The Things We Cannot Say(18)

“Don’t do anything rash,” I pleaded with Filipe at every chance I got. He was the more sensitive of the twins—Mama sometimes said that Stanislaw had been born a hardened old man. But Filipe was softer, vastly less arrogant and I knew if I could convince him to remain cautious, Stanislaw would likely follow.

“Mama and Father think that if we keep our heads down, the Nazis will leave us alone,” Filipe said to me one morning, as we collected eggs together in the chicken yard.

“Is that so foolish?” I asked him, and he laughed bitterly.

“Life doesn’t work that way, Alina. Hatred spreads—it doesn’t burn out with time. Someone needs to stand up and stop it. You watch, sister—when they’re done with the Jews, it will be our turn again. Besides, even if we could ride out the war with our heads down, and we sat back while the Nazis worked all of our Jewish friends to death, what kind of Poland could be rebuilt once they were gone? Those people are as important to this country as we are. We’re better off dying with honor than sitting back to watch our countrymen suffer,” he said.

“The father of your girlfriend would disagree with everything you just said,” I muttered, and Filipe sighed heavily.

“Jan is a bigoted pig, Alina. It is hard enough to be civil to that man even on my good days—I can only force myself to be polite to him because if I wasn’t, I’d lose Justyna, and I love her. But don’t you see? It is because of men like Jan that we must find a way to rise up—we owe it to our sisters and brothers.”

Filipe’s rage only intensified once we had our first direct encounter with Nazi harassment. A group of SS officers stopped Truda and Emilia on the street outside of their home when they were walking to the factory to see Mateusz one day.

“I didn’t understand what was happening,” Truda whispered to Mama and me as we watched Emilia sit sullenly in the corner. Filipe and Stani were trying to make her laugh, but she was too shocked to even react to their antics. “One of the officers measured her height and said she is tall for her age and her eyes are green, so she is close enough to Aryan and they should take her.”

“Take her where?” I asked hesitantly.

“I don’t know,” Truda admitted with a shrug. “But clever Emilia was calling me Mama, and my hair is so dark. They looked at me and said her hair would get darker as she got older, and then they told us to go.”

“Yesterday, they took Nadia Nowak’s daughter,” Filipe murmured from his position on the floor. He looked up at us, rage simmering in his eyes. Nadia was Justyna’s aunt, the sister of her mother Ola, and I’d met Nadia’s daughter, Paulina. She was a tiny slip of a thing, only three or four years old, with a halo of blond curls and bright blue eyes. “It’s called the Lebensborn program. The SS are assessing each child in the township for their suitability to be taken from their families and ‘Germanized.’ The soldiers told Nadia that Paulina will be placed with a German foster family and given a new name so she has a chance of growing up to be racially pure. Nadia refused to let Paulina go, so the soldiers tore her from Nadia’s arms. Ola and Justyna are there today comforting her. Nadia is distraught.”

“Oh, that poor thing,” Mama gasped, clasping her hands in front of her chest. “Her husband was killed in the bombings too. She has suffered so much already.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” Filipe said, looking right at me. His nostrils had flared and his shoulders were locked hard. “I told you it was only a matter of time before they came for us too. This is our punishment because we lay down and let them torture our Jewish brothers and sisters, Alina. Now they steal our children, and God only knows what will happen to that little one now that she’s away from her family.”

Emilia was listening to all of this, her eyes growing wider, her jaw going slack.

“Filipe,” I whispered, glancing at her anxiously. “Please, not now.”

Stanislaw broke the tension—he leaped playfully at Filipe, who cried out in surprise. Just as he went to throw Stani away, Filipe looked at Emilia. A startled smile had broken on her face, and so Filipe went limp. Stani had clearly been expecting a wrestling match and didn’t seem to know what to do with Filipe now that he’d pinned him, so I quickly skipped across the room to join the tangle of bodies on the floor. I grinned at Emilia and locked my hands into claws, then tickled my strapping young brothers. They both looked at me blankly, but then when Emilia howled with laughter, they played along too.

When the time came for Truda and Emilia to leave, Filipe and Stani insisted on chaperoning them. As we watched the foursome walk up into the woods to cross the hill into town, Mama shook her head.

“That boy worries me,” she murmured.

I knew exactly which boy she meant.

After that day, I became Filipe’s shadow. The occupation was months old by then, and I’d heard nothing at all of Tomasz, so I had little to fill my thoughts but fears for him and terror that my brother was about to get himself killed—and only one of those things could I control. I kept myself busy by following Filipe around the farm waiting for any opportunity to convince him to stay safe.

I really thought the biggest risk to Filipe’s safety was the temptation to join the resistance, but he never even got the chance to go seeking danger, because soon enough it came to us. I was blindsided by the sound of a truck rumbling on the road beside our property one morning when I was in the field with Mama, harvesting potatoes. The soldier in the passenger’s seat stared right at us as they passed, and a sound escaped my mouth that was almost a shriek.