1945
“Am I dreaming?” Zuzanna said as the ferry docked at Gdansk, the salt air filled with the wild cries of gulls and terns. I lifted my hand to shield my eyes, for the sparkling water, alive with diamonds, blinded me.
We had spent two months in Malm?, Sweden, the place for which God saved all the most beautiful things in nature. The greenest grass. Sky the color of cornflowers. Children who seemed born of that landscape, their hair spun from white clouds, eyes of cobalt sea.
We were sorry to leave, for we were treated like royalty there, feasting on princess cake and pitepalt dumplings with butter and lingonberry jam. Once we regained our strength (both Zuzanna and I were up to forty kilos), many of us wanted to get home to wherever that might be. Poland. France. Czechoslovakia. A few women with little left to go home to stayed in Sweden to start new lives. Some waited to see what would happen with the proposed new elections in Poland before they ventured back. We’d heard the repressive Soviet law enforcement agency NKVD was in charge in Poland, but Zuzanna and I never hesitated. We ached to see Papa.
While I was grateful beyond words for my rescue, the stronger I became, the angrier I got. Where was the joy at being rescued? I watched women around me recover, eager to resume their old lives, but for me, the rage just grew, black in my belly.
Once we’d made it to the northern coast of Poland by ferry, a driver met us at the landing. He was a young man from Warsaw, one of more than one hundred former Polish Air Force pilots who’d joined Britain’s Royal Air Force and risked their lives fighting the Luftwaffe. He was only a few years my senior, but at twenty-two, I had the limp and posture of an old crone.
He reached for Zuzanna’s cloth sack and helped us into the car. I felt the leather of the backseat, cool and smooth. How long had it been since I’d been in an automobile? It may as well have been a spaceship.
“So what is happening in the world today?” Zuzanna said once we were under way, opening and closing the little metal ashtray in her door handle. I opened my own and found two crooked cigarettes stubbed out there. What they would have given for those in the camp!
“Heard what’s going on with the government?” the driver asked.
“There are to be free elections?” Zuzanna said. We drove through the port of Gdansk, bombed heavily during the war.
“The government-in-exile wants to come back,” the driver said. “So the Polish Workers’ Party says there will be a vote.”
“You believe Stalin?” I said.
“The Polish Workers’ Party is—”
“Stalin. Just what we need.”
“They say we’ll be our own free and independent country. People are hopeful.”
“Why do we keep believing liars?” I asked. “The NKVD will never let go.”
“Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” the driver said.
“That sounds free and independent,” I said.
Zuzanna and I slept much of the way to Lublin and woke once the driver stopped at our front door.
“Time to wake up, ladies,” the driver said as he pulled on the hand brake. We sat in the backseat and stared at the bare lightbulb next to our front door, bright in the darkness, inviting a frenzied party of fat moths and other bugs. At Ravensbrück prisoners would have happily eaten those.
“Can you believe we are here?” Zuzanna asked.
We stepped out of the car as if we were arriving on the moon. I circled Zuzanna’s waist with my arm. She leaned against me, and her hip bone knocked mine. The pain in my bad leg spiked as I climbed those beautiful front steps.
We had sent Papa a telegram. Would he be waiting with poppy-seed cake and tea for us? I turned the old porcelain knob of our apartment door. It was locked. Zuzanna fished the extra key out of the old hiding place behind the brick. Still there!
One step into the kitchen, and the realization knocked the wind out of me: My mother was gone. The room was dark, save for a small lamp on the kitchen table and the halo of a candle flame on the fireplace mantel. Too-happy yellow curtains hung at the windows, and a new family of red canisters stood on Matka’s wooden counter. Yellow and red. Matka loved blue. Someone had hung a painting of a field of wildflowers over the wall where Matka once pasted her bird pictures. A few sparrows peeked out from behind the painting, the mucilage holding them to the wall yellowed with age. I walked to Matka’s drawing table. Someone had laid it flat and covered it with a cheap lace tablecloth, atop it a Virgin Mary picture from a shrine in Gietrzwald and a china frame containing a picture of an old woman waving from a train.
I stepped to the mantel, to Matka’s picture there, the one where she looked quite serious and was holding her little dog Borys. Someone had set a black bow beneath the photo, the curled ends hanging down off the mantel. I felt dizzy standing there looking at my mother’s solemn face as it danced in the candlelight. A dog barked in the bedroom, and Zuzanna caught her breath.
Felka?
“Who is there?” Papa said, creeping down the hall from the back bedroom.
He came toward us in his striped underwear. His hair, thinned and gray as a squirrel’s coat, poked out in all directions, a black revolver I’d never seen before in his hand. Felka emerged behind him, her tail beating quite a rhythm. She was all grown up and fatter than the last time I’d seen her, right in that kitchen with Matka.
“It is just us, Papa,” Zuzanna said.
Papa stood as if struck dumb, his mouth open. How had he aged so? Even the hair on his chest was gray. Felka came to us and ran back and forth from Zuzanna to me, digging her wet nose into us.
“We’re home,” I said. My eyes pricked with tears. Papa opened his arms wide, and we went to him. He set his gun on the counter and hugged us both as if he would never let us go. How happy we were to be there in his embrace! Zuzanna and I both cried on his bare shoulders.
“Did you not receive our telegram?” I asked.
“Who receives telegrams these days?”
“You got a letter about Matka?”
“Yes, the handwriting on the envelope looked like hers, so I thought it was a letter from her. But it was a form letter. They said it was typhus.”
I took his hand. “It wasn’t typhus, Papa.”
“What then?” He was like a small child. Where was my strong papa?
“I don’t know,” I said.
He stepped back, hands on his hips. “But were you not together?”
Zuzanna led Papa to a kitchen chair. “They moved her to a separate block, Papa. She worked as a nurse—”
“And drew portraits for the Nazis. That’s what got her killed. Getting too close to them.” Why did I say such a thing? I knew too well that her bringing me a sandwich that night at the movie theater had gotten her killed.
Zuzanna knelt next to Papa. “You received Kasia’s letters. How did you know how to read them?”
“It took the whole postal center to figure it out. We knew there was some sort of code, but none of us knew how to read it. I dabbed water on the first letter. But then we figured it out. I told certain people, and they got the message to our underground in London, who spread the word. But it was Marthe who said we should iron the letter. That it was a trick from a book she knew.”
Marthe?
I knelt at Papa’s other side. “Thank you for the red thread.”
“I got the word out as best I could. Did you know the BBC broadcast it? What they did to you both…” Papa dissolved into another pool of tears. How hard it was to see our strong papa crying!
I took his hand. “Have you seen Pietrik? Nadia?”
“No. Neither of them. I post the lists every day. Red Cross Center does too. I wish we’d known you were coming.” Papa took up a linen dishcloth and dried his tears. “We’ve been frantic with worry.”
We?
Zuzanna noticed her first, in the shadows of the bedroom doorway, a thickset woman in a dressing gown. Zuzanna went to her and put out her hand.
“I am Zuzanna,” she said.