22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

it was just another summer day in the city. She got down from the table and felt a weight in her stomach. A greasy block of fear. She was alone. She realized she should have made more of an effort to make friends. The truth was she knew no one in Warsaw. Janusz and Aurek had been her only life. And now Janusz was gone.
    In the weeks that followed, the summer heat gave way to storms and the German soldiers arrived, marching in time in the pouringrain, motoring down the shopping streets and boulevards of Warsaw, bringing a cargo of terror that hit the city, tearing up buildings, raging through the streets. Silvana was too scared to risk taking her son outside, and too scared to leave him alone in the flat. She sat huddled by the stove. She received a letter from Janusz’s mother telling her to hurry up and come home. They were worried for her safety. She had heard nothing from her own parents.
    Curfews were announced. German trucks with loud-speaker systems trundled through the streets, blasting out orders, telling people to stay inside. The trams stopped running. People were not allowed to gather in groups of more than three. The sound of gunshots woke her in the night. Silvana’s days passed in a blur, sleeping, sitting by the stove, playing with Aurek, trying to summon up the courage to leave the flat and find a way out of the city back to Janusz’s parents.
    When the coal ran out, she went downstairs and sat in the hallways of the first-floor flats. They had radiators that worked and it was warmer there. Many people had left and the apartment building felt empty. The Kowalskis, the couple who had taken her into their flat when she gave birth to Aurek, had stayed. They had become new Germans, Volksdeutsche , with red linen bands on their sleeves embroidered with a black swastika, and refused to talk to her now, acting as if she were not there when they passed her in the corridors.
    Silvana was sitting on a radiator when she saw a family from one of the ground-floor flats leaving. A man and a woman with a little girl. The man carried two suitcases, the woman another. That’s how she knew they weren’t coming back.
    They left the door open and she slipped inside. In the kitchen she found stale bread, a few potatoes and some onions. There was a little coal left, so she lit the stove and made soup. She wandered through the flat. It was like stepping into a magazine picture. The piano, black wood with a shine that reflected her face in it, was covered in a pale-orange silk shawl with long, delicate fringing. Silvana pressed the keys. The notes rang clearly and Aurek stirred in his baby carriage.
    She stayed there a week, wandering through the empty rooms.She dusted the ornaments and swept the richly patterned carpets. At least if someone did come, they would see she’d cared for the place. Each day she bundled up her son and went out, trying to get a bus out of the city. Each day she queued for hours and then came back to the flat again.
    She was asleep in the master bedroom when the soldiers came. A hand grabbed her arm and she was jerked up onto her feet.
    ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said an officer, stepping through the group of soldiers. ‘These apartments are for German citizens only.’
    He told the other men to leave and then, taking off his leather coat, walked around examining pictures and ornaments.
    ‘These are nice,’ he said, lifting a brass candlestick from the marble mantelpiece. Silvana shrugged. It wasn’t her candlestick. He could have it. He could have anything he wanted. He looked at Aurek, who was sitting on the rug playing with his rattle, and she felt suddenly afraid.
    ‘I am going to be living here,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a maid. You’ll have to find somebody to take the child.’
    He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re a pretty girl. It’s very simple. If you have the right papers you can become German. It would be better for you. You can stay in Warsaw that way. You don’t