The Girl Who Wouldn?t Die

by Randall Platt

  “I see Pawel is better,” I say, handing Mrs. Praska her cut for the week and touching the baby’s cool cheek.

  “And just where the hell have you been?” she demands, adjusting Pawel on her hip and pulling me inside. The faint light hits my face. “You look like death.”

  “Tending to family business, not that it’s your concern,” I snap. I haven’t told her anything about my family, about Ruthie.

  “I see,” she snaps back. Her five younger children gather around me as I give each a piece of Christmas candy. “And for you,” I say, handing Mrs. Praska a vial.

  “Morphine? Where … how?”

  “What’s our agreement?” She doesn’t need to know I stole it for my mother. That she, my father, and my sister are gone.

  “Ask her no questions and she’ll tell you no lies,” Yankev answers.

  “You can’t tell what you don’t know,” I snap back at him. “You’re looking hearty, Yankev. Seems eating agrees with you.” I pat his stomach. “But don’t get too fat. Nothing’s more suspicious these days than a fat Jew.”

  Yankev steps back, as though my touch is poison. I know Yankev and I have a day of reckoning ahead of us. But we all have bigger problems just now.

  Mrs. Praska pours tea. “What’s the news out there?”

  I spare her the details, like I always do. “Winter. I would steal you more coal, but the competition is pretty steep this time of year. Every cellar has been raided. Most of the furniture is gone, too.”

  “The street is lined with trees,” Yankev says, pointing toward the side door.

  “Nothing like a tree stump to point the way to a family in hiding. Just follow the trail of sawdust.”

  “I know places out there,” he goes on. “And I know how to cover up a trail.”

  “Well, just remember this, Yankev. While you are out there proving me wrong, there are six children and a woman here knowing I was right.”

  Little Michal, the four-year-old, hauls over a burlap sack of recently rolled cigarettes. “Did you get the special ingredient?” I ask Mrs. Praska.

  “I harvested it myself, from dear Mrs. Kaplan’s greenhouse. Bless her soul. To think, we used to tease her about her herbs, medicines, and cures. Dried oleander. I cut the mix myself. Fifty-fifty, just like we decided.”

  I snap off a piece of straw from a broom in the corner and hold it up to her. “Shall we split a straw on it?”

  She snaps off a piece and I offer the straw to Yankev.

  “Did you tell him?” I ask Mrs. Praska.

  “Yes, she told me,” Yankev barks. “Oleander is poison. You’re going to get us all killed with your stupid plan!”

  “Only our special customers. Nur für Deutsche,” I say, lifting the sack and ignoring Yankev’s opinions. Mrs. Praska and I share a wicked smile.

  “Each pack has a tiny purple crayon mark on the bottom,” she says, her face alive with mischief.

  “Two in each pack?”

  “By a fluke of chance,” she says. “Or luck of the draw. Whichever you choose.”

  At that, I hold up my straw. “Secrecy?”

  She touches her straw to mine. “Secrecy.”

  We both look at Yankev. He hesitates, then touches his straw to ours. “Secrecy. Mother, look what Arab is doing to you.”

  “Arab is not doing it!” she screams, pointing outside. “The Krauts! They are doing it! They do this to me, to us all!” She turns to me. “Be careful this time. Very careful.”

  “Lizard and I have it all planned out. We’re going to spread the boys all across Warsaw so, if this actually works, no one can connect the dots and suspect us.” I pick up the other burlap sack. “And these?”

  “For Jews and Poles,” Mrs. Praska says. “See? The drawstring is black.”

  Yankev escorts me to the door. “Did you do the inventory?” I ask him.

  “We’re getting low. What are the chances you can steal a tobacco shipment?”

  “Don’t think I’m not working on it.”

  “Is there anything the great Arab of Warsaw can’t do?” He tosses down his straw.

  “Yes. Plenty.”

  “Well, I’m sick of the way my mother worships you. Arab this and Arab that. If it wasn’t for Arab, we’d all be dead.” He mimics his mother’s voice. “Now this.” He points to the sacks of cigarettes.

  “Yankev. This is what I do. You were right about me the very first time you met me. I’m nothing but a common gonif. A stupid, bleeding female at that! If any of us gets out of this alive, you can take full credit for everything. You can be the hero, because I’m just saving my own hide. You have family here, but out there it’s every man for himself—so you might be thinking about your own hide!”

  His face changes. “I did. I did save my own hide. The day they came to arrest my father. I ran and hid in the attic. Like a scaredy little girl.” He turns away from me and bows his head, sniffs, then turns back around. “Yeah, I’m the big hero.”

  I see his tears. God, I do not need him breaking down. Not now. You cry, you die.

  “Yankev,” I say, pointing to his family in the apartment, “where would they be without you? Your God helps those who help themselves. It is written.”

  “My father didn’t believe that.”

  “Yankev, your father is dead. Just get used to that. You have the rest of your life to enjoy your guilt.”

  “Sometimes you make me sick!” His face changes. “Then sometimes you make me … ashamed. You’re … I mean … you’re just a girl.”

  “No. I’m just a Pole, Yankev. Doing the best I can with what I have. And right now, I need you to open that door and see if it’s clear.” I pick up the burlap sacks.

  He opens the door and looks outside both directions. “It’s clear.”

  I pause, touch his shoulder. “Yankev, your family needs you. Forget your father. Just follow the living.”

  His face hardens again. I know that face. I know he’s holding back tears. He nods, and he closes the door behind me.

  V.

  If the market for cigarettes on the Aryan side of Warsaw is brisk, the market for them on the ghetto side is fantastic. But that damn wall! So inconvenient! Getting into the ghetto means it’s the sewers or it’s nothing. They can weld shut some of the covers, but the sewers can’t be bricked up—blood, piss, shit, and puke all need to return to the sea. A law of nature even the Germans can’t break; even they have blood, piss, shit, and puke. And the sewers guzzle it all, regardless of what race it spews from.

  There are others in the sewers, of course, but each day there are fewer and fewer. Some partisans, some underground resistance workers, even some who whisper of an uprising.

  “Dror Hechaluc,” the kid says, following me after I come out the sewers. He isn’t the first to try to recruit me.

  “Armed youth resistance?” I say back, looking him up and down. “Armed? With what? Peashooters? Slingshots?” I laugh and continue on.

  “We’ll get guns! Come and join us.”

  “Join you? Why? I have nothing to rise up against! But here!” I toss a pack of cigarettes to the boy with big ideas. “For your last smoke, when Goliath lines you up against the wall. Good luck, David.”

  I continue on alone.

  Most people subscribe to the safety in numbers theory. Not me. Especially not after those twelve people were assassinated, counting off by threes. I believe in a solo act. I learned this artful dance long before the Germans arrived: pretend to look into a store window to watch the reflections behind you; sneeze into a handkerchief or stoop to pick something up to hide your face from a passerby; hold up a newspaper with pin holes punched through and it looks like you’re reading, not spying. A shard of broken mirror can save your life, help you see around a corner, behind you, signal your accomplice, reflect a spot on your enemy, slice a throat.

  The roundups and searches and deportations to the ghetto or to Elsewhere are so commonplace by now, I don’t think anyone even takes the time to watch, shake t
heir heads, and mutter “How horrible. How horrible.” They may as well have issued horse blinders, the way they—we—turn our heads and look straight ahead. If I don’t see it, maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe I won’t remember it.

  “Thought you’d like to see this,” I say, plopping a newspaper down in front of Mrs. Praska as she sits with her brood around the kitchen table.

  “You know I can’t read German. I don’t suppose it says the Krauts have changed their minds and are leaving Poland,” she says, gently bouncing Pawel on her knee.

  “Well, not exactly. Here, let me read it to you. ‘Mysterious ailment claims lives of six patrolmen.’” I catch her eye.

  “Oh, dear,” she mocks. “Do read on.”

  “‘Fourteen others seriously ill.’”

  She puts her hand to her mouth and shakes her head. “What a world.”

  “Wait. It gets better. ‘Rare Jewish disease suspected.’” I let that sink in.

  “How horrible,” she says, her smile widening. “I certainly hope they find a cure.”

  Mrs. Praska and I gloat. She brings out a bottle of wine she’s been saving for a special occasion and allows each of her children a sip. We have killed six Germans. We drink a toast to those Mrs. Praska has avenged—her husband, his foreman, and her four neighbors, the founders of our feast of revenge. We drink a toast to those I have avenged—half the Jews I saw shot at the Crystal Café.

  When I get home I’ll mark off six more hash marks on my wall.

  Seven down. Five to go.

  DECEMBER, 1940

  I.

  I stop cold, halfway up the fourth-floor staircase to my apartment, remembering I have to use all five senses to survive. Feel the atmosphere, smell the enemy, see around corners, hear thoughts, taste danger. Then intuition kicks in. I look down the hall of the fourth floor and inhale. I smell trouble. Cigarette smoke. I glimpse a black uniform in my room. I can hear him lifting things, looking in drawers. God, what have I left out? Nothing. I’d never leave anything out in plain sight. Not in this hole or any other. Everything is well hidden. Except … oh God, the piss pot! Did I remember to empty it this morning?

  Okay, Arab, what will it be? Fight or flight? I’ve gotten up here undetected. Can I get back down? No, too late, I’m here. I slowly set down my pack and pull out the Luger.

  “You there!” a voice calls through my doorway.

  I raise the gun and aim it toward his face. The click of the safety is deafening. His hands spring up as he slowly backs further into the room.

  I follow him, keeping my gun high and steady. With a start, I recognize him—Captain Wilhelm Schneider, the very same who ordered the execution of those twelve Jews. The man who shot the woman because I tore her armband off. So, how does a man like that react when a gun is pointed between his eyes? What does he say? What does he do?

  He does nothing. He stands frozen; he doesn’t blink. He doesn’t even breathe. The smoke from the cigarette between his fingers wafts up.

  “What did you say, Herr Hauptsturmführer?” the other soldier asks from the adjacent room.

  Now I have two. Wilhelm Schneider and Fritz Von Segen.

  I point my gun at Fritz. He raises his hands.

  I glance around the room and see they’ve rifled through everything.

  “Well, well. The information was correct. It is your little cigarette seller, Fritz.” Schneider says.

  Fritz looks at me, knowing full well I understand German. “Ja, ja,” he says.

  “Well then, this is your problem, Von Segen. Do something. These people can be bought off. Work a deal,” Schneider says, never taking his eyes off the tip of my gun.

  “I’m afraid you’ve been discovered, Arab,” Fritz says in Polish. “This could get very ugly.”

  I turn to the captain. “Open the window.” My German is quite succinct. He hesitates. I step closer and put the gun to his chest. “Jetzt!” He tosses down his cigarette and lifts the window up. I tell him to climb onto the sill.

  “Arab,” Fritz says, seeing my plan. “Arab, don’t—”

  The captain looks first at Fritz, then at me. Horror and disbelief cover his face. “You miserable Polish pig, you are dead!”

  “Probably, but you first. Jump!”

  He stands frozen in the frame of the window. He looks at Fritz as though he’s supposed to do something. I train my gun closer and pull up the breech block.

  “Bitte, bitte,” he pleads. Then, “Fritz, for God’s sake!”

  “Jump!” I shove my gun into his gut. It’s enough to put him off balance, and he falls out. I hear the thump as he lands on the snow-covered alley below.

  I look out the window. Down at the crumpled body of the Nazi officer.

  “Why didn’t you just shoot him?” Fritz asks. “Too messy?” He nods to the Luger in my hand. “You could have shot us both and still have enough for a few more. It seems to be your sport of choice this season.”

  “I had to do it,” I mumble. Then I look hard at Fritz. I turn the Luger on him. “How did you know to look for me here?”

  “Put the gun down.” He shakes a cigarette out of a pack and offers it to me.

  “How did you know?”

  He pulls up a chair. “There are snipers and snitches everywhere.”

  “Sniper,” I whisper.

  “Schneider pays the snitch, then collects the German bounty himself. Simple commerce. Everyone gets a little something.”

  “Except the Jew.”

  “Except the Jew,” he repeats.

  I put the Luger on the table next to all my stashed belongings—evidence of my trades.

  “Don’t worry, Arab. I had no idea this was your hideout.”

  “So, what will your report say?”

  “What report? We aren’t even on duty. He ordered me to come with him.”

  “No one knows you’re here?”

  “No. But there’ll be an investigation, once they find his body. Are you going to kill someone every time we meet? Because, if so, we need to set some ground rules.”

  “Fritz, that soldier at the stables heard everything you said! We’d both have bullets through our heads! This is war, you know. We are enemies. That’s what enemies do—they kill each other!”

  “I know,” he says with wistful sigh. “That private at the stable would have turned in his own brother if it meant a promotion. We’re all enemies.”

  “How did you explain it? That man at the stables?”

  “I didn’t. I just walked back to the barracks and let someone else find him.”

  “Then all’s well that ends well,” I say.

  “No, it’s not. I hate to be …” He seems to search for the word. “… indebted to the enemy. Makes for a very complicated war.” He goes to the window and looks down at Schneider’s body.

  “And I’ve just complicated it even more,” I say.

  “Schneider deserved it. I hated him for his eins, zwei, drei method of execution. What he forced us to become. He was the worst of us.” His face has lost its healthy ruddiness, I notice. Just like all of us in Warsaw. We are all becoming shades of gray. “Schneider was a killing machine. The Nazi ideal.”

  “He’s more ideal to me now.” I look down at my hands and pick at a scab. “Funny. When I first met you, I thought you were the Nazi ideal.” He gives me a curious look. I wonder if he’s insulted or flattered.

  I stand up. “Come on, follow me out of here.”

  I lead him downstairs and see him safely to the delivery entrance. He pauses at the door. “It’s a clean slate now, Arab. From now on, it’s a new war. It has to be. Things are changing. It’s a new war.”

  He smiles weakly, wraps his black muffler about his face, and trots off toward the street.

  I go back upstairs, gather up my things. I can’t stay here any longer. Not with “snipers and snitches” out there. Fritz’s parting words stick in my head as I pack. “Great. A new war,” I mumble. “I was just getting used to the old one.”

  I ma
ke an X in honor of Captain Wilhelm Schneider on my wall. I pause to look at the hash marks. With the tip of my knife, I count the eight X’s, wondering if a stab of guilt will ever pierce me over the Germans—the enemies—I’ve killed. No, guilt needs to be reserved for those who count. My only guilt is over Ruthie.

  I take one last look at the body of the captain, four stories down in the alley. Seeing the frozen splatters of blood, watching a lowlife creep up, inspect the body, kick it, rummage through the pockets, then yank off those prized black leather boots, spit on the body, and run off is … it’s … can I say it? It’s joyful. Joy to the world! As the Christians sing.

  No guilt. Joy.

  What bothers me, really bothers me, is … deep down inside, when I’m this weary and sins are easy to confess … I’m liking this. They drum in your head that revenge belongs to God. But it’s oh so sweet when it’s all mine.

  I know what I’ve been, but oh God, look at what I’m becoming.

  II.

  “You know, Arab, we can’t take on any more,” Lizard says. He points the tip of his knife to our gang of boys. There’s eight of us, altogether. “It was easier in summer when there was more food to swipe, more people out and about. But this snow, this weather. Eight’s the limit. I know you’re hurting about losing Ruth. We’ve all lost people we love, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to go picking up every stray we find.”

  He goes back to slicing the loaf of bread into eight equal parts. “Come on, get some bread,” he calls out to the boys, who appear in an instant from every corner of our new, larger hideout. This old house is perfect since it’s closer to our “distribution center” in Three Crosses Square.

  “I mean, Stefan and Lorenz are great little brats,” Lizard goes on, crumbs from his crust of bread falling out of his mouth.

  “They speak Hebrew and Yiddish,” I say. “That’s helpful. Besides, what was I going to do? And look how they seem to fit right in. When have you seen a more budding pickpocket than that Stefan?”