Clara's War

by Clara Kramer

  And now, we had to go on without her, our lucky charm. We were still alive, whether we wanted to be or not. I now knew there was no such thing as a broken heart. It will go on beating to taunt you and mock you and tell you that even in grief it is indestructible and full of love.

  Every few hours Beck came down with another report. He told us that some neighbours down the street had sworn to the SS that they saw Mania run out of the house in the middle of the fire. Another had told Julia that he had seen Mania running to the nuns at the church just five blocks away. If Mania made it to the nuns…I prayed.

  Then Beck was taken into the SS and in his presence a Russian neighbour, old Stefaniuk, another drunk, who lived in the Britwitzes’ house, accused Beck of harbouring Jews. When the Russians came to Zolkiew, they brought with them workers, spies really, to work with the local businesses. Stefaniuk was our ‘spy’, but my father treated him well, like a friend, and here he was betraying us. Thank God, Beck’s Volksdeutscher friend, Mr Lang, a professor of Latin at the gymnasium, happened to be at the SS headquarters at the same time. Lang told the SS it was Stefaniuk himself, a Moskol, a hated Soviet sympathizer, who was harbouring Jews.

  Beck told us to stay. ‘We are all in God’s hands.’ How many times would he invoke this benediction? He was convinced the SS believed him when he told them that Stefaniuk was a ‘lying Russian dog’, and how could they believe their enemy when it was Beck, a loyal Volksdeutscher, who was telling the truth? Beck told the SS that the Russians, the Poles, the Volksdeutsche and the Ukrainians had been at each other’s throats for years. And he thanked God the Nazis were now here to bring order to the town. Beck would be damned if he wasn’t going to one day piss on this Russian’s grave.

  We waited and waited for the pounding on the door. But it didn’t come. The SS didn’t come for us that night.

  But the next day, they knocked on the door and took Julia in for questioning. God knows why they didn’t search the house as they had threatened. We sat in silence and horror as they took Julia away and still we did not say one word about Mania. Her fate was extraneous to our survival and therefore a luxury in the eyes of the others. We expected Beck to be panicked about his wife being questioned by the SS. We were worried about her being tortured and murdered because of us. Still Beck didn’t throw us out. He waited upstairs as we waited downstairs. The worse things seemed to us, the calmer he became. Again, he said, ‘It is out of our hands,’ meaning, of course, that it was in God’s hands.

  A few hours later, Julia walked in the door and reported that the SS told her that Mania had confessed she was a maid in the Beck house. Julia denied it, saying the German police, the Gestapo and the SS were all frequent visitors to the house and how could they possibly not notice a Jewish maid. She told them to ask Schmidt or Krueger if they wanted. They would vouch that the Becks harboured no Jews. The two policemen practically lived there. She was sent home and still the SS didn’t come. Where did the Becks get such courage to look the SS straight in the eye and lie with such conviction? Beck I could understand. But Julia was so timid and shy she could hardly smile in public, and if she did laugh or smile she covered her mouth, ashamed as she was of her teeth. This was the SS that could break the strongest man or woman if they had the slightest doubt in their story.

  After Julia came back, Beck brought a bottle and some glasses down into the bunker and told us what happened to Mania. He said he had gathered his information from different people: friends, enemies, partisans and traitors. He said he wished to hell that he didn’t have to tell us, but he did. He had to get it off his chest.

  This was the story he told us: ‘The entire street was on fire. The police were out in force pushing everyone back. Through the fire, I thought I saw Mania run up the street and disappear into the crowd. But I didn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe that she would leave us, leave you.’ Beck had to take another drink. His eyes were red-rimmed. This was so hard for him. We wanted to listen as much as Beck wanted to talk: not at all. But we knew we needed to hear what had happened to my beloved sister. Beck asked me if I knew two boys, Tilzer and Schitling. I went to a different school, all girls, but the boys were my age and I saw them most days, walking to and from school, playing football in the park or running the streets in a pack. I was shy and so were they. We would never even speak, but now and then we would have a silent nod. We weren’t friends, I couldn’t say that. But we all used to skate together on the river. Skating was the one sport that I loved. We would form long whips, and if I held Schitling’s hand in one of these whips, this was the closest I ever got to him. But he seemed sweet and was always polite to his elders.

  Beck continued: ‘Mania was walking quickly up the street to the church where some of the other Jewish girls had been taken in by the nuns. Tilzer told me they saw her and that Mania looked back and saw them. She didn’t start running, Tilzer said, because they smiled at her and she smiled back. The boys thought that she must have felt safe. The boys were poor as dirt and of course they knew there was a bounty on the capture of Jews. They didn’t say anything to each other. They just started chasing her. They said Mania was fast. She heard them running after her and they told me that when she looked back at them, she thought they might help her. But then she realized the two boys were after her. She ran like hell as far as the church steps when Tilzer tackled her. Tilzer was hoping that none of the nuns came out because they all knew him. Even I don’t understand why not one of the nuns came out of the church with all the commotion from the fire. Tilzer said Mania was only 10 metres from the convent door. She begged for her life, but then she followed him. She only asked that Tilzer tell her family her fate some day. When they came to the alcohol depot to pick up their bounty of five litres of vodka from me, they felt so guilty that they confessed everything, because they knew Julia had worked for Mania’s mother. They had no idea you were here. I wanted to kill them and cry for them at the same time.’

  My tears were coming now. Julia was questioned. They told her that they had caught a Jewish girl who had claimed to be cleaning house for the Becks. Julia looked right in their faces and called it an outrageous lie. She asked to see her accuser. Beck had a few more things to tell us. He had heard an SS buddy talking in a bar about a girl they had caught who said she was from Lvov. A maid! Mania had never given us away.

  Her last thoughts were to protect us at the cost of her own life. A 13-year-old girl, no more than 40 kilos, stood up against the SS and the Gestapo, whose officers and men represented the collected might of the Nazi empire, and they could not break her. In the bright, bright light of such love and courage, how could I not find the will to live?

  Dudio had seen the murder and had given Mr Beck a letter with the date, 19 April. Dudio wrote saying that they had brought her to the old Jewish cemetery, shot her and dumped her body. The cemetery was now a barren field of unmarked graves. Jewish boys had been made to cart away the headstones and break them with hammers, almost as big as most of the boys, into small rocks for paving.

  I didn’t know what they did to her or how much she suffered. But I did know that this had to have happened in front of dozens of people who had come out because of the fire. This had happened in our neighbourhood where everybody knew and loved her. The Becks had made a choice to risk their lives to save us, but all Tilzer had to do was look away and my sister would still be alive.

  Chapter 9

  THE LOVE AFFAIR

  May to September 1943

  Tuesday, 7 September. It’s terrible how we are dependent on all kind of factors. When the sister-in-law wants to get married, it’s our problem. When Mr Beck plays cards, we are worried. When he drinks, we are panicky. When he has a fight at work, we are desperate. God help us and all the problems should get straightened out. I hope Mrs Beck lets us listen to the news. Maybe the news is good.

  The bitter truth, the bitter unacknowledged truth about my sister’s death was that even as we prayed for her survival and once we learned of her captu
re, we also prayed she wouldn’t betray us. So our tears for my sister were also tears of relief. We were afraid to cry out loud so I wept silently. We couldn’t mourn in any of the traditional ways. We didn’t say Kaddish. We didn’t sit shiva. Instead, Mania’s presence filled the bunker in her absence. The rest of the bunker took their lead from Mama and Papa and never mentioned her name. The children as well didn’t ask. She was gone. When I awoke in the mornings, I looked for her. And the memory of her death was new again. It seemed to devour the air around me as if her memory wanted to live so much it required air. It was hard for me to breathe, yet I cherished the pain because it was all I had left of her.

  Nevertheless, our lives and needs had to be attended to. We put up our pallets and sprinkled a few drops of the precious water on our faces. Two weeks after Mania’s death, I was at the hotplate, peeling and cooking potatoes with Mama and Lola. As the morning wore on, the heat seemed to pour off the walls. Patrontasch had a newspaper open and was emptying out the dregs of tarry but unburned tobacco from the butts of smoked cigarettes. It was painstaking work and Mr Patrontasch constantly wiped his brow with a handkerchief to keep his sweat from dampening the tobacco. The newspaper was from the previous month and the news was both good and bad. The SS had taken over the German assault on the Warsaw ghetto. And Rommel had surrendered in North Africa. We were proud of the ghetto fighters, but knew they were all doomed. We felt like they were fighting for all of us and I wished I could fight with them.

  Mama said something she repeated at least 20 times a day. ‘It’s too hot to eat, never mind cook.’ We all laughed as if it were the first time we heard the remark. Mania would have laughed.

  We managed to live through the heat of the summer, the prickly heat, the hunger, the boredom and the depressing reality that there seemed to be no end to the war.

  Beck came down with a paper and handed it to Papa, who looked at it. ‘Italy surrendered! It can’t be too much longer now.’ He was excited.

  Mama couldn’t let such a remark go by. ‘That’s what you said ten months ago, nine months ago, eight months ago—’

  My father interrupted. ‘Enough already, I get your point. It says right here that the Russian army is at Zhitomir. Even the German papers say it so it’s probably true and the Russians are even closer.’ Zhitomir was west of Kiev, which meant the Russians were on the way to Lvov. This news was encouraging, but we were afraid to put our hopes in anything now.

  Mama changed the subject suggesting we should pick through our clothes to see if there was anything left for Julia to sell. We did this periodically and never found anything good enough. Kol Nidre was in a week or so and we wanted to see if there was anything special left for us to wear. The men were going to pray in their underwear, since the weather had turned warm. They had examined the Talmud and discovered that as long as one’s head was covered and one wore a tallith, the rest was optional.

  As my mother picked through her clothes, they all fell apart in her hands, eaten away by dampness and mildew. And then she told my father that since she had nothing to wear maybe the women should imitate the men and pray in their underwear since it was so hot anyway. My father said, ‘Go ahead’. All the other women threatened to do the same and were quite surprised that their husbands didn’t protest.

  Julia and Ala had gone to church as they did every Sunday morning. Almost immediately after they had left, Beck called Klara upstairs to perform some fictitious service. Ever since the first day Beck invited Klara upstairs, we lived with this additional source of terror. How long could this affair go undiscovered? We knew, given the closeness in which we lived; we knew about Beck’s increasing persistence and obsession; we knew that with his drunkenness came carelessness, and we knew that, sooner or later, Julia would find out that her husband and her best friend, a woman whose life and whose entire family she was saving, had both been betraying her.

  Beck had been getting bolder and bolder. As soon as the door closed and Julia’s footsteps echoed on the stone walkway to the street, Beck called down for Klara. We said nothing. We did nothing. Nobody could talk to Beck about it. And perhaps we knew that if Klara tried to break it off, there would be consequences as well. Who knew what Beck really felt about Klara? Was it love between them? And what did this say about the character of the man to whom we owed our very lives? If we begged him to stop, would that brave and generous man disappear and leave only the man who would sleep with his wife’s best friend? Would that man risk his life every day for us? We were afraid that simply to beg him to stop would be enough to put us on the street.

  We heard the front door open upstairs. There was no knock. I listened to Julia’s familiar footfall cross the nine steps from the front door to the kitchen. I’d counted them a thousand times. Nobody moved, nobody talked, nobody breathed.

  Julia’s voice was cheery as it called out to no one in particular: ‘It’s just me. I forgot my purse. I was in church and didn’t have one groshen for the collection plate.’ It was only five steps across the small living room to the bedroom. I counted to five and she was there.

  All our eyes went to the ceiling. I had never heard Julia raise her voice before, not above her usual pleasant tone, but she was screaming now. ‘You bastard! BASTARD! AND YOU! I WON’T HAVE A SNAKE LIVING UNDER MY ROOF! GET OUT! GET OUT!’

  Klara’s feet staggered across the room and she stumbled down the hatch, face first. She had her dress on, but it was unbuttoned. Without looking anyone in the eye, she buttoned her dress hastily and crawled past everyone around the corner into the furthest part of the bunker.

  Upstairs, I heard Beck roaring and throwing furniture around the room. I could only imagine the chairs and pictures smashing against the walls. There were the wedding pictures and the pictures of Ala at her confirmation, her graduation, skating on the river and so many others. Zosia and Zygush crawled over to me and buried themselves in my arms. The worst thing in the world, our world, was happening and we were powerless to stop it. The implications ran through my mind. She was going to throw Klara out. She was going to throw us all out. There was no way any woman could tolerate Klara and Beck’s affair. And she wasn’t just any woman. Before the war, Klara and Julia were friends, best friends. Two women could not be closer unless they were sisters. It was because of Klara that Julia convinced Beck to take us on. Klara knew it. We all knew it. Even Beck knew it.

  Beck screamed now as if he was the injured party, as if somehow Julia had destroyed his happiness, his perfect world and, most tragically, his image of himself. ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’

  But Julia fought back. ‘Get her out of here! Get them all out of here! All of them!’

  We were more than silent. This was our nightmare. This was the SS coming through the hatch in the floor; this was our marching with our friends and family to the marsh outside of town to be shot. And really all it was, was an unfaithful husband and an injured wife. This scene has been played out so many times, almost every minute of every day all over the world. But this time it was a matter of life and death to so many. Zosia was weeping and as much as I tried to console her, telling her it would be all right, I knew I was lying.

  Beck roared again: ‘YOU DON’T LIKE IT? YOU GET THE HELL OUT!’ Another mirror smashed against the wall, or maybe it was a picture, I don’t know. Then there was the sickening crack of a fist against bone and a body crashing to the floor.

  Beck panicked. ‘Help me. Help me! Help me! Patrontasch! Help me!’

  Patrontasch crawled up through the hatch. He had some first-aid training. Julia was on the floor, convulsive, bleeding from the mouth. Her eyes were rolled back up in her head and she thrashed on the floor. He immediately grabbed a belt and put it in between Julia’s teeth so she didn’t swallow her tongue.

  Beck didn’t say anything. He grabbed the bottle of vodka that he and Klara were drinking from and sat on the bed, calm as buttered toast now. Patrontasch wrapped his arms round Julia’s body to try and quell the fit, but it went on and on an
d on. He was a big man but, struggling with all his strength, he still couldn’t control the spasms. In the bunker, I was helpless. I didn’t know what was happening but I was afraid Julia was going to die. I wanted to tell Mr Beck to run for a doctor, but how could I? Patrontasch finally screamed what I was thinking, ‘You have to get a doctor!’

  Beck took another swig. ‘She has these all the time. She’ll be all right in a few minutes. God help me. I hate this house. I hate you all. Most of all, I hate her!’ He got up and walked out of the house. He was right. In a few minutes, Julia calmed down and Patrontasch put her to bed and came downstairs and told us what had happened. He also thought Julia was going to die.

  A few hours later, after Ala had come home, she, Lola and I sat with Julia at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Her face was swollen, her lips bloated and cut. Even though it was hot, the windows and curtains were closed. Ala held Julia’s hand.

  Julia wanted to talk, as if she had something to explain or confess. ‘I was so happy. I was at church the other week and after the service I was in a hurry to get home to get some money because it’s Sunday and I didn’t want to miss the bus to Lvov. I was rushing and slipped down the stairs at the church and my dress went up and Mrs Lueczkiewicz–you remember her don’t you?’ she said, looking at Lola and me and Ala. ‘Your sewing teacher at the school? I was so embarrassed to fall in front of everyone with my dress going way up past my knees. You can imagine how I felt. Mrs Lueczkiewicz helped me up and saw how my stockings were stitched with the zigzag stitching that Lola does and she remarked on what a good seamstress I was and that my stockings were so pretty. I couldn’t wait to get home to tell you three. I thought it was so funny that Mrs Lueczkiewicz thought I had sewed it when it was three of her students. I wanted to tell her that you and Lola were alive because I know she always liked you, but of course I didn’t.’ She stopped in the middle of a thought. She took a sip of tea and refilled my cup. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I can’t live with a snake under my own roof. I’m leaving. I have to leave. As soon as that bastard comes back. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to leave you with him.’ She looked at us like she expected us to argue or at least put up some kind of protest. But we just sat in silence drinking the tea that Ala made for us.