I. The Well
Before the war learned her name the river already knew it. She crossed at dawn and crossed again at dusk and the water never asked which side she was walking toward.
The river was the San. It bent through Przemyśl as though reluctant to leave and on its banks lived Poles and Ukrainians and Jews in streets so close that a child could learn three languages before school.
The midwife was called Hania though no register would ever write it down. She spoke Polish at the clinic and her mother's Ukrainian in the villages and enough Yiddish to ask where it hurt. A woman in labour does not care what language she is answered in. She only cares that she is answered.
Hania lived in Zasanie on the far bank in a house with a well in the yard. She never thought of the river as a boundary.
On the seventh of September 1939 German aeroplanes bombed Przemyśl. Hania was at a birth that morning with a neighbour holding the lamp. When the sound began the neighbour dropped it. Hania did not look up. The child came out screaming louder than the guns and she took it as a kind of answer.
II. The Line
Within days the Germans had shot about six hundred of the city's Jews in fields at its edge. Hania heard it at a back door and listened to the end. Then she went inside and boiled the cloth because two houses in the street were expecting.
Soon a notice went up on the walls. The San was now the line between the German and Soviet armies. People read it twice because it did not sound like a sentence about them.
They could not have known the line was drawn before the war began. In Moscow two foreign ministers had signed a secret protocol that ran through Poland along the water. They drew along the river because water is easy to find on a map.
People called the two halves the two kingdoms. By winter nobody was laughing. Hania's house was in one kingdom and her mother's grave in the other and her patients lived in both.
III. Two Papers
Each kingdom wanted a paper from her. Hania carried both papers in a tin beside her mother's bottle of rosemary oil.
In January she was fetched at midnight to Maria, the young wife of a schoolteacher. Her husband Antoni had been taken prisoner by the Red Army. She had received one pencilled card that said Alive. Cold. Do not worry.
The baby lay sideways and refused the door. Hania turned the child the way you turn a boat in a narrow canal. Nobody said Antoni's name. In that house a name was something you kept dry like matches. By morning a girl arrived small and furious and unconcerned with borders.
At dawn Hania crossed the railway bridge. Halfway over there was nothing to mark the middle. No line. No post. The river had not been told. A Soviet guard studied her second paper and asked who she was. She answered that she served whoever was screaming loudest at two in the morning. He let her pass.
IV. The Morning the Line Vanished
In June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union. One morning the sentries at the old town end of the bridge were gone. Hania crossed anyway because a woman was in labour. In the middle she stopped with one foot on each of the kingdoms that no longer existed. The only time she found a border was only a bridge.
V. The Cellar
In autumn 1941 the Germans confined the Jews of the city to a bend of the San bounded on three sides by water. In July 1942 about thirteen thousand people were put on trains to Bełżec, a camp built for killing and nothing else. From her yard Hania could see the smoke. She boiled the cloth.
A month earlier a knock had come at night. A girl of nineteen nine months had gotten out of the quarter. Death was the penalty for sheltering a Jew. Hania went down into the cellar anyway. The child did not cry as though it too had been warned. Hania held it until it made a thin sound no louder than a kettle. Before dawn a woman carried the baby away in a basket under a layer of apples.
Hania never learned what became of that child. She understood only that her neutrality had never been a wall. It had been a door she kept open and that night it opened onto a cellar.
VI. The Name in the Newspaper
In April 1943 German radio announced mass graves at Katyn. Maria found Antoni's name in a printed list between an advertisement for a tonic and a notice about ration changes.
She smoothed the newspaper on Hania's table the way you smooth a sheet. "If I grieve for him now I grieve in their newspaper," she said. Hania said nothing. She put her hand between Maria's shoulder blades and left it there until the shaking changed its rhythm. Then Maria said his name aloud for the first time in three years.
It was not a funeral. It was a grief spoken in a kitchen in Zasanie and that was the only place available.
VII. The Border That Settled
In March 1945 the Soviets handed Przemyśl to the new Poland. The line had moved four times around a single house. Then it left the river for good.
Nobody built Hania a monument. She had refused to choose a side every night for six years. A border is a story men repeat until it feels true. Underneath every story there is a river and a woman with clean cloth and a stubborn insistence that a life beginning has no interest in which kingdom claims the ground it is born on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Akanksha Singh Sengar is a Sociology (Honours) undergraduate at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She carries the curiosity of her school years in Narmadapuram, Madhya Pradesh, into the thinking of a big city. She is drawn to the questions that sit quietly behind everyday life: who gets seen, who gets heard, and whose labour keeps a city moving while others sleep.
Her research has taken her through policy spaces and lecture halls alike. She has interned with FICCI, the Impact and Policy Research Institute and the International Institute of SDGs and Public Policy Research. Her independent project “From Digital Diplomacy to Strategic Decoupling” reflects her interest in how power reshapes itself. At her own college she contributed to the Annual Principal’s Report, learning how institutional data tells stories of growth and silence.
She has presented at national and international conferences and won first prize as Best Paper Presenter at the Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College research conference. Her years in debating societies taught her that an argument grows stronger when it listens first. She has earned many debate and policy competition honours, along with the Young Achiever Award for academics and extracurricular work.
Beyond the classroom she volunteers in community outreach, from adult education drives to food packaging initiatives, because she believes sociology matters most when it meets people where they live.