The Great Altruist (2 page)

When the song finished and the nurses and doctors dutifully back to work, Kamila's ritual resumed the same as the other typhoid patients. Almost as soon as she sung her last note, she often sighed heavily and scurried away to the bathroom. Upon her return, she climbed into bed and whispered to Jadzia the same reminder: “From one hell to another, huh?”

“The hospital’s not so bad,” Jadzia said.

“I meant the bathroom,” Kamila laughed.

“A lot better than the camp at least.”

“Well, if it weren’t for the camp, none of us would be here," she said. She pulled the bed sheet up to her neck and took in a deep breath. "It’s strange, isn’t it?” Kamila wondered aloud, “but when I was left behind, I thought my life was over. I thought I’d surely die at the hands of the guards or by whatever army stumbled upon us. But now, I feel overwhelmed by all the opportunity.”

Jadzia looked away from Kamila and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t.”

“Why not?” Kamila asked. “The war is over now. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

Jadzia said nothing.

“So where will you go when you leave here?”

“Where will any of us go?” she wondered aloud.

“I heard a lot of the prisoners are still living in the camp.”

“I’d rather die than go back there.”

“Then where will you go?” she asked.

“I want to know what happened to my parents. And I’ll spend my whole life finding them.”

Kamila’s countenance grew sadder. “Then at least you have hope. I already know where my parents are.”

“I’m sorry,” Jadzia said. “Will you go back to Poland then?”

“I have nothing left there. A friend of mine was part of the resistance when the Germans invaded. He managed to escape. Before he left, we agreed that if we survived, we would go to America together. I suppose that’s as good a plan as any, right?”

“To have anyone to go to is a good plan.”

Kamila nodded in agreement as a tear came to her eye. Afraid to let anyone see her cry, she turned away and buried her head beneath the sheet.

Jadzia did the same.

Throughout the day, she drifted in and out of sleep. She tried to focus her mind on memories of her mother and father but sudden images of life inside the camp interfered like a period of complete silence broken by an explosion. No matter how she tried, sleep lasted just a few minutes. And when she did fall into a deep sleep, she later wished she hadn’t: visions of the gruesome tortures carried out by the prison guards invaded her dreams and produced catastrophic nightmares filled with unspeakable cruelty and molestation.

Then, as the long hours of sleep continued, the real nightmares began. They never included the long hours of work endured at the hands of shameful men whose appetite for barbarism knew no bounds. Nor of the dreadful sights of women being gathered together for execution, stripped of all their clothing, and led into a barrack where panic and then death awaited them. Nor even the awful cries of the dying she heard over the truck engines. Jadzia hoped one day these memories might disappear, maybe even dissipate from her mind like a dream upon waking. She could never get rid of the memory of her greatest regret – a mistake that may have cost her parents their lives. It fueled all her nightmares in the camp.

In the years before the war, Jadzia had a life of superb joy with her parents and grandparents in Poznan, a city in her native Poland. Then the Nazis invaded. Poznan was overrun and renamed; the Germans forced her father’s shop to close. Soon, neighbors disappeared. Her grandparents, considered too old to be useful, were led away with hundreds of other elderly people into the forest where none of them were heard from again. Her family was arrested and all their belongings destroyed. Her father and mother were separated and sent off to the camps, but since Jadzia was still young, she was sent to a facility to be Germanized. She was later sent to an orphanage until she was sixteen when she was sent to Ravensbrück to work. In the six years since the war began, Jadzia longed for word of her parents’ fate. Now that the war was over, she hoped one day to see them again. If they were still alive.

Not far from the hospital room where Jadzia slept, a small bomb fell from the sky and shook the earth. With the war’s end in sight, the sounds of warfare were slowly fading from the minds of the survivors. Jadzia was tortured by regret and slept soundly through the commotion. On the windowsill, staring at the explosion in the distance, sat a small, naked woman. She looked over her shoulder and watched the women sleep. With tremendous grace, the woman floated from the window and landed softly on the bed of the woman beside Jadzia. She placed the palm of
her
hand against the woman’s temple and closed her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered but then she frowned and pulled her hand from the woman’s face. She flew to another bed and grimaced as she read Kamila’s mind. She pulled her hand away in displeasure. Finally, she floated to Jadzia’s side and put her hand on her head. The woman smiled instantly and whispered: “You’re it.” In a flash of blue light, the woman disappeared.

The next few weeks went by faster than Jadzia imagined. Her friendship with Kamila grew closer and she was eventually strong enough to eat solid food again. Within a month of her arrival at the hospital barracks, her health had improved. Patients were being released daily to make room for new arrivals. Most were dismissed with no place to go.

As the time for Jadzia’s release approached, she tried to imagine her own future. Nurses and the other patients often asked where she was going. She never had an answer for them. At night, when conversation diminished and she had time to think, curled into a ball and wondered if she would (or could) recover from the nightmare of the last six years, if she would ever have a family of her own, if her body would be strong enough one day to bear children. Alone and afraid, she forced her eyes shut, pulled the sheet over her head to block the still, cold air, and struggled to block the fear from her heart. A nagging thought persisted:
Will I see my parents again – and will they ever forgive me?

Before she could conjure an answer from her imagination, she heard a whispered voice say: “Yes.”

She opened her eyes and looked around but there was no one there. Kamila and the other women had fallen asleep. She was completely unaware of the tiny, naked redhead who sat perched on the cross above Jadzia’s bed. In a flash, the young woman disappeared.

           
Hours before her release the following morning, a nurse approached her. “Do you have somewhere to go?” the nurse said.

           
“No,” Jadzia replied.

           
“A lot of the patients well enough to leave are going back to the camp,” the nurse suggested. “The barracks are a lot more comfortable than before.”

           
Jadzia shook her head vigorously. “That’s okay. I’d rather take my chances in town.”

           
The nurse smiled. “Of course. There’s a transport that goes to
Furstenburg
tomorrow, but I don’t know where you’d go from there; life is far from normal.”

           
“I’ll go with you,” Kamila said. “Does it pass Berlin?”

           
“Yes,” the nurse said.

           
“But what of your friend in Sweden?” Jadzia asked.

           
“You can come with us to America if you want. Start a new life,” Kamila answered.

           
Jadzia chuckled sarcastically. “Like there’s another option.”

           
Content with the arrangement, the nurse left to attend to the other patients. Kamila leaned toward Jadzia and whispered: “I mean it. Come with us to America.”

           
She sighed heavily and slouched in defeat. “I can’t go to America. I have to find my parents.”

           
“Then where will you go?”

           
“Maybe someone in Berlin will help me find them.”

           
“Wouldn’t they return to your home?”

           
“I want to remember Poznan the way it was before the war. No, I’ll only go to Poland if I
know
they’re there.”

           
“Then I’ll go with you to Berlin and help you.”

           
Later that day, the two girls climbed aboard the transport vehicle with nothing but the clothes they had on. Squeezed into the truck were a few prisoners Jadzia recognized, but many looked like local Germans, the fear of being noticed etched in their faces. Kamila chatted with the other passengers, trying her hardest to make someone laugh. A few people smirked but most looked at her with suspicion for being so cheery. Jadzia knew that Kamila’s hilarity was just a ruse; she was no happier than anyone else.

           
After a few hours, and after picking up a few other passengers who bribed their way aboard, the truck arrived on the outskirts of Berlin. Russian tanks and soldiers monitored the streets as Jadzia and Kamila stumbled across the rubble on their way into the city. Jadzia didn’t know what she would see in Berlin, but she stood by her belief that anything was better than returning to the barracks of Ravensbrück. Despite the palpable hopelessness in the air, there were signs that people were living or, at the very least, surviving. People in search of food were everywhere: desperate men carved meat from a dead horse, women waited in lines while Russian soldiers used German military daggers to cut bread into rations. Those not in search of food climbed over mountains of rubble as buildings around them burned to the ground. Along the main roads, hundreds of wounded German soldiers lied in the gutter or on improvised cots while nurses struggled to help. From the sound of Russian fighter planes roaring overhead and the Soviet tanks crunching glass and garbage beneath their treads, Jadzia and Kamila were surrounded by chaos.

           
“Where will we even go?” Jadzia wondered aloud.

           
Kamila approached a woman walking down the street with her child. “Do you know where we can find our family?” Her German was broken, but the woman seemed to understand and pointed them down a long road where throngs of people were gathered.

           
In the bell tower of a church high above the destruction, the tiny woman stood on the ledge and placed her hands on her naked hips. She watched Jadzia and Kamila stumble
across
the littered streets and down an alley to the camp for displaced persons. As the two girls walked around a corner, the woman flew high into the sky and descended on the rooftop overlooking the camp. She folded her arms under her breasts and studied the girls continually. She never took her eyes off of Jadzia.

           
When they arrived at the camp for displaced persons, Jadzia grew anxious at the thought of finding her family. There seemed to be no order as people scrambled to and fro in search of food rations and whatever clothing was available. Children kept busy by playing with whatever they could fashion into a toy, but the soldiers tried desperately to organize the people in whatever way they could, some by religion, others by language, most by ethnicity. Jadzia and Kamila stood by as soldiers supplied the other refugees with food from their own rations. The chaos was overwhelming to witness for Jadzia.

           
“Maybe we shouldn’t have come to Berlin,” Jadzia whispered.

           
Kamila shook her head. “No, we’re in the right place.”