Page 9 of The Storyteller of Krakow

The arms had let me go. Whose arms were they? I was not sure – guards to make me stand, or others from the train who were simply trying to help me?

‘Don’t look, Lena,’ my father said. He came next to me, and we started walking once more, and this time, no one spoke, no one cried, no one dared to even look at the bodies we had left behind.

We were led into a white of nothingness. It blinded me. The white. I tried to make out something other than the snow, and it took some time before wooden huts appeared, and thick fir trees draped in iced clothing. There was no barbed wire, no fences to keep us here in this void. But there was no need. For miles and miles, there was the landscape of something not yet drawn. A blank piece of paper that we could not ever escape the edges of.

It was worse, in a way, being enclosed. At least with a fence, you knew where the boundary lay in regard to freedom. Here, though, they wanted you to see that there was nothing. No freedom. No escape. To even try would mean death in a cold that would eat at your bones.

I trudged along with my father, calf deep in the snow. It was seemingly bottomless; I could feel it burning on my skin. And yet we walked.

Soon, we stood in front of a tiny hut, and the guards behind us told us to go inside. Father opened the door, and we were welcomed by two drawn, pale faces that looked at us with terror in their eyes.

The door closed behind us, leaving us now in a grimy darkness that was lit by only a small flame from a candle and some logs in a fire that were quickly burning away to ash.

‘Hello,’ one of the faces said. ‘Poles?’

‘Yes.’ My father stepped ahead of me.

‘Helena.’ One face came forward, and in the grim light, I could just make out that she was a young woman, perhaps not much older than myself. ‘This is Grzegorz. My brother.’

Her brother did not come forward and instead sat close to the fire.

‘Just the two of you?’ she asked, looking at us both and then the three bags we carried.

‘My wife—’ my father started, and then stopped.

‘Here, come sit.’ Helena ushered him to the hearth, and wrapped her own thin shawl around his shoulders.

I stood there, staring at Grzegorz. I don’t know why I did. And I don’t know why he stared back at me, matching my look.

I could hear my father talking to Helena, weeping now. He was talking about my mother, who he said was dead. It was as though his voice was coming from far away, and there was this strange buzzing in my ears.

‘Lie down,’ a voice said, then arms placed me on a thin mattress made of straw.

I looked to see Grzegorz’s face above my own. I wondered how old he was.

‘How did I get here?’ I looked about and saw I was on the other side of the room, on a bunk, a slat of wood above me.

‘You went all strange,’ he said.

‘Where’s my father?’

‘I’m here.’ I heard him, but I couldn’t see him. Nothing was making sense. Faces were blurry and merging together in front of my eyes.

‘I don’t like this,’ I said, feeling as though I were swimming underwater and yet I could still breathe.

‘Close your eyes,’ I heard my father say. ‘Close your eyes, Lena. Close them and leave this place.’

So I did. I let my eyelids fall and the room tipped away. I was still on the bunk, still smelling smoke and damp wool, but I was also nowhere at all. The dark behind my eyes filled with snowlight. Mama’s hand in mine. Then the sound again, that dry pop that didn’t belong, and the red blooming on her forehead. In the dream I tried to catch her as she fell, as if my arms could undo bullets, as if I could rewind time by wanting it hard enough.

When I opened my eyes again, someone was talking, Helena, maybe, my father weeping, a low animal sound coming from him. Something rose up in me, something unbearable. Shock, grief, sadness, all intermingled into one big ball. I knew if I let it out, I would never be able to swallow it down again. So there and then I tucked it away, tight behind my ribs. My mother, her face, her death, keeping her inside and close to me always.

5

1940, VORKUTLAG, SIBERIA

I cannot describe the cold. I could try, but it would never convince you of the constant chill that froze my very bones. It felt almost as if my blood had turned to ice, that every part of me was coated with frost. Nothing took away the cold that winter. We had coats, we had socks, we had trousers even and hats, but we worked outside from dawn till dusk, our freezing skin constantly thwacked by the iced air, our extremities in pain from the barrage of that uncaring weather.

Our job was simple enough, stripping bark from trees, but it was brutal. The bark was not just material to go off to a sawmill somewhere, it was sustenance when the food rations just weren’t enough. They dried it out, crushed it into a powder, boiled it into a slime that they fed us. I remember the taste – bitter, grainy, almost like starvation itself, which led to nothing but upset stomachs, dysentery and sometimes death. It was a way to feed us and to kill us all at the same time.