One in six million

Excerpt from “One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity” by Amy Fish

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away and long ago, a husband and wife were walking along a hot, dusty road when they made a wonderful discovery.

But wait. This is not a fairy tale. I mean, a wicked stepmother makes an appearance, and there is a happy ending, but the happiness is mixed with grief, as it so often is in real life. Let me start again. On a warm August day, a husband and wife walked along a road on the outskirts of a town in Poland. They were both far from home — he was Ukrainian, and she was from a Polish town hundreds of kilo- metres away. Times were hard; work was scarce. Almost three years had passed since the German army had invaded Poland from the west and the Russian army from the east. The Soviet occupiers were so brutal that, when the Germans drove the Russians out in 1941, the non-Jewish citizens of eastern Poland saw the Nazis as liberators. Ordinary working-class people like this couple were simply trying to survive. Perhaps he was looking for employment, and she was walk- ing with him, planning to beg for day-old bread from the baker. Or maybe she, too, was looking for work, hoping to earn some money scrubbing the floors of more prosperous families. Antonina and Vasili Markovitch had modest goals. They wanted a place to sleep, food to eat, and most importantly, they wanted to avoid drawing the unwanted attention of the Nazis who controlled the town. But they knew that no matter how difficult their lives were, no matter how challenging their day-to-day circumstances, they were lucky in one crucial way.

They were not Jews.

And then one of them heard a whimper that would change their lives forever. They stopped to see what was mewling — it didn’t sound like a feral cat or a hungry dog. The soft cry was coming from a tightly wrapped bundle nestled in a rut by the side of the road. It took a moment for them to realize that tucked into that wool blanket was a real, live baby. Although this couple had been married for many years, they had no children of their own. Antonina did not hesitate before she scooped up the swaddled bundle. She knew they had to move fast if they did not want the Gestapo to catch them. Picking up a strange child — no matter how small — from the side of the road was sure to arouse suspicion. Or worse.

Antonina didn’t let herself think about how the baby got there, about what choice the baby’s mother, both her parents, had made. Was it a family who had gone into hiding and couldn’t risk the cries of an infant revealing their hiding spot? Or had her mother stashed her there because it would mean one less mouth to feed? Antonina knew that the baby must be Jewish. She had seen the Jews around her rounded up by Nazi soldiers. She knew that leaving the baby must have been an act of desperation. She also knew that, as a childless woman of close to forty, she had no choice. After years of wishing and hoping and praying, this was her chance to become a mother.

She clasped the baby to her chest and started walking. A hand- written note was pinned to the baby’s blanket. “Maria,” it read, “25 November, 1941.”

The husband and wife took their new daughter Maria home with them that day. They fed her, they clothed her, they rocked her to sleep. When she grew older, they told her they had rescued her, that they found her at the side of the road on the day the Nazis ordered all of Krosno’s Jews to relocate to the ghetto. That was all they knew of her history.

Maria grew up. She got married and had a daughter of her own. But she always longed to know more about her past and to discover her true identity. Who were her real mother and father? Did she have any brothers or sisters? Had anyone in her family survived the war? She was small and dark and often mocked for looking like a Jew. Was she Jewish? How could she begin to find the answers to her questions?