“I must be quick. I just want you—” I heard a series of clicks on the line. “Caroline? You there?”
“Paul—I’m here.”
“Caroline?”
“Don’t leave me, Paul.”
The line went dead.
I listened to the vibration of the dial tone for a moment and then placed the receiver back in the cradle. We all stood there waiting for the phone to ring again. Roger and Pia just stared at me, hands at their sides. I’d seen those looks before. Pity. Like when Father died.
“I’ll patch him through if he gets a free line again,” Pia said.
I started back to my office, followed by a terrible feeling that would be the last time I would ever speak to Paul.
1940–1941
Before I could even answer Zuzanna, the ticket booth door burst off its hinges, and three SS blackshirts jumped over it into the booth. One grabbed Pietrik off the floor, and the other dragged me by the arms out of the booth, the coins from the cashbox flying everywhere.
“We were just visiting,” Pietrik said. “This is my girlfriend. There’s been a misunderstanding!”
Girlfriend? The guards said nothing, just dragged us on. I scanned the crowd for Matka. Where was she?
“Please, I have money,” Pietrik said.
The SS guard clubbed him across the cheek. Pietrik! His beautiful face.
The SS men pulled us past the crowd, and the people in line stared and whispered to one another. I turned and saw the SS man who had followed me, close behind holding Zuzanna and Luiza, each by one arm.
Matka broke through the ticket line and ran after us. The look on her face scared me as much as anything. I’d only seen that look once before, on the wild-eyed face of a horse hit by a carriage and dying in the street. She clutched the little basket with my sandwich in it close to her chest.
“Go home, Matka,” I called.
“No. Please, you have the wrong people,” she said to the guards.
“Kriminelle,” one woman in line said.
“They’ve done nothing,” Matka said, appealing to the crowd, her wild horse eyes wide. “This is my daughter. I am a nurse at the clinic.”
She went on like that, then came running after us, begging the men to release us until one of them said, “If she wants to come so badly, let her join them,” and grabbed Matka as well. He snatched her basket and threw it to one of the German women waiting in the ticket line.
“But who will sell us tickets?” a Fr?ulein in line asked the officers.
“Who needs tickets?” he said. “Just go in. It’s free tonight.”
The Germans hesitated, confused, and stood where they were as the SS dragged us off into the dark, the trumpets of the “Horst Wessel Song” blaring into the night air.
—
THEY SEPARATED MEN FROM women at Lublin Castle and the next day trucked a load of us to the rail station. Many around us shoved letters and bribes at the guards. Matka handed a letter to one of them.
“Please, I am German. Can you get this to Oberscharführer Lennart Fleischer?” She handed the man some money, and he stuffed both that and the letter in his pocket without even looking at them. They had no time for such things and simply pushed us along. Fleischer was Lennart the Brave’s last name? It means butcher. This was fitting.
They shoved Matka, Zuzanna, Luiza, and me and at least one hundred other women into what was once the dining car of a train, now with all the tables removed, and locked the door. Metal bars stood affixed to the windows and a tin bucket for our sanitary needs sat in the corner.
I recognized a few girls from my old Girl Guide troop, including a dazed Janina Grabowski. Had the Gestapo come for her at Lipowa Street? My heart sank when I saw Mrs. Mikelsky was there too, baby daughter in her arms. They’d been arrested when the Gestapo caught Mr. Mikelsky distributing underground newspapers. Their child was almost two years old by then, aptly named Jagoda, for she did look like a blond little berry.
After a few hours, we stopped in Warsaw, but soon started moving again and picked up speed. Not one of us in that car wept. We were mostly silent, the shame of it all so heavy to bear.
I made my way to the window as night fell and watched through the iron bars as we passed moonlit fields and dark forests. There was something disturbing about those trees, so close to one another.
While Mrs. Mikelsky slept, Luiza and I busied ourselves taking turns holding Jagoda. Small for her age, the baby wore only thin cotton pajamas, so we held her close, but even with that task to distract us, Luiza was soon in a state.
“What will my mother do without me?” she said. “I always help her bake.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll be home before long. This is all temporary.”
“What about Pietrik?” Luiza said. “Is he on this train?”
The car lurched right, and the excrement in our toilet bucket spilled over the top, onto two women sitting on the floor, causing them to cry out and jump up.
“How should I know?” I said. “Keep your voice down. People are sleeping.”
“Will they let us write letters?”
“Of course, Luiza. We will probably go to work somewhere. Picking beets or something.”
“Will they lock us up?” Luiza asked.
“I don’t know, Lou. You’ll see. It won’t be so bad.”
Mrs. Mikelsky came to take the baby, and the train rocked like a terrible cradle, lulling most of my fellow travelers to fitful sleep. Luiza rested against me near the window while Matka slept with Zuzanna in a corner on the floor. The two looked beautiful lying there, Zuzanna resting her head on Matka’s shoulder like a baby, her long legs curled up beneath her.
Luiza traded places with Zuzanna and fell asleep at last and as we sped toward Germany, my own demons crawled out to visit. How could I have gotten us all arrested? It was one thing to suffer myself on account of my own stupidity and quite another to bring everyone I loved down with me. Why had I gone to the theater? My lack of thinking had ruined us all. Would there be a trial? They surely would release the others once they realized they’d done nothing. Only I would be detained.
Had Pietrik already been shot? They did it in the castle courtyard, we all knew. I trembled all over. Where was Papa? We needed to get off that train right away if we were to have any hope at all. I reached up to the window and unlatched the sash. Though it was night, the shapes of spruce trees sped by. The air was growing colder as we went farther west.
“It’s time for you to rest,” Zuzanna said.
“We have to get out of here.”
“Get a hold of yourself, Kasia.”
“I can’t stay here,” I said, the anxiety mounting. “Why can’t I breathe?” Something compressed my neck, squeezing.
“Stop it,” Zuzanna said. “You’ll scare Luiza. She’s already bad enough.”
I doubled over at the waist. “I’m dying.”
Zuzanna turned my wrist and fixed the pads of her fingers in a row along the inside of it. “Your pulse is elevated. You are having a panic episode. Breathe. Big breath in. Deep breath out.”
I filled my lungs as best I could.
“Look at me, Kasia. Breathe again. Don’t stop. This may take ten minutes to pass.” Having a sister who knew everything about medicine came in handy. It took almost exactly ten minutes for the episode to abate.
Hours later we passed through Poznan and then veered off northwest. The morning light showed the leaves on the trees, redder and more orange the farther we went. I dozed, cheek against the cool iron bars, and woke once the train slowed.
Luiza and others came to stand next to me at the window.
“What is happening?” she asked.
The whistle screamed, long and high, as the train slid into a station.
Matka pushed through the women and stood with me. “What do you see?”
I held her hand. “Sign says Fürstenberg-Mecklenburg.”
There were women on the platform, blond giantesses wearing hooded black capes over their gray uniforms. One threw a cigarette down and squashed it with her boot. A few held dark Alsatians at their sides. The dogs seemed to anticipate our arrival, watching the train cars go by much as a pet waits for its owner. Had they done this before?