Such Good Girls

by R. D. Rosen

  As Zofia watched the sunrise with both Halinka and Bear in her lap, she hoped her friends were safe, especially Wacka—it was pronounced Vatska—her good friend from school, whose father was a shoemaker with a shop on the town square, opposite the gift shop, where her mother had recently bought her the bear. It was Wacka’s father who made Zofia’s shoes, the lace-up boots and sandals that her mother made sure were at least two sizes too big so Zofia had plenty of time to grow into them. It was one of the things Zofia looked forward to, when the war was over, that her mother would buy her shoes that fit her now and not at some time far off in the future.

  “We’ll be safe here,” Zofia whispered to her two little companions, stroking the big doll’s hair and rubbing her thumb nervously over the bear’s little face with its tiny glass eyes that had been sewn on unevenly.

  “Are you two warm enough?” she whispered later that morning, pretending to offer Halinka and Bear bits of hardboiled egg. She sat Bear, who had jointed arms and legs, down between her legs. “Make sure you share with Halinka,” she warned him.

  This was an adventure, a rare outing for her these past few months. The sun was shining and her mother was relaxed for once, since even she felt safe sitting inside a haystack in a field of identical haystacks. Overhead, black bombers rumbled west like a formation of gruesome geese.

  “Zosia,” her mother said, “someday it will be like before.”

  “Like before” meant nothing to Zofia. As far back as she could remember, she and her mother were poor Poles on the move. When Zofia tried to remember things, she couldn’t quite get past some invisible sentry who guarded the first four or five years of her life. A couple of memory fragments slipped through, like the wonderful smells in her grandmother’s kitchen, her father returning from work, and the memory of her great-grandfather lying dead on his bed, dressed in a black suit. She even dimly remembered that they had buried him the next morning, someone pushing a crude coffin through the streets in a wheelbarrow.

  It was toward the end of the war, when Laura couldn’t have bought a good night’s sleep with a million zlotys, that an itinerant Catholic priest walked into Busko-Zdrój from who knows where and drew a crowd of faith-hungry Poles to a field outside of town. For reasons Laura herself barely understood, she stood in the chilly spring wind and listened to him.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. With his black moth-eaten cassock and sunken dark eyes, he looked as if he had experienced his own share of suffering. He stood in the pasture with his Bible open in one palm and his other hand pointing to the sky. He told the crowd that they would overcome their suffering with hope and prayer, that Jesus had not forgotten them, and that God would punish the evildoers, and so on and so forth. So where’s God been since 1939? she thought.

  Laura almost never went to church on Sunday with Zofia and her class, and she couldn’t even remember a single Jewish prayer, but the man’s message struck some forgotten chord in her. When he finally closed the Bible and made some blessing motions and thanked everyone for coming, Laura was overcome with the desire to go right up to him and ask him to hear her confession.

  “Prosze pani, I will gladly hear your confession,” the priest said, “but only in a church, if you would be so kind as to show me the way to your house of God.”

  She led him back across the field to St. Leonard’s Church, which was empty. She sat in a pew and he took a seat in the row behind her.

  “I haven’t said a word to anyone for so long, and although I know I am putting my life in your hands by telling you, Father, I feel I must. I’m not even sure why, but please have mercy on me.”

  “Go ahead, my daughter,” came the voice right behind her.

  She swallowed and said, “I’m Jewish.”

  There was silence behind her, which she broke by explaining that she and her daughter had been living as Catholics since 1942. What am I doing? she thought. Am I sending the two of us to our deaths after all this? After coming so far? A word from this tattered priest to the Gestapo and that would be it.

  Still, there was silence, and Laura’s stomach tightened terribly.

  She finally heard the priest say in a low voice, “You should not fear anyone or anything except God. Fear God only and you will be helped and he will have mercy on you. Bless you, my daughter.”

  The priest mumbled something in Latin and fell silent.

  She waited, but the priest said no more. When she finally turned to look at him, he was no longer in the pew. She caught a glimpse of his long coat as he exited the church and turned. She stood up, amazed at what she had done and overcome with the unfamiliar feeling that there was a supernatural being looking out for her and Zofia. Before the war, she had been a nonbeliever, bound only by ethical principles. What sense did it make that only now, after God had abandoned the Jews, she should feel imbued with some fresh hope and renewed strength to survive? And yet she felt a presence.

  She really didn’t know what to think. She had been the beneficiary of more than her share of sheer luck, but she didn’t believe she had been chosen. She didn’t believe she had earned it. She and Zofia had escaped deportation several times. Why? Because she was pretty? Because she spoke perfect German? Because her daughter was blond?

  She had lived undetected among the Nazis. Why? Because she did the Polish officer and his family a favor? Because her landlady had given her a Christian prayer book and a good piece of advice?

  During the bitterly cold winter of 1944 to 1945, some happiness arrived for both of them in the form of Laura’s much younger sister, Putzi, who had against all the odds managed to make her way to Busko in a horse-drawn cart to live with them. She had spent the past two years in Kraków, posing as a Catholic and working under the name Ksenia Osoba as a housekeeper for a German family. Putzi had left her job when her German employers had fled from the advancing Russians back to Germany. Laura introduced her to Zofia by her Catholic nickname, Nusia.

  Putzi was shorter than Laura, with a round face and high forehead. It was hard to overestimate the joy Laura felt at this reunion, with her husband, parents, and brothers gone. And Zofia was delighted to have a companion in her twenties, almost as close in age to Zofia as she was to Laura. Where Zofia’s mother was so strict and tense—she was the oldest daughter in her family, after all—Putzi, the youngest, was theatrical and fun-loving. At times Putzi seemed more like a child even than Zofia. Her mere presence lit up their two-room apartment and brought out an expressive side of Zofia that her mother hadn’t seen in years.

  Best of all, Putzi brought with her the most wonderful possession—a goose feather comforter. For Zofia, it was the epitome of luxury—soft, fluffy, warm, and white in a world of black boots, fear, and no chocolate—and it was to rest permanently on Zofia’s single bed, which she was to share with the aunt she knew only as Nusia. After just one night, though, Putzi complained to her sister right in front of Zofia that she kicked her legs in her sleep and kept her up all night.

  Putzi said that she’d sleep on the floor.

  “You will do no such thing, Nusia,” Laura said. To avoid any slips, of course, they addressed each other only by their adopted Christian names.

  Listening, Zofia thought that her mother might as well have been Putzi’s mother too.

  “But, Bronia,” Putzi said, using Laura’s Catholic nickname, “she kicks like a mule!”

  Laura proposed they alternate, one week at a time.

  “So instead of getting no sleep,” Putzi replied, “I’ll get half the sleep I need!”

  They both laughed—Zofia couldn’t remember hearing her mother’s laughter, ever—and the two sisters hugged each other tightly.

  “Now set the table, Nusia. I saved a chicken for you.”

  “It’s a miracle I got here,” Putzi wrote her other older sister, Fryda, who was living in Germany, shortly after arriving. “I hope I will manage. I sang Christmas carols, and I just play with little Zosia and make her little things she loves for dinner. I got lucky
I came here during the holidays, since everyone treats you with good food. Bronia cooked half a chicken. The little one received some toys and skates. She is a really sweet and good-natured child and very talkative. You cannot stop her! She engages everyone. It’s just that she coughs, the croup, though not to a great degree.”

  For the first time that she could remember, Zofia felt like she had a family. Maybe not like the other girls in school, but a family nonetheless. Having Putzi around softened her mother and took the sting out of Laura’s constant anxiety.

  “Why does she make me recite the catechism all the time?” Zofia complained to her aunt one day.

  “Because she loves you, Zosia my dear. Because she wants you to be a good Christian. Then, if you pray to God for this horrible war to be over, maybe he’ll listen.”

  But it was Putzi who did most of the listening—to Zofia, who at last had someone to talk to after school when her mother was at work. Life seemed almost normal. Putzi began discreetly tutoring Polish students, which Laura was already doing—they snuck in and out of their apartment at night—and they were all beginning to feel somewhat like human beings again. Between her mother’s salary and their modest incomes from tutoring there was more food and even the occasional new dress.

  Putzi was a talented seamstress who had once bartered her sewing skills for bread with one of her Catholic neighbors back in Lvov. Now, in addition to mending their clothes, she rendered Zofia speechless when she fashioned out of an old blue-striped blouse a little coat for her bear. Zofia was delighted. Putzi’s talents extended to the kitchen as well, where she prepared welcome alternatives to her sister’s repertoire. So consistently good was her cooking that it would become legendary when one of the peasants she tutored brought her as payment a goose, a rare delicacy, and Putzi managed to burn it beyond recognition.

  Putzi’s arrival made Laura long all the more for Fryda. All they had was a letter, postmarked Gelsenkirchen, Germany, where she had volunteered for a women’s labor camp after her boss at a pharmacy in Bochnia, near Kraków, threatened to expose her when she wouldn’t sleep with him. Fryda, a fragile beauty in the best of times, said she was slowly being starved to death and pleaded for food parcels. In addition, she wrote, the Allies were bombing the camp daily and she was hiding in a shelter, wanting to die. Laura tearfully put together a package of what she could spare and sent it off.

  There were times when Laura could barely sleep, her fear of exposure was so great, and she would lie in bed with the thoughts flying around in her head like bullets. When she did doze off, sleep was like another occupied country, in which her husband and all the dead were alive again. It is amazing how much a human being can suffer, she thought to herself more and more. One is made of steel. You spring back and carry on. But her secrets were growing too big to be contained, and it was worse because she had no one to share them with but Putzi.

  “I’ve had no choice, but for months, she’s been running and hiding when she sees me coming,” Laura confided to Putzi, tilting her head in the direction of Zofia’s bed, where only a tiny hand could be seen peeking out from under the eiderdown.

  Putzi told her that when the war was over, there would be time to make amends.

  “If this is over. And by then, I’m afraid it will be too late.”

  Putzi said she’d speak to Zosia. “I’ll make her understand.”

  “She’s so hateful,” Laura added. “Do you know what I heard her say to her doll the other day? She told Halinka not to play with Jews. She said, ‘They kill Christian babies, you know.’ Now I understand how easy it is to raise anti-Semites. There’s really nothing to it.”

  A letter from Fryda arrived, this time from the Fraxel Fabrik company in Hanau am Main, Germany.

  My Dears!

  I already wrote you once that I was transferred to a different factory, in which I am already two weeks. I was taken quite arbitrarily, straight from work. I suppose additional workers were needed here. Although others traveled with me, they were assigned to agricultural work while I was selected to sit here by myself. The town is quite large, the factory as well, but the conditions as usual. Maybe this war will finally end and we will happily tell stories about our experiences. Chin up, don’t pick up anything in the street, because there is war going on and one has to be careful. Don’t let anyone take advantage of you.

  Kisses, Fryda

  Like everyone else, Fryda took the precaution of writing in code, so the truth had to be read between the lines. Phrases like “taken quite arbitrarily,” “the conditions as usual,” and “we will happily tell stories about our experiences” all hid the reality of forced labor and forced optimism in the face of catastrophe. No, they would never tell stories happily, but at least, Laura hoped, they would be able to tell them.

  By the end of 1944, there was something in the air in Busko. Even a seven-year-old girl could sense it. Something like confusion and disarray. In Zofia’s school there was much talk that the Germans were really losing the war. Soon, people were saying, the skies would be full of Allied planes and the Polish people would finally be freed from their German occupiers.

  Around this time, while Zofia was visiting her mother at the cooperative, there was a commotion in the courtyard behind the building and Zofia joined a group of Polish workers at the window. What she saw was inexplicable.

  In the courtyard, six uniformed Nazi officials—Herr Leming among them—circled a long, black Mercedes touring car, festooned with tiny Nazi flags. The men were evenly spaced and moved slowly counterclockwise. As each of them passed one of the tires, he would kick it softly without breaking stride. On a command from one of them, they reversed direction and continued to circle the car clockwise. On another order, each man’s right arm shot up in unison to “Heil Hitler!” Then they all piled into the car and drove off through the courtyard gate.

  Laura couldn’t help relishing the sight of German soldiers throwing their weapons away en masse and fleeing just ahead of the Russians. But the killings continued. The retreating Nazis were emptying the camps and forcing the prisoners on death marches westward to relocate them to labor camps for a last-ditch effort to win the unwinnable. As if not enough Jews had already died, hundreds of thousands more would succumb to starvation, illness, and exposure to the cold. And despite Churchill’s promise of their imminent arrival, the Allied forces had not yet come to stop them.

  In the spring of 1945, with Germany’s defeat assured, Laura and Putzi were both concerned that they hadn’t heard from Fryda in many weeks. There had been no acknowledgment of the last two food packages. Fryda’s new camp and the factory where she worked were close to a rail line, and when reports of repeated heavy Allied bombing of Germany began circulating, Laura feared the worst. Rail lines were a primary target.

  Why, she thought? Why hadn’t the Allies managed to bomb any of the rail lines carrying Jews to their deaths in the last few years, yet they could somehow manage to bomb her sister, poor Fryda, the prettiest of them all?

  Laura accepted that it was just the three of them now, plus a cousin Toncia in Israel, and her uncle Max Schaerf, who had left Austria for Cuba and had since settled in New York City—where Laura now dreamed of going. She didn’t allow herself to feel safe even for a moment. The Germans might be on the run, but the Poles in Busko-Zdrój weren’t exactly kind to the Jews. When those who had survived both deportation and the gas chambers came filtering back to reclaim their homes, they found their fellow townspeople ensconced there with no intention of moving, or even letting the Jews reclaim their possessions. Instead the Poles threatened to—and maybe did, as far as Laura knew—shoot their own homeless countrymen. What recourse did the Jews have anyway? Complain to the new Soviet authorities, immersed as they were in setting up a local government, and who despised the Jews even more than they despised the Poles? Every Jew in Poland was doing his or her best to get out of the country.

  The Soviets came and were as loud as the Germans. They were peasants. They camped with
their horses in courtyards, including Laura’s and Zofia’s, drinking vodka all the time, paring off chunks of black bread from huge round loaves (and offering pieces to Zofia), and biting into raw onions as if they were apples. They relieved themselves wherever they wanted, even in the courtyard—even in an empty office at the agricultural cooperative, where Laura continued to work. They moved into Poles’ apartments. They ate horse meat. Most of the Soviet soldiers seemed to know nothing of modern life. Laura’s daughter stared in amazement one day when a soldier, frightened by a ticking pocket watch, shot it with his service revolver.

  But the cloud of fear had lifted for Laura. In the May Day parade, she marched behind her neighbor, the mayor, with a rainbow ribbon across her chest, and with Zofia by her side.

  Putzi was a bigger concern for the moment. She was tempting fate with a new boyfriend she’d acquired after starring opposite him in a local play at the cooperative. He was a handsome Polish Catholic named Tadeusz, a member of the Resistance and the brother of one of Laura’s coworkers. The two had fallen in love and were seeing each other regularly, much to Laura’s distress. It would still be dangerous if anyone, even a Resistance fighter, discovered that Putzi and her family were Jewish. The Poles had already proven themselves to be more than capable of murdering Jews without any help at all.

  Laura begged Putzi not to fall in love with the boy.

  “It’s too late,” Putzi said. “I already have.”

  “It can’t end well. Someday we will leave Busko-Zdrój. We can’t stay here forever. And then you’ll have to forget him.”

  “Then I’ll stay with him here.”

  “No. We must stick together. He’s not right for you.”

  “How can you say that? You see me with Tadeusz! You see how in love we are! He wants to marry me!”

  “You’ll see. You’ll regret it. How can you put our lives at risk?” Laura said, who was haunted by her own ill-advised confession to the priest. “Haven’t we lost enough family? His brother probably already knows we’re Jewish. I’ve worked alongside him for the last two years and he’s no dummy. You know the Poles are better at identifying Jews than the Germans.”