A vehicle's lights were visible in the distance; she stood in the middle of the road and waved her hands to stop. "What happened, ma'am? Your face is bleeding. Do you want me to take you to the hospital?" The driver asked. She got in the car and slammed the door, "The injuries are not profound, I was attacked by a bully who cut me with a knife, and I managed to escape." she did not tell him the truth; she didn't want to share the event with anyone.
As she entered her shared apartment with Viktor, she washed her bleeding face and was happy to find out she was not hurt; all the blood on her face and clothes came from the attacker's severed cock.
When Viktor woke up, he noticed her filthy clothes with clotted blood. "I'll kill him. Did he hit you?" He jumped out of bed and began to get dressed. "Calm down, it's not him, it's nobody, I just bumped into a stone and fell on my head, and the bleeding from my nose was strong," she said.
"I do not believe you; you cover for him."
'Victor, calm down, do you want to quarrel with me?; it's nothing. I'm healthy and in one piece. "Let's go to the American embassy and see how we can speed up the visas?" She suggested.
After changing clothes and hanging her washed clothes on the back of chairs to dry, the two set out to the American embassy.
When they arrived, several hundred people stood in line. "We'll come another time," Viktor said, "otherwise, we'll spend here all day."
"Wait, I'll try something."
She approached one of the security guards who kept order there and asked to speak to him, "Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to let you know that one of the important partisans who fought against the Nazis in the woods and killed dozens of them is here. The Germans murdered his whole family, and he has one aunt in Houston, Texas. How can he be helped to be interviewed without waiting in this queue?"
The security guard looked at Viktor with admiring eyes, "Come tomorrow at eight in the morning; I'll put you at the top of the list."
Violette gave him their details and thanked him.
On the way back, Viktor apologized to her about how he treated Janusz last night at a restaurant. "I hope this did not spoil your relationship," he said.
"We have no relationship; I do not want to see him anymore, and do not dare ask me why?."
"So I see I'm spoiling your relationship anyway; I'm sorry. how can I help to fix the damage?"
"Nothing. Next time be careful not to interfere in matters that do not concern you."
In the evening, they went out to eat at the small restaurant near their apartment. It was a kind of home food restaurant in a one-room apartment in a residential building where an old mother lived with her fifty-year-old daughter. An oil burner with a frying pan, a small cupboard, and a sink stood on a small table. There were four tables with two chairs at each table. There were two folded beds in the restaurant's corner and a wardrobe with a large mirror in the front. There was a pleasant aroma of homemade dishes, and guests could see the mother in the makeshift kitchen. "What's the special of the day, ma'am?" Viktor turned to the younger woman who was serving at the tables.
"Pierogi stuffed with cabbage and onion and fried in goose fat served with pickles."
He ordered two portions and red beetroot borscht served with sour cream, "It reminds me of my grandmother Roza where every Friday we would eat this with her."
"We did not eat Jewish food at home, but when we would come to Warsaw, then my grandmother would usually make stuffed carp; she called it Gefilte Fish in Yiddish," said Violette and burst out laughing.
"Why are you laughing?" Viktor asked, surprised.
"The Poles stole from the Jews not only the houses but also their recipes," she laughed again.
The waitress overheard the conversation and intervened. "Jewish food is part of the Polish tradition menu, we really like Jewish food, and we got used to it."
"Why not? You're doing them better than our grandmothers, 'Viktor complimented her. "The fries Pierogi are delicious, even though you fry them after cooking, it's something I do not know, but I will admit that the taste is fine."
"My mother had Jewish neighbors, and she learned cooking from them," she said.
"And what happened to your neighbors?" He asked.
"Like most Jews, they were taken to the ghetto, from there to the concentration camps, the war ended, and they did not return, it really hurts to hear about all this tragedy."
"Where did they live?" He asked.
"There were two; The Levin family above us, and the Grabowskis in front of them, on the second floor."
"And who lives there now?" He asked.
"Poles came from the village and entered the apartments by force, we kept the apartments keys with us, but they broke the locks and invaded. What could we do?; My mother is a widow, I am sick, and have no husband, we barely make a living from cooking."
She went to one of the drawers and took out two bundles of keys. "Here, look, I'm not lying, we could go in and live in the apartments, but we did not dare to do so. The invaders agreed to give us the family albums; we thought they would come back" A tear fell on her cheek, and she wiped it with her palm. Her words sounded sincere.
When they had finished eating, Viktor approached the mother and kissed her on both cheeks, "I ate and thought of my mother and grandmother, I felt at home, thank you in Babushka, be healthy and strong."
In the morning, when they showed up for the interview at the embassy, only Viktor was allowed to enter, and Violette was left outside to wait. When he left the building after a long hour, his face was red from anger. "What happened, Viktor?" She asked him, worried.
"They are worse than the Nazis. They questioned me in great detail about my past, my affiliation with the Jewish partisan movement, and finally focused on my relations with the Bolshevik Russians. I told them that the Russians had saved us and provided us with weapons; I showed too much sympathy for them, and then the interviewer, after filling out a page with all the data, took out a large wooden stamp from the drawer and knocked on the form: 'refused.' When I tried to understand why and I raised my voice a little. Two big security guards came and escorted me out. '
Violette paled; she had also been in the Jewish partisan movement. She now realized that her answers to her interviewer had to be carefully chosen.
"What will you do now?" She asked anxiously.
"I will go to Eretz Israel; what else is there left for me? I will not stay in the cemetery of the Jewish people. Here there is only the smell of death."
"I'll only go for the interview after I get a letter from my parents so I can show them it's a family reunion. Now I want to go to the committee offices and check for the last time about my Jaroslaw. "
Viktor decided to go to the apartment and from there to the offices of the Jewish Agency and the "Rescue" Association, which takes care of bringing Jews to Palestine.
When she got to the committee offices, she went to the board and started going through the lists from the beginning. She believed that hope must not be lost and that the impossible is possible.
Two young men in their twenties were searching the list of relatives, they spoke to each other in a language Violette had never heard, after long minutes of listening to, her curiosity grew "Excuse me, turned to them in Polish, what language do you speak?"
One of the guys who understood Polish replied, "Hebrew, we are from Eretz Israel." She looked at them in amazement, "Palestine?"
"Yes, but soon we will drive the English out and establish a state for the Jewish people."
"What are you doing here?"
"We are in the service of the Jewish Agency and the Rescue Committee; we came to find Jewish children hidden in Catholic monasteries or Catholic homes and bring them to their homeland. Poland is not a home for the Jews; Poland has ejected the Jews out of here, they want 'Judenrein,' a country free of Jews, and we do not want to live where they hate us. We have lived here for a thousand years, and now is the time to stop living in exile and return to our land, the land of the Jewish people. "
Violette remained speechless. Here in front of her stand two Jews, sturdy, bright-eyed guys, full of energy and talking about the state of the Jewish people as a dream that is about to come true. They are not those humble and submissive Jews who were led to their death like a herd of sheep, who stood in front of the pits of death and looked up to heaven and called out, 'Shema Israel! Hear, O Israel! And waited for a bullet in the back of their head.
As she looked at the board, still thrilled by the meeting with the Jewish Agency's emissaries from Tel Aviv, she felt a slight pat on the shoulder. She turned and saw Janusz standing next to her. "I was worried about you. I've been looking for you for days and couldn't find you."
"You were so worried about me, so you let me go out on the street alone in the middle of the night? I do not want to see you anymore."
"Violette, I love you; you are wrong; I went to look for you and did not find you, I did not know which way you went. I searched for you for hours."
Suddenly Violette got dizzy and grabbed Janusz by his clothes. "I'm about to faint," she whispered and slid to the ground while Janusz was holding her lest she hit her head on the floor.
The two guys next to them hurried and picked her up as Janus made their way through the crowd and put her in one of the rooms on the ground floor where there was an armchair. She lay down on the armchair half-seated, and Janusz tucked a chair under her feet.
They poured some water on her face, and she recovered immediately and opened her eyes. "What happened to me?" She muttered.
"You fainted for a few minutes," he said, looking at her anxiously; she was as pale as death and her eyes sunken deep in their sockets.
Within minutes a doctor arrived. Everyone vacated the office, and only the doctor and Janusz remained. The doctor checked her pulse and listened to her heart rate with a stethoscope. "Everything is fine; it's exhaustion; she has to rest for a few days," he said. Then he took out a syringe and a vial. "Now we'll inject her with a bit of adrenaline, and she'll feel much better.
After the injection, she fell asleep for a couple of hours; then, she woke up and sat. Janusz, who had been keeping watch over her all this time, stood up and supported her outside.
He ordered a carriage, helped her to climb in, and then sat in front of her. She felt the cool breeze that was blowing in while the horse was galloping, and she was breathing deeply, "I needed the fresh air." she said.