Too Little, Too Late (3 page)

After what seemed like an eternity trying to keep her balance in a crouched position, Katya’s knees began to hurt. “I want to sit down.”

“Stay down and do as Herr Gunter tells us,” Lilly admonished her. “If anyone has a right to complain, it has to be Hans. With his long legs tucked under his chin like that, he probably has terrible cramps but you don’t hear him complaining, do you?”

“I suppose not,” Katya relented. “Still, I just want to go home to Mama.”

Before her sister could reply, there was a loud noise, followed by a flash of fire. Chunks of forest burst through the open windows, showering them with dirt and debris. Several of the children screamed while many others began coughing from the acrid smoke filling their bus. The bus swerved sharply to the right, tossing those that weren’t holding on to something secure, all over the bus. More screams followed. The children were truly frightened now.

“Quiet down, everyone!”

Katya could hear their teacher’s urgent voice through the cloud of debris although she could no longer see him. Lilly had covered Katya’s body with her own as they held on to the leg of their seat for dear life. The second blast, which followed a minute or two later, was so close that its impact managed to flip over their bus several times, before it finally came to rest on its roof.

“Katya!” Lilly’s shrill voice rose above the crying and groans of pain. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

Katya tried to see through the dirt and smoke but it was impossible. “I can’t hold on anymore! My hands are slipping!”

“That’s because we’re upside down,” Lilly explained. “It’s okay to let go, Katya. You won’t have far to fall, I promise. Let go now!”

Crying quietly, Katya did as she was told, mentally preparing herself for a jolt of pain, but instead of the hard landing she had been expecting, something cushioned her fall. Peering down, she saw that it was Hans’ body.

“Katya, over here!” Lilly was crawling towards her on her hands and knees, the impact of the blast having thrown her clear across the bus. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

“No!” cried Katya, clearly petrified. “Herr Gunter will be angry with us.”

“Herr Gunter is dead,” Lilly told her. “So are many of the others and if we stay here, we’ll die, too!”

Katya began crying in earnest. “I just want Mama!”

“I’ll get us to Mama, I promise.” Lilly held out her hand. “Please, Katya, we’ve got to hurry!”

Lilly grasped her hand and pulled Katya through one of the windows. Several of the other children who had survived the blast were already out of the bus and running in every direction. Lilly pulled Katya closer to her as they followed the forest road, well behind two older boys. The road was little more than a narrow, muddy path at this point and the artillery fire around them was deafening. They were about four kilometers northwest of Chelmno, off the east side of the road to Kolo, which abutted their compound to the south.

Katya froze in terror as another blast hit the road in front of them, sending her sister’s classmates hurtling up in the air before pieces of their bodies dropped from the sky around them like grotesque chunks of disfigured confetti.

“Don’t stop now!” Lilly tried pulling her sister around the bloody stump of an arm. “We’ve got to keep going!”

Katya refused to budge. She raised a shaking finger at the huge tank that had just broken through the underbrush and was bearing down on them. “That monster’s coming straight for us!”

1949

Oslo, Norway

Out of all their chores at the internment camp, Katya disliked latrine duty the most. She despised it, in fact. The camp had 165 women and children and only twenty-seven holes. The guards and administrators of the camp had actual toilets but they, the prisoners, had holes in the ground and latrine duty meant looking after both. She shouldn’t complain, really. All she and the other children had to do was fill the boxes beside each hole with long strips of newspaper that served as toilet paper. The women, on the other hand, had to scrub the toilets and the shit-encrusted metal enclosures that went over each hole. The buzzing flies and the stink were terrible and it was a job Katya didn’t wish on her worst enemy, let alone her poor mother.

Their days in the overcrowded camp, which lacked even the most basic of necessities, were long and filled with despair. Not a single day went by that Katya didn’t long for her former life – before the allied troops had marched into Poland and turned her world upside down. When the tanks had crashed through the woods, the soldiers had gathered up Katya and the other surviving children and had taken them back to their compound. Her mother and the other adults had been taken to one of the outbuildings where they had been interrogated. Thanks to Sonja Holberg’s Norwegian citizenship, they had eventually been released. The only problem was, there had been nowhere to go.

In the end, they had taken a night train to Berlin but with the fall of Germany, there had been no available jobs. Her mother had resorted to entertaining countless men, civilians and soldiers alike, who appeared on the doorstep of their squalid tenement at all hours of the day and night. This came to an abrupt end in the latter half of 1946 when the German government declared them, and others like Katya’s family, to be an embarrassment to Germany and shipped them back to Norway where an internment camp had been set up for them in Oslo harbor. The camp had been their home for the past three years.

Katya fervently hoped her father had met with a better fate. The day they were captured was the last day she had seen Karel Bauer alive and all Katya had left of her father was his little black notebook which she would take out from her secret hiding place and look at every now and then. She had told no one about the notebook, not even Lilly.

“Here, Mama, let me scrub for a while.” Katya took the bristle brush from her mother’s worn hands. “Why don’t you take a break?”

Sonja Holberg nodded gratefully. “Do a good job. Remember, there’s going to be an inspection today because of the visit.”

“I remember,” Katya reassured her grimly. Pulling the neck of her shirt over her mouth and nose, she got down to work.

Word had quickly spread among the women that the visitor to their camp was going to be Lars Thomassen, a hero in the Norwegian resistance. None of this seemed particularly significant to Katya as she watched her mother go over to a corner and collapse against the wall, as far away as possible from the stench and lapping flies. While the years since the fall of the Third Reich had been hard on all of them, they had been particularly hard on Sonja Holberg. It showed in the dejected slump of her mother’s shoulders and in her weary countenance. When they had first arrived at the camp, all the women had been ruthlessly shorn; their shaved heads branding them as traitors in the eyes of their countrymen. Any remaining scrap of dignity her mother may have managed to hold on to until that point had fallen away with her hair.

As fate would have it, Katya’s path crossed with the visitor’s later in the day as she made her way over to the laundry facility where Lilly was assigned. Lars Thomassen dropped one of his gloves and she ran to pick it up for him. He rewarded her with the briefest of smiles and a small piece of candy which Katya was quick to share with Lilly. Overall, the encounter had been fleeting and Katya had all but forgotten about it until she and her family were summoned later that afternoon to the office for what turned out to be the visitor’s personal inspection.

Lars Thomassen took his time as he looked over Katya and Lilly, making them bend over to touch their toes several times. Katya thought it was a game until he turned his attention to her mother. There was something in the way he looked at Sonja Holberg that chilled Katya to the bone but then Lars turned to speak to the guard and the uneasy feeling passed. After a brief haggling and an exchange of Norwegian Kroners, the fate of Katya and her family was quickly settled. They were brusquely ordered to gather up their meager belongings and the relative security of the camp was soon left behind as they found themselves on a train heading to northern Norway in the company of a man they didn’t know.

Their destination was Lars Thomassen’s farm, remotely located outside of Alesund. The farm was primitive by anyone’s standards and without any nearby neighbors to look after the property, the farm had fallen into neglect while Lars had been away at war. Any gratitude Katya may have felt for Lars rescuing them from the hell that had been the internment camp was soon tempered by the stark realization that they had been purchased to serve as unpaid laborers on his farm. As the weeks wore on, Katya and Lilly discovered that their savior was prone to violent outbursts of anger when things weren’t done to his satisfaction. Of course, they were too young to understand that Lars’ anger stemmed from an unadulterated hate of the very ideals their existence represented but Sonja Holberg knew this, and took what little consolation she could from the bottles of plum brandy she’d discovered in Lars’ cellar shortly after their arrival.

***

The steam rising from the water-logged goose lying in the metal tub in front of them stunk, filling the drafty summer kitchen with a foul odor.

Lilly looked at the scrawny goose with misgiving. “Maybe we should wait for Mama to come back.”

Their mother had gone inside earlier to get a sweater but had not yet returned.

“We can’t,” Katya told her. “Mama says once the water cools, it’s harder to pluck out the little pin feathers from its wings.” She gingerly took hold of the goose’s foot and pushed it further into the tub until its entire body was submerged under the boiling water.

Just then Lilly coughed, a deep, rattling cough from inside her chest that left her clinging weakly to the side of the old worktable.

“Are you getting sick?” Katya asked worriedly. Lilly’s coughing had become worse since they’d arrived at the farm, exacerbated by the cold Arctic air. The years in the camp had taken their toll on Lilly, both physically as well as mentally, and her sister was extremely thin to the point of being frail. Although Lilly had been Katya’s protector in the past, their roles had slowly reversed over time without either girl having become consciously aware of it.

“I’m all right,” her sister replied, managing a weak smile. “Worry about the goose instead of me.”

Katya nodded. “Let’s start with the legs and work our way up its body. Mama will have less to do when she gets back.”

The two girls set about plucking the goose, quickly yanking at handfuls of wet feathers. The water was scalding hot, making their task difficult. Although the outer layer of feathers came out easily enough, the fine down underneath it was harder to grasp. By the time they got to the wings, their small fingers were numb and their nails soft, making it difficult to grasp the toughened pin feathers.

Lilly coughed again, harder this time, until a thin sheen of sweat had broken out across her forehead and upper lip.

Katya handed her an old towel to mop her forehead. “You
are
getting sick!”

“No, I’m not,” Lilly argued stubbornly. The words were barely out of her mouth before she launched into yet another coughing fit, her spittle staining the towel with slimy mucous tinged with flecks of bright red.

“You shouldn’t be out here in the cold. It’s making your cough worse.” Katya stared at her sister’s flushed cheeks worriedly. “Go find Mama and ask her to make you some of her peppermint tea.”

Her sister looked dubiously at the half-plucked goose. “I promise I’ll help you finish the goose when I get back.”

“Don’t worry about me. Just go.” Katya went back to her plucking, trying not to worry about her sister. She had just finished the one wing and was about to start on the other one when Lilly came rushing back.

“Katya, come quick!” she cried. “Mama’s been at it again!”

Katya swiped her hands on the back of her trousers as she quickly followed her sister through the main kitchen and living quarters, into the small bedroom at the back of the farmhouse Lars had demanded their mother share with him. Sonja Holberg was sprawled across the bed, an empty bottle clutched in her hand.

“Mama!” Katya rushed over to the bed, taking the empty bottle from her mother’s unresisting hand before smelling it. It smelled just like the others from the cellar. “Open your eyes!” When Sonja didn’t respond, Katya vigorously rubbed her cheeks until her mother groaned.

Lilly looked at the clock on the wall. “We’ve got to do something. You know how Lars gets when Mama is late with supper.”

“Go make some strong coffee and get Mama to drink all of it.”

“There’s not much left of the rations,” Lilly pointed out.

“Use it anyway,” Katya told her, looking at their mother’s prone form on the bed. “You have to make sure Mama’s up by the time Lars gets back from the bush.”

“What about supper?”

“Don’t worry about supper,” Katya tried to sound confident. “I’ll make it.”

She hurried back to the summer kitchen and plunged her waterlogged fingers into the cooling water, determined to clean the rest of the bird. When she was done, she eyed the bird’s damaged skin and scraggly pinfeathers with misgiving. Somehow, it didn’t look as good as when her mother did it, but it would have to do. She picked up the wet goose by one of its legs and struggled to carry it into the main kitchen, before laying it in the roasting pan on the table. Dipping her fingers into the small pot on the counter, Katya massaged duck lard into the goose’s body, as she had seen her mother do, before seasoning it with liberal amounts of salt and pepper. Adding a little water the bottom of the roasting pan, she put the goose into the oven before throwing more wood in the old stove.

Running down into the cold cellar, she hunted around in the sand pile until her fingers latched on to some wrinkled potatoes, a few rotting carrots and an onion. Carrying them back upstairs, she washed them and prepared them for cooking. Noting the time with mounting dread, she swallowed her panic and opened the oven door. Her senses were immediately assaulted by a strange smell. She pulled out the goose, checking it worriedly. Although it looked more or less like a roasting goose was supposed to look, it didn’t smell right. She shoved the pan back into the oven and reassured herself it would smell better once it had finished roasting. Katya put the few precious potatoes on the stove to boil and went to set the table. She was just tidying the summer kitchen when she heard the whinny of horses as Lars’ wagon came to a stop outside the house. Rushing back inside, Katya was relieved to find her mother at the sink, draining the pot of potatoes.