We Were the Lucky Ones Read online

  As the Jews begin to dig, the Ukrainians walk circles around them, their teeth bared like wild dogs, barking orders or insults over their shoulders. ‘You with the children,’ one of them yells. Mila and the three others with children at their sides look up. ‘Work faster. You dig two holes.’

  Mila instructs Felicia to sit at her feet. She keeps her chin down, with one eye always on her daughter. Every once in a while she glances over at the others. Some are sobbing, tears rolling silently down their cheeks and onto the cold earth beneath them. Others appear dazed, their eyes glazed, defeated. No one looks up. No one talks. The only sound filling the thin March air is the scrape of steel against the cold, hard dirt. Before long, Mila’s hands are cracked and bleeding, her lower back slick with sweat. She peels off her wool coat and sets it on the ground beside her; within seconds, it is snatched up and added to a mound of clothing beside the train.

  The Ukrainians continue to keep a close watch, making sure that hands are moving and bodies are occupied. An officer in a captain’s uniform surveys the scene from his position by the train. He appears to be German, SS. Obersturmführer, perhaps – Mila has begun to recognise the various Nazi military ranks by their insignia, but she’s too far away to know for sure exactly what position this man holds. Whoever he is, it’s obvious that he is calling the shots. What went through his mind, Mila wonders, when he was assigned this job? She grimaces as her weight on the shovel’s wooden handle tears another coin-sized flap of flesh from her palm. Ignore it, she commands, refusing to feel the pain. Refusing to feel sorry for herself. With the ground nearly frozen, her progress is slow. Fine. It’ll buy her some time. A few more minutes on earth to spend with her daughter.

  ‘Mamusiu,’ Felicia whispers, tugging at Mila’s slacks. She sits cross-legged at her mother’s feet. ‘Mamusiu, look.’

  Mila follows Felicia’s gaze. One of the Jews in the field has dropped his shovel and is walking toward the German by the train. Mila recognises him as Dr Frydman, who before the war was a prominent dentist in Radom. Selim used to see him. A couple of the Ukrainians notice, too, and cock their rifles, aiming them in his direction. Mila holds her breath. He’s going to get himself killed! But the captain motions for his subordinates to lower their weapons.

  Mila exhales.

  ‘What happened?’ Felicia whispers.

  ‘Shh-shh, chérie. It’s okay,’ Mila breathes as she presses her foot into her shovel’s blade. ‘Be still, okay? Stay just here, where I can see you. I love you, my darling girl. Just stay close to me.’ Mila watches as Dr Frydman converses with the German. He appears to be talking fast, touching his cheek. After a minute, the captain nods and points over his shoulder. Dr Frydman bows his chin, and then walks quickly to an empty train car and climbs inside. He’s been spared. But why? In Radom, the Jews in the ghetto were always being called upon to help the Germans – perhaps, Mila thinks, Dr Frydman has done some dental work for the captain in the past, and the German has realised he’ll need his services again.

  Mila’s stomach turns. She certainly hasn’t done any favours. She’d be better off grabbing Felicia and running for their lives. She glances at the tree line, but it’s two hundred metres beyond the tracks. No. They can’t run. They’d be shot in an instant.

  A sharp wind whorls a cloud of dirt across the field, and Mila leans into her shovel, her eyes gritty, blinking as she contemplates her reality: no favours to be returned. Nowhere to run. They’re stuck.

  As she wraps her mind around the inevitable, a gunshot rips through the air. She wheels her head around in time to see a man a row over from hers fall to the ground. Had he tried to run? Mila covers her mouth, and immediately looks to Felicia. ‘Felicia!’ But her daughter is transfixed, her eyes glued to the body lying facedown now on the dirt, to the blood rippling from the back of his skull. ‘Felicia!’ Mila says again.

  Finally, her daughter turns. Her eyes are huge, her voice tiny. ‘Mamusiu? Why did they—’

  ‘Darling, look at me,’ Mila pleads. ‘Look at me, only me. It’s going to be okay.’ Felicia is trembling.

  ‘But why—’

  ‘I don’t know, love. Come. Sit closer. Just by my leg here, and watch me. Okay?’ Felicia crawls closer to her mother’s leg and Mila reaches quickly for her hand. Felicia gives it to her and Mila bends down quickly to kiss it. ‘It’s okay,’ she whispers.

  As she stands, the air is filled with yelling. ‘Who will be the next to run?’ the voices taunt. ‘You see? You see what happens? Who is next?’

  Felicia stares up at her mother with tear-filled eyes, and Mila bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from unravelling. She mustn’t cry, not now, not in front of her daughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jakob and Bella

  Armee-Verpflegungs-Lager (AVL) Factory, Outside Radom, German-Occupied Poland ~ March 1942

  Jakob waves a handkerchief as he approaches the factory entrance. ‘Schießen Sie nicht! Don’t shoot!’ he pants, his breath coming and going in a staccato of short, shallow puffs. He’s jogged nearly eighteen kilometres carrying his suitcase and his camera to get there, and he is terribly out of shape. The muscles in his right arm will be sore for a week and the soles of his feet are swollen and abscessed from the journey, but he hasn’t yet noticed.

  An SS guard rests a hand on his pistol and squints in Jakob’s direction. ‘Don’t shoot,’ Jakob pleads again when he’s close enough to hand the guard his ID. ‘Please, I’m here to see my wife. She’s—’ He glances at the dagger dangling by a chain from the guard’s belt and suddenly he’s tongue-tied. ‘Shesexpectingme.’ It comes out as one long word.

  The guard studies Jakob’s papers. They’re his real ones; in the ghetto and here at the factory, there’s no point in posing as someone he’s not.

  ‘From,’ the guard asks, studying Jakob’s ID, although it’s more a statement than a question.

  ‘Radom.’

  ‘Age.’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘Date of birth.’

  ‘First of February. 1916.’

  The guard quizzes Jakob until he’s certain he’s the young man his papers say he is.

  ‘Where is your ausweis?’

  Jakob swallows. He doesn’t have one. ‘I requested one but – please, I’m here for my wife … it’s her parents, they are very sick. She has to know.’ Jakob wonders if the lie is as obvious as it feels on his tongue. The guard, surely, will see through it. ‘Please,’ Jakob begs. ‘It is dire.’ A film of sweat has collected on his brow; it glistens under the glare of the midday sun.

  The guard stares hard at him for a moment. ‘Stay here,’ he finally grunts, pointing with his eyes at the ground before disappearing through an unmarked door.

  Jakob obeys. He sets his suitcase at his feet and waits, wringing his felt cap in his hands. The last time he saw Bella was five months ago, in October, just before she was assigned to work at the Armee-Verpflegungs-Lager factory, which everyone referred to simply as AVL. Back then, they were living with her parents in the Glinice ghetto, just down the road from the factory. Bella was still a wreck. The days were long and miserable, and there was little he could do to comfort her as she descended into the depths of despair over the loss of her sister. Jakob would never forget the day she left. He’d stood at the ghetto entrance, his fingers curled around the iron bars of the gate, watching as she was escorted to a waiting truck. Bella had turned before climbing in, her expression heavy with sorrow, and Jakob had blown her a kiss and watched, through wet eyes, as she’d brought her own hand to her lips; he couldn’t tell if she’d meant to return the kiss, or if her hand was there to keep from crying.

  Soon after Bella left for the factory, Jakob requested to be transferred to the Wałowa ghetto, so he could live with his parents. He and Bella kept up by letter. Reading her words brought Jakob some peace – she’d barely spoken since Anna disappeared, but putting pen to paper, it seemed, was easier for her. At AVL, Bella said, she’d been allocated the job o
f mending leather boots and broken holsters from the German front. ‘You should join me,’ she coaxed in her most recent letter. ‘The foreman here is tolerable. And there is far more space in the factory barracks than there is in the ghetto. I miss you. So much. Please, come.’

  Jakob knew when he read those words – I miss you – that he would find a way to be with her. It would mean leaving his parents, but they had Halina to watch out for them. False IDs if they needed them. A small stash of potatoes, flour, and some cabbage his mother had stockpiled before winter. The amethyst. He’d be close. Eighteen kilometres. He could write to them, visit if he needed to, he reasoned.

  There was also his job, however, and the prospect of leaving it was daunting. In the ghetto, a job was a lifeline – if you were deemed skilled enough to work, you were, for the most part, worthy of living. When the Germans discovered Jakob knew how to operate a camera, they assigned him work as a photographer. Every morning, he was allowed to exit Wałowa’s arched gates to take pictures of whatever it was his supervisor asked for – weapons, armories, uniforms, sometimes even women. Every so often his supervisor would recruit a couple of blonde Polish girls who for a few zloty or an evening’s meal were more than willing to pose for Jakob wearing nothing but a tattered fur kept for this purpose. When he returned at the end of the day, he would hand over his film, without any idea as to who would eventually look at his photos, or why.

  Today, however, would be different. He’d received his assignment as he always did, but he’d set off from his supervisor’s office with a pocketful of Yunak cigarettes and an assignment he wouldn’t complete. If he is forced to return to Wałowa, his roll of film still blank, his plan will likely cost him his life.

  Jakob checks his watch. It’s two in the afternoon. In three hours, his boss will realise he’s missing.

  The factory door swings open and Bella appears, clad in the same navy slacks and white collared shirt she was wearing when she left. A yellow scarf covers all but a small fraction of her hairline. She smiles when she sees him, and Jakob’s heart warms. A smile.

  ‘Hello, sunshine,’ he says. They hug quickly.

  ‘Jakob! I didn’t know you were coming,’ Bella says.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to –’ Jakob pauses, and Bella nods, understanding. Their letters have been censored for months; it would have been foolish to write and tell her of his plans.

  ‘I’ll go talk to the foreman,’ Bella says, glancing over her shoulder at the guard parked a few metres behind her. ‘Did your sister make it off?’

  In his last letter, Jakob had told Bella of Mila’s plan to move to the States. ‘She left this morning,’ he says. ‘She and Felicia.’

  ‘Good. That’s a relief. I’m glad you came, Kuba,’ Bella says. ‘Stay here.’ The guard follows her back inside, and Jakob remembers a second too late about the cigarettes – he’d meant to sneak them into Bella’s palm so she could use them for a bribe. He curses himself silently, left once again to wait outside in the cold, cap in hand.

  Inside, Bella makes her way to the desk of the foreman, Officer Meier, a big-boned German with a broad forehead and a thick, well-kept mustache. ‘My husband has come from the ghetto,’ she begins, deciding it best to get straight to the point. Her German is now fluent. ‘He is here, outside. He is an excellent worker, Herr Meier. He is in good health, very responsible.’ Bella pauses. Jews don’t ask favours of Germans, but she has no other choice. ‘Please, I beg of you, can you find him a job here at the factory?’

  Meier is a decent man. In the past three months he’s been good to Bella – allowed her to take her meal on Yom Kippur after nightfall, to visit her parents every so often in the Glinice ghetto, a short walk from the factory. Bella is an efficient worker – nearly twice as productive as most of the others at the factory. Perhaps this is why he treats her well.

  Meier runs a thumb and forefinger over his moustache. He sizes Bella up, narrowing his eyes at her, as if searching for some ulterior motive.

  Bella removes the gold brooch that Jakob gave her so long ago from the chain she’d strung around her neck. ‘Please,’ she says, dropping the tiny rose with its inlaid pearl into her palm and offering it to Meier. ‘This is all I have. Take it.’ Bella waits, her arm outstretched. ‘Please. You won’t regret it.’

  Finally, Meier leans forward, resting his forearms on his desk, his eyes meeting hers. ‘Kurch,’ he says, in his thick German accent. ‘Keep it, Kurch.’ He sighs, shakes his head. ‘I’ll do it for you, but I won’t do it for anyone else.’ He turns to the guard standing at attention by the door to his office. ‘Go on. Let him in.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Mila and Felicia

  Outside Radom, German-Occupied Poland ~ March 1942

  The pile of earth beside what Mila knows will be her grave has grown to half a metre high. ‘Deeper,’ a Ukrainian shouts as he struts by, making his rounds.

  Mila’s palms are caked now with blood, her entire torso drenched with sweat, despite the March cold. She takes off her sweater, drapes it over Felicia’s shoulders, and wraps her scarf tightly around her right hand, the more painful of the two. Pressing the sole of her shoe to the head of her shovel, she ignores the sting and glances again toward the train tracks to survey the scene.

  The captain stands with his arms folded over his chest at the front of the train. A few cars down, a dozen Ukrainians appear bored as they fiddle with their caps, twirling them around their fingers, their rifles slung to their backs. Some kick the dirt. Others converse, their shoulders rocking at a remark one of the others has made. Barbarians. Two more Jews have joined Dr Frydman – apparently they too have doled out special favours and have been spared. Clamping her jaw shut, Mila lifts another mound of dirt from the hole at her feet, pours it atop her pile.

  ‘Look,’ someone behind her whispers. A young blonde woman has dropped her shovel. She struts quickly toward the tracks, toward the German, her shoulders pinned back, her black overcoat cinched tightly to her waist, its tails billowing behind her. Mila’s heart skips as she is reminded of her sister Halina, the only other woman she knows with that kind of bravado. As others begin to whisper and point, one of the Ukrainians beside the train raises his rifle, aims it; the others follow suit. The young fugitive raises her palms. ‘Don’t shoot!’ she cries in Russian, picking up her pace to a trot as she approaches the men. The Ukrainians cock their weapons and Mila holds her breath. Felicia looks, too. The gunmen glance to the German, awaiting approval, but the captain tilts his chin and fixes his gaze on the petite, fearless Jew approaching. He shakes his head and says something Mila can’t decipher, and the Ukrainians slowly lower their arms.

  Mila catches a glimpse of the young woman’s profile when she reaches the tracks. She’s pretty, with fine features and skin the colour of porcelain. Even from afar, it’s easy to see that her hair is the kind of strawberry blonde that can only be real. Peroxided hair, which was common now in the ghetto – anything to look less Jewish – was easy to spot. Mila watches as the woman gestures casually with one hand, the other resting on her hip, and says something that makes the German laugh. Mila blinks. She’s won him over. Just like that. What did she offer? Sex? Money? Mila roils with a mix of disgust with the captain and jealousy of the beautiful, unflinching blonde.

  A perimeter guard shouts, and the Jews go silently back to their digging. Mila tries to imagine herself putting on a bold, provocative face and strutting across the meadow. But she’s a mother, for goodness’ sake – and even when she was young she never had Halina’s talent for flirting. She’d be shot before she even reached the train. And on the chance she managed to make it to within earshot of the German, what could she possibly say to seduce him into saving her? I have nothing to –

  And then an idea strikes her. Her spine snaps upright.

  ‘Felicia!’ she whispers. Felicia looks up, surprised by the intensity in her voice. Mila speaks softly, so the others won’t hear. ‘Watch my eyes, love – do you se
e that woman over there, by the train?’ Mila looks toward the train car, and Felicia’s gaze follows. She nods. Mila’s breath is shallow. She’s shaking. No time to second-guess yourself – you got your daughter into this; you can at least try to get her out. Mila kneels for a moment, pretending to pull a pebble from her shoe, so she and Felicia can see eye to eye. She speaks slowly. ‘I want you to run to her, and pretend she’s your mother.’ Felicia knits her eyebrows together, confused. ‘When you reach her,’ Mila continues, ‘hold on to her, and don’t let go.’

  ‘No, Mamusiu …’

  Mila brings a finger to her daughter’s lips. ‘It’s all right, you will be all right, just do as I say.’

  Tears well in Felicia’s eyes. ‘Mamusiu, you will come too?’ Her voice is barely audible.

  ‘No, darling, not right now. I need you to do this – alone. Do you understand?’ Felicia nods, her eyes lowered. Mila reaches for Felicia’s chin, lifting it so their eyes meet again. ‘Tak?’

  ‘Tak,’ Felicia whispers.

  Mila can barely breathe, her lungs suffocated by the sadness in her daughter’s eyes, by the plan that is about to unfold. She nods as bravely as she can. ‘If the men ask, that woman is twoja Mamusia. Okay?’

  ‘Moja Mamusia,’ Felicia repeats, but the words taste strange and wrong in her mouth, like something poisonous.

  Mila stands and glances again at the woman by the train, who appears now to be telling a story; the German is rapt. She lifts her sweater from Felicia’s shoulders. ‘Go now, love,’ she whispers, nodding toward the train. Felicia scrambles to her feet, looking up at her, pleading with her eyes – don’t make me! Mila squats, presses her lips quickly to Felicia’s forehead. As she rises, she braces herself with her shovel; she can’t feel her legs, and everything about the moment suddenly feels wrong. She opens her mouth, all the parts of her that are a mother clawing at her throat, begging her to change her mind. But she can’t. There is no other plan. This is all she has.