Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
CURRENT DAY
Kopciowice, Poland
The sun continues to rise behind us as we leave the farmhouse shelter, hoping that we’ll find somewhere else that’s safe along our path. It’s hard to imagine much else existing here along the endless tree line shadowing its endless road.
After losing Noah three years ago, it feels like all I’ve done is leave more people and things behind.
I can’t reach my parents. I can’t send mail, and if I could, it could be dangerous for them and me.
They have no clue whether I’m alive at all.
I might never know if they tried to make it back to Amsterdam.
If they did, they wouldn’t know where to find me.
I wouldn’t even know where to find myself.
All I know is I’m somewhere in southeast Poland now. And my destination is unclear.
“Why were you so eager to leave?” I ask Avi, curious why her nerves are suddenly so frayed. I realize food would have been an issue, and anything else we might need, but something more is driving her to move this fast.
“We don’t know who anyone is or who anyone is working for,” she exclaims, her hands doing more talking than her mouth.
“For all we know, the Soviets just want to warm us up so they strike us again. We need a shelter where we won’t become a prisoner again.
” Avi balls up her fists and presses them into her cheeks.
“The last thing we need to do is give them more information about ourselves, not when we’re finally free.
We should be grateful not to have papers now.
I don’t want to be found by the Soviets or German soldiers again. ”
This girl has so much anger brewing inside of her, I worry she might implode. I don’t know what she needs, or if there is anything I could do to help her. I’m more fearful that even she doesn’t know the answer to that.
“There’s no saying how far away another shelter is,” Elias says.
“Then why did you come with us?” Avi snaps at him, slapping her hands by her sides.
Elias peers over at Avi with arched brows and wide eyes.
The sun highlights the harsh lines of the bone along his cheeks and forehead.
Then his mouth parts, Avi’s aggression taking him by surprise.
All I see is a young boy when I stare at him, though the dark circles beneath his eyes, and weight he seems to carry on his shoulders, say otherwise.
“I didn’t want the two of you to be out here on your own,” Elias says, the hopeful energy in his voice gone.
Avi laughs, a cynical sound. “We all survived the same way until now. We’ll manage.”
She rolls her eyes and returns her focus ahead. I’m not sure if I would have made it through this at sixteen or seventeen years old. I’m not sure I can in my mid-twenties.
“You don’t have to be so ungrateful,” Elias slings back, his response an attempt to have the last word.
“I’ve already seen what happens when I don’t speak up,” he says.
“I won’t do that again. I just want to help.
” His words trail off into the wind and his cheeks pale as if he’s realized his statement suddenly holds no merit.
Avi sneers, whipping back around with her hands stretched outward. No verbal response.
I step between them, unsure if Avi might snap and attack Elias.
I lift a palm to each of them. “Elias, it’s kind of you to care about us.
We appreciate it. I think we’re all hungry and tired, and saying unnecessary things.
” I realize I’m breaking up a juvenile argument between…
two young people who have experienced the worst of humanity at far too young an age.
“If the Soviets are moving northwest, they must be heading toward a source of transportation—possibly a railway that’s still in service. ”
Avi takes a step back and paces in a small circle, tugging at an uneven strand of her dark hair, twisting it into a tight coil.
“Celina’s right,” Elias says.
Avi stops pacing and stares east, between Elias and me, straight toward the sun. Her voice lowers and words slip out slower. “Shelter and food are what we need. We stay behind them. Not with them.”
“We continue with caution. That’s the compromise here, is it not?” I add.
Avi huffs and turns her back to the sun and to us.
Our walk continues in silence, thankfully, but also tempered with heavy steps and huffs and puffs.
We were strangers two days ago, but if they’re anything like me, they’re strangers to themselves right now too.
I don’t recognize my thoughts, endurance, weakness, or strength.
This is not someone I ever had to be before the day Noah told me to run.
Told me to live. For…both of us…an equation he wasn’t even a part of.
I glance down at my concave stomach, wishing I could remember the sensation of movement rather than the nagging pain from whatever bacteria was eating at my insides for weeks. A motor rumbles from behind us. That’s not the sensation I was recalling.
“Truck,” Elias says.
I scan our surroundings, looking for a place to hide. A handful of trees up ahead on our right might be the only place. We move as quickly as we can and sink down into the snow, hoping the slight snowbank drifting toward the road will be enough to conceal us between the trees.
“It’s moving so slowly,” Avi mutters.
There’s no other reason to crawl along this road unless searching for something. The questions of “what if?” never cease.
What if…whoever is in this truck sees us?
What if…they’re German?
What if…they’re Soviets who don’t want us here either?
What if…they’re Polish citizens who see us the way the Reich made Jewish people out to be?
My heart races, an incessant knock from within my body. Snow seeps through the wool of my coat and the fabric of my uniform.
The engine sputters and the tires rotate slower than the second hand on a clock.
The wind heaves snow into my face, and I hold my breath, praying the truck will keep moving.
“More bodies,” a man says, his accent unplaceable.
The snow keeps pummeling me in the face, making it so I can only hear something hit the ground with a small thud.
Another what if…
Several more minutes pass of me convincing myself we’re almost safe again, even though I’m now soaked from the wet snow. But at least the rumbling engine has gone silent.
With a break in the wind, I peek out toward the road, spotting nothing but open space on the other side of the trees. “It’s clear.”
My stomach cramps, the familiar pain that keeps coming back, but I push through it and clamber back up to my feet. The cold seeps from my head down my spine. My uniform hangs heavier across my shoulders now sticking to my arms and legs. As if the cold itself wasn’t already enough.
As the road ahead grows clearer, across the road, in front of the tree line, I notice a rock wrapped in a red scrap of fabric sitting in front of a snow mound with hints of a German uniform poking through.
“They were marking bodies,” I tell Elias and Avi.
They don’t argue or disagree, just pull themselves up too.
* * *
The struggle against the elements to move up the road’s icy incline is draining every bit of energy I might have recuperated last night. And with each break in the trees, there’s nothing to see but frozen fields of flattened hay—a desolate world.
“The snow over here is more rigid from the tire marks,” Avi says, veering to the left of the open road.
Elias steps ahead of her, forming footprints larger than ours to follow. “You smell that?” he asks.
My nostrils are frozen. With each sniffle comes a cold crackle, but there’s something faint in the air. Something acidic and smoky.
“I’m not sure what it is,” I say.
“Grease. Maybe tar,” Avi says. “I smell it too.”
The hill we’re fighting against looks like it might carry us into the sky, but when it unfurls into an even road, cottages pop up in the distance.
Even some with working chimneys. The road narrows, the edges darkening into blackened snow.
Abandoned train carts lean haphazardly, some still with tubes of metal spilling out of the sides, others empty.
A few small houses stand in one piece, but they’re dilapidated, shutters dangling, and fences rotting.
Faces peek out through the windows, spotting us as we set foot in their territory.
Polish villagers are moving about, carrying sacks; others are lugging wooden buckets.
One woman has a straw basket looped over her intertwined hands, dangling over her swollen belly, a man by her side, carrying two heavy sacks. New life with a chance.
“Stop staring at them,” Avi hisses at me. “We already stick out with our soaked striped uniforms.”
“I didn’t mean to stare,” I reply.
“Who would think about having a baby during a war?” she utters.
Anger strikes hard and fast, and words threaten to roll off my tongue in rebuttal to Avi’s freedom of saying whatever she wants to whoever she pleases.
But my words wouldn’t be enough to explain certain aspects of life to her. She’s young. If she had known my past, she wouldn’t have said anything. I can convince myself of that.
The farther we trek through the village, a distant sight of Soviet soldiers standing about in casual conversation stops us in our tracks. Their laughter drifts toward us. Who could find laughter at a time like this?
“They’re here,” Avi says, halting abruptly. “We need to go a different way so they don’t see us.”
Avi’s words echo in my head, except the realization to me is a mix of relief with a bit of hope that I might be able to scope out the prisoners again to get a closer look.
Avi cuts between a cluster of trees that end at a set of rusty rail tracks, more abandoned train cars and a wide brick building, covered in dirty white plaster with broken windows angled to the roof.
We move to the side of the building, leaving footprints wherever we go.
We can hide, but there’s no hope of covering our trails.
“If it’s empty, we can sleep in here tonight. And with the Soviets here, there must be food somewhere,” Elias whispers.
“No. Not a chance. I’m not sleeping near all those soldiers.
We said we were staying behind them, not with them,” Avi says, continuing to walk toward the back of the building while Elias and I move closer to the front.
There’s no surprise to hear rifles clattering against uniforms. From the side of the building, I watch them pace forward, their posture slack, weapons loosely gripped between their hands, and an obvious lack of concern.
Two lines of Germans prisoners pour out from the thicket of trees, moving between the Soviets. There are more of them than before. The line has grown. They’re clearly gathering them together.
Still the same uniforms, now wrinkled and dirty.
Some are no longer standing up straight.
Their hunched shoulders molded as if carrying sacks of potatoes for miles.
Though they carry nothing. Many are missing their caps.
Various colors of hair stick out in every direction.
Scowls replace their simpers. Only a couple of them look around as if searching for something. For a way out, I assume.
I begin to scan each face, ignoring the pestering thoughts in my head telling me I’ve been a fool this whole time, and I’m looking at nothing more than the guards who tried to kill us all.
“I do not have papers,” one of the prisoners calls out. I don’t see where the voice came from, but I hear a Dutch accent, I hear—a deep inflection, hoarse against the last word. He sounds like Noah.
Maybe the blast from the explosion broke something inside my head. And maybe, I need him to be alive so badly that I keep imagining every part of him.
“Celina,” Avi shouts through a whisper. “You’re getting too close.” I block out her warning because I need to get a better look. “Your husband is not there. Listen to me…”
Without realizing my mistake, I take an extra step forward, focusing on a nervous prisoner with dark hair, and a height that looks correct…wondering if he was the one claiming not to have papers.
A sudden movement at the end of the line catches my eye, and I’m met with a Soviet soldier staring directly at me. Our eyes lock. “Du dortn!” he shouts in Yiddish.
“Are they calling to you?” Elias asks behind me.
If I don’t step forward, I could end up exposing Elias and Avi too. This is my mistake. Again. “Yes,” I utter, the one word rattling.
With my arm that’s still behind the building, I push Elias away. “Go. Go now. Behind the building.”
Elias listens, even if only for the sake of taking Avi with him before she’s spotted too.