The Girl from Krakow (13 page)

CHAPTER TEN

E
insatzgruppen
were not a solution. Too many Jews, not enough bullets. According to reports from Latvia, sometimes it took several days to dispose of twenty-five thousand people. Impact on morale was bad too, especially where shooting children was required. Leideritz had, in fact, lost two more subordinates who refused to carry out such orders. And there was always the chance, never so far encountered, of a thousand or so Jews overpowering a hundred men armed only with machine pistols. So, now a solution had been contrived, finally.

His Jews were to be herded into three ghettos, A, B, and C, a total of 520 houses. Each ghetto was to be repeatedly filled and liquidated. Disposal was to be at the extermination camp Belzec. The task of making Galicia
Judenrein—
clean of Jews
—
could be completed in a year or less if the facility at Belzec was properly run.

With a little warning, Erich had been able to think things out. In the days before the move, he chose a house at the edge of ghetto A, the largest of the three. The building was a two-story clapboard structure, with a front porch and a few steps. A short footpath from the rear door led to a privy. Immediately behind that, a boundary wall—really just a slatted fence—was being built to keep the vermin in.

As he led Rita and Stefan straight toward the house, she asked, “Why this one, Erich?”

“It’s your lifeline. Biggest ghetto, longest fence, hardest to guard. With your house back up right to the wall, easy to trade across the fence.”

He had been thinking ahead. They were only allowed to bring in what they could carry. For Stefan that meant a large stuffed dog. Only Rita knew it contained the morphine, the poison, and the gold coins Urs had left them. She knew Stefan would never lose hold of his stuffed bowwow, and guards would not search it on the way in.

When the three finally settled down in a room on the top floor at the back, overlooking the wall, they were surprised to find themselves alone. The house had been assigned twenty occupants, and they had the largest room on the upper level, with a small woodstove, to which five thin mattresses had been allocated. Erich headed back to Rita’s apartment to carry in another bag of necessities. With a work permit, he could come and go with relative freedom before the curfew.

After Erich left an older man poked his head in, shrugged his shoulders, and took possession of a corner. His hair was white, short but still thick, brushed carelessly to the right. The matching white beard was not of the religious variety. Rows of wrinkles on his brow gave way to crow’s feet that deepened so they almost hid his eyes when he smiled, as now he did. Once he had been heavy, and he still had the round cheeks of a well-fed Father Christmas.

He introduced himself, in a thick German accent. “Friedrich Kaltenbrunner. Excuse the poor Polish. I was raised in Germany, and only moved back to Poland in ’38. Or rather was moved there
 
.
 
.
 
.” He said this last more to himself than Rita.

“You’re quite welcome.” Rita smiled a little. “Still plenty of room. There are only three of us so far, if you count my child. Don’t understand why we are so lucky.”

“Don’t you? That person you are with—no man wants to be in a room with him. He’s a pederast. They are all saying so downstairs. Didn’t you know?”

Rita said nothing, her welcome to the old man immediately wearing out.

Kaltenbrunner went on. “Doesn’t bother me, though. I’m more broad-minded than the next man. Seen it all in Berlin anyway, before the Brownshirts cleaned up the place—not that there weren’t a lot of queers in the SA anyway.”

“If you are broad-minded, then be respectful of Herr Klein.” She deliberately invoked the German. “He’s my friend.”

“Mine too,” Stefan chimed in, unafraid to approach the old man.

“You are quite right, my dears. Besides, I’m too old to raise any interest in a young man. We’ll be the best of friends! So will we.” He looked down, reached out to Stefan’s dog, and began moving it across the floor, making barking sounds. The boy was immediately won over.

Perhaps Kaltenbrunner would be all right.
It’s not as if we have the luxury of choosing our bedfellows,
Rita thought.

“Stefan, stay in the room and play with your doggie.” She looked up at Kaltenbrunner. “Can I leave him for a few minutes?” she asked. The old man smiled reassuringly and reached for the stuffed animal again. Instinctively she knew she could trust him. Were the eyes really the mirror of the soul? Of course not, but Kaltenbrunner’s sought hers out and twinkled reassuringly. He was a schoolteacher, one with the best teachers’ knack for putting pupils at their ease, and he was using it now on both of them.

Rita went down the stairs and into the street. It was not something she had done without great risk for a long time. It was silly, now imprisoned in a ghetto, but for a moment she felt free. A convict, liberated from solitary confinement, finally allowed to roam the prison yard with the other inmates. The feeling would soon wear off.

When Rita returned, the older man was unpacking his case. What was his name, she wondered.
I can’t be so rude as to ask again
 
.
 
.
 . 
Stefan came to the rescue. “
Pan
Kaltenbrunner says I can call him ‘Freddy.’ ”

“That’s not respectful, Stefan.”

“We’ll be living a little too close for the niceties, ma’am.” Kaltenbrunner was taking two large books from the jumble of clothing in his case. Rita’s jaw dropped perceptibly. Books! Did he think he was coming to the university? He put them at the head of his mattress. Noticing her widened eyes, he explained. “My pillows.”

That evening they exchanged brief autobiographies. The older man’s was wrapped in history. “I was born in Warsaw, but taken to Germany as a child, 1872.” Erich and Rita started making the same calculation in their heads.
He’s seventy
, they thought. “I was a student in Göttingen, and then a teacher in Stuttgart for thirty-three years—science—with time out for the Great War. I was in the west when we nearly captured Verdun.” There was a twinge of patriotism in his voice, but the name Verdun meant little to his listeners.

“How did you manage to get out of Germany?” Rita asked.

“I was pushed. The Nazis were working to a deadline. Early in ’38 the Polish government announced it wouldn’t admit anyone from Germany without valid Polish passports after October that year. So the German government revoked residence for every Jew with Polish nationality, to force them out before the deadline. My Iron Cross second class didn’t matter.”

Trade was the way of the world. Once an institution like the ghetto was established, a whole economy spontaneously arose to make it pay.

But first the
Judenrat
had to establish its police, the
Ordnungsdienst—
order service
.
This ghetto
Judenpolizei
—the
Jupo—
soon began to fulfill its function: ensuring the high prices of a thriving black market. Once ghetto rations were fixed at less than two hundred calories per person per day, service with the
Polizei
became a magnet. The opportunity to stand at the gates, charged to prevent smuggling, attracted men with ingenuity as well as a broad streak of sadism. Sharper than the German or Ukrainian guards just outside the gate, the Jewish police were not above finding the most intimate hiding places, stripping whatever food that workers had managed to get past the Germans.

A market in survival sprang up and flourished beneath, over, and through the ghetto walls. Gentile urchins could be called from the shadows beyond the wall simply by standing near it long enough to be noticed on the other side. They would scratch or rap on the wood to let you know they were there and ready to trade. Most anything was available for a price, if it was small enough to be tossed over or passed through, and if the price was right. Some of the Polish traders developed a reputation for honesty that earned them the ability to charge the highest prices. As long as there was the prospect of continued business, even the less well-established “firms” could be relied on.

Within a few weeks, a reliable postal service was established, though the rates to mail a letter were always transatlantic, and whatever came from elsewhere arrived postage due. It was through these mails that Rita learned of her parents’ relative good fortune. Unlike Karpatyn, their small town in the west of what had been Poland was now the Reich. The district was governed by a civilian
Gauleiter
, and none of the draconian measures of the
Generalgouvernement
had been imposed—no ghetto, no food restriction, nothing but the yellow star. Her parents were surviving, slowly trading away what they had.

Each morning the two men left for work—Erich to the factory and Kaltenbrunner to the school established by the
Judenrat
. Once they left, a morbid fascination would draw Rita to the windows. Day by day she watched the first month’s triage eliminate the weakest—the ill, aged, and infirm—from the ghetto. Those who came without money or tradable goods immediately began to perish. From her window Rita could track the fate of a victim, from selling pencil stubs to begging, to listlessly sitting at the curb, finally to collapse, self-befoulment, and then death by a combination of starvation, the elements, typhus, and the implacable will to die.

The morning came that she could not bring herself to the window nor to venture outside. Her eye fell on the two volumes that really did serve Kaltenbrunner for a pillow. Reaching down, Rita broke the unspoken rule that no one’s things were to be touched. She picked one up: Darwin,
The Descent of Man
, and then the other, Darwin,
On the Origin of Species
, both in German, well-read, annotated, dog-eared, both almost as old as Kaltenbrunner himself. She had heard of the more famous of these, and it held no interest. The other was unfamiliar to her. She slid her back down the wall, opened the volume, and read the subtitle, “Selection in relation to sex.” She turned the page and began reading. The
Fraktur
print
posed no problem, and the German was clear. All the rest of that morning she read, occasionally monitoring Stefan, who was content to play with wooden blocks and a few broken lead soldiers. She only needed to be sure he did not chew them.

As the afternoon ended, she realized that she had ignored Stefan, who had fallen asleep at his naptime, and she had neglected any preparation for the evening meal. Worst of all, she had violated the invisible barrier surrounding another’s scant possessions. Carefully she put the book down, laid its more famous predecessor on top, and went about her business.

That evening, after a supper of gruel, Kaltenbrunner pulled Stefan into his lap. The boy was content to remain there with his stuffed dog. “So, how far did you get in
The Descent of Man,
my dear?”