The Girl from Krakow (37 page)

“The bullet was probably from a pistol. It was not big, and it went clean through my side without touching any organ, I think. Anyway, here I am, and it’s healing. But when it happened, I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke I was already bandaged and in a group of people still on the German side of the river at daybreak. It was early in October, maybe the first or second—I never knew. We decided to surrender and walked into the German lines with a white flag.

“They made us join a much longer column of people leaving the city under Wehrmacht guard. The march ended up at Pruszków railway station. People said we were going to a labor camp from there. But I knew what that really meant. There were thousands of people, all kinds—Home Army soldiers, civilians from all over Warsaw. I still had my papers and tried to show them to the sentries. But whenever I did, someone would yell out Jewess or Yid or something. Anyway, once my wound stopped bleeding, I knew I had to get away. After a few days in this assembly area, they put us on a passenger train—seats and windows, not even a cattle car. We must have had high priority for extermination. Anyway, I could tell we were headed toward Krakow and probably the extermination camp at Auschwitz. When the train had begun moving and most people were asleep, I jumped.”

“With your wound?”

“I was too frightened even to notice. I didn’t have a choice. Something was forcing me to try to survive, no matter what I wanted. That’s how it felt. When I jumped the fall knocked me out again. It was the second time I woke up surprised to find someone taking care of me. Why are people like that, just as willing to save a stranger as kill one?” Rita thought she knew. But it wasn’t the moment to explain. “This time it was a peasant woman near Tomaszów Mazowiecki.” It was a large town halfway between Warsaw and Krakow. “There I was, in a bed in her house. It was more like a hut attached to a barn. She told me a Catholic priest had brought me in, calling me a hero of the Warsaw uprising. It must have been the wound in my side. She kept me fed for three days. Then her husband showed up and said I had to be a runaway Jew. Next day she made me leave. But she gave me a little food—half a loaf of bread and some shriveled apples. By that time the wound in my side was bleeding again and looked like it might have become infected.”

Dani stopped for a moment. Rita handed her the only nightshirt she had. Sliding it on, Dani pulled the blankets down and slowly lowered herself onto Rita’s bed. Then she took up her narrative again. “I had to get the wound treated properly. So I walked into Tomaszow and went to the hospital. I didn’t say much, but when they saw it was a gunshot wound, they assumed I was Home Army and had been in the fighting in Warsaw. So I got it cleaned and properly bandaged. The antiseptic they had was excruciating. But then the questions started—what’s your name, where are you from, how did you get here? After a while I could see the look on the nurses’ faces: she’s dangerous; get rid of her. It wasn’t that I might have been a Home Army member resisting the Germans. No. I heard one say to the other,
She sounds like a Yid.

“So I just got up and walked out. Wandered around town till I couldn’t stand up. Fell asleep on a park bench. At dawn I was awoken by a German soldier poking me with his rifle. I raised my hands, showed him my
Kennkarte
. He made me follow him, but at least he stopped pointing his gun at me. We ended up at a public bathhouse where a lot of Polish women were being deloused. After that we were put on a train to Katowice, headed for forced labor in Germany.

“When we got to Katowice, I finally caught a break. They took us off the train and told us to wait in the station for another one that night that would take us to Germany. I could already hear the whisperings among the other women about me. I knew I’d have to run for it at some point. So I walked off the platform and out into the street. There, in front of me, was a soup kitchen for refugees—
Volks-Deutsche,
from the east, escaping to the Reich. There and then I became one of them. I had a good
Ausweis
, that
Kennkarte
. They were all Germans, not a Pole among them to question my looks, accent, or anything else about me. In the mob of refugees, I was safe, just another homeless German seeking shelter in the Reich. They fed us without a lot of questions. We slept in a warehouse near the station that had been requisitioned for refugees. Trouble was, I was fast asleep by the time the train I was supposed to be on left. The next morning I was interviewed, showed them my papers, and told them I had a sister in Heidelberg. They gave me a pass as far as Breslau and told me to report to the relocation office there.” Dani stopped for a sip of water.

“As we got closer and closer to Germany, there were more and more document checks, three before the train even got into Breslau. I jumped off as it slowed down for the main station. The wound opened up again. I circled back to the station entrance, found another refugee soup kitchen, had a meal, and then hid myself till nightfall. I found a line of freight wagons loading a crowd of
Volks-Deutsche
for Poznan and got on with them. In Poznan I hid in the toilets. There was a moment when I looked around and saw this grimy hag staring at me. I was frightened till I realized I was looking at myself in the mirror!” Rita couldn’t help smiling at the image.

“It took ten days, hiding in bombed buildings, sleeping in doss houses, spending hour after hour in washrooms, avoiding ticket barriers, identity checks, blending into refugee crowds in Cottbus, Braunschweig, Hanover
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and finally Frankfurt. Sometimes the trains went in the wrong direction. The farther west we got, the more they had to stop while bomb damage was cleared. But finally I am here.” Dani closed her eyes.

Rita was left with one question: what had Dani meant at the beginning of her narrative when she had said, “You were right
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
right about everything”?

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

T
his woman is your sister?”

Rita nodded. “Sister-in-law, actually. Wife of the brother who was taken by the Russians.”

“Well, she can’t stay here.”

“I know, Frau L. I will find her another place
sofort—
immediately.” With that the matter was closed, and the lady of the house left the kitchen.

Dani had been listening. She turned to Rita. “She asked no questions. She didn’t need to see any documents. But she looked like she didn’t believe you. I think she is going to turn us in.”

“No. She’s much more afraid of losing a decent housemaid.”

“What about Herr Lempke? When he gets back, he’ll recognize me, and that will be the end.”

“Stop worrying. He is almost always in Berlin. We hardly ever see him. We’ll get you a job before he comes back. Besides, he knows they are losing the war. Lempke is too smart to get his hands any dirtier than they are already by actually turning someone in to the Gestapo. Just you wait till he tells me he knew I was a Jew all along and was protecting me!”

Mannheim was twenty kilometers away and had been bombed so badly it had become a rubble field. Few domestic servants wanted to work there. It was not hard to find Dani a place with an elderly widow whose expectations about servants were not high. The flat was small, and the maid’s room was adjacent to the mistress’s bedroom. It was not an arrangement that invited callers. So Rita left off going to lectures at the university on Thursday afternoons, and the two women began to explore what was left of bombed-out Mannheim. Within a month they were well acquainted with every café left standing in the town.

Twilight, December 14, 1944.
A low winter sun, obstructed by little more than a few broken building walls, glinted through the taped window glass of a café and revealed every wrinkle in the yellowing wallpaper. The empty chairs cast long shadows across the chessboard tile work of the floor. Dani and Rita had been nursing cups of
Ersatzkaffee
for the better part of an hour, murmuring about the distant past and wondering aloud about the unforeseeable future.

“When you first got here, Dani, and told me what had happened, you said I had been right, right about everything. Now for weeks I have been trying to get you to explain, but you always change the subject. What was that all about? Was there something you were wrong about, something those weeks in Warsaw and your escape made you recognize or realize?”

Dani smiled. “You know, seeing the world straight doesn’t make you smarter or better. It might just make you worse and more complacent about things.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s the argument you and I have been having since 1942 back in Karpatyn. You have never been willing to try to make sense of things, to figure what they mean for us, or for anyone really. To you this whole war, and everything that led up to it, along with all the tragedies that it has produced, don’t add up to anything. It’s just—how did you used to put it—blind variations in an environment that changes so rapidly that yesterday’s survivors are tomorrow’s victims. I always thought that you were wrong. Events had meaning for what came after them, people’s individual choices made a difference at least for themselves, there are reasons for what happens. Well, I was wrong. There you are. That’s what you were right about.”

“So, what changed your mind?”

“The Germans, the Soviets, the Poles
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
August to October. I lived it. I saw how the process worked itself out. Anyone looking for a moral to the story, for the unfolding of a meaning behind the war, is going to have to conclude that history just aims at killing people, killing hope, freedom, and human progress.” Dani paused and thought. “But that is so perverse a thought, you’re better off concluding that history doesn’t mean a thing. What’s the line? It’s just sound and fury.”

Rita nodded, but Dani was going on. “Here’s another thing you were right about. Even when something looks like it’s a force for good, the way the Home Army must have looked to those hoping for Polish independence, on the inside it’s just another group of creatures preyed upon by parasites. I don’t mean the commanders were, or the Germans they fought, or the Russians. People aren’t the parasites. It’s the ideas that infect people and spread from them to others
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and destroy each one. But not before the parasite has the chance to spread further. Ideas spread like the germs of a disease. Like the deadliest diseases, they die out because they kill their hosts before they can jump to new ones. That’s what happened to so much of the Home Army, even those murdering thugs I was with, killing off Germans one by one. They weren’t garrote-artists before, and if any of them survived, they aren’t now. People think they are agents, really making choices
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
but we’re all just victims, even those whose victims we have been.”

“You seem to have my theory down better than I do.” Rita smiled. “Of course it isn’t really mine. Did you know Freddy Kaltenbrunner in the Karpatyn ghetto?”

“The old boy who gave you those books? No, I never met him. That was a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t so long ago. Everything was really hopeless then. Now it’s beginning to be tempting to think we might even survive.” Rita looked at Dani. “The Germans are going to lose the war. In a year or maybe less, we’ll be free. What will you do?” She moved her hand onto the open palm of Dani’s hand. Rita knew her own answer to this question, and she needed Dani to know her answer as well.

“Stay with you, I think. We’ll find some place together, yes?”

“Dani, I want that. But first I’ve got to know whether my son is still alive somewhere in Poland. Until I know about Stefan for sure one way or the other, nothing else will be possible.”

“So, you’ll go back to Poland?” Rita nodded. Dani sighed audibly. “I am glad. I have to go back too. I was afraid you wouldn’t want to. I need to know if anyone is left of my family. Maybe it’ll end the nightmares.” The two women fell silent. “Let’s walk,” said Dani.

“Right.” Rita brightened, and together they left the café.

It was now dark, and the derelict streets leading from the town center were completely deserted. They began walking arm in arm, in a manner long common among European women. To Rita and Dani, it meant something different.

The evening was cold enough for snow, and soon their arms were stretched around each other’s waists, pulling their bodies closer. Beneath the thin coats, their thighs moved together, and then simultaneously Rita and Dani found themselves thrusting hips against each other. It broke the somber spell that had loomed over them. They also knew they would not be together again for another week. Rita began looking around to see if there was anyone on the street behind them. Meanwhile Dani squinted into the darkness of the bombed-out buildings for a little shelter, perhaps an overhanging upper floor. Finding a relatively protected alcove with a splintered door, she pulled Rita inside. Both laughed in anticipation of pleasure, mutual embarrassment at remnants of personal modesty, and the thrill of making love in a bombed-out ruin. By the time their mouths found each other, neither woman was any longer cold, and the thin coats were unbelted and open to their exploring hands.

As she began to move her face away from Dani’s, Rita thought there would not be time or space enough to give Dani what she wanted to give. The cold air, the broken gravel scraping at her knee, the fatigue of the posture Dani had to adopt to give Rita access—discomfort was apt to break through their passion and move their feelings back inside their bodies. But still Rita was going to take her lover as far as she could. Dani pulled her skirt up and loosened her underwear. She was evidently going to follow as far as Rita would lead.

Dani began to open her legs while holding herself with an arm against a collapsed wall. She could feel Rita’s tongue on her labia, searching up and down. She was quickly becoming wet as Rita caressed with a tongue and probed with a finger. Then her shoe moved a stone, a piece of mortar, perhaps a loosened brick, which tumbled over a ledge and down into a pit, carrying flotsam with it that thudded with a dull report and what even seemed to the women to be an echo. Suddenly they heard a voice and then another.

“What was that?” It was a man.

Then another male voice. “Seemed to come from that direction.” The light of an electric torch played across the open doorway beside them and back to the rear wall.

“Probably just a couple of alley cats.”

The sound of the footfalls came closer. When the light trapped them, Rita was still rising off her knees, and Dani was balancing on one foot as she pulled her underwear up the other leg.

In the dark space of the bombed-out ruin, two darker shapes loomed. Then the voice. “You are both under arrest for public indecency,” followed by the snapping of a holster clasp. It was a noise they both recognized. “
Ausweis
,
sofort
—immediately.” Rita opened a purse while Dani withdrew her identity card from the pocket of her coat. One of the two lights continued to shine in their faces, while the other played across the documents. Then they heard one of the two men emit what sounded like a growl of satisfaction, followed by the sound of metal against metal as he pulled handcuffs from his leather coat.

Twenty minutes later Rita and Dani were still cuffed together, side by side, at Otto Schulke’s desk in the Heidelberg Gestapo headquarters. He was seated facing them, leafing through a folder of onionskin sheets, carbon copies, telex messages with edges torn from the teletypewriter, scribbled case notes. And Schulke was smiling.

Neither woman had said anything. Each could feel the other trembling through the handcuffs. Strangely, the young Gestapo creature before them had said nothing either, nothing beyond the telephone call he had placed as they listened. “Herr
Sturmscharf
ü
hrer
, please come immediately. I have apprehended two persons committing a serious disorder, and one is implicated in crimes against the state. They are also almost certainly Jews.” After a silence, he concluded,
“
Heil Hitler
,”
and put down the receiver. Now Rita recognized him—the Gestapo officer who questioned her at the university the previous spring. How much was in his file? Suddenly she became frightened, not just for herself and Dani, but for the terrible secret she had been carrying since her escape from Karpatyn two and a half years before. The secret of the code, a secret she had finally come to know had to be true as the war unfolded, that had assured her through everything that there would be a victory worth surviving for. Could they have connected her with Erich, and him with the code? Would anything they did force her to reveal it? Was it something she could bargain away? How could saving her life be worth destroying so much? Through the handcuffs that held them together, Dani could feel Rita’s trembling increase.

At one o’clock in the morning, the
Sturmscharführer
arrived, hung a hat on the hat rack, and slowly removed the obligatory leather coat to reveal a rumpled shirt, no collar attached, and a pair of nonuniform trousers held up by military suspenders. He was a man in his midforties, unshaven, with a face lined by a lifetime’s experience as a policeman. He sat down at another desk. “All right, Schulke, what’s this about?”

“Richtman and I caught these two in a sexually incriminating state tonight in Mannheim.”

Rita and Dani could see a look of irritation spread over the older man’s face. The words were forming there:
This
was the reason I am called back to the office in the middle of the night, to deal with a couple of lesbians?
Before he could spit out the words, Schulke went on, “I was readying to arrest one of them anyway. Rita Trushenko, certainly an alias—anti-Nazi agitation, complicity in the July conspiracy against the
Führer
, suspicion of false identity, theft in Warsaw, flight from the
Generalgouvernement
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
probably a Jew. The other one is certainly a Jewess, and her name surfaced in the reports on the first one—”

“Where did you get all this, Schulke?” His boss seemed impressed.

“Well, sir.” He pointed at Rita. “I found the blonde at the university last spring and started tracing her back
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
all the way to Poland. She or someone who matches her description was reported in Berlin last winter for defaming the Wehrmacht. In Krakow she was employed in the same office as a blood relative of one of the July 20
Führer-
assassination
conspirators on the Army General Staff. A woman named Magda Halle. Before that, I have reason to think she may have been reported by her employer in Warsaw for theft and suspicion of communist labor agitation.” Rita was staggered by the ability of the German bureaucracy to marshal such detail about a nobody while the entire nation was crumbling around it. “And that’s not all, sir. She meets the description of someone the
RSHA
—
Reich Security Main Headquarters—has been after for two years with the absolutely highest priority.” Schulke read out from a flimsy. “Report immediately to
Generalmajor
Friedrich von
Richter, Wehrmacht
Abwehr
, if and when apprehended.”