[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  No one seemed to know. The barrack was filthy, and Feliks curled up on a straw mat ridden with lice, sweating and shaking from fever. The next morning, they were pushed onto a railcar with no talk of a destination.

  As the hours passed on the journey, Feliks had nearly passed out, squeezed next to Lucyna in the darkness of the train. He expected to find Germans at the end of the line, but when the railcar finally stopped and he stumbled outside, gulping deep breaths of chilly air, he found only peasants. The train was stopped at a depot on the outskirts of Krakow, and the local villagers had come to offer their homes to the displaced residents of Warsaw.

  In icy rain, the local mayor stepped forward. He loaded Feliks and Lucyna onto a horse-drawn carriage and dropped them in front of a nearby farmhouse. Feliks and Lucyna walked to the door and knocked lightly.

  A man peered outside, frowning. “I am not taking freeloaders in my house.”

  “As soon as we feel better, we’ll work for you,” Feliks offered. “We’ll work for you on your farm.”

  “I am not going to take nobody,” the man said and shut the door.

  Feliks had no idea where to go and so he stood there with Lucyna on the farmer’s front porch. They had no coats, no boots. He hugged Lucyna tight to try to keep warm. The night passed ever so slowly. Eyes open, eyes closed, counting raindrops.

  WHEN THE MAYOR came back the next morning, he motioned to another farmhouse nearby. Feliks was burning up with fever and unsure if he had the strength to walk. He barely noticed the couple that opened the door, fed him chicken soup, and settled him into their bed. Blessed sleep.

  Had an hour passed? A day? A light flashed in his eyes. Feliks thought it might be the Gestapo, but the man by his bedside whispered, “I’m from the Underground, the Home Army in this area.”

  Feliks spoke, but his words sounded garbled. The man mentioned the farmer who had turned Feliks and Lucyna away the night before. “We are sorry that we couldn’t come to help.”

  Feliks drifted off. He sweated and shivered, mumbled incoherent thoughts. Another hour? Another day? He was being dragged through snow and hoisted onto the back of a wagon. Whispers about a Polish doctor. Wait, Feliks wanted to shout. He couldn’t be examined. He would be found out a Jew.

  The doctor lived a dozen kilometers away, and the farmer that Feliks and Lucyna were staying with helped Feliks to an office on the second floor of a stone house. The examination was thankfully brief, sympathetic talk of hepatitis and jaundice, and Feliks fell into a deep sleep on the ride back to the village.

  Finally, several days later, his head cleared. He found Lucyna peeling potatoes and tending to chickens. Feliks decided to wander the modest village, spread across the rolling fields of southern Poland.

  It was a poor community with no running water, but there was church every Sunday and a grand feast with ham at Christmas. The farmers seemed generous and kind, but Feliks soon heard stories about local men who butchered Jews found hiding in the woods.

  Feliks and Lucyna would go to church and celebrate Christmas.

  The farmers made Lucyna a coat from rabbit fur and offered the couple a sack to sleep on, which Feliks positioned between four chairs. He was grateful for the help and one morning went to see the mayor to inquire about teaching local children math and geography. Schools had been closed since the start of the war, and Feliks would have to teach in secret.

  The mayor sent Feliks to a nearby village to collect Polish primers, crayons, pencils, erasers, arithmetic books. Feliks stationed one of the schoolboys on the roof of the school to keep watch for German soldiers, who would surely burn the building to the ground if they discovered a Polish school.

  The days passed quickly. In the final months of 1944, the Red Army and Polish forces were moving quickly across Poland. Just after Christmas, Feliks heard movement in the woods, a rumbling at first, then blasts of artillery, coming closer to the village. The magnificent sounds of war. He crawled through the forest on all fours and spotted Soviet tanks a hundred feet away, preparing to liberate the region.

  The next morning, Soviet soldiers marched into the village.

  “Who are you?” a Soviet commander asked Feliks.

  “I am the teacher here,” he answered in Russian. And then he lowered his voice so the villagers couldn’t hear and said for the first time in months, “I am also a Jew.”

  The commander frowned. “You’re lying. There are no Jews here. You must be a spy. All the Jews were killed.”

  “That’s not true,” Feliks protested. “I escaped with my wife. I am telling you, I’m Jewish.”

  The commander summoned a young Russian soldier. “Take a load of this. This guy is telling me he’s a Jew. You’re Jewish. You find out.”

  The soldier turned to Feliks and explained that he had worked as a plumber in Leningrad before the war. “Are you a Jew?” he asked, frowning.

  Feliks nodded.

  The soldier started speaking Yiddish. Feliks struggled to make sense of the words. His family had always spoken Polish at home in Lublin.

  “If you’re Jewish, speak Yiddish,” the soldier demanded.

  “Believe me, I am a Jew, but I don’t speak Yiddish.”

  “Then you must be a spy.”

  When Feliks was a boy, his father had hired a rabbi to teach Feliks how to recite Jewish prayers. They sat around the kitchen table, and when the rabbi nodded off, Feliks quickly flipped to the last page of his prayer book to prove that he had finished his readings.

  From someplace in the depths of his soul, bone tired after five years on the run, Feliks remembered.

  “Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”

  The most important prayer in Judaism, recited morning and night. Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One.

  Feliks started to cry as he said it, and then the Soviet soldier kissed his cheek and pulled him into a long embrace.

  “You,” the young soldier whispered, “really are a Jew.”

  THE PEASANTS MADE Lucyna boots out of rabbit fur for the long journey back to Lublin, about eighty kilometers through the dense winter snow. The mayor begged them to stay, to make a new life in the village. Feliks secretly suspected that the mayor knew that he and Lucyna were Jews, and Feliks was grateful that he had kept their secret. But it was time for Lucyna and Feliks to go home.

  Lublin had been liberated early, in July 1944, and with it the Majdanek concentration camp, where Feliks’s family and Lucyna’s mother had been sent. More than forty thousand Jews had lived in Lublin before the war. Surely some had survived. On foot, Feliks and Lucyna trekked through village after village, shivering in the cold for ten days. On the outskirts of Lublin, an old man in a red hat stared as they passed by.

  “Amchu?” Feliks called gently in Hebrew. You are one of us?

  The old man hesitated.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Feliks said.

  “I have no one left,” the man answered and then offered Feliks and Lucyna a scrap of bread.

  Other Jews were coming out of hiding, heads down, frightened. Lucyna and Feliks could spot them instantly. “Like dog to dog,” Lucyna would say later.

  What does home look like in an upside-down world, on streets filled with ghosts and memories, in forests filled with corpses? To Lucyna and Feliks, Lublin looked like death, every stone covered in blood, every neighbor a stranger.

  There was a Jewish registry in the town square, established by a committee of Polish Jews to connect survivors from across Europe. Feliks and Lucyna searched the list for the names of family members, more than one hundred between them. But they found no parents, no cousins, no younger brother who should have been safe in Switzerland. They returned every day, praying for a familiar name, walking away with red, wet faces.

  Without graves to tend to, Lucyna and Feliks had no way to connect to the family they had lost.

  Feliks soon learned that two uncles had survived. One was living in Yugoslavia, but the other had returned to Lublin. He gave
Feliks some gold coins to sell on the black market to pay for food and a place to stay.

  Feliks and Lucyna wanted to leave Lublin, but they needed more money. Though the furs, radios, silver, and jewelry that Feliks’s family had stashed with neighbors at the start of the war were gone, he was the sole owner of his family’s apartment house. He contacted a lawyer, and because the building was not subject to state control and Feliks could prove ownership rights, he was able to sell the property to a local butcher for the equivalent of $1,000.

  Feliks bought Lucyna a dress, a hat, a gold watch, and, finally, a proper wedding ring. He bought himself some clothes. He had $400 left.

  “We cannot bring back what we lost,” he told his nineteen-year-old wife, who couldn’t bear to go near her own family’s home. “We can only live with the memories.”

  Feliks had never thought much about fate, but now he found himself in postwar Lublin, no smarter than the millions who had perished but somehow still alive, in a new suit and bow tie, Lucyna safe by his side. Had it been fate or sheer luck, like a good hand at cards, chance over choice?

  On a cold night in October 1946, with help from an agency in Palestine, Feliks and Lucyna crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, two of only two hundred Jews from Lublin who had lived to see the end of the war.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Good Fortune

  New York City

  1950–1951

  Lucyna Wojcik’s first impression of the Western world was forged off the coast of Nova Scotia on a blustery early morning in November 1950. From the deck of the USNS General R. M. Blatchford, she looked across the Halifax harbor and spotted a boy no older than seven, bundled against the cold, swinging fat batches of newspapers high into the air and over the side of the ship.

  Most of the twelve hundred war refugees on board couldn’t speak or read English, but they were hungry for news. They took the papers and knotted money to the end of the rope. One good toss and the rope landed back on the dock’s wooden planks with a thud.

  How hard these people work, Lucyna thought as the sun rose over the icy waters of the north Atlantic.

  She remembered what her parents had said when she had been a girl at home in Lublin, back when Lublin was still home. In America, people find money on the streets.

  This new world wasn’t what Lucyna had expected.

  It had been a stormy crossing from Bremerhaven, Germany, to northeastern Canada, and Lucyna and Feliks had huddled below deck on the crowded US Navy ship for nearly two weeks. They had come with only ten dollars, a satchel of Feliks’s medical books, and two microscopes that he couldn’t bear to leave behind in Europe.

  The war had uprooted millions of people, who crowded roadways, waterways, and displaced-persons camps, searching for family, searching for work, hoping to find someplace to settle when all of Europe was in a chaotic state of transition. After leaving Lublin, Feliks and Lucyna had settled in Vienna so that Feliks could finish medical school.

  His tuition had been free, part of a reparations pact that the Austrians had struck with the Allies. Feliks and Lucyna took classes with four hundred other young Jewish refugees who had found their way to the Austrian capital from Nazi-run camps and hiding places across eastern Europe. Most were orphans, and they had instinctively banded together in an old schoolhouse that served as a dormitory, pooling postwar food rations to make communal pots of soup.

  Lucyna was grateful that she was no longer in Poland, where she had lost her family, her identity, her God. Late into the night, the Jewish students in Vienna gathered to talk about their studies in engineering, medicine, or architecture and the professors who were loath to pass and promote foreigners, particularly Jews. Some professors, Lucyna discovered, had been members of the Nazi Party.

  Mostly, Lucyna, Feliks, and their new friends talked about where they would go once they had earned their diplomas. Where was home when no one was waiting to welcome them, when every street, every neighborhood, every town, every country, seemed more foreign than the next?

  The decision almost always came down to a tenuous family connection, a second cousin in France, a great uncle in Italy, an aunt by way of marriage in Palestine. And when there was no connection at all, a continent wiped clean of even the most distant relative, Vienna was no better or no worse than anyplace else. It was a city, not a home, but maybe that would change after memories gained distance, after some series of summers and winters and birthdays.

  Unlike many of the others, Lucyna wanted to leave Europe altogether. She had attended two years of medical school, but the sight of blood so soon after the ghettos had been too much to bear, and she stopped going to class.

  “I just want peace,” she told Feliks one night. “I have to rest.”

  Feliks wanted to finish his medical degree in Vienna. “I promised my mother that if I survived, I would go back to school.”

  He suggested Israel after graduation. Lucyna shook her head, unable to imagine herself living in another tumultuous part of the world. She had a distant cousin in New York, an older man with a family of his own. Lucyna had never met him, but he had sent winter coats and American money through Switzerland. In the United States, they could start over.

  “Let’s try,” Feliks said.

  In 1950, after four years in Vienna, they left for Germany’s North Sea coast, where Allied forces had established a displaced-persons camp in the port city of Bremerhaven. They stayed for six weeks before boarding the military transport ship with their new immigration visas, squeezing into narrow passageways alongside hundreds of other refugees wearing overcoats and nametags. Lucyna had spotted the Jewish refugees easily enough. They hauled suitcases filled with china, one set for meat and one set for dairy, to be sure that they could keep kosher in America.

  The voyage across the Atlantic passed slowly, the ship rocked by North Sea winds. In the galley at dinner one night, Lucyna and Feliks ate roasted turkey to celebrate a holiday that the ship’s captain called Thanksgiving. It would become Lucyna’s favorite day of the year.

  When the ship docked days later in Nova Scotia, the first stop on the way to America, Lucyna paced the deck, looking out across Canada as the chill from the water numbed her fingers and toes. Soon, she would arrive in the United States, in a city she didn’t know to see a cousin she had never met. Lucyna felt adrift, caught between worlds, the wailing of seagulls growing louder overhead.

  In America, people find money on the streets.

  Lucyna sighed, took one last look at the paperboy, and went back inside to find Feliks.

  THE SHIP PASSED a towering copper statue that appeared bluish-green in the morning light. Lucyna gaped at the robed woman on a pedestal high above the sea, holding a torch straight into the sky. And then, in the distance, the sprawling harbor of New York City, bigger and busier than any place Lucyna had ever seen.

  Ships bobbed in swirling clouds of steam. Loading cranes swiveled right and then left, hauling the day’s cargo. The air was raw, a smelly mix of fish and gasoline. The dock itself was a sea of red, and as the ship drew closer Lucyna could make out hundreds of Americans waving bright-red flowers that someone called carnations. She blinked, overwhelmed by the sight of it all, but then there was the bedlam of the vast processing center. Immigration agents corralled a mass of frightened people into lines for health screenings.

  Once outside, Lucyna and Feliks were whisked to a Jewish assistance center near the harbor, past a dizzying blur of buildings that seemed to block out the sun. Her cousin appeared, a stranger really. But he was polite and kind, and he showed them to a hotel in a village called Greenwich. It was in lower Manhattan, but Lucyna couldn’t tell up from down, only that the hotel was on Lafayette Street near pretty brick walk-ups and cobblestone streets lined with crisscrossing streetcar tracks.

  Lucyna and Feliks spent their first night in New York City in a pitch-black hotel room, listening to a never-ending symphony of strange sounds—car horns and sirens and slamming doors.

  The ne
xt morning, Feliks combed his closely cropped hair. Even in the ghettos he had been a meticulous dresser, clean and neat, and Lucyna admired her young husband as he set about seeing some Jewish doctors for help finding a job. Lucyna made her way back to the Jewish assistance center for breakfast.

  Several Jewish families asked Lucyna to keep their children while they went in search of work, and she quickly accepted. Until Feliks found a job, twenty-five dollars a week seemed like a small fortune, enough money for a cup of coffee and the occasional trip to a theater on 42nd Street, where Feliks and Lucyna could practice their English watching Sunset Boulevard.

  The hotel where they were staying charged a quarter for twenty minutes of radio time. Lucyna saved most of her earnings, and after several weeks she squirreled away enough to buy a twenty-five-dollar radio. Alone at night, Feliks and Lucyna listened to American news stations for hours, picking up English, and then wandered outside to explore the streets and alleyways of their bustling neighborhood, filled with young artists and jazz musicians.

  Six weeks passed while Feliks searched for a job. Lucyna’s cousin lived in a sprawling apartment overlooking Central Park, and more than once he had tried to slip Feliks and Lucyna some money. But Feliks wanted to find his own way, and he had politely declined the offers.

  Feliks and Lucyna went to see a Jewish committee that was helping survivors find jobs and housing. They were shown a map of the United States. Where would they like to live? Without thinking, Lucyna put her finger on a place called Rochester, in upstate New York.

  “That sounds nice,” she said, “wherever it is.”

  The Jewish committee arranged an internship for Feliks at the hospital at the University of Rochester, and soon they were renting a room in the home of a Jewish family who had emigrated from Germany just before the war. Lucyna found a job at a store called Woolworth, selling sweet fried cakes that someone called doughnuts.