Even if we do sleep, we’re on pins and needles. We are asleep, but we hear everything. Sometimes near morning we hear the rumble of a wooden wagon. The noise swells in the darkness, and by the time the wagon passes our house, the racket is like that of some infernal machine. Mother walks to the window on tiptoe and carefully draws aside the curtain. It is possible that at this very moment other mothers on Wesola Street are doing the same thing. They see the slowly rolling wagon, on it the huddled figures, the Red Army men walking behind it, and — behind them — darkness once again. The neighbor who saw how they were burning St. Andrew Bobola alive tells Mother that it is as if these wagons are rolling over her. The next day she aches everywhere.
THE FIRST IN CLASS to disappear was Paweł. Because winter was approaching, the teacher suggested that Paweł had probably caught a cold and was staying in bed. But Paweł didn’t come the next day or the next week, and in time we began to understand that he would never come. Shortly thereafter we saw that the bench in the first row, in which Janek and Zbyszek sat, was empty. We grew sad, because the two of them played the best practical jokes, which was why the teacher made them sit in the front row, so that he could keep an eye on them. In other classes children also disappeared, more and more frequently. Soon no one even asked why they didn’t come or where they were. The school grew empty. After class we still played ball, hide-and-seek, stickball, but something had happened — the ball became very heavy, during hide-and-seek no one felt like running fast, and in stickball everyone waved the stick around any old way. Bizarre disputes and fierce battles erupted easily, after which everyone took off — angry, sullen, and listless.
One day our teacher disappeared. We arrived at school as usual by eight o’clock, and after the bell, when we had sat down at our benches, the principal, Mr. Lubowicki, appeared at the door. “Children,” he said, “go home now and come back tomorrow, you will have a new teacher, a lady.” For the first time since my father’s departure I feel a cramp near my heart. Why did they take our teacher? He was constantly nervous and looked out the window frequently. He would say, “Ah, children, children,” and shake his head. He was always serious and seemed very sad. He was good to us, and if a student stammered while reading Stalin, he didn’t shout, and even smiled a little.
I walked home dejected. As I was crossing the tracks, I heard a familiar voice. Someone was calling me. Freight cars stood along the railway, packed with people who were about to be deported. The voice was coming from there. In the door of one of the cars I saw our teacher’s face. He was waving to me. My God! I started to race in his direction. But a second later a soldier caught up with me and struck me over the head so hard that I fell. I was getting up, dizzy and with a sharp pain, when he made as if to strike me again but didn’t; he only started shouting at me that I should clear out of here, go to the devil. And he called me a son of a bitch.
BEFORE LONG the hunger began. There hadn’t been any frost yet, and right after school we would start prowling through the gardens. We knew well their intricate geography, because there, amid the beds and shrubs, we used to play our endless games, our wars, hide-and-seek, and Indians. Everyone knew in whose garden the large apples grew, where it was worth shaking down the pear tree, where so many plums had ripened that everything was purple, or where there had been a good crop of bulgy rutabagas. These expeditions were risky, because the owners of the gardens would fiercely drive us away. Hunger was already staring everyone in the face, and everyone was trying to lay down provisions. No one wanted to lose even one apricot, one peach or gooseberry. It was much safer to plunder the orchards of those who had been arrested and locked up in the freight cars, for no one was guarding their trees or vegetable patches.
The river market on the Pina, where peasants brought in their treasures by boat — fish, honey, kasha — was long deserted. Most of the shops were closed or had been robbed. The only hope was the countryside. Our neighbors would take a ring or a fur coat and drive to the nearby villages to buy flour, salt bacon, or poultry. It happened, however, that when these women were out of town, the NKVD would come to their houses and take their children away for deportation. Our neighbors talked about this, completely shaken, and warned my mother. But even before that she had already determined never to be more than a step away from us.
OUR LITTLE TOWN, green and sweltering in the summer, in the autumn brown and gleaming in the sun like amber, suddenly, one night, turned white. It was on the cusp between November and December. The winter of 1939–1940 was early and harsh. It was a frosty, icy hell. From the direction of Spokojna Street, from the side of the cemetery where my grandmother lay, my sister and I crawled as far as the bushes, from which we could see a transport standing on the railway siding. Inside the freight cars were people who were about to depart. Where to? The grown-ups said Siberia. I didn’t know where that was, but from the way in which they pronounced this word, it was clear that even thinking about this Siberia was enough to make one shudder.
I didn’t see my teacher. He had surely left long ago already, for the transports were leaving one after another. We sat hidden in the bushes, our hearts pounding from fear and curiosity. Moans and cries reached us from the direction of the siding. A moment later they grew very loud, piercing. Wagons were driving from one car to the next, collecting the bodies of those who had died that night from cold and hunger. Four NKVD men walked behind the wagons counting something, writing something. Again they counted and wrote. Counted and wrote. Afterward, they closed the doors to the cars. The doors must have been heavy, because they did this with great difficulty. The doors moved on little rollers, and the rollers screeched terribly. The men secured each door with wire, then squeezed the wire tight with pliers. Each one of the four then tested the lock to make sure no one could undo the wire. We crouched in the bushes, petrified from the cold and the emotion. The locomotive whistled several times, and the train started to move. When it was far in the distance, the four NKVD men made an about-face and went back to the station.
WE SAID NOTHING about it to Mother, so as not to make her angry. For days on end she stood at the window, motionless. She was capable of not moving for hours at a time. There was still a little bit of kasha and flour in the house. Sometimes we ate the kasha, sometimes Mother cooked flour pancakes on the stove. I noticed that she herself would not eat anything, and when we ate she would turn away so as not to watch, or she went into the other room. When we went outside, she would say, “Bring a little brushwood.” We would walk around the neighborhood digging up dry stalks and sticks from beneath the snow. It’s possible that she no longer had the strength to go out herself, and we had to heat the furnace, if only a little, for we were turning into icicles. In the evenings we sat in the darkness shaking from cold and from fear, waiting for deportation.
Sometimes I roamed with my friends around the town, ice-covered and sparkling in the sun. We snooped around after food, not really expecting to find anything. One could eat a bit of snow or suck on a piece of ice, but that only increased the hunger. The most tormenting thing, but at the same time the most pleasant and rare, was the smell of food cooking. “Hey, fellas!” one of us would call, and with his hand wave the others over. We would dash toward him, and he would already be standing with his nose thrust between the fence rails, staring at someone’s house. Together we would begin inhaling the smell of roasting chicken or cooking sauerkraut stew that floated our way. Later, we had to pull one another away by force from such a fence.