The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

She had recognized early on in the war the need to make our captors into friends. The table was filled every weekend now with thick-necked brutes who fouled our house with cigar smoke and soiled our carpets with mud-stained boots they did not bother to wipe at the door.

At first, Ana Lucia claimed that she was fraternizing with the Germans to get information about my father. That was in the early days, when we still hoped he might be imprisoned or missing in action. But then we received word he had been killed and she continued to socialize with the Germans more than ever before. It was as if, freed from the pretense of marriage, she could be exactly as awful as she wanted to be.

Of course, I did not dare to confront my stepmother about her shameful actions. Since my father was declared dead and had not prepared a will, the house and all of his money would legally go into her name. She would happily cast me out if I made trouble, replace the furniture she had never wanted in the first place. I would have nothing. So I treaded lightly. Ana Lucia liked to remind me often that it was thanks to her good graces with the Germans that we remained in our fine house with enough food to eat and the proper stamps on our Kennkarten to enable us to move freely about the city.

I stepped away from the front door. From the pavement, I looked sadly through the front window of our house at the familiar crystal glasses and china. But I did not see the horrid strangers who now enjoyed our things. Instead, the visions in my mind were of my family: me wanting to play dolls with my much older sisters, my mother scolding Maciej that he would break things as he chased me around the table. When you are young, you expect the family you were born into to be yours forever. Time and war had made that not the case.

Dreading Ana Lucia’s company more than the curfew, I turned away from the house and started walking again. I was not sure where I was headed. It was almost dark and the parks were off-limits to ordinary Poles, as were most of the better cafés, the restaurants and movie theaters, too. My indecision in the moment seemed to reflect my larger life, caught in a kind of no-man’s-land. I had nowhere to go, and no one to go with. Living in occupied Kraków, I felt like a pet bird, able to fly just the tiniest bit, but always mindful of being trapped in a cage.

It might not have been like this if Krys was still here, I reflected as I started back in the direction of the Rynek. I imagined a different world where the war had not forced him to leave. We would be planning a wedding, maybe even married by now.

Krys and I had met by happenstance nearly two years before the war broke out when my friends and I had stopped off for a coffee at a courtyard café where he was making a delivery. Tall and broad-shouldered, he cut a dashing figure as he strode through the passageway carrying a large crate. He had rugged features, which appeared to be cut from stone, and a leonine gaze that seemed to hold the entire room. When he passed our table, an onion fell from the crate he was carrying and rolled close to me. He knelt to retrieve it, and looked up at me and smiled. “I’m at your feet.” I sometimes wondered if he had dropped the vegetable deliberately or if it was fate that sent it spinning in my direction.

He invited me out for that very night. I should have said no; it was not proper to accept a date on such short notice. But I was intrigued and, after a few hours at dinner, smitten. It was not just looks that drew me to him. Krys was different from anyone I had ever met. He had an energy that seemed to fill the room and make anyone else present fade away. Though he came from a working-class family and had not finished high school, much less gone to college, he was self-taught. He had bold ideas about the future and how the world should be that made him seem so much bigger than everything else around us. He was the smartest person I had ever known. And he listened to my opinions in a way that nobody had.

We began spending all of our free time together. We were an unlikely couple—I was sociable and liked parties and friends. He was a loner who shunned crowds and preferred deep conversations while taking long walks. Krys loved nature and showed me places of rare beauty outside the city, ancient forests and castle ruins buried deep in the woods that I had not known existed.

One evening, a few weeks after we had met, we were walking along the high ridge of St. Bronisława Hill, a hill just outside the city, heatedly debating a point about French philosophers, when I noticed him watching me intensely. “What is it?”

“When we met, I expected you to be like the other girls,” he said. “Interested in superficial things.” Though I might have been offended, I knew what he meant. My friends seemed largely interested in parties and plays and the latest fashions. “Instead, I found you another way entirely.” We were soon spending all of our free time together, making plans to marry and travel and see the world.

Of course, the war changed all of that. Krys was not conscripted, but like my father, signed up to go and fight from the start. He had always cared too much about everything and the war was no exception. I pointed out that if he just waited it might be all over before he had to go, but Krys would not be swayed. Worse yet,