The Girl from Krakow (14 page)

Rita was mortified. “Freddy, I am so sorry
 
.
 
.
 
.”

Kaltenbrunner waved her apology away. “I only know because you put them back in the wrong order.
On the Origin of Species
always goes on the bottom.” Rita looked at him quizzically. Again he seemed to read her mind. “No, I’m not superstitious
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
that just brings bad luck.” He smiled, and this time both Rita and Erich laughed out loud. Now Kaltenbrunner became serious. “
The Origin
on the bottom because it’s the foundation. You have to read it first. Holds the explanation of the world, makes sense of everything, even the fate of the Jews.”

“But you can’t buy that stuff. Darwin is what the Nazis believe.” There was heat in Erich’s voice.

“Yes, and they also believe the earth is round. Does that make it false? Anyway, Nazis don’t understand Darwin at all.”

“You do?” Erich was still contemptuous.

“I’ve spent the last forty years on the subject, written a few books, corresponded with the leading evolutionists
 
.
 
.
 
.” He paused to gauge the effect on Klein, who did not reply.

Here Rita intervened. “So, how does Darwin explain the world, never mind the fate of the Jews?”

Erich joined in. “Then you can get on to how the Germans get him wrong.”

“That’s easy
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
What Darwin discovered was the completely mindless, mechanical process that, repeated a million times, produced life, then human life, thought, language, everything people used to think needed a God to design and create. What looks like purpose, meaning, means and ends—it’s all just blind variation and an environment passively filtering out the losers in the latest heat of a race that never ends.”

It was now dark in the room. “We don’t need another argument for atheism, Freddy. We have enough already. Just look around,” Erich said.

“So, where did the Nazis get Darwin wrong?” Rita’s question was earnest.

“They got almost everything Darwin taught wrong. To begin with, evolution has no room for higher purpose, still less, Nazism as fulfilling one. And there is no such thing as a master race. There are just temporary local winners and losers. The Third Reich is the transitory outcome of a vast process heading nowhere. Today’s winners are sure to be tomorrow’s losers when environments change. Think of the dinosaurs.”

Rita’s laugh was grim. “How many millions of years were dinosaurs around? Hitler’s thousand-year Reich might as well be a million years as far as you and I are concerned. Anyway, how does your Darwin make sense of the fate of the Jew?”

Erich was silent. He knew that the Reich could not last more than a few years more, but why that was was too dangerous to reveal, even to his fellow inmates condemned to death.

Kaltenbrunner replied, “I’ll tell you some night
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
when you’re ready to listen.”

The next morning Rita began reading
On the Origin of Species
. When she finished a week later, she turned back to the first page and started to read it again.

A few minutes after ten o’clock on a gray morning a week later, Erich burst through the door. “Grab your coat; let’s go.” He swept Stefan off the floor too quickly for the boy to grab his stuffed dog. Erich’s urgency brooked no hesitation. Rita pulled on her coat and followed him down the stairs. Erich turned at the bottom and made for the back door that led to the outhouse and the ghetto wall. Three boards were akimbo. Still carrying Stefan, he pushed Rita through them. Straightening the slats, he yanked Rita’s yellow star armband off, took the arm, and began walking down the street directly away from the ghetto wall. At the end of the first block, he finally spoke. “We’re just a nice Aryan family out for a stroll.” Then she became aware of the noise rising from behind the receding wall.

Erich spoke under his breath. “Ghetto clearing
Aktion.
Just keep walking. You’re not involved. You don’t hear anything.”

“What if we’re caught out here without the armbands?”

“Stay inside today, and you’re certain to be ‘caught.’ There is a double-reinforced German
Polizei
unit in there, along with the Ukrainians and the
Jupo
thugs, taking everyone without a work permit to
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
to wherever they have been taking them.”

“Where are we going, then? We can’t walk around outside all day.”

“We’re going to visit family friends, my dear.” He patted her arm. Raising Stefan to ride on his shoulders, Erich led them through the town square, where a desultory farmers’ market was in progress. Then they turned down the tramway toward the factory district.

The streets were deserted, sinister, bathed in gray halftones. Dazed, Rita asked, almost to herself, “Couldn’t we just keep walking right out of town?”

Erich’s reply brought her back. “To where would we just walk, without papers or money? We’re a hundred fifty kilometers from the nearest city large enough to hide in, and even there we probably wouldn’t last a week.”

Twenty minutes later they walked past a large building with a peeling sign,
Terakowski Ready-to-Wear,
and came to a high wall with a gate. Turning in at the entrance, they saw a large villa. Rita felt the immediate relief of no longer being exposed on the street. They came up to the stairs to the entry. Erich dismounted Stefan from his shoulders and rang the bell.

An elderly woman invited them in. With some formality, Erich spoke. “
Pani
Terakowski, permit me to introduce
Pani
Doctor Guildenstern and”—here he turned to the boy—“Stefan.” Turning to Rita he explained, “The Terakowskis own the factory.
Pani
Terakowski’s daughter is in charge, now that her father is
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
gone.”

“So pleased to meet you, my dear.” The elderly woman led them to a sitting room. “May I offer you some tea?” Every seat seemed covered by antimacassars. The lady herself looked out of the last century: her posture was upright, gray hair swept to wide flat promontory above her forehead, held at the back by a pearl comb. Her black dress swished across the floor, lifting the fringe from the carpet as she moved across the room to a bellpull by the fireplace.

Rita found herself on another planet. “Very pleased to meet you. Yes, tea would be lovely.” Lovely? Heavenly! Then she thought,
The ghetto is being brutalized, and I am sitting here preparing to balance a teacup on my lap?

As she sat, Stefan came over to her and whispered.

“Excuse me,” Rita said, embarrassed. “The child needs the toilet.”

“How silly of me.”
Pani
Terakowski put her at ease. “Yes, you both need to freshen up. It’s just at the top of the stairs.” Rita looked beyond the open double doors to the foyer. Up the stairs? She had nearly forgotten about indoor plumbing. By the time she returned, a servant girl was setting out the tea.

After a half hour of inconsequential conversation, a younger woman entered, brightened as she saw Erich, kissed him on both cheeks as though he were family, and introduced herself. “I’m Lydia. Excuse me, Erich, we need you on the shop floor.” Evidently he was more than a bookkeeper. She turned to Rita. “Would you care to come too?” Rita caught the hint of something more than an invitation in her voice.

“Of course.” She took Stefan by the hand and followed.

They went through the kitchen and out the back door to a cobblestoned alley separating the residence from a complex of storage sheds and factory buildings. Inside the largest of these buildings, a short flight of stairs led to an office with a large window overlooking the shop floor. Holding Stefan’s hand Rita struggled to keep up with Lydia and Erich as they mounted the stair. There she turned to observe the factory floor itself through the window.

The workbenches were covered with field-gray German military coats, interspersed with sewing machines, large boxes of metal buttons, and bags from which cloth military insignia were spread out across the tables. The workers—men and women, some very young—were not at the benches. They were gathered in small groups, some sobbing, others rending their clothes. A dozen were shrieking as others sought to calm them. A few were at the doors of the building, physically being prevented from leaving by their coworkers.

Erich looked at Lydia, who began, “People have been coming in all morning, with more and more horrible stories.”

“I see.” He nodded, turned, and went down to the shop floor.

Looking down through the office windows, they could see him moving toward the other end of the building, where the largest group of workers was gathered. Rita could not hear what he was saying, but whatever it was, after a few minutes, his words seemed to be having an effect. Some went back to their workbenches; others began again to shift stock from place to place. A forlorn few remained where they had been.

Erich returned to the office.

“What did you tell them?” Rita asked.

“Most of them left kids in the ghetto this morning. I told them that we’d gotten word back, and the children had been hidden. Then I told them we had a quota to maintain, and lives depended on it.” Erich sat down at a desk and pulled a ledger toward him. Then he dropped a piece of paper and three colored pencils to Stefan, who began entertaining himself on the floor. Lydia too busied herself with correspondence. Left alone, Rita walked down the steps and moved along the shop floor. She could see that at least some of what was being done did not require any skill and it would occupy her mind. She found a space at one of the workbenches and began sorting buttons.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
hat night after curfew, they slipped back into the ghetto the way they had come. Upstairs in their room, they found Kaltenbrunner, trembling. They said nothing. Kaltenbrunner couldn’t deal with the silence.

“You don’t want to hear? Look out the window tomorrow morning. The bodies will still be there. They must have beaten a few thousand out of the ghetto by the afternoon. Anyone who didn’t jump was shot, anyone who fell out of line was shot, anyone carrying anything was shot, until the
Feldwebel
told the goons to stop. Killing too many was going to prevent them from meeting their quota at the railroad sidings, he said.”

“You heard this?”

“And saw it. Through a cellar window, where I was hiding, with about fifty children. It will be worse tomorrow or the next time when they realize they didn’t get many of the kids.”

“Tomorrow they are going to clear ghetto B,” Erich observed quietly.

“How do you get this stuff?” Rita wasn’t so much asking as expressing wonderment.

“Don’t ask.” He thought better of his answer. “Mainly through Lydia. There are always leaks.”

The Germans were as good as Erich’s word. The next day they burned the smaller ghetto, along with all those still hiding in it, to the ground. It was the first time Rita experienced the smell, first of burning human hair, then flesh, and finally organs. The acrid smell gave way to a distinctive roasting odor, which turned treacle-sweet and then hung in the air like smolder-smoke. The only way to rid oneself of the smell was to sit in the outhouse. Even that did not work for more than a few minutes. Why did her child have to live through this?

The smoke cleared, but the smell never left her.

That night Erich and Rita lay together, for warmth and humanity. Erich began to whisper. “They’ll be back for the children soon.” He fell silent, gathering his courage for a moment. Then he began again. “I think we can save Stefan.” Rita didn’t reply, so he outlined a plan. The last letter from Rita’s parents in Gorlice reported the continuation of relatively good conditions there. Lydia could locate a Polish woman to bring Stefan to them. “He’ll be safe, and then we can get you a work permit from the Terakowski works.”

“No. I can’t do it.”

From the darkness they heard Kaltenbrunner, who had been listening. “You have to, Rita.” He spoke between clenched teeth. “You must. Ever hear of the
Kindertransport
?” Silence from Rita. He continued, “In ’39, everyone knew there would be war. The Brits organized ten thousand visas for German children. People took their kids to the
Bahnhöfen—
the railway stations—packed and labeled, certain to be safe and sound. At the last minute, dozens of mothers snatched their children from the train and ran home. Every one of those kids is dead today.”

Rita was not going to argue. There would be no point to life without the child. Literally, nothing to organize her continued existence around. No reason to take another breath.

Rita thought the matter had dropped. In fact, she had become a creature to be manipulated by two men who knew better than a woman. There was little time to lose. Freddy began by finding her parents’ address among her things. Within three days Lydia Terakowski had located someone—a Polish Home Army courier—who traveled between Galicia and the Tarnow region, where her parents lived. Then they sought the right time one evening to broach the matter with Rita.

Erich produced a Terakowski work permit with Rita’s name on it.

“Rita, this will enable you to get out mornings and avoid the next ghetto clearance.”

She looked at the form. “But what about Stefan? I can’t take him to the factory.”

Quietly, firmly, Freddy replied, “You must send him to your parents. It’s his only chance to survive.”

“I told you. I can’t do that to my own child. I’d rather die.”

Exasperation tinged Erich’s voice now. “You’d rather both of you die than neither?” He could not control himself. “What kind of a mother are you?”

Freddy spoke. “People have to survive this war. You, your son, someone. Erich and I probably won’t make it. Maybe you won’t either. But you don’t have the right to help them kill off more of us than they can. Someone’s got to tell the world, to bear witness, to see that the guilty are punished.”

Rita gathered her wits to reply. “Bear witness to their crimes before the bar of history?” She spat out her rejection. “That’s not a reason to live. In a hundred years’ time, Hitler will be remembered the way we think of Napoleon. In a thousand years, he’ll be another Alexander the Great, saving civilization from the Bolshevik hordes the way Alexander saved Greece from the Persians!” She paused, troubled by the thought. “You’re right; I don’t have the right to help them kill. But my emotions are real, and they are screaming that I cannot send the boy away.”

It was Kaltenbrunner who finally broke through. “Yes, your emotions are screaming at you. But your emotions have no foresight. They can’t look ahead. They only look back to what enabled your ancestors to survive. If you allow them to overmaster you in the life-or-death choice you face, you’ll regret it in a future that your emotions cannot see.”

Rita was listening. But she was also doing something else. She was making herself give up Stefan. She was creating the emotion of loss, grief, horror, torture that she would experience when a German or a Ukrainian, or even a
Jupo,
tore Stefan from her and did something so despicable to his body she could not bring words to it, even as the images moved across her thoughts. She was inwardly watching a man push Stefan’s body off his bayonet with a jackboot and then clean the gore from his shoe, drawing the heel across a curbstone as if befouled by a dog. She made herself watch invisibly while Stefan danced, begging for a crust, in a group of children. In her imagination they were picked off one by one, so many clay targets moving across a carnival shooting game. Finally she pictured Stefan in a soldier’s grasp, held tight by his arm until the soldier opened his grip, letting the small body fly into the brick wall. The emotion she produced flooded away the pain she felt at the thought of sending him away.

“Very well.”

Erich began quietly. “We don’t have much time. Tomorrow they’ll sweep through ghetto C. Then early next week, it will be our turn again.” She nodded. “You must have him ready to leave tomorrow afternoon. Lydia’s contact might be ready to go that soon.”

In fact, it was late in the afternoon two days afterward that Erich slipped back into the ghetto through the fence and led Rita, holding Stefan close, out into the street on the other side of the wall. The contact Lydia had found was a very tall, straight-backed woman, in a long coat and cloche hat with a Robin Hood feather, and a face half covered by a net veil—rather chic. The veil’s fine black tracery of lines and nodes ended just above her mouth, which had a slight but pronounced tilt to the right. Was it a stroke, or more likely a birth injury, the last mark of a difficult forceps delivery? The doctor’s wife in Rita wondered. Then, as she passed Stefan to the woman’s arms, she noticed the finely manicured varnish of the nails on her fingers. The woman put Stefan gently on the pavement. Rita proffered a small bag, but the woman refused it. “We two cannot look like we are going away for any length of time.”

“I see. You have done this before?” The woman nodded. Rita looked at her closely, trying to memorize the face. She needed to know this person. The veil made it hard. “Can you tell me your name?”

“I am sorry. I can’t risk it. I am Home Army.” It was the indigenous Polish resistance. “Mainly I am a courier. There is a unit in Nowy Sacz. They’ll get the boy to his grandparents in Gorlice. I have learned the address by heart.” She looked down the alley both ways. She pulled a small piece of hard candy from her pocket. “Here, Stefan, now kiss Mommy, and we’ll go for a walk.”

Erich was standing aside, feeling that he should do something. “Rita,” he whispered, “what about his stuffed dog? At least he can take that.”

She shook her head. “I have to keep something of him.” She waited till Stefan turned the corner before beginning to sob.

The next morning was a Saturday. For Rita, now living on time paid for by forced labor, it was a workday. Up in the dark, she followed Erich out the ghetto gate, showing her pass with studied boredom, keeping a few paces behind, expressing no wonder at the open streets beyond the gate. Despite the gloom and the cold, the walk to the Terakowski works felt almost like freedom.

After a very hot, thin tea and a piece of rye-and-sawdust bread with more margarine than she had seen in a month, Rita was assigned to buttonhole making. This was a process done by hand that required good eyes and consistent stitching, but had little risk of ruining a greatcoat. She sat at the bench working steadily all day and the next, willing herself not to go up to the office each time she saw Lydia come in. Since there was nothing she could do anymore for her child, knowing his fate wouldn’t make a difference. Besides, not knowing, she could enjoy imagining Stefan in his grandmother’s lap, cosseted and fed, clean and warm.

By Tuesday Rita had played this trick on herself so often it was no longer distracting her. She was at work on the buttons of a
feldgrau
greatcoat when Erich came over and sat down. “We just heard. The woman, the courier, was taken by the Gestapo.” She gasped. He put a powerful hand around her wrist and forced her to respond to the pain before she could cry out. “They don’t know when or where exactly. She was carrying Home Army documents. They don’t have any idea whether she had already delivered Stefan safely or not.”