The Second Winter Read Online Free PDF

you understand?”
    She shook her head, squirmed.
    “You belong to Czeslaw now, Polina.”
    She was suffocating. She tried to suck air through his fingers. Then she surrendered. Her body relaxed. Her father held her up, forced her to look at him.
    “Do you understand, Polina? You can’t be my daughter anymore. Listen to me, Polina.
Listen
. You can’t have anything to do with me or your mother. Understand? You belong to Czeslaw.”
    Next to them, Polina saw her uncle, hidden in the shadows. His eyes were glowing like embers.
    “Understand?”
    When her father took his hand off her mouth, Polina didn’t speak. She remained still, staring at her father.
    “Good,” her father said. Then he touched her cheek and raised his mouth in what should have been a smile. And then he let her go. Without more, he took a step out from the doorway and started walking down the street toward the soldiers.
    “Papa,” she said, but he didn’t hear her.
    When the soldier who had clubbed Julian pointed his pistol at him, her father stopped and raised his arms. The soldier shouted, and her father nodded at the truck. “My wife,” he said. He gestured so that the soldier would understand — his hands over his heart, a finger pointed at the rear of the truck, where Ania had disappeared. “My wife,” he repeated. He held his arms against his chest in the shape of a cradle. “Mydaughter.” The soldier waited while the Pole approached, then grabbed him by the neck and shoved him toward the other prisoners. In the road, Julian was trying to raise himself onto his knees. Blood was still flowing from his forehead, but the soldiers left him alone. Polina watched her father climb up behind her mother and Adelajda, into the waiting cage. He had disappeared before she realized that Czeslaw’s hands were on her shoulders. Her uncle’s grip tightened. He pulled her backward until the shadows had swallowed them completely, and she let him.
    January 1940 .
    It was after midnight. In the sitting room of Czeslaw’s apartment, Polina’s cousins were asleep on the cold floor. In the narrow bedroom behind the kitchen, her uncle was snoring. The sounds of lovemaking — the rustle of blankets on the hard mattress, her uncle’s truncated grunts, her aunt’s gasps — had long since quieted. In the kitchen, the cast-iron stove ticked as it cooled. The air was close with the smell of cheap tobacco and her aunt’s horrible cooking — a veiny stew that had been simmering for more than a few days now. Polina lay in the hallway on a roll of blankets, her eyes wide open. As tired as she was, it wasn’t difficult to keep herself awake. In the last few weeks, it had been impossible for her to sleep. She waited as long as she could. Then, when she was certain that no one would hear, she sat up and gathered her things. She didn’t possess much — only the few pieces of clothing they had been able to recover from her house. She placed the doll her uncle had given her on her pillow, then stood from her makeshift bed as quietly as she could. She was already dressed — in preparationfor her escape, she had even worn her coat to bed — so all she had to do was sneak from the apartment without knocking into anything or stepping on one of her cousins’ hands. She let herself out the front door, then, when nothing moved inside, started down the stairs, running faster and faster the closer she got to the bottom.
    Outside, the wind whipped fiercely through her clothes, but she hardly noticed the cold. She felt nothing but relief. She had the sense that she was breathing for the first time since the afternoon when her family had been stolen from her. She buried her hands into her small bundle of belongings, then set out in the direction of Julian’s house. There was no moon, and the streets were dark. She walked in the center of the road until her eyes adjusted, then slipped into the shadows and meandered through the village toward the river.
    As she crossed the