Karolina's Twins

by Ronald H. Balson

  “He slid the knife out of its sheath and pointed at my skirt. ‘Do you take it off or do I slice it off?’

  “I stood frozen. Any other time, he would have had to kill me before I’d let him defile me. But this time Ares’s report was hidden in my shoes. It could change the war. I had to get it to Colonel Müller. Never taking my eyes off him, I slid my skirt down. A salacious grin spread on his face. He threw me down on the grass and straddled over me. I watched as he loosened his belt and dropped his trousers. He started breathing hard.

  “As he lowered himself onto me and bent his knees, his pistol came into my view, but not quite into my reach. I had to maneuver myself. Move to the side. Get him closer. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him up. ‘Aah,’ he said. ‘You like it.’ His breathing was heavier now. I slid my right arm down his back, down his leg, grabbed the pistol out of its holster and shoved the barrel under his chin.

  “‘Get up,’ I said.

  “‘Ha.’ He laughed. ‘You don’t know the first thing about a gun.’

  “‘Don’t bet on it. I’m the Captain’s daughter.’ I pulled the trigger and blew a hole through his head.

  “I was shaking like a leaf. I had blood on my hands, on my face and on my shirt. I rolled Rolf’s body off of me and under the bushes. I wiped my hands on the grass and put my skirt on. My cart was still in the street. I ran to it and quickly pushed it down the street and around the corner. I had to get to Colonel Müller, but I couldn’t go into the house covered in Rolf’s blood. Else would see me.

  “Three blocks away, on the other side of the train tracks, the Chechlo River wound through the town. I wrung out my cotton top and washed my face and hands in the muddy water as best I could. I looked like hell, but at least most of the blood was gone.

  “Finally, I made it to Colonel Müller’s and knocked on the door. The colonel answered, took one look at me and stepped back in shock. ‘What in the world happened to you?’

  “‘I was attacked.’ My head was spinning. ‘But I have your reports, sir.’

  “He hurriedly steered me into the study and shut the door. I sat down on the leather chair, looked at him with dazed eyes and threw up.

  “‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to clean you up. We’re lucky Else’s not here.’

  “While he was out of the room, I took the reports out of my shoes and laid them on the desk. One of the reports unfolded. What I read there was terrifying. Insane. Totally unbelievable. As it was, I was living in a nightmare, under the cruelest of oppressors, but Ares’s notes portrayed a terror far worse than I could have imagined—a locked, sealed chamber in Bunker 2 where naked prisoners were taken and mass-murdered by poison gas. The report disclosed that the IG Farben factory in Monowitz was manufacturing Zyklon B gas for the future extermination of the Jewish race.

  “The report went on to describe the selection process. Jews arriving at Auschwitz were divided into lines for men and women. SS officers would then go through the lines and those considered fit for labor were moved to one side of the ramp. The others—women with children, those under fourteen, older persons, disabled—were taken to other barracks. A drawing of the two camps, a layout of the barracks and cell blocks was included with the report.

  “This report was more shocking than I could have ever imagined. No wonder Jan had stated that it was of the gravest importance. The colonel came back into the room while I was reading the reports. I looked at him, grabbed the papers and shook them in his face.

  “‘Do you know about this? What you German monsters are doing?’

  “He grabbed my shoulders. ‘Shh! Not one word. You have seen nothing. Do you understand me? This report must get to London. If any of this leaked out, if the Gestapo got wind of it, they would find us. They would shut down the network. And don’t think for a minute they can’t find us. They are the most accomplished investigation unit in the world. Earlier this year, they found documents in Prague that identified our best Polish intelligence agents. They tracked them down all the way to Istanbul. If they know about Ares’s reports they’ll find him and all our agents, including you, me and David. You should never have read these reports.’

  “‘You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t breathe a word. All I care about is getting this information to the rest of the world.’

  “He nodded. ‘Tell me what happened to you tonight.’

  “I narrated the attack. My jaw quivered, but not with fear. With anger. Rage.

  “‘Where is the body?’ he said. ‘We must dispose of it immediately. If the SS or the Gestapo finds out a Wehrmacht corporal has been killed, there will be a rampage of reprisals.’ So, I told him to follow me and I’d take him to where I had left Rolf.

  “‘First we need to clean you up.’ He tilted his head. ‘You know where the bathroom is. Take a quick shower and we’ll leave.’

  “It felt odd showering in my house again. Everything was surreal. I was in my bathroom, in the shower, washing away the blood of a Nazi rapist. None of this was happening. Like one of those bizarre dreams where improbable episodes are strung together and when you wake up, you think, how could my mind have conceived of such freakish things? I finished showering and almost walked up to my bedroom.

  “The colonel grabbed a shovel and we quietly left the house. We pushed my cart six or seven blocks to where I was attacked. Rolf’s body, minus a large portion of his skull, lay in the bushes, his pants down around his ankles. We covered his body in coats and tried to lift him into the cart. But he weighed three hundred pounds. Dead weight. We couldn’t lift him. Finally, we tipped the cart down and rolled him in.

  “We dug a shallow grave by the riverbed and dumped him in. We threw the gun and his hat in after him. I stopped the colonel from pulling up his pants. ‘Bury him just the way he died,’ I said. ‘He deserves no dignity. If someone should ever find him, they’ll know why he was killed.’

  “‘You are one tough woman,’ he said with a smile. ‘I knew that the minute I met you. So, we’ll bury him with his flag flying at half-mast.’ We covered him up and filled in the grave.

  “The colonel instructed me to take the cart back to David, and turned to walk back to his home. I should say my home. He took a step, looked back at me and said, ‘Well done, Captain Scheinman’s daughter. He’d be proud.’

  “I reached the Shop and put the cart away. David opened his door, let me in and said, ‘What in the hell happened to you?’ I started to answer and collapsed into tears. I couldn’t talk for several hours, except to tell him that the reports had been delivered to the colonel. As usual, I stayed with David for the rest of the night. He was so kind and understanding. He cradled me all night. Eventually, toward morning, I told him what had happened. I never did tell him I was violated.

  “He told me he was proud of me. He told me I was a Polish hero. ‘You don’t have to carry any more reports. We’ll find another courier. You did your share, more than your share.’

  “‘The hell you will. I read the report tonight, David. I saw what Ares wrote. It’s madness. I insist on being a part of the network.’ With that, he kissed me and told me how deeply he cared for me.”

  “Was that the night you fell in love?” Catherine said.

  “I didn’t tell you I fell in love with David.”

  “I didn’t tell you I was pregnant.”

  Lena’s smile broadened. “Well, the answer is if I hadn’t already, I probably did that night. Morning came way too soon. David elbowed me. ‘Shift change,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get downstairs. You can take the day off. Go back to your apartment and sleep.’

  “‘Do you think I can sleep after all this?’

  “‘Then stay here. I’ll come up later this morning.’

  “So I did. Actually, I stayed for three days. It was heaven.”

  “Even in the direst of circumstances, love will emerge,” Catherine said. “Reminds me of Casablanca—‘the fundamental things apply.’”

  “Catherine!” Lena said
sternly, but with a smile.

  “Sorry, I’m a sucker for a love story. Especially a wartime love story. I feel like I’m talking to Ingrid Bergman.”

  “Okay. Okay. That’s enough.” She sat up straight, crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. “During 1942, the Germans started their liquidation of the Polish ghettos in line with the principles adopted at the Wannsee Conference, and Chrzanów was targeted for clearance by the end of the year. As with most of the world, we were unaware of the Wannsee Conference.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “In July 1941, Hermann Goering appointed SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to organize and carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. He convened a secret conference in January 1942. In that meeting, Heydrich informed the German ministry leaders that the Reich’s efforts to rid Europe of its eleven million Jews by emigration, attrition and other means had proven largely unsuccessful. A new solution was necessary, a Final Solution.

  “The Wannsee Protocol provided that able-bodied Jews, divided by sex, were to be sent to labor camps. All other Jews were to be gathered and deported to transit camps and from there to death camps, where mass exterminations would rid the continent of its remaining ten million Jews. Accordingly, in 1942 the Germans began transports from the Chrzanów ghetto.”

  “So Germany began mass executions following the Wannsee Conference?”

  Lena shook her head. “Mass murders were already taking place throughout Poland and the Soviet territories. Death camps, like Treblinka, had already been built and Nazis were already executing Jews. Even before the conference, the death camp at Belzec was under construction. The thrust of the Wannsee Conference was to make the deportations and transports more efficient, and to leave no uncertainty of the fate of Europe’s Jews. To that end, ghettos in Polish cities were being cleared out and towns were being made judenfrei one at a time.

  “In May, the Nazi command demanded that the Chrzanów Judenrat supply fifteen hundred names for immediate transport, comprised of children under the age of ten and adults over sixty. The professed reason, the one given to us through the Judenrat, was that the ghetto was too crowded and workers needed to be resettled. Young children cannot work and older people couldn’t do the heavy work the Germans wanted. The official Nazi explanation was that the babies and young children would be sent to a children’s camp to be trained and reeducated. The seniors would be sent to camps where labor was much less strenuous.

  “That order went through the ghetto like a thunderbolt. Parents were not about to send their children away. Mothers clung to their babies and begged the Judenrat to do something. Some tried to escape, but all roads had checkpoints and the attempts were futile. The Nazis were quick to inform us of the runaways they captured and executed.

  “Immediately, the Judenrat filed its objections with the Nazi command: you can’t tear young children away from their parents. But the Germans said the children’s camp had playgrounds, hospitals, nurses and matrons, a place where they could go to school, where they would be with other children and where they would be taught skills useful in the workplace. ‘Our children’s camps are much healthier than living in your squalid ghettos,’ they said.

  “Many of the parents refused to believe the Nazis and tried to hide their children, but soldiers came through the ghetto and physically grabbed the little children. Parents who resisted were shot. Some parents begged to go with their children, but the Germans told them it was only a children’s camp—no parents allowed. The Nazis promised that all parents would be reunited with their children after the war. Ultimately, over twelve hundred children were gathered at the Chrzanów train station. At the railroad embarkation point, the Nazis gave each child a piece of bread with marmalade to show them how much fun it was going to be. They waved good-bye to wailing parents and innocently climbed into the boxcars. We know now that they did not survive; there were no children’s camps.

  “That day, when I returned to our apartment, I saw that the children’s deportation was especially hard on Karolina. Not that it didn’t dishearten everyone; anyone with a human heart was disconsolate, but to Karolina, it was as if she were personally affected. She cried for nights and nights, and then I finally understood why. We were in the middle of bathing and washing our clothes in a bucket we’d filled from the fountain when Karolina saw me staring at her naked body. We locked eyes.

  “‘Oh, damn, Karolina. How far along?’

  “She bit her lip. ‘Three months.’

  “‘Siegfried?’

  “‘I haven’t been with anyone else, Lena,’ she said indignantly.

  “‘Does he know?’

  “‘I don’t think so. It’s always pretty dark when we’re together.’

  “‘Are you going to tell him?’

  “‘I’m not sure, but unless I abort this baby, I can’t keep it from him much longer.’

  “‘Is that what you’re planning? Are you thinking of terminating your pregnancy?’

  “Her jaw quivered and her eyes filled with tears. She grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook them. ‘I don’t know, Lena. I don’t know. I don’t want to. I don’t know. What should I do?’

  “‘What can I say? How do you two feel about each other?’

  “‘He says he loves me. He says it all the time.’

  “‘If you think he loves you, I mean really loves you, and he’s not just saying that in the heat of the night, then you need to tell him. If you’re not going to tell him, then you need to break off your relationship.’

  “‘I don’t want to break up with Siegfried. I don’t want to hurt him. He wouldn’t understand. We have these long conversations about our life together when the war is over. He has a family home in Bavaria.’

  “That sounded so improbable to me. ‘He knows you’re Jewish?’

  “She nodded. ‘Of course. He says he doesn’t care. He loves me. He said his parents would love me, too.’

  “I was shocked by the whole thing. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong person, wrong everything. ‘Do you love him, Karolina?’

  “‘I think so. I mean, he’s a nice guy. He’s kind. He’s gentle. He’s very good to me. But damn, Lena, how’s this ever going to work? It’s against the law for him to have relations with a Jewish girl. We could get caught any day. He could be convicted of a crime. Sent to the Russian front. Who knows what?’

  “I had no answers. I knew she needed counseling and advice, but I was just too dumbfounded by the whole thing. All I could do was hug her. We stood that way for quite a while, both of us crying.

  “‘I could ask Dr. Gold for an abortion. I know he’s already done a few at the clinic.’

  “‘Is that what you want?’

  “She pitifully shook her head. ‘No.’

  “I thought to myself, how foolish of her to want to keep this baby. They just tore twelve hundred children away from their parents. Even if they didn’t deport any more, how could she raise a baby under these conditions? Then it occurred to me that in the midst of this dehumanizing war, she had found something beautiful, something very human. Something to love. Something to hang onto.

  “‘There’s a terrible risk of infection with any surgeries at the clinic,’ I said firmly. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. Leah Gruenberg died after she had her abortion. They don’t have any medicines. If it were me, I’d probably keep the baby too. Besides, in another six months things could be different. The war could be over.’

  “She wiped a tear from her eye. ‘Thanks, Lena.’

  “I patted her bump. ‘You’re already showing a little. You either have to break off the relationship or tell him.’

  “She nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ll tell him.’”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN APRIL AND MAY we saw several deportations, but none that were limited to children. Because the ghetto was ordered to systematically empty, the Judenrat was charged with supplying additional lists of names for ‘resettlement.’ The inclusion of your name on the list meant that your
entire family was to show up at the market square to be transported.

  “The official explanation from the Nazis was that other work camps were being constructed with new housing and ample room for all who were willing to work. People were told to take their nicest clothes and pack as much as they could in one suitcase per person. They gave each family a white marker to write their names and home addresses on the sides of each piece of luggage. That was to ensure that they could find their luggage when they got to the resettlement camp, and if it got lost, it would be forwarded to them.”

  Lena shook her head. “Deep down, it sounded like a lie, but even a morsel of hope was enough to induce people to pack, line up and board the trains for resettlement without resistance.

  “The Shop continued to manufacture coats and jackets, and those working at the Shop were generally immune from deportation lists, but in June rumors started circulating that the Shop would be closing by the end of the year. I don’t know if one of the girls overheard something or if our workloads were decreasing, but fear of the shutdown created anxiety among all of us. It was the only job left for Jews and the only thing saving us from the resettlement lists.

  “I told you about winters in the ghetto, how harsh and deadly they were. Well, summers brought their own torments. Imagine thousands of people crammed into tiny living spaces in blistering temperatures with no way to cool off. Clean water was scarce. The Germans posted warnings about using the central fountain and erected a sign declaring it was contaminated with typhus. Some drank it anyway, believing it was just a German tactic to prevent us from getting water. Karolina and I found a well at a house on the other side of the tracks, outside the ghetto. We would fill bottles in the middle of the night.

  “Insects—mosquitoes, flies, bugs of all sorts—flourished in the summer heat. People who chose to sleep outside and find respite from the heat were attacked by insects. Small pests—rats, mice—infested our area and our living quarters, especially the dormitory. The Shop, with its fifteen hundred workers, was a pressure cooker. A few fans were installed to bolster production, but they afforded little relief.”