Free The Upright Heart by Julia Ain-Krupa Page A

Everyone is trying to make do. Anna cannot help but mull over how much everything has changed.
    When the Russians first arrived, we fed them our last morsels of bread, our sausage, our stored potatoes and beans. Whatever we had became theirs. The Germans had received news of the Soviet Army’s approach before their arrival in January of ’45, so the majority of Nazi soldiers had left Kraków for the west by that time. A few Nazis remained. The Soviet army did take prisoners of war, especially those who had been Gestapo or SS, and there were some executions, in a nearby village, but it was almost impossible to see a Nazi’s body on the streets of our town. It did happen sometimes, though. There was an occasional fight with a soldier, a traitor, or a collaborator. There was an explosion caused by some Nazi soldiers that took place on a bridge away from the Wisła River. The possessions of those dead soldiers became fair game. There were boots, watches, shirts to be taken. People needed clothes. Here was a portrait of humanity that would not be easy to forget. Not only war can instill fear in a person’s heart. Life is better without war, yes, but I cannot help but wonder what is yet to come
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    Anna stops her internal rant to admire a small ornate opal pin in a shop window. The pin is a simple gold line dotted with tiny opals that form the points on a delicate star. Anna would like to own something like this. She imagines herself wearing a new dress made of fuchsia silk, imagines walking into a dance, being admired by the handsomest man in the room. The store owner, a woman of about seventy, sits at a table in the back. Barely visible through the foggy pane of the storefront window, she leans against her left hand, staring into space, smoking a long brown cigarette with her right hand. Every thirty seconds her pursed lips take a puff. Like so many other people around, she looks sad, gray. This is thelife that has descended upon their world. They are all lucky to be alive, yes, but what price does living through the war make you pay? Anna takes another painful step, and with that twinge returns the ramblings of her mind.
    Before the war, life was one big party. My family lived in Łódź, had a big, beautiful house with paintings on the wall and a maid in the kitchen. We didn’t know that our house would be robbed or that we would be threatened. We were still enjoying our summer vacation in a small country village when my father returned to Łódź to gather some papers, only to find that Germans had broken into our home, stolen all our belongings, and even burned much of our house to the ground. We never went back
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    Before the war, I was a girl of fourteen. We lived in a big comfortable home, my mother, father, Wojtuś, and I. Wojtuś is six years younger than me. Mama had him just when she thought that she couldn’t have babies anymore. There he appeared, and so we all loved him the most, like he was our little doll. Wojtuś even looked like a doll, so pretty and delicate with his little blond curls and big blue eyes. Where I was a moody troublemaker, he was polite and kind. I remember once a beggar came to our house, and Wojtuś stopped the game he was playing in order to open the gate for the beggar, even helping him to pick the finest apples off the tree. Someone else’s father would have given his child a scolding for what he did, but our father just laughed and picked Wojtuś up in the air, swinging him around with joy
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    Not understanding the fuss he had caused, Wojtuś began to cry, tears spouting from his sweet innocent eyes
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    “That’s okay, dear Wojtuś,” my father said, laughing, “We can have one less apple pie this year.”
    Every day my mother gave me a warm, buttered roll wrapped in foil for school, and every day as I reached the corner of our street I would throw the roll into the trash, smiling with the secret joy of knowing that I didn’t have to eat it and that nobody would ever know what I had