The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Very good police work, Schulke. Patient, thorough, all watertight. I am sure you have finally managed to track down some serious enemies of the Reich, at least a couple of Jewesses in hiding.” The Sturmscharführer stopped, leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, drew in a breath, and blew a series of smoke rings, each perfectly shaped and replaced by another as it dissipated. After an appreciative glance at the paperwork before him, he turned to his subordinate. “Now, unlock those handcuffs and let the nice young ladies go home.”

  “What?”

  It was said with too much defiance from an Unterstrumführer to let it pass unnoticed. “That’s an order, Unterstrumführer. Sofort—immediately. And don’t ever use that tone with me, even after the surrender.”

  Schulke could not respond. He could do nothing but sputter.

  “Yes, that’s what I said . . . after the surrender . . . to the Amis.” The Sturmscharführer looked at him, realizing that the stupid man just couldn’t understand his situation. If he had, he would never have carried this pointless little exercise so far. “Unlock the ladies and sit down; there’s a good fellow.” Wordlessly, Schulke pulled a key from his waistcoat, walked around the two women’s chairs, took off the handcuffs, and returned to his desk, where he slumped into the chair.

  “Let me explain, Unterstrumführer. The Amis are at the Siegfried Line, a hundred kilometers from here.” Calling them Amis made the Americans sound almost like friends. “With any luck the war will be over in a few weeks. When it’s over, we’ll be the lucky ones—alive, in one piece, and occupied by the Allies—not the Ivans. About the only thing you and I can do now to lose our particular war is to go around making difficulties for nice young Jewish girls.” Schulke still didn’t get it. “Look, when the Americans get here, people who went out of their way to give the Jews a hard time are going to pay. The people who took their property are going to come in for a beating too. But people who were just following orders—policemen, for example—well, what choice did we have? The Amis will understand that. Besides, they’ll need us to keep things running smoothly, just like we are going to need them to eat next winter.

  “If, right up to the last minute, you make it your business to ship Jews off to some extermination camp that probably won’t even be working anymore when they get there, well, it won’t be very easy for the Amis to overlook that kind of zeal. Understand, Untersturmführer?” He turned to Rita and Dani. “You girls just go home. In fact, I’m going to drive you home. Wouldn’t do to be caught after curfew.”

  As the Kriminalsekretär drove them away from the station in a Grosser Mercedes, Rita couldn’t suppress a swelling feeling of vindication. It was, after all, perfectly clear. The idea that Erich had inoculated her mind with, that had kept her alive for so long, had in the suddenly changed environment of the police station become fatal to her. But then she had been spared by another Darwinian struggle. The bacillus of Nazism was losing the struggle for survival against other parasites in the German mind. It wasn’t kindness or scruple or opportunism she had to thank for the comfortable ride she was getting back to the Lempkes. It was something that had recently taken hold of this man’s mind, something that had displaced what had been there, running his life, for the previous twelve years or so. Something different from Nazism, better in the current circumstances at exploiting his own personal desire for survival, another trait imposed on him by Mother Nature. All that, plus a certain amount of random chance. She was going to survive to be liberated.

  Three days later, and liberation did not seem so palpable a thought after all. The Grossdeutscher Rundfunk was full of the great breakthrough battle in the Ardennes, on the border with Belgium. At last, the Führer’s masterstroke that would divide the Amis and the Limeys from the Bolsheviks, bring the war in the west to a standstill, and allow Germany to mass all its strength in the east. Was the complaisant Sturmscharführer going to change his mind and send Schulke after Rita and Dani after all?

  Frau Lempke kept the radio on all day long, listening for bulletins. Rita was required to maintain a joyful countenance as she went about her work, being called hourly into the parlor to join the family in listening to news of the advance. How could this surprise have overtaken the Allies? Perhaps they didn’t have the German codes after all. Perhaps someone like Rita had known and betrayed them. If so, could the Germans bring the Allies to a standstill in the west? Perhaps, Rita thought. But nothing could any longer stop the Soviet onslaught. After a week with no news of any German victories in the east, the same thought must have begun to occur to Frau Lempke.

  One afternoon before Christmas, she turned to Rita. “What if the Amis stop before they reach the Reich and the Russians sweep all the way to the Rhine? What then? Have they thought about that in Berlin?”

  Rita had never been asked to respond to a geopolitical question before. Silence seemed the safest response. The lack of reassurance made Frau L more loquacious. “I thought about your warning. I have purchased poison—cyanide pills—for the children.” She omitted herself, though Rita knew there were enough pills for the children and their mother.

  Rita felt the urge to be provocative. “Do you have enough for yourself? Can you spare one for the housemaid?”

  “I have thought about it. I cannot take the easy way out. If there is any chance, the Führer will need more Germans. I am still young enough to have more children. So I won’t be needing mine. Therefore I have an extra dose I offer you.”

  “Thank you.” Rita added a quiet, “Heil Hitler.”

  Once the Allies had rolled back the last German offensive to the Siegfried Line at the German border, Frau Lempke began thinking harder about how to cope with the coming western occupation. Barrels were procured, brought up the Schlangenweg by Rita, filled carefully by Frau L with silver, china, her Dresden figurines, crystal, and damask, then carried out to the back garden, there to be buried. Rita made it her business to misremember the exact location of each hole she dug and to scrupulously record the misinformation in Frau L’s little copybook.

  In late March, the day after she finished her excavations, the entire family found itself for the first time visiting Rita in the cellar. Apparently, low-level Allied air strikes had set off the air-raid alarms in Heidelberg, almost for the first time in the war. The scream of engines approached and then began to rattle windowpanes. Frau Lempke would not stand on ceremony. She brought her entire brood down for a visit to the cellar. Soon Rita was asked to go up in the kitchen so that there would be enough room for Frau L and the children in the only room without a window in the house. Rita found herself standing alone in the kitchen reflecting on the irony that, after five years of war and almost four years of German bestiality, she was about to be killed by the American Air Force. As the sound died away, she began to see what looked at first like large white snowflakes flitting through the air. Suddenly she realized they were too large for snowflakes. Some caught a tree limb, but most landed across the back garden. Yet they did not melt in the warm sun or in the wet puddles. They were handbills.

  Stepping out the back door, Rita could see writing on the papers. In roman script but German language, the pieces of paper called upon civilians in Mannheim to evacuate the city or remain in bomb shelters, basements, or other protected areas. Evidently the leaflet bombers had missed their target, twenty kilometers to the west. Now the children came out of the house and, led by Flossie, began picking up the leaflets and carrying them into the kitchen to burn. Frau L stood before the door. “Did you get every last one, children?”

  The next afternoon Dani arrived at the back door. Rita was unsurprised to see her. “The old lady I work for has left town. She forced me to clear out before she locked up her flat. Everyone in Mannheim is getting out.”

  “We saw the leaflets. They dropped some here.”

  “There’s a Volks-Sturm—people’s storm unit—and what’s left of a Hitler Jungend brigade defending the city. The Bürgermeister tried to surrender the town, but they won’t all
ow it. There’ll be street-to-street fighting in the ruins. When I left I could see civilians with rifles hiding in wait. It’s going to be like Warsaw.”

  “You can stay here, at least for a few days. Go on downstairs. I’ll deal with Frau Lempke.” Just then the parlor bell rang on the kitchen wall.

  Rita went upstairs and found the front door open. There was Herr Lempke, whom she had not seen more than twice since she had arrived from Krakow, carrying bags from a government Opel into the house. She walked down the front steps, took a valise from his hand, and brought it up to the front door. He nodded at her, and she followed him into the parlor, where he took off his hat and coat and handed them to her.

  Frau Lempke was standing at the bellpull. “Ah, Rita. Bring Herr Lempke a pot of tea.”

  “With milk, madam?”

  “If there is any.”

  By the time she returned with the tea, the Lempkes were in heated discussion. Rita stretched out the process of preparing, pouring, and serving the tea. She needed to hear what Lempke had to say. She also had to prepare him for the surprise of seeing the kitchen maid he had last seen in Krakow.

  Lempke was talking. “No. I am not going to any Bavarian redoubt, and that’s flat.”

  “But if Reich Minister Frank ordered you to, you have no choice.”

  “What do you mean, I have no choice? They can order, but they can no longer enforce their orders. They couldn’t even get me through the lines out of Berlin. I had to figure my own way out, traveling with filthy refugees in hard-class carriages. It took three days to get here. Coming out of Berlin, we were strafed by Russian aircraft and bombed by the RAF every night.”

  “But you can’t desert. They are hanging deserters on lampposts in Mannheim, not fifteen kilometers from here.”

  “I’m not in the Wehrmacht. They can’t hang me for deserting it.”

  Frau Lempke stood, trembling. “But this is the time to stand with the Führer.”

  “I am sorry, my dear. I was never a fanatic.” The word hung in the air between them. It seemed to Rita that Lempke had stopped just short of saying “a fanatic like you.” “Now that the war is lost, we need to start thinking about how to survive. Continuing to follow orders from the Reichsministerium für Finanzen is not the way to do that.”

  “We cannot lose, you defeatist!” she hissed. “What about the Vengeance rockets, the secret weapons? The Führer will bring our enemies down with us.”

  He ignored this remark and continued to try to put her in touch with reality. “I brought some papers that will help the Amis figure out the government finances. I am going to use them to get on the right side of the occupation that is coming.”

  “But you are a party member, Heinrich. You swore a personal oath to the Führer.”

  Lempke grimaced. “Yes, just like all those officers who tried to kill him last July.” He stopped and reconsidered. “You aren’t worried the Americans will lock me up? Look, the Amis and the British won’t have a choice. They will have to make use of all the MussNazis, and even some of the real ones, to keep the country running.” He turned to address Rita. “You’ve listened to enough of this, Fräulein Trushenko. Go back to the kitchen.”

  Perhaps telling Lempke about Dani could wait a day.

  But there wasn’t another day to wait. The next day Rita’s war was over.

  PART VI

  AFTERWARD

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was time to become Tadeusz Sommermann again, alas. In Spain Gil Romero had set him free. But now, here in Moscow, with the war about to end, Gil Romero was a death sentence. The only chance of reprieve was to turn himself back into Tadeusz Sommermann.

  The death sentence to be passed on Gil Romero had many counts: he was a foreigner, he was a doctor, he spoke too many languages, he was an intellectual, he had opinions he could not suppress, he had been in Spain, where he was bound to have met Trotskyites or even to have been one himself. That he had violated the law against abortion, that he had taken bribes in gold, that he had lied about his identity—these were not the most serious problems he faced. His real problems were ones he shared with literally a million others in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Each of them had one or more mark of cosmopolitanism likely to attract the attention of the NKVD.

  That Gil had compromising information about figures in the Spanish Party might put him at risk, but he didn’t think so. Enrique Lister had ended up a general in the Red Army and had long ceased feeling vulnerable enough to send Gil anything more to hide away on his behalf. In fact, the second time they had seen each other, at a dacha party in the summer of ’44, Lister had looked right through him and walked past without any sign of recognition. That was fine with Gil.

  But Gil was in danger. How great a danger had been made clear by his famous writer friend Ehrenberg. When they met for the last time, it was a few days after the Soviet army had crashed through the thin line of German resistance on the Vistula. Everyone in Moscow knew the Soviet pause before Warsaw in the summer of 1944 was purely tactical. Stalin had even refused the Americans and the Brits the right to land planes dropping supplies to the Home Army in Warsaw. The Germans had done his work, disposing of any hope of noncommunist Poland. All this Gil and Ehrenberg saw clearly. Now, in November, with the Home Army crushed by the Germans, there was no reason to hold back. There was every reason to push through the rest of Poland and take as many German towns and cities as possible before the western Allies got there.

  “I’m going back to the front, Gil,” Ehrenberg said. “Soon.”

  “Why? Haven’t you seen enough killing?” Gil wasn’t really surprised. He knew Ehrenberg enjoyed the action and the limelight, and didn’t mind the discomfort and risk.

  “I have been hearing things about German atrocities. I have got to find out for myself, and tell the world if it’s true. I’ve also got to get out of Moscow. In fact, that’s why I’m glad I ran into you.” Ran into Gil? Ehrenberg had insisted on a meeting, and in an open park, at that. He had obviously been worried about something. There was no question of this being a casual meeting. “Gil, take my advice. Get out. I saw their terror campaign before the war. Once it’s over and they feel confident again, they are going to start asking questions about educated people, tracing proletarian provenance all the way back to your grandmother’s calluses. Foreigners will be suspect. Lucky you’re not a Polish Jew. The Georgian mafia really has its long knives out for them.”

  “But why, Ilya?”

  “It’s true believers, and capable ones, they fear the most. All those ‘wreckers’ in the ’30s—the engineers, the agronomists—they were guilty only of being too ambitious for the success of the revolution. They were dangerous. It’s mediocrity and thuggishness that rules here, I fear. Get out. You have a passport, right?” Gil nodded. “They never took it? Good. Use it, please.”

  Ehrenberg was too well connected not to take seriously. By January a temporary government for Soviet-occupied Poland had been set up in Lublin. Gil realized they would need politically reliable people, real Polish nationals. Physicians with bona fide Polish papers would be safe and cared for.

  Gil was sitting in the Maternity Hospital director’s office, not at the desk, but facing the director across a low table between two leather armchairs. “So, you want to have some time off, Romero? Well, you deserve it. Three years now at Number 6 with no break except for that duty in the Crimea. Hardly a picnic, eh? How much time do you want?”

  “Can I be spared for two weeks?”

  “Take a month, Romero. Where are you thinking of going?”

  “South, perhaps back to the Crimea or Odessa. Someplace on the Black Sea with a bit of sun, fresh vegetables. Someplace far from the war zones.”

  “I’ll have some furlough documents drawn up. You don’t want to travel without authorization these days. And you won’t get any rail tickets without documents.”

  “Very kind of you, Comrade Director.” Gil rose, and they shook hands.

  I
t would be tricky. He would be able to make it to Kiev without much trouble. After all, that was the route to the Black Sea. But then he’d have to start moving west toward the front. He would need to find exactly the right moment to bury Gil Romero and recover Tadeusz Sommermann. He could only hope that the closer he got to Poland, the more disorganized and fluid things would be. Pulling out the valise he had carried since leaving Lvov, his hand felt the seam for his Sommermann papers. Then he packed a civilian suit, his personal gear, and the sack of a dozen gold coins he’d collected—medals for services rendered to military morale. He decided to start out wearing the uniform they’d given him for duty herding the Tartars out of their homelands. It gave him the temporary military rank of major. He deserved it, after all. He’d been a major at the beginning of the war and served loyally.

  Moscow to Kiev. A long ride, but at least his documents got him a seat in first class—officers’ territory, with access to the restaurant carriage. The express didn’t stop often, but as the train slowed through stations, he could see groups of German prisoners of war working on the roadbed or clearing ruins. It was January, but many were in the remains of summer uniforms, stuffed with old newspapers, hatless, with rags wrapped around holes in their jackboots, if they had any boots at all. One morning at Bryansk, he saw a Russian on a platform toss his cigarette butt on the tracks, and three Germans scrambled for it. The sight sent a thrill through him. Yes, he thought, we’ve done it. We’ve beaten them! The feeling was so strong, so clean, so invigorating, he had to experience it again.