“Someone give us some clean cloth!” Rosalia called, and rags and a scarf appeared from nowhere, thrust forward into the darkness. The scarf Yona gently laid beneath Elizaveta’s hips the next time they rose and bucked, and the scraps of fabric she handed back to Rosalia for when the baby emerged.
Elizaveta cried out again, her voice strangled, and then, in a rush of liquid, the baby—a girl—slipped from her body and into Yona’s waiting arms, tiny and still and blue, membranes covering her silent face like a burial shroud.
“No,” Yona whispered, frozen in place, unable to accept that Elizaveta’s child could be stillborn. It was Ruth who came from behind her, her voice solid and commanding in a way none of them had heard before from the shy mother of three.
“It’s the cord,” she said. “It’s wrapped around the baby’s neck.”
Yona saw it then, too, but Ruth was already in motion, unwrapping the umbilical cord. Yona stared at the baby, paralyzed, before remembering that the cord was supposed to be cut. Wasn’t it? Was that why the baby wasn’t moving yet? Taking a deep breath, she reached for her knife.
“No!” Ruth cried, flinging her hand out to stop Yona. “No! Don’t cut the cord yet. It is the baby’s only source of oxygen until we can get her breathing.”
Horrified, Yona dropped the knife, and for a long second, she and Ruth just stared at the motionless baby. Then she shook herself out of her horrified trance and reached for the tiny infant, hardly bigger than a sparrow. “Make sure Elizaveta is all right,” she said to Rosalia, and Rosalia nodded, moving away from her and back to Elizaveta, who was whimpering, a sound that filled Yona with relief, for it meant she was alive and alert enough to be scared.
Yona prayed now as she tore her own shirt off and laid the baby down on the fabric, faceup. She rubbed the baby’s stomach and chest, and then tapped on the bottom of her feet. Still nothing. Yona stopped her conversation with God as she took a deep breath and bent to the tiny child. She would need to breathe for her, the way Jerusza had taught her so many years before, one in a countless number of scenarios the old woman had prepared her for, just in case. Would she remember how? Jerusza’s voice whispered to her from somewhere far away as she placed her lips over the baby’s mouth and nose and pushed a small burst of air into her lungs.
All around them, their small island, and the swamp in which they floated, seemed to have gone silent. The stars held their breath, the moon hid behind a cluster of clouds, and even Elizaveta had stopped sobbing. It was into this silence that the most beautiful sound Yona had ever heard emerged: a tiny sputter, then a cough, then a mewling that sounded like a kitten’s, coming from the lungs of the tiny baby before her.
And just like that, in the midst of an inhospitable wilderness, another life came into the world, a tiny, impossible miracle that reminded them all that even when there were those trying to wipe them from the earth, they could survive by the grace of God, and by the sheer force of will. Before Yona passed the crying baby to her mother, she looked into the child’s eyes and saw a future there, long and beautiful and bright, a future that would go on after Yona herself had passed from the world, a future still unwritten. Whatever else she would do, Yona vowed she would make sure this baby survived, and she would fight to the death for all those who had gathered here, under the stars, on this night.
* * *
Elizaveta and Shimon named the baby Abra, which meant mother of nations, and she carried the hope of all of them. Though she was tiny and struggled for life in her first few weeks, the other adults in the group gave up a portion of their meager supplies without being asked so Elizaveta could eat enough to make milk to nurse the infant to health. At night the baby cried, and Elizaveta muffled the noise so that it sounded like little more than the grunts of a bear cub finding her voice.
Against the odds, Abra began to thrive, but the rest of the group was withering; the island had almost no food available beyond the edible flowers and mushrooms they had already picked clean, and though the water around them was plentiful, it seemed to be making some of them sick. They couldn’t stay here forever, and they were all worried about Zus and the others, and so after a month had passed in the swamp, Rosalia and Chaim set out to venture to the nearest town to see if the Germans had gone.
It was five days before they returned with eight loaves of dried, brittle bread, a bottle of vodka, and good news. The Germans had departed a week earlier, and though they’d caught a few dozen fleeing Jews and a handful of Russian partisans on the outskirts of the woods, they’d been mostly unsuccessful, missing both the Bielski and Zorin groups, and had abandoned the forest after torching many of the villages in retaliation for their failure.