by Monica Hesse
Papa had already reported to the stadium once: The Germans made all men report. They were taken, but they were returned, ashen and not wanting to speak of what they’d seen. They returned.
I would tell this Red Cross worker that our identification cards were how we survived: Without one, you couldn’t buy food or walk in the street. So we had to go, and we wore our best clothes. The instructions told us to do this, which we took comfort in, because maybe they really were going to take our pictures for identification.
But then we got there, and there were no cameras. Just soldiers. And all they were doing was sorting us. By health. By age. Strong-looking into one group; weak or old or families with young children in another. One line to work in factories. Another line to camps.
It took hours. It took days. Thousands of us were on the field. All of us had to be sorted. All of us had to be queried about whether we had special skills or connections. The SS surrounded the perimeter. Behind my family, an old man I recognized from the pharmacy was praying, and two soldiers came over to jeer. One knocked the pharmacist’s hat off; the other kneed him to the ground. My father ran over to help him up—I knew he would; he was always kind to old people—even while my mother and I begged him not to, and I thought, What’s the use?
My mother and I took turns curling our arms around Abek and telling him fairy tales: The Frog Princess. The Bear in the Forest Hut. The Whirlwind, his favorite.
Abek was tall for his age, which made him look older. When we realized how the soldiers were sorting us, we told ourselves that would matter. Abek, Mama said. You are twelve, not nine, all right? You’re twelve, and you’ve been working in your father’s factory for a year already.
We made up these reassurances for all of us. We looked at Baba Rose, my sweet, patient grandmother, and we told ourselves she looked much younger than sixty-seven. We told ourselves nobody in Sosnowiec could sew half as well. Customers who bought suits and skirts from my family’s business did so because of the embroidery done at Baba Rose’s hand, and surely this counted as a special skill.
We told ourselves my mother’s cough, the one that had made her weak and gasping over the past months, the one Abek was starting to get, too, was barely noticeable. We said nobody would even see Aunt Maja’s limp.
Pinch your cheeks, Aunt Maja told me. When they come to you, pinch your cheeks to make them full of life.
Beautiful Aunt Maja’s face was so pretty and her laugh was so gay, none of her suitors ever cared that she was born with a mangled hip that made her lurch instead of glide. She was much younger than Mama, just nine years older than me. She used to tell me to pinch my cheeks so I would be as pretty as she was. Now it was so we would both be safe.
Darkness fell; it started to rain. We opened our mouths to catch the drops; we hadn’t eaten or drank in days. The water on our now-sunburned skin felt nice for a minute, and then we were cold. Next to me, Abek tucked his hand in mine.
And Prince Dobrotek crept into the horse’s ear, I said, telling The Whirlwind again. I was always good at telling stories. And when he crawled out the other side, can you remember what he was wearing?
A golden suit of armor, Abek said. And then he rode the horse to the moving mountain.
Pinch your cheeks! Aunt Maja hissed to me. Zofia, pinch your cheeks and smile.
I kept Abek’s hand in mine and dragged him with me to the soldiers.
Fifteen, I told them. I can sew and run a loom. My brother is twelve.
Do you see why there isn’t enough room on this woman’s intake form for me to explain all this? It would take her hours to write it down. She would run out of ink. There are too many other Jews, millions of missing, whose information she also needs to collect.
Dima steps forward. “Zofia doesn’t have more names; she’s not well.”
“I can do it,” I protest, but I’m not even sure what I mean by it. I can keep standing in this line? I can be well again?
The official woman adds my records to her pile. Dima extends his hand, and I accept it. I fold myself into the passenger side of his jeep and allow him to arrange his coat over my lap while Nurse Urbaniak makes sure the bundle of food is secure on the floorboard.
What I should have told the official woman is this: I know I don’t need to put anyone else on my list, because when the soldiers sorted my family, they sent us all to Birkenau. And when we got to Birkenau, there was another line dividing into two. In that line, the lucky people were sent to hard labor. The unlucky people—we could see the smoke. The smoke was the burning bodies of the unlucky people.
In that line, Abek and I were sent to the right.
On this continent, I need to find only one person. I need to go home, I need to survive, I need to keep my brain working for only one person.
Because everyone else: Papa, Mama, Baba Rose, beautiful Aunt Maja—all of them, all of them, as the population of Sosnowiec was devastated—they went left.
DIMA DRIVES SLOWLY. ON WHAT LOOKS LIKE THE MAIN street of this town, an aproned woman sweeps her stoop. At least, I assume it’s hers, I assume it was a stoop. What she’s doing is sweeping pebbles into a dustpan, then emptying the dustpan into a bin, and behind her is nothing. Rubble. The waist-high remnants of a brick structure, the vaguest hint of a doorway. It could be new rubble, from the Allies, or old, from the Germans. Poland was invaded twice. Is this Poland? The boundaries keep changing. This is the farthest I’ve been from the hospital. From the window, I could make out only a half-boarded-up milliner’s shop, with no dresses in the window. What do you think we’ll buy when we’re well? the woman we called Bissel had asked dreamily. I expect we’ll buy nothing, I said. Because nothing is for sale.
Dima’s Polish is a baby’s Polish, one- and two-syllable words punctuated by points and gestures. “Hungry?” he asks when the cobblestones give way to dirt. “Candy, under your chair.”
“No, thank you.”
“Look anyway,” he says proudly. “Surprise.”
Obligingly, I feel under my car seat. A paper packet of hard candies, and next to it, something rectangular and smooth. A fashion magazine. American, it looks like. A woman in a smart red hat. The first time Dima visited and I was actually awake, he asked what he could bring to the hospital, and I told him, lipstick. I could see he was taken by this, this idea of a scabbed, wasted girl wanting to look beautiful. I didn’t tell him I just wanted something to stop the pain in my chapped lips. I didn’t think he’d know the Polish words for beeswax or petroleum jelly. Lipstick, I thought he might know.
“Comfortable?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Blanket,” he offers, nodding toward the back seat.
“I’m not cold.”
“But every day you are cold.” He frowns. He was so pleased with himself to have thought of this, and so crestfallen that I might not need it. I reach for the blanket in the back seat and arrange it over my shoulders. Dima smiles approvingly.
“Thank you,” I say. “You are very kind.”
“Exciting day,” he says. “We’ll be there soon. This car is fast. Until, you rest.”
I lean against the side of the car but don’t close my eyes. The road is dotted with debris. Broken wagon wheels, upturned yokes, milk cans with rusted-out bottoms. Each item, I think, is a family that couldn’t walk any farther before they were stopped, or taken, or just too tired to carry more. Possessions were left behind this way, the frivolous things first, like music boxes and silk shawls and then everything but what a body needs for its own survival. And since a body can survive on almost nothing, everything was left behind. Broken wagon wheels, upturned yokes, milk cans with rusted-out bottoms. Each item is a family that couldn’t walk any farther before they were stopped, or—
Stop it, I tell myself, trying to break the loop. Stop. This is what happens to my brain now. It trips. It goes in loops. It won’t let me think about some things and won’t let me stop thinking of others. Sometimes my brain is fine. Getting better. But still triggered b
y things that I can’t always predict, and patchy like black ice.
I look to the other side of the road, toward the rolling farmland, trying to get unstuck. No debris in that direction. But there’s a large plot of upturned earth, brown and mealy, and I can’t stand to look at that, either.
Sometimes it’s not that families got tired. Sometimes they were shot on the spot. Sometimes it was whole towns, into mass graves. I squeeze my eyes shut.
It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
I used to like the smell of dirt. On holiday in the country, Abek and I would draw pictures with sticks; I would teach him the alphabet.
A is for Abek.
Is it possible that right now I can smell something beneath this earth, something fetid and terrified?
B is for Baba Rose.
“We stop for lunch?” Dima suggests, and I’m relieved at the sound of his voice, breaking up my thoughts.
“Do you mind if we keep driving? I want to get to Abek. Unless you want to stop,” I add hastily. This is the longest period we’ve ever spent together, the first time he’s seen me off the hospital grounds. But if he thinks it’s strange, he hasn’t let it show.
“No, we can drive. I want to take you there, safe. Do you need anything else? Water? Walk your legs?”
“Stretch your legs,” I correct him.
“Stretch?”
“That’s what you say. It’s an idiom. A saying, I mean.”
“You need to stretch your legs?” He’s pleased with the new phrase; he reaches over and pats my knee. Lucky, the other nothing-girls had said. Be sweet to him.
I don’t know if Dima’s posting to Sosnowiec was chance. He might have requested it. I didn’t want to ask; I thought it was best not to clarify our terms.
“No, I—could we just keep driving?” I ask. “That’s what I’d like best. Maybe you could tell me a story. Or I could try to rest again.”
His eyes immediately fill with concern. “Yes. You should rest. You rest, and I’ll take us home.”
I didn’t even mean for my eyes to close; I was looking for quiet, not sleep. But they must have closed, because suddenly I feel the car jolt to a stop.
“Zofia.” Dima’s hand is on my shoulder, gently waking me.
My eyes fly open, get my bearings. The ground is flatter. The sun is in the middle of the sky; hours have passed. Dima smiles broadly, gesturing through the windshield.
At first, I can’t tell what he wants me to see, and then I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A wooden sign with painstaking calligraphy.
“Already?” I gasp.
“I told you, this car is good. This car is fast.”
SOSNOWITZ, the sign says. The Germans had come into Sosnowiec and given it a German name.
I hadn’t meant that the car is fast, though. I meant, How can we be here? How can I be back home already? It was easier to imagine the evil things happened far away. On a different continent. But Birkenau, the first camp, was barely twenty-five kilometers from my town.
“This is it, yes?” Dima asks. He’s pulled the jeep to a stop and peers at me curiously. I’m not having the reaction he thought I would.
“This is it.”
“Tell me where I should go now?”
I swallow, get my bearings. “Home. Abek.”
“Which way?”
We’re on the edge of Sosnowiec now. Small farms, small plots of land. As we get closer to the city, the houses will cluster and turn into three- and four-story apartment buildings. In the distance, I can make out the factory district; if we were closer, I’d be able to see the soot that the factories create, hovering in the air above the power lines for the trams. Wide, paved plazas. Electric streetlights, lunch cafes filled with rushed workers.
“Zofia?”
I gather my thoughts. There are two addresses I could direct Dima to. The first is in the Środula neighborhood on the outskirts of town, the Jewish ghetto my entire family was forced into when I was thirteen. Trash in the streets. Crumbling walls, vacant lots. Six of us crowded into one room.
The second address is my home, my real one, which belonged to Baba Rose, where my mother was raised and my father moved after they married. Closer to the center of the city.
“Turn right,” I decide. Our real home. That was the plan, for Abek and me to meet there. That’s what I’d told him. Repeat the address, Abek. Remember the birch trees outside? What if he’s been waiting there alone for me? I tried to get better sooner, Abek. I tried.
Dima turns, and the gravel road becomes a paved one. We pass a few men in simple work clothes, and then we pass more men, but they’re in business suits and hats. Dima raises a hand in greeting; one waves back, cautiously, and the others don’t acknowledge our presence at all.
“What’s this?” Dima points through the windshield at a large expanse of green in the middle of buildings.
“Sielecki Park. Sometimes we would go here on school trips.”
“Ah!” A few minutes later, he stretches out his hand again, pointing at something else. “And this?”
He’s so excited to see this town, as if he himself were on a school trip, as if we were on holiday together. At the hospital, they tried to prepare us that it might be strange to return home, but I didn’t expect what I’m feeling now. My twisting insides, the shallow, metal taste in my mouth.
“This is a castle?” Dima points toward the most ornate building we’ve seen yet.
“Train station. There used to be a market there on weekends. We call it—” I break off, because even this inconsequential memory makes me feel a pang of familiarity. “We call it the Frying Pan.”
My ugly, beautiful city. Sosnowiec is not an impressive place like Kraków, where Mama would take me for birthday lunches. Sosnowiec is where the industrial barons came to build their mills: iron, steel, ropes, and dyes. It has wide roads, practical buildings, smoggy air. Efficiency, not charm. Who could love a city whose fondest nickname was “The Frying Pan”?
My family did. We had no idea how little the city loved us back.
I know that many people resisted the German Army: the Home Army, the National Armed Forces, the Jewish Military Union all fought against the occupation. I know—or I heard later—that there was a revolt in Warsaw, that the city rose up for more than sixty days to protest the Nazis, and I know that this is why there essentially is no more Warsaw: The Germans punished the city by razing it.
But I also know that when the Germans invaded, a lot of people in my city knew the Nazi salute.
The scenery becomes more personal. We pass the library, or what used to be. The market where we bought food the week of the invasion. It was summer; our cupboards were bare because we’d just returned from holiday. In the store, staples like bread were already scavenged. What was left behind were delicacies. Paper-thin nalesnikis, waiting to be rolled with minced meat. Bright jars of rhubarb preserves, in rows beside the dazed-looking grocer.
“Buy it all,” my mother said quietly.
The first two weeks of the German occupation, we ate like we were having a party.
The jeep circles a redbrick building with limestone archways, and I don’t wait for Dima to ask what it is. “Dietel Palace,” I say. “Heinrich Dietel started the textile factories in Sosnowiec.”
But as I say the words, my heart rate quickens, my mouth is dry. Dietel Palace means we are close to home. My father used to walk this route to get to our own factory.
I look closer. The fabric draped over the palace’s front gate isn’t the usual brocade representing the Dietel family’s fortune, but a billowing red with a yellow star and sickle.
“That must be where you’re supposed to go, Dima.” I point toward the Soviet flag.
His face lights up. “I think so. I will stop here, and then I will take you to your home?”
My panic rises, my heart pats faster. “No! I need to get to my house first.”
His face falls. “It will take only a minute.”
I bite back
annoyance, and I’m already reaching for the door. “My house is only a minute.”
“But, Zofia.” He’s stunned, I think, by my sudden fortitude, and I’m stunned, too.
“You should go. I’m sure you want to check in with your superior officers.”
And my brother might be home already, and I don’t want to wait. And I can’t have a reunion with other people watching.
“You’ll be safe without me?” he says reluctantly.
“I’ll write down the address—you can come over when you’re done.”
Eventually I persuade him to leave. I wasn’t lying. I’m only a few blocks from my home, an even shorter walk if I cut through the alleyways, which is what my feet do by memory, running, running, while my bad foot begins to ache on the stones. I can’t run; I’ve been too weak to run for years, and yet here I am, running while my heart explodes in my chest.
And then I am there, standing beneath a white street sign: MARIACKA.
It’s a short road, made mostly of apartment houses facing the team line. Our building is midway down the block. Four stories tall, made of rosy brownstones.
I’ve rehearsed this moment a thousand times. What I would do if our old doorman was there. What I would do if it were a new doorman who didn’t recognize me.
Nobody is standing by the entrance, though. There’s nobody to stop me from going in, so I push against the oak door. In the lobby: the same marble tiles. Same flickering bulb. Home.
At the row of mailboxes, I stop. Sweeping my hand through the box, I feel a lump of brass: the spare key, taped far in the back where nobody would feel if they weren’t looking. The key falls into my hand, heavy and sculpted, Sellotape crumbling into brown flakes.
