The Girl from Krakow (15 page)

Two weeks later came a letter from Rita’s father. It was his last. Conditions had changed in the regions absorbed into Germany proper. The old Gauleiter had been removed, and the new one had begun ruthlessly to impose the new order on their town. Remaining Jews had been told to pack bags for a journey to the east and report the next morning. Rita’s father knew they were to be sent for extermination. She read the letter three times. There was nothing in it about Stefan.

All three were sitting on the floor, each slouched against a different wall, staring at the candle in a lantern equidistant among them in the middle of the room. Like a family no longer on speaking terms, the silence among them was ominous.

Erich’s voice cut into it. “Freddy, something you said a few weeks ago, it keeps coming back to me. Something I don’t understand at all.”

Kaltenbrunner replied listlessly. “What’s that?”

“Well, you said Darwin explains everything, including the fate of the Jews. There’s nothing about Jews, Germans, or even human history in his books, is there?”

Rita looked up. She recalled the question lingering with her after the others had fallen asleep. “Yes, tell us, Freddy. Tell us how your Professor Darwin predicted that the Germans would exterminate the Jews.”

“Quite the contrary. They won’t exterminate the Jews. And the Germans will lose eventually.”

“Eventually, when we are all dead?” Eric’s tone was quiet but fierce.

“Not all of us, Erich. They will kill off a lot of us. But not all of us.”

Rita broke in. “Why are you so optimistic?”

“Look, Rita, think of Nazism as a disease carried by a bacillus, one that is highly contagious and invades brains by playing on people’s hatred, fears, greed. For years it barely subsisted without spreading. Then the environment changed—the Depression—and it began to breed and spread.”

“Hasn’t infected us, but it will kill us,” Erich interjected.

“Maybe
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
probably. Under the right conditions, Nazism spreads from brain to brain. Like any parasite, it kills its carriers, so it has to spread faster to survive. Think of all those Nazis dying on the Eastern Front.”

Rita interrupted. “Why be confident the disease will be wiped out, instead of wiping everyone else out?”

They couldn’t see Kaltenbrunner’s smile at the question he expected. “Like any disease, Nazism breeds resistance. Think about the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century. The plague killed off thirty percent of the whole population of Europe. But it created a new environment for itself, one that selected for anything that could defeat the plague. It left an entire generation resistant to it. We’ve never had another Black Death. The Nazis will do the same thing.”

Rita was persistent. “And why shouldn’t the Germans kill all of us off long before Nazism is burned out or burns itself out?”

Kaltenbrunner was silent for a moment. Then he began, “I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. Darwin realized there is no way to predict when or where or even what variation will blindly emerge and begin to exploit its environment. Only that there will always be one. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, perhaps even already, some variation has emerged—some response, triggered by the new environment Nazism has created for itself, that will destroy it.”

Erich had been listening, thinking,
Freddy, you are right, and your reason isn’t too far off the mark. If only you knew.
There was something that was already working to destroy Nazism. And Erich was sworn to secrecy about it. Would it make any difference for them? He couldn’t see how.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
fter April orders came down to suspend the ghetto-clearing
Aktionen
. Leideritz wondered what the problem was. Perhaps other larger ghettos—Lvov, Lublin—had priority. Never mind, typhus and starvation were doing some of his work for him. It was only important to prevent infection from spreading beyond the ghetto. That would require really severe discipline. He had already had to threaten more than one unshaven
Polizei
with the Eastern Front for slovenliness.

Passage through the ghetto gates was a twice-daily challenge to appear completely inconspicuous. Never be first. Never come late. Carry nothing. No bright colors, no tatters, and above all, no eye contact with anyone, inmate or
Polizei.
At least once Rita thought she’d copped it.

Coming in late, as the curfew siren began to blare, she was jostled in the crowd and brushed a German sleeve.

“
Entschuldigung, Mein Herr,”
she said, as sincerely and obsequiously as she could contrive.

Perhaps it was the faultless German, but the words jolted the
Gefreiter,
bored by the passing tide of flotsam. He grabbed her coat and pushed her to the ground. “Too close, Jew-sow.” Rita watched him reach for the lanyard on his belt to guide his hand toward the sidearm, heard the snap of the metal holster clasp and the slight squeak of stiff, polished leather. The sequence seemed to proceed in exquisite slow motion. She tried to make eye contact. Impossible! His face was shaded by the high-peaked cap and its black brim. Now the blue metal pistol barrel came into view. She could even smell it—Cosmoline? Gun oil? Cartridge powder?

A
Leutnant
came out of the guard shack. The corporal straightened up. “As you were,
Gefreiter
. Can’t waste bullets anymore, especially on workers.” The officer walked away, and the soldier merely kicked Rita in the thigh. She rose and walked away as though nothing had happened. Nothing had, she decided.

The Terakowski textile factory was a vast conspiracy. Most employees had contrived to add a relative or two to the work rolls. Now there were several hundred in the buildings every day being fed, kept warm, and out of harm’s way. Each piece of clothing produced went through exhaustive, obsessive examination for defects, and almost everything needed restitching somewhere. The work was spread out over the available hands.

A few days after Rita began stitching buttonholes, she noticed the young woman, a girl actually. She couldn’t help noticing. Small, dark, her hair in a pageboy that seemed always to look as though it had been newly washed and cut by a French coiffeur—how did she do it without shampoo or even hot water? Dark eyebrows, and the worry lines between them, above a prominent nose gave her a serious look Germans would have called Jewish. But it was the eyes Rita couldn’t stop making contact with. Small irises in whites so large there was no trouble at any distance telling that the girl was glancing in her direction.

On the third morning, looking up from her steaming mug of tea, Rita just openly smiled at her. By that afternoon the girl was at the bench behind Rita’s work space, perched on a high backless stool, a belted gabardine coat before her, with a small book half hidden by the folds of the coat. Without dropping a stitch, Rita asked, “What could you be reading?”

“
Lord Tadeusz.
”
Her whisper carried. It was the great classic of nineteenth-century Polish literature, suppressed by the Russians and the Austrians, celebrated by the newly independent Poland, compulsory in all the schools.

Rita smiled slightly. “We all grew up on it, didn’t we?”

“Funny. I hated it in school. It was the set text in three different classes in the gymnasium I was sent to.” She paused. “My name is Daniella, after my grandfather. But they call me Dani. I know yours
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Rita. You’re a friend of Erich’s, right?”

Rita nodded. “Why are you reading it again if you hated it?”

“They made us read it. That’s why I hated it.”

“So, now you love it?” Rita reflected for a moment. “All I can think about it now is how it seduced us into Polish patriotism.” She looked down at her needlework. “Look where that got us. Patriotism is for Germans! Not for Poles, certainly not for us.”

Dani would not be bullied. “Still, it’s beautiful.”

Rita had to show that she was no philistine. She put down her needle and thimble, closed her eyes for a moment, and began to quote a line of the poem,

O mother Poland, in your fresh grave

We lack the strength your doomed life to praise.

She looked up at the girl. “And our doomed lives? Shall we spend them praising Poland?”

“It’s beautiful.” Dani would not be gainsaid.

“Yes, the poem is very beautiful, but that’s all it is. Think about the words, glorifying a country that has forsaken you entirely. Let the Germans take Poland—to devil with it
 
.
 
.
 
.”

“Stop.” Dani said it so loud the workers at the benches around them lurched in their direction, ready to break up a catfight. But Dani was hugging Rita and whispering to her, so only she could hear. “It’s beautiful, and that’s all it has to be.” She released Rita, and taking up her work, she began to recite from memory.

At first Rita was not listening. She was still in the fierce grip of Dani’s embrace well after the girl had released her. Why? It wasn’t just the human contact. It was a frisson she couldn’t classify, one she had never experienced. Finally the feeling subsided. Rita began listening to the poetry. When Dani finally finished, Rita asked, “Why do you need the book? You know it by heart.”

“I don’t know the whole poem yet. I am trying to memorize it.”

“All of it? How’s that possible? It’s four hundred pages.”

“It rhymes. That’s how. The
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
were sung from memory long before they were written down. When I know the whole thing, no one will be able to take it from me. I’ll be able to escape from all this whenever I want.” She passed her hand before her face dismissively. Then Dani cut a thread with her teeth and finally put down the piece she was working on.

Within a few days, Rita and Dani were inseparable at their workbench. Rita would listen to long passages from
Lord Tadeusz
, sometimes closing her eyes, calmed by the rhythm of the girl’s distant voice. Some days there was silence, as Dani’s lips would move silently, repeating over and over passages she had not yet learned, the book held open by cloth on her workbench. Rita would not distract her. From time to time, in the evenings they would walk back to the ghetto together. Those times there was no opportunity for talk. Dani would use the twenty minutes or so to test her day’s memorizing. One night Rita realized that the only thing she had to look forward to was the completion of the task Dani had set herself.

As they separated inside the gate, often they would smile, reach out, and brush hands. But Rita never asked her where she lived or where she had come from, whom she was with, or even what she prized besides the epic poem. Rita didn’t want to know any of this. It could only burst the spell they shared. And Dani was equally incurious.

She knows Erich. Perhaps he can tell me about her,
Rita thought more than once. But she never remembered to ask him.

Five months later, toward the middle of September, as they moved through the passageway between the main factory buildings and the street, Erich passed Rita muttering, “Walk with me.” She caught up to him. From prudence alone they rarely moved together between work and the ghetto. Now Erich spoke. “There is going to be a general registration. Lydia has asked me to prepare a real list of essential workers, two hundred at most out of the 650 we’re now protecting.”

“When does it need to be finished?”

“I told her I can’t do it. I won’t make up a list of people to be killed, some immediately and others later.”

“You can’t be sure that’s what will happen. Besides, you’d just be doing what you’re told to do.”

“Listen to what you are saying
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Everyone knows what’s going up the rail line to Belzec. No one is going east for resettlement. I’d be writing out death warrants.”

“So, you are going to let Lydia or one of her foremen do it? Just to keep your hands clean?”

“Rita, have you never simply refused to do something just because you couldn’t bring yourself to do it?”

Once
, Rita thought, and then she said it under her breath.