The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Ah, yes. Good question.” He thought for a moment, then took out a piece of paper and a pencil. He switched to German. “Here is my name and unit. We are going to bivouac down the Necker about two kilometers, between here and the bridge they told us about. There’s a military police unit there too. If they give you any flak—that’s a German word, do you know it?—just come down to my unit and ask for me. As for them”—he pointed toward the room where the family was still gathered—“I wouldn’t feel any need to take orders anymore. You might even want to give some.” Lieutenant Shaw turned and walked out of the house.

  A moment later Herr Lempke made his way into the kitchen. “Ah, Dani. What a pleasant surprise. I am so glad to see you. I was worried from the moment you left us in Krakow.”

  Dani was venomous. “In Krakow you didn’t know I existed. Now the war is over, and you have lost; it’s too late to be solicitous.”

  “My dear, I knew you and Rita were Jewish girls in hiding from the start. That’s why I took you in, to protect you.” He turned to Rita. “Well, Rita, now the war is over, at least for us. Where will you go; what will you do? You may, of course, stay here, under the same terms, if you wish.” He smiled slightly, whether at his cleverness or his generosity she couldn’t say.

  Rita had been waiting for this little address and now she spoke. “Thank you, Herr Lempke. I will stay, and so will Dani. But not as your servants. We are moving into one of the rooms upstairs. You and Frau Lempke will have to move two of the children out of their room and into yours. I won’t be working for you any further. I will be your guest, as will be Dani. If we are not treated properly, Lieutenant Shaw of the 44th US Division will learn of it.”

  Frau Lempke had been listening. She was growing redder and redder, and finally burst out to her husband, “This little Jewess cannot talk to you like that, Heinrich. Call the labor office immediately. Call the Gestapo, or they’ll run away.” She walked over to Rita and demanded, “Go get your papers and give them to me!”

  Rita looked Frau Lempke up and down. Then she raised her right hand, slapped the woman across the face, back and forth, and left the room.

  As she left, Herr Lempke was remonstrating. “Dear, you don’t understand. The war is lost. If we don’t curry the favor of these young women, they will make life difficult for us with the occupation.”

  An hour later the two women were lying across the slightly too small children’s beds in a bright room on the second floor of the villa overlooking the Neckar, smoking cigarettes from one of Herr Lempke’s silver cigarette boxes. Their few possessions had already displaced the children’s toys and clothes.

  From the bed Rita was staring out the window at the Heidelberg castle across the Necker, a sight she had almost never had time to contemplate from a second-story window of the villa. She turned to Dani. “You know, when I met that Ami officer, I said to him, ‘I am free, I am released, I am alive. I love you.’ What must he have thought?”

  Dani smiled. “But what are we free to do? Now that we have been released, what do we do? Where do we go? What do we want now that we have our lives back?”

  “The first thing you are going to do now that you’re free is teach me English, Dani. I am going to need it. And you, with your English—the Amis are going to need you.”

  Dani wasn’t listening. There was an overwhelming lassitude in her, a feeling of total emptiness, as if all the air had rushed out of her, leaving a complete vacuum. She barely had a will to speak. Quietly she began, “Why was I allowed to survive? There is no reason at all.” She stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray. “Rita, I can’t accept that. I feel like dying, along with everyone else. Starting over, walking away from what has happened . . . I’m too tired, I don’t have the will for it. What can I do?” Rita came over to her bed and held Dani for a long time.

  That night as they climbed into the soft warm beds, Dani asked the question she already knew the answer to: “Will you really go back to look for Stefan? Is that for sure?” Her friend nodded. “I’ll go back too, with you.” At least it was something to do.

  Two days later, in the late afternoon, Flossie came up to the women’s bedroom. “The Ami officer wants to speak to the woman who knows English.” Dani followed her down the stairs. Lieutenant Shaw had turned up at the Lempkes’ villa.

  A few minutes later, Dani returned. “There was another officer with Shaw. He only spoke English. He asked me to come and work for the Amis. He said they will pay US dollars and give me American rations, including real coffee. I told him I’d do it if they took you too. I told him you were learning English.”

  “What do they want us to do?” Rita was suspicious. They both knew the use to which Wehrmacht units put local women in occupied territories.

  Dani understood. “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s all right. The other officer was a Christian chaplain. He said they have a facility, a club for soldiers, and they need hostesses who can give information, serve snacks—not drink, Rita!—and maybe help them not feel lonely.” Another grimace from Rita. “No, he promised, it’s not like that.”

  “Real coffee?” Rita had already accepted in her mind. “When does he want us to start?”

  Dani switched to English, and Rita tried to follow, “Tomorrow, at the train station café in town.”

  Fitted with rather snug but clean khaki officers’ jackets and forage caps, both sporting the insignia USO, Dani and Rita began working at the counter of an enlisted men’s club across from the Heidelberg railway station the next day. A Negro cook, the very first black man either had ever seen, taught them how to deep-fry doughnuts and how to make coffee the way American soldiers liked it—definitely an acquired taste for two women who had not had a cup of espresso for five years.

  American soldiers were completely unlike German ones. Not nearly as formal or polite, far friendlier, and much more willing to share candy bars, cigarettes, chewing gum, cans of Spam, rolls of toilet paper, bags of cotton balls, without any expectation of a quid pro quo. They didn’t always stand when an officer entered, or even always salute. One told Rita it was completely unnecessary when not wearing a hat. Their uniforms differed from one to another, and they sometimes didn’t stay in uniform. Shoes were unshined, ties askew when worn at all. These soldiers treated the USO club as a refuge from the war and from their officers, who rarely ventured in. They wanted to dance when the radio played a big-band tune. But it was not the sort of dancing Dani and Rita had ever learned or even seen in films. The women tried to jitterbug, but at first it made them dizzy, and the steps were too complex and too athletic. The soldiers tried to teach the steps slowly, even demonstrating with one another. It might have worked if the chaplain—the only officer Dani and Rita ever saw much of—had not discouraged the practice.

  Another thing the chaplain discouraged was the vernacular English they were rapidly learning from the troops. Dani had begun assiduously teaching Rita English. But her grasp of American slang was weak, while her knowledge of Army abbreviations and acronyms was understandably nonexistent. These they both learned at the same pace, along with oaths, curses, and obscenities, which they began to use in exactly the way the enlisted men of the 44th Division did, but without the benefit of knowing what the words meant.

  One morning, upon hearing their language the chaplain asked, “Ladies, do you know what SNAFU and FUBAR mean?”

  “Yes, captain,” Dani volunteered. “One means when something has gone wrong; the other means broken, not working, screwed up.”

  “Screwed up? Who taught you that word?” He frowned and left the club.

  In early May, when the Nazis finally capitulated to the western Allies and to the Soviets, Dani and Rita were still living at the Lempkes’. The lady of the house had not reconciled to the new order. But Herr Lempke had continued to cultivate the fiction that he had been protecting the two women since their earliest days in Krakow.

  A day after the capitulation, Lempke came into the parlor in the evening and announced to the two
women, “I have just learned that Magda Halle is still alive.”

  “What happened to her?” They had not dared to ask, but the surprise in Lempke’s tone prompted their curiosity.

  “Well, they came to arrest her soon after the July 20 plot against Hitler. Seems her cousin was part of the Wehrmacht staff unit that tried it, and they were rounding up anyone with links to them.”

  “But she worked with you for two years. Why didn’t they arrest you too?”

  “Oh, they came back and questioned me after they took her. They seemed to think she was providing Ausweise for fugitives right under our . . . under their noses. She was sent to Buchenwald, but she has survived.” He smiled.

  “But you didn’t know anything about that either, yes?” Dani was sarcastic.

  “I’m glad she never told me about the plot or the papers she got for people in hiding. It would have been dangerous for me to know about it.” Lempke had for some time been convincing himself that he was just an innocent bystander for the twelve years of the Dritte Reich. “We certainly did not know anything about the atrocities committed by . . . others. Rita, Dani, you know we never so much as saw a uniform in the Krakow office, let alone Gestapo or SS.”

  He withdrew a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his gray double-breasted suit coat, unfolded it, and took out a fountain pen, whose cap he screwed off. “Rita, I have prepared a statement I would be grateful if you would sign.”

  “Oh yes? Please read it.” Rita sounded polite.

  “ ‘This is to affirm that I, Margarita Trushenko, was employed first in Krakow, as housekeeper to the Office of the Tax Inspectorate, and then in Heidelberg, Germany, as housemaid in the home of Heinrich Lempke from February 1943 to March 1945. During this time I was paid the prevailing wage, provided with room and board, treated correctly, respectfully, and my identity as a Jew and an opponent of the German Reich was protected by Herr Lempke.’ ”

  “I regret that I cannot sign this statement, Mein Herr. To begin with, that is not my name. I am Rita Feuerstahl.”

  “Hey, Rita, Chaplain wants to see you and Dani over in his office right away.” It was the chaplain’s clerk-typist, standing at the door of the USO. “Say, got a doughnut you can spare?”

  They straightened their uniforms, gave the corporal a doughnut, and followed him out of the canteen.

  “Ladies.” He spoke only in English, hoping they would understand. “I have found much more suitable and much more important work for both of you. We are dealing with a flood of refugees moving across Europe now that the war is over. The US government has set up an office to manage reunification of families, food and shelter for former slave-labor victims, concentration camp inmates, everyone who suffered under the Nazis. Anyway, they need people who speak the languages, who will be trusted by victims, and who understand what they have gone through. It’s an important job, and all over Germany, the chaplain corps are looking for people who can do it. I think you two would be perfect. So, if you want, I’ll cut orders to get you up to Frankfurt to join this project. It’s called UNRRA—United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.” He looked from Dani to Rita. “What do you think?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Within a week Dani and Rita were in Frankfurt, out of USO fatigues. Instead, there were UNRRA uniforms. They were nice, but Rita and Dani wore them only rarely. It was important to dress like a civilian in the work they now began to do. Refugees were allergic to uniforms.

  With German, Polish, some Russian, more Yiddish, and newly acquired English at their disposal, both were almost immediately put to work in the Tracing Office, the information desk dealing with inquiries from across Germany about family reunification. The officer in charge, a burly Canadian, Major Thompson, told them they were the first European women they had been able to find suitable for this work. Suitable, Rita and Dani eventually decided, meant nothing more than that they were not so victimized by the war that the work would overwhelm them.

  The Tracing Office was the epicenter of almost every town in the former Reich. Every DP—displaced persons—camp in central Europe had one too. In the first weeks after the Nazi surrender, camps operated by UNRRA were swamped with former slave laborers. In Frankfurt many were from Speer’s underground rocket-works in the Harz Mountains. Though skeletal, these people were stronger than survivors from concentration and extermination camps.

  Rita and Dani were assigned to Salzheim, a camp near Frankfurt-Hochst, a western suburb. The buildings were not much better than German prison barracks, but there was food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention. Arriving refugees had more urgent wants, however. They came with names—dozens, scores, and sometimes a hundred names of family members, people about whom they sought information. Their information had to be distributed to every part of occupied Germany. The resulting lists were constantly updated and exchanged, continually consulted, checked, rechecked, corrected, and cross-indexed. Even as they added to their lists, Rita and Dani became so familiar with them they could produce names from memory.

  Many of the refugees were Osties—Ostarbeiter, forced into the factories, construction works, synthetic oil plants, and armaments factories of Krupp, Thyseen, and I. G. Farben. They were Ukrainians, Russians—Soviets who had served the Germans willingly enough when they were winning and now were fearful about the prospects of repatriation to the east. There were even Volks-Deutsche from the Baltic countries—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—taken into Soviet citizenship at the beginning of the war by Stalin with Hitler’s compliance, then “liberated” by the Nazis, and at last evacuated by their German governors as the Russians moved west. And, of course, there were the Jews, from the extermination camps, from slave labor, from hiding all over Germany and Poland.

  The first thing Rita noticed about Jewish refugees, especially about the younger ones, was their self-identification. They were Polish, Lithuanian, Yugoslavian, Rumanian, Hungarian, even Austrian—a citizenship that had not existed since 1938. But rarely would they admit to being Jewish. Until, that is, she let it be known she was Jewish herself. Then everything would change: demeanor would become more animated and demands more aggressive. And they would begin talking about their experiences. They had to tell her, and she had to listen. And for the same reason. She was the first apparently unscarred, healthy, visibly normal Jew they had met.

  For all her personal terror of the ghetto, slave labor, false identity, and extortionists, Rita soon realized that compared to almost everyone in these camps, her war had been . . . what? How to describe it? She kept searching for the right word. She had no right to compare it to theirs. Mostly it had been a harrowing ordeal, but not much more than that. It had been punctuated by terror, fraught with risk, and included periods of harsh deprivation and much personal loss. But most of these people had experienced all this along with years of unremitting torture, bestial sadism, dehumanizing degradation, obligatory self-abnegation, starvation, epidemic sickness, the ever-present extermination machine . . . Rita had been confronted with it only intermittently—in the ghettos of Karpatyn and Warsaw. These were glimpses of their reality. What the survivors of the camps had lived through would have been more than enough to have made her throw herself against an electrified fence, cross over a trip wire into a killing zone, provoke a guard into killing her quickly. There was no particular value to surviving such a life. She knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

  Rita’s work settled into days of standing at a counter, responding to requests from DPs, filling out records of new arrivals, updating lists, and collating information. Sometimes she would have to make her way through the camp to deliver news—more often bad than good—to a resident. Walking along the muddy lanes between rough one-story pine shacks with tarpaper roofs, communal kitchens, and rather foul-smelling latrines, Rita would have to remind herself of the conditions their occupants had only lately known. She was continually surprised when people smiled and waved. She would find young children amusing themselves with makeshift toys, or
pass groups of older children gathered around someone teaching. Women were already tending garden allotments. There were people continually moving into and out of the camp. Surely they would become restless and dissatisfied. But not yet, she thought, not yet.

  Late in June, a still emaciated young man arrived at Rita’s desk for registration.

  “Name, please, and place of origin.” Her words were automatic.

  “Kurtzbaum, Moritz, Gorlice, Poland.”

  Rita reeled. This was her home, and this was a name she vaguely knew. She looked up but was unable to place the face. Never mind, it had been nine years since Rita had married and left the town, nine years during which a child could grow to adulthood and an adult could become a ghost, an apparition before her. She put down her pen. “Did you know the Feuerstahl family?”

  “Of course.” He brightened at the question. “When I was little, they lived across the street. That was before the war. Once the ghetto was established, we were in the same house with them.” He stopped, then went on in a darker tone. “We were taken in the same Aktion.”

  Rita didn’t know what to do first—identify herself or ask the question she dreaded an answer to: what about Stefan? Was he with them? Go slowly, she said to herself. Establish the provenance of your question so he will have a reason to remember something he should want to forget. “My name is Feuerstahl, Rita. I am their daughter.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”

  Rita was not listening. Her eyes were burning into his. “Now this is very important. Was there a baby, a child about two years old or so, with my parents when you were taken?”

  “No. It was just the two old folks and my family.”