The Kommandant's Girl (3 page)

F
rom the foot of the bridge, I walked a few hundred meters along the granite wall of the ghetto. The top edge of the wall had been sculpted into arcs, each about two feet wide. Like tombstones, I thought, my stomach twisting. When I reached the entrance, an iron gate, I paused, inhaling deeply before approaching the Nazi guard. “Name?” he asked, before I could speak.

“I—I…” I stammered.

The guard looked up from his clipboard. “Name!” he barked.

“Gershmann, Emma,” I managed to say.

The guard scanned his list. “Not here.”

“No, but I think my parents are, Chaim and Reisa Gershmann.”

He looked again, turned to another page. “Yes. Twenty-one Limanowa Street, apartment six.”

“Then I want to be with them.” A look of surprise flashed across his face and he opened his mouth. He’s going to tell me I cannot come inside, I thought. For a moment, I felt almost relieved. But then, seeming to think better of it, the guard wrote my name beside my parents’ on the list and moved aside to let me enter. I hesitated, looking down the street in both directions before stepping into the ghetto. The gate slammed shut behind me.

Inside, a wall of human stench assaulted me and I had to fight the urge not to gag. Trying to take only shallow breaths through my mouth, I asked directions from a man, who pointed me toward Limanowa Street. As I made my way through the ghetto, I tried not to look at the gaunt, bedraggled passersby who stared at me, a new arrival, with unabashed curiosity. I turned onto Limanowa Street, stopping before the address the guard had given me. The building looked as though it had already been condemned. I opened the front door and climbed the stairs. When I reached the top floor, I hesitated, wiping my sweaty palms on my skirt. Through the rotting wood door of one of the apartments I could hear my mother’s voice. Tears sprang to my eyes. Until now, I hadn’t wanted to believe they were really here. I took a deep breath and knocked.
“Nu?”
I heard my father call. His footsteps grew louder, then the door opened. At the sight of me, his eyes grew wide. “Emmala!” he cried, throwing his enormous arms around me and hugging me so hard I thought we would both fall over.

Behind him, my mother clutched her apron, her eyes dark. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. When my father finally released me, she pulled me into the apartment.

Looking around, I shuddered inwardly: did they really live here? Small and dark and smelling dankly of mold, the single room with its lone cracked window made our modest Kazimierz apartment look like a palace in comparison. I could tell that my mother had tried to make the place habitable, fashioning pale yellow curtains to hang over the cloudy, cracked window and hanging sheets to divide the room into two parts, a makeshift bedroom and a tiny communal living area, barely big enough to hold three chairs and a small table. But it was still horrible.

“I came back to stay with you, but you were gone.” I could hear the accusing tone in my own voice: why hadn’t you told me where you had gone, or at least left a note?

“They gave us thirty minutes to leave,” my father said, pulling out two chairs for me and my mother to sit on. “There was no time to get word to you. Where’s Jacob?”

“His work,” I said simply. They nodded in unison, unsurprised. They were well aware of Jacob’s political activities. Aside from the fact that he was not Orthodox, it was the one thing they did not like about him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” my father fretted, pacing the floor. “We are older people. Probably no one will bother us. But it is the young people…” He did not have to finish the sentence. The young people were the ones being deported from Kraków. Those who received deportation orders in the ghetto were trapped, unable to run.

“I had nowhere else to go,” I replied.

“Well,” my mother said, taking my hand, “at least we are all together. Let’s get you settled.”

The next morning, I reported to the Jewish Administration Building to register with the Judenrat, the group of ghetto inhabitants designated by the Nazis to run the internal affairs of the ghetto. I was assigned to work in the ghetto orphanage. My parents had already received work assignments, and by some luck, they had also been given reasonable jobs, my father to the communal ghetto kitchen, where he could once again bake, my mother to the infirmary as a nurse’s aide. We had all managed to escape the dreaded work details, where Jews were forced to perform heavy manual labor outside the ghetto walls under the eyes of brutal Nazi guards.

I began working that afternoon. The orphanage was a small, two-story facility that the Judenrat had established on Josefinska Street. The inside was dark and overcrowded, but a tiny grass enclosure behind the nursery gave the children, mostly toddlers, a place to play. It housed about thirty children, virtually all of whom had lost their parents since the start of the war. I enjoyed watching them. Aside from being woefully thin from the meager ghetto rations, they were still children, oblivious to the war, their abysmal surroundings and the dire situation of having no parents to care for them in an uncaring world.

Yet despite the small amount of pleasure I took in my job, I thought constantly of Jacob. Surrounded by children, I was often reminded of the family we might have started by then, if not for the war. At night I played back our moments together in my head, our courtship, our wedding, and after. The nights had been few and dear enough that I could remember every single one. Staring up at the low ceiling of our apartment, I thought guiltily, defiantly, of sex, of the silent, unexpected joys that Jacob had fleetingly taught me. Where was Jacob? I worried each night as I lay in bed, and whom he was with? There must be girls in the resistance, yet Jacob had not asked me to join him. I wondered with shame not if Jacob was hurt or warm enough, but whether he was faithful, or if some braver, bolder woman had stolen his heart.

I was lonely not just for Jacob but for other company, too. My parents, overwhelmed by the twelve-hour work shifts spent almost entirely on their feet, had little energy to do more than eat their rations and crawl into bed at day’s end. The ghetto had taken a tremendous toll on both of my parents in the short time they had been there; it was as if they had aged overnight. My father, once hearty and strong, seemed to move with great effort. My mother moved more slowly, too, dark circles ringing her eyes. Her rich, chestnut mane of hair was now brittle and streaked with gray. I knew that she slept little. Some nights, as I lay in bed, I could hear her muffled sobs through the curtain that separated our sleep quarters. “Reisa, Reisa,” my father repeated, trying unsuccessfully to reassure her. Her cries unsettled me. My mother had grown up in the small village of Przemysl in a region to the east known as the Pale, which had been under Russian control prior to the Great War and was subject to intense, sudden outbursts of violence against its Jewish inhabitants. She had seen houses burned, livestock taken, had witnessed the murder of those who offered a hint of resistance. It was the violence of the pogroms that had caused her to flee west to Kraków, after her parents had succumbed to illness brought on by the brutal living conditions. She had managed to survive, but she knew just how afraid we all ought to be.

The other women who worked in the orphanage were not much company, either. In their fifties and older, and mostly from the villages, they were not unkind, but the work of bathing, feeding and minding so many children left little room for conversation. The closest I came to a friend at the orphanage was Hadassa Nederman, a heavy-set widow from the nearby village of Bochnia. Round-faced and perpetually smiling, she always had time for a kind word or a joke. Most days, after the children had gone down for their afternoon naps, we would share a few moments of conversation over our watery afternoon tea, and though I could not tell her about Jacob, she seemed to sense my loneliness.

One day when I had been working in the nursery for about two months, Pani Nederman came to me, leading a dark-haired girl with her same thick-waisted build by the hand. “Emma, this is my daughter, Marta.”

“Hello!” Marta cried exuberantly, drawing me into a bear hug as though we were old friends. I liked her instantly. A few years younger than me, she had bright eyes that leapt out from behind her improbably large spectacles and wild dark curls that sprung from her head in all directions. She smiled and talked nonstop. Marta’s job in the ghetto was to serve as a messenger for the Judenrat, delivering notes and packages within and sometimes outside the ghetto.

“You must come to our Shabbes dinner,” she declared after we had spoken for a few minutes.

“Your family’s?” I asked, puzzled. People seldom admitted observing the Sabbath in the ghetto, much less invited guests to join them.

She shook her head. “My friends and I have a gathering every Friday night. It is just over there.” She pointed to a building across the street from the orphanage. “I checked ahead of time, when my mother told me about you. They said it is all right for you to come.”

I hesitated, thinking of my parents. Shabbes in the ghetto was just the three of us, but we observed it together every week. My father would smuggle a tiny loaf of forbidden challah out of the ghetto kitchen, and my mother would burn a small amount of our precious remaining candles on a saucer, the candlesticks having been left behind in Kazimierz. Though weary from their long, grueling workweeks, my parents always seemed renewed on Friday nights. Their backs would straighten and the color would return a bit to their cheeks as they chanted the Sabbath prayers in hushed but unwavering voices. We would sit together for hours, sharing the anecdotes we were too tired to relate on other days. I hated to think of leaving them alone, even for a single Friday.

“I’ll try,” I promised Marta, thinking that it was unlikely I would go. In truth, it was not just my parents that concerned me; I was shy, and the thought of walking into a room full of strangers made me nervous. But as the week progressed, I found myself wanting to go with Marta. Finally, on Thursday night, I mentioned it to my parents.

“Go,” they replied at the same time, their faces lifting. “You need some company your own age.”

The next afternoon, when my shift at the orphanage was ending and the children had all been fed, Marta appeared at the door unannounced. “Ready?” she asked, as though my attendance at the dinner had never been in question. Together we walked across the street to Josefinska 13.

Marta led me up a flight of dimly lit stairs and through an unlocked door. The room we entered was long and narrow, with a kitchen off to the right side and another door at the far end. The faded, frayed curtains were drawn. A long wooden table occupied most of the room, surrounded by mismatched chairs. Marta introduced me to the dozen or so young people already gathered in the room, some seated at the table, others milling around. I couldn’t remember most of their names, but it didn’t seem to matter. Newcomers, it appeared, were not unusual, and I forgot to be nervous among the friendly banter. I recognized a few of the people from around the ghetto, but they looked like entirely different people from the somber characters I had seen on the streets. Here, they were energized, talking and laughing with friends as though at a party a million miles from the ghetto.

A few minutes later, someone rang a small bell. As if on cue, everyone quieted and gathered around the table to find seats. Marta led me to two empty places at the end of the table by the front door. Looking around, I counted at least eighteen people. It seemed there would not be room for so many, but everyone jostled and squeezed in. We stood shoulder to shoulder with the others at our respective places in silence.

The door at the far end of the room opened and two men entered. One was stocky and appeared to be in his early twenties, the other slightly taller and older with a trim goatee. They stood at the places that had been left empty at the head of the table. A young woman standing beside the older man lit the candles. The gathering watched in silence as she circled the flames with her hands three times, reciting the Sabbath prayer.

“That’s Alek Landesberg,” Marta whispered, gesturing toward the older man. “He sort of leads this group.”

“Shalom aleichem,”
the man began to sing in a rich baritone, and the group all joined in the traditional welcome to the Sabbath. I looked around the table. The faces had been unknown to me an hour ago. Now, bathed in candlelight, they looked as familiar as family. As they sang, their voices rose and formed a tapestry that seemed to separate this place from the horrible, desolate world outside. Tears came to my eyes. Marta, noticing my reaction, squeezed my hand.

When the song was over, we sat down and Alek raised a rusted wineglass and said the kiddush blessing. He then said the
motze
over the challah before sprinkling salt on it, cutting it and passing it around. The bread was clearly not from the ghetto kitchen; it had a thick crust and a soft inside that reminded me of father’s bakery. As soon as the plate had passed by, I regretted not managing to take an extra piece to take to my parents. Then several girls stood and went to the kitchen and emerged with steaming pots, from which they ladled generous spoonfuls of chicken stock, carrots and potatoes into our bowls. My stomach rumbled. This, too, was obviously not ghetto food.

Throughout the meal, people chattered nonstop. They were friendly, but self-absorbed, and there were many inside jokes, teasing and nicknames that no one bothered to explain to me. I listened with interest as Marta talked over me with the girl to my right about various boys, and then debated with two boys to her left whether the United States would enter the war. I did not mind that no one addressed me directly or asked me questions. At the head of the table, I could see the man who had chanted the prayers looking in my direction. He whispered something to the stocky, younger man on his left. I could feel my cheeks growing flushed in the crowded, too-hot room.