Page 8 of The Storyteller of Krakow

And so, we found ourselves on a train, heading further east. The cold as we travelled across the border to Russia was nothing like any cold I had experienced before. In Poland, the winter air bit at my skin, nibbled it, tasting to see if it could penetrate. But there was always home to go to, before it took huge bites out of you. This time, because there was no home, no fireplace, no warming soup or stew, it gnawed at me, taking flesh, bone and blood.

I could not stop shivering. My mother, father and I huddled together in that cattle cart for warmth, but it was as though we were simply sharing the cold, making each other worse. I could hear my father’s teeth knocking against each other, feel the tremor of my mother as she tried to stop the shudders.

The others in the carriage, the shadows opposite us, did not speak. All we knew of them was the wisps of white in the dark as they expelled warm air, taking in ice instead.

How we survived that journey I am not sure, as many did not. Once, in the middle of the night, the train lurched and stopped so abruptly that we all pitched forward. Someone near the door began to wail. At first I thought it was a child, but it was a woman. The guards slid the door open and one of them climbed in, boots crunching on frozen filth, and prodded at a shape by the wall with the end of his rifle.

He barked at the figure in Russian but the shape did not move. He prodded again, harder. Still nothing. Then, bored, he and another guard hooked their hands under the man’s arms and dragged him towards the door. His head lolled back, mouth slack, eyelashes white with frost – he was dead.

For a moment his heel caught on my ankle and I flinched. The guards laughed at me then heaved the man out of the door and into the darkness.

The door then slammed shut. The woman’s wail became a whisper, and then even that stopped. After that, no one spoke for hours. We all listened to the wheels and wondered whose turn was next.

There were moments of respite when one, or all of us, fell into sleep. I do not know what my parents dreamt of in those moments, but I remember dreaming of sitting by a fire, the logs crackling, then all of a sudden it would be taken away and I would find myself falling through the ice of the pond back home, sinking down into the darkness, the cold slowly enveloping me, and eventually becoming almost warm. Almost welcoming.

We arrived at some point during the day. We had no way of knowing the time. Time had been taken from us in that carriage where even day turned to night with only slivers of light under the door to tell us that perhaps it was morning, or afternoon.

The light almost blinded me when I stepped out. It bounced off the pristine white snow, so that I had to shield my eyes for a moment. Once I had found my sight again, the snow became distant. In front of me was a line of darkness. Dark men in their uniforms, carrying guns, wearing bearskin hats and shouting at us in a language we did not understand.

My mother grabbed my hand, and I realised she did so not to comfort me but to steady herself.

‘Are you all right?’ my father whispered to her.

In any other setting, perhaps we would have joked with her that her feet had fallen off, that they were frozen to ice blocks. But here, both Father and I knew that if she could not feel her feet, then surely frostbite had taken hold, and soon the pain would start. We had seen it before, Father and I, with a patient of his who had got drunk on too much vodka and slept in a snow drift. By the time he was found by his wife, barely alive, and she had brought him to us, his feet were black. When the pain hit, when the realisation of his toes falling off hit this man, the screams were so unbearable that my father had to knock him out with a drugged dose of morphine.

There was no time to inspect Mother’s feet. The guards ushered us onwards into the snow. Dogs strained at leashes as we walked, barking, saliva dripping from their teeth.

A guard yelled words I did not understand and pushed me hard in the back, causing me to trip and take my mother down with me.

The snow stung at my face, and as I tried to rise, I saw a droplet of blood staining the white and realised, somehow, it was mine. As I pushed myself to stand, I felt the rocks that lay underneath the blanket of ice, then raised a hand to my head, feeling a slice of skin taken away just above my left eyebrow.

My father bent down to pick my mother up, but she could not stand and cried out every time my father tugged at her arm. He would not stop trying to help her, even when the guards with guns appeared. He pulled and tugged at her, but she cried and cried.

A guard shouted more intelligible words.

My father looked to me, then at the guard, then to Mother.

She stopped crying and smiled. And in a second, a second, a pop fired and she lay back in the snow, a bloody circle in the middle of her forehead.

My father began to cry out then, reach down to her, tried to kiss her. There was blood in my eyes and I wiped it away as much as I could.

Arms tugged at my arms. Fingers bruising that gentle skin above my armpits where Boris’s friend had once tugged at too, pinching, not letting go.

There were cries, shouts. There was blood in my eyes.

‘Tata!’ I cried out.

‘Lena!’ he yelled back.

There was another pop. Another shout. Some more crying.

I looked about, expecting to see Tata now in the snow along with Mama, but he was still there, still standing and alive. Instead, a child was in the snow, blood seeping from their mouth. I didn’t know what they had done. Didn’t know why they had been killed. But then I wasn’t sure why Mama had either.

Nothing was making sense. My thoughts jumped about and refused to be caught.

Mama dead. The train. Blood in my eyes.

I fingered the cut on my eyebrow and was surprised to feel no pain.