The Girl from Krakow (41 page)

Another thing the chaplain discouraged was the vernacular English they were rapidly learning from the troops. Dani had begun assiduously teaching Rita English. But her grasp of American slang was weak, while her knowledge of Army abbreviations and acronyms was understandably nonexistent. These they both learned at the same pace, along with oaths, curses, and obscenities, which they began to use in exactly the way the enlisted men of the 44th Division did, but without the benefit of knowing what the words meant.

One morning, upon hearing their language the chaplain asked, “Ladies, do you know what SNAFU and FUBAR mean?”

“Yes, captain,” Dani volunteered. “One means when something has gone wrong; the other means broken, not working, screwed up.”

“Screwed up? Who taught you that word?” He frowned and left the club.

In early May, when the Nazis finally capitulated to the western Allies and to the Soviets, Dani and Rita were still living at the Lempkes’. The lady of the house had not reconciled to the new order. But Herr Lempke had continued to cultivate the fiction that he had been protecting the two women since their earliest days in Krakow.

A day after the capitulation, Lempke came into the parlor in the evening and announced to the two women, “I have just learned that Magda Halle is still alive.”

“What happened to her?” They had not dared to ask, but the surprise in Lempke’s tone prompted their curiosity.

“Well, they came to arrest her soon after the July 20 plot against Hitler. Seems her cousin was part of the Wehrmacht staff unit that tried it, and they were rounding up anyone with links to them.”

“But she worked with you for two years. Why didn’t they arrest you too?”

“Oh, they came back and questioned me after they took her. They seemed to think she was providing
Ausweise
for fugitives right under our
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
under their noses. She was sent to Buchenwald, but she has survived.” He smiled.

“But you didn’t know anything about that either, yes?” Dani was sarcastic.

“I’m glad she never told me about the plot or the papers she got for people in hiding. It would have been dangerous for me to know about it.” Lempke had for some time been convincing himself that he was just an innocent bystander for the twelve years of the
Dritte Reich
. “We certainly did not know anything about the atrocities committed by
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
others. Rita, Dani, you know we never so much as saw a uniform in the Krakow office, let alone Gestapo or SS.”

He withdrew a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his gray double-breasted suit coat, unfolded it, and took out a fountain pen, whose cap he screwed off. “Rita, I have prepared a statement I would be grateful if you would sign.”

“Oh yes? Please read it.” Rita sounded polite.

“ ‘This is to affirm that I, Margarita Trushenko, was employed first in Krakow, as housekeeper to the Office of the Tax Inspectorate, and then in Heidelberg, Germany, as housemaid in the home of Heinrich Lempke from February 1943 to March 1945. During this time I was paid the prevailing wage, provided with room and board, treated correctly, respectfully, and my identity as a Jew and an opponent of the German Reich was protected by Herr Lempke.’ ”

“I regret that I cannot sign this statement,
Mein Herr
. To begin with, that is not my name. I am Rita Feuerstahl.”

“Hey, Rita, Chaplain wants to see you and Dani over in his office right away.” It was the chaplain’s clerk-typist, standing at the door of the USO. “Say, got a doughnut you can spare?”

They straightened their uniforms, gave the corporal a doughnut, and followed him out of the canteen.

“Ladies.” He spoke only in English, hoping they would understand. “I have found much more suitable and much more important work for both of you. We are dealing with a flood of refugees moving across Europe now that the war is over. The US government has set up an office to manage reunification of families, food and shelter for former slave-labor victims, concentration camp inmates, everyone who suffered under the Nazis. Anyway, they need people who speak the languages, who will be trusted by victims, and who understand what they have gone through. It’s an important job, and all over Germany, the chaplain corps are looking for people who can do it. I think you two would be perfect. So, if you want, I’ll cut orders to get you up to Frankfurt to join this project. It’s called UNRRA—United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.” He looked from Dani to Rita. “What do you think?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

W
ithin a week Dani and Rita were in Frankfurt, out of USO fatigues. Instead, there were UNRRA uniforms. They were nice, but Rita and Dani wore them only rarely. It was important to dress like a civilian in the work they now began to do. Refugees were allergic to uniforms.

With German, Polish, some Russian, more Yiddish, and newly acquired English at their disposal, both were almost immediately put to work in the Tracing Office, the information desk dealing with inquiries from across Germany about family reunification. The officer in charge, a burly Canadian, Major Thompson, told them they were the first European women they had been able to find suitable for this work. Suitable, Rita and Dani eventually decided, meant nothing more than that they were not so victimized by the war that the work would overwhelm them.

The Tracing Office was the epicenter of almost every town in the former Reich. Every DP—displaced persons—camp in central Europe had one too. In the first weeks after the Nazi surrender, camps operated by UNRRA were swamped with former slave laborers. In Frankfurt many were from Speer’s underground rocket-works in the Harz Mountains. Though skeletal, these people were stronger than survivors from concentration and extermination camps.

Rita and Dani were assigned to Salzheim, a camp near Frankfurt-Hochst, a western suburb. The buildings were not much better than German prison barracks, but there was food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention. Arriving refugees had more urgent wants, however. They came with names—dozens, scores, and sometimes a hundred names of family members, people about whom they sought information. Their information had to be distributed to every part of occupied Germany. The resulting lists were constantly updated and exchanged, continually consulted, checked, rechecked, corrected, and cross-indexed. Even as they added to their lists, Rita and Dani became so familiar with them they could produce names from memory.

Many of the refugees were
Osties—Ostarbeiter
, forced into the factories, construction works, synthetic oil plants, and armaments factories of Krupp, Thyseen, and I. G. Farben. They were Ukrainians, Russians—Soviets who had served the Germans willingly enough when they were winning and now were fearful about the prospects of repatriation to the east. There were even
Volks-Deutsche
from the Baltic countries—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—taken into Soviet citizenship at the beginning of the war by Stalin with Hitler’s compliance, then “liberated” by the Nazis, and at last evacuated by their German governors as the Russians moved west. And, of course, there were the Jews, from the extermination camps, from slave labor, from hiding all over Germany and Poland.

The first thing Rita noticed about Jewish refugees, especially about the younger ones, was their self-identification. They were Polish, Lithuanian, Yugoslavian, Rumanian, Hungarian, even Austrian—a citizenship that had not existed since 1938. But rarely would they admit to being Jewish. Until, that is, she let it be known she was Jewish herself. Then everything would change: demeanor would become more animated and demands more aggressive. And they would begin talking about their experiences. They had to tell her, and she had to listen. And for the same reason. She was the first apparently unscarred, healthy, visibly normal Jew they had met.

For all her personal terror of the ghetto, slave labor, false identity, and extortionists, Rita soon realized that compared to almost everyone in these camps, her war had been
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
what? How to describe it? She kept searching for the right word. She had no right to compare it to theirs. Mostly it had been a harrowing ordeal, but not much more than that. It had been punctuated by terror, fraught with risk, and included periods of harsh deprivation and much personal loss. But most of these people had experienced all this along with years of unremitting torture, bestial sadism, dehumanizing degradation, obligatory self-abnegation, starvation, epidemic sickness, the ever-present extermination machine
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Rita had been confronted with it only intermittently—in the ghettos of Karpatyn and Warsaw. These were glimpses of their reality. What the survivors of the camps had lived through would have been more than enough to have made her throw herself against an electrified fence, cross over a trip wire into a killing zone, provoke a guard into killing her quickly. There was no particular value to surviving such a life. She knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Rita’s work settled into days of standing at a counter, responding to requests from DPs, filling out records of new arrivals, updating lists, and collating information. Sometimes she would have to make her way through the camp to deliver news—more often bad than good—to a resident. Walking along the muddy lanes between rough one-story pine shacks with tarpaper roofs, communal kitchens, and rather foul-smelling latrines, Rita would have to remind herself of the conditions their occupants had only lately known. She was continually surprised when people smiled and waved. She would find young children amusing themselves with makeshift toys, or pass groups of older children gathered around someone teaching. Women were already tending garden allotments. There were people continually moving into and out of the camp. Surely they would become restless and dissatisfied.
But not yet
, she thought,
not yet
.

Late in June, a still emaciated young man arrived at Rita’s desk for registration.

“Name, please, and place of origin.” Her words were automatic.

“Kurtzbaum, Moritz, Gorlice, Poland.”

Rita reeled. This was her home, and this was a name she vaguely knew. She looked up but was unable to place the face. Never mind, it had been nine years since Rita had married and left the town, nine years during which a child could grow to adulthood and an adult could become a ghost, an apparition before her. She put down her pen. “Did you know the Feuerstahl family?”

“Of course.” He brightened at the question. “When I was little, they lived across the street. That was before the war. Once the ghetto was established, we were in the same house with them.” He stopped, then went on in a darker tone. “We were taken in the same
Aktion
.”

Rita didn’t know what to do first—identify herself or ask the question she dreaded an answer to: what about Stefan? Was he with them?
Go slowly
, she said to herself.
Establish the provenance of your question so he will have a reason to remember something he should want to forget.
“My name is Feuerstahl, Rita. I am their daughter.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”

Rita was not listening. Her eyes were burning into his. “Now this is very important. Was there a baby, a child about two years old or so, with my parents when you were taken?”

“No. It was just the two old folks and my family.”

“Are you sure? Really certain?”

The young man became grave. “It was the worst moment of my life. I can tell you every detail.” His voice rose. “There was no child!”

Rita wanted to exult. But she couldn’t. “Sorry. Let’s get back to you
 
.
 
.
 
.” She picked up her pen.

“Was it your child?” His anger had been replaced by sympathy. She nodded. “You should be glad then. We were all loaded onto cattle wagons for Auschwitz directly from the
Aktion
. I’m sorry, but your parents were selected immediately.”

Suddenly Rita had the image. She would not allow herself to dwell on it for a moment. Not now. Perhaps later. “And you? What happened to you?”

“I was sixteen. They took my parents and my younger sister. They put me on the fire brigade for Canada—that’s what we called the storage depot in Birkenau where they kept all the stuff they took off the people they gassed. Then they moved me around to some of the other camps. Then I was a cook for a while. That saved my life
 
.
 
.
 
.” He looked down at his hands, all bones and protruding veins. “Fattened me up.” He laughed. “Then we marched for months back to Germany last winter.”

“So, anyone to trace?”

“I had some cousins in Nowy Sacz.”

“I’m going back to Poland as soon as I can.” It was the first thing Rita said to Dani that evening. Working at separate desks in different barracks, they had not seen each other all day. Before Dani could ask, she explained what she had learned. “There is a chance, you see? He may still be alive somewhere.”

Dani did not even pause to digest the news. She pulled a battered suitcase out from beneath her cot and unbelted it.

“Don’t do it, Rita.” Thompson, the camp administrator, was considering the matter the next morning. “No passports, and anyway, the borders are closed between Germany and Czechoslovakia. No idea what the situation is at the Czech-Polish border. I’d wait till things get normalized more. Besides, we need you here.”

Both women shook their heads. Dani spoke. “The longer we wait, the colder the trail gets.”

“We? Are you both going?”

“I never found out exactly what happened to my parents or
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
my brother.” Dani didn’t have a brother. Rita supposed the lie was just something Dani had contrived to add to her urgency.

“Look, I’ll rough out some official-looking documents—authorizations, identities—on official letterhead. At least I can get you accommodation in Munich and Regensburg and travel authority for the railways. You’ll have to go through Regensburg to slip into Czechoslovakia. It’s the shortest path to Poland. I’ll give you the name of someone who can help on the Czech side.”

“How do you know anyone?” Rita was surprised at the offer and the local knowledge.

“Some of the Canadians have been helping refugees make their way to Palestine through Czecho’. I’ll trust you not to mention anything to the Brits.”

Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Augsburg, Munich—every station was seething with the flotsam of European humanity, climbing over one another on platforms, sleeping rough or waiting wordlessly for space on the roof of a train. Like so many ant colonies sending out and receiving foraging parties, from each station packed lines of refugees fanned out and funneled in. At each there was a UNRRA desk ready to help Dani and Rita, who pulled such rank as the uniforms they now wore could provide. At Regensburg they showed Major Thompson’s counterpart his letter of authorization. When the officer saw the name, he brightened.