Lujo did not know that there were no labor camps, only places of starvation and torture. Before the end of the year, he would be marched into the hills of Herzegovina, where the limestone is eaten away in a maze of wormholes. Rivers vanish there, running through the underground caverns, suddenly bubbling up again many miles distant. With other bruised and emaciated men—Jews, Gypsies, Serbs—Lujo stood at the lip of a deep cave whose floor he could not see. A Ustasha guard slashed his hamstrings and pushed him into the abyss.
They came for Rashela when Lola was out delivering fresh-pressed laundry. The soldiers had lists of all the Jewish women whose husbands and sons had already been deported. They herded them into trucks and deposited them at the ruined synagogue.
Lola returned to find her mother and sister gone, the door wide open, their few possessions tossed around in a vain search for something of value. She ran to her aunt’s flat, a few streets away, and knocked until her knuckles ached. A Muslim neighbor, a kindly woman who still wore the traditional chador, opened her door and took Lola inside. The woman handed her water and told her what had happened.
Lola fought back the panic that emptied her mind. She had to think. What should she do? What could she do? The only single idea that made its way through her confusion was that she needed to find them. She turned to go. The neighbor laid a hand on her arm. “You will be recognized out there. Take this.” She handed Lola a chador. Lola flung the cloak around her and set off for the synagogue. The front door, splintered by hatchets, hung loose on broken hinges. There were guards there, so Lola crept around to the side of the building, to the small room where the siddurim were stored. The window had been shattered. Lola took off the chador and wrapped it around her hand. She worked a piece of jagged glass loose from its lead surround, reached in, and slipped the catch. The frame, empty of its glass, tilted outward. She pulled herself up to the sill. The small room was in disarray, the shelves pulled down and the prayer books they had contained shredded all over the floor. There was a foul smell. Someone had defecated on the pages.
With the strong arms formed by lifting wet laundry, Lola hoisted her own weight till her ribs rested across the sill. Kicking, scrambling, the lead edge scraping through her clothes, she wriggled her way through the opening and dropped as gently as she could to the floor. Then she cracked open the heavy, polished-wood door. A pungent stink, of fear and sweat, burned paper and sour urine, filled the desecrated sanctuary. The ark that had housed the community’s ancient Torah, carried safely from Spain so many centuries ago, gaped open, blackened by flame. The damaged pews and ash-filled aisles were packed with distraught women, old, young, some trying to comfort infants whose cries were amplified by the room’s high stone dome. Others hunched over, head in hands. Lola eased her way slowly through the crowd, trying not to call attention to herself. Her mother, her little sister, and her aunt were huddled together in a corner. She came up behind her mother and laid a hand gently on her shoulder.
Rashela, thinking Lola had been caught, let out a cry.
Lola hushed her and spoke urgently. “There’s a way out, through a window. I got in that way; we can all escape.”
Lola’s aunt Rena lifted her fat arms and made a gesture of defeat that took in her wide body. “Not me, my darling girl. My heart’s not good. I’ve got no breath. I’m not going anywhere.”
Lola, frantic, knew that her mother would not abandon this beloved older sister. “I can help you,” she pleaded. “Please, let’s try.”
Her mother’s face, always lined and careworn, seemed to have fallen suddenly into the deep, folded creases of a much older woman. She shook her head. “Lola, they have lists. They would miss us when they load the trucks. And anyway, where would we go?”
“We can go to the mountains,” Lola said. “I know the ways, there are caves where we can shelter. We’ll get to the Muslim villages. They’ll help us, see if they won’t….”
“Lola, the Muslims were here at the synagogue, too. They burned and broke, looted and cheered just like the Ustashe.”
“Just a few of them, just the louts—”
“Lola, darling, I know you mean well, but Rena is ill, and Dora is too little.”
“But we can do it. Believe me, I know the mountains, I—”
Her mother laid her hand heavily on Lola’s arm.
“I know you do. All those nights at Hashomer, I should hope they taught you something.” Lola stared at her mother. “Did you really think I was asleep? No. I wanted you to go. I’m not like your father, worried about your honor. I know you are a modest girl. But now I want you to go away from this place. Yes,” she said firmly, as Lola shook her head. “I am your mother, and in this you must obey me. You go. My place is here with Dora and my sister.”
“Please, Mamma, please let me at least take Dora.”
Her mother shook her head. She was struggling hard to contain tears. Her skin had turned blotchy with the effort. “Alone, you have the best chance. She’d never keep up with you.”
“I can carry her….”
Dora, clinging to her mother, looked from one to the other of the people she most loved, and, realizing that the result of the argument would be the loss of one of them, began to wail.
Rashela patted her, looking around, hoping the outburst wasn’t drawing the guards’ attention. “After the war, we’ll all find each other.” She reached both hands up to Lola’s face and stroked her cheeks. “Go now. Stay alive.”
Lola dragged her hands through her hair, pulling hard at the tangles until she hurt herself. She threw her arms around her mother and her sister and hugged them hard. She kissed her aunt. Then she turned away and stumbled through the press of sagging bodies, rubbing her eyes with the fleshy part of her hand. When she reached the door to the storeroom, she waited until the guards’ eyes were elsewhere before she opened the door and slipped inside. She rested her back against the door, wiping her nose on her sleeve. As she dropped her arm, a small white hand reached out and grabbed it. The hand belonged to a girl with an intense elfin face, eyes huge behind thick glasses and finger planted firmly on lips. She pulled Lola down, hard, then pointed at the window. Lola saw the shape of a German helmet, the muzzle of a rifle, passing by the broken window.
“I know who you are,” whispered the girl, who looked about nine or ten years old. “You went to Hashomer with my brother, Isak. I was going to go this year….”
“Where is Isak?” Lola knew he’d been expelled from the university. “Was he taken for forced labor?”
The girl shook her head. “They got Father, but Isak is with the Partisans. There are others from your group, too. Maks, Zlata, Oskar…maybe even more now. Isak would not take me with them because I am too young. I told him I can carry messages, I can spy. But he wouldn’t listen. He told me it would be safer to stay with the neighbors. But he was wrong. He must take me now, because here is nothing but death.”
Lola winced. No child her age should talk like that. But the child was right. Lola had seen death in the faces of those she loved.
Lola regarded Isak’s little sister. A waif, not much bigger than Dora. Yet her face was animated by the same worried intensity as her brother’s. “I don’t know,” Lola said. “It’s going to be hard walking, and dangerous, getting out of the city…. I think your brother…”
“If you want to know where he is, then you have to take me. Otherwise I’m not telling. And anyway, I have this.”
The child reached under her pinafore and pulled out a German Luger. Lola was astonished.
“Where did you get that?”
“Stole it.”
“How?”
“When they came to drag us out of the house, I made myself vomit on the soldier who was carrying me to the truck. I had been eating fish stew, so it was disgusting. He dropped me and cursed. While he was trying to clean the sick off himself, I snatched this from his holster and I ran. I was hiding in that building where your aunt lives. I followed you here. I know where my brother is, bu
t I don’t know how to get there. Will you take me or not?”
Lola knew this stubborn, wily child would not be tricked or persuaded into telling her where Isak and the others were. Like it or not, they needed each other. As soon as the light began to fade, they scrambled out the window and melted away down the city’s back alleys.
For two days, Lola and Ina slept in caves and hid in barns, stole eggs and slurped them raw from the shells, until they reached Partisan territory. Isak had given Ina the name of a farmer, an elderly man with a weathered face and huge ropy hands.
He asked no questions. He opened the door to the cottage and ushered them inside. His wife, tutting and fussing about their matted hair and filthy faces, boiled water in a big black kettle and poured a bowl for each of them to wash. She then set a rich lamb casserole with potatoes and carrots before them, the first real meal they’d had since leaving the city. She treated their blistered feet with salves and put them both to bed for two days before allowing her husband to lead them on to the Partisans’ mountain camp.
Lola was glad of the food and rest, as they made an exhausting climb up near-vertical rock faces. As she climbed, the reality of her predicament began to sink in. She had thought only of getting out of the city. She did not feel brave enough to be a resistance fighter. What could a laundress do that would be useful? There had been rumors of Partisan attacks on railway lines and bridges, and terrible reports about wounded Partisans captured by Nazis. One story told how the wounded men had been laid out on the road while the Germans drove a truck over and back across their bodies. Lola clutched the scree and pulled herself up the rock face, her mind filled with these frightful stories.
When they reached a wide ridgeline where the ground flattened and grasses and moss grew in mounds like cushions, she threw herself down, exhausted. Suddenly, a figure in gray emerged from a copse of low trees ahead of them. The uniform was German. The farmer fell prone on the ground and aimed his shotgun. Then he laughed, scrambled to his feet, and embraced the youth.
“Maks!” cried Ina. She bolted toward the youth, and he scooped her into his arms. Maks was one of Isak’s best friends. Ina fingered the place where the Nazi insignia had been torn off his uniform. In its place was a crudely sewn five-pointed star, the emblem of the resistance.
“Hello, little sister of Isak. Hello, Lola. So, are you our new partisankas?” Maks waited while the girls thanked the farmer and made their farewells. Then he led them along the ridgeline toward a one-story building of heavy beams, lathe, and plaster. Lola recognized Oskar, sitting in the warm grass with his back against the wall. There were two boys she did not know lounging alongside him. All were busy picking lice off their jackets, two of which were German uniforms and one sewn from a piece of gray blanket.
Maks led Lola and Ina past the youths and through the pigsty that formed the entryway to the building’s only door. The door opened onto the kitchen. A long, thatched roof over the front of the house made space in the peak for a loft that was reached by a ladder. “Good place to sleep,” said Maks. “Warm. A bit smoky.” The kitchen floor was of rough-trodden dirt, covered in part by brick, upon which a banked fire burned. The smoke drifted straight up to the rafters and out through the thatch. There was no chimney. A heavy chain held the cooking pots over the fire. Lola noticed several tubs of water near the door. Beyond were two rooms with planked floors. One contained a pec, or cement oven. Lola saw the poles for drying laundry suspended above it, and nodded approvingly. It would be possible to get washing dry even on wet and snowy days when it couldn’t hang outdoors.
“Welcome to the headquarters of our odred,” Maks said. “We are only sixteen…eighteen now, counting yourselves, if the commander accepts you. Nine of us you know from Hashomer. The rest are local peasants. Good boys and girls, but young. Though not as young as you,” he said, tickling Ina, who giggled. It was the first time Lola had seen the child smile. “Your brother will be surprised. He is second in command of the odred. Our commander, Branko, is from Belgrade. He was a secret Communist Party student leader there.”
“Where are they?” Lola asked. Despite Maks’s friendly manner, the words “if the commander accepts you” filled her with dread. As afraid as she was of being a partisanka, she was even more afraid of not being one; being sent back to the deadly city.
“They’ve gone to collect a mule. Soon enough, we’ll be moving on from here. We’ll need a mule to carry our supplies when we go on missions. Last time, the explosives and detonators we had to carry took up all the room in our packs. We ran out of food halfway to the section of track we were meant to blow up. We were two days without a crust of bread among us.”
Lola’s anxiety deepened as Maks talked. She had no idea about explosives or guns. She looked around the kitchen, and suddenly saw something she did know how to do.
“This water, can I use it?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Maks. “There’s a spring not ten yards from here. Use all you want.”
Lola filled the largest of the blackened kettles and hung it over the fire. She stoked the flames and added some wood. Then she went outside.
She stood before Oskar and the two strange youths. With her toe, she scuffed nervously at the turf.
“What is it, Lola?” Oskar asked.
She felt the blush rising.
“I wonder if you…if you…would give me your jackets and trousers?”
The boys looked at one another and laughed.
“They told us Sarajevan girls were fast!” one said.
“You can’t get rid of lice by picking at them.” Lola spoke in a rush. “They hide in the seams where you can’t find them. If I boil your clothes, it will kill them all. You’ll see.”
The youths, prepared to do anything to end the infernal itching, handed over their garments, ribbing one another and jostling like puppies as they did so.
“Give her your underpants!”
“Never on your life!”
“Well, I am. No bloody good to get rid of the lice in your coat if they’re still running round your balls!”
Later, Lola was hanging the steaming garments—coats, pants, socks, and underpants—over bushes when Branko and Isak emerged from the copse, leading a mule with loaded saddlebags.
Branko was a tall, austere young man with dark hair and eyes that seemed permanently narrowed in an expression of skepticism. Isak came barely up to his shoulders. But Lola noticed, as he swept up his little sister, that he looked stronger across the chest and arms than he had in his student days. His face had lost his indoor pallor and was a little sunburned. He seemed pleased to see Ina; Lola thought his eyes even looked a little moist. But soon he was questioning her closely to make sure she had not made any missteps that would betray their position.
Reassured, he turned to Lola. “Thank you for bringing her. Thank you for coming.”
Lola shrugged, unsure what to say. It wasn’t as if she’d had a choice, but she didn’t want to say that in front of Branko, who would decide if she could stay or not. Little Ina, it seemed, they had a use for. A child could wander inconspicuously around town, observing enemy activities. Lola’s uses were less clear to Branko, and Isak’s introduction didn’t help.
“Lola is a comrade from Hashomer Haza’ir,” Isak told Branko. “She came to all the meetings. Well, almost all. She’s a good hiker….” Isak, who had never paid the least attention to Lola, ran out of things to say that might recommend her to his commander.
Branko stared at her with his narrowed eyes until Lola felt her face burn. He lifted a corner of the jacket she had spread out to dry. “And a good laundress. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for such luxuries.”
“Lice.” She could barely get the word out. “They carry typhus.” She hurried on, before her nerve failed. “In case of infestation, you…you have to boil all clothes and linens, at least weekly…to…to kill the eggs…otherwise the whole odred could become infected.” Mordechai had taught her that. It was the kind of practical i
nformation that Lola could understand and remember.
“So,” said Branko. “You know something.”
“I…I…know how to splint a fracture, and stanch bleeding, and treat bites…. I can learn….”
“We could use a medic.” Branko continued to regard her, as if by staring alone he could somehow assess her abilities. “Isak has been doing the job, but he has other heavy responsibilities. He could teach you what he knows, maybe. And later, if you do well, we could send you to one of the secret hospitals to learn about treating wounds. I will think about it.”
He turned away then, and Lola let out a breath. Then it seemed he reconsidered and turned his blue stare upon her once again. “Meanwhile, we are in need of a muleteer. How do you feel about mules?”
Lola could hardly say that she didn’t know the front of a mule from the back. But she worried that Isak might find her too stupid to be a medic. She looked at the beast cropping the grass. She walked over and lifted the straps where they cut into his hide. The flesh was raw and weeping.
“I know that you should put a saddlecloth under a heavy load such as this,” she said, “if you want the beast to work for you.” She opened the saddlebags and began removing several of the heaviest packages and carrying them into the house. When Oskar strode over to relieve her of them, she shook her head. “I can manage,” she said. She gave a shy smile. “In my family, I was the mule.”
Everyone laughed then, including Branko. Nothing more was said, but Lola understood that she had been accepted as a member of the odred.
That night, around the pec, as Branko spoke to them of his plans, Lola’s doubts revisited her. Branko was a zealot. In Belgrade he’d been interrogated and beaten for his political activism. He spoke about Tito and Stalin, and about their own duty to follow these two glorious leaders without question. “Your life is not yours,” he said. “Every extra day you are given belongs to those of your families who have died. We will see our country free, or we, too, will die. There is no other future before us.”