Wartime Lies (4 page)

My father’s uniforms were taken out of the storage wardrobe. He inspected them and had two pairs of britches taken in—the diet he had been following for kidney stones made him lose weight. He and Tania argued about where the August vacation would be spent. My father thought I should be at my grandparents’ place in the country. Tania said she wasn’t going; he could take me there himself. But that was impossible: he was substituting for the Catholic surgeon, who had already been called up on maneuvers. They settled on M., a popular spa some two hours away, famous for its mud and warm mineral
water. The water would be good for my father’s stones; he could join us on weekends. Bern was also going and would look after us when we were alone.

In M., we lodged in a brown wooden hotel standing in its own small park. A short distance from the park, down a shady boulevard, was the
Kurhaus
. In front of it was a kiosk for the orchestra. Off to the right one drank the water through angled glass straws. Zosia and I shared a room. Next door was Tania’s room, with a large balcony, armchairs and an awning. When my father came, he took whatever room near us was free. Zosia wore blue cotton skirts with white blouses that Tania had imposed instead of a nurse’s uniform. I had sailor suits; I seemed to be always propelling a hoop before me. Tania had never been more elegant. She wore long beige pleated skirts with sailor tops edged in navy blue (she claimed these were to go with my suits), dresses of white and blue and gray raw silk, and little hats, like helmets, of matching straw. Bern was often with us. He had an automobile the top of which could be taken down: a Skoda. He drove it himself. Tania claimed that he went too fast, and swore Zosia and me to secrecy. My father must not know about the risks we were taking on our drives through the woods near M. On Saturdays, my father appeared, arriving by train, sad, tired, ready for a good time. He held my hand on our walks and asked that I sit next to him when we went to a café for sweets or ices. At the very end of August, he came in the middle of the week: Tania and Bern were going to Lwów to see a cabaret act that was essential and could not be missed. It was the first time Tania had left me alone
with my father. He asked me to come to his room as soon as I woke up. There were things he had to tell me. It turned out that he was privy to the secrets of an English spy named Alan, who had learned from a Chinaman by name of Tung Ting the true story of the kidnapping of the last empress of China. The story was involved and seemingly endless; he told it to me from then on in installments, on Sunday mornings.

Brusquely, August ended. We returned to T. Talk about Germany displaced most other conversation. For the first time, I heard the word “Wehrmacht.” There were jokes about the Polish army: How many times can the same tank pass before Rydz-Śmigły reviewing in the course of one parade? Answer: Exactly the number of times our only airplane can fly over his head during that parade. A few weeks later, Germany occupied the Sudetenland; we bravely sliced off a piece of Czechoslovakia without losing a single Polish life; soldiers returned with wreaths of wildflowers around their necks. Beneš resigned and was replaced by Hácha. Now, there were jokes about Hácha’s name—the last prewar jokes I remember. Kristallnacht happened and was spoken about in embarrassed whispers. Rydz-Śmigły and Beck, Poland’s new leaders, would know where to draw the line; nationalism was not the same as lower-class bestiality. There were certain subjects that my father and Tania did not want to discuss before Zosia. We would both be sent out of the room on some indispensable errand. Less than one year later came September 1939, and it was all over.

I
T HAD
been raining very hard for more than two weeks. We heard that the river had overflowed and the bridge might be washed away. Our cellar flooded. My grandfather tipped the barrels of pickles and sauerkraut and put boards under them so they would not stand in water. He emptied potatoes and beets from the bins, and we stored them in bags that he and Tania carried into the kitchen and laundry room. Sacks of flour and rice also had to be moved, along with bags of dried beans that were less heavy. They said I could help with them.

Later that day, I was at the window of my father’s study and watched water, now almost as high as the sidewalk, streaming in the direction of the railroad station. Across the street, in the house that belonged to the older of my father’s Jewish colleagues, were stationed the SS. German troops overran eastern Poland in June 1941, after Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and attacked Russia. Dr. Kipper had not left with the medical staff when the Russians evacuated the hospital during the days of panic preceding the Germans’ entry into T. Families were not
allowed on the evacuation train to Russia, and my father and the younger Jewish doctor had left alone, very quietly. While he was getting his things together, I lay face down on the white rubber-covered couch in his examination room, crying, out of breath, unable to speak. Dr. Kipper refused to leave without Mrs. Kipper. The chief Russian doctor called him a deserter and said he would have him executed, but there wasn’t time. Instead, Dr. and Mrs. Kipper were shot by the Germans a few days later, together with some other Jews. It was all done in the early afternoon, in the field on the other side of T. where Zosia and I used to go sledding, but they brought the bodies back to town in a truck and rounded up some other Jews to unload it. Earlier in the day, a good part of T.’s Catholic population had come out into the streets to greet the German soldiers. It was all very gay; these well-dressed warriors on their trucks and motorcycles, with leather cases and field glasses hanging from their necks, were a nice change after the shabby, bedraggled Russians retreating from the front. There were girls handing flowers to them. They were happy to have the Russians gone. Zosia wanted to take me on her shoulders to watch, but Tania absolutely forbade it, and she said Zosia wasn’t even to go there herself. The roundup of the Jews, the shooting and then the corpses dumped on the street made people more cautious. One couldn’t yet be sure that this was just something between Germans and Jews.

The rain became heavier. In a short time, the sidewalks disappeared under the water. The SS rushed out from the Kipper house in shorts, without their black boots, holding
their carbines over their heads. They milled about for a while in knee-high water. Then the
Feldwebel
shouted an order, and they all ran off in a single file toward the station.

I went back to the kitchen. Tania was cooking lunch. My grandfather smoked. He had recently acquired a new sort of cigarette, which was made like a two-part tube. One inserted tobacco into the thin paper part with a little metal pusher that resembled a lady’s curling iron. It was important to be careful, or the paper would tear. He was teaching me how to do it correctly. The other tube was like a cigarette holder. My grandmother was wrapped in her fur coat against the humidity. She wanted to know what we would do when the kitchen flooded. Tania assured her that God would look after us in this as in every other adversity; besides, what difference did it make? We wouldn’t be staying in the house much longer.

My grandparents came to T. in September 1939 to escape from the Germans and to be near us in this time of danger. They lived in our house. Relations between the mother and the daughter had not improved, and now practically all the work of the house fell to Tania. Most often, she refused grandmother’s offers of aid, saying that she needed real help, someone to do something, and not instructions about how this or that should be done. Grandfather alternated between asking Tania to think what kind of example she was setting for me and laughing and teasing. He claimed that this was real peasant-woman talk and that Tania should be congratulated on her progress in learning proletarian manners.

Before the Russians took him with them, my father had been careful to stay out of this sort of family discussion. He would only say that he felt guilty about how tired Tania was. It was he, after all, who had decided, very soon after the Russians arrived in 1939, that we could keep Zosia if she was willing to help a little with the housework and that all the others had to be let go. One could not carry on like bourgeois, he explained, especially with the grandparents right there. Landowners were considered the worst class. One denunciation would send us all to Siberia. He joked that we would not find the House of the Dead a satisfactory family residence.

Now Zosia was gone as well. Aryans were no longer allowed to work for Jews. Zosia cried, saying this had nothing to do with us, that I was her child. She wanted to stay. She would become Jewish like me. But her father came from Drohobycz and asked to speak to Tania. He told her it was high time his child stopped wiping the rear end of a little Jew bastard. He was prepared to let bygones be bygones, but there had to be compensation. What kind of a future could Zosia have with the smell of Jew all about her? Fortunately, my grandfather was out of the house. Tania asked Zosia’s father to wait at the railroad station and please to remember next time he called on us to come to the kitchen door. She went to get her beaver coat and hat and gave them to Zosia and also gave her money. Grandmother too wanted to give Zosia a fur, but Zosia cried very hard and refused, and instead grandmother gave her the ring with little diamonds she always wore on her second finger. Then Zosia packed her things. She
asked to wait for my grandfather, but Tania said to run along, that all this crying and saying good-bye was going to make me regress permanently to being a two-year-old.

Tania turned out to be right about the house. A few days after the flood receded, a German officer presented himself, very politely asked Tania if she was the owner and told her that we must move out by the end of the next day. The house was needed for Gestapo headquarters. We could take our clothes and personal items; everything else was to remain. An inventory would be made. He suggested she be present to make sure that everything was quite in order and said it was pleasant in this part of the world to hear German spoken correctly.

Our tenants were also ordered to leave. Pan Kramer came to see Tania and told her that he was embarrassed to propose such a thing, but if we wished, we could move together. He knew of an apartment near the market, a couple of houses from his shop. It was very modest, not the sort of thing she had ever seen, but it was available and it was furnished. The old lady who lived there was willing to give it up and go to live with her children. The rent was too high for the Kramers alone. Since we were old neighbors, perhaps we would not mind sharing. They were very quiet, spent most of the day in the shop, and Irena and I could play together. My grandfather was consulted and he agreed. There were no apartments for Jews in T.; Jews were all being thrown out. He would see the man who had stabled his horses about carting our things.

The new apartment was in a house that was four stories high. We were to live on the third floor, which was hard
on grandmother because of her heart. One passed through a gateway wide enough for a horse-drawn cart into a rectangular courtyard. Above it, balconies on which the apartments opened ran around each floor, linked by stairs. Our apartment consisted of three rooms and a large kitchen that my grandmother declared was quite good. The three Kramers were to sleep in one room; Tania insisted they take the largest one. My grandparents had the room next to them, where there were two beds. Tania and I took the living room; she would sleep on the couch and I on a folding cot we could open at night. We discovered there was no running water; one got it from the pump in the courtyard. Pan Kramer showed me how to work the pump, with short strokes at first to get the water to flow and then slow and steady; that was how to do it without getting tired. Irena and I were to be responsible for the water: that was how one became careful not to waste it.

We made yet another discovery. There were no toilets, just one room on each floor with a sort of box and an enamel bucket inside it for all the tenants to share. One could use it or one could use a chamber pot. One emptied the bucket or chamber pot in the outhouse in the yard. One could also go to the outhouse in the first place. I asked Tania which she intended to do. In reply, she slapped my face very hard, right in front of Pan and Pani Kramer and Irena. It was the first time that she had ever hit me; she had fired Zosia’s immediate predecessor and made her leave in the middle of the night because that Panna had slapped me.

This time it was grandmother who flew to my defense.
She said she was ashamed; Tania should move in with Bern if that was how she meant to behave. Grandfather told them both to stop and asked me to come for a walk with him.

I was crying, and I noticed that he was crying a little also. All the same, he told me crying was no use. Everything had changed. We were in for a difficult time. People would act very differently because they were afraid and confused; even he was afraid. He thought what I must learn was to watch very carefully and try to understand things as much as possible with this in mind. He would try to help, but I had to remember that grandmother was sick, that they were both old and that Tania was the one who would take care of me until the war ended and my father came back. Afterward we walked to the end of the street, where there was an empty lot with piles of gravel and larger stones and a lumberyard that seemed deserted. Still farther off was the river. Some Catholic boys, older than I, were throwing stones, aiming at trees. We stopped to watch. They threw very hard and accurately. I asked grandfather if he would teach me to throw like that. He said that he couldn’t; being a bad thrower himself was something he had regretted all his life. There was another skill, though, that was equally useful. We went to the marketplace and bought some thick red rubber and a patch of leather. Then we returned to a pile of gravel in the empty lot. My grandfather cut a low, forked branch from a tree, peeled it, threaded the rubber strip through two holes he made in the leather, and then fastened the rubber to the fork. He explained that he had just made a
slingshot and that we were going to practice using it right then, and as often as we got a chance, but I must not tell grandmother about it, and I must not aim at houses because I could break a window. When I got good at it, we would try shooting crows.