Chapter 4
FOUR
ROSALIE
SANOK, POLAND
From my perch in the clock tower, the entire village square in the heart of Sanok sprawls wide like a framed painting.
Once full of color with horse-drawn carriages, music drifting between café windows, and the chatter of street vendors, now there are only falling leaves and silence, even on a Saturday.
The view that has always been my solace since Mama and my baby sister died is disappearing little by little each day.
Somewhere in my mind, I’m still an eight-year-old girl, cowering in the corner of our cottage, staring at blood.
But the sight of Sanok’s village square tethers me to the present—being sixteen, losing a grip on happy memories, as well as the hope that joy might one day return to Poland, or anywhere in the world.
A year ago, the German Reich stormed into Poland and has been taking over city by city, town and village.
Now the square is silent, emptier than I’ve ever seen.
Even the pigeons know to stay away. It’s nothing but a gray palette of grief.
Inside, I’m surrounded by red and brown bricks that threaten to crumble if I press too hard.
The only exit is a spiral staircase that creaks with every breath.
“Do you hear that?” Papa calls from his workbench, dark wood, stained and scratched, always covered in tools.
He moves fast, checking the gears, the weights, the thing he calls an escapement. He taps his fingers and bobs his head as if he hears music no one else can hear.
“It’s slow,” I say. I feel it too…the rhythm is wrong. I stand up from my seat at the window and move closer to the barometer, staring at the dial. “A storm’s coming. The pressure has dropped.”
Papa peers down at his old, oversized chronograph wristwatch then joins me and squints at the numbers. “You’re right.” He pats my back and groans while straightening his posture. “I’ll lift the pendulum bob.”
After Mama passed away, those words meant we were staying in the clock tower for the night. I would set out the blankets so I could go to sleep. Papa would stay up, listening…to the ticks, to the quiet, and to the time he couldn’t get back.
“Time can’t slow for a storm,” he always says. “Every second matters.”
I’ve always known this.
If he had come home sooner that day when Mama needed me…
If I hadn’t been so scared…
If the town clock hadn’t been wrong…
Papa said their deaths weren’t my fault.
But I still have the scissors.
With me by his side, Papa works day and night, protecting the clock tower, making sure no one else in our city loses their life because of the wrong time. But no matter how many seconds we count, gears we clean, or weights we wind…nothing will ever turn back time. Nothing will bring them back.
I return to my perch at the window and lean my cheek up against the cool glass, staring at the somber view of silence.
“How are you planning to finish your school paper if you’re too busy staring out the window all day?” Papa asks, grumbling as he stands up from a long stare at the barometer.
“I saw a notice pasted to the brick wall beside the post office on the way back from school.”
While the Reich continues to set new laws, prohibitions, and regulations for all Poles, the Jews have it worse than everyone else. They’re being forced to walk around with white armbands donning a blue Star of David as if they’re contagious lepers.
Papa rolls his eyes. “What is it now?” he huffs.
“Let me make an assumption…Poles shall no longer breathe the city air?” He shakes his head and squats in front of the swinging pendulums. “The hell with them. That’s what I have to say.
” Papa’s defiance against the Reich is anything but quiet between us, but he’ll never press his luck with boundaries to anyone else.
He stays away from the uniformed men, which is easy to do since he hardly leaves the clock tower. He’s hardly left this place since Mama…
“The Jewish doctor, the last one in Sanok—he’s gone. And the poster…it’s in German. A reminder that no Jewish doctors shall practice in Poland.”
Papa leans to the left to glance at me from around the pendulum.
“Rosalie…” His voice deepens and his left brow rises.
He already knows what I’m thinking. “He was practicing in secret, and he’s lucky he lasted here as long as he did.
He knew as well as we do it, it’s only a matter of time before the Nazis invade. ”
“Well, I don’t see any of those soldiers anywhere yet. And what about Elena Rozenfeld? Her baby is due any day now. Mister Witkarz, the cobbler—”
“Yes, Rosy, I know who he is,” Papa says with frustration. “What does he have to do with this?”
“Well, I passed him on the street last week and he mentioned that he invited Elena and her husband to hide in the cellar beneath his shop in case Nazis come lurking around.”
Elena Rozenfeld is one of maybe just a few remaining pregnant Jewish women left in Sanok.
Like the others, she’s desperate to give birth at home to avoid the hospitals where German patrols could be lurking at every corner.
She isn’t wrong, and I don’t blame her for hiding.
I would be too if I were in her position. If I were Jewish.
I know Papa will argue. And he knows an argument won’t stop me.
“No. No, no, no. We can’t help them. Not anymore. Not with these German soldiers moving in closer to us.”
“She’s not ‘them,’ Papa. She’s a young woman who deserves care at a time like this, and she’s my patient.”
“You’re sixteen, Rosalie. You don’t have patients.”
The floor groans beneath my feet as I stand back up.
I pull Mama’s old satchel and medical bag out from beneath Papa’s worktable and check to make sure all supplies are inside before slipping my coat over my shoulders.
After she died, her satchel, books, and notebooks became my lifeline to her.
I knew if I could become someone like her, I would always feel her with me.
“Do you know how many times I’ve read and studied every one of Mama’s medical textbooks, her hundreds of pages of notes, documentation, records, and post-delivery reports?”
“It’s not the same as a formal education in midwifery,” he says, his voice wavering as if he doesn’t know if what he’s saying is true.
“I’ve not only helped deliver babies, but I’ve also delivered over twelve on my own, Papa.”
“That’s impossible, Rosalie. You’ve only watched midwives deliver babies.”
“I used to only watch. Sometimes, I would help boil linens and hold mothers’ hands. But there were times when I’ve had to do more. Then, women began asking me to be their midwife.”
“You’ve never told me this…” Papa says, an eyebrow raised.
“I wouldn’t boast about watching a midwife become frantic and lose her train of thought just as a baby is crowning and a mother is losing too much blood, or when a midwife becomes sick at the most inopportune time.
Or even the times where the midwife didn’t show up at all.
” In truth, I didn’t tell him these stories because I was sure he might not let me go “watch” anymore.
Papa slides his plump hand over his balding head as if trying to steady his thoughts. “All this time?”
“Yes, well—for the last couple of years, it’s been me checking on the women when their time comes, me who has stepped in when no one else could.
I’ve breathed life back into babies who came out blue, pulled cords off their little necks, and pressed cloths against mothers who wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Elena has asked for me now, just as the others did before her. I can’t let her down.”
Papa sighs and grabs my hand as I walk past him, pulling me over just to kiss my forehead. “I should have known better than to question you—or not question you, I suppose.” His grumble isn’t out of anger, but fatherly frustration.
“I wouldn’t tempt someone’s fate with my own hands if I didn’t have faith in my capabilities,” I explain. “Not after watching Mama…”
A small uneasy smile grows along Papa’s mouth.
“You know,” he says, clearing his throat, “your mama—she’d be—” Another sniffle.
Another gulp. “She’d be so proud of you for following in her footsteps, and at such an unthinkably young age.
I’m proud of you too, despite how much you’ve aged me these past eight years, and—just now. ”
A tug at my heart keeps me from responding. I know if I open my mouth, tears will fall. It didn’t take long after her death for me to realize that, unlike time, tears never seemed to run out.
The side door of the building takes me out onto the old cobblestone road between the mirroring rows of whitewashed shopfronts and apartments, many with decorative iron-framed windows.
An arched covered alleyway splits the walls with only a faint withering light hanging in the center.
The sun hasn’t fully set, but it’s dark enough to conceal our shadows from the street.
I tap my fist gently against the cobbler’s wooden door, hoping someone inside will hear.
The cobbler lives upstairs, and I assume he’s the one who invited the Rozenfelds to occupy the space in his cellar.
Antoni Witkarz pries open the door, shoe polish smudged along his hand, a smear down his cheek as if an extension of his messy dark strands of hair. “Rosy, what are you doing here?” He quickly runs a rag down his face as if to fix himself for the sake of my presence.
Antoni and I go to school together. His dad runs the small shop he’s at school, then Antoni works on repairs all night after getting home.
“I know your father invited Elena and her husband to come…stay—hide—here with you,” I whisper. “I need to check on her and the baby.”
“Are you mad? You can’t go down—how’d you know she—” His dark eyes are wild with panic as if I just exposed a lethal secret. I would never.
“Your father told me. I’m going to help her deliver the baby. Let me in.”