We Were the Lucky Ones Read online

  Eliska offers her hand. Her eyes, powder blue like her mother’s, once again meet Addy’s. ‘Votre musique est très belle,’ she says, holding Addy’s gaze. Her French is perfect, her handshake firm. Addy finds her confidence at once attractive and startling. There is more to this young woman, he realises, than her lovely face. He lets his hand slide from hers and immediately regrets it. It’s been a year since he’s felt a woman’s touch – he hadn’t realised how much he longed for it. His fingertips are electric. His whole body is electric.

  ‘They call you the Master of Ceremonies on the ship, you know?’ As Eliska smiles, two small dimples form around the corners of her lips. She brings a hand to the pearls resting on her collarbone.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Addy replies, trying desperately not to seem flustered. ‘I’m glad you enjoy the piano. Music has always been my passion.’ Eliska nods, still smiling. Her cheeks are flushed, although it doesn’t appear she’s wearing any rouge. ‘Prague is an alluring city. You are Czechoslovakian, then,’ Addy says, tearing his gaze from Eliska’s to address her mother.

  ‘Yes, and you?’

  ‘I am from Poland.’ A stab in his gut. Addy doesn’t even know if his home country exists any more. Again, he pushes the worry aside, refusing to let it ruin the moment.

  Madame Lowbeer’s nose twitches, as if she might sneeze. Poland is clearly not the answer she was anticipating – or perhaps for which she was hoping. But Addy doesn’t care. He looks from mother to daughter, a flurry of questions darting through his mind. How did you wind up on the Alsina? Where is your family? Where is Monsieur Lowbeer? What’s your favourite song? I’ll learn it and play it a hundred times if it means you will sit and watch me again tomorrow!

  ‘Well,’ Madame Lowbeer says, her smile tight, ‘it is late. We must sleep. Thank you for the concert; it was lovely.’ With a quick nod in Addy’s direction, she links elbows with her daughter and they make their way through the arched doorway toward their cabin, the soles of their buffed ankle-strap heels knocking softly on the hardwood floor.

  ‘Bonne nuit, Addy Kurc,’ Eliska calls over her shoulder.

  ‘Bonne nuit!’ Addy replies, a bit too loudly. Every part of him wishes Eliska would stay. Should he ask her to? It had felt so good to flirt with her. It had felt so – normal. No, he’ll wait. Be patient, he tells himself. Another night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Genek and Herta

  Altynay, Siberia ~ February 1941

  Nothing could have prepared Genek and Herta for the Siberian winter. Everything is frozen: the dirt floor of the barracks. The straw scattered over their log bed. The hairs on the inside of their noses. Even their spit, long before it hits the ground. It’s a wonder that there is still water at the pit of the well.

  Genek sleeps fully clothed. Tonight he wears his boots, hat, a pair of gloves he’d purchased when the snow first started falling in October, and his winter coat – it is lucky he’d thought at the last minute to bring it from Lvov – and still, he aches from the cold. The feeling is intense. It’s nothing like the dull pain between his shoulder blades after hours spent heaving his axe, but rather a deep, relentless throb that pulses from his heels, up through his leg bones, into his gut and out his arms, triggering spastic involuntary full-body shivers.

  Genek curls and uncurls his fingers and wiggles his toes, nauseated by the thought of losing one. Nearly every day since November, someone at the camp has awoken to find an appendage black with frostbite; when it happens, there is often no other choice but for a fellow prisoner to amputate. Genek watched a man once writhing in pain as his small toe was sawed off with the dull blade of a pocketknife; Genek had nearly fainted. He inches his body closer to Herta’s. The bricks he’d warmed by the fire and wrapped in a towel to set at their feet have gone cold. He’s tempted to burn some more wood but they’ve already used their two allotted logs, and sneaking out under Romanov’s watch to steal an extra from the pile would be reckless.

  This godforsaken land has turned on them. Six months ago, when they’d first arrived, the air was so hot they could hardly force it into their lungs. Genek would never forget the day their train finally screeched to a stop and the doors were thrown open to reveal nothing but pine forest. He’d leapt to the ground clutching Herta’s fist in one hand and his suitcase in the other, his scalp swarming with lice, the skin over his vertebrae scabbed from leaning against the splintered wooden wall of the train car for forty-two days and nights. Fine, he’d thought, looking around at their surroundings. They were alone in the woods, impossibly far from home, but at least here they could stretch their legs and urinate in private.

  They’d walked for two days in the blistering August heat, dehydrated and dizzy with hunger, before arriving at a clearing with a long, one-storey log barracks that appeared to have been built in a hurry. When they finally set their suitcases down, their exhausted bodies reeking and sticky with sweat, they were welcomed with a few select words from Romanov, the black-haired, steel-eyed guard assigned to their camp: ‘The closest town,’ Romanov said, ‘is ten kilometres south. The villagers there have been warned of your arrival. They want nothing to do with you. This,’ he barked, pointing at the ground, ‘is your new home. You will work here, you will live here; you will never again see Poland.’

  Genek had refused to believe the words – there was no way Stalin could get away with this, he’d told himself. But as the days turned into weeks and then months, the strain of not knowing their future began to chip away at him. Was this it? Was this how they were destined to live out their lives, felling logs in Siberia? Would they, as Romanov promised, never go home again? If that were the case, Genek wasn’t sure if he could live with himself. For not a day passed that he wasn’t reminded of the fact that it was his own pride that had put them here in this horrific camp – a truth that weighed on him so heavily that he feared he might soon break.

  The worst of it, though, the piece that tormented Genek more than any other, was the fact that it wasn’t just his wife for whom he was accountable any more. She didn’t realise it at the time, but Herta was newly pregnant when they left Lvov – a surprise, of course, and one they’d have celebrated if they still lived in Poland. By the time they figured it out they’d been cooped up on the train for weeks. Herta had mentioned just before their arrest that she was late, but considering the stress they were under, it didn’t strike either of them as strange. A month later, her period still hadn’t arrived. Six weeks after that, her waistline had thickened enough despite the lack of food to announce the baby’s arrival. Now, she’s weeks from giving birth to their child – in the middle of a Siberian winter.

  Genek shivers as a loudspeaker clicks on, spitting static into the frigid air. He groans. All day and into the night the speakers spew propaganda – as if the incessant rants will convince the prisoners that communism is the answer to their problems. Fanatical revolutionary ideology fills their ears all day, and now, nearly fluent in Russian, Genek can understand the majority of the nonsense, making it impossible to tune it out. He drapes an arm gently around his wife and rests a palm on her belly, waiting for a kick – Herta says the baby is most active at night – but there isn’t any movement. Her breathing is heavy. How she can sleep through the cold and the roar of the loudspeaker is a mystery. She must be spent. Their days are gruelling. Most involve cutting down trees in the bitter cold, hauling logs from the forest across slippery, frozen bogs and over windswept snow dunes to a clearing, and piling them on sleds for the horses to pull away. Genek is done in to the point of delirium by the end of each twelve-hour shift, and he’s not carrying a child. In the past two weeks he’s begun begging Herta to stay put in the mornings, fearful that she’ll overexert herself on the job, that the baby will arrive while she’s stranded in the middle of the woods, knee-deep in snow. But they’ve already sold every keepsake and article of clothing they can live without for extra food, and they both know that the moment Herta stops working, their rations will be cut in half. �
��You don’t work, you don’t eat,’ Romanov reminded them often. Then what?

  The loudspeakers finally go silent and Genek exhales, relaxes his jaw. Blinking into the darkness, he makes a silent promise, that this will be the first and last winter they spend in this frozen hellhole. He doesn’t have it in him to survive another. You got us here, you can find a way out. He will figure a way. Perhaps they can escape. But where would they go? He’ll think of something. Some means to protect his family. His wife, his unborn child. They are all that matters. And to think that all it would have taken was a check mark – a willingness to feign allegiance to the Soviets until war’s end. But no, he was too prideful. Instead, he’d marked himself as a resister. Fuck – what has he gotten them into?

  Genek clamps his eyes shut, wishing with every part of his being that he could go back in time. That he could transport them to a better place, a safer place. A warmer place. In his mind, he travels to the clear waters of Lake Garbatka, where he and his siblings spent endless afternoons in the summertime swimming and playing hide-and-seek in the nearby apple orchards. He visits the sunny shores of Nice, where he and Herta once spent a week basking on a black pebbled beach, drinking sparkling wine and feasting on generous portions of moules frites. Finally, his memory skips to Radom. What he would do to sit down to a lavish dinner at Wierzbicki’s, to settle in with his friends for back-to-back pictures at the local movie house.

  For a moment, Genek is lost, the memories wrapped around him like blankets, easing the cold. But he is jolted back to his icy barracks when, in the distance, a wolf howls, its sorrowful call echoing through the trees on the outskirts of camp. He opens his eyes. The forest is full of wolves – he sees them every now and then while he’s working – and at night the howling has recently grown louder, closer. How hungry would a pack have to get, he wonders, before venturing into camp? The fear of being torn apart and eaten by a wolf seemed childish, like something his father would have threatened in jest when he refused to eat his cabbage as a boy – but here in the woods in snow-smothered Siberia, it feels eerily possible.

  As Genek contemplates how, exactly, he would go about staving off a hungry wolf, his heart begins to punch at his ribs, and out of his mind pours a barrage of horrific what-if scenarios: what if he simply isn’t strong enough and, in the end, the wolf wins? What if there’s a complication in Herta’s labour? What if the baby, like the last three born in the camp, doesn’t make it? Or worse, what if the baby survives, and Herta doesn’t? There is one doctor left living among them. Dembowski. He’s promised to help deliver their child. But Herta … The odds of survival for the average prisoner at Altynay narrow by the day. Of the three-hundred-some Poles who arrived at the camp in August, over a quarter have died – of starvation, pneumonia, hypothermia, and one he doesn’t dwell on, in childbirth – their bodies laid to rest in the forest, exposed to the snow and the wolves, the ground too frozen for a decent burial.

  Another howl. Genek lifts his head and glances toward the door. A sliver of moonlight glows beneath it. Overhead, he can make out the shadows of icicles suspended from the beams of the barracks, trained like daggers at the dirt floor. Returning his cheek to the straw mat beneath him, he presses his shivering body tighter to his wife’s, willing himself to sleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Addy

  Dakar, West Africa ~ March 1941

  Addy and Eliska sit staring at the sea, watching as a liquid sun sinks toward the horizon. A cool breeze rustles the giant leaves on the coconut trees behind them. This is their third visit to the crescent-shaped Plage de la Voile d’Or. Tucked away between the Parc Zoologique and an ancient Christian cemetery, the beach is an hour-long walk from the port of Dakar. At each visit, they’ve had it entirely to themselves.

  Addy brushes a few silvery flecks of sand from his forearms, which over the past ten weeks have browned to the shade of toasted baltona bread. He never imagined when he set sail from Marseille in January that he’d wind up in Africa, with a tan. But since the Alsina was detained in Senegal by British authorities – ‘This is a French ship, and France is no longer a friend of the Allies,’ their captain was told – Addy’s skin had grown accustomed to the relentless West African sun.

  The Alsina has been anchored for two months. The passengers haven’t an inkling of when – or if – they’ll be allowed to sail again. The only date Addy knows for sure, the date he is acutely aware of, is the one two weeks from now when his visa will expire.

  ‘I’d do anything for a swim,’ Eliska says, her shoulder grazing Addy’s. They didn’t believe it at first, when the locals told them the sea was infested with great whites. But then they saw the headlines in the paper – SHARK ATTACK, DEATH TOLL RISES – and began spotting shadows beneath the water’s surface from the bow of the Alsina, long and grey like submarines. On the beach, sharp, heart-shaped teeth washed up by the dozens, pricking the soles of their feet if they weren’t careful where they stepped.

  ‘Me, too. Shall we tempt the fate, as the Americans say?’ Addy smiles, thinking of the night, two and a half years ago, that he’d learnt the expression. He’d been at a cabaret in Montmartre, and had taken a seat beside a saxophonist who turned out to be from Harlem. Willie. Addy remembers the conversation well. He’d told Willie that his father had lived for a short stint in the States – an adventure that has always intrigued Addy to no end – and had peppered poor Willie with endless questions about life in New York. Hours later, to Addy’s great amusement, Willie offered up a few of his distinctly American idioms, which Addy scribbled in his notebook. Tempt fate, break a leg, and close but no cigar were among his favourites.

  Eliska laughs, shakes her head. ‘“Tempt the fate”? Did you get that one right?’ she asks. Addy is obsessed with his American sayings and is reluctant to admit to butchering them on occasion.

  ‘Probably not. But what do you say, shall we?’

  ‘I will if you will,’ Eliska says, narrowing her eyes at him as if daring him to accept the offer.

  Addy shakes his head, marvelling at the ease with which Eliska is able to laugh off danger. Aside from complaining about the heat, she hasn’t seemed fazed by their two month detour in Dakar. He turns to her, blowing playfully into the blonde hair over her ear and studying her scalp as his mother used to study the skin of the chickens at the market in Radom. ‘You look just right,’ he says, cupping his hand into the shape of a c. ‘It’s supper time. I bet the sharks are hungry.’ He clamps down on Eliska’s knee.

  ‘Netvor!’ Eliska shrieks, slapping his hand away.

  Addy catches her hand. ‘Netvor! This is new.’

  ‘Tu es un netvor,’ she says. ‘Un monstre! Tu comprends?’ They speak French together, but Eliska has been teaching Addy a dozen or so Czech words a day.

  ‘Monstre?’ Addy banters. ‘That was nothing, Bebette!’ He wraps his arms around her, biting her ear as they roll backward, their heads landing softly on the sand.

  They’d discovered the beach two weeks before. The fresh air and seclusion are heavenly. The others from the ship aren’t brave enough to venture so far off on their own, and the locals don’t seem to have much interest in the beach. ‘What with their dark skin and all, why would they?’ Eliska once quipped, prompting Addy to ask her if she’d ever seen a black person before. Like many of the others aboard the Alsina, until she set foot in Dakar, she hadn’t. Most of the Alsina’s European refugees refused, in fact, to converse with the West Africans, a behaviour Addy found absurd. Racism, after all – the very root of Nazi ideology – was the reason most of them had fled Europe.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I want to get know the Africans?’ he’d asked, when Eliska questioned why he thought it necessary to mingle with the locals. ‘We’re no better than them. And besides,’ he’d added, ‘the people are everything – they’re how you come to know a place.’ Since they arrived, he’d befriended several of the shopkeepers who manned the stores lining the harbour, even bartered with one – a photo of Judy Garland torn f
rom a magazine left by a passenger in the Alsina’s first-class lounge for a colourful string bracelet that Addy had tied around Eliska’s wrist.

  Addy checks his watch, stands, and pulls Eliska to her feet.

  ‘It’s time already?’ Eliska pouts.

  ‘Oui, ma cherie.’

  They carry their shoes as they make their way back down the beach in the direction from which they’d come. ‘I hate leaving this place.’ Eliska sighs.

  ‘I know. But we can’t afford to be late.’ They’d talked a sentry into giving special permission to disembark the Alsina between noon and six in the evening. If they broke curfew, the privilege would be revoked.

  ‘How is Madame Lowbeer today?’ Addy asks as they walk.

  Eliska chuckles. ‘La Grande Dame! She’s … how do you say it … a bourru. A curmudgeon.’

  In the past month, Eliska’s mother has made it quite clear that there is nothing acceptable about Addy courting her daughter. It hasn’t anything to do with the fact that he’s Jewish, Eliska assures him – the Lowbeers are Jewish, too, after all – it’s that he’s a Pole, and in Magdalena’s mind, her Swiss boarding-school-educated and bright-futured daughter is far too good for a Pole. Addy is determined to win over Madame Lowbeer, though, and has gone out of his way to treat with her nothing but the utmost respect and deference.

  ‘Don’t worry about my mother,’ Eliska sniffs. ‘She doesn’t like anyone. She’ll come around. Just give it some time. The circumstances are a bit … étrange, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Addy says, although he’s never met a soul who didn’t like him.

  They walk slowly, enjoying the open space around them, chatting about music and films and favourite foods. Eliska reminisces about growing up in Czechoslovakia, about her best friend, Lorena, from the international school in Geneva, about her summers in Provence; Addy talks about his favourite cafes in Paris, his dream to visit New York City and the jazz clubs in Harlem, to hear some of the greats in person. It feels good to converse like this, in a way that they might have before their worlds were turned upside down.