The Forest of Vanishing Stars(100)

And then the world had sound again, and the man who had once been her father was falling back on the snow, his blood red and angry and mingling with hers. He gasped for breath, gasped for life, and Yona found her voice at last. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, using the last of her strength to turn her head toward him. He was lying on the snow beside her, his head tilted toward her, and so their eyes met once more, and in them, she could see disbelief and a great, deep fear of what was to come. “I’m sorry,” she murmured again, and then he gasped once more, and the light in his eyes went out forever, leaving behind an empty, ruined shell.

Yona closed her eyes, exhausted. Zus was safe now, though it was impossible to know whether her father had been alone. What if he’d been traveling with other deserters? What if another angry German had heard the gunshot and was already on his way here? “Run,” she whispered, forcing her eyes open again. Zus hovered over her, his tears falling. “Danger… You must run,” she managed to say.

“No.” His voice was choked but firm. “No, Yona. I never had the chance to tell you what I came back to say. I came to tell you I was wrong. That I want to open my heart again. That I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

She could see a future stretching before him, beautiful and bright. Children. A solid home. Food on the table and flowers in the garden. But it wasn’t her life, wasn’t her future. It was his, and she wanted him to live it, to be happy. “Go, Zus,” she whispered. “If you don’t, you will die.”

“Then so be it.” He was firm through his tears. “But I will not lose you, Yona.”

“Zus,” she began, but she couldn’t manage to say more, for she could no longer hold the air in her lungs, could no longer remember how to pump blood through her veins. So instead, she gazed up at his face, his beautiful face, as he picked her up in his arms. She was weightless, floating, suspended in air, and then, because it hurt too much to see the pain in his eyes, she looked past him, up at the vast sky visible above the skeletal trees. There, the night stretched on forever, a road to a heaven that had been there all along.

As the last of the light slipped away, he carried her out of the clearing, back toward the camp, his tears falling warm on her frozen face as the world faded around her and the stars vanished from the sky.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT




Seven months later, thousands of refugees once marked for death poured from the mouth of Poland’s vast forests, alive and free, though the world they’d once known lay in ruins. The final weeks in hiding had been the deadliest; all through the woods, the Germans had struck back as they retreated from the advancing Red Army, felling scores of innocent Jews who had survived the war only to lose their lives in its waning days. Shimon and Leonid were among the final victims; they had been on patrol when a dozen fleeing Nazis had approached the camp, and the men had managed to open fire, killing four soldiers, before being shot themselves. The Rozenberg brothers, roused from their sleep by the noise, had run into the woods and doubled back, encircling the Germans from behind and finishing them off before they could reach the main camp.

In the months since Yona had been shot, the group had grown, eventually numbering fifty-three by the time the spring thaw came. When they reemerged into the world, with Chaim as their leader, his wife and boys beside him, there was joy at the war’s end, but also great sadness at all that had been lost. In Nowogródek, in Pinsk, in Lachowicze, in Lida, in Mir, in all the towns they’d come from, they found the homes they’d once lived in occupied by others. They found news of countless loved ones who hadn’t returned and never would. They found synagogues burned to the ground and townspeople astonished to see Jews who had survived. They found a world that no longer felt as if it had a place for them in it.

Those who had survived the war, though, knew that they had to find a way to go on. And so they lived and thrived as best they could, some resettling in the towns they had once called home, most leaving tattered Slavic villages behind for a new life somewhere else. Chaim, Sara, and their boys went to Israel, as did Miriam, Oscher, and Bina, and the families of Shimon and Leonid, the wives vowing to start over to build a new life, a safe life, for their young children. Ruth, Pessia, Leah, and Daniel immigrated to Israel, too, hoping for a new start, and sixteen years later, when Daniel lost his life on a reprisal mission after an attack on his adopted country, Ruth and her daughters grieved deeply, but they were proud that Daniel had died fighting bravely for the rights of Jews to live in peace. It was a war that seemed to know no end.

Some who had survived the Second World War in the great woods would spend the rest of their lives trying to forget the things they had endured, the things they had lost. They started over, lost touch, tried to move on. Others stayed in place, forever conscious of the impossibility of ever righting the scales, of ever taking back the moments that had been stolen. All of them, though, were forever tied to the dark forests of eastern Europe—the forests that held their secrets, the forests that held their dead.

Many years later, well into the next millennium, children still told tales of the old woman who lived deep in the heart of the Nalibocka Forest, the one with one green eye and one blue. Some wondered if she was real at all, though others swore they had seen her singing to the stars, speaking to the squirrels, swaying with the trees. They believed she was a witch, and they whispered stories of terror and fright about her in the hallways of schoolhouses where children of all races and religions now learned side by side.