The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  Suddenly everything was drowned out by the roar of four Merlin aeroengines throbbing under the wing of an Avro Lancaster flying much too low. Whether it was disabled and about to crash or off course and on damaged instruments, no one could tell. Whatever, it was more than enough of a distraction for Rita to pull free, grab her case, and begin running out of the park, into the danger of bombs now audibly and visibly falling on the Ku’damm. “Thank you,” Rita said aloud under the drone of the engines in one of the few English phrases she knew. Better, she thought, to chance her life to the RAF’s carpet bombing than to have to explain herself to Goebbels’s Jew-loving Polizei.

  Rita reached the park exit at the station still running. Instead of going down toward the U-Bahn air-raid shelter, she decided to follow the elevated tracks of the aboveground S-Bahn as it curved south and west away from the station. The closer to a military target, like railway tracks, the safer she would be from the Polizei. After ten minutes of sprints broken by the need to catch her breath and the pain of a stitch in her side, she found herself in a square, trees splintered and cut down, surrounded by a number of buildings already derelict from previous bombings. There was an entrance to the S-Bahn at the end of the square, and a light still shone on the station name, Sivigny Platz. The name rang a bell for Rita. Then she recalled the Berlin address Magda Halle had given her back in Krakow. She reached into her purse and pulled out the piece of paper: Directions: S-Bahn to Sivigny Platz, two blocks west to Schlucterstrasse, 21, Halle’s family’s home in the Charlottenburg district. Bombs were still falling, but the sounds were definitely moving away. Rita turned toward what she reckoned had to be west.

  A few minutes later, she found herself before 21 Schlucterstrasse, or what was left of it. The building number was still clearly visible on the lintel of the burned-out entryway. It had been a substantial art nouveau structure in pastel peach. Now all that remained was blackened peach stucco topped with broken white windowsills. Above the second-story walls, black sky was visible through broken rafters and timbered beams. Derelict parquet flooring cascaded in a frozen stream down toward the ground floor. Through the main entry, Rita could see a staircase going up to nothing at all. Behind it was the charred rear of the building, where a courtyard and a large burned-out tree were visible in the street lighting that cast the facade’s shadow back to the next street’s bombed-out structures. If Magda had any family left, they were not to be found hereabouts.

  There was nothing to do but to continue to put distance between herself and the women in the Tiergarten. Fifteen minutes’ farther down the street brought Rita to still another small park, in the middle of which hundreds of people were sitting out the air raid, evidently excluded by lateness or other disability from the Fehrbelliner U-Bahn station at the foot of the park. Rita laid out her coat, setting her head on the case, and was quickly asleep.

  Even before the all clear had sounded, Flora was urging Ingrid and the children back to the station. She was aflame to report this woman, who had defamed the Wehrmacht and was probably a Jew or a spy or at any rate a disloyal person.

  There was a lone Orpo—Ordnungspolizei—pacing the station waiting room. Not much need for order police to regiment the bombed-out Berliners sleeping on the benches and the floor.

  “Herr Polizei,” Flora called across the waiting room, wakening several of those who could do no more than doze. The Orpo turned and brought a finger to his lips, “Shhh . . .,” then closed the distance between him and the women.

  With a subdued click of his heels, he whispered, “Genedige Frau?” making his salutation a question.

  Flora began, “I have to report a crime, and the criminal may still be about . . .” She looked across the waiting room, searching the benches and alcoves for Rita.

  “What is it, ma’am? Theft, assault?”

  “No. Slander against the Wehrmacht.”

  Suddenly the Orpo realized what he was dealing with. If he didn’t make a show of taking this matter seriously, he would shortly be the subject of another complaint to be taken seriously. He withdrew a small notebook, poised a short pencil above it, looked up at Flora, and said, “Details, please.”

  Both volunteered, “Her name was Rita.” Flora continued, “That’s what she said, anyway. Didn’t give a surname. From the east, Poland probably.”

  The Orpo was taking it down carefully. “Description?”

  Flora and Ingrid had her to a tee. One corroborated the other’s report of Rita’s outrageous statement. Well, he would file it with the SS-Kripo and make a carbon for the RHSA—the Reich main security headquarters here in Berlin. But he wasn’t going to turn over the station looking for someone who was probably already gone.

  Rita was back at Zoo Station the next morning. Before joining the queue for a new ticket to Leipzig, she scanned the waiting room. She didn’t want to meet Flora and Ingrid again, so before seeking her train to Leipzig, she searched the departure board for their train to Magdeburg. This time she made no friends, or even eye contact, on the line. After an hour of waiting, she had new tickets, this time with no changes all the way to Heidelberg. There was a train to catch immediately. Owing to cancellations it was full, and until Leipzig she had to sit on her case in a corridor, along with many others. Finally, seated at a window, looking back in the direction from which the train had come, she watched the agricultural landscape pass by, hoping ghoulishly to feast an eye on the tangle of destruction that would line the right-of-way through Leipzig, Jena and Fulda, Frankfurt and Darmstadt, all the way to Heidelberg.

  Disappointment grew as the train moved south from Frankfurt. There were fewer and fewer signs of destruction. But for the occasional uniforms at the stations they rolled through, there were almost no signs of war at all. Bucolic was the word that came to her. But Rita was unprepared for what she saw as the train began to glide along the River Neckar. First the green of the ivy, overhanging ancient stone walls down to the very tracks, then the lush hills rolling away across the river to the north. Along the river there came into view a storybook stone bridge of arches and towers. It held her eye until she saw the vast castle looming up through the windows on the other side of the train. Nothing had prepared Rita for Heidelberg in the early morning sun, its stone warmed into a molten glow. The beauty of this place was yet another mystery in a world in which nothing was distributed in accordance with reason or justice or merit or desert. How, she wondered, could there be such a place on the same continent with the Warsaw ghetto?

  Rita glanced at her instructions once more, pulled her case off the baggage rack, and left the compartment. She was the first one out of the carriage when it came to a halt. Surrendering her ticket at the barrier, she walked out of the station and into the dreamworld that she had glimpsed from the train.

  She boarded a tram. Settling herself at the window, Rita could watch the passing scene as it wended its way through the streets to the river. The vagrant thought that a Jewess had no right to use the tram at all passed through her mind, but at this moment, the regulation didn’t seem to apply to her. A small chink in her identity. Perhaps she was on the way to becoming Margarita Trushenko, echt-Deutsch—a real German.

  A brace of round white towers framed the bridge at each end. Past one set the tram crossed the slowly moving river and then turned east along its bank on the Neuenheimer Landstrasse. Above the two- and three-story buildings at the river’s edge, all painted a gleaming white, villas climbed the forested hillside. Rita turned to watch the castle come into view again on the far side. Along the footpath following the river just below street level, women were pushing prams, couples strolled casually, old men sunned themselves on benches. Retaining walls bounded each of the streets leading up from the river into the wooded hill. On each there was a painted arrow with the word Philosophenweg—philosopher’s trail—written across it.

  The tram came to its last stop. “Bitte, Mein Herr,” she said to the tram driver, “can you direct me to Schlangenweg?”

  “It’s that na
rrow little path going up the hill, back about fifty meters.”

  And now she was climbing up a steep cobbled lane, with high, honey-colored sandstone walls overhung by ivy. The path twisted up from the river so that the main road was no longer visible. Rita suddenly felt she was moving through a labyrinth, trudging higher and higher with nothing but high wall on either side and no outlet before her or behind her. Then she began to see steps, and just to their right a gate. Here she was, at the back entrance to number 48 Werrgasse. She had been warned not to use the front entrance, but to climb up this way. Rita dropped her case, opened the gate with both hands, and stepped in.

  There she found a girl of about nine pummeling a smaller boy, already muddy at the knees and forearms, while two other children watched, laughing. Seeing her the older child turned to the house and shouted, “The new Ostie is here.” The fighting stopped, and the chorus went up, “Ostie, Ostie, Ostie.” Even among the youngest, a strain of derision rose in every repetition of the word, until at last an adult came to the back door to quell them.

  “Children, she is no Ostie. This girl is almost an Aryan, she is Volks-Deutsche. There is a big difference.”

  The woman was of middle height but running to fat, round-faced, blonder than Rita, with much darker, fiercely plucked eyebrows, wide open green eyes, too much lipstick, a heavy gold chain worn above a crocheted dress in light blue. There were several rings on each hand, a bracelet on one wrist, and a watch on the other. Even at a distance, Rita could make out the swastika pin over her heart.

  “Come this way.” She led the way in, followed by the four children who had been playing outside. She continued speaking all the while. “The children are a bit confused. The last girl was an Ostarbeiter, blue patch and all. I found her through the NS-Frauenschaft.” This was the Nazi Women’s League. “I had to send her back. Not strong enough, and she took sick as well. Frankly, I suspected she might be a Jewess. But I had no proof.” By now they had entered a parlor, and the lady of the house turned around. “Let us formally introduce ourselves.” She cleared her throat. “Heil Hitler,” the arm raised toward the ceiling. “I am Frau Lempke, and you are . . . ?”

  There was no alternative. “Heil Hitler. I am Margarita Trushenko.”

  “Your papers, please. Can’t be too careful.”

  Rita pulled them from her purse and handed them over. Frau Lempke pulled on a pair of spectacles and examined them. It was clear to Rita, who had watched her papers examined many times before, that this woman did not really know what she was looking for or even at. Good.

  “All correct. Now, let’s meet my brood.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  These are my three oldest, my Rhine maidens, Flossie, Gunde, and Brone. Flossie is nine.” Here Frau Lempke was interrupted by the child who repeated her mother’s greeting, “Heil Hitler,” at a pitch so loud it suggested the child was disturbed or unable to control her voice. She was wearing a Jungmädel BDM badge, which she pushed forward with one hand as she saluted. Rita was required to repeat the salute. The other two curtsied slightly when introduced. They were seven and six. “The big boy here is Horst. He is five.” The big boy was still in diapers. Not yet trained evidently. “The babies are napping in the nursery.” She clapped her hands twice, and the children scattered. Babies? Lempke had said nothing of babies.

  “Please sit down. I’ll explain your duties and take you on a tour of the house.” The duties were well beyond the time and the endurance of any single person. Frau Lempke proved, however, oblivious to housework herself and had no idea of how difficult and time-consuming these duties were. There were ten rooms—six with drapes and rugs to dust and beat—and a coal furnace to stoke, which also produced the dust to be beaten from the rugs and which heated the water for washing three sets of diapers. In the kitchen meals were to be prepared in accordance with the Reich’s guidelines on food waste by following the Reichseierkarte—the coupon book named after the egg consumption it restricted.

  A kitchen garden supplemented the ration book’s allowances, but it needed to be weeded, watered, and protected from vermin. There was a small orchard of a dozen trees, whose fruit was to be canned and preserved against winter shortages to come. “It may take many more years to defeat the Russians, Rita. I will call you Rita. Fräulein Trushenko is too formal. You may call me Frau L for short.”

  Back to the list of duties: there were shirts to iron when Herr L was at home—something that no longer held so much mystery for Rita—and the rest of the family’s laundry to be done, in the cellar laundry tub, equipped with the latest in modern hand-wringers, Frau L eagerly observed. “You’ll see it when you go down to your room in the cellar.”

  The tour took them to the second floor. There was a nursery, a library of matched but apparently unread books, all bound in rococo, a sewing room showing as much dust from lack of use as the library, and a master bedroom, whose unmade double bed accused Rita of skipping work she had not yet started. Back downstairs they came into the large kitchen, with an indoor hand pump and wood-fired stove. Finally they reached the cellar stairs, down which Frau L pointed without actually deigning to descend.

  “Please begin when you have unpacked, Rita. Lunch at one o’clock. There is an NS-Frauenschaft wartime cookbook to follow.” NS, Rita understood, was National Socialism, the polite form for Nazi.

  Rita lit the kerosene lamp at the top of the stairs and carried it down into the dark cellar. The first things to be seen were the laundry sinks and the promised clothes wringer, the coal furnace, with scuttle and coal bin, and beyond it, a door. Rita pushed the door open to reveal a sparsely furnished, windowless room: bed against the wall next to the furnace, a deal bureau with many more drawers than she needed—none of them sliding smoothly—a small table on which to put the kerosene lamp, and a wooden chair. Underneath the bed, which like the one upstairs had been left unmade, Rita found a chamber pot. She pulled it out from beneath the mattress and saw a piece of paper folded in half. This she opened and began reading. It was in good Polish:

  To my successor:

  Frau L never comes down here and couldn’t bring herself ever to touch a chamber pot, so I am sure this note will reach you undisturbed. Some tips that may help you survive longer than I did.

  Steal! It is the only way to survive. Steal the best pieces of meat or veg from the beastly soup you have to make them every day. Eat every scrap from their plates; don’t let them see any fruit that has fallen from the trees. Eat immediately. When you go to the market, you can always scarf some of the edibles before you get home. But don’t cut any corners on the diapers. You will have to stay up with a baby suffering from diaper rash. Frau L will never get out of bed for them.

  Watch out for Flossie. She spies and tells her mother everything she sees, and she lies when she doesn’t catch you out. If she sees you leaving the house without your OST badge on, she’ll tell her mother.

  You can keep warm in the winter when Lempke is away. The frau likes it warm and doesn’t understand how much coal you use or the price. It’s not rationed to party members.

  Good luck!

  This woman was evidently no simple Ostie farm girl. Probably Frau L’s suspicions were correct. But she must have been on the strict Ostarbeiter ration. Would they put a Volks-Deutsche on it?

  Rita lit a cigarette and burned the note in the ashtray. It was the last time she would be able to sit down and smoke till after midnight that evening. Looking at the ashes made her realize she had to write to Dani. She had bought one postcard on the journey in order to write. Now she took it from her bag and dashed off a line for the censors:

  Having a wonderful time; wish you were here. Send news to me at this address.

  Love, R.

  No reply ever came. A week later she summoned up the courage to write to Magda Halle. Back came a postcard, also written with the German censors in mind:

  Danielle Nowiki left on holiday the week after you did. Visiting the sights of Warsaw.

  Cheers,


  Magda Halle

  By the time she received the card, Rita had found a routine. Actually keeping this house clean was impossible for one person, or three for that matter. Everywhere you had to cut corners that any good housekeeper might notice. For example, you could make a lot of noise beating rugs without really putting your back into it. Reversing sheets instead of changing them went unnoticed by Frau L. No one ran their fingers along the wainscoting looking for dust. Stealing food while cooking was easy, and if you Heil Hitler-ed Flossie often enough, she would get tired of the game and leave you alone in the kitchen. The hard jobs were hauling Lebensmittle—food, often from the farmers’ markets across the river—in a child’s wagon, every day or so, up the steep Schlangenweg; repeatedly washing the ammonia out of the diapers without bleach or even much laundry powder—an item in short supply even for the party elite, she discovered; and the endless canning, which began in the autumn when the fruit started to fall from the trees. Not a peach or apple or plum was to be lost to scavenging squirrels or field mice. Nor could fallen fruit easily be diverted to the housemaid’s belly, for the children had been enlisted as orchard sentries. Boiling jars, stewing fruit, pickling vegetables, sealing lids, and putting them up in the kitchen cold larder made it easy for Frau L to keep count and tell when one was missing. She kept a small notebook with the count continually updated to be sure.

  Frau L was a patriot, having had six children for the Führer in nine years. Five children entitled her family to a significant quantity of milk daily and an egg a week for each child. The sixth earned double rations. But it was up to Frau L how to best deploy these scarce commodities in the interests of the Reich.