The Girl from Krakow Page 22

  Here Lotte observed, “Every Jew I’ve ever seen is a millionaire. The szmalcowniks shake down the same people week after week. The Yids never run dry, and these pests just live off the proceeds, never doing a stitch of honest work and making a lot more out of it than a poor honest shopgirl. I feel like turning some of their targets in myself just to get back at those scroungers.”

  A girl from cosmetics wondered aloud, “The Jews were rich, so why were they all soft on the communists and socialists? When the Jablkowskis owned the store, the unions had the run of the place. They made Catholics pay union dues even when the Cardinal Archbishop told us not to have anything to do with the Reds.”

  Before she could stop herself, Rita asked a question. “Did the nonunion workers get pay raises when the union people got them?”

  Lotte was perceptive enough to catch the drift of a subversive question. “Of course. That was only fair. If the Jews had openly favored their union pets that way, we would have gone on strike. What’s your point? Jew lover? Socialist, Red?”

  Rita would have to be careful around this one. She beat a retreat. “No, just curious. I am sure things are much better now that the Jews are gone. I worked for Jews in a shop in Lvov, before the Russians came. Then I had to work for the Soviets.”

  “Poor girl. You’ll have to tell us about it.” The older woman rose, and they all went back to work.

  The next day just before lunch, Rita saw a large and obviously German car pull up in front of the revolving door at the main entrance across from her fountain pen display. Three men entered, in full-length leather, each a different stereotype of the Gestapo officer. The floorwalker approached, bowed, and Heil Hitler-ed. They clicked heels, snapped a slight bow from the waist, turned, and began walking right toward Rita. They reached her display, wheeled left in unison, and came to a halt on either side of the perfume counter across from her. Behind it stood a young woman. She was petite, dark, with large eyes and a clear complexion that went well with her department store smock. Once the three men had deployed themselves at the counter, she slowly unbuttoned her smock, picked up her purse, and came out from behind the counter. Refusing to say anything at all to anyone, she took up a position among them, and all four walked out. The calmness in her movement, the look of acceptance in her eyes, the furrow lifting from her brow, all sent an unambiguous message: “I am glad to stop hiding, living every waking moment in apprehension, wondering when I will be taken. It’s over, and I can surrender at last.”

  Who did she remind Rita of? Who did she look like? It came to Rita with a stab that made the girl’s fate suddenly completely personal to Rita: the girl had the coloring, the carriage, even the calm of that girl at the Terakowski factory, back in Karpatyn, the one who was memorizing Lord Tadeusz . . . Yes, Dani.

  For a long moment after the Gestapo and the girl had gone, there was a silence. Everyone seemed to be holding their breaths, afraid to show a reaction, wondering if the little drama was really over. Some appeared to be silently saying Hail Marys; others looked about as if they could detect who had betrayed her. Then the buzz broke out across the floor. Meanwhile, the floorwalker fluttered about in his cutaway shushing the salesgirls and reassuring the tut-tutting clutch of dowagers among the clientele.

  A few moments later, Rita was polishing fingerprints off the glass top of the counter when Lotte slid over, leaned forward, and spoke under her breath. “I knew she was a Jewess, first moment I saw her. Just a little too refined, manners too nice.” Rita nodded. “Then, she ate too much at the canteen for her size. It was probably her only meal every day. A giveaway when you’ve been watching them for as long as I have.”

  “Shove off, sister,” Rita said, taking her cue. “If I don’t clean this counter, the Goddamn floorwalker will have me by the short hairs.” Was this crude enough? Or was Lotte’s ear going to catch out her irony again?

  Perhaps. Lotte went on, “Half the girls in this shop must be Jewish. Maybe you are too.”

  In a voice loud enough for one or two customers to hear, Rita blurted, “Jesus Maria!” She glared at Lotte. “Go on like that, and I’ll think you’re one! Want to see my baptismal certificate?” She reached for her purse under the counter. “Where’s yours?”

  “Calm down, sister, calm down.” Lotte was still whispering. “You know, I saw her last weekend, that girl they just took. She was out with a Wehrmacht noncom, a sergeant, I think. Probably wouldn’t come across when he wanted it, so he turned her in.”

  Now it was Rita’s turn to be upset. “Do you think a German soldier would turn in a girl just for protecting her virtue?”

  “Sure. Why not, if he knew she was a Yid?”

  “Lotte, I’m from the east; I haven’t been in the big city long. Explain some things to me. Why would a German soldier have anything to do with a Jew-sow? Why would a girl tell a German soldier if she was Jewish?”

  “Jewesses sleep around. They all do. So, they’re the only girls a soldier can get. As for the soldiers, not all of them are Nazis, and even the ones who are, well, there are limits to their loyalty to the party, right? Girl’s willing to sleep with a German, she’s probably Jewish. Girl refuses, well, then let her prove she isn’t. Simple.”

  “I see. Thanks.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mrs. Kaminski was pleased with her lodger. Never brought anyone home, never asked to use the kitchen, quiet and neat, out every evening doing something in town presumably. But no trouble. Eventually she warmed to Rita. Finally one evening, she broke her own rule and invited Rita into the kitchen for tea, offering to let her cook. She had been relieved to learn that her tenant took meals at the department store canteen and didn’t need to cook. Still, a young lady could always learn something from her elders, and both of them were alone in this world apparently.

  Mrs. Kaminski’s husband had been killed by the Reds during the Polish-Russian war in 1920. She had been alone, renting rooms ever since. She would be glad of some company, especially on long winter days. Sunday mornings she invited Rita to accompany her to Mass, and Rita was glad to go. When Mrs. Kaminski first offered to teach her how to cook, Rita politely declined. The smells from her kitchen eventually broke down Rita’s resistance. Somehow Mrs. Kaminski could turn a little flour, lard, and some water into a pastry dough. Then by stretching and pulling, throwing on a few raisins, wrinkled old apples no one could want, and the walnuts that were one commodity still unrationed, plus a little precious sugar and some cinnamon, she could roll the whole thing into a strudel any Gaulieter would be pleased to serve. Watching her once or twice, Rita begged the chance to try her hand. It was a way to make Sundays after church go by.

  The only problem about Mrs. Kaminski’s place was that it was a little too far from the ghetto. Every night Rita had to go some distance to court disaster. After work ended at six o’clock, she took to walking up Marszakowska Street toward the ghetto, doing what she could to attract the attention of the extortionists. All too often it was only a German soldier whose interest she piqued. Apparently she needed to look more furtive, less Aryan. How, short of putting a yellow star on her arm?

  She was desperate to be victimized by the shakedown artists, to attract the attention of those she should have feared most. Every night she forced herself to do it. A few zloty in her purse, her documentation at the ready, even a copy of the German Warsaw newspaper in her coat pocket to add to her false identity. But then, how to put on the face of a Jew on the run? It shouldn’t be so hard. That was just who she was. After a time she realized that sauntering, strolling, making a display of herself was part of the problem. No one took her for a fugitive. She was just another tramp on the streets. She couldn’t have looked more like one if she had been standing under a streetlamp smoking a cigarette, adjusting a garter.

  As she walked along, Rita would repeatedly see people plucked into side streets, being shaken down. But never her. Twice in the first few weeks she was in Warsaw, she saw Gestapo convoys, a truck and one or two cars, pull up b
efore a row of flats. A half dozen very large Waffen-SS, led by an officer in the precise-fitting black, rushed a door and broke it down. In moments men pointing their automatic weapons were herding trembling children, mothers clutching infants to their breasts, gaunt, broken men out into the street. They made pathetic attempts to climb up the back of the truck, falling away from lack of strength and inability to reach the handles or the tailgate chains or even just the floors of the open-gated truck beds. The rain of rifle butts and pistol barrel blows failed to contribute in the least to their success, only increasing their frantic clawing. Finally the soldiers simply had to lift and hurtle each of them into the back, where hands eventually reached out to break a fall or catch a child.

  Rita knew she had to watch the bystanders and learn how a Pole—or better yet, a Volks-Deutsche—reacted to such a scene. Some stared, openmouthed; others smiled, a few even jeered, most slunk away. This last Rita could do with no trouble.

  What she needed to find was a Jewish thug, someone like Jerszy in Lemberg. But when she finally began to be noticed, all she seemed to attract were Polish szmalcowniks. These she faced down when she could. “Leave me alone. I am Volks-Deutsche, and you will get into a lot of hot water trying to drag me in to the Gestapo.” She would burst into a flood of German, loud enough to be heard by any passing Blue Police or German soldier. That was usually enough. She knew enough to identify a Jewish extortionist—the accented Polish, Yiddish intonation or expression. The few times she was in doubt, dragged into an alley, held at knifepoint, threatened with immediate harm, she would surrender the money in her purse and condemn the thief as a common criminal. But she would listen carefully for their Polish. Was it native? Was it colloquial? Was it fluent?

  Christmas passed into the new year. Happy 1943 said the somewhat forlorn sign over the inside of the revolving doors at Jablkowski Brothers Department Store. There was a very small bonus in the paycheck and a desultory attempt at a Christmas party. Surely if anything was going to give away the identity of the Jews working in the store, it would have been the way they celebrated, or rather didn’t. But the Poles at the parties were evidently some combination of too drunk or too nice or too indifferent to notice.

  Rita kept moving closer and closer to the ghetto in her nightly peregrinations. Sometimes she was stopped by sentries for papers. More often she was cautioned that the area was dangerous. The Blue Police were korrekt. “Desperate Jews, criminals, even partisans—best steer clear, Panna,” or just as often, “Fräulein.”

  But it all seemed very quiet. After her experience of the Karpatyn ghetto and its repeated Aktionen, she couldn’t understand why the Warsaw ghetto was being left alone. A few men coming and going from the ghetto, showing their papers at the gates, but no German entering at all. Were they just starving the ghetto? They evidently weren’t liquidating it anymore. Was food getting in somehow? If so, perhaps she could find a way in with it.

  Rita’s weekly wage was not enough to meet her needs, pay her rent, contribute to Mrs. Kaminski’s kitchen, and pay off the urchins and impoverished extortionists—more like beggars—that she was attracting. So, early one February evening after work, she dropped in on the Chemiot café in Praga precisely at six thirty. Krystyna was alone at one end of the Zinc—it really was a bar counter from Paris, shiny, smooth silver metal. Rita came in, hung up her coat with the lining out, and sat down at a table. Seeing her, Krystyna went to the back of the bar, evidently heading for the toilet.

  A few moments later, nursing a beer, Rita found herself making eye contact with a Wehrmacht soldier. It was brief, but not brief enough. Encouraged, he was coming to her table. What to do? She couldn’t leave. Smile, you’re a Volks-Deutsche Mädchen. Give some small comfort to a German boy far from home. She smiled, pushed open a chair, and moved her beer to make room for him.

  “Good evening, Fräulein. Can you spare a few moments of your company to a soldier on his way to the Eastern Front?” His German was singsong—was it Swabian?

  “With pleasure, though I have a train to catch myself.” Her German was as casual as she could make it. “How did you know I was German?”

  “Looks, I guess. But I was just hoping. I have no Polish to use on the girls here.”

  Small talk, then, Rita thought. “Can you tell me where you are going? No, don’t answer that.” She smiled. “Military secrets. Not even a German girl can be trusted. Tell me instead what you have been doing. A furlough at home from your unit?”

  “Afraid not. Worst assignment you can get short of the Eastern Front, and now I am getting that one.” He paused. “My unit was doing guard duty at the Jewish quarter.” He used the official designation.

  “Why so bad?” Rita tried not to appear particularly interested.

  “The place . . . disgusting. You can’t stand being near it. Decaying corpses on the streets, desperate people. The way they smell, the walking dead. Worst of all, the starving children. No matter how important it is to rid the world of those people, it’s hard, really unpleasant work. Even the party members sometimes ask themselves, is this suffering really necessary? Can’t we put them out of their misery any faster? Well, the thing is, we were putting an end to their suffering, clearing large numbers of Jews out, sending them . . . away.” He would not say what he really meant, and Rita couldn’t afford to finish his thought aloud. He took a sip of his beer. She emulated. Then he began again. “But the whole operation stopped a week ago.”

  Dare she ask? Will he go on? The wait was an agony of several seconds. He looked around, hunched over a little more, almost as though guarding his beer, and began to speak under his breath. “They are fighting back. Somehow they’ve got guns, a few of them, anyway. Maybe from the Polish resistance, maybe on the black market. Last week they started shooting during a roundup. When our unit disarmed them and took them out, they broke up a transport, outside the ghetto. Jews running for cover everywhere. Hundreds of them, loose. There weren’t enough guards to round them up. It all got back to the ghetto, of course.”

  His urgency allowed her to ask, “What happened then?”

  “Four days of street battles with terrorists inside. We took a lot of hostages. But it didn’t stop them. The Uberkommando thinks the Jews are preparing a bigger armed revolt or some sort of surprise for us.”

  “What will your commanders do?” she asked, though what she wanted to ask was when this would happen.

  “I don’t know. For the moment they have stopped the deportation from the ghetto. At some point they’ll have to go in with force. But not my problem now.” He stopped. “I’m going east. They’re combing the units to send out replacements. Slightest infraction, and you’re gone.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Should a Volks-Deutsche commiserate, Rita wondered?

  Staring into his beer glass, the soldier went on unbidden. “I cut a little corner, and now it’s my death certificate.”

  “Don’t tell me if it will get you in trouble.”

  “Can’t get any worse than the Eastern Front. I was a code clerk, perfectly safe in headquarters company. Anyway, there were so many messages to send. But they made us change the code settings on the machines every day. That was too much trouble.”

  Rita stopped him. “You mustn’t tell me any more, soldier.” All the while she was thinking, Could Erich have been right about their code? Is this why the Americans and Brits are winning in Africa? Is this why the Royal Navy is sinking more U-boats every week?

  He wouldn’t stop muttering. “Code’s unbreakable anyway. So, once in a while, we didn’t bother to change the settings. Somebody noticed higher up, and now I’m for Army Group Center on the Volga.” He lifted his glass and spat out a bitter, “Prost.”

  Rita followed his gesture with her own toast. They finished their beers together.

  By this time Krystyna was back at her place at the bar. Rita had never even noticed her putting anything in the coat she had hung up. It would be a perfect dead-drop exchange. She rose and grasped the soldier’s hand
firmly. “I wish you the best of luck.”

  He replied, “Heil Hitler,” with no enthusiasm whatever.

  The reply formed in her mouth almost without thought. “Heil Hitler.” She turned and left.

  Now Rita had a deadline if the ghetto was finally to be cleared. It was urgent she find the right extortionist. She had to let it be known in the right places there was someone looking for a way to get inside before it was too late.

  She began taking longer and longer walks, later and later at night. No longer just walking, either. Rather, she tried walking fast enough to attract attention, brushing past people, making them wonder where she was going in such a hurry—even better, she thought, what she was hurrying away from. It worked. Soon enough she had been stopped and shaken down by the same few extortionists several times. Finally she gathered her nerve and began to ask, “Do you know any Jew in this business?” “Why?” was the only reply. Her answer was, “Don’t ask. But if you can bring me one, I’ll make it worth your while.” She couldn’t chance missing a contact. She had to give her address. It was the worst thing she could do, but now she was as desperate as any Jew in hiding. Unlike them, she needed to be found.

  One morning in the middle of February, Mrs. Kaminski came to her room as Rita was dressing. The knock was peremptory. Then, before she could answer, the older woman was in her room. “I told you no visitors, and especially no Jews! I am sorry, but you will have to leave.”

  “Jews? What are you talking about, Mrs. K.?” Rita’s emotions were mixed, fraught and excited.