Sandusky, Ohio
August 2004
Slumped lifelessly against the tufts of her chair, Wanda stared out an open window overlooking a lovely garden. Warm August rains had colored the grounds with a sea of vibrant flowers, their scent filling her room like a bouquet, though she barely noticed. Occasionally, even the most insignificant events would trigger memories from a time long gone: a soft whisper, a faint smell, the delicate warmth of a child’s breath against her face, the soothing melody of a Mozart sonata. It was at those moments that Wanda would waken from her darkness; and with a look of fear spreading across her face, remember her family in Radom, who had no idea that a hundred miles south, the skies rained gray with the ashes of a thousand souls. On most days, they hardly detected the grainy soot around them, or even witnessed an evening sunset because the five incinerators in Auschwitz burned bodies day and night. Before long, everyone in Radom simply got used to it; a lingering grit that filled the air and settled upon the smallest things: a blade of grass, a delicate flower, a pat of butter spread on toast, a tongue that flicked unconsciously to rid itself of a strange and fleshy taste that hours earlier had been someone’s husband or wife.
Wanda’s memories these days came in and out, bubbling to the surface then vanishing as if someone had reached in and wiped them away. On especially bad days, her world was a blank slate. No parents or grandparents to remember. No children or grandchildren to bring joy into her life. Not even a husband to keep her warm at night as she slept. The good sisters of Saint Francis who ran the Catholic nursing home tried as best they could to ease the bouts of anger and depression that overcame her. It didn’t help that Wanda, afflicted with worsening dementia, had, on some days, reverted to speaking Polish to everyone around her.
That particular day in early August started out as a good one. Perked up and searching the room for anything familiar, her eyes sparkled as she caught glimpses of happier days, but suddenly turned despondent when she remembered the day she’d seen her beloved Janek for the last time. He was eighty-six years old when she walked into his hospital room in Pensacola, Florida; a gentle, shadow of a man with a Polish accent, kind but stoic face, and such remarkable stories of love and suffering and war that they’d forever changed the way his children and grandchildren looked at life. The few friends he had knew him as John, but he preferred Janek, one of the few reminders he had of his beloved Poland. His hazel eyes, so animated they seemed to dance, would glisten with tears whenever he spoke of what his wife and daughter had endured in the brutal labor camps of Siberia; and it was at those moments when Janek’s eyes would harden and expose the very depths of his soul.
Wanda remembered that morning like it was yesterday, picturing the ventilator tube snaked down his throat, his frail chest rising and falling to the rhythm of oxygen that kept his heart from stopping until his family could all gather and say goodbye for the last time, staring at his ashen face as she thought back to a life that most people would find unimaginable. Her bony fingers clenched as if holding onto something precious, she looked at a small painting of the Virgin Mary, then glanced around the stark room. Something familiar pervaded the silence. She felt alone, as she did on most days, though she rarely knew it or even cared, until her memory suddenly returned and she would whisper, “Janek. Where are you, my love?”
For the entire minute she was lucid, Wanda remembered pressing Janek’s cold hand into hers, thinking that he had no business being alive; that his children and grandchildren should not have been born; that whosever life he’d ever touched or changed, made better or worse because of his existence on earth would be as different as night and day. And that whatever he’d done in his next forty-six years, whatever contributions he’d made, significant or not, would have vanished like dust in the wind were it not for the fateful day he’d risked his life and walked to freedom while twenty-five thousand other Polish soldiers marched in lockstep to Stalin’s execution order and on to their graves in the Katyn Forest.
Over the years, Wanda had heard the tragic story of Stalin’s Katyn Massacre and the Polish soldiers executed and thrown into mass graves where they lay buried and forgotten for decades. Though she’d never spoken of it herself, and it pained her to listen to Janek’s heart-wrenching tales of war, she’d accepted that, for him, it was cathartic. But as she grew older, and because she’d experienced more pain in seven years than most women would suffer in a lifetime, she prohibited even a mention of anything Russian, especially when Janek would describe a time in history when hell, in all its fury, had made its home on earth.
Wanda’s Poland, with a population of only 35 million, was the only Allied nation that fought in World War II from the opening salvos of Nazi occupation and Russia’s invasion in 1939 until Germany’s surrender a week after Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in 1945. For its size, no other nation on earth had given as much or had suffered more than Poland: millions sent to gulags or deported to labor camps in Kazakhstan and the frigid regions of Siberia; millions more exterminated in concentration camps dotted across the Polish landscape; countless men, women, and children starved, tortured, murdered, and worked to death simply because they were Poles. By the time the war ended, its population had been reduced by at least ten million.
To survive six years of the two most brutal regimes in modern history was not only unlikely, it was truly a miracle. But amongst the ashes and smoldering ruins, broken lives and unspeakable horrors of war, miracles did happen; survivors who’d lived to tell their children of war and gulags, of victors and unlikely heroes, trying in vain to forget the shocking cruelty of a world that had taken everything they had from them, living their lives in the shadows as if no one else in the world cared. It’s said that these heroes were like embers in the night, glowing brilliantly in the darkest moments of history, forever changing the course of humanity, and then, just as suddenly vanishing as distant memories fade and the world forgot what ordinary men and women had done when hope was gone and all seemed lost.
Wanda and Janek were two of those seemingly ordinary people, and on that day and at that moment in Sandusky Ohio, Wanda remembered.
“How are we doing this morning?” one of the sisters asked as she walked into Wanda’s room and pulled the curtains apart to let the morning sunlight in. She never expected a reply, but she’d ask anyway, just in case. Wanda squinted when the brightness hit her eyes, and her gaze drifted from the Virgin Mary to the window.
Sister Regina, who had taken her vows less than a year ago, was a young, plump nun with a roundish face and rosy cheeks. Rarely were her lips not turned into an infectious smile and not once did she enter Wanda’s room without a song or a kind word. On Wanda’s darkest days, the good sister was a godsend, though Wanda would see only a pretty but unfamiliar face and hear neither song nor kind word.
“You look nice this morning,” Sister Regina said. She pulled the blanket over Wanda’s lap and gently brushed the hair from her eyes. “Did you sleep well?”
“Tak, zrobilem” Wanda said. “Yes, I did.”
“What are you looking at?”
“I see Janek,” Wanda said, her finger reaching outward, a broad smile crossing her face. “He’s in the garden picking those beautiful flowers for me. Do you see him?”
Sister Regina’s face beamed with delight because she knew that, for a moment at least, Wanda’s memory had returned. “Yes, I do,” Sister Regina said happily. “I see him smiling at us.”
“Isn’t he handsome?” Wanda asked her.
“He is,” Sister Regina said. “Very handsome.”
Wanda then closed her eyes tightly. Her lips turned downward, and she began shaking. “He’s gone,” she said. “Janek’s gone. The earth is moving, and the sky is so dark. Why are they doing this to us?”
“Wanda?” Sister Regina adjusted the blanket and saw the void that had suddenly come over her. “You rest now,” she said, looking dolefully at Wanda’s face and seeing the emptiness of someone who’d just descended back into her darkness.
