He stands with his head bowed until she moves aside.
Outside, the bleak trees and bushes are covered in green lights, buds of leaves opening. The Soviet soldiers in the village look rough, dirty brown padded jackets, sheepskin hats. They eye him with a blank-eyed lack of interest. He goes to see the enlisting officer with his three red stars on his cap band, his well-polished boots and leather gloves. Moments later, Misha is signed up to fight for the Soviet army and sent east to the Sumy barracks to train to join the Russian Polish regiment.
He signs with a firm hand. He signs for Sophia and for their future.
CHAPTER FORTY - THREE
KOPYCZYNCE, MARCH 1944
I can give you but one thing only – a longing for a better life; a life of truth and justice: even though it may not exist now, it may come tomorrow.
Janusz Korczak
Sophia picks up the old flat iron from on top of the stove. She holds it on the worn cotton tunic on the blanket spread over the kitchen table. She presses along the seams, listening for the crackle of a crushed louse. The boiling water has killed some, the heat of the iron finishes off the rest. So far they have not found any in the house, escaped from the partisans’ washing.
She can hardly imagine the conditions for the men and women hiding in the forest in their muddy dugouts among the swaying trees. The bag arrives at the back door each week, smelling of leaf mould and woodsmoke. With the girls’ help Josefa washes and dries the clothes and returns the bag to the back stoop a couple of days later, with food inside.
Sophia has seen the man coming to collect it at night, tall and with a sculpted nose and cheekbones, wiry black hair and a red scarf like a Gypsy. The typical Jewish looks you can’t show in the street any more. He caught sight of her in the doorway, nodded his head, and said thank you, deferential to the good Polish girl helping the Jews. The clothes the partisans leave are stained with sweat and mould, running with lice. They go straight into the copper to be boiled, though she itches as she stirs them with the wooden tongs. So this is how it feels to meet a Jew. She thinks of the notices around Warsaw warning that Jews carry lice and disease.
She folds the ironed tunic, hangs it to air over the wooden rack in front of the fire, and picks up a pair of patched trousers. The iron has cooled. She places it on the stove top and takes up the second flat iron, hot from the black stove top, and presses it on the seam until she hears another crackle; a slight smell of singeing while she holds it in place for a moment, making sure the louse is dead.
Marianek is playing on the rag rug with a wooden train filled with bricks, a toy kept from Michal Wojciechowski’s childhood.
‘Mama,’ he says, holding up his arms. It’s important that he’s learned to call her Mama. And each time he does, something grows in her heart. For Sabina, for her sister’s beautiful dark eyes in the child’s delicate face, she has let a mother’s love grow for him. She hugs him, kisses his forehead and then settles the little boy with his wooden blocks, helping him build a tower before she carries on pressing the clothes.
The middle-aged Wojciechowskis are devout Catholics. On Sunday, Sophia, Krystyna and Sabina’s little boy go to mass with them. It’s important to take the communion with everyone else, Mr Wojciechowski has explained, or people will talk. God won’t mind at all if their hearts are not entirely in it. Strange to look around those heads bowed in prayer each Sunday and think, you were there and you were there. You were there when it happened.
Six months earlier all the Jews in Kopyczynce were rounded up, shot in the woods or sent to camps where they were never heard from again.
She wonders what it is that makes a family turn in their Jewish neighbours for a reward.
And yet there are people like the Wojciechowskis, plain, serious – heroes now – taking a terrible risk to shelter three Jewish strangers. And they’re not the only ones. Josefa has told them about a family living next to the Gestapo offices in the town hall who are hiding a Jewish woman in their loft. They play the piano to warn her to keep silent if the Germans come to the house.
The little boy is growing sleepy, leaning against the settle with his head nodding. She lays him down on the settle cushions by the stove. She strokes his head. Sabina’s soft hair.
Sometimes they all ambush Sophia with their absence: Sabina, Mother and Father, and the gentle and wild children in Korczak’s home. Korczak, Stefa. They ambush her with a sudden and violent grief that makes her gasp and empty out her heart, making her want to lie down and give up.
And Misha. She’d feel it, wouldn’t she, if something had happened?
People still need clothes to wear. She returns to her task, picks up the half-ironed trousers.
Later, the sun setting, as she lights a lamp to finish the last of the ironing, she jumps at a loud knock on the door. She sweeps the ironing off the table into a basket, a cloth over the top, and answers the door.
There’s a German soldier in the doorway. He looks her up and down approvingly, her pale hair.
Three other soldiers are getting out of the jeep.
‘We’re commandeering the house for billets for the night,’ he tells her.
She hasn’t got time to get Krystyna out of the house before the soldier spots her in the kitchen, cutting up cabbage. She stands close to Marianek as the soldiers come in. They smell of drink, jackets open, dishevelled and unwashed.
With a flash of hope, Sophia realizes that they must be on the retreat, heading west and helping themselves as they go. But the war’s far from over yet. She sees reckless and bitterness in their faces. Defeat has made them more dangerous than ever.
She will have to tread carefully. One of the men kisses her hand, close and greedy and reeking of old sweat.
By the time the Wojciechowskis are back from work, the soldiers have made themselves at home. They’ve found the dried ham and are cutting off slices. They bring in bottles of vodka from the car and tell Krystyna to make sure there’s enough stew there for all of them, seem not to notice when Mrs Wojciechowski serves most of it to their German guests.
Marianek is in bed. Grey-haired Mrs Wojciechowski excuses herself and goes up to keep watch over him, leaving her husband with the girls and three very drunk and very complimentary soldiers. The fat one next to Krystyna won’t let her go up too when she says she’s tired. He kisses her on the cheek, his arm around her neck, pulling her towards him while the other soldiers sing a maudlin song in German.
Sophia is flirting and filling glasses, watching as the soldiers’ eyes grow red, perspiration on the fat one’s forehead. The man next to her is young, callow. He pinches her leg and she smiles. Mr Wojciechowski, the awestruck old teacher, is carefully getting the soldiers to explain in great detail the rapid advance they made across Russia two years ago, their victories, making them concentrate on their explanations. He too fills glasses, this time from his own bottle of vodka – a very potent home-made moonshine.
The first soldier nods off, the other two take longer, sprawling drunkenly across the chairs, the sofa.
But Sophia knows that if they wake, they will come looking for her and for Krystyna.
She sees a spare leather holster in the jumble of bags the men have piled up by the door, all pretence at army discipline gone. With a skip of her heartbeat, sees there’s a gun still inside it.
She knows how to shoot a gun.
Keeping her eye on the sleeping men, she slips it out and hides it under her arm, beneath her cardigan. She’s just leaving when the fat one wakes, sees her and calls her over. He makes her sit by him and listen as he talks in German and cries. He leans his body towards her, heavy arms around her, his breath stale alcohol. He lays his head on her shoulder, whispering something, then he takes a deep, sighing breath. She realizes he’s asleep again.
She stays rigid with him sleeping on her shoulder until the sun has almost come up over the dark line of forest trees behind the house. With the threat of dawn, the men have remembered the war at their heels and leave the
house in a hurry, piling the bags in the jeep, shouting at each other to get a move on.
They roar away. She still has the gun.
A few weeks later, the Russians reach Kopyczynce. They are civilized and respectful towards these fellow countrymen they are liberating.
The gun Sophia stole from the Germans is now a danger in itself, with a death penalty if the girls are found possessing arms. Sophia’s lessons in the ghetto mean that she can easily dismantle it. For the next few days the girls take a daily walk along the lake and every time they throw in a section of the gun, each splash in the water a sign of the war finally ending.
But still no news from Misha. If he were alive, wouldn’t he have tried to contact her by now?
The wind bangs the door left ajar in the kitchen. She goes to close it. A wild March day, a black cloud low over the trees. The white blossom of a plum tree is blowing away like paper confetti, lit up from behind by the sun, flying bright across the ashy sky. She holds up her face to the feel of the light.
Coming along the path between the back gardens she sees the postman in his smock, his canvas cap pushed back on his head. She watches him turn in to their gate. He hands her a triangle of paper folded and glued at the edges, looking at it as if he’s trying to see through the paper and read what’s inside.
‘From the Sumy barracks, then. From a soldier.’
She opens it as quickly as she can, trying not to tear the words, fingers trembling. She reads it, reads it again, leaning hard against the door frame, making out the words through a blur of salt water, swimming up to life again. It’s from Misha. Misha’s alive and he’s written to her. He’s alive.
She’s surprised to see the postman’s still there, mouth ajar, watching her with interest.
‘From your husband, news at last?’
Sophia blinks.
‘Yes.’
The postman looks impressed. Along with the rest of the village, he has not, up to this point, believed in the husband. She’s been quietly accepted as a woman of shame, a Polish girl with a child, pretending to be married. He doffs his cap respectfully and she closes the door on him.
She doesn’t care what they think of her. That’s not the secret she’s been hiding.
She reads the letter all morning, examining the writing, the ink, the smell of the paper, holding it against her face.
Misha is alive and well. He’s written her a letter. He’s training at Sumy in the Ukraine as part of the Polish First Army alongside the Russians. He thinks of her all the time, kisses her, longs to hold her again, his wife.
He’s alive.
She finally bursts out of the back door, the room too small to contain her joy, and dances with the falling petals of the plum tree.
Misha has written again. The entire Russian army is on its way west and they’re not going to stop until they reach Berlin. He’s left the Sumy barracks and has been assigned to a reconnaissance unit.
The war will end soon, he tells her, and then he and Sophia will go home to Poland.
CHAPTER FORTY - FOUR
LITTLE ROSE SUMMER CAMP, JULY 1944
The Russian army’s advance west is spectacular that summer and by July the Russians reach Poland.
After a long day’s fighting, Misha finds himself standing in a grassy field next to a white bell tower pitted with shrapnel – the bell tower of the convent at Little Rose summer colony. Five years earlier he climbed it with the children to see Warsaw in the distance. A month after that, the nuns tell him, a plane landed in the field and Hitler climbed the tower to watch the siege of Warsaw, vast drifts of black smoke scarring the sky.
Now the Russians are on the verge of liberating Warsaw and as part of the Polish First Army under Russian command, Misha will be there to see it happen.
Across the field are the wooden huts where the children used to stay, empty now.
Soldiers run past wheeling a gun. Misha turns just as a large explosion sends him flying up into the air in a shower of dirt. He’s unharmed, but there’s loud ringing in his ear, a sharp pain. He’ll never hear through that ear again, but today nothing can dampen his spirits as they press on under gunfire, heading towards Praga and the suburbs of Warsaw.
A feast that evening. The Russian soldiers have been liberating the German rucksacks left behind in the recently abandoned trenches, rifling their superior supplies, sardines, Belgian chocolate, Dutch cheese, even French champagne.
‘Have to watch out for lice, though,’ one of the Russians tells Misha. ‘Germans don’t know how to get rid of lice like Russians do.’
Misha’s unit eat in the garden of an abandoned house. They sit along a bench in a small orchard, hard, new apples growing on the branches.
By the end of the following week they have taken Praga back. The Polish unit are welcomed home to Warsaw’s working-class suburbs as heroes. The Russian army set up camp on the banks of the River Vistula, looking out across the water.
On the other side of the river in Warsaw the Polish underground army have risen up against the Germans in the expectation that the Russians will soon arrive across the bridge to join them.
The Polish First Army make one breakout attempt to help them, but the casualties as they cross the river are so high, they are forced back in bitter defeat – while the Russian army sit tight and watch.
Scant intelligence comes through but it seems the Poles are fighting with antiquated and home-made weapons against the most feared of German troops, the savage Dirlewanger Brigade. The reported losses are catastrophic, but the Poles fight on – and wait for relief. Impatiently, Misha and the Polish army stand ready for the order to move on Warsaw, desperate to go to the aid of their fellow Poles.
But the order to move does not come. The months go by and winter sets in. The Warsaw uprising is crushed.
Are the Russians happy to see a Warsaw broken and defeated, ready for a Russian occupation?
The sound of explosions does not stop. Hitler will never forgive the Poles’ stubbornness in defying him not once but twice. It’s not enough to march its entire remaining population away to camps. A furious Hitler has ordered a complete eradication of Warsaw’s very bricks and stones. With an anguished heart, Misha watches the burning skyline across the river as a squad of Wehrmacht demolition engineers destroy Warsaw’s medieval libraries and Baroque churches with dynamite. The city bursts into atoms of dust, crumbles to the ground. Flamethrowers follow and Warsaw blows away in mighty clouds of black smoke.
The Führer has fought the stones of Warsaw and won.
Months later, in January, Misha’s unit is sent across the white waste of the river in the dead of night to find a silent Warsaw guarded by the corpses of frozen Germans. Dawn shows stumps of a broken city protruding from a blanket of snow. The ghetto is a ploughed field of salt and silence.
A few emaciated people in muddy rags appear from cellars to gaze wild-eyed at the blaring speakers on the Soviet jeeps proclaiming Warsaw’s liberation.
Sitting in the icy jeep as the Russians move on to crush Berlin, Misha is silent: if you can lose an entire city, then how much easier to lose a slight, fair-haired girl with pale blue eyes. He understands now that there is scant hope of seeing his family in Pinsk again, Papa, Ryfka, Niura and all the many aunts and uncles. All he can do now is fight on, for Sophia, for all those he has lost.
CHAPTER FORTY - FIVE
WARSAW, MAY 1945
I cannot give you love of man, for there is no love without forgiveness.
Janusz Korczak
The room behind her is filled with flowers. Yesterday was Sophia’s name day and the children at the Polish school where she now teaches came with so many bunches of lilac and mayblossom that she’s had to use every jug and bottle she could find, stand them on shelves, on the table. It looks like an indoor garden – and it feels right on a momentous day like today. She’s leaning on the windowsill, looking out for the first sight of an American Willys jeep. She’s holding a letter from Misha in her hand, a sm
all triangle of thin, army paper, light as a child’s paper aeroplane. She’s read it over and over. It says he’s been stationed nearby and is due leave, so he’s hoping he’ll be able to drive out to see her today.
She and Krystyna have been living in Łowicz for the past few months. It’s a small country town badly damaged by the war. But it’s not just the buildings that are broken with whole sections of the town missing. She’s seen no Jewish faces on the street, no Jewish businesses, no women with baskets of bagels in the market. She and Krystyna are two blonde girls living quietly. They don’t often mention to people that they are Jewish. Officially, under the communists Jews have equal rights now, but Łowicz is a town of unexploded bombs, fenced-off buildings, an uncertain landscape.
Today, however, as she gazes from the first-floor rooms that she and Krystyna share, this humble street of low houses has become another place, illuminated by the morning sun, everything hyper-real and significant as she listens out for the sound of a jeep. In this street, among these buildings, she will see Misha again. The sky is a remarkable blue, small white clouds hurrying across in the warm breeze. Under this sky she’ll meet Misha again.
She’s not seen or touched or smelled Misha for nearly three years. Will he be the same? They will come to each other with three years of terrible experiences, piled up between them like a mound of unwanted luggage. She knows so little of what he’s been through since they parted, the people he has met. He’s said nothing in his letters about Berlin, the fighting.
His letters say how much he longs to see her, to be with her again, that he loves her as much as ever.
But she’s not the same. What will he see? Her face looks a little haggard, she thinks. Small lines around her eyes when she looks in the mirror. She’s done her hair three times with Krystyna’s help, and then combed it all out again. And this dress. Isn’t it a little dowdy? She’s mustered lipstick, perfume, but she thinks it smells a little sour and faded.
The Good Doctor of Warsaw Page 24
