CHAPTER IV

Under Another's Roof

Innocenta's family home, the place where she had grown up and where, in her own fashion, she had felt safe, was slowly fading away. The time had come for her to provide for herself and think of her own future. The nearer and farther countryside offered few ways of earning a living. The surest of them, and for a lone woman perhaps the only one, was work in the fields. Innocenta had kin who owned large farms, and it was to them that she turned for seasonal work. She was often seen at the Pawelskis' farms in Śniadowo, or, more often still, at Wrona, among the descendants of Jan Kiliś. There Mieczysław and Bronisława Ostrowski lived in the old Kiliś house, working a large part of the farm they had inherited from them.

Besides the Ostrowskis, several other people worked about the place. In summer a pair of girls would be taken on; and, apart from them, there had long lived there "old Błaszkiewicz" and a boy called Dolata. His true surname was Ostrowski, but how was Mr. Ostrowski to call a hired hand by his own name? The solution was found by the farmhand himself, who year after year announced that he would serve only "till summer."

When young Innocenta appeared in the yard, Dolata saw his chance. His courting took various forms, but usually rose no higher than the boy's imagination.

"Nocia, take Dolata his dinner," Bronisława asked, bustling about the great kitchen stove, upon which several kettles were always standing. Above them hung a huge hood, black, forever humming and moving. It was the thousands of flies covering it that made the sight almost unreal, perhaps even frightening. The insects had taken a liking to the hood because food was close at hand there, food that was constantly being cooked in the house, whether for people or for animals. The kitchen never rested, and the flies never complained of hunger. The household had grown used to them from childhood and treated their presence as something natural. In time Innocenta, too, made her peace with them, trying only at night to cover her bedding with an old curtain. Now, called by her cousin, she went in to collect the three-tiered meal carrier with dinner for the farmhand, who was pasturing cows on the fallow ground.

The boy saw her from afar and, rising, smiled as he waited for the girl to come nearer. She came up and held out the dish.

"Here's your dinner."

The boy did not move. He thought a moment and drawled,

"I ain't gonna eat."

The housewife's cousin turned on her heel and started back toward the yard.

"I'll eat, I'll eat," she heard behind her. She returned.

"I ain't gonna eat!"

"Then don't," Innocenta replied, and again started toward the house.

"I'll eat..."

"Then eat!"

"I ain't gonna eat..."

"I'll eat!"

"No, you won't eat!" a voice answered Dolata from a distance. The adventure must have wounded Dolata deeply, for that day Innocenta lost her admirer.

Less romantic adventures befell her during fieldwork on Władysław Pawelski's land. For the autumn potato digging, not only Innocenta went to her uncle and aunt, but also her two sisters, Jadwiga and Marianna. In a field set somewhat apart from the farm buildings, several women were digging potatoes out of the earth with hoes, while others followed behind, gathering them into woven baskets.

"You are leaving a good many potatoes behind you," Pawelski remarked to the women, watching the whole work while seated on a stool beneath a white parasol.

Jadwiga, to whom the words were most likely directed, turned her head in surprise.

"Those are potatoes?" she answered with a question, pointing to the tiny tubers for which, in her opinion, it was not worth bending down.

"Then call them what they are!" he ordered impatiently. There was no point in arguing.

While her husband watched over the workers, Marianna Pawelska saw to it that they were fed. After several hours of labor, each woman received a slice of bread with zgrzeb, that is, stewed apples.

Marianna Wasilewska, née Pawelska, was living at that time near Nasielsk. There she met Piotr Korycki of Morgi—a quiet man with a trade; in Marianna's eyes, a good match, especially since his sister, Waleria Kostewicz, had been living in the United States for years.

The Koryckis came from the petty gentry of northern Mazovia. Before the January Uprising they had held a small landed property; after the disasters of the nineteenth century the family grew poor and scattered across Mazovia and Podlasie. Piotr's father, Jan of Nuna, was by then already a man working on an estate, and he died when his son was twelve. His mother, Joanna née Kowalska, married Antoni Sadkowski in 1904. Yet the memory of the "old Koryckis" endured in the house—without fanfare, as a daily code of work and dignity. For Innocenta something else mattered: honesty and steady earnings.

Before the war Piotr had worked as a railway conductor; after 1939 he supported himself by shoemaking. The neighbors said that he "could do anything." Even so, he lived modestly in a rented little house in Morgi.

Wasilewska's efforts of several months brought the desired result. On August 25, 1940, in the church at Nasielsk, before the altar, stood the betrothed pair: twenty-eight-year-old Innocenta Kiliś and fifty-two-year-old Piotr Korycki.

The newlyweds' idyll could not last long. She, a woman until then living among a numerous family, no longer especially young; and he, rather old for a bridegroom, accustomed to living alone and deciding everything for himself—sooner or later they were bound to fall out.

"Why, I cannot even clean the rooms there," the newly made wife complained to her family. "Everything there is a keepsake from his mother!"

The woman also reproached her husband for ordinary oddities, such as collecting matchboxes and handing them out as collectors' treasures to children returning from school. It is unlikely that these were all her objections to Piotr, for already in the early winter of that same year Innocenta returned alone to Szczypiorno. Nor did she alter her decision to separate when it turned out that she was with child. After waiting a short time for his wife's return, her husband moved out of the house and took a rented little room with his Śmigielski relatives. In Szczypiorno they waited for him to appear and persuade his wife to return to the bosom of the family newly founded. They waited in vain. Innocenta's husband did not come. When he learned from Helena Szcześniak, who visited him, that he was to become a father, he seemed wholly surprised by the news. As proof of his concern he sent a woolen shawl in which the child was to be wrapped during the winter months. Though the gesture merely angered both Nocia and her kin, almost everyone agreed that the marriage ought to be saved.

Some three kilometers from the Chojnackis, just beyond a small wood, a new village was taking shape: Śniadówek, formerly called Zatoka. At its opposite end, on the bank of the Wkra, lived Stanisław, the son of Władysław Pawelski. Some years earlier the young man had married Genowefa Biernacka. The girl had been a servant on the Pawelskis' farm. There was, then, nothing surprising in the fact that his parents had not approved of the match. Nevertheless, the young couple received by inheritance considerable lands northwest of Szczypiorno, which became the basis of their livelihood. They themselves raised a house on a plot belonging to the Biernackis. When, very early in the spring of 1941, Genowefa stepped beyond the gate, she saw a shaking sight. Along the road, which at the time of an unexpected thaw was covered with thick, deep ruts full of water, two women were making their way from the direction of Cieksyn. One was far advanced in pregnancy, the other ailing and not long before death. Both, barely rising above their surroundings, thin and exhausted, carried great bundles of some kind.

"Auntie, Nocia, where have you come from?" the woman cried at the sight of them. "Come into the house!"

They accepted the invitation, for it had come at the last possible moment. Their exhaustion was extreme. Only after a long rest did the women begin to talk.

"You are coming from Morgi?" the housewife guessed. In answer Rozalia nodded sadly.

"Yes. Nocia insisted on taking her things..." The words, and the sight of the little bundles they had dragged along, explained everything. Minutes of silence and consternation followed.

"Nocia, perhaps after all..." Genia still tried to mediate.

"No, it is too late," Innocenta cut her off shortly, and her cousin did not press her. Nor did she ask about the details of the meeting. In Innocenta's face she saw a stubbornness and determination that left no room for illusions.

Similar gloomy moods prevailed in Morgi as well. "Head, head, what have you done, that you persuaded me into marriage," Piotr was said to have recited earlier. Yet he did not go after his wife. Whether illness, winter, or other reasons stood in the way is not known. In mid-March word of his unexpected death reached Szczypiorno.

That death surprised the Śmigielskis, too. In the evening they had still been speaking with their lodger, and the next morning at dawn they were awakened by a loud pounding at the window. It was two Suskis, distant relatives from Nuna, who had come to take away the possessions of Piotr, dead in the night. They loaded all of Korycki's goods onto a wagon and drove off. "How did they know of his death when I, living through the wall, did not know?" Śmigielska wondered. In wartime no one inquired into causes of death.

At six o'clock in the morning on May 17, 1941, Innocenta's daughter came into the world in Szczypiorno. The condition of the newborn promised a swift death, and so, in haste, the very next day, the local midwife, Marianna Oraczewska, carried the little girl to the church in Pomiechowo and asked for an urgent baptism. Father Antoni Szewczak gave her the name Jadwiga, and Antoni Pawelski and Jadwiga Kamińska became her godparents.

Contrary to general fears, Jadwiga survived, and even managed to diminish the property of the Third Reich. During the war, in the Szczypiorno woods, the Germans set up workshops for repairing armored vehicles. To increase the protection of the installation, they marked out a security zone in part of the village, the so-called "ghetto," which the locals interpreted in their own fashion as: "Shit is all Hitler will get out of it."

One afternoon, when little Jadwiga was returning with her mother from Śniadowo, she noticed by the road a small stool that took her fancy so much she insisted on taking it. Her mother, seeing that a German standing nearby had understood the child's intention and deliberately walked away, allowed her daughter this unusual theft of a piece of furniture, which long after the war continued to serve the Kamiński family.

The winter that came seemed to bring another tragedy with it. Innocenta's daughter fell ill with pneumonia, and her condition seemed to worsen by the hour.

"Nocia, she will die on you," her sister Marianna wailed.

"And what am I to do? I have no money for a doctor or medicine," the woman cried in tears.

"Go to the German. They have a doctor there."

"He won't poison her?"

"Without a doctor she will not live anyway. Go!"

Innocenta had to admit that her sister was right. She dressed, wrapped up her little daughter, and went to the doctor of the German soldiers. By the very next day the child began to recover.

Relations with the occupier were not always so proper. The inhabitants were used by the occupation authorities, among other things, for numerous field labors. One of these was tending the so-called rubber crop. The daughters of Stanisław Kiliś also went to pull weeds, and Innocenta took little Dziunia with her. When the child began to interfere seriously with the fieldwork, the Germans intervened.

"What is she doing here?" one of them asked.

"And what am I to do with her? A bitch carries her pups in her teeth, and I am to leave my child?" Korycka answered.

"Get out of here and take that brat with you," the German shouted back, fulfilling the woman's secret wish.

"What is going on there?" one of the sisters wondered aloud as they were coming down from the wood. Her curiosity had been stirred by a strange clamor spreading through the area from one of the nearby lots. Out of curiosity they quickened their pace. Passing what were then the first buildings of the Kielaks, they could already see Jadwiga's house. There they saw nothing suspicious; the noise, then, had to be coming from the next property, Marianna's yard.

"Look there, see what that madman is doing," Jadwiga said to her older sister, nodding ahead.

On a ladder set against the wall of the little room in which Innocenta lived with her five-year-old daughter stood Stanisław, trying with a metal claw to tear away the last pieces of the roof. Each time he succeeded, some portion fell to the ground with a crash.

The women stopped beside the fence, without even stepping off the road. Everyone was afraid of Chojnacki. Usually calm and ready to help others, when he fell into a rage he became unpredictable.

This time he was so occupied that he paid no heed to Czesław Kamiński, who was watching the whole thing, and did not even notice his wife with her sisters. When he came down from the ladder, he muttered toward his brother-in-law:

"In a few years, when the little whore grows up, men will be coming here. What do I need that for?"

The Kamińskis, who lived next door, took in those left without a roof over their heads. Czesław took the remaining material from the destroyed room and built from it a new one, "stuck" onto his own house.

There were moments of reflection. Innocenta had never seen the book. Her father had shown it only to the oldest. Yet when, on winter evenings, she heard her older siblings whisper of the "book from Czarnowo," she felt that it contained something she would never be allowed to know. Now, when she herself had a daughter, she often asked herself whether that curse concerned her as well. How would the life of an only child unfold, and would those ancient events from Lithuania leave their mark on her too? There were many questions, and to each of them no answer was to be found.

Innocenta, despite the passing of time, still earned her living by working for her relatives. If she was away only two or three days, she left her daughter in the care of her sister Jadwiga. The child disliked this arrangement very much. It happened that the little girl would run out onto the road and cry after her mother as she disappeared toward the forest: "My dear, golden, heavenly Mama! Don't leave me!" It never helped, and Dziunia always remained inconsolable. This did not mean, however, that she accepted the situation without argument. From her earliest years she knew how to speak her mind, and not always in a manner pleasing to grown people.

"Dziunia, how can you behave so? God will be angry," Aunt Chojnacka cried when her niece answered her mother in a way the family judged inadmissible.

"God can't see."

"What do you mean, He can't see? God sees everything."

The little girl looked theatrically all around. God was nowhere to be seen.

"No, He can't see," she confirmed, though even then she understood her own game perfectly. She showed her spirited character also in Śniadowo, when she and "Grandpapa" Władysław Pawelski went to pick currants. The old man not only filled the little one-liter pail with fruit, but at the end he heaped a fine mound on top.

"Mama, Mama, how beautiful!" Dziunia cried as she returned from the orchard. When her mother saw the vessel full of fruit, instead of admiring it aloud she yielded to temptation. Taking a full handful, she began to eat, which brought on a real fury in the child. It was useless for "Grandpapa" to promise that he would go and pick the missing berries. The despair lasted a very long time, and later regret for such behavior remained for life.

"There was to be Basia's wedding at the Szcześniaks'," Kazimierz Kiliś wrote shortly after the war. "Ignacy and I went together, but we took Nocia with Dziunia too. Waiting for a transfer in Szczecin, we went into the ruins of some tenement. Unfortunately, we let the child go in there." Indeed, the child remembered that visit, especially the human hair still lying in the rubble. Yet from that journey Jadwiga also remembered what she had seen with a child's eyes: the wedding preparations, the abundance of food, and the plucking of slaughtered poultry.

Her first years of schooling were connected with the local four-grade school, and her catechism with the parish in Pomiechowo.

"Dziunia, who was with you?" her mother asked curiously after returning from work.

"No one was with me."

"How is that? Mrs. Korytowska, who was walking along the road, heard you talking to someone."

"No, I was only reading a book aloud," answered the girl, who truly loved to read. In that way, too, she filled the long hours during which she was alone at home.

The road running beside the Kamińskis' fence scarcely deserved to be called a road. It was merely a sort of not-quite-road, simply the strip behind the fences. The real road lay perhaps a hundred yards farther on. To the left, if one insisted, one could reach Śniadówek and then Cieksyn. To the right, one went not only to the store for provisions, but also to Mass in Pomiechowo or to the office in Pomiechówek.

At the crossing of that road and the not-quite-road, Jadzia arranged a solemn funeral for her only toy, a doll. Taking part in the "ceremony" were Stasia Radomska, her sister Teresa, called Rojza, and several boys, with Radomski at their head. In truth Radomski was the foundation of the whole affair, for the entire game had been his idea. When the doll died, she was buried with dignity and flowers were planted. After the mourners had dispersed, Dziunia decided to return to her doll. What she found at the burial place amazed her greatly, for the grave was empty, and there were no witnesses to the "resurrection." It was suspected that Radomski must have known something about this miracle, but he remained almost as silent as the empty grave.

In June 1949 Jadwiga made her First Holy Communion in Pomiechowo. During the regular wanderings "for bread," most often to Bronisława Ostrowska's, the little girl liked to walk the seven kilometers to Ostrowska's brother, her uncle Stanisław Kiliś. Thus she was also a frequent guest in his watermill on the Wkra. Frequent, and exceptionally independent.

"Dziunia, wait, I will walk you back," Stanisław would ask his little cousin.

"I came by myself, and I will go back by myself," she answered once.

Jadwiga's wandering paths led not only among the homes of her relatives. During her stay in Szczypiorno she was more than once sent to Wrona to bring back some stores of food. Innocenta would usually set out later to meet her daughter and help her carry the heavy bags. So it was on that November afternoon. This time, however, she did not meet Dziunia just after passing the Szczypiorno woods. Nor was she to be seen among the fields of Śniadowo. Only near Wrona did she notice the girl, who, despite the burden she was carrying, was looking with curiosity along both sides of the boundary strip.

"What took you so long?"

"I am looking to see whether I can find another hare," Jadzia replied.

"What hare?"

"Well, another one like that... didn't Mama see it? It was standing by the road..." she added, handing one of the bags to her mother and setting off briskly ahead. Along the way she explained how, that morning, she had found a hare shot by hunters and had set it by the path to wait for her.

"Why didn't you take it? Surely someone found it long ago," Innocenta scolded her daughter, who had no sense at all of the imprudence of her act. To her surprise, however, the hare had continued to "wait" where it had been left. They set out for home, humming a song they both knew:

"Do not weep, Karolcia, do not weep, my angel,
There is more than one Leon in the world;
And though he has not long been with us,
When he returns, he will not leave...
Ah, dear Mother, he will not return,
For my heart beats so hard...
Either his horse will throw him from the saddle,
Or an evil man will kill him.
Leon comes back, and here the wedding is over,
Guests are making merry in the parlor,
And Karolina on another breast,
Another kisses her lips.
Ah, Karolina, where is your oath,
Where all your solemn vows?
You wrote in letters, come, ah come,
And now another you have married."

The next day, together with her sister Kamińska, they were able to prepare an uncommon dinner.

Besides her frequent visits to the Ostrowski cousins and to Antoni Pawelski, Innocenta sometimes stopped in at the home of Antoni's brother, Władysław. Although, coming from Szczypiorno, Uncle Władysław's buildings stood right by the fork in the roads and therefore on the way, these visits did not occur often, which in turn gave rise to many grievances. "They pass right by us and go to the Antośes," people complained. Yet neither Innocenta nor her daughter remembered their stays on that farm with much fondness. Eight-year-old Dziunia forever retained the image of Aunt Marianna, who scolded her for climbing onto the fence to pick two nuts hanging on a branch high above her head.

"Where have you climbed to!" Aunt Marianna shouted, and, to hide her true intentions, added, "Have you nothing to do? When I was your age I was already embroidering wall hangings! I still have them to this day."

"Then Auntie, show me those hangings," the girl asked innocently, not expecting the inevitable attack of fury.

The grief over a nut that might have been eaten was to some degree justified, for the woman economized even on food for her own children.

Also living in that house was Julcia, Władysław's sister. Nine years younger than her brother, the woman never married. True, she had once had a candidate for a husband, but, regarded by her family as "not quite right," she was effectively dissuaded from the idea. What remained to her was the role of unpaid servant, first to Władysław and later to Antoni. Despite poor treatment, Julianna was ready to do anything for her brothers. "This is for Władzio," she would say, placing on the table a plate on which she had earlier arranged the best-cooked potatoes. For him they had to be properly mealy and shining with starch.

Boundless love did not prevent fear at the same time. "Władek will kill us," she cried when her sister-in-law hurled her son Heniek against the wall and the child lost consciousness. Fear of the man's anger forced her to revive her nephew. He regained consciousness, but he paid for his mother's fury with a lifelong stutter.

Only after several years did Julianna move to the homestead of the other brother, standing two hundred meters away. Antoni, known for his explosive temper and called, after a phrase of his own, "psia treść," was a man of a kinder heart. Nevertheless, even there Julcia knew neither peace nor respect.

Meanwhile, though the facts suggested otherwise, long before the outbreak of the Second World War the Pawelskis, as prosperous people, were frequent guests at weddings. Although there were eleven children in the house, someone grown, trusted—preferably a relative—had to be called to look after the property. There was no lack of willing persons, especially since in the neighboring villages lived many much poorer relations who, for the sake of good relations with the Pawelskis, were ready to do a great deal.

"Well, then, we are coming back tomorrow," Marianna said to Cousin Lipkowa of Szczypiorno, preparing to leave the house.

Lipkowa accepted this with understanding, but Stanisław, the eldest of the Pawelski children, asked:

"And what are we to eat?" His mother seemed shocked by such a question and dismissed it with a short answer that was obvious to her:

"What do you mean, what? There is water in the ditch, potatoes in the cellar. You have food!" she shouted, and, without waiting for any reaction, left the house. As soon as the door slammed behind their mother, Stanisław turned to the caretaker, who was stunned by the whole situation:

"Auntie need not worry. We will manage."

Taught by experience, the boy had already prepared a copied key to the granary, and poultry ran about the yard, from which a strengthening broth could be made. It was necessary only to see that the younger children did not become aware of the "crime," for a report, even an unintentional one, might have ended unpleasantly for Staś in the future. There was reason to be afraid, since in his mother's opinion the children had teeth and therefore could eat potatoes every day; their daddy had no teeth, and therefore had to eat roast duck.

Władysław, despite so solicitous a wife, seemed to care more for his own reputation than for her. Returning from weddings or other parties, Marianna was most often quite drunk, which her husband tried to hide from the curious eyes of neighbors by throwing her off the wagon so that she might sober up in the roadside ditch before returning home.

The hard conditions in which Władysław Pawelski's children grew up did them no harm. All of them reached adulthood and became independent. It was exactly the reverse in Antoni's family, where the children were cared for exceedingly well, and yet they died one after another.

The year 1952 was a time of great change for Innocenta and her daughter. When Jadwiga completed the four-grade school in Szczypiorno, her mother decided that they would move to Wrona for good. This was dictated not only by material circumstances, but also by the distance to school. If they remained in Szczypiorno, the child would have to walk about five kilometers through forest and fields to school. The school in Wrona was much closer.

"Do you know what happened to me today?" a classmate, excited by some event, shouted to Dziunia. "Yesterday I was going home and stopped in at Kiliś's leased place for apples. I am sitting up in a tree, and then I look—Kiliś is coming straight at me with a stick. I wanted to run, but I see he is running, shouting something, and all the while bowing to me!" the boy related, laughing. He did not know that the victim of his prank was the uncle of the girl to whom he was telling the story. Stanisław Kiliś suffered from a nervous tic that caused involuntary movements of the head. The little rascal regularly did him mischief, though not out of malice. He attended school only seasonally, from November to April. In other months he earned his keep by pasturing cows.

Amid the broad fields of Wrona, surrounded by a dozen or so trees, stood a wooden house remembering still the times of Jan Kiliś. A track running past its right gable ended at a small pond, beside which a heavy horse gin had been set. Straight ahead and to the right lay the farm buildings. Opposite the house, on the other side of the track, a heavy stone cellar was hidden in the earth. The food of every sort stored there—smoked hams, sausages, and cream among it—made the move, for eleven-year-old Dziunia, a welcome change.

The relative idyll of country summertime was disturbed by the coming of harvest. Like all children then, Jadwiga had to take her part in the fieldwork. Her task, apparently easy, carried a mortal danger. The Ostrowskis, who cared for the farm animals, hitched not two but three horses to the horse gin. The one that walked alone in front, however, had to be led. The mare assigned to this role had her preferences and would not allow herself to be mounted in a place she did not approve. Dziunia was the only one who could come to an understanding with the animal. Their harmonious cooperation was brief. The girl soon began to suffer chafing about the thighs and was forced to lead the mare by the bridle. One moment of inattention was enough for the six-hundred-pound animal to set its hoof on the girl's foot.

There could be little time for convalescence, for only a few days later Dziunia again mounted the unruly mare in the stable. The next events came swiftly. Feeling a human being on her back, the animal bolted straight through the open doors. Only an instinctive ducking low over the horse's neck saved Jadwiga from smashing her head against the beam over the doorway. The mare, having run out into the yard and frightened further by Innocenta's desperate cry, cleared a nearby antitank ditch with the child on her back and stopped only in the meadows of a neighboring village.

Another story from that autumn also remained in the child's memory. Staying in the abundant Ostrowski household gave her the chance to eat often her favorite pudding, for there was no lack of milk. Innocenta, who readily prepared this dish, one day cooked a whole pot of it in irritation and made her daughter eat it. Jadwiga, though in later years she understood that her mother must have been exhausted, still, seventy years afterward, sometimes felt sick at the thought of that dish.

The beginning of September 1952 marked Jadwiga's start at a new school. Classes in Nowa Wrona were held not only in the school building but also in the organist's house beside the church. Despite the necessity of walking about eight kilometers every day, Jadwiga felt that a better time was beginning for her.

Everything ended on January 20.

A few days earlier, somewhere at the start of the year, Stanisław Ostrowski had awakened in a strange mood. "Can it be that I am to die?" he whispered, as if to himself. When the curious asked, he told of an unusual dream. He had seen "a lady, all in white, who told him to be always ready for death." How deeply he took it to heart, no one knows; in any case, the matter was soon forgotten. Until the time came.

When Innocenta moved from Szczypiorno, she did so with the intention of remaining in Wrona permanently. Yet the winter months, when there was little work about the village farms, stirred in her a sense of uselessness.

"Dolata will be enough for you now," she told her cousin Bronisława in mid-January. "I will sit awhile in Szczypiorno, and come back to you in the spring," she assured her. On the day before her planned return to her home neighborhood, Innocenta decided to go with Ostrowski to Płońsk for supplies. They were to be provisions for the time she would spend with her sister. The winter was snowy, and so choosing sleighs for the journey seemed proper. True, the neighbor Salamonowicz advised that for such a road one ought rather to take the large sleigh, but Ostrowski decided they would go in the little zajdki.

Sensing a great adventure, Jadwiga wanted to go on that journey too.

"No, Jadzia, you have school," her mother protested, allowing the child to ride in the sleigh only as far as the center of the village.

During the short trip the girl was, however, an involuntary witness to an argument among the adults, from which she concluded that her mother would return home by train. After lessons she therefore decided to go straight to Uncle Stanisław Kiliś, whose house stood fairly close to the railroad line. Later, again and again, at every sound of a passing train, she ran out to meet her mother. Unfortunately, contrary to the earlier plans, Innocenta decided to return together with Mieczysław Ostrowski. It was after four in the afternoon when, having left Płońsk, they were approaching Szczytno. The road ran downhill, straight toward a bridge over a little river. When the sleigh disappeared into the hollow, a military Star truck came from the direction of the town. When the driver saw the obstacle in front of him, he no longer had time to stop the vehicle. The only thing he could do was either steer off the embankment and risk his life, or bring on a catastrophe. The young soldier chose his own safety. The force of the blow was so great that pieces of the wooden vehicle were found dozens of meters away, as were fragments of the driver's body. Innocenta had the least visible injuries. Unfortunately, as the less badly hurt, she was not taken from the scene by ambulance, but in a chance-stopped Żuk van.

"What will become of my Dziunia now?" she whispered to someone who accompanied her on the way to the hospital. She died in the Płońsk hospital fifteen minutes after midnight.