The Girl from Krakow (42 page)

“We need to get across the Czech border. Can you help?”

“Not too many people going that way, ladies. Most of the traffic is moving the other way, into the American zone. It’s not just Czechs, either. Mainly Poles, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Romanians. A lot of them don’t seem to make it across at all. Passport checks by the Soviet frontier guards. Where are you headed?”

“Katowice, in Poland, Major.”

“I hope you’re planning on a one-way journey, ladies.” The women were silent, so the officer continued, “Look, are you girls Jewish? Because if you are, there are people in Prague who can help. There’s an office there set up by the Joint.”

Rita and Dani asked the one-word question simultaneously: “Joint?”

“The old American JDC. They’re supporting surviving Jews and trying to move those who want to go to Palestine.” But JDC meant nothing more to Rita or Dani than the word “Joint.” He tried again. “JDC—Joint Distribution Committee. Don’t know why it’s called ‘Joint,’ but they probably have field agents in Poland too. Here’s their address in Prague. Now let’s see about a truck to Elsarn; that’s the last town this side of the Czech border.”

At midnight they were following a farmer down a dry two-track lane through rising summer wheat, pale in the half moon. The track wound into a copse of trees, and then they found themselves creeping through the knee-high stalks in a newly cultivated field until they reached the first trees of what was a thick woods.

Following the farmer they clambered over a wall made from five hundred years of stones laboriously dislodged and moved to the edge of the field. He stopped. “You’re in Czecho now. There’s your path into Zelezna. You’ll have to hitch a ride into Smolov, but there are lots of farmers that’ll take a couple of girls like you.” He held out his hand for payment. Dani reached into her haversack and handed him a carton of Camel cigarettes. Best currency there was in circulation.

Prague was far beyond the writ of the UNRRA. It had been occupied by Russian forces, though most of the units were already preparing to pull back to Poland. But the Joint—the JDC—was clearly visible in the main waiting room of Prague Central Station. The desk could have been mistaken for a UNRRA operation: lines of inquirers, Joint workers passing among them, others behind the desk collating lists, checking for names, organizing housing, transport, documents. Rita and Dani held back. They knew from experience that these workers wouldn’t give any priority to a couple of well-fed, healthy-looking, cleanly clothed women.

When the woman at the desk finally had a moment, she spoke. “We can put you up for a day, girls. It will be cramped. Tickets to Brno are possible, but you probably won’t have any seats. From there anywhere in Poland won’t be too hard to reach. There are even seats going there.” She looked at Rita. “Are you really Jewish?”

“Yes, why do you ask?”

“You both look pretty healthy.” She looked at Rita. “But it’s the Bavarian peasant braids pinned up the side of your head, I guess. Probably saved your life. With your German it was a great disguise.” Then she confided what she’d really been thinking. “Not a very popular look these days in Prague.”

Getting to Katowice was as easy as expected. The Joint office in the train station was not hard to find either. Now they were supplicants, like a thousand others on line, and they waited their turns. Finally Rita found herself standing at the counter. Her form was in her hand, filled out: maiden name, Feuerstahl, married name, Guildenstern—it had been five years since she had written it or even thought of herself as Guildenstern. No need for Trushenko on the form at all. How strange. Birthplace: Gorlice, Last Polish residence: Karpatyn. She pushed the form across the counter, and now suddenly she knew how the others had felt, many hundreds, perhaps even a few thousand people, who had stood expectantly across from her in the Frankfurt UNRRA office. They would watch as she moved a finger or a pencil down one list after another, moving from clipboard to clipboard, looking up occasionally to see a face hoping against hope. Nine times out of ten, she would disappoint them with, “Sorry, no one by that name on our lists.” Now it was her turn to feel the emptiness of being a castaway, a sole survivor, tossed by the currents in a sea of hollowed-out faces washing up at tracing desks all over Europe. The woman behind the desk had a “United Kingdom” shoulder flash on her sleeve. “You speak English?” Rita nodded but drew Dani forward. “We’ve been working for the UNRRA for three months.”

“Sorry. Nothing under Feuerstahl. Very unusual name. Let’s see about Guildenstern. Another uncommon name. Makes things easier.” The woman went back to her first list. She smiled and looked at Rita with a rare look of pleasure. “Well, this is unusual.” She didn’t appear to recognize the conflicted look that began crossing Rita’s face as she conveyed the information. “Guildenstern, Urs, Karpatyn, Colonel, Medical Corps, Northern Army Group, Soviet Forces, stationed Third Evacuation Hospital.” And now her voice rose so that coworkers and supplicants on line turned their heads. “Current location: Katowice, Poland. You’re practically on top of him. Your husband?”

Rita nodded. The woman lowered her voice. “But this is strange. The file says ‘seeks information about parents presumed dead’
 
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.
 
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but nothing about ‘spouse.’ I am going to check the files in the cross-index.” She turned away from the desk and moved toward a back room. A few minutes later, she returned to the desk, frowning. Rita had remained mute the entire time. “Coincidence. Can’t be who you are looking for. Or else it’s a cock-up in the files. We’ve an entry back there for a Guildenstern that lists a wife, Karla, citizenship USSR, child, Saul, born Moscow, 1944.” She looked up at Rita, ready to ask more questions. The woman stopped when she saw the look in Rita’s face. It was literally a blank. Rita stood her ground, mulling over the information, testing out the emotions it elicited in her, inwardly standing back and observing how the news sat with her. Then she moved back from the desk a few paces, still thinking things through.

Now it was Dani’s, or rather Dani Cohen’s turn. The Karpatyn lists were still in the Joint officer’s hands. “Let’s see, lots of Cohens here. Michael and Deena? Both taken to Belzec. But then we also have a Michael Cohen, from Karpatyn, registered at the ‘Joint’ field station in Rzeszow, daughter Dani. Is that you?”

“Could be my father. Must be my father! Rzeszow—where is that, please?” Dani asked anxiously.

“It’s the last town in Poland before you get to Lvov, L’viv now, on the other side of the Soviet border. There were a lot of Home Army forces fighting there, first against the Germans, then against the Russians. Shall we send word, or do you want to go? Getting there would be pretty tricky for a woman.”

“Why?”

“A lot of Soviet soldiers between here and there. They haven’t seen a woman looking like you in a few years, and their officers aren’t much interested in discipline anymore. Probably not much sympathy for Polish Jews among the local peasants. And no direct rail service yet. I’d stay here, and we can send word. If it’s your father, we can probably get him transport here.”

Dani gulped. “Yes, please. Right away.”

“Where are you two staying?” the woman asked, looking at their information forms.

“We just arrived from Prague,” Rita said. “We were working in the Frankfurt UNRRA office”—Rita looked around—“doing this.”

“I guess you better stay with the Joint staff. We have a billet across the street from the station.”

“Thanks. One more thing.” Rita bit a lip and continued, “I’d better look up this Colonel Guildenstern. He’s probably a relative of my husband’s.”

She looked back at Rita and down to her clipboard. “Third Soviet Evacuation Hospital, center of town. I’ll get someone to take you.”

Rita had to wait twenty minutes or so while they tracked down Lieutenant Colonel Guildenstern. It gave her time to go over several different conversations. Most of all she wanted to avoid falseness in the initial exchange. She wondered whether there was any chance the tone of the meeting could be businesslike. After all, they were adults, and neither should have to explain himself or herself to the other. Yet the prospect was fraught with potential for recrimination, she knew. Her complaints would be obvious. But so would his, especially when it came to Stefan. And he would be right, she thought. Her action had sacrificed their child.

Standing at the flaps of the large field tent—lend-lease and marked with the now familiar white star in a broken circle of the US Army—where the evacuation hospital’s administrative unit was housed, she saw him at a distance, still too tall and too thin, picking his way awkwardly through the muddied truck ruts, slipping and grabbing hold of parked vehicles, taking salutes with a slightly flustered motion of a right hand to his cap. It was clear that three and a half years had not produced a military officer.
So much the better
, she thought. He climbed with some relief onto the duckboard five meters from the tent, pulled his tunic down below his Sam Browne belt, and pulled off his forage cap. Seeing Rita, he could not help breaking into a smile. Her immobile face quickly melted his smile away. He came in, and they took two seats at a desk, facing each other in the shadow of the ill-lit tent.

She spoke first. “Almost four years.”

“Three years, eleven months, three weeks, and one day.”

Had he just made the calculation, or had he been keeping count all this time? She knew the answer.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

S
o, you survived,” he stated.

Was this observation a reflection of his surprise, disappointment, or just the potential for complication he now faced?

All she could say without showing anger was, “As you can see.”

“I had no idea
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
how?”

“Blind luck, inefficiency, indifference, and a little help from people who had no reason to help. Never mind. I am here.” She remembered how glad she had been to be rid of him there on that platform in Karpatyn that day in late June 1941. It would be the very falseness she wanted most to avoid were she to now recriminate him for desertion. Yet the temptation briefly overcame her. “Were you really so sure I hadn’t survived, or weren’t you very interested in whether I had?”

“What do you mean, Rita? That’s very hard.”

“Your inquiry sheet at the Joint office
 
.
 
.
 
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it was just your parents’ fate you were interested in, not mine, not even Stefan’s. And unless their records are wrong, you have married some woman in Russia and had a child. All that without much of an inquiry about whether your wife or child were still living
 
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that’s what I mean.” It was all exactly what she had promised herself she wouldn’t do. Rita raised both her hands. She was about to apologize and try starting over when Urs’s unemotional demeanor broke down completely.

“How dare you say such things to me. You who traduced me before the war and sent my child away so that you could survive during the war.”

That she was guilty of adultery did not trouble her, but the apparent obviousness of her guilt in Stefan’s death overwhelmed her. Rita began to sob.

This Urs hadn’t intended either. He handed her a handkerchief.

She took it for a conciliatory gesture and began to explain. “It wasn’t like that. Gorlice was not ghettoized, people were not suffering, there was food, no
Aktions
. No transports to the extermination camps. All that was happening in Karpatyn. I thought he’d be safe.”

“I understand.” He seemed sincere.

“But Urs, he never got to Gorlice. Stefan was taken by a woman, a courier for the Home Army. When my parents were sent to Auschwitz, there was no baby with them. I was told by someone who was with my parents when they were taken and who somehow survived the camp.”

“Stefan couldn’t have lived, Rita.” Urs was moved by her explanation but unwilling to accept even the possibility that Stefan had somehow survived.

“I don’t know. But that’s why I came back, to try to find him. I looked for him in the Warsaw ghetto just before the uprising there. They had no record. Who knows? He might be in a convent or with Polish people somewhere.”

“No.” Urs was shaking his head.

“What do you mean, no?”

“The new government at Lublin has secured lists from all the churches, the convents and the Catholic orphanages, underground organizations, tax registries, of the names of children kept or hidden during the war. They are to be returned to their parents if still living. There is no child of the name Stefan Guildenstern on any of these lists. Since I got here, I’ve been kept informed regularly of additions to the register.”

Rita sighed. “I see. Well, congratulations on your marriage. I don’t think we need to go through a divorce. Our marriage was dissolved by the war. I will never make any claim based on it.” What she really thought was that the marriage was dissolved long before that, but there was no point in being provocative. “Urs, your child has every moral right to legitimacy. Don’t give our past together another thought.”

“That is very generous. Still, I’d like to explain.” Rita shook her head as if to say, no need, but he continued. “Karla is a girl I met in Moscow in ’43, after we heard that the Karpatyn ghetto had been
 
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.
 
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liquidated and everyone sent to Belzec. Anyway, she became pregnant, and I had to marry her. She was willing to have an abortion, but it was illegal.”

“Illegal?” Rita observed. “But you could have done it without risk, no?”

“No, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I won’t break the law or the Hippocratic oath. I was never built like your—” He sought the right word:
friend
,
lover
,
partner
in adultery
? Finally he just settled on the name. “Like Gil Romero.”

“What do you mean?”

“He spent most of the war in Moscow performing abortions for hard currency and gold.” The contempt was evident.

“How do you know?”

“My wife gave birth to our son in Moscow Maternity Hospital Number 6. Romero had been working there for two years when she was admitted. He was away when my wife delivered. But everyone in the hospital, at least all the doctors, knew he was performing abortions for hard currency.”

“He wasn’t caught?”

“No one understood why he wasn’t. So many people knew, somebody must have talked to NKVD or even just the Moscow militia police. It wouldn’t have been safe to know a thing like that without telling the authorities. He must have had important protection. That is what the doctors thought.”

“Is he still there?” Rita surprised herself by voicing the question.

“Don’t you know?” She looked at him blankly. “He’s probably not forty kilometers down the road from here. In Gliewitz. I saw him a month ago in Kiev, and that’s where he was headed.”

That night, without finding Dani at the Joint offices, Rita left for the east. She had to be as sure as she could that there was no trace of Stefan before thinking about the rest of her life. She spent an hour between trains at Krakow, wandering through the old university section again. But all her memories of the ’30s were now obliterated. The war, the German occupation, the ghettos, the drudgery of Lempke’s offices, the constant threat to her and to Dani—her lover, her partner
contra mundum
—these were what she remembered now. Not her life before the war.

She started in Nowy Sacz, where there was a tracing office. She lodged the standard inquiry form about her parents and Stefan. As expected, parents transported to Auschwitz in 1942. No record of a child taken at the same time. The Germans had been methodical. The records were probably complete.

On the third day out of Katowice, Rita was walking the streets of her birthplace. Gorlice was a town already rebuilding itself, as if after a whirlwind. There were new sheds—not really houses—now rising on the burned-out street where her family’s home had been located. But along the street where she had grown up, there was not a name or face she could recognize. Those houses she could recognize were occupied by new residents.

Rita presented herself at the local constabulary. It was obvious that no one was much interested in the recent past or immediate future of Jews formerly living in Gorlice. The sole officer on duty was preoccupied or indifferent to everything except the cigarettes he was rolling, one after another, almost perfectly.

“Sorry, miss, all inquires have to be made in Nowy Sacz, local district seat.” The policeman turned back to cigarette papers and loose tobacco.

“Can you tell me anything about the Home Army hereabouts?”

That got the man’s attention, and not in the way she had hoped. “Excuse me, comrade.” He was looking right through her. “We know nothing about terrorist fascist organizations here. This is a police station. You want to go to State Security. That’s Nowy Sacz too.”

“Terrorism? I don’t understand.” Rita stood her ground. “I need to find out about a woman courier for the Home Army who operated in this area in 1942.” Then she added, “This woman couldn’t have been a fascist; she was fighting the Nazis.”

“Home Army, terrorist organization, miss. Still out there in the hills, fighting the legitimate government. I advise you not to ask further, or I may have to inform the security organs about this inquiry.”

“I’m sorry. I have been out of the country for many years. Can you just explain about the Home Army being a fascist terrorist organization?”

Looking at Rita now, the officer turned avuncular. “Well, my dear, all I know is that last winter they attacked the provisional government’s prison at the Castle in Rzeszow, trying to rescue Home Army thugs arrested for resisting our Soviet allies. The scum were caught, and they’re in prison now. Enough said.” Rzeszow, she recalled, was the town they had been told Dani’s father was to be found in.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Piece of advice, sister. You’re such a pretty girl. I don’t want to see you in the slammer. Don’t make a lot of inquiries in Nowy Sacz. Jews, Home Army
 
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.
 
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well, the state organs of security don’t welcome questions about them.”

Back to the tracing desk in Nowy Sacz, the district capital. The middle-aged Polish woman behind the desk had nothing new for Rita. She had not expected anything. “I have one more question. Is there a convent, orphanage, or children’s home here in Nowy Sacz or in the district?”

“No. Unfortunately.” The woman, evidently a devout Catholic, launched into a historical lecture. “Not enough wealthy Catholic families to support a convent. Just the Dominican sisters’ school. All closed now. Never were enough unmarriageable girls to need a convent. A lot of the money hereabouts was Jewish, and most of the Christians were Ukrainian. The few girls who had a calling went to Krakow
 
.
 
.
 
.”

Rita was not listening anymore. Suddenly she wanted to be cured of the need to seek out Stefan. After the last three years, she finally had no emotional energy left for further struggle, danger, disappointment. He was dead and that was that, she told herself with finality, and began to search around in her thoughts for ways of making the conclusion stick.

No more Urs, no more Stefan. Just Dani. The three thoughts repeated themselves in a sequence whose rhythm matched the clicking of the wheels as they slid over the gaps in the rails. The train carrying her west, back to Katowice, was much fuller. Everywhere it was the same, the asymmetry of many going west and few going east. Everyone understood why. Rita hurried out of Katowice station eager to find Dani and tell her that she had finished trying to resurrect the dead and was ready to get on with their life together.

She arrived in the dormitory room of the Joint residence where they had been provided with beds. There at the back, sitting on her bed, she saw Dani facing two others—men sitting on the opposite bed. The older was a burly figure, with graying curly hair above a well-lined and leathery face. Despite age, the man was strong, his shirtsleeves taut around arm muscles. There was a younger man next to him, tanned, fit, darkly attractive, almost handsome. As Rita approached, Dani said in a voice loud enough for Rita to hear, “There she is now.” She stood up from the bed. “Rita, this is my father, Michael
 
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.” She paused, obviously flustered. “And my fiancé, Paul Bernays.” As she said the words, she reached out for Rita’s right hand and squeezed it very hard. Rita recognized the meaning of the gesture, but she was reeling from the news.