Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  “Might you teach us something of your faith?” Josefina asked her one day in a whisper while they were eating the morning soup. She offered half her bread to the woman.

  Agatha agreed to help, but she didn’t want Josefina’s ration of bread. “I do this because you, too, are children of God,” she said. “Besides, as a Jew, you already know the foundations of Christianity.” The other details, she explained, “about the order of things in a service or who does what—no one in charge in the Soviet Union will admit to remembering them anyway.” Over the course of the months that followed, Agatha taught them how to genuflect and say the Catholic prayers and, winking at Peter and Suzanna, how to pretend to be following Mass even if they didn’t really understand what was going on or being said.

  LATE AUTUMN 1941

  JOSEFINA HAD TO SOLVE A SECOND PROBLEM, which demanded considerably more effort. It was easy to train herself to think and speak in Polish and to silently rehearse the Catholic prayers while standing and being counted in the zona. The most important task, however, was to procure the necessary identity and transit papers, signed and stamped with approval by the appropriate clerk. Such documents were produced in towns and cities, and travel to such places outside a labor camp meant negotiating approval from the camp director and then enlisting the means to get there. To complicate matters, transportation options were limited; the war determined whose demands were prioritized; and no reliable communication network existed. Paper was in limited supply, which made securing the necessary travel documents even more difficult. All the zeks knew how the rules might change arbitrarily, because they did change all the time—norms were constantly adjusted; privileges suspended; basic rights erased. Which meant that something given to a prisoner—such as early release from the camps—could just as quickly be revoked.

  The months between the announcement of the amnesty and the actual time of departure was an emotional no man’s land between anticipation and anxiety. Josefina kept busy with a determination she tried to subdue lest she be noticed and potentially subjected to the retributive actions of guards or those zeks who were not being released. She collected bits of information, as did Peter, about whom to see, what to pay, and how to travel from one point to the next. She curried favor with the zovchoz, offering her embroidery skills in exchange for permission to travel to Yoshkar-Ola, the capital city of the Mari El Republic. The zovchoz, in a moment of unexpected generosity, pressed into Josefina’s hand a fair number of rubles. They exchanged no words. The gesture caused Josefina to feel her heart again, that quickening when it expands or breaks, as she closed her fingers around the gift.

  Little by little, Josefina had collected as much as she could by way of resources. Suzanna spent any extra time mending socks and coats and rucksacks. When Peter worked in the woods, he gathered fuel for their comets. Finally, the time came to go to Yoshkar-Ola, an excursion Josefina found herself awaiting with something like eagerness, a feeling that had eluded her since leaving home. She traveled by horse-drawn cart, driven by a Mari man who delivered goods to the labor camp and was some distant relation to Natalia. At first, she was delighted to find herself in transit and then in a place where the buildings and shops confirmed the existence of a place akin to civilization. But after the initial pleasure of seeing people in coats without numbers sewn on them and after the smell of tea and wood fires drifted away, Josefina noticed there were many Poles in Yoshkar-Ola, conducting the exact same business as she, all of them desperate and hungry.

  Josefina entered the building where transit papers were issued. The long line moved sluggishly, as she expected. It didn’t matter, though, because it was warm inside, and although no one could say that the Polish deportees who had queued up were happy, they were that much closer to leaving the sorrowful places in which they had been confined. They had also been granted this brief respite from freezing in the forests, although not working meant less food. Josefina touched the secret pocket sewn inside her coat, discerning the small bundle of ruble notes hidden there. She had become very practiced at assessing her environs without appearing observant; now she scouted out those hawk-eyed thieves who frequented such places. Thinking it safe, she plunged her fingers into the pocket and separated the number of notes she anticipated needing for the travel permit.

  “Next,” called out one of the clerks, her face impassive and her tone inscrutable. The line inched forward.

  Josefina observed the press of the line toward the windows where civil servants decided the fate of those who had come to seek travel permits. She watched the encounters, one after the other, in which few of the clerks practiced either civility or service.

  “Why don’t you have enough money, you stupid Pole?” she heard one clerk ask an elderly woman who had somehow managed to survive not only the trains but the subsequent imprisonment in the labor camp. The Polish woman, emboldened by her liberty and old enough not to care anymore what punishment the Soviet state might mete out, simply looked up at the clerk.

  “I forgot, citizen chief, that freedom must be purchased,” she said. “How foolish to think the work I’ve done here was enough to set me free.”

  “You don’t have enough for transit papers. Your request to cross the frontier is denied,” the clerk said.

  The burden of the mundane was elevated to unknown heights in the Soviet Union, Josefina mused. If buying bread was, for the average citizen, a daily lesson in uncertainty and shortages, for a zek to request permission to go anywhere was an exercise in irrationality. Josefina felt nauseous. What if she didn’t have enough money? She didn’t have a pass to stay overnight in the city, and even if she did, where would she stay? This meant returning to the camp like a dog with its tail tucked … only to figure out how to come up with more rubles and then make all the arrangements all over again to come back to the city.

  Josefina thought of it immediately, the wedding band she had refused to sell to Leonid Petrov back in Lwów. During the eighteen months of her captivity, the ring had remained in her shoe. A callous had hardened on the part of her foot that pressed into the ring during all the daily hours of standing and walking. Josefina looked at her hands. Her fingers had thinned so dramatically that, even if Julius were still alive, even if they were one day reunited, she knew she’d never be able to keep the ring on her finger.

  Finally, it was her turn at the window.

  The female clerk she stood before was Josefina’s age; her cheeks were round but grayed from lack of proper nutrition and exercise. She wore a thin band of copper on her ring finger, and her thick auburn hair was cut short. Had they met under different circumstances, Josefina wondered, would the two women have developed, if not a friendship, then at least an acquaintance unencumbered by the terrible fears promoted during this war?

  “Madame,” the clerk said in a tired but not discourteous voice, “how might I assist you?”

  “I just want to go home, citizen chief,” Josefina said.

  This statement, delivered so dispassionately, moved the clerk in some way.

  “You can call me comrade,” she said, and her mouth softened into a small smile. Josefina knew the other woman was seeing a Polish refugee in a filthy, tattered-yet-mended coat, but she suspected the clerk recognized her as a woman without a husband, a middle-aged mother more or less like herself—trapped by the circumstances of history—who would, by any means necessary, save her children.

  “Your permission letters, please. How many rubles do you have?” the clerk asked.

  She could have been like the majority of the men and women working here, Josefina thought, all of whom presided over their small corners of the Communist machine and were themselves fearful of arrest. These functionaries, she knew, could be held responsible for mistakenly permitting an enemy of the state to escape or evade “re-education.” Because they feared for their own freedom, they were meticulous in the execution of the most seemingly banal tasks. They’d rather deny someone a permit or a ticket or identification rather than bend the rules
and possibly suffer the consequences.

  But not this clerk; not this one time. The woman was being rational, allowing for an altered circumstance, providing an avenue of solution. Josefina considered this one of those small moments of providence, which raise into relief such kindness and generosity of spirit still possible in a world otherwise preoccupied with war. It was the sort of encounter she had vowed to recall, as a way to preserve her humanity, and for which she had made another knotted thread after they were released from the trains on which they had been thrust into captivity. To date only four such knots were in that thread, but each one was a singular window into the world beyond imprisonment.

  Josefina pressed the damp ruble notes into the clerk’s hand. “This is all I have, comrade,” she said.

  The woman counted the rubles. “It is enough,” she said, starting to fill out the application for the transit papers. She took Josefina’s given and family names and those of the children, and then noted their nationality (Polish), religion (Roman Catholic), and destination (Tashkent, where the Polish Army was headquartered).

  Afterward, Josefina headed to the train station. It was early afternoon, and a light snow had started to fall. She walked slowly, trying not to attract attention, hoping the prisoner number sewn into the lapel of her coat was adequately hidden by the plain shawl she used to cover her shorn head, the telltale mark of a zek. For the first time since she arrived in the Soviet Union, she felt the insecurity that accompanies public shaming. Ironic, Josefina thought, that the things which were true embarrassments—unjust arrest and imprisonment, forced labor and starvation—made her captors feel not one iota of self-consciousness. Even the zovchoz, whose generosity had insured her arrival in Yoshkar-Ola, did his job as if it were perfectly normal to enslave men and women in subhuman conditions, and aberrant to show others compassion, kindness, and respect.

  A commotion outside the train station caught Josefina’s attention. NKVD men were stopping the Poles who had come to buy tickets. Here it is, she thought, the obstacle of the day. All days in the Mariskaya labor camp featured at least one and usually many more obstacles. She watched as one of the men—he must have weighed no more than a ten-year-old child—was punched by a tall Soviet soldier doing the bidding of an NKVD officer with too much time on his hands and unkindness in his heart, motivated by having to meet his own quota. The man lay in the street writhing. And while it sickened Josefina to happen upon this scene, she knew, too, that to help him, to even look at him, or to turn and leave the area would attract more attention, and she would be stopped from completing her mission for the day. Better to continue, try to stay hidden in plain sight.

  She arrived at the door to the station, undetected, shaking just a bit, but near her objective.

  “Papers,” said a voice behind her.

  She turned to behold the NKVD man who had presided over the violence against the Polish man. Her shawl had slipped, and part of the prisoner number on her coat was visible.

  “Yes, citizen chief,” she said meekly, extending her identification and the recently approved transit papers.

  “You’re a prisoner?” he asked. He thumbed through the papers with an imperious air.

  Josefina nodded.

  “A dirty Pole?” He was taller than she, and he looked down at her.

  She bit her tongue, which brought tears to her eyes, an act she had learned was sometimes useful.

  “You’re probably also a stupid Jew as well,” he said. “Which means you cannot leave, you know?”

  Josefina shook her head no. The man asked her if her no was meant to answer the question about being Jewish, or whether she knew the Jews from Poland were not permitted to leave. He was trying to trap her, and now tears, the kind that had lodged in her gut since the last days of August 1939, started to wet her gaunt face.

  She could see the NKVD man was taken with his own clever questioning. He looked down at the transit papers, and held them out so that they caught the lightly falling snow, which blotched one or two of the freshly inked words. If enough were muddied this way, she’d have to start all over again. Josefina thought she might scream. “Please, citizen chief,” she said, holding back both the rage and fear that might contort her tone, “please allow me to explain, and perhaps inside, where you might be able to sit.”

  He grunted and thrust the papers back to her, and she quickly but carefully blotted and folded them and placed them inside her coat. “Keeping you here isn’t worth the bread we give you,” he said. “But to go inside, you must pay me.”

  “Yes, of course, citizen chief,” she said. Josefina reached inside her coat to the hidden pocket and deftly extracted several ruble notes, which she extended to the NKVD officer. He promptly burst into laughter. And then he did what she would never have expected, thrusting his hand inside her coat and feeling, without any modesty, for the secret pocket.

  “Is this where you hide all the money, you filthy Pole?” he asked, no longer smiling.

  Josefina managed to tell him yes. Her face flushed with shame.

  “I can’t hear you, filthy Pole,” he said, prolonging the search inside her coat, his hand rough against her bony body.

  “Yes,” she almost shouted. People were watching them; she could feel their gazes, their silent accusations, their pity.

  The officer reached into the hidden pocket and extracted the entire bundle of rubles. He lowered his mouth to Josefina’s ear and whispered. “You’re lucky this is all I’m taking from you,” he said, “you’re lucky you’re all worn out and about to break.” Straightening to his full height, he ordered her to get out of the way, couldn’t she see she was blocking the door?

  Josefina stepped inside the train station and immediately headed toward a bench where she could sit and compose herself. She mustn’t cry; she mustn’t allow her prisoner number to show; she mustn’t count all the ways she had just been humiliated. For a brief moment, she closed her eyes and summoned an image of herself as a younger, more robust woman. This is who you are, she told herself, this is the woman who will stand up and buy train tickets for herself and her children, with a wedding ring hidden in her right shoe.

  Which is exactly what Josefina Kohn did after she stood up from that bench. She waited in a line, slipped off her shoe, took out the ring, and gripped it in her hand. When it was her turn, she calmly asked the clerk for three tickets from Yoshkar-Ola to Totskoye, where she had heard would-be soldiers were to report. And when she extended the gold band, she saw in the eyes of the clerk who took it, the desire for such a shiny thing. Josefina wondered if the train-ticket seller could see on her face what the possibility of freedom looked like, or that the price of such a ticket was worth parting with the last thing that kept her husband alive in her mind.

  4 JANUARY 1942, MARI EL REPUBLIC

  AND NOW IT WAS THE FIRST SUNDAY OF JANUARY. For the zeks, it was a day off, the first in at least two months. For Suzanna and her family and the other Poles who had secured the necessary documents to leave the camp, it was a day of travel. Their papers and tickets were tucked inside their coats. Their rucksacks were buckled, and they were dressed in their many layers. They were about to leave the labor camp in the Mariskaya ASSR, where they had subsisted on very little. Suzanna knew her mother would not look back once they left. And if both women survived the voyage out, she knew neither of them would speak of it.

  When Suzanna said she would be leaving soon, Natalia smiled weakly. Suzanna grasped the Mari girl’s hand, and into it deposited the one treasure Mama had let her keep the day she sold most of their jewelry in Lwów. It was a very small locket, a gift from Aunt Greta. It was pretty—enamel on tin—but not a valuable piece of jewelry. But in the labor camp, Suzanna knew the Mari girl might be able to use it some day, to obtain something she didn’t have, something she might need. And if not anything necessary, perhaps it would be a reminder to Natalia that friendship was still a possibility in these dark times. The locket had been hidden—first in Suzanna’s shoe and then in a
hole carved into one of the posts of her bunk.

  “So you remember us,” Suzanna said. “Look, it opens.” She showed Natalia how to use a fingernail to pry apart the two halves.

  Inside were two tiny drawings, which pictured Suzanna and Josefina. They had been sketched by Herr Sinaiberger, in his villa in Skoczów. It was summer, and Suzanna was sitting in the garden. Mama was talking with Helen, Herr Sinaiberger’s wife. There were bees, of course, and it was a fine thing to sit in the shade and close her eyes and listen to them buzz as they hovered over the flowers. Before she had to hide the locket, Suzanna liked to open it and study the images. She had memorized the expressions Herr Sinaiberger had drawn, how they were brightened with smiles and eyes that looked forward. She felt certain she was able to carry in her mind—to wherever they were going next—the image of herself and her mother looking happy. She didn’t need those pictures anymore. Besides, the locket was one more tether to a place called home, a place, Suzanna intuited, she would never see again. And, it was something that might prove more valuable to Natalia.

  “We look different because we smiled so much more then,” Suzanna said.

  Natalia looked at her. “I have only this for you,” she said, producing a small bundle from her pocket. Suzanna recognized the fabric and understood that her friend had torn a small square from the colorful shawl she always wore. Folded inside the cloth envelope were tea leaves, a precious commodity in the camps. Suzanna was about to tell her friend that she couldn’t accept such a gift, but the older girl spoke insistently. “In case you get sick again,” she said. Natalia took Suzanna’s hands in hers. “Don’t forget me.”

  PETER TOOK ONE LAST LOOK AROUND THE BARRACK where he had lived the past eighteen months. The other zeks were in their bunks. Some were sleeping, others chatting quietly or smoking. Vladimir Antonovich was polishing his boots. He stopped when Peter neared his bunk.