“Ha—have you—found anything—about your family?”
Please, God. Don’t let him suffer what I have.
Stefan presses his forehead to mine and closes his eyes. “They—” his voice shudders. “They made it.” A soft cry escapes with the words. “They’re all right. All of them.”
Tears spill down my cheeks, mixing with his. And now I understand…I don’t need philosophy to find my purpose.
It’s him. He is my purpose.
EPILOGUE: STEFAN
SANOK, POLAND
Present Day: May 5, 1950
Blue skies, poppies in every flower bed, and gabled shops painted in pastel tones. Vendors with street carts, performers, and artists, children chasing balls and running with kites across cobblestone. It took a village of people to return home, to sweep away the ash, to patch, and paint. No one above another, no one below. Every hand with a broom or paint brush.
Rosalie rests her head on my shoulder as we gaze out the clock tower window. “Isn’t it the most beautiful view?” she asks.
“Like a painting of perfection,” I reply, staring only at her.
She nudges her elbow into my side. “How lucky was I to grow up being able to stare out this window every day?”
She didn’t think so then. With her mother gone, and her father lost in grief, Rosalie lived before as if caught between the minutes of a broken clock. Some scars never heal. Some nightmares outlive a mind. And yet, she pressed onward to fix what couldn’t be left behind.
“Dinner is getting cold,” Eloise says, huffing and puffing from the spiral stairwell.
“No, it’s not,” I argue with my sister, pointing out the window. “People are just taking their seats.”
I glance over my shoulder, finding Mama’s look painted on Eloise’s face—at twenty, she’s a spitting image.
“It’s time,” Mama calls out as she reaches the top of the steps, Benjamin shoving past her in the hurry he’s always in to go nowhere.
“Is the cake up here?” Father calls out, following the others upstairs.
“Yes, I’ll take care of it,” I tell him.
“Well let’s go!” he exclaims.
“Just another minute,” Rosalie tells the others, staring down at her papa’s watch.
She scoots off the window bench and hurries over to the pendulum and gears, counting quietly to herself as she peers between her watch and the escapement, bobbing her head like her Papa used to do. She closes her eyes gently and smiles just as the clock bells chime.
“Perfect,” she says.
“It truly is,” Mama agrees, making her way over to Rosalie and placing her arm around her shoulders.
They almost didn’t survive the years after the Sanok ghetto was liquidated. A priest who knew my family took them amid the chaos of ghetto deportations and hid them in a storage room beneath a small church. They lived in darkness, afraid that even the smallest movement might be heard above. The priest had nothing more to give, but gave them whatever spare food he could, hoping it would be enough to keep them alive.
After liberation, Father was in the hospital for a while from starvation. “Something a man does to save his family. All I could do was give them my crumbs,” he told us. Mama didn’t know he had stopped eating to make sure she, Eloise, and Benjamin werebeing fed enough. If there was one more mouth to feed, Papa wouldn’t have survived. I’ve recognized that on my own.
The day Papa was released from the hospital, he set out to find me. We found each other outside our family’s factory. I made my daily rounds between our house, the factory, and the clock tower, convinced someone would come back to find me there too. We found each other.
Horseshoes clomp steadily, the strings of a violin harmonize with the passing breeze, and the small village of Sanok, those who rebuilt it with their bare hands, sit at the longest table I will ever see, in the middle of the square, and share a Sunday night meal together every week.
As evening settles over Sanok, all twenty different desserts have been depleted, and a clink against glass shushes all the conversations at once.
“It’s my turn to make a toast this week,” Father says, standing from his chair. “To the wonderful people of Sanok, another week has come and gone, more flowers have budded, another shop has reopened, our new bakery is in business, and—” he stalls, swiping at his napkin before blotting a tear beneath his eye. “I just found out I’m going to be a grandfather today. And Miriam, she’s going to be a grandmother.” His voice breaks into a soft cry as Mama reaches up to take his hand.
