The Girl from Krakow (27 page)

Now Rita had a deadline if the ghetto was finally to be cleared. It was urgent she find the right extortionist. She had to let it be known in the right places there was someone looking for a way to get inside before it was too late.

She began taking longer and longer walks, later and later at night. No longer just walking, either. Rather, she tried walking fast enough to attract attention, brushing past people, making them wonder where she was going in such a hurry—even better, she thought, what she was hurrying away from. It worked. Soon enough she had been stopped and shaken down by the same few extortionists several times. Finally she gathered her nerve and began to ask, “Do you know any Jew in this business?” “Why?” was the only reply. Her answer was, “Don’t ask. But if you can bring me one, I’ll make it worth your while.” She couldn’t chance missing a contact. She had to give her address. It was the worst thing she could do, but now she was as desperate as any Jew in hiding. Unlike them, she needed to be found.

One morning in the middle of February, Mrs. Kaminski came to her room as Rita was dressing. The knock was peremptory. Then, before she could answer, the older woman was in her room. “I told you no visitors, and especially no Jews! I am sorry, but you will have to leave.”

“Jews? What are you talking about, Mrs. K.?” Rita’s emotions were mixed, fraught and excited.

“One of those street-corner shakedown artists brought a Jew to the door last night, looking for you. I told him to go away. He left this note for you. It has your name on it. I told you, no Jews.” She handed over the note. “Be out of here tomorrow.”

“I can’t possibly find another place that quickly, Mrs. K. Give me another day.”

“Very well, Wednesday.” She shut the door with finality.

Rita read the note.

I’ll be under the ghetto bridge on Mirowski at 14:30 two days from now. Be there. Bring one hundred zloty, or it’s the Gestapo for you.

Was it the right contact? Was it a trap? Would she have enough to make these people do what she needed? She went to work behind the pen counter in a fever. Before lunch she went to the women’s room several times and finally asked the floorwalker to excuse her for the day. “Cramps.” Squeamish, he wanted to hear no more. Yes, she could go for the day.

She got off the streetcar a hundred feet from the ghetto bridge. She made a point of arriving by streetcar so that there would be no doubt she had a right to pass freely, to use the very services Jews were strictly forbidden. Her contact must have noticed. He was there with the kid she’d dealt with two days before. They stirred from the shadows of the footbridge and came forward. Before they could say anything, Rita held out a twenty zloty note to the boy who had made the contact for her. “Here. Now beat it. I don’t want to see you again.”

When he had gone, the haggard wraith stepped forward. “Hand it over, lady.” His accent was reassuringly uneducated, Yiddish, and hungry.

She pulled him into an alley,
a new experience for him
, she thought to herself. “Here’s the hundred. There is another hundred zloty for you if you can get me someone who used to work for Group 13, or someone with contacts in the
Jupo
, someone who can get me in and get me out of the ghetto. Understand? When you find him, don’t come to my address. I’m not living there anymore. You’ll find me walking Marszakowska Street from here to Aleje Jerozolimskie between 19:00 and 22:00 the next three nights. Any tricks, no hundred zloty.”

The next night after work, Rita went back to the
Chemiot
. Entering, she could see Krystyna propping up the bar as usual. She left as soon as she noticed Rita, who had ordered a glass of tea. She gulped it down, and went straight to Krystyna’s building, pushed enough buttons to get someone to buzz her through the front door, and mounted the stairs to the fourth floor. A few minutes later, Krystyna appeared. She was red in the face from fury or exertion or both. “I thought it would be you. What are you doing? I told you never—”

“I know. This is the last time you will ever see me. I left two gold coins hidden in your apartment. I need them now.”

“I know. I found them. You Yids can’t be trusted, even by people who risk their lives to help you. Eighteen gold coins just seemed like an odd number to carry around. I figured there were at least two more, and it didn’t take me long to find them after you left. You don’t deserve them, Jew cow.”

Rita crumpled into tears. Krystyna had a right to be furious. Her trust had been betrayed. But Rita had to do these things. “I need the rest of my money now, and those two coins
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
it’s the only way I’ll ever get a chance to see if my son is alive.”

“Wait here.” In a moment she was back. “Here.” She handed Rita the two coins. “The Home Army’s not going to be your safe deposit box anymore. We’re keeping the rest of it. Consider it carrying charges. Now get out.” She slammed her door.

That night Rita walked the kilometer or so between the ghetto and the department store several times, this time looking unconcerned and exuding unapproachability. Not even a prostitute would have lingered so brazenly at each intersection. But no encounter. It was after eleven o’clock when she returned to 44 Widok Street. There was a note pinned to her door:
Out. Tomorrow, or I confiscate your belongings and turn you in
. She packed that night.

In the morning she left with her case. When she presented herself at the
Hotel Handel
, the clerk remembered her. “Yes, I’m back in town for a week or so. I know the drill. I’ll register with the police tomorrow.” She asked for a room with a sink, as close to the shower and toilet in the hall as possible, and went up to it directly.

Another day behind the fountain pen counter with Lotte droning on about the rationing, her family, encounters with men, offering her offensive opinions. It seemed endless. But at 19:00 Rita was out again walking Marszakowska Street.

About 21:00 her nameless Jewish contact finally whistled her into an alley and then on to a backstreet. From there he walked her north toward the ghetto, wordlessly. At Plac Bankowy they climbed through the boarded-up entrance of a gutted building and groped their way in the dark down into its basement. When they arrived someone in front of them struck a match, lit a cigarette, and offered Rita one. She took it. When her eyes adjusted to the light of the match, she saw a middle-aged man, face weathered but not broken. There were several lines of wrinkles at his neck, rising behind his mouth and across the sides of his face, climbing into his brow line. His hair was thin as far as she could make it out. His lips were large, as was his nose, which had also obviously been broken. But his eyes showed life and defiance. He was dressed in what looked like rags, but he didn’t look hungry.

“Well, you’ve found the person you’re looking for. Don’t imagine I’m alone, even in this hole in the ground. What do you want?”

“I need to get into the ghetto.”

“So, go in the front door. It’s open.” It was his way of telling her to stop wasting time and get on with it.

“My child might be in the ghetto. I have to find out. I want someone who can take me in and get me out, with my child if I find him in the orphanage or what’s left of it. Can you do it?”

“Maybe. How much is it worth to you?”

She opened her palm to reveal one gold coin.

“Not enough, and why shouldn’t I just take it from you now and turn you over to my friends in the Gestapo?”

“Because there are several more just like it, and you would miss out if you did either of those things.”

He didn’t ask how many. He was obviously going to get every one she had, no matter how many there were. “I may just be able to help you. When do you want to go?”

“Now. We both know there isn’t much time before the ghetto blows up.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

N
ow? You want to go right now?” he repeated. “Not dressed like that. Those clothes would be ripped off your back. Not even a brute like me could protect you. And then there are people in there who would kill you just for looking healthy and Aryan.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe we can do something about your clothes. Follow me. Watch your head.” They moved down deeper toward a tunnel just large enough for her guide to move through, stooped over.

As they walked Rita broke the silence. “What is your name?”

“No names. I don’t want yours either. We don’t need them, and we won’t have any in the pits they’ll bury us in.” Rita suppressed the question that immediately arose: so, why do anything for a few gold coins?

They were evidently in a tunnel, a long one, moving downhill as it went along toward what Rita thought must be the west, the direction of the ghetto. After a hundred meters, the tunnel began to rise. It ended in a room, where two men sat on the floor, evidently guards. They nodded at Rita’s guide, but said nothing. Her guide looked around. “Any rags we can fit her up with?” Lethargically one of the two rose and picked over some torn garments, handing up a torn skirt and a threadbare coat. Her nameless host passed them to Rita. “Change into these.” She hesitated. “No time for modesty, lady. They may look, but they won’t touch.” He turned to his henchmen. “Don’t harm the golden goose, boys.” There was nothing for it but to remove her coat and dress and put on the rags. The only thing she took from her coat was the envelope containing her documents.

“So, I am going to take you to what’s left of the
Judenrat
office. If there is anybody there, we’ll have a way of getting them to check records or getting to the kids still in the ghetto.” Rita nodded, and he led her out of the tunnel and up into the first circle of hell.

She was grateful for the darkness cloaking the misery around her. But the darkness could not veil the smell. It was not the smell of burning flesh still reeking in her mind’s nostrils six months after the Karpatyn ghetto fires. It was more familiar in some respects, but overpoweringly rank. It was the smell of excrement, of befoulment, of dysentery and vomitus, irregularly punctuated by the smell of putrid meat or some organic substance—human bodies?—gone very bad. The odors were coming at her in waves that effectively prevented her nose from accommodating itself so that the smell’s offensiveness might dissipate into the background. Rita began to feel herself involuntarily swallowing, and then starting to vomit. Her nameless guide handed her a rag that had been dipped in gasoline. “Here, cover your nose with this.” A smell she normally found repugnant rescued her, and she was able to continue.

In the darkness, several times she tripped over bodies, mostly dead, but some responded with a slight moan. And once she inadvertently stepped on flesh that gave way and spread a slime over her shoe top, seeping in around her ankles. Better not to think of what was making her foot slap in her shoe with each step she took.

In the darkness too, it seemed to her, there lurked shadows that retreated as her guide went past, not prepared to confront him or anyone he was guiding. But Rita instinctively closed up the space between the two of them.

After a ten-minute walk, they found themselves in an open square. On one side of it, Rita could make out a gallows. It was twice or three times as long as the one she had known in the Karpatyn ghetto, and there were still bodies hanging from it. She could tell even in the dark: the heads akimbo, outlining ovals slightly darker than the night sky behind them, waists narrowed by the ropes securing their hands. She looked down—involuntarily, she realized—seeking and finding the marks of excrement that the executed always lose. She forced herself to look up and away from it.

Suddenly it dawned on her. She had not seen a single other person actually moving through the ghetto streets. Pulling away the gasoline rag for a moment, Rita shouted ahead to her nameless guide, “Where is everybody? Is the ghetto empty? We haven’t passed anyone.”

He stopped for a moment. “This ghetto used to hold 350,000 or 400,000. Now there are only about 50,000 left. Overcrowding is no longer a problem. Anyway, all the able-bodied are underground, literally, building bunkers and hiding in them. They know the Germans are coming.” She thought,
“They,” not “we”? Where does he think he’s going?
“There is nothing much to do out in the open at night, except get knifed by people like me.” There was a mordant laugh. He turned to continue. “We’re nearly there.”

The
Judenrat
headquarters was a two-story building, with a raised triangular crown. It must have been a school or a government building before the war. It too seemed deserted. They entered and began moving down a corridor. Her guide obviously knew exactly where he was going.
Here at last, sleeping on the floors, were people, living people
, Rita thought with a little relief. Picking their way through the sleeping bodies, occasionally they woke one by the noise or their footsteps, but invariably the body simply turned over and went back to sleep. Finally they found themselves before a closed door. Rita’s guide
pushed it open, struck a match, and extracted a short candle end from somewhere inside his coat. Seeing a body in the corner of the room, he went over and shook it awake. “Are you in records? We need some information.”

The man stirred. The guide grabbed him by the lapel, yanked him to his feet, and kept a grip on his neck in a way that made it clear the man had no choice but to respond. He turned to Rita. “Ask him what you want.”

“Are there records for children brought here from outside—orphaned children or children sent here from other ghettos?”

She could only make out bleary eyes in the candlelight, but the voice answered, “There had to be, for the rations. But since last fall, they have been hopelessly incomplete.” He turned, put his hand out for the candle, and began looking at ledger books. “Arrivals are listed by date. Do you have a date the child arrived?”

“April last year. Stefan Guildenstern. He would have been two and a half.” Then she added, to no one in particular, “He was already speaking—Polish. He knew his name.”

The clerk moved the candle across a shelf, with his finger on the bindings. “It’s gone.”

“What do you mean, it’s gone?” Rita demanded. “What’s gone?”

“The ledger for that month.”

Rita was firm. “Look further. It’s probably just out of order.”

“Lady, if April ’42 were here, it would be on this shelf.” He scanned back and forth. “I’m sorry, but people have been coming and going in this room for months. Taking ledgers and bringing them back, cutting out pages to use for handbills, documents, anything. Half the volumes are gone.” He stopped. “Besides, if you’re looking for a kid, go to the orphanage. There is hardly anyone left, but if he got here, maybe someone will remember him.”

The guide tightened his grip. “Where?”

“You’re hurting me. It’s not far. It’s opposite Gesiowka Prison on Smocza. You know where that is?” The grip was relaxed.

“All right; let’s go.” He didn’t bother looking toward Rita but simply barged out the door, sending bodies in the corridor sliding away. Not bothering to go back to the main entrance, he blew out the candle and made his way to a side door.

Outside the stench regaled Rita again, and she reached back into the tatters of her garment for the gasoline rag. Here some street lighting from beyond the ghetto gave more illumination than Rita wanted. She could see the shreds of broken life before her in every way: no doors, no window glass, shattered sticks of furniture, upholstery stuffing, an icebox, plumbing, mountains of trash, detritus of every kind, the carcass of a horse, stripped of flesh and rotting. And everywhere bodies she could now not avoid seeing in the eerie light: flies buzzing on open wounds and ghostly white maggots crowding the eye sockets of the dead, decaying at the curbsides. Here and there, as in Karpatyn, a dead child at its mother’s side or cradled in a dead lap created by the
rigor mortis
of legs straightening while the corpse remained upright at the curbstone. As they walked she thought she saw curtains move ever so slightly. They were being watched
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
by whom? The already dead, those too weak to bestir themselves? Or was it the few predators left—like her guide—watching, stalking?

Now she was frightened. This was not a fool’s errand. It was a suicidal mistake. Rita was beginning to tremble and sweat uncontrollably in the cold air, no longer moved by pity or sorrow, human sympathy or care. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She was drowning, being smothered, paralyzed in a nightmare that was swallowing her up. She reached out to her nameless guide, still striding along. “I can’t go on. Take me back.”

He was gruff. “Nearly there. Get a grip.”

She felt a sharp slap and regained some semblance of control over herself.

An eternity later the man stopped in front of one of the derelict tenements. “Here you are. Go ahead in. Be careful. If there are any children left in there, they have been untended for long enough to have gone feral.” Rita was struck by the word. Where had this man picked up a word like that? Then it struck her. He had been moving in and outside of a region of feral animals for months, years. Surely the word was one he had heard often. He handed her the candle and struck a match.

Carefully she pushed open a door that hung by a single hinge and looked within. The first thing she saw was a half dozen, then a score or more forearms rising to foreheads, protecting eyes from the brightness of the candle. Then she saw the children, ranging from toddlers to ten-year-olds, some so closely intertwined on the ground that they must have been older and younger siblings. All in tatters, blue with cold, filthy in every way. Once adjusted to the light, those with any strength surged forward, hands outstretched, some piteous, some threatening, all ravenous, all emaciated. The only children who did not move were already dead, bloated by malnutrition beyond the ability to stir themselves, or too young to recognize the disturbance as a potential source of food. Staring at them, nothing to offer, Rita suddenly could not even remember why she had come, what she wanted.

The man broke her hysterical trance. “Well, do you see him? What’s his name?”

“Stefan,” she whispered. Then she shouted it, “Stefan? Stefan Guildenstern. It’s your mother.”

A dozen of the older boys, even a few girls old enough to understand, rose weakly, began to wave an arm so thin any cloth remaining on it fell away. “It’s me
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I’m here, please.”

Rita ignored them. Instead, she brought the candle down to the toddlers, moving quickly from face to face, rushing through her search, more eager to get it over with than to find her child. She came to the last child. Then she forced herself to search again, pushing aside the arms and the bodies of children old enough to seek a savior, too old to be her child. Finally she addressed a girl who seemed the oldest. “How long have you been here?” The girl did not respond. Rita passed a hand across her blank stare. Her eyelids did not close. She was close enough to smell death on the child’s breath that matched the pallor of her skin.

Standing up, she said in a voice that reached across the space, “Anyone know a boy named Stefan?” Rita recognized the pointlessness of her question even as it left her mouth. She was now feeling foolish, cruel, fearful, and grief-stricken all at once, trembling with cold and sweating at the same time. Children began to surround her, almost threatening in their numbers, if not their strength. A strong hand reached in and pulled her back, then guided her out into the street, now almost backlit by lights behind the ghetto walls. “I’ve got to get you back out of here before daybreak if I am going to get me any more of those gold coins of yours.” The guide led the way out of the building and into the street.

Two steps away from the building, Rita turned back unnoticed and slipped into the doorway again. When she came out ten seconds later, her guide was turning around looking for her. “What happened to you?” he whispered as she reached him.

“I got dizzy,” she replied. “I lost you for a moment.”

“Can’t afford to lose you now.” He grabbed her wrist and began pulling her along. They wound their way through a maze of alleys and open streets, each as much a grim witness to the ghetto charnel as the rest. The journey seemed to Rita an endless torture. The gasoline smell of the rag had long weakened to ineffectiveness, and she was retching up acid with every breath as they finally found their way to the place where they had begun. Her nameless guide pushed her head down as they entered the basement, meanwhile deftly reaching into the coat she wore to remove the envelope of documents she had carried into the ghetto.

“Give me that,” she hissed, and began to scratch at him. He had no trouble warding her blows off with one hand as he held the envelope aloft. She stopped, exhausted. “It’s just my papers. The gold coins aren’t there. Would I be foolish enough to carry them with me?”

He opened the envelope and satisfied himself. “Well, where are they? We’re not going to let you go without the rest of the payment.”

“Just get me back to where I left my clothes.” She retched out the words. He turned back, not relinquishing her envelope.

A few minutes later, they were at the tunnel opening. Holding her firmly, the man reached down to the ground, picking up her dress and coat. Carefully the hand began to feel through the garments, feeling for coins. “No payoff, no papers.”

“The second coin is back there in the building where the children were. On the lintel of the door. Just go back and reach up for it. I went back and put it there when I told you I got dizzy.” His smile was slightly rueful. “For the next one, and the ones after that, you’ll have to give me my papers and let me go. I know you’ll have me followed. So, you’ll know where I live. Send someone you trust up to my room when you think it’s safe enough, and the rest will be there.”