I don’t know why You let this happen to me. I don’t know how You could have brought life out of such an ugly situation. You have to give me wisdom because I don’t know the way forward, and I don’t know how to survive this.
I heard the door to the chapel open, and I looked up to see Sister Agnieszka Gracja. She knelt beside me at the altar and lit another candle. When I rose, she rose.
“What were you praying about at this strange hour?” I finally asked her as we walked back to our cells. She smiled.
“I was asking God to ease your torment.”
* * *
The next day was Saturday, and Truda again came alone. For the first hour of her visit, we made small talk about her week—the food she’d prepared, the chores she’d done, the curtains she was trying to sew with some fabric she found.
“Mateusz is trying to complete the grant application for his new business, but I know he is so sorry to miss you again,” she told me. “He said he will come tomorrow if you want him to.”
“Why are you two so good to me?” I asked her suddenly.
Truda looked at me, confusion in her eyes. She thought about this for a moment and then said softly, “You are the answer to more than a decade of prayer, Emilia. You are the ray of sunshine that came out of the darkest years of our lives.”
“Will you adopt this baby?” I blurted, before I could change my mind. But as soon as the words left my mouth, I felt my tension ease. This was the answer to my prayer, and the answer to Sister Agnieszka Gracja’s prayers, too. This was the way forward. Truda recoiled as if I’d struck her.
“What? Emilia, why?”
“I want the best for it.” My voice began to waver. “And you and Mateusz are the best.”
“But that will mean that you will need to see it,” Truda said. She spoke carefully, but her voice was strained. “I couldn’t do that to you. It is better that the baby goes to another home, so that you can forget about it.”
“I thought that, too. I really did, but I will never forget about it. I hate the way that it was conceived, but I will always care about it.” I stopped, and my gaze fell to the table as I whispered, “Plus, I want you to experience motherhood. You have waited so long.”
“Silly girl.” She sighed, shaking her head at me. “For half a lifetime I prayed for a child, and God heard those prayers and gave me a chatty, inquisitive eleven-year-old who has almost driven me crazy in the six years since. I have plenty of experience with motherhood. Don’t do this for me.” Her gaze softened, and she added gently, “Emilia, if you love this baby, you should raise it yourself.”
“It was conceived in rape,” I said stiffly. “How could I possibly love it enough?”
“The next time you leave this place, I want you to look closely at the children you see,” Truda said. “See if you can identify which children were conceived in rape and which were conceived in love. There will be an entire generation of children in this country who were forced upon their mothers, and the lucky ones will grow up in love just the same.” I hesitated, and Truda reached to take my hand. “Don’t think of this as a child of war. Every child is simply born good, and as long as they grow up in a family who can raise them that way, the circumstances of their conception are irrelevant. You, Emilia Rabinek, are plenty capable of handling this challenge if you want to raise the baby yourself.”
“But I want you and Mateusz to—”
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“Do not do this for us, Emilia,” she said flatly.
I exhaled shakily.
“I think I’m doing this for me,” I said slowly, tears filling my eyes. “I can’t raise it, Truda. I’m not ready, and I still have so much healing to do. But I’m going to see this child for the rest of my life, either with my eyes or in my dreams. I love it enough to know that I can’t raise it and too much to give it away. Could you love this baby as if they were your own?”
My voice trailed off by the end of the question because I already knew the answer. She had taken me into her life in a heartbeat, as if I had already lived in her heart forever, even at the most tumultuous time of her life. While our entire world changed, the fierceness of her love had never wavered. Not once.
Truda was not soft, and she was not always warm, but she loved in a way that was as constant as the rising and setting of the sun.
“You know I could,” she said quietly.
“Please,” I choked out. “Please, will you be this baby’s mother?”
“If you are sure that this is what you want...”
“I am sure. Talk to Mateusz about it?”
“I already know what he’ll say,” she whispered, then she hesitated. “You can always change your mind. We can plan this, but if you decide to keep it—”
“Truda,” I said, “I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything in my life.”
At the end of her visit, I walked her to the entrance to the convent, then I hesitated.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just do me one favor.” I drew in a deep breath, then said, “Please let me be the one to tell Roman.”
39
Roman
“When the city opens up properly, you should start looking for a job with a lawyer,” Mateusz told me, as we cleared an alleyway. It was November, and some days we were working in the sleet or the snow. “Now that the war is over, it is time for us all to get back to the lives we were supposed to live.”
“The war isn’t over,” I said impatiently. “We’ve just reached a new phase. The war won’t be over until the Red Army is gone.”
“They will install a Communist government, Roman,” he told me carefully. “And you need to be careful, speaking like that. Mokotów Prison is already full of those who have tried to dissent. You should lie low.”
“I will lie low when the streets are free again,” I vowed. “Until then, the fight isn’t over.”
I was trying to reconnect with the Resistance but having little luck with the city in such disarray. I knew that Truda and Mateusz were less than sympathetic to my frustration, but at dinner one night, I couldn’t help but vent.
“Most of the leaders of the AK died during the Uprising, and this was exactly the outcome the Soviets had hoped for. They stirred up the rebellion with promises of assistance, only to watch from a safe distance as the bloodbath took place. Did you know that the surviving AK leadership was instructed to register any fighter who returned to Warsaw? I was so lucky I stayed in Berlin with my friend and came back months later than the others, because otherwise I’d have been on that list, too. Almost every man registered has now been tortured or executed. The Soviets quashed the inevitable rebellion long before it could take shape. Are we really going to sit back and let them have Poland after that? It is madness!”