The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  With no students in residence, rooms in Krakow were a buyer’s market. Rita visited a half dozen. Some she ruled out because she did not fancy their officious landladies, setting out the rules even before showing the rooms: no cooking, no gentlemen callers, above all, no Jews. This last seemed in a few cases to be a ritual pronouncement, made to establish the bona fides of the house. But twice it was elaborated upon. In one case, the lady of the house lamented that she had been blamed by the Gestapo for harboring the vermin. “How was I to know? They were very quiet, neat, paid in advance.” She answered her own question. “I should have caught on when they paid so promptly and never fell into arrears.” In the other case, the landlady related her experience with prewar students: “Socialists, communists, political meetings, parties till all hours, posters on the wall. Rich Jews, no loyalty to the government, the church, anything.” Some rooms were dusty from lack of occupants.

  Rita could afford to choose. After examining six, she went back to the third one, closest to the law faculty, on Wenecja Street, mainly because she had hit it off with the landlady. The middle-aged woman had asked few questions, but had volunteered that she missed the bustle of students coming and going, the enthusiasm of young people, their romances, and even the noise of their arguments.

  “You’re back,” Mrs. Wilkova greeted her on the second visit.

  “Yes. I’ll take the room if it’s still available, please.”

  “No one has come since your visit an hour ago, dear. No one is likely to, unless they open the university again, and there’s not much chance of that.”

  Rita didn’t want to make the university a topic of conversation. She was just a girl from the east, who had lost her family in the Russian occupation and escaped to the west. For the German authorities, there was the additional claim that she was a Volks-Deutsche Mädchen, but that was not going to make a difference among Poles. “Mrs. Wilkova, can you tell me where the labor exchange is?”

  “In the main square, just next to the Blue Polizei Bureau. You won’t fail to register, will you, dear?”

  She felt like replying Sofort and clicking her heels. But instead she merely nodded. “I’ll do it on my way back to the station for my things.” The landlady handed her a latchkey.

  Rita’s path led her back past the Fac’. Suddenly she found herself before the building where she had first met Urs in the winter of ’35. Looking both ways down the street, she could see no one at all. Just the gaunt plane trees and the lines of weeds growing between the once carefully maintained paving stones. Even the café where she and Urs had first become acquainted now appeared derelict. She mounted the three steps anyway and opened the oversize door. It crashed with a loud report behind her. This was followed by a light going on behind a frosted glass door under the great marble staircase. Out came an elderly little man, with a growth of stubble, a mop of white hair, and a familiar look about him. Yes, the same old man she had seen as a student. He had been a bit of an eccentric and a vocal patriot, rather a pet of the Green Ribbon nationalist bullies, cheering on their harassment of Jewish students. Would he still share their enthusiasm after three years of Nazi occupation?

  She approached. “I used to be a student here. Where is everyone?”

  “Well, Pani.” He stroked the white stubble and thought. “The Germans closed the faculty in early 1940. Took the professors all away, don’t you know?” It seemed obvious from his tone the little man had not understood why. “Almost none of them ever came back . . . Germans even took their families.” He pulled a dirty kerchief from his overalls. “The cardinal archbishop got one or two back. They say the rest were shot. I saw them one day, the two who came back, but they looked too old to lecture. Besides, what good would two lecturers do? There were no students anymore.”

  Rita found herself feeling sorry for the old anti-Semite. Could he be part of the Home Army? She wanted to ask, but feared doing so. “Why are you still here, Pan? What is the building used for?”

  “I still get a pay packet every week, so I come. Even without heat it’s a little warmer than home, and there is an electric light. Besides, the Germans have used the lecture hall once or twice. I even saw the head of them all, Gauleiter Frank, come in for a speech to a lot of men in black. It was all German, so I didn’t understand . . .”

  Tentatively she probed, “Ever see any Poles here now—former students, people from the university?”

  “No one. You’re the first person to come in for a long time . . . except for the Germans, that is. You said you were here before the war, Pani . . . ” He looked at her, unsuccessfully trying to place her. Rita said nothing. “Well, it’s cold in this hallway . . .” He turned and without a parting word returned to his cubby beneath the stairs, closed the door, and turned off the light.

  The clerk at the Blue Polizei registry office made a careful study of Rita’s documents. He was evidently acquainted with the forger’s art and disinclined to laxity so close to the German headquarters. “Very well,” he said, more to himself than her, added to a register her name and details, along with her local address, and countersigned the second of the four places available on her Kennkarte. Without even looking twice, he handed back her documents.

  A few moments later, she was staring at the vacancies in the labor exchange’s wall postings. Rita saw that several of them required German, had slightly higher salaries, and expressed a racial requirement: “Volks-Deutsche applicants only.” These she took note of, submitted her name, and waited her turn along the benches. There were few other applicants that morning. Why? Did the unemployed know something she didn’t?

  When her name was called out for the second time, “Trushenko,” she started. For a moment she had forgotten her alias. Not a mistake to make. She rose and went to the desk.

  “Tak—well,” said the woman, looking at her form. She switched to German. “You want this job as a Hausdame—a housekeeper? It’s for the Fiscal Accounting Service, Reich Tax Inspectorate. Qualifications?”

  “I worked in a hospital and a hotel,” Rita lied in fluent German.

  “Can you cook for Germans? They don’t eat pig’s knuckles, flaki, or kasha.”

  “I can make an excellent strudel.” Thank God for Mrs. Kaminski, she thought.

  “Starching and ironing? How many shirts an hour?”

  Rita had never lifted an iron over a man’s shirt. She had no idea. “Fifteen.”

  “No! Really? I’ll hire you myself!” Evidently this was too high a number. She appeared to treat Rita’s answer as pardonable exaggeration: “Very well.” She handed across an address. “They will expect you tomorrow morning. It’s a trial.” The woman stared at her, altogether too knowingly.

  That evening she asked Pani Wilkova, as casually as she could, how many shirts a good laundress might starch and iron in an hour.

  “If she is fast, perhaps six.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Reich Tax Inspectorate was two streets north of the main square, on Świętego Jana, St. John’s Street, in a newer two-story block opposite a chapel. She mounted the stairs from the street entrance to the first floor and knocked. The door was opened by a small man, peering at her over rimless reading glasses. Wisps of gray hair were combed over his pate from left to right. The skin on his face showed no exposure to the sun, but it displayed at least two shaving nicks. Four straight wrinkle lines ran across his forehead, and he lacked any sign of a chin. The gray eyes were matched by an open gray waistcoat.

  His shirt cuffs were covered by ink guards. He had evidently just risen from his work at a set of account books. Looking up at Rita, his first words were in German. “At last you are here, Fräulein.”

  “They told me to report this morning, Mein Herr. Am I late?” Rita looked at her watch. Spot on 9:00 a.m.

  Impressed with her German and her punctuality, he replied, “No, no, my dear young lady. It’s only that I have been in urgent need since we lost the last housekeeper. My name is Herr Lempke, and you are . . . ?”
>
  “Fräulein Trushenko.” She proffered her placement notice from the labor exchange and her papers. Rita decided not to ask why he had lost the previous housekeeper.

  He pushed the papers aside. “It’s quite all right. How soon can you begin?” Behind him a door was open to a kitchen in disorder.

  “Immediately, sir.”

  “Very well. Please begin in there. We will discuss the details of your work when I can spare a moment this afternoon.” He walked off down a corridor with at least six doors opening onto it. At its end, Rita could see a large office, and there another woman, a secretary, laboring over a very large typewriter with an extra long platen, evidently for the many columns an accounting ledger required.

  Off the entry where they had been standing was a large dining room, with furniture even heavier, darker, and much larger than her own dimly remembered dining room in Karpatyn.

  Rita took off her coat, enjoying the warmth rising from radiators beneath each window, and attacked the dishes in the sink. When she finished she surveyed the kitchen more closely. It was well stocked, and there was ample clean linen in the pantry. She had found herself transported back into a world she thought no longer existed.

  At noon Herr Lempke entered the now orderly kitchen with a sigh of relief. He motioned Rita to a chair, sat down himself, and laid out what was expected of her. His manner was tentative, if not diffident. It was almost as if in describing the job, he feared scaring Rita off.

  Her duties would include keeping house and cleaning the offices, as well as cooking and laundry for the staff. There were usually two or three tax inspectors from the Reich visiting at any one time. Lempke was the senior resident, though he returned to his family in Germany from time to time. His wife remained in Mannheim with their six children. There would be an allowance to do marketing and as many zloty as she needed to provide for Herr Lempke and his associates. They would bring certain things in short supply from Germany—wines, liquors, other delicacies. There were two rooms off the kitchen for servants. She could choose either of the two rooms, and she was to have a salary of three hundred zloty a month, or the equivalent in reichsmarks, along with two afternoons off a week—Wednesday and Sunday. Was all this acceptable to Fräulein . . . uh . . .

  Rita supplied the name again, “Trushenko . . . and yes, it is perfectly acceptable.” She had never expected to be satisfied with domestic bliss. But here it was, hers for the keeping, and she was going to hang on to it for dear life.

  “Herr Lempke, I have a room in town. May I keep it, or must I reside here?”

  “Well, Fräulein Trushenko, you sleep where you please so long as you are here before breakfast each morning.” In the end she would move in—food and warmth made up for lack of privacy—but for a few weeks, she kept the room at Pani Wilkova and stayed there from time to time. This would prove to be another piece of blind luck.

  “Dinner for three tonight, seven o’clock.” He rose and was about to leave the room.

  “Including your secretary?” Rita looked over his shoulder down the hall.

  “Fräulein Halle? No. She does not board.”

  Were the farmers’ markets still in the same places they had been before the war? Was there anything much still for sale after four winters of German occupation? Were the stalls still open this time of day? What could she find in the larder? The first meal had to be beyond complaint if she were to keep this job. Best to begin with some advice from her landlady. So, after taking stock of a canned ham, a bushel of potatoes, and some shriveled onions in the pantry, Rita marched back past the law faculty to Wenecja Street.

  “The farmers’ market is still there, on Biskupia, and the Germans haven’t stolen everything.” Was this a political remark? Rita explained her new position and her intention to keep her room.

  The amount of food Rita was able to assemble that night would have fed a large family in the ghetto for three weeks. With dried apples, raisins, and nuts from the market, the amount of butter she found in the cold larder was enough for a strudel far richer than anything Mrs. Kaminski could have made. When the three German bureaucrats pushed their chairs back from dinner that evening and asked her to join them at the table, she knew that the job was well and truly hers.

  “So, Fräulein Trushenko, where did you learn to cook so well?” Lempke proffered a cigarette. Rita decided to decline. She could not afford the mark of sophistication or comfort when consorting with the haute bourgeoisie.

  “My father ran a hotel in the east, and my mother learned to cook from her German grandmother, who bequeathed her a cookbook of Silesian dishes. She taught me.” Rita decided not to amplify. One of these three men could be from Silesia for all she knew.

  “And your parents?”

  “Taken to Siberia by the Russians, sir. They were considered capitalists. I never heard from them again. My mother was weak. I don’t think she could have lived long.”

  “The strudel is Viennese, my dear. Where did you learn to make it so well?”

  “Years of practice, sir.”

  That evening after clearing up, she found some stationery and an envelope, sat down at the kitchen table, and began a letter:

  Dear Lydia,

  You will see by the envelope that I am now an employee of the German Reich Tax Inspectorate.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that even letters from Reich offices were likely to be censored, especially when sent east. She decided that this letter would have to be much more circumspect than she had planned. She began again.

  I am well treated and grateful that we Volks-Deutsche are so warmly welcomed in the Reich. After an interesting trip from Lvov and a few weeks in Warsaw, I am now settled in Krakow. I am writing to ask whether you have heard anything from cousin Erich since he left to join the forces fighting in the East. I would be glad to learn how he is doing and where I can send him some socks and other warm clothes that I am knitting for our brave soldiers.

  You may write to me at the address at the top of this letter.

  Best wishes,

  Margarita Trushenko

  Reading the letter over once more, she crossed out “Lvov” and wrote “Lemberg,” sealed it, found a stamp in one of the offices bearing Hitler’s profile in Prussian blue, and placed it in the outbox. It would be carried to the post office with the rest of the mail in the morning by the secretary, Fräulein Halle.

  No reply ever came back. But she was to receive far more by way of reply than any news about Erich she had hoped for.

  The next morning Rita made a point of inviting Fräulein Halle into the kitchen for a cup of ersatz. No one was drinking real coffee anymore in Poland. The woman was German, grateful for the company, and garrulous, at least about their employer. Taller than Rita, willowy but not undernourished, she had the stereotypical features of an Aryan woman—cheekbones so high they would not have looked out of place on the Mongolian steppe, but deep blue eyes and the inevitable blonde hair, permed into the Babelsberg version of a Hollywood hairdo. She wore no ornaments and an unladylike pair of trousers, along with a white blouse.

  Rita broke the silence first. “What’s Herr Lempke really like?”

  “He’s a bureaucrat. Just another MussNazi.”

  “How do you know?” Rita was relieved, but wanted reassurance he wasn’t a true believer.

  “They hardly ever ‘Heil Hitler’ in here. I’ve even overheard them joke about the uneducated, greedy, slovenly Gauleiters who have come through Krakow. And now they are all scared. They think there is no way that the Germans can hang on to what they have taken in Russia. They tell themselves the only thing to do is to divide the Allies from the Russians, play for a truce in the west, and hold on to the Ukraine, like they did for a couple of years after the Great War.”

  “But if they talked like that, they’d be shot!” Rita was pleased but surprised. They sounded more pessimistic about Germany’s war than she was!

  “That’s why you may not hear them say anything like that. But among themselves,
well . . .”

  “And you? MussNazi?”

  “No. I’m a Berliner. We never had time for that crowd in Berlin. Just a German girl who wandered into the wrong office in the civil service. Pay is good here; the RAF and the US Eighth Air Force don’t bother us this far east. Lempke is harmless. So I’ll stay for a while.”

  “Here, have the last piece of strudel.” Rita smiled, feeling confident she had finally found an ally, perhaps even a friend.

  Two weeks and things had settled into a routine that was allowing Rita to sleep nights, gain a little weight, listen to radio concerts from Berlin, and chat with Pani Wilkova a few evenings a week. She was reluctant to move her two vast Darwin tomes to Świętego Jana Street. They weren’t subversive, just seriously incongruous with her cover. What would the daughter of an innkeeper from the eastern marches of Poland be doing with Darwin on her hands? So, she kept them in the case under the bed in the room she continued to rent. She had read them so many times, by now they had mainly sentimental value. She almost laughed out loud as the words flitted across her consciousness.

  One morning in Rita’s third week at the Tax Inspectorate, returning from the farmers’ market, she found herself looking up the stairs from the street entrance into a dark face under a kerchief. The woman came down to the vestibule. Her clothes were dirty and torn, and her smell was rank. With the sun behind the open door shining on her, it began to dawn on Rita—first the realization that this was someone from Karpatyn, then from the Terakowski textile factory, and finally she knew. It was Dani, the girl whom Rita had listened to for months, reciting the Polish epic Lord Tadeusz. It was Dani, threadbare, with a haunted look in her eye, thinner even than when Rita last saw her, leaving the factory for the ghetto the day Rita had escaped. Then Rita remembered the electric warmth the brief moment her body had touched Dani’s the first day she had found her reading at the workbench.