by Michele Lang
Our guide took Raziel and me to Kazimierz, the Jewish district, and we were soon installed in Chana’s brother’s place on Miodowa Street, in the heart of the quarter.
I could not believe the calm in Kazimierz under German occupation. The first week of September was done. Warsaw still resisted, but here where the battle against the German invader had already been lost, Poles strolled along the street, lingered in cafés, and read their newspapers as if the war itself had never happened.
When I mentioned these observations to Chana, she shrugged. “Warsaw is fighting like a lion, at least,” she said, her eyes puffy and red despite her defiant words. “England and France have declared war. They will soon squash Hitler like a bug. The war will be over by Chanukkah.”
I stood in her brother Asher’s stuffy little parlor, and I said nothing. They had not yet heard Gisele’s prophecy. The Poles, in their crazy determination to fight and resist until the Western powers intervened, filled me with a profound admiration. But I feared it doomed them.
I tried, as gently as I could, to tell Chana what I already knew. I explained Gisele’s foreknowledge of the murder of the Jewish people, explained that we had come to try to stop the invasion by magical means, get them all out in time if we could.
She simply would not believe me. “Palestine?” she said, incredulous. “Why would I go to Palestine? Everything I know is here, my family is here. My beloved husband is dead, how will I survive in some strange desert full of Arabs? No, the Lord put me here, so here I will stay.”
Raziel interrupted me, and I translated for him, my voice shaking with my frustration. Chana was much safer with the Arabs than with her Polish countrymen.
“Never mind,” he said, his voice as gentle as a feather. “All we need is to talk to the local Hashomer.”
The boy Yankel knew was with the Hashomer in Kraków. And Chana’s brother Asher, a more worldly character with a big watch on a chain which he kept taking out of his vest pocket to check, knew where we could find them. “I will take you to meet Viktor,” he said. “But you need to wash up first.”
So it was that I got a nice bath, a decent meal, and a new dress the morning I found the Zionists of Kraków. Chana’s sister-in-law was zaftig and I was thin, but I didn’t care. The borrowed dress was cornflower blue, my favorite color, and I resolved to take that as a good omen.
But my good omen was belied after meeting Viktor Mandelstam, the leader of the Hashomer in Kraków, Poland.
Raziel and I met Viktor after following Asher down and across Miodowa Street to the pharmacist’s shop, then up a narrow, high staircase smelling faintly of pinewood and cigars.
The landing at the top of the stairs revealed a single door, the leaded glass unmarked by any sign. Asher knocked, then swung the door open; it was unlocked. He introduced us briefly, bowed, and to my surprise, disappeared down the stairs.
I shut the door behind me and took the measure of the man who sat behind the desk. Viktor Mandelstam sat behind an enormous desk covered with piles of paper, a ratty-looking desk blotter, and a black, squat telephone with a rotary dial.
He surprised me with how young he was, how dapper, and how overwhelmed. He wore a double-breasted suit with a thick chalk stripe in it, as elegant as any I had seen in Paris the previous summer.
But his eyes. Startlingly blue, and sharp. Yet, looking into Viktor’s eyes, I thought I already could see defeat.
It wasn’t Viktor’s fault: his job in Kraków was impossible. The Germans were still going through the motions of politeness to the citizens at large in the city of Kraków: there had been alarming, but isolated, reports of mass arrests of academics, magicals, and mystics in the past few days, when the Germans had first installed themselves in town. But as yet, none of us (except Gisele, really) knew what the Germans had planned, and hardly a building had been destroyed by the invading Wehrmacht.
Only the Jews had been mistreated, and from the very first. Aside from the sneering contempt they encountered from the Germans, nothing official had yet been done. But I remembered my sister’s prophecies and I shuddered in Viktor’s dusty little office on the second floor, remembering the future as Gisele envisioned it.
“We have no time to lose,” I said. My Yiddish was pretty basic, so I had no way to gild the truth to make it less ugly. “Hitler means to murder us all. We must get the children at least to Palestine, now. And the religious—if the Catholics will go, they should. The gypsies, too. All will be in special danger under the Nazis’ boot heels.”
Viktor lit a cigarette and offered me one, which I gratefully accepted. Raziel waved away the proffered cigarette and matches—he still didn’t really know how to light it himself without burning his fingers.
Viktor gave him a long, contemplative look. Raziel spoke no Yiddish so he could not help me convince Viktor. But he didn’t need to say a word.
“My God, you two look like the veterans of a big war already,” Viktor said with a sigh.
“Parlez-vous français?” I asked with a sudden flicker of hope, and to my delight, Viktor responded in French. He and I could have a real conversation now.
I decided to give Viktor everything: he was in the Nazi crosshairs in a way that Mordechai, the Hashomer leader my friend Eva worked for in Budapest, was not yet. I told him about my summer’s misadventures, Gisele’s prophecies, everything. Even that Hitler of late had been possessed by a demon: anything to get him to see how serious was the threat to every decent person in Poland.
“It is no secret,” I concluded, “that Hitler sees every Pole as subhuman. So far, he has treated you humanely—perhaps he does anticipate an attack by the French or the English.”
“The West will certainly honor their treaty with us and stand with Poland in her hour of need.” He still thought of himself as a Pole, and of Poland as a nation instead of a possession of Nazi Germany.
“Please,” I concluded, already nearly at the end of my patience. “Don’t wait for anything more. Just send these people to Palestine.”
“But if we enrage the English, it may interfere with their battle with Germany. The Palestine Mandate is under their control, after all, ever since the end of the Ottoman Empire. The English need the Arab oil to fight this war.”
“Can’t you sneak them in? Not even the children?”
He took a long drag of his cigarette, slowly blew smoke. We stared at each other in the half-lit, dusty silence of his office.
“I believe you,” he said, finally. “Why else would you risk your life and run into Poland while the rest of us should be trying to get out?”
“So you will help these people?”
“Help? We are trapped here ourselves.”
I refused to accept his fatalism as the end of the matter. “Let me call the Budapest Hashomer. If I establish a pipeline to Budapest will you send people there? You’ll at least be getting people out of here—Hungary is still technically neutral. Even if they don’t go any farther, the children will be safer there than here!”
He took a long look at Raziel, his hollow cheeks, hungry-looking eyes, and dirty fingernails. Viktor crushed out the end of his cigarette in a gigantic crystal ashtray on his desk that was already overflowing with dead cigarettes.
“All right,” he said, and pulled the phone to him. “The telephone service is spotty at best—we are likely to be arrested by the Gestapo in any event before the end of the day.”
“In that case, I will hide you in the forest. They don’t know about me yet, and I can keep your operations running in Kraków until my cover is blown.” I meant it for a grim joke, but Viktor’s blue eyes lit up, a bright, fierce fire. He didn’t look like someone who had been born to do a bureaucrat’s job behind a desk.
Viktor lifted the receiver and began the long search for an operator willing to try to patch through a call to Hashomer headquarters in Budapest.
The operator said she would buzz when she had made the connection, and if not, would try again in ten minutes. Viktor laughed at th
at and lit another cigarette. His eyes narrowed as he studied me sitting across from him.
“So your sister says none of us are going to survive.”
I could not bear to say it again, so I just nodded yes.
“But what about you?”
I sat glued to my seat, thunderstruck.
“You and the other magicals, the vampires, the demons, all of you—to you, dying is a cheap parlor trick. You ask of us to come to fight and die based on your little sister’s prophecy. I will fight to the death for my people, but fighting to the death means nothing to you.”
I swallowed hard, my cheeks burning with the backhanded slap of his words. “I grieve as much as you do when my people die,” I finally ventured to say, my voice hoarse.
“You may grieve,” Viktor said, the anger in his voice now palpable. “But you cannot understand. Death has dominion over us.”
“Only if you allow it,” I said. “Besides, you can kill me, or a demon, or a vampire, just as dead as any ordinary mortal. It just takes more doing, that’s all—and it often takes another magical to do the deed.”
Viktor tapped his fingers on the surface of the desk, his nerves seeming jangled by the cigarettes, or by the war, or my unsettling presence, or by all of it together. “The Hashomer has a policy not to deal with the magical folk. We are ordinary mortals. In many ways, Magda Lazarus, you are as much of an enemy as the Nazis. For you fight on death’s side of the battle.”
“No, I don’t. I fight for Churchill.” There, my last weapon, and I used it to the hilt. “Not two weeks ago, I myself met with Winston Churchill. I am his witch, and I have come to establish a spy network for him here in Poland. He is ready enough to use magic to serve his cause. For God’s sake, why will you not?”
I leaned forward, rested my hands on the far side of the desk blotter. “Nazis do not hesitate to use magicals. They seek to enslave demons and to raise a demon army. They so far have failed only because magicals like me are fighting them. They have made alliances with the MittelEuropa Vampirrat and the great Eastern Werewolf Pack … but vampires and werewolves are natural enemies, and we all know a pact with those lying Nazi bastards means nothing. Look at Czechoslovakia! The British and French deserted and betrayed them to make peace. How long did that last—a year?”
I had to make Viktor understand; the Hashomer had to hear me, or we could not fight our common enemies. “Viktor, you cannot fight vampires, demons, werewolves with ordinary weapons.”
Viktor took another drag of his cigarette. His fingers trembled. “Precisely. That is why mortals must shun the magical.”
“No. Wrong! I am your weapon. My sister is your weapon. Fight magic with magic, Viktor. With magic in your arsenal, you can negotiate with the likes of the vampires, and perhaps get them away from the Nazis altogether.”
I thought of Gabor Bathory, my elegant, melancholy vampire boss, now imprisoned in Berlin for daring to love the idea of a free Hungary. Surely Bathory wasn’t the only vampire unwilling to enslave himself to the cause of Nazi Germany. “Don’t throw away the advantages you can use to survive. To save your people and mine.”
“But the Hashomer leadership—”
“To hell with them! Who are they, some eminent old men in Jerusalem or someplace? They are not here, fighting! They left you, the young men, the children, in the slaughterhouse to sacrifice you for the cause. I come here to say ‘Live.’ Surviving is victory. Let us join forces.”
He stubbed out his second cigarette in the ashtray, looked from me to Raziel. “You can’t die. Neither can he.”
“We can die. And Raziel here can die as easily as you. He is a mortal now. He was magical once, but he sacrificed his magic to fight the Nazis.”
The truth was, of course, rather more complicated than that, but I had delivered its gist. He looked again from me to Raziel, this time with a completely different expression on his face. Now, he looked, I thought, as if he was evaluating our value as deadly weapons in his fight.
The telephone on the table buzzed loudly, and he picked up the receiver, eyes still fixed on Raziel as he spoke in Polish, then French, then German. After flirting, cajoling, and screaming into the telephone, Viktor, miraculously, got patched through to Budapest.
He spoke rapid-fire French for a bit, so fast that I had trouble following him. A smile passed over his face and was gone, like a flash of heat lightning.
He held the receiver out to me, gingerly, as if it were a loaded revolver. “Some girl named Eva is on the line. She says she knows you, and she has found a vampire for you, one that is ready to join your cause.”
Her name stopped my breath.
Eva, my old friend, not a drop of magic in her, but braver than the rest of us put together. I never thought I’d get to talk to her again. Viktor handed me the receiver, then leaned back and contemplated me and my conversation.
But at that moment, I left Viktor, the Hashomer in Kraków, and all of the war behind. My Eva was on the phone, alive and safe and still ready to fight.
I swallowed hard and composed myself. “Eva!” I said, embracing the Hungarian I spoke like a lover. “It is so good to speak to you. It is a miracle.”
“You sound clear as a bell, too,” Eva said, her voice as melodious and cheerful as ever, never breaking. “My darling little star, how busy I have been. That vampire is in trouble indeed. A world of trouble. He is in vampire jail and the trial is scheduled for next week!”
There was a crackling, then silence on the phone as I gathered up my wits to speak on the open line. We were certainly being listened to, by a phone operator who might or might not understand Hungarian, or by some Hungarian Fascist. We spoke in Hungarian still, but I spoke the truth in riddles.
“What is the charge against him?”
“Who cares? The punishment is public staking.”
“Oh, horrible, Evuska. The whole arrest is garbage. We have to get him free.”
“I have been working on it.”
I could hear the twinkle in my girl’s eyes, and could not restrain a smile. “I am sure you have.”
I changed the subject. Who knew how much time we had left before we were cut off. “The cousins are doing well up here in Kraków, the little ones, my, how they have grown.”
“I can only imagine.”
“It’s like there are hundreds of the little darlings. And can you believe, they all want to visit their Auntie Eva in Budapest!”
She laughed, but the sound was hollow. I was not surprised; I had just asked her to take in hundreds of Polish Jewish refugees, all children. “Where would we put the little bonbons, in my tiny flat? The little mousies would overrun the place, and there is the hungry cat on the white horse to consider.”
She meant, of course, Horthy, the grandiose regent on a white horse, making a great show of Hungarian anti-Semitic jingoism and the glorious Austro-Hungarian past in an effort to keep the Nazis placated and out of Hungary.
Eva said, “I would love nothing more than to take every single one of those little cousins. They are so sweet and adorable—I would never let them go back to their mamas! But my landlord … I don’t know if he would let me.”
The leader of the Hungarian Hashomer, Mordechai, was fierce and unbending in his ideology. He would say no on principle just because it was me, a magical, who proposed to save the children of Kraków.
“Well, I will have my landlord talk to your landlord. My landlord here likes my idea.”
“Well, my landlord is out looking for a bigger apartment house as we speak. Once he finds a great, giant one, as many cousins can visit as you like.”
I had a flash of inspiration. “My uncle has an enormous, fantastic mansion on Rose Hill. You know the place? It is huge, and he lives alone. When he returns from that trip to Berlin, he would let you rent the place for nothing.”
I heard a gasp on the other end of the line. She knew I meant Bathory’s place. “But isn’t that cat even more fearsome than the cat on the horse?”
�
��No, no. This other cat is hungry, but he only eats willing mice. It is a point of honor.”
“I have never heard of such an honorable cat.” Eva’s voice was as sour as a corked bottle of Tokaji wine. I had to laugh, I couldn’t help it.
“I know that cat well. But you have to save him from the dogs.”
“I can do that. But have your landlord call my landlord before you send the little cousins down here unannounced.”
I had no idea how Eva would manage to save Bathory from death. But she was resourceful and brave, and she had worked as a human courier for Bathory and survived. If she meant to save him, Eva could make it happen. But at what price? I put grim thoughts out of my mind and forced myself to smile. “I love you, sweetheart. I will have my landlord call today.”
“Miracles are still your specialty then, Magduska. I kiss you a thousand times, my darling.”
I meant to tell her that Gisele was fine, but the line went dead in my hand. I looked up at Viktor, who was waiting with an expectant expression.
“She says she has to talk to the leader of the Hashomer in Budapest, and that you and he must work out the details. Eva is working on getting safe houses lined up to protect them. But let’s get the children out of here as fast as we can. We have no time at all.”
13
And that was Viktor Mandelstam. A man who dared to dream of victory even in the midst of defeat. I will give Viktor this: despite our many disagreements, he moved fast and with a ruthless efficiency. A couple of phone calls later, and after some messengers sent as couriers, he had collected, within half an hour, two dozen young, likely-looking fighters from the Hashomer, unarmed and untrained, but too clear-eyed to disbelieve Viktor’s message of death, and young and brave enough to fight anyway.
I was surprised to see that more than half of the contingent were girls. Some of them were tiny, delicate-looking things, but they, like me, burned to fight. They had given up more than the boys had, I imagined, defied their parents more, to join the Hashomer in the first place. Now they had less than nothing to lose.
