Misha resists smacking the man in the face with his fist.
‘What do you want?’
‘Whatever you’ve got. And I’d hand it all over, if you know what’s good for you.’ He takes Misha’s train fare, shoves it inside his jacket. Then he pulls Misha further into the doorway, making him turn out his pockets, checking his jacket hem and shoes.
‘And the watch,’ says the blackmailer.
Misha stares at him with hate.
‘You really are scum, aren’t you?’ He takes out his father’s fob watch. ‘One day, you’ll need help and then you’ll remember what you did today.’
‘I help myself, mate,’ the blackmailer says with a whining tone.
Then he leans out of the doorway, looks along the street and hurries away, casting from side to side as he goes, to check he’s not being followed.
The loss of his father’s watch hurts bitterly, but the most dangerous thing is that Misha has nothing left to buy a ticket to Lvov. And by now the guard will have noticed he’s gone. No chance left of slipping back into the ghetto and trying to get new funds together without being shot. And soon the streets will empty for curfew.
He’s out on the street with nowhere to go and plenty of people who would hand in a Jew.
Near the barracks is the small shop run by the Polish couple. He’s often slipped in there to buy bread during work detail and the woman has been kind, willing to quickly sell him a loaf of bread even though she can see from his ragged clothes that he’s a Jewish prisoner from the ghetto.
He has no idea if she’ll be prepared to risk what he’s going to ask her, but he has no other choice. He walks back along the street to put his life in her hands.
The shop is closing, the old woman cleaning the shelves. She turns to say that they’re shut, but when she sees Misha standing in the doorway her expression changes. She lets him in and closes the blinds.
He stands humbly by the counter with his cap twisted in his hands and tells her outright that he’s escaped from the work crew. He was trying to get to the train when a blackmailer robbed him. He wishes he did not smell so bad, that he looked cleaner. She wears a peasant-style headscarf. Her face is stony, nobody’s fool. He can’t tell what she’s thinking.
She nods to a door behind. ‘Go in the back.’
They are good people. They feed him a large bowl of potato soup with bread and home-made cheese. He tries not to gulp it down as they watch, embarrassed by how fast it’s disappearing. They go out into the back room and he hears them talking, a long discussion. They return and say they will lend him enough for a ticket.
That night he sleeps on the hard little sofa in the room at the front of the apartment over the shop, listening to the tramp of boots as a patrol goes past in the street.
Early in the morning, while it’s barely light, the wife packs up bread and salami for the journey.
‘I will repay you as soon as I can,’ Misha tells her.
The old lady puts her hand on his stubbly face. ‘Perhaps. Now go safely, and God bless you, boy.’
Hoping that Warsaw’s blackmailers will still be asleep, he walks through the dark streets of Praga to the station and buys a ticket to Lvov.
Sitting on a wooden bench, with other workers in transit, Misha watches through the window as the industrial suburbs of Praga slip away. Sophia too would have taken this train. He closes his eyes, willing her to stay alive, to stay safe in Kopyczynce.
‘I’ll come to you again, my darling,’ he whispers to the pale crimson sun, rising above the horizon across the fields. ‘Stay well, my darling. Whatever it takes, I will see you again.’
In Lvov, Misha finds labouring work on a building site. A few weeks later, a German construction company requisition him to work on repairs at Kiev railway station. It’s been badly damaged during the fighting, most of the buildings now a smashed collection of brick boxes wet with November rain.
All through the winter there’s no news from Sophia. And though he knows her address, he can’t write to her in case he endangers her cover.
CHAPTER FORTY - ONE
KIEV, JANUARY 1943
At the beginning of 1943, while the January snow blankets the ground, some extraordinary news reaches Kiev, whispered ear to mouth. The Gestapo have entered the ghetto to deport any Jews not in prison workshops, and a band of young people have fought back, killing dozens of Germans and forcing them to retreat. Inside the walls, a Jewish and a Polish flag have been hoisted above the roofs for everyone to see.
Misha knows Yitzhak, Tosia and all the others at the Dzielna Street commune will have been among the fighters. How many of them have fallen trying to repel the Germans?
His own hands ache to do something to make this war end. If only he could find a way to join up with the Red Army to push the Wehrmacht all the way back to Berlin.
Three months later SS Commander Jürgen Stroop enters the ghetto with a large detachment of soldiers and tanks to finally clear out the fighters. The world is electrified by the news that seven hundred teenagers are managing to continue to repulse the might of the Wehrmacht army with nothing but pistols, hand grenades and a couple of machine guns.
Misha and the other labourers manage to tune in to the messages on the Polish free radio, General Sikorski calling for all Poles to take courage from the ghetto fighters’ example and do all they can to help them. The Jews in the ghetto are fighting not only for their freedom but also for the freedom of Poland, and of the rest of Europe.
The battle rages on for a month. But block by block, the ghetto is burned to the ground, its inhabitants forced out of their underground cellars with gas and smoke to be shot or taken away to camps
It’s not enough to empty the Jewish ghetto of its people. Every building, except for the few in use by the Gestapo, must be dynamited and burned. The ruins are razed, every brick taken away. Finally, Jürgen Stroop sends a bound report to Hitler with extensive photographic illustrations. Its title: ‘The Warsaw Ghetto is no more’.
But even so, the German soldiers refuse to patrol the ghetto ruins after dark. They fear Jewish ghosts.
*
In Kiev, Misha hears news from a Pole who has travelled from Warsaw, how the Poles watched the ghetto burning with cries of horror and compassion, nothing they could do to help.
‘And yet,’ he adds, ‘it shames me to tell you, there were people riding the merry-go-round for the Easter fair, children in their best clothes rising up in the air in little bucket seats, laughing, as if they’d stopped seeing the clouds of smoke billowing up behind the walls.’
‘But tell me, how many people do you think are left in the ghetto now?’
The man looks at him quizzically.
‘There’s no one left. It’s gone. It’s nothing but burned buildings and rubble.’
Misha takes himself away to the edge of the river and howls into the blackness.
CHAPTER FORTY - TWO
KIEV, NOVEMBER 1943
Perhaps this longing for truth and justice will lead you to Homeland, God and Love.
Don’t forget.
Janusz Korczak
Misha has been in Kiev for a year. He’s living as a Ukrainian Pole and since he speaks both languages fully and has light brown eyes and hair, a tall Russian build, no one imagines he might be Jewish.
One bleak November morning, he huddles with the other labourers around a brazier in the sidings of Kiev station, a tiny fortress of warmth in the freezing cold fog. Over the past few weeks the constant thunder of Russian gunfire has sounded from the other side of the Dnieper River as the approaching Soviet army pushes the Wehrmacht west. In reply, the Wehrmacht has blown all bridges across the Dnieper as it retreats, leaving Stalin’s army stalled on the far bank, unable to get their brand new tanks across. But now the Russians are building pontoons. Soon they will cross over the river into Kiev.
‘At least when the Soviets get here we’ll see the back of the Germans,’ says Anton.
Kostya shakes his head.
‘You’re Ukrainian, you fool. What do you think is going to happen when the Russians come? Haven’t you heard? The Soviets are enlisting every Ukrainian they come across, giving them half a brick and standing them in the front line to soak up a few German bullets.’
‘They think we should have risen up and fought the Germans harder. They think we’re all collaborators.’
‘What difference does it make to us anyway – the Soviets crush us one way, the Germans flatten us another?’
‘I’m just telling you, don’t be a Ukrainian when the Soviets roll in.’
‘At least the Jews are gone now. Hitler did that favour for us.’
Misha tips the grounds of his thin coffee into the flames and returns to the work site. He shows no outward reaction to the man’s comments, barely registers any anger inside. His heart seems frozen by the deep winter cold.
Six months earlier, news of the ghetto’s defeat reached him like a physical blow. He collapsed onto his bed that night, aching with grief, knowing that most of the young people from the Dzielna Street commune would now be dead.
And he aches for news of Sophia. He has not seen or heard from her for a year. His fingers numb with cold, he takes her photo from his wallet. Hunger has made her face fragile, a mere girl. But her direct look tells of her courage and determination. Her eyes are pale, almost luminous, the picture a little overexposed, pale washes of grey as if her physical matter is departing into light. He aches to see the precise shade of blue of her eyes again. And what would it feel like to hold her fragile weight in his arms? He recalls the emotion, the feeling of homecoming, but he can’t recall the exact texture of her skin. Alone in grey and sullen Kiev, a cold city of strangers, he hopes and believes that she is still alive – just as he hopes against hope that his family in Pinsk have survived the German expansion east. He has heard nothing from his father or sister, only terrible rumours of mass shootings.
Some days, it seems as though he can no longer distinguish between the cold in his limbs and the cold in his heart. All it would take would be to stand still a while and let the icy wind penetrate him a little further. Then all would quieten and stop.
But he’ll never give in to despair and depression, not while Sophia needs him. He has to keep on believing that she is breathing and waiting for him to come and find her.
The next morning, he mixes a batch of concrete, the spade scraping and slapping on the wet ground. He looks along the railway tracks heading west, towards where Sophia is hiding.
Everyone is muttering the same rumour. When the Soviets come they will enlist the Ukrainians like convicts, throw them under the wheel of the German army. The Soviets are also deeply suspicious of anyone who’s arrived from Poland, and the risk of Misha being arrested and shot as a spy before he can explain himself is very real.
If he survives that long. The Red Army is rumoured to be the largest ever seen. To wait for the hail of rockets to rain down on Kiev is to wait for death.
He has to get out of Kiev before the Red Army arrives.
The following morning, Misha wakes to swirls of icy ferns on the windowpane, his breath clouding white as he washes. He dresses warmly, and packs a rucksack before he sets off to the station. The broken-off bust of Lenin is still there, askew on its stick. Beneath it are hand-daubed Nazi posters in black gothic lettering, mocking the great leader.
He walks on through the station, a white palace where light streams into the concourse through cathedral windows. Outside, he heads for the sidings, makes a small detour and hides his rucksack in the bushes behind the storage sheds.
At eleven the other workers break for a smoke. He walks to the outhouses, picks up the rucksack and walks on towards the far end of one of the platforms. At ten past eleven a train comes in, heading west. He’s waiting, ready as it slows, finds an empty wagon with the door unlocked. He slides inside, hidden by a cloud of steam, and sits down in a corner of the boxy darkness.
He must have slept for a long time, exhausted and rocked by the train’s momentum, his head on the rucksack. When he wakes, the sun is setting, a beam of red light passing through the slats, playing over his eyes. The train slows, stops. Cautiously he slides the door back a little way. He breathes in the deep green smell of orchards at twilight, a rising cold mist. It’s a tiny station in the middle of nowhere, a halt to load on farmer’s produce. He climbs out of the boxcar.
A thick frost is falling with the dark as he walks through winter orchards, the low trees seeming to float in the twilight, a few greying leaves still clinging on. Frost crackling on the grass, he finds a barn to pass the night in. He wakes cramped with cold and eats the bread from his rucksack and walks on through orchards of apple trees, bare of leaves, the frozen ground crunching under his feet.
At the edge of one of the orchards is a single-storey wooden cottage with a shingle roof, a picket fence and a garden of dark green cabbages. A woman in a headscarf is chopping a stump of wood into kindling. He watches her wearily raise the axe, the fall, the wood splitting. Her arms are too thin for the weight of it. When she finally notices him standing the other side of the fence, she holds the axe across her chest, frightened but fierce. She looks about thirty.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I mean no harm. Do you have food to sell me? If it’s no trouble, ma’am, I have some money.’
She still holds the axe across her body. After staring at him for a long time, she lays it down on the chopping block and goes inside.
She sells him soup and bread, at a very high price. She makes him stay the other side of the picket fence, asking him wary questions, scrutinising him through narrow eyes in a pale and yellow-tinged face.
She keeps a dog by her side. It looks close enough to a wolf.
After they have talked for a while, her demeanour changes, softens. She has decided to trust him.
‘I’m sorry to be harsh,’ she says in Ukrainian, her voice flat and weary. ‘We don’t see many men around here now. My husband was shot by the Germans. If you want to do some work for me around the farm, I can’t pay you but I can give you food. You can sleep in the lean-to.’
Inside, she takes off her scarf. She has very pale blond hair like sun on water, in two girlish plaits, a shapeless skirt and jacket, a woollen sweater that may have been a man’s.
A pretty face once, but now sunk into sadness.
He tells her about Sophia. She looks at the picture. ‘So do you know if she is all right?’
‘I haven’t had any news for a long time, but she’s with good people.’
The woman pulls a face and draws back. Not so interested. She has her own problems.
Winter deepens and the snow piles up against the walls of the house. The months pass and a bitter and wet March turns the ground to mud. Sometimes, she stands in front of the fire in her white nightgown and shawl, legs outlined in the light, brushing her pale hair for a long time, staring into the embers. She knows that Misha has a wife, but that does not stop her falling in love with him.
No news of Sophia. Almost a year and a half now. Misha leaves the heat of the tiny room, stands out under the acidic March sky and calls out Sophia’s name.
Inside, the damp wood in the fire spits like miniature gunfire. She’s still there, roping her long silvery plait back over her shoulder.
‘Stay with me here, Misha. Don’t think about her any more. I will take care of you so well. When the apples start to ripen here in Antonowka, it is the most beautiful time. You will see.’
She comes over and stands close, puts her head on his shoulder. ‘So many people have died. You’ve heard nothing. Why do you hold back?’
He waits for a beat, then takes himself out and walks for miles until his lungs hurt from breathing the cold air.
*
A few days later, she comes back from market with the pony and trap and runs to find him in the orchard where he’s digging in a new sapling. Her scarf flies from her hair but she doesn’t stop to pick it up. ‘There’s Russian horsemen in the villag
e. Misha, you have to hide. You know what they’ll do if they find a Polish spy. They’ll shoot first and they won’t wait for you to explain yourself.’
His one thought is Sophia. He has to see Sophia again. But hide where?
In the end he lowers himself into the cesspit under the outhouse while the Soviet soldiers trample through the cottage, liberating her potatoes and apples. She keeps the dog next to her.
After they’ve gone, he washes under the cold pump.
The next day she makes him stay hidden in the attic space with the apples she saved from the Russians. He can’t stand upright, his limbs cramped by the small space. He longs to be with soldiers, forcing the Wehrmacht troops back to Berlin, for Sophia, freeing her little town of Kopyczynce. In the cold, dusty air of the attic, the wind needling in, he can hardly breathe. He holds the tiny picture of Sophia in his hand and focuses on her clear, constant gaze.
That night he dreams of Szymonek and Abrasha, boys from the summer camp at Little Rose. He dreams that Sophia is shaking him to get up and join them at the midnight feast to roast apples and potatoes. He wakes in the attic, the air ripe with dust and old apples. He can’t shake the feeling that she has just left the room, calling him to follow her.
When the woman comes back from the village she tells him that the Russians are behaving well, handing out bread. No one has been rounded up for forced conscription. There’s an office in the village for men who want to enlist voluntarily, with papers.
‘I’ve seen the commandant,’ she says. ‘He looks Jewish if you ask me, but then the Bolsheviks always were hand in glove with those Jews.’
She watches as Misha packs his rucksack. In the slanting sun with the dust of the room dancing, her pale gold hair and thin face, she’s like a ghost of Sophia.
She blocks his way out of the door. ‘Why join a war that isn’t ours? You’ll die. You think you’ll see her again? Perhaps she’s already dead. Stay.’
The Good Doctor of Warsaw Page 23