In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  From somewhere far ahead they could hear commands shouted in German, a burst of caustic laughter, something that popped like a string of firecrackers. The guards looked relieved. German soldiers disliked the forests around Włodawa, rife with saboteurs and partizan activity.

  A corona of green light dawned in the night sky. Shayna caught her breath. The aurora borealis was rarely seen this far south. For a few minutes, it undulated gently among the stars. All at once, the great green ribbon flushed red.

  A frenzy of strange sounds discharged all around them. A muffled whine. The screeching of birds, wheeling through the trees just overhead. The roar of an attacking bear grew in volume, then receded as it bounded through the woods. Branches shook as some huge beast galloped past them, just out of sight.

  The Jews muttered among themselves, the guards glanced at each other uneasily. All down the line, they held their rifles at the ready, swinging their flashlights wildly at the underbrush.

  To Shayna, it seemed like an opportunity. She whispered to Hersh, “They’re distracted. If we’re going to make a run for it, now’s the time. There are only five of them.”

  Hersh hissed furiously. “Are you crazy? He’ll shoot us.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the soldier guarding them.

  “They’re going to shoot us anyway,” she said.

  Sweat was making rings in the armpits of Achim’s greatcoat. Breathing heavily, he swept his rifle at the woods, at the prisoners, at the woods again. In the flashlight’s beam, Shayna could see that his eyes were round and fearful. She almost felt sorry for him.

  Yossel followed Achim’s movements with a troubled expression, his muscles jumping and straining under the skin. Perhaps he was frightened. Turning toward her, he laid his hand on the side of her face. “Shayna,” he said in his gravelly voice.

  All the tenderness in the world resided in that one word. He leaned over, rested his head on top of her shining hair. Then he separated himself from her and launched himself at their guard.

  Taken by surprise, Achim wheeled around, bringing up the barrel of his weapon. He managed to squeeze off a solitary burst before Yossel struck him to the ground. As if he were taking a toy from a child, Yossel took the gun out of his hands. With a single killing blow, Achim was dead.

  Yossel climbed to his feet. He seemed to grow larger before her eyes, the muscles of his arms and legs and shoulders and chest rippling and swelling as if he were a giant in one of Hersh’s stories. “Run,” he said.

  A line of bullets drilled across Yossel’s chest as he hurled himself at the next guard. The Jews fled, scattering in every direction. Hersh grabbed Shayna’s wrist and dragged her into a thicket, where they lay flat in the underbrush.

  They heard men shouting and pleading in German, the staccato rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. The creak of leather boots running frantically back and forth, fewer at each pass. The snap of breaking branches, or was that bone? The desperate cries all creatures make when they’re wounded. Shayna buried her face in the shoulder of Hersh’s coat, put her hands over her ears.

  The shooting grew sporadic, then ceased altogether. Eventually, so did the moaning. Quiet settled over the woods, more dreadful than the sounds that had preceded it.

  Men came fanning through the brush now, calling furtively in Yiddish and in Polish. Soldiers of a Jewish partizan unit, seeking survivors. A man in the uniform of the Soviet army helped Shayna to her feet, told her she was safe. They had to move quickly, he said. The forest would be swarming with German soldiers by morning.

  “We have to go back,” she told him urgently. “We left someone behind.”

  “We’ve all left someone behind,” he said.

  Her hair blowing wild around her face, she started back through the forest. Swearing, he followed her back to the place where they had last seen Yossel.

  They found the first German soldier hanging from the fork of a tree. Loops of his entrails dangled to the earth like ribbons.

  The second one was missing his fingers. Another had lost his nose and both ears. The third soldier had his throat raked open. He had no face at all. The last one had no skin.

  “What did this?” the partizan breathed in appalled awe.

  They found Yossel on the riverbank. He lay on his back, half in and half out of the water, the current tugging gently at his body. Though his eyes were closed, his chest struggled up and down with the effort to breathe.

  At the sound of Shayna’s voice, his eyes flew open. With nerveless fingers, she prised open the flaps of his jacket, then sat back on her knees.

  A dozen bullet wounds tracked in a curved line across his chest. There were more stitched across the flat stomach she had kissed, stab wounds where the bayonets had found him. She couldn’t believe he was still alive.

  Yossel was looking up at her. His face was knotted with pain. Shayna took his hand. When he breathed, it made a wet, syrupy sound. “Shema,” he whispered.

  “Shayna?” she said, with a calm she did not feel. Tears were blurring her vision. “I’m right here.”

  “Shema,” he begged. With an effort that was painful to watch, his hand crept slowly up to his chest.

  Beside her, Hersh drew a sharp breath. “The Shema,” he blurted. “He wants you to remove the Shema.” His voice was unsteady. “The Golem can die only when his mission is complete. When the rabbi removes the name of God from over his heart.”

  Inside his jacket, she found a pocket. Her fingers closed around a tiny scroll of paper. The Shema Yisrael, washed in blood.

  She put the scroll in his hand, curled his fingers around it. Gratefully, he smiled. He turned his head a little so that it rested against her lap, and then he was still.

  * * *

  The town of Żuków, located halfway between the Parczew Forest and the Bug River, has a thriving tourist industry. At least once a week in the warm months, a taxi arrives at the hotel, bearing American Jews who are seeking their Holocaust roots, or a family whose grandparents came from Żuków before the war, or college students with grants to study the partizan activity that flourished in the area.

  Żuków even has its own mascot, the Golem of Żuków. A bronze statue of the Golem occupies a place of honor in the center of town. You can buy a small reproduction cast in tin, or a picture postcard of the statue at sunset, at any of the stores and kiosks around the square. The partizans who witnessed the results of the Golem’s rage carried his story throughout the region.

  Since no photograph of the Golem exists, the sculptor leaned heavily on artistic license, carving him with a huge barrel chest, short legs, and exaggerated, dull-witted features. On the pedestal, a Stalinist-era plaque describes in Polish and bad English how the Golem of Żuków saved two hundred and fifty innocent civilians from death at the hands of the fascist enemy forces in the winter of 1942.

  There is a hotel named after the Golem, and a café. For a modest fee, a taxi driver will drive you to the Mirsky mill, now nationalized, or to the riverbank, where a shrine sprang up to honor his memory.

  After the fall of the Soviet Union, new records surfaced that shed some light on the identity of the so-called Golem. Late in October 1942, the Jews of the town of Lubień were herded into the forest, where they were stripped, machine-gunned, and buried in a mass grave, a story tragically familiar throughout Eastern Europe. By some miracle, the barrage of bullets missed David Turno, oldest son of the rabbi of Turno, a respected authority on the Maharal of Prague. Later that night, he must have dug himself out of the tangle of bodies, physically unharmed but mentally shattered, and wandered through the freezing darkness until, too tired to go any farther, he stumbled into the home of Shayna and Hersh Mirsky. One of the partizans who buried him was from Turno. He recognized the rabbi’s son.

  In 1990 a reporter tracked down Shayna Mirsky, now the owner of a kosher bakery in Chicago, Illinois, looking for an interesting angle. All this time, he asked her, did she honestly believe she’d been saved by a Golem? Did she really believe in magic?
/>   Obviously, she had given it some thought over the years.

  “Love is a kind of magic, too, isn’t it?” she said before hanging up the phone.

  A DECENT MAN

  He arrived in Włodowa on a wet Wednesday in April, at the start of a muddy and riotous spring. Seven months earlier, Russia and Germany had divided Poland between themselves, and his first job was to negotiate the movement of Russian, Ukrainian, Volkdeutsch, and Polish farmers across newly drawn borders to their proper territories. Willy Reinhart was very good at this, earning praise from all sides.

  Within a year, he was the Reich Regional Commissioner of Agricultural Products and Services, administering over the districts, towns, and villages of the Włodawa sector. He was directed to take up residence in Adampol Palace, a white baroque villa belonging to the Earl of Zamoyski, recently relocated to Paris. Nestled in the heart of an ancient wood, the villa had been used as a hunting lodge; the earl had invited aristocratic acquaintances from all over Europe to shoot red deer, elk, boar, bison, wolves, lynx, and bears.

  A starchy, thin-lipped wife arrived from Breslau with two dark-haired boys and was duly installed in the castle. It wasn’t long before the trunks were loaded back into the wagon, the wife and boys deposited at the station. No one could explain this mysterious turn of events—until the cook’s beautiful daughter was spotted riding around town in the back of Reinhart’s black Mercedes.

  His first act as Regional Commissioner was to summon the estate manager to his office. The manager was a frightened young man in his twenties, with a raft of sandy brown hair and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down whenever he swallowed hard, which he was doing now. His thin, spidery fingers roved nervously over the account books he was carrying. Obviously, he was going to be shot. So many Poles in positions of responsibility had already been killed, he seemed to expect that it was his turn.

  Reinhart was opening and shutting the drawers of an eighteenth-century desk with an Italian marble top. Instead of the customary SS black, he was attired in an umber suit with pinstripes. His tie was a satiny bottle green topped by a Windsor knot, his shoes polished a deep, glassy obsidian.

  Finally, he found what he was looking for, a wooden box of cigars. With a little sigh of contentment, he put one between his lips, held a match to the tip until it glowed, then leaned back into the leather cushions of a Louis XIV chair. When he was almost completely enveloped by a cloud of blue smoke, he spoke. “What’s your name?”

  “Drogalski.” The manager’s voice was shaking.

  “Drogalski,” said Reinhart, firmly taking hold of the name. “I have a little job for you. I want you to make me a list of the craftsmen around here. But Drogalski, one moment, please. I want only the best. The best tinsmith, the best blacksmith, the best stonecutter, the best carpenter, the best tailor, the best miller, the best saddlemaker, the best shoemaker . . . I’m very easy to please, you see, Drogalski. All I want is the best of everything.”

  When Reinhart smiled, all the witnesses would later agree, you believed exactly what he said, that everything was going to be all right. The corners of the sensual mouth angled up, the green eyes squeezed down to a jovial glint. The smile twinkled encouragement: Come on, it’s not so bad. The smile promised that it knew your secrets and would keep them safe. The smile wanted to tell you a dirty joke, to buy you a drink, it wanted you to stop worrying. The smile threw its arm around your shoulders and called you friend.

  Reinhart walked him to the door of the office, a hand on his shoulder. “You married? Wife, children?”

  Drogalski replied reluctantly. “Wife. One daughter.”

  “I’ll have to meet them,” Reinhart said. Another smile creased the handsome friendly face. “And one more thing, Drogalski. Stop looking so anxious. You’re making me worry. Everything is going to be fine.”

  As Drogalski compiled his list, he told the men whose names were on it: This German, Reinhart. He seems to be a decent man.

  * * *

  The Gestapo was quartered on Staromiejska Street, on the market square. Reinhart was directed to an inner courtyard, where he found the police chief, an Obersturmführer Otto Streibel, standing in a sea of Jews, reading from a typewritten list. As he called out names, men moved to the right or to the left.

  Streibel looked up from his clipboard just long enough to put the fear of God into him. A youngish man, perhaps in his middle thirties, who took himself very seriously, with hair shaved to a line above his ears and remote, mirthless eyes. “This is impossible,” he grumbled irritably. “I can’t even pronounce half of these names.”

  Reinhart introduced himself. He never went anywhere empty-handed; a case of Hennessey was unloaded from the trunk of his car. It was acknowledged with a flicker of pleasure across the stony face. If you didn’t have business with the Gestapo, it was good policy to stay as far away from them as possible. If you did have business with them, it was wise to bring gifts.

  Streibel granted him a cold, professional smile. “We’re having a little get-together, a Beerfest, at the SS club later tonight,” he said. “Your driver will know where it is.”

  Reinhart nodded enthusiastically. Of course he would be there. Had he met anyone else in the local administrative hierarchy yet, Falkner, Rohlfe, Haas, Gruber? No, but he certainly looked forward to it. Did he like to hunt? They often held shooting events, and they hoped to use the Adampol Palace as an unofficial officers’ hunting lodge. Marvelous, a splendid idea, he would be happy to host, nothing would give him more pleasure.

  The meeting over, Reinhart strode back through the corridor. A blond secretary carrying a set of files sashayed toward him, her breasts jiggling perkily under the blouse of her uniform. Just the way he preferred his ladies, with a tiny waist he could put his hands around, a curvaceous behind, long legs. She smiled as she drew near, he smiled back. Reinhart liked women. No, that wasn’t entirely true—Reinhart loved women, he adored them, he worshipped them. His first sexual experience had come when he was just fifteen, with the mother of one of his school friends.

  One of Blondie’s files went swishing to the floor. Was she making a pass at him? Despite her anxious clucking, he dropped chivalrously to one knee to pick up the scattered papers, taking the opportunity to enjoy a closer look at her rounded calves. She smiled and murmured her thanks, pushed a strand of hair back behind one pink ear. Reinhart continued on his way, stealing a glance over his shoulder to see if she was still watching him. That was why he nearly tripped over the man sitting to the right of the duty officer’s desk.

  Reinhart almost apologized, the words already escaping his lips, when he noticed the white armband on his jacket. Dejectedly, the man raised his head. He looked miserable. Who would look any different, confined to a bench in the Sicherheitspolizei headquarters? The Jew’s eyes were as light as the sky, set deep in a sunburned, leathery face with a square, determined chin. A strong, honest face, a face you could trust. Reinhart wondered what he was in for.

  Quickly, the Jew dropped his gaze back to the floor. Looking directly at the Deutschen could get you beaten, maybe killed. With a glum sigh, the Jew removed his cap and furrowed his fingers through his hair, which was a sunny orange.

  A woman flung open the door to the building. Her eyes were fierce and black under eyebrows drawn down together in an angry vee. Like the other village women, she wore a flowered apron over a heavy shapeless skirt, her hair swathed in a long shawl. In her fist, she clutched a blackened frying pan. “There you are!” she shouted, marching up to the man on the bench. “So it’s true! They said I would find you here!”

  To Reinhart’s immense surprise, she began flailing the frying pan at the red-haired man’s head and shoulders. “You bastard! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” Thwack. “Where have you been?” Thwack, thwack! “Never came home last night!” Thwack! A good one to the side of the head.

  One by one, the German administrators turned their heads to watch the show. “Do you have a girlfriend? Tell me,
you louse, you lazy bum! Where were you all night? You were drinking with that shit-for-brains Jablonski, weren’t you? When the kids are hungry and begging for bread!” Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack!

  By now, the place rang with laughter. People stuck their heads out of their offices to see what the commotion was about. The man held his arms over his head, beseeching her to stop, pleading for forgiveness, babbling excuses, swearing to God and the devil and anyone else who was listening that he would never do it again. The furious little babushka gave her husband another corrective blow with the frying pan, grabbed him by the earlobe, and dragged him out the front door. The German officers shouted encouragement: You tell him, little mother, again! Give it to him good!

  Reinhart glanced hopefully down the corridor at the secretary, her red lips parted in a lovely blond laugh. He took the opportunity to ask for her name, and would she be interested in seeing his castle. Of course she said yes; he would send his driver for her later.

  The show was over, work was waiting for him back at the castle. He pushed open the door to the outside. It was a fine May morning, the cherry trees were in bloom, silky pink petals swirled around the cobblestones at his feet. He stopped to admire his sleek new automobile, idling at the curb. It was market day. He could smell horse manure, rotting vegetables, smoke. The square was packed with wagons, tables and booths, tradesmen sharpening knives and scissors, selling pots and pans, old clothes, live chickens. Merchants hawked their wares, villagers milled around tables, voices were raised in haggling. Reinhart smiled. He’d grown up near a town like this, and though he’d left it to attend university in Breslau, it still felt like home.

  That was when he spotted them, the angry little wife and the hapless workman, making their way through the vendors. At the other side of the square they halted, dared a glance behind them in the direction of the Gestapo Headquarters. When they saw that no one had followed them, the wife dropped the frying pan on the cobblestones, and the couple embraced. They stayed that way for a long moment, arms wound tightly around each other, bodies pressed together as if they were dancing. Then the man took his wife’s face between his two hands and kissed her hard on the lips. After that, they melted into the crowds flowing down Rynek Street, and out of his sight.