The Children's War (12 page)

She was a remarkable woman, intelligent, well-read, and full of fascinating stories and insights. She had a wonderful collection of books, even some prewar tomes in English, and she let him borrow them and gave several to him as gifts. After he had worked his way through her personal library, she began to take books out of the town library for him to read. Their discussions ranged over a wide variety of topics from ancient history to personal anecdotes; they only avoided politics, recent history, and the exact details of his past. Over time, their friendship developed further and they began to confide more and more in each other.

“You know, there’s no one here I feel really comfortable talking to,” she said one day, waving her hand around her to indicate the residents of the apartment block. “You never know when someone has an ax to grind or something. You just can’t trust anyone.”

He nodded. It was a familiar theme, and he knew she was simply working up the courage to tell him something. He did not press; she would tell him if and when she felt ready.

She pulled out her cigarette case and offered him one. He accepted it, but put it in his pocket, saving it for later or as barter material.

Frau Reusch removed one for herself, lit it, and sat silently smoking for a moment.

“Peter”—she dropped her voice—“I never did tell you about my son.”

“No, you never did. What was his name?”

“Ernst. Just like his father. Maybe it was a bit silly of us, but we really wanted him to feel as though he belonged with us.”

“Was there any doubt?”

She set down her cigarette and sipped her tea. Suddenly, as if she had only just noticed it, she waved at the television and snapped, “Would you turn that damn thing off!”

He went over to the set and found the off switch; it was the first time he had been in the apartment while the television was off, and he found it extraordinarily quiet. She continued to sip her tea as he sat back down.

Another moment passed; she glanced at the mantel clock. It ticked loudly—
the only noise in the room. “We couldn’t have children. There is so much pressure to have children and we couldn’t produce even one! You can imagine what that is like.”

Actually in England it had been rather the reverse situation. When young couples generally set up house in a parents’ living room, it was not surprising that few thought about large broods of children. Life was so unpleasant and the future so bleak that most families were hard-pressed to want to produce even one child, and the paperwork needed for a birth permit was both cumbersome and expensive. It was debated whether there was a deliberate government policy to discourage the birth of English children, but whether or not there was, that was the overall effect. The English birthrate, already rather low, had fallen dramatically after the hostilities ceased and continued to decline, for in the long run, economic hardship won out over patriotic fervor. But these things did not seem appropriate to Frau Reusch’s story, so he simply nodded.

“So, we adopted a child. That is not all that easy, I’ll have you know, but Ernst was a veteran, decorated at that, and we had some friends in high places, and eventually a child was found for us. He was wonderful! He had the blondest hair and the most beautiful blue eyes. But that wasn’t why we loved him.” She paused, wrapped in memories.

“He came to us when he was two or so. A scared little boy; some terrible accident had taken his parents, or so we were told. He soon learned to call us Mom and Dad, and to answer to Ernst, and to treat this place as his home. He had a wonderful personality. So kind. So loving.

“The trouble started later, when he was about sixteen. Long before then, I began to have my doubts about where he had come from. After he first arrived, he had nightmares and would scream, ‘Don’t go, don’t go!’ and sometimes he asked us if we were going to go, or if we were going to be taken away.

“At first I tried to believe it was simply confusion on his part. That
going
meant ‘dying’ or something like that. But then I also heard stories, whispered tales, about how some children were stolen from their parents. Even so, I thought, if his parents were arrested or guilty of some crime, perhaps it was better for a little boy to be raised by a good family, people who would take care of him, people who would provide him with opportunities, people who would care about him.

“I figured, if the official story wasn’t true—and I had, have, no idea whether or not it is—well, if it wasn’t true, then perhaps I had saved him from some terrible life with drug addicts or criminals.”

The words had come out in a rush, but suddenly she stopped and stared absently out the window. Her fingers brushed against her lips as though trying to coax words from them. Peter waited silently, remembering a quote from Himmler he had once read:
We must not endow these people with decent German thoughts and logical conclusions of which they are not capable, but we must take them as they really are . . . I think it is our duty to take their children with us. . . . We
either win over the good blood we can use for ourselves . . . or else we destroy that blood.

Frau Reusch picked her cigarette back up, smoked silently for a moment, then stubbed it out with single-minded intensity. When she was satisfied that every spark had been extinguished, she spoke.

“So I left it at that. Eventually, it was necessary to tell him that he had been adopted. I didn’t want him to find out accidentally, some other way. You know people, they do talk! So, when he was fifteen, I told him. At first there wasn’t any problem. He said that we were his parents and that was that. But a year later, he began to ask questions. He wanted to know more about his birth parents. Where did he come from? What had happened to them? What had they named him?

“Well, although I had no official information, I was able to answer one question. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But I did. I told him that he used to answer, when asked, that his name was Jan, and that he used to say some words that I simply did not recognize. I don’t know, they could have been anything. You know how hard it is to understand children, and at the time I didn’t want to hear anything other than German. I know Jan is a Dutch name, and I think it is Czech or Polish as well. But I wanted him to be like us, so I told myself that he was German and his name had been Johann. I even thought we should use that name, but Ernst argued that it would confuse the boy to be renamed yet again.”

She sighed, refilled the teacups, and offered him more cake.

“Did he hear the same rumors that you had, about adopted children?” Peter inquired gently.

“Oh, yes, and more. He heard that sometimes children were simply taken for no reason at all. That they were taken from perfectly good, perfectly loving families. He heard that villages were sometimes destroyed in retaliation for terrorist acts, that the adults were sent to their deaths in concentration camps, and that the children, especially the ones with Aryan features, were given to good German families for adoption.

“I don’t know where he got such stories, maybe from some cleaning lady at school—those Slavs, they will tell such tales! But I couldn’t tell him whether or not they were true.” She turned away from him to look out the window and began to sob. “God knows, I had no intention of stealing somebody’s baby!”

No, he thought, but you did accept a nameless child without a history, and you carefully avoided asking the right questions.

She seemed to sense his unease. “You must think I’m a monster. But honestly, at the time, I had never heard of such a thing. I never suspected! I still don’t know for sure. All I knew at the time was I wanted a child, and there was a little boy who needed me.”

She looked at him, her eyes begging him for forgiveness. “We were good to him, we loved him. We really did.”

“I know you did. You did what you thought was right—you can’t ask more
than that of yourself,” he said, trying to console her, but his words felt empty. It wasn’t his place to offer forgiveness.

“Well, Ernst, our son, wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know for sure. Of course, there was no hope of an official response. He tried and tried. We tried to help. Pulled strings, asked friends. Eventually it was clear that we were annoying people and that if we kept pressing for information, there could be trouble. So we tried to talk him out of finding out anything, but he became obsessed.”

“A past is a precious thing,” Peter offered obscurely.

Frau Reusch studied him for a moment, a question on her lips, but then she decided better of it and continued with her story. “It occupied all his free time. He took trips, tried to track sources, tried to find any scrap of information. Eventually—he was twenty already, my how the time went by—eventually, he tried to break into a registry office. He was shot dead as an intruder.”

Frau Reusch stopped, a hard look in her eyes. “I sometimes wonder . . .”

He did not get to find out what she was wondering, for at that moment Herr Reusch returned from his after-dinner stroll and they returned to the shop to reopen it for the afternoon. He thought about Frau Reusch and her son throughout the afternoon, but he could not conceive of any consolation he could offer her nor could he work out the implications of her revelations for himself. No wonder they were so unusually kind to him, he was taking the dead boy’s place! It should have made him feel more secure, but instead he felt uneasy. He knew intuitively that their loyalty to him was a figment of their needs and that they would abandon him to his fate as soon as he became a liability. The question that remained unanswered was, Did that really matter?

14

“P
USH!”
ADAM
NEARLY SCREAMED
in her ear.
“Push!”

“I have an idea,” Zosia said dryly between gasps.“How about one of you people-push for a little while and I’ll just take a break?”

No one laughed. They all seemed so serious! Here she was, the one who was in pain, sweating, gasping, and groaning; straining with all her might to push that little head out of her body, and they were so serious they could not even laugh at her little joke. She felt like berating them, but then she felt another wave of pain and someone stupidly yelled in her ear to push again.

She tried again to no avail, then she heard Marysia whisper soothingly in her ear that she should simply rest for a few moments. “Gather your strength and ignore the contractions,” she said softly.

Zosia looked up into her mother-in-law’s round, dark eyes, looked at the lines on her face and the silver sprinkled throughout her black hair, and she felt
comforted. If Adam’s mother said everything was okay, then it was all okay. Her own mother flapped her arms in a near frenzy in the background. Judging from her nervous antics, one would never guess that she herself had borne six children, but that was typical of Anna—if it had anything to do with her children, she fretted extravagantly, perhaps making up for her husband’s famed British reserve.

Zosia turned her thoughts to her father and wondered if his dispassion was genuine or a calculated exhibition of his determinedly English character. “Anything to stay above the fray,” her father would say, as if simply existing among so many “foreigners” was an accomplishment he could be congratulated for or as if emotion were something that could be caught from them, like a disease.

“Okay, now,” counseled Marysia.

Zosia threw her will into pushing, and slowly the recalcitrant head of her child emerged. She felt the sudden easing of pressure, telling her that she had succeeded, and she gasped for breath.

“Marvelous!” Adam praised. “You’re doing great!”

Adam held Zosia up and she peeked at the head nestled between her legs.

“The rest will be easy,” Marysia assured her, and indeed it was.

Only a moment later, Adam held their daughter while Marysia gently washed away the birth debris and cut the cord. The little girl squeaked and gasped and finally wheezed her way into a full-bodied cry. As Marysia cleaned the child, Adam regarded her adoringly and Anna fussed over her, stroking her hands and touching her feet. No one seemed to notice that Zosia lay exhausted on her pillow regarding the four of them as though from a distance.

“Do you have a name for her?” Marysia asked, stroking the infant’s face with her finger.

“Joanna,” Adam answered proudly. “After Grandmother.”

They continued to admire and fuss over the infant, each taking a turn at holding her until finally Zosia panted, “May I hold her?”

They all looked up at her as if surprised. “But of course!” Marysia said, and placed the baby on Zosia’s breast.

Adam grinned at Zosia. “Since you got her, I’ll go have a cigarette. I’ve been dying to have one. I’m beat from all that!”

Zosia, Marysia, and Anna all burst out laughing, but Adam was already gone. “Shall I try and feed her?” Zosia asked.

“You can try,” Marysia said, “but I doubt she’ll be ready to eat.”

Zosia held the baby to her breast and crooned over her little miracle of creation whilst Marysia and Anna began cleaning up. Another series of contractions began about the time Adam returned, and he took Joanna into his arms as the placenta was delivered.

Marysia and Anna were still busy making Zosia and the room presentable when her first visitor arrived. “Is anyone home?” Alex asked in his peculiar accent as he tapped lightly on the doorjamb.

“Dad!” Zosia exclaimed.

Alex grinned benevolently at his youngest daughter. He was a stocky man with hair that had gone completely and somewhat prematurely gray. “Silver” he called it with his usual authoritative and all-knowing manner. “So, where’s my grandchild?” Alex asked as he bustled over to Joanna. “Can this little bundle possibly be her? My goodness, what a little cabbage!” he said as he whisked her into his arms. He stroked the tiny fingers and asked, “So, how did it go, sweetheart?”

“Whew!” Zosia sighed. “I think I’ll revise the number of kids I’ll have downward a bit.”

“Oh, that wasn’t so bad!” Adam assured her breezily.

“How would you know?” Alex asked pointedly.

“I think I’ll go have another smoke,” Adam said by way of an answer, and left the room.

“Dad!” Zosia pretended to chide.

“He doesn’t appreciate you,” Alex grumbled.

Zosia glanced guiltily toward Marysia and said, “Well, he was worth marrying just to have Marysia and Cyprian as my in-laws!”

Alex looked back at Marysia and smiled his agreement. “Yes, your mother and I are glad, too. All the more so now.”

“Now? Why now?” Zosia asked, suddenly suspicious.

“Alex!” Anna hissed. “This is hardly the time!”

“What, what’s going on?” Zosia asked, looking from one to the other.

“It’s not bad news, don’t worry,” Alex explained. “We’re just getting transferred. We asked for it, and it’s come through.”

“You want to leave?” Zosia asked, incensed.“You asked for it? You didn’t tell me!”

“Calm down, little one. You know your brother’s been transferred to Göringstadt.”

“Yes, quite a coup for him.”

“Well, we’ve decided to go there as well and help out. He’s been having a very hard time of it, and with yet another baby due . . . Anyway, they can use the help, and besides, it will be a move up for both me and your mother.”

“Mother?”

“I’ve been elected to join the Warszawa Council once I’m there,” Anna replied.

Zosia raised her eyebrows in surprise and wondered if either her brother or her father had something to do with that.

“Yes, and I’ve been put forward as a candidate for the government-in-exile. I need to be up there to coordinate my campaign and to get to know the leadership a bit better.”

“You!” Zosia exclaimed.

“I can’t imagine why they want me. I guess they think my English fluency is a boon.” Alex had grown up in England and had only learned Polish when he was deported back to his father’s homeland by the new Nazi government.

“Oh, don’t be modest,” Marysia chided. “Everybody knows you’re a natural for politics.”

“Maybe. Anyway, there’s no rush. We won’t be leaving for some time, but once we’re gone, Marysia and Cyprian have promised to take care of you, so you won’t be alone.”

Zosia was hardly a child, but at the moment she did not feel like pointing that out to her father; instead she reminded him, “I’ll have Adam, too.”

“Ah, yes, your husband, too,” Alex conceded.

Zosia furrowed her brow, then asked, “If you’re leaving, Dad, there will be an empty seat on the Council here, won’t there?”

Alex smiled at his daughter. “Yes, good thinking. I’ll talk to Katerina and see what we can do for you.” Katerina chaired the Council and was, by virtue of her position, her vast experience, and most of all her unyielding personality, a woman of considerable influence.

“Won’t it seem a little stacked if you, Adam, and my mother all have Council seats?” Julia asked from the doorway.

“Julia! Look at my little girl!” Zosia enthused. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

Julia came into the room, greeted everyone with kisses, and then taking the baby into her arms, declared, “A niece! I’ve waited so long for a little girl in this family!”

“Just like I’ve waited for a son-in-law,” Marysia commented somewhat sourly, having noted the smell of alcohol that accompanied her daughter into the room.

Julia shot her a contemptuous look and said, “When one is deserving of me.”

“Olek—” Marysia began.

“Has turned out to be a fine lad,” Zosia interjected. “And I’m sure he’ll welcome his little cousin with open arms.”

“Indeed he will,” Julia agreed. She turned her attention back to the baby and cooed at her. “She’s beautiful, Zosiu. Absolutely marvelous! Congratulations to both of you. How do you feel? How did it go?”

The others drifted out as Julia and Zosia chatted. Adam joined them after a time, and then their mutual friend Tadek stopped by. Tadek was a tall, lank man with dark brown hair and icy gray eyes. Only six years prior, he had joined their group from the outside as a rather unusual recruit, having first attempted suicide by walking, unescorted and uninvited, directly into the no-man’s-zone that surrounded their mountainous retreat. Zosia had been out and about that day and had decided to disobey orders and bring the interloper in alive. They learned he had just lost his wife to a street roundup, that she had been put in an SS brothel, and that he had, in desperation, sought them out to gain their help in rescuing her. Of course, they did no such thing—with all the criminal depravity that was perpetrated in the name of the Reich, they could not afford the resources to single out and save one lone woman from a life of sexual slavery.

Despite that, Tadek offered them his services and was accepted into their ranks. He moved up rapidly in the hierarchy and was valued for his cool analyticity
and his ability to make decisions unemotionally. Only once had he screwed up, in an unapproved and bungled attempt to rescue his wife. It had cost a number of his comrades their lives, and only with great difficulty had he come to terms with that failure. Since then he had been exemplary in obeying the rules, and since then it was said that the only thing that could rile his temper was the irrationality of his fellow conspirators and their willingness to take useless risks.

Tadek greeted both Julia and Zosia with a kiss on the lips.

Adam cleared his throat. “Ahem. If I might remind my dear comrade,” he joked, “the lady is now a married woman.” He tapped his cheek to indicate where Tadek should have planted the kiss for Zosia.

“Sorry,” Tadek responded, and he bent down to Zosia and kissed first the left cheek, then the right, then the left again. He held the last kiss, running his tongue over her skin and creeping upward in a line of little kisses to nuzzle her ear. Zosia giggled in response, and Julia giggled as she saw Adam turn bright red.

“Is that better?” Tadek asked his friend. He did not wait for an answer, instead turning his attention to the newborn. He cooed and fussed over the sleeping baby now in Julia’s arms, and they discussed the birth and Joanna’s future and then news and local gossip, and at length, the conversation turned to Julia’s work.

“It has just gotten to be too much,” Julia conceded after she had described her efforts in Berlin several months earlier. She did not look up as she spoke; rather, she stared entranced at the infant, stroking her nose repeatedly as if to invoke magic.

“But it all went well?” Zosia asked. “Didn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. Every time it goes well until it doesn’t; then you’re dead, end of story. I’m tired of it.”

“We all have to die sooner or later,” Adam commented. “No one gets out of this life alive.”

“Well, I’d rather not die sooner.”

“Don’t you want to contribute anything? Do you just want to retire?” Adam asked pointedly.

“I
have
contributed!” Julia snapped.

“So did you talk with the Council?” Zosia asked before Adam and Julia started sniping at each other.