was cooperating with them; it was clear.

  Papa stepped to the window and pulled down the shade. “We don’t have much time, but I had to tell you I’ve heard something. Don’t be alarmed. This is something we can fix.”

  I don’t know about you, but when someone says, “Don’t be alarmed,” I have trouble listening to the rest of what they say, since fear starts running up and down my body.

  “What are you talking about, Papa?” I hadn’t seen him so frightened since the night we buried our treasures in the backyard with Matka.

  Matka. Every thought of her was still a fresh stab.

  “I heard that there are rumors going around about you girls who came back from Ravensbrück.”

  “From who?”

  “This is serious, Kasia. They are saying that you are not to be trusted.”

  “Don’t believe all—”

  “Zuzanna too.”

  This sent a real quake of fear through me. “Who is saying this?”

  “The authorities—”

  “Who? NKVD? Let me talk to them.”

  “This isn’t something to take lightly, Kasia.”

  “ ‘Not to be trusted’? What does that even mean?”

  “They think, because you were at Ravensbrück, a German camp, that you were working for the Germans. Contaminated by fascism.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “And you’ve been seen partaking in suspicious activity. Do you have a secret hiding place?”

  “The wall by Nadia’s house? That’s child’s play, Papa—”

  “Well, stop it. You are being watched.”

  “Who can live in such a—”

  “Do you want to go away again? This time for good? Get Zuzanna, and destroy any evidence you were there—”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Your Girl Guide uniform. Your letters I saved.”

  “But if they read the letters, they’d see—”

  “They are not easily reasoned with, Kasia. Go. Now.”

  Zuzanna and I made a fire in the backyard that afternoon, as one often did to dispose of household trash, and burned the few things we had from the camp. We threw the bags we’d made from our old uniforms on the pyre. Regina’s English book. My Girl Guide uniform.

  I hesitated when it came to the urine letters I’d sent. Papa had kept them in the kitchen drawer, a neat stack that told the world of our troubles.

  “I can’t burn these,” I said, my grip on the envelopes tightening.

  “You listed every girl’s name in those,” Zuzanna said. “You have to protect them. Who cares about some old letters?”

  I still hesitated.

  Zuzanna snatched the top letter and handed it to me. “Here,” she said and tossed the rest on the fire. At least I would save one.

  As the fire burned, black bits of ash floated about, much as they had from the Ravensbrück chimneys. When we were done, almost all evidence of our camp life was gone.

  Who needed such things anyway, we told ourselves. Souvenirs of a terrible time. But it made the black spot in my chest grow larger. I was a patriot. I took an oath to serve my country. I gave up my youth, my mother, my first love, and my best friend for Poland. For this I was accused of being an enemy spy?

  —

  I TRIED TO FOCUS on good things. Even with the terrible shortage of food and the confusion of people returning to Lublin, there was a ray of optimism surrounding the reopening of demolished factories. The universities were not up and running again, but the Red Cross taught basic nursing classes at the hospital.

  I headed there one late-summer morning, hoping to get some nursing practice. I stepped into the back wing of the hospital, happy to see it had survived the bombings somewhat intact. The massive ward on the second floor was filled with rows of canvas cots divided almost equally, half occupied by Russian soldiers, the other half by Polish civilians from the camps and other places. Russian nurses and medics brought the wounded, presenting with every type of injury imaginable, in on canvas stretchers.

  “We’re off to Warsaw soon,” said Karolina Uznetsky, one of my favorite nurses, as she unfolded a cot. “The army is taking over the hospital.” She filled a basin with warm water.

  “I’ll miss you all,” I said, instead of what I really wanted to say: Please stay. You leave, and who will be here when Pietrik comes back? Leaving means you’ve given up on survivors.

  “How about a free class on the bed bath?” Karolina said.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  Such an opportunity! The bed bath was known to be more complicated than it sounded.

  “Let us start over here,” Karolina said.

  She carried a basin of water and a stack of towels straight toward a particularly damaged row of soldiers. The facial injuries were the hardest to deal with. They’d taken the mirrors in the lavatories down for a reason. I forced myself to look. How could I be a nurse if I couldn’t deal with such things? Suddenly I could not recall even basic Red Cross training. Karolina stood at the cot of one of the worst, a dark-haired man who slept curled on his side. The blood that had seeped through the gauze wrapped around his head had dried black.

  “First, introduce yourself to the patient,” Karolina said, indicating the man on the cot. “We can skip this step, for the patient is unresponsive.”

  It would not be exaggeration to say I idolized Karolina. She was everything a good nurs
e should be. Smart. Levelheaded in the face of gruesome injury. Pleasant. I would have to work on all these things.

  “Ordinarily we would pull the curtain for patient privacy,” Karolina said, “but we will go right to the washcloths and rubber gloves.”

  I pushed my hands into the gloves, smooth and powdery inside, the smell of the rubber somehow hopeful. Karolina folded a washcloth over my gloved hand like a mitt.

  “Begin the bath with the face, no soap used there. Eyes first.”

  I sat on a chair next to the patient and started with the eyes, reaching the cloth into the deep sockets and moving outward. Could he even feel it?

  The soldier next to him lay on his back, arms splayed, snoring louder than any person I’d heard snore before, and there had been many candidates at Ravensbrück.

  “Try to use a different part of the washcloth for every stroke,” Karolina said. “You are a natural, Kasia.” Her words made me puff up with pride. My mother had been a nurse after all. Maybe it was in the blood?

  There was something satisfying about washing the survivors, revealing clean swaths of pink skin under all that grime, the dirt drifting to the bottom of the bowl. When I finished, the water in the bowl was dark brown so I replaced it with clean water at the tap.

  When I returned, medics came with two more Russian soldiers and placed them near us, one with a skull fracture, the other unresponsive. I started a fresh bed bath on one. These men had not washed in months. I knew how that felt.

  “You’re good at this, Kasia,” Karolina said. “You really should think about coming with us to Warsaw. We could use the help.”

  I wiped the washcloth down the soldier’s forehead and across one cheek.

  Why not go to Warsaw? Papa might miss me, but his ladylove Marthe wouldn’t care.

  “The training is first-rate,” Karolina said.

  “Maybe,” I said. I was ready for a new adventure. Warsaw would be a fresh start. And I was good at this.

  I moved on to the next patient and began with the face. I was making good time. Soon, I would be done with the whole row.