‘I’ll be back shortly,’ her mother said, and never returned

In September 1941, German soldiers came to my mother’s house in Kolomyja, Poland. Believing the Germans were only looking for men, my mother’s father and her brothers hid in the attic. In the street, my mother stood with her mother and about 30 neighbors, almost all women, who had been detained.

A German soldier studied my mother, pointed his leather whip and asked her age. “Ten,” her mother lied, trimming four years off my mother’s age. As the Germans took her mother away, my mother clung to her. “Go on, go on,” her mother said, ushering her back toward the house. “I’ll be back shortly.”

Afterward, my mother’s father — devastated by his wife’s disappearance and the rumors that she was among 500 shot in the nearby Scheparowce Forest — refused to hide.

Could my mother have known then — a girl of 14 — that, in time, her father, Joachim Sperber, her two older brothers, Maks and Munio, her younger sister, Donia, and a large extended family would also be murdered?

Kolomyja no longer belongs to Poland. It sits inside a swatch of western Ukraine with a long history of “shifting borders and overlapping histories.” After Russia attacked Ukraine three months ago, Kolomyja again became part of a war zone, and it has been flooded with refugees.

As the war in Ukraine grinds in the east, as evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine continues to grow — including the slaughter of innocent civilians in some of the same cities and towns where the German military massacred innocent civilians during World War II — I think of my mother and the country she left behind and the war that took so much from her.

In 1997, my mother and I visited Kolomya. Much of the town remained familiar to her. There were still cobblestone streets, baroque wrought iron balconies, and ancient keyhole passageways between buildings. Her elementary school, Krolowa Jadwiga, had become a biotech company.

Here and elsewhere, she carried on expansive conversations in Polish or Ukrainian. I understood none of it.

Remarkably, her childhood home also still stood — faded, weathered, but essentially unchanged. It had two A-frame roofs, tall windows and a brick chimney. The man who lived there saw us standing in the yard. He came out, gray-haired and wearing a sweater vest.

Speaking in Ukrainian, my mother explained that she and her family had lived in this house before the war. The man insisted this was impossible and invented a lie: The house had always belonged to his family, from the time it was first built. My mother asked if we could go inside. He refused, went back in the house and shut the door.

We stayed in the yard, talking. I picked a leaf from a tree and tucked it in my journal. Standing there, I tried to picture what life had been like for my mother and her family.

Here in this house, her oldest brother Maks had played records on a hand-cranked phonograph and their father had scolded him after he was caught smoking cigarettes. From this house, her mother had taken the kids to the library, to the movie theater and to the ice cream shop.

When winter came, her family had brought out the pierzynas (heavy down comforters) and stored potatoes, dried peas, and apples in a cellar accessible only by ladder. Summers, the family vacationed in a Ukrainian village and rented a cabin near land owned by her father.

After a while, the man who lived in my mother’s childhood home opened the door again. He’d had a change of heart. We were invited inside.

It was extraordinary to stand inside the house where my mother had grown up with her siblings and parents.

Any family contains within it a universe of intimacies — untold moments of love, laughter, anger, forgiveness, sacrifice, distance, devotion.

All of that had once been here, and all of it had been abruptly erased.

Now Russia has brought war here again.