Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  Bern told us that he had learned on the telephone from a colleague in Lwów that the Kommandantur there had given the Jewish community office orders to move all the Jews into a ghetto, like the ones in Warsaw and Cracow. It was no laughing matter. People would have to live squeezed together like sardines. It would make us think the new lodgings we shared with these very decent Kramers were luxuriously spacious. He hoped it would not come to that in T. We already had the armbands, the yellow star and the curfew. If the Jewish community office acted responsibly, and our dear café intellectuals for once avoided provoking the Poles, perhaps we could remain as we were. This way of talking was new, and Tania and my grandfather teased Bern about it, saying he was using very modern Polish. We had always referred to Poles who were Catholics simply as Catholics, because after all we too thought we were Poles. But the mention of the curfew made them remember the hour; it was time for Bern to leave. Tania went out with him, saying she would accompany him as far as the corner.

  When Tania returned, grandmother said she was glad she was sick and would not live long anyway. She had been one of four sisters; people said they were all good-looking; now only she was left. When she was a young girl, she could have everything she wanted. Then when her father lost his money, my grandfather performed the only good action of his life: he paid his father-in-law’s debts. The two real children she had were dead; Tania had never been her child. Now my grandfather could be proud of how she had turned out. Just like his women. This was enough misfortune in one life, and yet she didn’t mind the hovel we were in, or wearing a star or an armband, or being beaten or shot like those poor Kippers. When she was ten, she had seen a pogrom. Ukrainian peasants pulled beautiful Jewish men by their beards, violated young girls, beat everybody. Thank God, they had not come into their house, but she had seen and heard. She didn’t think Germans could do worse. But never, in all that time, or anytime until now, had she heard anyone talk as shamelessly as Bern. My grandfather remained silent. Tania looked very tired and very calm. After a while, she turned to my grandmother and said, You don’t know yet what is shameless, you don’t know yet what we will do, just wait, you will see before you die.

  A short time later, Bern got a job for Tania in the Wehrmacht supply depot. They needed someone who could speak and write German perfectly and also do some typing, and finally told the Jewish community office to supply such a person. There did not seem to be any qualified Aryans in T. This development made our situation very much better—we had become the dependents of an essential worker—but it left me very much alone. Grandmother was sicker than usual, and grandfather had to take care of her. Because everything was rationed, he spent a good part of the day buying provisions in the regular stores, where one had to wait in lines, and also pursuing his private connections through which he could get good milk and eggs and sometimes calves’ liver. Grandmother had a liver ailment; it was recommended that she eat only lean food, and calves’ liver was both lean and very strengthening.

  I began to spend all the time when grandfather and grandmother did not need me with Irena or the older boys in the building. There was no school for Jews anymore. The boys and I played hide-and-seek in the lumberyard at the end of the street. No workmen ever seemed to be there. We built a shack where we could sit when it rained or when we wanted to talk. We talked about women; they explained how one could shove it in between a girl’s legs so she would bleed or into her rear end. In either case, it had to hurt. Women bled every month anyway. They used paper to stop it, but sometimes they couldn’t. The blood was called kurwa. The worst insult was to call somebody kurwamać or kurwysyn. That was mother or son of that blood. You could shove it into a woman when she was bleeding and women liked it, but it was a very dirty thing to do. The boys wanted to know if I had already shoved it into Irena. One of them had seen her in the latrine. They thought I should try, when she was asleep. All I had to worry about was the blood that her mother would see in the morning. There was a song that could be adapted to the name of each of us and to the name of each girl we knew. They would sing it about Irena and me: Maciek, Maciek, an officer made Irena an offer, I will shove in my two-meter, you will bleed a whole liter. She cries it’s hard, it’s hard, but this just makes him fart. She cries now I bleed, but he pays no heed. We marched up and down an alley in the lumberyard, taking turns being in the lead and being named in the song with a girl whom one of us was thought to like or who was in his family.

  The empty lot and the lumberyard were also, after they got out of their school, the territory of many Catholic boys. They played tag ball and practiced throwing stones at trees, just as they had the day grandfather and I had watched them. When they wanted a space we were in, they would yell that all Jews and other garbage must disappear. We began to throw stones at one another. I would use my slingshot once or twice and then run away. The older boys stayed and fought. I was discovering that I liked to hurt others but was afraid of being hurt myself.

  One day, the Catholic boys came in much greater numbers and said they would kill us. It would be a permanent Jew curfew. They had big rocks, the size of fists, and sticks with nails in them. From then on, we went to the lumberyard only during their school hours. We would urinate on the piles of stones they used. It served them right to get Jewish piss on their hands.

  I was reading the books of Karl May. Bern had brought them to me, saying they were just the thing to fill my time when grandfather was so busy. Old Shatterhand had no fear of Indians; he liked and understood them very well, and yet he killed them pitilessly. Laughing, Bern pointed out to me that Old Shatterhand often killed fifteen redskins in a row, although his Colt 45 only held six bullets. I was not discouraged by Bern’s scoffing. Probably, May did not bother mentioning each time Old Shatterhand reloaded. Irena liked these books too. When we played, she would be the only squaw left alive in a village where I had just exterminated all the braves. She would plead to be spared; she deserved to be punished for the crimes of her tribe, but she was very young and did not want to die. I would tie her up, sometimes to the chair, and sometimes spread-eagle on Tania’s couch. Then we would argue about whether she should be tortured, for instance by having the soles of her feet burned, or whipped with my lasso, or released at once to become my servant. It was lucky that Irena looked like a squaw. She had black hair and black eyes and a broad nose. She wasn’t very big; I was almost as tall as she and I could wrestle her down when we fought.

  Irena found a book called In the Opium Den that her father kept in the back of his shop. We read it in Tania’s and my room, where nobody could see us. A German living in China uses opium. He smokes it lying on a low couch, dressed only in a silk kimono. The German’s skin has become all yellow from the opium; he is very thin. His Chinese mistress kneels on the floor next to the couch, also dressed only in a kimono, which falls off her shoulders. Her breasts are small but have large nipples. The German holds her breast and pinches her nipple very hard and explains that he no longer wants to do it; he just wants to puff on his pipe and dream about how they have done it in the past. He tells her his dreams. Then, one evening he feels the stirring of a desire. Near the couch on a little table lies a box studded with precious stones. He asks her to open it and take the ivory-handled razor inside it. Then he makes her cut one nipple with the razor. He wants the blood to run first on his chest and then into his mouth. Irena said we should play opium den. She could get her mother’s bathrobe to use as a kimono, and we would pretend about the razor. Her breasts were already round, like two bumps.

  My grandmother felt much worse, and then after leeches and cups were applied directly over her liver to relieve the congestion, she improved. Her room no longer had to be darkened. I was allowed to sit with her. She told stories about the country, when I used to visit them in the summer. She wanted to know if I remembered the rabbits and the goose she kept especially for me, and about picking mushrooms. It was all very vivid in her mind, in what direction we had gone for a drive on a particular afternoon
when my father came to see us, in what clothes she had dressed me, and the day I learned to like cold raspberry soup. She told me about my uncle, and how he died. She said my mother had looked just like him; they were both too gentle and too good. She was glad I took after my grandfather. We were living through a time that was not made for good people.

  I liked being with her. Irena now had to be at the shop almost all the time; her parents did not want to be separated from her in case there was another roundup. For the same reason, grandfather no longer allowed me to go out to play with the boys. The first Judenaktion had just taken place in T. It was done one morning by the SS, with some Polish policemen in civilian clothes and a lot of Jewish militiamen. I was in the lumberyard with the boys when it happened. Some of them ran home when the shouting began, but I and a couple of others were too scared; we hid between a large stack of boards and the fence. We could watch from there. The Germans went into one house after another, yelling in German, Alle Juden heraus! All Jews out! It took a long while, and then people began to pour into the street, where the Jewish militiamen lined them up in an orderly way. I saw my grandparents and Pan and Pani Kramer and Irena, all standing together. Then the Polish policemen began to check everybody’s papers and divide people into two groups. They put my grandparents, the Kramers and some other people off to the side and pushed the other group toward trucks that had meanwhile arrived at the end of the street. A woman I did not know suddenly broke away from a file that was climbing on a truck and rushed to the other end of the street, where some large cement pipes were stacked. She crawled into one of them and would not come out, although the Germans were ordering her to. For a while, everything was still. Then two militiamen came and poked at her with long sticks until she appeared, on hands and knees, at the other end. There, the Germans kicked and beat her and finally got her on the truck, which was already quite full, and drove away. The militiamen and the Polish police remained and told the Jews who were still in the street to clean up.

  When I returned, my grandfather said I was right to remain hidden because it all had happened when I wasn’t with them, but the important thing, in fact, was for me not to be alone. This particular roundup was against Jews without working papers or proof that they were dependents of workers. If they had caught me alone, they probably would have taken me too because I had no papers and nobody would have spoken up for me; then grandmother and grandfather would have had to follow, to be with me. I said it made no sense that they had to go with me if it was right for me to hide in the lumberyard instead of running to them, but grandfather explained that they had already lived their lives; they would be quite willing to go if I could stay with Tania. The thing we had to try hard to prevent was for me to be taken alone or to be left alone if they and Tania were taken.

  Tania appeared almost immediately after the roundup was over, very frightened. She had heard about it while it was still going on; the Germans in her office told her to go home right away to make sure we were safe and gave her a document that was an order saying we were not to be disturbed, which she was to leave with us. We would talk later; in the meantime, she had to go back to work. This was typical of Tania now—she was always saying we would talk when she came back from the office. As soon as she had gotten her job, Tania brought home a typewriter and practiced every evening after work. She said if she learned to type quickly and accurately she would become indispensable. She sat at the table in our room copying page after page of a German novel. Then, to practice dictation, she had my grandfather read aloud from the novel fairly fast, and she tried to keep up with him on the typewriter. One day, she said it was enough; she was the best the Germans had. They gave her a special pass, so that she didn’t have to respect the curfew, and often she worked very late. Sometimes, she was on duty all night and only came home in the morning to change her clothes.

  That evening, however, she returned early. She brought canned pâté, a bottle of vodka, and chocolate for grandmother and me, although grandmother was supposed to avoid sweets. She also brought a canned ham for the Kramers and chocolate for Irena. After dinner, when we were in my grandparents’ room, she said she wanted to tell us an important secret. She had a German friend. He was in love with her. He wasn’t a Nazi, he wasn’t even a soldier anymore, although he wore a uniform, because he had lost an arm in a factory accident. He was very good at organizing army supplies, so he was important and influential. If we were lucky, if grandfather behaved reasonably, her friend would save us. He was already risking his life for Jews. Bern had found a way to get to the partisans; this German friend, Reinhard, was equipping him for the forest. He was even going to give Bern a rifle and ammunition and drive him to the rendezvous in his own car. We would meet Reinhard when the time came. She wanted grandfather and grandmother to think of me and for once to concentrate on what was really happening around them. She didn’t care what others would think. Jews in T. and everywhere else in Poland were as good as dead, but she intended to live and to save us, and this was the only way.

  They knew they could not shout because of the Kramers, so the news all came out very slowly and very quietly. There came a silence, and then my grandfather said that Tania was wrong, it was not the only way. If the Germans won the war, then her way led nowhere—in the end, we would be killed just like everybody else, only perhaps a little later. And if the Germans lost, then surviving her way was no good. There was enough money, if we sold grandmother’s jewelry piece by piece, to get a peasant family to hide us and feed us as long as the war lasted. He would begin looking for the right people immediately.

  Tania had been crying, but at once she stopped. She spoke again very softly and very slowly. She said that no peasant family would take all four of us; we would have to be separated; and if peasants took us, it would be to get hold of our money and our jewels. Afterward, they would sell us to the Germans. There had already been such cases near Lwów. Jews found families to hide them so they would not have to go to the ghetto, and after a week with their saviors they were denounced and shot. Waiting in some boarded-up cellar until the Gestapo came to get us was not for her. We could trust Reinhard; anyway, there was no use arguing. Reinhard had told her that he would take care of all of us and that he would not, under any conditions, allow her to leave.

  So Tania won the argument, and so far as we four were concerned, it was all now in the open. Bern came to say good-bye. It was awkward, until Tania said that she would be there when Reinhard and he drove off the next morning. Then Bern understood that what she was doing was no longer a secret, and he said that Tania was the best of daughters and friends, that she was brave, and that Reinhard was probably the only decent man in T., present company excepted but all Jews included. Thinking about him, and the possibility that perhaps he was killing someone like him, would be the only thing that could spoil the joy of killing Germans once he got to the forest. Tania told us later that she helped to wrap Bern like a bundle in blankets and cover him with other bundles in the back of Reinhart’s car. My grandparents and I never saw him again. Grandmother sometimes mentioned him, saying she hoped he was doing well in the forest; she was glad she was no longer obliged to speak to him. Grandfather would laugh; according to him poor Bern had no need to be worried about shooting good Germans; Bern would never manage to shoot anybody, good or bad.

  All the time we were waiting for good news, and none came. We listened to the Wehrmacht radio. It told us that Europe was theirs, all the way to the Spanish border. They were before Moscow; the British army in Africa was wax in Rommel’s hands. They would invade England. Sometimes we could catch the BBC. Its story was not very different. My grandfather stopped making jokes about Napoleon and field marshal snow. Jews were rounded up almost every week now, for different purposes. Always, there would be the SS in their rich uniforms and shiny leather, Polish policemen who understood Jews and could not be fooled by their tricks, and Jewish militiamen with long sticks hurrying people along, throwing their possessions into the street. They
were now taking away men under thirty, men and women over sixty-five, and sometimes unemployed Jews, even if the head of the family had working papers. In our building, members of families had been separated. The Kramers thought they would hide Irena behind the boxes of supplies in their storeroom if there was time; the disadvantage was that people found hiding were always beaten and sometimes shot directly after the beating.

  The noise of the roundups remained in one’s ears a long time after it was all over: first would be the announcement Achtung Judenaktion, then the Germans yelling monotonously Alle Juden heraus, the Poles yelling in Polish, and Jewish militiamen yelling in Polish and Yiddish, people wailing. From time to time, there was also the barking of police dogs. We speculated about what was done with the people who were taken away. If they were put on trucks and driven out of T., they were likely to be shot in a wood a little distance away. That is what peasants who lived in that direction said. Those who were herded to the railroad station and put on trains might be going anywhere. There was talk of a camp in Bełżec, near Lublin, of factory work in Germany, of Wehrmacht brothels, of consolidation in ghettos of the large cities like Lwów, Łódź and Warsaw. Tania said that none of them would ever return; it did not matter where they died. Our papers guaranteed that we would not be touched. She was right. When she or, if she was at work, grandfather showed them to the police, they would tell us to return quietly to our apartment. We began to be treated with suspicion by our neighbors, even the Kramers, although Tania never brought home food anymore without bringing a package for them as well.