to see you again,” Sara said and smiled, but then her smile faded, and she cleared her throat. “There’s something else, Emilia. How do you feel? Physically?”
“I’m better,” I said quickly. “I really don’t—”
“Sweetheart,” Sara said softly. I looked at her, then looked away. “Truda is concerned that you may be pregnant.”
My gaze flew back to hers.
“What? No! Why would she—”
But I realized then that I hadn’t had my courses since the attack. I sank onto the bed. Suddenly, Truda’s insistence that we return to Warsaw made a lot more sense. Truda, with her near phobia about frank discussions of human biology, would not have been comfortable broaching this possibility with me, let alone figuring out what to do about such a scenario.
“I can’t,” I blurted, shaking my head in fear. “I can’t be...”
I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word. Surely I would have known if...
“Can I examine you?” Sara asked gently. “It was three months ago, yes? Late March?” I nodded stiffly. She had me lie on the mattress, and she pressed her fingers on my abdomen. After a moment, her hand stilled on my belly. “Do you remember when we talked about my nursing textbook? Do you remember when I told you that we can measure the fundal height of the uterus to determine the gestation of a pregnancy?”
“Please, no,” I whispered. My lips felt numb. Sara touched a spot on my lower stomach.
“I can feel the top of your uterus here. That means that most likely you are around twelve weeks pregnant.”
“I want it out of me,” I said, sitting up and pushing her hands away. I was shaking, trembling in a way that I hadn’t since the day of the attack. I wanted to tear my stomach open with my fingernails. I felt as violated as I had lying on the cobblestones that day.
“Sweetheart, there is nothing I can do. You will have to do—”
“You have to find someone that can help me,” I pleaded. “There has to be someone in the city who can... There has to be some way to stop it. I can’t—You can’t—”
Sara’s hands gripped my shoulders, and she stared into my eyes.
“Emilia, you are strong. You have made it this far. You can do this.”
“I can’t,” I whimpered. “This is too much. It’s all been bad, but this is too much.” A new thought struck me, and I pressed my hands over my mouth, feeling my lunch in the back of my throat. “People will know, Sara! People will see! What will they say?” I started to cry at last, feeling the shame rise all over again. “I don’t know what’s worse...that people might think I am a whore, or that people will know that I’m not.”
“We will find somewhere for you to go,” she said calmly. “Somewhere safe. The Sisters will help us... You can shelter somewhere until the birth, and then you can start afresh. No one will even know.”
“I can’t do this,” I said again, sobs coming in earnest again now. “Please, Sara. Help me. There has to be a way to stop it.”
“You and I have been through a lot, Emilia. That’s how I know that you can do this.”
By the time we left the orphanage that day, new plans were in place. I’d be moving to a Franciscan convent in Marki. The Sisters would take me in until the baby was born.
“And then what?” I asked Sara numbly.
“Then we will find someone to adopt the baby, and you can move back to Warsaw with Truda and Mateusz to figure out what comes next.”
35
Roman
It had been almost six months since the Uprising had failed. I marked the days with tiny notches on the wooden frame of my bunk in the dormitory at the Stalag XIII-D POW Camp, on the Nazi-party rally grounds in Nuremberg.
“I don’t understand why you’re in such good spirits,” Kacper muttered. This startled a burst of laughter from me.
“No one has ever said those words to me before.”
He and the other Polish prisoners were shocked by the dirty barracks, the broken windows as well as the lack of heating, the worn mattresses and the bedbugs. Some protested at the pits we used for outhouses or the troughs of cold water we were provided for bathing. To those prisoners, such conditions seemed unbearable, but after what I’d endured in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nuremberg camp was a walk in the park. With the bulk of the German ire focused on Soviet prisoners, I