“Go home, Magda.” Nelka tied Magda’s scarf firmly under the old woman’s chin.
“He was going to kill her—then the Major talked—” Magda whispered so Hansel couldn’t hear, but he clung to her side and heard the words. He breathed heavily through his mouth, a hoarse sound in the cold air. “I’ll stay until they look at the baby.” Magda nodded, but her lips trembled.
“Go.” Nelka gave Magda a light push, and some hardness in the girl’s face made Magda turn and go. Nelka didn’t need the presence of a great-aunt called a witch by half the village or kinship with a mad child and a circumcised boy.
They walked as fast as Magda could go. The road was growing soft with the slush that replaced the icy snow of January. Thank you, Mary, she thought, for letting them stay with me. Magda stopped walking and closed her eyes, praying a last time. Sweet Mary, she prayed silently, don’t let them take Nelka’s baby away. Let God come to earth if he has to and kill the SS man.
Hansel had stopped skipping and was watching Magda. “Are there any Jews left in any of the villages, Magda?” His neck itched. He knew it was the lice. He hadn’t had a bath for weeks.
“The Germans have eaten the Gypsies of Poland for breakfast, child, and then they ate the Jews for lunch, but soon it will be supper.”
“What will they eat then?”
“All the rest of the Poles, my boy.”
Hansel ran toward the hut. “Magda, can I put a piece of bread on the boards for the birds?”
“No, child. The bread is for us now.”
“You said you’d always give the birds bread. You’d rather be hungry than scared.”
“I was foolish. Now I’m wiser.”
They went in the hut and closed the door. The sleet began again and fell straight down like a curtain, closing off the hut from the forest with strings of gray.
“Not a single child in the village worth saving so far. All of them ugly and round-faced or mutilated by carelessness. It’s odd that the children all had accidents. Could they have known?”
Forgetting that he never spoke unless spoken to, forgetting that being involved in this line of thinking could get him killed, forgetting all the survival skills he had learned in the jails of Warsaw and then used when he was selected by the Nazis for work—forgetting everything, Wiktor spoke.
“It’s often like this at the end of winter. There are more accidents when it’s cold.”
Wiktor stared down at the desk and cursed himself silently. All his creeping and crawling and his silences and his work. He had taken a chance on throwing it all away for peasants in a mud village who weren’t even his kin. But they were Poles, and Wiktor was still a Pole. The Nazis couldn’t change that. Wiktor looked up, but the Oberführer turned away when Nelka knocked.
“Put the basket down.”
They forgot Wiktor, and he sat feeling the sweat slide like oil down his spine.
Unwrapping the baby on the desk, Sister Rosa displayed its legs and arms, its smooth stomach and the perfect bobble of its uncircumcised penis. As the Oberführer watched, the penis lifted slightly and a strong stream of urine jetted up.
“A sign of health,” Sister Rosa said firmly. “And look at the limbs. The straightness. The eyes are blue, I can testify to that, and the hair is the palest blond. See the ears? They lie flat the way the ears of an Aryan should. You agree that he should receive the red card?”
The Oberführer sighed. “There is another matter. I will question the mother, Sister Rosa.”
“Of course, Oberführer.”
The Oberführer saw Sister Rosa’s slyness, and rage began to make his neck feel hot. The bitch. Rosa had been present when Jedrik had blurted out the village gossip. So now it had to be brought out. If he didn’t question Nelka, Sister Rosa would be suspicious. She might even report him when they got back to Berlin.
“Nelka, I was told that you have a heritage not as pure as I assumed.”
Jedrik must have told, Nelka thought. No one in the village bears me bad will, but Jedrik will do anything for a sack of potatoes and some salt.
“Perhaps you have an ancestor who was a Gypsy? Is this true?”
“I don’t understand.” Nelka stared at the baby.
“If you are of pure Polish blood, and if your husband was untainted by Jew or Gypsy blood, this baby is perfect for assimilation into the German people. He will be taken to Germany to live as a free man in the new world that we are building. If he is part Gypsy, then we are merciful, of course. You and the child would be sent to a camp until you can be relocated.”
She had heard of the camps. No one returned from the camps.
“But if the baby is sent to Germany. I can go with it?”
“That is unfortunately impossible.”
If she said that her blood was part Gypsy, she could stay with the baby. They would be in a camp, but they might live. The Russians were close. If they could live just a month—two months.
“In Germany—” She stopped. There was hardly any air in the room.
“Your child would become a true German. You should be proud.” Sister Rosa smiled.
Nelka thought. She could go to the camps. They could live there until the Russians came and freed them. She opened her mouth to say that she had Gypsy blood in her veins when she remembered. Father Piotr was her grandfather. Magda was her great-aunt. The trains. The cold, damp spring in a camp. Neither could survive it. If she admitted her Gypsy blood, it followed that Magda and Piotr had Gypsy blood, and Hansel and Gretel, her cousins.
“Death,” she whispered. Nelka bent her head. She would have to be separated from the baby and take a chance on searching for him in Germany. She couldn’t doom her family.
“There is no Gypsy blood in me,” she whispered. “My child is pure-blooded.”
The Oberführer smiled. “I knew it. The rumors were simple jealousy because your child is the only perfect one.” He stared defiantly at Sister Rosa.
Sister Rosa tucked her notebook and the calipers in the baby’s basket. She took a red card, wrote the baby’s identification on it, handed it to Nelka, and left the room. The baby was hers now. She carried the only perfect Aryan child in the village of Piaski.
“I am relieved that the rumors are false,” the Oberführer was saying. He stared at Nelka. She would understand. It was their secret. He had her blood inside him now, and if that blood was tainted, he would have been very angry. More than angry. He would have been murderous. He smiled as he thought of it, the joy of unleashing such a feeling.
The Major wondered why he hadn’t been told this rumor of Gypsy ancestors. Wiktor should have heard something, but what a magnificent joke it would be if Nelka were part Gypsy! What a disaster for the arrogant bastard, an Oberführer who’d avoided every major battle in the war.
Nelka went outside and walked down the steps into the sleet. She didn’t even put her scarf over her head but let the frozen rain wet her hair and face unchecked.
“I didn’t think she had Gypsy blood. You can always tell. It would have been tragic.” The Oberführer shook his head.
Major Frankel almost laughed. He knew exactly how tragic it would have been.
“Of course, I would have shot her immediately. And the child. I’m glad it wasn’t necessary. Such a mess in the office. Bloodstains are hard to remove. Depressing for you and your clerk.”
“Blood is impossible to remove. It can be the hardest stain to get out.”
The Oberführer stared at the Major for a second, but the other man’s face was bland and faintly bored. With a nod, the Oberführer left the office, and Major Frankel lit another cigarette. He looked quickly at Wiktor, but the man had enough sense to be staring down at the papers on the desk as if he heard and understood nothing.
The Major sucked the smoke deeply into his lungs. There were parts of this war that would never bear remembering. He sighed, the smoke expelled from him in a diffuse cloud. For a moment he actually wished he was in the trenches again at the Russian front.
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March 11, 1944
They had walked for three days when it began, groups of men and trucks, a thin trickle fleeing Poland. Then the trickle of Germans began to grow. At first the partisans were afraid. They stayed deep in the woods, away from the road, but after a while they crept closer to watch.
The trucks stopped only to refuel. The German soldiers walked with great exhaustion, but they moved as fast as they could. They didn’t even step behind the trees to piss but pissed on the road openly. And that was wise. If they stepped into the trees, they were easy prey for the partisans. A lone man would not be missed in this great exodus out of eastern Poland.
The men and machines turned into a thick snake that was never broken. Even at night they passed. The only sound in the forest was the tramp of feet, the engines of the machines, and the curses when guns were stuck and had to be abandoned or loaded on trucks.
And the constant stuttering of guns came from the distance. The partisans hardly heard the noise after a few days. If it had stopped, they would have been startled.
The airplanes were flying overhead now too. They passed in waves, too high for the Germans to bring down with their guns. The planes were Russian this time, and they moved west, toward Germany. The Russian grinned whenever he heard their drone above the trees.
But sometimes the planes, as if the pilots couldn’t stand watching the snake of German soldiers and equipment moving unscathed below them, dove and strafed the road, scattering men and machines and delaying progress. After the strafing, the dead had to be picked up and buried. The trucks that burned were pulled off the road, so the retreat could go on. The partisans watched from the safety of the forest, and the Russian sometimes had to shove his fist in his mouth so he wouldn’t shout out loud with joy at watching the men who had branded and starved him lose their war.
The partisans had to move through the trees, the roads being full of Germans now, so they went more slowly, but the weather was changing. The snow had melted, and that meant they didn’t have to push through drifts, but all of them wore a layer of mud to their hips. The mud was like glue catching their boots, and when they found rocky areas, it was a great relief. As they moved east, the rocks were fewer and the ground was more swampy.
“It’s hard for us, but think what it is for them.” The Russian moved relentlessly now, not letting them rest for more than a few minutes.
It was March, and they were beginning to see tanks as well as trucks. Most of the motorcycles were abandoned by the road because the mud was so churned up that they were more trouble to ride than it was worth.
The partisan group sat beside a field and watched tank after tank cross it. The tanks came in a regular pattern, a swooping curve that avoided the worst of the low, swampy places. Beyond the field was smoke from a village, but the crows had moved deeper into the forest. Except for the noise of the tanks, it was silent.
They had fought the tanks as best they could. Every village had soup tureens, and when they were upended and covered with dirt, they looked like carelessly laid mines. Starzec, the oldest man of them all, had thought of the idea, and it delayed the tanks so they could pick off the men as they climbed out to check the mounded mud. Many Germans had been killed that way.
They had worked all one morning laying pots in the dirt, until suddenly the Mechanik stopped walking and turned his face up to the sky, listening. It was beautiful. The most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
They all stood, draped with arms around one another’s shoulders, and were silent. The booming was steady and definite. It was gunfire, but not the stuttering they had heard for weeks. This was the steady beat of heavy artillery. It throbbed in the distance like the thunder of a coming storm, and they all smiled. It was the sound of a mighty force coming toward them. The full weight of Mother Russia was moving over the land.
“My brothers. We’re going to drive the rats out and kill them and then go home and be heroes and make our women happy.” The Russian began to sing a song in Russian, and the Poles sang in Polish, and the Mechanik, for the first time in his adult life, began to sing a song in Yiddish that his father had hummed when he sat with his grandchild in the garden and fed her oranges.
They sang softly, the rhythm of the artillery serving as a drumbeat to the songs, until they saw the first tank coming through the woods into the meadow. A man rode on top peering ahead. Another tank was behind and several men clung to the top of it.
They waited, and heard the man on the first tank scream out a warning. The tank sputtered and churned to a halt. There was a lot of shouting in German that the partisans couldn’t hear clearly, but they didn’t have to hear it. The Germans thought the mounds of dirt over the pots was a minefield.
“They’ll have to go back a mile to find any other field. And that one leads to a swamp.”
“They’ll take to the road.”
“They’re too heavy. They’ll sink in the mud by afternoon. The mud will be impossible.”
The tanks had disappeared, and a group of about twenty men trotted into the meadow. They began to approach the buried pots cautiously.
“They’re going to clear a path.” The Russian was almost dancing for joy. “Let’s get rid of this bunch.”
With one accord, the partisans raised their rifles and began to pick off the Nazis. The meadow was littered with their bodies.
“They’ll think a mine got them. This field is going to stay empty for a while.” The Mechanik was pleased. Since his wife had disappeared, he had taken more joy in seeing the Germans die.
The men grinned. They all shook hands and one of the younger village men who had helped collect the pots stood before the Russian and saluted as if the Russian were a Polish army officer.
“My parents are slaves in Germany. I’m not afraid of dying. Let me go with you.”
“What do you call yourself, boy?” The Russian looked the peasant over. He had a rifle in his hand and the lump of a pistol under his coat.
“Dobry. I can fight.”
The Russian laughed and slapped the boy on the back. He had guns. He was strong. “Fight with us then. Until we drive them to Berlin and kill them.”
They moved off around the field, heading toward the sound of the artillery in the distance. It wasn’t much that they’d done, and they knew it, but every German slowed down, every tank abandoned in a field or bogged in the swamps, was a small victory.
“When we get to Germany,” Dobry asked Starzec, “will we find our people, do you think? The ones they took to work?”
Starzec shrugged. He didn’t have the heart to tell the boy how unlikely it was that the Germans would let a Polish slave have food when the Germans were hungry. He didn’t want to discourage this orphan.
“What God wills is what happens. Pray for the Poles in Germany and Russia, boy.”
Dobry nodded out of respect for the older man. After all, Starzec had had the idea that stopped the tanks. But he didn’t pray. He had prayed for three years, and there was no good that had come of the prayers. As if hearing his thoughts, Starzec spoke again.
“We prayed that the Russians be driven out, and the Germans did it. Now we’ve prayed that the Nazis be destroyed. Look at the Nazi bastards on the road. They’re beaten. While we’re killing the last of them and driving them out, we can pray for those Poles kidnapped and stolen from us.”
Dobry thought about it. It was true. The Russians had been beaten back into Russia, and the Nazis were now fleeing Poland. He shook his head stubbornly.
“It didn’t happen fast enough. Half of Poland died before God helped us.”
“God’s time isn’t our time.” Starzec sighed.
“God shouldn’t have let this killing happen. God should have stopped it.”
Starzec gestured at the trees and the forest around them. “Do you see God? Where is he, you fool?”
Dobry flushed and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“God didn’t come down and kill us. I don’t see God shooting childre
n and priests. None of us met God beating up Jews and shoving them into railroad cars. This is men doing the murdering. Talk to men about their evil, kill the evil men, but pray to God. You can’t expect God to come down and do our living for us. We have to do that ourselves.”
Starzec turned his back on the boy and walked on, feeling the pains in his knees and back and ignoring them. He had a long walk before this war would be over and he safely back in his bed in Warsaw—in what would be left of Warsaw when the Nazis and the Russians had burned and looted it—but he didn’t like to think about that.
The young peasant stood staring after the older man, and he was so flushed that his eyes watered. He brushed away the tears and trotted behind Starzec, and his mind, almost against his will, began to form prayers for his father and mother, for all the Poles taken from their country, kidnapped and beaten and starved and perhaps worked to death or dead already in the camps. He prayed, and the prayers developed a sort of rhythm as he walked, and his mind grew quiet as they moved steadily eastward toward the thunder of death.
They had no trouble finding food. There were trucks, abandoned and pushed off the road into the trees, that had food in them. There were dead Germans left behind in the race to stay in front of the Russian troops and get out of Poland.
“They know if my countrymen catch them, there’ll be no pity.” The Russian smiled. “The Russians have suffered like no one else. They won’t let a German live.”
The older Pole shook his head. “Let’s not debate who has suffered most. Anyone alive hasn’t suffered that much, or they’d be dead,” he said. “The real sufferers can’t brag about their suffering anymore.”
The guns were near now, and there weren’t many Germans left on the road. It was desolate and silent, only the machines torn apart and cannibalized so other machines could be fixed, the bodies abandoned, the guns sunk in the mud, a reminder that the German army had struggled past.
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Page 21
