Above the odd couple, a wooden spread eagle clasped an ornamental clock, wing tips flanked by a framed certificate on one side and a fairy-tale poster for Soneryl sleeping tablets on the other. A wall of shelves stretched up impossibly high, alternating displays of tall blue and white porcelain jars and wide necked bottles with glass stoppers, labelled in Latin with names like Podophyllin, Ferri Sulph. Exs., Calcii Hypophosph. Below the counter, a few hundred fragile drawers, varnished as a doll’s house, hid their pharmacopoeia of ancient remedies.
I loitered at the rear, superfluous, thrust back in time to my parents’ grocery store in the Carpathians. There was a long table with two mixing bowls and a pestle and mortar at which I could almost see my mother grinding horseradish roots. Mahogany cabinets towered from dark wooden floorboards, while the far wall was leavened by only the odd stripe of sickly green paint between cupboards. It was a small room, fastidiously cluttered and lit powerfully from brass ceiling lamps. But I had seen enough of the Ghetto to know there was no wattage of bulb capable of dispelling the all-pervasive gloom.
‘Of course you can see her,’ Pankiewicz was saying. ‘But you must remain calm, Hauptsturmführer.’
‘I. Am. Perfectly. Calm.’
‘And no more shouting, please. The girl’s half-terrified already. And that’s not in anybody’s interest.’
‘She’s here?’
‘I thought it prudent to invite her, yes.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’
‘It wasn’t for lack of trying,’ Pankewicz said. ‘If you’d like to come this way.’ Unhasping the hinge beside the till, he lifted the counter upright for Kunde to enter. The two men walked past the crowded shelves and disappeared into the pharmacist’s office in the corner, leaving me alone.
I stepped up to the counter to try and listen. The only sounds were the ticking of the clock under the eagle and the standard shouts from the streets. The office was well sound-proofed, or Kunde was keeping good on his word to control that temper. It was impressive to see how the pharmacist had stood up to the most senior Nazi in the Ghetto, the degree of power that white coat conferred. I could not imagine Kunde being spoken to in such tones by anybody at 37 Jozefinska.
I backed away, pulled up a stool at the long table and idly examined the instruments. The mixing bowls were spotlessly clean, the marble mortar and pestle unblemished. I wondered whether any of the massed ranks of jars and bottles were in use, or if they were all for display only, like the Jewish Police sign outside the building where old babushkas were flung to their deaths for taking unsanctioned breaks.
I laid the pestle on the table, but it rolled rather quickly off the edge and I had to dive to catch it, at which moment Pankewicz’ office door opened and a young brunette emerged wiping a thermometer on her striped smock. She was smiling shyly to herself, but her face wiped blank when she looked up and saw me crouched at the table cradling the pestle.
‘It was going to fall,’ I said.
‘They are not toys to play with.’
‘I know. I apologise.’
The assistant performed a curdled curtsey and made her way down the length the counter, as far away from me as possible. I watched her busy herself making preparations from the tiny drawers. She was no older than the undergraduates I had known at Kiel, in a former life. Once upon a time, we would have worked and laughed together as student and professor. Now, I was the enemy. If Tadeus Pankewicz was the only Pole who lived in the Ghetto, then his staff had to live outside. Which meant the pretty young woman doing her best to ignore me came and went past the soldiers at the gates on a daily basis.
‘My name’s Harry, by the way.’
‘Helena.’ She spoke without looking up from her work.
‘You might have guessed it’s my first day in the Residential District.’
‘Welcome, then, if welcome is the world.’
I coughed, clearing my throat like a love-struck chump. I had never been any good at chatting to women I considered attractive, even without the yolk of an SS collar around my neck.
I said, ‘I’m not really sure what I’m doing here, to be honest.’
Finally, Helena’s sweet eyes flickered up to meet mine.
‘At the pharmacy, I mean.’
Before I could work myself up to ask more, the bell rang above the front door and a smart, rotund gentleman carrying a sturdy brown bag bustled in, expelling a puff of a breath. Despite his severe grey parted hair and tweed suit, the man’s thick eyebrows bestowed the air of a nascent adolescent. He looked straight through me but his eyes glittered when they alighted on Helena at the far end of the counter.
‘Miss Krywaniuk,’ he said, smiling. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’
‘Good morning, Dr. Zurowski.’
‘Oberführer Mohnke,’ I said, inserting myself between the two. As I reached out to shake the doctor’s hand, I realised I was still gripping the pestle.
He stared at it briefly, nose twitching, then returned his attention to Helena Krywaniuk.
‘Is everybody here?’
‘They’re waiting for you, Doctor.’
‘Then I shall not tarry. Oh. While I remember.’ He raised his bag and held it to his stomach. ‘I have the Boric acid you requested.’
‘Very good. I was just making the tincture.’
Zurowski set his leather bag down next to the till, rummaged through to the bottom and removed two bottles of thick black liquid that Helena carefully walked back to her work station. The doctor closed his bag, lifted the hinged countertop, squeezed through the opening and let himself into the pharmacist’s office. In the few seconds the door was ajar, I saw Kunde pacing the floor, hands clasped at his back. The door closed. I turned, frowned to Helena, but she was bent beneath the counter, busy with her black bottles. I side-walked a few steps towards her and she rose, pinching her smock at the waist.
‘Busy day,’ I said.
‘They all are.’
‘Is it usual to treat sick patients on the premises? There is a hospital, I understand.’
‘Forgive me, I don’t know the details.’
‘Yet you came out with a thermometer - ’
The door opened again. Hauptsturmführer Kunde’s flushed face poked out and whistled for me. His obedient dog, I trotted the length of the counter.
‘This is going to take a while.’ He handed over a slip of paper. ‘Go back to the station, give this to Brühl and the two of you get over to Kazimierz sharpish to convey an executive measure.’
Conveying executive measures. The Belorussian Police Chief had used the same phrase to describe the massacre outside the synagogue.
I turned the slip over. A single name was scrawled on the other side, above an address: Marek Ringelblum, seventeen Szeroka Street.
‘A Jew,’ I said. ‘Outside the Residential District.’
‘Last known hiding place. The bastard’s going by the name Jaroslav Filov, but I’ve got it on very good authority he’s JFO.’
The Jewish Fighting Orgnaniation. If I went with Brühl, Marek Ringelblum would be captured, tortured for the names of his associates, then killed. If I went alone, there was a chance I could spare him.
‘Sir, if I may. The Kacick Street gate is on the other side of Zgody Square. I could be over the Slaskich Bridge in five minutes – it would take me twice that to return to Jozefinska.’
‘This is true.’
‘Should I go directly to Szeroka then, or to Brühl?’
‘That depends.’
‘On?’
‘Were in the habit or querying senior officers’ commands in the East?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Just here, then. Funny Scherer never mentioned that.’
‘Forgive me. After what happened to my brother in Warsaw, I don’t want these JFO bastards slipping away.’
‘Hands On Harry, eh?’ As a nickname, it was better than the Lesser Spotted Mohnke. ‘You’d better be off then. Just don’t screw this up.’
I bowed and hurried out the front door, feeling the glare of Helena Krywaniuk’s sweet, baleful eyes between my shoulder blades.
One day, when this was all over, I would come back and tell her the truth. Until then, there was nothing I could say – to anybody – not if I wanted to preserve my cover. I couldn’t even tell the man I was racing to rescue.
It would be hard enough to let Marek Ringelblum go without making him suspicious, never mind confiding that I was a Jew who had infiltrated Willie Kunde’s inner sanctum. Word of even a slightly sympathetic SS officer would spread round the Ghetto quicker than Typhus.
There was a very good chance I wouldn’t get to exchange a word with Ringelblum. If he was a vigilant member of the JFO and saw an SS officer pounding the door, it could be Harry Mohnke who ended up dead.
And this time with no hope of an Act Two.
17
A ring of maple trees stood at the northern end of Szeroka Street, its crooked roof-line presiding over a row of quaint merchant houses. I knew the area well. My mother’s old shop was less than a mile away, on the other side of the Remuh synagogue, in what used to be the heart of the Jewish Quarter.
17 Szeroka was an abandoned bakery called Pivorski. The plate-glass door and windows were whitewashed and plastered with dusty sheets of newspaper. There was no way to see inside, or for anybody to see out.
I stepped back to the pavement and studied the prescription slip. I needed an excuse, something to blame for the blunder I was about to make. Kunde’s handwriting was as a densely slanted Gothic marvel, the crossed seven in ‘17’ resembling a miniature swastika. Depending on your perspective, however, it could also be mistaken for the number 4.
I turned round and scanned the terrace on the other side of the street. Even house numbers: 18 directly opposite, sixteen on the right, fourteen about two hundred metres away.
I grabbed Pivorkski’s padlocked handles, rattled the door in its frame, then pounded on the glass.
I hissed in Yiddish, ‘They’re coming for you. Run now, out the back.’
Then I crossed the cobbled street and slowly approached number 14, studying my piece of paper.
Rapturous shouting from within the house – I had to knock twice before I got a response. This was good. No way they would have heard my noise.
A bald man with a scabby red nose and scalp opened the door, saying, ‘Come on in, join the party - ’
Glassy eyed at eleven o’clock in the morning, he stopped when he saw my uniform. The silver drinks tray he was holding started to slide.
‘Don’t tell me the neighbours have complained - ’
He was cut off by an impromptu round of cheering from a room off the hallway.
‘Oberführer Harry Mohnke,’ I said. ‘Department of Civil Affairs. Papers, please.’
The schnapps bottle and tumblers slid back across the tray as the bald man’s other hand fumbled into his back pocket for his wallet, which had got snagged in the fabric.
‘We’re good Volklistes here, officer, as you can see.’ He produced a pink coloured Personal Identity Card, triple stamped by the Third Reich.
A chant broke out behind the door: ‘Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!’
The photograph in the top right corner showed a thoughtful looking younger version of the bearer, before his face became ravaged with dermatitis. I barely glanced at his details.
I said, ‘Do you know anybody who goes by the name of Jaroslav Filov?’
‘Never heard it before. Why?’
Before I could answer, a chubby youngster in a Wehrmacht uniform came prancing into the hallway. ‘Look, Dad, they’ve got pictures and everything - ’
Like his father before him, the soldier stopped in his tracks when he saw me on the doorstep.
‘Pictures of what?’ I said.
The young soldier raised a limp newspaper from his thigh. ‘The Americans.’
A small headline announced the declaration of war against the USA, but the page was subsumed by an enormous photograph of Hitler receiving salutes from the Reichstag, the Führer anointed like Christ by the emanating rays of a white supernova behind the stage.
‘Father,’ the soldier said. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I’m not sure. Do you know anybody called – what was it – Jaroslav Filo?’
‘Filov,’ I corrected.
‘No,’ the son frowned, and pushed a hand through a thick sprouting of dry hair. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘There’s been some kind of misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘Could I please have a drink?’
The old man poured me a measure of peppermint schnapps.
Emboldened by my gulp, I said, ‘I have come directly from the SS command post inside the Residential District.’ I rubbed the back of my hand across my lips. ‘We have just received intelligence that suggests a Jewish terrorist, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organisation, was holed up inside your house. Obviously I see now that that is… unlikely. But the information was delivered to me personally by my commander, Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Kunde.’
I held up the prescription slip for their inspection. The father was perhaps too drunk to notice, but the son squinted his fat face at the number and said, ‘Hang on. That says 17, not 14.’
‘What?’
‘Pivorskis,’ he said to his father. ‘It’s been empty for months now.’
I returned the glass to the tray. ‘I apologise for the intrusion - ’
‘Lads,’ the youngster shouted into the hallway. ‘Get your guns. We’re going on a Jew hunt.’
I tried to protest, but it was too late. Whooping like a Red Indian, he pushed past me and tore across the cobbles in his stockinged feet. Another two soldiers ran out the house before I could recover my balance.
‘Don’t you worry, Oberführer,’ the father said. ‘My boys will get your man.’
That’s exactly what I was afraid of. By the time I caught up, one of them had already put a brick through the Pivorksi window and another was picking jagged shards out of the hole. When the gap was big enough, I followed them through.
The small bakers was deserted. I squeezed past the brick ovens at the other end of the counter, the long handled peels and paddles gathering dust against the wall. Opposite the kiln was a fire escape that the soldiers had missed.
The door was open.
I quickly stepped out, heard a manic dog barking across the yards, jumped back in and pulled the door shut. The pungent smell of old flour was already furring my nasal cavities and I thought I was going to be sick.
‘Jackpot,’ the chubby soldier called. ‘Come have a look.’
In the white-tiled back room, arranged between enormous bowls where the Pivorskis used to mix their dough, the soldiers had discovered an entire JFO forgery workshop.
Propped on plastic orange crates was a blackened tray of purloined Nazi stamps and a typewriter. Behind them, three cartons of blank ration books and piles of just about every identification paper known to man: student cards, boy scout cards, social security cards, driving licences, fines, certificates of employment and university diplomas. Hundreds of them. There was even a small roller-printing machine in the corner that I originally mistook for a pastry press.
I returned to the father’s house with the youngest Mochowitz soldier-son in order to put in a call to Jozefinska. This provided a brief moment of embarrassment, as I did not know the telephone number. Recalling Anton’s sage advice once more, I explained that it was my first day on the job.
Fortunately the operator was able to connect my call to the station; I made a note of the number for future reference. Hauptsturmführer Kunde had not yet returned but I was transferred to his adjutant Rottenführer Ritschak. I explained that Kunde had given Marek Ringelblum’s name and address at the pharmacy, told him what I found and requested a truck to seventeen Szeroka.
While I was waiting, Mochowitz senior offered another schnapps to toast our success.
‘I’m not sure my superior will see it that way,’
I said after putting the phone down. ‘I had an executive measure for Marek Ringelblum, not just his workshop.’
‘That haul will lead to the capture of a dozen Marek Ringelblums,’ Mochowitz said, his scabby nose glowing purple. ‘Not bad for your first morning, I’d say.’
The truck delivered the contents of the workshop back to 37 Jozefinksa shortly after twelve noon. I unloaded the tray of stamps while two SS soldiers grappled with the orange crates and followed me in through the station’s front entrance.
It took a few seconds for the desk officers to look up from their work, but when they did, they greeted us like returning heroes. A ripple of applause broke out from the Vehicles and Statistics departments at the front, and before long the entire office was on its feet, NCOs and adjutants rushing to relieve our burdens, stacking the evidence on a desk that Augustus Brühl cleared opposite his at the far windows. Even the one-armed Rottenführer Ritschak joined us from the first floor to ferry a carton of ration books.
‘Anybody would think you’re trying to show me up,’ Brühl said, then grinned lopsidedly and shook my hand. ‘Congratulations. I’ve moved once in three hours to go to the bathroom and Harry Mohnke’s cracked a JFO forgery ring.’
‘Beginner’s luck.’ I slumped into my new seat. ‘It’s all downhill from here.’
‘Bullshit. And I thought I might be onto something with this Kopaliny business.’ Brühl pulled his own seat round to my side and sat down so close his knees pressed into my thigh. ‘So what happened? The last I saw, you were running up the street after Kunde.’
I told the short version of the discovery on Szeroka Street, omitting my confusion over the two addresses. Brühl explained that I should start work on the resulting reconnaissance He was aware of Harry Mohnke’s previous experience as an SS telecoms engineer, and ascertained that I might not be familiar with investigative protocol. I asked for a brief refresher.
I Am Juden Page 28