Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF THE SZENBERTS

The next night Michał woke Paweł, and the two of them went off somewhere. Misia could not go back to sleep. She thought she could hear shots, faraway, anonymous, sinister. Her mother was lying still on the bed with her eyes open. Misia checked to see if she was breathing.

At dawn the men came back with some people. They led them down to the cellar and locked it.

“They’ll kill us all,” she said into Paweł’s ear when he came back to bed. “They’ll stand us against the wall and burn down the house.”

“It’s the Szenberts’ son-in-law and his sister and her children. No one else survived,” he replied.

In the morning Misia went down to the cellar with some food. She opened the door and said “Good day.” She saw them all: a stout woman, a teenage boy, and a little girl. She didn’t know them. But she knew the Szenberts’ son-in-law, Rachela’s husband. He was standing with his back to her, monotonously banging his head against the wall.

“What’s going to happen to us?” asked the woman.

“I don’t know,” replied Misia.

They lived in the fourth, darkest cellar until Easter. Only once did the woman and her daughter come upstairs to bathe. Misia helped the woman to comb her long black hair. Michał went down to them each evening with food and maps. On the second day of the holiday he took them to Taszów by night.

A few days later he was standing by the fence with Krasny, the neighbour. They were talking about the Russkies, and the reports that they weren’t far off. Michał didn’t ask about the Krasnys’ son, who was in the partisans. No one spoke about that. Right at the end, Krasny turned around and said:

“The news is there are some murdered Jews lying by the road to Taszów.”