Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  Julius sat next to Mr. Kosinski, who held the reins and gently urged his mare forward. Mr. Kosinski had suffered the death of his wife, a cracked rib and bruising, but after several days, he had insisted on taking the Kohns to Lwów as planned. Not only was he concerned for their safety, but he had also promised to provide passage to other refugees. Now he and Julius talked in a low tone. Josefina couldn’t discern what they were saying, though occasionally words such as Nazi and family and bombing were spoken with a little more volume and inflection. She noticed her husband’s jacket was starting to loosen. The idea that one could diminish over the course of several weeks unnerved Josefina.

  Mr. Kosinski picked up the other passengers on the way out of the hamlet. Traveling with them in the wagon were a woman and her three sleeping boys. A girl Peter’s age sat in the corner behind Julius, her knees drawn up under her chin. Maybe she was a year or two younger or older, but like both of Josefina’s children, the girl had been thrust overnight into adulthood. She sat on a threadbare wool coat and a tiny bundle, wearing a dirty and torn dress, ragged stockings mottled with dust, and one shoe. The shoeless foot was wrapped with gray rags. Her knees were covered in scabs and her braids loose. She kept her eyes cast downward even when awake.

  If the girl had carried a suitcase and they had been on a train, and if they had been traveling during peacetime, which was only several weeks ago, instead of now under the duress of war, the girl’s bag might be packed with lovely dresses. Maybe even a swimsuit and a tennis racket. She would have looked smart in tennis whites. Perhaps the girl would have been reading Gone with the Wind, trying to emulate the adult men and women in Poland who were reading that book just before the war started. What a different world they had lived in. Everything seemed to shine then, from the faces of girls to a watering can sitting in the corner of a garden. Now the only polish and shine they saw was on the helmets, boots, and cars of the Nazis. Dust coated everything else, and anguish shaped peoples’ cheeks, the set of their lips. Eyes once bright with the hope of new days and futures were starting to cloud from fatigue and worry. Soon, though Josefina could not predict this, hunger and thirst would sharpen into outright agony and dull their eyes even more. Six weeks ago, her son would have been eager to talk with the one-shoed girl. Now all he could do was try to not meet her gaze.

  Mr. Kosinki’s thick-necked draft horse clopped onward, the wagon bumping along behind. The three sleeping children bounced slightly. Suzanna scooted close to Peter and rested her head on his shoulder. At least they were no longer bickering. Josefina was mortified that war was required to change their behavior. The road was congested with refugees old and young, mostly Jews of diverse nationalities and Poles. Some were wounded or ill. They walked wearily, rode bicycles, sat in carts, their movement kicking up dust, their collective hands carrying bundles which were, by necessity, diminished. What will we see before we arrive in Lwów? Josefina wondered. Where will we be safe? There were so many questions, and she would have to learn to live without answers.

  On this fine September evening, the air was still and fresh. Josefina Kohn shut her eyes. A little minute, she told herself, giving into the repetitive motion of the wagon and the heaviness that induces slumber. But even dreams were not safe, and just as quickly, she was returned in sleep to the nightmare of Warsaw, walking past an array of images, as if she were in a museum of macabre attractions. A boy, no more than nine, smudged from head to toe in ash, carried a canary in a cage and picked his way across a hill of debris. Books on display in a shop window toppled off their stands. Hitler’s Mein Kampf lay on its side, but it wasn’t clear which page it was opened to, and it outraged Josefina to even see that book. In another shop window, fantastic jewelry. Would women ever wear bracelets and pearls or opera gloves again? In another, a crystal vase stood, undamaged, while next door, the building had collapsed. The Hotel Bristol, where she and Julius stayed during prewar visits to Warsaw, stood alone and undamaged, all the buildings around it reduced to the too-familiar high piles of gray rubble.

  A farmer milked his cow in front of the American Embassy, its windows blown out and its flag tattered. The milk was sweet and warm. All the while, everyone was running. Taking cover. The church across the street from where they stood the day before became the next day a smoking mound of plaster and wood. The trees next to it were still alive, a small miracle. The sky was so blue. A boy with a canary in a cage. The whistling bombs. Smoke in the distance. A farmer milking his cow on the street in front of an embassy. Airplanes darkening the sky. The milk, so warm and sweet, the cream at the top. The farmer’s wrinkled hand.

  NEAR DAWN, JOSEFINA WOKE when she heard the shouting. Everyone in Mr. Kosinski’s wagon had turned their attention to the scene. A squabble had erupted between some of the refugees who were walking on the road.

  “It’s all on account of those Jews that this is happening to us,” a young woman said loudly, pointing to a group of Orthodox Jewish men who had stopped to pray on the side of the road. The woman couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five, Josefina guessed. And already infected with a thing able to kill other people.

  “You are ignorant, Maria Wózniak,” said a man walking nearby. Thin with glasses, he wore a rumpled suit. He carried a battered leather briefcase.

  “Who are you to say that to her?” another man asked. He was shaped like an armoire—heavy and rectangular. Josefina considered his belligerence, how it matched his muscular build. That’s what the Nazis like, she thought, athlete-thugs. “You think you’re better than she is? More right?” the man asked, his voice rising.

  The thin man stepped off the road. He removed his glasses and started to methodically clean them with a handkerchief. Everyone moved along, including Maria Wózniak and her defender, leaving him behind. He stood there for a long time. Getting out of the way, Josefina observed. Something she and the children might have to do one day. Perhaps sooner than she wished.

  “He was my history teacher,” Josefina heard Maria Wózniak say. “He thinks he knows everything.”

  “To hell with him. To hell with history,” the man said. “And anyway, you’re right. All this is because of the Jews. Because of them—” he said loudly, pointing to another group of Orthodox Jews walking together.

  He spat before picking up a rock, which he threw at them. The stone hit a woman in the arm. Josefina saw her wince in pain.

  Peter made ready to stand just then. “Enough,” he started, but his father had already placed a hand on his son’s shoulder and preempted any movement.

  “No, Son,” Julius said. “Not the time for that.”

  “Please, Peter,” Josefina said. “Please listen to your father.” Luckily no one had heard Peter or seen the expression of disgust on his face.

  Maria Wózniak and her defender were laughing. “They don’t even cry,” she said. “Maybe it’s true what the Germans say about them, that they’re not human.” She laughed.

  Though she wanted to scold the pair, Josefina knew, already less than a month into the war, that it was better to mind her own business. She remembered Aunt Laura’s description of Kristallnacht: “Neighbors, they are my neighbors,” Laura had repeated, talking about the people who stood by and watched as property was destroyed, men arrested, women humiliated. Josefina knew how the chemistry of hatred could transform a crowd into a mob. She heard evidence of this in Maria Wózniak’s laughter, which was shrill with self-importance. All around her were too many tired people carrying too much for too long. After this day’s end, the Jewish woman who had been hit with the rock would have a bruise on her arm. She and her family likely felt the indignity of being targeted. And although Josefina couldn’t imagine just how much the Jews of Lublin would suffer, on this particular morning the members of this particular family were going home together.

  At the next crossroad, which led to a village, the woman with the three children got out of the cart. They said something about having relations nearby. People started to drift off the roads into
the fields, where they would take cover as the light grew stronger and the inevitable bombardments started again. Mr. Kosinski was able to drive the cart a little faster, leaving Maria Wózniak and her defender behind.

  “Mother,” Suzanna asked discretely, “If, as a Jew, you knew that people wanted to hurt Jews, why would you not shave your beard or get another hat? Or at least dress differently, you know, so others wouldn’t see that you were Jewish?”

  Another unanswerable question. Or, at least a question Josefina could not possibly begin to parse now.

  “It’s very complicated,” she said.

  “If someone wanted to kill me for being Jewish and they asked you if I was a Jew, what would you say?” Suzanna was clearly preoccupied with this line of thinking.

  From the corner of her eye, Josefina saw Peter watching her, waiting for the answer to his sister’s question. He was still brooding about being held back from tangling with Maria Wózniak’s thug-like defender. Suzanna was leaning in toward Josefina, who took her daughter’s hand and absentmindedly inventoried it. The tapered fingers, the nails short and neatly filed, the skin still smooth and soft—Suzanna had the hands of a girl who hadn’t done any physical labor. Young hands, which Josefina had once envisioned decorated with rings, holding tea cups and babies and books and opera glasses. I packed gloves for those hands, Josefina thought.

  “Mother, what would you say?” Peter asked.

  They had arrived in Lublin. The streets were empty. The weather was still fine, and most people would have left their windows open, but shutters were closed, and inside, curtains drawn. Mr. Kosinski was taking them to a tavern owned by a cousin he trusted. There they would eat and rest before heading out toward Lwów under the cover of night.

  Josefina looked at the girl with one shoe, who was still in the wagon and who hadn’t said a single word during the entire ride. Her head lolled to one side and her eyes were closed. That poor, sorry girl is already exhausted, Josefina thought. She wondered how the girl would fare if things worsened. And because she had been keeping track, Josefina knew things were going to get worse.

  “I wouldn’t let anyone hurt either of you,” she said to her children.

  To Go to Lwów

  SEPTEMBER 1939 THROUGH MARCH 1940, LWÓW

  AFTER THREE NIGHTS OF TRAVEL, they came to Lwów. In its glory days, the City of the Lions was a prosperous and elegant metropolis, where different cultures had, over the centuries, mingled, traded, settled, and disputed. It had been called Leopolis, Lemberg, and after the war, it would be known as L’viv. The historic center of Galicia, Lwów was home to Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Armenians, and the third largest population of Jews in what was still Poland.

  The Kohns arrived at dawn, and the city was in chaos. The Polish Army was engaged in battle—with the Nazis to the west, and the Soviets to the east. Lwów had been heavily bombed in the first weeks of September by Hitler’s army. Confusion reigned: Ukrainian Nationalists embraced the approach of the Germans, with whom they already had covert relationships. Those few Ukrainians whose allegiances rested with God or human decency would hide Jews and Poles. A good number of Jews were not only relieved by the arrival of the Red Army, some collaborated with the Soviets. Those who were not sympathetic to the Communists—the majority of Polish Jews—became their victims. The Poles welcomed neither army. Josefina was not interested in these political allegiances, though she knew to be wary of them. The two-pronged invasion of Poland was, simply, another betrayal. All she wanted to do was secure passage out of her country, but the chances of that happening were growing slimmer with each day.

  Mr. Kosinski stopped his cart at a building on Kotlyarska Street, where Julius’s mother was staying with Ernst’s brother Emil and his wife and daughter. Julius shook hands with Mr. Kosinski, and Josefina noticed that the two men maintained their grasp longer than usual. She woke Suzanna and Peter, and they collected their belongings and said their good-byes. The silent, unnamed girl with one shoe remained in the wagon, and Josefina hoped Mr. Kosinski would look after her.

  The sun had risen. Julius knocked on the door. An old woman, her white hair covered with a colorful scarf, opened it after several minutes.

  “Tak?” she said, eyeing the layers of clothing the Kohns wore and the rucksacks they carried.

  In broken Ukrainian, Julius explained why they were there, and the old woman motioned them inside. After she shut and latched the door, Josefina and her family stood inside a dark hallway and awkwardly introduced themselves. The woman—her name was Lyudmyla—led them to the stairs and gestured.

  “Verkhniy poverkh,” she said, gesturing upward.

  “Top floor,” Julius explained to his family.

  On the third floor, each of the three rooms was rented by a different family. In the room at the end of the hallway, they found Ernestyna Kohn, who was surprised and relieved to be reunited with her son, her daughter-in-law, and her grandchildren. Josefina noticed right away that her mother-in-law had lost weight. As she took in what served as a kitchen—a near-empty shelf above a tiny kerosene stove and a small washing tub—she understood why. She saw, too, that only one of the four small beds was covered with a blanket.

  Emil and his family had left Lwów several nights ago, to Dobczyce, near Kraków, Ernestyna explained. “Emil was desperate to get away from the Red Army soldiers,” she said. Lydia, their daughter, she told Josefina later, was only fourteen, and they worried for her safety. “Finka, you should cut Suzi’s hair short,” Ernestyna whispered.

  “Yes, Mama, yes,” Josefina said, “but not until tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Suzanna sat on a chair by the small window, waiting to have her hair cut. Her face was damp with the tears she had tried to shed privately. Josefina hated this moment and all it represented. Not only did she have to transform her daughter into a boyish version of herself, but she was obliged to explain to Suzanna how badly certain men—and in particular certain men during wartime—behaved. It was not a conversation Josefina wanted to have, but one she knew had to take place, with words delicately balanced so as not to instill too much fear. She waited until Julius and Peter had left the room.

  “You must try to appear as undesirable as possible,” Josefina said, “more like a boy than a girl.”

  Suzanna nodded, though her sullen expression exposed her unhappiness at having to comply.

  “Suzi, you are a beautiful girl,” Ernestyna said. “It is not your hair that makes you so lovely. But your long hair tells everyone you are female.”

  “To be blunt, my daughter,” Josefina said as she braided Suzanna’s hair, “men rape women, especially in wartime … short hair and dressing as a boy are simply precautions.” She knew there were no guarantees as she finished the braid and then took the scissors to it. A bit of effort was required to cut through the thick bunch of dark hair. With any luck, Josefina thought, they might fetch a good price for the hair shorn from her daughter’s head.

  AFTERWARD, JOSEFINA AND SUZANNA joined Julius and Peter at the Café de la Paix in the center of town. The establishment was the place where refugees met up with one another. They each paid one złoty for a cup of coffee and a seat and before too long were pleased to see Julius’s employee Eric Zehngut. He had his own story to tell about fleeing western Poland. He and his brother Fred had been lucky to make it out on the last transport from Teschen. The Germans had bombed their train as it waited at Oświęcim, the town later known as Auschwitz. The brothers traveled to Jarosław, where they met up with another brother, Beno. Before leaving home, they had sent to friends in Jarosław several wooden trunks full of silver and other valuables.

  “Our supposed friends denied these trunks were ours,” Eric said.

  With the Nazis rapidly advancing, the brothers headed east, to Lwów. Ordered by the Polish Army to take a horse and cart stocked with ammunition, Eric and Fred traveled at night and rested by day. At a forest near Grodek Jagiellonski, they stopped to eat. The whistle and thud of the German bombs pa
nicked the horses, who ran and were killed, Eric told them, along with many of the Polish soldiers also in those woods. Finally, after walking twenty miles from the woods, they made it to Lwów.

  Eric and his brother were staying in a room on Kazimierzowska Street. His uncle Henry was living with cousins at a railway hostel on the other side of town.

  “We’ve heard the Nazis burned down the synagogue in Teschen,” Eric reported. “On Saturday the thirteenth.”

  Josefina blanched. Her father liked to attend shul on Shabbos mornings. She hoped he had stayed home with Milly and the baby.

  “No one was in the building,” Eric added quickly. When he spoke, Josefina felt the blood return to her face.

  BY THE FIRST OF OCTOBER, or four weeks after the Kohns left Teschen, Poland ceased to exist. Only later would anyone learn about the secret pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which divided Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland between German and Soviet “spheres of influence.” When the Red Army detachments came into Lwów the prior week, Josefina was running an errand and saw soldiers walking on Grodecka Street. They were dirty and tired and unsmiling. They washed their boots in puddles and used papers picked off the streets to roll their cigarettes. They swarmed into the city, buying everything in the stores, even unfamiliar items. By the next day, the walls and buildings were plastered with posters whose message was arrogant and clear: “The rule of the Polish masters has ended. The Red Army has liberated Poland.”

  Within a week of the Red Army’s arrival, Lwów had been transformed. The occupiers removed the stone lions—the city’s treasured symbol—from the town hall. Trucks and tractors had ripped up sidewalks, lawns, and trees. Propaganda was broadcast over speakers. The odor of tar, which impregnated the footwear of the soldiers, mixed with the sour smell of refuse decomposing in the streets. People stopped wearing colorful or extravagant clothing; men no longer wore ties, and women covered their heads with scarves. To look like a proletariat meant less chance of being stopped on the street by militiamen.