Such Good Girls (8 page)

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.”

As it happened, Tadeusz himself soon figured out without much difficulty that Putzi was Jewish. He not only had grown up with a Jewish family—and spoke better Yiddish than Putzi!—but he had been badly treated by the Nazis and sympathized with Jews. The relationship continued—for now.

For Zofia, life was better. The Sunday afternoons she spent with her mother and Putzi in Spa’s Park were more relaxed than before, especially when they weren’t downwind from the rotten-egg smell of the sulfur baths in the grand building at the far end. From the Danish Red Cross came candy and from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association came Spam and Crisco, which Zofia greedily spread on bread that had not seen much butter. The Red Cross arranged a trip for the town’s children to a convent in Rabka, another spa town in the mountains, where Zofia got to kiss a prelate’s relic ring, a moment that transported her.

A few weeks before the first Christmas after the war, Zofia wrote Santa Claus:

I am requesting candy or a small doll or cookies or a sled. I am asking for skis, but most of all I would like a small doll, but dressed in that pretty dress in the gift shop window and wearing shoes. Sometimes I was a good girl and sometimes not. I cannot tell exactly how many times, because I did not count. I do not know if I deserve it all. I beg your forgiveness and Mommy and Auntie, but I would like to ask you not to be angry with me, I will be good.

Zofia

What Laura wanted for Christmas was something else: freedom. She had no address for her uncle Max Schaerf, but in desperation wrote him anyway in care of “New York City, America.” She sent it off in January 1946, and waited week after week for a reply. In the meantime, the past was impossible to escape—both in her mind and in reality. She heard from friends that Julek, the Pole who had escorted them to Kraków and stole their luggage, had accompanied her brother Manek to the Lvov train station two and a half years before on the day he was, or so Julek had told her, hanged. Suspecting him of betraying her brother, Laura had to fight the urge to report him to the Russians as an anti-Communist.

“They’d know what to do with him,” she told Putzi.

“Well, why don’t you?”

Laura sighed. “It won’t bring Manek back. And, anyway, how can I become what I despise?”

Laura and Putzi played along with the Russians. Although neither she nor Putzi could bring themselves to become members of the Communist Party, as long as they didn’t reveal their Judaism they felt safer than before. They didn’t feel so alone and different inside, because more and more Polish people around them had also lost family. Yet not to be able to commiserate with the returning Jews made them feel guilty. Putzi, Zofia, and she were neither real Catholics nor real Jews. The war had taken their relatives’ lives, but it had also taken the survivors’ identities.

Finally, miraculously, on April 12 she heard from her uncle.

My dear niece:

It is the third day since I have received your registered letter of January 14, and still I am shocked about the tragic news contained in it. The Huns have surely done a thorough job, and no one could properly describe or picture their misdeeds because their atrocities were and still are beyond human imagination.

My hands are trembling, and I don’t know how to begin this letter. After you have gone through such torture and sufferings, what consolation can a letter—even from your nearest relative—bring to you? … All of you need real help. My wife Clara and I are willing to do all what is humanly possible… . Write us immediately whether you intend to join us, and to immigrate into the United States… .

Meanwhile we will try to send you a few food packages; your aunt Rosa, married to Emil Hoenig, is living in London… . A copy of your letter has been airmailed to her; and you may be sure that she will get in touch with you as soon as possible.

With love and affection

Max, Clara, and Howie Schaerf

It was all very perilous. If the Russians discovered that Laura was trying to get them to the West, the three of them would be thrown in jail, if not worse.

Uncle Max advised them to consult an immigration lawyer, since their birthplace of Lvov was now in the Soviet Union, under whose quota they would come. He told them to apply for a visa at the nearest American Consulate. Quick attention is necessary, he wrote. The best alternative for you would be to join us here in America.