“Yes. But I meant, too, that you need to find a home for the winter, a place that will keep you hidden, safe, and warm until the spring.”
This time, his expression was confused. “But we must keep moving. You said it yourself. It is how we’ve stayed safe.” The week before, on a quick mission into a village on the edge of the forest to get a new pair of spectacles for Moshe, and for Oscher this time, too, Aleksander and Yona had overheard a conversation between two local women who were talking about a small Jewish encampment a kilometer into the forest that the Germans had discovered the week before. Each of the sixteen refugees had been shot on sight, even two little girls. Yona had felt bile rise in her throat, and she’d had to cover her mouth as the women laughed. The chill in her bones hadn’t gone away.
“But there is more to staying alive in the winter than staying hidden,” she said now. They were quiet for a moment as they approached a flat patch of ground hidden in the heart of a cluster of spruce trees. By silent agreement, they stopped and gestured to the group that this would be their spot for the night. Without being asked, Rosalia and Leib, both carrying guns, disappeared to scour the area for signs of human activity.
“But if we stop somewhere for too long, we become easy quarry, don’t we?” Aleksander asked as they set their packs down on the ground and began to collect logs and large sticks for makeshift shelters for the next few days.
“It is more dangerous to face the cold.” Quickly, she pulled her axe from her pack and began to chop down some of the narrow, dead trees nearby. Silently, Aleksander removed his axe, too, and set to work splitting the long, dried logs into poles. They had established a routine since Yona had joined the group and had begun to teach them. Now, together, they could build a hut large enough for six or seven in under three hours, adding a roof of dead oak or live spruce bark when the cold or rain threatened, and Rosalia could do the same. The others had learned to build shelters, too, though they were slower. Yona liked that they had all developed a rhythm, a set of intrinsic responsibilities. It had never been like that with Jerusza; the two of them shared everything that needed to be done, except in the very end. But Yona had learned that a group this large worked best when there was a delineation of duties.
“Besides,” she added after a few minutes as she and Aleksander set up their own small, individual lean-tos, just beside each other, as had become their custom. He was almost always the first person she saw when she woke in the morning, and she realized she liked that very much. “We are deep enough in the forest now that no one will find you once the snow begins to fall.” On the other side of the clearing, Sulia—who usually shared a shelter with Luba and Rosalia—watched them as she lashed together her own gathered branches.
“But won’t we leave traces in the snow?” Aleksander asked. “We’ll be more obvious if they come looking.”
“You will build shelters into the earth, both for warmth and to hide. And you will move about only when the snow is falling and will cover your tracks. The nights are long and the days are gray. It’s easier to disappear in the cold.”
Aleksander didn’t say anything as he finished lashing his shelter and covering the roof with bark.
“When you speak of the winter, Yona, you never use the word we,” Aleksander said finally, turning his gaze back to her. “Are you leaving?”
She was silent for a long time, for she didn’t know the right answer. “That was always the plan, wasn’t it? That I would stay only until you didn’t need me anymore?”
Aleksander waited until she looked him in the eye. “We still need you, Yona,” he said, his voice low.
“Aleksander—”
“Please. Don’t leave.”
“You’ll survive without me.”
“But I think I would miss you far too much.” He cleared his throat. “We all would, I mean. You are one of us now. Stay—unless you don’t want to.”
She held his gaze for a long time, and in it, she saw a future she had never imagined for herself, a future filled with laughter and friendship instead of silence and loneliness. Maybe even a future filled with love. “I do,” she said softly. “I do want to.” But even as she said it, the wind whipped up, and she could hear it whispering to her, hissing a warning.
Two days later, they’d found a spot deep in the woods, a two-hour hike from the closest stream. Yona spent an additional day searching for an underground water source before digging a shallow well and returning to tell the group that they’d found their spot for the winter. No one argued.