“What are you doing?” I asked. She startled out of her daze and looked at me sharply.

“Cleaning the pot,” she said abruptly. “Back to bed!”

“I... Mama,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. I stared down at the pot over the fire, breathed in the heavy scent again and forced myself to state the obvious. “That’s jam, Mama. I can see you’re making jam.”

Mama looked back to the pot for a moment. She stirred some more, and then she turned back to me, a challenge in her gaze.

“Of course it’s not jam,” she said. She lifted the spoon so I could see the syrup dripping off it. A drop formed then fell, and then another, but Mama remained completely silent even as long moments dragged past us while I watched the spoon, and she watched me. My sleepiness cleared, and I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat, then forced my eyes back to Mama. The look in her eyes was so intense that it became very hard to look at her, so I flicked my gaze between Mama and the spoon. In the semidark room, the thick red jam looked exactly like blood. It was quite hot in the house because of the fire, but a shiver ran through me from my head to my toes.

Mama lowered the spoon back down into the mix and resumed her stirring, and she stared into the pot as she murmured, “If it was jam, I’d be withholding produce, and if I was caught doing that, I’d be executed. They’d shoot me or hang me or beat me to death.” She left another long pause, and for me, that silence was loaded with the sheer terror of the truth of her statement. “Now, would I ever take such a foolish risk?”

There was an open challenge in her eyes, as if Mama was daring me to say otherwise, and as if me stating the blatantly obvious would be the thing that caused her death. I was shaking now—confronted with the reality of our circumstances in a way that I had easily avoided until that moment.

I dropped my chin and shook my head.

“No, Mama. Of course you wouldn’t,” I croaked out.

“Good. Go back to bed.”

I did. I turned quickly and ran into my room and even though it was uncomfortably warm, I climbed under my blankets and I pulled them up over my head. Eventually, I fell into a fitful sleep, but when I woke the next morning to watch the sunrise through my window, there was no way I could avoid facing the truth.

My mother was hiding food from the Nazis. And now that I knew for sure, I wanted to know exactly how extensive her deceit was.

The chickens were hard to count when they were outside during the day—especially because our flock had free rein of the house yard and the large barn during the day. But at night I would chase them into the barn and lock them away to keep them safe from foxes. The next night, I decided to confirm my suspicions. I locked the chickens in the barn, left them to settle, and then went back to count them once they were still.

“We have twenty-three chickens, plus the roosters,” I said to Mama when I went inside. She looked at me, then frowned.

“No. Exactly twenty, plus the three roosters,” she said abruptly.

“Maybe we have some strays then, because I just counted—”

“We have exactly twenty, Alina,” Father said flatly. The words bounced around the walls of our small house, and then I knew.

“We have twenty chickens,” I echoed dully.

Jam, eggs... Where did it end? I started watching the supplies Father would return with when he went to get our rations, and I compared it to the food we were eating. We were hardly living a lavish lifestyle—but we all ate eggs most days, despite Father only bringing a half-dozen back from the town each week. We’d always had jam with our bread, and I had assumed it was left over from the season before the war, but now I looked closely at the jar we were eating from.

That very same jar had lasted for months. The jam never seemed to go down.

I wondered what my diet would look like if it wasn’t for the contraband jam and the extra eggs. I wondered what else my parents were doing that they didn’t want me to know about. Soon, I’d stare at the strawberry jam on my biscuit and feel somehow equally panicked that my mother had risked her life to give it to me, and that perhaps it might be the last serving.

One morning, when Mama and I were collecting the eggs, I waited until she’d rounded the corner of the barn to check the house yard. I ran back inside for the oil lamp, then I forced myself to go down into the dark cavity of the cellar. It had been hard enough to force myself into that space with my whole family around me, even when the threat of bombing was looming. My heart was racing as I climbed inside, but it nearly stopped altogether when I found only a single, dusty jar of jam and two bolted potatoes.

That’s when I realized that even worse than the thought of Mama keeping a secret supply of food was the possibility that we’d already exhausted what she had. I clambered out of the cellar and back toward Mama.

“Mama,” I choked. “We have run out of food, haven’t we?”

“No,” she said, and she continued her work as if I hadn’t spoken. I stared at her in disbelief, then grabbed her upper arm to force her to look at me.

“But I went into the cellar.”

She silenced me with a single, incredulous look, and then she barked a laugh.

“Alina,” she said, “since when do you go into the cellar?”

“I was just so worried...”

“When you need to be concerned, I will tell you. Until then, work hard and don’t ask so many questions.”

“But, Mama,” I said uneasily, “I need to understand.”

“Sometimes, not understanding something is the wise thing to do,” Mama sighed, and she glanced up at me. “We are nothing to the invaders, Alina. We were already poor, so there is not much more for them to take from us and if they think they are getting all of our produce, they leave us alone...for the most part. But if they suddenly start paying attention, then you and I will discuss this matter. Until that day, you have to trust Father and I to take care of you.”

The jam kept coming long after it should have run out, and the potato cakes kept coming on Sundays, and most mornings Mama would silently serve me a heaping mound of eggs with my ration portion of oatmeal. I saw her slipping potatoes and eggs and sometimes even a small bag of grain or sugar into Truda’s coat after lunch every Sunday. I saw that all of us looked drawn and too slim, but Emilia somehow kept color in the apples on her cheeks. I saw the large sacks of wheat and sugar my Father uncovered in the back of the cart after a “spontaneous” trip to the town to “visit with Truda.”

We were surviving only because my parents were covertly skimming from our harvests and making the occasional dip into the black market. It was thriving in those days, because every single Polish citizen was in exactly the same position.