Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  Pietrik helped me wash the few paintbrushes Matka had not buried. She’d placed them under a floorboard so she could still paint at night. They were not just any brushes, but Kolinsky sable-hair watercolor brushes, and washing them was a task of honor Matka trusted me with. She inherited those Stradivariuses of the brush world from her mother, and each was worth a fortune. They came tucked in a red-flannel roll, each one with its own narrow sleeve to live in, each made of Russian weasel hair, from the male weasels only, three times more precious per pound than gold.

  “I have nothing for you, Kasia,” Pietrik said. “Things are quiet now.”

  For a boy with such large hands, he was gentle with the brushes. He dipped one in the soapsuds and ran his fingers gently over the nickel ferrule and down the sable tip.

  “If I spend another day in this house, I’ll go mad.”

  Pietrik set his brush next to mine on the dishrag. “You know the rules. You’re not old enough. Read a book.”

  “I’m capable of more—”

  “No, Kasia.”

  “Nothing feels better than fighting them, Pietrik. Send me anywhere. It doesn’t have to be big.”

  “If you were ever caught, being a beautiful young girl is no defense against them. They’ll shoot a pretty one as soon as any other.”

  Beautiful? Me? Pretty?

  “If you don’t assign me, I’ll go work for the Free Press. I heard they need runners.”

  “You are safer with me.”

  “There you go.”

  Finally, progress!

  Pietrik turned to me, serious.

  “Well, there is one thing. A complicated assignment, so you have to listen.”

  “In the ghetto?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  Right away I was afraid but didn’t dare show it. One frightened look, and that would be the end of my assignments.

  “You need to go to Z’s Pharmacy.” He paused. “No, on second thought, you’re not doing this.”

  “Who is better? I used to have chocolate ice cream at Zaufanym’s with Nadia. Mr. Z goes to our church.”

  Though it was in the ghetto, there was no rule against Christians buying at Z’s. All sorts of people shopped there, even the SS, since the pharmacist and owner, known as Mr. Z to most, was practically a doctor and somehow stocked every remedy, even with the war on.

  “Can you be there at exactly two tomorrow?”

  “Have I ever been late?”

  “The patrol shift changes then, so you’ll have exactly five minutes when there will be no guards who will stop you. Avoid the blackshirts as best you can. They’ve added patrols.”

  “Got it,” I said with a smile, though all the blood in my body seemed to stop running. I had the feeling in my stomach that said, “Think twice about this,” but I shooed it away.

  “Enter, and go straight to the door at the back of the shop,” Pietrik said.

  “To the basement?”

  “Yes. Take the stairs down.” Pietrik took my hand and looked into my eyes. “Once you make contact, stay five minutes only. You’ll be accepting an important package, Kasia. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. Doing my best to keep a calm voice, I asked, “Might anything explode?”

  “No, but speak to no one as you leave. Come back to your regular shift at the theater. Your cover story is you are buying aspirin.”

  Pietrik was so serious as he gave me my instructions. A cover story. It was a real mission, and though my hands shook, I would execute it perfectly. Five minutes was a world of time just to pick up some things.

  —

  I BARELY SLEPT THAT NIGHT, a running loop of all that could go wrong playing in my head. The ghetto. Just being in the wrong place could get one arrested. Every day one heard of neighbors and friends taken to Gestapo headquarters, “Under the Clock,” the innocent-looking office building with cells in the basement, or worse, to Lublin Castle, where prisoners were shot in the courtyard.

  I set out for Z’s Pharmacy the next afternoon with shaky legs. It was a gray day, the wind pushing heavy clouds about the sky. No need to be afraid. That was what got you caught. Nazis could smell the fear.

  I was halfway to Grodzka Gate, the official entrance to the ghetto, when I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. It was Matka coming out of Deutsche Haus, the restaurant where every German in town ate. The one with the extra big FÜR POLEN VERBOTEN! sign on the door. The SS men especially loved the place, since they knew the food was safe to eat and practically free, and they knew they didn’t have to eat sitting next to any Polish person. Rumor was the place was full of cigarette smoke and the portions were so large much went uneaten, but no one I knew had been inside, or so I thought. At least not to live to tell of it, for this was the rule. No Poles allowed. Just the week before, our greengrocer had been caught in the kitchen, there to deliver potatoes, and was arrested. He never came back.

  These arrests were becoming common events. That morning I’d read in Zuzanna’s underground newspaper that in just three months of war, fifty thousand Polish citizens had been rounded up and murdered, about seven thousand of them Jews. Most were town leaders—lawyers, professors, and religious leaders, anyone who broke rules or opposed the occupying forces. The Nazis saw the Catholic Church as a dangerous enemy, and there was a long list of priests arrested. Citizens were often wrongly accused of crimes and sent away or executed in public squares, the shots waking us at night.

  So once I saw Matka come out of Deutsche Haus clutching a brown package no bigger than a small loaf of bread at her chest, I had to know what she was doing there. It was lunchtime, and people packed the sidewalks, heads down against the wind. She walked in the opposite direction from me, toward home.

  I pushed through the crowd to reach her. “Matka!” I called.

  Matka turned and, once she saw me, looked like the icy hand of a spirit had touched her. “Kasia. You’re not at the theater? I’m bringing your sandwich later.”

  “I took late shift today.” I had worked as ticket girl at the movie theater near our flat since Zuzanna bequeathed the job to me.

  We sidestepped a water-ration line that wound down the block.

  “You were at Deutsche Haus? No Poles are allowed in there.”

  “They consider me German.”

  I felt a little sick just thinking about her in that place. It was true about the cigarettes! I could smell them on her.

  “How could you?”

  “Don’t be hysterical, Kasia. I was just dropping—”

  We both stepped off the sidewalk and let a German couple promenade by us, per regulations.

  “Dropping what?”

  She clenched the paper bag tighter and squeezed out a fragrant scent—dark and exotic—of palm trees and sunburned Brazil. Coffee.

  “You can tell me, Matka.” I breathed deep to dispel the panic. “Is that a new eau de toilette?”

  She stepped back up onto the sidewalk and picked up her pace. “Leave it alone, Kasia.”

  I’d seen the new silk stockings in her bottom drawer, puddled under folded shirts, limp as shedded snakeskins. The realization wound around me. “You can’t just ignore it. You must go to confession.”

  She stopped again and drew me close, voice low.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have had coffee with an SS man? Lennart is—”

  I laughed. “Lennart? The name Lennart means brave, Matka. Lennart the Brave killed our Psina with a shovel.”

  The sun broke through the clouds, and the barest smudge of black in the hollow of her cheek caught the light, iridescent. Charcoal.

  “You’ve been sketching them.” Deep breath in…

  She pulled me to her. “Quiet, Kasia. They like my work, and it gets me close—”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “You think I like it? It’s all for Papa. They would have shot him, Kasia.”

  “If I had a husband like Papa I’d rather die than be unfaithful to him.”

  She walked on, pushing
through the crowd, and I followed, knocked about by people rushing in every direction.

  “How could you understand?” she said.

  I pulled at her jacket sleeve.

  She brushed my hand away.

  “They call it race defilement, Matka. A Pole and a German. Together.”

  She spun to face me.

  “Would you be quiet? What is wrong with you?” Her breath smelled of coffee and pear chrusciki.

  I was beyond crying. How could she be so reckless?

  “They’ll take us all. Papa too.”

  “Get to work,” she said with a cross look. She rushed away across the street and narrowly missed being hit by a couple in a fancy open car, who honked and yelled something in German. She made it to the curb and turned. Feeling badly she’d been cross with me?

  “I’ll bring your sandwich to the theater,” she called to me, one hand next to her mouth. “I’ll drop it off early!”

  When I didn’t answer, she clutched her coffee to her chest and walked along, swallowed up by the crowd.

  I stood there trembling. Whom could I tell? Not Papa. He would kill Lennart the Brave, and we’d all be shot. I glanced back to Deutsche Haus and saw Lennart walk down the steps with three others, digging a toothpick in between his teeth. How could Matka meet with such a man?

  I brought my thoughts back to the mission. What was our Girl Guide motto? “Be aware!” It was important to stay focused so I could execute Pietrik’s mission without a hitch. I would tell Zuzanna later. She would help Matka regain her senses.

  I continued on toward the ghetto, passed through Grodzka Gate, and made it down to Zaufanym’s Pharmacy in record time. That was easy enough. I’d been to Z’s Pharmacy millions of times with Nadia, but this time as I walked down the cobblestone road, I couldn’t shake the impression I was descending into Dante’s Inferno.

  Once, Old Town had been the most active shopping district in Lublin; it was always a fun day with Nadia going to see the shops and feast on Hanukkah doughnuts, warm and sprinkled with powdered sugar, the wagons on the street piled high with turnips and potatoes. Groups of children played in the streets, and black-hatted shopkeepers in their bell-sleeved gabardines stood out front and talked to customers, their doors flung wide to display their wares: Shoes and slippers. Rakes and pitchforks. Cages of squawking hens and ducks.

  Back then, at the massive Chewra Nosim Synagogue on Lubartowska Street, men with white-and-black prayer shawls over their shoulders came and went. We would see many leaving for home from the men’s bathhouse, the steamy air felt all the way down the street.

  But since the Germans came, crossing into the ghetto, one felt a terrible, sad mood. Lublin Castle, which loomed over the area, had been requisitioned by the Nazis as their main prison, and it peered into the twisting cobblestone streets below, streets no longer full of shoppers and children playing. The Nazis had taken most of the younger men away for a construction project, clearing land to build what they said was a new labor camp called Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin, south of the city. As a result, many of the shops were shuttered, and the few peddlers who opened their doors offered little. SS men patrolled here and there and the teenagers of working age who hadn’t been marched off to work for the Nazis stood in groups with a worried air. I saw women crowded around a tray of meat scraps on the ground, and a young boy was selling white armbands he kept on his arm, each stenciled with a Star of David. The synagogue was boarded up, signs in German nailed to the doors, and the baths stood quiet, no longer breathing steam into the air.

  I was relieved to make it to the pharmacy. It was one of the few places open, and it was lively there that afternoon. Word was Mr. Z bribed every Nazi he could to stay in business, since he was the only non-Jewish shop owner in the ghetto.

  Through the plate-glass window at the front of the shop, I spied tables of men in black hats, busy about their chess games. Mr. Z stood at the wood counter that ran the length of the pharmacy, assisting a couple with a remedy.

  I turned the smooth crystal knob. The door creaked as it opened, and a few of the men looked up from their games. They followed me with their eyes as I entered, some with quizzical looks. Though I knew Mr. Zaufanym a little from church, he did not acknowledge me when I walked in. As I skirted the tables, I caught bits of conversations, most in Yiddish, a few in Polish. Once I made it to the door along the rear wall of the place, I took the doorknob in my hand and turned it, but it would not budge. Was it locked? I tried it again, my palm slippery on the metal. Still no luck. Should I abandon the mission?

  I swiveled to face Mr. Z. He excused himself and started toward me.

  Just then, a Nazi brownshirt, one of Hitler’s everyday enforcers, gun strap across his chest, cupped two hands to the front window and peered inside. He was looking at me! Even some of the men at the tables noticed and sat up straighter, watching it all. I repeated this oath in my head: I shall serve with the Gray Ranks, safeguard the secrets of the organization, obey orders, and not hesitate to sacrifice my life.

  The “sacrifice my life” part was becoming all too real.

  Mr. Z came to me and led me back to the counter. I barely made it there, my legs wobbled so.

  “You need aspirin?” he said.

  “Yes. I have a terrible headache.”

  Once the brownshirt moved along, Mr. Z took me to the door. He jiggled the knob and let me through in a most natural way.

  I made it to the bottom of the steps, rapped my knuckles on the wood door, and stood beneath the bare lightbulb. A chill ran through me. Maybe I would tell Pietrik this was my last mission.

  “Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.

  “Iwona,” I said.

  The door opened.

  “They send me a child?” the woman said from the shadows. I entered, and she closed the door behind me.

  A child? I was eighteen after all and often told I looked older.

  “I’m here for the aspirin. I only have five minutes.”

  The woman stared at me for a long moment, as one looks at the last piece of fish at the market, and then walked to an adjacent room. I stepped farther into the basement. It was twice the size of our apartment and black paper covered the windows, so it was dark. The smell of mildew and dirty socks down there was strong, but it was well furnished, with a long sofa, a kitchen table and chairs with a bright blue-and-red lamp hung above, and a sink on the far wall. Long silver drips plopped from the sink faucet, and the thuds of footsteps and chairs scraping the floor came from above. Where was the woman?

  She came back shortly with a thick package. I tucked it in my rucksack and peeped at my watch. I was finished in less than one minute even with Mrs. Slowpoke taking such a long time. That’s when I noticed the girl on the sofa. She sat in shadow, her head bowed.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “None of your affair. You should go.”

  I stepped closer.

  “Have you hurt her?”

  “Of course not. Anna is going to live with a Catholic family. Her parents think she will be safer there.”

  “Dressed in such a way?” The girl wore a dark coat over a hand-knit sweater, black boots, and stockings, and her hair was tucked up under a black-and-red plaid scarf tied like a turban, puffed up on top. I was an expert on how Catholic girls dressed, of course, being one myself and, thanks to Matka, the first at mass every Sunday. That girl wouldn’t get far in those clothes.

  “No Catholic girl would dress like that,” I said.

  I turned to go.

  “Would you take a moment and tell her what to wear?” the woman said.

  “I don’t know—” I began. This woman was now nice to me when she needed something? I had problems of my own: carrying secret packages through the streets.

  “It would mean a lot to her,” said the woman. “She’s all alone.”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  I stepped closer to the girl and sat on the sofa beside her.

  “I’m Kasi
a.” I put my hand over hers, which was even colder than mine. “Anna, what a beautiful name. Did you know it means ‘favored by God’?”

  “Hannah is my real name,” she said without even a look at me.

  “If you are going to live with a Catholic family, first of all, you must give up your scarf.”

  Hannah hesitated and looked at me with stormy eyes. It was all I could do not to stomp back up the stairs and leave her.

  Slowly, she pulled off the scarf, and her dark hair dropped down around her shoulders.

  “Good. Now, it’s best not to wear black stockings or boots. Here, switch with me.”

  The girl did not move.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  “Hannah—”

  “Three minutes left,” said the woman, standing at the door.

  “You need to hurry,” I said.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Hannah said.

  I stood and brushed my skirt. “Fine then. I’m leaving.”

  “My boyfriend says I am dead to him for doing this.”

  I sat back down. Boyfriends could be such trouble!

  “You can’t base everything on a boy.”

  “He hates me anyway, now. Says I am abandoning my parents.”

  “Your parents want this, and your boyfriend will see it’s best.”

  The woman stepped toward us. “Finish up, now.”

  “They are only taking away the men,” Hannah said. “Maybe I am better off staying home—”

  “It’s better to live with a new family than be sent off to work somewhere. Go through with the plan, and you can get food to them—”

  “Impossible.”

  “People do it all the time. For now, you must cheer up. No sad eyes. The SS look for that.”

  She wiped her face and sat up straighter. A start! She was a pretty girl with a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  “Take my shoes. Quickly now.”

  “Two minutes,” the woman said from the door.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Hannah said.

  “You must. Your boots are a dead giveaway. Switch with me.”

  What if I was stopped? I had authentic papers, and Papa would help me no matter what. Hannah pulled down her dark hose and traded them for my white anklets. I took her boots—just a bit smaller than my shoes.