Outside there is hissing, brakes screaming. The train slows. Mila peers out the window, surprised to see nothing but open fields on either side of the track. An odd place to stop. Perhaps there is another train meeting them to take them the rest of the way to Kraków, where, they’ve been told, a group of Americans from the Red Cross will escort them to Naples. The door slides open and she and the others are ordered to disembark. Outside the car, Mila’s eyes follow the length of the tracks splayed out before them; they are empty. Her stomach flips. And just as suddenly as she realizes that something is amiss, the group is surrounded by a throng of men. She can tell right away that they are Ukrainian. Burly, dark haired, and broad chested, they look nothing like the fair-skinned, sharp-featured Germans who’d piled them into the train car hours earlier at the station in Radom. The Ukrainians shout orders, and Mila tightens her grip on Felicia’s hand, her plight instantly and horrifically clear. Of course. How could she have been so naive? They’d volunteered for this, thinking it was their ticket to freedom. Felicia looks up at her, eyes wide, and it is all Mila can do to keep her knees from buckling. This was her decision. She’d brought this upon them.
The group is arranged into two lines, marched twenty meters into the field, and handed shovels. “Dig!” one of Ukrainians yells in Russian, his hands cupped around his mouth in place of a bullhorn, the metal barrel of his rifle catching the waning rays of the afternoon sun. “Dig or we shoot!”
As the Jews begin to dig, the Ukrainians walk circles around them, their teeth bared like wild dogs, barking orders or insults over their shoulders. “You with the children,” one of them yells. Mila and the three others with children at their sides look up. “Work faster. You dig two holes.”
Mila instructs Felicia to sit at her feet. She keeps her chin down, with one eye always on her daughter. Every once in a while she glances over at the others. Some are sobbing, tears rolling silently down their cheeks and onto the cold earth beneath them. Others appear dazed, their eyes glazed, defeated. No one looks up. No one talks. The only sound filling the thin March air is the scrape of steel against the cold, hard dirt. Before long, Mila’s hands are cracked and bleeding, her lower back slick with sweat. She peels off her wool coat and sets it on the ground beside her; within seconds, it is snatched up and added to a mound of clothing beside the train.
The Ukrainians continue to keep a close watch, making sure that hands are moving and bodies are occupied. An officer in a captain’s uniform surveys the scene from his position by the train. He appears to be German, SS. Obersturmführer, perhaps—Mila has begun to recognize the various Nazi military ranks by their insignia, but she’s too far away to know for sure exactly what position this man holds. Whoever he is, it’s obvious that he is calling the shots. What went through his mind, Mila wonders, when he was assigned this job? She grimaces as her weight on the shovel’s wooden handle tears another coin-sized flap of flesh from her palm. Ignore it, she commands, refusing to feel the pain. Refusing to feel sorry for herself. With the ground nearly frozen, her progress is slow. Fine. It’ll buy her some time. A few more minutes on earth to spend with her daughter.
“Mamusiu,” Felicia whispers, tugging at Mila’s slacks. She sits cross-legged at her mother’s feet. “Mamusiu, look.”
Mila follows Felicia’s gaze. One of the Jews in the field has dropped his shovel and is walking toward the German by the train. Mila recognizes him as Dr. Frydman, who before the war was a prominent dentist in Radom. Selim used to see him. A couple of the Ukrainians notice, too, and cock their rifles, aiming them in his direction. Mila holds her breath. He’s going to get himself killed! But the captain motions for his subordinates to lower their weapons.
Mila exhales.
“What happened?” Felicia whispers.
“Shh-shh, chérie. It’s okay,” Mila breathes as she presses her foot into her shovel’s blade. “Be still, okay? Stay just here, where I can see you. I love you, my darling girl. Just stay close to me.” Mila watches as Dr. Frydman converses with the German. He appears to be talking fast, touching his cheek. After a minute, the captain nods and points over his shoulder. Dr. Frydman bows his chin, and then walks quickly to an empty train car and climbs inside. He’s been spared. But why? In Radom, the Jews in the ghetto were always being called upon to help the Germans—perhaps, Mila thinks, Dr. Frydman has done some dental work for the captain in the past, and the German has realized he’ll need his services again.
Mila’s stomach turns. She certainly hasn’t done any favors. She’d be better off grabbing Felicia and running for their lives. She glances at the tree line, but it’s two hundred meters beyond the tracks. No. They can’t run. They’d be shot in an instant.
A sharp wind whorls a cloud of dirt across the field, and Mila leans into her shovel, her eyes gritty, blinking as she contemplates her reality: no favors to be returned. Nowhere to run. They’re stuck.
As she wraps her mind around the inevitable, a gunshot rips through the air. She wheels her head around in time to see a man a row over from hers fall to the ground. Had he tried to run? Mila covers her mouth, and immediately looks to Felicia. “Felicia!” But her daughter is transfixed, her eyes glued to the body lying facedown now on the dirt, to the blood rippling from the back of his skull. “Felicia!” Mila says again.
Finally, her daughter turns. Her eyes are huge, her voice tiny. “Mamusiu? Why did they—”
“Darling, look at me,” Mila pleads. “Look at me, only me. It’s going to be okay.” Felicia is trembling.
“But why—”
“I don’t know, love. Come. Sit closer. Just by my leg here, and watch me. Okay?” Felicia crawls closer to her mother’s leg and Mila reaches quickly for her hand. Felicia gives it to her and Mila bends down quickly to kiss it. “It’s okay,” she whispers.
As she stands, the air is filled with yelling. “Who will be the next to run?” the voices taunt. “You see? You see what happens? Who is next?”
Felicia stares up at her mother with tear-filled eyes, and Mila bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from unraveling. She mustn’t cry, not now, not in front of her daughter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Jakob and Bella
Armee-Verpflegungs-Lager (AVL) Factory, Outside Radom, German-Occupied Poland ~ March 1942
Jakob waves a handkerchief as he approaches the factory entrance. “Schie?en Sie nicht! Don’t shoot!” he pants, his breath coming and going in a staccato of short, shallow puffs. He’s jogged nearly eighteen kilometers carrying his suitcase and his camera to get there, and he is terribly out of shape. The muscles in his right arm will be sore for a week and the soles of his feet are swollen and abscessed from the journey, but he hasn’t yet noticed.
An SS guard rests a hand on his pistol and squints in Jakob’s direction. “Don’t shoot,” Jakob pleads again when he’s close enough to hand the guard his ID. “Please, I’m here to see my wife. She’s—” He glances at the dagger dangling by a chain from the guard’s belt and suddenly he’s tongue-tied. “Shesexpectingme.” It comes out as one long word.
The guard studies Jakob’s papers. They’re his real ones; in the ghetto and here at the factory, there’s no point in posing as someone he’s not.
“From,” the guard asks, studying Jakob’s ID, although it’s more a statement than a question.
“Radom.”
“Age.”
“Twenty-six.”
“Date of birth.”
“First of February. 1916.”
The guard quizzes Jakob until he’s certain he’s the young man his papers say he is.
“Where is your ausweis?”
Jakob swallows. He doesn’t have one. “I requested one but—please, I’m here for my wife . . . it’s her parents, they are very sick. She has to know.” Jakob wonders if the lie is as obvious as it feels on his tongue. The guard, surely, will see through it. “Please,” Jakob begs. “It is dire.” A film of sweat has collected on his brow; it glistens under the glare of the midday sun.