Chapter Seventeen
Shokolad
How I hated that man who came each day and took away the cartridges and brought us our slop. But then one day he didn’t come. Or the next day. Now that he wasn’t showing up, I was aware of his absence. He was our only link to the outside.
We had made all the cartridges that we could but we ran out of gunpowder and cylinders. There were so many cartridges that they filled the box and we had to stack the overflow on the table, but they kept rolling off.
We had no food.
My body had become used to living on our meagre diet, but to survive on nothing was not possible. Each day, every day had been punctuated with that piece of sawdust bread and that bowl of turnip soup. Even with that food, my arms and legs had turned to sticks and my teeth had loosened. Now my feet stank from their open wounds and my knees buckled when I tried to stand. I lay on my lice-infested mat and waited to die, hoping that somehow my sister would live. I lost all track of time.
The floor shook.
Bits of stone crumbled from the earthen wall and hit me on the cheek. A bomb? Was this how I would finally die? I turned my face to the wall and closed my eyes.
A loud pounding on the door. I pushed myself up to a sitting position.
The wood cracked. People around me roused and stumbled to their feet. Someone pulled on my arm and I got up too, although the pressure of the cold stone floor on the sores of my feet was nearly unbearable.
We clustered at the back of the room, our arms wrapped around each other so the weakest wouldn’t fall, huddled in fear.
Bang … bang … bang … Soon the door was nothing but splinters. With one final loud smash of a booted foot hitting the wood, what was left of the door fell away. A gust of fresh air brushed against my face. I breathed in the incredible sweetness. It had been so long since I had smelled fresh air.
A soldier stepped through the splinters of wood.
But it wasn’t a Nazi. He had no arm band where the swastika should have been. And his helmet was bowl-shaped, not curving out at the edges. He blinked a few times, as if he couldn’t quite comprehend who or what we were. He reached for his pocket. Was there a gun in there? But no, he took out a handkerchief and held it to his face. That embarrassed me. I knew we stank. Would he think we were pigs like the Nazis did?
He said something in a language that I didn’t understand, but a rheumy-eyed prisoner with rags on his feet perked up at the words. He answered in the same language, then translated for us.
“He’s an American soldier. The Nazis are losing on all fronts. He will give us food, and he will get us medical treatment.”
I tried cheering, but I was so weak that it came out like the croak of a frog. I could feel my eyes tickling with the thought of tears, but I was too thirsty to weep. Was it really over? Could I now find my sister and go home?
The soldier asked another question and the prisoner translated for us. “He wants to know how many of us can walk out and how many need to be carried. He can get stretchers.”
We were all weak and hungry and every one of us had trouble standing, but we decided as a group that we would walk out with our dignity. It was our victory after all. We looped our arms around one another and stepped out of that horrible building and into the light.
The sunlight felt like a knife to my tender eyes. I covered my face with my hands so just a bit of the sun could shine through. I felt a warm hand on my shoulder as I listened to gentle murmuring in that strange language. The voice guided me somewhere and I followed him without hesitation. Everything about his manner showed that he considered me human — equal to him. I didn’t have to understand the words to know that I could trust him.
Soon I found myself sitting on a bench, and when I could finally take my hands away from my face, I saw that the soldier was sitting beside me, watching me with concern. He held a metal flask.
“Drink.”
He tipped it up to his own mouth to demonstrate, then handed it to me.
I lifted it gingerly to my parched lips and felt the cool clean water moisten my swollen tongue. I swallowed, nearly choking, then sipped some more. It tasted so good.
The soldier rooted around in the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small metallic packet. He set it on my open palm.
“Eat,” he said, motioning with his hands and pointing to his mouth. “Chocolate.”
Shokolad?
I knew that word. I looked down at the small package. It did not look like what I knew as shokolad.
He took it from me and bit into a corner of the metal, ripping off a bit of the package and opening it up. He shook out a small brown square and handed it back to me.
I held it to my nose and sniffed. It smelled heavenly. It was nothing like the sweet from the Nazi Brown Sister. Could it really be shokolad? I had only tasted it once as a very young child, but this scent brought the memory back.
I tried to bite into it but it was too firm for my wobbly teeth. The soldier took it from me again and broke off a small corner. I put that bit in my mouth and held it on my tongue. An explosion of flavour filled my mouth as that small morsel of chocolate slowly dissolved. I closed my eyes and savoured it.
I wanted to eat more but the soldier shook his head. He slipped the chocolate back into its metallic package and placed it in my palm, folding my fingers around it. I understood that he was giving it to me but didn’t want me to eat it all at once. I slipped it into my pocket.
My eyes had gradually adjusted to the light so I took a look around me. The bench where I sat was on that cobblestone street of quaint cottages. Army trucks with a white star emblazoned on the wood idled all along it. There was even a tank. American soldiers, all looking impossibly tall with clean hair and all their teeth, were busy setting up tents and chatting in clusters. I looked across the road and noticed the blue-shuttered cottage. That same ruddy-cheeked woman stared out through her lace curtains. Her eyes darted fearfully from me to the soldier at my side. The sight of her made me unbearably angry. All this time we had been starving, locked up mere steps from her house. Had she thought of us once? And now she was afraid.
The soldier followed my gaze. He stood up and motioned for me to come with him. He held my elbow as we walked to that house and he banged on the door. The woman disappeared from the window but she didn’t answer. He banged again. No response. He kicked it hard with his boot and the door flew open. We stepped inside.
A portrait of Hitler over the fireplace draped with black ribbon. Underneath, a picture of a young man in uniform, a black ribbon of mourning around it as well. Threadbare furniture, meticulously clean. The woman cowered in the archway between the living room and her kitchen, her eyes cast down.
The soldier gestured for me to come in and look around, but somehow now that we were face to face, I couldn’t bear to hate that woman. Was that a picture of her son? Had he died, fighting for Hitler? Was Hitler now dead as well?
Then the woman met my eyes and said in German. “Take what you want.”
I followed her into the kitchen. She opened up one cupboard after another, showing me how little she had. Mostly jars of pickled vegetables. Her most precious item was a stale loaf of dark bread and my mouth watered at the sight of it, but how could I take it from this woman who had so little?
She cut off a thick slice and handed it to me. I thanked her in German and held it to my face, breathing in the wonderful aroma of yeast and rye. How long had it been since I had held a piece of bread that was not made of sawdust? I longed to eat it, but my stomach was still roiling from that tiny piece of rich chocolate. Now that I finally had food, I couldn’t eat it. I put the slice of bread in my pocket, feeling more secure just knowing it was there.
When we walked out of her house, I saw that the rest of the soldiers had bashed open other houses. Mostly what the slaves carried out were bits of food, like a small wedge of cheese or a jar of pickled herring, but some brought out looted treasures that Nazi soldiers at the Front must have s
ent home to their families.
The man who had translated for the soldier cradled a large wooden icon of the Madonna in his arms. He was so weak that it took all his strength to hold onto it, but I could see the determination on his face. A soldier stepped in to help him with it. The sight of the plundered painting made me want to cry. It looked so much like the ancient icon that had been stolen from my blue-painted church back home. I watched as a soldier found the man a blanket to wrap the icon in. They loaded it carefully into the back of an army Jeep.
I walked over to the man and silently stood beside him as we watched the Jeep drive away.
“Where are they taking it?” I asked him.
“There is a Ukrainian Catholic priest in a refugee camp nearby who is building a temporary church for us,” he said. “The icon is a start.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my piece of bread. I tore it in half and gave one piece to him. He held it to his lips but did not eat it.
Chapter Eighteen
Looking for Larissa
It was a nurse who took Larissa away from me, and it was the doctor at the work camp who killed children for their blood. When the Americans took me to their hospital, I couldn’t stop screaming.
They took away my blue flannel dress. I was channelled into a lineup, naked and shivering, for a shower. I refused to go in.
A nurse picked me up and carried me in, ignoring my screams and scratches — ignoring the hot water that streamed down her uniform and ruined her leather shoes. When the warm water coursed through my hair and over my face, my muscles relaxed and I clung to that nurse as if she were my mother. Soaking wet and fully dressed, she sat me on her lap and rocked me, cooing a lullaby as she gently massaged shampoo into my hair and lovingly soaped away the months of dirt encrusted beneath my fingernails and behind my ears. I sobbed when she lathered the soap with her fingertips and gently massaged the soft suds into the wounds on my feet and legs. She washed sores I didn’t even know I had on my back and on my elbows. It had been so long since someone had cared for me that I could barely stand it.
The soap she used smelled like lilacs. It was nothing like that bleaching powder. She used real shampoo for my hair, so my scalp didn’t sting a bit. She wrapped me in a towel and she dried herself as well. Her nurse’s cap was wilted and ruined and her bun had come unpinned.
When I was dry, she gave me back my blue flannel dress. As I pulled it over my head, I wrinkled my nose at the unmistakable chemical smell of lice-killer. I longed for a future when that poison was no longer necessary.
Once I was clean, I thought she would let me go to one of the camps for refugees. I wanted to go to the one with the priest and the makeshift church with the icon of the Virgin Mary, but Nurse Astrid said not yet. She brought me to a long corridor of white beds that were not made of filthy straw. Each bed held a slave labourer who had been injured in a different way. Bandages covering eyes, or a leg in a cast suspended by a pulley. Some looked whole, but they stared at the ceiling without blinking. She lifted me onto an empty bed at the end of the corridor.
When she held a syringe to my arm, I tried to pull away. My mind knew that Nurse Astrid was trying to heal me, but my heart remembered the terrible things that had happened to children in that hospital in the work camp. “Please trust me,” she said in American-accented Ukrainian.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I tried to trust her.
She brought a doctor who did things to my feet and legs that hurt beyond belief. When I tried to crawl away, Astrid was the one who caught me and threatened to tie me to the bed. “Please trust me,” she said.
Astrid fed me. First just spoonfuls, and as my stomach got stronger, mouthfuls. My hunger roared like a lion. I could have eaten non-stop if she’d let me.
I knew that Astrid was being kind, but everything she did reminded me that I was still a prisoner. More than anything I wanted to get away. To begin my search for Larissa and for us to both go home.
When my feet had no more open wounds, Astrid would come by with a salve and massage them. It hurt intensely when she did it, but I also knew it was good for my feet.
“Soon you’ll be ready to leave,” she said.
One morning after breakfast she placed a big wrinkled paper bag beside me on my hospital bed and grinned. “Open it.”
Inside was a pair of thick woollen socks and a pair of sturdy leather boots that looked to be my size. My eyes filled with tears. The shoes that Juli had given me were so badly worn that they had disintegrated long ago. Clothing was scarce with all the refugees to be cared for, and footwear was even harder to come by, yet Astrid had somehow found me these precious items.
“Thank you,” I said in her language. It was one of the first phrases of English that I had learned.
It was early June and warm out, but the wool felt good on my feet. I laced the boots up as tightly as I dared and took a few steps. Slowly I was beginning to feel like a human again.
It struck me that Astrid looked so much like that nurse who had taken Larissa away from me, and it made me wonder. Did that other nurse think she was somehow healing us with her actions? I would probably never know.
Astrid got permission to take me by Jeep to the displaced persons’ camp with the makeshift church. The distance between the hospital and the camp was not great, but it took several hours because the roads were clogged with ragged refugees. They would travel in clusters but not all in the same direction.
“They go from camp to camp, looking for loved ones,” said Astrid.
I searched the faces as we passed them, and I looked especially carefully whenever I saw a girl with blond hair, but I never saw anyone who could be Larissa. The refugees were a wild assortment, speaking more languages than I ever knew existed. Some pushed wheelbarrows piled high with plundered china plates. Others, carrying battered suitcases overflowing with yellowed family photos, looked too healthy to be refugees. More than a few were clothed in striped rags. Gaunt beings clutched a piece of bread or a jar of pickles as if it were the finest treasure on earth.
The countryside was pocked with ragged craters where bombs had landed and it was rare to see a building standing. The road itself was a maze of rubble and holes, and I knew that unexploded land mines littered the ground, but Astrid manoeuvred like an expert.
“Here we are,” she said, pulling up to the one standing section of an ancient stone wall. Hundreds of bits of paper fluttered from it, their corners shoved into the crevices and cracks to secure them. “This used to be a convent.”
The sight of those hundreds of papers made me panic. By the time my father had been taken by the Soviets, praying was against the law. I had watched my mother fold up a note in the middle of the night and walk in the cover of darkness to our little blue church. It had been locked, and the priest executed, so what was she doing there? The next day I had crept to the church when no one was looking. I found her note tucked into a crack in the church wall. I pulled it out and read her plea to God to bring my father home. Then I took the note and placed it on my tongue, swallowing it like a sacrament. I wanted my father home too, but didn’t my mother realize she risked all our lives by writing that note? I never told her what I had done.
Astrid took my hand and together we walked over to those fluttering bits of prayer. I reached up and held one flat so I could read it. Anya Zuk, from Drohobych, looking for Ivan. Left for Flensburg June 2, 1945. I looked at another, and another. All were details of refugees, searching for their loved ones.
“Will they get into trouble for making these notes?” I asked.
Astrid shook her head. “Who is it you’re looking for, Lida? I’ll help you go through these.”
I told her about Larissa, but also about Luka and Zenia, Kataryna and Natalia. My heart ached as I read the details of so many lost loved ones, but I kept my hope until the very last paper. When we were finally done and I found no one I loved, I wanted to curl up and weep, but Astrid told me she would send my name and the names o
f my dear ones to the Red Cross.
“It may take time,” she said. “But maybe we will find someone you know.”
With her hand draped lightly across my shoulder, she led me inside the refugee camp.
Chapter Nineteen
Praying for Larissa
The smell of bleaching powder but not misery. No barbed wire. No Nazi soldiers with guns. This refugee camp had taken on a personality while I was being treated at the hospital. Fragments of families had claimed corners of rooms in the various blasted-out convent buildings. Others had built makeshift homes amidst the rubble from what they could find — twisted metal, broken-down doors, half-bricks.
The first thing I looked for was the church. People grinned when I asked about it and pointed me to an area at the back of the camp. Set off to one side was what looked like a long-abandoned barn on the outside, but there was a well-trod path leading up to it. I walked to the door and it creaked loudly as I opened it.
Sunlight poured in from the shattered rafters.
I gasped in amazement at what I saw. An altar neatly made of stacked tin cans with a wooden door laid across as a tabletop. The stolen icon from that German house was propped up in the centre of the altar, a golden candelabra on one side and dirt-filled tin cans holding hand-dipped candles on the other side. On the back wall of the barn hung a handmade wooden cross.
I knelt down before the altar and sobbed a prayer for the souls of my mother, father, grandmother. I hoped that soon they could rest in peace.
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