Yona bit her lip and slipped backward, letting the shadows swallow her. Something was wrong. Her heart pounding rapidly, Yona hurried up the narrow street, doubled back down an alley, and crept toward the door of the church near the altar. She would just glance in, reassure herself about the nuns’ safety, and then depart as quickly as she’d come.
There was no guard at the side door, which didn’t surprise Yona; there hadn’t been a guard posted here the last few times, either, and Yona had assumed that the door had been locked. What she didn’t expect to see was an unguarded door that had been left slightly ajar. The tempo of her heartbeat quickened.
She hesitated before slipping inside, as quiet as a breeze. The church was silent and dark, and in the stillness, Yona smelled the blood and the spent bullets before she saw the bodies. She clapped a hand over her mouth as her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. There on the altar, lined up in a neat row, lying on their backs, were seven of the eight nuns, bullet holes in their heads, their open eyes looking sightlessly up toward God. The eighth nun was just a few feet away, on her knees and slumped to her right, facing the crucifix above the altar, a bullet hole in her back. She had died in prayer, staring up at Jesus. Yona knew before she approached and gently turned the body over that it was Sister Maria Andrzeja.
The kind nun’s eyes were open and empty, her lips just slightly parted. Yona could imagine her whispering to God, quickly saying her final words, even as the other gunshots rang out. Or had Sister Maria Andrzeja been the first to die?
“I’m so sorry,” Yona whispered, but there was no forgiveness in the nun’s lined face, no absolution in her eyes. She wasn’t here anymore; her soul had already flown. The dove on Yona’s wrist throbbed as Yona bent quickly to kiss the nun’s cold forehead. With the palm of her hand, she gently closed Sister Maria Andrzeja’s eyes and stood frozen for a few seconds. Then she straightened and put her hand over her mouth again as she looked at the seven other nuns, forever silent now. She backed away and said a quiet prayer in the darkness, then she slipped out the way she’d come and gulped the fresh air outside. She could still hear Jüttner’s raised, angry voice coming from the church’s front steps, and she knew this hadn’t been what he’d wanted.
He had tried to stop the execution, but perhaps the end had always been inevitable. Yona had been fooling herself in believing she could make any difference.
But she could still help the group in the woods.
Jüttner had said that the plans to enter the forest were already well underway, but what if it wasn’t too late to do something? Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world. She could still hear the quote from the Talmud in Sister Maria Andrzeja’s soft, gentle voice. As she turned and walked quickly away, trying her hardest to look casual and nonchalant instead of like a sobbing mess, Jüttner’s voice faded behind her, and she moved away from the past forever.
She knew she would never see him again.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Yona reentered Jüttner’s house through the back door, changed into her own dress and sturdy boots, and grabbed what she could from the dead girl’s closet: two pairs of shoes, a dozen socks, two sweaters, and a beautiful red wool coat that was impractically bright for the forest but would provide much-needed protection against the freezing winter. She went back out the way she came, and, wiping away tears that wouldn’t stop, she strode quickly along the road leading to the farmhouse near the forest’s edge, the one with the red window frames and the eagle with the clipped wing. She had to make sure Anka was safe before she left the town forever. It would bring her peace to know that amid the madness at least one life had been saved, that one of Sister Maria Andrzeja’s last acts could be her legacy.
“Halt!” A voice rang out from the side of the road, and a German soldier stepped into her path, a few crumbs hanging from the corners of his narrow lips. He’d been eating as she approached, a clear dereliction of his duty, and his startlement upon seeing her was obvious. It took her only a second to register that it was the same German she’d encountered on her way back into town three days earlier, and he seemed to realize the same thing a few beats later. “Ah, it’s you,” he said in his smooth Belorussian. “You’re after more milk for your daughter?”
She mustered an embarrassed smile, which served to hide her relief. He hadn’t been there in the square that day when she announced herself to Jüttner; he didn’t know that she was anything but a simple villager. “She is very hungry, sir.” She bowed her head and added, “Thank you for the chocolate.”