By Jeffrey Felshman
But Henry understood there was no cause for jealousy. Janina was only 14 in 1942, when she’d risked her life to sneak food to Shalom, his two younger brothers, and his sister. Janina knew that Henry understood. She worried about being able to understand Shalom.
Before this postcard the last sign Janina had seen of Shalom had been in 1943–a note left under her family’s farmhouse door. “I was here,” he’d written, and signed his name. Even that was telling too much.
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That couldn’t last. Tarnava was trapped between Stalin and Hitler; in 1940 the Soviets ordered everyone from the village into a long train. Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and even some Germans were shipped northeast. There were no bathrooms on the train; every time it stopped during the three-week trip, everyone would use the track for a toilet. The guards joked, “Stalin took the Poles to shit over Russia.”
In April of 1942, the Jews were rounded up into a ghetto in Berezno. Though Shalom’s 14-year-old brother escaped–he hid with a woman in Polany–the rest of his family, all seven of them, stayed in one room. Then German soldiers took Shalom and his father to a labor camp in Kostopol, about 30 miles north.
How long did she feed them? Three weeks, a month maybe. So much time had gone by since then. The war had meant hunger, at least. After the Nazis had killed the Jews, they’d come for the Poles. Janina could talk about Dachau, where she was taken in 1943, a few months after she’d last heard from Shalom. But she preferred not to remember. After a month in Dachau she’d been relocated to a labor camp where she’d made door frames for German barracks. A German man in the factory had noticed her hungry eyes and sunken cheeks, and pity overcame fear, for if he was caught feeding a Pole he too would wind up in a camp. He would sidle up to her work station every day and toss a slice of bread on the floor underneath her table. She would wait until no one was watching, dart under the table, and bolt the bread. When their situations were reversed after the war she gave food to the man, who was starving, and she did so gladly.
The Jews didn’t know yet what the Nazis’ intentions were. They hadn’t heard about that January’s Wannsee Conference on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. But laying the headstones at the bottom of the muddy pit was a sign to Shalom of things to come.
