The officer leans forward in his wooden chair, resting his elbows on the desk. “You understand, Kurc, that you are now on Soviet soil?”
Genek parts his lips, tempted to unleash—No, sir, you are wrong; you are on Polish soil—but he thinks better of it, and it’s in this moment that he understands the reason for his arrest. The questionnaire, he recalls, had a box he was meant to check in order to accept Soviet citizenship. He’d left it blank. It had seemed false, to call himself anything but Polish. How could he? The Soviet Union is—has always been—an enemy to his homeland. And besides, he’d spent every day of his life in Poland, had fought for Poland—he sure as hell wasn’t going to give up his nationality just because a border had changed. Genek feels his body temperature rise as he realizes now that the questionnaire wasn’t just a formality, it was a test of sorts. A way for the Soviets to weed out the prideful from the weak. By refusing citizenship, he’d labeled himself a resister, someone who could be dangerous. Why else would they come for him? He locks his lips, refusing to admit there is truth in the officer’s statement, and instead meets the man’s eyes with a cold, stubborn stare.
“And yet,” the officer continues, pressing his forefinger to the questionnaire, “you still say you are Polish.”
“I told you. I am from Poland.”
The veins in the officer’s neck deepen in color to match the purple of the piping around his collar. “There’s no such thing as Poland anymore!” he bellows, a ball of spit torpedoing from his mouth.
A pair of young soldiers appears, and Genek recognizes them as two of the men who searched his flat. Genek glares at them, wondering if it was one of them who had stolen Herta’s purse. Thugs. And then it’s over. The officer dismisses them with a wag of his chin, and Genek and Herta are escorted out of the police quarters, to the train station.
—
It’s dark inside the cattle car, and hot, the air swampy and reeking of human waste. There must be three dozen bodies packed inside, but they can’t tell for sure—it’s hard to know—and they’ve lost track of how many have died. The prisoners sit shoulder to shoulder, their heads rocking back and forth in unison as the train clatters along on crooked rails. Genek closes his eyes, but it’s impossible to sleep sitting up, and it’ll be hours before it’s his turn to stretch out. A man squats over a hole cut in the center of the car and Herta gags. The stench is unbearable.
It is July 23. They’ve been confined to the cattle car for twenty-five days; Genek has carved a small gash in the floor with his pocketknife for each day. On some, the train rolls straight through, into the night, never slowing. On others, it stops and the doors are flung open to reveal a small station with a sign bearing an unrecognizable name. Every so often, a brave soul from a nearby village approaches the tracks, commiserating—Poor people . . . where are they taking them? Some come carrying a loaf of bread, a bottle of water, an apple, but the Russian guards are quick to shoo them away, swearing, their M38s cocked. At most stops, a few of the train cars peel off, veering north or south. But Genek and Herta’s car continues on its path. They haven’t been told, of course, when or where they’ll disembark, but they can tell by pressing their faces to the cracks in the train car’s walls that they are headed east.
When they first boarded the car in Lvov, Genek and Herta made a point of getting to know the others. All are Poles, Catholics and Jews alike. Most, like themselves, were sequestered in the middle of the night, their stories similar—arrested for refusing Soviet citizenship as Genek had, or for some made-up crime they had no way of proving they didn’t commit. Some are alone, some with a brother or a wife by their side. There are several children on board. For a while, Genek and Herta found comfort in talking with the other prisoners, in sharing stories of the lives and families they’d left behind; it made them feel as if they weren’t alone. Whatever was in store for them, it helped the prisoners to know they were in it together. But after a few days, they found they had little left to talk about. The chatter ceased and a funerary silence settled upon the train car, like ash over a dying fire. Some wept, but most slept or simply sat quietly, withdrawing deeper into themselves, encumbered by the fear of the unknown, the reality that wherever they were being sent, it was far, far away from home.
Genek’s stomach rumbles as the train screams to a stop. He can’t remember what it feels like to not be hungry. After a few minutes, a metal latch lifts, and the car’s heavy door slides open, bathing the prisoners in daylight. They rub their eyes and squint at the outside world. Framed in the door, the landscape is bleak: flat, endless tundra, and in the distance, forest. They are the only humans in sight. No one rises. They know better than to try to climb from the train until they are given the order to do so.
A guard in a starred cap climbs into the car, stepping over legs and between lice-ridden bodies. In the far corner he stops, bends down, and prods the shoulder of a prisoner propped against the wall with his chin resting on his chest. The old man is oblivious. The guard nudges him again, and this time the man’s torso tips to the left, his forehead landing heavily on the shoulder of the woman next to him, who gasps.
The guard seems annoyed. “Stepan!” he yells, and soon a comrade in a matching cap appears in the doorway. “Another one.”
The new guard climbs aboard. “Move!” he barks, and the Poles in the corner scramble stiffly to their feet. Herta looks away as the Soviets bend to lift the limp body and shuffle toward the open door. Genek glances up as they pass by him, but the man’s face is obscured—all he can see is an arm, dangling at an awkward angle, its skin a sickly yellow, the color of phlegm. At the doorway, the guards count to three, grunting as they heave the corpse from the train.
—
Herta covers her ears, worried she might scream if she hears the sound of another dead body colliding with the ground. He’s the third to be discarded this way in three days. Tossed out like trash, left to rot beside the train tracks. For a while, she’d been able to tune it out, the hideousness of it. She’d let herself go numb. Sometimes, she pretended it was all a farce, something out of a horror film, and she’d let her mind float out of her physical body as she watched herself from above. Other times her mind took her off the train entirely, conjuring up an image of an alternate universe, usually one salvaged from her past, from growing up in Bielsko: the opulent synagogue on Maja Street with its ornate neo-Romanesque fa?ade and its twin Moorish-style turrets; the view of the valley and of the beautiful Bielsko Castle from atop Szyndzielnia Mountain; her favorite shady park, a couple of blocks from the Biala River, where she and her family would picnic when she was little. She would stay there as long as she could, comforted by the memories. But last week, when the baby died, a little girl no older than Genek’s niece, she couldn’t take it any longer. The child had starved. The mother’s milk had gone dry; she didn’t say anything for days, just sat in silence, her torso cocooned around the lifeless parcel in her arms. One afternoon, the guards noticed. And when they pulled the infant from her mother, the others erupted in shouts—Please! It’s unfair! Let her be, please!—but the guards turned their backs and threw the tiny body out of the train as they had the others, and the prisoners’ pleas were soon drowned by the desperate howl of a woman whose heart had been severed in two, a woman who would refuse to eat, her grief too overpowering to withstand, and whose own lifeless body would be thrown from the train four days later.