The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “Oj dos Fräulein hot gebracht di teler!” exclaimed the girl, at which Frau Pohorylle murmured two incomprehensible little phrases that produced the rapid removal of the jars near the sink.

  “There was no need to get up,” she said, but wasn’t in time to wipe her hands on the apron before Ruth had put down her burden and, with an “It’s nothing,” set off to return to the living room. Even with the door closed, she could hear that they had immediately resumed speaking in Yiddish. Rivka, just arrived from Galicia, is better off here than my mother at the Kaufmanns’, she thought and she looked for a way to say so to Gerda.

  “You’re very liberal, in your house.”

  “Quite, yes. Why?”

  “From the way your mother treats the maid.”

  “You know, she’s not used to it. We’re hardly like the Chardacks, what did you think?”

  Ruth doesn’t remember if it was a cousin of the Dachshund or of another of their rich friends, but certainly the girl ambassador sent to the Pohorylle house after that terrible March 18, 1933, when the brownshirts had turned the apartment upside down and taken Gerda away, came from a well-known family in the fur trade. Georg’s siblings—he was in Berlin at that moment, studying medicine—had immediately called a meeting, past the first Schrebergärten of the Rosental, where they anticipated there would be only a few people, some dogs, babies in carriages, all brought out with a great desire to return to the warmth. In Friedrich-Karl-Strasse there had already been a visit from the brownshirts, useless from the point of view of a search and therefore intimidating. They had the right channels for getting information and wanted to inform the family that Gerda, detained in Schutzhaft, had been charged with belonging to an illegal union organization.

  Were the Pohorylles, those small-time businesspeople who didn’t understand how their daughter had gotten involved in certain milieus, aware that for the Nazis preventive detention was enough to detain anyone at will? That even without formal charges they could move Gerda to another prison or send her to a concentration camp? So someone had to inform them as soon as possible. It couldn’t be Dina or her children, whose illegal affiliations were known. The least compromised of their group, starting with the Dachshund, had moved abroad. Thus, in spite of the union militancy at the Gaudig-Schule, Ruth went ahead, hypothesizing that going up there for ten minutes couldn’t be so terrible.

  “At least they’ve already seen me other times . . . ”

  In reality, she had goose bumps, not extreme but noticeable—the same fear that now, when she went to Berlin to bring information and aid to the families of detained comrades, suggested that she put her Swiss passport under her pillow. At times, waking at night, she made sure that it was still there, on the night table, before closing her eyes again.

  That time, thanks to the expert instructions of Dina Gelbke, Ruth hadn’t appeared the right candidate. Who else could they send to the Pohorylles’?

  That was how they’d arrived at that Else, Ilse, or Inge. It seemed, on the spot, a very desperate thought, since she was thirteen at most, but Jenny, Georg’s little sister, had played with her as a child and claimed she was a smart girl.

  They could offer her something in exchange, a reward.

  “So you think we buy a girl like that with a bag of candy for a few Pfennig? Come on!”

  “Why not? It’s not just candy, it’s a prize,” said Jenny.

  “A medal for valor . . . ”

  “Exactly, Soma. You can spare me your sarcasm.”

  They decided they’d lose nothing by trying. During recess Jenny talked to this Else, Ilse, or Inge, who, very pragmatic, answered that she could drop by after school, but couldn’t stay too long because her parents were already starting to make a fuss. Now she was escorted by the Aryan Fräulein to gymnastics and piano, and, when the lesson ended late, the driver for the store came to pick her up.

  “I’ll take you on the bike and wait for you at the corner,” Jenny had reassured her. “But you have to be quick.”

  “Is it dangerous?” the girl had inquired.

  “For you no.”

  “Because I look like a child?”

  “Yes. And because you seem more interested in candy than anything else.”

  “No. If I can do something against them I’ll do it free.”

  Jenny had recounted all this, laughing at a success that seemed taken from a children’s book. Yes, their ambassador must certainly have read Emil and the Detectives and the other more recent novels of Erich Kästner. Novels or not, she had done what she had to do.

  She had introduced herself with the proper formality (her good last name had had its effect) and, saying first that she was expected at lunch, hadn’t wasted any time in delivering her message. All her friends, she had said, are close to Gerda and her family. The Pohorylles had looked at her in bewilderment, but hadn’t asked anything, so, taking advantage of their disorientation, Else, Ilse, or Inge had launched the exploratory question.

  “Can we help you in any way?”

  At that point Gerda’s father must have understood. “Thank you,” he had said to her, as if speaking to an adult: “Our consul is taking care of it, the Polish consul. He is about to lodge a complaint with the Foreign Minister. Report that, miss.”

  The final note, the most grotesque, was that Frau Pohorylle didn’t want to let the messenger leave without tangible proof of gratitude, but, given the terrible moment, she had nothing good to offer her. In the end she appeared with a package containing a carton of ten eggs.

  “They’re ours, Grade A, fresh today. They could be useful now that Easter’s coming.”

  The eggs had ended up in Friedrich-Karl-Strasse, where they were served fried, on a stack of black bread and ham, at a hasty, hearty nonbelieving dinner.

  Gerda was released in early April, a few days before the start of Passover. But the Judenboykott had stunned with incredulity and terror even the tradesmen and professionals who hadn’t suffered physical violence or looting or vandalism, starting with broken windows. The wholesaler Heinrich Pohorylle had regained his daughter. He had thanked the Lord, restocked the goods he had lost, cleaned the egg warehouse. But the girls knew that nothing would be straightened out. They had to go.

  Ruth had received the advice to leave soon from an admirer who had become a Nazi (“Good job, I didn’t treat him badly!” she had said to herself) and hadn’t wasted any time. Gerda, too, was aware that if she fell into the clutches of those gangsters again at the very least she would be expelled and sent to Poland: of that land she preserved a vague smell of warm milk and burned wood, the apparition of a fox that perhaps she had dreamed, and a fear of Cossacks that must have been equally imaginary. “You know, Ruth, I haven’t been there since I was five years old. The only words I know are the ones written on the passport and I can’t even pronounce them.”

  Later, in Paris, when André and Gerda exchanged their prison stories, it seemed to Ruth that she was present mainly at a conspiratorial challenge, a contest between lovers that required the presence of a competition judge.

  “They gave me such a beating that when I got on the train for Vienna I still had broken bones and my backside burned so much that I stayed in the corridor smoking. I finished my entire supply of cigarettes before customs.”

  “We could hear the screams of the men being tortured by the brownshirts during the interrogations. Then I discovered that we could use the bell reserved for the police. It was like a school bell, a sound that shook the building.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Nothing. Insults. I stopped ringing as soon as they started down the stairs. But the comrades heard us, and plus we really annoyed those bastards.”

  “Either you’re not being straight with me or even there you conned them with your charms.”

  “Of course. And also I could tear up easily . . . ”

 
Was it possible that Gerda had remained so lucid even in prison? That she had always been responsive and encouraging and, it goes without saying, surrounded by chic and charme like a creature from a different world?

  “They arrested me when I was going dancing . . . ”

  “With whom?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Georg was already in Italy.”

  “You’re saying that just to provoke me, right?”

  “Come on. I meant that it was quite an advantage, because the cops couldn’t conceive that someone wearing shoes that matched her silk dress could be a rabid red.”

  Did Gerda really believe that her little smiles and her finery would serve as an impenetrable armor, and had that conviction been strong enough not to be damaged? Or was she truly impervious to fear, to anguish (in the torture chamber, good God!), and to the inexorable sense of defeat?

  To live, but not with every compromise—they all wanted that. Georg and his siblings wanted it, she and Melchior and their comrades in the SAP wanted it. Chim and Kati Horna and Csiki Weisz and anyone who had gone to Spain, even just for a brief time, to support the Republican struggle with a camera, wanted it. How did Gerda manage to be infinitely better equipped than the others? Because there was no doubt that she was, she always had been. There was no need to open the Pariser Tageszeitung the day after her funeral to find confirmation in an article of how, already in the spring of ’33, she had been an intrepid and worldly cell mate, how she had distributed cigarettes and sung American hits to the detainees, until from a dubious stranger (in jail, too, they must have thought of her as a “gussied-up featherbrain”) she had become a leader.

  Hard to believe that it had been like that, but the acts recounted by a prison comrade from Leipzig and by those who had known Gerda in Spain also confirmed it. Besides, going to Germany with Melchior as a clandestine courier, she herself had felt on her skin that no better stimulant for stage fever exists than crude, naked fear.

  And then Fräulein Pohorylle, a Polish citizen born in Stuttgart, possessed the martial virtues that Hitler demanded from German youth: nimble as a hare, tenacious as a hide, and sometimes hard as steel. But Gerda’s tenacity and hardness were modeled from different clay: not warrior, not mortuary. To live at all costs but not at any price: Gerda desired it more than all of them put together. And indeed she overcame the chains and obstacles placed in the way of that desire with an irresistible impulse, a force that only the steel mass of a tank had been able to crush.

  On Friday Ruth had gone with her to the doctor’s appointment. They awakened at dawn to get ready without hurrying and then cross half of Paris. On the metro they read the paper and commented on the news in a low voice so as not to bother the workers, who filled the early trains with the need for a little more sleep. They got out at Filles du Calvaire, entered a building at the start of Rue Oberkampf. “Voilà,” Gerda said, as soon as they entered the front hall, similar to so many waiting rooms, except that at that hour of the morning it was completely empty.

  The doctor came out almost immediately. From the little that Ruth was able to see, she liked her: middle-aged, medium-length hair, small pearl necklace under the white coat, fresh lipstick. She had noticed that in the pile of magazines on the table in the waiting room there were some copies of Vu and Regards, but she preferred the women’s magazines. She distracted herself with the new styles suggested by Le Petit Écho de la Mode (the only idea worth copying was wearing big Scottish bows on the collar). She returned the “Bonjour, madame” of a young couple, seeing her stomach emerge like a coconut from under a pale wool shawl, and the boyfriend, still wearing his cap, said: “Voyez, il-y en a deux, là-dedans,” there are two in there, and then had asked if he could look at the Humanité that Gerda had left on the chair next to her.

  “Bien sur,” and they could keep the daily.

  “Merci, camarade!”

  “De rien. Et beaucoup de félicitations, camarades.”

  “Ce sera dur, putain, mais on va se débrouiller.”

  The girl gave him a hint of a nudge with her elbow and instinctively smoothed her belly.

  They made an effort to laugh. They talked about extra shifts, about how to accommodate the twins, and about the doctor, who saw them for nothing, because a worker, like any future mother, also had the right to give birth with minimum risk. Thus, when the first patient came out of the gynecological comrade’s office, Ruth felt completely reassured.

  “On y va!” Gerda had trilled, crossing the waiting room lightly, but in the elevator she had collapsed against the oily wood of the car.

  Ruth wanted to look for a taxi, but Gerda insulted her. “Are you an idiot? Right here in front?” and insisted on the metro. A compromise came out of it, suggested by the first café that appeared along the sidewalk, where her suffering friend went in to get a glass of water.

  “Stay there,” Ruth said. “I’ll come get you in a taxi.”

  On the way Gerda looked out the window. She went up the stairs ignoring Ruth’s arm and even in the room didn’t say a word.

  “Shit, it burns. Next time I’m going to be born a man!”

  She staunched it, changed the pad, folded up the old one, carried away the chamber pot full of red soup and brought it back to the room rinsed out. She went to do some errands and came back to see if everything was all right. Gerda was still curled up, unmoving, she couldn’t tell if she was sleeping. Later, glancing at her from her half of the mattress, she had found her touching. A little ball of female limbs that breathed, snoring faintly, mouth slightly open. Sleep disarms even the most combative. The next day Gerda declared that she was fine, although she still felt disgusting (“like a fish cleaned before being boiled”) and didn’t need any more help.

  “I just need some aspirin.”

  “I got it for you, it’s there on the night table with a fresh cup of tea.”

  “You’re an angel. Then see you around evening.”

  That was it.

  No, not completely. Soon after the triumph of the Front Populaire they met by chance at the Café Capoulade, and Gerda had told her, among various other news, that she’d been again to Rue Oberkampf to that kind doctor: no aftereffects, no problems, and there was even the positive side that the cops were occupied with the general strike, so she had allowed herself a taxi right away, not like the other time . . .

  It was likely that the cause of the accident was André, but Ruth hadn’t asked that question even the first time, when she was living with Gerda.

  Poor Capa, she feels like sneering now, how happy he must have been to sneak in among the barricaded workers at Renault and photograph the salesgirls on strike at the Galleries Lafayette, rather than devote himself to female zones never touched from that point of view. But once he returned to Rue Vavin, he would have rushed to buy gauze and aspirin and cared for Gerda with cuddling and chocolate and maybe even fresh flowers. His lamed kitten and princess must have taken great pleasure basking in those attentions, while outside there was the whole country in ferment, along with the fine warm June sun. Until she whispered, “Leave me alone, André, I want to rest quietly for a while,” and he, banished onto Boulevard Montparnasse, would have gone off in search of new kinds of comfort, and, to comfort himself, too, would drink up a good part of the advance for the exclusive report on Renault in Billancourt. The peacemaking bouquet, made by the florist near the Dôme, if it hadn’t been forgotten at the café, would have ended up anywhere except in the pitcher of water on the desk. The next day, Gerda would have saved the salvageable or decreed that, too bad, the flowers had to be thrown away, but, apart from a scolding, because being drunk wasn’t an excuse to collapse on the bed with your clothes on, she’d be in a splendid mood, as always. Splendid herself as well, regal and willing to give every intact part of herself and forget the tiff, the burning, the wilted flowers and all the rest.

  Ruth is distracted by those somewhat entert
aining conjectures, but the Picture Post brings her back to the reality that has to be looked in the face. “THIS IS WAR!” in block letters is the title of the report, followed by images with almost no text; one is printed on two pages, showing five soldiers, crowded beneath a natural gallery of rock, who observe, in the distance, a bare plain torn up by bombs. Except for that photomontage created in London, she’s seen them all. She packed them and addressed them sitting at that table, and then found them again in the stacks of journals on display at the newsstand. Two weeks ago the back cover of Regards was devoted to the same men rushing into the attack.

  Attaque sur le Sègre! Toutes les phases du combat. Photographies par CAPA.

  She had grabbed Regards while she was running over to pick up the latest typed version of the script of There’s No Tomorrow to bring back urgently to Max Ophüls. There was no time to stop at the Atelier, even less to visit the sick man. There were no seats on the metro, but, balanced precariously, she leafed through the pages of the magazine, and the photos had given her shivers again.

  And now in the Picture Post she finds those men who, bent like dromedaries, advance sideways over the rocky ground. The man black as the rock, out of focus, completely alone in the world erased by the whitish smoke of the explosions. Three shadows: two hold up their companion at the center of the photo, in the middle of the nothing of the smokescreen that licks their steps. The man seriously wounded. The man who dies under the lens.

  La victoire du Rio Sègre; un document unique et exclusif.

  Victoire, victoire, victoire: at the top of every page.

  The victory was heroic, but nothing changed. The final offensive is now in the air, you sniff the odor everywhere, even in Rome, where the Pope, confident of finding a listener in General Franco, has asked for a Christmas truce. It’s the last unknown: will the Pope get what he’s asked for? Melchior, when they talk about it at home, says, “Hypocritical bastards”; Csiki, “Well, let’s hope.” Chim considers it an insult to decency, since, when holidays are celebrated, los moros in the pay of the self-styled crusaders would be left free to slaughter civilians, as always. Capa wanted to return to Catalonia for Christmas at all costs. It was two weeks away.