The Girl from Krakow (31 page)

Asking Lempke to help Dani get papers was too much of a risk. He might have been a
MussNazi
, but he was still a Nazi. And for all anyone knew, Dani was supposed to be just someone off the streets, someone who could find her way back on them without anyone in the house being concerned. More than once Halle or Lempke found themselves trying to send Dani far afield on errands that Rita simply had to countermand. “She has work to do. I will go,” she would insist. Both Rita and Dani knew that besides the risk Dani ran as a Jew, without solid German papers she might be swept up at any time in the daily roundup for forced labor workers at German projects in the city, or even sent off to more distant locations.

Krakow was a wholly different city for Rita than it was for Dani. Her
Kennkarte
, her German, her job, her connections provided the best of covers. She could safely go anywhere. But as in Warsaw, it soon began to be apparent to her that many of the
Echt-Deutsche
—real Germans—she met every day were Jews hiding in plain sight, invisible to Germans because Germany had been
Judenrein
for so long that Poland’s educated, affluent, urban Jews were hard for them to tell apart from its Poles. These were the ones who had survived almost four years of the relatively coarse filtering sieve, culling Jews from the Krakow environment. These people went about their Aryan business day by day, probably suspecting one another, but never willing to put their hypotheses to the test. Jew would meet suspected Jew. Both would greet one another, “
Heil Hitler
,” giving nothing away.

Did it make Rita safer, knowing that none of these people were going to expose her? Or should she have felt less safe, knowing there were so many Jews around her that a day’s sweep by a zealous Gestapo officer would easily fill a boxcar?

The bureaucracy
had established special German shops where good food, especially food not available to Poles, was sold. Going to and fro among these shops, moving through the government blocks, daily passing the same officers and bureaucrats, Rita became a familiar figure in the city center, just as others became recognizable to her. Sometimes she could almost forget her fugitive state, even occasionally experience the feeling of freedom and lightness she had felt as a student, now almost seven years before.

Krakow had been spared by the Germans’ campaign in ’39. It was too distant from Britain and too unimportant for Allied strategic bombing. And it had been cosseted by the Reich under the pretense that for centuries it had been an island of German culture in a sea of Polish backwardness: an Aryan outpost on the Slavic marches of the Reich. But the atmosphere in the restaurants and cafés—of which there were still many—and in the offices began to acquire a certain edginess as winter gave way to spring 1943. The defeat at Stalingrad, culminating in a field marshal’s surrender of 600,000 troops, could be hidden here even less than in Germany itself. The quiet voice of doubt whispered that Germany could not win a two-front war, now in its fourth season, especially on the night the surrender on the Volga was announced by the
Grossdeutscher Rundfunk
. It was followed by a long period of funereal music. If only Rita and Dani had been able to listen alone that night!

One evening in early March, Rita found herself in a
Kino
, a cinema for Germans. She watched with a mixture of revulsion and fascination the speech of “Dr.” Goebbels in Berlin
Sportpalast
, ringing changes of irony, hauteur, sermon, and most of all bombast, as the demagogue openly admitted the threat from the east. A podium had been raised high enough so that the little man with the clubfoot towered above a fanatical host of uniformed Nazis, nurses, soldiers, militants of the party, and upper civil servants. Behind him was a great banner,
“Totaler Krieg, Kürzester Krieg”—
“Total War, Shortest War.”
But the banner was belied by the speech. The rhetoric wasn’t a call to full mobilization. It was a warning. Goebbels was telling Germany that it could lose, in words for all to understand.

Rita had heard the speech two weeks before as the entire Tax Inspectorate office had gathered before the radio. But now, on the screen, the effect, the message, the signal that Germany could lose the war was more powerful, and in the darkness of the
Kino
,
Rita could smile and laugh silently as well. In the
Sportpalast
the audience rose and fell back to their seats as one,
heiled
their
Führer
, and responded to the exhortations of his minister of propaganda. But, Rita recalled, around their radio the week before, there had been no such enthusiasm from the
MussNazis
.

She left after the newsreel, a bit of a spring in her step. That night, behind a well-made blackout curtain, the two women lay side by side, sharing a cigarette before snapping off the table lamp. The bed was narrow, but it was reassuring when one woke in the night to feel the other close by.

“I saw Goebbels’s
Sportpalast
speech in a newsreel tonight. They know they are going to lose the war.” Erich had to have been right—Africa, now Sicily, the surrender of Italy. The “strategic withdrawals,” “shortening the front,” the admission of defeats—all were coming too regularly. She had wondered whether to tell her lover.

“I suppose they will lose.” There was the sound of indifference in Dani’s voice.

“Don’t you care?”

Dani sat up. “So, they lose. What will they take down with them? What have they already destroyed? What about my family, my life, my humanity? I’ll never get any of it back. I’ll go to the grave with this experience emptying the meaning out of everything I’ll ever do.” Rita had no reply. “Even if they lose the war, why did it ever happen, what kind of a God would allow it, what kind of sense can anyone make of it? You and I, we’ve seen human bestiality so far beyond what we could have imagined, it’s hard to go on living. When it’s over, it will still have happened. I don’t think I can live with that
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
can you? Most of the time, I really just want to die.”

This was not the moment for atheism, for determinism, for explanations. Rita could only hold on to her lover, her friend, her companion, and suppress her own answers to these questions, ones that carried her through the same events and through the same emotional response to them. She could not help thinking that for all the weight of Dani’s lamentations, tomorrow Dani would awake and move through her day, stifling the occasional pang. She would find little things to take pleasure in. She would make plans that would lead to small satisfactions in days; she would, in fact, continue to live, despite the future her thoughts, emotions, and memories combined to condemn her to.

Dani began again. “If I survive, I’ll torture myself with the question, why me? By what right do I survive? Where’s the value in that, compared to a million other people? If they lose this war, I still won’t have any answer to this question.”

Rita let her friend sob herself to sleep. The question, she knew, no longer troubled her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A
pril 20, 1943, was a Tuesday. As on any other day, like clockwork, at 16:00, Herr Lempke, Fräulein Halle, and a visiting inspector rose from their ledgers and typewriter and came into the dining room for tea. Dani and Rita had it ready when they arrived, along with a few small sandwiches, biscuits, and the Polish poppy-seed cake German visitors were especially fond of. The swinging door to the kitchen had been propped open so that Rita could come and go easily carrying the tea things. As she pulled the cozy off the teapot, the front door opened, and another of the Germans entered and sat down.

“Interesting news from Warsaw,” the new man said. “That SS-
Oberführer
with the double-barreled name, von Sammern-Frankenegg
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
he’s been fired.”

“Really. Never heard of such a thing. Law unto themselves, those
Oberführers
are. Who ranks high enough to dismiss him? What’s he done, anyway?”

“Himmler. Too soft on Jews, apparently. Turns out there’s some kind of revolt in the Warsaw ghetto. They got hold of pistols and rifles, even a couple of machine guns. Anyway, he couldn’t put it down. Berlin was furious. Polish flags and terrorist banners flying, even visible outside the walls. Dozens of Wehrmacht killed.”

Rita said nothing. She stood still, hoping they would not notice her listening to every word. Dani had quietly come as close to the dining room as she could. Both listened for more. Rita put the news together with what she had heard in Warsaw and what she had seen in the ghetto. It sent a shiver through her.

But the matter was not sufficiently distracting to tax inspectors, and they moved on to a subject of more immediate concern, the correct rate of depreciation for Polish rolling stock taken into Reichsbahn capital accounts.

There was nothing to do but wait until late enough to risk listening to the BBC news broadcast in Polish at midnight. The radio stood on the sideboard. It was a rather large prewar model, more powerful than the
Volksempfänger—
people’s broadcaster—in most German homes and offices. It came with a sticker warning users not to tune to foreign stations under a
Führerbefehl
—an edict directly from Hitler. Punishment was severe.

A few minutes before midnight, Dani flicked the on/off button but left it at zero volume. Three vacuum tubes, unshielded by a back cover, began to shine a reflected orange glow on the wall of the darkened room behind the set. There was nothing they could do about this, even though it would make what they were doing evident as far away as the corridor’s end, down to the last office in the suite. It would take at least three minutes for the set fully to warm up and begin receiving. As the two women waited in the gloom, anticipation made them fidget. Then, turning the volume up only enough to be able to tune in a station, Dani began to slide the tuning knob away from the
Grossdeutscher Rundfunk
toward where they knew the BBC wavelength was. Finding it, she stopped and raised the volume slightly. There was the BBC, giving a full report of war news from around the world: “Mopping-up operations by victorious Allied Forces in Tunis. Further western movement of Soviet forces against German Army Group South. Heavy nighttime and daylight bombing of German industrial centers, Bolivia enters war against Axis
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
” Nothing, not a word about Warsaw. Rita tuned back to the
Grossdeutscher Rundfunk,
turned the radio off, and they retreated to their room.

“I have to know.” Dani’s voice cut through the night.

“It’s too dangerous. Maybe we’ll hear something tomorrow.”

“How can we contact the Home Army?” Dani wondered. “They might know something.” They were standing at the kitchen sink the next morning after breakfast.

“Dani, the Home Army has very little interest in what happens in the ghetto. There are people in the Home Army who think Jews are as alien to Poland as Germans or Russians. If they are doing anything for the ghetto, it won’t be much. And the chances someone here would know anything are nil.” Rita was trying to convince herself as well as Dani. “Besides, Krakow is the worst place in Poland to look for the Home Army.”

“I’m going out,” Dani announced. “I’ll find a bar with
Polizei
or Waffen-SS soldiers and listen for news. I can’t stand this.”

“
Verrückt.”
Rita used the German word—crazy. “Are you completely mad? You want to throw away your life, probably mine too, on the chance you might find out what is happening hundreds of kilometers from here, something that you can’t do anything about anyway?”

Dani looked at her lover with something akin to hatred. She hissed, “Better than sitting here wiping the Germans’ asses and licking crumbs from their table, trying your best to be an Aryan
Mädchen
.” Dani rushed at her, her nails digging into Rita’s arms. Fending her off, Rita gasped. Surely the words could be heard all the way down the hall. A door opened. There was Fräulein Halle, the secretary, marching down the hall.

“Lempke sent me out to find out what this disturbance was about
 
.
 
.
 
.” She looked at both women, still struggling. “What’s going on? I thought you two were lovers.”

Equally startled by this observation, both women turned and gaped at her. Under her breath, Halle spoke. “I wasn’t born yesterday, girls.” Then she smiled to reassure them. “I told you I was from Berlin. These things are familiar to us.” She followed the two women’s eyes as they looked back toward the offices. “They don’t have the slightest idea. Those little gray men in there are devoted to double-entry bookkeeping. They don’t even realize you’re Jews.”

From down the hall came the call, “Halle, let’s finish that letter.”

“Jawohl.”
She said it out loud. As she turned to go back, she said quietly, “We’ll discuss this at a more opportune moment.”

Halle’s head leaned through the kitchen door. “So, what was that fuss about this morning?” It was 6:00 p.m., and the office was closing.

“We’re desperate to know what’s going on in Warsaw,” Rita said. “The Jewish quarter, what’s left of it is resisting.”

Rita was going to go on when Halle interrupted. “Jews fighting back? Not before time too!”

“Anyway, we can’t find out anything. Not even on the BBC.” She was giving more away with each interchange. “Dani was threatening to leave the house to look for information. I tried to stop her. We argued.”

Halle looked at Dani with a mixture of admiration and incredulity. “It matters that much to you? Can’t think why. Much too late for them. Nothing you can do to help, even if it’s true.”

“What do you mean, ‘if it’s true’? You heard the talk at teatime yesterday.”

“Look, if neither of you do anything foolish, I’ll pass by the office of the
Befehlshaber
on some pretext and scan the teletypes from Wehrmacht headquarters or the SS/Gestapo offices. At least that source will be reliable.”

Dani was grateful. “Would you?”

Rita was anxious. “Won’t it put you at risk?”

“Actually, the staff in the Krakow military
Kommandantur—
military headquarters—are more frightened of people from the Reich Tax Inspectorate than they are of the Gestapo. They won’t bother me.”

The next evening Halle came back after dinner and sat down in the kitchen. Until that moment they hadn’t even known her Christian name. “I’m Magda. Magda Halle, sounds like Matta Hari, the spy from the Great War.” Everyone on both sides knew that name.

Between Nazis and Berliners, they learned from Magda Halle, there was no love lost. She came from a family split between allegiance to Rosa Luxemburg, the communist revolutionary, and Friedrich Ebert, the social democratic founder of the postwar Weimar Republic. This spanned across enough of the left to make for at least a decade of bitter acrimony in Halle’s family. For ten years between the end of the Great War and the arrival of the Depression, the arguments were ceaseless. But the Depression sealed the family’s united front against the Nazis. Too young at first to avoid the
Bund Deutscher M
ä
del
, Magda Halle was fully inoculated against the regime by the experience. Instead, she had gravitated to what was left of Berlin’s Weimar culture. She had modeled for Yva, the famous Berlin fashion photographer, and even had a fling with Yva’s protégé and apprentice, a young man named Helmut, who was constantly importuning her to take her clothes off. A stint at secretarial college had led her into the civil service and eventually to Krakow. Rita and Dani learned all this the evening Magda Halle came back from the Krakow
Kommandantur.

“Nothing yet on the teletype from Warsaw Wehrmacht headquarters, but I think I’ll be able to get some reliable news from the SS.”

The two women sighed.

“How ever did you know we were Jewish?” Rita asked.

Before Magda could answer, Dani interrupted. “How did you know about
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
us?”

“It wasn’t hard, the way you two swish by each other and find occasions to touch. As for your being Jewish—Dani, you look like the description of Rebecca the Jewess in the English novel we had to read in school
 
.
 
.
 
.” She searched her memory. “
Ivanhoe
, by Walter Scott. And you, Rita, you speak Polish like a Pole and German like a German, and there are two volumes of Darwin on your shelves. You can’t just be a Ukrainian Catholic girl who grew up in her father’s inn on the Russian border. In fact, when I noticed those books, I thought you might be a Nazi. It’s only Nazis I have ever heard going on about Darwin—you know, survival of the fittest, hygienic breeding, evolution of the master race, the
Ubermensch
.”

Rita was defensive—and it had not even registered on her that Magda had been snooping through her things. “The Nazi version of Darwin is all rubbish, just what you would expect from uneducated street thugs who picked up their wisdom from
Mein Kampf
.”

“Their version of Darwin sounded pretty convincing when I was a schoolgirl.”

“In fact, the reason I carry those books around is because they’re the only things that ever made sense of the horrors of Nazism.”

Magda looked at her quizzically. “How’s that?”

“Go ahead, Rita, explain it,” Dani challenged. “I don’t get it. Neither will Magda.”

“There is only one thing to get, Magda, or maybe two. Evolution is inevitable. But the process isn’t going from lower to higher. It’s just going from different to different—today’s fittest are likely to be tomorrow’s unfit. It’s environments that decide fitness, and environments change. Maybe too slow for us to notice. But the reptiles—the dinosaur—used to dominate, and now the mammals are on top. Why? Change. Maybe in the climate, weather, a new disease the dinosaurs couldn’t handle. A million years from now, the reptiles might be on top again, or it’ll be the cockroaches. Think of the master race as dinosaurs—or better, cockroaches.”