In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  “They were already shoveling sand over them. I was looking down into the pit, into her eyes, and I saw pleading there. Help me, Stefan, she seemed to be saying. Help me.

  “I am a hunter, I said to myself. I do not let even an animal suffer. So I raised my rifle to my cheek. I aimed carefully. I did not miss.”

  The priest was staring at him. He had abandoned all pretense of polite conversation. When the old man spoke again, he was calm, almost matter-of-fact. “They brought Jews all that day, and the next day, and the day after that. On the third day, we were finished. There were no more Jews in Włodawa. We were Judenrein.”

  The priest was finding it difficult to speak. “And where did it take place, all this killing?”

  The old man looked surprised. “Right here,” he said.

  The boy had finished his snowman. It sat at the frozen edge of an undeveloped patch of land between the buildings, the scarf Eric had contributed fluttering in the wind. What was unusual was the grass, a summery apple green even though the temperature was a steady fifteen degrees Fahrenheit and the sidewalk was ridged with ice.

  The priest felt goose bumps rise along his arms. “Thank you for your help,” he said.

  “No, Father, thank you,” the old man replied, his smile a garish rictus of gratitude. “I’ve never told anyone that story, not even my daughter. It’s good to talk about it after all this time. I should have told you the truth from the beginning. I think I was hiding it even from myself.”

  This time the wizened cheeks crinkled up into a jovial grin, and the priest caught a glimpse of the boy he must have been before history caught him up in its jaws and twisted him into something hideous, a boy who might have been the lover of a murdered girl named Cilla.

  The old man wanted to linger, to talk some more, but the child was tugging at his sleeve. “Maybe there’s a reason that you came here today,” he suggested with a satisfied sigh. “All these years, I haven’t been able to take Communion. Maybe God sent you to me.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” the priest said automatically. He wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible, as he would from a bad smell.

  Only reluctantly did the old man totter away after his grandson. Eric went to retrieve his scarf and cap from the snowman. When he straightened back up, he noticed that the priest was crying, tears falling from his red-rimmed eyes.

  “That was horrible,” he said.

  “Yes,” agreed the priest.

  “We should report him to someone. He’s a war criminal.”

  The priest, whose last name was Reinhart, wiped his eyes with the heels of his hand. “Yes. We should. But then none of these people would ever talk to us again. We’d be defeating our own purpose.”

  They began to walk down Wirka Street toward their car, a battered green Soviet-era Škoda. “I think I have frostbite,” said Eric. “I can’t feel my fingers. I haven’t built a snowman since I was ten.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Father, I know this sounds crazy . . . but the story he was telling reminded me of something. You know that photograph? The one in the file?”

  They had reached the car. Gratefully, the priest slid behind the wheel. Despite the deceptively cheery presence of the sun, it was brutally cold. He took off his gloves to open the manila file that lay on the cracked leather seat of the Škoda. Inside were a few xeroxed pages, accompanied by a grainy black-and-white photograph taken by some anonymous bystander at a mass killing just like this one. The priest squinted at it, trying to imagine it imposed over the present landscape. There was his father, standing with a quartet of officers over to one side. A few soldiers penned in a blurry mass of human beings. In the forefront of the picture, a young man in civilian clothing stood at the jagged edge of a pit, a too-large jacket hanging awkwardly on his frame, aiming his rifle at a girl in the bottom of a trench that was already partially filled with bodies. She was naked; her hands were pressed against her stomach.

  The priest had seen all too many photos like this one, but he had to admit, Eric had a point. There was something in the way the gunman stood, a tenderness in the way he cradled the stock to his cheek, something more in the way the girl was looking up at him. The priest shivered.

  “Where are we going next?” said Eric, scribbling notes into a loose-leaf notebook.

  Carefully, the priest spread out the map of Poland on the dashboard. It was dated 1939, the names of the towns were printed in German. He had to be careful with it; the paper was yellowed and cracking at the folds. It was dotted over with tiny red X’s. “There are so many places like this,” said the priest wearily. “And these are just the ones my father knew about.”

  “How can you keep on doing this?” said the younger man. He had finished with his notes and was closing the photo back into the file.

  “I have to. It’s the only way I can think of to atone for him.”

  “This guy—we didn’t even get his name—did he tell you anything new?”

  The priest heaved a sigh. He repeated the old man’s words. He looked very pale. He knew some of the people being killed, they worked for him. He had promised that he would protect them. Either he was lying or his friends back in Berlin had other ideas.

  “That’s something,” said Eric. Sympathetically. “He couldn’t have been the monster they say he was.”

  “You should have noticed by now,” the priest said. “Sometimes a monster looks just like any other man.”

  He started up the car. After overcoming an initial reluctance, it came juddering to life.

  THE JEW HATER

  Pavel Walczak hated Jews.

  When the first German soldiers came knocking on the door of his isolated farmhouse, they were just thirsty. Pavel took it upon himself to point out the homesteads and businesses of his Jewish neighbors.

  Later on, he would inform upon locals he suspected of aiding Jewish partizans, and after that, he would volunteer the names of farmers he suspected of hiding Jews. Upon sighting bedraggled strangers venturing timidly from the safety of the trees to beg for food, Pavel made a special trip to town to tell the SS where they could be found.

  Life had made him that way, his neighbors told each other. A farmer and the son of a farmer, the Lord had seen fit to redeem him from a harsh, unsparing upbringing with the love of a vivacious young girl named Lidia.

  After a brief courtship, they were married. They set up house in a low thatched cottage, three kilometers from the market town of Włodawa. That spring, purple wildflowers sprouted from the dirt between the furrows. Gray clouds sprinkled rain over the trembling, heart-shaped green leaves while Pavel built a cradle and Lidia sorted eggs on the porch, her belly growing bigger and rounder with each passing week. They named the baby Kazimir, after the patron saint of all children.

  For a year or two, they were happy. Pavel plowed and planted, Lidia raised chickens. The baby thrived, the fields produced. In 1925 the killing flu that had made its presence felt during the Great War writhed one last time before disappearing forever. It took Lidia and Kazimir with it. Shortly after this, the farmer’s face closed in on itself, assuming the look it would bear for the rest of his life: cold, hard, with eyes like slits and the mouth no more than a lipless slash, all in muted tones of browns and gray. The less kind among his neighbors suggested that he resembled a potato.

  The Depression seemed to bring with it disastrous weather on a biblical scale. Drought stalked the land, followed by the vast unimaginable destructive power of floods. The winding, lyrical Bug overflowed its banks and spread like a five-fingered hand of God over the land, scouring away farmsteads and livestock, obliterating crops. People starved. In church, where the impoverished pious gathered to seek explanation, the priest placed the blame squarely on Communists and Jewish bankers.

  Pavel’s neighbor to the north was a farmer by the name of Jasinski. When Pavel griped, as he regularly did, that Jewish speculators had started this war, that they had started the last one, and that furthermore, they
drank the blood of little Christian children in their religious ceremonies, Jasinski would point out yet again that two of the most trusted merchants in the county, Mirsky the miller and Soroka the saddlemaker, were both Jewish.

  While Pavel scowled, Jasinski would bring up an incident that had occurred two years earlier. In June of 1941, tanks and trucks had rumbled through Włodawa en route to the Soviet Union. The soldiers of both armies showed no respect for Pavel’s potato fields. They fought there, they died there, they dug up his seedlings and ate them, they lit fires and burned his vines and hid in the heavy yellow smoke. Artillery from both sides pounded what was left into muddy pits.

  As luck would have it, his ancient wagon harness chose that particular moment in history to dissolve into dust. The trip to Soroka’s shop was a waste of time. The craftsman shook his head, saying he could do the repair, but the reins and bridle were rotted through. Could he fix them? Yes, but he would feel like he was stealing the farmer’s money. Better to spend his hard-earned zlotys on a whole new harness.

  Pavel made some lame excuse and plodded slowly back to the farm. There would be no money for luxuries like that this year, even if they were necessities.

  To his utter and lasting astonishment, Soroka showed up the following day with a brand-new suit of leather—reins, bridles, straps, and horse collars—coiled in the back of his wagon. Shamefacedly, Pavel was forced to admit that he couldn’t afford it. The saddlemaker shrugged and told him to pay him back whenever he could.

  “Does that sound like a man who drinks the blood of children at his holiday gatherings?” Jasinski asked, shifting his smelly cigarette to the other side of his mouth.

  Pavel glowered at him. So what, a Jew was a Jew. They were all cut from the same cloth, greedy, scheming Christ killers, just waiting for the opportunity to cheat an honest Pole out of his money. Anyone who thought differently was either stupid or naive.

  * * *

  It was like a bad joke, the young man standing in his house, bleeding onto his floor.

  At midnight, two men had knocked on his door, rousing him from his bed. Occasionally, he would receive a surreptitious visitor from the AK, the Polish Home Army, asking for food or a place to sleep, and he liked to do what he could to help.

  But these men were no Poles. Clearly, they were Jewish partizans based in the nearby forest. The leader was tall and spare, with a handsome hawklike profile, straight black hair drawing back like a crow’s wings from a broad, high forehead. Rising from his body were the smells of pine and outdoor living, doing battle with the stink of the smoking oil lamp in the air of the low, cramped hut. He was also armed to the teeth, a modern Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle slung over his shoulder and a rusted World War I–era pistol stuck in a belt around his waist. Even more impressive, he was attired in a Russian army greatcoat. As he stood in the entryway of Pavel’s hut, blood dripped slowly from the bottom of the magnificent coat, forming a small pool on the hard-packed dirt floor.

  “The Deutschen ambushed our camp,” the young man explained, though Pavel hadn’t asked. “A lot of our people were killed. They knew we were there. Someone tipped them off.” His breathing was labored. Whether it was from his injury or his emotions was unclear. He put his hand to his side and swayed, shutting his eyes for a moment.

  “You’re wounded,” Pavel said. “Good.” He spat venomously on the floor. “I hope you die. I hope you all die. Poland will be better off without you bloodsuckers.”

  The young man’s eyes were sick with pain, but they could still flame with passion. Pavel found himself staring down the barrel of a German Luger, almost certainly recovered from a dead Wehrmacht soldier. The farmer cowered back in confusion. It had never occurred to him that he might die at the hands of a Jew.

  His companion caught his arm, a slight, worried-looking man. “Yosha,” he said.

  Despite the cold, sweat had broken out on the young man’s forehead. “This is why we’re here, you prick,” he said. “We know you ratted us out to the Germans. Usually, we kill people like you. But today’s your lucky day. We’re going to give you a chance to redeem yourself.”

  The partizan moved aside to reveal the little girl hidden behind the skirts of his coat. She was dressed in an elegant navy blue jacket with a velvet collar and a double row of gold buttons. On her head was a matching blue velvet cap that tied under her chin. But for the tumble of red-gold curls that stamped her unquestionably as a Jew, she could have been on her way to church in Warsaw.

  “This is Reina. She’ll be staying with you for a while.”

  Pavel couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Were you hit in the head? Anyone can see she’s a Jew.”

  With difficulty, the wounded man got down on one knee and unbuttoned the little girl’s jacket. When he lifted up her shirt, Pavel averted his gaze. “Look over here, you bastard,” the partizan said between gritted teeth. “You need to know about this.”

  Under a bandage made from knotted rags was a circular red-rimmed wound. A bullet had passed through the white flesh of the little girl’s left flank and out the other side. Despite himself, Pavel caught his breath. What kind of a soldier would shoot a little girl?

  “It doesn’t seem to have penetrated any organs,” said the partizan. He sounded exhausted. “But it needs to be kept clean, and she needs to rest. Since you’re the biggest anti-Semite in the county, no one will suspect you’re hiding Jews. We’ll come back for her after we set up a new camp. Shouldn’t be long. A month or two.”

  At this, the little girl burst into tears and threw her arms around his legs. Gently, he disentangled himself, speaking to her in the Jews’ secret language, stroking her hair. Drip, drip, drip, his blood fell steadily from the hem of his coat onto the floor.

  “Is she yours?”

  “My sister,” he said. “Maybe you knew our father. Soroka the saddlemaker.”

  A feeling of coldness stole over the farmer’s heart, taking him by surprise. “Why can’t she stay with him? Isn’t he in Adampol, with the rest of Reinhart’s Jews?”

  The young man bowed his head.

  “There is no more Adampol,” said the second partizan grimly. “Haven’t you heard? Three hundred and fifty people, shot behind the stables.”

  Pavel was taken aback. Reinhart had a reputation for being a good man, even if he was a German, even if he was a Jew lover.

  The wounded partizan, the one called Yosha, was crying, tears glistening on his hawk’s face. “I should have gotten them out.”

  “Stop blaming yourself,” the other man said. “We thought they were safe with Reinhart. Besides. Your father is a smart man. For all you know, he’s hiding somewhere.”

  “Then why was she wandering around the forest by herself?” Yosha cried in despair.

  This exchange seemed to take the last of his strength. His head drooped, and the hand he rested on the little girl’s neck seemed to be holding on to her for support.

  “We’d better be going,” said the second partizan. “Someone might have seen the light.”

  “What will I tell people?” said Pavel desperately. “When the Germans find out, they’ll kill us both.”

  “Say that she’s your cousin from Drohobych. Her parents sent her to the country to keep her safe from the Communists.”

  “I don’t have any family in Drohobych.”

  “You do now.”

  “Yosha,” said his friend, gentle but insistent.

  “One more thing,” said the young man hurriedly. “She doesn’t speak Polish. It’ll be easier if you just tell people that she’s mute.”

  Pavel threw up his hands in panicked disbelief. This was really too much. But the young man ignored his distress, instead stooping down to give the girl a soft kiss on top of her head. Then he folded his arms around her in a tight embrace.

  Her chubby fingers worked off his cap and tunneled through the waves of his hair. The partizan’s eyes squeezed shut, his doomed, dramatic face contracting in expressions of pain and grief; then he
straightened up and limped out the door, favoring his left side.

  Pavel followed them as far as the gate. “You’ll be dead by morning,” the farmer jeered at his retreating back. “What’s to prevent me from handing her over to the Gestapo the minute you leave?”

  The partizan wheeled around, locked the farmer in his feverish, fanatical gaze. “Only this. If anything happens to this little girl—and I mean anything, accident, wild animals, act of God—my friend Arno here—Arno the Hammer, by the way—will find you, wherever you are, and burn down your house. With you in it.”

  Seething with hatred, Pavel watched them leave, killing them a hundred different ways inside his mind, until their forms were liquidated by the black and starless night. He wanted to slam the door, scream curses and insults, but he didn’t dare. He closed the gate with an angry click. As he climbed the steps to the hut, his rage mounted in leaps and bounds, looking for an acceptable outlet.

  The dog. Where was the dog?

  Cezar was the biggest, blackest, meanest, ugliest, smelliest dog in the district, with a blunt, boxy snout and demented red eyes. He had rough scraggly hair like a wild boar and the rabid temperament of a mother bear protecting her cubs. Twice he had snapped at Reinhart when the commandant came to inspect the farm. Pitiless executioner of innumerable cats, mice, rabbits, and weasels, just last week he had killed a fluffy white companion dog as its horrified master looked on, picking it up by the scruff of the neck and giving it a vicious shake. Where had he been during this furtive night visit? Wasn’t this the very reason that a man kept a dog? Pavel picked up his walking stick, slapped the thick end of it into his palm. He would beat some sense into the animal’s skull, teach him a lesson. At the very least, it would make him feel better. He opened the door, whistling.

  There was Cezar, stretched out in front of the fire, his ears pricked up at attention, long pink tongue lolling blissfully from between jagged teeth. The little girl’s arms were clasped around his thick woolly neck, her bright head resting on his matted black fur.