Under a Sunburnt Sky, page 1
Under A Sunburnt Sky
Lilly Mirren
Contents
About the book
Foreword
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part II
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part III
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Ready for more?
Also by Lilly Mirren
Author’s Note
Discussion Guide
About the Author
FREE book
Subscribe to Lilly Mirren’s newsletter
And get a FREE book!
* * *
The Waratah Inn
The smash hit first book in the bestselling, heartwarming series. Readers say
* * *
"Yes! Yes! Yes! All 4 should be made into movies!"
* * *
"Wow, this series just gets better and better. I do not want to see it end. Looking forward to the next book."
* * *
You’ll also be notified when there’s a new release or sale and get access to exclusive free gifts and giveaways.
* * *
SUBSCRIBE NOW
About the book
Inspired by the true story of an overlooked hero of World War II, Under a Sunburnt Sky is the unforgettable tale of one boy’s heroism when faced with evil and the unbreakable bonds of love.
When the Nazis invade Poland and round up the Jews to force them into a ghetto in Warsaw, Jan Kostański, a Polish Catholic teenager, doesn’t let the Nazi warnings of executions for those caught helping Jewish people stop him. With his neighbours now living in the ghetto, he joins a group of smugglers to take them food. And it isn’t long before he finds love in the dark shadows of the ghetto walls.
Nacha Wierzbicka has a normal life in the Old Town when the nazis invade Poland. After months of heavy shelling, they think things can't get any worse. Then Warsaw falls, she and her family find themselves faced with an anti-semitism they've never experienced before. When they're locked into the ghetto, she's certain they'll never see freedom again.
A captivating story of heroism, love and family from a USA Today bestselling author. For fans of The Nightingale, The Things We Cannot Say and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Please note: this book is written using Australian English and includes limited Polish. Some words, spelling and phrases may be unfamiliar to you.
In 1943, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe.
This number represented 1.7% of the population of Europe and more than 60% of the world’s entire Jewish population.
Poland’s Jewish populace was the largest, with three million within its borders, the majority of whom resided in the capital of Warsaw.
By 1945, the number of remaining Jews in Europe totalled 3.5 million.
Only 45,000 were left in Poland.
For Janek Kostanski (24.06.1925 - 19.11.2010), who I never met, but who has given me hope that there is yet good in the world.
“We saw ourselves as a Jewish underground whose fate was a tragic one, the first to fight. For our hour had come without any sign of hope or rescue.”
Yitzhak Zuckerman (Jewish Underground Fighter)
I
I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror—the wide brown land for me!
Dorothea Mackellar, 1904
1
2nd January 1983
Melbourne, Australia
The kettle whistles as the water passes its boiling point, and my wife is pouring our herbata tea. One of the many everyday habits that bring peace and contentment to our lives. We like our traditions; the routine of the mundane is something too many take for granted.
She sets down the tea tray on the table between us and sits beside me on the small brushed-steel chair with the bird-print cushion. I watch her every move with interest. How did we find each other? How can love last the way it does? These questions will never have an answer other than fate or divine destiny, I suppose. But can we believe in those things now, in spite of all we’ve been through? Rather, perhaps destiny is proved true because of it.
We sit side by side and sip our tea. She talks about the garden and the hive of native bees she bought at the market to help pollinate her blooming flowers. I nod and interject with thoughts every now and then, but my mind is elsewhere. I’m poring back through the past. The memories slap into me unbidden, like the flap of gull wings in the air when I’m carrying butcher’s paper filled with hot chips across the beach, my feet slipping in the scalding sand.
I close my eyes.
“Jan, you’re crying,” she says in Polish.
My eyes blink open, and I raise a hand to my wet cheeks.
I want to tell her it’s nothing. Not to worry, just a speck in my eye. But she knows. I can’t hide these things from her.
Instead, I reach for her hand and squeeze it, unable to speak.
“We don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she says gently.
I shake my head and swallow down the lump in my throat. “No, I want to.” I reply in Polish too. I’ve never been very good with languages. She’s much better than me, so we still use our native tongue when we’re alone together.
“It’s important, Doniosły,” she adds with an encouraging nod.
“I know. I don’t think about the past often enough, that’s all. Mama doesn’t talk about it either. But perhaps she should. Perhaps we all should.”
“When it’s pushed down so deep, it hits you here,” she says, her eyes brimming. Uderzenie. She taps her chest softly with two fingertips.
I squeeze her hand again, then reach for my tea and take a sip. “We’ll go. It will be good. Good for Mama and the boys. Good for our friends, to help them see.”
“They don’t know,” she agrees. “They don’t understand.”
“No,” I say. And it’s all that needs to be said.
They can’t possibly understand. They weren’t there, with us. They were here, in this distant land, so far away from it all. They think they know, but they don’t. They want to understand, but they can’t. They still think people are good, like naïve children who’ve never had to face the truth. They are blind.
Evil lurks in human hearts. One can often find goodness in a heart too. But which heart is which? How can anyone determine which of their friends will turn them in with a kiss on the cheek for a few silver coins, and which will give his life to save them?
I’ve lived in this place since 1958, and yet I sometimes still feel like an alien. That’s what they called us when we first came here all those years ago. We were resident aliens. We couldn’t speak the language—we didn’t understand anyone around us. The culture was foreign, the people polite and welcoming, but unknowable to us. We were traumatised and exhausted and didn’t fit in or feel at home for such a long time. But we were happy all the same. Happy because we were finally free and safe.
We’ve raised our family here. I’ve built businesses too, businesses that have thrived and given me the opportunity to get to know the people who live around us in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise. We’ve been protected, loved and happy here. But lately, Poland has been drawing me back in.
My thoughts turn more often these days to the land of my birth, the people I used to know but whom I left behind in the rush and hurry of getting away. People who were so precious to me then, but now are gone. Their voices no more than a whisper in the deep recesses of my mind.
My sons don’t understand. This place is all they know. This life of sunshine, freedom and waves, is the only one they’ve had. They tell me they can’t comprehend the things I’ve done, the places I’ve been, the horrors I’ve seen. They don’t listen for long when I speak of it. It’s too much for them to take in, and I don’t blame them. It’s too much for any of us, even those who lived it.
For me, the memories are vague. Colourless around the edges, as though they happened to someone else while I watched from a distance. But it was me who stood there on the precipice of humanity’s condemnation, a witness to the destruction of the world from the centre of the flames.
There’s a photograph hanging on the wall in the living room of a family a world away. My family before we were linked by marriage. The family of my wife’s birth. Most of them are gone now, but the image of their faces lingers on in our memories and shine out of the photograph to grab hold of my heart and shake my emotions when I least expect it.
It’s not the things I did back then, but the things I didn’t do that stumble into my thoughts these days. The things I could’ve said. Did I say them? It’s hard to recall. My former self appears mute when I file back through the events of the past. What words were spoken? Did the friends and family I’ve lost know how much I loved them? Did I tell them, or was it an agreement between us that we never acknowledged but always knew?
For years, I ran over the memories so infrequently, they’ve turned soft and malleable. I can transform them into a moving, shifting, abstract thing as easily as swiping a watercolour paintbrush over canvas. But that’s not what I want. I want the truth to stick in my mind, to be only what it was. Nothing more or less than that.
They’re giving me an award, they say. I don’t know how to respond. The things I did were done because there was nothing else that could be done. If I hadn’t, it would’ve changed everything. I wouldn’t have married her, there’d be no children occupying every moment of our lives. This home wouldn’t exist.
Would we still live back there, in the place that became a wasteland of rubble and grief? Would we even know each other?
There’s sunshine outside. The land is warm and sweet. Prisms of light reflect off fat droplets of rain that squat on bending stems of dark green grass. Flowers dot the backyard with brilliant displays of colour. And we will sit a while longer to stare out over the yard while we sip our tea, chat about life and enjoy the hum of bees and the morning sun on our feet. The sun here is too hot to stay for long—we’ll hide in the shadows of the cool house shortly. But for now, I revel in the scent of fresh-mown grass and fallen rain.
I’ve heard it said that love is hard to find. But for me, discovery was the easy part. Keeping it seems to me to be the most difficult thing. Love creeps up on you and launches itself at you with a shout of joyful victory and you find yourself tumbling downhill at top speed, with love laughing in your ear.
It’s the holding on that takes work. And I’ve held on to her with every fibre of my being and every breath in my lungs for so many years, I can’t imagine a life without her. Everything we’ve been through, so much love and terror all rolled into one broken, beautiful whole. She is my heartbeat. There is nothing for me without her.
My eldest says he’s looking forward to the ceremony. I know I should be excited to go, but I don’t know how to feel, only that there’s something gnawing at my insides and a lightheadedness that makes me want to run in the opposite direction. But my wife says that it’s time for the world to be reminded of the past. We can’t afford for them to forget.
She says it’s our duty to expose evil. When I remind her that the worst kind of evil was done by ordinary people, her lips pull tight, and she stares into the distance. She won’t talk then, I know. Not for hours. It’s the ordinary nature of those capable of the blackest evil that we both find the hardest to reconcile.
Evil lies hidden beneath the surface. It festers and grows when fed with hate. But before the evil manifests like a shark’s fin slicing through the ocean’s surface, it’s impossible to foretell which, good or evil, each heart will choose. Until it’s too late.
2
15th October 1940
Warsaw’s Old Town, Poland
Janek Kostanski jogged along the cobblestone street and jumped up onto the footpath just as an automobile rattled by. It blew its horn at him as it trundled through a throng of pedestrians and bicyclists outside St. John’s Archcathedral.
He slowed to a walk, ducking between a woman pushing a perambulator and a trio of girls wearing matching calf-length dresses and overcoats. The girls giggled at him, and he flashed them a grin. His arms swung freely at his sides, and he dipped his head in greeting at people as he passed.
Two elderly Jewish men crossed his path, deep in conversation, heads bent together and hands gesticulating. White armbands with blue stars flashed stark against their dark clothing. They wore long, black coats over woollen shirts, with kaszkiet on their heads, the workers’ caps that’d replaced the traditional yarmulke. The yarmulke was banned when the Germans had invaded Warsaw six months earlier. The distinct headwear changed overnight.
He skirted around them and overheard the words “Judenrat” and “ghetto” spat from their mouths like poison. Those were words he'd heard more frequently these days, but still didn’t mean much to him. He wasn’t interested in politics or the musings of adults.
Ever since the Germans invaded Warsaw, people had predicted disaster, but so far, life had carried on. The utter chaos of the German attacks on the city had ended, and the noise and cloying fear that had saturated the atmosphere through a haze of smoke and ash had subsided. He hated to see the fascists parading around the city, but they allowed him to do mostly as he pleased.
There were anti-Jewish posters everywhere now. Nazi propaganda had been accompanied by an uptick in violence against the Jewish citizens of Old Town for months before the invasion, but it’d escalated the moment the Wehrmacht marched into the city.
One such poster was pasted to the side of a building across from the cathedral. The poster was white with a picture of a scientist looking into a microscope, alongside a spider with a human face and elongated nose. It read, “Tuberculosis Syphilis Cancer are curable...It is necessary to finish the biggest curse: The Jew!" The sight of it sent a shiver down his spine and he pulled his overcoat tighter, then shoved his hands deep into its woollen pockets.
Jan took the stairs to the cathedral two at a time, paused on the threshold to cross himself, and strode inside. Saint John’s on Świętojańska Street was a large Gothic structure in orange brick with tall, rounded windows on a sharply reaching façade that towered high on either side to a pinnacle. Jan paused in the entry and glanced up. Vertigo swept over him, and he inhaled a sharp breath. He tipped the cap from his head and crumpled it in one hand, then stepped inside.
At fifteen years of age, he’d taken it upon himself to come once per week and light a candle for his father, who’d left them several years before the war in Europe began. Perhaps he’d return one day, if only Jan prayed hard enough. Surely he couldn’t mean to stay away forever.
Mama, Jadzia and Danuta didn’t speak of him any longer, but Jan missed his father more than he could express. He was gone, Mama had said, and there was nothing more to discuss on the subject. Only where had he gone? And why? Jan hadn’t found the answers to his questions. He couldn’t help wondering if his father’s leaving had something to do with him, though Mama had assured him once that it didn’t. Now, he thought about finding his father and asking him all the questions that lingered in the back of his mind daily.
He hurried down the centre aisle beneath the arched dome of the basilica, with its crisscrossed brickwork against the white plaster, and knelt quickly at the altar. He crossed himself again and recited Our Father. Several women dressed in black knelt in pews dotted throughout the cathedral. Black shawls covered their heads and they murmured quietly, hands clasped together in front of them.
A man sat on the first pew, staring at his gnarled hands. Two boys giggled from the vestibule, where the table of candles stood. One shushed the other. Jan walked to the vestibule and sent the children a brief smile before taking a match from a jar. He used it to draw the flame of a candle and light one of the others standing upright on the table. He began a prayer for his father, but the words stuck in his throat.
