She taps her thumbs nervously on the steering wheel, scanning the wreckage before her. She must be in the wrong place, Mila thinks. Has she made a wrong turn? She’s barely slept in weeks—it’s certainly possible she’d lost her way. The convent should be just there, ahead, she could swear it . . . and then her eye catches something black, a shard of slate jutting up out of the earth. Her stomach heaves as she recognizes it for the chalkboard it once was. She’s in the right place. The convent is gone. Vanished. It’s been blown to pieces.
Without thinking, she climbs from the car, its engine still running, and sprints across the plot of land where she’d last seen her daughter, leaping over scattered bricks and mangled fence posts in the tall grass. At the sight of a miniature desk chair lying upside down, she crumples to her knees. Her mouth is gaping, but she is breathless, faint. And then her screams slice like knives through the October sky, growing more violent with each desperate inhale.
—
“Miss, Miss.” Mila is being shaken by a young man. She can barely hear him, even though he’s knelt down beside her. “Miss,” he says.
She feels the weight of a hand on her shoulder. Her throat is raw, her cheeks tear-stained, the voice in her head relentless: Look what you’ve done! You should have never left her here! Her heart throbs as if someone has driven a javelin through it.
Mila looks up, blinks, a palm to her chest, another to her forehead. Someone, she realizes, has turned off the engine to the V6.
“There is a basement,” the young man explains. “I’ve been trying to reach them for days. My name is Tymoteusz. My daughter Emilia is down there, too. Yours is . . . ?”
“Felicia,” Mila whispers, her mind too frantic to remember that at the convent, her daughter went by Barbara.
“Come, help me, there could still be hope.”
Mila and Tymoteusz take turns lifting rubble from the place where the convent once stood.
“You see,” Tymoteusz explains, pointing, “this appears to be a stairwell. If we can clear it perhaps we’ll find a door to the bunker.”
They’ve been at work for nearly two hours when Tymoteusz stops, kneels, and presses his head to the earth. “I heard something! Did you hear it, too?”
Mila drops to her knees, holding her breath as she listens. But after a few moments, she shakes her head. “I don’t hear anything. What did it sound like?”
“Like a knock.”
Mila’s pulse quickens. They stand and begin slinging rubble again, this time with a renewed sense of purpose, a thread of hope. And then, as Mila bends to reach for a block of cement, she freezes. There it is. A sound. Yes, a knock, coming from beneath their feet. “I hear it!” she gasps. She places her face to the wreckage and yells as loudly as she can, “We hear you! We’re here! We are coming for you!” Her cries are met by another knock. A muffled shout. Tears immediately spring to Mila’s eyes. “It’s them.” She half sobs, half laughs, and then reminds herself that a knock could mean anything. It could mean a single survivor.
They work faster now, Mila brushing sweat and tears from her cheeks, Tymoteusz breathing heavily, his eyebrows knit together in concentration. Their hands bleed. The muscles running the lengths of their spines spasm. When they break, they rest for a minute or two, no longer, making small talk to keep themselves from imagining the worst.
“How old is Emilia?” Mila asks.
“Seven. And Felicia?”
“She’ll be six in November.”
Mila asks where Tymoteusz is from, but skirts the subject of Emilia’s mother, in hopes that he won’t ask about Felicia’s father.
They are halfway through clearing the stairwell when the sun disappears, which means they have another hour, at most, of light. They both know, though, that they won’t leave until the stairwell is cleared.
“I’ve brought a flashlight,” Tymoteusz says, as if reading Mila’s thoughts. “We’re pulling them out of there. Tonight.”
There are stars overhead when they finally reach the bunker door. Mila had thought there would be more shouting, more communication with whoever had knocked earlier, but since they’d made initial contact, she’s heard nothing, not a sound, and suddenly it’s not the rubble or the dark or the task of prying open the door that terrifies her, but the quiet. Surely whoever is inside can hear them now—so why the silence? She grips the flashlight with two shaking hands as she shines it on the door’s handle, watching with her face half turned away as Tymoteusz wrenches it open.
“Are you all right?” Tymoteusz asks.
Mila isn’t sure if she can move. “I think so,” she whispers.
Tymoteusz takes her arm. “Come,” he says, and they step together into the shadows.
Mila glides a narrow beam of light a meter in front of her as they shuffle silently inside. At first they see nothing but the cement floor, its cracks and dust illuminated in the glow of light. But then the beam catches what appear to be footprints, and a second later Mila jumps at the sound of a voice, not far from them. She recognizes it as that of the Mother Superior.
“We are here.”
Mila shines the flashlight in the direction of the voice. There, along the far wall of the bunker, she can begin to make out bodies, large and small. The smaller ones, for the most part, lay motionless. A few sit up, rub their eyes. Run to them! Mila’s heart screams. Find her! She’s just there, she has to be! But she can’t. Her feet are fixed to the ground and her lungs reject the air, which suddenly smells of excrement, and something else, something horrible. Death, Mila realizes. It smells like death. Her thoughts come and go quickly. What if Felicia isn’t there? What if she had been outdoors when the bombing began? Or what if she is there, but she’s one of the ones not moving? Too sick even to sit up, or worse. . . .
“Come.” Tymoteusz nudges her and she moves alongside him, unable to breathe. Someone coughs. They shuffle toward the Mother Superior, who remains sitting, apparently unable to stand. When they reach her, Mila runs the flashlight over the others. There are a dozen bodies, at least.
“Mother Superior,” Mila whispers. “It is Mila Kurc, Felicia . . . I mean Barbara’s mother. And—and Tymoteusz . . .”
“Emilia’s father,” Tymoteusz offers.
Mila directs the light at herself and at Tymoteusz for a moment. “The children. Are they . . .”
“Papa?” Soft, scared, a voice penetrates the darkness and Tymoteusz freezes.
“Emilia!” He drops to his knees in front of his daughter, who disappears in his arms. They are both crying.
“I’m so sorry we couldn’t reach you sooner,” Mila whispers to the Mother Superior. “How—how long have—”
“Mamusiu.”
Felicia. Mila tracks her light swiftly along the wall of bodies until finally it lands on her daughter. She blinks, swallowing back tears. Felicia is struggling to stand. Bathed in light, the sockets of her eyes appear far too pronounced in her small face, and even from afar Mila can see that her neck and cheeks are badly blistered.
“Felicia!” Mila presses the flashlight into the Mother Superior’s hand and darts across the bunker floor. “My darling.” She kneels beside Felicia and scoops her up, cradling her with an arm under her neck and another under her legs. She weighs nothing. Her body is hot. Too hot, Mila realizes. Felicia is mumbling. Something hurts, she says, but she hasn’t the words or the energy to explain what. Mila rocks her gently. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m here now, love. Shhh. I’m right here. You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.” She recites the words over and over again, rocking her feverish daughter in her arms like an infant.
Somewhere over her shoulder she can hear someone speaking to her. Tymoteusz. His voice is soft, but urgent. “I know of a doctor in Warsaw. You need to get her to him,” he says. “Right away.”
JANUARY 17, 1945: Soviet troops capture Warsaw. That same day, the Germans retreat from Kraków.
JANUARY 18, 1945: With Allied forces approaching, Germany makes a last-ditch effort to evacuate Auschwitz and its surrounding camps; some 60,000 prisoners are forced to set off on foot on what will later be coined a “death march” to the city of Wodzis?aw in southwestern Poland. Thousands are killed before the march, and over 15,000 die en route. Those remaining are loaded onto freight trains in Wodzis?aw and shipped to concentration camps in Germany. In the coming weeks and months, similar marches will take place from camps like Stutthof, Buchenwald, and Dachau.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO