Such Good Girls (7 page)

Still, she continued to test her on the catechism, on the invented fates of loved ones, on what she should say to strangers if she was ever questioned.

“Where’s your father? Who is your Savior? What is the name of your mother’s boss?” She pushed and pushed until Zofia began running away at the sight of her anxious mother approaching. Laura herself was sick of rehearsing the lies because the price of keeping her daughter alive was to lose her affection—even their very relationship.

Yet she envied her daughter’s ignorance. Better to believe you really are a Catholic schoolgirl than to know you’re a Jew hiding behind a mask of deception, without which you cannot survive. Better not to realize that the mother and son emerging from the woods would be shot and killed.

Was there not a point when terror simply took over a psyche like an invading army and annihilated the self? How was it that during the day Laura could function as well as she did, sitting at her desk in the agricultural cooperative, only feet away from Leming, translating Polish documents into German for him?

As the Polish Resistance in the area grew, it increasingly became Laura’s job to translate something far more unpleasant. Young Polish partisans were sabotaging trains carrying supplies to the Eastern Front, and those who were caught in the vicinity of Busko-Zdrój were brought before Herr Leming for interrogation. It was her job to translate Leming’s screaming accusations and denunciations from German to Polish, and then the partisans’ screaming defenses and denunciations from Polish to German. The adversaries kept having to pause and wait for her translations, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been another matter of life and death. Later, she would hear the cries of the partisans being tortured in the cooperative’s basement—the ones, that is, who hadn’t been taken out and shot.

Laura had to believe that one day soon history would regard Leming and his kind as evil, as a once-in-the-history-of-the-world aberration, or else civilization itself surely would have to come to an end. In the meantime, while she appeared to be doing her part voluntarily to facilitate the punishment of the partisans, she took the extraordinary step of tipping them off to the Germans’ military movements she learned about in Leming’s office. The Polish Resistance was becoming more active and Laura wanted to do something to help. It was a terrible gamble for Laura, all the more so since many Poles around her in the cooperative had begun to suspect her of precisely the opposite sympathies, of collaborating.

News that she spoke excellent German had circulated quickly in Busko-Zdrój, and her Polish neighbors were beginning to talk, wondering whose side she was really on. Her neighbors began questioning her and, worse, six-year-old Zofia. Now not only did she live in constant fear of being exposed to the Germans as a Jew, but she was suspected by the Poles of being a German spy! Once, when Zofia visited her mother at work during lunchtime, two Polish women followed them to the outhouse and stood outside eavesdropping, hoping to hear pro-Nazi conversation—with her daughter? What were they thinking? When Laura provided them with no ammunition, she felt that her Polish colleagues began to trust her. Laura detected a more general shift in the sentiments of the local, mostly peasant Poles toward the Jews. With news of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and other acts of heroism, contempt for the Jews was now grudgingly mixed with admiration.

However, Zofia came home from school to tell her that her teacher was laughing at the futility of the uprising. Poor Zofia, Laura thought: she had no idea how many times her mother had gotten off the bus because she thought a man across the way suspected she was a Jew, or because a woman’s stare might mean that she knew her from Lvov or Kraków. Zofia didn’t know how often she had altered her route or slipped down an alley when she thought she was being followed. She wished she could share with Zofia her happiness when the Jewish fighting held the Germans off for a month in Warsaw.

Laura began to care more and more about their appearance, buying a secondhand coal-heated iron. If she couldn’t be the mother to Zofia she would have liked, she at least wanted her daughter to look her best. When a neighbor borrowed the iron and didn’t return it, she marched over to demand it back. When the neighbor told her that a German soldier had swiped it from her, Laura proceeded immediately to SS headquarters and insisted on getting it back, which she did. In a world ruled by atrocities, correcting even the smallest injustice helped keep you sane.

In case of emergency, Laura kept a green velvet bag with wooden handles by the front door. In it were money, clothes, their identification papers, a few family photographs that she’d sewn into the lining, a bit of flour, sausage, some hardboiled eggs, a bottle of vodka to use as barter, and a humble family heirloom, a hand-hammered silver soup spoon. Twice before, at the sound of approaching German planes flying to the Eastern Front, her mother had grabbed the bag and rushed with Zofia to their apartment building’s cellar in Busko-Zdrój.

By the fall of 1944, the tide had turned. Zofia’s mother had overheard at her job that the Nazis were going to go door to door the next day looking for Poles to conscript as laborers in a last desperate attempt to win the war, which was not going well for the Germans. The Germans would have been looking for Jews, had any been left in Busko-Zdrój. The Russians were pushing back into Poland, and Zofia had even seen a broken line of bandaged and limping German soldiers trudging westward, tunics unbuttoned, soles flapping, looking as bedraggled as Jews.

Before dawn, Laura, already holding the velvet bag, woke up Zofia and led her through the empty streets of Busko-Zdrój. In her pocket, Zofia squeezed Bear, the small Steiff she had not yet bothered to name, and carried Halinka under her arm. She followed her mother out of the dark town and into a field dotted with conical haystacks. They saw no one else in the field. Laura marched them to one in the farthest corner, near the woods. Using their hands and a pitchfork she found nearby, they worked on the side that faced the forest, the least likely side to be seen. Within minutes, they had scooped out a cave in the middle of the haystack, just big enough for them to sit in.

As Zofia watched the sunrise with both Halinka and Bear in her lap, she hoped her friends were safe, especially Wacka—it was pronounced Vatska—her good friend from school, whose father was a shoemaker with a shop on the town square, opposite the gift shop, where her mother had recently bought her the bear. It was Wacka’s father who made Zofia’s shoes, the lace-up boots and sandals that her mother made sure were at least two sizes too big so Zofia had plenty of time to grow into them. It was one of the things Zofia looked forward to, when the war was over, that her mother would buy her shoes that fit her now and not at some time far off in the future.

“We’ll be safe here,” Zofia whispered to her two little companions, stroking the big doll’s hair and rubbing her thumb nervously over the bear’s little face with its tiny glass eyes that had been sewn on unevenly.

“Are you two warm enough?” she whispered later that morning, pretending to offer Halinka and Bear bits of hardboiled egg. She sat Bear, who had jointed arms and legs, down between her legs. “Make sure you share with Halinka,” she warned him.

This was an adventure, a rare outing for her these past few months. The sun was shining and her mother was relaxed for once, since even she felt safe sitting inside a haystack in a field of identical haystacks. Overhead, black bombers rumbled west like a formation of gruesome geese.

“Zosia,” her mother said, “someday it will be like before.”

“Like before” meant nothing to Zofia. As far back as she could remember, she and her mother were poor Poles on the move. When Zofia tried to remember things, she couldn’t quite get past some invisible sentry who guarded the first four or five years of her life. A couple of memory fragments slipped through, like the wonderful smells in her grandmother’s kitchen, her father returning from work, and the memory of her great-grandfather lying dead on his bed, dressed in a black suit. She even dimly remembered that they had buried him the next morning, someone pushing a crude coffin through the streets in a wheelbarrow.

It was toward the end of the war, when Laura couldn’t have bought a good night’s sleep with a million zlotys, that an itinerant Catholic priest walked into Busko-Zdrój from who knows where and drew a crowd of faith-hungry Poles to a field outside of town. For reasons Laura herself barely understood, she stood in the chilly spring wind and listened to him.

She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. With his black moth-eaten cassock and sunken dark eyes, he looked as if he had experienced his own share of suffering. He stood in the pasture with his Bible open in one palm and his other hand pointing to the sky. He told the crowd that they would overcome their suffering with hope and prayer, that Jesus had not forgotten them, and that God would punish the evildoers, and so on and so forth. So where’s God been since 1939? she thought.

Laura almost never went to church on Sunday with Zofia and her class, and she couldn’t even remember a single Jewish prayer, but the man’s message struck some forgotten chord in her. When he finally closed the Bible and made some blessing motions and thanked everyone for coming, Laura was overcome with the desire to go right up to him and ask him to hear her confession.

“Prosze pani, I will gladly hear your confession,” the priest said, “but only in a church, if you would be so kind as to show me the way to your house of God.”

She led him back across the field to St. Leonard’s Church, which was empty. She sat in a pew and he took a seat in the row behind her.

“I haven’t said a word to anyone for so long, and although I know I am putting my life in your hands by telling you, Father, I feel I must. I’m not even sure why, but please have mercy on me.”

“Go ahead, my daughter,” came the voice right behind her.

She swallowed and said, “I’m Jewish.”

There was silence behind her, which she broke by explaining that she and her daughter had been living as Catholics since 1942. What am I doing? she thought. Am I sending the two of us to our deaths after all this? After coming so far? A word from this tattered priest to the Gestapo and that would be it.

Still, there was silence, and Laura’s stomach tightened terribly.

She finally heard the priest say in a low voice, “You should not fear anyone or anything except God. Fear God only and you will be helped and he will have mercy on you. Bless you, my daughter.”

The priest mumbled something in Latin and fell silent.

She waited, but the priest said no more. When she finally turned to look at him, he was no longer in the pew. She caught a glimpse of his long coat as he exited the church and turned. She stood up, amazed at what she had done and overcome with the unfamiliar feeling that there was a supernatural being looking out for her and Zofia. Before the war, she had been a nonbeliever, bound only by ethical principles. What sense did it make that only now, after God had abandoned the Jews, she should feel imbued with some fresh hope and renewed strength to survive? And yet she felt a presence.

She really didn’t know what to think. She had been the beneficiary of more than her share of sheer luck, but she didn’t believe she had been chosen. She didn’t believe she had earned it. She and Zofia had escaped deportation several times. Why? Because she was pretty? Because she spoke perfect German? Because her daughter was blond?

She had lived undetected among the Nazis. Why? Because she did the Polish officer and his family a favor? Because her landlady had given her a Christian prayer book and a good piece of advice?

During the bitterly cold winter of 1944 to 1945, some happiness arrived for both of them in the form of Laura’s much younger sister, Putzi, who had against all the odds managed to make her way to Busko in a horse-drawn cart to live with them. She had spent the past two years in Kraków, posing as a Catholic and working under the name Ksenia Osoba as a housekeeper for a German family. Putzi had left her job when her German employers had fled from the advancing Russians back to Germany. Laura introduced her to Zofia by her Catholic nickname, Nusia.

Putzi was shorter than Laura, with a round face and high forehead. It was hard to overestimate the joy Laura felt at this reunion, with her husband, parents, and brothers gone. And Zofia was delighted to have a companion in her twenties, almost as close in age to Zofia as she was to Laura. Where Zofia’s mother was so strict and tense—she was the oldest daughter in her family, after all—Putzi, the youngest, was theatrical and fun-loving. At times Putzi seemed more like a child even than Zofia. Her mere presence lit up their two-room apartment and brought out an expressive side of Zofia that her mother hadn’t seen in years.

Best of all, Putzi brought with her the most wonderful possession—a goose feather comforter. For Zofia, it was the epitome of luxury—soft, fluffy, warm, and white in a world of black boots, fear, and no chocolate—and it was to rest permanently on Zofia’s single bed, which she was to share with the aunt she knew only as Nusia. After just one night, though, Putzi complained to her sister right in front of Zofia that she kicked her legs in her sleep and kept her up all night.

Putzi said that she’d sleep on the floor.

“You will do no such thing, Nusia,” Laura said. To avoid any slips, of course, they addressed each other only by their adopted Christian names.

Listening, Zofia thought that her mother might as well have been Putzi’s mother too.

“But, Bronia,” Putzi said, using Laura’s Catholic nickname, “she kicks like a mule!”

Laura proposed they alternate, one week at a time.

“So instead of getting no sleep,” Putzi replied, “I’ll get half the sleep I need!”

They both laughed—Zofia couldn’t remember hearing her mother’s laughter, ever—and the two sisters hugged each other tightly.

“Now set the table, Nusia. I saved a chicken for you.”

“It’s a miracle I got here,” Putzi wrote her other older sister, Fryda, who was living in Germany, shortly after arriving. “I hope I will manage. I sang Christmas carols, and I just play with little Zosia and make her little things she loves for dinner. I got lucky I came here during the holidays, since everyone treats you with good food. Bronia cooked half a chicken. The little one received some toys and skates. She is a really sweet and good-natured child and very talkative. You cannot stop her! She engages everyone. It’s just that she coughs, the croup, though not to a great degree.”