Marga’s expression was hard to read. Would she still tell the Commandant about us? I took a deep breath and forced myself to be brave. “If you or Marga told the Commandant what we did, we could be punished.”
“My dear girl,” said Frau Schneider, “I would never say such a thing to the Commandant. You were so kind to us when we first came to town, offering us milk, and now coming here and telling us outright about the cow. That takes courage. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because I wouldn’t want my daughter out on her own to take a cow to pasture while there’s a war on. And the Volksdeutsche Liaison Office acts like a welfare agency, supplying us with all that we need.”
I thought back to the day before. The uniformed man organizing the newcomers to dig the grave pits, organizing them to sort the clothing. This was their welfare agency? To watch as others were killed and then steal their things?
Marga remained silent as her mother spoke, but her brow was furrowed.
“What about you, Marga?” I asked. “Do you forgive my family for taking the cow and chickens?”
She didn’t respond.
Frau Schneider regarded her daughter. “You wouldn’t bring this up with the Commandant, would you, Marga?”
Marga stared down at the dirt floor and her face flushed pink. “No, Mutter, I wouldn’t,” she finally said.
“Good,” said Frau Schneider. She looked from her daughter to me. “Shake hands, girls,” she said. “We’re in the midst of war, but all the more reason for human kindness.”
I reached out my hand and gripped Marga’s, but she gave me a quick, limp handshake in return.
I was about to leave, but Frau Schneider put her hand on my forearm. “I have something for you.”
She took a tin of pork from the kitchen table and placed it in my basket. “Thank you, Frau Schneider,” I said. “That is most generous of you.”
As I walked home, I puzzled over the enigma that was Frau Gertrude Schneider. It was thoughtful of her to give us pork, and good to make Marga promise to keep our secret from the Commandant, yet it was not a kind woman I had seen the day before, coldly sorting through the clothing of murdered Jews. And it wasn’t a kind woman who could so easily wear the clothing of the dead. I would step lightly around Marga—and also Frau Schneider.
Mama was thrilled with the pork, and relieved at the kindness behind it. This pork was too precious to use up now, so I hid it, thinking of the future.
I regarded the worried faces around our table. It was less than a week since the execution of the hundred and one Viteretz Jews. My whole family was here—Borys, Uncle Ivan, Auntie Iryna, Maria, Mama, and me. And in my heart I felt the presence of Tato, Uncle Roman, and Josip.
“They’ve arrested our Ukrainian leaders in Lviv,” said Uncle Ivan slowly. “Our independence is dead.”
Mama put her hand to her heart. “This is the end of us all, then.”
“I refuse to believe that,” said Borys. “This country doesn’t belong to Stalin, and it doesn’t belong to Hitler! Even without our leaders, we’ll do what we can to resist.”
His words scared me a little, but also made me proud. “Are you in danger?” I asked.
Borys looked at his cup of tea but didn’t reply.
“Yes, we’re in danger,” said Uncle Ivan.
“Uncle Ivan,” I said, looking at him but also at Borys, “I could keep my eyes and ears open for information when I’m cleaning at the Commandant’s. Officers sometimes come to the house when he’s there, to give him information.”
Mama glanced at me and then nodded. “I can do that as well, and so can Maria.”
Maria looked startled by the idea, but she didn’t argue.
Uncle Ivan nodded ever so slightly. “Thank you.”
By midsummer, the Commandant must have felt that he had complete domination of our town, because he sent most of his soldiers to the front in the East. In their place came a group of German administrators: office workers, managers, nurses, doctors, teachers, and police.
These new people were quite different from the Volksdeutsche refugees who had already settled in after arriving on the heels of the army. These ones weren’t starving and ragged. They wore good clothing and spoke in a cultured way, and seemed to be on friendly and familiar terms with one another. It seemed that they had worked together as a team before coming to Viteretz.
They were also different from the military, which was nearly all men. This new group included a surprising number of female teachers, nurses, and office workers. From the snippets of conversation I was able to hear at the house, I realized that these new people were true Nazi believers.
And what did the Nazis believe?
I pieced it together from bits of their conversations. The Nazis had a complicated way of putting people into categories. The Commandant used different terms to describe the various groups. The ones who were considered good were called Aryan, German, and Volksdeutsche. These were part of something the Commandant called the Master Race. The Nazis thought everyone else was “subhuman.”
I witnessed the actions of one true believer with my own eyes as I was walking Krasa to a farm in the country to be bred—we hoped she’d get pregnant so she would continue to give milk for another year.
This woman wore a white cloth over her hair and a white smock over a light blue dress. It wasn’t until I was closer that I saw the armband with the red cross on it and realized she was a nurse. She had set up a first-aid station on a horse-drawn wagon, and she was slowly making her way down the street, looking after the medical needs of the refugees. She dressed an infected eye for an elderly man and gave some sort of needle to another, then she rocked a crying baby in her arms as she carried on an animated conversation with the mother. She seemed to be very good at her job—that is, for those she considered part of the Master Race.
A lineup of Volksdeutsche had formed, but a young boy wearing a skullcap approached her. He cradled his forearm, which seemed to be resting at an odd angle. His face was smudged with dirt and there was a rip in the knee of his trousers.
“How did you hurt your arm?” asked the woman.
“I, ah … tripped,” said the boy.
“It looks more like you’ve been beaten.”
The boy didn’t say anything, but his face flushed red and he reluctantly nodded.
“I can’t help you,” she said. “You’re Jewish.”
“But my arm …” he said. “I think it might be broken.”
The nurse ignored him and walked over to the teenage girl who was next in line.
Anger boiled up inside me. Didn’t nurses take a pledge to help everyone who needed it? How would she feel if the tables were turned and it was her own son who needed help?
The boy walked away, now in tears.
“Excuse me,” I said as I stepped alongside him. “Go to the brown house across the road from the church.” I pointed down the street.
He looked up at me, confused.
“There’s a lady doctor there. A Jewish lady doctor. She’ll set your arm for you, I know for sure.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I felt helpless and angry as I watched him walk toward the Kitai house. The boy had been denied care for no reason except that he was Jewish. Was this kind of thing happening in other towns as well?
With all the crystal, paintings, and silver arriving at the Commandant’s house, Frau Hermann kept me busy with dusting and polishing. These were easy chores that I did in silence, with the Commandant and his wife hardly noticing my presence. I often overheard snippets of Frau Hermann’s telephone conversations. They were mostly about luncheons and clothing and flowers. Herr Commandant wasn’t home much, as he had an office in the municipal building next door and his job took him other places as well. But when he was home, the bits I heard of his phone calls were troubling—about bullets, barbed wire, and the front.
I also learned that the Soviets and Britain were now on the same side of the war, fighting the Nazis together. This made no sense. Surely the Briti
sh knew that the murderous Soviets were not much different from the Nazis? Couldn’t the British fight them both?
One morning in August I noticed the Commandant’s uniform jacket hanging on a hook by the entrance, with the edge of what looked like a telegram sticking out of the pocket. I looked around to be sure I was alone, then slid it out to read. The Nazis were nearly all the way to Leningrad. I thought of all the towns and villages between here and Leningrad. If people like the Commandant were in charge of all those other towns, I could picture the mass graves and the shootings there. Who would be left alive by the time these two horrible armies were finished?
The sound of Frau Hermann’s clicking heels startled me from my thoughts. I returned the telegram to the Commandant’s pocket and continued with my dusting. The Commandant’s wife bustled into the room. She was in high spirits, perhaps because she knew about the Nazis’ success in the war, but also because she was arranging a party for the newly arrived true believers who had come from the Reich to help with the running of our town.
Mama and I worked very hard on the day of the party. I was supposed to be keeping up with the dirty dishes in the kitchen, but at the last minute one of the Volksdeutsche serving maids became ill.
Frau Hermann came into the kitchen and surveyed all of us who were frantically cleaning pots, polishing wine glasses, and arranging food on trays.
“You,” she said, pointing at me. “You’re the same size as Wilma. You’ll have to take her place.”
She took me to a room beside the kitchen and pointed to a neatly pressed uniform draped across the back of a chair. “Put that on,” she said. “And tie your hair up. You’ll also need to wear those.” She indicated a pair of sturdy-looking leather shoes. “Hurry and dress, then go find Helga and she’ll tell you what to do.”
I would have much preferred to stay in the kitchen, rather than wearing someone else’s clothing and doing a job that I had never done before. What would the Commandant’s wife do if I made a mistake? But then again, the party might be a good opportunity for me to learn something that could help us stay alive. I’d have to be brave.
I slipped out of my own clothing and put on the black skirt and blouse, then tied the white apron over the top, but when I slipped my foot into the first shoe, I realized they were too small. I curled in my toes and tied the laces loosely, but with each step they pinched.
When I found Helga, she redid my hair and adjusted the apron. “You’ll have to do,” she said, frowning. “I wouldn’t trust you with the drinks tray, but perhaps you’ll be steady enough to pass around this one.”
She handed me a silver platter laden with small open-faced sandwiches. They all looked delicious. Each small sandwich contained more food than I had eaten all day.
I balanced the heavy tray in front of me and watched as the guests shoved the tidbits into their mouths as they kept talking and laughing. I was certain that none of the guests saw me as anything more than a walking tray, and that was fine with me.
The snippets of conversation were mostly about the weather or life back home. There were a couple of conversations about Leningrad, and also something called “the Hunger Plan.” But the phrase that surfaced more frequently was “the Jewish Question.”
What did that mean? The way these Nazis talked, it was a problem for them, not a question.
By the time the party was over, my shoulders ached from holding the tray, and when I took off the shoes, my socks were stained with blood. I put my own clothing back on and went to the kitchen to help Mama finish up with the cleaning.
There was a mound of half-eaten sandwiches left over. “We’re not supposed to take any of this,” said Mama, but she and the rest of us filled our pockets. “What the Commandant doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
That night, as I soaked my bloodied feet in a basin of cool water, Mama, Maria, Auntie Iryna, and I feasted on the leftovers. I had a stomachache all night but I didn’t care.
It was a hot day in August when Auntie Iryna and her chickens disappeared. At first I was frantic, thinking she had been taken or killed, but then I remembered that Borys had wanted her to go to the forest with him. I asked Mama, and she said, “Yes, that’s where Iryna is.”
I tried to picture her living in the forest, sleeping on a mattress of fir boughs with her chickens by her side, but I couldn’t see it.
“Iryna’s stronger than you think,” said Mama, almost as if she guessed my thoughts.
I had apparently done a good enough job at the party that Frau Hermann trusted me to act as a maid whenever Wilma was busy. To save my toes and the socks, I’d wrap my feet tightly with thin cotton strips before pulling on the socks.
It turned out that Frau Hermann and her friends were hardly worth eavesdropping on. They talked about silly things like dresses and cake recipes. Didn’t they know that we were in the middle of a war? What I really wanted to hear about was the Jewish Question. Dolik and Leon and Doctor Mina would want to know, so they could prepare. So would Nathan and his parents.
Most evenings, Mama, Maria, and I would talk about the things we’d overheard, and try to put it all together. It was obvious that all the people considered “subhuman” by the Nazis were treated poorly, but the Commandant didn’t talk about the Subhuman Question, only the Jewish Question. What was the question?
At the end of August, we got an inkling.
Flyers were posted throughout Viteretz demanding that Jews wear distinctive armbands—a blue Star of David painted on a white piece of cloth. As I walked through town seeing all the people forced to wear them, it chilled me knowing that everyone who was a part of the Commandant’s Jewish Question was now clearly identified.
At first Dolik refused to wear his. “It would make me feel like a prisoner,” he said.
But then a Polish man whose father had been Jewish was caught by the police and shot dead in the street for not wearing one.
“He wasn’t even Jewish,” said Dolik. “Didn’t he go to St. Joseph’s?”
“But his papers identified him as Jewish,” I said. “Just like yours do. The Nazis are stopping people on the street, demanding to see our papers. You have to wear the armband or you’ll be shot.”
As a warning to all, the man’s body was left in the middle of the road to rot in the heat. A full week went by before the new Volksdeutsche dogcatcher loaded the bloated body into the back of his wagon and took it away.
After that, even people who had just one Jewish grandparent began wearing the armband so they wouldn’t be shot. But while Jews not wearing them could be shot, Jews wearing the armbands were forced into labor. The official order was that any Jew between the age of fourteen and sixty had to perform labor, but Leon and Dolik were both younger than fourteen. Still, they often joined the work crews. “We decided it was safer to be considered useful to the Nazis,” Dolik explained to me.
It seemed that nearly every day, a different group of Jews would be summoned at a moment’s notice. Sometimes they were made to do manual labor like renovating our school for its new German students or rebuilding bombed houses. At other times, a few would be selected to perform pointless and humiliating tasks. Once, the Segal family was made to collect the horse dung from the streets with their bare hands and dispose of it in the Jewish cemetery. It was a blasphemous and horrible job, and it was especially hard on Mrs. Segal, whose weak leg left her exhausted at the best of times.
Leon, Dolik, and other young Jews were given wheelbarrows, pickaxes, and shovels and marched out to widen the dirt road beyond town. Day after day, the same group was called, and each day they had to travel farther to complete their task. They wouldn’t get back until dark.
One evening I sat with Dolik on our front step after he got back from a grueling day of road widening. His hands were a blistered mess and his face was still covered in dirty sweat. “I’ve never done this kind of labor before,” he said. “I’m not very good at it.”
“At this rate, you’re going to collapse from exhaustion,” I
said.
“But if I’m useful, I’m safer,” said Dolik.
A few days after this conversation, things did improve slightly. I noticed that Dolik and his brother weren’t being sent out every single day to work on the roads. Sometimes they were given less arduous jobs around town, like picking up trash or sweeping the sidewalks.
“Maybe the Nazis are realizing the work will be of better quality if they treat their workers more humanely,” I said to Dolik as we sat side by side on his front step.
“That’s not it,” he said. “Some of the leaders in our community offered to take over the management of the work groups. They’ve formed what the Commandant calls a Judenrat. There’s still the same amount of work, but the Judenrat is able to assign it more fairly than the Nazis.”
It was a small improvement, but a welcome one.
As summer turned to fall, we had one piece of excellent news: Krasa was pregnant and her calf would be born in mid-April. Her milk would start to dry up around January and she’d likely be completely dry for February and March, but once her calf was born, we’d have plenty of milk again, plus we’d have a calf to sell.
In addition to our usual chores and the job of cleaning at the Commandant’s, we harvested our potatoes, cabbages, and onions from the garden and stored them in our root cellar. We had just taken down the last of the potatoes when a woman from the Volksdeutsche Liaison Office came to the house.
“Your produce,” she said, writing notes on her clipboard. “Where is it?”
“Harvested,” said Mama. “And stored for the winter.”
The woman tapped her clipboard with the tip of her pen. “Your produce is needed for the war effort.”
“We have only a small garden,” said Mama. “And we’ll barely have enough to get through the winter as it is. If you take our produce, we’ll starve.”
“That is no concern of mine,” said the woman. “Now please show me into your root cellar.”
“And what would happen if we don’t show it to you?” asked Mama.
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