CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For the next month, it was as if the night had never happened, as if they hadn’t held each other in the starlight until dawn and opened their hearts for a moment to let a bit of light in. A thousand times she had replayed it in her mind and wondered if she should have pulled away in those few seconds before he kissed her. He had mentioned his wife and child, and perhaps his grief for them had clouded his judgment for a few minutes. Perhaps it had been up to her to stop him from making a mistake, up to her to stop her heart from suddenly wanting something she shouldn’t.
But she often caught him looking at her, his gaze tender and penetrating, and sometimes, when she looked up and met his eyes, it felt as if they were the only ones in the world. The feeling confused her, as did the way her skin tingled whenever he brushed against her, which had never happened with Aleksander. But she pretended nothing was wrong, for what could be gained from harping on feelings she didn’t understand, when their survival was at stake?
She focused instead on checking on little Abra, who was, blessedly, a quiet baby, and on the eight newcomers: the Rozenberg brothers, Benjamin, Maks, Michal, and Joel; Regina and Paula, who were the wives of Benjamin and Michal; and the two men who had come with them, Rubin Sobil and Harry Feinschreiber. All were young, angry, and ready to fight back, and already, their arrival had changed the mood in the camp. Now there was a restlessness to everything, a feeling of waiting.
The Germans had fallen back for now, leaving in their wake an eerie silence, a feeling that the worst was still to come. The more immediate problem, though, was that winter was fast approaching and the group’s food supply had dwindled to nearly nothing, since they’d taken so much of the preserved food with them when they fled into the swamps. There were more mouths to feed now, and much less food. They would not survive the winter with what little they had left, and when Benjamin and Maks Rozenberg brought up the idea of ambushing a German supply convoy to steal food and weapons, Yona couldn’t dismiss it, though she hated the idea of putting any of them in harm’s way.
“There is no choice,” Zus murmured one day as he sat down in the clearing with Yona, Chaim, and Rosalia. “We must eat.”
“And the villages have been bled dry,” Chaim said. In the time since they’d been back at their camp, several of them had taken turns venturing out to the towns on the edges of the forest to see what had been left behind. They were desperate to find stores of food, but instead they found bodies and burned buildings everywhere they went. The Germans had torched farms and slaughtered livestock to prevent refugees from finding any nourishment. Still, there had been some beets remaining in the ground, and Chaim and Zus had found a small underground bunker filled with potatoes, which they’d transported back to camp in big sacks. It was a start, but the food wouldn’t last the winter; they needed more.
It was Rosalia who replied. “Something must be done. They have forced us into the woods, murdered our people, taken all that we hold dear. It is time they pay.”
Yona didn’t know Rosalia’s history, what had brought her into the forest, but for the first time, she understood that something terrible had happened to her. There was a crack in Rosalia’s cool exterior now, and it made Yona shiver.
“Why now?” Yona asked.
When Rosalia turned to her, her eyes were on fire. “Because it is no longer enough to simply survive. How long are we supposed to go on like this? Our bodies may be enduring, but what about our souls? What about our pride? What about the things that make us who we are beyond our flesh and bone?”
The others nodded, all except Yona. When she looked at Zus, he was watching her. “What do you say, Yona?”
“I thought we were talking about taking food from the Germans, which is dangerous enough,” she said slowly. “But revenge? I think, at best, revenge would be a short-term salve, and at worst, it could be dangerous.” There was no right answer here on earth, so she looked for reason elsewhere. “？‘You shall neither take revenge from, nor bear a grudge against, the members of your people,’？” she said at last. “？‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’？”
Zus looked stricken. “Leviticus 19.” He took a deep breath. “？‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart,’？” he said, quoting the same chapter, his eyes not leaving hers.
“But they are not our brothers.” Rosalia’s voice had grown colder, and Chaim was nodding slowly along with her now, something dark flickering in his eyes. “The German soldiers are not our neighbors. They have invaded our home. They have turned our countrymen against us. Moses himself commanded revenge against those who murdered the children of Israel. ‘Go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them,’ he said.”