Wombs of World War 2
Time crawled, dates changed. August 31st was gone, September 1, 1939, stood there, a ghost for all.
One could see the darkness spreading all around as the sun rose over the horizon, marking its arrival. This was because the Germans had attacked the Polish border. Some real screams of the dead were heard. Many silent screams were heard, not by the ears, but by the ears of the heart—a prediction of what more was to come. Everyone’s eyes saw the blue river appearing red today, in the sky of doomsday. Everyone was dead silent, expressionless with a single thought – “Whatever is to come, will we have anyone by our side to lend us shoulders?”. This thought was frightening, and it squeezed the heart out of anyone.
Hanna lived with her only son in Toruń. She was divorced from her husband who was a famous Polish writer and journalist. She was a single mother, and she raised her son all by herself who later joined the army. The order had come, and her son had already left to fight the war from Poland’s side, following the mobilisation and careful, strategic organisation of the Polish army which became really chaotic due to German invasion. Since Toruń was a military hub, he never knew before he left that he would be told to join a unit that will be sent to Warsaw to fight, and many of the soldiers will perish on the way.
The day before he was going, she couldn’t think of anything else except his going. In the evening, she sat at the old armchair in her living room, keeping the lights off except for a dim bulb. She sat expressionless with tears just flowing down, and her son sat on the floor with his head on his mother’s lap and kept staring ahead.
That night, he slept cuddled to her, and she held him like a baby. The next morning, he got dressed, ate his favourite breakfast made by his mother, and started putting on his boots to leave. She walked towards the door with trembling legs and couldn’t control her tears. She couldn’t explain how scared and uneasy she felt.
“Promise me, you’ll take good care of yourself,” he said, his wet eyes full of emotion.
“I will,” she somehow managed to reply. She kissed his forehead and combed his hair with her hands. He left, then, and she stood there until his body disappeared from her sight.
She went back in and lay on the bed fatigued and weak due to the immense stress had taken over. Her eyes, now wrinkled, suddenly became too tired, and her face grew pale and dull due to the tension – what would happen to her son? She was finding it too difficult to survive a few hours after he had gone, she thought about how would she manage to live all these days as he would come back after months.
She could barely eat anything, always thinking about what condition her son would be in at that moment, and could never find herself at peace. As days crawled by, she would keep her hand on her heart as she heard the casualties from the neighbours. She also kept track of what was happening in the neighbourhood, who came and who went. She hardly ever got to listen to the radio as Toruń had been occupied by the Germans by the end of the first week of September, and this was followed by the gradual forbidding to listen to foreign BBC radio and Polish radio stations which were the main sources to get to know about the proceedings of the war. To gather information about what was really happening at the site of fighting or to learn about the real sufferings of the people, returning soldiers, local authorities passing by, and neighbours were the only sources of information about any new news and harm done. She waited daily, and asked her neighbour about who came back, and who departed to heaven. The feeling of dependency, and not knowing immediately what had happened was very difficult to tackle.
During the Siege of Warsaw in September 1939, Civilians were being killed, and even the soldiers were dying. This news sent chills down her spine; she didn’t know where her son was. She was torn apart between negative thoughts, great worry, and a little bit of hope that everything would be all right. She used to sit all day with her eyes closed, praying for him and sending him blessings of long life. She hoped it reached him. But did this Great War care about anyone’s sufferings? Definitely not.
She woke up one day, and was way too tired that day, and mostly lay down. She had taken an immense amount of stress which had clearly degraded her mental well-being and physical health. There were no thoughts in her mind that day, just his face going on in her head.
The next day, while she sat on the sofa lost in her thoughts, she suddenly felt pain in her stomach. She couldn’t figure out why, but it didn’t go away. Two days later, she was told that Warsaw had been besieged and had to surrender. She felt restless, and sat every day the upcoming days at the entrance of the willing to spot her son from the very few soldiers who were returning. Sadly, she couldn’t spot him coming home.
Many days later, in the last week of October, a gentleman knocked upon the door of her house. She didn’t recognise him but welcomed him inside the living room.
“I must sadly tell you that your son has sacrificed his life for our country, and has departed to heaven,” he said with moist eyes as his voice trembled, his hands shook, and he couldn’t look into the eyes of the mother.
Hanna sat there expressionless, eyes wide open, and she forgot to respond. She felt as if she had fallen into a black hole and was sinking down and down.
“How did you come to know?”, she managed to control her emotions and ask him.
“ You have never met me, but I live quite a few crossroads away from here. I met him on the day we were being sent to Warsaw. We were the few lucky ones who managed to go and fight in Warsaw. There we fought bravely on the streets of the city. Some soldiers who had spent a full day fighting, used to go back to the basement of a school that had been shut down during the war. We would rest at night along with other soldiers, we were both among them. Every night we hid in the basement, and we would see who had come back. The one who hadn’t come back had gone to heaven for sure. The day your son passed away, I scanned through the entire basement, but he was nowhere to be seen, and never came back. Then two days later, all the other fellow soldiers who were most of the time seen with him, were worried about his absence. This news might look uncertain, but trust me as I am also a soldier, and I have seen many of them die, your son is dead, as the one soldier with whom he mostly fought and was mostly there with him didn’t know where your son was. This probable news is the only thing what the families get. But very shortly, Warsaw had been besieged, and I was a captured soldier. With great difficulty and immense risk I managed to escape. I decided to disguise myself as a civilian, got rid of my uniform, and ran away with difficulty. I blended in with many Polish people who were moving around. I walked down long rural routes, moving at night and taking food and water from the kind people whose homes I passed by. I came back home yesterday”.
She couldn’t control her tears after listening to this. She started yelling and sobbing and beating the sofa with her hands. He tried comforting her, but he knew nothing could help her except bringing her son back.
“I can’t even see the dead body of the child I nurtured in my womb for nine months,” she said as her pain knew no bounds.
“I live at the sixth crossroad. Tell me if you need anything. Take care,” that was all he could manage to say and he left her alone to heal herself.
She sat at the window of her bedroom. Her eyes saw a bird chirping loudly, crying in its language and panicking, as she came back to the tree finding her egg broken and fallen on the ground. Now, she couldn’t control herself. She started weeping and moaning and cursing god. She felt as if her womb, which nurtured her son and shed blood to let him out into the world, was now being stabbed and set on fire. She cried for hours nonstop, seeing his photos and begging him to come back. Her emotional pain had now converted to physical pain. The burning sensations throughout her body and the immense weakness she experienced were nothing compared to the terrible pain one experiences while giving birth to a child. She sobbed loudly, her hand on her womb.
“Why?”, this immensely loud cry of hers echoed through the silent neighbourhood filled with the vacuum of terror and hopelessness. It shook the souls of those who heard this haunting cry, as nobody could understand why this war had to take place. People lost their limbs, were burnt alive when bombs fell upon them, some starved and many lost their children and loved ones, but what problem in the world can be so big for the leaders of their countries to give rise to such a bloodshed, nobody could understand this.
The next day, she couldn’t bear it and thought of committing suicide. She wanted to go back to her son. She had prepared herself to burn herself alive, and just at that moment came a voice – the last words her son had spoken to her. He wanted her to take care of herself. But how could she when she had died from the inside now? She continued to live for him, fulfilling his last wish, like an almost-dead person, until death actually came to her.
She prayed for death to come, for days, but she knew she had to live for him. That’s when she one day stood up, and re-assembled his crate. She made soft balls of his clothes which carried a very slight scent of him into the shape of a baby, and fixed his photograph on it. That’s where she was always, singing his favourite lullaby to that baby she had made. Seeing it, she was sure that just like how this lullaby made this baby sleep, it would also reach to her son resting peacefully in heaven.
Hanna used to learn about these events days after what had happened through the neighbours and trusted people who were a part of the tiny, secret and illegal presses who told people to pass on the course of events as they met other people; and the ones who could bring in the courage of listening to forbidden radios which was prohibited by the Germans and could bring a death sentence. Every time she learnt any horrible news, she became more and more ashamed of being a human. But there was more tragedy to follow her.
On the night of 25th October 1939, German officers banged her door. When she opened the door, she came to find out that they had come to capture her as she was the ex-wife of a famous Polish journalist who was actively spreading nationalism among Polish people and was caught running an illegal and secret press that informed the people, hence she was also misunderstood in being an influential nationalist. The Germans arrested anyone who could be a part of spreading Polish nationalism, or if they were linked by relation to any such elite person and were assumed to be guilty. There she was being taken away, with very few basic belongings like a few clothes. She carried her son from his crate and tried to hide it from their eyes but couldn’t. Those German soldiers quickly examined her and told her to hand over. As she handed it over to them, and they saw that photo, they threw her assembled baby on the floor and did not allow her to take it with her.
“Please I beg you, I will do whatever you say, I will obey you and go where ever you tell me to. He is dead, this is all his memory I can have with me,” she begged them as she wept looking at the photograph of her son on her baby that had been thrown on the floor. They dragged her away to Fort VII, and there kept her with other many captured Polish people. She was always kept in extreme hunger, and in poor conditions, letting her shiver if she felt cold. That incident, when they didn’t allow her to keep her son’s clothes and photo, had made a serious impact on her. She screamed and wailed loudly, and shivered continuously murmuring. “I want him back,” she used to yell.
But there was good news awaiting her. She was one of the many guilty nationalistic Poles were taken from the Fort VII in Poznań to the Barbarka Forest to execute them. They were killed here as these forests were away from the normal areas where people lived and getting rid of those dead bodies would be easier here in these forests. She could now go and reunite with her son in heaven – the moment for which she was yearning and tormenting for so long now. She was shot by the Germans and blessed the soul who freed her from this suffering of maternal loss as she fell down on the ground.
Shlok Pandey is a 17-year-old Indian writer who is a student of a completely different field and practices writing and reading in the very little spare time he can manage from his studies. His stories have appeared in the Wise Owl Magazine, Setu Journal, The Drift and Dribble Miscellany and Wildflower Post and his poems have appeared in/ forthcoming in The Crossroads Review, cloudymoon lit mag, The Utrecht Pigeon Magazine, Poetic Practice and Aesterion magazine.
