The Girl from Krakow (26 page)

For a long moment after the Gestapo and the girl had gone, there was a silence. Everyone seemed to be holding their breaths, afraid to show a reaction, wondering if the little drama was really over. Some appeared to be silently saying Hail Marys; others looked about as if they could detect who had betrayed her. Then the buzz broke out across the floor. Meanwhile, the floorwalker fluttered about in his cutaway shushing the salesgirls and reassuring the tut-tutting clutch of dowagers among the clientele.

A few moments later, Rita was polishing fingerprints off the glass top of the counter when Lotte slid over, leaned forward, and spoke under her breath. “I knew she was a Jewess, first moment I saw her. Just a little too refined, manners too nice.” Rita nodded. “Then, she ate too much at the canteen for her size. It was probably her only meal every day. A giveaway when you’ve been watching them for as long as I have.”

“Shove off, sister,” Rita said, taking her cue. “If I don’t clean this counter, the Goddamn floorwalker will have me by the short hairs.” Was this crude enough? Or was Lotte’s ear going to catch out her irony again?

Perhaps. Lotte went on, “Half the girls in this shop must be Jewish. Maybe you are too.”

In a voice loud enough for one or two customers to hear, Rita blurted, “Jesus Maria!” She glared at Lotte. “Go on like that, and I’ll think
you’re
one! Want to see my baptismal certificate?” She reached for her purse under the counter. “Where’s yours?”

“Calm down, sister, calm down.” Lotte was still whispering. “You know, I saw her last weekend, that girl they just took. She was out with a Wehrmacht noncom, a sergeant, I think. Probably wouldn’t come across when he wanted it, so he turned her in.”

Now it was Rita’s turn to be upset. “Do you think a German soldier would turn in a girl just for protecting her virtue?”

“Sure. Why not, if he knew she was a Yid?”

“Lotte, I’m from the east; I haven’t been in the big city long. Explain some things to me. Why would a German soldier have anything to do with a Jew-sow? Why would a girl tell a German soldier if she was Jewish?”

“Jewesses sleep around. They all do. So, they’re the only girls a soldier can get. As for the soldiers, not all of them are Nazis, and even the ones who are, well, there are limits to their loyalty to the party, right? Girl’s willing to sleep with a German, she’s probably Jewish. Girl refuses, well, then let her prove she isn’t. Simple.”

“I see. Thanks.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

M
rs. Kaminski was pleased with her lodger. Never brought anyone home, never asked to use the kitchen, quiet and neat, out every evening doing something in town presumably. But no trouble. Eventually she warmed to Rita. Finally one evening, she broke her own rule and invited Rita into the kitchen for tea, offering to let her cook. She had been relieved to learn that her tenant took meals at the department store canteen and didn’t need to cook. Still, a young lady could always learn something from her elders, and both of them were alone in this world apparently.

Mrs. Kaminski’s husband had been killed by the Reds during the Polish-Russian war in 1920. She had been alone, renting rooms ever since. She would be glad of some company, especially on long winter days. Sunday mornings she invited Rita to accompany her to Mass, and Rita was glad to go. When Mrs. Kaminski first offered to teach her how to cook, Rita politely declined. The smells from her kitchen eventually broke down Rita’s resistance. Somehow Mrs. Kaminski could turn a little flour, lard, and some water into a pastry dough. Then by stretching and pulling, throwing on a few raisins, wrinkled old apples no one could want, and the walnuts that were one commodity still unrationed, plus a little precious sugar and some cinnamon, she could roll the whole thing into a strudel any Gaulieter would be pleased to serve. Watching her once or twice, Rita begged the chance to try her hand. It was a way to make Sundays after church go by.

The only problem about Mrs. Kaminski’s place was that it was a little too far from the ghetto. Every night Rita had to go some distance to court disaster. After work ended at six o’clock, she took to walking up Marszakowska Street toward the ghetto, doing what she could to attract the attention of the extortionists. All too often it was only a German soldier whose interest she piqued. Apparently she needed to look more furtive, less Aryan. How, short of putting a yellow star on her arm?

She was desperate to be victimized by the shakedown artists, to attract the attention of those she should have feared most. Every night she forced herself to do it. A few zloty in her purse, her documentation at the ready, even a copy of the German Warsaw newspaper in her coat pocket to add to her false identity. But then, how to put on the face of a Jew on the run? It shouldn’t be so hard. That was just who she was. After a time she realized that sauntering, strolling, making a display of herself was part of the problem. No one took her for a fugitive. She was just another tramp on the streets. She couldn’t have looked more like one if she had been standing under a streetlamp smoking a cigarette, adjusting a garter.

As she walked along, Rita would repeatedly see people plucked into side streets, being shaken down. But never her. Twice in the first few weeks she was in Warsaw, she saw Gestapo convoys, a truck and one or two cars, pull up before a row of flats. A half dozen very large Waffen-SS, led by an officer in the precise-fitting black, rushed a door and broke it down. In moments men pointing their automatic weapons were herding trembling children, mothers clutching infants to their breasts, gaunt, broken men out into the street. They made pathetic attempts to climb up the back of the truck, falling away from lack of strength and inability to reach the handles or the tailgate chains or even just the floors of the open-gated truck beds. The rain of rifle butts and pistol barrel blows failed to contribute in the least to their success, only increasing their frantic clawing. Finally the soldiers simply had to lift and hurtle each of them into the back, where hands eventually reached out to break a fall or catch a child.

Rita knew she had to watch the bystanders and learn how a Pole—or better yet, a
Volks-Deutsche
—reacted to such a scene. Some stared, openmouthed; others smiled, a few even jeered, most slunk away. This last Rita could do with no trouble.

What she needed to find was a Jewish thug, someone like Jerszy in Lemberg. But when she finally began to be noticed, all she seemed to attract were Polish
szmalcowniks
. These she faced down when she could. “Leave me alone. I am
Volks-Deutsche,
and you will get into a lot of hot water trying to drag me in to the Gestapo.” She would burst into a flood of German, loud enough to be heard by any passing Blue Police or German soldier. That was usually enough. She knew enough to identify a Jewish extortionist—the accented Polish, Yiddish intonation or expression. The few times she was in doubt, dragged into an alley, held at knifepoint, threatened with immediate harm, she would surrender the money in her purse and condemn the thief as a common criminal. But she would listen carefully for their Polish. Was it native? Was it colloquial? Was it fluent?

Christmas passed into the new year.
Happy 1943
said the somewhat forlorn sign over the inside of the revolving doors at Jablkowski Brothers Department Store. There was a very small bonus in the paycheck and a desultory attempt at a Christmas party. Surely if anything was going to give away the identity of the Jews working in the store, it would have been the way they celebrated, or rather didn’t. But the Poles at the parties were evidently some combination of too drunk or too nice or too indifferent to notice.

Rita kept moving closer and closer to the ghetto in her nightly peregrinations. Sometimes she was stopped by sentries for papers. More often she was cautioned that the area was dangerous. The Blue Police were
korrekt.
“Desperate Jews, criminals, even partisans—best steer clear,
Panna,”
or just as often, “
Fräulein
.”

But it all seemed very quiet. After her experience of the Karpatyn ghetto and its repeated
Aktionen,
she couldn’t understand why the Warsaw ghetto was being left alone. A few men coming and going from the ghetto, showing their papers at the gates, but no German entering at all. Were they just starving the ghetto? They evidently weren’t liquidating it anymore. Was food getting in somehow? If so, perhaps she could find a way in with it.

Rita’s weekly wage was not enough to meet her needs, pay her rent, contribute to Mrs. Kaminski’s kitchen, and pay off the urchins and impoverished extortionists—more like beggars—that she was attracting. So, early one February evening after work, she dropped in on the
Chemiot
café in Praga precisely at six thirty. Krystyna was alone at one end of the
Zinc
—it really was a bar counter from Paris, shiny, smooth silver metal. Rita came in, hung up her coat with the lining out, and sat down at a table. Seeing her, Krystyna went to the back of the bar, evidently heading for the toilet.

A few moments later, nursing a beer, Rita found herself making eye contact with a Wehrmacht soldier. It was brief, but not brief enough. Encouraged, he was coming to her table. What to do? She couldn’t leave. Smile, you’re a
Volks-Deutsche Mädchen
. Give some small comfort to a German boy far from home. She smiled, pushed open a chair, and moved her beer to make room for him.

“Good evening,
Fräulein
. Can you spare a few moments of your company to a soldier on his way to the Eastern Front?” His German was singsong—was it Swabian?

“With pleasure, though I have a train to catch myself.” Her German was as casual as she could make it. “How did you know I was German?”

“Looks, I guess. But I was just hoping. I have no Polish to use on the girls here.”

Small talk, then
, Rita thought. “Can you tell me where you are going? No, don’t answer that.” She smiled. “Military secrets. Not even a German girl can be trusted. Tell me instead what you have been doing. A furlough at home from your unit?”

“Afraid not. Worst assignment you can get short of the Eastern Front, and now I am getting that one.” He paused. “My unit was doing guard duty at the Jewish quarter.” He used the official designation.

“Why so bad?” Rita tried not to appear particularly interested.

“The place
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
disgusting. You can’t stand being near it. Decaying corpses on the streets, desperate people. The way they smell, the walking dead. Worst of all, the starving children. No matter how important it is to rid the world of those people, it’s hard, really unpleasant work. Even the party members sometimes ask themselves, is this suffering really necessary? Can’t we put them out of their misery any faster? Well, the thing is, we were putting an end to their suffering, clearing large numbers of Jews out, sending them
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
away.” He would not say what he really meant, and Rita couldn’t afford to finish his thought aloud. He took a sip of his beer. She emulated. Then he began again. “But the whole operation stopped a week ago.”

Dare she ask? Will he go on? The wait was an agony of several seconds. He looked around, hunched over a little more, almost as though guarding his beer, and began to speak under his breath. “They are fighting back. Somehow they’ve got guns, a few of them, anyway. Maybe from the Polish resistance, maybe on the black market. Last week they started shooting during a roundup. When our unit disarmed them and took them out, they broke up a transport, outside the ghetto. Jews running for cover everywhere. Hundreds of them, loose. There weren’t enough guards to round them up. It all got back to the ghetto, of course.”

His urgency allowed her to ask, “What happened then?”

“Four days of street battles with terrorists inside. We took a lot of hostages. But it didn’t stop them. The
Uberkommando
thinks the Jews are preparing a bigger armed revolt or some sort of surprise for us.”

“What will your commanders do?” she asked, though what she wanted to ask was when this would happen.

“I don’t know. For the moment they have stopped the deportation from the ghetto. At some point they’ll have to go in with force. But not my problem now.” He stopped. “I’m going east. They’re combing the units to send out replacements. Slightest infraction, and you’re gone.”

“I’m so sorry.” Should a
Volks-Deutsche
commiserate, Rita wondered?

Staring into his beer glass, the soldier went on unbidden. “I cut a little corner, and now it’s my death certificate.”

“Don’t tell me if it will get you in trouble.”

“Can’t get any worse than the Eastern Front. I was a code clerk, perfectly safe in headquarters company. Anyway, there were so many messages to send. But they made us change the code settings on the machines every day. That was too much trouble.”

Rita stopped him. “You mustn’t tell me any more, soldier.” All the while she was thinking,
Could Erich have been right about their code? Is this why the Americans and Brits are winning in Africa? Is this why the Royal Navy is sinking more U-boats every week?

He wouldn’t stop muttering. “Code’s unbreakable anyway. So, once in a while, we didn’t bother to change the settings. Somebody noticed higher up, and now I’m for Army Group Center on the Volga.” He lifted his glass and spat out a bitter, “Prost.”

Rita followed his gesture with her own toast. They finished their beers together.

By this time Krystyna was back at her place at the bar. Rita had never even noticed her putting anything in the coat she had hung up. It would be a perfect dead-drop exchange. She rose and grasped the soldier’s hand firmly. “I wish you the best of luck.”

He replied,
“
Heil Hitler
,”
with no enthusiasm whatever.

The reply formed in her mouth almost without thought.
“Heil Hitler.”
She turned and left.