Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  During the summers, they retreated to the hills of Skoczów, where they met the Viennese painter Sergius Pauser. Julius commissioned portraits of his family by the artist in the mid-1930s. When Finka sat for Pauser, she was able to assume almost complete stillness for hours. He and the children found such modeling more difficult. The paintings were hung in the house at Mennicza Street and caused a small sensation among the family’s relations and friends. Julius summoned now the painter’s stylized image of Finka: sheathed in a brown dress, a yellow scarf from Paris at her throat, a red beret tilted on her head, and the matching jacket draped over her shoulder, her posture a kind of commanding silence. Her expression was serious, almost melancholic, and her gaze a bit distant. The painter had captured a certain nostalgia in the way Finka looked out beyond the frame of the painting, a look Julius had seen on her face some years before, as she sat in the garden in the back of their house, after tending to roses. The afternoon light softened the edges of her face and made her skin seem otherworldly, but her eyes contained a sadness he had not before seen. Was she simply a modern woman on the verge of fatigue, and was that what Pauser had painted? Or was she imagining already the grim future awaiting them?

  Like Ernst, Finka had been right. They should have left Poland in 1938 when there was still time and money … they should have heeded the warnings—so many … they should have paid attention … Julius remembered suddenly a conversation he had with his wife one morning, about Sigmund Freud, though he couldn’t sort out the details of what she had said. That was the day he should have acted. But what good was it to dwell on the possibilities of decisions not taken? Solace did not exist in what if’s, only regret. And besides, Julius and Finka made many choices because they had held out hope—or at least he had—that no one with any sense of decency would allow Hitler to prevail. Hope was a vanishing idea in these modern times; to entertain it meant a belief in something beyond a material self; the divine, maybe. When the inevitable came to pass—Nazis marching into Teschen, German bombs falling on Warsaw, the Soviets taking over Lwów, assistance from France and England stalled—their hopes, of course, were dashed. He and Finka, like everyone they knew caught in the same circumstance, did the best they could.

  JULIUS TASTED THE SALT ON HIS LIPS and was surprised, when he touched his face, by his own perspiration. He smelled the iron of blood and the stench of dread rising from the exhausted men and women who were waiting, as he was, to die. One gunshot after another, the sound of exasperated sighs, muffled groans, and bodies falling to the floor. The NKVD had taken the prisoners to the basement of the prison, and his holding cell was to be next.

  Ivan Shumakov, Deputy Chief of NKVD Investigations in Lwów, appeared before the iron bars. From a list, he pronounced each prisoner’s name and identification number. He did this with a somber expression, as if the syllables he so carefully uttered belonged to the names of his own relations. As soon as the prisoner stepped forward, the soldier by Shumakov’s side aimed his pistol and shot the named inmate, as systematically as any factory worker might attach a rivet. The Deputy Chief penciled in a little mark by each name.

  “Kohn, Ilia Emiritovich,” he called.

  This fellow Shumakov was handsome in that robust Soviet way. Tall, broad-shouldered, and clean-shaven. Brown eyes. Dark hair kept short and meticulously combed. His uniform was without flaw and he had, perhaps even recently, polished the buttons on his coat. But his boots were spattered with blood. And just now, Julius saw that his eyes were bloodshot, as if to match.

  In the first days and weeks that Julius was at Zamarstynivska Prison, it was Ivan Shumakov who had interrogated him. They sat for hours in a small, dank room. The bare electric bulb cast a severe light on the dingy concrete walls. Julius was not so much dressed but rather draped in gray rags. The NKVD officer was outfitted in an impeccably white shirt and trousers creased so sharply you might cut yourself on them. His uniform jacket, adorned with medals, hung from a hook, and this small bit of normalcy, more than anything else, seemed to Julius completely unfitting.

  Shumakov slowly rolled up his sleeves. He rose to wash his hands in a tiny sink in the corner. He allowed the faucet to run, the sound of the water an insult to anyone imprisoned at Zamarstynivska, where bathing was practically nonexistent and one’s thirst was rarely quenched. Shumakov scrubbed his hands as meticulously as a surgeon. Then he dried them, took his chair, rubbed his palms together, and uncovered a dinner of chicken and potatoes sitting on the table. This he proceeded to eat while Julius sat and watched. When Shumakov finished cutting and chewing, which he did with what seemed to Julius a practiced restraint, he set down his fork and knife, folded his napkin, and offered his prisoner two greasy scraps of gristle and bone.

  These Julius refused. His captor placed the plate on the floor, unholstered his revolver, and pressed the barrel into Julius’s temple.

  “On your hands and knees. Eat, you scoundrel dog,” Shumakov ordered. “Or so help me, I’ll find your wife and children and bring them here to watch me shoot you.” He held up the papers that lay on the table next to his plate and examined them. “Wife: Josefa. Children: Piotr Zygmunt and Suzanna.” He paused, allowing the syllables to echo in Julius’s head. “Suzanna: doesn’t that mean … rose?” the Deputy Chief added.

  After that, Julius obeyed. He spent long, long hours with Shumakov, who asked him the same questions again and again: “Why did you go to Złoczów? Where is your money? Who are the other enemies of the state in your group? Why were you overthrowing a frontier?” Overthrowing the frontier was the charge used by Soviets for people trying to cross borders that had not been borders previous to the Soviet occupation of Poland.

  To Shumakov’s repeated questions, Julius repeated the same answers: “I went to Złoczów to see about doing business there. I have no more money. I am not an enemy of the state. When I came to Lwów and left for Złoczów, both were still part of Poland.”

  At the sound of the word Poland, Shumakov clenched his fist, then his jaw, and quickly Julius learned to say “that place I once lived” rather than suffer the consequences. The younger Soviet man looked for any excuse to backhand a prisoner or force him to stand or squat or stay awake, or deny him rations. The next day and the next and all the days, which came to seem like one singularly long day, Shumakov asked the same questions and listened to Julius’s same answers until one afternoon, as he watched his interrogator crush a fly with his thumb, Julius Kohn, son of Emerich, broke. Though what he said wasn’t true, he confessed. Yes, he told Shumakov, he was an industrialist enemy of the state who crossed borders to overthrow the great and powerful Soviet Union.

  His interrogator was dissatisfied with this confession. And for a moment, Julius thought he saw uncertainty shape Shumakov’s eyes into something other than the menacing emptiness possessed by the men and women who had submitted their will to Stalin’s machine. A silence rose between them.

  Julius decided to break it. He sensed opportunity, in that way he was able to read men with whom he did business. And besides, I’ve “confessed,” he thought, relieved at last of the burden of saying no. “Citizen chief, where are you from?” he asked the Deputy Chief of Interrogations.

  “Saratov oblast, on the Volga,” Shumakov said, in an undertone. “Where the Germans were invited by Catherine the Great to farm so long ago.”

  The two men spoke no further. At the appointed hour, a secretary brought in tea for the Deputy Chief, who pushed his cup toward Julius. And just as any proper host might, Shumakov offered him the bowl of sugar and remained seated, his newly relaxed expression at odds with the perfect military posture he maintained at all times. Julius sweetened the weak, black tea and drank it slowly before he was escorted back to his cell. That was the last the two men had seen of one another.

  UNTIL TODAY.

  “Kohn, Ilia Emiritovich,” the soldier called. Shumakov looked up from his list.

  “I am here,” said Julius Kohn, son of Emerich.

  Parting Gifts />
  SEPTEMBER 1941, MARI EL REPUBLIC

  NEWS WAS AN INFREQUENT and often fractured commodity for the zeks. With communications closely monitored in Nazi-occupied Poland (now called the General Government), and censors who had always been active in the USSR, news arrived in the remote places of the Soviet Union stripped of accuracy and timeliness. Thus, although Josefina knew the Nazis had invaded the USSR in June, she had no news about the fate of her husband. Two months passed before she learned that because of the invasion, Stalin had joined forces with the Allies, and another month passed again before she heard about the amnesty, which granted immediate release to the Polish citizens who had been deported and subsequently imprisoned when the Soviets invaded. The release of prisoners had been negotiated in order to create a Polish Army on Soviet soil, but this news trickled in and was alternately disputed or never delivered.

  Amnesty, Josefina thought when she heard the word, was another repulsive Soviet absurdity. From the Greek for forgetfulness, it was insulting, like that Nazi term for theft from Jews, Aryanization. None of the Polish citizens who had been arrested and deported by the Soviets had committed the sorts of crimes warranting pardon, absolution, or forgiveness associated with the idea of amnesty. Later, Josefina would learn that the Polish diplomat who drafted the document used the word amnesty instead of the more accurate release, but there had been no time to change the document prior to its signing in August 1941. Regardless, it was the news of the amnesty, not the word, which was most important to those who benefited from it, and this news, for many of the prisoners, was announced too late, or went undelivered. Some heard it at the right time but had no means to act accordingly. A good number of the labor-camp commandants simply did not communicate any information that might disturb the work force and thus their camps’ quotas, and those unfortunate zeks who never heard the news about the amnesty remained imprisoned.

  The news had been delivered to the prisoners of the Mariskaya labor camp as if remaining were a better option than leaving. According to the NKVD officer who made the announcement, those Polish citizens who were interned must remember they’d need papers and transportation, all of which required money and permission to travel. The dangers of passage were many in wartime, especially for women and girls, he warned ominously. As if living in a forced-labor camp with ruthless guards and hardened, violent criminals weren’t dangerous, thought Josefina as she listened to the man speak.

  “And where would a former zek stay?” he asked, making sure the eager-to-leave deportees knew they’d be viewed suspiciously wherever they went. After all, he reminded them, this was not Poland—there were no inns or hotels. “Around here, it’s mostly peasants anyway,” he said. They shouldn’t forget that the average Soviet citizen was unlikely to take in former prisoners or share what little they had with them. Who knew what crimes they suspected the zeks of having committed? No one liked a criminal, especially one who wasn’t completely re-educated and reformed. And no one wanted to risk arrest or re-arrest. Why not stay in the camp and await the war’s end? “Isn’t being part of the great Soviet Union worth something to you?” he asked.

  Josefina counted in English to herself, a practice she had adopted to suppress the rage and nausea that accompanied the Communist propaganda lessons she had been required to endure. He was so sure of himself, this NKVD officer with his mustache and thick neck. As he spoke, she looked out toward the gates separating the zona from the world beyond the perimeter of this miserable labor camp. A single objective formed in her mind: walking through those gates with her son and daughter. She didn’t have to convince Peter to join the Polish Army; her son had wanted to enlist before they fled Teschen. He had become a man who kept them alive by working hard. Josefina knew he would make a fine soldier. And even if they couldn’t make it to the army’s recruitment center, they could leave this cold place for someplace farther south, where it was warmer. She had heard, from other zeks in the Mariskaya camp, about the kolkhozes, the large collective farms in Soviet-governed Central Asia where people lived and worked. Eventually, Josefina reasoned, the war would end. Anywhere—even a nebulous idea of somewhere else—was better than where they were, especially because Suzanna’s health had been compromised by illness. Another winter, Josefina feared, would prove fatal to her daughter.

  JOSEFINA WAS READY TO LEAVE THE BUNK where she had slept since August of 1940. She was ready to leave the vermin-infested barrack. She was ready to leave behind her mattress stuffed with hay, the roll calls, the stolovaya, the rezhim, the guards, the zona. She was ready to leave before winter worsened and claimed its dead. She had been ready since August 1941, when they were first informed of the amnesty.

  Before they could leave, however, Josefina had to solve two problems, one of which she would have been unaware of, if not for the intervention of another pridurki. Vera Adamova was the secretary of the camp’s director. She and Josefina were often at the administrative building at the same time. You couldn’t say they were close friends, though Josefina admired the Russian woman and looked forward to their encounters and the news of the world to which Vera Adamova was privy because she worked for the director. During these brief moments spent together, the two women learned how similar they were: Josefina and Vera were roughly the same age. Before their arrests and deportation and the war, they shared a similar inclination toward the world, both preferring the slow movement through life afforded by politeness and good education. They both had been ardent skiers. They both loved music and theater. They both were practical and efficient, enthusiastic about living. They both were possessed of a dry humor. They both had a husband gone missing in the Soviet prison system and they both had two children in a world at war. Eventually, they confided to one another that they were both Jews.

  Vera Adamova had been a professor of mathematics at Moscow University when she and her husband were arrested in 1936 during the Great Terror. After a year in the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, she was sentenced to seven years of hard labor at Solovki, the infamous camp on the White Sea, which the Soviets had used as propaganda to boast about their effective “re-education” system. Like many zeks, Vera Adamova had been moved to another camp after her sentence began. Which is how she wound up in the Mari woods. She never learned where her husband had been sent or what had become of her children, but when she spoke of them, she used the present tense. Her way of keeping them alive, Josefina thought.

  One day in early September, Vera Adamova and Josefina found themselves waiting for the mail to be distributed. They chatted.

  “Fine weather today,” Josefina said, as if they were meeting at the fountain in the center of Rynek Square in Teschen. The morning was not cold. Nor was it dusty or hot. A day such as this was to be remarked as a brief moment of respite in the weather of the taiga, this place of tall, dense trees. With release on her horizon, Josefina felt as if she might experience a lightness of spirit once again, though she was sober enough to be cautious. So very many mornings during the past two years had been, at best, disappointing.

  Vera Adamova nodded. The usual cordial smile was absent. “Josefina Hermanovna, there has been some disturbing news,” she said, tucking an errant hair under the shawl she wore on her head. In the hoarse whisper of a parched and cold zek, she reported overhearing a conversation between the camp director and the NKVD man who had come to announce the amnesty. “As usual, the rules are changing right before our eyes. They will let out only the ‘real’ Poles,” Vera Adamova said, explaining that Ukrainians, Jews, and Belarusians deported from what was once Poland were now considered Soviet citizens and thus not eligible for the release granted by the amnesty. Neither woman knew what to say, but Josefina knew what she had to do.

  She and the children would have to pretend to be Gentiles. Josefina winced to even think of this, but she also prided herself on her practical rationality. Her mother had brought up her children to suspend any expectation of empirical proof when it came to their Jewish faith. She wanted them to carry forward t
heir Judaism and never question or abandon it. Karola Eisner was a woman who would never hide her Jewishness, nor would she ever consent to her family diluting it.

  What would her mother think of the situation in which they found themselves? Josefina weighed the options: To say they were Jews meant reducing the odds of their leaving, which meant increasing the odds they wouldn’t survive. To say they were Gentiles meant increasing the likelihood of departure and decreasing the probability of dying. Still, if Karola knew what her daughter was thinking, she would be alarmed, and her heart would be broken. Josefina apologized to her mother silently. We won’t convert, she promised.

  The surname Kohn might give them away, Josefina thought, and even if it didn’t, such a German-sounding name might effect Peter when he tried to enlist. They had stopped speaking German where anyone might hear it some time ago, and both children were born in Poland and fluent in Polish. But to identify oneself as Roman Catholic meant having the presence of mind to convince others to believe they were veritable Gentiles. And should they be put to a test, they’d have to know something about being Christian. There were no classes they could enroll in, no books to read, no copies of the New Testament to learn from. And even had there been such things, the practice of all religion was forbidden in the Soviet Union and considered a crime. Thus, none of the zeks talked about God. No one said prayers aloud. Those who did risked punishment.

  One of the older Polish women, Agatha, who worked in the laundry and lived in the same barrack as Josefina and Suzanna, had been sent to the cells after a guard caught her murmuring the words to grace before eating her food. When she returned after five days of solitary confinement, Agatha was hungry, but her faith remained intact. She had been given nothing but a small ration of bread and soup only once during the time she spent in the cells. Agatha continued to pray, but secretly. Both Josefina and Suzanna gave the woman portions of their own meager rations when she returned to the barrack.