in rubble—huge slabs of concrete and partial brick walls, scattered with smashed glass and thick dust. We had left the city in early October. There had been some damage then, mostly from incendiary devices and fires, but this destruction was all I could see for miles.
“There’s nothing left,” I whispered numbly.
“There are some buildings,” Mateusz said, trying to sound hopeful, but he was entirely unconvincing. He sounded more confused and devastated than optimistic.
“This was a bad idea,” I said. “I know that you did this because you thought it would cheer me up, but there is nothing here for us. How would we ever find Roman and Sara, even if they are alive? How would we even find our old building?”
“We have to make it work,” Truda said flatly, and she opened the creaky door and slipped out of the truck. I looked at her incredulously.
“Truda, how?”
“Get out of the truck, Emilia,” she said, pursing her lips.
Beside me, Mateusz and the farmer exchanged quiet farewells, then Mateusz cleared his throat.
“We really should get going. It is going to be quite the walk across the city.”
“If we stay here, where will we even sleep tonight?” I asked, frustrated, then added sarcastically, “Do you think we will find a hotel? Maybe an empty mansion we can squat in?”
“We must find Sara. Roman, too. Remember? It was all we could talk about before—” Truda broke off abruptly, eyes widening in realization as if the mere mention of the attack was going to traumatize me further. This enraged me. I felt my face heating.
“Before what?” I said.
Truda’s gaze dropped to the road. “We have to find them. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. That sounds like something you would have said to me, once upon a time.”
Mateusz gently nudged me toward the door, and I sighed impatiently and shuffled across. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to return to Lodz, either, but the thought of becoming vagrants living on the streets of a city that had been destroyed was much more unappealing. Still, I could tell Truda was determined, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to counter such a thing. Especially in the state I was in.
I hesitated for another moment, trying to figure it all out, and Truda’s patience finally wore thin. She planted her hands on her hips and leaned forward to hiss at me. “We need Sara. I do not know how to explain it to you yet, so I am asking you to trust me. There is a very good reason we need to be back in the city, so get out of the car, and let’s go.”
I slipped out of the car, planted my shoes in the crushed-concrete dust and glass that covered the entire street and took a reluctant step forward.
“Good,” Truda said, satisfied. She pointed at the back of the truck. “Get your bag. The sooner we start walking, the sooner we will find somewhere to rest tonight.”
Mateusz took my bag from the back of the truck and tossed it to me. I caught it, shot them both a resentful glare and set off toward the city.
* * *
Six hours later, we stood in stunned silence at the front of what used to be our building. It had fared somewhat better than many of the others we had passed, but it was still severely damaged. Sara’s apartment was gone—I assumed a bomb had taken it out. Her side of our entire floor and the floor below us had just disappeared, leaving a gaping hole.
Our apartment was still there, but there were no windows, and there had been a fire on the ground floor. The one small blessing was that there were no corpses visible in the rubble around our apartment. I spent much of the trip stopping to gag, composing myself, then repeating the process all over again just steps down the road. Winter preserved the corpses, but spring had arrived, and they were finally beginning to rot.
We had seen dozens of other people on the road as we crossed Warsaw, at least half of them walking back out of the city, having decided they would prefer to go back to wherever they’d come from. But I didn’t have the energy to fight with Truda and Mateusz. I barely had the energy to stand.
“So what do we do now?” I asked them. Truda wiped at her eye, dislodging an errant tear, but we were so dirty and dusty by then