We Were the Lucky Ones Read online

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jakob and Bella

  Lvov, Soviet-Occupied Poland ~ July 1, 1941

  Lvov has come undone. The madness began at the end of June, shortly after Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, which is when Jakob, Bella, Halina, and Franka went into hiding.

  They’ve been holed up in their building’s basement for over a week. A Polish friend named Piotr brings news and food when he can – a one-man makeshift relief organisation. ‘The city is swarming with Einsatzgruppen and what appears to be a Ukrainian militia,’ Piotr said when he first came by to check on them. ‘They are targeting Jews.’ When Jakob asked why, Piotr explained that the NKVD had murdered the majority of the inmates at the city’s jails before fleeing, thousands of whom were Ukrainian, and that the Jews were being blamed. ‘It doesn’t make much sense,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of the inmates were Jewish – but this doesn’t seem to matter.’

  There is a single knock from upstairs. Piotr. It was no secret that he, too, would be targeted by the Germans should he be discovered aiding Jews. Jakob stands. ‘I’ll go,’ he offers, lighting a candle and tiptoeing to the staircase. Along with news of the pogrom, Piotr often brings food – small parcels of bread and cheese. His knocks usually come once a day, in the evening.

  ‘Be careful,’ Bella whispers.

  Yesterday, ten days after the pogrom began, Piotr said that the paper estimated the city’s Jewish death toll at a horrific thirty-five hundred. Ten, twenty, even a hundred, Bella could believe. But thousands? The statistic is far too gruesome for her to bear, and she can’t put out of her mind the fact that she hasn’t heard from her sister since the invasion. Again and again she imagines Anna’s beautiful body among those strewn in the streets – Piotr says he has to step over corpses just to reach their doorstep. Bella has begged Piotr to visit Anna’s flat; he’s been twice, and twice he’s returned with the news that his knocks have gone unanswered.

  She listens as Jakob climbs the stairs. Soon there is another single knock, this one from Jakob, followed by four quick reciprocal taps, Piotr’s code indicating it is safe to open the door. The hinges whine, and a storey below, Bella exhales, listening to the faint murmur of conversation.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ Halina says, sitting down next to her.

  Bella nods, admiring her sister-in-law’s strength. Adam is missing, too. He’d insisted on remaining aboveground during the pogrom, claiming that the resistance needed him now more than ever. Halina has yet to hear from him, and yet here she is offering Bella comfort.

  The women sit quietly, listening. After a while, the conversation halts and Bella stiffens. The silence overhead stretches on for two, three, four seconds, then nearly half a minute. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she whispers. She can feel it in the dread blooming within her rib cage; whatever it is, she doesn’t want to know. Finally, the door above squeals, the deadbolt snaps shut, and footsteps make their way slowly back to the staircase. By the time Jakob reaches the basement, Bella can barely breathe.

  Jakob hands the candle and a loaf of bread to Halina and lowers himself to sit. ‘Bella,’ he says softly.

  Bella looks up, shakes her head. Please, no. But in Jakob’s face she can see that her instinct is right. Oh God, no.

  Jakob swallows, staring at the ground for a moment before uncurling his fingers. In his palm is a note. ‘Piotr found it, sticking out from under Anna’s door. Bella, I’m so sorry.’

  Bella stares at the wrinkled slip of paper as if it were a bomb about to detonate. She presses her lower back into the wall behind her, brushing Jakob’s hand away when he reaches for her. Jakob and Halina exchange a worried glance, but Bella doesn’t notice. She is paralysed by the notion that whatever her husband has, whatever he knows, will destroy her. That in a moment’s time, everything will change. Jakob waits patiently, silently, until finally Bella gathers the courage to take the note. Holding the wrinkled paper with both hands, she recognises her sister’s handwriting immediately.

  They are taking us away. I think they are going to kill us.

  Bella braces herself, suddenly unsteady, as if the ground beneath her has given way. She crumples the note, and as the walls begin to spin, her world goes dark. She brings her fist to her forehead and wails.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Halina

  Lvov, German-Occupied Poland ~ July 18, 1941

  ‘Ready?’ Wolf asks.

  They’ve paused on a street corner, a block from the work camp. Halina nods, surveying the camp – a shoddy cement structure confined by a barbed-wire-topped fence. At the entrance, a guard with a German shepherd at his heels. If things don’t go as planned, she realises, she’ll spend the foreseeable future staring at that fence from the inside. But what other choice does she have? She can’t sit idle any longer. It will destroy her. And perhaps Adam, too, if it hasn’t destroyed him already.

  ‘You’d better go,’ Wolf says. ‘Before they think we’re up to something.’

  Halina glances down the street at the tables in front of a cafe two blocks east of them, their designated meeting place.

  ‘Right,’ Halina says. She takes a breath and straightens her posture.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this alone?’ Wolf shakes his head, as if willing her to say no.

  Halina turns her attention again to the camp. ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

  Wolf, an acquaintance of Adam’s from the Underground, had insisted on walking with her to the camp from the city centre, but Halina was adamant that he hang back once they arrived – at least that way, she reasoned, if her plan failed, he would be able to return to Lvov, recruit some help.

  Wolf nods. A Polish couple walks by, arm in arm. He waits for them to pass, then leans in as if to kiss Halina on the cheek. ‘Good luck,’ he whispers, before righting himself and turning toward the cafe.

  Halina swallows. This is madness. She should be en route to Radom, she thinks, the summer’s heat suddenly stifling in her lungs. Her father had sent a truck. There are rumours of another pogrom in Lvov, Sol wrote after hearing of the first one. Come to Radom. You will be better off here with us. Jakob, Bella, and Franka had left that morning. Halina had stayed.

  She’d been home seven weeks ago, in early June. She’d brought IDs along with some zloty she’d saved – not that either would do her parents and Mila any good in the ghetto; the black market had all but dried up, and there was no use for an Aryan ID inside Wałowa’s walls. Halina had thought about staying in Radom, but her job at the hospital provided some income – she’d have been foolish to leave it – and Adam was far too entrenched in Lvov’s Underground efforts for him to move back. And anyway, there wasn’t room for the two of them in the tiny flat in the ghetto. She’d stayed only briefly, returning to Lvov with travel documents approved by her supervisor at the hospital, and with a set of her grandmother’s silver, carefully wrapped in a napkin. ‘Take it,’ Nechuma had insisted before she left. ‘Maybe you can use it to help get us out of here.’ And then Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and unleashed his Einsatzgruppen in Lvov; a massacre ensued, and her father sent the truck to retrieve his family. It had pained her, turning down his plea to return home, and she hates to think about what the truck had cost. She knows the family needs her. But she can’t leave Lvov without Adam. And Adam is missing.

  Halina recalls the day, just over two weeks ago, when the fighting let up in Lvov and it was finally safe to come out of hiding. She’d run the half kilometre to her old apartment only to discover it empty. Adam was gone. He’d left in a hurry, it seemed – had taken his suitcase, some clothes, and his false ID from behind the watercolor painting in the kitchen. Halina had searched the apartment for a note, a hint, anything that might reveal where he’d gone, but had found nothing. Over the next three days she visited each of the spots they’d designated as safe places to meet in an emergency, a dozen times – the arched doorway beneath the steps leading up to Saint George’s Cathedral, the stone fountain in front of the
university, the back bar of the Scottish cafe – but Adam was nowhere to be found.

  It wasn’t until Wolf knocked on her door that Halina was able to piece together what had happened. Apparently, Wolf said, the Germans had shown up at Adam’s flat one night during the pogrom. He had been taken to a work camp just outside Lvov’s city centre – Wolf knew this only because someone in the Underground had managed to bribe a guard in the camp to pass notes through the fence surrounding the property. Adam’s note had shown up in Wolf’s hands the week before: Please check on my wife, it read. He’d signed the note with the name he and Halina used on their false papers – Brzoza. The Underground had been trying to find a way to get him out, but without any luck. Hearing this news was an enormous relief – Adam was alive, at least – but it also made Halina sick, not knowing what the Germans had in store for him. If they knew about his involvement in the Underground, he was a dead man. ‘I have some silver,’ she told Wolf, ‘a set of cutlery.’ Wolf had nodded tentatively. ‘That could work,’ he said. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  Halina wraps her fingers around the leather handles of the purse hanging over her shoulder. You’ll get only one shot at this, she reminds herself. Don’t botch it. Her heart beats in double time as she makes her way toward the guard at the camp’s entrance, feeling as if she’s about to go on stage, to perform in front of an unforgiving audience.

  The German shepherd notices her first and barks, straining against his leash, the tan and black fur over his shoulders spiked and angry. Halina doesn’t flinch. She keeps her chin high, trying her best to exude a sense of purpose in her stride. With the leash wrapped firmly around his wrist, the guard stands with his feet spread wide for balance. By the time Halina reaches him, the German shepherd is nearly hysterical. Halina offers the guard a tight smile and then waits for the dog to quiet. When the barking ceases, she rifles through her purse for her ID.

  ‘My name is Halina Brzoza,’ she says in German. Like Russian, German had come easily to her; she’d perfected it when the Nazis first invaded Radom. She rarely speaks it, but to her surprise, the words flow naturally off of her tongue.

  The guard doesn’t speak.

  ‘I’m afraid you have mistaken my husband for a Jew,’ Halina continues, handing the guard her forged ID. ‘He is inside, and I’m here to collect him.’ She hugs her purse to her side, feeling the lump of the cutlery against her ribs. The last time she’d used these knives and forks was around her parents’ dining table. She’d have laughed then if someone had told her that someday they might be worth her husband’s life. She eyes the guard as he examines her ID. Unlike some of the Germans in town, whose necks appear as broad as their skulls, this one is built tall and narrow. Shadows pool in his eye sockets and beneath his cheekbones. Halina wonders if his features have always been this sharp, or if he is as hungry as she. As the rest of Europe.

  ‘And why would I believe you?’ the guard finally asks, handing her back her ID.

  Sweat has begun to gather on Halina’s upper lip. She thinks quickly. ‘Please,’ she huffs, shaking her head as if the guard has offended her. ‘Do I look Jewish?’ She stares hard at him, her green eyes unblinking, praying that her assertiveness, which she has grown to rely upon, might help her. ‘Clearly there’s been a mistake,’ she says. ‘And anyway, what would a Jew be doing with silver of this quality?’ She slips the silver from her purse and unwraps a corner of the napkin to reveal the handle of a spoon. It glints under the sun. ‘It’s my husband’s great-great-grandmother’s. Who was German, by the way,’ Halina adds. ‘She was a Berghorst.’ She runs her thumb over the engraved B, silently thanking her mother for insisting she take it when she left Radom, and sending up an apology to her deceased grandmother, who grew up a proud Baumblit.

  The guard blinks at the sight of the silver. He looks around, making sure no onlookers have seen what he’s seen. Returning his gaze to Halina, he lowers his chin, his silt-grey eyes again meeting hers.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he says. His voice has fallen almost to a whisper. ‘I don’t know who you are, and frankly I don’t care if your husband is a Jew or not. But if you say your husband is of German decent,’ he pauses, looking down at the silver in Halina’s hands, ‘I’m certain that the boss can help you out.’

  ‘Then take me to him,’ Halina says, without hesitation. The guard shakes his head. ‘No visitors. Give me what you have there and I’ll bring it to him.’

  ‘No offence, Herr—?’

  The German hesitates. ‘Richter.’

  ‘Herr Richter. But I’m not parting with this until you’ve delivered me my husband.’ She slips the silver back into her purse, tucks it tightly into the crux of her elbow. Inwardly, she is trembling, but she keeps her knees locked in place and her expression steady.

  The guard narrows his eyes, then blinks. It seems he’s not used to being told what to do. At least not by a civilian. ‘He’ll have my head,’ Richter says coolly.

  ‘Then keep your head. And keep the silver. For yourself,’ Halina counters. ‘You look like you could use it.’ She holds her breath, wondering if she’s gone too far. She hadn’t meant the last bit as an insult, but it had sounded like one.

  Richter considers her for a moment. ‘His name,’ he finally says.

  Halina feels her shoulders relax a touch. ‘Brzoza. Adam Brzoza. Round spectacles, pale skin. He’s the one in there who looks nothing like a Jew.’

  Richter nods. ‘I make no promises,’ he says. ‘But come back in one hour. Bring your silver.’

  Halina nods. ‘All right then.’ She turns, walking briskly away from the camp.

  At the cafe she finds Wolf seated at an outdoor table, a cup of chicory coffee before him, feigning interest in a newspaper. By the time she’s seated across from him, Richter has disappeared from his post. ‘Can you spare an hour?’ Halina asks, gripping the seat of her chair to steady her hands, grateful for the fact that the tables around them are empty.

  ‘Of course,’ Wolf says, and then lowers his voice. ‘What happened? I couldn’t see a thing.’

  Halina closes her eyes for a moment and exhales, willing her pulse to slow. When she looks up she sees that Wolf has gone pale, that he is as nervous as she.

  ‘I offered him the silver,’ she says. ‘He tried to take it right then but I told him he could have it as soon as he delivered me my husband.’

  ‘Did it seem like he would come through?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  Wolf shakes his head. ‘Adam always said you had guts.’

  Halina swallows, suddenly exhausted. ‘It’s all an act. Let’s just hope he believed it.’

  As Wolf motions for the waitress, Halina contemplates how the war, until recently, has in many ways felt surreal. For a while, her family got by. Soon enough, she often told herself, life would return to normal. She would be fine. Her family would be fine. Her parents had endured the Great War and made it through. In time, they’d toss the horrible hand of cards they’d been dealt back into the pile, and start anew. But then things started to fall apart. First it was Selim, then Genek and Herta – gone. Vanished. Then it was Bella’s sister Anna. And now, Adam. All around her, it seems, Jews were disappearing. And suddenly, the consequences of this war were undeniably real – an understanding that sent Halina spiraling as she wrestled with the knowledge she both feared and loathed: she was powerless. Since then she’s begun to imagine the worst, picturing Selim and Genek and Herta locked up in Soviet prisons, starving to death, and drumming up a long list of the atrocities Adam had no doubt been subjected to at the work camp, telling herself that if he of all people – with his looks and ID – had not been able to talk himself out of captivity by now, then it must be dire.

  And what of Addy? They haven’t heard from him since the family moved into the ghetto, nearly two years ago. Had he joined the army as he said he would? France has capitulated. Did the French Army even exist anymore? She racks her memory often for the sound of Addy’s voice, but quits when she fin
ds she can’t retrieve it. She hopes against hope that wherever he, Genek, Herta, and Selim are, they are safe. That they can sense how much the family misses them.

  A waitress brings a second mug of coffee and sets it on a saucer before Halina. She nods in thanks and glances at her watch, discouraged to find that only five minutes have passed. It’s going to be a long hour, she realises, removing the watch and setting it under the lip of her saucer so she can check the time more discreetly. And then she waits.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Genek and Herta

  Altynay, Siberia ~ July 19, 1941

  Herta drags the limb of a small pine toward a clearing in the forest. Józef, four months old, is tied snug to her breast with a bedsheet. She steps carefully, scouring the ground for sleeping vipers and half-buried scorpions, humming to distract herself from the rumble in her stomach. It’ll be hours before she receives her slice of bread and, if she’s lucky, a tiny slab of dried fish.

  Józef squirms and Herta lowers the log to the ground, running the cotton of her sweat-stained shirtsleeve across her forehead, and squints up at the sky. The sun is directly overhead; Ze, as they’ve taken to calling the baby, must be hungry. She finds a shady spot beneath a tall larch at the edge of the clearing and lowers herself carefully to sit, cross-legged. From her perch she can see Genek and a handful of others, fifty or so metres away, piling logs by the river. Their figures appear blurry in the July heat, as if they’ve begun to melt.

  Herta extracts Józef carefully from his bedsheet harness and lays him gently to face her in the space between her legs, propping his head on her ankles. Wearing nothing but a cloth diaper, his skin, like hers, is pink and sticky to the touch. ‘Hot, aren’t you, my love,’ she says softly, wishing the sweltering temperatures would break, but knowing it will be another month, at least, before they do, and that the heat of summer, despite its intensity, is far more tolerable than the cold that will envelop them come October. Józef looks up with his father’s sky-blue eyes, staring at her in the only way he knows how, without blinking or judgement, and for a moment Herta can do nothing but smile. Unbuttoning her blouse, she follows his gaze as he studies the branches of the larch above. ‘Any birds up there?’ she asks, smiling.