Outside, the January cold slaps her hard in the face. Patches of snow and ice cover the cobblestone street. She’d arrived in early October, when the weather was still relatively mild and she’d traded Pinkus her winter coat. Her lightweight trench is no match for the winter chill. She pulls her collar up to her chin and digs her hands into her pockets, squinting uncomfortably into the glare of the sun. Ignoring the wind slicing at her cheeks and the shooting pain behind her kneecaps, she walks briskly, determined to put as much space between her and Montelupich as she can while she contemplates what to do next.
At a street called Kamienna, she pauses at a newsstand, where she realizes for the first time since leaving the prison that she hasn’t seen any Germans on the streets. She scans the papers, elated to read that the Soviets, just three days ago, had captured Warsaw. That the Nazis had begun to retreat from Kraków. That in France, the Germans were withdrawing from the Ardennes. These are good signs! Perhaps the rumors flying around Montelupich were true—perhaps the war would soon be over.
Halina peruses the small crowd of Poles gathered at the stand for someone who might be able to direct her to the address Herr Den had left her. Hahn had said the bank was closed, but maybe with the German retreat it’s been reopened. They were able to find Herr Den, after all. If he isn’t there, she decides, she’ll have to track down his home address. She’ll reach him. Thank him. Promise to reimburse him, then ask for a loan. Just enough to pay for some food, and for her passage back to Warsaw, where, she prays, she’ll find her family intact.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Halina and Adam
Wilanów, Soviet-Occupied Poland ~ February 1945
It’s this one here, on the left,” Halina says, and Adam turns the Volkswagen down the narrow drive leading to the Górskis’ home. “Thank you for coming,” she adds.
From behind the steering wheel, Adam glances at her and nods. “Of course.”
Halina rests a hand on Adam’s knee, deeply thankful for the man at her side. She would never forget the day that she returned from Kraków to her apartment in Warsaw to find him waiting for her. Mila, Felicia, Jakob, and Bella were there, too. The feeling of seeing them together, her siblings, was indescribable. Her euphoria vanished, however, when Adam told her he had no news of Franka and her family. They were still missing. His own parents and three siblings—two brothers and a sister with a two-year-old son—had disappeared, too, not long after Halina left for Kraków. Adam had been trying desperately to find them, but without any luck, and Halina could sense how much this agonized him.
She’d felt bad at first, asking him to come along with her to Wilanów—but she knew that he would never let her travel on her own, and that if she arrived to an empty house or to bad news from the Górskis, she wouldn’t have the strength to return to Warsaw alone.
Adam slows the Volkswagen to a stop and Halina peers at the Górskis’ cottage through the dusty windshield. It looks tired—as if the war has given it a beating. There are a dozen shingles missing from the roof, and the white paint has begun to peel from the shutters like birch-tree bark. Weeds grow in the spaces between the blue slate walkway leading to the door. Halina’s stomach turns. The house looks abandoned. Adam said he wrote to the Górskis twice over the winter to check up on them, promising to send money as soon as he could, but he never received a reply.
Halina runs her fingers along the unsightly scar over her eyebrow and then slips her hand into her pocket, where she’s tucked an envelope of zloty—half of the sum Herr Den loaned her when she finally tracked him down in Kraków. It’s been seven months since she has been able to deliver the Górskis their money, since she last saw her parents, and it is everything she can do not to fear that the worst of her nightmares have come true. “Just be here,” Halina whispers, wishing away the horrific scenarios her mind has become adept at concocting: that the Górskis, destitute, had been forced to leave her parents at the train station to fend for themselves with their false IDs; that Marta’s sister, nosing around, had discovered the false wall behind the bookcase and threatened to turn Albert in for harboring a Jew unless he got rid of them; that a neighbor had spotted her parents’ laundry, suspiciously larger than the Górskis’, hanging to dry in the backyard, and reported the Górskis to the Blue Police; that the Gestapo had made an unexpected visit and discovered her parents before they had a chance to slip into their hiding place. The possibilities were endless.
Adam turns off the ignition. Halina takes a breath, exhales through a narrow part in her lips.
“Ready?” Adam asks.
Halina nods.
She climbs out of the car and walks ahead, guiding Adam around to the back of the house. At the door, she turns, shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can,” she says.
“You can,” Adam says. “Would you like me to knock?”
“Yes,” Halina whispers. “Twice. Knock twice.”
As Adam reaches around her, Halina looks from the door to her feet to a line of tiny black ants marching across the stone doorstep. Adam raps his knuckles twice against the door and then reaches for her hand. Halina holds her breath, and listens. Somewhere behind her, a wood pigeon coos. A dog barks. Wind rustles the scale-like leaves of a cypress. And then finally, the sound of footsteps. If the steps belong to the Górskis, their expressions will say it all, Halina realizes, staring now at the doorknob, waiting.
Albert answers the door, thinner and grayer than when she’d seen him last. His eyebrows leap at the sight of her. “It’s you!” he says, and then claps a hand over his mouth, shaking his head in disbelief. “Halina,” he says through his fingers. “We thought . . .”
Halina forces herself to meet his gaze. She opens her mouth but can’t bring herself to speak. She hasn’t the courage to ask him what she needs to know. She searches his eyes for an answer but all she can read is his surprise at finding her at his doorstep.
“Come, please,” Albert says, waving them inside. “I’ve been so worried, with the news from Warsaw. Such devastation. How on earth . . .”
Adam introduces himself and in an instant they are enveloped in shadows as Albert closes the door behind them.
“Here,” Albert says, flipping on a lamp. “It’s terribly dark in here.”
Blinking, Halina scours the den for a sign, any sign, of her parents, but the room is just how she remembers it. The blue ceramic vase on the windowsill, the green paisley pattern adorning the armchair tucked into the corner, the Bible resting on a small oak side table beside the sofa—there is nothing out of the ordinary. She lets her eyes travel along the far wall to the bookshelf with the invisible wheels.
Albert clears his throat. “Right,” he says, making his way to the shelves.
Halina swallows. A flash of hope.
“When I saw your car come up and didn’t recognize it,” Albert says, sliding the shelves gently away from the cedar-planked wall, “I thought they’d better hide. Just in case.”
They’d better hide.
Albert knocks on the wall in the place where the shelf used to be. “Pan i Pani Kurc,” he calls quietly.
Halina’s cheeks are suddenly warm. Her skin prickles in anticipation. Behind her, Adam rests his hands on her shoulders, leans in so his chin brushes her ear. “They’re here,” he whispers. Beneath the floorboards, there is movement. Halina listens intently—to the shuffle of bodies moving in her direction, the muffled sound of leather soles meeting wood, the click of a bolt sliding open.
And then, they emerge. First her father, then her mother, squinting as they climb, stooped at first, from the Górskis’ crawl space into the brightly lit den. A strange sound escapes Nechuma’s lips as she rights herself to find Halina before her. Albert steps aside as the women collapse into one another.
“Halina,” Sol whispers. He wraps his arms around the union of his wife and daughter, closing his eyes as he holds them, his nose burrowed into the small space between the tops of their heads. They stand like this for a long moment, their bodies melded together as one, crying silently until finally, mother, father, and daughter part, wiping their eyes. Sol seems surprised to see Adam.