but she’d stood firm. Mrs. Mikelsky, pregnant with her first child, had rushed out, wrapped her arms around Nadia, and shouted at the bullies to stop or she’d call the police. Mrs. Mikelsky was every girl’s favorite teacher, our North Star, since we all wanted to be like her, beautiful and smart and funny. She defended her girls like a mother lion and gave us krowki, toffee candies, for perfect math tests, which I never failed to get.
Pietrik, who’d come to walk us home, chased the street boys away waving a shovel in the air but ended up with a little chip off his front tooth, which in no way damaged his smile and in fact only made it sweeter.
I was startled from my daydream by a peculiar sound, like the buzz of crickets all around us. It grew louder until the vibration soaked the ground beneath us.
Planes!
They zoomed over us, flying so low they turned the grass inside out, light bouncing off their silver bellies. Three abreast, they banked right, leaving an oily smell in their wake, and headed for the city, their gray shadows gliding across the fields below. I counted twelve altogether.
“They look like the planes from King Kong,” I said.
“Those were biplanes, Kasia,” Pietrik said. “Curtiss Helldivers. These are German dive bombers.”
“Maybe they’re Polish.”
“They’re not Polish. You can tell by the white crosses under the wings.”
“Do they have bombs?” Nadia asked, more intrigued than afraid. She was never afraid.
“They already got the airport,” Pietrik said. “What else can they bomb? We have no ammunition depot.”
The planes circled the city and then flew west, one behind the other. The first dove with a terrible screech and dropped a bomb in the middle of town, right where Krakowskie Przedmieście, our main street, wound by the town’s finest buildings.
Pietrik stood. “Jezu Chryste, no!”
A great thud shook the ground, and black and gray plumes rose from where the bomb had fallen. The planes circled the city again and this time dropped their bombs near Crown Court, our town hall. My sister Zuzanna, a brand-new doctor, volunteered at the clinic there some days. What about my mother? Please, God, take me directly to heaven if anything happens to my mother, I thought. Was Papa at the postal center?
The planes carouseled around the city and then flew toward us. We dove to the grass as they passed over us again, Pietrik on top of Nadia and me, so close I felt his heart beating through his shirt against my back.
Two planes circled back as if they’d forgotten something.
“We need to—” Pietrik began, but before we could move, both planes dove and flew closer to the ground, across the field below. In an instant, we heard their guns firing. They shot at the milk women. Some of the bullets hit the field and sent puffs of dust up, but others hit the women, sending them to the ground, their milk spilling onto the grass. A cow cried out as she fell, and the pup-pup-pup of bullets punched through the metal milk cans.
The refugees in the fields dropped their potatoes and scattered, but bullets found some as they ran. I ducked as the last two planes flew back over us, leaving the field below strewn with bodies of men and women and cows. The cows that could still run bucked about as if half-mad.
I tore down the hill, Nadia and Pietrik behind me, through the forest along pine-needled paths, toward home. Were my parents hurt? Zuzanna? With only two ambulances, she’d be at work all night.
We slowed at the potato field, for it was impossible not to stare. I walked a milk can’s length away from a woman Zuzanna’s age, potatoes scattered around her. She lay on her back across hoed rows of dirt, left hand across her chest, shoulder steeped in blood, face splattered with it too. A girl knelt next to her.
“Sister,” the girl said, taking her hand, “you need to get up.”
“Compress the wound with two hands,” I told her, but she just looked at me.
A woman wearing a chenille robe came and knelt near them. She pulled a length of amber rubber from her black doctor’s bag.
Nadia pulled me away. “Come. The planes might come back.”
In the city, people were running everywhere, crying and yelling to one another, evacuating by bicycle, horse, truck, cart, and on foot.
As we neared my street, Pietrik took Nadia’s hand. “You’re almost home, Kasia. I’ll take Nadia.”