The Girl from Krakow (22 page)

“Ilya, what if it were true? Would it make any difference?”

“What are you saying? How could it be true? It’s Nazi propaganda.”

“Listen, Ilya. When I was still in the army in late ’41, I treated a dying NKVD captain.” Gil tried to repeat what the man had said to him before he died. “This was two years ago, Ilya. Long before Goebbels could have gotten hold of those bodies.” Why was he telling Ehrenberg this? Why was he even remembering it himself, putting himself and Ehrenburg at risk? Because he admired this man so much. Because for a moment, he wanted to tell dangerous truths, to rise to the nobility he saw in his friend. “Does it really make any difference?”

“It makes a difference. It adds to the burden we have to carry inside. It’s another lie we have to bury for the good of the cause.” Tears were running down Ehrenburg’s cheeks. “No, it only makes a difference where it counts, in one’s conscience.”

The words left Gil unmoved. He carried no burden. Gil consoled himself with a thought:
I suppose the reason I am no artist is that I lack his emotions.

“We are winning, but the costs, Gil!” Ehrenburg mused one afternoon as they walked through early spring slush.

“What do you mean, such costs? War always costs!”

“For everything that has gone well, the Soviet people have been made to pay a much higher price by the madness, the stupidity, the suspicions of Stalin. To begin with, any fool knew the war was coming months before the Germans attacked. Stalin was warned by Churchill, by the Americans, by his best agents in Japan. He did nothing—worse than nothing. He ordered the Red Army to stand down along the borders: ‘No provocations,’ he demanded. So we lost a million and a half men in the first six weeks of the war, just because he had wanted so much to suck up to Hitler.”

“How do you know this?”

“Zukov told me.” Ehrenburg named the most successful of Stalin’s marshals. “Came back from the Manchurian border and saved Stalin’s neck. Anyway, Zukov thinks he’s mad.”

“Do you really think Stalin’s mad? You know him, Ilya.”

“I know Stalin is not fit to lead a country at war. And it is only his bodyguards that have kept him in power. For a month after the German attack, he cowered in his dacha, depressed, drinking, sleeping all day, unable to stir himself. Finally the politburo came to arrest him. Everyone knew his crimes. Instead, when they got there, they were disarmed by Stalin’s guards. Then, in his fury at his own friends, Stalin finally bestirred himself. And to do what? To order futile counterattacks that lost us another 750,000 men. A reserve lieutenant could have organized the defense of the motherland better.”

When they met a few weeks later, Gil was ebullient. “You have read the news? Stupid of me! You must have written it.” Ehrenburg waited. “The new Stalingrad, the encirclement on the Dnieper. A hundred thousand Germans?”

“Yes. But self-congratulations are not in order, Gil.”

“As usual, you must know more.”

“More than I want to know. It’s always that way. It was half the number we announced. And we lost more men than the Germans in that victory—twice as many—and five times the number of tanks.”

“Why?”

“Many reasons. Because the army throws men away instead of using weapons. Gil, do you know what trampers are, or blocking formations?”

“No, never heard of them.”

“Blocking formations are machine gun units deployed behind our lines, with orders to shoot down our own solders retreating
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
not just the occasional deserter, but whole units. Why are whole units withdrawing, fleeing against orders? Are they cowards? Fascists? No. It’s because they are senselessly ordered to charge into German fortified positions. When the war began, they were being ordered to advance without weapons! Think of it, Gil! Even after the victories of 1943, the army still needs blocking formations!”

“And trampers
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
what are they?”

“Punishment battalions, filled with prisoners, deserters—people whose willingness to fight is suspect. Or zeks from the gulag, and worst of all, our own soldiers—prisoners of war we’ve managed to liberate. They’re used as human minesweepers. You fill them with vodka and march them in straight lines into a minefield. Whoever walks to the other side has found the way through for the rest of the army. Does the general staff order this because they lack mine detectors? Do they do this because they are sadists, or because they are ordered to do it?” Gil had no response to all this. “It’s hard to cheer victories when you know what they cost.”

In 1944 March passed into April, making the problem of Karla Guildenstern more pressing. Every few weeks he had called for her chart among many others and seen that her pregnancy was proceeding normally. Worse luck, the final lifting of the German siege of Leningrad meant her husband would almost certainly be able to come to Moscow for her lying-in. As a physician Urs would be accorded all the courtesies of a colleague, including the doctors’ common room, the cafeteria. He’d be introduced all around. There would be no way to avoid him. What to do?

By May Day the matter was urgent. The next morning, the medical staff was called to a meeting by the hospital director.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” he began (there were several women among them), “I have been ordered to seek volunteers for a”—he was searching for the right word—“an unpleasant
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
uh, a difficult mission. It will require the volunteer’s absence for two weeks to a month and will begin in a week’s time. I am not allowed to say more than this: medical officers are required to accompany a large forced deportation to the east. It’s a nationality that has given aid and comfort to the Fascists during their occupation. Conditions will be very severe for these people, and no picnic for those who are required to carry out the deportation. Party members are expected to volunteer. Others are invited to do so.”

He paused, considered, and went on, “Do not volunteer if you are uncomfortable with the concept of collective responsibility or the guilt of a people as a whole.”

Everyone listening realized that the director was himself taking a risk making this observation in the presence of several physicians who, as party members, would be obliged to report his remarks. Gil’s admiration for the director’s bravery was immediately followed by the realization that volunteering could get him out of the hospital and out of Moscow for just the period Karla Guildenstern would be in the hospital.

“If you wish to volunteer for this assignment, see the hospital party secretary. Meanwhile, this matter is confidential, and no one is to discuss it. That is all, colleagues.”

So Guillermo Romero spent sixteen days on a train that started with 2,498 Crimean Tartars, a few old men, but mainly women and children. They were to be moved from their homes on the Crimean peninsula five thousand kilometers to Samarkand in trackless Central Asia. When it was over, he reflected that no matter how hard it had been for him, at least he had the food and the warmth of an NKVD guard car. The poor Tartars had been given thirty minutes’ warning to leave their homes and then were marched to the railway line, where they were crammed into cattle cars and moved without letup for two weeks through the barren landscape of war-ravaged Ukraine and the empty desert of Kazakhstan, only to be left to shift for themselves in the steppelands north of Samarkand.

Gil had been briefed about their crime before the deportation began. They, or at least too many of them, had welcomed the Germans as liberators. Worse, they were guilty of sending large numbers of their menfolk to the Wehrmacht, where they fought ferociously against the Red Army, even after the Crimea had been retaken from the Germans. And this after twenty years of Soviet enlightenment, electrification, schooling, the mechanization of their agriculture. Twenty years after scientific socialism had freed them from the feudal yolk of their religion. All this, and they were still disloyal to the state.

He did his best for these Tartars, delivering three pregnancies, one of which survived, treating the wounds of adolescent boys brazen enough to taunt the guards, even treating several shot while trying to escape. There was nothing he could do for the elderly, dying of exposure and hunger. Gil was able to enforce hygiene firmly enough that he did not have to deal with typhoid, though there was nothing he could do about the dysentery. At the end he estimated that three hundred of his train had died along the way. The chief medical officer of the deportation congratulated him; some trains had lost half their consignment. There were hard figures on how many people had been forcibly relocated, about 200,000. But there had been orders not to keep track of fatalities.

When the exercise was over, almost forty thousand NKVD security personnel were to be moved back to the Ukraine. On the return journey from Kiev, Gil found himself in a compartment of physicians who had participated in the deportation. For three days the train rattled north to Moscow. The whole compartment argued about the morality of what they had done. Gil had no interest in the debate.

PART IV

ENDURING

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

M
argarita Trushenko,
Volks-Deutsch
, was standing on the platform as the 21:00 Warsaw express glided to a halt at Karpatyn station.

She knew herself as Rita Feuerstahl, not even Rita Guildenstern—she had never been able to call herself that. She never would again.

So Rita Feuerstahl was standing there on this night in late October 1942, trying as hard as she could to change her identity into Margarita Trushenko. She began by concentrating on the catechism she had once known by heart, back in the gymnasium
of the Dominican sisters. Inevitably, her mind began wandering.

I’m not the same person who learned these sentences by rote the first time fifteen years ago. Ten years from now, everyone I know will have been thinking of me as Margarita Trushenko for so long and so completely that I really will be her.

An initially imperceptible hum now gave way to an increasing roar as the passenger train rumbled in from the east. Once the engine, bearing two swastikas, had passed, the line of carriages slowed until the entire train precisely bracketed the platform.

As each coach glided by, Rita could make out the effaced Polish national railway markings underneath the Reich Bahn insignia on the doors, until finally one stopped and swung open before her.

Lifting her case into the rack above her head, she felt its uneven weighting as the two heavy volumes within shifted from one side to the other. She knew why she had taken them. It wasn’t to remember Freddy. She needed them. The books had become a center of gravity, and not just in the valise she had raised up to the luggage shelf above her seat. They had become her center of gravity. It was ironic that in the ghetto, where what she had really needed were food and shelter, she had found exactly what she’d always been looking for: the real why of things she’d been searching for as long as she could remember. Reading them over and over, those two books had slaked a thirst that had been with her since the Dominican sisters’ gymnasium.

She settled herself in a seat. In a few minutes, the blackness of the darkened town and then the night turned the window beside her into a mirror. She couldn’t see through the reflection of her face, and so she began to stare at it, trying to make it the face of Margarita Trushenko. Changing her identity shouldn’t be so hard. Starting now, everyone around her would help, assuming she lived long enough for them to do so.
Myself, me, my identity. Just a useful illusion, like much else foisted on us by natural selection. What quick work Darwin makes of the philosophers’ great puzzles
.

The train was rattling through a countryside that in daylight would have reminded her of journeys to Lvov three years before, which would have made her remember the slightly nervous anticipation, the rush of pleasure at seeing him—was it Gil or Tadeusz?—on the platform in Lvov, the pure sensation of sexual release, the intimacy of a shared meal, the chagrin of returning home that last time with Urs. As it was, she remembered none of this. She was already a different person from that Rita.

Noiselessly the conductor came up behind her and cleared his throat to alert her to his presence. Not noticing how his German uniform had frightened Rita, he doffed his cap and asked for her ticket, in German, which he duly punched and walked on.

At ten thirty Margarita Trushenko alighted from her train and walked up the long quay beneath the glass and wrought iron roof of the Lemberg
Hauptbahnhof
. That’s what the signs said everywhere—not Lvov, Lemberg. There was not a Polish sign to be seen. She was greeted by
Fraktur—
gothic printing everywhere. Directions to the
Befehlshaber
—military headquarters
;
Wartehallen
—waiting rooms; the
Gepäckaufbewahrung
—the left-luggage.

Rita decided to head for the
Gepäckaufbewahrung
. Surely the rules in force in Karpatyn were to be followed here. Wandering around in the night on the street with a suitcase was an invitation to police inquiries. She walked directly to the open bay and passed her bag across. In return for a few groschen, she was handed a small claim check. As she turned around, a rather nice young man in an overcoat with a turned-up collar came up to her, took off his hat, and hugged her. He was clean-shaven, shorter than Rita, with curly brown hair.

“Darling.” It was a voice too loud for her ears only. “I’m so glad to see you.” Then, in a whisper, his mouth at her ear, “Your name, dear, quickly.”

“Margarita,” she whispered back, her cheek still brushing his ear.

Again, just a little too loud: “Margarita. Thank goodness you’re back.” He took her arm and walked her out of the station and into the square beyond. He paused to light a cigarette and offered her one. “Take it, even if you don’t smoke. It helps.” They stopped, and Rita looked back at the glass ceiling of the entry hall, barely illuminated against the black sky, then turned to the brighter arch of the station entrance. It had not changed in four years. Everything else had.

“I do smoke. Thanks,” she said, exhaling. “What does smoking help? Who are you; what is this all about?”

The young man smiled. “My dear, smoking helps because nice women don’t smoke in the street, especially nice Jewish girls. Back there were about a half-dozen SS and Gestapo, ready to pick you up and send you straight to Lemberg ghetto—or would have sent you there, if there still was one. Didn’t you see them closing in on you?” He nodded back to the station. “I saved your pretty little neck in there.” They walked along, and he continued, “Coming in alone from the east on a late train is a giveaway around here.”

“I have nothing to hide from the police,” Rita insisted.

“Of course not. That’s why you gave a complete stranger such a warm hug and your first name. Any little Jewess would have shrieked for protection against this masher, yes?”

“Really! Take me back,” Rita huffed. “I insist.” But when he stopped, shrugged, and began to turn, she resisted. He had called her bluff. As they resumed walking away from the station, she asked his name.

“Jerszy Sawicki, at your service, ma’am.”

“And why are you risking your neck for me?”

“Patriotism, my dear, pure patriotism.”

“Where are we going, then?”

“A hotel not far from the station. We’ll be there shortly.”

A few moments later, they were at the
Hotel Nowozytny
, a rundown nineteenth-century tenement grayed by fifty years of coal dust, with a single door and two windows facing the dark narrow street of similar buildings. A man in shirtsleeves and a leather vest was sitting on a milk can leaning back against the outside wall. He rose as they approached and entered the hotel ahead of them.

The door opened to a small lobby with a narrow counter in front of a row of pigeonholes with keys in them. There was a steep staircase going up, and beneath it a back door,
probably
, thought Rita,
for an outhouse
, which had ceased to be used only long after the hotel had been built.

The leather-vested man who’d entered before them was the clerk. He took a toothpick—or was it a matchstick—out of his mouth and spoke. “Jerszy, bringing me another guest?” He looked at Rita. “Staying with me, or your own room?”

“How much is a single?”

“Two marks. Identity card, please. It will be returned in the morning.” She laid it down with a thump, along with a reichsmark note. The man copied her details into a thin, worn, stained ledger, handed her a key, and walked back outside into the night air, muttering, “First floor, number 2, best room in the house.”

Jerszy took his own key off the row, number 5, and they moved up the stairs.

Rita reached the first door and began fumbling with the heavy skeleton key. Jerszy offered to help, but she refused. When it was finally opened on the third try, he tried to invite himself in. Rita blocked him. “It’s been a long day. I am tired. Perhaps tomorrow.” She tried to smile as she firmly closed the door.

The narrow room had a bare overhead bulb, a single bed with the springs showing beneath the mattress, a rickety cupboard, a window that looked down on the street above the hotel entrance, and a door behind which stood a sink. A showerhead dropped from the ceiling, with a drain in the middle of the floor. There was no toilet in the room.

The next morning Rita was up at dawn. She dressed quietly, put on her coat with its cargo of coins and morphine sewn into the hem, and made her way down the stairs. The same clerk was on duty, but snoring, with his head on the counter. There was no point in taking her key with her. She had left nothing in the room. She placed her key into its pigeonhole and slipped out the door.

Now, where to go?
Be careful, Margarita!
She knew exactly one person in Lvov, or rather Lemberg: Dr. Stanislaw Pankow, the physician Urs had sent her to and who, in turn, had referred her to Gil. Now, where was his office? She began by retracing her steps to the station. From there, one turn and then another led her back to Pankow’s medical cabinet. When she arrived at seven thirty, it was far too early for a doctor’s practice to be open. The safest thing seemed to enter the building and wait on the staircase landing above his office.

As she sat on the wrought iron stair tread, the chill rose from it through her body. Repeatedly she stood to shake it off.

Promptly at nine o’clock, she heard Pankow arrive, unlock his door, and switch on his light against the winter’s morning gloom. Rita came down the stairs, remembering that for this meeting she had to chance being Rita Guildenstern again, and knocked on his door.

“Come.” The command was peremptory. He wasn’t expecting a patient. Pankow looked up from his desk. He did not place her. “Do you have an appointment,
Panna
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
or is it
Pani
?”

“Dr. Pankow.” She paused. “I was a patient of yours briefly, four years ago. Rita Guildenstern.”

Pankow thought for a minute, and then his face grew red. He put his pen down, straightened in his chair, raised both of his hands to his waistcoat, and began smoothing it down, obviously disconcerted. “Yes, I remember.” His face had turned to a glare. “How dare you come here? Your conduct was a scandal in the local profession. It was intolerable. Please, go immediately.” By the time he finished, however, his dudgeon had been replaced by anxiety. It was as though she were contagious.