Halina
Montelupich Prison, Kraków, German-Occupied Poland ~ January 20, 1945
A shaft of iridescent light perforates her cell from a miniature barred window three meters overhead, illuminating a square of cement on the wall opposite her. Halina can tell from its position that it is late in the day. It will be dark soon. She closes her eyes, her lids heavy with exhaustion. She didn’t sleep at all the night before. At first, she blamed her restlessness on the cold. Her blanket is threadbare, and her straw pallet does nothing to buffer the icy January chill that emanates from the floor. But even by the standards of Montelupich, the night had been a busy one. Every few minutes, it seemed, she was startled awake by the piercing screams of someone in a cell a floor above her, or by the sobs of a prisoner down the hallway. The misery is suffocating; it’s as if at any moment, it will envelop her.
Halina’s cellmates, who once numbered thirty-two, have been whittled down to twelve. The handful who were discovered to be Jews were taken months ago. Others come and disappear by the hour. Last week, a Polish woman arrived, accused of spying for the Home Army. Two days later, she was hustled out from the cell before dawn; as the sun began to rise, Halina heard a scream and then the pop of gunfire—the woman never returned.
Curled on her side with her hands between her knees, she teeters at the edge of sleep, half listening to the whispers of two inmates on pallets next to hers.
“Something’s happening,” one of them says. “They’re acting strange.”
“They are,” the other agrees. “What does it mean?”
Halina has noticed a change, too. The Germans are behaving differently. Some, like Betz, have vanished, which for her is a blessing—she hasn’t been called into the interrogation room in weeks. The men who come to the door now to remove a prisoner or to drop off a tin of watery soup, in the brief instances that she sees them, seem rushed. Distracted. Nervous, even. Her cellmates are right. Something is happening. There are rumors that the Germans are losing the war. That the Red Army is entering Warsaw. Could the rumors be true? Halina thinks incessantly of her parents in hiding, of Adam, Mila, Jakob, and Bella, presumably still in Warsaw. Of Franka and her family—has Adam been able to find them, she wonders? Will Warsaw soon be liberated? Will Kraków be next?
The door slides open. “Brzoza!”
Halina starts. She pushes herself to a seated position and then slowly to a stand, her joints stiff as she makes her way across the cell.
The German at the door reeks of stale alcohol. He grips her elbow tightly as they walk the hallway, but instead of turning right toward the interrogation room, he pushes open a door to a stairwell—the same stairwell she’d descended nearly four months ago, in October, when she was first escorted into the bowels of Montelupich’s women’s ward.
“Herauf,” the German directs, releasing her elbow. Up.
Halina uses the metal railing, gripping it tightly with each step for fear that her legs might give out beneath her. At the top of the stairwell, she’s escorted through another door, and then down a long hallway to an office with the name HAHN printed in black letters across an opaque glass door. Inside, the man behind the desk—Herr Hahn, Halina guesses—wears a uniform bearing the double lightning insigna of the Sicherheitspolizei. He nods, and in an instant Halina is left standing, alone, shivering, in the doorway.
“Sit,” Hahn says in German, glancing at a wooden chair opposite his desk. His eyes are tired, his hair slightly disheveled.
Halina lowers herself gently to sit at the edge of the chair. Her mind buckles as she contemplates how exactly the Gestapo plan to kill her, whether it will be quick, whether she will suffer. Whether her family, if they are still alive, will ever learn of her fate.
Hahn slides a piece of parchment across the desk. “Frau Brzoza. Your discharge papers.”
Halina stares at him for a moment. And then down at the parchment.
“Frau Brzoza, it seems your arrest was invalid.”
She looks up.
“We have been trying to contact your boss, Herr Den, for months. It turns out his bank was closed. But we’ve finally found him, and he has stated that you are who you say you are.” Hahn laces his fingers into a tight ball. “It appears a mistake has been made.”
Halina exhales. A smoldering rage crawls up her spine as she stares at the man opposite her. For four months, she’s been locked up, starved, beaten. For four months she’s worried incessantly about her family. And now this, a halfhearted apology? She opens her mouth, furious, but the words don’t come. Instead she swallows. And as the relief washes over her, quelling her anger, she is dizzy. The room spins. For the first time in her life, she is speechless.
“You are free to go,” Hahn says. “You can collect your belongings on your way out.”
Halina blinks.
“Do you understand? You’re free to go.”
She presses both hands into the arms of the chair and eases herself to a stand. “Thank you,” Halina whispers, when her balance is in check. Thank you, she whispers, silently this time, to Herr Den. He’s done it again. Saved her life. She can’t think of how she will ever repay him. She has nothing to give him. Somehow, someday, she will find a way. But first, she needs to contact Adam. Please, just let him be alive. Let my family be alive.
At the prison office, Halina collects her purse and the clothes she’d arrived in, and steps into a washroom to change. Her blouse and skirt feel sumptuous against her skin, but her appearance is shocking. “Oh, my,” she whispers when she catches a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror over the sink. Her eyes are bloodshot, the skin under them eggplant purple. The bruises over her cheekbones have faded to a dull green, but the gash above her right eyebrow—thick and scabbed black, with an angry red rash around it—is lurid. Her hair is disastrous. Leaning over the sink, she cups her palms together and splashes a few handfuls of water over her face. Finally, she digs a clip from her purse and combs a lock of blonde hair with her fingers a few times before pulling it over her forehead and pinning it to the side in an attempt to cover the laceration over her brow.
Folding her tattered prison jumpsuit, she sets it on the floor, then rifles through her pocketbook, where, somewhat miraculously, she finds her watch and her wallet. The money, of course, which was intended for the Górskis, is gone. But her false ID is there. Her work permit. A card with Den’s information. And—her stomach drops when she feels it still hidden in the soft lining of her purse—Adam’s ID. His real ID. With his real name, Eichenwald. Halina and Adam had exchanged their old IDs at the start of the war, shortly after they were married. It was Adam’s idea. “You never know when we might need them again,” he’d said, “until then, best not to give anyone a chance to find them on us.” Halina had cut a slit in the lining of her purse and sewn Adam’s ID into it. She didn’t have time to remove it after her arrest and before turning over her purse. The Germans had missed it. Breathing relief for the oversight, Halina exits the prison as quickly as her swollen joints will allow her.