Such Good Girls

by R. D. Rosen

  But the part of Leming’s face that she could barely take her eyes off of—that she had to force herself to ignore—was the short smudge of a mustache between his nose and thin upper lip, just like Adolf Hitler’s.

  Zofia sat quietly on the soft gray velour seat with her mother. Herr Leming himself hardly said a word during the two-hour journey to Busko-Zdrój. The town was small and no longer full of the well-dressed people who normally flocked to it for its famous natural sulfur springs. No one looked like they even knew a war was going on. The sanatorium was in a large beautiful park with a garden and chestnut trees, but surrounded by a town that looked like a place where nothing much ever happened.

  But, in fact, a great deal had just happened. Busko-Zdrój’s little ghetto, which had been created in April 1941, had already been liquidated by the time they arrived. Its two thousand Jews had been transferred to Jedrzejow, joining 4,000 others from the ghettos of Lodz, Wloclawek, and Warsaw on their way to the Treblinka death camp.

  Leming offered Laura and Zofia a room in his own apartment, but Laura declined, knowing what that meant.

  “As you wish,” he said. “I can see you are not eine Mädchen für alles.” A woman for all to enjoy.

  “But I’ll be the best bookkeeper you’ve ever had,” she replied.

  Laura and Zofia ended up sharing a room attached to a granary that had only a paraffin stove to warm them. It was early November but so cold it might as well have been January. Zofia, who seemed constantly sick, was sniffling and sneezing more than ever. Her mother wouldn’t leave her alone anymore, so she took her to the local grammar school and told the headmaster that Zofia’s birth certificate had been destroyed in the war, but that she had turned six—not five—in July. The ruse worked. Zofia was both tall and smart for her age, and her reserve made her seem even older. Within a week of their arrival, Zofia joined the first grade class.

  By the spring of 1943, mother and daughter moved again, this time to a two-room, first-floor apartment facing a courtyard. It was much nicer than the granary—in fact, the mayor of Busko lived upstairs with his family—but not at all as nice as the homes of some of Zofia’s classmates.

  In their new place, Laura and Zofia slept on two single beds in a room with pale green walls. The kitchen, which was painted orange, contained a stove, a table, and three chairs. Zofia started eating better than she had in a long time. There was milk, bread, jam, eggs, butter, potatoes, onions, beets, cucumbers, and even a little meat, and in the nearby woods and fields the two of them picked gooseberries and wild strawberries. Zofia was surprised to learn that her mother was something of an expert on mushrooms who collected wild borowik mushrooms for soups and omelets. Zofia hadn’t eaten so well in a long time.

  Zofia made a couple of friends, but she sensed a gulf. Many of the children in her class had two parents, bigger homes, even relatives with farms, which meant a steady supply of the meat and fruit that Zofia seldom saw. But she fit in as best she could, giggling with the others at news of the Jews’ fate. What were the Jews thinking? Her teacher compared the Warsaw ghetto uprising to a mouse trying to stop a locomotive.

  One of her friends had quite a lot of toys, which made Zofia so envious that one afternoon she pocketed a small toy horse. That night, after suffering a great deal over her theft, knowing it was wrong, she confessed the crime to her mother, who said she had to return it. Which, being a most obedient girl, she did.

  And her mother was different from the other mothers too—prettier, more sophisticated, but also so joyless and demanding. In her anxiety, she occasionally still drilled Zofia.

  “Where’s your father? Who is your Savior?” Zofia began to hate her.

  “If you don’t stop,” she snapped at her mother one day, “I’m going to report you to the Gestapo!”

  Now Laura knew how Leming had felt. It was the only time she ever slapped her daughter.

  When Zofia wasn’t cursing her mother, she was trying desperately to please her.

  One day she decided to clean the wood floor in the kitchen by pouring a bucketful of water over it. This was apparently not the right method, because when her mother came home and saw the results, she had a fit—which to Zofia seemed wildly out of proportion to the misdeed. She had only a single toy named Halinka to amuse her, a large doll, blond and blue-eyed like Zofia herself, that her mother had bought from a fleeing German family, and so Zofia often resorted to playing in puddles, another activity her mother didn’t find amusing. She arranged for Zofia to stay after school with a Polish woman and her two young sons, but one day the boys took a hot poker out of the fire and convinced Zofia that she should touch it. Laura didn’t find this funny either and stopped the after-school visits.

  Zofia returned to being a latchkey child, condemned to spend many more hours than she would have liked with her two favorite books. One was a Scandinavian fable about a bear named Kurol who was king of the forest. The other was called Mr. Thermometer, a poem about a sickly child much like herself. Later her mother would buy her a small walleyed bear with a quizzical expression to keep her and Halinka company, but Zofia barely knew how to play. Tea parties were foreign to her. She knew nothing of nonexistent tea and invisible cakes.

  “What do you think of Halinka’s dress, Bear?” she’d ask, wait a few seconds, then say, “Well, that just shows how much you know about girls’ dresses.”

  “Halinka thinks you’re handsome, Bear,” she’d say, then pause. “Now you say something nice about her. . . . Yes, go ahead. . . . That’s very nice of you, Bear. Yes, I think she has beautiful hair, too.”

  The neighbors made sure Laura knew that their furnished apartment had been occupied by Jews before they were deported. Laura lived not among Jews, but among their things. The furniture in their apartment. The sidewalks on which she walked were paved with gravestones from the Jewish cemetery; the dresses the town’s poor Polish Catholic girls wore were made from Jewish prayer shawls.

  Whenever Laura slipped on the icy stone step by the front door, she was convinced that the previous occupants were reprimanding her from their crowded graves.

  Occasionally Zofia would walk around town after school, looking in the gift shop window or the ice cream store, wishing she had a few zlotys. Other times, she’d go to the park, sit under a chestnut tree, and read. One day she saw notices posted in the park that a Pole was going to be executed in the town square the next day. She didn’t think she’d like watching a Pole being killed, so she stayed home. On the following day, she did venture into the square to pay her mother a visit at work in the two-story stone agricultural cooperative. Right there, near the front door, at the base of the front of the building, she saw streaks of blood. More blood had pooled, and dried, between the stones of the sidewalk.

  Zofia stared, trying to summon a mental picture of the event that had left these stains. Next to her, a man shook his head. He wore a brown overcoat that was too big for him and had probably belonged to a bigger, and now dead, man.

  It wasn’t that Zofia had become inured to the apparent cheapness of human life in Poland—she still shuddered at what could happen to her mother or her—but like all children, even in a time of war, little pleasures loomed large, none larger than the treat her mother brought home from work one evening: a Suchard chocolate bar that Herr Leming had given her. Zofia couldn’t recall ever having tasted chocolate, but she must have. Why else would her mouth water at the sight of it? Chocolate, fresh vegetables, and fruit were almost impossible for most ordinary Poles to obtain. When Zofia came down with scurvy from a lack of vitamin C, one of her aunts in Kraków had somehow acquired an orange and sent it to her. But an orange was such a luxury that Laura was able to trade it to a nearby farmer for enough apples to last the entire winter and cure the scurvy. But chocolate? It was in her mother’s hand just inches away, and her eyes grew wide.

  Then, just as her mother was about to give her the candy, she suddenly pulled it back.

  “Mama!” Zofia protested, but not befo
re the candy had already disappeared into an apron pocket.

  Her mother said it might be poisoned.

  Zofia was perplexed. “Poisoned?”

  “You know Herr Leming, the man I work for?” She explained that she didn’t trust him. He was a German and might try to poison them.

  “But why would he poison us?”

  She explained that the Germans hated the Poles almost as much as they hated the Jews.

  This was disturbing news to Zofia. The Jews were detestable, dirty, and worthless. Her teacher had made that clear. Besides, the evidence was everywhere. Why else would some of the streets of Busko be paved with Jewish gravestones? But why would the Germans hate Zofia herself, a Polish girl who went to church every Sunday, even when her mother’s headaches prevented her from going with her daughter? The figure of God depicted in the fresco on the church’s ceiling, a fatherly-looking man with a flowing white beard, was a great comfort to a girl whose own father had been taken away. She was going to take her First Communion in less than a year. She knew that Jesus Christ was going to be there with her.

  “The Germans couldn’t hate us. Not like they hate the Jews,” Zofia protested.

  “They hate us too,” her mother explained, “and they have killed plenty of innocent Poles to prove it. Zosia, you must take my word for it. To them, we are slaves and they are the masters. But you must never, ever mention it. Do you understand? When you come to visit me at work, you mustn’t speak to Herr Leming unless spoken to, and then you must say very little.”

  It was all beyond a child’s understanding.

  “But the Jews killed Christ and they kill Christian children for their blood,” Zofia said, repeating what she’d heard so often at school.

  “Well, I’ve known some Jews who were quite nice,” her mother said. “Anyway, my little Zosia, you must never look sad. You must always look happy, Zosia. Then Herr Leming and the others won’t bother us.”

  Zofia wished her mother would stop telling her not to speak because she was already an expert at not speaking when not spoken to. She was a master at hiding sadness. She was a genius at not making any noise at all.

  After midnight, when her mother was asleep, Zofia slipped out of bed and padded to the kitchen, where she found her mother’s apron hanging over the back of the chair by the stove. She slipped her hand into one pocket, and then the other, but both were empty. She stood on the chair, inspected the shelf and the crockery. Nothing. Zofia returned to bed empty-handed.

  In the endless present moment that is childhood, Zofia could no more understand the disappearance of the chocolate bar than she could comprehend the disappearance of her father, or remember leaving the Lvov ghetto, or even of having lived there.

  Laura and Zofia were walking in Spa’s Park one day when a hollow-eyed young woman and her little boy passed them, followed by two SS men with German shepherds. It was apparent from the leaves and twigs clinging to the mother’s and son’s torn clothes that they had just been found in the woods. And it was just as clear to Laura that the two Jews were about to be shot. Under the brims of their peaked hats with the death’s head medallions, the SS men wore the smug expressions of men who were doing their job well. The mother had her arm around her son’s tiny shoulder, determined to protect him from the horrible fate she must have known awaited them.

  Laura closed her eyes in an equally futile attempt to ignore the situation. The woman was a mother too, trying to shield her child from the truth, but the knowledge that she and Zofia might survive their lie, while the other woman and her child had perhaps only minutes to live, tore at her heart. A wave of guilt and despair passed through her as she tugged Zofia onward. And what made it all even more unbearable was Zofia’s apparent lack of curiosity about the doomed pair. Or was it obliviousness? Either way, her own daughter seemed like a stranger to her, and the more successful Laura was in protecting her, the stranger Zofia became to her.

  Still, she continued to test her on the catechism, on the invented fates of loved ones, on what she should say to strangers if she was ever questioned.

  “Where’s your father? Who is your Savior? What is the name of your mother’s boss?” She pushed and pushed until Zofia began running away at the sight of her anxious mother approaching. Laura herself was sick of rehearsing the lies because the price of keeping her daughter alive was to lose her affection—even their very relationship.

  Yet she envied her daughter’s ignorance. Better to believe you really are a Catholic schoolgirl than to know you’re a Jew hiding behind a mask of deception, without which you cannot survive. Better not to realize that the mother and son emerging from the woods would be shot and killed.

  Was there not a point when terror simply took over a psyche like an invading army and annihilated the self? How was it that during the day Laura could function as well as she did, sitting at her desk in the agricultural cooperative, only feet away from Leming, translating Polish documents into German for him?

  As the Polish Resistance in the area grew, it increasingly became Laura’s job to translate something far more unpleasant. Young Polish partisans were sabotaging trains carrying supplies to the Eastern Front, and those who were caught in the vicinity of Busko-Zdrój were brought before Herr Leming for interrogation. It was her job to translate Leming’s screaming accusations and denunciations from German to Polish, and then the partisans’ screaming defenses and denunciations from Polish to German. The adversaries kept having to pause and wait for her translations, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been another matter of life and death. Later, she would hear the cries of the partisans being tortured in the cooperative’s basement—the ones, that is, who hadn’t been taken out and shot.

  Laura had to believe that one day soon history would regard Leming and his kind as evil, as a once-in-the-history-of-the-world aberration, or else civilization itself surely would have to come to an end. In the meantime, while she appeared to be doing her part voluntarily to facilitate the punishment of the partisans, she took the extraordinary step of tipping them off to the Germans’ military movements she learned about in Leming’s office. The Polish Resistance was becoming more active and Laura wanted to do something to help. It was a terrible gamble for Laura, all the more so since many Poles around her in the cooperative had begun to suspect her of precisely the opposite sympathies, of collaborating.

  News that she spoke excellent German had circulated quickly in Busko-Zdrój, and her Polish neighbors were beginning to talk, wondering whose side she was really on. Her neighbors began questioning her and, worse, six-year-old Zofia. Now not only did she live in constant fear of being exposed to the Germans as a Jew, but she was suspected by the Poles of being a German spy! Once, when Zofia visited her mother at work during lunchtime, two Polish women followed them to the outhouse and stood outside eavesdropping, hoping to hear pro-Nazi conversation—with her daughter? What were they thinking? When Laura provided them with no ammunition, she felt that her Polish colleagues began to trust her. Laura detected a more general shift in the sentiments of the local, mostly peasant Poles toward the Jews. With news of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and other acts of heroism, contempt for the Jews was now grudgingly mixed with admiration.

  However, Zofia came home from school to tell her that her teacher was laughing at the futility of the uprising. Poor Zofia, Laura thought: she had no idea how many times her mother had gotten off the bus because she thought a man across the way suspected she was a Jew, or because a woman’s stare might mean that she knew her from Lvov or Kraków. Zofia didn’t know how often she had altered her route or slipped down an alley when she thought she was being followed. She wished she could share with Zofia her happiness when the Jewish fighting held the Germans off for a month in Warsaw.

  Laura began to care more and more about their appearance, buying a secondhand coal-heated iron. If she couldn’t be the mother to Zofia she would have liked, she at least wanted her daughter to look her best. When a neighbor borrowed the iron and didn�
��t return it, she marched over to demand it back. When the neighbor told her that a German soldier had swiped it from her, Laura proceeded immediately to SS headquarters and insisted on getting it back, which she did. In a world ruled by atrocities, correcting even the smallest injustice helped keep you sane.

  In case of emergency, Laura kept a green velvet bag with wooden handles by the front door. In it were money, clothes, their identification papers, a few family photographs that she’d sewn into the lining, a bit of flour, sausage, some hardboiled eggs, a bottle of vodka to use as barter, and a humble family heirloom, a hand-hammered silver soup spoon. Twice before, at the sound of approaching German planes flying to the Eastern Front, her mother had grabbed the bag and rushed with Zofia to their apartment building’s cellar in Busko-Zdrój.

  By the fall of 1944, the tide had turned. Zofia’s mother had overheard at her job that the Nazis were going to go door to door the next day looking for Poles to conscript as laborers in a last desperate attempt to win the war, which was not going well for the Germans. The Germans would have been looking for Jews, had any been left in Busko-Zdrój. The Russians were pushing back into Poland, and Zofia had even seen a broken line of bandaged and limping German soldiers trudging westward, tunics unbuttoned, soles flapping, looking as bedraggled as Jews.

  Before dawn, Laura, already holding the velvet bag, woke up Zofia and led her through the empty streets of Busko-Zdrój. In her pocket, Zofia squeezed Bear, the small Steiff she had not yet bothered to name, and carried Halinka under her arm. She followed her mother out of the dark town and into a field dotted with conical haystacks. They saw no one else in the field. Laura marched them to one in the farthest corner, near the woods. Using their hands and a pitchfork she found nearby, they worked on the side that faced the forest, the least likely side to be seen. Within minutes, they had scooped out a cave in the middle of the haystack, just big enough for them to sit in.