Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  I brushed off her touch. “I don’t believe it—she killed people, did this to me.” I pulled back my skirt.

  Caroline stepped closer. “I know, Kasia. We can fight it.”

  I laughed. “Fight them? How exactly would this happen?”

  “First, we need someone to make a positive ID.”

  “And that someone would be…”

  “Only if you’re comfortable.”

  The sun came up over the trees, warm on my shoulders. “Comfortable? No, I’m not comfortable with that.” I threw the trowel in the bucket, where it landed with a clatter. “How can you even suggest I visit Herta Oberheuser?” All at once, the sun seemed too hot.

  “We need a photograph or an official receipt from her office. Otherwise, it’s simply hearsay.”

  “Snap a picture of Herta Oberheuser? You’re kidding.”

  “I’ll provide transit papers and money.”

  Was she really asking me to go see Herta? I conjured up her face. The smug look. The bored expression. My stomach contracted. Was I going to be sick there on the perfect grass?

  “I’m sorry. You’ve been very kind to us, but no thank you.” I started along the gravel path toward the house.

  Caroline followed. “Sometimes we must sacrifice for the greater good.”

  I stopped and turned.

  “We?” So Zuzanna would stay here safe while I alone went to find Herta?

  “Please just consider it, dear.”

  “But—”

  “Take your time. We’ll go make a fresh pot of coffee.”

  The pig woke with a start, struggled to her feet, and followed as we walked to the house, our steps crunching in the gravel.

  It felt good to be needed by Caroline, but she was asking the impossible. To go see Dr. Oberheuser? Would I have to talk to her? Would she recognize me? Remember Matka?

  By the time we made it to the house, I realized Caroline was right about the roses. Once the sun was overhead, the fragrance was gone.

  1959

  Back in Lublin, things had changed so much. I’d been gone less than nine months, but it felt like ten years. Pietrik had moved us to our own apartment at the Lubgal Ladies Garment Factory where he worked, just outside of the city. The whole place was no bigger than Caroline’s kitchen in Connecticut, but it was ours, just the three of us. No Papa. No Marthe. Zuzanna was with Serge in Connecticut. Two bedrooms all for us.

  The kitchen was compact, barely big enough to turn around in. On my day off from the hospital, I sewed blue curtains Matka would have loved, gingham, with birds along the hems, and I arranged the two little bottles of vodka the stewardess from my flight home had given me along the kitchen windowsill.

  Pietrik seemed happy to have me home. Had he missed me? He would not say, and I was not about to ask, but he was all smiles when he met me at the airport, a single pink rose in hand. I was all smiles as well with my new tooth. Perhaps things would be better between us? Why did I feel so shy with him, my husband? I could walk so much better, too. The pain pills the Mount Sinai doctor gave me to ease the little discomfort I still had were running out, so I was irritable at times. But I was eager to make things right again, to get back to how it was before the war.

  —

  ONE LATE AFTERNOON that fall I went to the postal center to see Papa. He handed me a package through the bars of the pickup window.

  “I got to this before the censors did,” he whispered.

  The package was no bigger than a shoe box and wrapped in brown paper.

  “Be careful about what your friends mail you.”

  The return address was C. Ferriday, 31 East 50th St., New York, NY, U.S.A. Caroline had been smart not to send it from the consulate. It would have been opened for certain. But any communication from the West was suspect and noted on one’s record.

  “And a letter from Zuzanna,” Papa said.

  He looked curious, but I just tucked both under my coat.

  I hurried home to our apartment and climbed the three flights of stairs, finally able to walk like a normal person. Halina had pinned a new poster on our door: DISTRICT 10 ART EXHIBITION: POLAND IN POSTERS. It was graphic and stark, a new look for her. How had I forgotten the art show was that night? Since I’d left, Halina had attacked art with new vigor. I tried not to think about this.

  I set the brown paper package on the kitchen table and stared at it. I knew what was inside.

  I heard a pebble hit the kitchen window and went to see who’d thrown it. Neighborhood boys, no doubt. I pulled up the window sash, ready to scold, and saw Pietrik standing below.

  “It is a beautiful day!” he said. “Come out and play.”

  “You will break the window with those stones,” I said, resting my weight on my forearms along the windowsill. He was still so handsome, like a boy. A little thicker around the middle, but everywhere we went women still glanced at him when they thought I wasn’t looking.

  “Are you going to make me come up there and get you?” he said with a smile, hands on his hips.

  I closed the window, and he was up the stairs in seconds. He arrived in the apartment winded, his cheeks flushed. He came to me and tried to kiss me, but I turned away.

  “Remember me, your husband?” he said.

  “I think I have the flu. My muscles ache. I can’t stop sweating.”

  “Still?” said Pietrik. “Maybe because you’re not taking those pills.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Pietrik placed his hand on the package. “What is this?”

  “From Caroline,” I said.

  “Well?” Pietrik tossed the box to me. “Open it.”

  I caught it. “Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for, Kasia?”

  “I know what’s in it. She wants me to go up to a town in Germany called Stocksee. To identify…”

  “Who?”

  I placed the box back on the table. “Herta Oberheuser.”

  “She’s out?” Pietrik said.

  “They think she might have a medical practice up there. And they need an eyewitness identification from someone who knows what she looks like.”

  “Still a doctor? Are you going?”

  I said nothing.

  “You’d need special papers, Kasia. And even that doesn’t guarantee they let you through.”

  “That’s what is in the package,” I said.

  “And it isn’t cheap. The gas alone—”

  “That’s in there too,” I said. “Knowing Caroline, both zlotys and marks.”

  Pietrik took a step closer. “We have to go, Kasia. Finally we can do something to get back at them. I’ll come with you. Just getting across the border is dicey as hell. Do you know how many people have died crossing it?”

  “Illegally. People do it legally every day.”

  “It’s harder now. Plus the area’s full of booby traps and minefields. Fifty thousand GDR guards patrol it, all top marksmen. When in doubt, they shoot first.”

  Pietrik took up my hands in his.

  “I’ll come with you. Halina can stay with your parents.”

  “I’m done with all that, Pietrik. The underground. Ravensbrück. I need to move on.”

  “That’s the problem—you can’t move on. Have you even said two words to your daughter since you’ve been home?”

  “She’s been busy with art class—”

  “She missed you when you were gone. Made a calendar and X’d off the days till you came home.”

  “I’m working two shifts now,” I said.

  Pietrik took hold of my shoulders. “Can you make room for her?”

  “She’s always over at Marthe’s…”

  He walked to the chair where he’d thrown his jacket and reached for it.

  “It’s always someone else, Kasia.” Pietrik headed for the door. “You never learn, do you?”

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To our daughter’s art show.”

  I stepped toward him. How could
he just leave? “What about dinner?”

  “I’ll eat elsewhere.” He stopped at the doorway. “And give serious thought to going up to Stocksee with me. It isn’t every day you get a chance to do something like this, Kasia.”

  I turned away and heard the door close, my stomach ready to erupt. I watched him through the window as he walked off, hands in his pockets. Halina met him in the street, hauling a black portfolio pregnant with artwork. They embraced and went their separate ways, Halina headed up to the apartment. When she reached our place, I was still nursing a grudge.

  “You look awful,” Halina said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you coming to my art show tonight? I was kind of hoping you would.”

  Halina looked more like an artist every day, that day dressed in one of Pietrik’s old shirts, splattered with paint. She wore her blond hair piled on top of her head as my mother used to. It was hard to look at her, almost the exact image of Matka.

  I tucked Caroline’s package under the table. “I have work to do.”

  “You’ve never been to one of my shows, Matka. A teacher wants to buy my poster.”

  I looked out the window. “Better run and catch Father. He’ll buy you dinner.”

  “They are serving cheese at the show,” Halina said.

  “And vodka, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  If the modern art wasn’t modern enough, it would become so after a paper cup of two-hundred-proof alcohol.

  “Run along and find Father,” I said.

  Halina left without a goodbye. I went to the window and watched her once she made it to the street below. She looked so small. Would she turn and wave? No. At least Halina connected with one parent.

  I opened Zuzanna’s letter, a short one and to the point, the way she always handled things when the news was bad. She would not be returning. She had extended her visa again and hinted a wedding was in the works. There was one bright note, though. The doctors at Mount Sinai agreed that her cancer was still in remission.

  I drank to that, draining one of my airplane vodkas.

  There was only hot cereal in the cupboard, so I made a bowl and poured a glass of Pietrik’s vodka. For vodka made in someone’s basement, it traveled down the throat easily. As Papa used to say, you could taste the potatoes. It was more flavorful than the airplane vodka, and it stayed down as long as I didn’t imagine the contents of my stomach, gray hot cereal and vodka, sloshing around.

  No wonder Pietrik drank it on occasion. It made my whole body tingle and warmed arms and fingers, head and ears. Even my brain was numb by the time I slipped into my American dress. I smiled at the mirror. With my tooth repaired, I could look at myself again. Why shouldn’t I go and enjoy my daughter’s big night? The nylon stockings covered the few scars I had left. Even my husband might be happy to see me.

  It was a short walk to Halina’s school. I stepped into the gymnasium and found it filled with bright spotlights trained on posters hung on the cinder-block walls. People milled about admiring the students’ artwork. Marthe and Papa stood at the opposite end of the room talking to an arty-looking couple. A card table across the room held bottles of vodka and a paper plate of cheese cubes.

  “You came, Matka,” Halina said with a smile. “First time ever. Come, let me show you everything.”

  Pietrik stood at the other end of the room, leaning with his hand on the wall, in deep conversation with a woman in a red hat.

  “Perhaps some cheese first,” I said, my breath suddenly short.

  We went to the refreshment table, and I took some cheese cubes and a paper cup of vodka.

  “Since when do you drink vodka?” Halina asked.

  “It’s important to try new things,” I said.

  I tasted it, then tipped my head back and drank it in one shot. It was smoother and had a more refined taste than ours at home. I was becoming a vodka aficionado.

  “Let me show you my self-portrait,” Halina said. She took my hand in hers, and my eyes stung with tears. When was the last time she had taken my hand?

  Halina’s work was grouped along one wall, full of bright color. Graphic and strong. A portrait of a woman, Marthe no doubt, cooking, painted as if through a kaleidoscope. Next, a fish with an automobile body full of gears and machine parts.

  “Do you like the one in the kitchen?” Halina asked.

  “The one of Marthe? What pretty colors.”

  “That isn’t Marthe. It’s you,” she said. “I did it in blue. Your favorite.”

  More tears came to my eyes, and the colors swirled like paint in a water jar.

  “Me?” I said. “How nice.”

  “I have been waiting to show you the best one. Teacher wants to buy it, but I may keep it.”

  I tried to dry my eyes with my napkin as Halina brought me farther down the wall to her self-portrait. Once I stood there in front of that canvas, it was as if it reached out and bit me, it was so alive.

  “Well?” Halina said.

  It was the largest painting in the room, a woman’s full face, with golden hair, and a wreath of thorns wrapped around her head.

  It was my mother.

  I became warm all over, and my head spun. “I need to sit down.”

  “You don’t like it,” Halina said. She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I just need to sit.”

  I sat on a folding chair and watched Pietrik laugh with his lady friend while Halina went to fetch me another vodka. There was a reason I didn’t go out much.

  Halina grabbed Pietrik’s hand and brought him over.

  “Here, Matka,” Halina said, handing me a cup of vodka.

  “What got you to come here?” asked Pietrik with a smile. “Wild horses?”

  “Certainly not you,” I said.

  Pietrik’s smile faded. “Not here, Kasia.”

  “You’re enjoying the show,” I said with a jerk of my chin in the red hat’s direction. My vision was blurry, my tongue loosened by the spirits.

  “You’ve been drinking?” Pietrik said.

  “Only you are allowed to drink,” I said, taking a sip from the paper cup. I felt a new clarity of thought.

  Pietrik reached for the cup. “I’m taking you home.”

  I snatched the cup back and stood just as Marthe and Papa came by, Halina’s art teacher in tow.

  “You are Halina’s mother?” said the teacher, a pretty, dark-haired woman, who wore round, black glasses and a violet caftan. The teacher put one arm, the sleeve like a batwing, over Halina’s shoulder.

  “Halina and I have long talks,” said the teacher. “She speaks highly of you.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “She admits she has a mother?”

  The group laughed a little too hard. It was not that funny.

  “Oh, yes, teens,” said the teacher. “Have you seen Halina’s self-portrait? My colleague at the university says it’s his favorite piece here.”

  “It’s my mother,” I said.

  “Pardon?” said the teacher.

  Marthe and Papa exchanged looks. The room spun like a fun house.

  “Halina painted it of herself, Kasia,” Marthe said.

  Pietrik took my arm.

  “If you knew my mother, you wouldn’t be sleeping in her bed today,” I said.

  “We’re going home,” said Pietrik.

  I pulled away from his tight fingers. “Halina may not have told you in one of those long talks, but I got my mother killed by working in the underground. After all she did for me.”

  I brought the paper cup to my lips, and it collapsed in my hand, splashing vodka down my dress front.

  “Pietrik, we’ll take Halina home to our house,” Marthe said.

  “Yes, my mother was an artist just like Halina here, but she drew portraits for bad people, Nazis in fact, if you must know.” I felt my face wet with tears. “What happened to her? Only God knows, Mrs. Art Teacher, because she never said goodbye, but take it from me, the woman in that post
er is my mother.”

  All I remember after that is Pietrik holding me up on the way home, us stopping for me to be sick in an alleyway and to wipe formerly hot cereal off my American dress.

  —

  I WOKE BEFORE DAWN the next morning.

  “Water,” I called out, for a second thinking I was in the Revier at Ravensbrück.

  I sat up in Halina’s bed and saw that my dress had been exchanged for my nightshirt. Pietrik had changed me? The previous night bobbed to the surface, and my cheeks burned there in the dark. What a fool I’d made of myself. Even before rising, I knew I’d go to Stocksee.

  I walked past Pietrik’s room. He slept with one arm across his face, chest bare. Beautiful. What if I just crawled in with him? Why didn’t I have the courage to sleep with my own husband?

  As dawn broke outside our window, I gathered my overnight things and pulled open Caroline’s package, careful not to make a sound. In the small box I found my transit papers. German money. Polish money. A letter addressed to Germany’s largest newspaper detailing Herta Oberheuser’s war crimes at Ravensbrück and her early release, complete with German postage. Three maps, a list of approved gas stations at which to purchase fuel, and detailed travel instructions. A note apologizing for only being able to obtain one set of travel papers, and a whole package of Fig Newton cookies. I tossed the box in my suitcase and clicked the locks. Pietrik stirred in the next room.

  I froze for a second. Should I leave a note? I scribbled a quick goodbye on the paper from Caroline’s package and made my way down the stairs to the old turquoise car Papa loaned me now and then, the one Pietrik had kept alive for years. As Papa said, that car had more rust on it than paint, but it got us wherever we needed to go.

  At first, I fretted as I drove. What if it really was Herta? Would she hurt me? Would I hurt her? My head cleared a bit once I was under way, one of the few drivers on the road that early. I spread a map and the driving instructions out on the seat next to me, turned the radio volume up, cranked the window down, and breakfasted on a whole cellophane sleeve of Fig Newtons. The box said, NEW TWIN-PAK STAYS FRESHER! and they did taste better than ever, soft and moist cookie outside, sweet figgy middle. Eating these helped my mood very much. Perhaps this trip was a good idea after all.