A car approached.
Sarah cupped her head in her hands. “They got us! We’re doomed.”
But the car drove on.
Sarah shouted, “Renia, faster! This is it. If we make it, we’ll both stay alive.”
With every passing minute, Renia became weaker. She tried and tried, but her legs were failing. She fell on the road. Sarah picked her up. She was in tears. “Renia,” she pleaded. “Please keep going. If not, it will be the end for us both. Make the effort. I have no one but you. I can’t lose you. Please.”
Her tears landed on her sister’s face, reviving her. Renia stood, paused. They moved on.
But Renia gasped for air. Her lips were dry. She couldn’t feel her arms, as if she’d had a stroke. Her legs were gummy, buckling under her.
Every time they heard the sound of a passing bus, their hearts stalled. Passersby slowed down to look at them, probably thinking they were insane.
Another bus stopped on the road near them. Renia was sure this was it. How would they make it? The Gestapo could trap them so easily, at any moment. The sisters were wearing muddy rags, their shoes covered in dirt, so incredibly suspect.
The bus passed.
Sarah walked a hundred feet ahead, Renia dragged behind. How strange it felt to walk alone, unaccompanied by a guard. Slowly the two of them approached Katowice. They’d covered four miles.
Sarah wiped Renia’s face with her saliva and kerchief, and removed the mud and debris from her jacket. She was beaming with happiness. She knew a German woman who lived nearby. Nacha Schulman, Meir’s wife, was disguised as a Catholic and worked for her as a seamstress. They couldn’t take the tram, in case a gendarme recognized them, but it wasn’t too far. Only another four miles to go.
Renia walked slowly, step by step, on the side of the road. Then: a group of gendarmes in the distance.
The uniforms. Renia shivered. It was too late for them to turn around.
The men approached, observed the girls . . . and moved on.
Renia forced herself forward. She needed to pause every two or three steps. Her breath was heavy, hot.
“There’s not far left to go,” Sarah encouraged. She would have carried Renia if she could have.
Renia wobbled like a drunk. Sarah pulled her forward. Their clothes were drenched with sweat.
Renia made the effort—for her sister.
At last, they approached the first buildings outside the town of Siemianowice. Renia could not go more than two steps without stopping to lean against a wall. She ignored passersby; her vision was so blurry, she could barely see them.
Renia stopped at a well in someone’s yard, splashed water on her face. Wake up.
The sisters walked through the town, Renia using all her strength to stay upright, to be inconspicuous. They crossed from alley to alley until they reached a small street. Sarah pointed at a two-storey building. “This is it.”
Sarah then bent down and picked up her tiny sister, carrying Renia up the stairs like a bride. “I don’t know where she found the strength,” Renia later wrote. The door opened, but before Renia could even see inside, she fainted.
When she came to, Renia took a pill, but her fever persisted. She peeled off her filthy rags and got into a clean bed—a pleasure she wasn’t sure she’d ever have again. Her teeth chattered and her bones felt hollow even under the blankets; spasms of cold shook her.
Sarah and Nacha sat by her side, crying. Nacha hadn’t recognized Renia at all. But Sarah comforted them both. “Forget everything. What’s important is that you’re free.”
But where was Halina?
Sarah told the German lady of the house that Renia was a friend of hers who was ill and needed to rest. But Renia could not stay there. The usual refrain.