In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  Reinhart forced down the acid taste of panic. “Where are my manners!” he cried. “Welcome to Adampol Palace! Come in, come in! Let’s get you something to drink, something to eat.”

  The officer let loose with more gobbledygook. In response, the rifleman prodded Reinhart with his bayonet. They directed him down the steps, away from the house, into the overgrown yard.

  Impulsively, he turned around. “Who likes brandy, women, hunting?” he sang. “You’re in the right place. Are your men hungry, Officer? I’ll check the kitchen. I think there are some sausages and eggs left over from breakfast. Let me send someone over to Farmer Swaboda. He always has the best—”

  The officer gave a command. The rifle coughed. Reinhart pitched forward into the grass.

  The air was heavy with the scent of impending rain. At the edge of the paving stones, a pandemonium of white butterflies fluttered in ecstasy over a stand of wildflowers. One came to rest on his upturned fedora, and it perched there, opening and closing its papery wings.

  When the officer saw that Reinhart was still moving, he berated the rifleman. Then he took out his gun and walked through the long grass. For a moment their eyes connected. Reinhart thought he saw something like pity. In all honesty, he understood their situation perfectly. They were hunting SS men, not farm administrators, but it was a bad day to be German. The officer raised his gun and fired.

  NEW YORK CITY, 1989

  Julia was late. He was already there, wielding a tremendous black umbrella in front of the 92nd Street Y, where they’d arranged to meet. In her backpack were tickets to a concert. Leonard Slatkin was conducting the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Seeing him, she slowed her pace. Was she really doing this? Not too late to run away, pretend she was sick.

  Last summer Julia had participated in a Jewish heritage trip to Poland. A tiny, wizened old lady had chased her clean across a dusty town square for the sole purpose of returning her grandfather’s long-lost tallis bag. The woman was wearing a shapeless housedress that looked like a hospital gown and a pair of cheap blue slippers. At first they thought she was an escapee from a mental hospital.

  “She was beating a carpet on her balcony when she saw your group walk by,” the guide translated slowly. “There was a saddlemaker named Soroka who used to live here. He had a daughter with hair like yours. She says she’s never seen anything like it, not since the war. Soroka’s daughter raised rabbits.”

  “Haskel Soroka was my grandfather,” said Julia. “My mother raised rabbits during the war.”

  As the guide translated, the old woman’s face broke into a blissful smile, conjuring up a ghost of the beauty she had once been. With a sigh of immense relief, she placed a bundle in Julia’s hands. When Julia untied the knots, she found her grandfather’s tallis bag under layers of burlap.

  This was where things got weird. Beneath the velvet bag was the diary of a Nazi named Willy Reinhart. Apparently, the little old lady had been the lover of this Reinhart, who saved Julia’s family not once but many times.

  The Sorokas were elated. To think that their Julia had met someone they knew from the war years—incredible! A flurry of communications was fired off across the Atlantic Ocean to anyone who’d had anything to do with their survival. Upon Julia’s return from Poland, her mother celebrated with a special Shabbos lunch. Over schnapps and poppy-seed cake, the lantsmen peppered her with questions. Oh, Reinhart’s lover was a beauty! Did you take pictures of the town? Is the shul still standing? Did you go into our house? Are they using our furniture? What about our shop, did you see it? Is Reinhart’s castle still there?

  The handful of Włodawa Jews who had survived the Holocaust thought of one another as family. The table was crowded with short, stocky old men and bustling, round-faced women sharing their war experiences in a rapid-fire patter of Yiddish and English. Each of them had a Reinhart story. He’d rescued the bakery lady from a gang of SS men. He’d informed partizans of German troop movements and supply trains. He’d helped people he didn’t even know about, her mother explained, for every time he’d warned her grandfather of an upcoming Aktzia, Zaydie had told ten more people that they should go and hide.

  In the fall, Julia moved to Manhattan, scoring a grubby rent-controlled studio on a questionable block in Chelsea, with ambitions of making it as a furniture designer. By coincidence, the Nazi’s grandson was in New York, too, studying international law at Columbia. The lantsmen had insisted they meet. At least she could give him the diary.

  Now the grandson was peering hopefully into the face of each woman who passed, a tricky thing to do without looking like a creep. Julia took a deep breath and stepped forward.

  He was facing away from her, gazing expectantly down Lexington Avenue. She walked up to the vast umbrella and said, “Hi. You must be Lukas.”

  He took a surprised step backward. This was unfortunate; he had positioned himself too close to the stairs leading down to the entry level, and now he stumbled, pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance, making a weapon of the umbrella. He would have tumbled down the steps if she hadn’t reached out and grabbed his hand.

  She had an extraordinary mouth, he was thinking as he righted himself, and swept the umbrella above them to protect her from the rain. The upper lip was longer than the lower, making her look unreasonably sad.

  “Sorry,” she said, giving him a wry smile. “I’m not making a very good first impression, am I.” When she smiled, the effect was the same as when the sun came out from behind a cloud.

  “No, no. It’s me. I’m . . . ” He grasped for the correct word, came up blank. How did you say clumsy in English? “Ungeschlickt. Do you speak Jewish? Many of the words are similar to German.”

  He’d said the wrong thing, he saw it immediately. Her face chilled into a polite mask. “It’s called Yiddish. Anyway, my parents speak it, not me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said carefully.

  “Never mind,” she said, but her tone was frosty. “Why don’t we go in.”

  He collapsed the enormous umbrella and shook off the rain. It took them a comically long time to reach their seats; she’d purchased student tickets, situated at the very tippy-top of the nosebleed section.

  The lights went down while they were struggling with their coats. The first somber notes broke over them, the strings quivering bleakly, gathering momentum and force. Julia felt the music thrum through her chest, overriding the regular beat of her heart. Violins strained upward in a haunting cry of waste and desolation. The instruments wept for the dead of every nation, in every war, for all time.

  Slowly, gently, the piece drew to an end. If mourning could be translated into music, it would sound like this.

  When the last chord faded to silence, the room exploded into deafening applause. Julia turned to her companion. To her astonishment, his eyes were wet. He smiled, embarrassed. “It vas . . . very beautiful, yes?” he said.

  She cringed. It didn’t matter that he was disconcertingly handsome, with green eyes fringed just now with long damp black lashes, or that he was pleasingly proportioned and dressed entirely in bohemian black. Every time he opened his mouth, he sounded like a Nazi.

  “What is it?” he asked, seeing her expression.

  She didn’t answer.

  Lukas felt a wash of disappointment. This wasn’t going the way he had hoped. He’d come to this meeting with the saddlemaker’s granddaughter expecting to hear stories of his grandfather’s war heroics, but she was treating him like he was some kind of criminal.

  The fact was, he knew very little about Opa Willy. All thin-lipped, bony-framed Oma would ever say about him was that he was a demon, with the power to weave spells with his words. His own papa barely remembered him, though he harbored vague memories of living in a castle. Uncle Matthias had known him best, and as a priest, he was supposed to have compassion for all sinners, but even he didn’t speak of him. There was an understanding that he had done something terrible out ea
st, and those things were best swept under the carpet and forgotten. Which wasn’t unusual. Among his friends, no one talked about what their grandparents did during the war.

  He helped her with her coat. She raised her arms to free the thick tumble of her hair from where it lay trapped under her collar. He’d never seen anything like it, long and wavy, with strokes of mahogany, ochre, copper, and caramel. Like a painting by a Renaissance master.

  “I enjoyed very much,” he said. “Thank you for the tickets.” This time he saw her wince. “What’s the matter?” he asked, puzzled. “Something I say?” He cupped his hand over his mouth, breathed into it. “Maybe my breath?”

  This made her laugh. She hesitated before selecting the next words. “It’s your accent. If you’re Jewish, there’s just something about a German accent that makes you shiver.”

  “But my grandfather protected your family.”

  “Yes. My mother’s family. But on my father’s side, the Einsatzgruppen wiped out his whole village. He was the only survivor.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Outside, the rain had turned to sleet. He hoisted his enormous umbrella over them both. But she was already inching away, eager to escape. “That’s all right. I, ah, have to go.”

  Under the umbrella, his shoulders sagged. What can I say? he wondered. What can I do to make her stay? Nothing, he concluded. Given her family history, he might react the same way. Regretfully, he smiled.

  The smile twinkled encouragement: Come on, it’s not so bad! The smile promised that it knew your secrets and would keep them safe. The smile wanted to tell you a dirty joke, to buy you a drink, it wanted you to stop worrying. The smile threw its arm around your shoulders and called you friend.

  She faced him in the rain, stray crystals of snow and ice catching in the parabolas of her hair. “You must look like him.”

  “That’s what my grandmother tells me. Though she doesn’t seem happy about it. What makes you say that?”

  “My mom . . . I think she may have had a little crush on him. Whenever his name comes up, she mentions that he looked like a movie star. Though these days, I think she does it just to make my dad jealous.” The corners of her lips tugged up in a sly grin. “Everyone with a Reinhart story says something about his smile. Even the men.”

  “Nobody in my family ever talked about him. I’m pretty sure my grandmother thought he killed all those people himself.”

  “Oh, no, no. My family agrees, the lantsmen agree, whoever killed those poor people in Adampol, they took him by surprise. He didn’t know they were coming.”

  “How can you be so sure?” He desperately wanted to believe it. Too few Germans had offered resistance during World War II. Even if his grandfather had tried and failed, it was a thousand times better than the millions who turned their heads and pretended not to see.

  She looked surprised. “Everyone knew. The Jews, the Poles, even the Germans. Willy Reinhart was a decent man. Oh, I almost forgot! I’m supposed to give you this.” She began to rummage through her bag.

  “What is it?”

  “His diary.”

  “Oh yes, the diary! Tell me, how did you get it?”

  “His lover—um—Petra Ostrowski—gave it to me. She found it in the grass after he was killed. She was going to destroy it—it was dangerous for her to keep it around after the Communists took over—but she could never bring herself to do it. It was all she had left to remember him by. We wanted to mail it to your grandmother, but she said she wasn’t interested.”

  “That sounds like my grandmother.”

  Julia rewarded him with a quick smile. “But your dad thought that you might like to have it.”

  The sleet was pelting harder now, coating the sidewalk with a mix of snow and slush. She glanced up at the sky, frowned. “If I take it out here, it’s going to get ruined.”

  “Perhaps we could go for a cup of coffee,” he suggested cautiously.

  She pushed the diary deeper into her bag for protection, slipped it back onto her shoulder. “I know a place, but it’s a bit of a walk.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “But you must come under my umbrella. You are getting wet.”

  Together, the grandson of Willy Reinhart and the granddaughter of Haskel Soroka set off down Lexington Avenue. Behind them, the snow grew steadier, filling in the traces of their footsteps with a light dusting of white.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book wouldn’t exist without the devoted efforts of many extraordinary people.

  I am indebted to my wonderful agent, Jennifer Weltz, for her insight, wisdom, and guidance. Thanks to the rest of my team at JVNLA, Ariana Philips and Tara Hart, for so many reasons. A special heartfelt thanks goes to Jean Naggar; without her faith and dedication, I wouldn’t be a writer.

  Great armloads of thanks to my eagle-eyed editor, Liese Mayer, for her vision, passion, and inspiration. Thanks also to Beth Thomas, my indefatigable copy editor. Many thanks to Katie Monaghan and her fabulous PR team, and to all the talented, marvelous people at Scribner for bringing Armadillos to life.

  My unending gratitude to The Kenyon Review, Gargoyle, 2 Bridges Review, Danse Macabre, and JewishFiction.net, where these stories first appeared. Without their support and encouragement, the entire collection would still be sitting in a file on my desktop.

  Many of the events in these pages were handed down to me by my mother, Brenda Soroka Maryles, who reported her war experiences with pitiless accuracy. My dad, Barry Maryles, told me narratives of blinding courage and incomprehensible horror. I pass them on the only way I am able, through the filter of fiction.

  I am deeply grateful to my uncle Philip Soroka, who tolerated my phone calls and answered my myriad questions, no matter how trivial. His sense of humor, his memories, and his knowledge of local history have contributed immeasurably to these pages.

  My very warm thanks to Chaim Melczer, Paul Edelsberg, and Jack Pomeranc for sharing their Włodawa recollections with me. Joe Tenenbaum ignited my interest in partizans with a single sentence overheard at a Sukkot dinner: “So I jumped out of a tree, and I killed him with my knife.” I am grateful beyond words to Dieter Schlüter, stepson of Righteous Gentile Bernhard Falkenberg, for sharing his family’s war experiences and his photographs with me. Thanks also to historian Peter Kamber, and to the research staff at the Bundesarchiv in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

  For some of my Jewish folklore, I turned for inspiration to three wonderful books: A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, edited by Nathan Ausubel; The Diamond Tree: Jewish Tales from Around the World, selected and retold by Howard Schwartz and Barbara Rush; and Chosen Tales: Stories Told By Jewish Storytellers, edited by Peninnah Schram. For the title story, “In the Land of Armadillos,” I was inspired by the magical The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, and “The Good Old Days”: the Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, edited by Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess.

  Myriam Auslander, Ruchama King Feuerman, Leora Fineberg, Olivia Fischer Fox, Zalmie Jacobs, Deborah Landesman, Shelley Mendelow, David Naggar, Karen Benchitrit Naggar, Dan and Eileen Raab, Rena Bunder Rossner, Steve Kendall, Elana Maryles Sztokman, Deborah Tannenbaum, Bluma Katz Uzan, Michale Wacks, Avi Weiss, Deena Yellin, Larry Yudelson, and Eve Yudelson, thank you for taking time from your busy lives to read the stuff I send you, and for being brave enough to tell me when it still needs work.

  To all Maryleses, Sorokas, and Shankmans, my circle of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, and in-laws: Life is a journey, and it is a much better journey because I share it with you.

  To my sister, Bernice, and my brothers, Chaim and Sam, thank you for your unwavering support, in a thousand different ways.

  To my children, Gabriella, Raphael, Ayden, and Jude, you are the brightest lights in my sky. Thank you for putting up with me.

  And finally, to my sweet Jon: You are the greatest miracle that has ever happened to me.

  © JANET JOYNER PHOTOGRAPHY

  HELEN MARYLES SHA
NKMAN’s stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Color of Light. A classically trained artist, Shankman divides her time between writing and painting. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children. You can visit the author’s website at helenmarylesshankman.com or connect via Twitter at @hmshankman.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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