Chapter 2/Episode 1: The Camp Stefania Never Spoke Of

After A Lifetime Of Silence, A Place Has A Name

Lila drove back to Cedar Run the next morning with the photograph in a clean folder, the slip of paper in her pocket, and the first uncomplicated certainty she had felt in months, which was that nothing else in her life had any business waiting for her permission while she did this.

Stefania was awake. The blanket was tucked the way the morning aide always tucked it, but her grandmother had pulled it down to her lap, and her hair, which had been wrapped overnight, lay loose around her shoulders, brushed. She had asked, the aide whispered as Lila came in, to be brushed. Lila pulled the visitor’s chair close.

“How did you sleep, Babcia.”

“Better.” It was true. The blue eyes were clear all the way to the bottom. “I have not slept like that since I cannot say when.”

Lila held up the folder. “Do you want to do this now, today? It’s all right if you don’t.”

“Today. Before the fog comes in.” Her grandmother held out a hand for the folder, and her voice was steady, and that was the way they began.

Lila set a small recorder on the rolling tray between them. It was the kind of thing she kept in her work kit, a habit from an oral-history project she had done one summer, when she had been young enough to think memory was a thing you could capture if you only sat still. “I’m going to record, Babcia. So I don’t lose anything.”

A nod. “It will be a help to you.”

Stefania looked at the photograph in her lap, at the young proud frightened girl against the pale stone wall, at the bundle she was holding. The room held the thinned-out quiet of a place where most of the residents were still asleep, a radiator clinking down the hall, a cart wheel squeaking by.

“It is called Wildflecken,” she said.

Lila wrote it in her notebook in block letters and underlined it.

“Wild-flecken.” Her grandmother said it slowly, the way you teach a word to a child. “In Bavaria. In the south of Germany, in the mountains. The Americans had a camp there for us, after.”

“After the war.”

“After. Yes. After.” The thin shoulders lifted and settled. “When the war ended I was fifteen years old. I had nothing. I had no one. The Americans gave us a place to wait, and we waited. Thousands of us, the Polish ones, in the barracks the Germans had built for their soldiers. Some went back. Most of us could not go back. Some, in the end, the Americans took, in ‘forty-eight, when they wrote the new law for it.”

It was the first concrete thing her grandmother had given her about anything before America, in thirty-eight years of asking and not asking. Lila wrote, and kept her face still, and let her grandmother choose her own pace.

“How long were you there, Babcia.”

“Spring of ‘forty-five until the autumn of ‘forty-eight. Three and a half years.” She looked up, and the blue eyes were direct. “I was a girl when I went in. By the time I came out I had a baby in my arms and I had buried more people than I could count.”

“And the baby was born there. At Wildflecken.”

“In November of nineteen forty-seven. So he was almost one year old when we sailed.”

A pause. Lila let it sit. Then she asked the question she had been asking herself all night, the careful way.

“His father, Babcia.”

The smallest beat. Her grandmother’s hand smoothed the blanket once.

“His father did not come on the ship with us.”

That was all she said. Lila knew enough about grief from her work to know when a person was deciding, second by second, how much of a story she could carry into the open air. She had no right to push the cart of it for her.

Stefania looked at the recorder a long moment. Then at the photograph. Then she said, quietly, “What I am telling you, Lila. None of it has ever been spoken aloud. Henryk, God rest him, never heard a word. Your mother does not know. Father Bryla holds what he holds under his seal and cannot say it even to me. So you will please understand if I do not give you all of it in one morning.”

“Of course, Babcia. Of course.”

“There are names.” Her grandmother smiled, small and tired. “There are names I have not let myself say in a long while. The saying of them wears a person down, after enough years. So I save them. But you should know there were people there, with me. There was a woman. There was a man. The man, I loved him before he died. The woman was the dearest friend a girl ever had. They are not in the photograph. They are not anywhere now. That was what the camp was, in the end.”

Lila’s pencil hovered. She did not write down what she did not know.

“Their names, Babcia.”

“Another day.” A small wave of the hand. “Today I have given you the name of the place. That is enough for one morning, I think.”

“Yes, Babcia.”

They sat with the photograph a while longer. The aide brought the tray and Stefania ate the way she ate now, slowly, with long pauses, the spoon resting between bites. The fog began to come in around the edges of her, the way Lila was learning to watch for. The loosening of the hands. The drift of the eyes to the window and the empty parking lot beyond. By eleven the brightness had thinned out of the blue, and her grandmother was somewhere just barely with her.

Lila stayed. She made small talk about the weather and the house and the realtor. She held her grandmother’s hand. The fog deepened. Stefania began the soft continuous murmuring she did in the deeper places, the Polish language she had used as a girl coming back over the language she had built as a woman, a slow river of words Lila could not follow.

And then, in the middle of it, in a voice low and almost surprised, almost as if a name had walked out of her mouth without her permission, her grandmother said it.

“Tadeusz.”

She said it the way you would say the name of someone you had loved more than your own life, the name of someone you had not let your tongue near for seventy-eight years. She said it once, and her face did something soft and ruined, and then the murmuring closed over the place where the name had been and the name was gone.

Lila stopped the recorder very carefully and wrote the name in her notebook beneath Wildflecken and underlined it twice.

It was not Joseph. It was not Henryk. It was not Mikołaj. It was a fourth name now, a man her grandmother had named with the look of a woman saying goodbye to her own heart, and Lila sat in the visitor’s chair with the pencil shaking in her hand and understood that the story she had thought was Stefania and a buried child and a kind country boy named Joseph Mazur was something larger and older and stranger than that. There was a man in this story who had not been named. There was a story before the story she was being told.

And somewhere, behind the rest of the fog, her grandmother was still holding it.