The Children's War (4 page)

Olek shrugged. “Out.”

“Drinking?”

“Probably.”

“I hope she makes it to the wedding. She’s my maid of honor, after all,” Zosia fretted, but not very convincingly.

“What do you need her for?”

“I don’t, I just need her closet,” Zosia answered as she tromped past Olek into the apartment. “Fashion emergency.”

With a bit of stuffing the shoes fit well enough, and Zosia did not suffer unduly as she marched forward to take Adam’s hand. Adam looked quite dashing in the uniform he had chosen to wear. The uniform matched his most commonly assumed identity, that of an SS major, but he had carefully removed the obnoxious Nazi paraphernalia that was usually attached and had covered the German insignia with the shields and decorations of his own rank in the Home Army. Or rather, his mother probably had. Adam was not particularly handy with needle and thread or, in fact, any other domestic object. Nor was Zosia, and the pair’s combined gross domestic incompetence was the source of many jokes and wagers among their friends and comrades.

The ceremony was held outside in the crisp October air, and with the inspiration of the wind rustling the leaves and the bright sunshine glinting through the pines, Zosia and Adam quieted their natural exuberance and solemnly pledged themselves to each other. After the ceremony, the touching display of solemnity did not last very long, and the wedding party soon became raucous. Adam and Zosia joined in the dancing and drinking and merrymaking until early the following morning and then absconded quietly, mounting a horse and disappearing into the predawn mist that covered the pine woods in an ethereal cloak of gray.

5

G
RAY.
G
RAYNESS
EVERYWHERE.
Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling. Even the wooden door had a gray patina. His clothes were gray from dirt, his skin, sallow and gray from imprisonment. As the gray fluorescent bulb flickered day in and day out, he thought he would go mad if he did not see the sun soon. He didn’t though. He just waited, aching, hungry, scared, and bored in a demihell of gray.

While he waited, a routine of sorts developed. They continued to feed him, delivering food in the morning and the evening; he was able to visit the toilet twice a day, just after breakfast and just after his dinner, but otherwise he never left his cell. His new cellmates, two friends from the same factory, had no reason to trust him, and their conversation was somewhat limited as he did not trust them either. By virtue of his seniority, he claimed one of the two cots for himself. They could have ganged up on him and seized it, but they did not, opting instead to share the other cot between them. The two were taken out and interrogated regularly, and his heart went out to each as he heard their cries of pain, but when they returned, he did not bother being solicitous. Let them offer each other comfort.
In any case, they were Germans—union organizers, he gathered from their occasional conversations—and for that reason alone he was not much inclined to like them. Let
them
enjoy the bestiality their master race had inflicted on its subject peoples. Let
them
understand what it felt like to be labeled as somehow inferior.

Monique.
That was the word his eyes settled on. The writer had used blood to draw a heart and inscribe the name across it. His eyes wandered further, searching out the next graffito in a familiar routine.
Dona eis requiem.
He heard the words sung, whispered almost, in his mind. It was the funeral of a friend, and a stranger stood next to him in the church singing quietly, mourning her loss. He had not looked at her face, his eyes had been too intent on Allison and her husband, only a few pews away. He remembered how, unaware that she was being observed, she discreetly made the sign of the cross. It was then that he had realized how very little he knew about her. His eyes returned to the wall and the word
Freiheit
scratched near his cot. Freedom. Then there was the long polemic near the door. Each day he managed to decipher a bit more of the rambling sentences. Each line was more incoherent than the last, as the writer had slowly succumbed to daily torture.

Done with reading the graffiti, he lay on his cot, exhausted and bored, and watched as his two companions wrote furtive notes with pens and paper they had somehow managed to acquire.

“What are you staring at?” one of them asked accusingly.

He shook his head at his faux pas. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“Do you want a bit of paper?” the second one asked, rather more helpfully. “We’ll see that the note gets out.”

He shook his head again, then rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “There’s no one out there,” he said as if talking about God.“No one at all.”

The second one stood and walked over to his cot.“No one?”

A series of faces passed through his mind: his little sister, his mother, his father, his friends, Allison. He felt an urge to confide in his cellmate but blinked the deadly impulse away with the faces. “No one,” he repeated in a voice that indicated further questions would be unwelcome. There was an awkward silence, and then the union organizer pursed his lips as if preparing to ask another question. He decided to preempt it, and taking in the two with his eyes, he asked, “So what have you two lads been up to that has gotten the local cops so riled?”

That’s all it took. The union organizer was an idealist and talked freely of his traitorous beliefs, smiling with pleasure at the rare opportunity to have an interested audience. Only the sound of the door being opened interrupted his long monologue. All three prisoners looked with trepidation at the two men who entered. One was their usual guard, the other an officer. As the guard herded the two union organizers to the far side of the room to bar their exit, the officer beckoned imperiously to him. He smiled at his two comrades as they cowered in
the corner. “I guess you won’t need to share the cot anymore,” he quipped as he obediently rose to his feet. He submitted to having his hands bound behind his back, and then he was shoved toward the door.

Rather pointlessly, one of the union organizers called out, “Good luck,” as he disappeared down the hall.

The court was a modest affair: a simple wooden table with two chairs, one occupied by a harried-looking military official sitting in judgment and the other by a prosecutor who presided over stacks of documents. Off to the side a private sat at a small table and took notes. It was late afternoon and everyone in the courtroom was obviously tired.

He approached the bench as ordered; there was no defense attorney, no crossexamination; he stood helpless and alone as his guard retreated to the far wall to light a cigarette. Sighing heavily, the prosecutor set down his cigarette and began impatiently searching through a stack of files. Finally finding the right one, the prosecutor pulled it out, slumped back into his chair, and finished the cigarette, fussily waving away the cloud of smoke it had produced.

It took about five minutes for the charges to be read. Crossing the border turned into a litany of crimes: escape from imprisonment, unauthorized departure from his place of work, falsifying documents, resisting arrest, corruption and bribery, deception, fraud, besmirching the reputation of the Reich, violation of national borders, smuggling . . . He stopped listening. They were throwing the book at him. It was, quite literally, overkill since his escape attempt—his second criminal conviction!—was in and of itself sufficient to get him the death penalty. As the prosecutor concluded by summarizing the evidence and reading out his confession, the judge stirred and prepared to pass sentence.

“I want counsel,” he demanded into the momentary silence.

The bald statement stunned them all, then finally the judge found the wherewithal to answer, “You have abrogated that right.”

“That’s impossible. I demand a defense.”

“Be silent. You will not speak out of turn,” the judge responded coldly, trying to hide his irritation.

“I want a defense.”

“You have no right to an attorney. Now be silent!”

“Then I want my turn to speak. I demand an opportunity to defend myself.”

“You will not make demands of this court!” the judge snapped angrily.

“I demand—”

“Shut up!”

He refused to stay quiet. He shouted out his opinions over the objections of the court and the senseless pounding of the judge’s gavel. As it degenerated into a shouting match, his guard threw down his cigarette, carefully ground it out with his boot, and approached his prisoner. Assuming the guard would try to drag him away, he rushed to vent his years of outrage and anger, but the guard was in no mood for such physical exertion. The guard swung the butt of
his pistol at the back of his prisoner’s head and watched impassively as the defendant crumpled to the floor, thus restoring silence and dignity to the courtroom.

“Guilty,” muttered the judge, ticking a box on a sheet of paper. “Sentence: death,” he added, checking another little box on the form. He carefully placed the sheet on a stack of papers, and as the prisoner was dragged out of the room, the judge sighed, rubbed his forehead, then called out,“Next!”

6

“H
ERE’
YOUR ADDRESS,”
Richard snorted as he let the slip of paper float down to Kasia’s lap. “It seems they’re moving up in the world,” he added sarcastically.

Kasia grasped the slip of paper and read the address. “Poznan? Are they registered there?”

“Posen,” Richard snapped testily.“No, but your sister was granted a work permit and a temporary, foreign-employee residence permit. I assume your parents are living with her since they wouldn’t be able to resist going ‘home’ as they would call it.”

Kasia suppressed a bitter reply. Richard had only met her parents once, and their unremitting hostility toward him had left its impression. Fascist murderer, her father had called him. Baby thief, her mother had said, tears in her eyes. Pigheaded ignoramuses, Richard had called them, deliberately sacrificing their children’s future to a chimerical nonsense. Kasia held the paper tightly in her hand and asked imploringly, “Do you think I could try another visit?”

Richard motioned to the servant to light him a cigarette. “You know, in my position, these things are not easy,” he replied coldly.

“I know, darling.”

Richard smoked in silence for a moment. Kasia stared wide-eyed at him, wordlessly pleading. With each puff of the cigarette he felt a little more mellow, and finally relenting, he said, “I’ll check with the authorities.”

The building had been constructed sometime in the sixties or seventies: a massive tower of moldering concrete, misfitted windows, and dangling electrical wires. The concrete steps that led around and around, up innumerable flights, had huge chunks chipped away from overuse, poor maintenance, and vandalism. Here and there in the walls the slabs had chipped down to the rusting metal bars that threaded their way through as structural supports.

Kasia stopped on the eleventh floor, and once she had caught her breath, she turned into the hallway and began inspecting the doors. The numbers indicated
that she had miscounted and had one more stairway to climb, so she returned to the steps and dragged herself up another flight. When she finally achieved the eleventh floor, she walked down the gloomy hallway peering at the faded numbers on each door until she found the appropriate one. There was a small nameplate next to the door and in tiny handwriting was written her sister’s name.

Kasia rang the bell and waited. She had not warned anyone she was coming, and she had deliberately chosen the dinner hours so that she would have the best chance of finding someone at home.

“Who’s there?” a voice asked in German.

“I have news of Kasia,” she answered.

The door opened a tiny width and a young woman peered out. “Who are you?”

Kasia looked into the face of her younger sister and was ready to reveal herself, but her sister recognized her and slammed the door shut before she could say a word. A muffled “Go away!” came at her like a knife through the door.

Kasia rang the bell again and pressed her ear to the door. Inside she could hear an argument, and she continued to ring the bell insistently. Again the door opened, this time held by Kasia’s father. He motioned her inside, but even as she stepped through, her sister pushed past her and left the apartment. A man whom Kasia did not know approached and stared at her with undisguised curiosity, then dutifully followed Kasia’s sister out the door and down the hall.

“Your brother-in-law,” her father explained. “They’re married, though of course they never got official permission.” He led her to the dinner table where her mother and brother were seated but did not offer her a seat. Kasia seated herself, and grabbing one of the glasses on the table, poured herself some water from a pitcher.

“It’s tap water,” her brother warned. “It will make a fine lady like you quite sick if you’re not used to it.”

Kasia already felt so sick from her pregnancy that she found herself pushing the glass away, even though she had not meant to.

“What do you want from us?” her mother asked wearily. “Does your husband need our winter coats for his dog? Or maybe he would like to steal your sister’s child to clean his toilet?”

“Mama . . . ,” Kasia began, but stopped as her mother raised a hand in warning.

“Do not call me mother! They stole two children from me, Kasia! Two innocents taken as babes from my arms. Your brothers! Stolen so that they could become some other couple’s adopted children or so that they could slave in some carpet factory weaving their fine carpets. Torn from my arms because I did not have a legal marriage, a legal marriage which they would not grant to me! They were stolen, but you, you harlot, you go voluntarily into their homes, you sleep with that man you call a husband, you produce children for him! You carry some piece of paper they’ve given you to prove your worth, but in here”—Kasia’s
mother tapped her chest dramatically—“in here, you are hollow. You are no daughter of mine.”

“I’ve brought pictures of the children. Your grandchildren, Mama.”

“I am not your mother!”

“Darling,” Kasia’s father soothed his wife, “let her speak.”

“My husband does not steal children,” Kasia stated. “Your sons were taken decades ago, before I was born, before Richard was born. If only you would get to know him, you would see, he is a good man.”

“A good man! There is no such thing as a good German! The only good German is a dead German!” Kasia’s brother inserted angrily.

“Hatred gets us nowhere,” Kasia replied quietly. “I have my reasons for what I do, for what I have done . . .”

“What reasons could explain such a betrayal?” Kasia’s father asked pointedly.

“I can’t explain, Papa. You must have faith in me. We do not need to discuss our differences. I just wanted to tell you about the children, to show you their pictures, to see if we can offer you any help—”

“Help?
Help?”
Kasia’s brother interjected. “They steal everything, they destroy everything. They slaughter people for this reason and that reason and for no reason at all, and then they want to know if they can offer us help?”

“Kasia, how can you be so naive?” her father asked plaintively. “They only keep us alive to produce cheap agricultural goods, to slave in their factories and in their homes. They have destroyed our universities and schools, they have slaughtered our political and religious leaders, they continue to use terror to suppress even the tiniest glimmerings of freedom or hope. How can you leave your people and become one of them?”

“I have not become ‘one of them’! I married Richard, that’s all. I’ve made a life and a family with a man who represents all the wrong things to you. But he was not born a symbol, he is just a person, and it’s unfair of you to shun me just because I love the wrong person.”

“He’s no innocent bystander! He works in the Security Ministry!” Kasia’s brother scolded.

“Please leave.” Kasia’s father stood and moved around to her seat. He placed his hands on the back of her chair as if he would pull it out from under her if she did not stand up. “Leave and do not return. It is not safe for you to come here, and your presence could make difficulties for us. Leave now.”

Kasia looked desperately from her mother to her brother and then up at her father, but none of them betrayed the slightest emotion. She stood slowly, gathering the photos that she had laid in front of her on the table, tidying them into a neat little pile. “I’ve marked their names and a little about them on the back,” she said, tears invading her voice. “I’ll leave them for you.”

“Take your photographs and go. We cannot afford such fancy things,” Kasia’s mother stated coldly, pushing the pile roughly toward her daughter. “We do not want you here. You do not belong to us. Go.”

Kasia walked slowly toward the door. On the threshold she stopped and turned to confront her family one last time. They did not even look up at her. Drawing up every last ounce of self-discipline that she had, Kasia suppressed a bitter tirade and left in silence. By the time she reached the street, she found the photographs, torn into tiny bits, scattered on the ground and lifted by the wind along the dirty, treeless street.

“I told you so,” Richard said, and indeed he had.

Kasia did not say a word in reply, just stared up at him with those beautiful, wide, brown eyes of hers. He kissed her forehead, then put his arms around her, and she buried her head in his chest. He bent his head down to kiss her hair. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said with uncharacteristic tenderness. “I wish it could be otherwise.”

He felt her body trembling as she finally gave way to the tears she had held back for so long.

“Do you know, both your sister and her husband are in the Underground?” he asked, casually trying to change the subject to cheer her up.

Kasia looked up in alarm at her husband. He smiled a reassurance. “Don’t worry, no one at the Ministry knows. They’re safe.”

“What do they do?” Kasia asked unsteadily.

“They’re quite low down. Obviously,” he added smugly. “They’re involved in printing and distributing illegal textbooks. Or so I’ve been told.”

Kasia nodded, proud of her sister but unwilling to say so to her husband.

“You know, I have to go to Breslau. Inspection tour,” Richard reminded her.

“Breslau? You don’t have any connection with anything there, do you?”

“No, but I have a personal invitation from my erstwhile subordinate. I’ve accepted it because I want to keep tabs on what is going on there. I’m catching the midnight train.”

“Midnight?” Kasia asked, confused. “Won’t that get you in too early?”

Richard sighed. “My host has asked if I could come early, so I could see an entire day’s routine.” He stroked Kasia’s hair worriedly. “Are you going to be all right on your own?”

Collecting herself, Kasia nodded. “Yes, I have the children and the servants and my fine house, after all.”