“Zofia.” Dima’s hand is on my shoulder, gently waking me.
My eyes fly open, get my bearings. The ground is flatter. The sun is in the middle of the sky; hours have passed. Dima smiles broadly, gesturing through the windshield.
At first, I can’t tell what he wants me to see, and then I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A wooden sign with painstaking calligraphy.
“Already?” I gasp.
“I told you, this car is good. This car is fast.”
SOSNOWITZ, the sign says. The Germans had come into Sosnowiec and given it a German name.
I hadn’t meant that the car is fast, though. I meant, How can we be here? How can I be back home already? It was easier to imagine the evil things happened far away. On a different continent. But Birkenau, the first camp, was barely twenty-five kilometers from my town.
“This is it, yes?” Dima asks. He’s pulled the jeep to a stop and peers at me curiously. I’m not having the reaction he thought I would.
“This is it.”
“Tell me where I should go now?”
I swallow, get my bearings. “Home. Abek.”
“Which way?”
We’re on the edge of Sosnowiec now. Small farms, small plots of land. As we get closer to the city, the houses will cluster and turn into three- and four-story apartment buildings. In the distance, I can make out the factory district; if we were closer, I’d be able to see the soot that the factories create, hovering in the air above the power lines for the trams. Wide, paved plazas. Electric streetlights, lunch cafes filled with rushed workers.
“Zofia?”
I gather my thoughts. There are two addresses I could direct Dima to. The first is in the Ĺrodula neighborhood on the outskirts of town, the Jewish ghetto my entire family was forced into when I was thirteen. Trash in the streets. Crumbling walls, vacant lots. Six of us crowded into one room.
The second address is my home, my real one, which belonged to Baba Rose, where my mother was raised and my father moved after they married. Closer to the center of the city.
“Turn right,” I decide. Our real home. That was the plan, for Abek and me to meet there. That’s what I’d told him. Repeat the address, Abek. Remember the birch trees outside? What if he’s been waiting there alone for me? I tried to get better sooner, Abek. I tried.
Dima turns, and the gravel road becomes a paved one. We pass a few men in simple work clothes, and then we pass more men, but they’re in business suits and hats. Dima raises a hand in greeting; one waves back, cautiously, and the others don’t acknowledge our presence at all.
“What’s this?” Dima points through the windshield at a large expanse of green in the middle of buildings.
“Sielecki Park. Sometimes we would go here on school trips.”
“Ah!” A few minutes later, he stretches out his hand again, pointing at something else. “And this?”
He’s so excited to see this town, as if he himself were on a school trip, as if we were on holiday together. At the hospital, they tried to prepare us that it might be strange to return home, but I didn’t expect what I’m feeling now. My twisting insides, the shallow, metal taste in my mouth.
“This is a castle?” Dima points toward the most ornate building we’ve seen yet.
“Train station. There used to be a market there on weekends. We call it—” I break off, because even this inconsequential memory makes me feel a pang of familiarity. “We call it the Frying Pan.”
My ugly, beautiful city. Sosnowiec is not an impressive place like Kraków, where Mama would take me for birthday lunches. Sosnowiec is where the industrial barons came to build their mills: iron, steel, ropes, and dyes. It has wide roads, practical buildings, smoggy air. Efficiency, not charm. Who could love a city whose fondest nickname was “The Frying Pan”?
My family did. We had no idea how little the city loved us back.
I know that many people resisted the German Army: the Home Army, the National Armed Forces, the Jewish Military Union all fought against the occupation. I know—or I heard later—that there was a revolt in Warsaw, that the city rose up for more than sixty days to protest the Nazis, and I know that this is why there essentially is no more Warsaw: The Germans punished the city by razing it.
But I also know that when the Germans invaded, a lot of people in my city knew the Nazi salute.
The scenery becomes more personal. We pass the library, or what used to be. The market where we bought food the week of the invasion. It was summer; our cupboards were bare because we’d just returned from holiday. In the store, staples like bread were already scavenged. What was left behind were delicacies. Paper-thin nalesnikis, waiting to be rolled with minced meat. Bright jars of rhubarb preserves, in rows beside the dazed-looking grocer.
“Buy it all,” my mother said quietly.
The first two weeks of the German occupation, we ate like we were having a party.
The jeep circles a redbrick building with limestone archways, and I don’t wait for Dima to ask what it is. “Dietel Palace,” I say. “Heinrich Dietel started the textile factories in Sosnowiec.”
But as I say the words, my heart rate quickens, my mouth is dry. Dietel Palace means we are close to home. My father used to walk this route to get to our own factory.
I look closer. The fabric draped over the palace’s front gate isn’t the usual brocade representing the Dietel family’s fortune, but a billowing red with a yellow star and sickle.
“That must be where you’re supposed to go, Dima.” I point toward the Soviet flag.
His face lights up. “I think so. I will stop here, and then I will take you to your home?”
My panic rises, my heart pats faster. “No! I need to get to my house first.”
His face falls. “It will take only a minute.”
I bite back annoyance, and I’m already reaching for the door. “My house is only a minute.”
“But, Zofia.” He’s stunned, I think, by my sudden fortitude, and I’m stunned, too.
“You should go. I’m sure you want to check in with your superior officers.”
And my brother might be home already, and I don’t want to wait. And I can’t have a reunion with other people watching.
“You’ll be safe without me?” he says reluctantly.
“I’ll write down the address—you can come over when you’re done.”
Eventually I persuade him to leave. I wasn’t lying. I’m only a few blocks from my home, an even shorter walk if I cut through the alleyways, which is what my feet do by memory, running, running, while my bad foot begins to ache on the stones. I can’t run; I’ve been too weak to run for years, and yet here I am, running while my heart explodes in my chest.
And then I am there, standing beneath a white street sign: MARIACKA.
It’s a short road, made mostly of apartment houses facing the team line. Our building is midway down the block. Four stories tall, made of rosy brownstones.
I’ve rehearsed this moment a thousand times. What I would do if our old doorman was there. What I would do if it were a new doorman who didn’t recognize me.
Nobody is standing by the entrance, though. There’s nobody to stop me from going in, so I push against the oak door. In the lobby: the same marble tiles. Same flickering bulb. Home.