We Were the Lucky Ones

How will she manage, fending for herself? […] Every day another shop is boycotted––first it was Friedman’s bakery, then Bergman’s toy store, then Fogelman’s shoe repair. Everywhere she looks, there are massive red swastika banners; JUDAISM IS CRIMINALITY billboards depicting hideous caricatures of hook-nosed Jews; windows painted over with the same four-letter word, as if Jude were some kind of curse rather than part of a person’s identity. Part of her identity. Before, she would have called herself a mother, a wife, an accomplished pianist. But now she is nothing more than, simply, Jude.

Halina stares. “You stole them? From the cafeteria?”

“No one saw me.”

“But what if they had?” Halina’s tone is harsh, probably too harsh. It’s not like her to speak like that to her mother and she knows she should apologize, but she doesn’t. It was one thing for Mila to sneak an infant into her workplace—she has no alternative but to do so––but another for her mother to steal from the Germans and then shrug it off.

The room is silent. Halina, Mila, and their parents all look at one another, their gazes forming a square. Finally, Mila speaks. “It’s okay, Halina, we need it. Felicia is a skeleton, look at her. Mother, thank you. Come, let’s make soup.”

Mila is a disaster, sickened by the distance between her and Felicia. She has no way of knowing if the bombs have reached Włocławek, and she never thought to ask if the convent had a shelter. With little to eat and an even smaller appetite, her slacks have begun to hang low and loose around her waist. She is stuck. And with each passing day—she’s counted fifty-two since she’s been in hiding––she grows more frantic. Every few minutes, it seems, the ground shakes as another steel explosive plummets to the earth, shredding homes, shops, schools, churches, bridges, cars, and people in its wake. And there’s nothing she can do but listen, and wait.

Halina rests a hand on Adam’s knee, deeply grateful for the man at her side. She would never forget the day that she returned from Kraków to her apartment in Warsaw to find him waiting for her. Mila, Felicia, Jakob, and Bella were there, too. The feeling of seeing them together, her siblings, was indescribable. Her euphoria vanished, however, when Adam told her he had no news of Franka and her family. They were still missing. His own parents and three siblings—two brothers and a sister with a two-year-old son—had disappeared, too, not long after Halina left for Kraków. Adam had been trying desperately to find them, but without any luck, and Halina could sense how much this agonized him.

They hug in pairs, Sol and Nechuma, Mila and Felicia, Mila and Halina, Halina and Nechuma, and then huddle together as one, like a giant wheel, hands wrapped around waists and foreheads pressed up against one another’s, Felicia tucked somewhere in the middle. Time disappears as they hold each other, laughing and crying, Sol reciting the telegram’s twelve perfect words over and over and over again.