The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  “I see.”

  Krystyna was not going to say more. “Look, Rita, like I said, tomorrow, out you go. Find a place, get a Kennkarte, disappear.”

  “Krystyna, I think I have something the Home Army can use. But I need some help.”

  They were sitting at the breakfast table. Krystyna’s agitation was evident. So was Rita’s, for that matter.

  With a look of annoyance, Krystyna responded, “Yes, what?” She might as well have said, “Yes, what now? Jews, never grateful, always wanting more. Why did I ever get involved with you . . . ?” Well, Rita thought, can you blame her, either for her response or for her anxiety about the risks she is running? No. So, be patient. Rita stood and went over to her coat, brought it back to the kitchen table, and began to rip the seams out of the bottom. Out onto the table came the remaining dozen vials. She laid them across the table and then went into her garret, coming back with the three parts of the syringe. “Morphine.”

  Krystyna visibly relaxed. “Something we can always use.”

  “It’s a gift to the Home Army.”

  “And in return?” Krystyna was back to business.

  Rita tore more of the seam out and began fishing out gold zloty coin after gold coin, until eighteen of the twenty coins were on the table. She left two still hidden in the seam. “I can’t go anywhere in Warsaw with a hoard like this, can I?”

  “No. It would be stripped from you piece by piece or all at once. Just having it on you is enough to prove you are a Jew in most people’s eyes.”

  “Yes. I’ve been told I am safer with nothing of value on me. I’d give these coins to the Home Army too, but I think I am going to need them. So, I need someone to keep them for me.”

  “Well, it won’t be me. I told you when you arrived, you can’t stay here. You can’t come back here, ever. You have to forget all about this place and me. Besides, what are you going to need all that money for? You’ll get a Kennkarte, no problem. And then you’ll be safe.”

  Rita drew a breath. “I have to get into the ghetto. I have to find the orphanage. I have to look for my child.” Krystyna was shaking her head. “I have to. It will take money. I need someone to keep it.”

  Krystyna was still shaking her head, and now closing her lips into a tight grimace.

  “Look, you told me yourself, yesterday, there are ways . . . what did you call them, dead drops? You can hold my money and pass it to me without anyone knowing, without any risk to you. You can even keep what I don’t end up needing.”

  Krystyna was weakening, Rita could see. After a moment’s thought, Krystyna said, “All right, I am going to get zloty for this from the Home Army. They need hard currency and will give you a fair exchange.” She stopped. “There is a café down the street. It’s called Le Chemiot, French for trainman. You passed it coming here. I stop there in the early evening for a glass of wine—terrible stuff, but I do it every day at 18:30. If you need money, go in, have a beer or something, ersatz coffee, whatever. Hang your coat on the coatrack at the back, always inside out. That way I’ll know which is yours. When I come in, do nothing. When you leave, there will be money in your coat.

  “I don’t know why I am doing this. It’s dangerous for you, for me, for the resistance.” Rita knew why. Like most humans, Krystyna would respond to human emotions with kindness, especially if there were something to gain. “Now, here’s a key. Out you go. You know where to go and what to do. When you come back for your things, I won’t be here. So put the key on the top of the doorframe when you leave. You are tall enough to reach it.”

  An hour later, Rita was across the Vistula, in Three Crosses Square, central Warsaw, queuing at the Generalgouvernement Internal Passport Office, documents in her hand. After thirty minutes or so, she found herself in front of the bars of a window grill, confronted by the pinched, birdlike face of a man addressing her in German-accented Polish. “Tak—yes . . . ?”

  Wordlessly Rita handed across her Polish identity, her birth certificate, her baptism certificate, and the completed application form, along with the required photo, taken that morning at a little studio in Praga. The little man put a series of ticks against various items on his checklist, looked up, and addressed her in Polish: “Come back in a week.” Rita was ready for this. She began in her rehearsed German, “But, Mein Herr Inspektor, can’t it be today? I cannot go around Warsaw without papers, and I am applying for a job today, with the Generalgouvernement.” Then, with all the stealth she could muster, she slipped one of the reichsmarks banknotes Julia had given her that last night in Karpatyn across the counter. At the going rate of exchange for zloty, it was at least a week’s salary for the poor bureaucrat. At the same time and in the most pliant tones she could muster, she pleaded, “Bitte, Mein Herr, could you not do it for a good Volks-Deutsche?” She put her finger on her mother’s names in the baptismal certificate.

  He grumbled. “Always the same. Special treatment.” Then more quietly, “Come back before we close at five thirty.” Then he looked up. In a voice louder than he seemed capable of, he called, “Next.”

  On to the labor exchange, though how she was to negotiate this office without papers was beyond her. The office was in the next building, a holdover from the prewar Polish government office. Rita studied the listing of positions available in a glass case on the wall. She found one that might be promising—shopgirl in a department store—and moved to a bench. Again, another form to fill out on her lap, this time demanding work experience. Her only relevant experience was having been a customer in such a store. But that wouldn’t work here, so she mentioned positions at a few shops in Lemberg. Would they check?

  “So, you are interested in the salesgirl position at Jablkowski Brothers? Not too many girls want to work there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the neighborhood. Close to the ghetto. Lots of identity checks.” She looked straight at Rita, as if to say, “Jewish? Don’t take this job.”

  “No problem. Please give me the address.”

  “Very well. Report there on Thursday at eight thirty. Take your documents.” That gave her a day to find lodgings.

  It seemed safe to ask the one obvious question a stranger might ask. “Exactly where is the Jewish quarter?” This was the ghetto’s official name. “With my luck, I’d end up on top of it.”

  “It surrounds Mirowski Square, a few blocks north of the Jablkowski Brothers Department Store on Bracka Street. It’s easier to avoid now. Much smaller than it was.” Rita did not have to ask why.

  It was almost noon when she came out of the labor exchange, too late to begin looking for a room. Everything decent advertised in the newspaper would already be taken. Besides, walking the pavement without a document in her purse would be madness. There was nothing for it but to find a hotel for the night and convince them she could show papers by the evening.

  Rita joined what passed for noontime bustle. At the first intersection, she surveyed the streets in four directions. Three-story stucco buildings, all attached, all painted creamy pastel colors, mainly ochre, and visibly deteriorating after three years of occupation. Not many cars, and those bearing marks of German requisition. A few horse-drawn carriages. One felt sorry for the horses and their drivers, in that order. Both looked as though they knew their lives would end before the war did.

  There, down the street, halfway back to the Internal Passport Office, stood a decrepit-looking building with a small sign she could just make out: a German name, Hotel Handel—the Hotel Commerce. She began walking toward it. From the moment she crossed the street away from the labor exchange, she felt a presence behind her. As Rita passed a narrow gap between two buildings, she was pulled back into it. She turned around to see two young men—boys actually, both smaller than she was—one brandishing a broken penknife blade. The slightly larger one began, “Tak, suka Yid. [So, Jew bitch.] One hundred zloty, and you can go.”

  Rita looked at them, two urchins, probably starving in the streets, but prepared to threaten a woman
for a zloty or two. The knife was real enough. But if she was going to survive in Warsaw, she had to be able to deal with this. In her loudest German, she began to shriek, “Hilfe! German lady being attacked by Polak street thugs. Someone, anyone, help a German woman undefended.” Then in Polish, “Do you hear? I am a German woman, and you will be in for it if they catch you . . .” Back to German: “Hilfe! Hilfe!” The boys looked at one another twice and began to scamper down the alley.

  The clerk at the Hotel Handel was a wizened spinster, or at any rate, wore no wedding ring. “Yes, we have a room. No luggage? Well, payment in advance, fifteen zloty. No visitors, no Jews; you have to register with the police by tomorrow. Your papers.” She held out her hand.

  Rita gestured with her head. “They’re just being issued, at the office up the street. I’ll bring them by at six o’clock. I’ll get my luggage from the station and come back when the papers are ready.”

  The woman shrugged. “If there is one thing the Szkops can do right, it’s issue papers on time.” It was the first time Rita had heard the word in Warsaw. “Szkops” was an abusive Polish term for Germans. This woman evidently had no more love for them than for Jews.

  By six o’clock Rita had papers, good anywhere in the Reich until 1948, bearing her photo, endorsed by an eagle gripping a swastika, and registering her in Warsaw. After slapping them on the hotel counter, Rita boarded a streetcar and traveled back across the Vistula to Praga, thinking hard about where she was going to hide the last two gold coins in Krystyna’s apartment. They would be her reserve, and she had a good idea that she would need them.

  As Krystyna had promised, no one was in the flat. Rita packed her few things quickly. Then she began to seek a hiding place for the two gold coins. Somewhere dark where it would be hard to shine an electric torch, she thought. In the kitchen she dropped down to her knees in front of the large enamel iron sink. It stood beneath a window overlooking the air shaft. Reaching the back of the sink, she pushed her hand up until she could feel the gap between it and the wall it was bolted to. She wrapped each coin in enough cloth that it could be pushed into the space and remain there. Then she stood at the sink, pushing and pulling at its frame to try to dislodge the coins. She could not move it. Satisfied that the coins were held fast, she closed her case and left the apartment, placing the key high enough on the doorframe to be invisible to anyone who was not looking for it. “Thanks, Krystyna,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rita lay there in the dark on the narrow, creaking bed, trying to warm the damp sheets and shape the lumpy pillow, unable to cover both shoulders and her feet with the thin, short blanket. The hotel’s small but annoying blue neon sign was flashing through the translucent blinds every seven and a half heartbeats.

  Sleep was not coming. Her thoughts kept returning to what she had learned in only a few days since escaping the ghetto. As if Nazis weren’t enough. There were Blue Police, the Home Army, a sea of factions, and add to the mix Jewish thugs preying on Jews, Jewish gangs trying to control the ghetto. Was there no end to the spawning of new predators?

  The question started out in her mind as purely rhetorical. But then it turned into something Freddy had said about the Black Death. Don’t think about people as the agents who perpetrate the horrors. Think about us as a fertile environment, a niche that diseases invade, occupy, change. We are the prey, the hosts, the victims that the virus or bacillus, the parasite carrying the disease, feeds on. The infection of Nazism had created breeding grounds that selected for other, different parasites, even infecting Jews and spreading a new parasite among them that made their hosts scavenge on the Germans’ prey.

  Then she thought, Rita, your mind is a breeding ground too. What parasitical idea in your head is surviving by making you survive?

  The next morning Rita set out from the hotel to find a room as close to Marszakowska Street as she could get. This street ran from Mirowski Place, where the two parts of the original ghetto had been connected by a wooden trestle pedestrian bridge over the tram tracks, down to Aleje Jerozolimskie, a block from the department store on Baska Street. She didn’t think it would be hard to find a room along Jerozolimskie Street. By now the ghetto was much smaller than it had been at its origin in 1940. So many had been deported to extermination that the Germans had closed the little ghetto that had been connected to the larger one by the pedestrian bridge. Still, Poles probably didn’t want to live near even an empty ghetto, and Jews in hiding certainly didn’t. It would surely be the part of the city where the Germans checked for papers more than anywhere else. Yet the newspapers had no adverts for rooms in the district. And as she walked the street up from the store and back down from the German ghetto administration office, there didn’t seem to be many “for let” signs in the windows. She rang every door with a sign. But evidently something about her was putting off the owners. More than one lady with rooms to rent didn’t like a brand-new Kennkarte, and a few others accused her to her face of being a Jew on the run. Others would not rent to a single woman: “Who knows what line of work you are really in, dear?” By late in the afternoon, Rita had given up hope and resigned herself to another night at the Hotel Handel, with no chance to look the next day. She had to report for work on Thursday.

  She was practically back to Baska Street, where the department store sat. The lady at the last door she tried was at least genuinely regretful with her—“No, nothing.” As Rita turned to descend the stair, she called out, “Wait. A friend told me today that she had lost her lodger. Perhaps you can take the place. Let me give you the address.” She wrote out Widok 44. It was a street Rita already knew from wandering through the district. She thanked the lady and turned to leave. As she left, the woman said, “She’ll like you. The last tenant was a man, a Jew she had a lot of trouble getting rid of. Finally she just had to call the police.”

  At Widok 44 Mrs. Kaminski was suspicious, especially since Rita could not remember the name of the lady around the corner who had given her the address. “Sorry, I don’t have any room.”

  “But your friend, Panna—Mrs. . . . Anyway, she said you just lost your lodger . . .” No response. “She said you had to get rid of him. He was a Yid.” How could she break through? “But as you see, I am not a Jewess. I am Aryan, Volks-Deutsche. Please, I am new to Warsaw and have no place to stay.” Finally, “I’ll pay in advance! Please.”

  The door opened slightly, and now Mrs. Kaminski was reconsidering. “No visitors, no Jews, no noise, do not ask to use the kitchen. Bath only twice a week. Lights off at 10:00 p.m. Twenty zloty a week. Police registration slip . . . I have to have it tomorrow.”

  “Yes, yes, agreed. Thank you.” Rita pushed the money into her hand and practically barged through the door. “May I see the room?”

  “I suppose so, as you have forced me into renting it to you.” Mrs. Kaminski did not even smile at her own unintended joke.

  The room wasn’t much better than what Krystyna had provided in Praga. Still, it was where she needed to be if she was ever to find her way into the ghetto and back out again, with her son if she could find him.

  Jablkowski Brothers Department Store was still an imposing building, one that must have been a splendid emporium in prewar Warsaw. Now it was living on its past and on what its buyers could scrounge in the wake of German requisitions throughout Europe.

  Without even bothering to examine her perfectly valid papers, the floorwalker engaged Rita instantly and led her to the stationery and school supplies. All she had needed was her German and an obsequious air about her. She was handed a brown smock with the lettering “Stationery” embroidered over the heart and sent to the fountain pen desk to learn her duties. The stock was displayed under glass in a long counter, across from the revolving door at the store’s main entrance. To the left were perfumes and cosmetics, stocked with whatever the French had left to export after the German occupation troops had taken their fill. To the right were hats and gloves, scarves and baggage. In each department there w
ere one or two salesladies—in many cases, just girls. All seemed to Rita to be watching her, sizing her up, guessing at her secrets, as she was led across the floor to her station.

  The floorwalker was dressed in a cutaway, with a waxed mustache and hair parted in the middle, reminding Rita of a character out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. She almost wanted to stay the night, put on roller skates, and dance them across the wide space between pens and the revolving entrance doors. He led her to her station, more concerned with making an impression on customers, especially German ones. This floorwalker, she could tell, would rarely notice what was really going on among his charges.

  Shortages had reduced trade in the store’s main line of business, textiles and clothes. Rita knew why this was so from the inside, so to speak. Almost all of Poland’s textile production was now fashioned into uniforms by slave labor exclusively for the Wehrmacht. But some luxury goods, especially ones from Germany, such as fine fountain pens, were still coming into Warsaw. They were going out again, back to Germany, because here they could be bought for zloty at the exchange rate that made a German corporal better off than a Warsaw lawyer.

  The main thing the floorwalker was not noticing was that his staff seemed to be composed of two sorts of people: rabidly anti-Semitic clerks and Jews on false or no identities. This fact about the employees became clear to Rita when she entered the canteen for lunch that first day on the job.

  She was motioned over to a table by her counter mate, a young woman named Lotte. Once seated, Rita was invited to participate in a round-robin of abuse and vituperation directed at the Jews of Warsaw, Poland, and Europe. It wasn’t what she was expecting.

  One of the few older women employees began. “You just started, right, sister? You should have been here when this place was a Jew-business. Owned by Jews, catering to the Yid trade. Never gave a Christian even a chance to rise above floorwalker. Fired people for the littlest offense—taking home a trinket no one would have missed, cutting out of work early on saints’ day. What did it matter when they were so rich?”