Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  Suzanna watched the other women in the dark and humid laundry as they scrubbed, wrung, and hung the wash. These other pridurki were mostly older women who could no longer toil in the harsh outdoor conditions. Many of them had already labored for years in the forests. She marveled at how they had managed to stay intact. Each one had been sentenced for some violation of Article 58. Each one had, like Suzanna, another life before this one, a home, a bed, a table at which to eat food. Maybe some even had had gardens or horses or enjoyed long walks with dogs. Did they fear or love wolves? Which fairytales had they told their own children or grandchildren? Suzanna promised to tell the story of the wolf and the devil to Kasia, as soon as she returned to the infirmary. In the meanwhile, there was laundry to scrub and wring and hang. Water to pump and carry. A stove to keep warm. Folding to do.

  Kasia did not live to hear the story. When Suzanna finally returned to the infirmary on that mid-February day in 1941, the child had taken a turn and was once again consumed by fever. And though Suzanna tended to her with a maternal vigilance—sponging her with alcohol, changing the linens, pressing a rag dipped in water to the girl’s mouth—Kasia died.

  Suzanna was not surprised when she fell ill, though later, she tried not to remember that terrible time. On a hospital cot in the infirmary, she writhed with fever for weeks, and lost consciousness for several days. “Strong Polish girl,” the nurse called her when she lived, such a rarity. Afterward, her lungs were permanently scarred. Many years later, Suzanna suffered from bouts of pneumonia, several of which were severe enough to hospitalize her. During those episodes of illness, which she called the season of Kasia’s death—a winter of wind and wolves, she called it privately—she thought of the little girl she had loved but whose life she could not save.

  Spring was brief and muddy. Though Suzanna had recovered from her illness, breathing was more difficult, and she tired more easily. Summer, with its steep heat, brought green to the world, and upon occasion, a vegetable or two. Work went on and on. They were considered lucky—in their camp, prisoners were allowed letters and parcels. And every now and again, Josefina retrieved a package from Milly, which contained whatever she could procure during this time of great shortages—sausages and silk thread and bits of fabric and, once, a lemon, which had been a sensation among the camp’s higher-ups who hadn’t had a decent cup of tea, they said, in ages. News of the war came in pieces—in letters whose contents slipped by the censors; with newly arrived prisoners sent from other camps and settlements; from pridurki who worked in the director’s office and overheard reports broadcast over the wireless. No one knew what to believe. The ever-escalating war meant one thing only for the zeks: more work, higher quotas, less food, more death. The world beyond the USSR was very far away, but it was also in your belly.

  AND THEN THE GERMANS INVADED the Soviet Union. But by the time Josefina and her children heard this news, Julius Kohn had already been one of the first casualties, murdered by the Soviets before the Nazis reached Lwów, his body and that of other prisoners left where they had fallen. They would not know his fate. Or, if they did learn what happened to him, they would never speak of it.

  Behind the Bars, No World

  26 JUNE 1941, ZAMARSTYNIVSKA PRISON (ALSO KNOWN AS PRISON NO. 2), LWÓW

  JULIUS KOHN WAITED FOR HIS EXECUTION with hundreds of other prisoners. None of them knew why they were about to be killed, but all had heard rumors about the recent Nazi invasion of the USSR. Several days ago, they had been prisoners. Today they were scheduled to die. As Julius waited his turn in one of the holding cells of Prison No. 2, he recalled a long-ago day when his father had taken him and his sister to the Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the Vienna zoo, to see the first elephant born in captivity. Julius was eleven, Greta, eight.

  Like most people who lived in Teschen, Julius had never seen a real elephant. Or a real rhinoceros. Or real tigers. In his home on the western bank of the Olza, the days revolved around family and the obligations of education and commerce. Julius’s childhood home, a three-story house at Hocheneggergasse 15, was situated on a corner. It was an austere brown building with understated embellishment.

  In the parlor on summer afternoons, Ernestyna Kohn liked to sit with her children and look at books. Julius looked forward to these moments. His mother had a taste for atlases and poetry, and also for pictures, which she collected during her regular visits to Zygmunt Stuks’s bookshop across the river and from a network of family members who sent her postcards and pamphlets. Not long before the trip to the zoo, in fact, Julius’s mother had shown him and Greta the famous sixteenth-century etching by Albrecht Dürer of the rhino named Ganda, whose life ended abruptly in a shipwreck en route to Rome. She read them Rilke’s poem about the panther in the Paris zoo, a phrase from which, “behind the bars, no world,” resonated now for Julius in a way he could never have predicted. The stories of these animals cramped in their enclosures and ogled by crowds, Ernestyna explained to her children, were stories of human disgrace.

  But Julius had been a boy in an age when men ventured to and from India and Africa, the Americas, and the frozen north and south poles. He was hungry to see exotic animals, hungrier still to travel to their faraway habitats. He listened to and considered his mother’s opinions about capturing and displaying wild creatures, but still yearned keenly to see such animals. And because no one was taking him to the Serengeti in Africa or the Ganges in India, he had to settle for seeing an elephant at the zoo.

  His Uncle Eugen understood Julius’s curiosity. A lifelong bachelor with no children, Eugen adored his nephew, feeding his imagination with the Englishman Rudyard Kipling’s stories, which he translated as a pastime. The author was, he told Julius, a man to admire because he had lived in two worlds. This was something Julius wouldn’t really understand until after the Great War, when Teschen, a former duchy of the Habsburg Empire, was divided between two countries, split in two, and renamed Cieszyn on the Polish side and Český-Těšín on the Czech side. After 1920, to visit relatives who lived across the river meant crossing not only a bridge, it meant crossing a newly created border.

  Julius missed his Uncle Eugen, the pipe smoke and heavy furniture of his attorney’s office in the house at 54 Głęboka Street. All those hand-tooled leather volumes of the law on the high shelves. His uncle’s ink-stained fingers and his passion for afternoon pastries and coffee. Julius had loved visiting, especially when Uncle Eugen read to him those wonderful tales by Kipling, who resided in India and whose stories of how the rhinoceros got his skin and the leopard its spots enchanted Julius.

  But Mädi the baby elephant was four hours west of Teschen in Vienna. She was a sensation, described in detail by Aunt Laura in a recent correspondence from her home in the imperial city. “The newness of her,” she had written, “defies expectation.”

  Aunt Laura: Julius didn’t want to imagine what had become of her. She had stayed in Vienna, where there had been so much trouble before the war began. What a woman she was: Round as a bagel, her husband had liked to tease, which always made the nieces and nephews giggle, though all the cousins were comforted by her unconditional warmth. Julius and Greta were equally charmed by Laura’s daughter, Hedwig, who, he vaguely recalled, went to London in 1939, before the Nazi invasion. It was so difficult to remember all the details—for example, where everyone was when the bombing started. What would the world be like if no one were left to remember what had happened to others? But Laura, she was in Vienna when they fled Teschen … she said she couldn’t leave. She said she’d be just fine. She had thanked Julius for the money he had sent.

  “PLEASE, FATHER,” HE HAD PLEADED AS A BOY, upon hearing Aunt Laura’s description of the animal, “please take us to Vienna to see the newborn elephant.” Julius didn’t dare look toward his mother, who was examining her sister-in-law’s most recent letter, and, he knew, shaking her head almost imperceptibly at whatever bit of gossip Laura had included for the benefit of the adults.

  From across the room, Julius c
ould feel his mother’s disappointment in his determination to see the elephant, but his was an overwhelming urge. Greta tugged their father’s sleeve and said that she wanted also to go to the zoo and see the elephant. “I’m your little shadow, Julek,” she said. Her dark eyes were already lit with a certain fire, the kind he’d see twenty years later in his own daughter, Suzanna.

  Julius wondered now how his Suzi was faring, and if his son, Peter, was watching out for her. He thought about his sister, Greta, and her husband, Ernst. Had they lived or died? If they had perished, were they buried? And where? These mysteries he added to the long list of never-to-be-known things, an inventory he tried to ignore because when he started to think of all he would never know, Julius felt defeated.

  As it happened, Ernst had been right: no matter how much money they invested in their country or communities, or how much education they had or how perfectly they spoke German; no matter their military service to the Empire or their memberships in non-Jewish social organizations, they were still Jews. And as such, as Ernst put it, they were disposable. Disposable. Yes, it was the correct word, though Julius argued with his brother-in-law the night he said it. Greta, sitting by the fire, her head bent over some sewing, murmured, “Perhaps we should have learned to pray better.”

  In prison, Julius had taught himself to pray. One night he faced east and recited the Shema. He was surprised to discover that he still knew the prayer. Back came the sacred words, as clear as when he first heard them uttered in the synagogue at home. Uncle Ferdinand, one of his father’s brothers, had taken him to shul as a boy. Julius had felt embarrassed that he didn’t know what to do. He stood with the men. He held the siddur, but he could not read Hebrew or understand it.

  IN THAT FIRST CELL IN BRYGIDKI PRISON—three and a half paces across and nine long—Julius remained for weeks on end. First with ten others, then twelve. Men and women and children together. All of them picking off lice from their clothing, which disgusted him at first, but then, like everyone in those awful rooms, Julius did the same. One bunk. One window out of which they were forbidden to look. One pail. No privacy. On that first night, his singular desire was to scream. It felt impossible to crush that impulse. From the moment Julius was shoved into the tiny cell, he knew he would go mad if he didn’t control his mind. And why not, at last, hearken unto God, who had been until that moment a fleeting notion that flickered off more often than not, much like a candle in front of an open window?

  What does a man, who has had everything and then lost it in the course of twenty-four hours, pray for? How does he pray if he has not before prayed much? What does he believe in? Will God take him in and provide comfort if such a man comes to God in despair? After saying the Shema, Julius at first prayed for good fortune to fall upon those who were dearest to him: That they not meet the same fate as he. He prayed for his family’s passage to England, which Finka was so keen on making. For his wife and daughter’s safety. That his son, Peter, would have the presence of mind to act should danger manifest. Later, Julius prayed for other things: For the suffering of a cell mate to end. That the animal-like screaming of a tortured prisoner stop. For the lice to be smote. A glimpse of sky. More air, more heat, more food. For a sip of water.

  Sometimes he prayed for faith itself.

  The cramped and endless waiting—and for what were they waiting? he often asked himself—was, in the end, a ceaseless parade of days and nights punctuated by interrogations and torture. Only occasionally did the prisoners have any reprieve, and this came when they were marched out by the guards to visit the latrines. In those precious moments when the inmates were granted toilet privileges, it was the female prisoners who whispered encouragement to them as they passed in the corridor: “It is all right,” they said. “You will see. Everything will be all right. Only don’t give up. Not ever.”

  Now, standing in a cell, waiting for the executioner to stand before him, Julius remembered that day in the Vienna zoo. Do elephants pray? he wondered during this last hour of his life.

  MUD-GRAY, MÄDI THE BABY ELEPHANT was all wobble, her ears like large, soft petals of an impossible flower, her eyes sleepy with having nursed. Greta cried upon seeing her and did not stop until she fell asleep that night in Aunt Laura’s arms. Julius didn’t understand why his sister could not tolerate the sight of the baby elephant.

  “Look, Greta, at her trunk, how she uses it to feel for things. Look at her tail, how she swats the flies with it,” he said, trying to get her to ignore the obvious tragedy of the animal’s captivity. But his sister only sobbed harder. And when he failed to soothe her, Julius fixed his gaze on Mizzi, the mother elephant, and he thought not of the sadness he recognized in her eyes but of rain clouds and glossy-leafed rubber trees, and the adventures he might have in the lands where such animals roamed.

  Such thoughts he had entertained as a boy … to return to those memories as he waited his turn to die was a strange relief. During these past eighteen months—first Brygidki and now here at Zamarstynivska Prison—despair, not idealism, ruled the long days, each one an interminable succession of indignities. He lived in airless rooms packed with broken men and women and children, all of them faint with a profound hunger that gnawed one’s gut. Each of them accustomed to the blatant indecency of people they may have once named friends or neighbors or countrymen. Julius’s boyhood had unfolded in another time and place, all of it vanished, the memories empty of any meaning because they could not be given to the next generation to preserve or challenge. Julius grieved just then for his son, Peter, who would never know his father as a man because they would never be men at the same time.

  Mädi the elephant seemed close to him as the footsteps of his executioner echoed in the prison corridor. If only he could inhabit, as if by magic, that moment when he first saw the baby elephant. He wished he could tell his children how much he learned between that day and this one. If Julius had kept a diary, his son and daughter would have a record of his life. But of course he was too busy, he traveled too much. He barely had enough time to read a book. The children would know only the superficial things: That he had once written poetry. That he played tennis and was an officer of his club’s organizing committee. Made enough money to have servants and an automobile. Had a bald head and wore an eye patch. Was a person who liked to visit and entertain. That he had been a member of the German Theater Society. But they—and even Finka for that matter—might never know that he had died in Zamarstynivska Prison in Lwów, or if he had suffered, or why he had been killed. They would certainly never know what it did to a man to behold the terror on his wife’s face, or the sound of his mother’s muted sobs when the Soviet soldiers came in the darkest hour of the night to arrest him. Or that he had prayed at that moment, clumsily because he had not prayed since he had been a boy learning the Shema: “Please, Adonai,” he had asked silently, “let my children sleep through this moment, please do not let them see me being arrested.” Or that of all the things he missed, the now-absent sound of his wife and children’s laughter in the house in Teschen made him ache the most. They would never know if he believed in God or justice and they would never know what he found beautiful.

  Finka’s face. Her hands. The figure she cut through fresh snow on skis. The smell of his daughter’s dark, thick hair as he lifted her to see more closely the showy flower of a chestnut tree in May. The way Peter squinted when he looked at the stars on a summer’s night, picking out the constellations he knew—there the big dipper, there Orion’s belt. How Peter teased his sister, Suzi, much as Julius had teased his sister, Greta. The warm, earthy aroma of Helenka’s piroshki from the kitchen on a winter evening.

  “WE HAD SUCH A COZY LIFE BEFORE THE WAR,” one of Julius’s fellow prisoners had said one evening, a propos of nothing, just before he was dragged from their cell and never seen again.

  Such a cozy life: The evening before his engagement, when Julius first embraced Finka, the scent of some flower discreetly behind her ear. He had held her hand under li
lacs and drank champagne and enjoyed the ever-hopeful attentions of parents eager to see their children betrothed. Josefina: She didn’t walk, rather she strode into a room like an empress coming in from the hunt. She was famished or weary, exuberant or invigorated, never merely hungry or tired or happy or refreshed. Josefina had been well named, he liked to tell her. “My empress,” he sometimes teased. Even after the courtship—long Shabbos afternoons on the horse-hair sofa, under the discerning brow of her religiously observant mother, Karola Eisner, and the more amiable gaze of her father, Hermann—Julius felt lucky to marry such a woman. He told her he was blessed, and Finka dismissed him, smiling nonetheless. After they had set up housekeeping in the Kohn family residence at Głęboka Street, Finka arranged an outing to see Richard Strauss’s production of Don Giovanni at the Vienna Hofoper. “Wasn’t that Elizabeth Schumann simply astonishing in the role of Zerlina?” she asked as they ate at the Tivoli Café, and “wouldn’t it be grand to live near the famous Ringstrasse?”

  Not that his bride was discontent to share with Julius and his uncles the four-story townhouse in a Silesian town—Little Vienna, everyone called it—in what had become Poland. She hiked in the nearby Beskidy Mountains, went skiing at Innsbruck, played tennis, and hosted dinner parties for their friends and family.