Prince of Ponies

She reached out to Mira with the plate of biscuits now, but Mira noticed how she held it back a little, as if the offer of the biscuit itself was contingent on what happened next.

“You will write for me,” the old woman said. “I will tell you my story and you will put it down in words on paper.”

“And why would I do that?” Mira asked.

“Because,” the old woman replied, “I will be making you an exchange. If you will write my story for me, then I will do something for you.”

“What?” Mira asked.

The old woman took a biscuit herself now and mashed it between her gums and followed it with a vigorous slurp of tea.

“I’ll teach you to be a horsewoman,” she said. “And if you are a good student and you mind what I say, then, yes, I’ll let you ride Emir.”

Mira couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“What do you say, then?” the old woman asked.

Mira leant forward and very slowly and deliberately she took an angel wing from the plate.

“Excellent!” The old woman smiled and Mira saw just how gappy her grin was and how much work it must have been to chew that biscuit. “We shall start tomorrow. You will come back to my house. Bring the little dog with you if you like.”

“I have school tomorrow,” Mira said.

“Well, come before school, then,” the old woman replied, as if this solution were obvious. “I wake early.”

“OK,” Mira agreed.

The old woman stood up and made it clear that, with the arrangements sorted, their afternoon tea was now over. As they walked to the door, she made a fuss of Rolf and gave him one last angel wing. “For being a good boy,” she told him, with a pat. Then she opened the door for Mira. “I will see you tomorrow, child,” she said.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she called after her: “You haven’t told me your name. What do they call you?”

“I’m Mira,” Mira replied.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Mira,” the old woman said. “My name is Zofia.”

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My name is Zofia. And as I told you yesterday, I am Polish. I was born in a forest village, Janów Podlaski, to the east, miles from the excitement of the big cities of Krakow and Warsaw.

Don’t worry, Mira. I promise I will not bore you with the dull, happy days of my early childhood. I don’t want you to fall asleep when you should be writing! I will skip the first nine years of my life because nothing of importance happened, and I will begin this memoir on the date my whole life changed forever: 1 September 1939. The day when Adolf Hitler sent his Nazis to invade us and take over Poland. That was the start of the Second World War, of course, although we did not know it then. Within days of Hitler crossing our border, the French and the British declared war and after that … Hey! Mira, are you keeping up with me?

***

Mira, who had been frantically scribbling away as Zofia spoke, was suddenly shaken back to reality and the tiny living room where she was sitting once more with Zofia, Rolf, a pot of tea and a freshly baked batch of angel wings.

“Yes, I am keeping up,” Mira lied. She had such cramp in her hand from trying to write the old woman’s words and – look! They had only completed one page!

Zofia was suspicious. “It’s important that you stop me if you are being left behind, because I want to make sure you are getting all my words down correctly. This is actual history I’m telling you. After I die, who will know the truth about these events except me? This is a record of what happened and I don’t want any of it to be lost, so from here I will go slower for you …”

Rolf, who was sitting on Zofia’s lap, gave a theatrical yawn at this moment and Mira noticed how his little pink tongue unfurled and snapped back again behind his sharp teeth. Zofia chuckled at the antics of the little dog as he stood up and stretched and resettled himself, then she drank a sip from her teacup and resumed her story once more, speaking every bit as fast as before, so that Mira had to scribble frantically to keep pace.

***

Hitler was such a bully! And a liar! Do you know he said we started it? Can you believe that? He claimed that he was only invading Poland because we had attacked first, but of course it wasn’t true. The Nazis struck without warning, sending troops from the north, the south and the west. We weren’t prepared, and none of our allies came to help us. As the Germans advanced closer and closer to our village, my parents decided we had no choice but to abandon our home and flee to safety.

I remember my mother being very firm with me when we left the house. I wanted to take all my toys but she’d said that I could take only one, a brown knitted squirrel named Ernst. I carried him myself in my tapestry carpet bag, along with a change of clothes. My mother and father carried everything else. Because I had my hands free, I was entrusted with taking care of Olaf. He was our family dog, a strapping great hunting hound, not at all like our little Rolfie here. And there was me, just a skinny nine-year-old, trying to hang on to him. It took all my strength to keep him from pulling away from me on the leash when we set off, but after we had left the village behind and we were on the open road my father said I could safely let Olaf off the leash and, sure enough, he trotted along obediently, staying close to me.

On the road, our ranks swelled and other villagers joined us, all heading towards the river. The River Bug marked the border into Romania, and if we could make it across the bridge, then we’d be out of Poland and away from the German danger.

We walked alongside all these other families, hundreds of us making our way to the river. I know it sounds awful to say, but I remember that day as a rather exciting one. There was a sense of adventure about it all. We were all banded together on this journey, and that night the families gathered round an open fire, and we grilled sausages and cooked potatoes in the embers and there was singing. My father had a koza with him – you have probably never seen one and the closest thing I can compare it to is a Scottish bagpipe. My father played it well. He was an academic, a professor of Polish studies, and in Janów Podlaski he was very respected as a member of the Gmina – the district council. Often he would have meetings at our house. As I said, he was very well educated and my mother was too, so I think this made it even harder for them that I couldn’t learn to read or write.

Anyway, I am straying away from the story. My father played the koza that night and we sang. There were couples dancing and we were all singing along and it was only after the embers in the fire had died away to nothing that I went to sleep.

In the morning, we rose early and began walking again, the mood uplifted by the night before. There was talk on the road that day about the river, how it was not far now. We were almost at the border and the sides of the road were dense with forest.

As the day passed by, bands of travellers who were moving faster than we were would catch us up from time to time and our ranks would swell briefly. Sometimes they’d stay with our group, but other times they were too quick to keep our pace and they would leave us behind and disappear into the distance. So I knew that there were people on the road ahead of us, I suppose. All the same, it came as a total shock when, at the end of that second day, in the late afternoon, when we still had miles ahead of us to cover, we saw them all coming back towards us.

It was everyone that had passed us by, and a few others besides! They were heading back with as much urgency as we were going forward! As soon as we saw the looks on their faces, we knew things were very bad. My father ran forward to meet the group, and his face when he returned to us – it was very grave.

“We’re going back,” he said. “We must turn at once for home.”

“But that is crazy, Pavel!” My mother was stunned. “For all we know, the Nazis have already arrived in Janów Podlaski. We can’t go back!”

“We can’t go forward either,” my father replied. “Magda, look up ahead! Do you see the smoke?”

Now that my father said this, we could all see smoke billowing on the horizon. “The Red Army have bombed the village of Kovol,” my father said. “They’re coming, Magda. They’re on the road, and they are heading straight for us.”

“The Russians?” My mother was horrified. “How close?’

“They march nearer the longer we hesitate,” my father said. “We must turn and go home.”

If the mood on the road up until this point had been one of buoyed spirits and camaraderie, now it could be summed up in one word: fear. We were on a road in the middle of nowhere, unarmed, defenceless and trapped between two unstoppable armies. Instead of running from Janów Podlaski, we were now heading home and back into the clutches of Adolf Hitler.

“Mama?” I asked anxiously. “Will the Nazis be there? Will they treat us better than the Russians?”

My mother managed to summon a thin-lipped smile and she took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. “They can hardly be worse!” she said.

“Why do they want Poland?” I asked.

“Hitler is flexing his muscles and expanding his empire,” Mama replied. “He wants more Lebensraum: living space for the German race.”

Mama stroked my hair with her hand. “The Germans come to rule us, but there is no reason to believe that they will harm us.”

Later, when things had turned truly bad for my family, I would think about what my mama said to me that day and wonder if she knew the true evil of Hitler’s vision and was keeping it from me because she didn’t want to scare me. In this new world, Hitler would rule Poland, the Germans would occupy it and the Polish people would be their slaves. But then, slavery was not even the worst that Hitler had in store for us.

***

We’d been on the road heading back for home for several hours when we heard a sound ahead, rumbling through the forest. As the rumble grew nearer, the earth beneath us trembled as if there was thunder under our feet. My friend Agata, who was walking nearby with her parents, and who until now had been very quiet, suddenly burst into floods of tears.