Two steps away from the building, Rita turned back unnoticed and slipped into the doorway again. When she came out ten seconds later, her guide was turning around looking for her. “What happened to you?” he whispered as she reached him.
“I got dizzy,” she replied. “I lost you for a moment.”
“Can’t afford to lose you now.” He grabbed her wrist and began pulling her along. They wound their way through a maze of alleys and open streets, each as much a grim witness to the ghetto charnel as the rest. The journey seemed to Rita an endless torture. The gasoline smell of the rag had long weakened to ineffectiveness, and she was retching up acid with every breath as they finally found their way to the place where they had begun. Her nameless guide pushed her head down as they entered the basement, meanwhile deftly reaching into the coat she wore to remove the envelope of documents she had carried into the ghetto.
“Give me that,” she hissed, and began to scratch at him. He had no trouble warding her blows off with one hand as he held the envelope aloft. She stopped, exhausted. “It’s just my papers. The gold coins aren’t there. Would I be foolish enough to carry them with me?”
He opened the envelope and satisfied himself. “Well, where are they? We’re not going to let you go without the rest of the payment.”
“Just get me back to where I left my clothes.” She retched out the words. He turned back, not relinquishing her envelope.
A few minutes later, they were at the tunnel opening. Holding her firmly, the man reached down to the ground, picking up her dress and coat. Carefully the hand began to feel through the garments, feeling for coins. “No payoff, no papers.”
“The second coin is back there in the building where the children were. On the lintel of the door. Just go back and reach up for it. I went back and put it there when I told you I got dizzy.” His smile was slightly rueful. “For the next one, and the ones after that, you’ll have to give me my papers and let me go. I know you’ll have me followed. So, you’ll know where I live. Send someone you trust up to my room when you think it’s safe enough, and the rest will be there.”
With a look of admiration, he handed over the papers. “Jewess or not, you’re a clever one. But you’re right. You won’t go far unless you come across with the rest. And if the second coin is not where you say, you’ll be in the hands of the Gestapo by suppertime.” He let go of her wrist, handed her the documents, and went quickly out back into the ghetto. Rita dressed and crept back out into the Warsaw streets.
She could feel herself being followed before she could see who it was. Perhaps the street urchin following her had been told to make it obvious. She made no attempt to lose him. By now it was dawn, and they were alone on Marszakowska Street. She let the boy follow her all the way to Aleje Jerozolimskie, walking in the direction of her hotel. In the distance she could see the first tram of the day coming up behind her. It was three stops away, full of early morning riders headed to work. She gauged her pace so that she arrived at a stop just before the tram pulled away, jumped on, and paid her fare. The boy was left on the other side of the street, grimacing. Rita could only hope that he was not prepared to attract attention by running and that he might even be a Jew, forbidden on the trams under any circumstances.
It was going to be too easy, she thought, outwitting these szmalcowniks. But what if she had found her child? This plan would never have worked. Did she really think she would find him? Did she even want to do so? Was the entire horror something that she had to subject herself to, knowing that she wouldn’t find him—or, finding him, would have condemned herself to death along with him? Did she need to know what she had learned about the Warsaw ghetto? Did it do anything more than add to her own personal hell in the Karpatyn ghetto? These were questions without answers, questions one was driven to ask oneself. Fatuous questions. She had to convince herself they were as pointless as they were answerless. Alas, willing them away just didn’t work. But now her tram approached Warsaw Main Railway Station.
Rita walked off the tram and into the station. Surreptitiously she looked around for Gestapo, though she felt confident enough to pass their scrutiny. She was more anxious about the extortionists preying on the foot traffic coming into the station. Perhaps entering without a valise, a grip, or a bag of any kind, she might not attract their attention.
But there, leaning against the railing of the ticket barrier, was one of the two men from the darkened ghetto tunnel. Back there, even in the dim light of the entry to the ghetto, he must have gotten a good look at her as she changed into the rags. Despite the dimness of the candlelight back there, she had no trouble identifying him now. In a moment it also became clear to Rita that he had recognized her. Would he approach? Would he simply make it impossible for her to get away? He pushed himself away from the ticket barrier and began moving in her direction.
Rita reached into her coat pocket to pull out her left-luggage receipt. All her clever planning—finding a way to save her Darwins, getting her few other things from the room without checking out, finding a cheap case at the station the day before, packing it and checking it—all would be for naught. As she pulled the claim check out of her coat pocket, another bit of paper came out with it. She looked at it. Milkolaj Bilek, Detective Inspector, Metropolitan Police, Lemberg, with a small blue dot under ‘l’ in the word “Bilek.” She looked up and then around the vast space of the station. There, between her and the left-luggage, stood a uniformed Blue Police constable.
“Officer, can you help me? A policeman in Lemberg gave me his card. He told me to show it to any Blue Policeman if I ever needed help.”
The man looked at her, then at the card, and handed it back. “Be off with you, woman. I am not here to help damsels in distress.”
“Please, sir.” Rita proffered it again. “Might you not look at it a little more closely?” Her finger pointed to the ink dot under the name.
Grudgingly he looked a second time. Then knowing eyes sought hers. “May I be of some assistance, Miss?”
Rita felt she would have disrobed for him then and there, she was so grateful. But all she did was give him the winningest smile she could contrive. “I have a bag at the left-luggage. Then I need to get a ticket to Krakow and make my way through the barrier. My papers are all in order.” She looked directly at him, as if to say, There is no risk in all this for you. “Then I think I will be fine.”
“I’ll be pleased to accompany you.” He smiled conspiratorially and clicked his heels. Rita put her arm through his.
It didn’t take more than two days for Lotte to realize Rita was not coming back to work at Jablkowski Brothers. No one could afford to miss a second day and expect to keep her job at the department store. At the same time, it came to her that she could profit nicely from this unannounced resignation. Just before opening, she pocketed four of the nicest fountain pens from under the glass and immediately approached the floorwalker with her suspicion that Rita had quit and taken property with her. What is more, she suggested, Rita might have been a Jewess. “She was talking like a communist only a few days ago at lunch, sir.”
“Thank you, Lotte. I will file a report and take the matter up with the Kripo.” That was the criminal detective police. And he would. Pilferage was the most serious offense in the floorwalker’s catalog of crimes. He went to his office and picked up the telephone. Now, what was her name . . . Trushenko, Rita Trushenko.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Karpatyn to Lvov/Lemberg, Lemberg to Warsaw, now Warsaw to Krakow. The rattling, rocking, lurching train moved south and west toward a city she thought she knew and understood. When was Rita’s luck going to run out? How long could she continue to play roulette with her life and not lose? The thought held Rita briefly until fatigue overwhelmed her and she fell into a sound sleep.
She was awoken twice, once by the conductor seeking her ticket and then later by a Gestapo Shutzpolizei, demanding to see her Kennkarte. He handed it back and reminded her that its Warsaw registration would need
to be amended to Krakow if she intended to remain there.
Now she was awake and traveling through familiar scenery: the bleak winter landscape of small-hold farms hedged around by broken stone fences and brushwork hedges that would become impenetrable even to sight in the summer. The fields were dotted with boulders unmoved over centuries, surrounded by derelict stubble. No farmer and team of horses were to be seen in any of the fields, nor even cows lolling around sloughs. Smoke curled out of stone and timbered farmsteads. Were the lives within so different from what they had been five or ten years ago?
The train slowed along a curve. Through the window for a moment, Rita could see the engine banking slightly, and then in the crescent of the curve a cemetery. Was that a gravedigger? No, a watchman, a farmer, approaching a tall woman holding aloft a white cloth against the strong wind, at her feet a brace of hunting dogs digging at something. It was as though someone were staging the scene from Lord Tadeusz that Dani had been learning that first morning Rita spoke to her in the Terakowski works. How did the verse go?
Their dogs dug in the ground,
And howled furiously, as though the scent
Of death their frantic tunneling unearthed
For war or starvation these things portend.
The forest watchman was not the first
To have seen, wandering through cemeteries,
The Maid of Pestilence, tall as the trees,
Waving a bloody kerchief in the breeze.
And then the rhythm of the words gave way to an echo of the frisson Rita had felt when Dani had held her in what now seemed a world away—that afternoon months ago in the ghetto factory.
The man and woman in the cemetery were the only humans in the winter landscape of stolid farmhouses, from each of which rose two or more steady columns of smoke. These Polish peasants were at least sometimes warm through a long winter, she thought. Even their animals were out of the elements. Not her. Rita felt she had been continually cold as far back as the Soviet invasion of Poland, certainly since the German attack in the east. In fact, she realized the only time in her whole life she’d been warm in the winter were those months after she had arrived in Karpatyn. Being cold was just the normal order of things, to which now could be added being hungry. Nothing but a perpetual cold was really to be expected in this world.
There had to be some point to her being cold, being hungry, being alone. There had to be some meaning to it. Judgment, punishment, test, trial, strengthening—something that made sense out of it. Some scheme into which what was happening could all be fit—Rita, Urs, Tadeusz, Stefan, Erich, Freddy . . . A story from which she might at least learn something about herself and her life. At the end of it, when the war was over, if she survived, there would be a plot with a natural beginning, a long, painful, tension-filled middle, villains and heroes, and a satisfying end, or at least one that brought the story to a close—her survival. When it was all over, the story would stitch together everything that had happened—her perpetual discomfort and danger—even if it didn’t make sense of the horrors visited on the millions somehow suffering through the demented melodrama that would end with her survival. Yes, there would be a story at the end, if she did survive—a plot with dangers and escapes, in which her actions and everyone else’s would make sense. But would it explain how and why she survived?
No, Rita knew well enough. The real explanation would be just blind chance! The odds were in her favor, slightly, but enough to make her survival unmysterious. The meaning of it all would just be dumb luck. The explanation would not be satisfying. It would merely be true. She wouldn’t delude herself.
The fact was, most people were not prepared to take the trouble involved in turning her in. There just weren’t enough real Nazis, virulent real anti-Semites, crazed Polish nationalists, prepared to take pains to rid the environment of their racial, cultural, or class enemies. Most people were no worse than indifferent to other people’s fate. The Mrs. Kaminskis of the world would rather just walk on by than act on their prejudices, especially when dealing with individuals they knew, especially when the Jew they had to turn in was a familiar face. To do that required an incentive, some gain, and little risk.
But what about the compliant Blue Police constable at the ticket barrier in the Warsaw station? Wasn’t that a miracle, the hand of God, like winning a thirty-six-to-one bet at the roulette table? Think, Rita. What was the chance that that cop was Home Army just like Bilek in Lemberg? Forty percent? Fifty percent? Higher? What was the chance that, even if he had not been Home Army three months before, he was now? The Germans had lost the battle of Stalingrad two weeks before. Maybe the smart money in Poland was turning against them?
Throw in her Aryan looks, her twin plaits of blonde hair, her faultless Polish, her excellent German, her Kennkarte and baptismal certificate. The odds were stacked in her favor. Rita’s chances were improving every day.
It’s just that the stakes are so high, Rita told herself, and my estimates of the chances likely so inaccurate. It’s easy to think survival is a fluke, a miracle, and then try to make sense of it all. As though the obvious explanation for all the bullets she had dodged was God’s will, or divine providence, or that somehow she was meant to survive.
Thinking things through the right way would make her more cautious. That was good. It freed her from taking some misplaced credit for surviving. It might even relieve her of a weighty burden of feeling guilty about surviving. But, Rita asked herself, was she an unfeeling monster for thinking this way? Were cold, calculating probabilities depriving her of her humanity, anesthetizing her grief over her losses—of parents, in-laws, even Urs, probably Tadeusz, certainly Stefan? She could still cry, couldn’t she? She was still moved by the hollow in her life created by the loss of her son. She could still hope against all evidence and reason that he lived. She could risk coming right up to the edge of the cliff, even climbing down into the abyss beyond it, on the chance she might find him. Surely for all the rationality she forced on herself, she was still completely human.
Why was she alive? Intelligence, foresight, the right decisions? How foolish to think that. Better to ask why thought always seeks stories, meaning. Why do we endlessly try to make sense of things? Why are we never satisfied with the right answer—dumb luck? Why do we always crave a motive? And why did rail journeys always provoke interior monologues of philosophy?
Krakow is a city I know, she tried to reassure herself. She would not have to wander around pretending to be going somewhere. Still, there would have been many changes since she left in the spring of 1936. To begin with, Krakow was probably Judenrein. Of the sixty thousand or so Jews who had lived there before the war, ghettoization and Aktionen surely had left at most a remnant, one too small to muster any possibility of resistance, as in Warsaw. Would the town be honeycombed with Jews in hiding? What of the university? Would there still be anyone at all who might recognize her? No. It had been too long since she had been a student, there was such a turnover every year, even the number of women in the faculty of law was great enough for her to have been relatively anonymous. And of course, no names were ever taken in the vast lecture theaters or examination halls. The ghost of Rita Feuerstahl wouldn’t haunt Margarita Trushenko.
Everyone knew that Krakow had become the capital of the German administration of Poland, the headquarters of the Generalgouvernement, installed in the Wawel Castle, beside the cathedral just off the town square. Would the Germanization of the city make it harder to survive on false identity, or easier? She’d find out soon enough.
Off the railway coach, up the platform to the station building, through the ticket barrier, past the identity check, leave your bag at the left-luggage, buy a newspaper, and find a room. Clockwork. There it was, the absurdly vast space made by the plaza before the equally out-of-scale three-story nineteenth-century railway station, still frowning under its overhanging balustrade, still the ochre color of an Italian palazzo. Just as she had left it . . . except for all the Fraktur si
gnage.
The main square, where Rita had lurked that night Urs had first dined with her, was lousy with Germans. Officers carrying leather briefcases under their arms would stop one another, come to attention, raise an arm instead of saluting. They would make a display of snapping their cases open, exchanging onionskin flimsies for countersignatures. Noncoms bearing stripes and service ribbons from the Eastern Front would pose before the cathedral or the castle for each other’s 35 mm Leicas and Retinas. Older men in gray flannels and dark ties scurried from one side of the square to the other, usually carrying files and stacks of paper tied neatly into bundles. The scene was correct, normal, civilized—a continent away from the mayhem these men were imposing on a region that stretched from Riga on the Baltic to Athens.
Rita moved through the square quickly and found that her old habits were leading her directly to the Jagiellonia and the lecture halls of the faculty of law. Out past the western side of the square, in a few minutes she found herself in an almost deadly calm among the streets where before the war young people had thronged. Cafés were crowded, pushcarts sold street fare, student life spilled out from shops in fierce competition with one another. Now, nothing. An eerie quiet, punctuated by an occasional pedestrian’s footstep audible in the silence.
The newsagent’s shop was still there on the corner, where students had purchased their pen points, ink, and notepaper. But it was doing no business at all when Rita stepped in. Opening the newspaper to the rooms-to-let pages, Rita began hunting for locations past the university. She had seen the signs in German pointing to the Jewish Quarter in the other direction, across the river, in the crowded tenements where she and so many students had lived before the war. Let’s stay as far away from there as we can, she told herself.
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