The Girl from Krakow (36 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

O
ne day in early November, Flossie, the nine-year-old, thrust her head around the kitchen door. “Rita. There is a beggar woman around the back of the house asking for you.”

Shaking the dishwater from her hands and reaching for a rag to dry them, Rita wondered what this could all be about. A silly prank by the older children, a ruse to get her out of the kitchen so they could steal a jar of preserves? Someone selling vegetables from an allotment? She stepped outside, and there before her was indeed a woman in a torn coat, with dark hair matted by the mud, which had also spattered her coat, gaunt of face, her face furrowed and scabbed in places, carrying a small brown package tied with strands of broken, unraveling string. Beggar was exactly the right description.

The woman looked up, tried to smile, and in a hoarse whisper said, “At last I have found you, sister.”

It was Dani. Again! This time a real wraith, but a living one. Rita rushed to her and found that instead of hugging her, she was suddenly supporting her friend’s—no, her lover’s—weight, preventing her from falling to the ground. They turned, and Rita half-led, half-carried Dani inside to a chair in the kitchen.

First Rita needed to short-circuit intrusive questions from Flossie and prevent the wrong messages being carried to Frau Lempke. Thankfully the lady of the house was out. Rita had perhaps an hour to figure out how to deal with Dani’s arrival. She turned to Flossie. “My dear, this is my sister-in-law Dani, who has finally escaped from the Bolsheviks and come to Germany. As you can see, she has had quite an ordeal getting here. But she is finally safe among her fellow Germans.” And then, as an afterthought,
“Heil Hitler.”
Flossie nodded. “Please be sure and tell your mother as soon as she gets home. Meanwhile, I will take my sister to the cellar, and she can clean up a bit.”

When the child was gone, Dani looked up. “Bad penny I am. Forever turning up at your doorstep threatening to ruin everything.” They both smiled.

“What do you need first—food, a cup of tea, sleep, a bath, a doctor?”

“All of them. First a cup of tea, then a bath, then some clean bandages for a wound.” She winced and put her hand to her right side. Rita winced with her. Then she rose and put on the kettle.

“Tell me everything. I knew you went to Warsaw after I left Krakow. Magda Halle sent me a postcard.”

“You were right.”

“About what?”

“About everything.” Dani broke down.

It wasn’t the moment to ask what she meant. Rita took the kettle off the hob and helped her friend down the stairs.

Lying on Rita’s bed, Dani looked up at Rita and patted the mattress. “I’m too agitated, too excited to sleep right away, Rita. I want to tell you everything anyway. So, sit by me.” She began.

A week after Rita left Krakow at the end of April, Dani had quietly slipped out of the apartment and disappeared, taking her few belongings and, of course, her new
Kennkarte
. Magda had been right: Dani had gone looking for the Home Army. She found it intolerable to remain sheltered from the reality of the war by the protection of Nazis, even if they were only
MussNazis
. She was going to make her life count for something, even if doing so required her to put an end to it. Arriving in Warsaw, this time with a solid identity, she found a room in Praga and began to frequent bars, cafés, pool halls, workers’ clubs of the prewar trades-union movement. Surely, she thought, these were the places in which she would find the resistance, the underground, the parts of the Home Army that she could join.

With a real
Kennkarte,
Dani felt, if not invulnerable, at least willing to take risks. By now the German army and even the
Waffen-SS
were busy holding back the Russians surging across the Polish border. They were too preoccupied to spend a great deal of time trolling Warsaw for Jews. Besides, the ghetto had been cleared, burned, and razed. Even extortionists—the
szmalcowniks
—had become edgy. They were being picked off by underground elements. No one could tell whether it was Home Army or the remnants of ghetto resistance or the internecine struggle over scarcity—fewer and fewer Jews with any money left at all to prey on and eventually sell out to the Germans. The Gestapo was as ruthless as ever, but its first priority was a line of retreat back to the Reich, and the Polish Blue Police now knew exactly which way the tide was running.

Dani found work in one of the cafés near the bridges across the Vistula, on the city side, away from Praga. But try as she might, she could not make contact with the Home Army resistance. Surely they were there, in the cafés and the workers’ restaurants, the police, the brothels. Late one night in June, she found herself alone in the café where she worked, closing up. The last customer was still nursing a beer at the
Zinc
as Dani tried to send him a signal to go, ostentatiously lifting the chairs and turning them over on the tables preparatory to mopping the floor. “What’s the rush, sister? Have one with me.” The man pushed a coin across the bar and pointed to the beer tap.

“Since you asked nicely.” Dani came back around the bar, pulled herself a pint, and glided down the bar till she was facing him. “Pretty quiet tonight,” she volunteered. “Even the streets
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
hardly a German patrol all night.”

“Before the storm,” he replied. She looked at him quizzically. He offered, “The Home Army is laying low, just waiting for the Russians to get a little closer. Then all hell will break lose.”

Was this her chance finally to make contact? Or was it a provocation? Why would anyone raise the matter so openly? She had been looking for a way into the resistance for too long not to risk a direct approach. “Is that so? How can a woman help?”

“Sorry, sister, no Jews.” He put up his hands to wave away her protest. “Don’t bother denying it or showing me your documents. It’s in your voice. You can fool a German but not a Pole. I’m not going to turn you in or shake you down. But don’t expect me to put you on to the resistance.” The man moved back from the bar, drew himself up, and delivered himself of a little speech. “The Home Army is a patriotic expression of Polish national identity.” Dani thought,
I am watching a propaganda poster come to life from the past, from one of the old right-wing groups—ONRA, the National Radical Camp, the National Democrats, or the Green Ribbon League.
It was as if the war had never happened. “We are not going to let a lot of emancipated Yids worm their way into our fight. We’ll have enough trouble with all the Yids running the Red Army when it gets here.” With that he rose and walked out of the café.

So, five years of occupation by a common enemy had not yet reconciled Jew and non-Jew in Poland. Was there anything left of the Jewish Resistance Organization—the
ZOB
—that had organized the uprising in the ghetto? Even if there were, it would be harder to find than the Home Army. Courting all the danger she dared, Dani wandered the ruins of the ghetto, haunted the precincts of the remaining prison for those few Jews still left in Warsaw, searching for some sign of their existence. But she was exciting no interest from anyone at all. Even German sentries were no longer much interested in checking
Kennkarten
.

There was nothing Dani could do but keep trying. There had to be some part of the Home Army that would take her on. But by the end of July, she was ready to give up her quest. Then everything changed. Suddenly, on July 27,
Generalgouvernement
posters went up on walls all over town, announcing a requisition of 100,000 citizens to prepare entrenchments, ditches, tank obstacles for the Wehrmacht. This was a signal to everyone to get off the streets. It was also a signal to the Home Army. Four days later the battle for the city began to rage. The Poles inside Warsaw had committed themselves to liberating their capital before the Russians arrived. And the Russians across the river were happy to let them try. They knew it wouldn’t work.

Suddenly Dani found herself in a war zone. With Russian forces waiting and watching just across the Vistula, Warsaw continued to be one for the next two months.

“What did you do from August to October? How did anyone survive?”

“That’s when I finally got my chance to become part of the Home Army.”

“You fought?”

“I was more of a human booby trap.” Dani shuddered and went on, “When the fighting first started, people just stayed inside, away from windows. But then as it became more intense and the Germans began shelling buildings, we had to move into basements. At the end we were living in sewers, nothing to eat or drink. That’s when I got my ‘chance.’ ” She almost laughed through the sobs that welled up. “I was in a basement with a unit of the Home Army. They brought me to the commander. He had been told I wanted to help. It turned out there might be something I could do and they’d share their food and water with me.”

“What was it?” Rita almost didn’t want to know.

“Be a whore, be their whore, service their troops. How did the officer put it? ‘Build morale.’ Find a corner of the basement and open a one-woman brothel!” She stopped for a moment. “I just turned and started to walk away. I wanted the food. I was dying of thirst. But I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Anyway, he grabbed me and turned me around. He was smiling, and I could actually hear him say to himself something like, ‘Well, it was worth a try.’ Then he said, ‘All right, there is something else you can do. It’s much more dangerous, but it will help.’ He sent me through the sewers out behind the fighting to where German units were billeted. They used me as a decoy, as bait in the ruins, to waylay German soldiers, boys on patrol, so they could kill them and take their equipment and weapons.”

Rita gasped. “You were willing to do that?”

“I had no idea what I was getting into until it was too late
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Rita, it was horrible, maybe worse than being their kept woman. I would sit out at twilight trying to look innocent enough not to be a threat, but sluttish enough to give a Wehrmacht
soldier or even an entire patrol an idea. I wouldn’t resist, but I would insist we go somewhere ‘private.’ When we did, the Home Army soldiers would quietly garrote the soldier, take his helmet, rifle, ammunition, medical kit, anything
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and not just that. In fact, that’s not what they really wanted. They’d strip the body, take the rations, the cigarettes, his watch, the money, read his letters, deface his family pictures, and sometimes if they were really drunk, they’d mutilate the body
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I couldn’t watch. The only thing that kept them from attacking me is that they needed me to continue their game.”

“I don’t know how you could have done it. Though at least, I suppose, you were fighting.”

“Fighting? Was it fighting or was it robbery and murder? I told myself I was doing it to survive. Rita, I got a good look in the eye of every one of those German soldiers. Kids—seventeen, eighteen, twenty at the most. They’d even talk to me on the way to where I was taking them
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
tell me it would be their first time, or talk about where they were from, how scared they were. Then, just as I opened my coat and pulled them onto me, the wire would cut through their necks
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I was killing innocents.”

“How long did this go on?”

“We must have been there for five or six days. By the time the German unit began to notice their losses, there were a dozen bodies stacked up and rotting. The smell would have given us away if it hadn’t been for the fact that everything smelled that way in the ruins
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Anyway, we finally retreated back through the sewers. And that was pretty much the end.”

“How did you get out?”

“Well, the Russians were on the other side of the Vistula, just watching the Germans destroy the entire city and almost everyone in it. At the end, people were moving out of the sewers toward the Vistula, driven by the fighting, the fires, thirst. The night I got to the river, the few boats were already overloaded. Once they started across, the Wehrmacht began firing flares, illuminating the whole bank. Their artillery simply sank every boat in the river. Then the Germans began firing into the crowd on the bank. That’s when I got hit.” Dani lifted her dirty blouse to reveal a bandaged wound around her ribs, yellowing around a fading red mark on her right side, in the flesh below the rib cage.

“Let me help you off with these clothes.” Rita began unbuttoning the blouse from the back. “We’ll wash them
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
or maybe burn them and find you others. How badly hurt are you?”