Such Good Girls (6 page)

The thought that she had been hired by a Nazi was promptly replaced by the fear that he had already decided to fire her. As she introduced herself, he was complaining about the delayed flight and the “wretched Poles.” He promptly informed her that he would have nothing to do with her.

Laura was desperate. She couldn’t return either to her job or to their rented room at the Polish officer’s house.

“Bitte, Herr Leming—” she began.

“Useless people!” he spat at her, saying he should’ve hired a German fräulein in the first place.

She reminded him in German of his promise, saying she’d given up her job and lodging. Her little girl and she would have nowhere to go. Tears filled her eyes.

Leming said that was her problem.

“But I have your letters to me. You state very clearly—”

He turned on his boot heels to go, saying that he was sure she would have no problem finding other employment.

She played the only card left in her hand. She took a deep breath and said, “Herr Leming! I don’t imagine the Gestapo would be very pleased to know that you are not a man of your word.” She could hardly believe the words that were coming out of her mouth.

He could have her arrested; it would be nothing to him. But when he turned back to face her, he looked worried, even frightened. Laura barely knew what to make of his expression. What chance did anyone have against secret police so powerful that an empty threat from a single mother could be instantly effective? Leming looked her up and down, stroked his chin, and said, “Well, well, Frau Tymejko, very good. Your German is excellent and you are obviously not a typical Pole.”

It was the biggest automobile Zofia had ever seen that came to pick them up the next day. The chauffeur stared straight ahead behind the wheel while Leming himself opened the back door and beckoned to them. Zofia would have been truly frightened by her mother’s new employer if her mother didn’t seem so pleased about going to work and eager to get into the car.

Leming had a large, lined face, big for his body, with a pointed, pomaded widow’s peak that made him look like the Count Dracula puppet Zofia had once seen in a department store window. Under his deeply furrowed forehead, which featured one sinister groove that bisected his forehead vertically, were two heavy-lidded eyes. His chin was so deeply cleft that it almost looked like someone’s bottom, but with stubble. Zofia was fascinated by this chin, as she had been by the Totenkopf on the SS hats.

But the part of Leming’s face that she could barely take her eyes off of—that she had to force herself to ignore—was the short smudge of a mustache between his nose and thin upper lip, just like Adolf Hitler’s.

Zofia sat quietly on the soft gray velour seat with her mother. Herr Leming himself hardly said a word during the two-hour journey to Busko-Zdrój. The town was small and no longer full of the well-dressed people who normally flocked to it for its famous natural sulfur springs. No one looked like they even knew a war was going on. The sanatorium was in a large beautiful park with a garden and chestnut trees, but surrounded by a town that looked like a place where nothing much ever happened.

But, in fact, a great deal had just happened. Busko-Zdrój’s little ghetto, which had been created in April 1941, had already been liquidated by the time they arrived. Its two thousand Jews had been transferred to Jedrzejow, joining 4,000 others from the ghettos of Lodz, Wloclawek, and Warsaw on their way to the Treblinka death camp.

Leming offered Laura and Zofia a room in his own apartment, but Laura declined, knowing what that meant.

“As you wish,” he said. “I can see you are not eine Mädchen für alles.” A woman for all to enjoy.

“But I’ll be the best bookkeeper you’ve ever had,” she replied.

Laura and Zofia ended up sharing a room attached to a granary that had only a paraffin stove to warm them. It was early November but so cold it might as well have been January. Zofia, who seemed constantly sick, was sniffling and sneezing more than ever. Her mother wouldn’t leave her alone anymore, so she took her to the local grammar school and told the headmaster that Zofia’s birth certificate had been destroyed in the war, but that she had turned six—not five—in July. The ruse worked. Zofia was both tall and smart for her age, and her reserve made her seem even older. Within a week of their arrival, Zofia joined the first grade class.

By the spring of 1943, mother and daughter moved again, this time to a two-room, first-floor apartment facing a courtyard. It was much nicer than the granary—in fact, the mayor of Busko lived upstairs with his family—but not at all as nice as the homes of some of Zofia’s classmates.

In their new place, Laura and Zofia slept on two single beds in a room with pale green walls. The kitchen, which was painted orange, contained a stove, a table, and three chairs. Zofia started eating better than she had in a long time. There was milk, bread, jam, eggs, butter, potatoes, onions, beets, cucumbers, and even a little meat, and in the nearby woods and fields the two of them picked gooseberries and wild strawberries. Zofia was surprised to learn that her mother was something of an expert on mushrooms who collected wild borowik mushrooms for soups and omelets. Zofia hadn’t eaten so well in a long time.

Zofia made a couple of friends, but she sensed a gulf. Many of the children in her class had two parents, bigger homes, even relatives with farms, which meant a steady supply of the meat and fruit that Zofia seldom saw. But she fit in as best she could, giggling with the others at news of the Jews’ fate. What were the Jews thinking? Her teacher compared the Warsaw ghetto uprising to a mouse trying to stop a locomotive.

One of her friends had quite a lot of toys, which made Zofia so envious that one afternoon she pocketed a small toy horse. That night, after suffering a great deal over her theft, knowing it was wrong, she confessed the crime to her mother, who said she had to return it. Which, being a most obedient girl, she did.

And her mother was different from the other mothers too—prettier, more sophisticated, but also so joyless and demanding. In her anxiety, she occasionally still drilled Zofia.

“Where’s your father? Who is your Savior?” Zofia began to hate her.

“If you don’t stop,” she snapped at her mother one day, “I’m going to report you to the Gestapo!”

Now Laura knew how Leming had felt. It was the only time she ever slapped her daughter.

When Zofia wasn’t cursing her mother, she was trying desperately to please her.

One day she decided to clean the wood floor in the kitchen by pouring a bucketful of water over it. This was apparently not the right method, because when her mother came home and saw the results, she had a fit—which to Zofia seemed wildly out of proportion to the misdeed. She had only a single toy named Halinka to amuse her, a large doll, blond and blue-eyed like Zofia herself, that her mother had bought from a fleeing German family, and so Zofia often resorted to playing in puddles, another activity her mother didn’t find amusing. She arranged for Zofia to stay after school with a Polish woman and her two young sons, but one day the boys took a hot poker out of the fire and convinced Zofia that she should touch it. Laura didn’t find this funny either and stopped the after-school visits.

Zofia returned to being a latchkey child, condemned to spend many more hours than she would have liked with her two favorite books. One was a Scandinavian fable about a bear named Kurol who was king of the forest. The other was called Mr. Thermometer, a poem about a sickly child much like herself. Later her mother would buy her a small walleyed bear with a quizzical expression to keep her and Halinka company, but Zofia barely knew how to play. Tea parties were foreign to her. She knew nothing of nonexistent tea and invisible cakes.

“What do you think of Halinka’s dress, Bear?” she’d ask, wait a few seconds, then say, “Well, that just shows how much you know about girls’ dresses.”

“Halinka thinks you’re handsome, Bear,” she’d say, then pause. “Now you say something nice about her… . Yes, go ahead… . That’s very nice of you, Bear. Yes, I think she has beautiful hair, too.”

The neighbors made sure Laura knew that their furnished apartment had been occupied by Jews before they were deported. Laura lived not among Jews, but among their things. The furniture in their apartment. The sidewalks on which she walked were paved with gravestones from the Jewish cemetery; the dresses the town’s poor Polish Catholic girls wore were made from Jewish prayer shawls.

Whenever Laura slipped on the icy stone step by the front door, she was convinced that the previous occupants were reprimanding her from their crowded graves.

Occasionally Zofia would walk around town after school, looking in the gift shop window or the ice cream store, wishing she had a few zlotys. Other times, she’d go to the park, sit under a chestnut tree, and read. One day she saw notices posted in the park that a Pole was going to be executed in the town square the next day. She didn’t think she’d like watching a Pole being killed, so she stayed home. On the following day, she did venture into the square to pay her mother a visit at work in the two-story stone agricultural cooperative. Right there, near the front door, at the base of the front of the building, she saw streaks of blood. More blood had pooled, and dried, between the stones of the sidewalk.

Zofia stared, trying to summon a mental picture of the event that had left these stains. Next to her, a man shook his head. He wore a brown overcoat that was too big for him and had probably belonged to a bigger, and now dead, man.

It wasn’t that Zofia had become inured to the apparent cheapness of human life in Poland—she still shuddered at what could happen to her mother or her—but like all children, even in a time of war, little pleasures loomed large, none larger than the treat her mother brought home from work one evening: a Suchard chocolate bar that Herr Leming had given her. Zofia couldn’t recall ever having tasted chocolate, but she must have. Why else would her mouth water at the sight of it? Chocolate, fresh vegetables, and fruit were almost impossible for most ordinary Poles to obtain. When Zofia came down with scurvy from a lack of vitamin C, one of her aunts in Kraków had somehow acquired an orange and sent it to her. But an orange was such a luxury that Laura was able to trade it to a nearby farmer for enough apples to last the entire winter and cure the scurvy. But chocolate? It was in her mother’s hand just inches away, and her eyes grew wide.

Then, just as her mother was about to give her the candy, she suddenly pulled it back.

“Mama!” Zofia protested, but not before the candy had already disappeared into an apron pocket.

Her mother said it might be poisoned.

Zofia was perplexed. “Poisoned?”

“You know Herr Leming, the man I work for?” She explained that she didn’t trust him. He was a German and might try to poison them.

“But why would he poison us?”

She explained that the Germans hated the Poles almost as much as they hated the Jews.

This was disturbing news to Zofia. The Jews were detestable, dirty, and worthless. Her teacher had made that clear. Besides, the evidence was everywhere. Why else would some of the streets of Busko be paved with Jewish gravestones? But why would the Germans hate Zofia herself, a Polish girl who went to church every Sunday, even when her mother’s headaches prevented her from going with her daughter? The figure of God depicted in the fresco on the church’s ceiling, a fatherly-looking man with a flowing white beard, was a great comfort to a girl whose own father had been taken away. She was going to take her First Communion in less than a year. She knew that Jesus Christ was going to be there with her.

“The Germans couldn’t hate us. Not like they hate the Jews,” Zofia protested.

“They hate us too,” her mother explained, “and they have killed plenty of innocent Poles to prove it. Zosia, you must take my word for it. To them, we are slaves and they are the masters. But you must never, ever mention it. Do you understand? When you come to visit me at work, you mustn’t speak to Herr Leming unless spoken to, and then you must say very little.”

It was all beyond a child’s understanding.

“But the Jews killed Christ and they kill Christian children for their blood,” Zofia said, repeating what she’d heard so often at school.

“Well, I’ve known some Jews who were quite nice,” her mother said. “Anyway, my little Zosia, you must never look sad. You must always look happy, Zosia. Then Herr Leming and the others won’t bother us.”

Zofia wished her mother would stop telling her not to speak because she was already an expert at not speaking when not spoken to. She was a master at hiding sadness. She was a genius at not making any noise at all.

After midnight, when her mother was asleep, Zofia slipped out of bed and padded to the kitchen, where she found her mother’s apron hanging over the back of the chair by the stove. She slipped her hand into one pocket, and then the other, but both were empty. She stood on the chair, inspected the shelf and the crockery. Nothing. Zofia returned to bed empty-handed.

In the endless present moment that is childhood, Zofia could no more understand the disappearance of the chocolate bar than she could comprehend the disappearance of her father, or remember leaving the Lvov ghetto, or even of having lived there.

Laura and Zofia were walking in Spa’s Park one day when a hollow-eyed young woman and her little boy passed them, followed by two SS men with German shepherds. It was apparent from the leaves and twigs clinging to the mother’s and son’s torn clothes that they had just been found in the woods. And it was just as clear to Laura that the two Jews were about to be shot. Under the brims of their peaked hats with the death’s head medallions, the SS men wore the smug expressions of men who were doing their job well. The mother had her arm around her son’s tiny shoulder, determined to protect him from the horrible fate she must have known awaited them.

Laura closed her eyes in an equally futile attempt to ignore the situation. The woman was a mother too, trying to shield her child from the truth, but the knowledge that she and Zofia might survive their lie, while the other woman and her child had perhaps only minutes to live, tore at her heart. A wave of guilt and despair passed through her as she tugged Zofia onward. And what made it all even more unbearable was Zofia’s apparent lack of curiosity about the doomed pair. Or was it obliviousness? Either way, her own daughter seemed like a stranger to her, and the more successful Laura was in protecting her, the stranger Zofia became to her.