Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  She couldn’t tell what the hour was, or what day exactly. She knew the season, and that very soon it would be summer’s end. In their old life, school came next. But also the high holidays. Suzanna thought about the ways her family marked time: the year began in autumn, when they ushered in the new year. She always looked forward to Rosh Hashanah, walking with her family to the river and emptying their pockets into the water. Afterward, Papa Hermann always brought her to the bakery, where they made round loaves of challah. She did not want to think of how sweet the honey on the bread and apples—such a thought would evoke too intense a yearning. So Suzanna turned her mind instead to the solace in the solemnity of the kol nidre melody at the Yom Kippur service. In winter, she was excited to kindle the menorah lights at Chanukah. But of all the holidays of her people and family, Suzanna loved most the magnificent Passover celebration in the spring.

  Now she thought back to a particular seder. It must have been after Uncle Arturo had passed away, when Aunt Elsa and her children, Maddalena and Corrado, traveled to Teschen to celebrate the holiday. It was Suzanna’s task to inspect the kitchen drawers for chametz, which she did with utmost seriousness. Maddalena was assigned cupboard duty. Suzanna adored the older girl, wishing she were her sister. The two worked together in the kitchen, chatting softly about dress styles and the cinema and music.

  Mama and Aunt Elsa opened all the windows to admit the fresh spring air. They made bundles of linens and clothing to donate to charity. Peter and Corrado were in charge of polishing the winter boots, which they all hoped to put away soon in favor of spring footwear. Julius took down from a shelf in the closet the box of Haggadot. Suzanna and Maddalena set the table, which included correctly folding napkins, placing silverware, and distributing the Haggadot.

  And the food: The savory smell of lamb roasting. The potato kugel was Nana Ernestyna’s specialty. Making matzo with Papa Hermann and Uncle Arnold. That year, Uncle Hans came too. He didn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves and help prepare the apples, which were chopped with walnuts and dried figs for the charoset. This mixture was placed, with the other five traditional items on the seder plate—maror, roasted egg, karpas, chazeret, and the shank bone. This last item Papa always procured from Jacob Zehngut’s butcher shop.

  SUZANNA’S REMINISCENCES were interrupted by a brief, but wild murmur sounding from the trees around the clearing where the deportees stood. As if on cue, the deportees, a sorry chorus of wretches, responded to the forest noise with choked whispers, gasps, sighs. Just as quickly, they all hushed, a moment emptied, it seemed, of its own breath. Suzanna was overcome with missing her father. She worried she’d never smell again the forest scent of his Fougère Royale cologne, never see his sporty but often crooked bow tie or even the eye patch, which sparked endless inquiry when she was a small child.

  “Why do you wear that eye patch?” she asked when she was about eight or nine.

  Instead of answering with a riddle or a joke to deflect the question, which he usually did, her father answered plainly.

  “I lost my eye. To look upon that part of my face would ask others to behold something unpleasant. It might distract them from seeing who I really am.”

  Suzanna wished she had seen her father’s face without that eye patch, if only once. She would have told him he was so much more than a man who lost his eye. If Papa were here now, she’d feel safer. Maybe he’d even make her smile. Mama wouldn’t have to watch everything. Peter wouldn’t be scrunching up his brows. But her father wasn’t here. Suzanna couldn’t think of him now, or the emptiness caused by his absence would cause her to collapse. When the Soviet soldiers came and took him, she was more frightened than the day the first bombs fell on Warsaw. The sound of those Red Army men calling her father’s name was as terrifying as being in the cellar when the Nazis came and hurt Mr. Kosinski and broke all his wife’s teacups.

  Sensations from the past ten months mixed together in her mind: The huddle in the basement of the Hotel Angielski in Warsaw and the rancid smell of everyone’s fear as the bombs exploded and the dust quivered in the spaces between solid things such as walls and pillars. The farewells to people she was certain to never again see—Helenka, whose attempts at hiding her tears had been so subtle but seemed to Suzanna as if on a movie screen and thus enlarged; Aunt Greta, her mouth constantly on the verge of contracting and releasing in a cry; Uncle Ernst, dressed in the same shirt and tie for five days; Nana Ernestyna, who had become so thin and quiet. Suzanna pictured the small room in Lwów where she and her mother and grandmother sewed by the dull light from a tiny window. It was in this room where she last saw Papa, watched him secretly as he said good-bye to her mother. Each of those moments seemed infused with disbelief and doom. She could see herself clearly, sitting in the cart on the road to Lublin, watching her father press his handkerchief against the back of his neck. Something so refined and yet defeated in his gesture made Suzanna feel weak. When she was a little girl, and he still picked her up in his arms, she liked to pluck the folded hankie from his jacket’s breast pocket when she thought he wasn’t looking. But he always noticed, and when he pretended to be cross, Suzanna giggled.

  When she was small, Suzanna cried when her father went away for work—and he was gone often—to Warsaw, Lwów, Kraków, Prague, Vienna, sometimes Paris or London. But always when he returned he brought a trinket or a sweet or a new toy. After admonishments from Mama to stop crying, and the advice from Helenka to instead guess what gift he would bring, Suzanna’s tears stopped. But the ache of missing him was never subdued. As she got older, Papa brought hats or gloves or pretty hair ribbons. These presents he hid in his valise, and as soon as he arrived home, he opened and unpacked it while Suzanna stood in the doorway to her parents’ bedroom and watched him.

  “Oh, dear,” he’d say, “I’ve forgotten to get a gift for my little Suzi. What do you think I should do?”

  “Papa, you must be getting very old to keep forgetting,” she said.

  He pretended to be an ancient traveler who couldn’t recall even his name. And Suzanna always laughed.

  He rooted around in the bag: “Where’s my sandwich?” he said, as if one were in the suitcase, and she laughed harder. “Aha, here is the pickle!” And with that he turned, bowed extravagantly, and proffered her the gift—purchased, packed, and wrapped in the city he had just come from.

  “You spoil her, Julek,” Mama said once.

  “Finka, a child should be spoiled,” Papa said. “They should enjoy their lives.”

  SUZANNA SAT ON THE HARD GROUND holding her mother’s hand. No train was coming to take them to their next destination, and even overcrowded lorries and horse-drawn carts were nowhere in sight. It was time to put away all the fond memories, set one foot down in front of the next, listen to her mother, watch the world as Mama and Peter did, with equal measures of suspicion, fear, and curiosity. Enjoy life, Suzanna thought—that would come later. It had to.

  WITH DAWN A LIGHT RAIN FELL, clean and cool, upon the deportees in their gloomy cluster. Josefina retrieved from her rucksack a small tin cup, which she set out to collect rainwater. She tilted her head back, lifted her face toward the sky, and rubbed her skin until it felt approximately clean. Her children did the same.

  “No one is coming for us,” a man said. “We are going to starve to death. We’ll be forgotten. We will die and rot right here.” He was a gaunt man—all the men had become hollow-faced in their captivity. The variations in their thinness hinted at the length and kind of imprisonment they had endured prior to being loaded onto the trains. Once the war was over, it would become a cliché to talk of how the deportees had been packed into the boxcars as if they were no better than swine or cows. But at the time, such treatment was alien to those who had just arrived in the Soviet Union. The man who was speaking had lost a front tooth, and his face trembled. In the first days of the boxcar, he recounted over and over again how his disfigurement had come to pass. “It was the NKVD man who arrested me,” he started. “He
beat me and knocked out my tooth.” He described the man’s large hand, decorated with tattoos and wearing a heavy signet ring he had taken from another prisoner. How through coincidence, the metal of that piece of stolen jewelry intersected with his tooth. The sound it made….

  His name was Herr Auerbach. Josefina had been the one to ask him to please stop repeating his story, couldn’t he see it was upsetting the children? He had softened, almost to the point of tears. Then he said something to Josefina about being from Kraków, his wife the daughter of a rebbe, but the details of their conversation eluded her now. And anyway, such things don’t matter anymore, Josefina thought.

  “Oh, Lord, please save us,” a woman shrieked. “What did I do, God, to die here in this forsaken place?”

  Josefina glanced at the children. Peter looked to the ground to hide his pinched expression of distaste at the woman’s outburst. He had grown intolerant of what he called displays of exaggeration. Suzanna was quenching her thirst—mouth open, face tilted skyward, her eyes closed. Normally, Josefina would have disapproved of such comportment, but given the circumstances, she let it go. At this point, her son’s overt exasperation and her daughter’s open-mouthed rain-catching were simply new ways of residing in a world in which decorum had been displaced by the barbarity of war.

  She looked from Herr Auerbach to the shrieking woman.

  Josefina yearned suddenly for her Julek, an ache so profound it threatened to collapse her into insignificance, right there with the July dust and its scent of wet rain, somewhere very far from home. No, she told herself, you mustn’t give in. And so it was that Josefina Kohn closed the door to any recollection of what she once knew as home and any comfort derived from such memories. Unless she learned otherwise, she told herself, she could not afford the kind of sentiment attached to what wasn’t. Which meant Julius was lost to her now, his laughter and tender solidity and unconditional kindnesses also perished. All that mattered was exactly where she was and what she had to do to survive and keep the children alive from one hour to the next.

  “Instead of making things worse, you should be collecting rain to drink,” Josefina said to Herr Auerbach. “Who knows when we will next be given any water.” She purposely neglected to mention food, which was obviously not forthcoming.

  All of the deportees turned their heads then and looked at her. Or, as she recalled later, they looked through her. She wanted nothing more than to not see them. Their eyes were already sunken, and their mouths were set in grim lines. She hoped her face did not appear like theirs, but she doubted it could look like anything else. A collective movement began, the search for something in which to catch the lightly falling rain. Not all of them had tin cups, but all of them had something—a small plate or bowl, their cupped hands—and those who had vessels set them out on the hard ground where they sat, disheveled, exhausted, forlorn, vacant, and nearing hopelessness. Their faces turned to the sky.

  WHEN THE LORRIES FINALLY ARRIVED, the deportees had buried five people. Buried, Peter thought, was not the correct word because they had no shovels and could dig no graves. He suddenly grew nostalgic for his grandmother Ernestyna and their regular pilgrimages to the Jewish cemetery on Hażlaska Street in Teschen. There his great-grandparents Sigmund and Charlotte Kohn were buried. There Ernestyna supervised the tidying of the ground around the headstones of the industrious, prosperous, and charitable Kohns. Sigmund was Peter’s middle name, and later he would sometimes use it as his first name, spelled the Polish way, Zygmunt. Peter was proud to remember, each time he wrote it, his upstanding great-grandfather, a man who had bequeathed a legacy to his family and community.

  “He was a kind man, a good father-in-law,” Ernestyna told her grandson. “Honest and respectable. He earned the right to expect much from his children.” She was not a woman of many words. When she spoke, those who knew her paid attention. In Lwów, she stopped talking altogether at the end. Peter thought of her as having entered a long season of complete silence. What might she be doing now, in the care of the nuns in Brzuchowice, where they had left her? Was she eating warm meals and sleeping on clean linens? He was certain he’d never see her again. Why had he never thought to ask her how she spent her childhood? Or how she had met his grandfather Emerich, who said kaddish each year at the grave site of the family patriarch?

  This was no cemetery. There were no rites, no shrouds, no coffins, no markers. Dead was dead in this land, a kind of nonhuman animal death. The combination of severe deprivation and the outlawing of religion invited primitive behaviors. The bodies of the deceased had been stripped of any valuable outerwear and covered with handfuls of dirt loosened from the earth with bare hands. Peter had helped cover the dead as best he could. He stood by and listened as his fellow prisoners intoned their brief prayers, in Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew. Like their Soviet captors, Death had traveled with them and had not discriminated. The babies who were in the boxcar from the beginning of the trip had not survived. Their little bodies were thrown from the train; their mothers’ faces contorted with grief. It was as if these women were made of ash, Peter thought, and if you rubbed their outlines, they would disintegrate.

  Who will die next? he wondered.

  He looked at the people he had traveled with these past two weeks: grandparents, young people like him and Suzi, but mostly men and women who were the same age as his parents. Peasants and urban folk, farmers, teachers, businessmen, a nurse, a rabbi and a priest, the family members of people who had been arrested for all sorts of crimes, all manner of nationality and creed, all of them united under the label “enemy of the Soviet state.” In the boxcar, some had prayed; others remained silent; several seldom spoke; others chattered and sometimes screamed. Many didn’t sleep; one or two snored; others cried out from nightmares only to find their waking lives worse than any nocturnal imagining.

  Together they had suffered the indignities of deportation: the crowded boxcar, the airlessness, the lack of privacy, the salted fish given them by the soldiers, which made them thirst in ways no one could imagine. Together they had listened to the babies screaming and then the wails of mothers when their children grew silent. Together they smelled the death that took the very young and very old and also someone his mother’s age. Together they had shared provisions packed in the things they carried, stuffed in pockets, tossed to them by the citizens of Lwów just before the boxcar doors were closed and locked. Together they understood these small acts of generosity as a macabre farewell. Together they had told one another it wouldn’t be long before they were released and then listened as one and then another among them went mad and raved about how they were all going to perish, sealed in this forsaken boxcar. Together they went silent and then wept. Together they shared the rag stuck into the boxcar’s roof when it swelled with rainwater. Together they rejoiced in air or light coming through the one tiny window, a window from which they took turns watching the landscape transform into a majestic vista. God’s country, Peter thought. A place God had touched once and never returned to and then abandoned, he thought later.

  THE SOLDIERS HERDED THEM INTO THE LORRIES. Some of the deportees were dispatched to camps farther east, but the truck in which Peter and his family found themselves bumped northward along the rutted earth. He listened to the soldiers talking, and after several mentions of the word Mariskaya, determined it was the name of the place they found themselves in. Later Peter learned more about the republic on the northern bank of the Volga River, whose indigenous people, the Mari, were the subject of Soviet persecution.

  The child named Kasia was still with them; she clung to Suzanna, who made every effort to keep the girl clean and distracted. Kasia’s sister had been separated from their group, and the farewell had been tragic. The little girl wept uncontrollably until one of the Red Army soldiers, his breath rank, put his face close to Suzanna’s and told her she had best keep the brat quiet. Suzanna enfolded the child in her arms and cooed to her as they rode past tall trees. Each of those girls, Peter deci
ded, was brave in her own way.

  In the distance, wolves howled. Owls hooted. The refugees raised their heads as the animal sounds echoed in the dark forest, where stands of spruce, pine, and larch towered above them. The sky was barely visible past the dense canopy.

  They rode for hours before they were commanded to get out and again told to remain where they stood. This the deportees did for another night and day, until the horse-drawn carts came. The old mares pulling the wagons were all ribs; exhaustion clouded their eyes. Peter would have shot them as an act of mercy if he’d had a gun. He even contemplated trying to convince one of the soldiers to do this, a young man his age, but he thought better of the idea when he saw how the Soviet men eyed his sister. One had to choose one’s battles, as his father always said. Until now, Peter hadn’t really understood the meaning of that expression. It was ironic, he had believed earlier, that in wartime, you might be able to pick which fights to have. But now, irony had been eliminated from the world. Everything was plainly and absurdly horrifying.

  The wagons hobbled along, heading farther north. By midnight, the ragtag group of enemies of the state, under guard by Red Army soldiers, reached the encampment.

  You’ll Get Used to It

  END JULY 1940, MARISKAYA LABOR CAMP, MARI EL REPUBLIC

  THE WAGONS BUMPED TO A STOP. Guards were yelling as the deportees approached the high wooden gate separating the labor camp from the woods. Josefina came to with a start, surfacing not from real sleep but from a fatigue- and hunger-induced stupor. She took stock of her surroundings. On a sign above the tall gate’s doors were words in Cyrillic letters, and Josefina deciphered some slogan about work in the Soviet Union being an honor and a duty. Other deportees had been transported here in a variety of ways under heavy guard: on foot, by cart, in lorries. There were men, women, and even some children, including several who were Kasia’s age or younger. Some of the prisoners appeared crazed, others on the verge of collapse. In a place such as this, everyone watched one another. Even the air seemed electrically charged with suspicion and its tensions. The best way to get by, Josefina reasoned, was to appear strong, never weak or needy, and be slyly enterprising. But she didn’t want to stoop to a criminal level and so she resolved to keep her moral compass pointed in the right direction.