I don’t wait for her to say anything else. “I didn’t break the eggs,” I blurt out. It’s a strange place to start. But I talk and talk. I tell her about Zina and Jozef. How I understood a few of their words. “I had to help them, to bring them some food.”
She pulls me back so I’m leaning against her, and wraps her arms around me. Facing away, it’s easier to talk, to confess. “Stephan got the letter from his sister. I was afraid you would all be shot. Because of me.” I tell her about being Anna Bauman, in Warsaw, about Mama who played piano and Papa who made furniture. Sophia’s clenching my hand, my fingers woven between hers. It’s as if my words travel down my arm like electricity and flow from me into her. I tell her about the ghetto, about becoming Anna Karwolska. I don’t stop until I’ve told her everything.
“I’m sorry,” I say when I finish. I turn to face her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” But that’s not all I’m sorry about. There’s something else crushing me. It’s almost too big for words. “I’m sorry that I put you in danger. You, Stephan and Jerzy.”
“Oh, Anna,” Sophia’s voice is scratchy from crying. “I wish you hadn’t gone through this all alone.”
My sobs grow stronger. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Shhh, Anna. Please. There is no need to apologize. I’m not upset with you. We knew. We all knew you were Jewish.” She looks away.
“You did? How? Who?”
“The Resistance group that asked us to help you. They said you were Jewish and needed a home. When you came from the orphanage we just assumed you were an orphan.”
“You knew?” Sophia’s eyes dart all over the room before landing back on my face. “But why didn’t you say anything?”
“You seemed, well, Catholic from the very start, the first meal, the first Mass. I thought maybe you were young and didn’t remember.” She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I’ve asked a few times, about your parents, but you never opened up.”
These past two years could have been so very different. I could have been Anna Bauman here at home with Sophia, Stephan and Jerzy.
I let out a sigh and lie down. Sophia does the same. When I roll to my side, Sophia puts her arm over me. “Anna, you’re like my very own daughter.” I can tell Sophia’s out of tears. She begins to breathe easily.
“Sophia? My parents are getting their daughter back after such a long time. I hope that Lidia’s on her way home to you too.”
“I hope so too,” she says.
Chapter 46
Before Mr. Goren has finished breakfast, Stephan walks around the table and puts a hand on his shoulder. “We’re not comfortable with you taking our Anna,” says Stephan. My heart grows so big I think it will jump out of me.
Jerzy and I listen quietly as Sophia and Stephan question Mr. Goren. They want to be sure I’m safe, they tell him. In a few minutes, it’s obvious that Mr. Goren is with the rescue organization. He knows everything about my family including the addresses of my grandparents in the Lodz ghetto and my aunt in Canada. Next, Stephan and Sophia ask Mr. Goren to bring my family here instead of taking me away.
“We’d like to meet them,” says Sophia, “and to ask . . .” She looks up at Stephan.
Stephan clears his throat. “We want to help. We were actually hoping to adopt Anna when we thought she was an orphan.”
Mr. Goren rambles on about paperwork and the Soviets and people moving around so unexpectedly in Poland. He ends by saying a Jewish child requires Jewish parents, as if Stephan and Sophia—who risked their lives for me—aren’t good enough to be my parents.
I stand and clear the dishes from the table before he can insult them more.
Mr. Goren has a big black car. The fenders puff out over the wheels the way a woman’s skirt billows out when she rides a bicycle. It makes the tires look small, too weak to carry such a huge amount of black metal. Mr. Goren shakes hands and climbs into the car. Jerzy hugs me fiercely. When we pull apart he holds his hand up and I match my palm to his. We don’t say anything. He will always be my brother.
Stephan’s next. “Write to us. Let us know if you need anything.” While Sophia hugs me, Stephan walks around the car. He tells Mr. Goren to bring me right back if he can’t locate my family in Warsaw.
“I’ll write,” I promise. I can’t bear Stephan’s sad eyes and Jerzy’s faraway expression. “I’ll come back to visit. I will.”
Sophia walks me to the passenger side. Even when I’m inside, she keeps bobbing her head in the window like a mother bird checking on a nest. She reaches in the window for my hand, just as Mr. Goren starts the car. Suddenly I’m terrified to leave. I want to pull Sophia into the car with me. I don’t want to let go of her hand, though I’m worried Mr. Goren will drive off and hurt Sophia. Sophia’s not worried at all. She puts her whole head in the window for one last hug. “You’ll always have a home here,” she says.
I don’t take my eyes off the three of them as we drive away. Too soon we are off the country roads and driving through town.
Mr. Goren is silent but glances in my direction every few minutes. Finally, he speaks. “I’m pleased to see that you were well cared for.”
Well cared for? He doesn’t know what he is talking about. I was part of a family. I was loved.
“Please tell me anything you know. Are you taking me to both my parents? Or . . .”
Mr. Goren lights a cigarette and rolls it between his fingers. The smoke stings my nose. “I’m not sure how much you know about, let’s say, the end of the war. There were many deaths. Your parents were sent away.”
“Where were they sent? When will they come back?”
Mr. Goren blows a thin trail of smoke. “They were taken to a camp. I don’t know how to tell you. The conditions were horrible there. Most people didn’t survive.”
Most people. “Well, some did, right? My parents, they are the type that would survive.”
“It’s impossible to know for sure with so many people moving around. But considering that the camps have been liberated for months, we are operating under the assumption that those who survived are already back.”
He is avoiding my question. “Where are my parents?” I want to raise my voice.
“They are unaccounted for, presumed dead.” He moves his cigarette to his other hand.
“But you said yesterday at least one of my parents was alive. You said I had family to return to.”
Mr. Goren coughs. “Family, yes. Not your parents. I’m so sorry.”
“My grandparents?”
“No, they didn’t make it,” he says.
“My Aunt Roza? My Uncle Jozef? My Aunt Halina? My Uncle Isaiah?”
Mr. Goren slowly shakes his head.
“My Uncle Aleksander?”
Mr. Goren blows puffs of smoke out of his nose and shakes his head again.
I name all eight of my aunts and uncles. Mr. Goren only continues to shake his head.
I can’t control my voice. I’m yelling. “My cousin Hanna? My cousin Emanuel? My cousin—” I force myself to say his name. “My cousin Jakub?”
“Stop, Anna.” Mr. Goren no longer pays attention to his cigarette. He chews his bottom lip and stares straight ahead. But I can’t stop. There are more names. I say them all, the names of every single person in my family. Still Mr. Goren drives on, shaking his head. I pound my hand against the window. This can’t be true. This is not true.
“Anna, enough.”
“How do you know? How could you possibly know? You haven’t met my family. You’ve never even seen my cousins. You don’t know my father. You are wrong.”
He finally turns his head to me. “I’m sorry.” His voice is soft. “I wish it weren’t so. Believe me. I am telling you the truth. It is my job to find someone to take care of you before I come for you. They went on the transport.”
“No, they couldn’t have.” The transports. We called them actions in the ghetto. They would round up people, force them onto the platform and then into tra
ins. Away. We always hid. We always hid. “My parents wouldn’t have gotten on a transport.”
“I’m sorry.” His voice is soft as if he’s really very sorry. “They didn’t have a choice.”
This cannot be true. I want to jump out of the car. I want to run back to Stephan and Sophia. They can help me find my parents. “Are you trying to tell me that no one in my family survived? No one at all?”
“Your father’s sister in Canada. A Felicia Levison. She’s been contacted. She knows that I left yesterday to retrieve you. She’s waiting for word that you are safe.”
My Aunt Felicia? She left for Canada when I was a baby.
I stare at the small farmhouses surrounded by fields, tiny sheds and barns. The world looks the same as it did yesterday. We pass a small gray farmhouse. A group of children chase each other outside. I can’t hear them, but I can tell by the way they move that they are shouting, maybe even laughing. How can anyone laugh on a day like this?
Chapter 47
The road grows bumpy. My window is covered with dust. We are driving near the bank of a river. “Warsaw. This is Warsaw.”
Mr. Goren slows the car to a stop. “What’s left of it,” he says. “No more roads. We walk from here.”
I look across the river. Where once a city stood there is . . . emptiness. Flat. Broken. Warsaw now looks like a desert. A desert of concrete and trash and broken buildings. I can’t resist walking closer to the river, though there’s no longer a bridge to take me across. One building stands in the city. One building surrounded by rubble. “What is . . . ?” I recognize the structure before I finish my sentence: it’s a Catholic church.
“We can’t get any closer. Come this way.” Mr. Goren turns his back on the ruined city.
I follow him. “Have you been over there yet?”
“Yes, it’s been well searched. We even found survivors hiding in the rubble.” I look again at the blasted-out buildings. “There’s no easy way to get across,” says Mr. Goren as if he can read my mind.
But there must be a difficult way to get across, because people are hard at work, clearing rubble, pushing wheelbarrows. I walk alongside Mr. Goren and in five minutes we arrive at a long two-story building surrounded by guards. “She’s with me,” says Mr. Goren to the guard in front of the door.
“Jaina! Jaina!” calls Mr. Goren as we walk in the door. A tall thin girl speeds down the stairs to us. “Jaina, this is Anna Bauman. Please get her settled. She is to testify tomorrow. That is all.” He turns and leaves without another word.
I stare into the girl’s dark eyes. “Come with me,” she says. Jaina leads me upstairs to a room with rows of beds. “You are number 86. This is for you.” She hands me a washcloth and a green toothbrush. “Is something wrong?” she asks.
Is something wrong? A man, a stranger, took me from home. He told me that everyone in my family is dead. He walked me past a Warsaw that is bombed out, destroyed. Finally he brought me here to a guarded building where I don’t know a soul. No, something is not wrong; everything is wrong.
“Why, I mean . . . guards?” My stomach is cold as if I’ve done something wrong. Maybe Mr. Goren brought me to the wrong place.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” says the girl, Jaina. “They’re Jewish.”
“But why? The war is over.”
Jaina tilts her head and studies me a moment. “They protect us. They keep us safe. Don’t worry, Anna.”
I walk the halls and follow my ears to the crowded dining room. It’s just like the orphanage but larger, and boys as well as girls. So many children of all ages. Were all of these children in hiding like me?
I search the noisy room for a familiar face, someone from my old neighborhood or the ghetto, even the orphanage. But I don’t recognize anyone. I stand in line and I’m served soup in a tin bowl. Soup. There’s always soup.
My arms feel heavy. It is exhausting just bringing the bowl to my lips. I drink the last drop of soup but wonder, What is the point?
Why did I become someone else? Hide in so many places? Leave my family? Why, if no one else survived? Why did I leave Sophia and Stephan to come here?
The other children are talking to each other. Some even talk to me. The words buzz around me but I can’t hear anything. I force my heavy legs up the stairs and find bed 86. I’m so tired. I wind my face cloth tightly around my new toothbrush and fall into bed without using either one.
Chapter 48
A gunshot explodes in the night. The blast shakes the floor and the window. It sounds like it is right next to my bed. “Sophia! Stephan!” I start to call for Jerzy too, but I recognize the new room, the girls lined up in the rows of beds. Most have slid off and under their beds by now and I do the same. We scoot far back under our beds, close to the wall.
More gunshots. Breaking glass. Shouting. Horrible words fly through the air. Then footsteps and laughter as a crowd runs away. The girls climb back into bed and I do too. But I stare at the nearby window, wondering if anything will sail through it after I close my eyes.
After breakfast, I’m taken to a small room. A man with round wire glasses sits behind a tiny desk. “Name?” he asks without looking up.
“Anna,” I say.
He lifts his head to look at me. “I see about a dozen Annas a day, you’ll have to be more specific.”
My heart races up to my head and booms in my ears. “Anna Bauman.”
The man motions to the chair opposite him. I sit and see him scratch my name at the top of a blank piece of paper. “Anna, I’m going to ask you some questions. You must be completely honest.” He begins with easy questions at first. How to spell my name. The names of my parents. My address in Warsaw before we were sent to the ghetto. Our address in the ghetto.
“What is your birthday?”
When I tell him, he glances up. “Tomorrow. You’ll be twelve tomorrow.”
A lump grows in my stomach. “I know.”
He clears his throat and says, “I’m going to ask you the most important question of all and I want you to tell me every detail you can remember. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me how you survived the war.”
How can I answer such a question? It would take forever. “So many people helped me. It was over such a long time.” I study my shoes. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“We’re going to start at the beginning and just take it a bit at a time.”
He writes quickly as I talk. At first I don’t like talking about Mama and Papa, about leaving the ghetto. Somehow the scratching of his pen on the paper adds strength to my voice. Eventually it feels right, important, that I’m telling my story and someone is writing it down. When I get to the part about Martin and Frieda arriving at Auntie’s house, there is a loud crash against our wall. “What?”
“Nothing,” says the man. “Someone must have knocked over a chair.”
But it comes again, even louder this time. It sounds like someone is trying to break through the wall.
We hear a boy’s voice wailing. “I’m not under arrest. Let me out! Let me out!”
The man with the glasses walks around his desk and opens the door. A boy with red hair sticking out in every direction is kicking the wall outside the door. He looks to be about ten years old. “Let me out! Let me leave, you dirty Jew!”
Mr. Goren’s voice fills the hallway. “Chaim, stop hitting the walls.”
The boy screams, “My name is not Chaim; it’s Casmir. I am Casmir!”
Mr. Goren’s voice is cool and steady. “Chaim, come back in this room and sit down.”
Chaim hits his head against the wall. “I am not Chaim. I am not Jewish. I’m a Christian. I’m a loyal German. I’m a Soviet. I hate all of you!”
“It’s important that you sit down.” Mr. Goren advances to Chaim and holds him by the shoulders.
“Let me go.” Chaim kicks the wall. “Death to Jews! Death to Jews!” Mr. Goren lifts him in the air. But that doesn’t stop Chaim fr
om yelling “Death to Jews!” as Mr. Goren carries him down the hall.
The man with the glasses closes the door, takes his seat and says, “Where were we?” He looks up at me as if nothing has happened.
“That boy? Do they have the wrong person?” It’s possible. The way children were moved so often, especially orphans. What if someone changed houses and Mr. Goren took the wrong child, a Christian boy?
“No, that’s just Chaim. He learned to be Casmir when he was only four years old. And . . . how can I say this? He learned well.”
It’s cool in the room but my neck is sweating. I feel as if I could vomit.
“He’s going to be fine, really,” the man says. “Actually, he’s a lot better than when they first brought him in. It’s just a matter of time.”
Everything is always a matter of time. A matter of time to grow older. A matter of time for the war to end. Adults really have no idea what they are talking about.
The man checks his watch. “Time for lunch,” he says.
I hope he’s at least right about that.
Before lining up for food, I search the faces of the children. I hope to find Halina and Marek or Sonia from the ghetto. I search for Martin and Frieda from Auntie’s house. Everyone will be older. Even the baby, Rachel, whom we rescued in the crate; she would be three by now.
I poke my head into the room with the small children. “Is there a girl named Rachel here?”
A woman with dark curls pulls out a list. “No Rachel. Are you looking for your sister?”
I shake my head. “Not my sister, just someone I know.”
I find a seat in the dining room at the end of a long table. A group of boys joins me. They look about my age, maybe a year or two younger. Two of the boys cross themselves and bow their heads. One mumbles a Catholic blessing. The other simply stares at his food.
It really is the end of the war. I don’t have to keep secrets. I am surrounded by people who know I am Jewish, and I’m safe. I remember how Papa always blessed our food, any food, even a single carrot shared between the three of us, even scraps if that was all we had to eat.
The Safest Lie Page 14