Wartime Lies (6 page)

That evening, however, she returned early. She brought canned pâté, a bottle of vodka, and chocolate for grandmother and me, although grandmother was supposed to avoid sweets. She also brought a canned ham for the Kramers and chocolate for Irena. After dinner, when we were in my grandparents’ room, she said she wanted to tell us an important secret. She had a German friend. He was in love with her. He wasn’t a Nazi, he wasn’t even a soldier anymore, although he wore a uniform, because he had lost an arm in a factory accident. He was very good
at organizing army supplies, so he was important and influential. If we were lucky, if grandfather behaved reasonably, her friend would save us. He was already risking his life for Jews. Bern had found a way to get to the partisans; this German friend, Reinhard, was equipping him for the forest. He was even going to give Bern a rifle and ammunition and drive him to the rendezvous in his own car. We would meet Reinhard when the time came. She wanted grandfather and grandmother to think of me and for once to concentrate on what was really happening around them. She didn’t care what others would think. Jews in T. and everywhere else in Poland were as good as dead, but she intended to live and to save us, and this was the only way.

They knew they could not shout because of the Kramers, so the news all came out very slowly and very quietly. There came a silence, and then my grandfather said that Tania was wrong, it was not the only way. If the Germans won the war, then her way led nowhere—in the end, we would be killed just like everybody else, only perhaps a little later. And if the Germans lost, then surviving her way was no good. There was enough money, if we sold grandmother’s jewelry piece by piece, to get a peasant family to hide us and feed us as long as the war lasted. He would begin looking for the right people immediately.

Tania had been crying, but at once she stopped. She spoke again very softly and very slowly. She said that no peasant family would take all four of us; we would have to be separated; and if peasants took us, it would be to get hold of our money and our jewels. Afterward, they
would sell us to the Germans. There had already been such cases near Lwów. Jews found families to hide them so they would not have to go to the ghetto, and after a week with their saviors they were denounced and shot. Waiting in some boarded-up cellar until the Gestapo came to get us was not for her. We could trust Reinhard; anyway, there was no use arguing. Reinhard had told her that he would take care of all of us and that he would not, under any conditions, allow her to leave.

So Tania won the argument, and so far as we four were concerned, it was all now in the open. Bern came to say good-bye. It was awkward, until Tania said that she would be there when Reinhard and he drove off the next morning. Then Bern understood that what she was doing was no longer a secret, and he said that Tania was the best of daughters and friends, that she was brave, and that Reinhard was probably the only decent man in T., present company excepted but all Jews included. Thinking about him, and the possibility that perhaps he was killing someone like him, would be the only thing that could spoil the joy of killing Germans once he got to the forest. Tania told us later that she helped to wrap Bern like a bundle in blankets and cover him with other bundles in the back of Reinhart’s car. My grandparents and I never saw him again. Grandmother sometimes mentioned him, saying she hoped he was doing well in the forest; she was glad she was no longer obliged to speak to him. Grandfather would laugh; according to him poor Bern had no need to be worried about shooting good Germans; Bern would never manage to shoot anybody, good or bad.

All the time we were waiting for good news, and none came. We listened to the Wehrmacht radio. It told us that Europe was theirs, all the way to the Spanish border. They were before Moscow; the British army in Africa was wax in Rommel’s hands. They would invade England. Sometimes we could catch the BBC. Its story was not very different. My grandfather stopped making jokes about Napoleon and field marshal snow. Jews were rounded up almost every week now, for different purposes. Always, there would be the SS in their rich uniforms and shiny leather, Polish policemen who understood Jews and could not be fooled by their tricks, and Jewish militiamen with long sticks hurrying people along, throwing their possessions into the street. They were now taking away men under thirty, men and women over sixty-five, and sometimes unemployed Jews, even if the head of the family had working papers. In our building, members of families had been separated. The Kramers thought they would hide Irena behind the boxes of supplies in their storeroom if there was time; the disadvantage was that people found hiding were always beaten and sometimes shot directly after the beating.

The noise of the roundups remained in one’s ears a long time after it was all over: first would be the announcement
Achtung Judenaktion
, then the Germans yelling monotonously
Alle Juden heraus
, the Poles yelling in Polish, and Jewish militiamen yelling in Polish and Yiddish, people wailing. From time to time, there was also the barking of police dogs. We speculated about what was done with the people who were taken away. If they were put on
trucks and driven out of T., they were likely to be shot in a wood a little distance away. That is what peasants who lived in that direction said. Those who were herded to the railroad station and put on trains might be going anywhere. There was talk of a camp in Bełżec, near Lublin, of factory work in Germany, of Wehrmacht brothels, of consolidation in ghettos of the large cities like Lwów, Łódź and Warsaw. Tania said that none of them would ever return; it did not matter where they died. Our papers guaranteed that we would not be touched. She was right. When she or, if she was at work, grandfather showed them to the police, they would tell us to return quietly to our apartment. We began to be treated with suspicion by our neighbors, even the Kramers, although Tania never brought home food anymore without bringing a package for them as well.

New rules required Jews to step off the sidewalk if a German was approaching. Whoever didn’t move fast enough was beaten; sometimes people were executed right on the spot. Polish youths thought they were entitled to the same respect. It became common to see them chasing Jews of any age, hitting them with canes or throwing stones at them. Polish police did not interfere; occasionally, order was restored by a German Feldgendarmerie patrol. My grandfather told me to remember these scenes: I was seeing what happens if one is turned into a small animal like a rabbit. He now regretted having been a hunter all his life. When Tania heard him, she shrugged her shoulders. According to her, Catholic youths beating Jews with canes was nothing new; National
Democratic students had amused themselves just that way in the corridors of the university in Cracow in her time.

Since the beginning of the winter, there had been rumors that a ghetto would be established in T. They became more insistent. My grandfather thought it was unlikely; there were too few Jews left to justify the bother. A couple of good roundups would be enough to kill them all. Tania reported that Reinhard was less sure of what might happen. He explained that the general rule called for all Jews to be in ghettos, and that the Jewish-question people would not be deterred by practical considerations. On the other hand, in the case of other small towns, Jews had been sent to big-city ghettos. That meant we might be sent to Lwów. Either possibility, ghetto in T. or ghetto in Lwów, worried him a lot. He thought that, once we were inside, it would be very difficult for him to create better conditions for us; he was not even sure that he could protect us. We supposed, although Tania did not say so, that he was also afraid he would be less free to see her.

At last, he decided that, until the situation became clearer, he would personally hide us in T. Incredibly, what made him think that it would be easy to hide us was that his daughter was coming to spend the Christmas holidays with him. She loved him; her mother had died when she was little; she would accept the situation. He had complete trust in her and so should we, Tania told us; his life and his daughter’s were at stake just as much as ours. He would take a larger apartment for his daughter, and Tania and I would move there too. My grandparents would live
in his. We would be in the same building, but we would have to remember that we were hidden. There would be no going out and no seeing one another until he was able to make a better arrangement.

My grandfather said that Reinhard was right about avoiding the ghetto at all cost, but he was not going to hide behind a sofa in a German officer’s apartment while other arrangements were thought of, because nothing would come of this thinking. And Tania was right about peasants selling Jews. Grandfather would instead get Aryan papers for us. He knew how genuine or forged birth and baptismal certificates and all the German-invented nonsense documents could be bought. Then at least grandmother, he and I could leave for Warsaw and sink into some obscure hole. Provided we avoided Catholics who knew us, they would be just another uprooted old couple, waiting out the war with their orphaned grandchild. Tania could follow as soon as Reinhard came to his senses.

He did get the papers, but the scheme could not work. Grandmother was too sick for the discomforts and risks of travel, and certainly too sick to take care of me in Warsaw. How grandfather could take care of both of us was the question Tania asked over and over. She gave us a message from Reinhard: let the grandfather go first and find his bearings in Warsaw; we will send the grandmother and the boy when both he and they are ready. This time all three of them agreed that Reinhard was right. We would be separated, but only for a short while, and there was nothing else that could be done.

My grandfather could not leave from T. by train; he was too well known to go to the station, buy a ticket and board the train. These actions were all forbidden to Jews. Once recognized, he would be arrested and probably shot. Reinhard would not hear about peasants’ carts or professional passers who might take him to the Lwów or Drohobycz station. One night, well after the curfew, Reinhard came to pick him up. My grandfather was ready, and we all stood together at the entranceway to the yard. We said good-bye; we were all crying. Then Reinhard got out of his car, kissed my grandmother’s hand and took grandfather’s suitcase. He was almost as tall as grandfather and wrapped in a military coat. They were going to Lwów. From there, grandfather could take a train with relative safety.

It was common knowledge that the greatest dangers for Jews living on Aryan papers were being unmasked by the Polish police or denounced to the Polish or German police—either by Polish neighbors, indignant at the usurpation by some Rosenduft or Rozensztajn of an honorable name and identity, or by dissatisfied extortionists. Germans could not distinguish an assimilated Jew from a Pole unless the Jew had a face that looked like a Nazi caricature. They caught Jews trying to pass for Poles only if assisted by the Polish police or by a denunciation or if they recognized the Aryan papers presented by the Jew as a forgery. Perhaps because Germans were so deficient in this domain, a profitable profession had sprung up alongside the activities of the Polish police: the blackmail of Jews. It was open to all Polish connoisseurs of ineffably Jewish elements
in physiognomy; perhaps ears were a trifle too large or too well articulated, or eyelids were heavier than was becoming to a purebred Slav. The blackmailers’ appreciation of the purity of accent and diction was equally fine. Although they often spoke themselves like true children of the slums, they could hear in the speech of a former eminent lawyer or professor of classics the unmistakable gay or sad little tune from the shtetl. If there was no money left to pay off the extortionist one more time, a woman could perhaps try to browbeat him. She might say she was a Sarmatian tracing her descent from unsullied generations of other Sarmatians, all of whose names ended like her own in the noble “ski” of Sobieski and Poniatowski; let him prove the contrary. Sometimes this worked. But with men, there was no cheating, no place for Jewish ruses. Very early in the process would come the simple, logical invitation: If Pan is not a kike, a
żydłak
, would he please let down his trousers? A thousand excuses if we are wrong.

Therefore, the attention of Tania now became focused on my circumcised penis; in the new life stretching before us, it was for grandfather and me the mark of Cain oddly placed on the body of Abel. Tania thought that he and I had a good chance of deceiving these keen judges of Jewish traits but only down to the waist. My grandfather, with his old man’s flabby skin, might even pass the trousers test if he was careful. It was possible, with surgical glue, to shape and fasten enough skin around the gland to imitate a real uncut foreskin. Grandfather was duly equipped with such glue. On a boy or young man, it
would not work; should reconstructive surgery be tried? A consultation was arranged with a Jewish surgeon from Lwów, now living in T., who had left Lwów just before the establishment of the ghetto. The surgeon was unenthusiastic. He had, indeed, performed several operations of this sort. It could be done with grafts. The two basic risks were that the graft would not take and infection. In addition, for a child of my age, there was the problem of growth. My penis would become longer but the grafted skin would not keep pace. I would have trouble with erections. This last consideration tipped the scales. They decided to leave me as I was.

While we were so occupied, a sort of quiet descended on T. There was less food for Jews and Poles alike. On the other hand, the roundups stopped. We received, in care of Reinhard, a letter from grandfather. He had found a place to live in the Mokotów section of Warsaw; we were not to worry. We answered, poste restante, in circumspect terms. The Kramer parents hardly ever went to their shop anymore; there were no buyers. Tania had become their only real source of food. This did not make them more friendly toward her, but they sat in the kitchen with grandmother all day. Irena and I read and played in Tania’s room. The coal stove was lit only in the evening; it was extremely cold. We were told to read under the covers on the couch. Irena now allowed me to touch her between the legs; sometimes, she put her legs around my waist and rubbed until her squaw face turned red. We talked about what the Germans would do when they took us away. We did not want to be beaten; Bern had told me
that they always beat people before killing them or else they let the Polish police do it for them. They even beat the women they were taking to brothels. A good way out was to insult a German: for instance, spit in an officer’s face. Then he would shoot you on the spot. We were not sure that we would get an opportunity to do that. In the roundups, the Germans usually stood off at the side while the others did the work. One could also take poison, but we didn’t have any. I knew that Tania was trying to get some for us, but that was a secret. I didn’t tell Irena.