“There are worse things than murder, Alina,” he whispered. “I betrayed our countrymen, and one day...one day when Poland is whole, you can bet there will be an accounting for cowards like me. Especially me. I went to Warsaw to learn to heal, and instead, I enforced their ideology. They liked me because I spoke some German from summers on vacation. They liked me because I was strong and fast—and because...” He broke off altogether now, and I heard the sob he tried to muffle. “The commander said I had a way about me that put people at ease. They assigned my unit to moving families to the Jewish area. The little children were so scared, and their mothers were so frightened, but I told them it was going to be okay. They just had to do what we told them to do and they’d be okay. But it wasn’t okay, not even in the early days, because there wasn’t enough room or food and it was just a way to corral them all into one place to make it easier to hurt them. They built a wall around that ghetto. It is Hell on earth and there is no escaping it, and I marched those children in there and I promised them that they’d be okay.”

He could no longer muffle the sobs, and I could no longer stand to hear this story without holding him. I stopped, turned to him and threw my arms around his waist. I pressed my face against his chest and I listened to the beat of his heart, the thumps coming faster and harder as the memories and his shame surfaced. I struggled in that moment—horror and revulsion at his actions, but also, growing understanding.

Because it finally made sense—the darkness I glimpsed in him from time to time. It was rooted in mortification and regret of the deepest kind; he had made decisions that betrayed the very values that made Tomasz Slaski the man he was.

He sank to the ground at one point, but I followed him, and then pushed him until he was resting against a tree trunk. Tomasz still couldn’t look at me, so I straddled his lap and I cupped his face in my hands.

“Tell me everything, my love,” I whispered. The tears rolled down his face into his beard, and he raised his eyes to the forest canopy above us.

“Your father would kill me if he knew what I’d done.”

“Perhaps not if he knew why, Tomasz.”

“Your father is a good man. He would have resisted.”

“He won’t judge you, Tomasz, and neither do I.”

“The Poles will kill me one day, if the Nazis don’t get me first. Good men like your father will find me and kill me for what I’ve done.”

I shook my head fiercely, then I kissed him, hard—the best thing I could think to do to stop such talk. He swallowed, then met my gaze again.

“Tomasz,” I said firmly. “Tell me the rest.”

He drew in a shuddering breath, then sighed.

“One day, I was patrolling the ghetto, and I saw him. Saul Weiss.”

“Your surgeon friend?”

“Yes. He and his wife, Eva, had been taken there too. They’d been dragged from a nice apartment near the hospital to a pathetic room in the ghetto they had to share with two other families. I pretended I didn’t recognize him at first, because I was so ashamed to be a part of what was happening to him. I looked away from him, and I walked some more, and then I glanced back, and do you know what he did? He smiled at me. Kindly, Alina. He smiled at me.” I could barely understand the words leaving Tomasz’s mouth because he was weeping again. I started to cry too, and I bent and kissed the tears away from his cheeks, then nuzzled my nose against his.

“I’m still here, my love,” I whispered. “Keep talking to me.”

“But he should have hated me, only he refused to debase himself with hatred. We had a shared history—a friendship—and even in those circumstances he extended warmth to me. Saul Weiss had lost everything because of people like me; people who didn’t have the courage to take a stand, and still? He chose to smile. That was the day that I broke inside and I knew I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“How did you get out of Warsaw?”

“The sewers,” he said, then he pressed his forehead against mine and paused for a moment, collecting himself. “We waded through the sewer. Me, Saul and his wife, Eva.”

“You let them escape with you?”

“No,” he laughed bitterly, then sadness crept over him. “You still think I am the hero of this story, Alina, but I am trying to tell you that I’m the villain. They let me escape with them. I went back to apologize to Saul. I dragged him into an empty shop front because I had to play the part, but once we were alone—it was me who wept, and a few days later when it was time to go, he trusted me enough to invite me to come with them. They had used the last of their money to pay a guide to lead them through the sewers. Honestly, I thought it was a suicide mission—that’s actually why I agreed to go. I had no thoughts of what I’d do if we made it, because it didn’t even seem a possibility, and death seemed far better than staying there in that uniform and dying of the rot inside. No one was more surprised than me when we climbed into daylight in the outskirts of Warsaw. Saul and Eva had no plan from there, so we started on foot—we lived under bridges and in barns for months on the way back here.”

“But...how? Did you come the whole way on foot? It is hundreds of miles, Tomasz. It’s...”

“Close to impossible, right?” he said sadly. “You see my point, then. We had so many close calls I kept thinking that anytime soon it would all be over...but luck or God or fate was on our side, because we eventually encountered a sympathetic farmer who connected us to the Zegota network—it is an underground council to help the Jews, supported by the government in exile. We would never have been able to cross over from the General Government area without their help.”

We fell into a bruised silence for a while. Eventually, I shifted onto the ground beside him, and wrapped my arms around his waist, then rested my head against his chest. I let my mind conjure images of all that he’d told me—even the parts that I didn’t want to imagine, because they were a part of Tomasz now, and I wanted to know and understand all of him.

After a while, he cleared his throat.

“You need to understand, Alina. Saul and Eva saved my life, and I have made it my mission to help them. They are hidden nearby and until I can repay them, I will do whatever I can to help them hide.”

“You steal food for them?”

“Yes, if I can find it. I capture birds sometimes, sometimes squirrels. I steal from farmers when I can—only because I know the Nazis take it all anyway so I’m really stealing from them. I’ve taken eggs from your own hen yard, but only because you have so many chickens I thought they wouldn’t be missed...only when I was truly desperate.”

I felt like I had to say the words aloud—just to put a name to it all. It took me another few minutes to find the courage to say the words, and even then, I whispered them.