Anna does not start her story with her age. She starts with the warning.
“There’s going to be a killing in the morning,” said the German woman who was employing Anna to do domestic chores. “You’re too good a worker to die. I’ve never seen a Jew work so hard.”
Anna, still the interpreter, feels the need to translate for me. “She helped me not because I was a good person, but because I was a good worker.” Anna shakes her head. “She told me, ‘You can’t go home, they’re gonna kill you. Tomorrow, they’re going to take all the Jews from the ghetto.’”
Radziwillow, like other Volhynian towns, was rife with such rumors in the fall of 1942. The killing squad had already executed more than 1,500 from Radziwillow’s “expendable” ghetto—including Anna’s mother, her twelve-year-old brother Mendel, and her nine-year-old sister Esther—on May 29, 1942. Her father’s early death in 1934, perhaps from the famine, had spared him the fate of dying in an open pit with the rest of her family.
Before the first massacre, Anna says, she would come to her mother’s ghetto before work, and they would talk through the fence, no touching allowed. Then one day, her mother wasn’t there. Anna, frantic, went to the Judenrat, the council that the Nazis required the Jews to form in the ghetto, and told one of the men in charge, “I usually see my mother before I go to work. She wasn’t there today.”
What did he say? I ask.
“Tears came to his eyes,” she says. “That’s how I knew.”
She had to see the gravesite. Soon after the massacre, Anna says, she stealthily made her way before first light to the killing field. It seems incredible to me, not to mention perilous and foolhardy, but Anna says that’s what she did, that’s what she had to do, she had to see the place where her mother, her brother, and her sister had been executed. She had to say good-bye.
I am family.
No one was there, she says, no guards, no police to keep away the curious. The executioners had coated the pits with lime—Anna uses the Ukrainian word, “vapno”—to speed up decomposition and keep down the smell, but there was no way to cover up what had taken place. “There were five big huge, long graves,” Anna tells me, shuddering at the image in her mind. “You could see the blood. I hate to tell you this, but it was boiling.”
“Boiling?” I say.
“Bubbling, still fresh. I saw a child’s hand, sticking out. I was crying and screaming.”
Every Jew still alive in the Radziwillow ghetto lived with fear that a second massacre was coming, and that this time, their status as forced laborers would not save them. Before the first massacre, the executioners had had the advantage of uncertainty and deception—they had led the Jews to believe that they were being deported, and that was horrible enough—but this time, the targets couldn’t be lulled. Still, how much good would their knowledge do them? Most of them had no place to go, and few places to hide. Some would flee to the nearby forests, looking for the partisan fighters supposedly operating there, but at most, only two hundred survived. Some would decide to take their own lives rather than die at the hands of the Nazis; a few would find families, non-Jews, willing to hide them.
Anna, however, received something more than just a warning; she received an offer of help from the German woman who admired her work ethic.
The Nazis had sent the German woman and her husband to Radziwillow so he could work for the Eisenbahn, the railway transport serving the Eastern Front via the same train line that gave Radziwillow its prominence as a border town. If Anna could hide until after the massacre, the husband would sneak her aboard and take her to the end of the line, 450 miles southeast to Dnepropetrovsk, an industrial city not far from where the Nazis had established an Ortskommandantur, a local occupation headquarters.
That left the problem of what to do until the transport left. Anna couldn’t go back to the ghetto—if she were there in the morning, there would be no way out. The local police opened the locked gates only to let the workers come and go to their jobs, usually under escort. But for all its similarities to a prison, the ghetto had one huge difference: There was no bed check, no requirement to sign in or sign out. If someone went missing altogether, that would draw attention, and if a Jew were caught outside the ghetto after curfew, the consequences could be deadly. But Anna could vanish for a night, and her absence would not raise any particular alarm. The German woman would tell the escort that Anna had already left for the ghetto, and that was plausible enough for now.
The woman’s warning about the impending massacre was sudden, but Anna’s thoughts about fleeing were not. She had been preparing for the possibility, and had even attempted to leave once before, walking the ten kilometers or so across the border to Brody, where her aunt lived. She arrived to find her aunt’s house empty, and when she asked if anyone had seen the family, someone told her, “Don’t you know? They were killed a few days ago.”
Her flight to Brody (When did she go? How long was she gone? She tries to remember, but finally shrugs and gives me a weak smile) might have been brave, but in retrospect, it was mostly rash, the sort of impulsive act that might be expected of a desperate eighteen-year-old girl. Her other preparations, however, proved just the opposite. She knew a family whose daughter had died at age eight. The girl’s father was Ukrainian, and her mother was German, which meant that the girl had been a Volksdeutsche, an ethnic German of mixed blood—not as good as being pure German, but in Hitler’s cosmology, part of the Greater German empire.
“I had to have a new identity and new papers if I was going to leave,” she says. “I couldn’t be Anna Schlajn any more. I paid that family for hers.”
When the Nazi transport pulled away from Radziwillow with its cargo of livestock, clothes, and food, a young girl sat on the floor of one car, surrounded by Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war being shipped back from German labor camps, deemed too sick to work, their fates unclear. The girl was alone. She had only the clothes she wore, a sliver of bread, and her identification documents.
If anyone asked, she would tell her story and hand over the papers, which said she was Anna Prokopowitsch, age sixteen, born December 1925, Volksdeutsch.
The German woman had given her some old clothes, and Anna had put them on, shedding the ones that bore the Star of David that Jews were supposed to wear at all times. The woman’s husband had warned her that the transport would be nothing like a passenger train—no seats, no food service, but also no ticket-takers. “He would get me on, but he made clear that I was on my own after that,” Anna says.
The presence of the POWs surprised her. She huddled in a corner and waited for the man in charge of the prisoners to approach, as he surely would. Not for the first or last time in her new life, she fought the urge to panic. But instead of a barrage of questions, he offered her some of the soup that he was feeding to the POWs. She took a cup, gratefully.
A passenger train might take most of a long day to make the journey to Dnepropetrovsk, but night came and went as the transport crept slowly through the Ukrainian countryside, stopping frequently, an excruciatingly slow ride that gave Anna plenty of time to practice her new identity, to say “My name is Anna Prokopowitsch” as blithely as she once said “My name is Anna Schlajn.” Two or three days, maybe four—Anna doesn’t remember how long she stayed on the train, only that it was evening again when the transport ground to a halt in Dnepropetrovsk station.
“This was the night,” she tells me now, six decades later, “when I learned to lie.”
Several hours ticked by before a man asked her what she was doing there, alone, in the station. “I’m waiting for my sister,” Anna told him—or maybe she said “uncle” or “parents,” she’s no longer sure. He went away, but returned as the station was closing for the night, and told her she would have to leave. She replied, “I’m not going to bother nobody. I’ll just sit here quietly until my sister shows up.” The next morning, another railway worker asked her why she was still there. She unveiled her concocted story, something a
bout getting separated from her parents, she couldn’t find them, she was worried sick. The man took pity on her.
His mother, he said, lived on the outskirts of town, she was old and alone, and she could use the help and the company. He would take Anna as soon as he finished work; he had a car, a broken-down one. Anna, scared and with no place to go, was suspicious but didn’t know what else to do. “I go,” she says, “and he does have an old mother. Well, not that old, probably in her late fifties, but I was young, so everyone that age seemed old.”
Within a few days, Anna came to two conclusions: First, the kind woman didn’t have enough food for herself, let alone this uninvited guest, and second, survival depended on finding work. Anna saw a notice that said the local employment office, a branch of the Nazi occupation authority, had jobs available, including one for a translator.
When the woman at the employment office asked about her skills, Anna told her: I speak four languages, I’m a quick learner. She never expected to get the translator job—she was so young, her bogus papers said she was only sixteen—but she thought if she could meet someone in authority, maybe she could impress him enough to land a job cleaning houses. The woman gave her directions to the Ortskommandantur, in nearby Novomoskovsk: Go see the major there; he’s with the military police, the Feldgendarmerie. He’s the one who needs a translator.
It was a long walk, more than five miles, and when Anna arrived, the major wasn’t in. The building housed all the Nazi security forces—the Gestapo, the SS, the SD, and the military police. While she waited, she rehearsed her story, trying to make it more specific, more convincing. She didn’t want a lot of questions just yet, questions that might cause her to stumble. She reminded herself: My name is Anna Prokopowitsch, and I’m just sixteen, but I’m a good worker, and I need a job.
The major’s name was Könitzer, a small, stocky man. He listened to Anna’s fabricated account and said she reminded him of his daughter back in Germany. Later, after Anna had worked for him for nine months, Könitzer would write her a glowing letter of recommendation, dated July 14, 1943, that reads in translation: “The interpreter Anna Prokopowisch of O.K.I/837, born December 19, 1925, has since November 1942 worked for O.K.I/837 until it closed down. She possesses exceptional language abilities, speaking German, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian. She’s enthusiastic, she has a pure, clear sense of judgment and is a fast learner. In translating German into foreign languages and vice versa, she is exceptionally good.” He stamped it with the seal of O.K.I/837, military police unit 837 of Ortskommandantur I, and signed it with his last name only: Könitzer.
At that first meeting, the major asked her how she had learned to speak so many languages at such a young age, and she told him, “I have a gift, I guess, it comes easily to me.” She could have told him she spoke a fifth and sixth language, but now was not the time to brag about speaking Hebrew and Yiddish.
He wanted to hire her; he said he had two interpreters, but both were useless in Ukrainian, something of a liability in occupied Ukraine. There was one problem, the major told her: Regulations require me to hire German citizens for a military job involving matters of security. The military has no authority to issue such identification papers, so you must go to the civilian commissar’s office. “I was afraid to go, so I told him, I don’t know anyone there, could you please write me a letter?” So the major did as she asked, he wrote the letter that gave her the credibility she needed, a letter explaining that the Soviets had sent her parents away, that her identification papers were gone and she needed new ones.
I’m confused: The Nazis had hired other translators who were Volksdeutschen. Did the military police have more stringent requirements? Or was Könitzer trying to protect himself by clarifying Anna’s status, while helping her out at the same time? Anna doesn’t know. But in retrospect, getting him to write that letter changed everything, it converted her from a runaway with a dubious story into a refugee with the backing of a Nazi military officer.
As she walked to the commissar’s office, she says, she tried to calm herself, tried not to show her nervousness about her story, but she underestimated both the power of the major’s letter and the lack of curiosity she encountered. The letter was read, and accepted, and the coveted document issued on the spot. She was now a German citizen and a translator working for the military police.
The major looked out for her, she says. As far as he knew, she was just a month shy of her seventeenth birthday when he hired her, this babe in the woods who reminded him of his daughter. He warned her about certain men, telling her, “You’re a young girl, stay away from that one.” Once, after an officer persisted in his advance, inviting himself to the new quarters that came along with her job, she told the major and he said, categorically, “Don’t let him in.”
She looks at me sharply when she tells me this, and she says she knows what I’m thinking. We’re sitting in the suburban Chicago home where she now lives with Sidney, her old school chum from Radziwillow. I hadn’t planned to ask her about sexual favors, whether any were demanded or given; it didn’t seem necessary. But she’s bringing it up, so I don’t cut her off. “Nothing like that happened,” she says. “I wouldn’t let it, and neither would the major.”
I had come to Chicago to go over her story once more, to resolve some of the inevitable discrepancies that dim memory and buried pain have imposed on her account. She wants to be helpful, tries to be precise, but not all the pieces fit together in a seamless narrative. Did you hide one night or two before fleeing Radziwillow? Did you go to Brody just after the first massacre, or was it later? Why does this identification document say Volksdeutsch—wouldn’t that be a problem, given what the major had said?
At one point, she stops in midsentence, her eyes wide and suddenly misty. She apologizes, saying that she woke up feeling nervous about some family tensions with her children, but confessing that, yes, she sometimes finds it hard to remember such horrific times, that she’ll never stop feeling guilty about working for the Nazis. I return the apology, saying that she’s such a stoic that I sometimes don’t realize how much pain my questions must cause her.
She looks off in the distance, and I wonder whether I’m getting the full story, whether it’s even possible to reach that level. Isn’t it human nature to wall ourselves off from some parts of our most appalling experiences? She’s a survivor, and she survived by lying, by reinventing herself, by taking a job with the killers who had murdered her family, who were bent on wiping out her fellow Jews. Her counterfeit identity gave her a new life, but it also took its toll, requiring her to nurture the deceit, to learn the art of lying—not merely how to tell a lie, but how to live a lie, because lying was the route to survival, lying was safety. But always, always, she lived with the fear of being discovered. She was a Jew hiding in plain sight, and to make her disguise believable, she had to believe her own deception, she had to make herself appear comfortable among the very enemy that had killed her family. She had to turn herself into a secret. So isn’t it possible—no, more than that, isn’t it likely—that after the war, when she could go back to being Anna Schlajn, a Jew from Radziwillow, that she would find it hard sixty-five years later to keep it all straight, to help me separate the facts from the fictions, to satisfy my desire for precision when obscurity had been her goal?
Fooling the Nazis turned out to be easier than she had feared. They were strangers in occupied territory; they didn’t know the language, the people, or the terrain. The biggest threat to her secret, she says, came from local people who thought she was Jewish. One time, while translating for a prisoner, he looked at her and spat in Ukrainian, “you filthy Jew.” He continued his tirade and his German captors finally asked what he was saying. Anna, protecting herself, told them: “He’s calling you filthy Germans.” They took the man away.
Another time, a German officer hauled in a Jewish woman he found hiding in the nearby forest, calling her a “dirty Jew.” The terrified woman saw Anna, who had been summoned to t
ranslate, and said in Polish, “Are you Jewish?” Anna, acting quickly, told the woman to be quiet, that she would handle it. She went directly to the major’s office and informed him that the officer was mistaken. “If she’s a Jew, then I’m a Jew,” she says she told the major.
I can’t help but smile at her audacity in the midst of this life-or-death confrontation. “You really said that?” I ask. “‘If she’s a Jew, I’m a Jew?’”
Anna returns my smile. “The major said, ‘Fräulein Anna’—that’s what he called me—‘if you say she’s not a Jew, then she’s not a Jew. Tell the officer to let her go.’”
Anna’s stint with the O.K.I/837 ended abruptly in midsummer 1943. The Nazi defeat at the battle of Stalingrad in early February had signaled the beginning of the end for Hitler’s vision of a conquered Soviet Union; the Red Army was pushing back now, pushing to recapture Ukraine from the German occupiers. Anna’s unit would be leaving for combat areas elsewhere, and the major thought it was best if she went to Germany. Anna wanted to stay in Novomoskovsk, but she couldn’t do that—if the Soviets came, she could end up in Siberia, or worse. For now, she was a German; going “home” to Germany was her only option.
She boarded the train again, heading west along the same tracks that had brought her to Dnepropetrovsk nine months earlier. She was on her way to Memmingen, in Bavaria, armed with the major’s letter of recommendation. To her surprise and alarm, the train stopped at the border, in Radziwillow of all places, something to do with the military needing the train, so the passengers had to get off and wait for another one.
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