They Were Like Family to Me by Helen Maryles Shankman

Author:Helen Maryles Shankman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

“Oh, you know. Everyone lives happily ever after. When the prince finds out he’s been fooled, he tricks the fake princess into coming up with her own punishment.” She was readying herself to leave, rearranging the babushka around her shoulders.

“What is it?”

“She’s stripped naked. They put her in a barrel lined with nails. Horses drag her through the streets until she’s dead.”

He shuddered. Those old fairy tales could really be gruesome. Her hand was already on the doorknob when he said shyly, “You know, you don’t have to go.”

As she stood there deciding, Pavel moved quickly. He brought out the slivovitz, plunked down two glasses.

“Real slivovitz!” she marveled, holding the bottle up to the lamp to test its clarity. On the opposing wall, a kaleidoscope of rainbow-colored lights chased each other across the plaster.

By the light of the smoking lamp, Pavel gazed into Marina Michalowa’s clear eyes and saw the world as it used to be, a world run by the seasons, not by soldiers with machine guns. With harvest dances and girls who wore flirty, flouncy skirts, singing as they spun flax in their parents’ parlors. Where neighbors helped one another instead of running to tell tales, where people made an honest living working the land of their fathers, where it was against the law to kill another man’s children because of how they worshipped or the color of their hair.

Over the slivovitz, she confessed: Two of her sons were fighters in the illegal Home Army, she hadn’t seen them in months. She feared sleep. When she slept, she dreamed, and when she dreamed, it was always the same thing, her boys screaming, tortured by SS butchers, or torn open in a ditch somewhere, crying out her name.

This was why, when she discovered that Pavel was hiding the saddlemaker’s daughter, she wanted to help. While her sons fought for Poland by stealing arms and sabotaging troop trains, her battle was waged in a two-room hut at the edge of a potato field. She would fight to keep a single Jewish child alive.

Pavel felt a pang of shame. His motive was self-interest, pure and simple; he was hiding the girl because the dark-haired partizan had threatened to burn him alive. Before Michalowa’s innate altruism, he was touched by an almost religious awe. He had never met anyone who could be so good, so righteous, and still so beautiful. She was like one of the saints painted on the walls in St. Adalbert’s, like the Blessed Virgin herself. Had Lidia lived, she would have been just like this, he was sure of it.

For the first time in many years, he uttered a private prayer. May the Holy Mother care for Michalowa’s sons in the same way that the widow cares for the child of a lost saddlemaker.

* * *

The dog barked and barked. Pavel roused himself from sleep before dawn to the sound of someone knocking at the door. It was a firm knock, an authoritative knock, the kind of knock

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