The Girl from Krakow Page 35

  Getting off the train at Kiev, Gil handed his case to a porter. It wasn’t heavy, but the porter would cost almost nothing, and it did not befit an officer—a major—to carry his own luggage. He walked down the platform. On each side was a long single file of German prisoners—no officers, no noncommissioned officers, just ragged, bedraggled, unshaven, dirty, prematurely aged men with vacant eyes and chins fallen to their stoved-in chests. Gil drew a breath, expanded his chest, forced his shoulders back, and straightened his spine to give him maximum height. Then he quickened his step into a military stride and walked down the quay, every inch the victorious Soviet officer. Every few steps he raised his arm in a mock salute and announced in impeccable German, Wir danken den Führer! The phrase that had echoed through the thousand-year Reich—We thank the Führer. But the disheveled, hungry, threadbare conscripts on each line were too fatigued, too dispirited, too numbed by what had already been months of retribution even to look up and take in this little indignity. Gil, however, didn’t notice. He enjoyed himself right to the stairway at the end of the quay.

  The train had been nothing but soldiers—replacements heading toward the front, moving with high priority to the replacement depots in Lvov. There would be no chance to become a Polish civilian yet. Perhaps none when he alighted. Lvov, he was certain, was to be Ukrainian and Soviet forever. In the war it had become Lemberg; now it would be L’viv, a thoroughly Ukrainian city.

  In the great hall of the railway station, he could still see the word Lemberg bleeding through the whitewash of the walls beneath the now aggressive Cyrillic lettering. He walked out onto the open square and immediately knew where he was. He looked down one avenue toward the hospital and down another toward the building where his flat had been. Lvov, Lemberg, L’viv—it was almost untouched by war. He knew with equal immediacy that he couldn’t remain here, not if he was to become Tadeusz Sommermann again. He turned back to the station and began to stand in the line of officers queuing for space on the next train west, to their units, to the front and the Germans. It was early, and the desk was not manned. But the line was already long. It grew longer behind him.

  Once the queue began moving forward, Gil consulted his mental map of what was once Poland but henceforth would be the Ukraine. He needed to get as far west of this new eastern border of Poland as he could. Briefly he considered a detour south and east 150 kilometers to Karpatyn. Why? he asked himself. Not his parents. They had been deported by the Russians and couldn’t have survived in Kazakhstan or beyond the Urals. Rita? If she was alive, she was not there. And the chances she was alive were so slim, he would not allow himself to fold her into his future, even in his imagination. So, west, not south. He had to move west as far and as fast as he could. He came to the head of the line. The word “Gleiwitz” entered his head. Between the wars it was the last town in Poland or the first town in Germany, depending on whether you were a Pole or a German. It had taken a League of Nations plebiscite to decide the question. It was on the German side of town that Hitler had staged the pretext—a mock attack on a radio station by Germans dressed in Polish uniforms—that began the war.

  Gil put down his identity card and travel permit.

  The officer looked up at Gil’s medical uniform. “Where to, Doc?”

  “Gleiwitz.” He tried to say it with a combination of authority and as an offhand matter of fact.

  “Gleiwitz, Doc?” The officer was skeptical. “All the frontline units went through there more than a week ago. No field hospitals or evacuation hospitals there. Besides, you’re not attached, according to these documents.”

  “It’s a little delicate, sir.” The man at the desk was a captain. Technically Gil outranked him. But a little respect might smooth Gil’s way. So, “sir, you see . . .” He lowered his voice. “You’ve seen all the women in the forces, more and more of them, even at the front, drivers, clerks, little friends for the officers. Well, not all of their medical needs are the result of war wounds. You understand.” The officer nodded, beginning both to be uncomfortable and to lose interest in this matter. Gil went on a little further; it was remarkable how little men wanted to know about women’s complaints. “I have been asked to establish a branch of Moscow Maternity Hospital number 6 at Gleiwitz for . . . well . . .” He stopped.

  The captain pulled a rubber stamp off a rack, inked it, and pressed it down on the bottom of Gil’s travel document. He then picked up a pen, wrote out his authorization, and scrawled a signature. He jerked his head toward the platforms. “Next.”

  Some distance away, waiting on the same line, Urs Guildenstern noticed Tadeusz Sommermann get his travel orders.

  Gil was sitting in the station officer’s canteen, waiting for his train, nursing a small tumbler of vodka, when he saw Urs enter. Urs was looking straight at him. Retreat and escape was impossible, as was any pretense that they did not know each other. Urs came over, pulled out the chair opposite, and said, “May I?” while peremptorily taking a seat. He looked at Gil visibly tensing before him. “Don’t worry. I bear you no malice any longer. The personal problems of three people aren’t very important after six years of this war. What came between us happened a long time ago. I am not going to turn you in to the NKVD just because you are impersonating a Spanish doctor.” He lit a cigarette.

  Why not? Gil thought. Mainly because you want nothing to do with the secret police yourself. Doesn’t matter how innocent you are, once you put your boot on that tar slick, you can’t get unstuck. “How did you find out?”

  “Rank. I’m a colonel; the transport officer is a captain.” He didn’t need to say more. “So, you survived the war.”

  “It’s not over yet, Urs. We both still have a chance to become heroes.”

  “How did you do it, Tadeusz?”

  Answering this question might be difficult. He was tempted to tell the story, to show how cleverly he had done it. But if he was going to cover his tracks, he couldn’t afford to tell anyone. The story he would fabricate had to be hard to check, and it had to be plausible. “Same way you did.” He looked at Urs’s rank and service pin. “Medical Corps.”

  “Then you learned a lot of medicine they never taught us in medical school.” Urs looked down at his hands, obviously contemplating the surgeries he’d done, over and over. “Where did you serve?”

  Tadeusz had to improvise. “Don Army, Stalingrad Front.” If he was going to cover his tracks, why not do it impressively? “It was tough. For six weeks we lived on vodka and American powdered eggs.” At least that part was true. He had lived on vodka and eggs. But the six weeks in question had been passed in Moscow. “Then I helped move a lot of fascist sympathizers out of the Crimea in ’44.”

  “We heard about that in the Medical Service. Forty thousand died of exposure and malnutrition out of about 200,000 during the move.”

  “Hard to work up sympathy for people who fought alongside the Nazis. There was a whole Tartar Legion fighting with the Waffen-SS.”

  “I don’t know. They never got anything from Soviet power before the war. The way they thought about it, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I suppose. It was the women and children, mainly, who suffered in the relocation.”

  This kind of talk is not going to preserve Urs’s life very long in Stalin’s Russia, Gil thought. “Fascists need to learn a lesson.” He waited for a rejoinder. There was none. “How about your war?”

  “I was on the Leningrad Front. They would have killed for powered eggs in Leningrad.” He changed the subject. “I was still in Karpatyn when the Soviets took your mother and father away in ’40. Were you able to trace them?” Tadeusz shook his head. It would have been dangerous and pointless too. In fact, this was the first hard news he’d ever heard about their fates.

  “How about your family, Urs?” He wanted badly to ask about Rita, but wasn’t going to risk provoking the cuckold.

  “Everyone is gone. Murdered by the Germans. I passed through Karpatyn last month. They’ve set up a local information bureau. My mothe
r was killed, and my father was sent to Belzec extermination camp pretty early. The whole ghetto was liquidated and burned. No one survived. That’s what I was told, anyway.” Urs wasn’t going to mention Rita. “All killed. Including my boy.”

  “You had a child . . . with Rita?” Gil blurted out. Urs nodded. “I am very sorry about all of your loss, Urs—your parents, your son . . . Rita.”

  “Actually I have remarried—a Russian girl I met in Moscow—and we have a boy.”

  “Congratulations. So, you had confirmation that Rita died, then?”

  “Nothing specific. But a woman alone, with a small child. There was no chance.” Urs seemed little affected by this, though.

  “You’re right.”

  “Look, Tadeusz, we both started out from the same place, and five years later, we’re both still alive and not even scratched, when everyone else from back there is dead. Do you ever wonder why? Doesn’t it bother you? I can’t sleep nights thinking about it.”

  Surviving didn’t really bother Gil. And he knew perfectly well why he had survived. It hadn’t been luck. It was foresight, being smart enough to always see which way the tide was running, being unconflicted enough always to seize the main chance, not scrupling the means when the end was worth it. He had deserved to survive. It would be nice to crow about it, but it also seemed the best way to tempt fate. Gil said nothing.

  Urs rose. He looked down at Gil from his great height. “Oh well, I should have known better than to ask you what it all adds up to.”

  Gil rose, trying to lessen the distance he needed to look up. “What do you mean by that?” Every fiber of his being was straining to stop himself from saying what he really thought: Urs, you fool, you didn’t deserve to survive. If only you’d succeeded in your suicide back in ’38, I would have had Rita, and she might have survived with me. Instead, she’s dead, and you’ve come out of the great patriotic war a colonel.

  But Urs replied, “All I meant is that there’s no point asking questions like these of someone who never thinks how he affects other people’s lives.” He looked at his watch. “My unit is headed for Katowice. I better get back to it.” He turned and walked away without offering a hand or making a farewell.

  Did Gil have to worry their paths might cross again? There was little he could do about the matter, so he turned his mind to other things.

  Gil wasn’t the only one attracted by the geography of Gleiwitz. The town had swollen with refugees—Germans, Poles, many from the former Polish provinces now permanently annexed to the Ukraine. He had found lodgings quickly enough by wearing his uniform. The trick was how and when to stop wearing it. Pulling Tadeusz Sommermann from the bottom of a valise, where he had been for seven years, Gil registered him with the local refugee information office and gave the names of his family members when they asked whom he wanted to be reunited with. This would build up a record. If Urs was right about the extirpation of their families and acquaintances in Karpatyn, there wouldn’t be anyone left to challenge a story, no matter how improbable, about survival in hiding, fighting with partisans—communist, not Home Army. Documents in hand he went to the Municipal Police to register himself, and to the local authorities to renew his Polish identity cards.

  Then he—Tadeusz—set about looking for work as a doctor. This was a little more difficult, as the only documents he had from Marseille bore the forged name Gil Romero. He would have to send to Marseille for new copies with the real name. Nonetheless, the need for medical staff was too great for hospitals to stand on ceremony, and Tadeusz obviously knew what he was doing. Within days he had become a locum at two different clinics.

  Almost from the first, nothing felt right to Tadeusz Sommermann. Daily he felt the need to be Guillermo Romero—for the nurses, for his patients, for their families. He needed to be the debonair, exotic romantic with the Catalan name and flair. Instead, he was Tadeusz Sommermann, a perfectly competent physician, but a Jew in Judenrein Poland. After six years of Nazi occupation, people were no longer proud of their feelings against Jews, but they still carried them. No matter their surprise at meeting a Jew who had survived, his Jewishness produced a chill, then disquiet about his diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, none of which could be hidden. Orderlies brought the casual anti-Semitism of the streets into the wards. Nurses did not respond to his informality or his willingness to listen, to consult them, in the ways they had warmed to Gil Romero. Doctors would not go beyond the exchange of pertinent patient information. Tadeusz wasn’t really their colleague. He was a wraith, a throwback, an oddity, a reminder of indifference, of complicity, and worse. He was someone they had to work with—because of the war, because of the Soviets, because of their guilt—but not because they wanted to. Life with Tadeusz Sommermann was not going to be easy for anyone, including Tadeusz himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The morning of March 30, 1945, Rita came down the Schlangenweg onto the Neuenheimer Landstrasse, which ran along the north side of the Necker. She was on her way to find some milk for the children. Looking up toward the bridge, she saw two loose lines of men in green uniforms, some with short khaki jackets and all with green helmets nothing like the German ones. Their walk was gangling, and they did not have the smartness or the relentless pace she associated with German soldiers. They were carrying weapons in a variety of ways—some across their shoulders, slung behind them, some even in their hands parallel to the ground. Across their waists there were a variety of pouches, pockets, and tools that seemed to move up and down as they walked. Nothing was tied down neatly, as with German infantry. She stood there and waited. Between them a small open vehicle with a flat bonnet, looking nothing like a Kubelwagen, came into view, approached her, and stopped. It had a white star in a dashed circle on its hood. At last Rita knew what she was looking at: Americans—“Amis,” the Germans called them, as if they were distant cousins. Amis, who would treat Germans better than the vengeful Brits.

  She would learn to call the vehicle a jeep—it was almost her first word of English. An officer jumped out and asked, in halting German, “How far along to the next bridge?” He was her age, but grimy, unshaven, with hooded eyes, a single white bar on the front of his helmet. He held a clear celluloid map case, but no weapon besides a pistol.

  “I don’t know. I have never been past this point on the river. I am not a native.” Suddenly she realized she was being forthcoming. Telling someone something true about herself, instead of hiding the truth.

  “Can we find someone who does know?” His German was basic, without the declensions, she found herself noticing.

  “Yes. Please follow me.” Rita led the officer up the Schlangenweg.

  “Where are you from, if not here?” he asked as they mounted the step path. The officer had not taken out a weapon.

  It was then, as they trudged upward, that the realization of deliverance reached her. She turned back. Tears welled into her eyes. She threw herself on this strange American one step behind her on the steep pathway. “At last! I am free, I am released, alive. I love you.” She gulped. The German words had come out unbidden.

  He pulled her hands from around his neck, but he smiled. “Free, released? And already in love with me?” He had understood every word. “Were you a prisoner?” His German wasn’t as limited as she thought.

  “I love you because you have come. And yes, I am—I was—a prisoner.” Would he understand the past tense? She turned back up the path, but now walking beside the officer. “I’m a Pole, a Jew, in Germany on false identity, working for a Nazi family.”

  “Is that where you are taking me? To some Nazis up this path? Should I call my platoon? Do I need a weapon?”

  “I don’t think so. Only watch out for the nine-year-old girl and her mother. The rest are harmless, and the husband’s a tax collector, not a zealot for Hitler.” They reached the back gate. Rita held it open.

  As they walked into the kitchen, Rita called down to the cellar. “Dani, come up quickly.” A moment later Dani was ther
e. Instantly she understood how suddenly everything had changed.

  “You are an American?” Dani said it in English. She spoke English! How could Rita have known her for so long without knowing this?

  The officer addressed her. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Lieutenant Shaw.” He looked to Rita inquiringly. “Her?”

  “She’s Jewish, like me, Lieutenant. False identity. Like me, from Poland, hiding in plain sight.”

  He nodded. “Maybe you can help me. Come along.” Then he walked through the kitchen and into the dining room, followed by the two women.

  The family was assembled and eating breakfast. All stood as they stared at the intruder. He began in German, “I am Lieutenant Shaw, 44th Division, US Army. Consider yourselves under military authority in a war zone. I will ask some questions. Any failure to provide accurate answers will be considered a violation of the regulations of the occupation authority.” It sounded like a memorized script. Lieutenant Shaw turned to Dani and spoke English. “My German may not be up to this. If the answers sound wrong, you’ll tell me?” She nodded. Meanwhile, Lempke had begun to study Dani’s face. After a moment, a flash of recognition crossed his eyes.

  Shaw began to fire questions at the Germans: about the locations of nearby bridges, German facilities. But between questions and answers, an exchange began between Lempke and his wife in rapid colloquial German. Lieutenant Shaw looked at Dani. “What was that about?”

  “Sir, the wife told him not to answer, and he told her to shut up, they were at your mercy now.” She smiled. Lempke now began to answer Shaw’s questions in a German he could understand. After a few moments, Lieutenant Shaw turned to leave. Dani followed him out the door, and Rita rushed after them both.

  Dani was speaking in English. When she saw Rita was behind her, she began to translate what she had said. “Are you just going to leave us with this Nazi family, sir? What should we do?”