The Girl From the Train

by Irma Joubert

  “Right, Captain.”

  Jakób heard the planes before he saw them. They were heading straight for the bridge. Part of a wall was blown into a thousand pieces right next to him, raining dust and gravel.

  “Bloody hell!” said Waldus. “I think they already know we’re here, Corporal.”

  Jakób looked at the dust-covered child next to him. “I guess you’re right, Waldus,” he said.

  Like caged animals they waited for the onslaught.

  As soon as the guns and tanks came within striking distance, they began to fire. The noise was deafening, and Jakób could give no further orders. He aimed the machine gun at the leading tank and waited. The tank spat fire and a tree down the road burst into flame. Dense clouds of smoke hid the approaching tanks from view.

  A boy came running to them, ducking as he ran. “The captain says we must withdraw!”

  He ducked out to deliver his message to Stan’s section, but halfway across the road he was struck by a bullet. He managed to drag himself to cover behind a flat chunk of concrete.

  “Stay there!” Jakób shouted. “We’re coming!”

  From across the road Stan aimed the bazooka at the tanks and tried to provide cover for Jakób. Crouching, he ran to the injured boy, picked him up, and began to make his way back amid a hail of bullets. The next moment he felt a burning sensation in his calf.

  Jakób laid the boy down next to Haneczka and fell down at Waldus’s side. Hot blood was pumping through his brain, through his whole body.

  “There’s blood on your leg, Corporal,” said Waldus.

  “Yes,” said Jakób. “You carry the ammunition belt. We must provide cover for Captain Ryszard and the other sections.”

  The German wave rolled on, bombs exploding, guns rattling, people screaming.

  “Fall back!” shouted Ryszard over the noise. “Provide cover and fall back!”

  “We’re going to blow up the bridge!” Jakób shouted at his men. “Fall back!” He looked around him. “Haneczka, come!”

  She threw the wounded boy over her shoulder. His head hung limply down her back. She grabbed her case and began to run.

  “No! Haneczka! Wait!” Jakób shouted.

  But she kept running, strong, fast, with her patient and her case. Jakób threw his gun to his shoulder and tried to provide cover. Haneczka weaved in and out among the rubble on the bridge. Then she disappeared behind a wall on the other side. “She’s made it, Corporal!” said Waldus.

  Jakób kept firing.

  Stan’s section retreated over the bridge, followed by Jakób’s.

  “Blow it up!” motioned the captain. “Blow it up!”

  One of the men pushed the lever down with all his strength and fell to the ground. Nothing happened. He got up and pushed it again and again. There was no response.

  The first tanks began to roll across the bridge.

  “Get cover!” shouted the captain. “Fall back!”

  Total chaos erupted. Men fell to the ground, tried to shoot, crawled to find cover behind mounds of earth and bricks.

  Jakób headed for a disused factory. The earth seemed to suck at his feet while bullets exploded around him. He ran with the heavy machine gun pressed to his chest. His leg was throbbing. Waldus kept up with him, running slightly behind him, the ammunition belt draped around his neck. Planes dived, bullets cracked around them, bombs exploded overhead. He felt a pain in his arm and his side. They reached the door, stumbled over the threshold, fell against a blackened brick wall.

  “Help me over here!” shouted Haneczka.

  Through a haze of smoke and pain Jakób saw her crouching over the boy. The child was writhing, grabbing at the air with his hands, screaming soundlessly, his mouth wide open. Jakób crawled across the room.

  “Hold him down,” said Haneczka. “I must get the bullet out and disinfect the wound.”

  But before he could, there was a creaking noise as the building was ripped apart and collapsed around them. A sharp pain stabbed through Jakób’s belly.

  Then a thick, black mist swallowed him completely.

  The mornings were getting colder, so that Gretl sometimes wore her red coat to school. It was still dark when she got up to milk the goats.

  At school Anya said, “My dad says there’s no food left in Warsaw. He says when people get really hungry, they eat rats and mice!”

  “I know something even better,” said Starika.

  Anya said nothing, just looked at her angrily.

  “What do you know?” asked Gretl.

  “I know about that camp where the Jews are. I know the name of the camp!”

  Gretl felt the lump in her tummy again. “What is it?” she asked softly.

  “Auschwitz!”

  “Auschwitz? How do you know?”

  “My granny lives in Oświęcim. She told me. It’s near her home. She says she can see the smoke from the chimneys.”

  “My daddy says all the people in Warsaw are dead, every single one, and the Nazis have caught all the rest,” Anya countered.

  Gretl grew ice-cold. Everyone dead? And the Gestapo caught the rest?

  The knot in her tummy was so tight that it ached.

  She prayed more than she had ever prayed before.

  Gretl saw Stan first. She was scolding Rosie because the goat wouldn’t stand still to be milked when she saw Stan coming up the hill.

  Slowly she got to her feet. She looked again. He was walking very slowly, his head bent.

  Jakób wasn’t with him.

  She began to walk down the hill, her heart pounding. When she came closer, she broke into a run.

  “Stan?”

  He looked up. “Is Turek home?”

  “No, he’s at work. Stan, where’s—?”

  “Call my father,” he said. “Tell him to bring the pushcart to the bottom of the hill.”

  “Stan—”

  “Go! Hurry!” He turned and walked away.

  Gretl ran home. Uncle Janusz was standing on the porch. “Stan says you must bring the pushcart to the bottom of the hill,” she panted.

  He turned to go to the stable. “Bring in the milk,” he said over his shoulder.

  She ran across the grass and grabbed the heavy bucket of milk. Then she put it down and untied Rosie. She walked to the kitchen as fast as she could without spilling the milk, carefully poured it into the pot, and covered it with the cloth. Then she ran down the hill.

  There were three people at the turnoff to the farm: Uncle Janusz and Stan and a big woman in men’s clothing. They were loading someone onto the pushcart. The woman was waving her hands. Gretl stopped at a distance.

  It was Jakób, she knew.

  She stood frozen to the spot.

  They pushed him up the hill, Stan and Uncle Janusz and the woman. His feet dangled limply over the edge of the pushcart.

  She knew what it meant. She knew, because she’d seen it before.

  “We were lucky to get out,” said Stan. He sat at the kitchen table next to the woman. He sounded tired, not cross like usual.

  “Jakób is very weak,” said the woman. “And the journey here didn’t do him any good.”

  “If he didn’t have the constitution of an ox he would never have survived.”

  Monicka set plates of buttered bread in front of them. “Why didn’t you leave him at the hospital?”

  “Because there is no hospital,” said Stan. “Warsaw has been razed.”

  “I’ll l
eave the medicine that I’ve got with you,” said the woman. “It’s Prontosil. It fights infection. I found it in a German field hospital. Give it to him regularly, and keep him quiet for at least another month.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Monicka.

  “Back to Katowice.”

  Slowly Gretl walked across the porch and pushed the curtain aside. Jakób lay on his bed motionless, his eyes closed. His head made a deep dent in the soft pillow.

  She went to his side. He looked strange. A black beard like a pirate’s covered his square chin. His eyebrows were dense and black; his face, which had always been brown, was white. She wished he would open his eyes so that she could see whether he was still in there.

  Carefully she reached out and laid her hand against his cheek.

  His eyes opened.

  They looked the same, those black-black eyes. He gave her a slight smile. “Hello, Gretz.”

  Her smile was broad. “Hello, Jakób Kowalski,” she said.

  The next week she didn’t go to school at all. She remained at Jakób’s bedside, giving him water when he was thirsty. Sometimes he was warm and she wiped his face with a moist cloth. She thought of Elza and was sad. Aunt Anastarja changed the dressings on his chest and leg and arm, cleaned the wounds, and gave him medicine. When she went to mass or had to feed the baby his bottle, Gretl gave Jakób his medicine.

  He was too tired to eat by himself. “I’ll feed him his soup,” Gretl offered.

  In the mornings she fed him his porridge. After three mouthfuls he shook his head. “You must eat, Jakób Kowalski,” she said.

  He opened his eyes. “Where did you learn to be so strict?”

  “At school.”

  “Oh?”

  “I go to school now, at the convent. I’m the brightest pupil in the class. Sister Zofia said so. It’s because I read a lot. And because you showed me how to do those clever sums.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No, I’m listening. Tell me more.”

  “I’ll tell you more if you eat another spoonful of porridge.”

  He opened his mouth, but his eyes remained closed.

  “I help the other children with their reading and I tell them stories. I make up the stories myself, because I ran out of stories to read, kaput. You must swallow, Jakób; don’t just lie there with the porridge in your mouth.”

  A week later Stan went to Katowice to find work, because his job at the steelworks had been given away. Gretl went back to school. Jakób had told her to go.

  In the afternoons he lay waiting for her. She ran home. When she pushed aside the curtain, her cheeks were red and her blonde curls formed a halo around her head. She always waited, as if she wasn’t sure she was welcome. She waited for him to say, “Hello, Gretz.”

  “Hello, Jakób. Do you want some water?”

  “If there’s coffee in the pot, you can bring me some.”

  She was soon back with the coffee. “Shall I put Stan’s pillow behind your back?” she asked.

  His left shoulder was in pain, and his left hand remained dumb. He did the exercises the old Jewish doctor in Warsaw had prescribed, but he didn’t notice any improvement.

  “Does your arm hurt a lot?” Gretl asked.

  “No, it’s nothing. My hand is just dumb.”

  “Starika writes with her left hand, so you can imagine how dumb her right hand is! If the baby cries, I’ll have to go and pick him up, because your mother is smoking a ham. His name is Czeslaw, but everyone calls him Czes.”

  “Yes, I know. Monicka brought him to me.”

  He tasted the coffee. She had added sugar. He had become used to drinking it bitter, but he enjoyed the sweetness.

  She clambered onto Stan’s bed. “He’s a cute little baby,” she said. “He knows me. When I stand next to his crib, he smiles at me, except when he’s crying. He likes to hold my finger in his little fist. Like this.” She took Jakób’s right hand and folded her hand around his index finger. “He has a strong grip, you know,” she said. “Shall I take the pillows away?”

  It was new to him, this compassion. She was so young, yet she cared for him. He had never known anything like it. “No, I’ll sit like this for a while,” he said. “How was your day at school?”

  “School is the same every day, Jakób. Sister Zofia tells us about God, then we do arithmetic, and we read and write. It’s very easy, we don’t even do multiplication tables yet. When Sister Zofia has time, she talks about God, because she loves Him so much. If she’s busy, I tell the children stories. I prayed for you every day while you were gone, Jakób Kowalski.”

  In the more than two months he had been away he hadn’t thought of her once, he realized. If he had to go away again, it would be different. This had to be how Jerzy Tatar had felt when he left his young daughter behind—Jerzy, who wouldn’t be returning to his farm. Or Ryszard.

  One night he awakened to find her sitting up beside him in Stan’s bed, petrified. “Gretz?” he asked.

  “Just a dream,” she said, but her voice was shaking.

  He waited, but she said nothing more. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No, I don’t want it to stay in the room.” But she asked, “Jakób, what is Auschwitz?”

  A cold hand gripped his heart. “It’s a place between Katowice and Kraków.”

  She was silent for a while, then she asked, “Is there a camp there?”

  The hand began to squeeze. “I’ve heard so, yes.”

  “Where Jews are burned in an oven?”

  He lay motionless. Mother of God, give me strength and wisdom, he prayed.

  “Jakób?”

  “Where did you hear that, Gretl?”

  “At school. Anya says her daddy said so. And Starika’s granny lives in . . . What’s the name of the town close by?”

  “Oświęcim?”

  “Yes, Oświęcim. Her granny sees the smoke. And she says other things that I don’t want to repeat.”

  Jakób had no idea how to answer.

  “Jakób?”

  “I don’t know, Gretz. I’ve heard stories too,” he said. “Is that what your dream was about?”

  But she didn’t answer. Just when he thought she had fallen asleep again, she asked, “Where does Rigena live?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Rigena, the woman who gave me to you?”

  He sighed, wishing he could end the conversation. But he knew her. Once she was on a trail, it wasn’t easy to distract her. “Between Katowice and Kraków.”

  “Near Oświęcim?”

  “Not too far from there, yes.”

  It was quiet again, but he knew what was coming.

  “Jakób? Mutti and Oma’s train, it was going to Auschwitz, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you know everything.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “That’s what my dream is about,” she said after a while.

  “About the train?”

  “No, about Mutti and Oma. The angel doesn’t come.”

  He didn’t understand, and yet he understood only too well. He reached out, folded her cold little hand in his. When she had finally fallen asleep, he lay awake for a long time, still wondering about her words.

  Because the angel hadn’t come for him either.

  One afternoon when she came back from school, he was sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket. Happiness bub
bled inside her. “You’re up!” she said.

  “My father helped me,” he said. “It’s cold. It’s probably going to start snowing this week. Is your coat warm enough?”

  “It’s a very warm coat, nice and big.” She sat down on the floor and took off her shoes.

  “Why are you doing that? Your feet will be cold.”

  “Because my shoes are too tight, that’s why. Look, they make my toes pink.” She held up her bare feet for his inspection.

  “I see, yes. You’ll have to get new shoes and warm socks.”

  “Shall I fetch you some coffee?”

  “Yes, then there’s something I want you to do for me. I hope you’ll agree.”

  When she returned with his drink she said, “I’ll do anything. I’m not afraid.”

  “Do you remember where Professor Sobieski lives?”

  She thought. “Sonja says he lives at her house.”

  “Sonja?”

  “The girl whose coat I’m wearing. I suppose I could go home with her from school.”

  “I want you to fetch a book from him. While you’re at school, I want to learn too. Or one of these days you’ll be smarter than me.”

  She laughed out loud. “Jakób Kowalski, I’ll never be smarter than you!”

  The next afternoon she waited to go home with Sonja. Sister Zofia allowed Gretl to stay in the classroom and look at the atlas. Gretl’s teacher opened the atlas for her at the right place before she sat down to work.

  Gretl found Warsaw without any difficulty, then Kraków and Katowice, because they were printed in dark letters. It was hard to find Częstochowa, and she searched for Oświęcim for a long time. Auschwitz wasn’t on the map, maybe because it was just a camp.

  There were roads on the map and railroads. She followed the railroad from Katowice down to Oświęcim with her finger, but it was no good; she still didn’t know what had happened. Then she traced the road from Częstochowa to Warsaw with her finger, the one Jakób had followed. But not the return journey, because they had come back in a horse and cart along back streets and farm roads, Stan had said. Because the Gestapo had been everywhere.