Genek had refused to believe the words—there was no way Stalin could get away with this, he’d told himself. But as the days turned into weeks and then months, the strain of not knowing their future began to chip away at him. Was this it? Was this how they were destined to live out their lives, felling logs in Siberia? Would they, as Romanov promised, never go home again? If that were the case, Genek wasn’t sure if he could live with himself. For not a day passed that he wasn’t reminded of the fact that it was his own pride that had put them here in this horrific camp—a truth that weighed on him so heavily that he feared he might soon break.
The worst of it, though, the piece that tormented Genek more than any other, was the fact that it wasn’t just his wife for whom he was accountable anymore. She didn’t realize it at the time, but Herta was newly pregnant when they left Lvov—a surprise, of course, and one they’d have celebrated if they still lived in Poland. By the time they figured it out they’d been cooped up on the train for weeks. Herta had mentioned just before their arrest that she was late, but considering the stress they were under, it didn’t strike either of them as strange. A month later, her period still hadn’t arrived. Six weeks after that, her waistline had thickened enough despite the lack of food to announce the baby’s arrival. Now, she’s weeks from giving birth to their child—in the middle of a Siberian winter.
Genek shivers as a loudspeaker clicks on, spitting static into the frigid air. He groans. All day and into the night the speakers spew propaganda—as if the incessant rants will convince the prisoners that communism is the answer to their problems. Fanatical revolutionary ideology fills their ears all day, and now, nearly fluent in Russian, Genek can understand the majority of the nonsense, making it impossible to tune it out. He drapes an arm gently around his wife and rests a palm on her belly, waiting for a kick—Herta says the baby is most active at night—but there isn’t any movement. Her breathing is heavy. How she can sleep through the cold and the roar of the loudspeaker is a mystery. She must be spent. Their days are grueling. Most involve cutting down trees in the bitter cold, hauling logs from the forest across slippery, frozen bogs and over windswept snow dunes to a clearing, and piling them on sleds for the horses to pull away. Genek is done in to the point of delirium by the end of each twelve-hour shift, and he’s not carrying a child. In the past two weeks he’s begun begging Herta to stay put in the mornings, fearful that she’ll overexert herself on the job, that the baby will arrive while she’s stranded in the middle of the woods, knee-deep in snow. But they’ve already sold every keepsake and article of clothing they can live without for extra food, and they both know that the moment Herta stops working, their rations will be cut in half. “You don’t work, you don’t eat,” Romanov reminded them often. Then what?
The loudspeakers finally go silent and Genek exhales, relaxes his jaw. Blinking into the darkness, he makes a silent promise, that this will be the first and last winter they spend in this frozen hellhole. He doesn’t have it in him to survive another. You got us here, you can find a way out. He will figure a way. Perhaps they can escape. But where would they go? He’ll think of something. Some means to protect his family. His wife, his unborn child. They are all that matters. And to think that all it would have taken was a check mark—a willingness to feign allegiance to the Soviets until war’s end. But no, he was too prideful. Instead, he’d marked himself as a resister. Fuck—what has he gotten them into?
Genek clamps his eyes shut, wishing with every part of his being that he could go back in time. That he could transport them to a better place, a safer place. A warmer place. In his mind, he travels to the clear waters of Lake Garbatka, where he and his siblings spent endless afternoons in the summertime swimming and playing hide and seek in the nearby apple orchards. He visits the sunny shores of Nice, where he and Herta once spent a week basking on a black pebbled beach, drinking sparkling wine and feasting on generous portions of moules frites. Finally, his memory skips to Radom. What he would do to sit down to a lavish dinner at Wierzbicki’s, to settle in with his friends for back-to-back pictures at the local movie house.
For a moment, Genek is lost, the memories wrapped around him like blankets, easing the cold. But he is jolted back to his icy barracks when, in the distance, a wolf howls, its sorrowful call echoing through the trees on the outskirts of camp. He opens his eyes. The forest is full of wolves—he sees them every now and then while he’s working—and at night the howling has recently grown louder, closer. How hungry would a pack have to get, he wonders, before venturing into camp? The fear of being torn apart and eaten by a wolf seemed childish, like something his father would have threatened in jest when he refused to eat his cabbage as a boy—but here in the woods in snow-smothered Siberia, it feels eerily possible.
As Genek contemplates how, exactly, he would go about staving off a hungry wolf, his heart begins to punch at his ribs, and out of his mind pours a barrage of horrific what-if scenarios: What if he simply isn’t strong enough and, in the end, the wolf wins? What if there’s a complication in Herta’s labor? What if the baby, like the last three born in the camp, doesn’t make it? Or worse, what if the baby survives, and Herta doesn’t? There is one doctor left living among them. Dembowski. He’s promised to help deliver their child. But Herta . . . The odds of survival for the average prisoner at Altynay narrow by the day. Of the three-hundred-some Poles who arrived at the camp in August, over a quarter have died—of starvation, pneumonia, hypothermia, and one he doesn’t dwell on, in childbirth—their bodies laid to rest in the forest, exposed to the snow and the wolves, the ground too frozen for a decent burial.
Another howl. Genek lifts his head and glances toward the door. A sliver of moonlight glows beneath it. Overhead, he can make out the shadows of icicles suspended from the beams of the barracks, trained like daggers at the dirt floor. Returning his cheek to the straw mat beneath him, he presses his shivering body tighter to his wife’s, willing himself to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Addy
Dakar, West Africa ~ March 1941
Addy and Eliska sit staring at the sea, watching as a liquid sun sinks toward the horizon. A cool breeze rustles the giant leaves on the coconut trees behind them. This is their third visit to the crescent-shaped Plage de la Voile d’Or. Tucked away between the Parc Zoologique and an ancient Christian cemetery, the beach is an hour-long walk from the port of Dakar. At each visit, they’ve had it entirely to themselves.
Addy brushes a few silvery flecks of sand from his forearms, which over the past ten weeks have browned to the shade of toasted baltona bread. He never imagined when he set sail from Marseille in January that he’d wind up in Africa, with a tan. But since the Alsina was detained in Senegal by British authorities—“This is a French ship, and France is no longer a friend of the Allies,” their captain was told—Addy’s skin had grown accustomed to the relentless West African sun.
The Alsina has been anchored for two months. The passengers haven’t an inkling of when—or if—they’ll be allowed to sail again. The only date Addy knows for sure, the date he is acutely aware of, is the one two weeks from now when his visa will expire.
“I’d do anything for a swim,” Eliska says, her shoulder grazing Addy’s.