The Winter Guest (31 page)

26

Helena paused to catch her breath. She released Sam and he slumped to the ground beside her, resting on one knee. Though a light snow still fell, the wind had eased. In the distance the sky began to brighten, pink against the dark silhouette of the low station, signaling equal parts hope and despair. They had nearly made it, but as the sun rose, their cover would be lessened, worsening their chances and making discovery more likely.

“Come.” She pulled Sam, willing him to go faster, though she herself could not. “When we get over the border...” she began. There was a slight tug at her hand as he faltered. A strange look crossed his face.

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “Let’s just get to the train.”

Minutes later they neared the station, approaching slowly from behind it. It was nothing more than a freight depot where logs could be loaded, a simple building, now mercifully deserted.

Helena scanned the platform hopefully for Ruth and Michal. “They aren’t here.”

“They will be.” His voice wavered.

Helena was not comforted. She and Sam, already slowed by the children they had to carry, had been delayed by the detour and the unexpected necessity of taking to the water. She had hoped, almost expected, that her sister would have found Michal quickly and gotten here first.

“Would she have been caught behind the field where we heard the shooting?” he asked.

Helena shook her head. “They should have been able to go around.” A pit formed in her stomach. “I should have been the one to go. I’m so much stronger.”

“You’ve gotten these two here. Come.”

She took his hand once more. Then she released it as something wet and warm seeped through her mitten.
Blood.
She remembered how he had risen to shield her as she ran across the field. “You were shot?” Not waiting for an answer, she pulled back his coat and sweater to reveal a small hole at his waist that oozed red with each breath he took. How could he have not said anything... How could she not have noticed?

“It’s nothing,” he protested, but there was a paleness to his face that said otherwise.

“You’re hurt,” she said, feeling the pain as though it were her own. Her panic rose. Sam’s earlier breakdown had been more than just shock at seeing the bodies—his wound must be deep and the growing pain almost too much to bear. “We have to get you help.”

Before he could reply, a train whistle sounded long and low in the distance. Now Sam, seeming to find new strength, was pulling her as she half carried and half dragged the girls to the platform. She scanned the tree line behind her, willing her sister and brother to appear. “I never should have let her go,” she repeated desperately. Ruth, despite her protestations, was not strong enough to do this alone. Something, Helena knew, had gone terribly wrong.

She willed the train to slow down to give them more time. But its lights appeared in the darkness, a threat as well as a promise. “We have to go back,” she said desperately as the train neared the station, lights like two giant eyes, searching.

Sam grasped her firmly by the shoulders. “Lena, don’t you understand?” he panted, with more breath than voice. “There is no going back.” His words were an echo of her own weeks earlier when she refused to let him push her away. He looked down at the children. “People will have noticed you gone by now,” he added more softly. “They’ll be at the house.”
They.
“You can’t undo things, darling, as if they never were.”

“We could hide here until the others arrive.” Even as she said this, she knew it would not work.

Sam shook his head. “The Germans have already closed most of the borders. The trains won’t run for much longer. And the army will be here soon, and then the passes will be worthless.”

The train screeched to a stop, drowning out his last words. Sam pulled them hurriedly into the shadow of the station as the engineer stuck his head out. When it was clear, Sam opened a door to one of the freight cars to reveal a gaping black hole. Helena hesitated. She had not expected a parlor car, exactly, but the massive cargo space, dark and cold, terrified her.

Sam helped Dorie up into the car. “Take care of your sisters,” he ordered, and the girl nodded, wide-eyed.

Realization dawned on her then. Helena stared at Sam in disbelief. “You’re not coming with me, are you?” He had known he was going back and had kept it from her, knowing she would not go without him. “You lied.”

“Lena, I’m going back for your sister and brother. I’ll find them for you.” Helena waited for him to say he would find her, as well. But he would not make that promise. They had found each other once, no twice—and such a miracle would likely not happen again.

“You can’t possibly keep going. You’re shot.”

“It’s just a flesh wound. I’ll be fine.”

“But my leg,” Helena protested. If his wound would not dissuade him, then perhaps her own. “I can’t possibly go on without you.” She stopped, hearing how weak and desperate her own voice sounded. She hated herself for it. But she would do anything to make him stay. “Without you, how am I to get to the partisans?”

“Once you are over the border, head toward the town of Polomka. In the woods to the east you’ll find a small encampment. Tell them you’re my wife and that I sent you.” Sam paused, his eyes betraying doubt that his plan would work. In that moment of hesitation, she knew that she could persuade him to come with her. But Ruth and Michal were still out there, and Sam was the one person who might be able to find them. The others needed him if they were to have a chance to survive.

Yet still she persisted. “I don’t have my pass.” The ground rumbled then from an unseen explosion and Helena clutched Karolina tighter as she struggled to maintain her footing.

“I know, but you’ll think of something. You’re smart, resourceful. Look at everything you did in Kraków. You’ll manage. You have to. Don’t you see—I’m going back for you. You saw it,” he said, his voice hushed. He was talking, of course, about the mass grave. Seeing it then, she had understood everything he had tried to shield her from. Now she could not deny the truth that awaited them if they stayed. She had Dorie and Karolina and she had to get them out; she owed it to them to take this chance and not turn back, no matter how painful.

“Here,” he said, pressing the gun into her hand, its cold steel now familiar. This time she did not argue, but took it and slipped it into her pocket. “Take these, too.” He pulled the chain from his neck and handed it to her. “My dog tags. If you make it to the Americans, these should mean something.”

“But then you won’t have them with you if...” She couldn’t bear to finish the thought.

“That’s not gonna happen,” Sam said, his voice full of bravado. He reached out to touch her cheek. “I’m coming back to you, Lena Rosen.” She blushed as he gave her his surname. Then taking in the red sky behind her, his voice grew serious once more. “You can do this.”

“Fine,” she managed. He took a step away.

“No!” It was Dorie who cried out this time, her voice high and plaintive and dangerously loud. “You aren’t leaving us, are you?” Her lip quivered. She had known Sam for only a few hours, but she trusted him as immediately as Helena had herself. Dorie had lost her father and mother and the war seemed to be chipping away at the rest of her family. This additional break was too much.

“He’s just going to get Ruti and Mischa,” Helena said. “Then we’ll all be together.” She forced certainty into her voice. Sam turned to go. “Wait.” Helena clung to his arm desperately, knowing that if she let go, it would be the last time. She would never see him again. She wanted to beg him to stay with her, to hold on to this moment they had only just found. But Ruth and Michal appeared in her mind. Sam was their only hope. And she could tell by the fierce look of determination in his eyes, his grimly set jaw, that there would be no changing his mind now, even if she wanted to.

He pressed his lips against the top of her head. “Just get them to safety,” he murmured. Looking at Dorie, something broke open within Helena then. She had been keeping the children at a distance for so long. She had convinced herself that she had been tough for their own good, but it had been as much for her, the distance a means of self-preservation. They were no longer just her siblings, or even her own children, but a part of her, and a part that must survive.

Still, she could not let Sam walk away. “No,” she cried as the full realization of what was happening unfurled before her. She pressed herself against him as though she might make them one being, inseparable.

He wrapped his arms around her and breathed in her ear. “Save me a dance, okay?” She nodded, unable to answer. “Until then, I’ll see you in my dreams.” He kissed her long and hard, then broke away. Then he took Karolina from Helena and placed her into the boxcar where Dorie took her hand.

Helena started to reach for him, then stopped. She looked desperately across the horizon. She could not bear leaving Michal and Ruth, but going back now with Dorie and Karolina meant certain death for them all. The three of them at least still had one another. Helena owed it to the children to try. Reluctantly she boarded the freight car.

Sam ducked from sight in the shadows of the station and Helena pulled the children farther into the car as the driver stuck his head out to inspect the train again. A whistle sounded. Helena traced the air in front of her, as though Sam still stood before her. She stared out at the dark silhouette of the trees against the barely lightening sky, a scene she had known her entire life but would surely never see again. Smoke amassed in a cloud to the east. Ruth and Michal were out there, somewhere, though whether together or alone, safe or in peril, she could not say. They were torn and scattered, their one promise to Mama broken.

As the train began to move, Helena sank down, clutching tightly to the children as if they, too, might disappear into dust. The children sat down on the floor of the boxcar, too unfamiliar with trains to expect seats. There was no heat and a fine glaze of ice covered the door frame. The smell of rotting grain and manure hung heavy in the air.

She looked down the platform, hoping in vain to see one or both of her missing siblings. A faint ray of sunlight peeked through the clouds, illuminating the fading smoke above the hills. Helena thought of Alek and the other resistance fighters. But for the children, she might have stayed and helped them, maybe even fought herself. But Alek would not have been able to save her family. Sam, a different type of hero, had put them first. Now, she would do the same.

Helena wrapped her sisters tightly beneath her coat. They clung to her, Karolina to her neck and Dorie to her hand as if she were Ruth, and Helena understood in that second that something had changed forever. She was both mother and father to them now. She rocked Karolina the way Ruth said, singing to her in a low voice as she never had before, surprised as they relaxed into her at the comfort she had not known was hers to give.

As the station disappeared from view, Helena gazed one last time at the tree line. In the distant direction of the chapel, the sky glowed bright orange. Her stomach skipped a funny little beat and then the light slipped from view as they pulled away.

Epilogue

New York, 2013

When several seconds have passed without my responding, the woman with the ponytail turns to the police officer. “I think we’re all set here,” she says brightly. The policeman turns, eager to be dismissed.

“There,” the woman says when he has gone. “That’s better, isn’t it? I only brought him to help me find you and make sure I could visit,” she adds apologetically. I nod. It has been decades and I still cannot see a policeman or hear a siren without wondering if they are coming for me. I am shaped irrevocably by all that happened. But I’ve been changed for the better, too, like the way that seeing a young American soldier in uniform on the street still fills me with a sense of nostalgia.

“Excuse me...” The young woman’s voice, tugging and insistent, pulls me from my thoughts. I blink my eyes and look up. “May I come in?”

“Please.” I step back. “
Herbata?
I mean, would you like some tea?” A mention of Biekowice and the old ways begin to creep back into my blood.

“No, thank you.” She sits, perching on the edge of the chair I’ve indicated. Her hands dance around each other, reminding me of the restlessness I have long since abandoned. “Mrs....”

“You can call me Helen.”

Her eyes widen. “Did you say Helen? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I thought...”

“You thought that I was Ruth.”
And that Helena was dead.
“I’m not.” I hear the brusqueness in my own tone. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”

“I’m sorry. My name is Rabbi Farber.” She says this as though she hopes the title will convey a sense of trustworthiness, but it comes out sounding stiff and silly. I process the information: a female rabbi. Once I would not have believed it, but I have seen enough in my years that few things surprise me anymore. “Elizabeth Farber. I’d like to talk to you about your hometown of Biekowice.”

I should be surprised at this unexpected visitor, asking about a place I’ve not seen in more than half a century. But in some sense this is a visit for which I have waited my entire life. “That was our village, yes.”

“Not far from your house there was a small church, more of a chapel, really. Are you familiar with it?”

“That’s where Sam...” I hesitate, not sure whether to speak of such things, even after all of these years. “It was in the forest. It wasn’t really part of our property.”

“No, but you were the landowners of record closest to it.”

“Why are you asking about all of this?”

“There’s some development going on in the area,” the woman explains vaguely. Does she think I will not understand the details? “Near the chapel site.”

Now it is my turn to be surprised and I do not bother to mask it. “It’s still there?” The woman shakes her head. “Oh.” I don’t know what I expected. A simple wood structure—there had not been much left but the walls seventy years ago. In my mind it was ageless; I can see every cracked windowpane and rotting floorboard like it was yesterday. But there was no reason to think it had actually withstood the test of time.

“I’m afraid the chapel burned down some time ago.”

I push down the pain, reminding myself that I should not care, that it was never the chapel that mattered. But I cannot help but grieve for the sweetest place I ever laid my head, a bed of leaves with a canopy of stars above. “So you know it?” she prompts gently.

“That’s where Sam hid after his plane crashed. I found him in the woods and helped him to the chapel. He stayed there while his leg healed and we fell in love.”

“But...” Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Maybe you could start at the beginning.”

“Maybe you could tell me why you’re asking in the first place.”

“Some bones were found at a development site close to where the chapel had been. Bones are a big concern in Poland because so many Jewish cemeteries were destroyed and are unmarked. The Orthodox rabbis worry that there may have been a cemetery there, or that the bones may have been Jewish. I’m here to ask you.”

“There was no cemetery there.” She exhales visibly. “Whether the bones were Jewish is more complicated.” I take a deep breath. “I was born Helena Nowak. I had a twin, Ruth, who I think you expected to find here, as well as three younger siblings. We were raising them at our cottage in Biekowice after our parents died.” I swallow. “The bones...they’re male, aren’t they?” I know the answer without looking up to see her nod.

“Yes, they were on the thin side so at first we thought female. But forensic tests confirmed it.”

“Michal...”

“Michal,” she repeats, the name unfamiliar on her tongue. Even if she had researched the history of what had happened in Biekowice, there was no reason she would have heard of him.

“My little brother. He was twelve. Sam had arranged for our escape. He was an American paratrooper, you see. But as we were about to leave for the border, Michal disappeared. We thought he went to the city to save our mother in the hospital. We had not told him she had already died. Ruth went to find him. It began to snow and he must have taken shelter in the chapel.”

The woman’s eyes dart back and forth as she tries to grasp the enormity of my tale. Finally, she says, “That would be consistent with what we found. Some bones of an adolescent male that showed signs of being at the chapel at the time it burned down.”

It is as if someone had punched me in the stomach. Michal is dead. Remorse, unbridled by the years, washes over me. We had tried to spare the younger children the worst by not telling them about our mother’s death. But in the end the belief that she was still alive sent Michal into the woods after her, making our escape together impossible. “I had told him about the chapel once and he must have taken shelter there.” An image forms in my mind. I see Michal opening the grate of the woodstove to stoke the fire, transfixed by the orange flames. Lulled by the heat, his eyes grew heavy. Just a small rest, he must have told himself, to give him strength for the rest of the journey. Or perhaps he knew that we would come looking for him and thought one of us would be there soon.

In my heart I had known—if he were alive, he would have come to me, found me and the others somehow. But I had been able to construct a fantasy world where he had grown to a man, had a family and children, a life. Now he was gone. I see his body lying on the cold ground of that Małopolska hill, a bed of pine needles beneath him, vacant eyes staring up at the sky.

“One can learn so much from bones. The age of a person at time of death, and often the gender, though that proved to be wrong here. We can learn about the position which the person was in, and that can often tell us much about how he or she died.” But not the things I really want to know, like why he had gone to the chapel and for how long he had waited, why Ruth did not reach him in time. Those are secrets for the bones to keep.

“There were a few other items found, like fragments of a cup.” Buried things that could survive so much longer than humans.

“We couldn’t find Michal,” I continue, forcing my voice to remain even. “Ruth insisted on going after him. It should have been me. I was the stronger one. But I went with Sam to take the other children to the train station. We made plans to meet there. But Ruth and Michal never arrived. I wanted to go back for them, but Sam wouldn’t hear of it. He put me and the children on the train and he went back to look for them, even though he had been shot as we escaped.”

“He never found either of them?”

“No. I later learned that Ruth was arrested and sent to Auschwitz.” I imagine now the Germans drawn to the woods by the fire at the chapel, happening upon Ruth, who was going in the same direction. I wipe my eyes as I think of my twin sister, the sacrifices she had made. “The Germans thought it was me because she was carrying my transit pass when she was arrested.”

She nods. “That’s why I expected to find Ruth here, not you.”

“Yes.” I had not corrected the records. The comingling of our names, my living as Ruth, seemed fitting. Part of me had died there with her, and part of her lived on in me still.

“What happened then?”

“We made it to the border.”

“It must have been hard living all of these years without him,” she says. “Sam, I mean.”

“All of these years? My Sam died last spring...”

Her jaw drops slightly. A Jewish soldier wounded and alone in the occupied Polish countryside. The odds of survival were nonexistent. I had thought so, too, when he pushed me on the train that morning and ran off to find my brother and sister, still bleeding from his wound. I was sure I would never see him again. But he had survived—and he had found me.

One June day some four years later there was a knock on the door of the Lower East Side boardinghouse where Dorie, Karolina and I shared a room. “Hello,” Sam said, and there was a moment’s shyness, meeting as strangers in the unfamiliar setting. He extended a hand. “May I have this dance?” I stared at him in wonder—his survival was nothing short of a miracle.

Then Dorie appeared behind me. “Sam!” she cried, wrapping herself around his legs, and just like that, we were a family.

“Lena, wait, I need to give you this.” He held a box in his cracked hands.

“Oh!” I gasped as I opened it, tears springing to my eyes at the familiar blue. It was Ruth’s cape, or rather a portion of it—the hood and a bit of the shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the visions of what might have caused Ruth to be separated from her beloved cape, or the garment to be torn into pieces so violently. “I went back to get them, just like I promised. Oh, Lena,” he said, breaking down as all of the tears he had hidden for so long rushed forth. “I’m so sorry. I told you I would...”

“And you did,” I replied, offering the absolution that would never be quite enough. He reached out to touch my face, and I fell into his arms, as if we were back in the chapel once more. I kissed him, not caring that Dorie was watching or that we were on the steps of the boardinghouse or what people might think. “Thank you,” I added, clutching the cape. “For bringing this back to me.” I took a deep breath, then grasped his hand to lead him to shelter once more.

“Sam came to me after the war,” I told Rabbi Farber. “Only later was he able to tell me the whole story of how he tracked Ruth to the camps and learned of her death there.” Nothing I had experienced before—not losing my mother or father—had prepared me for the fact that Ruth was gone. Now hearing what I have always known about Michal, the scar is ripped open again. Had Sam known about the chapel burning and tried to spare me further pain?

“I was in Poland researching and I found this.” Rabbi Farber pulls out a copy of a black-and-white photograph. “They wouldn’t let me take the original.” A bald woman in a striped uniform stares back at me. “Is that her?”

I sink to the ground. The woman in the photo is skeletal, but eyes a mirror image of my own stare back. It is the notion of my sister’s locks, her pride and joy, shorn to the scalp that brings me to my knees. I take the picture, clutch it to my chest.

Rabbi Farber helps me to a chair. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Why are we here, if not to cry for those who have gone?” I look at the photograph once more, my own name penciled beneath. “You’ve heard of how amputees sometimes have phantom pains where their missing limbs once were?” She nods. “That’s me. It is as if Ruth has been here with me this entire time, talking, living. I still turn to her to tell her things, almost every day.” Ruth had been with me since my first breath and, somehow, I assumed she would be there until my last. “We never knew about Michal, though, until now.”

“Of course, we don’t know for sure. If you’d like to be more certain, there are DNA tests.”

“It’s him. I’m sure of it.” Tears stream down my face now. “Oh, my sweet Michal.”

I will have to tell the others, Karolina and Dorie. Of course, to them our brother is just a shadowy image. When we first left Biekowice they asked for Ruth and Michal incessantly. But a child’s mind is mercifully short of memory and as we had escaped, finally landing in New York, the excitement and new unfamiliar sights that assaulted the senses pushed their pain away until the questions came only once every few days, then weeks and months between. When they were old enough I’d sat them down and told them the truth about a brother and a sister and parents they had never really known, and they’d listened gravely but their concern had been more for my tears than any real sense of sadness. Our family had become the stuff of once upon a time, bedtime lore or a fantasy world that had not truly existed.

“I’m so sorry,” Rabbi Farber says again.

“It’s all right. I knew when we couldn’t find Ruth that something had happened. My other two sisters survived. Dorie is a doctor now. She lives about fifteen minutes from here with her family and I see them almost every week. And my baby sister, Karolina—Kari, she’s called now—is a grandmother of five.” We are generations because of Sam’s heroism.

“And Sam?”

“A heart attack, two years ago. But we had a wonderful life for many years.” I worried that Sam would never find us. “I don’t think he ever forgave himself, though, for not being able to save the others—or find out what happened to Michal. Years later we checked the records in Poland, Tel Aviv, even Moscow after the wall came down. It became something of a fixation for Sam. He said it was about genealogy, constructing his family tree. But I knew that a boy from Chicago had no real cause to be poking around in all those archives. You see, Rabbi—”

“Elizabeth, please call me Elizabeth.”

I continue. “Elizabeth, he was doing it for me, trying to find the truth. We knew it was virtually impossible that Michal had survived. He was only twelve. Still, he was a strong boy and so smart and resourceful, so part of me always hoped... Well, never mind. He’s at peace now.” But the questions still haunt me. Had Michal been cold? Had he suffered?

“Did you have children of your own?” she asks, her voice round with kindness as she tries to change the subject.

“Not biologically.” The doctors had never been able to find anything wrong. My body, they suggested, was just too ravaged from the starvation and other hardships, to prove hospitable. But I knew that the reason ran deeper: after all I had seen, how could I bring a child into the world and live with the cold terror of knowing I might not live long enough to protect it?