The Girl from Krakow (11 page)

By now the radio was making static. Rita turned the tuning knob, sliding the indicator bar through the whole of the long wave band, then the shortwave. Nothing. Wrong time of day for broadcasts? More likely the stations in Lvov had already been abandoned.

She looked out the window. It was calm below. The few people along the street were going about their business. There was nothing to do but wait till Urs returned. Besides, why assume the worst? Her parents had been living under the Germans for almost two years now. They were suffering shortages and restrictions war always imposed on its losers. But no outright Nazi brutality had yet been visited on them. Indeed, they had hardly seen a German soldier in Gorlice, their village near the former Polish-German border. Perhaps what she had seen in the newsreels, what she had read in the Jewish press, perhaps even
Kristallnacht
, were exaggerations or aberrations. If not, well, most Jews had lived through them. Why should things be different here? There was no reason to panic. Saying so to herself did nothing to quell the emptiness in the pit of her stomach, the feeling of pressure on her temples, the disequilibrium when she rose and moved toward Stefan, still patiently mounting blocks on the floor across the room.

She had managed to get Stefan napping by the time Urs returned, now trudging slowly up the stairs to the landing, adrenaline evidently spent. He came into the kitchen and sat, heavily. Rita admonished him with a finger to her mouth and a nod to the nursery. Urs began in a whisper. “It’s bedlam at the town hall. Only a little better at military district headquarters. But with the NKVD gone, people are ready enough to talk.” He stopped and thought a moment about how to lay everything out. “Let’s see, first, it looks like the heavier thrust is not coming this way. The local garrison was ordered north this afternoon. They’ll be gone by tomorrow. Party officials have been told to make their way east. And all local officers have been militarized—police, fire brigade, anyone the army can use. That includes doctors, nurses, even orderlies, at the polyclinic.”

“You?”

“I got the order this afternoon.” He held up an onionskin flimsy. She grabbed it, unfolded it, and quickly read through the fuzzy typescript of a two-sentence carbon:

To Dr. Urs Guildenstern: You are ordered to report for military conscription no later than seventy-two hours from receipt of this notice at the Karpatyn main railway station. Until your military activation, you will be held responsible for maintaining order at your facility and preserving its stocks for military use.

Below the scrawled carbon of an illegible signature were the words:

By order of the military district of the western Ukraine.

She looked up at him.

Reading her mind Urs replied, “Don’t worry. I won’t have to go. In this bedlam they can’t enforce orders. They can’t even be sure I ever got them. Let’s wait a day.”

Sunday morning it remained unclear whether Urs would have to obey the mobilization order. All that day they turned over the alternatives a hundred times, thinking through every possibility. By evening the chains of reasoning were ending up at the same conclusion every time they tried them out: he had to go. The conclusion was strengthened by each new scrap of information.

Rita was the first to voice the inevitable. “You must leave. You’ve got to obey that mobilization order. It may be your only chance. You can’t stay in the clinic. Just like they did in the west, the first thing the Germans will do is shoot every doctor, lawyer, every educated man they get hold of. Stefan and I will be in danger too.” He didn’t voice disagreement. She didn’t say what she had been thinking. It was cruel to admit, but with Urs gone, she would not have to manage someone too weak to even deal with a failed marriage. She and the child would be better off without him. They would fade into the town’s population swelled by refugees.

Monday morning the clinic opened as usual. The staff was on hand and at work. All except the three Ukrainian porters. They were gone. So were the Ukrainian patients.

That afternoon Rita bartered some costume jewelry, a cameo, candlesticks, some lace, and an onyx box for a ten kilo bag of flour, three kilos of sugar, and tins of baking powder and soda, along with blocks of strong laundry soap. In the evening she helped Urs decide what to pack. As she did so, she monitored her feelings. Was this the right decision? Putting things out on the bed, choosing what he was to take and what not, only increased her resolve.

They woke on Tuesday, knowing without doubt that he would have to leave. It was all Urs could do to stifle the relief that welled up in his mind, a feeling he was utterly ashamed of, that he would admit to no one. Sometimes Rita read the shameful desire to get away on his face. And she was relieved. All she could think was that he would be just another burden to carry through a difficult occupation.

Three days later there they were, at the eastbound platform of the Karpatyn railway station. In the bright glare of a morning sun, the quay was crowded. The men were all between the ages of thirty and fifty, a few in ill-fitting uniforms, the rest in coats and ties. Every lawyer, doctor, engineer, factory manager, accountant—every educated Jew and the few Poles that had remained in town—were on the eastbound platform. Most were surrounded by wives, mothers, sisters. But none of the women were traveling. There was only one valise among each party, and the women were there to bid farewell. Mostly they were putting up a brave front.

The military train had not yet arrived. It gave Rita and Urs a chance to cover the ground once again. They had lost count of the number of times they had turned the facts and theories inside out, examined them from every angle, weighing chances and probabilities, information and rumors, like every other family on the platform.

Urs went into the station and came back out on to the platform with a ticket in his hand. “There was another report this morning.”

He didn’t even need to explain. Stories had reached them almost from the first. The Wehrmacht had been ordered immediately to execute commissars, party members, and any representative of the Soviet state. Was the
Kommissarbefehl
—the directive to execute commissars—Russian counterpropaganda, circulated by the Soviets in order to stiffen their cadres? No, it was coming from the west—the wrong direction to be entirely without substance.

At first it had not worried them. “Thank God you kept me from joining the party,” Urs had said. But now they were hearing something more. It wasn’t just Germans checking for party cards in Lvov. The rumor was Ukrainians were eagerly identifying Soviet functionaries—party members or not—to the Germans.

Standing on the platform, Stefan holding her hand, Rita looked hard at Urs. He stared back unblinking, then asked, “You’re sure?” She nodded. A sudden hoot in the distance, and everyone on the platform turned east, looking down the newly lain, wider, Russian-gauge track. Stefan clutched his mother’s leg at the sound. A large steam engine pulled in, locking its eight massive wheels as it slid along the platform, small red flags flying from each side of the main pistons. Behind it were four second-class carriages and a dozen boxcars. The carriages carried consecutive numbers, and each boxcar also had a number chalked on its sides. Urs looked at his ticket, and his gloom lifted a little. He had been allocated carriage seating.

Once he had hefted his valise onto the shelf above the seats in his compartment, Urs pulled the wide window down and leaned out. Rita held Stefan up to him, but the child looked down to the gap between coach and platform and began to cry. She drew him back and leaned forward to hug Urs one last time. As she did so, he whispered. It was not the endearment she expected. “Behind the bedstead there’s a loose baseboard. When no one is around, slide it up.”

Now as the train began to glide out of the station, he had to shout to be heard. “Did you hear me? Do you understand?”

There was no point answering in the hiss of the released air brakes. She nodded, and suddenly he was another indistinct, flesh-colored oval leaning from the side of the train shrinking into the distance.

That night after putting Stefan to sleep, Rita took stock. She had a fair amount to sell: clothing (hers and Urs’s), some jewelry, a fox collar, the dishes and silver, plus a second set, medical books in Polish, a radio and a German portable phonograph, the camera, a pair of binoculars Urs sometimes used for bird-watching, and a shelf of philosophy books no one would want. Then she remembered Urs’s last words. She walked back to the bedroom, moved the bed, and slid out the board. Urs had proved himself not entirely a
Luftmensch
. Hidden behind the baseboard, in a doctor’s clasped leather bag, there were two dozen morphine vials with a syringe, a sack of fifty Polish gold twenty-zloty pieces, and perhaps most forethoughtful, a small blue bottle marked in French
Poison, Cyanure de potassium
. How long ago had he bought that, and why?

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
hree days later Karpatyn was occupied, not by Germans in
feldgrau
, but by Hungarians in forest green. Everyone began to breathe a little. It was going to be another occupation—arbitrary, authoritarian, but not so different from the Soviets, or for that matter, the rigors of military rule many could still recall from the Great War. The only sign of German supervision was the requirement that Jews wear the yellow Star of David armband.

A month later the Hungarians were gone, on their way to the Russian Steppes, replaced by an SS Police detachment. Suddenly the world became an inferno. Even weeks after they arrived, Rita was still asking herself how long she would have to live with a constant knot of fear in her stomach. Once living with terror became everyday normality, some of the physical symptoms of fear lessened. The sudden cramps persisted, but Rita wasn’t sweating through two or three blouses a day, each needing to be washed to eliminate the rancid, acrid odor of fear. The knot tightening in her gut always came with a question, one she couldn’t really frame further than its first two words: Why this? Why now? Why us? Why me?

Sometimes she’d glance at the tomes of philosophy on the shelf in the living room. There were no answers to be found in any of them. Only Stefan was able to distract her, finding words, asking questions, growing more interesting every day, demanding her love, oblivious to everything pressing down on his mother.

From the moment he arrived in Karpatyn that August 1941,
Obersturmführer
Peter Leideritz had a problem: sixty thousand Jews to deal with, and only a dozen SS/SD and Gestapo, along with eighteen or so Vienna policemen, to do the job. Even with the hundred Ukrainian auxiliaries he had been authorized immediately to recruit, the only way to do the job was terror. He didn’t mind. It relieved the monotony. Leideritz was a policeman from Darmstadt who’d been smart enough to join the party when he came of age in ’31. He’d been behind a desk since ’38. The tight black officer’s tunic was uncomfortable against his paunch, but he was glad to be back in the field. It wasn’t the front, but it was important.

Leideritz managed to organize three good-sized mass killings by the end of 1941. It was heavy work and unpleasant after the first few moments. Russian machine pistols had been handed out to the Ukrainians. The clip held ten bullets, so reloading was not required after each shot. You couldn’t stand too close: the front of your uniform, sometimes even your face, would be covered in human brain. Disgusting. One of the Vienna policeman had refused to participate in the
Aktionen
. The man had to be sent home on sick leave, and despite Leideritz’s repeated requests, there was no replacement for him.

Later, when he attended Himmler’s speech at Posen, Leideritz knew he had earned the accolade the
Reichsführer
bestowed: “Most of you here know what it means when one hundred corpses lie next to one another, when five hundred lie there or when one thousand are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person—with exceptions due to human weaknesses—has made us tough. This is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.”

Rita had thought out a daily scheme that would expose her and Stefan to the least risk. But it was still a matter of placing high-stakes bets at roulette. She would awaken the boy just at sunrise, and together they would take a walk while the police were still sleeping. Only in the early evening, when the goons had released men from the labor details, did she venture out again, leaving Stefan napping, hoping he would not waken. It was during those brief periods she made the rounds of the shops, whose provisions were daily diminishing. Rita didn’t immediately fear running out of money or trade goods. The shops would probably run out before her reserves did.

What she really needed was someone to talk to, to share the days with, and even more, the long twilight evenings. That, she realized after a few weeks, was a problem she could solve. She had space. A lodger would give her company. Perhaps a refugee with a child for Stefan, even a bit of rent money.

Late one afternoon, two days after she placed a small card on the notice board outside the
Judenrat
office, she came back from the meager farmers’ market to see a tall, very thin young man waiting at her doorstep. There was a large leather case at his side. He looked neat, even a little prosperous, less withered, less defeated than most of the men she had seen that day. His raven hair was pushed back from his forehead, above dark eyebrows that seemed to rise like two accent marks—grave and acute—above deep brown eyes. His ears stuck out, and his skin was dark, with visible pores. The face was dominated by a straight narrow nose that made a right angle with his long, thin lips. Handsome in the Jewish stereotype, she thought as she came up the steps to the street door.

“Excuse me,” was all she said as she brushed past him and slid her key in the door. Before he could react, she was already putting the half-closed door between them. The stranger reacted to her evident anxiety, stepping back and raising his hands slightly as if to suggest he was weaponless. He smiled. “I came about a vacant room. Did you put the notice up?”

Shielding herself with the door, she nodded, frowning. “I don’t think you’d be suitable. I am all alone with a small child. What would people think?” What Rita was really thinking was what would her mother-in-law say?

The handsome face frowned. “Here we are all living on borrowed time. You can’t worry about what people will think.” He looked at her again and peered behind her up to the landing, where Stefan stood looking down at them. The boy had heard his mother’s voice and had come out of the apartment to the top of the stair. “Besides, I’m the best lodger you could possibly get.”

Rita decided she was willing to listen. She opened the door wide, and they marched up the stairs, where the stranger put down his case and crouched to make Stefan’s acquaintance. He was obviously trying to forge an alliance. Rita gathered Stefan up. “So, convince me you’re the best lodger I could get.”

“To begin, I have a steady job, with an ironclad work permit. If I take the room, you won’t have to look for another lodger anytime soon. The district supply officer has given the SS/SD orders to lay off workers like me. So, the Ukrainians can’t pick me up on their sweeps for forced labor. I’ll pay rent in reichsmarks. In fact, it’s the only way I can pay. But I can also use them to buy food for you and the child without risk.”

“And all I have to do is rent you a room? What else do I need to do?” She didn’t think she needed to insinuate further.

“Lady, you aren’t my type.” He frowned slightly. “But the Germans are quickly making Karpatyn a jungle. It won’t just be Germans and their stooges you’ll have to worry about. Very soon it’s going to be Jews selling out Jews to survive. Me, I don’t need anything you have except a room. And I am willing to pay.” He smiled and reached out to tousle Stefan’s head.

“It’s the boy’s room.” She looked down at Stefan. “He will move into mine.” She turned, and the man followed as she went through the sitting room and walked down the hall away from her bedroom to the nursery.

“I’ll take it,” he said, almost before he had looked around.

“But you haven’t asked how much or seen the kitchen or worried about where I can get a bed and furniture that will fit. Why are you in such a hurry?” Rita turned and led him back to the living room.

“I can’t stay where I was. I don’t have time to look around much—”

Rita interrupted, glancing at the prosperous leather case. “I see that.”

Ignoring the interruption, he went on, “—and I can’t afford to spend a lot of time looking. By the way, how much?” Rita mentioned a figure. “I can afford that.”

“Should I have asked for more? Mr.
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I think I should know your name if you are going to live here.”

“Erich Klein, at your service.” He plucked her hand and made to kiss it.

Rita pulled her hand back. “We had enough of that from the Hungarians.”

So, she had a lodger, and someone besides an eighteen-month-old to talk to. From the first, she had to admit, she liked him. He was easy to look at, in an unusual way. More important, he was interesting, even deep, in some way Rita couldn’t immediately identify. Confident, natural, composed, graceful in his movements, he knew instinctively how to share space. From the first, he took to Stefan. Erich Klein was going to be a pleasure to have around.

Klein was the bookkeeper at the Terakowski garment factory. He’d been there for almost four years and, in fact, was its manager. The factory was on the west side of town. Before the war they had produced heavy woolen cloth for the British market. They were just starting to make greatcoats for the Wehrmacht. No one had bothered mentioning to the Germans that October was a little late to start producing garments for the Russian winter.

Rita was avid for talk. The next evening when Erich came in from work, she invited him into the kitchen. She had only started putting kindling in the stove. It was still cold, and he kept his coat on. From it he pulled a long bottle that glowed yellow under the naked lightbulb. “It’s an Alsatian. From Riquewihr.”