Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  “I’m sure everything is fine, Finka,” he said softly.

  Julius pulled up to the Hotel Angielski, on the corner of Trębacka and Wierzbowa Streets in Warsaw’s center district. A three-story building, the hotel, Josefina knew, once boasted one of the finest restaurants in the city. In 1939, its amenities included hot and cold running water, central heating, telephones, bathrooms, and an elevator. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were served in the dining room. The name, designed in an art-deco script, was affixed to the outer wall overlooking the street.

  “Is this where we’re staying?” Suzi asked from the backseat. “The Angielski?”

  These were the first words she uttered since leaving Teschen.

  “Just for a night or two, Suzi,” Julius said. “Afterward we will stay at cousin Friedrich’s apartment.”

  “Will anyone try to pull you out onto the street and beat you up?” Suzi asked. “Like they did to that poor old man next door?”

  “We will all be safe here. And you must do as you’re told,” her father replied.

  “Look, Suzi,” Peter said, his tone protective. He pointed to a plaque above the word Angielski, noting the hotel’s most famous resident, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had taken up residence in a three-room apartment on these very premises during his 1812 escape from Moscow. “See, the place is famous. We have nothing to worry about because Napoleon’s ghost will scare away the Nazis.”

  Josefina, who had turned toward the backseat just before her son spoke, saw Suzi looking down at her feet. But her daughter was also smiling, in that private, vague, and just-shy-of-brooding way managed by thirteen-year-old girls. Josefina recognized the expression as one she might have had at that age. She approved of her son’s levity at that instant, was proud to see him helping his sister adjust to the worsening situation of having fled their home. And though she could not see it yet, later Josefina would understand that her family hadn’t, just then, left. Rather, they were entering an exile, not an unfamiliar thing for Jews historically, she reasoned, but nonetheless unknown to them personally. But at that moment in the car, just arrived in Warsaw at the Hotel Angielski, Josefina saw only Suzanna, legs too long for the backseat, clothes impeccable, braids tidy, with something resembling a smile’s shadow on her face. The girl from Teschen whom Camillia Sandhaus called so promising at piano.

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS IN WARSAW seemed almost ordinary, though tension infused everything with urgency. A constant pressure throbbed in Josefina’s feet, which she was unable to relieve or dismiss. She watched for signs of unease in her family, but the distress she harbored didn’t seem apparent in the faces of her husband, children, or the in-laws, who had, indeed, arrived without incident. Julius and Ernst occupied themselves with business at the tannery warehouse. Josefina, Greta, and the children purchased provisions.

  The constant talk of war had made everyone suspicious of strangers. And Josefina saw how people looked at the Orthodox Jews who clustered together as they moved along the streets. She saw how they glared at anyone who spoke German. One heard whispering: hadn’t the Jews, after all, brought the wrath of Hitler and this Nazi misery on the Polish people? She could feel the wariness of other pedestrians as she passed them on the streets, how their eyes quickly assessed the nose, hair, and eyes, even if—and one yearned to believe this—their hearts did not want to.

  A Screaming Comes across the Sky

  1 SEPTEMBER 1939, WARSAW

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF SEPTEMBER IN 1939, the residents of Warsaw woke to a crisp autumn morning, the kind that beckons you to picnic by the river, walk in the woods, take breakfast in a garden. The sky was clear. The city sounded its morning rhythms: shop vendors rolling up shutters, people chatting as they walked, streetcars making their metallic signatures. Early in the morning, German planes would cut into the brilliant blue above Warsaw and bomb the city mercilessly, although on this same day, Adolf Hitler made a speech in Berlin, informing the citizenry that he would restrict his air force to attacks on military objectives. “I will not war against women and children,” he said. The Nazi invasion of Poland would trigger a declaration of war by England and France on September third. The siege lasted twenty-seven days. It would end with Hitler and his Wehrmacht coming to Poland to survey their new realm, Warsaw in ruin beneath their indifferent gazes and polished boots.

  But before any bombs fell, the telephone rang in the Kohn’s room at the Hotel Angielski. Julius answered, and Josefina heard Eric Zehngut’s animated voice through the receiver. He was talking very loudly. He reported news from Teschen: Mayhem had erupted at the tannery, where he was calling from. “The Germans have invaded Poland,” he told Julius breathlessly. “Everyone is leaving. And in a great hurry.” This news of the invasion, Josefina knew, must have felt like a fresh wound to her husband.

  “Herr Kohn,” Eric Zehngut said, “my brother Fred and I are going to Jarosław to meet up with our brother Beno. They say the Germans are headed to Warsaw.”

  Julius thanked Eric before hanging up. He pulled on trousers and a shirt. No time for a bow tie today.

  “Finka,” he said as he buttoned. “Take the children next door and tell Ernst and Greta the Germans have invaded.” Josefina was already dressed before her husband could tie his shoes. Though he smiled at her, she read worry in his expression. “I’ll come to Ernst and Greta’s room,” he said.

  Later, Julius told his wife that he met the hotel’s cleaning woman on the stairs. “Come with me, please,” he had said, and she followed him. Once at the front desk, he told her and the clerk what he had learned. The desk clerk headed upstairs to warn the other guests.

  MINUTES LATER, THE SIX FAMILY MEMBERS gathered in Ernst and Greta’s room at the Hotel Angielski. The adults reviewed options. The children sat quietly. If you were to ask them later, when they could still remember this particular moment, perhaps they would have said that the windows were open, and the chitter of birds drifted inside. That a soft breeze carried the nostalgic smell of summer’s end. They might have said they were thinking about how fine the weather was, and that if they were in Teschen, they’d be strolling along the river. Or how strange the news, earlier, before the crash and smoke of bombs, that a war had started, and not far from what was once home in western Poland. Or that the crumbling of Warsaw began with a screaming that came across the crisp, blue sky.

  Josefina saw how dread shaped her husband’s features: lips taut, brow furrowed. She had to fight to not panic. Instead, she looked at the children, who seemed so calm, as if they were daydreaming. A premonition seized her, and Josefina realized she was seeing the last evidence of childhood on Peter and Suzi’s faces.

  “We must act quickly,” Julius said, “and take shelter in the hotel’s cellar.”

  They all moved at once. Josefina loaded food provisions into the children’s arms. She and Greta gathered bedclothes. Their husbands carried essentials—Ernst his doctor bag, Julius his satchel with business papers and cash.

  When the Kohns arrived in the lobby, the hotel maid and the clerk were locking doors and closing windows.

  The clerk pointed the way to the stairway down to the cellar. On the floors above them came a symphony of hurried sounds: doors opening, movement heavy with intent, alarmed voices still drowsy with sleep, phone calls being made, doors closing, and feet on the stairs.

  The Kohns were the first to settle into the cellar. Josefina and the children sat on their hastily rolled and folded bedclothes.

  “Papa,” Suzanna asked, “how long will we have to stay here?”

  Her father didn’t answer because he couldn’t. And in that instant, Josefina saw in her daughter’s face a recognition that uncertainty would color not only the days to come, but the weeks, maybe months, to follow. The silence that met Suzanna’s question caused a chill to spread in Josefina’s lower back, which in turn made her press into the wall behind her. This was fear settling in at the base of her spine. She recognized it because she had once felt the same thing when she was a girl. It was sum
mer and she had decided to go swimming by herself, to prove to everyone she was old enough to brave the waters alone. But the minute her feet could no longer touch the sandy bottom of the lake, Josefina had felt the immensity and power of water, its ability to both give life and take it away. Fear lodged in her, somewhere near the tailbone, and sent her, breathless and with a pounding heart, back to dry land. She was shivering, her hair still damp, when Elsa found her, and made her promise to never go in the lake alone, not ever again. Josefina remembered the warmth of her older sister’s body as she held her close. “There, there, Finka,” Elsa had repeated, until the fear clutching Josefina released, and she was no longer afraid.

  Josefina scanned the cellar: To the right of the stairs, a barrel. In a corner, a broken washboard. Greta fussed with the arrangement of their provisions. Julius and Ernst stood under the window that looked onto the street, their faces close together, the light flat, but not enough to dull the worry lining their foreheads. Peter and Suzi leaned against a pillar. Across the room, a hammer and saw had been left on the workbench. A squat wireless occupied the shelf above.

  Adrenaline surged through Josefina’s body, magnifying her heartbeat, tightening her lean muscles, and sharpening her vision, a sensation she had previously experienced only when skiing a steep mountainside. She could make out nicks in the wooden surface of the barrel, discern a splinter protruding from the washboard. A small dot of white paint had spattered onto the workbench. A short, loose thread hung from one of the buttons of Suzi’s dark blue dress. If she trained her eyes on the radio, she was sure she might see smudges from fingers on its dials. She wondered if her children could see everything so clearly. Did they notice that their father wore a suit but had omitted his signature bow tie? Or that, without cuff links, his shirtsleeves fluttered beyond the sleeve of his jacket? His bald head glistened. Had they seen that her sweater was misbuttoned? Did they notice the wisps of hair falling across her eyes? As parents, did she and Julius appear unsure about what to do next?

  As Josefina absorbed the details of the cellar, twelve other hotel guests gathered, taking their places among the bundles and parcels and pillows and blankets and food they had carried. The hotel maid set down a large box of candles and took a spot near the barrel. The woman had nothing but a thin coat, and so Josefina offered her a blanket.

  “My husband,” the hotel maid said, “he works across town. I pray he is safe.” Josefina drew the blanket around the woman and patted her hand. “I hope he is, too,” she said.

  She wondered how long she’d be able to accommodate the fears of others, or if she herself might someday require such assistance in mitigating panic. She’d never had to worry about much of anything before. Of course Josefina knew firsthand what it was to miss and fret about an older brother off at war. She was just a girl then during the Great War, but she had recognized the change that overcame her mother, and she wondered if her children saw the same thing in her as they settled into the cellar.

  The guests were silent now, but later, they would trade brief stories: Some had come to Warsaw on business, others for pleasure. Some were on their way home after the summer holidays. A few had been incredulous about the invasion—who would want to destroy the glorious Paris of the East? At first these doubtful guests were skeptical about the warning, but seeing as everyone had taken shelter, they did as well. Others thought war was inevitable and had been all along. The Jews among them—if there were others aside from the Kohns—did not reveal who they were.

  In the brief moments before the bombing started, Josefina observed them. One or two glanced at her husband, a man they did not know, who had taken a phone call and then reported the news of a German invasion. She wondered what they were thinking, if they looked to Julius because they took him for a leader. Or if they secretly harbored suspicions about the news he delivered or, worse, about her family. Suddenly, nothing was as it seemed. She sensed a need to be attentive and careful, as well, to not give themselves away as Jews. Josefina felt both hot and cold at the same time. Her heart was pounding. Calm, calm, calm, she repeated to herself.

  THE HOTEL CLERK WAS, LIKE JULIUS, a veteran of the Great War. Earlier, Josefina had noticed how they exchanged their war credentials, in the efficient way of former soldiers who recognize that time is in short supply. Julius pointed to the patch over his left eye. The clerk held out his left hand, which was missing half of the ring finger.

  “Second lieutenant,” Julius said.

  “Sergeant,” the other man replied.

  Josefina knew that each of them feared, in his own way and for his own reasons, the might and force of the German army.

  “I will stay upstairs by the desk,” the clerk announced, “in case—” but he stopped himself before completing the sentence, lest he induce panic among the guests. “I will remain upstairs in order to take any calls,” the clerk said quickly. He left the room.

  The door closed, darkening the basement. The guests quieted and stilled. The bell of a nearby church tolled. Just as the ringing ended, a whistling—a little like a scream, but one muted with distance—coursed through the air, then a bellowing explosion and immediately the acrid smell of sulfur, which in turn was followed by burning and smoke. The ground quaked. In the cellar, everyone’s attention focused on the pillars holding up the ceiling.

  Should one of those bombs strike the hotel, would these columns hold? Or would they give way? No one wanted to imagine what would happen should the pillars collapse, but Josefina knew that everyone, herself included, was considering such a catastrophe. A collective shudder shook those nineteen people. In the brief silence after each explosion, screams could be heard from outside. Some of the older women in the cellar whispered prayers and fingered rosaries. And again the whistle and the explosion and after the noise of the bomb making contact, the human sounds. Crying, yelling, sobbing, coughing, praying, screaming. Glass shattering. Dust rose outside the tiny windows that looked out onto the sidewalk. The walls vibrated. The ceiling heaved. A fury was falling on Warsaw.

  We will be trapped here, Josefina thought, the lot of us huddled here. The floors above us will collapse, and we will suffocate. She would have to keep this anxiety to herself. To entertain other thoughts was, she reasoned, a sensible way to endure the terrible threat of annihilation that overtook her as the bombs fell. Thus Josefina turned her mind to picturing her children in a specific moment when they were carefree. As though she might convince her deepest self that one day, they all might return to before. Only several months earlier, Suzi and Peter were excited to attend a birthday party for a friend from Teschen. There had been fine china, a glorious Sacher torte brought from Vienna, an assortment of delicate pastries and fine chocolates, perfectly brewed coffee. Sherry and brandy for the adults. Linens on the table, napkins folded into fleur-de-lis, crystal glasses, and the silver just polished. The windows were open, and lilacs perfumed the air. Josefina tried to summon their heady scent but the cellar of the Hotel Angielski was musty. The charred odors wafting in from the streets overwhelmed the fragrance of any flowers that might still be in vases in the rooms above or standing beyond these plaster walls. The distasteful smell of the present reality erased any thoughts of that happy moment in Teschen she had tried to conjure.

  Something was rotten, Josefina thought, in the state of Poland. It pained her to think that the foul something, which was approaching ever more rapidly, spoke German, could read Schopenhauer and Goethe, and listened, with the same rapt adoration as she did, to Mozart and Beethoven. She wondered if she would ever be able to speak German again without smelling the sickening odor of bombs and the fetid scent of human fear.

  Once the bombing subsided, everyone seemed to shift, as if the room itself had tired of their weight. The hotel maid stood up but just as quickly understood that she had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Two of the women from the second-floor rooms, unmarried sisters going home to Kraków from a holiday in the eastern forests gasped loudly. They began to speak with one another
, but nothing they said was relative to the situation. One talked about recipes for stuffed cabbage, as if picking up a conversation the two had had a week before. The other wondered if the neighbor had watered their kitchen garden at home while they were away. One of the men sighed. Another coughed. Suzi slowly unclenched her hand, which had crumpled the hem of her skirt. Peter stretched open his mouth. Julius went to adjust his bow tie and, discovering it was not there, dropped his hands and then his shoulders. Greta was crying silently, and Ernst was stroking her hand.

  For Josefina Kohn, other than her family members, the cellar occupants were strangers she might not have kept company with otherwise. Yet they were the people with whom she had just shared the first truly terrifying moment of her life. There was an immediate intimacy in having experienced such fear together. Did the woman from the third floor, a teacher from Lodz, feel the same way? Did the sighing man suspect that Josefina and her family were Jewish? And, if he suspected, or feared, this about them, what would he be likely to do? Would the sisters from the second floor be generous with their food if Josefina and her family had none? She rubbed her jaw, which she had been clenching. She thought about her family still in Teschen and wondered if her father and Milly and little Eva also had to hide in a cellar. Were bombs also falling now in Lwów, where her mother-in-law was staying? And what about Julius’s Aunt Laura in Vienna? She might never see her family, or Julius’s, ever again. As she contemplated this idea, the muscles of her chest tightened. She couldn’t catch her breath for a minute. Stop, stop, she said to herself, pushing the panicky feeling under, into some deep reserve she didn’t know she had.

  Close to five o’clock, the hotel clerk came downstairs, carrying a basket of food. When he opened the cellar door, a thick slab of muted light fell across the steps and as it illuminated his pale face, Josefina remembered how beautiful the morning sky had been. How faraway all that promise of a fine day now seemed. The clerk had removed his uniform jacket, and his shirt was nearly soaked to the skin. His hair was streaked with plaster dust. He set down the food in front of the guests and gestured to them to eat what he had brought.