We Were the Lucky Ones

by Georgia Hunter

  You can do this. You’re not far. Just be there when I arrive, Jakob. At the address you sent. Wait for me. With each breath, she repeats the words. Please, Jakob. Just be there.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1939 – BATTLE OF LVOV: The battle for control of the city begins with clashes between Polish and surrounding German forces, which greatly outnumber the Poles in both infantry and weaponry. The Poles sustain nearly two weeks of ground fighting, shelling, and bombing by the Luftwaffe.

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1939: The Soviet Union cancels all pacts with Poland and invades the country from the east. The Red Army begins marching at full tilt toward Lvov. The Poles push back, but by the nineteenth of September, the Soviets and the Germans have the city surrounded.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mila

  Radom, Poland ~ September 20, 1939

  The moment Mila opens her eyes she can sense it – something isn’t right. The apartment is too still, too quiet. Taking a sharp breath, she sits up, her spine straight. Felicia. She climbs out of bed and hurries barefoot down the hall to the nursery.

  The door swings open without a sound and Mila blinks into the darkness, realising that she’d forgotten to check the clock. She pads silently to the window, and as she draws the thick damask curtain aside, a shaft of soft, powdery light fills the room. It must be dawn. Through the wooden bars of Felicia’s crib she can vaguely make out the lump of a silhouette. She tiptoes to the crib rail.

  Felicia lies on her side, motionless, her face obscured by the pink koc draped over her ear. Mila reaches down, lifts the small cotton blanket, and rests her palm gently on the back of Felicia’s head, waiting intently for a breath, a rustle, anything. Why is it, Mila wonders, that even when her daughter is sleeping, she worries that something dreadful has happened to her? Finally, Felicia flinches, sighs, and rolls to her other side; within seconds, she is still again. Mila exhales. She slips out of the room, leaving the door ajar.

  Running her fingers along the wall, she makes her way quietly to the kitchen, glancing at the clock at the end of the hallway. It’s just before six in the morning.

  ‘Dorota?’ Mila calls softly. On most mornings, she awakens to the whistle of the kettle as Dorota prepares her tea. But it’s still early. Dorota, who stays during the week in the small maid’s quarters off the kitchen, doesn’t typically start her day until six-thirty. She must be asleep.

  ‘Dorota?’ Mila calls again, knowing she shouldn’t wake her, but she can’t shake the sensation that something is wrong. Perhaps, Mila rationalises, she’s still adjusting to the feeling of waking up without Selim by her side. It’s been nearly two weeks since her husband, along with Genek, Jakob, and Adam, was sent off to Lvov to join the Polish Army. Selim promised he would write as soon as he arrived, but she hasn’t received a letter yet.

  Mila follows the news in Lvov obsessively. The city, from what the papers report, is under siege. And as if the Germans weren’t enough of a threat, two days ago radios blared news of the Soviet Union allying with Nazi Germany. What peace pacts they’d established with Poland have been broken and now Stalin’s Red Army is said to be approaching Lvov from the east. Surely the Poles will soon be forced to surrender. Secretly, she hopes they do; then, perhaps, her husband will come home.

  When Selim first left Radom, Mila fought sleep, for when she succumbed to it, she awoke in a cold sweat, shaking with fear, convinced that her bloody nightmares were real. One night it was Selim, the next it was one of her brothers – their bodies mangled, their uniforms soaked in gore. Mila was on the brink of unravelling when Dorota, whose son had also been called up, rescued her from her downward spiral. ‘You mustn’t think like that,’ she scolded one morning as Mila picked at her breakfast after another fitful night. ‘Your husband is a medic; he won’t be at the front. And your brothers are smart. They’ll take care of one another. Be positive. For your sake, and for hers,’ she said, nodding toward the nursery.

  ‘Dorota?’ Mila calls a third time, switching on the light to the kitchen, noticing the kettle resting cold on the stove top. She knocks softly on Dorota’s door. But the tap-tap of her knuckles against wood is met with silence. She rattles the knob and nudges the door open, peers inside.

  The room is empty. Dorota’s sheets and blanket are folded and stacked into a neat pile at the foot of her bed. A lone nail protrudes from the far wall where a beveled crucifix once hung, and the small shelves Selim had installed are bare, except for one, which holds a slip of paper folded in half and propped up in the shape of a tent. Mila rests a hand on the doorway, her legs suddenly weak. After a minute, she forces herself to pick up the note and unfold it. Dorota has left her with two words: Przykro mi. I’m sorry.

  Mila claps a hand to her mouth. ‘What have you done?’ she whispers, as if Dorota were beside her, wrapped in her food-stained apron, her silver-streaked hair pulled tight into a pincushion bun. Mila has heard rumours of other maids leaving – some to flee the country before it fell into the hands of the Germans, some simply because the families they worked for were Jewish – but she hadn’t considered the possibility that Dorota would abandon her. Selim paid her well, and she seemed genuinely happy in her job. There has never been a cross word between them. And she adores Felicia. More than all of that, though, was the fact that in the past ten months, as Mila struggled with new motherhood, Dorota had become not simply a maid to her; she’d become a friend.

  As Mila lowers herself slowly to sit, Dorota’s mattress coils moan beneath her. But what will I do without you? she wonders, her eyes filling slowly with tears. Radom is in shambles; she needs an ally now more than ever. She rests her palms on her knees and drops her chin, feeling the weight of her head tugging at the muscles between her shoulder blades. First Selim, her brothers, Adam, now Dorota. Gone. A seed of panic sprouts somewhere deep in her gut, and her pulse quickens. How will she manage, fending for herself? The Wehrmacht’s men have proved to be brutes, and they’ve shown no sign of leaving anytime soon. They’ve desecrated the beautiful brick synagogue on Podwalna Street, robbed it clean, and converted it to stables; they’ve closed each of the Jewish schools; they’ve frozen Jewish bank accounts and forbidden Poles from conducting business with Jews. Every day another shop is boycotted – first it was Friedman’s bakery, then Bergman’s toy store, then Fogelman’s shoe repair. Everywhere she looks, there are massive red swastika banners; Judaism Is Criminality billboards depicting hideous caricatures of hook-nosed Jews; windows painted over with the same four-letter word, as if Jude were some kind of curse rather than part of a person’s identity. Part of her identity. Before, she would have called herself a mother, a wife, an accomplished pianist. But now she is nothing more than, simply, Jude. She can’t go out any more without seeing someone being harassed on the street, or pulled from their home and robbed and beaten, for no apparent reason. Things she had taken for granted, like walking to the park with Felicia in tow – leaving the apartment at all for that matter – are unsafe. It has been Dorota lately who has ventured out for food and supplies, Dorota who has retrieved her mail from the post office, Dorota who has delivered notes to and from her parents’ house on Warszawska Street.

  Mila stares at the floor, listening to the faint tick of the clock in the hallway, the sound of seconds passing. In three days it will be Yom Kippur. Not that it matters – the Germans have dropped leaflets throughout the city with a statement forbidding the Jews from holding services. They’d done the same at Rosh Hashanah, although Mila had ignored the mandate and snuck after dark to her parents’ home; she regretted it later when she heard stories of others who’d done the same and been discovered: one man her father’s age was made to run through the city centre carrying a heavy stone over his head; others were forced to haul metal bed frames from one end of town to the other while being flogged with metre-long clubs; one young man was trampled to death. This Yom Kippur, Mila had decided, she and Felicia would atone in the safety of their apartment, alone.

  What now? Tears spill down her cheeks. She
sobs silently, too paralyzed to wipe her eyes, her nose. Looking around the empty room, she knows she should be furious – Dorota has left her. But she isn’t angry. She’s terrified. She’s lost the one person under her roof she can trust, confide in, rely upon. A person who seemed to understand far better than she how to care for her child. Mila wishes she could ask Selim what to do. It was Selim, after all, who insisted that they hire Dorota when Felicia was a newborn and Mila was at her wits’ end. Mila had resisted at first, her pride too great to submit to relying on a stranger to help parent her child, but in the end Selim had been right – Dorota was her saviour. And now Mila is once again in crisis, but without her husband’s steady hand to guide her. The reality of her situation washes over her swiftly and Mila shivers: her safety, and with it, Felicia’s, now rests entirely in her own hands.

  Bile rises up in her throat and she can taste it, sharp and acrid. Her stomach constricts as a pair of images flashes before her – the first, a photo she’d seen in the Tribune taken shortly after Czechoslovakia fell, of a Moravian woman weeping, one arm dutifully raised in a Nazi salute; the second, a scene from one of her nightmares – a soldier in green, tearing Felicia from her arms. Oh, dear God, please don’t let them take her away from me. Mila gags. Her vomit lands on the linoleum between her feet with a wet slap. Pinching her eyes shut, she coughs, fighting another wave of nausea, and with it, a pang of regret. What were you thinking, being in such a hurry to start a family? She and Selim were married for less than three months when they discovered that she was pregnant. She was so confident at the time – there was nothing she wanted more than to raise a child. Multiple children. An orchestra of children, she used to joke. And then Felicia was such a fussy baby, and motherhood took so much more out of her than she was expecting. And now there is war. Had she known that before Felicia’s first birthday Poland might no longer exist … she gags again, and in that awful, noxious moment she knows what she has to do. Her parents had asked her to move back to Warszawska Street when Selim left for Lvov. But Mila had opted to stay put. This apartment was her home now. And besides, she didn’t want to be a burden. The war would be over soon, she said. Selim would return, and they’d pick up where they left off. She and Felicia could manage on their own, she’d argued, and besides, she had Dorota. But now …

  Felicia’s cry shatters the silence and Mila jumps. Mopping her mouth with the sleeve of her gown, she tucks Dorota’s note into her pocket and stands, reaching for the wall to steady herself when the room begins to spin. Breathe, Mila. She’ll clean up later, she decides, stepping carefully over the puddle on the floor. In the kitchen she rinses her mouth and splashes cold water over her face. ‘Coming, love!’ she calls when Felicia wails again.

  Felicia is standing at the crib rail, gripping it tightly with both hands, her koc resting on the floor below her. When she sees her mother she smiles brightly, revealing four tiny tooth buds – two each in her top and bottom gums.

  Mila’s shoulders soften. ‘Good morning, sweet girl,’ she whispers, handing Felicia her blanket and lifting her from the crib. Two months ago, when Mila weaned her from her breast, Felicia had begun sleeping through the night. With the extra rest, mother and daughter both had turned a corner; Felicia was a happier baby and Mila no longer felt as if she were teetering on the edge of insanity. Felicia wraps her arms around her mother’s neck and Mila relishes the weight of her daughter’s cheek, warm against her chest. This is what I was thinking, she reminds herself. This. ‘I’ve got you,’ she whispers, one hand on Felicia’s back.

  Lifting her head, Felicia turns toward the window and points a tiny index finger. ‘Eh?’ she intones – the sound she makes when she’s curious about something.

  Mila follows her gaze. ‘Tam,’ she says. ‘Outside?’

  ‘Ta,’ Felicia imitates.

  Mila walks to the window to play her usual game of pointing out all the things she can see: four speckled pigeons, perched by a chimney; the opaque white globe of a street lantern; across the way, three arched stone doorways and, above them, three large wrought-iron balconies; a pair of horses pulling a carriage. Mila ignores the swastika flag hanging from an open window, the grafittied storefronts, the newly repainted street sign (she no longer lives on Żeromskiego but on Reichsstrasse). As Felicia watches the horses plod by below her, Mila kisses the top of her forehead, letting the down of Felicia’s cinnamon hair, what there is of it, tickle her nose. ‘Your papa must miss you so much,’ she whispers, thinking of how Selim could make Felicia laugh by nuzzling his nose into her hair and pretending to sneeze. ‘He’ll come home to us soon. Until then, it’s you and me,’ she adds, trying to ignore the tang of bile, still sharp in her throat, as she processes the enormity of her words. Felicia looks up at her, wide eyed, almost as if she understands, then brings her koc to her ear and rests her cheek once again on Mila’s chest.

  Later today, Mila decides, she’ll pack up some clothes and her toothbrush, Felicia’s koc and a pile of diapers, and walk the six blocks to her parents’ house at 14 Warszawska. It’s time.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Addy

  Toulouse, France ~ September 21, 1939

  Addy is tucked away at a cafe overlooking the Place du Capitole’s giant square, a spiral-bound pad of music paper open before him. He sets his pencil down and massages a cramp from the muscle between his thumb and forefinger.

  It’s become his routine to spend his weekends parked at a bistro table, writing. He no longer travels to Paris – it feels too frivolous to get lost in the revelry of Montmartre’s nightlife with his homeland at war. Instead he devotes himself to his music and to his weekly trips to the Polish consulate in Toulouse, where he’s been trying for months to secure a travel visa – the paperwork required for him to return to Poland. So far, the effort has been exasperatingly fruitless. On his first visit in March, three weeks before Passover, the clerk took one look at Addy’s passport and shook his head, pushing a map across his desk and pointing to the countries separating Addy from Poland: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia. ‘You will not make it past the checkpoints,’ he said, tapping his finger on the line of Addy’s passport marked RELIGIA. ZYD, the designation read, short for ZYDOWSKI. Jewish. His mother had been right, Addy realised, hating himself for doubting her. Not only was it too dangerous for him to travel across German borders, it was, apparently, illegal. Even so, Addy had returned to the consulate time after time, hoping to convince the clerk to grant him some sort of exemption, to wear him down with persistence. But at each visit, he was told the same. Not possible. And so, for the first time in his twenty-five years, he’d missed Passover in Radom. Rosh Hashanah had come and gone as well.

  When he isn’t at work or writing home or composing his music or badgering the secretaries at the consulate, Addy pores over the headlines of La Dépêche de Toulouse. Every day, as the war escalates, his anxiety heightens. This morning he’d read that the Soviet Red Army was rolling through Poland from the east and had made an attempt to seise Lvov. His brothers are in Lvov; according to his mother, they’d been conscripted along with the rest of Radom’s young men into the army. Any day now, it seems, the city will fall. Poland will fall. What will become of Genek and Jakob? Of Adam and Selim? What will become of Poland?

  Addy is stuck. His life, his decisions, his future – none of it is in his control. It’s a feeling to which he is unaccustomed, and he hates it. Hates the fact that he has no way of getting home, no way of reaching his brothers. At least, thankfully, he is in contact with his mother. They write each other often. In her last letter, which she’d sent just days after Radom fell, she’d described the heartbreak of bidding Genek and Jakob goodbye on the night they left for Lvov, how painful it was to see Halina and Mila do the same for Adam and Selim, and what it was like, a week later, to watch the Germans march into Radom. The city was occupied within hours, she said. There are Wehrmacht soldiers everywhere.

  Addy thumbs through his pages, skimming his work, grateful for the distraction of
his music. This, at least, is his. No one can take it from him. Since Poland went to war, he has written doggedly, nearly completing a new composition for piano, clarinet, and double bass. Closing his eyes, he taps out a chord on an imaginary keyboard resting on his lap, wondering whether it has potential. He’s had one commercial success already – a piece recorded by the talented Vera Gran that tells the story of a young man writing home to a loved one. ‘List’, the letter. Addy composed ‘List’ just before leaving Poland for university and will never forget how it felt to hear the song for the first time on the air, how he’d closed his eyes and listened to the melody he’d created as it spilt from his radio’s speakers, how his chest had swelled with pride when his name was announced afterward, crediting him as composer. Perhaps ‘List’, he’d fantasised at the time, was the piece that would eventually lead to a vocation in music.

  ‘List’ was a hit in Poland – so much so that Addy had come to be something of a celebrity in Radom, which of course provoked constant teasing from his siblings. ‘Brother, an autograph please!’ Genek would call after him when Addy was home for a visit. At the time, Addy didn’t mind the attention, or the fact that in his handsome older brother’s ribbing he sensed a hint of envy. His siblings were happy for him, no doubt. Proud of him, too; they’d watched him compose since his toes barely reached the pedals of his parents’ baby grand. They understood how much this first break meant for him. It was Addy’s big-city life, he knew, that his brother secretly coveted. Genek had visited Toulouse, had met Addy once in Paris; each time, he’d left mumbling about how glamorous Addy’s life in France seemed in comparison with his own. Now, of course, things are different. Now, there is nothing glamorous about living in a country where Addy is virtually imprisoned. Even with his hometown overrun by Germans, Addy would do anything to return.