With Moses Montefiore wrapped in a nest of blankets, we trudged back through the slush to Podgorze. Rocked by motion and cocooned against my chest, the baby slept. Brühl tried engaging me in conversation about the collected worth of Frau Jagiello’s apartment, and what amount her rings might be pawned for. My muted responses conveyed what I hoped passed as aloofness, and he soon stopped. We walked the rest of the way in silence.
Just outside the Ghetto, on Kacik Street, a detachment of elderly male prisoners who must have been standing around the streets with no jobs to go to found themselves shoveling snow to clear a path for Wilhelm Kunde’s limousine. The rear window cracked down and his white-gloved fingers beckoned through the gap and beckoned us.
‘I’ll see you back at the office,’ Brühl said.
‘What do I do with baby?’
But Brühl was already climbing into the back of Kunde’s limo and did not supply an answer.
If the prisoners had been able to work faster, if we’d met the Hauptsturmführer’s procession earlier, I might have been able to spare Moses from his fate. But the guards at the Kacik Street gate had already seen me. An SS officer cradling a swaddled baby was not a sight they were likely to forget.
I had no choice but to carry Moses into the Ghetto, enduring their stares with a mirthless grin.
Dr. Fischer at the Jozefinska hospital could not accept the child and directed me further down the street to the House of Orphans at number 14. A softly-spoken old man called Dawid Kurzmann, Director of Religious Matters, received the baby with warmth, but warned that the orphanage was already stretched beyond capacity. They only managed to limp along thanks to donations from the Ghetto’s inhabitants. A mentally disabled boy named Juliusz Propst had been successfully transferred to an specialist institution in Iwonicz in 1940, only to be returned to the orphanage this summer, in accordance with German policy. And only last week - before my time, I pointed out – Alter Kurzmann had been forced to accept a group of ten children from a Cathlolic nursery outside the Ghetto walls, on Koletek Street. Although uncircumscribed and well versed in the catechisms, SS Obersturmbannführer Pavlu had insisted they were Jewish. Unsurprisingly, the new group were finding it difficult to adjust.
I realised I had listened too sympathetically to Dawid Kurzmann’s complaints.
‘You’ll have no worries with this one,’ I grinned, extricating my finger from the baby’s hot fist. ‘With a name like Moses, he’ll fit right in.’
20
Even after doubling my dosage of schnapps to two bottles that night, I resurfaced from dreamless depths at four in the morning, my mind churning. It was fair to say the new job was not working out as hoped.
In three days, what had I accomplished?
Closed down a Jewish forgery workshop, confiscated the equipment, failed to stop an elderly Polish partisan from being executed, rescued a baby from a life of pampered safety and delivered it to an over-stretched orphanage in the Ghetto. It was difficult to see how a real SS officer could have acted much worse.
Was I supposed to spend the rest of the war at the beck and call of Jews like Symche Spira and Anna Salit? Scurrying over the city to carry out their dirty work? The worst of it was, I couldn’t even bring myself to dislike them. The informers were doing what it took to survive. I had come back to Cracow to help the wretched, withered roots of humanity starving to death on the pavement, those who could not help themselves. The old man and woman queuing outside the pharmacy. The children. My own mother and sisters, wherever they were.
I took another fifty Reichmark from behind the Caravaggio and found the only baker in Podgorze open at 5 AM. Filling my pockets with pastries, crepes and onion cakes, I ventured back to Lworska. There were only two guards at the gate at this time of morning, and no dogs. I passed through clutching my overcoat to stop the bread rolls from banging against my thighs.
As I’d hoped, the streets were empty. Even the Ghetto had to sleep. I retraced my steps from yesterday, heading briskly towards Solna Targowa.
The gaunt woman was still twisted against the wall under a stiff blanket, her hair and lashes rimed with frost. I broke off a chunk of plain white roll and held it to her lips until she bit. Too weak to chew, she let the bread dissolve on her tongue and grunted for another. I fed her this way until a door banged in the street. Placing two more bread rolls under her blanket, I hurried away.
I did not have to search too hard for more in need. There were a dozen unfortunates sleeping rough on the main thoroughfares, propped up in doorways and alcoves.
Where I heard the disconsolate wails of children through tenement windows, I posted pastries through their letter boxes.
My tour brought me back onto Jozefinska. The House of Orphans was locked, but I succeeded in raising its director, Anna Feuerstein. I introduced myself and explained that I had delivered Moses Montefiore into her care yesterday.
‘If you’re here to interrogate the lad, Oberführer, you’ll have to come back in about eighteen months. He should be able to manage ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ by then.’
‘It’s my job to keep an accurate tally of population numbers for the Registry,’ I told her. ‘May I assume the boy has survived his first night?’
‘You may.’
‘Thank-you.’ I nodded, turned to leave, then stopped, patting my coat for the last of the onion cakes. I handed Director Feurstein the greasy bag. ‘A little stale, but I’m sure your children aren’t fussy.’
At 6.40 AM, I was the first German to arrive at the station. There was a skeleton crew of Jewish Police guarding the cells in the courtyard, but otherwise I was alone. I made straight for Wilhelm Kunde’s office and knocked, but of course there was no answer. The door was locked. My guess was that Rottenführer Ritschak had the only spare key. I snooped around the secretaries’ desks in the corridor, but there were no important documents to discover.
Downstairs, an officer from Vehicles and Statistics had arrived and was busy making coffee. I declined his offer of a cup and headed to my desk, but noticed Symche Spira at the back wall, a set of headphones clamped over his head in place of the usual peaked cap. Jerusalem’s next Chief of Police, catching up on the overnight reports from North Africa. I doubled back to the wall of filing cabinets containing the Ghetto Registry.
After twenty minutes of searching, I was able to state categorically that as of Friday December 18th, 1942, there were no female Sieglers living anywhere within the Ghetto walls. I didn’t know whether or not to celebrate. I crossed over to the wall of maps on the other side of the office.
Shoshana’s last letter had been franked in the town of Novy Sacz, about 60 km south-east of Cracow. She had not disclosed the farm’s address, which had been sensible at the time, but infuriating six months later. I found Novy Sacz on the map and made a crude sketch of the surrounding locale, including the names of the eight closest villages. With a vehicle, I would be able to get round them all in a day. It was a start. As I was slipping the sketch into my pocket, a whiff of cologne announced a presence at my back.
I turned and flinched: Augustus Brühl standing very close, practically leering into my face.
‘Good God, you frightened me.’
‘Cursed with fleet feet, my mother was a ballerina. Which worm are you looking for?’
‘Which what?’
‘The early bird and all that. I thought I was getting a good start on the day. What unearthly time did you get in?’
‘Couldn’t sleep. Been here a couple of hours now.’
‘Progress?’
‘Not so much. I’m still getting to know the lay of the land.’ I leant away from him and tapped the edge of the map.
‘Literally.’ Brühl put an arm around my shoulder and turned to study the terrain. ‘Beautiful countryside outside the city, if you get the chance. Eagle-nest castles, the Tatra mountains, Zakopane town…’ His other hand flicked from attraction to attraction. ‘We should go for a spa one weekend.’
I thought about the risk,
in terms of public nudity. Like Moses Montefiore, I too had been circumcised. ‘I suffer from quite bad eczema, so maybe not such a good idea.’
‘Healing waters, what could be better?’
‘I’m talking about the risk to other bathers. My skin is prone to… quite significant flaking.’
‘Ja, enough! That sounds ghastly.’ Brühl’s face contorted into a rictus, then brightened as his finger trailed up the main road north of Cracow. ‘Remember that business in Lublin?’
I frowned, staring at the city on the map, trying not fixate on the convergence of railway lines.
Brühl continued. ‘Police interpreter with his head caved in?’
‘Oh, yes, right. Gang of Poles arrested.’
‘One of them gave Gusta Draenger’s name, in Kopaliny.’
‘That’s right. Turns out his story was full of shit. The Hauptsturmführer and I took a ride out to the Draenger’s farm yesterday afternoon. Nothing doing but a bunch of snooty Zionists pretending to be farmers. They really are learning how to plough the Holy Land.’
‘You left them to it?’
‘What’s another few months, in the grand scheme of things?’
Later that day, when I had some time to myself, I pulled Gusta Draenger’s file from the Registry. She wasn’t living in the Ghetto anymore, but the Nazis had compiled more information on her and the husband than just about anybody else.
Gusta and Shimshon Draenger were first identified as troublemakers when they met in the Akiva youth movement as teenagers. The story of idealist young lovers was a familiar one to me. I had seen the same in Vilno with Vita Kempner and Abba Kovner, and, to a lesser extent, my own sister and Herman Glik.
Gusta went on to become one of Akiva Cracow’s most active members, committed to educational work, first as a group leader and later as a member of the movement’s central committee in Poland. At the same time, she wrote for and edited the youth newspaper, Zeirim, and kept the movement’s records in the city.
Following the invasion of September 1939, Shimshon Draenger was arrested by the Gestapo for having edited Akiva’s main paper, Divrei Akiva, which had published articles by Irene Harand, an Austrian Catholic who had founded an anti-Nazi organisation called The Jewish Defence Movement. Gusta, by this point was engaged to Shimshon, asked for permission permitted to go with her husband to the Troppau concentration camp near Opava in the Sudeten Mountains.
At the beginning of 1940, an enormous bribe obtained their release, but the couple were placed under surveillance, obligated to report to the Gestapo three times a week and to sever all relations with their comrades and younger members of the movement. Reports show however that they continued to meet in secret at various informal House Committees.
Gusta and Shimshon married in the spring of 1940. So strong was their love that Gusta could not bear to part from her husband. On three separate occasions she gave herself up to the Gestapo upon discovering they had arrested Shimshon, even though she was not wanted herself. In May 1941, she had followed him into the Ghetto. Now husband and wife were out, tilling the fields and dreaming of the Holy Land.
I found the letter that the Jewish Self-Help Society had sent from an office in Nowy Wisnicz to Chief Muller, requesting ‘approval for a series of courses to be offered for the purpose of retraining the Jewish youth’ and ‘permission to establish a farm in Kopaliny’. The letter was dated Saturday 12th December, the very day I left Lublin with the Gendarme.
I took this coincidence as a sign that our paths were destined to cross. But the Draengers were not my immediate concern; they had escaped the walls of the Ghetto. There had to be an element of a resistance left behind. I was determined to find it and establish contact.
I went back to the Gestapo surveillance reports of 1940, cross-referencing the Draenger’s young Akiva associates with the contents of the Registry. Of the twenty-three names, only one was listed as a resident: Syzmek Lustgarden. He was never personally under surveillance and was now just one name amongst seventeen-thousand. Syzmek’s file was minimal. Born on April 4th 1921, currently residing in an apartment at thirteen Jozefinska, a stone’s throw from the police station.
Slight though the information was, there was another coincidence. Syzmek lived next door to the House of Orphans, number 14. I had passed his building only a few hours previously. Twice in two days, in fact. Although my pulse raced at this, I tried not to read too much into the proximity. After all, the Nazis had taken the population of an entire metropolis and condensed it into one tiny suburb. The Ghetto Jews lived in a city of doll-houses.
***
I walked past number 14 on three separate occasions that afternoon, and stayed behind after the rest of the office had gone home. When Rottenführer Ritschak left at seven, I positioned myself at the first floor window. Syzmek’s building was on the opposite side of Jozefinska, about a hundred yards to the left. The terraces were three stories high, and Syzmek lived on the top floor, which was divided into as many as five rooms. I had no way of knowing which was Syzmek’s. But it didn’t matter. Eventually that night I saw enough to know that my intuition had paid off.
The crowded street began to thin out after eight o’clock, when it was too bleak for anybody but the most resilient or destitute. Shortly before nine, a group of four young men broke the curfew of cold, walking past the police station from the direction of the Lworska end. They crossed the road a little further up, and disappeared inside number 13. Within five minutes they were followed by another group, two men and three women. A little later, a third group approached from Solna Targowa. I was too far away to distinguish their gender, but I counted another four people enter the building.
By a quarter-past eight, Syzmek Lustgarden’s building had absorbed a total of fourteen additional bodies. They were assembling to celebrate the onset of the Sabbath, taking their seats at the festive table covered with white cloth and candles, as we had done on Pilies Street.
This was it. I had found the headquarters of Akiva’s Youth Movement.
21
There was a letter for Harry Mohnke in the mail-box when I arrived home, the first piece of mail since my arrival in the city.
The envelope was handwritten, and franked far away in the north-east of the country, in Neustadt, the nearest large town to Dahme.
Dear Son,
I’ve thought long and hard about what you said at St. Mary’s chapel.
I’m glad we had a chance to talk after the service. If your brother’s death has brought the two of us back to our senses, then, well, that’s something. What I’m trying to say is, I would like to accept your invitation.
I intend to travel to Cracow on December 24th, and will leave on the morning of the 26th. If you could recommend a suitable hotel somewhere near your apartment, I will make the necessary arrangements.
Yours,
Papi
22
I’ll say this for Otto Mohnke’s letter: having seven days before I was compelled to leave the city to become a fugitive certainly focussed the mind. There were two things I had to do before I fled.
Most difficult was to make contact with Syzmek Lustgarden. The convenient way was to send a letter of explanation to apartment thirteen. But Syzmek could dismiss a letter as a hoax, or a honey trap. There was also the fear that a piece of paper could fall into the wrong hands. There was only one alternative: we had to speak face to face.
But first, I had to discover what exactly it was the Nazis were planning for next year. Scherer and Kunde both mentioned the Jews were running out of time. Augustus Brühl told me the the Ghetto ‘gold-mine’ was only open for another few months. Yesterday he’d repeated the phrase, when he spoke of closing down Kopaliny: What’s another few months, in the grand scheme of things?
The morning after Otto Mohnke’s letter arrived, I told Brühl it had been a hard week and I was ready to take him up on his offer of a drink. We agreed to go to Michael’s Cave straight after work.
As we left the station at 5
o’clock, Brühl told me he needed the bathroom. He’d catch me up. I stepped out onto Jozefinska and began to dawdle towards the Lworska gate. The street on Saturday was the quietest I had seen it in the daytime. Religious services were forbidden in the Ghetto. I wondered how many secret Sabbath ceremonies were being held behind closed doors, in cellars, attics and back rooms like number 13, while others stood guard.
Brühl caught up with me at the end of the street, reeking of cologne, his short dark hair slicked back with water. He slapped my back and removed his wallet from his trousers.
‘Those rings pawned for two thousand Marks,’ he said, fanning a bunch of banknotes. There was a young Jewish couple up ahead, embracing against a doorway, but otherwise our side of the street was empty.
‘Put it away,’ I said.
‘Take your share.’
‘Not here. It looks cheap.’
‘A thousand Marks not good enough for you.’
‘It looks grubby, handing over money in the street. Something Jews would do.’
‘Fair enough.’ Brühl put his wallet away. ‘I just don’t want you to think I’m stiffing you.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Kunde couldn’t be happier, you know that. Jagiellon’s apartment made him very rich, Scherer too.’
‘I can’t claim much credit for that. Right place, right time.’
‘You’re my good luck charm anyway.’
The two Jews stepped apart as we passed, the man tipping the brim of his hat and burying his black beard in the crook of his shoulder. At that moment, I knew I had seen them before.
They were certainly not in the flushes of youth. Husband and wife might now sport heads that glistened like Russian crude oil, but there was no doubting they were the same wizened couple I’d passed yesterday on the steps of the pharmacy. I stopped and marvelled at their rejuvenation.
I Am Juden Page 31