“They will be coming for you,” Eva’s father had murmured to Irina just moments earlier. “They’ve already taken the men from the neighboring towns on both sides. Today or tomorrow, they will come for the women and the children; everyone else in the neighborhood. Don’t stay here, Irina. Take Tanja and Eva and go…”
Germany had declared war on Russia, and Stalin wanted ethnic Germans living in Russia nowhere near the advancing armies of their ancestral countrymen. Never mind that the Volga Germans like her father, brother, and Sascha had been self-governed Russian citizens for two hundred years. Deportation to labor prisons and resettlement camps at the farthest reaches of the empire would take care of any possible collaboration with Hitler’s forces, Stalin had reasoned, and if they died along the way, so be it.
Eva and her father and brother had just sat down to breakfast when they suddenly heard shouts up and down their street, poundingon doors, cries of distress, and commands in harsh Russian for the men in the neighborhood to assemble in front of the glass factory at the end of the block. They had five minutes to pack a bag. Anyone disobeying this direct order risked being shot.
Papa and Arman had been eating the oatmeal Eva had made; she’d been cooking for her father and brother since Tante Alice had passed away when she was twelve. She’d loved that part of her life. Sascha had whispered to her once that she was a better cook than his mother, and she’d adored him for saying it even though she did not think it was true.
“Can they do this?” Arman had asked after the soldiers banged on their door, verified his and Papa’s identities, and personally announced the edict. Arman was only a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, plenty old enough to be included in the roundup of sixteen and older.
“I…I think so,” their father had answered.
“So we have to go with them?” Arman’s eyes had been wide with alarm. “Where?”
“For how long?” Eva asked.
“I’ll find out,” Papa had said. “Stay here. Pack a bag, son. Eva, you pack mine. I’ll be right back.”
With shaking hands, Eva had placed Papa’s pajamas, clean socks and underwear, a change of clothes, a comb, a toothbrush, and her mother’s framed photo—which had been on her father’s nightstand for as long as she could remember—into a travel bag. Because they’d not had time to eat, she hurried into the kitchen and put the remainder of yesterday’s loaf of bread inside the bag, along with two small apples and a wedge of cheese. It was at that moment she realized if all the men and older boys were being taken, that meant Sascha would be taken, too.
Sascha, who lived three doors down, had long been Arman’sbest friend. Eva had grown up with him and his sister, Tanja, who was four years behind Eva in school. When she was much younger, Sascha had joined in with Arman’s roguish teasing, running from Eva with glee when she tried to play with them. But that was when they were children. Their feelings for each other changed when Eva was thirteen and Sascha fifteen. Six months earlier they’d pledged their love to each other and secretly vowed to marry when Eva was old enough.
The thought of losing Papa and Arman to an unknown future was bad enough; losing Sascha was unthinkable. She was to spend the rest of her days with him. He was her destiny. Where he went, she was meant to go.
Eva had dropped her father’s bag and run to the door, throwing it open to dash over to Sascha’s, but her father had been returning to the apartment that same moment and his frame filled the doorway. Behind him on the street Eva could hear women crying, babies wailing, men shouting.
She had fallen back a step as her father stepped inside.
Papa’s gaze had sought Arman standing in the small living room with a rucksack over his shoulder and cap askew on his head.
“They are taking us to a labor camp, Arman,” Papa had said, his voice empty of strength and falsely calm. “I don’t know for how long. Perhaps a very long time. And it’s far. Quite far. It will not feel like August there. Get your coat. And get mine.” Then he turned to Eva. “Listen to me, Eva. You need to stay with Irina and Tanja now. Do whatever Irina says. Promise me you will.”
But Eva could not speak. Papa had not included Sascha’s name in his instructions to her. They were taking him, too, just as she feared. Bile rose in her throat.
“Spatzi,”her father had said. “You must stay with Irina now. You need to tell me you understand.”
But before she could answer, an armed soldier on the street shouted into the house from the open door.“Seechas!”
Now!
When Papa and Arman had hesitated, he bolted up the four steps to stand on the threshold. He repeated the command with a shout.
Her father had reached for his coat over Arman’s left arm and his travel bag on the floor by Eva’s feet. He nodded to his son, and Arman took a trembling step toward the door.
“Follow us down to the glass factory, Eva,” her father had said over his shoulder as he paused on the threshold. “We need to find Irina.”
“Idti!”the soldier commanded.Move!
Eva’s voice had finally found its way back to her throat. “What about Sascha?” she yelled, but Papa didn’t answer her. He raced out the door to catch up with Irina and Tanja far ahead of them in the human flow filling the narrow street. She scrambled after him.
“You and the girls must get out of here,” he’d said to Irina when they reached her and as they closed the distance to the glass factory. “Don’t wait and don’t sleep tonight at your apartment. Take my vehicle and put the bicycles in the back. Stay off the main roads and drive west until it runs out of gas. Abandon it somewhere where it won’t be found for a while. Then use the bikes. Stick to the countryside. Speak only Russian. Finding the advancing German Army is your only hope—do you understand? You must go to where they are. Try to get to your sister’s place in Kyiv. The German Army will have to take it before they try for Moscow. You must try very hard to get there. Do you understand?”
Irina had nodded, wide-eyed with fear.
This was when Papa had finally turned to Eva, called herSpatzi, his little sparrow—a pet name that she’d long since outgrown—and told her they would surely meet again, as though he already knew he’d never see her again this side of eternity.
A split second later the soldier was cracking her on the side of her head with his firearm and a weeping Irina was pulling her away.
When Eva discovered the awful truth weeks later that tens of thousands of ethnic Germans who were put on trains bound for the gulag perished en route or died within weeks or months of arriving, and when she finally understood there was no plan to bring the Volga Germans back home, not even if the Red Army was successful in driving out the Nazi forces, and when she learned executions of political prisoners were as regular an occurrence at the gulags as cold gray skies, what haunted her most was having been denied the chance to speak to Sascha once more before he disappeared from her life for good.
