A Kind of Woman

by Helen Burko

  Below the headlines, the photograph of Rachel appeared in most of the papers. She was snapped standing in her torn dress, her hair all awry, with frightened eyes and with the woman with the tattooed numbers on her arm holding on tightly to Rachel’s dress and her mouth gaping as though she were screaming.

  All around the two of them was a crowd of people whose faces expressed curiosity, astonishment, and horror, and on some even mockery. One of the photos showed Leonora looking bewildered as her eyes searched the crowd, probably looking for Eddie, who hadn’t appeared yet.

  An illustrative weekly, thanks to a keen-minded photographer, showed photos of the scandal from many angles; the photos even showed how the second-act curtain was raised in an empty auditorium.

  Every newspaper showed photos, among them, Rachel’s efforts to flee and the woman on the floor after Rachel had pushed her away.

  Sensational headlines were in every paper along with a detailed description of what had happened. One paper had a strange headline: “Romeo and Juliet in a Modern Version!” That paper didn’t forget to include the telephone conversation with Jacob, who was called, among other names, a Romeo.

  Jacob almost smiled at that and prepared to visit his “Juliet” in prison. He packed a dress for her along with some packages of cigarettes, and then the telephone rang. It was his parents who, when they had read the articles and seen the photos, almost fainted.

  “Jacob, is it true?” his mother asked tearfully. “My God.” She couldn’t stop crying. “Is it true? Is Rachel really a…”

  “Jacob, it’s hard to believe!” Sam was calmer. “I have to talk to you, Jacob! Come here, quickly! What do you have to say about all this? We’re really sick about it! Why don’t you answer me?”

  It was really difficult for Jacob to answer. He had become indifferent to the whole affair. He saw himself as a clown in a circus with the audience expecting something unusual from him to entertain them.

  “Dad, I don’t know what to say! I was caught by surprise, too! I’m going now to see her in the prison, and after I talk to her and hear what she has to say, I’ll come over to you. Believe me, I feel like I’m in the middle of a nightmare, but one thing is clear to me: This woman, my wife, who took the name of Rachel, pretended she was Jewish to save her life! If this had happened to someone else and not your son, you would have watched it with interest from the sidelines. When it happened to me, it was a different story. Dad, tell Mom it isn’t worthwhile to cry and tell her I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”

  He put down the phone, which immediately rang again. He was sure it was Eddie or another reporter hungry for some sensational news. He remembered how the reporters had bothered him during one of his trials. So he didn’t pick up the receiver, and he hurried out of the apartment.

  *****

  The same warden, who now looked satisfied with her task, brought Rachel into the waiting room.

  Now that the warden knew who Jacob was, she gave him a sympathetic look and left with the ring of keys clattering as she went through the door.

  “Good morning! Excuse me, I don’t know by what name to address you,” said Jacob. “Did you sleep well?”

  At first, she didn’t answer, just sat down in a chair. Jacob sat down in a chair opposite her and examined her. Her eyes were cast down with rings under them; she looked even paler and listless. Her beauty seemed to have vanished, as had the fine figure all the men coveted.

  A picture of their wedding came, unbidden, into his mind. How lovely she had been in her white dress.

  He gave her the package he had brought. “Here, I brought you another dress and some cigarettes.”

  She lifted her eyes to him, and again he saw tears in them.

  The first time he had seen her cry was when she was intoxi¬cated after her trip with the Russian soldier.

  “Oh, thank you… Thank you,” she murmured. “I knew you would come. You’re still the same…” She wanted to call him something but, for some reason, couldn’t.

  “Technically, I’m still your husband.”

  “As you wish.”

  “I don’t wish it, but I’m sorry to say, those are the circumstances for now. Yes, for now, I’m still your husband!”

  She didn’t answer, just sat there with tears coursing silently down her cheeks.

  “Crying doesn’t help,” he said. “Crying never helped anyone. Only man can help if he wishes to.”

  When she didn’t respond, he continued. “I think it’s time for you to tell me about the woman I married, the woman I gave my love to, who she is and why.”

  “Oh, why… You know that.” She tried to smile. “I don’t know what you want to know. I imagine you talked with that woman and she told you all kinds of lies.”

  “Lies?” He was surprised but didn’t wait for her to reply. “I haven’t talked to that woman yet. I don’t know what she’s going to tell me about you—lies or truth. I just know that there’s a basis for all she has to tell me, but first of all, I want to hear from you. I think I deserve it.”

  She remained silent.

  He handed her a cigarette and lit one for himself, too. “Tell me!”

  “For what reason?”

  “The curiosity of a man!” After a long pause, he added, “I was waiting for your usual answer: ‘Oh, those men…!’”

  She remained silent.

  “Now you can understand why I wanted to know all about you.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “I don’t know anything yet. You have to reveal it all.”

  She still didn’t answer.

  “Why are you silent?”

  “It’s difficult for me to say the words.”

  “Maybe you can talk without words?”

  She smiled a bitter, mocking smile. “That’s what I did until now. You didn’t like my silences, my reluctance to talk, my strangeness. I knew that. You couldn’t understand me. You couldn’t understand that we were living in two different worlds.”

  She paused when she felt his probing look. He expected to hear her talk, for the first time since they met, candidly and honestly.

  He looked at her feminine mouth and waited to hear it express what she really felt. He couldn’t have kissed that mouth and didn’t even think of the possibility. If he had thought of it, he would have wondered how he could have kissed those pale lips so passionately until now.

  “It happened finally.” He heard her pleasant voice that was now a little cracked. “I didn’t imagine it would happen here, of all places, in America, in a place where I felt secure, more than in Warsaw, more than in the offices of the committee. In those places, someone was liable to recognize me any minute, as in Kiev, where fate brought me.”

  When he heard her words, he shuddered. It meant she really was one of the SS! If before this he had a shadow of a doubt, she had now wiped it out.

  “You’re a Nazi? A member of the SS?”

  “Yes, that’s what I am!” she said proudly.

  “I thought you would deny it.”

  “Why should I? I know what’s in store for me. I know that woman, who I have never seen before, will accuse me of more than there was, and so I want to tell you the whole truth. Maybe you will understand me. But I also want you to know that no matter what happens to me—no matter what my punishment will be—I’m not guilty of anything.”

  “You’re not guilty?”

  “No! When I tell you all about it, you’ll be convinced I’m not guilty.”

  “Who then, is guilty?” he said with restrained anger. “Maybe the woman with the number tattooed on her arm? And maybe they’re all guilty because they went like lambs to slaughter?”

  “First of all, listen to me, Jacob,” she said in a soft voice, “and then you can judge. I know you can accuse me of many things and rightly, but I also know you are capable of understanding. If I hadn’t met someone like you, I wouldn’t be revealing what I am about to reveal to you. I could have denied everything even now, even after that
woman said she recognized me, but I won’t do that. I want to tell you the truth about me, and then you can judge for yourself.”

  Jacob was silent.

  “You’re a lawyer.” She made an effort to work on his feelings. “And you can help me. I’m all alone here, in a foreign country, in this big city. Nobody but you can defend me in a trial.”

  “Do you suppose I will even open my mouth to defend you although I do sometimes defend criminals?”

  “I’m not a criminal!” she said with tears in her eyes. “I’m a past member of the SS, that’s true, but I’m not a criminal! I served my country!”

  “If you think you served your country as a member of the SS and a Nazi, then woe to the country that agreed to let such as those serve her!”

  “Don’t talk like that! What will happen now? I know you still love me.”

  “Love you? A woman who deceived me? A woman…”

  “Please, don’t talk like that!” She tried to put her arms around his neck. “I beg you. Please!”

  He pushed her away from him and called to the warden, who opened the door and let him out, leaving the prisoner crying.

  Jacob again spent a sleepless night. That day he had to answer innumerable questions from reporters and have a long talk with his parents.

  “I don’t know anything,” was his answer to all the questions. “All this is also a complete surprise to me,” he explained to everyone.

  As often as he tried to give evasive answers to the journalists, he did have to give honest answers. As a result, his picture appeared in all the papers with the sensational story of how a young attorney was sent to a concentration camp while on a visit to his family in Poland, and how he married a beautiful woman who was now revealed as a Nazi and a member of the SS!

  A very agile reporter succeeded in discovering his whole life story along with photos of his parents, and Doris and Lillian, who were exterminated in Poland after Jacob was arrested and separated from his wife and daughter by the KGB.

  Another newspaper went so far as to try to guess if Jacob, a lawyer and husband of the accused, would undertake to defend her in one of the most sensational trials in post-war America. The Nuremberg trials had just ended.

  When Jacob saw all the photographs in the newspapers, it hurt him, not for himself, but for his parents and Doris’s parents who were all very depressed by the whole affair. From his parents, he learned he was suspected of knowing who “Rachel” really was. It was presumed he was so much in love with her that he pretended he didn’t know, and that was the reason he hadn’t taken her immediately to his home but had taken her to a hotel when he returned to America.

  “Believe me,” he told them the evening after his second visit to “Rachel,” “I had no idea who she really was, but it is true I loved her very much.”

  “And still love her a little!” joked Eddie.

  Jacob answered him honestly. “I don’t know. Maybe!” After all, her being a Nazi didn’t change the fact that she was a beautiful and alluring woman.

  “Didn’t you notice anything strange about her behavior all that time?” asked Richard, who had begun, because of what had occurred, to visit Jacob together with Eddie.

  “As a matter of fact, there was much about her that was unpredictable, but I was sure it was just a case of an unusual Russian woman with strange convictions. Her indifference to the millions who were exterminated by the Nazis I interpreted as a natural part of her character. ‘What can we do? It was war,’ she would say, and I have to confess I felt the same way, so I didn’t attach any special meaning to her words.”

  “She’s very cunning,” commented Eddie. “I had sufficient time to get to know her a little. To tell the truth, she made a great impression on me. She is definitely intelligent, clever, and very beautiful. There wasn’t a man in the theater lobby who wasn’t charmed by her unusual beauty.”

  “Yes, she really is lovely.” Richard grinned.

  “But how was she situated in Russia?” Eddie mused. “Maybe she was sent there in the line of duty.”

  “For the time being, I don’t know the answer to that,” said Jacob. “She could have fled from Germany together with the returning refugees, or she might have gone there in a different way. It was difficult for me to listen to her story in my first visits to the prison, but I’m sure I’ll discover the whole truth. She wants me to defend her in the trial.”

  “Yes, that should be a very intriguing trial.”

  After that, until late that night, Jacob gave them a detailed account of how he and Rachel had met and what had ensued. Eddie and Richard listened avidly and advised him to see the accused again and listen to her story, which should be an interesting one. After that, they could compare what she said with the testimony of those from the concentration camp who had identified her.

  *****

  When the warden brought her to the waiting room again, where Jacob was waiting for her, she was quiet and listless. Now she was dressed in the new dress Jacob had brought her on his last visit and looked calmer. Her face, however, remained pale, and that accentuated the blue of her eyes even more. Her hair was combed back as if she had just risen from a sickbed. The dress flattered her figure and her bust. Her splendid, delicate hands were the same, but the situation had changed, and the woman he had loved so much looked like someone else.

  “Did you sleep well?” Jacob asked politely after he had greeted her.

  “Thank you,” she replied with a faint smile. “Not badly. I thought you wouldn’t come to see me again,” she said quietly, “and I so wanted you to come here often, to be with me every day…every hour…every minute…”

  “As a matter of fact, I should be in prison, too,” he said mockingly, “because I feel I am also guilty.”

  “You’re guilty of nothing, not toward me and not toward anyone else!” She lifted her eyes to his. “You’re a good man.”

  “I want you to tell me everything if you want me to come and visit you,” he retorted.

  “I’ll tell you everything, I swear!”

  “What is your real name? What a mockery of fate that I still don’t know the true name of my lawful wife!”

  “Call me Mathilda from now on,” she said in a low voice with a special glint in her eyes. “My real name is Mathilda Krause. You can prove that by the initials embroidered on my handkerchief, the one in my small suitcase. Do you remember it? You have it now, and it has a certain importance.”

  He listened to her words with an assumed calmness. His curiosity and desire to know everything increased every minute.

  “I wanted, more than once, to tell you everything about myself, but something restrained me. I know you won’t understand that, just as nobody else would comprehend. Maybe if my country had not been vanquished, I would have thought differently. I would have been proud of the fact I had done my duty for my country. But fate decided otherwise and made me look at things in another way.

  “In the few days I have been sitting in prison, I concluded that there isn’t much difference between people and between nations. I was taught to hate Jews, Americans, Russians, and, in fact, people of any other nation but my own. They sent me to fill a devilish task, and while I was accomplishing it, I saw things differently. I saw that there are good and bad people in every nation and race.

  “And now listen to what I have to say. The conclusions I have come to while sitting here, that’s another subject. First of all, I want to tell you about myself. You always wanted to know who your wife is, and as you said, you definitely deserve to know, so I want to satisfy your curiosity, especially now, after I spent last night more thinking than sleeping. I spent it thinking of everything: myself, you, and more importantly, my past.

  “So, as I told you, my name is Mathilda Krause, but if it’s more convenient for you to continue calling me Rachel, please do. I would like it because I know you love Rachel but will hate Mathilda.” She smiled bitterly and lifted her eyes to see what impression her story was making on him.
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  “My name, as I told you, is not Rachel Kimmelman,” she continued. “I made that name up after you told me you were Jewish. In an instant, I decided you could rescue me from the terrible situation I was in, but let me tell you the story from the beginning so you’ll have some idea of my stormy life…all of it. So you’ll know what forced me to disguise myself and deceive you. If you want, I’ll prove by hard facts that what I say is true, and you can decide what you want to do with me. I know my fate is now in your hands. You’re a lawyer, you’re rich, and if you want, you’re still my husband! I believe your feelings for me have not completely changed, not completely and not instantaneously. It’s impossible you have ceased to love so quickly just because you see me as a criminal. Do you remember what you said when we argued that point—we discussed it more than once—do you remember saying that crime and love are like two sisters and that they are connected? But don’t think I’m trying to exploit your love as I tried to do before. Anyway, I’m not completely sure you still love me after my having deceived you. As far as you have had time to know me until now, you know that I’m too proud to ask you to love me now. You know, more or less, that I have been educated differently.

  “There are things I regret, but I can’t undo them. I know I will remain a woman with a tainted past, even if I clear myself in your eyes. I know you can’t give me my freedom, but when I look back, I see I couldn’t have behaved otherwise, and therefore, I consider myself innocent.”

  Jacob sat silently listening to her with bated breath and astonishment. He didn’t want to interrupt her with a word, even though he had plenty to say and ask. He knew her story would be complete only if he didn’t react or intervene.

  Her confession was a great revelation to him. Her words flowed smoothly, as always, and sometimes brought a blush to her cheeks. Her lips regained their natural pink color, her eyes flashed, and her appearance wrung his sensitive heart.

  “I was born in 1920 in Bernau, a small town that lies between Berlin and Eberswalde. My parents, Kurt and Elsa Krause, were simple farmers but well-to-do. I have two brothers younger than me: Peter, who is four years younger, and Franzel, who is two years younger. I was the oldest daughter.