“You heard this?”
“And saw it. Through a cellar window, where I was hiding, with about fifty children. It will be worse tomorrow or the next time when they realize they didn’t get many of the kids.”
“Tomorrow they are going to clear ghetto B,” Erich observed quietly.
“How do you get this stuff?” Rita wasn’t so much asking as expressing wonderment.
“Don’t ask.” He thought better of his answer. “Mainly through Lydia. There are always leaks.”
The Germans were as good as Erich’s word. The next day they burned the smaller ghetto, along with all those still hiding in it, to the ground. It was the first time Rita experienced the smell, first of burning human hair, then flesh, and finally organs. The acrid smell gave way to a distinctive roasting odor, which turned treacle-sweet and then hung in the air like smolder-smoke. The only way to rid oneself of the smell was to sit in the outhouse. Even that did not work for more than a few minutes. Why did her child have to live through this?
The smoke cleared, but the smell never left her.
That night Erich and Rita lay together, for warmth and humanity. Erich began to whisper. “They’ll be back for the children soon.” He fell silent, gathering his courage for a moment. Then he began again. “I think we can save Stefan.” Rita didn’t reply, so he outlined a plan. The last letter from Rita’s parents in Gorlice reported the continuation of relatively good conditions there. Lydia could locate a Polish woman to bring Stefan to them. “He’ll be safe, and then we can get you a work permit from the Terakowski works.”
“No. I can’t do it.”
From the darkness they heard Kaltenbrunner, who had been listening. “You have to, Rita.” He spoke between clenched teeth. “You must. Ever hear of the Kindertransport?” Silence from Rita. He continued, “In ’39, everyone knew there would be war. The Brits organized ten thousand visas for German children. People took their kids to the Bahnhöfen—the railway stations—packed and labeled, certain to be safe and sound. At the last minute, dozens of mothers snatched their children from the train and ran home. Every one of those kids is dead today.”
Rita was not going to argue. There would be no point to life without the child. Literally, nothing to organize her continued existence around. No reason to take another breath.
Rita thought the matter had dropped. In fact, she had become a creature to be manipulated by two men who knew better than a woman. There was little time to lose. Freddy began by finding her parents’ address among her things. Within three days Lydia Terakowski had located someone—a Polish Home Army courier—who traveled between Galicia and the Tarnow region, where her parents lived. Then they sought the right time one evening to broach the matter with Rita.
Erich produced a Terakowski work permit with Rita’s name on it.
“Rita, this will enable you to get out mornings and avoid the next ghetto clearance.”
She looked at the form. “But what about Stefan? I can’t take him to the factory.”
Quietly, firmly, Freddy replied, “You must send him to your parents. It’s his only chance to survive.”
“I told you. I can’t do that to my own child. I’d rather die.”
Exasperation tinged Erich’s voice now. “You’d rather both of you die than neither?” He could not control himself. “What kind of a mother are you?”
Freddy spoke. “People have to survive this war. You, your son, someone. Erich and I probably won’t make it. Maybe you won’t either. But you don’t have the right to help them kill off more of us than they can. Someone’s got to tell the world, to bear witness, to see that the guilty are punished.”
Rita gathered her wits to reply. “Bear witness to their crimes before the bar of history?” She spat out her rejection. “That’s not a reason to live. In a hundred years’ time, Hitler will be remembered the way we think of Napoleon. In a thousand years, he’ll be another Alexander the Great, saving civilization from the Bolshevik hordes the way Alexander saved Greece from the Persians!” She paused, troubled by the thought. “You’re right; I don’t have the right to help them kill. But my emotions are real, and they are screaming that I cannot send the boy away.”
It was Kaltenbrunner who finally broke through. “Yes, your emotions are screaming at you. But your emotions have no foresight. They can’t look ahead. They only look back to what enabled your ancestors to survive. If you allow them to overmaster you in the life-or-death choice you face, you’ll regret it in a future that your emotions cannot see.”
Rita was listening. But she was also doing something else. She was making herself give up Stefan. She was creating the emotion of loss, grief, horror, torture that she would experience when a German or a Ukrainian, or even a Jupo, tore Stefan from her and did something so despicable to his body she could not bring words to it, even as the images moved across her thoughts. She was inwardly watching a man push Stefan’s body off his bayonet with a jackboot and then clean the gore from his shoe, drawing the heel across a curbstone as if befouled by a dog. She made herself watch invisibly while Stefan danced, begging for a crust, in a group of children. In her imagination they were picked off one by one, so many clay targets moving across a carnival shooting game. Finally she pictured Stefan in a soldier’s grasp, held tight by his arm until the soldier opened his grip, letting the small body fly into the brick wall. The emotion she produced flooded away the pain she felt at the thought of sending him away.
“Very well.”
Erich began quietly. “We don’t have much time. Tomorrow they’ll sweep through ghetto C. Then early next week, it will be our turn again.” She nodded. “You must have him ready to leave tomorrow afternoon. Lydia’s contact might be ready to go that soon.”
In fact, it was late in the afternoon two days afterward that Erich slipped back into the ghetto through the fence and led Rita, holding Stefan close, out into the street on the other side of the wall. The contact Lydia had found was a very tall, straight-backed woman, in a long coat and cloche hat with a Robin Hood feather, and a face half covered by a net veil—rather chic. The veil’s fine black tracery of lines and nodes ended just above her mouth, which had a slight but pronounced tilt to the right. Was it a stroke, or more likely a birth injury, the last mark of a difficult forceps delivery? The doctor’s wife in Rita wondered. Then, as she passed Stefan to the woman’s arms, she noticed the finely manicured varnish of the nails on her fingers. The woman put Stefan gently on the pavement. Rita proffered a small bag, but the woman refused it. “We two cannot look like we are going away for any length of time.”
“I see. You have done this before?” The woman nodded. Rita looked at her closely, trying to memorize the face. She needed to know this person. The veil made it hard. “Can you tell me your name?”
“I am sorry. I can’t risk it. I am Home Army.” It was the indigenous Polish resistance. “Mainly I am a courier. There is a unit in Nowy Sacz. They’ll get the boy to his grandparents in Gorlice. I have learned the address by heart.” She looked down the alley both ways. She pulled a small piece of hard candy from her pocket. “Here, Stefan, now kiss Mommy, and we’ll go for a walk.”
Erich was standing aside, feeling that he should do something. “Rita,” he whispered, “what about his stuffed dog? At least he can take that.”
She shook her head. “I have to keep something of him.” She waited till Stefan turned the corner before beginning to sob.
The next morning was a Saturday. For Rita, now living on time paid for by forced labor, it was a workday. Up in the dark, she followed Erich out the ghetto gate, showing her pass with studied boredom, keeping a few paces behind, expressing no wonder at the open streets beyond the gate. Despite the gloom and the cold, the walk to the Terakowski works felt almost like freedom.
After a very hot, thin tea and a piece of rye-and-sawdust bread with more margarine than she had seen in a month, Rita was assigned to buttonhole making. This was a process done by hand that required good eyes and consistent
stitching, but had little risk of ruining a greatcoat. She sat at the bench working steadily all day and the next, willing herself not to go up to the office each time she saw Lydia come in. Since there was nothing she could do anymore for her child, knowing his fate wouldn’t make a difference. Besides, not knowing, she could enjoy imagining Stefan in his grandmother’s lap, cosseted and fed, clean and warm.
By Tuesday Rita had played this trick on herself so often it was no longer distracting her. She was at work on the buttons of a feldgrau greatcoat when Erich came over and sat down. “We just heard. The woman, the courier, was taken by the Gestapo.” She gasped. He put a powerful hand around her wrist and forced her to respond to the pain before she could cry out. “They don’t know when or where exactly. She was carrying Home Army documents. They don’t have any idea whether she had already delivered Stefan safely or not.”
Two weeks later came a letter from Rita’s father. It was his last. Conditions had changed in the regions absorbed into Germany proper. The old Gauleiter had been removed, and the new one had begun ruthlessly to impose the new order on their town. Remaining Jews had been told to pack bags for a journey to the east and report the next morning. Rita’s father knew they were to be sent for extermination. She read the letter three times. There was nothing in it about Stefan.
All three were sitting on the floor, each slouched against a different wall, staring at the candle in a lantern equidistant among them in the middle of the room. Like a family no longer on speaking terms, the silence among them was ominous.
Erich’s voice cut into it. “Freddy, something you said a few weeks ago, it keeps coming back to me. Something I don’t understand at all.”
Kaltenbrunner replied listlessly. “What’s that?”
“Well, you said Darwin explains everything, including the fate of the Jews. There’s nothing about Jews, Germans, or even human history in his books, is there?”
Rita looked up. She recalled the question lingering with her after the others had fallen asleep. “Yes, tell us, Freddy. Tell us how your Professor Darwin predicted that the Germans would exterminate the Jews.”
“Quite the contrary. They won’t exterminate the Jews. And the Germans will lose eventually.”
“Eventually, when we are all dead?” Eric’s tone was quiet but fierce.
“Not all of us, Erich. They will kill off a lot of us. But not all of us.”
Rita broke in. “Why are you so optimistic?”
“Look, Rita, think of Nazism as a disease carried by a bacillus, one that is highly contagious and invades brains by playing on people’s hatred, fears, greed. For years it barely subsisted without spreading. Then the environment changed—the Depression—and it began to breed and spread.”
“Hasn’t infected us, but it will kill us,” Erich interjected.
“Maybe . . . probably. Under the right conditions, Nazism spreads from brain to brain. Like any parasite, it kills its carriers, so it has to spread faster to survive. Think of all those Nazis dying on the Eastern Front.”
Rita interrupted. “Why be confident the disease will be wiped out, instead of wiping everyone else out?”
They couldn’t see Kaltenbrunner’s smile at the question he expected. “Like any disease, Nazism breeds resistance. Think about the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century. The plague killed off thirty percent of the whole population of Europe. But it created a new environment for itself, one that selected for anything that could defeat the plague. It left an entire generation resistant to it. We’ve never had another Black Death. The Nazis will do the same thing.”
Rita was persistent. “And why shouldn’t the Germans kill all of us off long before Nazism is burned out or burns itself out?”
Kaltenbrunner was silent for a moment. Then he began, “I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. Darwin realized there is no way to predict when or where or even what variation will blindly emerge and begin to exploit its environment. Only that there will always be one. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, perhaps even already, some variation has emerged—some response, triggered by the new environment Nazism has created for itself, that will destroy it.”
Erich had been listening, thinking, Freddy, you are right, and your reason isn’t too far off the mark. If only you knew. There was something that was already working to destroy Nazism. And Erich was sworn to secrecy about it. Would it make any difference for them? He couldn’t see how.
CHAPTER TWELVE
After April orders came down to suspend the ghetto-clearing Aktionen. Leideritz wondered what the problem was. Perhaps other larger ghettos—Lvov, Lublin—had priority. Never mind, typhus and starvation were doing some of his work for him. It was only important to prevent infection from spreading beyond the ghetto. That would require really severe discipline. He had already had to threaten more than one unshaven Polizei with the Eastern Front for slovenliness.
Passage through the ghetto gates was a twice-daily challenge to appear completely inconspicuous. Never be first. Never come late. Carry nothing. No bright colors, no tatters, and above all, no eye contact with anyone, inmate or Polizei. At least once Rita thought she’d copped it.
Coming in late, as the curfew siren began to blare, she was jostled in the crowd and brushed a German sleeve.
“Entschuldigung, Mein Herr,” she said, as sincerely and obsequiously as she could contrive.
Perhaps it was the faultless German, but the words jolted the Gefreiter, bored by the passing tide of flotsam. He grabbed her coat and pushed her to the ground. “Too close, Jew-sow.” Rita watched him reach for the lanyard on his belt to guide his hand toward the sidearm, heard the snap of the metal holster clasp and the slight squeak of stiff, polished leather. The sequence seemed to proceed in exquisite slow motion. She tried to make eye contact. Impossible! His face was shaded by the high-peaked cap and its black brim. Now the blue metal pistol barrel came into view. She could even smell it—Cosmoline? Gun oil? Cartridge powder?
A Leutnant came out of the guard shack. The corporal straightened up. “As you were, Gefreiter. Can’t waste bullets anymore, especially on workers.” The officer walked away, and the soldier merely kicked Rita in the thigh. She rose and walked away as though nothing had happened. Nothing had, she decided.
The Terakowski textile factory was a vast conspiracy. Most employees had contrived to add a relative or two to the work rolls. Now there were several hundred in the buildings every day being fed, kept warm, and out of harm’s way. Each piece of clothing produced went through exhaustive, obsessive examination for defects, and almost everything needed restitching somewhere. The work was spread out over the available hands.
A few days after Rita began stitching buttonholes, she noticed the young woman, a girl actually. She couldn’t help noticing. Small, dark, her hair in a pageboy that seemed always to look as though it had been newly washed and cut by a French coiffeur—how did she do it without shampoo or even hot water? Dark eyebrows, and the worry lines between them, above a prominent nose gave her a serious look Germans would have called Jewish. But it was the eyes Rita couldn’t stop making contact with. Small irises in whites so large there was no trouble at any distance telling that the girl was glancing in her direction.
On the third morning, looking up from her steaming mug of tea, Rita just openly smiled at her. By that afternoon the girl was at the bench behind Rita’s work space, perched on a high backless stool, a belted gabardine coat before her, with a small book half hidden by the folds of the coat. Without dropping a stitch, Rita asked, “What could you be reading?”
“Lord Tadeusz.” Her whisper carried. It was the great classic of nineteenth-century Polish literature, suppressed by the Russians and the Austrians, celebrated by the newly independent Poland, compulsory in all the schools.
Rita smiled slightly. “We all grew up on it, didn’t we?”
“Funny. I hated it in school. It was the set text in three different classes in the gymnasium I was sent to.” She paused. “My na
me is Daniella, after my grandfather. But they call me Dani. I know yours . . . Rita. You’re a friend of Erich’s, right?”
Rita nodded. “Why are you reading it again if you hated it?”
“They made us read it. That’s why I hated it.”
“So, now you love it?” Rita reflected for a moment. “All I can think about it now is how it seduced us into Polish patriotism.” She looked down at her needlework. “Look where that got us. Patriotism is for Germans! Not for Poles, certainly not for us.”
Dani would not be bullied. “Still, it’s beautiful.”
Rita had to show that she was no philistine. She put down her needle and thimble, closed her eyes for a moment, and began to quote a line of the poem,
O mother Poland, in your fresh grave
We lack the strength your doomed life to praise.
She looked up at the girl. “And our doomed lives? Shall we spend them praising Poland?”
“It’s beautiful.” Dani would not be gainsaid.
“Yes, the poem is very beautiful, but that’s all it is. Think about the words, glorifying a country that has forsaken you entirely. Let the Germans take Poland—to devil with it . . .”
“Stop.” Dani said it so loud the workers at the benches around them lurched in their direction, ready to break up a catfight. But Dani was hugging Rita and whispering to her, so only she could hear. “It’s beautiful, and that’s all it has to be.” She released Rita, and taking up her work, she began to recite from memory.
The Girl from Krakow Page 12
