“Yeah, yeah. For real. One second I looked up and she was here, next one she was gone. She acted weird. Like, all emotional, you know?”
“Yeah. I hear you. She doesn’t have any children. You know?”
Nadia bit into a Baby Ruth. “Yeah, I know.”
When they were stuffed, Marko poured all his water into Nadia’s canteen and sealed the food in kitchen storage bags.
“Remember,” he said, “you’re not taking these. I’m leaving them. They’re part of the land. Only a fool won’t live off the land when it’s right there in front of him.”
Nadia shivered as her brother stood up to leave.
“I’d give you my poncho,” he said, “but it’s camouflage and yours was puke green. If Father came by and saw it…”
Nadia shrugged. “I don’t need it.” She screwed her face tight and tried to sound as tough as she could. “I don’t need no stinking poncho.”
Marko laughed. He didn’t laugh or smile too often, but she’d reminded him of one of his favorite movie lines from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Her satisfaction over making Marko laugh, however, quickly gave way to reality.
He was leaving.
She wanted him to stay. Better yet, she wanted to go with him, to feel safe and have fun, not be scared alone at night. But she didn’t dare tell him that, lest she disappoint him and make him think she was still a weakling. She had to be strong for him.
“Thanks for the matches,” she said, trying to pepper her voice with enthusiasm. “And the food. I mean, thanks for putting a lot of good stuff on the land.”
He turned back and shined the flashlight on his face so she could see him.
“Keep the whistle close to you. And don’t be afraid to use it. I’ll be around. Not too close, but not too far away.”
“That’s good to know,” Nadia said, fighting back the tears.
After he left, Nadia crawled into her sleeping bag and stayed there for twelve hours. She woke up constantly throughout the night, sometimes so hot she had to pop out of her sleeping bag, sometimes so cold she trembled inside it. She thought it was the sugar from the food she’d eaten, but when she woke up the next day some of the fever had stayed with her.
It didn’t matter. Nothing could bring her down now. When Nadia emerged from her lean-to, the morning sun shone through gaps in the trees. Marko had visited her. Marko had taken care of her. She had water, fire, and food.
She was certain the worst was behind her.
CHAPTER 18
I ate a late lunch at a Wendy’s in Rocky Hill. It boasted a highly visible parking lot surrounded by the Silas Deane Highway on one side and busy office buildings on the other. I parked near the driveway with the nose of the Porsche facing out. There was no way a van could block my exit or a couple of thugs could kidnap me without attracting attention.
After devouring a spicy chicken sandwich and a vanilla Frosty — a child’s size, just enough to take the edge off my stress — I called my friend Paul Obon. He ran the Duma Ukrainian bookstore in the Lower East Village of New York. He was my source for information on all things Ukrainian. I needed his help because I knew nothing about post — World War II DP camps in Europe. Our parents and grandparents didn’t discuss them, presumably to protect us from the pain and suffering of their past. But that always struck me as the partial truth. In fact, our elders preferred to keep this part of their lives shrouded in mystery for reasons unknown, or so I’d always thought.
Obon gave me the basics. After the end of World War II in 1945, five million refugees from the Soviet Union found themselves homeless in Western Europe. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed agreements at the Yalta Conference that required the repatriation of all Allied nationals, by force if necessary. The Soviet refugees consisted of slave labor moved to occupied Western Europe by Hitler, concentration camp survivors, and people who’d fled west during the war.
With the help of the Americans, British, and French, more than four million refugees — two million of them Ukrainian — were returned to the USSR promptly. The remaining homeless — including two hundred fifty thousand Ukrainians — refused to return voluntarily. The Americans, British, and French set up camps in Austria and Germany where they were allowed to live while the world decided what to do with them. The refugees were called Displaced Persons, or DPs for short.
The Soviets were obsessed with the repatriation of every single DP. Their fixation was rooted in two beliefs. First, they felt entitled to such a demand because of their disproportionate suffering during the war. Soviet fatalities totaled 20 million, compared with between 300,000 and 350,000 each for America and Britain. In fact, the average daily fatalities suffered in the USSR before 1943 exceeded the entire 130,000 deaths suffered by the Americans in three and a half years of war in Europe. The Soviet population shared Stalin’s bitterness. They felt their allies owed them a debt.
The Soviets were also motivated by their insecurity over their ideology. If the Marxist state was utopia, every citizen should have wanted to return home. The presence of a dissenter would have suggested otherwise, and that was unacceptable. Hence, the Soviets deployed foreign missions to Western Europe to help with the repatriation. “The Motherland would not be a mother if she did not love all her family,” they said.
The Americans, British, and French happily obliged the Soviets. Each country was dealing with its own postwar issues. None of the Allies wanted a refugee problem, but that’s exactly what they got. A British Zone military order proclaimed: “HMG do not recognize Ukrainian as a nationality. No recognition can be given to any Ukrainian organization or representation as such.” The Americans and the French agreed. Soldiers were ordered to use force to load refugees onto trains headed back to the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian DPs promised that they would resist repatriation “by all means.” One community gathered in a church to celebrate the Holy Mass for the last time. Word spread that they were planning to commit mass suicide. When soldiers arrived to intervene, a farmer approached an officer and handed him his axe. He asked the soldier to cut off his head, that he would rather die from decapitation than be sent back to the Soviet Union. Others did commit suicide, including a twenty-four-year-old man who’d learned his sisters had voluntarily returned to the USSR and ended up in a Siberian work camp.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff understood they were legally obligated to use force to repatriate the DPs, but they had little stomach for it. There was clearly a disagreement between the welcoming message being spread by the Soviet foreign missions and future life as the DPs saw it. What Eisenhower didn’t realize at the time was that the Soviet missions consisted primarily of agents from the NKVD, the predecessor of the notorious Soviet secret police, the KGB. And their agenda was altogether different from the one they advertised.
As soon as Obon mentioned the NKVD and the KGB, I immediately became suspicious they somehow had a hand in my godfather’s death. Most Americans would have thought it was a silly idea, I knew, and yet I couldn’t help myself. If you grew up a first-generation Uke in the free world, you heard enough horror stories about spying, persecution, and murder to believe the disciples of those organizations were capable of killing anyone, any place, at any time.