The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  The lady of the house frequently entertained neighbors. “Rita, tea with milk in the parlor, sofort.”

  “A word, please, Frau L.”

  “What is it? Can’t you see I have guests?” she hissed at Rita, standing at the parlor door.

  Rita whispered, “We only have half a liter of milk left, and the children have not had supper yet.”

  “Do as you are told.” Frau L turned and rejoined her guests.

  Some days later, into the kitchen strode the lady of the house. “Rita, the children want their eggs poached this morning.”

  “There are none left, ma’am.”

  “There were two yesterday. Have you been stealing?” High dudgeon spread across Frau Lempke’s face.

  How was Rita to remind her she had ordered up an omelet for herself the day before? “You were indisposed and needed the eggs yesterday, remember, Frau L?”

  “Ah yes. The children will just have to soldier along then.” She turned and left the kitchen.

  A governess came in four days a week to school the older children, and there was still a wet nurse for the infant twins, eighteen months old. Rita saw the two women come and go. Neither had any interest in engaging the servant in conversation. The former was a corker of a Nazi, and the latter was an uneducated local girl. Rita occasionally wished she had been left alone with the children, if only to cure them of Jew baiting as a form of play. In this house the greatest fear was that a Yid from the Nazi cartoons might be lurking under your bed, ready to carry you off to the east.

  One day in early June, Rita was in the back garden folding away the last of the linen, watching the shadows rise across the castle above the Neckar. One after another the facets of wall, gallery, crenelated tower, keep, and clock tower were cast first in gold and then in purple, until at last the whole became an indistinct romantic mass in the deepening gloom. Frau L had come to the back steps of the house and noticed both the splendid scene and her maid’s appreciation of it, something characteristic only of a refined person.

  “Rita.” Frau L startled the other woman. What now? Rita thought. Have I forgotten something? She began going over her mental list of chores. Instead, she heard, “Come in and have a cup of tea with me in the kitchen.”

  Rita made the tea, with a bit of milk, while Frau L opened the conversation. “It’s so nice to have a refined person in the house. Tell me, your German is so excellent. You must have spoken it from birth.”

  “My mutti had two German grandmothers, and her mother spoke German.” Rita was improvising. She knew the story had to be consistent. “She spoke to me in German from birth, when everyone else was speaking Polish.”

  “What became of her?”

  “Oh, the Russians sent her and the rest of the family to Siberia when they occupied eastern Poland. They thought I was just a barmaid at the hotel, so they left me alone when they took it over.”

  “The Jews must have run riot when the Bolsheviks occupied.”

  Tread carefully, Rita. “Actually, there were very few Jews in our town.”

  “Have you ever seen those horrible Ostjuden? The ones in the newsreels—swarthy, fleshy noses, loud ties and zoot suits, like blacks? Or the ones with long beards and wide hats, coats hanging to the floor?” Frau L was now disturbing herself with her own word pictures. She shivered.

  “I saw some of the religious ones in Warsaw once when I went there before the war. Were there no Jews here in Heidelberg?” There, she’d done just what she had promised herself she wouldn’t do: ask a subversive question. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut?

  “Oh, yes. But they were all professors, doctors, lawyers. You couldn’t tell them from anyone else. In fact, that was the trouble. And they took all the best posts in the university. There was no room for a German. Anyway, they all went to America years ago.”

  Frau Lempke hesitated. She had a reason for this conversation, and it wasn’t to tease out Rita’s biography. Frau L obviously wanted to ask Rita something, but could hardly bear to do so. What, wondered Rita, could it be?

  Finally, courage mustered, the lady of the house began again. “Rita, I am terribly afraid for the children. If we lose the war . . . I mean, if the Russians get here . . . they are already in Poland . . .” Rita was not going to interrupt or discourage this line of thought. “I mean, you have lived under them. What was it like? What will happen? What should I do?”

  Now Rita understood. It wasn’t the children, it wasn’t the fatherland, it wasn’t the party or the Führer that she worried about. It was rank terror at the prospect of sexual violence—rape—at the hands of a Soviet soldier from Mongolia. This was Frau Lempke’s nightmare.

  How to reply? What did this woman want to hear? Could Rita frighten her without bearing any cost? Provocation had already gotten her into trouble before, in Warsaw, and then in Berlin. Better to appeal to the kind of woman Frau L aspired to be.

  “Frau L, you will of course think first of the children, and you must be prepared for the worst.” She paused to let Frau L contemplate the unnamed worst, for herself. “You cannot let your beloved ones fall into the hands of Mongols. Such beautiful children must be protected from these monsters at all costs.” Rita subsided.

  Frau Lempke was nodding in sorrowful acceptance of this sage advice. “Perhaps I can get advice from the NS-Frauenschaft.”

  “A good idea, Frau L!”

  A few days later, hearing about the Allied landings in Normandy, Frau Lempke could now console herself that this part of the Reich might end up occupied by British and American soldiers, not the Asiatic hoards of the Soviet Army. The angst of Russian occupation receded, inspired now by the hope that her Führer would find a way to combine with the western Allies to stop the Russians at the Polish border. It was clearly not beyond his political genius. Frau Lempke speculated on this aloud more than once. Would she chide Rita for needlessly frightening her?

  In mid-July Frau L’s worst fears resurfaced. The Russians were still moving west briskly. By the beginning of August, they had already occupied all of Poland to the Vistula and were poised to take Warsaw. But then the Allied advance from Normandy slowed. One morning, cleaning in the upstairs bath, Rita found that a glass vial of seven cyanide pills had appeared in the medicine chest. Was this the formal advice Frau L had received? Then the Russians’ advance stopped at the Vistula. Had the Germans found a defensive barrier after all?

  In the early fall, lectures began again at the university. Though her workday was 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Rita had been given Thursday afternoons and evenings off. She needed badly to escape the house, or even these few hours would have been forfeit. With no money to speak of and no interest in German films or the Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels, she was at a loss about where to go. She wondered, Would I go unnoticed in a lecture theater? They would probably be filled mainly with women, the wounded, and those otherwise unfit for war. But the lectures would be free, warmed by many bodies sitting close together, and if large enough, they would be anonymous. Most of all, she hoped, the university might be a relief from the pervasive monotone of National Socialism. Rita couldn’t know that Heidelberg was the most Nazified of the German universities.

  Thinking about what lectures to follow, Rita realized that now what she wanted most of all to understand better was science—in fact, biology. She needed to know whether anyone in the zoology faculty read Darwin the way she did. Her first free Thursday afternoon found Rita searching for a rear seat in Foundations of Biological Systematics. The lecturer entered. The audience stood. Raising his hand, palm to the sky in the manner of the Führer, the lecturer shouted, “Heil Hitler.” The audience responded, repeating the greeting as one. So much, Rita thought, for disinterested science.

  The lecturer looked around the hall. He removed his glasses and cleaned them. “My name is Gerhard Heberer. I am professor of general biology and anthropology at the University of Jena, and I am an Untersturmführer in the SS. The faculty of biology here has given me the honor of offering a
series of lectures on evolution and race.”

  Heberer now looked down and began to read aloud. His account of evolution bore no resemblance to what Rita had read, over and over, in the same books he was citing. Heberer said nothing about variation, chance, extinction. But he did have a great deal to say about progress, racial purity, and mongrelization. As he read, Heberer would add to or remove slides from a projector, pushing them from one side to the other, illustrating racial differences and Aryan superiority—skulls, femurs, and pelvises of a variety of primates, a chart of the volumes of crania, dimensions of foreheads, chins, and noses, along with average heights and ratios of arms to body. All this he delivered with off-color innuendo about African and Semitic races. Heberer came to a peroration urging German youth to be worthy of their superiority to other creatures.

  Rita left the lecture theater thinking, So much for science at this university. She still had time for another lecture before returning to the Lempke house.

  Unterscharführer Otto Schulke stood at the doors of the zoology hall. He should have savored his good fortune. A few years in the prewar Wehrmacht, mustered out of an artillery battery with deafness from stupidly standing too near a howitzer barrel. His eagerness as a Hitler Jugend and his father’s service in the Mannheim Ordpolizei—the municipal police—had been enough to land him a plainclothes job in the depleted Heidelberg Gestapo soon after the war had become serious in the summer of 1941. A decent salary, a long black leather coat, a Luger under his arm, the authority to ask impertinent questions—it should have been enough for him.

  But the sources of his resentment were multiple, and they easily swamped any recognition of his good fortune. Otto Schulke was not a happy policeman. He didn’t look the part of a cop—too round-faced, and he didn’t need to shave more than once a week, no matter how often he tried. He was too chubby; even rationing couldn’t dissipate the baby fat. And he was too fastidious for police work—always washing his hands and paring back the cuticles of his nails. He couldn’t help himself. Assignment to internal security in the university district was deeply rankling. All those women who smirked at him, wounded veterans who couldn’t be intimidated, and the shirkers who had found a way to be excused service. They were the worst—enemies of the state. The least any of them deserved was a little inconvenience. He was not above imposing it.

  “Papers!” Schulke stood at the central door of the zoology building, making his demand. He had ordered the two side doors locked so everyone had to undergo his personal scrutiny on their way out. He could hear the mutterings along the queue, now stretching back up the stairs to the lecture theater, as students fumbled for their identity cards. “Miss my next lecture . . .” “Last tram home . . .” “Nothing left in the shops for supper.” Schulke’s satisfaction began to well up. If he had had the word “cossetted,” he would have used it. Harassing these wastrels was the least he could do for the Führer.

  But now there was something more interesting before him than just another professor’s child eyeing him with class hatred and intellectuals’ contempt. The girl was visibly frightened. Her hand trembled as she proffered the Ausweis, eyes cast down, poor—threadbare coat, bad shoes. He noticed these things. He had been a poor boy once himself. And she was patient, no pulling back the card, no sarcasm in her voice, no resentment at all. Schulke looked from her face to her card and back. They matched. Then he looked again and saw the Warsaw endorsement, then the Krakow police registration. He looked up. “Volks-Deutsche?”

  Rita nodded.

  “What were you doing in there?” He looked up the stairs to the lecture hall. “Trying to stay warm?” She nodded. Why, he asked himself, did I have to help her? Answering his own question; I’ll never make a good policeman. “Never seen an Ostie at the uni before. What were you doing up there?”

  “As you said, sir. Just passing the time.” Rita was obsequious.

  Schulke took out a notebook. This time he was going to be a smart cop. Laboriously he inscribed Rita’s particulars, as the students behind her grew more voluble in their annoyance. “Address?” Rita mumbled the number on the Schlangenweg. He handed her back her card and jerked his head toward the exit.

  Now what? Rita walked out the door, down the stairs, wondering whether the kontrolle—the identity check—was something to worry about. What is the least suspicious thing I can do? Just do what you were going to do anyway. She headed for the philosophy faculty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Rita watched the young man who had quietly entered from the lecturer’s entrance in the well of the hall. As he did so, the students began arranging themselves on the edge of their seats, ready to spring forward in a unison of salute to victory, Sieg Heil. The lecturer, however, raised his hands to forestall them and began. “Dear students of the university, my name is Eugen Fricker, docent in philosophy. It is now fully ten years since the address made to us by the then rector of Marburg University, Martin Heidegger, on the great challenge that lay before us in uniting the university to the new German spirit of National Socialism, whose torch is carried by our Führer, Adolf Hitler.” Now, aroused by fervor repressed, all rose in unison, raising their arms in obligatory expressions of unity. Rita joined in, almost laughing at the comedy of her raised arm and shriek.

  Fricker now looked down at his notes and began to read. At first Rita listened, recalling the abstractions she had become familiar with in the faraway philosophy library at Krakow. But as Fricker droned on, turning pages, it became harder and harder to concentrate on the sounds wafting up from the podium. From the rustling of papers and murmurs, it was evident that the sounds had evidently lost their interest, if not their meaning, for most of the students around her. Once or twice a particularly ardent student—or was he an ardent Nazi—sitting a few rows below Rita turned to his right and left, demanding quiet and respect in a stage whisper. Rita decided to try to concentrate, to make something of it. But Fricker’s monotone was hypnotic. She could not prevent her eyelids from falling again and again. A half-dozen times, her chin hit her chest, and she woke with a start. Once the young woman sitting beside her stepped on Rita’s foot, and she awoke to find Fricker glaring directly at her, or so it seemed for a moment. Surreptitiously she looked at her watch—fifteen minutes left, twelve . . . five.

  Turning over the last page of his notes, Fricker looked around the lecture hall and gave his final peroration. “Rector Heidegger recognized that it was the destiny of the German Volk to return philosophy to the true path, from which the Greeks strayed, from the error the Jews used to trick European civilization. It is our Führer and the party of National Socialism that have taken hold of the fate of our true being, our soul, our Dasien.” The lecturer’s voice was growing louder with each phrase. “He has mobilized philosophy itself to destroy the twin enemies of being—Bolshevism to the east, the materialist plutocracy to the west.” Now Fricker subsided, rhetorically spent, almost in imitation of the Führer’s fatigue at the culmination of a speech. He let his head hang so that his broad forehead glistened in the lights focused on the podium. The audience rose up in unison, finally freed from mere philosophy by the invocation of their world historical duty to triumph over Germany’s enemies. Once more shouts of “Heil Hitler” filled the lecture theater. Then the students began to file out.

  Leaving the university Rita felt she needed to wash her thoughts clean of the muddy verbiage she had been sprayed with. So, as she walked back across the bridge, she let herself be distracted by the dappled fish scales of sunlight—silver, gold, purple—that blinked up at her from the Necker as the afternoon sun set. Rita was fairly gliding as she moved up the Schlangenweg and opened the gate to the back garden. Quietly she entered the kitchen. There, evidently awaiting her return, was Frau Lempke, tapping her foot in a caricature of impatience.

  “Fräulein Trushenko, what were you doing at the university today?” The tone was peremptory, and without waiting for an answer, she continued, “I have had a visit from the local Gestapo, thank you ve
ry much! Never a spot of trouble in all my life, and now . . .” Frau Lempke was momentarily lost in her own chagrin.

  Rita worked hard to look innocent. “Have I done something wrong, Frau L? I only meant to improve myself a little.” Alarm bells were going off in her head, but she needed to stay calm.

  “An officer came to confirm your name, work permit, and address. That’s all. But it was so shaming, to be called upon by the police, as if one were a criminal.” The woman literally shivered with embarrassment, reliving the call. “Well, I told him what he had to know.” She looked at Rita as sternly as she could. “Now, you tell me why the daughter of a hotelkeeper from the east, an Ostarbeiter, is skulking about the institutions of higher education, putting on airs and graces, playing at things well above her station.” She continued tapping her foot even as she paused. “Or perhaps you are not what you say you are after all. Perhaps you are one of those jumped-up, cultivated, Europeanized Jewesses, masquerading as a Gentile, but finally unable to cloak your true identity as a cosmopolitan?”

  Rita was taken aback at Frau Lempke’s erudition—cosmopolitan, indeed. One of the alternatives frightened her, but the other might be a lifeline. She could throw herself on the good lady’s mercy and plead the desire to rise from her station and profit by exposure to true German culture, perhaps by invoking Nazi philosophy. What was a little more abnegation after so many years of it?

  “You are right, Frau Lempke . . . I had no right to be there. But I was not taking up space that an Echt-Deutsche—a real German—could have used. The lecture halls are half empty with so many young heroes at the front. But I do aspire to the civilizing influence of German culture.” She paused to gauge the reaction. At least she was not yet being interrupted. “I was at a lecture on the thought of the important national Socialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who gave the great lecture here at Heidelberg at the beginning of the Third Reich, calling students to the Führer’s service.”