Stolen Girl

by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

  I am shocked speechless.

  But she isn’t finished. There is more. “I will protect you.”

  The harsh ringing of a telephone jarred me back to the present. I blinked and looked around. The past was so real, yet here I was, lying on a sofa in the staff room of the library. I could hear Miss Barry’s voice talking to someone on the other end of the telephone. Then her voice faded …

  When Mutter and Eva come back from their errands, I am bursting to tell them what Cook said. She should be punished for her crime. But for some reason I say nothing. The next time Eva and Mutter go away, Cook invites me to share a meal in the kitchen with her. It is slave food—a thin soup with black bread. I take one spoonful of the thin broth and begin to weep. I try to remember what the soup reminds me of, but my memory has been washed clean.

  We are to go to a rally and Mutter has told me to be ready for when they get back. I put on my pink dress and Cook braids my hair. I wait. And wait. And wait.

  I walk through the house and see that drawers have been left open and belongings are scattered on the floor. I feel the ground tremble.

  “The Soviets are coming,” whispers Cook. “We must leave this place.”

  I do not want to go. This is my home. The room of books is here. The lilac bush is here. Mutter told me to wait. Cook picks me up and carries me out the door. I scream and pull her hair. She drops me on the ground and I fall hard on my back. “Come with me if you want to live,” she says. And she begins to walk away.

  I follow her, begging her to wait up. I run after her through the fields and I see that the slaves are all gone. When I mention this, Cook turns on me, her face red with fury. “Slavs,” she says, “Not slaves. Those people are Ukrainian. They’re just like you.”

  I don’t believe her, but this is not the time to argue. She tells me her name is Marusia, not Cook.

  We hide behind bushes as Soviet soldiers comb the fields, rooting out the other Slavs—the other stolen people. We are to be brought back to the Soviet Union and punished for letting ourselves be stolen by the Germans.

  We walk through forests and countryside studded with land mines. We see villages burning and hear bombs exploding. I do not expect to live.

  We join a group of ragged survivors. “Your name is Nadia now,” Marusia tells me. “You will never be Gretchen again.”

  “But why Nadia?” I ask her.

  “The name means hope,” she says. “It was the middle name of my little sister. She was stolen by the Nazis too.”

  “Nadia … Nadia. You are safe.”

  The scent of apples and laundry soap. It had to be Marusia. I opened my eyes. It was Marusia, in her work clothes. I blinked and looked around, trying to get my bearings. I was still in the library staff room, bundled up in Miss Barry’s blanket. A shiver ran deep in my bones. I felt unbearably sad and so very cold.

  Marusia’s arm was around my waist. Ivan was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, his brow creased with concern. There was no one else here, just me, Marusia, and Ivan.

  How much trouble was I in for running away from school a second time? Ivan seemed to know what was on my mind. “We told the inspector that you were ill,” he said.

  I could feel my throat filling with tears—of relief, but also guilt. How long had I been here?

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s after six,” said Ivan. “We have been sitting here with you for hours.”

  Money was so scarce for us, and I had made them miss work.

  I had no control over it—the tears flowed. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble.”

  “You are not trouble,” said Ivan.

  Marusia said nothing. I could tell by her gulps of air that she was weeping. I realized it wasn’t just me she was weeping about. She had lost another Nadia—her own sister—years ago. Just as I had lost my family. She held me tight and rested her head on my shoulder. I hugged her back. Ivan leaned forward and wrapped his arms around both of us. We wept together.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but I was suddenly aware that we were still in the library.

  “Can we go home?” I asked.

  We untangled our arms, but when I tried to get up, my joints were so weak that my knees buckled. Marusia was wobbly too.

  “Let’s get my girls home,” said Ivan. He took the blanket off my shoulders and held my coat open so I could slip it on. He must have gone to the school to get it. He wrapped one arm around my waist and another around Marusia’s, giving us each support.

  When we got home, Marusia warmed up some homemade soup and sliced a few pieces of rye bread. Before, a meal like this would have caused confusing memories and nightmares. But now that my memory was back—parts of it, at least—I was able to think of that last bowl of soup I had shared with my grandmother and sister. It was a sad time, but also a cherished one. How I missed them both.

  I still had not pieced together all the details of my life before my parents disappeared. The ache of their loss was like a wound in my heart. I must have been very young when they were taken away. And I realized now that they weren’t just taken away. They were dead. Tato was killed by the Soviets and Mama was killed by the Nazis. My teeth chattered—not from the cold but from the realization of all that I had lost.

  I wrapped my arms around my chest and rocked back and forth in my chair. Back and forth, back and forth, trying to remember the last time my parents had held me.

  But I also knew that Mama and Tato had loved me. Flecks and shadows of scenes from the past told me that. When I thought hard now about Tato, I could remember his warm smile and the last time he tucked me into bed … Mama, dear Mama. Her lilting voice as she sang the kolysanka.

  And Baba? What strength she had. But she couldn’t have survived the shock of losing me and Lida.

  Lida.

  The dark-haired girl in my dream who tried to grab my hand … The OST girl in the bombed-out factory who met my gaze. That was Lida. I knew it now.

  Marusia brushed her fingertips lightly on my forearm. “Are you ready to tell us about it?”

  I was. At least, about as much as I remembered. It was a relief to say the details out loud.

  At first it was all jumbled, but as I continued, my memories began to fall more and more into place. I sorted through the parts of my life when I was Gretchen, and the earlier parts when I was myself.

  It was a weight taken from my shoulders to know for sure that Vater and Mutter were not my real parents. The thought of Vater in particular made bile rise in my throat. I had a twinge of worry about Eva, though. She wasn’t my sister, but she was just a child. Where was she now? Was she safe? Did she ever think of me?

  Marusia nodded as I spoke. She knew my history from when we met at the farm. Of my earlier life, she had guessed some of it. Ivan must have heard from Marusia all that she knew, but still he sat spellbound.

  “I always wondered what your real name was,” said Marusia. “Larissa is a beautiful name. And you have a sister named Lida.”

  “Yes.”

  My sister. My dear big sister, Lida. I started to cry again. “Do you think she still might be alive?” I managed to ask.

  “With the memories that you’ve pieced together, maybe we will be able to find what became of her,” said Marusia.

  “We’ll write to the Red Cross,” said Ivan. “We can always hope.”

  I FIRST HEARD about the Lebensborn program from my mother-in-law, the late Lidia (Krawchuk) Skrypuch. The Nazi front passed through her city of Zolochiv twice and soldiers took over her house. She and her parents became prisoners in their own home. One day she overheard bits of conversation from the Nazi officers. Something was happening at her school the next day. Her parents kept her home. When she did go back to school, all of her blond and blue-eyed female classmates had disappeared. She heard they had been taken for the Lebensborn program. I asked her what that meant.

  The Lebensborn Program

  The Holo
caust—the Nazi murder of six million Jews during World War II—is well documented. Most people are not as aware of the Nazis’ plans for other people. Hitler and the Nazis believed that the Germanic peoples of Central Europe were the descendants of “Aryans”—members of a “master race” whose destiny was to rule the world. Other ethnic groups were sorted into a pecking order, based on how much “Aryan blood” they supposedly had. Most of the peoples of Northern Europe, Great Britain, and the Low Countries, as well as parts of France, were considered mostly or partly Aryan. Other groups, especially in the south of Europe, were judged less pure but acceptable as neighbors and allies. At the very bottom of this hierarchy were the Jews, along with the Roma (Gypsies). The Nazi goal was to exterminate every Jew and Rom in the world. The Nazis also planned to kill people they deemed mentally or physically unfit.

  Nazi policy regarding the Slavs—who include the Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, as well as the Poles, Czechs, and many others—was less consistent. Slavs were categorized as racially inferior, and Hitler declared that most of their lands in Eastern Europe belonged to Germany as Lebensraum (“living space”) for the expansion of the Aryan race. Although the Nazis did not call for a Holocaust-style eradication of the Slavs, they treated civilians in Eastern Europe far more harshly than they did civilians elsewhere in Europe. Historians estimate that at least 10 million civilian Slavs were killed by the Germans in Poland and the USSR.

  In order to free up “living space” for Aryans, Slavs were to be deported en masse from their homelands. Others were to be sent to Germany as slave laborers. People from the eastern part of Ukraine made up the bulk of these slave laborers. British intelligence reports indicate that the rate of deportation from Soviet Ukraine at times approached 15,000 to 20,000 a day. Soviet cities were full of what the Nazis considered “superfluous eaters”—and death by starvation was common.

  Hitler wanted more Aryans to be born, but German women weren’t having babies quickly enough. In 1936, Hitler’s secret police, the SS, created the Lebensborn (Fount of Life) program to increase the number of Aryan children, so that the master race could populate more of Europe. In the beginning, the Lebensborn program concentrated on making sure more Aryan babies were produced in Nazi-occupied parts of Europe. But between 1940 and 1942, the Germans also turned their attention to the blond, blue-eyed Polish and Ukrainian children from Eastern Europe, children who also looked Aryan. They began to steal these children from their parents.

  There were two methods of rounding up children. The first was to take every child of a certain age in random villages or towns and sort through them, sending some to be killed, assigning others for slave labor, and yet others for adoption by Nazi families.

  Method two involved using specially trained Nazi women known as Brown Sisters to go through a town searching for children with Aryan features. An Aryan-looking child would be offered candy, giving the Brown Sister the chance to ask questions. The child’s home would then be raided in the middle of the night and the child taken away.

  The stolen children were put through tests, including the measurement of sixty-two body parts, to ensure that they were “racially valuable.” Any tiny shortcoming meant the difference between an adoptive home and either a concentration camp or a slave labor camp.

  The final round of racially valuable children was then sent to special homes where the children were brainwashed into thinking that they were German. Some were told that their parents were dead, or had only been spies and liars. Children who were still young—under the age of eight—were then placed with their new Nazi families. Older children were put in Nazi Youth boarding schools or fostered out.

  The Nazis went to great lengths to destroy the records of these children when it became clear that Germany would lose the war, so it is hard to know exactly how many were stolen in this way, although it is estimated to be about 250,000 Polish and Ukrainian children alone. The Nazis were so successful with this program that after the war, most of the stolen children refused to leave their German parents, even if their birth parents were still alive and could be located.

  The Ostarbeiters

  The Nazis didn’t just steal children. They also forced millions of young adults into forced labor. Those from Eastern Europe were called Ostarbeiters (Eastern Workers). They were treated harshly—often worked to death. They were required to wear a badge stitched with the letters OST and most lived behind barbed wire in guarded camps. There were 3 to 5.5 million Ostarbeiters in Nazi Germany. Most were Ukrainian. Many were forced to work in German munitions factories because the Nazis realized that these factories were prime targets for bombing by the Allied nations. Many Ostarbeiters died in Allied bombing raids.

  Ukrainian Identity

  Before World War II, the land where Ukrainians had lived for more than a thousand years had become part of Poland and the Soviet Union. Since wartime statistics identified people by their citizenship, not ethnicity, Ukrainians were identified as Polish or “Soviet” (which was often inaccurately presumed to be Russian). The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has made long-suppressed archival information more available to researchers, and has also heightened public awareness of ethnic distinctions among the peoples of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Both developments have allowed a truer picture of the Ukrainian experience of World War II to emerge. The nation of Ukraine declared its independence in 1991.

  The room smelled of soap and the light was so white that it made my eyes ache. I held Larissa’s hand in a tight grip. I was her older sister, after all, and she was my responsibility. It would be easy to lose her in this sea of children, and we had both lost far too much already.

  Larissa looked up at me and I saw her lips move, but I couldn’t hear her words above the wails and screams. I bent down so that my ear was level with her lips.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said.

  I wrapped my arms around her and gently rocked her back and forth. I whispered our favorite lullaby into her ear.

  A loud crack startled us both. The room was suddenly silent. A woman in white stepped in among us. She clapped her hands sharply once more.

  “Children,” she said in brisk German. “You will each have a medical examination.”

  Weeping boys and girls were shoved into a long snaking line that took up most of the room. I watched as one by one, kids were taken behind a broad white curtain.

  When it was Larissa’s turn, her eyes went round with fright. I did not want to let go of her, but the nurse pulled our hands apart.

  “Lida, stay with me.”

  I stood at the edge of the curtain and watched as the woman made Larissa take off her nightgown. My sister’s face was red with shame. When the woman held a metal instrument to her face, Larissa screamed. I rushed up and tried to knock that thing out of the nurse’s hand, but the nurse called for help and someone held me back. When they finished with Larissa, they told her to stand at the other end of the room.

  When it was my turn, I barely noticed what they were doing. I kept my eyes fixed on Larissa. She was standing with three other girls. Dozens more had been ordered to stand in a different spot.

  When the nurse was finished with me, I slipped my nightgown back on. I was ordered to stand with the larger group—not with Larissa’s.

  “I need to be in that group,” I told the nurse, pointing to where Larissa stood, her arms outstretched, a look of panic on her face.

  The nurse’s lips formed a thin flat line. “No talking.”

  She put one hand on each of my shoulders and shoved me toward the larger group.

  A door opened wide. We were herded out into the blackness of night.

  Larissa screamed, “Lida! Don’t leave me!”

  I looked back into the room, but could not see her. “I will find you, Larissa!” I shouted. “I promise. Stay strong.”

  A sharp slap across my face sent me sprawling onto the cold wet grass. I scrambled up and tried to break through the sea of children. I had to get back
to Larissa.

  Strong arms wrapped around my torso and lifted me up. I was thrown into blackness. With a screech of metal, the door slammed shut.

  Blackness.

  I dreamed that I was lying in a sea of humming bees. We were swaying back and forth and I sang the lullaby under my breath, imagining that I was being rocked in Mama’s arms.

  I opened my eyes. It was so dark they took a few minutes to adjust.

  I was crammed inside a hot metal room that smelled like a dirty barn. It was so stuffy and stinky and crowded that I could barely breathe. I realized with a shock that we were moving. This was not a room after all, but a train car—the kind for cattle. It swayed back and forth. The sound was not the humming of bees, but the whispers of frightened children and the thrumming of the train on its tracks. At least the sound of war was muffled out.

  “Does anyone know where we’re going?” I asked.

  The whispers stopped. A lone thin voice answered. “To Germany, I think.”

  My heart sank. If they took me to Germany, how would I ever find Larissa? Wherever she was, she must be feeling so frightened, so alone.

  I tried to stand, but with the movement of the car and the hazy light, I fell backward, one of my bare feet landing on a girl’s chest.

  “Ow!” she cried.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It was pointless to try standing, so I sat up and tried to get my bearings. In the dim light I could see a tangle of limbs and tufts of hair. Kids were packed in so tightly that each overlapped the next. Something smelled bad and a sloshing sound came from one corner.

  “What is that over there?” I asked no one in particular.

  “That’s our bathroom,” said the girl I had stepped on. “A pail.”

  I wrinkled my nose. All these people and one pail for a bathroom? No wonder it smelled so bad.

  I crawled as far away as I could get from the stinky pail, moving slowly and being careful not to hurt any of the kids who were crammed in my way. When I got to the other side of the car, I saw there was a thin seam of light framing a panel in the siding. It was a door. I pounded and screamed with all my might. The children who were propped up against it scooted to the side.