We Were the Lucky Ones

“Coming!” she cries, cranking the stove’s knob to the off position. Another bomb. This one closer. On the same block, maybe. She should drop everything and run, but first, she decides, wrapping a towel around her hand, she will retrieve the milk. As she reaches for the handle of the saucepan, her ear catches something new. It sounds like a cat at first, like a deep, feline whine. Forget the milk, she chides, dropping the dish towel as she turns. But she’s too late. She’s barely made it to the door when the window explodes. The kitchen goes black with soot and Bella can feel herself being thrown off her feet. Her arms stroke the air helplessly, moving in slow motion as if swimming under water, as if trying to escape a bad dream. Broken glass. Shrapnel. Dishes spill from shelves, shatter. Bella lands hard and lies motionless on her stomach, cradling the back of her head with her hands, trying to breathe, but the air is thick with smoke and it’s difficult. Another bomb falls and the floor thrums beneath her.

Jakob is yelling now, but his voice sounds muted, far away. With her eyes pinned shut, Bella gives her body a mental scan. She moves her fingers, her toes. Her extremities are there, and they seem to work. But she’s wet. Is she bleeding? She doesn’t feel any pain. What’s burning? Dazed, she pulls herself to a sit, coughing, and opens her eyes. The room is foggy; it’s like she’s looking at it through a pane of filthy glass. She blinks. As her world comes into focus she notices what appears to be a plume of gray snaking toward the ceiling from the back of the stove. Bella freezes—had she turned off the burner? She had, right? Yes, yes, it’s off. She glances at the debris scattered across the floor: the slivers of windowpane, broken dishes, splintered wood, a dozen large, mangled hunks of shrapnel. The saucepan lies on its side in a pool of milk amid the rubble. She looks down at her clothes—she is not bleeding; she is wet from the milk.

“Bella!” Jakob cries, his voice rippling with fear. He is there suddenly, squatting next to her, his hands on her shoulders, her cheeks. “Bella! Are you okay?”

Bella can hear him, but only faintly. She nods. “Yes, I’m—I’m okay,” she mumbles. He helps her to her feet. Something smells as if it’s burning. “The stove?” Jakob asks. It has begun to hiss.

“It’s off.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Bella’s legs teeter beneath her like stilts. Jakob helps her up and throws her arm over his shoulder, half carrying her back to the basement stairs.

“Are you sure you’re okay? I thought—I thought . . .”

“It’s okay, love. I’m all right.”





OCTOBER 17, 1944: “[Warsaw] must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.”

   —SS chief Heinrich Himmler, SS Officers Conference





CHAPTER FORTY-NINE


    Mila


   Outside Warsaw, German-Occupied Poland ~ Late September 1944




Nearly eight weeks have passed since the bombs began to fall on Warsaw in early August. When the first one dropped, Mila had considered borrowing a car to retrieve Felicia at the convent in W?oc?awek, but she knew she would never get there. Not alive, at least. Warsaw was a giant battlefield. Everyone was in hiding. There were Germans stationed on the outskirts of the city, holed up in bunkers, waiting to pounce the second the Home Army showed a sign of weakness. To leave would be impossible. So instead she fled to Halina’s downtown apartment on Stawki Street, where she spent her days and nights huddled with her sister and Adam in the building’s crawl space, listening in the dark as the city was decimated above them.

Every week or so, a friend from the Underground would bring a small parcel of food, a bit of news. None of it was promising—the Poles were outnumbered, and greatly out-armored; 10,000 residents, apparently, had been executed in Wola, 7,000 in Old Town; tens of thousands more were transported to death camps; even the sick weren’t spared—nearly all of the patients at Wolski Hospital had been murdered. As the siege dragged on, the Home Army became desperate. “Has Stalin sent reinforcements?” Adam asked each time he received news from the Underground. The answer was always no—no sign of help from the Russians. And so the bombing persisted, and little by little, Poland’s onetime thriving capital slowly disappeared. After a week, a third of the city was razed, then a half, then two thirds.

Mila is a disaster, sickened by the distance between her and Felicia. She has no way of knowing if the bombs have reached W?oc?awek, and she never thought to ask if the convent had a shelter. With little to eat and an even smaller appetite, her slacks have begun to hang low and loose around her waist. She is stuck. And with each passing day—she’s counted fifty-two since she’s been in hiding—she grows more frantic. Every few minutes, it seems, the ground shakes as another steel explosive plummets to the earth, shredding homes, shops, schools, churches, bridges, cars, and people in its wake. And there’s nothing she can do but listen, and wait.





CHAPTER FIFTY


    Halina


   Montelupich Prison, Kraków, German-Occupied Poland ~ October 7, 1944




Halina is jolted awake by the metallic click of a key in a lock and the grate of iron scraping cement as her cell door is wrenched open. She narrows her eye that isn’t swollen shut.

“Brzoza!” Betz spits at her. “Up. Now.”

She stands slowly, breathing through the stabbing pain in her back. In the four days that she’s been imprisoned, she’s been questioned over a dozen times. With every interrogation, she’s returned to the cell with more bruises, each a deeper shade of purple than the last. She is on the brink of giving up. But she knows she must swallow the pain, the humiliation, the blood dripping from her nose, her forehead, her upper lip. She mustn’t break. She’s smart enough to know that the ones who break don’t return. And she refuses to take her last breath in this godforsaken jail. She cannot—will not—let the Gestapo win.

Halina was incarcerated just days after General Bór waved his white flag, declaring the uprising in Warsaw over. In the end, Stalin’s men, stationed on the outskirts of the city, never arrived; after sixty-three days of fighting, the Home Army was forced to surrender. On the second of October, for the first time in two months, a hush came over the city. When Halina ventured outside, shell-shocked, filthy, and half starved, Warsaw, still ablaze, was unrecognizable. Her building was one of only two still intact on Stawki Street. The others had been obliterated. Some were shorn in half, exposing their insides in an alarming state of disarray—toilets, headboards, porcelain, tea kettles, and parlor couches pushed up haphazardly against twisted metal and brick—but most were nothing more than shells, their insides hollowed out, gutted, like fish. Halina had picked her way through the rampaged city to try to find Jakob and Franka—a nearly impossible task as many of the roads were impassable. She arrived at Franka’s doorstep first, where she fell to her knees—the building was gone. Franka, her parents, and her brother were nowhere to be found. An hour later, when Halina finally reached Jakob’s apartment, she discovered that his building, too, had been eviscerated. She nearly fainted when Jakob surfaced from the remains with Bella in tow. They were safe. But they were also starving.

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