Page 13 of The Storyteller of Krakow

He nodded and stepped outside, pointing to a ramshackle barn.

We followed him, all the while Father still rambling on, asking him questions about his health and whether or not he had managed to soothe the baby that had had a fever. I did not know which of his patients he had decided this man was, and let him continue. There was no way to stop him anyway.

Inside the barn, sacks of potatoes leaned against each other. He went to one and drew out four, then pointed to the pocket watch. Four potatoes for one watch? I shook my head.

He shook his own back at me and pointed at the ground, then pretended to put the potato in it. That’s when I understood – they were seed potatoes. We could grow our own.

I nodded then and took the four potatoes and handed over the watch.

He then pointed that we follow him back to the house, but did not let us enter. He went inside, then returned with a clean-ish canvas sack and opened it to reveal some bread, sugar, a few gnarled carrots and a lump of something wrapped in grease paper. Then he pointed at the ring and my bracelet.

I handed them over quickly, not wanting Father to see Mama’s ring and start yelling, took the sack, placed the potatoes inside and said thank you.

He nodded, gave a quick smile, and then closed the door.

‘Well, can’t have been that poorly, could he? I mean, getting us to trek all the way out here?’ Father huffed, then turned and walked away.

That was the last time Father spoke to me. All the way back, he walked in silence and no matter what I said, or asked, he would not join in.

I wonder now what happened in his mind to make him stop talking. At the time, I told myself he was punishing me, the way parents sometimes do when they don’t know what else to do with their anger. But that was childish, and even then I think I knew it. Father didn’t have the energy for punishment. He was simply… gone. Not dead, not yet, but retreated somewhere I could not follow. In the gulag you learned to leave parts of yourself behind to survive, and I had done it with making stories up in my head. Father did it with his whole self. He had lost his wife in front of him, his son buried, his home, his work, his purpose. What was left was hunger and cold and a grief so constant it stopped being a feeling and became the air he breathed.

Later, when I became a doctor myself, I learned the tidy words for it. Shock. Trauma. Complicated grief. Depression so deep the body starts to switch itself off. Delirium from starvation, from exhaustion, from the brain being deprived of what it needs and inventing something kinder instead. I had seen men stop speaking in hospital beds too, eyes fixed on something no one else could see, as if the world had become too much work. At the time in that forest, I only knew the crude version: that Father was no longer Father. He was a shell walking beside me. And the most frightening part was not the silence. It was the faint sense of relief on his face when he finally stopped trying to make sense of any of it.

We were not far from our hut when from the edge of the clearing came a low groan and a figure staggered towards us – gaunt, wrapped in rags that might once have been a coat, eyes raw.

‘Please,’ the stranger said in Polish, his voice strangled. ‘Food.’

Father stared at the sacks and then at the man.

Before I could stop him, or at least think, Father delved into the bag and handed him two of the potatoes and the bread.

The man didn’t say thank you, just eyed the sack still in my hands.

‘Are you from the camp?’ I asked. ‘You won’t be able to escape.’

‘I’m not going back there,’ he said, his eyes still trained on what we had left.

I felt scared, not of being hurt, but that he would grab the sack and run, leaving us with nothing.

‘I’m going to plant the other potatoes,’ I told him. ‘There are only two left. I need to plant them for my family. I have a brother and a sick mother,’ I lied. ‘And my father here, he is not well either.’

His eyes finally left the sack and looked at my father, then me.

‘There’s a house, just a few miles away. A man lives there. He has food. Maybe you could ask for some?’ I suggested.

‘You won’t survive,’ the man said, then turned away to go back into the depths of the forest.

We walked on. There was nothing more to be done or said. The man was right. We wouldn’t survive, Father, me, or him.

6

1941, VORKUTLAG, SIBERIA

Father was dead by the spring of 1940 and I was only half alive by the time we were released in June 1941.

Why we were released had nothing to do with mercy – the Russians did not look at our gaunt faces, our half-lifeless selves and simply decide to set us free. It was merely because the Germans had now turned on the Russians and driven east, and all of a sudden, Stalin needed friends. Overnight, we were useful again. The Soviets started talking about alliances and agreements, about ‘amnesty’ as if we had committed some crime by being Polish.

Somewhere far from the snow and the bark and the graves in this place, men in suits shook hands and decided that a Polish army could be formed to fight Hitler. And so the locks loosened. Not for everyone, not cleanly, not kindly – but enough that the gates opened and people like me were shoved out into the light, blinking, half-dead, and told we were free.