It feels like an eternity since her day began. She was picked up that morning by a Wehrmacht officer who wore a pressed green uniform with a crisp swastika band on his arm and a mustache so thin it appeared to have been drawn over his lip with a charcoal pencil. He’d greeted her with a glance from beneath his visored field cap and a single word, “Papiere!” (hellos, apparently, were too good for Jews), then jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. “Get in.” Halina had climbed gingerly into the bed of the truck and found a seat among eight other workers. She recognized all but one. As they motored beneath the chestnuts flanking Warszawska Street—she refused to call it by its new German name, Poststrasse—she kept her head down for fear of being recognized; how embarrassing it would be, she’d thought, for someone from her previous life to see her being carted away like this.
But when the truck paused at the corner of Ko?cielna Street, she looked up and managed, to her horror, to catch the eye of an old schoolmate standing by the entrance to Pomianowski’s candy shop. At gymnasium, Sylvia had desperately wanted to be Halina’s friend—she’d followed her around for the good part of a year before they finally grew close. They did their homework together and visited each other on weekends. One year, Sylvia invited Halina to her home for Christmas; on Nechuma’s insistence, Halina brought along a tin of her mother’s star-shaped almond biscuits. They’d lost touch since graduation; the last Halina knew, Sylvia had taken a job as a nurse’s aide at one of the city’s hospitals. All of this flashed through her mind as the truck sat idling, as the old friends stared at one another from across the cobblestone. Halina had thought for a moment about waving—as if it were perfectly normal for her to be huddled there, in the back of a truck, she and eight other Jews, on their way to work—but before she could lift a hand, Sylvia narrowed her eyes and looked away; she’d pretended she didn’t even know her! Halina’s blood had boiled with humiliation and fury, and when the truck finally motored on, she spent the next half hour thinking of the things she’d like to say to Sylvia when she ran into her next.
They drove and drove, the cityscape quickly fading, two-laned streets and seventeenth-century brick fa?ades giving way to a patchwork of orchards and pastureland and narrow dirt roads hemmed in by pine and alder trees. Halina had cooled off by the time they arrived at the farm, but her bottom was bruised from all of the jostling, which made her hate the day even more.
When they parked, there wasn’t a building in sight, just dirt, and rows upon rows of leafy stems. It was then that Halina realized, looking out over the hectares of farmland, that this was no desk job. The officer lined them up beside the truck and tossed baskets and burlap sacks at their feet. “St?mme,” he said, pointing to the sacks. “Rote rüben,” he added, kicking a basket. Though she knew enough German to get by, “stems” and “beets” weren’t yet in her vernacular, but the instructions were easy enough to decipher. Stems in the sack, beets in the basket. After a moment the officer handed each of the Jews a knife with a long, dull blade. He glared at Halina as she took hers. “Für die st?mme,” he said, resting a hand on the well-worn wooden grip of the pistol strapped to his belt, his mustache morphing along with the curve of his lips into the shape of a talon. Brave of him giving us knives as big as these, Halina thought.
And so it went. Thwack, rip, shake, stuff. Thwack, rip, shake, stuff.
Perhaps she should pocket a couple of beets to bring home to her mother. Before their food was rationed, Nechuma would grate roasted beets and toss them with horseradish and lemon to make ?wik?a, pairing it with smoked herring and boiled potatoes. Halina’s mouth waters; it’s been weeks since her last decent meal. But something in her knows that an extra beet at dinner wouldn’t be worth the consequence of getting caught stealing.
A whistle shrills and she looks up to see the silhouette of a truck a hundred or so meters away, and beside it, a German officer, presumably the one who brought them, waving his cap over his head. From her plot, she can make out two of the others, already walking in his direction. As she stands, her muscles scream. She’s spent far too many hours of the day bent at right angles. She drops the knife on top of the beets in her basket and balances the wicker handle in the crook of her elbow. Wincing, she reaches for the stem-filled sack, loops its twine strap over her opposite shoulder, and begins limping toward the truck.
The sun has dipped behind the tree line, giving the sky a pinkish hue, as if stained by the juice of the plants she’d spent all day harvesting. She’ll need a warmer coat soon, she realizes. The officer whistles again, motioning for her to pick up her pace, and she curses him under her breath. Her basket is heavy; it must weigh nearly fifteen kilos. She walks as quickly as her joints will allow her, wondering if any of the beets she’s pulled will end up in the cafeteria where her parents work. They’ve been there for a week. “It’s not so bad . . .” her mother said after their first day, “. . . aside from having to prepare such lovely food we’ll never taste.”
At the truck, the officer with the flyaway mustache waits with an outstretched palm. “Das messer,” he says. Halina hands him the knife, then sets her bag and basket on the truck bed before climbing up. The others are already seated, each looking as bedraggled as she. They retrieve a final worker and then hunker down for the ride home, their day’s work at their feet, too tired to talk.
“Same time tomorrow,” the German barks, as the truck slows to a stop in front of 14 Warszawska Street. It’s nearly dark. He hands Halina her papers through the window of the truck’s cab, along with a small, stale, hundred-gram wedge of bread, her compensation for the day.
“Danke,” Halina says, taking the bread, trying to mask her sarcasm with a smile, but the officer refuses to look at her and speeds off before the word has left her lips. “Szkop,” she whispers as she turns and hobbles toward home, fishing for a key in her coat pocket.
Inside, Halina finds Mila in the foyer, hanging up her coat; she has just returned from the uniform workshop. Felicia sits on a Persian rug, waving a silver rattle, smiling at its tinkly sound.
“My goodness,” Mila gasps, taken aback by Halina’s appearance. “What on earth did they put you up to?”
“I’ve been farming,” Halina says. “Crawling about in the fields all day. Can you believe it?”
“You—on a farm,” Mila quips, suppressing a laugh. “Now there’s a thought.”
“I know. It was dreadful. All I could think,” Halina says, balanced on one foot by the door as she slips out of a shoe, wincing as she reopens a blister, “was if Adam could only see me, groveling around on all fours in the dirt, like an animal! What a laugh he’d get. Look at my shoes!” she cries. “God, what a mess.” She studies her socks, marveling at the soil they, too, have collected, peeling them off carefully so as not to sully the floor. “What’s that?” she asks, pointing to a loop of fabric draped loosely around Mila’s neck.
“Oh,” Mila says, glancing at her chest, “I forgot I was wearing it. It’s something I made—I don’t know what you’d call it, a harness I suppose?” She turns, pointing to where the fabric is crisscrossed between her shoulder blades. “I can tuck Felicia inside here.” She turns again, pats the loop dangling down the length of her torso. “It keeps her concealed on the way to and from the workshop.”
Mila brings Felicia with her to work every day, even though technically children aren’t allowed. No persons under the age of twelve in the workplace—it’s one of the Germans’ many decrees, disregard of which is punishable by death. But Mila can’t not work—everyone has to work—and it’s not as if she can leave Felicia, who’s not even a year old, alone all day in the apartment while she’s away.
Halina admires her sister’s ingenuity, her courage. She wonders if she were in Mila’s shoes whether she would have the gall to walk into a workshop with a child strapped illegally to her breast. Mila has changed since Selim left. Halina thinks often about how, when everything was easy, motherhood was hard for Mila—and now that everything is hard, it’s a role that seems to come more naturally. It’s as if some sort of sixth sense has set in. Halina doesn’t worry any longer whether, with one more sleepless night, Mila might come undone.
“Does Felicia like it in there, in her—harness?” Halina asks.