Józef was born just before midnight on the seventeenth of March, on the frozen dirt floor of their barracks. Herta had heaved logs on the day he arrived, breathing through contractions as they came and went every ten, then seven, then five minutes, before finally asking her friend Julia to find Genek, unsure if she could make her way back to camp on her own. “When you count three minutes between contractions,” Dr. Dembowski had said, “then you know the baby is coming.” Julia had returned alone, explaining that Genek had been sent to the town on an errand and that her husband, Otto, would cover for him as soon as he returned. Julia had helped Herta to her feet and walked with her, slowly, arm in arm, back to camp, where she called for Dembowski.
When Genek arrived two hours later, Herta was barely recognizable. Despite the arctic cold, she was drenched in sweat, her eyes pressed shut as she lay in a fetal tuck, drawing and exhaling breath in quick, heavy bouts through o-shaped lips as if trying to extinguish a stubborn flame. Clumps of wet, dark hair stuck to her forehead. Julia sat by her side, massaging her back between contractions. “You made it,” Herta breathed when she rolled over to see Genek, wrapping her hands around his and squeezing hard. Julia wished them luck and left, and Herta endured another six hours of pelvis-splitting pain before it was time, finally, mercifully, to push. It was a quarter to midnight when, with Genek at Herta’s side and Dembowski crouched between her knees, Józef took his first breath. At the sound of their baby’s cry, and at Dembowski’s definitive “to ch?opiec”—it’s a boy—Herta and Genek beamed at each other with wet, exhausted eyes.
That night, they tucked Józef between them in their straw bed, swaddled in Herta’s wool scarf and bundled with two of Genek’s extra shirts and a small knit hat that was passed down between the babies born at the camp; all they could see of him were his eyes, which he rarely opened, and the pink of his lips. They worried about whether he was warm enough, or whether they’d roll over onto him in the night. But soon a deep fatigue overcame them, blotting out their fears like blizzard clouds over the sun, and after a few minutes all three Kurcs were sound asleep.
Within days, Józef began to put on weight, Herta went back to work, and she and Genek grew used to sleeping with a lump between them. The only real trouble came in the mornings, when Józef would wake wailing, his eyes frozen shut. Herta learned to rub warm droplets of breast milk onto his lids to coax them open.
Now, Herta marvels, it’s hard for her to believe it’s been four months since her son was born. She has marked the passage of time by his first smile, his first tooth, by the day he was able to roll himself over from his belly to his back. What will it be next, she wonders: Will he suck his thumb? Start to crawl? Say his first words? Herta has written home at each milestone, aching for news of her family in Bielsko. She hasn’t heard from them, though, since before she and Genek left Lvov. The last letter she received had been from her brother Zigmund; his news was disheartening. There are fewer and fewer Jews left in Bielsko, he wrote. Some apparently had left at the start of the war to join the Polish Army. Others had been shipped off by train, and never returned. I’ve pleaded with the family, Zigmund wrote, begged them to leave, or to hide, but Lola is far too pregnant to travel safely. By now, Herta realizes, her sister’s baby would be almost a year old. And our parents, Zigmund added, are too stubborn to leave. I suggested we might come to you in Lvov, but they refused. Herta thinks about the child she has yet to meet, wondering if she’s an aunt to a boy or a girl, if the day would come that Ze would get to know his cousin. At the moment it seems unfathomable, separated by such a vast stretch of land, with the world crumbling around them.
Herta prays often for her family. As much as she is able to somehow make the most of her time here in Altynay, there is nothing she wants more than to return to a life of freedom. Part of her wishes she could travel forward in time, and skip to the end of the war. But there is also part of her that prays for time to stop. For there is no telling what the future might bring. What if, at war’s end, she returns to Poland to discover her family is no longer there? The idea is impossible to contemplate. It’s like staring directly at the sun. She can’t do it. She won’t. And so instead she puts it out of her mind, finding solace in the fact that, for now, at least at this very moment, she and Genek are healthy, and their son is perfect.
—
At dusk, Herta finds Genek in their barracks, smiling. “Some good news?” she asks. She unties Józef from her chest, lays the sheet on the dirt floor, and sets him on it. Standing, she rests a hand on her husband’s cheek, realizing how lovely it is to see his dimples.
Genek’s eyes are bright. “I think the tides have finally turned,” he says. “Herta, the Soviets may soon be on our side.”
A month ago, they learned that Hitler had broken his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. The news had apparently stunned the world, but it had done nothing to change their situation in Altynay.
Herta tilts her head at this news. “We thought so at the start of the war, too, yes?”
“True. But this afternoon Otto and I heard the guards whispering something about moving prisoners south to form an army.”
“An army?”
“Darling, I think Stalin is going to grant us amnesty.”
“Amnesty.” Herta marvels at the word. A pardon. But for what? For being Polish? It’s a difficult concept to digest. But if it means they will be freed, Herta decides, then by all means, she will welcome an amnesty. “Where would we go?” she wonders aloud. From what they’ve heard, there isn’t a Poland to return to.
“Perhaps Stalin is thinking of sending us off to fight.”
Herta looks at her husband, at his gaunt figure, his newly receding hairline, the hollow over his collarbone. He’s still handsome despite it all, but they both know he isn’t in any shape to fight. She thinks of the others in the camp, too, most of whom are either sick or starving or both. Aside from Otto, born with the natural build of a heavyweight boxer, none of the prisoners are fit to go to battle. She opens her mouth to voice the concern, but, seeing the hope in Genek’s eyes, she swallows the thought, kneeling instead by Józef, who is busy practicing his new trick of rolling onto his stomach. Herta tries to picture it: Genek, suited up alongside the Soviets, fighting for Stalin—for the man who’d put them in exile, condemned them to a life of labor. It seems backward. She wonders what this would mean for her and Józef—what would become of them if Genek is sent off to battle?
“Do you have a sense of when this amnesty might be granted?” she asks, rolling Józef gently to his back. Józef flaps his arms happily, showing off two miniature replicas of his father’s dimples.
“No,” Genek says, lowering himself to sit beside her. He squeezes Józef’s knee and Józef coos, smitten. Genek smiles. “But soon, I think. Soon.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Addy
Ilha das Flores, Brazil ~ Late July 1941
It’s become Addy’s habit to wake early, well before the other detainees are up, and walk the path circumventing the tiny Ilha das Flores. He needs the exercise and even more so the chance to be alone for an hour—together they help preserve his sanity. The scenery helps, too. Guanabara Bay is beautiful at dawn, when it is at its calmest, a mirror image of the sky. By ten in the morning, it’s teeming with boat traffic heading to and from Rio de Janeiro’s busy port.