After an hour or so of walking, Chaim fell into step beside Yona, his wife and boys several paces behind. They were all moving slowly northeast, deeper into the heart of the forest, navigating by the setting sun. At nightfall, Yona planned to stop and let them rest for three hours before moving again. To avoid the Germans, they would need to shelter during the day and walk at night from now on.
“My brother is a good man, you know,” Chaim said gruffly after they’d walked side by side in silence for almost thirty minutes.
His words, out of the depths of his silence, startled her. “How did you know I was thinking of him?”
“I didn’t.” He smiled. “But I hoped you were. I believe he is thinking of you.”
Yona shook her head. “He sees me as more than I am, I think.”
“No. He sees you for exactly who you are. And that is very difficult for him.”
“Difficult?”
Chaim scratched his jaw and paused before speaking again. “It nearly destroyed him when Shifra and Helena, his wife and daughter, died. It’s not my place to tell you, Yona, but he is not able to talk about it himself yet. And I think… I think he would want you to know.”
“What happened to them, Chaim?”
Chaim was silent for a long time, and it wasn’t until Yona turned her head that she realized he was trying not to cry. “Shifra had been married to Zus since they were teenagers, for more than ten years. She was a very good woman, and Helena, their daughter, she was only four. She was intelligent. Funny. Kind. She would have grown to be a good person, like her father. He loved them both with his whole heart, and I loved them, too.”
“I’m so sorry.” It was all Yona could think to say, though it would never be enough. Chaim didn’t seem to hear her.
“The Germans came. Zus, he had made a name for himself as someone people respected. We think that’s why they targeted him, to eliminate anyone who might speak up against them, who might encourage people to resist.” Chaim took a deep breath and went silent again. Their footsteps crunched over the fallen leaves, and the birdsong had gone silent, as if the forest were waiting for the remainder of the story, too.
Chaim’s voice was hollow as he began to speak again. “The day they came to move us all to the ghetto, they bound Zus’s hands and feet tightly, tied him to his stove so he couldn’t move. They beat Shifra unconscious, right in front of him, and then shot her and little Helena while he begged for their lives. They left, laughing, saying that by the time anyone found him, he’d be dead, too, but in the meantime, he could think about how it was his fault that his family was dead. They must have thought that no one would come to save him, since the Jews had all been moved. But five days later, I was able to sneak out with a work detachment, and I made my way back to our village. I found Zus, delirious, still tied to the stove. He had stopped trying to escape; he had given up. I brought him back to the ghetto, because I couldn’t abandon my own family, and I knew nowhere else to take him to nurse him back to health. His body eventually healed, but the rest of him…”
Yona choked on a sob as Chaim paused.
“He was whole once, Yona,” Chaim said after a moment. “He laughed all the time. He loved life, but they broke him. He’s broken.”
“We all are,” Yona murmured, but she knew now that Zus had been shattered in a different way than she had. You can’t heal a heart that has been smashed to pieces; you can only move forward, doing your best to hold the shards together until they eventually form into something new.
“He cares for you, Yona,” Chaim added after a few minutes. “I didn’t realize it at first, maybe because he was so careful to respect the fact that you were already with Aleksander. But when you left last month, I saw some of the light go out of him. If we’re fortunate enough to make it through this alive, you must promise to never leave again, not without warning. Please. We are your family now. All of us. But Zus… No matter what you feel for him, you must know that in a corner of his heart, something blooms for you.”
Yona bowed her head. She wanted to give Chaim her word that she wouldn’t leave, but she didn’t know what the future would bring. All she could say was, “I care for him, too, Chaim.”
He must have heard the truth of it in her voice, for he nodded, and after a while, he fell back and rejoined his family, leaving Yona to walk alone once again.
* * *
Yona’s group had just begun their second evening of walking, after a long afternoon break to eat and rest, when they heard the first signs of the German incursion. She had been wondering how Zus’s group was doing as she led them past an overgrown, abandoned dirt road that didn’t look like it had been used in months, but now, as twilight fell, the warm evening stillness was broken by the rumble of approaching trucks. Instantly, Yona hushed her group and pulled them back behind the trees. Less than two minutes later, two large vehicles passed, each loaded with several German soldiers, each bearing a swastika flag that whipped in the wind.