They started with bark-covered huts for shelter, but by the second day, they were all burrowing into the earth with makeshift shovels, everyone but the children. The girls were running around the outskirts of the clearing, pretending to be wood fairies, while Daniel giggled at them from his bed of reeds. Their laughter made Yona smile, even as her muscles burned. This was what they were saving—a future of smiles for these three innocent children, maybe even for the children Pessia, Leah, and Daniel would have themselves someday. For the millionth time, Yona wondered at a world that would allow lives like theirs to be violently snuffed out.
By the end of the next week, following Yona’s instructions, the group had finished two large zemliankas and a much smaller one. Unlike the temporary huts they had been constructing over the last few months, designed to be assembled and disassembled quickly, these were solid, permanent, protected. They were dug deep into the ground, with walls made of five-inch logs, wooden floors, and underground ceilings covered in earth and supported by log beams, each with a narrow stairway to the entrance aboveground. Now, before the first snowfall, the doors to the shelters were visible, but once the forest was under a blanket of snow, they would disappear. It would take the group a few more weeks to build mud-brick stoves and chimneys for warmth, and Yona would show them how; she had done it each year of her life with Jerusza as they prepared for the winter freeze.
The group also built a smaller, separate underground bunker for food storage, which Yona was eager to start filling before the cold made gathering harder, and a small latrine. In the end, in the space of two weeks, they all had real, semipermanent homes for the first time in years.
While Leib, Aleksander, and Moshe hunted and fished, the women gathered plants and berries, and Leon and Oscher tended a large smoker, Yona ventured out each day into the forest, gathering herbs to dry. Soon the ground would be frozen solid, and nature’s medicines would be underground until the spring.
When she’d lived with Jerusza, they had done this each year, drying the plants they gathered, pulverizing some for teas and poultices and keeping others whole. But for a group of fifteen people—of all different ages—the need was greater. So Yona gathered yarrow, wormwood, chicory, and chamomile. She pulled leaves of dziurawiec for wound care, black lilac and yarrow for fevers, coltsfoot for coughs, nettle leaves for muscle weakness, rosemary for heart ailments, horsetail tips for swelling, and comfrey to treat broken bones and arthritis. By the time the air tasted like snow, she had assembled a whole arsenal of dried or mashed herbs that would take them through the winter.
On a morning early in December, Yona awoke before dawn, and, even from her nest beneath the earth, she could feel the change in the air. She pulled on her wool coat and made her way aboveground, where snowflakes were falling, clinging to the dirt for only a second or two before disappearing forever into the earth. Soon the snow would begin to stick, but for the first few minutes, it was as if the sky and the ground met, becoming one.
She tilted her head up and felt the flakes kiss her cheeks. The season’s first snowfall in the depths of the forest was always magical, and though Yona had lived through nearly two dozen winters, the thrill of it never faded. Though she knew the sugar-delicate flakes were the harbinger of coming danger, of a winter that would test the resilience of all of them, there was no denying their beauty as they drifted down gently from a silent sky.
“Yona.” She heard Aleksander’s voice behind her, and she turned, startled out of her reverie. He was standing in front of the entrance to the larger zemlianka, watching her.
“Aleksander.” She put a hand over her racing heart. “I didn’t hear you. What are you doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” He hesitated and crossed to stand beside her. Like her, he was in a wool coat, but she could still somehow feel the heat of his nearness as his arm brushed against hers. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
They both gazed skyward, and for a moment, it felt as if they were alone in the forest. The others in their group slept, and the animals had all sought refuge from the cold. The only movement was from the snow itself. When Yona turned to look at Aleksander again, his eyes were already on her. “Is it wrong that I love the first snowfall so much?” she asked.
“Wrong?”
“The snow brings with it great peril. To welcome it feels strange in a way. It only means that life will become more complicated.”
She wasn’t sure he understood what she was saying until he reached for her hand. Neither of them had gloves, and so their fingers were freezing, but there was an instant warmth as they intertwined. “Perhaps the most complicated things are also the most beautiful,” Aleksander said softly, and when she turned to look at him again, she found that she couldn’t look away for a long time. When they finally turned their eyes to the magic of the sky again, it felt as if, for a moment, the world was at peace.