1945
The summer the year that Zuzanna and I came home to Lublin I tried to stay optimistic, but it was hard. Once I learned what had happened during our almost four years at Ravensbrück, I couldn’t understand why the world had never come to our aid. First with Hitler’s invasion in 1939 from the west, then with the Soviet invasion the same month from the east. Though these invasions had caused Britain and France to declare war on Germany, not one Allied soldier had been sent to help us fight. Our first reports of Auschwitz, sent to the Western world by our Polish underground at great risk, had received no response either. Our reports of thousands of our Polish officers murdered in the forests near Katyn, Pietrik’s father possibly among them, were ignored by the world as well.
So when this world rejoiced at Japan’s surrender and the war was officially over, I did not rejoice. The war continued for us, just under a new dictator, Stalin. Though it was not fully apparent right away, Stalin’s hand was already over us. Many of the leaders of the Polish resistance, several of them Pietrik’s friends, were taken and eventually murdered by the Red Army and the NKVD, Stalin’s brutal law enforcement agency. The NKVD were the nice people in charge of ferreting out “enemies of the people.” They executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners and sent thousands more to the gulags. Instead of a fresh start, Poland got new forms of injustice.
As a result, we were careful about where we went and spent much time looking over our shoulders. One of the first things I did once I came home was check the secret hiding place Nadia and I had used to exchange books before the war. This was simply a place where teenaged girls had played detective once upon a time. I walked over to Nadia’s old street, and the stone wall was still there, crumbling near the edges but still strong! Would the book Nadia left for me still be there?
I slid the stone from the spot in the wall, pulled out the book, and brushed the dust from the yellow cover. It was Kornel Makuszynski’s Satan from the Seventh Grade, our favorite book we’d exchanged so many times. How had Nadia been able to leave it after she’d gone into hiding? I looked carefully about, to make sure no one was spying on me, sat with my back to the wall, and held the book. The musty scent of the cover brought back earlier days when life had been simpler, when the worst thing we had to worry about was a bad exam grade or an aching tooth.
The book opened naturally to chapter five, and Nadia’s gift to me sat there, all ten of Pietrik’s dance tickets she’d bought for me. I was too angry to cry at the wall that day, for the childhood we’d lost came rushing back. We had only wanted to chat with boys and dance and read mysteries. Now Nadia was gone, maybe forever. All I had left of her was a book and the photo buried in the back garden.
It was late afternoon by the time I made it home, and I brought up the idea of retrieving the photo of Nadia and the other treasures we’d buried at the start of the war.
“Maybe we should do this another time,” Zuzanna said. This was not like my sister at all, to be standing there in the backyard wringing her hands. “Maybe once we are more acclimated it would be better. This can take an emotional—”
“Don’t be so nervous,” I said. “Why leave the only valuables we have in the ground?”
Papa and I shooed away her protests as he paced off the steps.
Ten, eleven, twelve.
Had the tin cans kept our most precious things safe?
Papa stood there for what seemed like a full minute, arms at his sides, the shovel loose in his hand. Was he crying? He then came alive, struck his shovel into the hard-packed earth, and dug like a man whose life depended on what was buried below.
He didn’t have to dig long before we heard the shovel blade hit tin. All three of us scooped dirt out of the hole with our hands and helped Papa pull out the cans we’d buried so long ago. We sat, out of breath for a while, staring at the cans. Zuzanna cried just looking into that hole. Missing Matka? Part of me was happy to see her cry, since she seldom showed her grief.
Next Papa lifted out the tin box with the hinged lid. He opened the top, and it let out a little sigh as air was released. He closed it right away, but not before I saw his old silver revolver there. How many guns did we own now?
The millet was next, still surprisingly dry and maybe even edible, and then we started opening the tin cans. Papa handed one to me, and I scraped away the wax. I pulled the scarf from the can, and it unwound, the scent of Pietrik still there! I opened the next can to find the picture of Nadia and me on the cow. Even my Girl Guide uniform was in perfect shape and the corduroy dress that Matka had sewn for my sixteen-year-old body was still bright red. I pulled it on over my skirt and blouse, and it was even loose on me, since I’d still not gained back much weight. None of this caused me many tears, for I was happy to have my precious things back.
The last can I opened was a biscuit tin. I broke the wax seal and lifted off the lid. I pulled out Matka’s sable brushes, like new inside their flannel wrap, and a surge of sadness rose up and crashed over me there in the yard. Matka was gone, and she would not be coming back to use her brushes. It was my fault too. I deserved to die for killing my mother. Papa and Zuzanna surrounded me with their arms as we crouched there by the hole, all crying by then.
—
THROUGH IT ALL, I kept up hope that Nadia and Pietrik would come back and checked the list of returning deportees each morning on the corkboard of the Red Cross Repatriation Center at Lublin Hospital. One especially fine late-summer morning I stopped there first thing to check. The staffers were polite, but I could tell they were tired of seeing me limp in every day. The pain in my leg slowed me up and gave them plenty of time to avoid me. When they saw me approach, they made themselves scarce or busied themselves with shuffling papers. If I did get a response from someone, it was curt.
“No. No Pietrik Bakoski. No Nadia Watroba either,” the girl at the desk called out that morning before I said a word.
Next I walked to the postal center, to check the list Papa tacked up in the cool front lobby. By summer’s end, the thick lists posted on the corkboard there had dwindled to one sad page. I ran my finger down the list, first by the W’s and then the B’s. Badowski, Baginski, Bajorek, Bakalar, Bal, Balcer. It felt good to read the names of those lucky few that returned, and I was often at the bottom of the list before I realized the name Pietrik Bakoski was not included there.
Papa came from his office, saw me at the list, and waved me to him.
“Kasia, my love, could you come see me in my office for a moment?”
Why was he being so formal all of a sudden?
I walked to his office, the same one he’d had for as long as I could remember, with its high tin ceiling and his wide oak desk covered with packages of every sort, all soon to be expertly delivered by Papa or one of his staff. Something seemed to be missing, and it took me a few seconds to realize what it was.
“Where is the flag, Papa?”
The Polish flag was one of the first things Papa had put back up in his office, once the Nazis left Lublin, much to the happiness of the postal center patrons. Had the new authorities pressured him to remove the flag? He was cooperating with them; it was clear.
Papa stepped to the window and pulled down the shade. “We don’t have much time, but I had to tell you I’ve heard something. Don’t be alarmed. This is something we can fix.”
I don’t know about you, but when someone says, “Don’t be alarmed,” I have trouble listening to the rest of what they say, since fear starts running up and down my body.
“What are you talking about, Papa?” I hadn’t seen him so frightened since the night we buried our treasures in the backyard with Matka.