Lilac Girls (4 page)

“Where have you
been
?” Matka said, her face white as the drawing paper in her hand.

“Up at Deer Meadow,” I said. “It was Pietrik's id—”

Zuzanna stood, holding a pile of glass shards in a cup, her white doctor's coat gray with ash. It had taken her six long years to earn that coat. Her suitcase stood next to the door. No doubt she'd been packing to go live at the hospital for her pediatric residency when the bombs had dropped.

“How could you be so stupid?” Zuzanna said.

“Where's Papa?” I said as the two came and brushed bits of concrete from my hair.

“He went out—” Matka began.

Zuzanna grabbed Matka's shoulders. “
Tell
her, Matka
.
”

“He went looking for you,” Matka said, about to dissolve into tears.

“He's probably at the postal center,” Zuzanna said. “I'll go find him.”

“Don't go,” I said. “What if the planes come again?” An electric eel of fear punctured my chest. Those poor women lying in the field…

“I'm going,” Zuzanna said. “I'll be back.”

“Let me come too,” I said. “They'll need me at the clinic.”

“Why do you do such stupid things? Papa's gone because of you.” Zuzanna slipped her sweater on and stepped toward the door. “They don't need you at the clinic. All you do is roll bandages anyway. Stay here.”

“Don't go,” Matka said, but Zuzanna rushed out, always strong, like Papa.

Matka went to the window and bent to pick up shards of glass but gave up because her hands were shaking so badly and came back to me. She smoothed my hair, kissed my forehead, and then held me tight, saying,
Ja ci
ę
kocham,
over and over like a skipping record.

I love you.

M
ATKA AND
I
SLEPT
in her bed that night, both with one eye open, waiting for Papa and Zuzanna to walk in. Psina, more dog than fowl, slept at the foot of our bed, her head tucked beneath one downy wing. She woke with a squawk when Papa did come home, well before dawn. He stood in the bedroom doorway, his tweed jacket powdered with ash. Papa always had a sad face, like that of a bloodhound. Even in his baby pictures, those creases and folds of skin hung down. But that night the light from the kitchen cast a shadow on his face, making him look sadder still.

Matka sat up in bed. “Ade?” She threw back the blanket and ran to him, their silhouettes dark against the light from the kitchen. “Where's Zuzanna?”

“I haven't seen her,” Papa said. “When I couldn't find Kasia, I went to the postal center and took my files outside to burn. Information the Germans will want. Names and addresses. Military lists. They've occupied the postal center in Warsaw and cut the telegraph line, so we're next.”

“What happened to the staff?” Matka said.

Papa glanced in my direction and did not answer.

“Our best guess is German troops will be here in a week. Chances are they'll come here first.”

“Here?” Matka gathered her housecoat around her neck.

“Looking for me. I may be useful to them.” Papa smiled, but his eyes stayed dark. “They'll want to use the postal center for their communications.”

No one knew the postal center like Papa. He'd run it for as long as I could remember. Did he know secrets? Papa was a patriot. He'd rather die than tell them anything.

“How do they even know where we live?”

Papa looked at Matka as if she were a child. “They've been planning this for years, Halina. If they take me, hopefully they'll need me enough to keep me alive. Give it two days. If you don't hear from me, take the girls and go south.”

“The British will help us,” Matka said. “The French—”

“No one is
coming,
my love. The mayor is evacuating, taking the police and fire brigade. For now we need to hide what we can.”

Papa pulled Matka's jewelry box from the dresser and tossed it on the bed. “First, wash and dry any tin cans. We need to bury anything of value—”

“But we haven't done anything wrong, Ade. Germans are cultured people. Hitler has them under some kind of spell.”

Matka's mother had been pure German, her father half-Polish. Even woken from sleep, she was beautiful. Soft but not fragile, a natural blonde.

Papa grabbed her by the arm. “Your cultured people want us gone so they can move in. Don't you see?”

Papa went about the apartment gathering our most valuable possessions in a metal box with a hinged lid: Matka's nursing certificate, their marriage license, a small ruby ring from Matka's family, and an envelope of family pictures.

“Get the bag of millet. We're burying that too.”

Matka pulled the canvas bag from under the sink.

“They'll probably do a house-by-house search for Polish soldiers in hiding,” Papa said, keeping his voice low. “They've broadcast new rules. Poland no longer exists as a country. No Polish will be spoken. All schools will close. There will be curfews. A pink pass is required to violate them, and we are not allowed weapons or ski boots or any food over our ration limit. Secretly possessing these things is punishable by—” Again Papa looked at me and stopped speaking. “They'll probably just take whatever they want.”

Papa pulled his old silver revolver from the dresser drawer. Matka stepped back, away from it.

“Bury that, Ade,” she said, her eyes wide.

“We may need it,” Papa said.

Matka turned away from him. “Nothing good comes of a gun.”

Papa hesitated and then placed the gun in the box. “Bury your Girl Guides uniform, Kasia. The Nazis are targeting scouts—they shot a pack of Boy Scouts in Gdansk.”

A chill went through me. I knew not to argue with Papa and placed my prized possessions in tin cans: the wool scarf Pietrik once wore that still smelled like him, the new red corduroy shift dress Matka sewed for me, my Girl Guides uniform shirt and neckerchief, and a picture of Nadia and me riding a cow. Matka wrapped one of her sets of Kolinsky sable-hair paintbrushes, which had been her mother's, and added them to a can. Papa melted wax on the seams of the tin cans.

That night only stars lit our back garden, a patch of dirt surrounded by a few planks of wood held up only by the weeds around them. Papa stepped on the rusty shovel blade to push it into the ground. It cut through hard soil as if it were cake, and he dug a deep hole, like a baby's fresh grave.

We were almost done, but even in near darkness I could tell Matka had kept her engagement ring on her finger, the one her mother had passed on to her when Papa was too poor to buy her one. The ring was like an exquisite flower, with a big center diamond surrounded with deep blue sapphire petals. It glittered like a nervous firefly as Matka's hand moved in the darkness. “The diamond is cushion cut—from the seventeen hundreds when they cut stones to react to candlelight,” Matka would say when people admired it. React it did, shimmering, almost alive.

“What about your ring?” Papa asked.

The firefly flew behind her back, protecting itself. “Not that,” Matka said.

As children, when crossing the road, Zuzanna and I had always fought over who got to hold Matka's hand that wore that ring. The pretty hand.

“Haven't we buried enough?” I said. “We'll be caught out here.”

Standing there arguing in the dark would only attract attention.

“Suit yourself, Halina,” Papa said. He flung shovelfuls of dirt into the hole to cover our treasures. I pushed earth into the hole with my hands to make things go faster, and Papa tamped it down smooth. He then counted his steps back to the building so he'd remember where we buried our treasure.

Twelve steps to the door.

Z
UZANNA FINALLY CAME HOME
with terrible tales of the doctors and nurses working all night to save the wounded. Word was many were still alive trapped under rubble. We lived in fear of hearing the sound of Germans at our front door, our ears to the radio in the kitchen, hoping for the best news but hearing the worst. Poland defended herself, sustaining great losses, but in the end could not match Germany's modern armored divisions and airpower.

I woke Sunday, September 17, to Matka telling Papa what she'd heard on the radio. The Russians had also attacked Poland, from the east. Was there no end to the countries attacking us?

I found my parents in the kitchen peering out the front window. It was a crisp fall morning, a light breeze blowing in through Matka's curtains. As I drew closer to the window, I saw Jewish men in black suits clearing the rubble from in front of our house.

Matka wrapped her arms around me, and once the road was cleared, we watched a parade of German soldiers roll in, like new tenants in a boardinghouse with their mountains of luggage. First came trucks, then soldiers on foot, then more soldiers standing tall and haughty in their tanks. At least Zuzanna did not see this sad sight, for she was already at the hospital that morning.

Matka heated water for Papa's tea as he watched it all. I did my best to keep us all quiet as could be. Maybe if we were silent, they would not bother us? To calm myself I counted the birds crocheted on Matka's curtains. One lark. Two swallows. One magpie. Wasn't the magpie a sign of imminent death? The rumble of a truck grew louder.

I breathed deep to quell the panic inside me. What was coming?

“Out, out!”
a man shouted. The terrible clatter of hobnail boots on cobblestones. There were lots of them.

“Stay away from the window, Kasia,” Papa said, stepping back himself. He said it in such an offhand way I knew he was scared.

“Should we hide?” Matka whispered. She turned her ring around and closed her hand so the stones hid in her palm.

Papa walked toward the door, and I busied myself with prayer. We heard a good bit of yelling and orders, and soon the truck drove away.

“I think they're leaving,” I whispered to Matka
.

I jumped as a rap came at our door, and then a man's voice.
“Open up!”

Matka froze in place and Papa opened the door.

“Adalbert Kuzmerick?” said an SS man, who strode in all puffed up and pleased with himself.

He was two hands taller than Papa, so tall his hat almost hit the top of the door when he entered. He and his underling were dressed in full Sonderdienst uniform, with the black boots and the hat with the horrible skull emblem with two gaping holes for eyes. As he passed, I smelled clove gum on him. He looked well fed too, his chin held so high I could see the blood through a little piece of white paper stuck on his Adam's apple where he'd cut himself shaving. They even bled Nazi red.

“Yes,” Papa said, calm as could be.

“Director of the postal center communications?”

Papa nodded.

Two more guards grabbed Papa by the arms and pulled him out without even time for him to look back at us. I tried to follow, but the tall one blocked my way with his nightstick.

Matka ran to the window, eyes wild. “Where are you taking him?”

Suddenly I was cold all over. It was getting harder to breathe.

Another SS man, skinny and shorter than the first, stepped in with a canvas bread bag across his chest.

“Where does your husband keep his work papers?” asked the tall one.

“Not here,” Matka said. “Can't you tell me where they're taking him?”

Matka stood, fingers locked at her chest, as the skinny one went about the house opening drawers and stuffing whatever papers we had into his bag.

“Shortwave radio?” the tall one said.

Matka shook her head. “No.”

My stomach hurt as I watched the skinny guard fling our cabinet doors wide and toss what little food we had into his bag.

“All provisions are the property of the Reich,” the tall one said. “You will be issued ration cards.”

Tinned peas, two potatoes, and a sad little cabbage went into the skinny one's bag. Then he grabbed a rolled paper bag that held the last of Matka's coffee.

She reached for it.

“Oh, please—may we keep the coffee? It's all we have.”

The tall one turned and looked at Matka for a long second. “Leave it,” he said, and his underling tossed it onto the counter.

The men stepped through our three little bedrooms and pulled drawers from bureaus, dumping socks and underclothes on the floor.

“Weapons?” said the tall one as the other searched closets. “Any other food?”

“No,” Matka said. I'd never seen her lie before.

He stepped closer to her. “You may have heard that withholding that which is due the Reich is punishable by death.”

“I understand,” Matka said. “If I could just visit my husband…”

We followed the men out to the back garden. The yard, fenced on all sides, suddenly seemed smaller with the SS men standing there. It all looked normal, but the ground where we'd buried our things the week before was still beaten quite flat. It was so obvious something was buried there. I counted the guard's steps as he walked into the yard.
Five…six…seven…
Could they see my knees shaking?

Our chicken, Psina, moved closer to our buried treasure spot, scratching near it, looking for bugs. My God, the shovel was there, leaning against the back of the house, dirt still clinging to the blade. Would they take us to Lublin Castle or just shoot us in the yard and leave us for Papa to find?

“Do you think I'm stupid?” the tall guard said, walking toward the spot.

Eight…nine…

My respiration shut off.

“Of course not,” Matka said.

“Get the shovel,” said the tall guard to his underling. “You really thought you'd get away with this?”

“No, please,” Matka said. She held on to the St. Mary medal she wore on a chain around her neck. “I am from Osnabrück, actually. You know it?”