The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  Evidently Heidegger was a name beyond Frau Lempke’s ken, for her brow furrowed. At last she found the name she was searching for and, now knowing that she had caught Rita out, replied with hauteur, “The philosopher of the party is named Rosenberg, Alfred Rosenberg.”

  “Please, Frau Lempke, if only you had heard the lecturer explaining how the Führer’s thought and Germany’s greatness were stolen from them two thousand years ago in the misunderstandings of the Judaizing Greeks Plato and Aristotle.”

  “So, you were at a lecture on the philosophy of National Socialism? I suppose there can be no harm in that for a Volks-Deutsche.” Rita was back from the danger of being an Ostie to the good graces of incipient German womanhood. She breathed an inward sigh. Frau Lempke was, however, not yet satisfied. “But, Rita, how can a girl, even a part-German girl, with no studies, no gymnasium, no Abitur from the state school examiners, understand lectures on philosophy?”

  “I never had any call to mention it, but for a while, I took some instruction from the sisters at a local Catholic gymnasium in my hometown. But then the Depression hurt my father’s business so much he withdrew me and I had to go to work. Of course, I did not understand a great deal of what I heard today, Frau Lempke. I was hoping to be able to ask you about it. I thought what I could not grasp, you would be able to help me understand.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s a bit too late tonight. Good night, Fräulein Trushenko.”

  What Rita really needed to know was how much trouble she was in. But that was the last thing she could ask Frau L.

  Untersturmführer Schulke was still working. For a long time, he simply sat and thought about the details he had learned from the very cooperative hausfrau he had interrogated over two cups of tea and a plate of children’s cookies. Exactly when had her little housemaid arrived, and exactly from where? How long had she worked for the good woman’s husband in Poland, and where? They had even spent a few minutes in the girl’s cellar room, taking note of the few documents and letters in the drawer by her bed. The lady of the house admitted her own suspicions about the maid. She and the plainclothes policeman enjoyed every moment of their brief appearance in a detective thriller.

  When Otto got back to the office, the Kriminalsekretär—the duty officer—in charge that night had smirked at his zeal. “Catch a spy, Schulke?” Poor Otto was the butt of a certain amount of raillery in the local unit—a little too much Heil Hitler-ing, and not much to show for his police work. He made no response, but bent over his typewriter.

  Three times he had to rip the paper and carbons out of the typewriter. The first time he had filled out half the form before realizing that he had put the carbon paper in the wrong way. The second time, he had torn the onionskin trying to erase the spelling errors his thick fingertips and erratic education had combined to commit. Finally, though, he had found his stride. Telexes to Berlin, to Krakow, to the Warsaw Gestapo records, now withdrawn to a town in Silesia, requesting information on Rita Trushenko: registration records, employment history, police reports, known associates. Schulke managed to find a place in the flimsy for every bit of data he had managed to bring away from his meeting with Frau Lempke.

  By the time he’d finished, everyone had left the office, including his boss and the teletypist. That was a break, Schulke realized. The Kriminalsekretär might have demanded to see his message and denied it priority: no time to waste tracking down the past of a domestic servant from Poland. Then the teletypist would have had to ask the boss whether it should go out, and she’d follow his orders. With everyone gone, he could just leave it on the top of her out-tray to be sent the next morning.

  By the time the first replies began to come back, five months later, Otto Schulke had almost forgotten about the entire matter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  One day in early November, Flossie, the nine-year-old, thrust her head around the kitchen door. “Rita. There is a beggar woman around the back of the house asking for you.”

  Shaking the dishwater from her hands and reaching for a rag to dry them, Rita wondered what this could all be about. A silly prank by the older children, a ruse to get her out of the kitchen so they could steal a jar of preserves? Someone selling vegetables from an allotment? She stepped outside, and there before her was indeed a woman in a torn coat, with dark hair matted by the mud, which had also spattered her coat, gaunt of face, her face furrowed and scabbed in places, carrying a small brown package tied with strands of broken, unraveling string. Beggar was exactly the right description.

  The woman looked up, tried to smile, and in a hoarse whisper said, “At last I have found you, sister.”

  It was Dani. Again! This time a real wraith, but a living one. Rita rushed to her and found that instead of hugging her, she was suddenly supporting her friend’s—no, her lover’s—weight, preventing her from falling to the ground. They turned, and Rita half-led, half-carried Dani inside to a chair in the kitchen.

  First Rita needed to short-circuit intrusive questions from Flossie and prevent the wrong messages being carried to Frau Lempke. Thankfully the lady of the house was out. Rita had perhaps an hour to figure out how to deal with Dani’s arrival. She turned to Flossie. “My dear, this is my sister-in-law Dani, who has finally escaped from the Bolsheviks and come to Germany. As you can see, she has had quite an ordeal getting here. But she is finally safe among her fellow Germans.” And then, as an afterthought, “Heil Hitler.” Flossie nodded. “Please be sure and tell your mother as soon as she gets home. Meanwhile, I will take my sister to the cellar, and she can clean up a bit.”

  When the child was gone, Dani looked up. “Bad penny I am. Forever turning up at your doorstep threatening to ruin everything.” They both smiled.

  “What do you need first—food, a cup of tea, sleep, a bath, a doctor?”

  “All of them. First a cup of tea, then a bath, then some clean bandages for a wound.” She winced and put her hand to her right side. Rita winced with her. Then she rose and put on the kettle.

  “Tell me everything. I knew you went to Warsaw after I left Krakow. Magda Halle sent me a postcard.”

  “You were right.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything.” Dani broke down.

  It wasn’t the moment to ask what she meant. Rita took the kettle off the hob and helped her friend down the stairs.

  Lying on Rita’s bed, Dani looked up at Rita and patted the mattress. “I’m too agitated, too excited to sleep right away, Rita. I want to tell you everything anyway. So, sit by me.” She began.

  A week after Rita left Krakow at the end of April, Dani had quietly slipped out of the apartment and disappeared, taking her few belongings and, of course, her new Kennkarte. Magda had been right: Dani had gone looking for the Home Army. She found it intolerable to remain sheltered from the reality of the war by the protection of Nazis, even if they were only MussNazis. She was going to make her life count for something, even if doing so required her to put an end to it. Arriving in Warsaw, this time with a solid identity, she found a room in Praga and began to frequent bars, cafés, pool halls, workers’ clubs of the prewar trades-union movement. Surely, she thought, these were the places in which she would find the resistance, the underground, the parts of the Home Army that she could join.

  With a real Kennkarte, Dani felt, if not invulnerable, at least willing to take risks. By now the German army and even the Waffen-SS were busy holding back the Russians surging across the Polish border. They were too preoccupied to spend a great deal of time trolling Warsaw for Jews. Besides, the ghetto had been cleared, burned, and razed. Even extortionists—the szmalcowniks—had become edgy. They were being picked off by underground elements. No one could tell whether it was Home Army or the remnants of ghetto resistance or the internecine struggle over scarcity—fewer and fewer Jews with any money left at all to prey on and eventually sell out to the Germans. The Gestapo was as ruthless as ever, but its first priority was a line of retreat back to the Reich, and the Polish B
lue Police now knew exactly which way the tide was running.

  Dani found work in one of the cafés near the bridges across the Vistula, on the city side, away from Praga. But try as she might, she could not make contact with the Home Army resistance. Surely they were there, in the cafés and the workers’ restaurants, the police, the brothels. Late one night in June, she found herself alone in the café where she worked, closing up. The last customer was still nursing a beer at the Zinc as Dani tried to send him a signal to go, ostentatiously lifting the chairs and turning them over on the tables preparatory to mopping the floor. “What’s the rush, sister? Have one with me.” The man pushed a coin across the bar and pointed to the beer tap.

  “Since you asked nicely.” Dani came back around the bar, pulled herself a pint, and glided down the bar till she was facing him. “Pretty quiet tonight,” she volunteered. “Even the streets . . . hardly a German patrol all night.”

  “Before the storm,” he replied. She looked at him quizzically. He offered, “The Home Army is laying low, just waiting for the Russians to get a little closer. Then all hell will break lose.”

  Was this her chance finally to make contact? Or was it a provocation? Why would anyone raise the matter so openly? She had been looking for a way into the resistance for too long not to risk a direct approach. “Is that so? How can a woman help?”

  “Sorry, sister, no Jews.” He put up his hands to wave away her protest. “Don’t bother denying it or showing me your documents. It’s in your voice. You can fool a German but not a Pole. I’m not going to turn you in or shake you down. But don’t expect me to put you on to the resistance.” The man moved back from the bar, drew himself up, and delivered himself of a little speech. “The Home Army is a patriotic expression of Polish national identity.” Dani thought, I am watching a propaganda poster come to life from the past, from one of the old right-wing groups—ONRA, the National Radical Camp, the National Democrats, or the Green Ribbon League. It was as if the war had never happened. “We are not going to let a lot of emancipated Yids worm their way into our fight. We’ll have enough trouble with all the Yids running the Red Army when it gets here.” With that he rose and walked out of the café.

  So, five years of occupation by a common enemy had not yet reconciled Jew and non-Jew in Poland. Was there anything left of the Jewish Resistance Organization—the ZOB—that had organized the uprising in the ghetto? Even if there were, it would be harder to find than the Home Army. Courting all the danger she dared, Dani wandered the ruins of the ghetto, haunted the precincts of the remaining prison for those few Jews still left in Warsaw, searching for some sign of their existence. But she was exciting no interest from anyone at all. Even German sentries were no longer much interested in checking Kennkarten.

  There was nothing Dani could do but keep trying. There had to be some part of the Home Army that would take her on. But by the end of July, she was ready to give up her quest. Then everything changed. Suddenly, on July 27, Generalgouvernement posters went up on walls all over town, announcing a requisition of 100,000 citizens to prepare entrenchments, ditches, tank obstacles for the Wehrmacht. This was a signal to everyone to get off the streets. It was also a signal to the Home Army. Four days later the battle for the city began to rage. The Poles inside Warsaw had committed themselves to liberating their capital before the Russians arrived. And the Russians across the river were happy to let them try. They knew it wouldn’t work.

  Suddenly Dani found herself in a war zone. With Russian forces waiting and watching just across the Vistula, Warsaw continued to be one for the next two months.

  “What did you do from August to October? How did anyone survive?”

  “That’s when I finally got my chance to become part of the Home Army.”

  “You fought?”

  “I was more of a human booby trap.” Dani shuddered and went on, “When the fighting first started, people just stayed inside, away from windows. But then as it became more intense and the Germans began shelling buildings, we had to move into basements. At the end we were living in sewers, nothing to eat or drink. That’s when I got my ‘chance.’ ” She almost laughed through the sobs that welled up. “I was in a basement with a unit of the Home Army. They brought me to the commander. He had been told I wanted to help. It turned out there might be something I could do and they’d share their food and water with me.”

  “What was it?” Rita almost didn’t want to know.

  “Be a whore, be their whore, service their troops. How did the officer put it? ‘Build morale.’ Find a corner of the basement and open a one-woman brothel!” She stopped for a moment. “I just turned and started to walk away. I wanted the food. I was dying of thirst. But I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Anyway, he grabbed me and turned me around. He was smiling, and I could actually hear him say to himself something like, ‘Well, it was worth a try.’ Then he said, ‘All right, there is something else you can do. It’s much more dangerous, but it will help.’ He sent me through the sewers out behind the fighting to where German units were billeted. They used me as a decoy, as bait in the ruins, to waylay German soldiers, boys on patrol, so they could kill them and take their equipment and weapons.”

  Rita gasped. “You were willing to do that?”

  “I had no idea what I was getting into until it was too late . . . Rita, it was horrible, maybe worse than being their kept woman. I would sit out at twilight trying to look innocent enough not to be a threat, but sluttish enough to give a Wehrmacht soldier or even an entire patrol an idea. I wouldn’t resist, but I would insist we go somewhere ‘private.’ When we did, the Home Army soldiers would quietly garrote the soldier, take his helmet, rifle, ammunition, medical kit, anything . . . and not just that. In fact, that’s not what they really wanted. They’d strip the body, take the rations, the cigarettes, his watch, the money, read his letters, deface his family pictures, and sometimes if they were really drunk, they’d mutilate the body . . . I couldn’t watch. The only thing that kept them from attacking me is that they needed me to continue their game.”

  “I don’t know how you could have done it. Though at least, I suppose, you were fighting.”

  “Fighting? Was it fighting or was it robbery and murder? I told myself I was doing it to survive. Rita, I got a good look in the eye of every one of those German soldiers. Kids—seventeen, eighteen, twenty at the most. They’d even talk to me on the way to where I was taking them . . . tell me it would be their first time, or talk about where they were from, how scared they were. Then, just as I opened my coat and pulled them onto me, the wire would cut through their necks . . . I was killing innocents.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “We must have been there for five or six days. By the time the German unit began to notice their losses, there were a dozen bodies stacked up and rotting. The smell would have given us away if it hadn’t been for the fact that everything smelled that way in the ruins . . . Anyway, we finally retreated back through the sewers. And that was pretty much the end.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Well, the Russians were on the other side of the Vistula, just watching the Germans destroy the entire city and almost everyone in it. At the end, people were moving out of the sewers toward the Vistula, driven by the fighting, the fires, thirst. The night I got to the river, the few boats were already overloaded. Once they started across, the Wehrmacht began firing flares, illuminating the whole bank. Their artillery simply sank every boat in the river. Then the Germans began firing into the crowd on the bank. That’s when I got hit.” Dani lifted her dirty blouse to reveal a bandaged wound around her ribs, yellowing around a fading red mark on her right side, in the flesh below the rib cage.

  “Let me help you off with these clothes.” Rita began unbuttoning the blouse from the back. “We’ll wash them . . . or maybe burn them and find you others. How badly hurt are you?”

  “The bullet was probably from a pistol. It was not big, and it went clean through my
side without touching any organ, I think. Anyway, here I am, and it’s healing. But when it happened, I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke I was already bandaged and in a group of people still on the German side of the river at daybreak. It was early in October, maybe the first or second—I never knew. We decided to surrender and walked into the German lines with a white flag.

  “They made us join a much longer column of people leaving the city under Wehrmacht guard. The march ended up at Pruszków railway station. People said we were going to a labor camp from there. But I knew what that really meant. There were thousands of people, all kinds—Home Army soldiers, civilians from all over Warsaw. I still had my papers and tried to show them to the sentries. But whenever I did, someone would yell out Jewess or Yid or something. Anyway, once my wound stopped bleeding, I knew I had to get away. After a few days in this assembly area, they put us on a passenger train—seats and windows, not even a cattle car. We must have had high priority for extermination. Anyway, I could tell we were headed toward Krakow and probably the extermination camp at Auschwitz. When the train had begun moving and most people were asleep, I jumped.”

  “With your wound?”

  “I was too frightened even to notice. I didn’t have a choice. Something was forcing me to try to survive, no matter what I wanted. That’s how it felt. When I jumped the fall knocked me out again. It was the second time I woke up surprised to find someone taking care of me. Why are people like that, just as willing to save a stranger as kill one?” Rita thought she knew. But it wasn’t the moment to explain. “This time it was a peasant woman near Tomaszów Mazowiecki.” It was a large town halfway between Warsaw and Krakow. “There I was, in a bed in her house. It was more like a hut attached to a barn. She told me a Catholic priest had brought me in, calling me a hero of the Warsaw uprising. It must have been the wound in my side. She kept me fed for three days. Then her husband showed up and said I had to be a runaway Jew. Next day she made me leave. But she gave me a little food—half a loaf of bread and some shriveled apples. By that time the wound in my side was bleeding again and looked like it might have become infected.”