We Were the Lucky Ones Read online

  Inside his apartment, Genek is glad to see a glow emanating from beneath the bedroom door. He finds Herta in bed with a favourite collection of Rilke poems propped on her knees. Herta is originally from Bielsko, a largely German-speaking town in western Poland. In conversation, she rarely uses the language she grew up with any more, but she enjoys reading in her native tongue, poetry especially. She doesn’t appear to notice as Genek enters the room.

  ‘That must be one engaging verse,’ Genek teases.

  ‘Oh!’ Herta says, looking up. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘I was worried you’d be asleep,’ Genek grins. He slips out of his coat, and tosses it over the back of a chair, blowing into his hands to warm them.

  Herta smiles and sets her book down on her chest, using a finger to keep her place. ‘You’re home far earlier than I thought you’d be. Have you lost all of our money at the table? Did they kick you out?’

  Genek removes his shoes and his blazer, unbuttons his shirt cuffs. ‘I’m ahead, actually. It was a good night. Just a bore without you.’ Against the white sheets, in her pale yellow gown with her deep-set eyes and perfect lips and chestnut hair spilling in waves over her shoulders, Herta looks like something out of a dream, and once again Genek is reminded how immensely lucky he is to have found her. He undresses down to his underwear and crawls into bed beside her. ‘I missed you,’ he says, propping himself on an elbow and kissing her.

  Herta licks her lips. ‘Your last drink, let me guess – Bichat.’

  Genek nods, laughs. He kisses her again, his tongue finding hers.

  ‘Love, we should be careful,’ Herta whispers, pulling away.

  ‘Aren’t we always careful?’

  ‘It’s just – about that time.’

  ‘Oh,’ Genek says, savoring her warmth, the sweet floral residue of shampoo in her hair.

  ‘It would be foolish to let it happen now,’ Herta adds, ‘don’t you think?’

  Hours before, over dinner, they’d talked with their friends about the threat of war, about how easily Austria and Czechoslovakia had fallen into the hands of the Reich, and of how things had begun to change in Radom. Genek had ranted about his demotion to assistant at the law firm and had threatened to move to France. ‘At least there,’ he’d fumed, ‘I could use my degree.’

  ‘I’m not so sure you’d be better off in France,’ Ivona had said. ‘The Führer isn’t just targeting German-speaking territories any more. What if this is just the beginning? What if Poland is next?’

  The table had quieted for a moment before Rafal broke the silence. ‘Impossible,’ he claimed, with a dismissive shake of his head. ‘He might try, but he’ll be stopped.’

  Genek had agreed. ‘The Polish Army would never let it happen,’ he said. Genek recalls now that it was during this conversation that Herta had stood to excuse herself.

  She’s right, of course. They should be careful. To bring a child into a world that has begun to feel disturbingly close to the brink of collapse would be imprudent and irresponsible. But lying so close, Genek can think of nothing but her skin, the curve of her thigh against his. Her words, like the tiny bubbles in his last flute of champagne, float from her mouth, dissolving somewhere in the back of his throat.

  Genek kisses her a third time, and as he does Herta closes her eyes. She only half means it, he thinks. He reaches over her for the light, feeling her soften beneath him. The room goes dark, and he slips a hand under her gown.

  ‘Cold!’ Herta shrieks.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispers.

  ‘No, you’re not. Genek …’

  ‘The war, the war, the war.’ He kisses her cheekbone, her earlobe. ‘I’m tired of it already and it hasn’t even begun,’ he says, marching his fingers from her ribs down to her waistline.

  Herta sighs, then giggles.

  ‘Here’s a thought,’ Genek adds, his eyes widening as if he’s just had a revelation. ‘What if there is no war?’ He shakes his head, incredulous. ‘We’ll have deprived ourselves for nothing. And Hitler, the little prick, will have won.’ He flashes a smile.

  Herta runs a finger along the hollow of his cheek. ‘These dimples are the death of me,’ she says, shaking her head. Genek grins harder, and Herta nods. ‘You’re right,’ she acquiesces. ‘It would be tragic.’ Her book meets the floor with a thud as she rolls to her side to face him. ‘Bumsen der krieg.’

  Genek can’t help but laugh. ‘I agree. Fuck the war,’ he says, pulling the blanket up over their heads.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nechuma

  Radom, Poland ~ April 4, 1939 – First day of Passover

  Nechuma has arranged the table with her finest china and crockery, setting each place just so, atop a white lace tablecloth. Sol sits at the head, his worn, leatherbound Haggadah in one hand, a polished silver kiddush cup in the other. He clears his throat. ‘Today …’ he begins, lifting his gaze to the familiar faces around the table, ‘we honour what matters most – our family, and our tradition.’ His eyes, normally flanked with laugh lines, are serious, his voice a sober baritone. ‘Today,’ he continues, ‘we celebrate the Festival of Matzahs, the time of our liberation.’ He glances down at his text. ‘Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ the others echo, sipping their wine. A bottle is passed and glasses are refilled.

  The room is quiet as Nechuma stands to light the candles. Making her way to the middle of the table, she strikes a match and cups a palm around it, bringing it quickly to each wick, hoping the others won’t notice the flame shivering between her fingers. When the candles are lit, she circles a hand over them three times and then shields her eyes as she recites the opening blessing. Taking her place at the end of the table opposite her husband, she folds her hands over her lap and her eyes meet Sol’s. She nods, an indication for him to begin.

  As Sol’s voice once again fills the room, Nechuma’s gaze slips to the chair she’s left empty for Addy, and her chest grows heavy with a familiar ache. His absence consumes her.

  Addy’s letter had arrived a week ago. In it, he’d thanked Nechuma for her candor, and asked her please not to worry. He would return home as soon as he could collect his travel documents, he wrote. This news brought Nechuma both relief and concern. She had no greater wish than to have her son home for Passover, except, of course, to know that he was safe in France. She’d tried to be honest, had hoped he would understand that Radom was a dismal place right now, that travelling through German-occupied regions wasn’t worth the risk, but perhaps she’d held back too much. It wasn’t just the Kosmans, after all, who had left. There were half a dozen others. She hadn’t told him about the Polish customers they’d recently lost at the shop, or about the bloody brawl that had broken out the week before between two of Radom’s soccer teams, one Polish, the other Jewish, and how young men from each team still walked around with split lips and black eyes, glaring at one other. She’d left it all unsaid to spare him pain and worry, but perhaps in doing so, she’d exposed him to a greater danger.

  Nechuma had replied to Addy’s letter, imploring him to be safe in his travels, and then assumed he was en route. Every day since, she’s jumped at the sound of footsteps in the foyer, her heart thrumming at the thought of finding Addy at the door, a smile spread across his handsome face, his valise in hand. But the footsteps are never his. Addy has not come.

  ‘Maybe he had to wrap up some things at the firm,’ Jakob offered earlier in the week, sensing her growing concern. ‘I can’t imagine his boss would let him leave without a couple of weeks’ notice.’

  But all Nechuma can think is: what if he’s been held up at the border? Or worse? To reach Radom, Addy would have to travel north through Germany, or south through Austria and Czechoslovakia, both of which have fallen under Nazi rule. The possibility of her son in the hands of the Germans – a fate that might have been avoided had she been more forthright with him, had she been more adamant in asking him to remain in France – has kept her lying awake at night for days.

 
As tears prick at her eyes, Nechuma’s thoughts cartwheel back in time to another April day, during the Great War, a quarter century ago, when she and Sol were forced to spend Passover huddled in the building’s basement. They’d been evicted from their apartment and, like so many of their friends at the time, had nowhere else to go. She remembers the suffocating stench of human waste, the air thick with incessant moans of empty stomachs, the thunder of distant cannons, the rhythmic scrape of Sol’s blade against wood as he whittled away at a log of old firewood with a paring knife, sculpting figurines for the children to play with and picking splinters from his fingers. The holiday had come and gone without acknowledgement, never mind a traditional Seder. Somehow, they lived three years in that basement, the children surviving on her breast milk while Hungarian officers bivouacked in their apartment upstairs.

  Nechuma looks across the table at Sol. Those three years, though they nearly broke her, are now as far behind her as possible, almost as if they’d happened to someone else entirely. Her husband never speaks of that time; her children, thankfully, do not recall the experience in any palpable way. There have been pogroms since – there will always be pogroms – but Nechuma refuses to contemplate a return to a life in hiding, a life without sunlight, without rain, without music and art and philosophical debate, the simple, nourishing riches she’s grown to cherish. No, she will not go back underground like some kind of feral creature; she will not live like that ever again.

  It couldn’t possibly come to that.

  Her mind turns once more, to her own childhood, to the sound of her mother’s voice telling her how it was common when she herself was growing up in Radom for little Polish boys to hurl stones at her kerchiefed head at the park, how riots had erupted all over the city when the town synagogue was first built. Nechuma’s mother had shrugged it off. ‘We just learnt to keep our heads down, and our children close,’ she said. And sure enough, the attacks, the pogroms, they passed. Life went on, as it did before. As it always does.

  Nechuma knows that the German threat, like the threats that came before it, will also pass. And anyway, their situation now is far different than it was during the Great War. She and Sol have worked tirelessly to earn a living, to establish themselves among the city’s top-tier professionals. They speak Polish, even at home, while many of the city’s Jews converse only in Yiddish, and rather than live in the Old Quarter as the majority of Radom’s less affluent Jews do, they own a stately apartment in the centre of town, complete with a cook and a maid and the luxuries of indoor plumbing, a bathtub they imported themselves from Berlin, a refrigerator, and – their most prized possession – a Steinway baby grand piano. Their fabric shop is thriving; Nechuma takes great care on her buying trips to collect the highest-quality textiles, and their clients, both Polish and Jewish, come from as far as Kraków to purchase their ladies’ wear and silk. When their children were of school-age, Sol and Nechuma sent them to elite private academies, where, thanks to their tailored shirts and perfect Polish, they fit in seamlessly with the majority of the students, who were Catholic. In addition to providing them with the best possible education, Sol and Nechuma hoped to give their children a chance to sidestep the undertones of anti-Semitism that had defined Jewish life in Radom since before any of them could remember. Though the family was proudly rooted in its Jewish heritage and very much a part of the local Jewish community, for her children Nechuma chose a path she hoped would steer them toward opportunity – and away from persecution. It is a path she stands by, even when now and then at the synagogue, or while shopping at one of the Jewish bakeries in the Old Quarter, she catches one of Radom’s more orthodox Jews glancing at her with a look of disapproval – as if her decision to mix with the Poles has somehow diminished her faith as a Jew. She refuses to be bothered by these encounters. She knows her faith – and besides, religion, to Nechuma, is a private matter.

  Pinching her shoulder blades down her back, she feels the weight of her bosom lift from her ribs. It’s not like her to be so inundated with worry, so distracted. Pull yourself together, she chides. The family will be fine, she reminds herself. They have a healthy savings. They have connections. Addy will turn up. The mail has been unreliable; in all likelihood, a letter explaining his absence will arrive any day. It will all be fine.

  As Sol recites the blessing of the karpas, Nechuma dips a sprig of parsley into a bowl of salt water and her fingers brush Jakob’s. She sighs, feeling the tension begin to drain from her jaw. Sweet Jakob. He catches her eye and smiles, and Nechuma’s heart fills with gratitude for the fact that he is still living under her roof. She adores his company, his calm. He’s different from the others. Unlike his siblings, who entered the world red-faced and wailing, Jakob arrived as white as her hospital bedsheets and silent, as if mimicking the giant snowflakes falling peacefully to the earth outside her window on that wintery February morning, twenty-three years ago. Nechuma would never forget the harrowing moments before he finally cried – she was sure at the time that he wouldn’t survive the day – or how, when she held him in her arms and looked into his inky eyes, he’d stared up at her, the skin over his brow creased with a small fold, as if he were deep in thought. It was then that she understood who he was. Quiet, yes, but astute. Like his brothers and sisters born before and after him, a tiny version of the person he would grow up to be.

  She watches as Jakob leans to whisper something in Bella’s ear. Bella brings a napkin to her lips, stifling a smile. On her collar, a pin catches the candlelight – a gold rose-shaped brooch with an ivory pearl at its center, a gift from Jakob. He’d given it to her a few months after they met at gymnasium. He was fifteen at the time, she fourteen. Back then, all Nechuma knew of Bella was that she took her studies seriously, that she came from a family of modest means (according to Jakob, her father, a dentist, was still settling the loans he’d taken on to pay for his daughters’ education), and that she sewed many of her own clothes, a revelation that impressed Nechuma and prompted her to wonder which of Bella’s smartest blouses were store-bought and which were handmade. It was shortly after Jakob gave Bella the brooch that he declared her his soulmate.

  ‘Jakob, love, you’re fifteen … and you’ve just met!’ Nechuma had exclaimed. But Jakob wasn’t one to exaggerate, and here they are, eight years later, inseparable. It’s only a matter of time before they are married, Nechuma figures. Perhaps Jakob will propose when the talk of war has subsided. Or maybe he’s waiting until he’s saved enough to afford his own place. Bella lives with her parents, too – just a few blocks west on Witolda Boulevard. Whatever the case, Nechuma has no doubt that Jakob has a plan.

  At the head of the table, Sol breaks a piece of matzah gently in two. He sets one half of the matzah on a plate and wraps the other in a napkin. When the children were younger, Sol would spend weeks plotting the perfect hiding spot for the matzah, and when the time came in the ceremony to unearth the hidden afikomen, the kids would scamper like mice through the apartment in search of it. Whoever was lucky enough to find it would barter ruthlessly until inevitably walking away with a proud smile and enough zloty in his or her palm to purchase a sack of fudge krówki at Pomianowski’s candy store. Sol was a businessman and played hard – the King Negotiator, they called him – but his children knew well that deep down he was as soft as a mound of freshly churned butter, and that with enough patience and charm, they could milk him for every zloty in his pocket. He hasn’t actually hidden the matzah in years, of course; his children, as teenagers, finally boycotted the ritual – ‘We’re a bit old for it, don’t you think, Father?’ they said – but Nechuma knows that the moment his granddaughter Felicia has learnt to walk, he’ll resume the tradition.

  It’s Adam’s turn to read aloud. He lifts his Haggadah and peers at it through thick-rimmed eyeglasses. With his narrow nose, high, sharp cheekbones, and flawless skin accentuated in the candlelight, he appears almost regal. Adam Eichenwald had arrived in the Kurc household several months ago, when Nechuma set a room fo
r let sign in the window of the fabric store. Her uncle had recently died, leaving the family with an empty bedroom, and her home, even with her two youngest still there, had begun to feel empty. Nechuma loved nothing more than a crowded dinner table. When Adam had stepped into the shop to enquire, she was delighted; she offered him the room immediately.

  ‘What a fine-looking young man!’ Sol’s sister Terza had exclaimed, after he left. ‘He’s thirty-two? He looks a decade younger.’

  ‘He’s Jewish, and he’s smart,’ Nechuma added. What are the odds, the women had whispered about the boy – a graduate in architecture at the Polytechnic National University in Lvov – leaving 14 Warszawska Street unwed? And sure enough, a few weeks later, Adam and Halina were an item.

  Halina. Nechuma sighs. Born with an inexplicable mop of honey-blonde hair and incandescent green eyes, Halina is the youngest and the most petite of her children. What she lacks in stature, however, she makes up tenfold in personality. Nechuma has never met a child so obstinate, so capable of talking her way into (or out of) practically anything. She recalls the time when, at fifteen, Halina charmed her mathematics professor out of giving her a demerit when he discovered she’d skipped class to see the matinee of Trouble in Paradise on opening day, and the time when, at sixteen, she convinced Addy to take a last-minute overnight train with her to Prague so they could wake up in the City of a Hundred Spires on the birthday they shared. Adam, bless his heart, is clearly allured by her. Thankfully, he’s proven nothing but respectful in Sol and Nechuma’s presence.