We Were the Lucky Ones

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Part 1, Chapters 4-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Bella, Radom, Poland - September 7, 1939”

Bella says goodbye to Jakob: He, Selim, Genek, and Adam, along with the other men in Radom, are being sent to Lvov (where Bella’s sister Anna lives) to fight with the Polish Army. Bella cannot believe how much has happened since the Germans invaded Poland the past week. The Germans bombed Radom, so her family moved into the basement for safety. Bella sadly thinks of the plans she and Jakob had: to move to France when he finished law school, to marry, and to start a family.

Three weeks later, Bella is riding in the back of a wagon on her way to Lvov. The Germans now occupy Radom. Jews who venture out into public are harassed, beaten, and humiliated. Jakob wrote and asked her to come to Lvov. Bella’s parents wanted her to go to the relative safety of that city, but they had to ask the Kurcs for assistance since they did not have funds or connections. At first Sol refused, not wanting Bella to travel alone. Finally, Sol agreed to hire a wagon for her.

Due to heavy rain, the trip to Lvov goes slowly. The wagon driver, Tomek, thinks they should turn back at several points, but Bella insists that they continue. After 11 days, they are almost to Lvov. The wagon comes upon a large contingent of Wehrmacht soldiers, and Bella realizes they must be at the German front. A soldier stops the wagon and asks for their papers. He directs them to go back the way they came. Bella wants to protest, but Tomek signals her to be silent.

Tomek turns the wagon around. Bella is devastated because they are so close to Lvov. Tomek suddenly veers off the road and stops in a clearing. He says that in the morning, Bella can try and crawl through tall grass to make it to Lvov. Bella knows it will be risky, but she has to try.

Bella painfully crawls through the sharp grass and mud. She thinks of her parents and how her mother silently cried looking out their apartment window as Bella rode away. Bella is startled by the sound of a gunshot and lies still in the mud, then she resolutely starts crawling again.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Mila, Radom, Poland - September 20, 1939”

Mila wakes in her apartment. Blackout curtains cover the windows. She checks on baby Felicia, who is sleeping peacefully. It has been almost two weeks since her husband and brothers left for Lvov. Selim promised to write to her, but Mila has not received any letters. Mila is worried because the radio news reported that the Soviet Union broke its peace pact with Poland and allied with Germany. Mila has been having nightmares since Selim left.

Mila calls for her maid Dorota, but there is no answer. Dorota has left with only a note saying she is sorry. Mila is shocked, though she has heard rumors of maids leaving their Jewish employers. Mila wonders how she will go on: “Radom is in shambles; she needs an ally now more than ever” (41). German occupying forces are brutally persecuting Jews, and life has completed changed for Mila. Dorota had been her lifeline since she could leave the house to bring back food and supplies. She had also been Mila’s friend and had helped so much with the baby.

Mila is terrified now, feeling left on her own. She vomits, imagining horrible things that might happen to them. Just then, she hears Felicia cry and realizes that she has to move back with her parents for support. With this thought, she feels stronger and more capable of managing without Selim and Dorota.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Addy, Toulouse, France - September 21, 1939”

Addy spends his time now working, composing music, and going back to the Polish consulate in Toulouse, trying to secure a travel visa to return home to Radom. He anxiously reads about how the war is escalating. Lvov, where his brothers are, is on the verge of falling to the Soviets.

Addy is glad that he can keep in touch with his mother through letters, but he is frustrated that there is nothing he can do to help his family. Going through his mail, Addy sees he has received a military conscription order. He is to report for a physical exam so that he can join a Polish unit of the French Army. Addy feels shocked, thinking how moments before he was worried for his brothers, as they were forced to fight in the war. Now he is in the same situation.

Addy takes the handkerchief that his mother sewed for him and rubs it between his fingers: “It’s going to be all right, he tells himself. Hitler will be stopped. France hasn’t seen any fighting yet; for all one knows, the war will be over before it does” (49). Addy believes that it will be only a matter of time before he can return to Poland and his family. He puts the handkerchief back in his pocket and thinks about how nothing is more important now than home and family.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Jakob and Bella, Lvov, Soviet-Occupied Poland - September 30, 1939”

Bella has made it to Jakob’s apartment, after her harrowing journey to Lvov. Jakob is thrilled to see her, but Bella is concerned to see him looking so exhausted: “Whatever has happened here in Lvov has left a mark on him” (52). As Jakob embraces her, Bella knows that she was right to come.

Jakob says that he would never have asked her to come if he had known that it would be so hard and dangerous. After Bella cleans up, she tells Jakob about how she crawled through the meadow, then got lost in the woods for hours. She came upon train tracks, talked her way through a checkpoint, and used the last of her money to buy a train ticket to Lvov. Bella says that she was surprised to see no Wehrmacht on the streets when she arrived. Jakob tells her that Lvov is occupied by the Soviets now, as they and the Germans have divided up Poland.

Bella is shocked to learn that Poland has fallen in just a few days. Polish Army officers were arrested by the incoming Soviet police, so Jakob got rid of his uniform and decided to stay hidden in Lvov. Bella asks about Genek, Selim, and Adam. Jakob says that Genek and Adam are also still in Lvov, but that Selim has not been seen since the Germans left.

Later, in bed, Jakob tells Bella that they should get married. Bella asks if he is serious, and he replies that he is. Jakob says that it was unbearable to be apart from her. He says, “Together from now on, all right? No matter what” (56), and Bella agrees.

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Halina, Radom, German-Occupied Poland - October 10, 1939”

Halina has been assigned field work by the German authorities who have taken over Radom. Before the war, she worked as a medical assistant in Selim’s lab, so she is not used to manual labor. When she received her assignment on a beet farm, she assumed that she was going to be working in the farm’s business office, so she wore nice clothing and her newest shoes. Instead, she is instructed to cut beets in a field. This first day of physical labor is hard on Halina.

Halina had a humiliating experience that morning as she rode in the farm truck to the countryside. She saw an old classmate waiting to cross the street, someone who had eagerly sought her friendship in school, but the girl looked away, pretending not to know Halina.

At the end of the long day, Halina returns home. Mila, whose work assignment is in a garment shop, cannot believe how dirty Halina is from working. Mila has fashioned a harness for herself to conceal Felicia. Children are forbidden at the workshop, but Mila has no choice but to bring her: “But Mila can’t not work—everyone has to work—and it’s not as if she can leave Felicia, who’s not even a year old, alone all day in the apartment while she’s away” (61). Felicia plays and naps under Mila’s worktable all day. Nechuma and Sol received job assignments in a German cafeteria, so they cannot watch Felicia either.

Halina asks Mila if there is any news from Selim, but Mila has not received anything. Halina received letters from Adam in Lvov, saying that he’s found work there. He wrote that Halina should come there as well. Halina longs to go, wondering if Adam’s comment was meant to be a proposal of marriage, but she feels she cannot leave her parents.

Nechuma and Sol return from work, and Halina is shocked to see that Nechuma concealed potato peelings in her blouse. She worries what will happen if her mother is caught stealing from the cafeteria and bluntly says so, which startles everyone in the room. Mila says that they have no choice because they need the extra food.

Part 1, Chapters 4-8 Analysis

These chapters focus on how life changes for the Kurcs after the war begins. All of them experience changes in both circumstances and personality due to the upheaval brought on by the shocking suddenness of occupation by enemy forces.

Bella finds the changes to Radom distressing, as Jews are harassed and humiliated in public. She would never have tried to travel to Lvov alone, with no family members, but when Jakob asks her to join him, she begs Sol to help her. None of them realized how hazardous the journey would be, so Tomek asks her repeatedly if she wants to turn back. Bella realizes that she has newfound courage when she decides to keep going: “She’d told Jakob in her letter that she was coming. She must keep her promise. To quit now, despite the uncertainty ahead, would feel cowardly” (29). Bella would never have believed that she could make it through the dangers and difficulty of her last push to get to Lvov, but she finds the strength to do so.

Mila goes through a major transformation, as she is an overwhelmed young mother at the beginning of the war, dependent on others to care for her and to help care for her baby. She becomes physically ill when she realizes that her maid has abandoned her: “First Selim, her brothers, Adam, now Dorota. […] How will she manage, fending for herself?” (41). The need to protect Felicia, however, gives Mila the fortitude to carry on: “‘He’ll come home to us soon. Until then, it’s just you and me,’ she adds […] as she processes the enormity of her words” (44). In Chapter 8, the reader sees how Mila has become even stronger and more self-sufficient, as she manages to continue caring for Felicia, smuggling the baby into her workplace.

Addy, at the beginning of the story, is brash and confident, but the uncertainties when the war starts confound him: “Addy is stuck. His life, his decisions, his future—none of it is in his control” (45). For someone accustomed to feeling in charge of his own destiny, this shakes Addy to the core: “Addy is struck by how quickly things can change in this new realm of his. How, in an instant, his future can be decided for him” (48). At the end of his chapter, Addy decides that everything once important to him—his career, his artist friends, and his freewheeling lifestyle in Paris—no longer matter. Now, his core values of home and family take precedence. His handkerchief emerges as a prominent symbol, representing a continual connection to his family.

Jakob, who was always such a cautious person, seems to have changed since the war began. Bella is surprised that Jakob brings up marriage so suddenly, on the first night she has arrived in Lvov: “The war, it seems, has emboldened him” (55). Jakob sees how life can suddenly change, so after he suffers a separation from Bella, he decides to stop waiting for his life with her to begin.

Halina, the pampered youngest of the Kurc children, also experiences an upheaval in her life when war comes. When she is assigned a job at a beet farm, she actually laughs out loud, thinking it must be a joke: “How is it that she, of all people, has ended up in the fields?” (56). Halina has grown up privileged, so she is aghast when she finds herself shunned by an old friend and forced to perform backbreaking manual labor. She finds herself in the position of being a protector as well, deciding that she cannot join Adam in Lvov: “No matter how she spins it, it doesn’t feel right to abandon her parents” (63). Halina even scolds her mother for stealing potato peelings from the German cafeteria, a sign of impudence that she never would have shown before, but one that reflects her new relationship with her parents.