Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  “Piotr Ilyich,” he said, “I wish you good fortune.”

  Peter nodded.

  “I have something you might need,” the older man said, and he produced an object tucked into a space between the bunk and his mattress.

  He handed Peter a small sheaf of blank pages, crudely sewn together into a notebook. “This I found,” the older man said. “I think it might be of better use to you than me.”

  Peter held the packet of paper in his hands before secreting it away in a pocket his mother had stitched into his coat when they lived, however briefly, in the third-floor room in Lwów. That world seemed as if it belonged to another century. He knew their journey out of the Soviet Union was not going to resemble a holiday excursion. He and his mother and sister would have to travel on foot, outside in the elements. The trains and trucks they’d board would be crowded with other refugees. They’d be bounced in carts. Their lodging would be uncertain, and food … well, nothing could be as bad as the food in the camp, but he also knew that food might prove difficult to obtain beyond the camp’s gates.

  “Thank you, Vladimir Antonovich. Citizen chief, it has been an honor to have worked with you. I wish we could have met under different circumstances.”

  “Very enterprising,” the brigade leader said, and then he smiled. He picked up his boots and the rag he had been using to polish them. “You don’t have to be always a Stakhanovite, Piotr Ilyich. Just have a good life if you can.”

  The first stop in that good life would be roughly 450 miles to the southeast, where the Polish Army was mobilizing the men and women who had been deported to the Soviet camps. Josefina, Peter, Suzanna, and several other zeks traveled by cart to Yoshkar-Ola. There they boarded a train bound for Totskoye. Snow fell on the newly released men and women as they straggled to the station. They wore shabby clothing and weathered footwear and held tight to small, precious bundles. They carried bread, and if they were lucky, a precious piece of sausage or sugar, provisions squirreled away or newly acquired. They were ragged and tired, but for the first time in a long, long while, they walked among the living, as free as they ever felt, with something like hope flickering in their minds.

  Brief Sojourn in the Garden of Eden

  5 JANUARY 1942, EN ROUTE TO TOTSKOYE

  PETER WATCHED THE SNOW FALL from the window of the train. What a difference their departure was compared to how they had arrived: Even though the train was very crowded, he and his mother and sister traveled now as ticketed passengers in proper wagons with seats and windows. Most of the other travelers slept. Peter could only guess at what filled their dreams: things that were comforting, perhaps, such as clean sheets, the soft fur of a dog or cat, warm food. His mother and sister leaned against one another. Though they had been in such close proximity these last several years, Peter never had much opportunity to look at either of them this closely. Good manners kept him from staring at anyone, especially Mother and Suzi.

  His sister’s kindness and quiet reserve were at the center of her great poise. Suzanna’s modesty made her seem even more beautiful. She deserved better than all this, Peter thought. She should be seated at a piano playing Chopin. Or listening to Uncle Arnold play a passage from one of the operettas he loved so dearly. She should be giggling and blushing because some boy looked her way. Gossiping with her friends. Suzanna deserved soft pillows and pretty clothes and gentleness. She wanted, he guessed, to marry one day, have a family. To have her own kitchen, a piano in a well-appointed parlor, fine china, jewelry. Or, simply, a good, kind husband and children who minded and studied hard.

  His mother’s chiseled features had sharpened on her much thinned face. She had lost her hair and covered her head with a nondescript shawl. Peter tried to recall what she had looked like when they were in Teschen. She had been a classy lady then. Classy lady: the expression conjured a conversation—in the kitchen of the bakery apartment, between his Uncle Arnold and Aunt Milly. Peter had been looking at a framed photograph of the two of them, taken in Vienna.

  “It’s before we were married,” Aunt Milly said. She touched Arnold’s cheek. He smiled at her. “Ten years of dating—who can imagine that? We were so happy.”

  “Your Aunt Milly was, as they say in English, ‘a classy lady,’” Arnold said.

  “Was?” Milly asked, a look of mock disbelief on her pretty face.

  They both had laughed. Peter always thought their love was something he could touch. Anyway, his mother had been classy before, yes, that was the word. And now, asleep, with this brief respite from hardship, she looked burdened with fatigue and worry.

  He retrieved the little notebook given to him by Vladimir Antonovich. He held it in his hands and absentmindedly stroked the paper. If only he had a pencil and was able to sketch, he would try to draw the sleeping faces of his mother and sister. Or he’d describe them with sentences. How long had it been since he set words on a page? His mother had done all the letter-writing while they were in the camp. Paper had been such a luxury. If Peter had had this notebook in the camp, he might have traded it for food. Or new boots. Yet Vladimir Antonovich had not done that. Peter guessed the older man must have felt a temptation to record what was happening in his daily world. But he hadn’t. Now Peter was holding the notebook, but he was without pencil or pen, and there was nowhere to procure such implements. He put the sheaf of pages away in his rucksack, leaned back in his seat, and closed his eyes.

  If he were to make a preliminary entry in a diary, perhaps Peter would have noted that travel under any circumstances is always potentially dangerous. Voyagers are distracted by things they haven’t seen before, and it’s often challenging to navigate unfamiliar languages and customs. But to circulate during wartime, in a country ruled by an iron fist—such a voyage is sure to be fraught with hazards no one can predict. Maybe he would have written a declaration—I must be vigilant, or something like that.

  It’s true, Peter thought before finally drifting off to sleep, I must be vigilant.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, THE TRAIN ARRIVED AT KAZAN, crossing the confluence of the Kazanka and Volga rivers and picking up more passengers. The train then moved south, past Ulyanovsk, where the river narrowed, and onto Syzran, where it crossed the Volga and headed east to Samara and then south again, arriving finally at Busuluk. They traveled more than 420 miles in just over twenty-four hours.

  All the Polish passengers got off the train. Many of them wore rags. An equal number were infested with lice or sick with various ailments. All were hungry and worn. Many could barely feel anything more than the rising doom caused by severe fatigue and sorrow, to which they had not succumbed during their imprisonments but now freed, were able to contemplate. Each of them, Peter guessed, wanted to return to something resembling normal life—a real bed, adequate food, care and medicine when they were sick. They were greeted by representatives of the Polish Army and social-welfare organizations, who ushered them into lorries and transported them to the Polish Army’s headquarters at Kultubanka.

  To find oneself over and over again in a tent or barrack of any camp in the Soviet Union, especially with the shadow of prison life cast over one’s psyche, was only a vague approximation of normal life. But, Peter thought, at least they were in a more mild region, whose rain and mud, although maddening, were nothing compared to the snow and ice of Mariskaya. The many sick among them were shuttled off to the makeshift infirmary. If they weren’t ill, they were issued a blanket and directed to tents. Their clothing was disinfested. They showered. The Polish women who served food, themselves released from the camps, presided over cauldrons and ladled out hot soup thick with potatoes and even some meat. They ate rations of real bread.

  The day after their arrival, January seventh, 1942, Peter enlisted in the newly formed 26th Infantry Battalion, which was part of the 9th Division. He was now part of Anders Army, named after the general who commanded them, Władysław Anders, who had also been imprisoned by the Soviets. Because Peter was a soldier in this army, his sister and mother w
ere allowed, as part of a small civilian contingent, to travel with the battalion out of the Soviet Union.

  At five in the morning on January fourteenth, Peter’s battalion moved out. If one could look down at the train station’s platform from above, the fur hats worn by the officers appeared like a wide ribbon of beaver pelts. Soldiers and civilians moved about in the falling snow. The locomotive stood massive and black, a great dark proud machine, for which Peter felt immense affection, as if the thing were animal and not metal. Wood had already been loaded onto the train. And food. When they boarded the heavy-goods and people-carrier transport, Peter was elated to be out of the freezing air. Their destination: Uzbekistan.

  They traveled for a week, first through the snow-covered steppes of Kazakhstan. Clay huts and camel-drawn sleighs appeared every so often on the horizon. In Aktyubinsk, they got off the train and ate in a huge hall with rows and rows of tables. There they were served chicken broth with noodles and buckwheat groats with fish.

  “It’s almost civilized,” his mother said as she set down a fork, a utensil no zek had ever seen in the camps.

  In Tashkent, a Soviet orchestra played music while they ate. Peter looked around. The officers were now dressed in neat uniforms supplied by the British. Disbelief played on the faces of almost all the Polish citizens who had been deported by the Soviets into the hell of the forced-labor camps that would become known as the Gulag. They were all entertaining the same question: how could the same government load you into an overfilled boxcar, starve and work you like a slave in abominable conditions and then send an orchestra to celebrate your arrival once you were released? There might never be an answer to that question.

  Local Uzbeks came and offered raisins, apples, nuts, and pomegranates. Peter was mesmerized by their brightly colored clothing and embroidered tubeteika, the tetrahedral, slightly conical skullcaps worn by both men and women. They were good-looking, strong people whose generosity humbled Peter.

  The train passed through villages and apricot orchards covered in snow. Both soldiers and civilians were astonished to see camels loaded with goods being led to market. On both sides of a wide road they pointed at houses made of clay with small wooden doors but no windows. What was it like inside such structures? When they arrived in Margilan at eight in the morning on the twentieth of January, Lieutenant Colonel Gudakowski ordered the recruits to wash and shave.

  “You need to represent our beloved Poland in an honorable fashion,” he told them.

  The mud swelled with each new instance of snow, sleet, or rain and was everywhere, making it difficult to move around, let alone remain respectably clean. Regardless, the lieutenant colonel wanted them to behave in an exemplary manner. Thus, they were to tidy up not only themselves but also the surrounding area. “If you see debris, remove it,” Gudakowski told them. No one was allowed in town past six in the evening. “And if you want to go to town, you must procure a pass from me or my deputy,” he added. Thieves would be prosecuted by military courts. The soldiers were to be polite to Soviet troops. Plans were underway to start an infirmary and community room for privates. Officers and soldiers were expected to attend Mass and other religious services.

  Peter’s mother and sister were quartered with the other civilians, most of them in army-issued tents. They procured rugs and blankets and made the best of things. Suzanna found a job in the camp’s kitchen, and Josefina went to work sewing silk parachutes. Silk had been cultivated and spun into fabric in Margilan for hundreds of years, and the city, founded by Alexander the Great, had become a well-known stop on the famous Silk Road between China and Europe.

  IN FEBRUARY, MORE SNOW AND RAIN FELL, which meant the misery of continued mud. The privates underwent training and were responsible for unloading provisions, often working ten hours a day. The officers attended lectures. Sometimes there were concerts. The soldiers drank beer made from apricots and ate roasted meatballs from street vendors when they did go to town. Recruits arrived by the hundreds. Tents were erected on a field, and instead of bunks, the newly minted recruits slept on mats made of eucalyptus or orange leaves. They were cold, but the weather was warming, and they were fed well. More importantly, they were spiritually restored by the presence of other displaced Polish citizens. While they dressed in English uniforms and saluted in the British manner, they spoke and sang and recited poetry in Polish. They attended Mass and listened to speeches made by the regiment’s commanding officers. The men shaved. They washed their shoes and thought of the days they had such things as shoe polish. They watched the spring come—first the plowing, the greening of the fields and the apricot trees, the emerald wheat, then the chorus of frogs, like at home, all of it followed by the deep melancholy of realizing they were not at home. They beheld the craggy, snow-capped Tian Shan mountain range, heard the complex, flight-borne song of skylarks, and delighted as the bright light of spring brought everything into focus. They were in the Fergana Valley, where, it was rumored, the Garden of Eden was supposedly located. Thinking about Adam and Eve traipsing around in mud caused some of them to laugh. It dried and then new snowfall melted, becoming what one officer called “a hellish cocoa.”

  On March twenty-third, they received orders to leave Margilan in two days. The hasty departure from the Soviet Union was ordered by General Władysław Anders himself. At the beginning of the amnesty, he had met Stalin, who, he surmised, was negotiating the release of the Poles only for Soviet gain. Furthermore, Anders knew Stalin wanted the Polish Army to be dispatched toward the German-Soviet front. He also knew such a move would mean death to almost all the Polish soldiers. Anders had been imprisoned at the infamous Lubyanka Prison, and like the majority of recruits in his army, he was starving upon his release. The men were not ready for the front. Thus he insisted that the Polish troops leave the Soviet Union. Persia, occupied in 1941 by the newly allied Soviets and British, was the most logical choice, and the British agreed to assist in outfitting and training the ragged Polish soldiers. At first, only the military higher-ups knew they were heading to Persia, from where they would be dispatched to other places: the soldiers into the theater of war, the civilians to refugee camps in Tehran. The officers in charge of the new recruits had to work quickly to organize this departure. The Soviets expected their equipment to be returned. Copies listing all the soldiers in the regiment had to be submitted. Uniforms had to be distributed. They did not have much to carry, so they were ready almost immediately.

  Peter recalled how carefully his family had packed before leaving Teschen, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. At least two days were spent filling valises and food hampers and rucksacks. Now that they were leaving, their belongings were neatly bagged and bundled in less than an hour. It reminded him of something his Uncle Ernst often said about going on vacation: “Weeks are required to ensure the proper packing of a bag before you leave. But when you’re ready to come home, you fill the suitcase quickly, behaving as if the Russian army had just come to town.”

  Out of Egypt

  25 MARCH 1942, MARGILAN TO MARY

  SUZANNA THOUGHT THE MORNING BIRDSONG a sign of good luck as she and the other refugee civilians in the company of the newly enlisted soldiers traveled to Gorczakowo station in Margilan. She took note of the local Uzbeks, who sat on carpets outside their houses and chatted in low voices, watching the Polish men load the train as the women and children boarded. A Soviet orchestra played Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7.

  It was finally spring, and Passover was coming in two weeks. Suzanna thought of Moses and his older sister, Miriam, and how it must have been for them just before they left Egypt. Probably, she reckoned, the departure of the Jewish slaves was more hectic than one thought while reading a Haggadah during a seder. First, there was the matter of the Jews even knowing they had been liberated. How would they have learned when to go and in what direction to travel? They had no postal service and no paper. No telephones or telegraphs. Suzanna imagined one person telling another, from one house to the next
, in a single act of communicating with one’s neighbor the blessed news about their liberty. Of course not only were there no modern forms of communication, there were no trains or lorries or bicycles or wagons. The Jews in Egypt had only their own legs and feet to carry them out of bondage.

  Her own transition to freedom, Suzanna mused, might have almost been missed if she hadn’t paid attention. Fraught with arrangements that could fail at any moment and colored by the arbitrary nature of violence and death during war and the continual uncertainty of any hour beyond the present one, the act of becoming unenslaved was not as jubilant a moment as she might have imagined. In fact, she thought, she probably wouldn’t ever again feel anything like safety, a thing she had taken for granted, a thing that was part of the past, vanished now, like her father, grandmother, aunt and uncle. This freedom seemed so mutable. How could she trust it? Peter was going off to war; she didn’t want to imagine losing him. And she and her mother were headed west, but she didn’t yet know where.

  Not only that, but the urgency to leave the Soviet Union was almost tangible in the press westward, town by town, hour by hour. The news trickled down to the recruits and civilians: they were headed to Persia, which required crossing the Caspian Sea. Suzanna understood that even with the tentative joy promised by liberation, a specter of some malevolence lingered, driving them more quickly to their destination. Like the Sea of Reeds in the Exodus narrative, the Caspian Sea would be all that separated them from their captors and freedom. It was still possible, she intuited, likely even, for the Soviets to arrest and retry any of them, and, of course, to return them to the labor camps in which they had been imprisoned.

  After the train was loaded with people and materials, a trumpet sounded. At that signal, the locomotive set off, pulling westward its bedraggled but newly hopeful human cargo. The day was warm, and the mood of the passengers alternated between relieved and fearful. They were leaving behind the misery of captivity, only to plunge once more into uncertainty in a foreign land, with yet other customs and another language to complicate all one takes for granted in daily life. Suzanna looked out at the passing Uzbek landscape dotted with flat-roofed clay houses. Rows of mulberry trees lined the streams. Oxen pulled wooden ploughs through the spring-darkened soil, all of it seemingly of another era. They traveled at the foot of the Alai Mountains and its stacked peaks shaped like Egyptian pyramids. The terrain was vast and largely uninhabited, but it hadn’t been touched by bombs. Now the transport of soldiers passing through added a brushstroke of war to the scene. Again Suzanna’s thoughts turned to the story of the Passover.