The Things We Cannot Say(19)

“Mama...”

“Stay calm,” Mama said quietly. “Whatever you do, Alina, do not panic.”

The blood was pounding through my body—echoing in my ears—my hands were shaking so hard I had to rest them against the soil to hold them still. In the end, I sat on my heels and I stared in horror as the truck came to a stop right at the gate to our farm. Four soldiers stepped from the truck and approached the barn where Father was working.

I couldn’t hear them speaking—we were just too far away. It was a very quick visit—the soldiers handed Father a piece of paper and left, so I told myself everything was fine. I watched the truck as it continued along the road, toward the Golaszewski house. Mama suddenly stood and began to run to the house, and I set my basket aside to follow her. When we reached Father, we found him reading the notice, leaning heavily against the door frame of the barn.

Father seemed stupefied. He was blinking slowly, and the color had drained entirely from his face.

“What is it?” Mama demanded, and she snatched the paper from his hand. As she read it, she made a little noise in the back of her throat.

“Mama, Father...” I croaked. “What is wrong?”

“Go fetch your brothers from the other field,” Father said dully. “We need to have a talk.”

We sat around the table and each of us took our turn to hold the paper. It was a summons—all families in our district who had children over the age of twelve would be required to send them for labor assignment. I was too upset to read the whole thing, in fact, every time I tried, my vision clouded with tears. Still, I was simply determined to keep a grip on some kind of optimism—or better still, to find a loophole.

“There has to be a way around it,” I told my family. My brothers shared an impatient glance, but I ignored them and pressed harder to find a way out of the mess. “They can’t make us leave our family and our home. They can’t—”

“Alina,” Filipe cut me off sharply. “These are the same people who shot Aleksy and the mayor in front of the entire town. These are the same soldiers who are making the Jewish children in the town work from sunup to sundown—the same pigs who think nothing of beating women and children to death if they disobey. The same men who took little Paulina Nowak just because her hair is blond. Do you really think they are going to hesitate to take a bunch of teenagers away in case we get homesick?”

I went to bed early that night, and I closed the door between my bed and the rest of the house, and I looked around my little room—my little world. My parents had split our tiny house into three rooms—although by today’s standards, two of those rooms would be laughably small, no more than closets. We were farmers—peasants, in the local vernacular—people who made only just enough from our land to support ourselves and during dry years, not a single shaft of wheat we didn’t desperately need.

So many times since Tomasz left, I’d been so desperate to flee that house to run to Warsaw to be with him. But that was when I thought I was walking away from my family into Tomasz’s waiting arms, an entirely different scenario to this one—where I was being torn away and sent to hostile strangers in a hostile land. I was existing here at the farm in a broken world, propelled out of bed each day only by the fact that every sunrise at least had the potential to bring news of Tomasz’s safety. If the Nazis took me away, how would he ever find me? How would I ever know what had become of him? The months that had passed since his last letter had felt close to unbearable. How could I survive if the not knowing became a permanent state?

I lay on my bed and I wrapped my arms around myself and I tried so hard to be brave, but I just kept picturing myself so far away from my family, isolated in a place where I didn’t speak the language and where I would no longer be the beloved and somewhat-sheltered youngest child, but instead a vulnerable young woman on her own. Eventually I closed my eyes, and I fell into an exhausted sleep, but I awoke sometime later to hushed whispers from my parents in the living area. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, so slipped out of bed to stand at the door.

But Stanislaw is the strongest. We must keep him—we cannot run the farm without him. At the very least we keep Filipe—he has no common sense and he will run his mouth off if we let him go—

No! Alina is tiny and she’s weak and too pretty. She is but a child! If we send Alina, she will never survive. We must keep her here.

But if we keep her, the farm will never survive!

I opened the door, and my parents both jumped in their chairs. My father looked away, but Mama turned to me and said impatiently, “Back to bed.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked her.

“Nothing. It is none of your concern.”

Hope blossomed in my chest. This was such an enticing sensation that I had to press a little harder, even though I knew I’d likely be shouted at for doing so.

“Did you find a way for us to stay?”

“Back to bed!” Mama said, and as I’d expected, her tone left no room for argument. There was no sleeping after that, and later, when I heard my parents pull out the sofa that served as their bed, I waited a while until they fell silent, then I sneaked past their bed to the boys’ tiny room at the other end of the house. My brothers were wide-awake, lying top-to-tail on the sofa they shared. When I entered the room, Filipe sat up and opened his arms to me.