Such Good Girls (5 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do, Zofia. You’re five years old, so on your next birthday on July twenty-seventh, you will be how old?”

“Six.”

“Excellent. Now, Zosia, what are the three divine virtues?”

“Faith, hope, and love.”

She kissed Zofia’s forehead again. “You’re so smart, Zosia. And don’t talk to anyone. You understand?”

“Yes, Bronislawa Tymejko.”

Laura smiled. “But to you, it’s still Mama.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Poor Zula, Laura thought. Her daughter was a blessing and a curse. She was the only reason to live, but for her to survive she was going to have to erase her only child’s identity, and destroy who knows what else?

On September 6, 1942, Laura washed and brushed Selma’s blond hair and fixed it with a white bow. They both put on their best clothes. With only one small suitcase each and their false documents, they set out on foot for the train station. Just before they walked out of the ghetto, Laura removed her and her daughter’s armbands with the Star of David. The trick was to look like they’d just been visiting the ghetto, doing business. Once through the gate, they strode into Christian Lvov, trying to look as little like Jews as possible. This meant walking past the German guards as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She had hired a Pole named Julek to have the rest of their luggage shipped ahead to Kraków, to escort them there, and to collect their luggage in Kraków and help them find a room. He joined them at the appointed street corner and walked silently next to them to the train station, smoking a cigarette. Most of the way there, Laura held her breath.

To everyone in the world but themselves, they were now Bronislawa and Zofia Tymejko.

Once they were settled on the horsehair seats and the train was moving, Laura repeated her strict instructions that Zofia not talk to strangers, to let her answer all questions. When it was necessary to speak, she told Zofia to speak only Polish. Her mother sometimes spoke German too, and Zofia knew many German words.

Once out of the ghetto, Laura felt an unfamiliar surge of hope and permitted herself the thought that maybe her daughter might even go on to have children of her own one day to say Kaddish for all of them. But the hope didn’t last long. On the train Julek sat in another row and pretended not to know her and Zofia, and Laura wondered—why not wonder in a world where children could betray their own parents?—if he was planning to turn them in. After all, he already had their money.

The trip ended without incident. Julek didn’t denounce them. However, he disappeared with the tickets for their luggage, and presumably the luggage too, leaving Laura and Zofia to find lodging for themselves. Laura looked around for him frantically. Not wanting to call attention to themselves by looking lost near the German policeman patrolling the Glowny station, mother and daughter, with even fewer possessions to their name, then set off in the rain across the plaza to find a room.

Kraków was the capital of the General Government, the name that Germans had given to the occupied region of what had been eastern Poland, and it was swarming with Germans. To avoid prying eyes, Laura moved Zofia and herself frequently, five times in the first month. Zofia was undernourished and constantly sniffling. Laura worried about her health but worried even more that she would make a mistake answering inquisitive neighbors’ endless questions while she was out looking for work. But Zofia passed the first tests with flying colors.

Laura had attended university and once wanted to be a doctor, but her ambition even before the war had been moot in a country where Jews weren’t allowed to attend Polish medical schools. Her brilliant brother Edek had had to go to engineering school in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in the early 1930s. Now any job at all would have to do; without a job considered “essential” by the Nazis, she couldn’t feed Zofia and they couldn’t remain in Kraków.

Luckily Laura found a job in a German bank, but the pay was too low to improve their condition. Moreover, she now had to somehow provide care for five-year-old Zofia during the day. First, Laura paid a small sum to an old woman to look after her. The obese woman in a babushka put Zofia to work every day collecting cigarette stubs in the streets of their neighborhood. She wore a handwritten cardboard sign on a string around her neck that read, “My name is Zofia Tymejko and I live at …” whatever their current address was. Zofia would fill her little play purse with the smattering of discarded butts on the cobblestones, then bring them back. The old woman would dump Zofia’s haul onto a newspaper and separate out the ones long enough to smoke. The useless ones she would hold up for inspection between pinched fingers and say, “And how do you expect me to smoke this, kochanie? With tweezers? Now go and bring babunia some more.”

Laura soon found a better alternative, dropping her off at a Catholic orphanage in the morning before she made her rounds. The terse nuns gave Zofia a plate of soup and a crust of bread at midday. She was shy by nature, and under her mother’s anxious care and ceaseless religious drilling she had grown even more so. Even when she was hungry, and she was hungry almost all the time, she knew how to keep quiet.

Laura managed to establish contact with her sisters, who were both in Kraków as well. Putzi, now living under the name of Ksenia Osoba, was a maid in a German home, and Fryda, under the name of Zofia Wolenska, worked for a Polish family. Neither of them had heard anything from or about their brother Manek.

A few weeks later, Laura ran into Julek in the streets of Kraków. He acted as if he had no idea what had happened to their luggage weeks before, and Laura would have been a fool to provoke him with accusations. What could she do in a country where a shifty Pole held their very lives in his calloused hands?

“Julek,” she said. “Do you know where my brother Manek is?”

The big Pole looked startled. “Oh, there’s bad news there,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

“How bad?”

“The Krauts caught him at the Lvov train station and hanged him.”

“Hanged him?!” she cried in disbelief. “Dear God!”

He said the SS wanted to see his papers and he ran. Julek shrugged. “So terrible,” he said without emotion. “I thought you knew.”

She would have predicted that Manek, the toughest of the five Litwak siblings, the one who once came home with a broken jaw after a fight with some anti-Semites, would have been the one to survive. She was brotherless now, having already lost the eldest of her siblings, Edek, who had suddenly died in the Holy Land of typhus, or maybe from water poisoned by the Arabs—the family would never know. What was the God she didn’t believe in anymore—maybe even the same God she had been drilling Zofia to believe in—doing to her family?

Or perhaps God had nothing to do with it. When Laura learned later from friends that it was Julek himself who had escorted Manek to the Lvov station, as he had escorted Zofia and herself, she couldn’t rid herself of the thought that he had betrayed her brother to the Germans.

All that Zofia would remember was moving from one damp, shabby room in someone’s home to another. Surely if her father hadn’t been taken away, there would be money and her poor mother would not have to be pleading with strangers for a bed. They had so few clothes that her mother seemed to be washing them in the sink every night. She would watch her mother, dark-haired and beautiful, coaxing a pair of stockings up her legs and applying lipstick in a chipped mirror before leaving to look for work.

The drilling didn’t stop. Maybe it had to do with Zofia’s father’s disappearance from their lives, and her praying for his return, but Laura tested Zofia continuously on her catechism from a prayer book. Was it Zofia’s imagination, or had her mother actually woken her up in the middle of the night to make sure she knew it?

“Zosia, what are the six principal truths of the faith?”

“‘There is one God,’” Zofia would recite sleepily. “‘He is a righteous judge who rewards good and punishes evil.’ I want to sleep, Mama.”

“Who are the three divine Persons?”

“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Can I go to sleep, Mama?”

“In a minute, Zosia. ‘The Son of God became man …’”

“‘… died on the cross and rose for our salvation.’”

“Good girl,” her mother said, kissing her hair. “I love you.”

They moved into a better home—a room they rented from a Polish officer and his family.

For Laura, the nightmare simply continued. The officer suspected she was not the Catholic she claimed to be, and tested and baited her mercilessly. When she went off to work at the bank, she feared that he would trick Zofia into a confession that they were Jewish. The officer could report his suspicions to the Nazis anytime he wanted. There were even times when, returning from work, she wondered if she would find Zofia alive. When she went off to work at the bank, her mother reminded her to stay in their room as much as possible and answer as few questions as possible. If the officer or his wife asks where your father is, she told Zofia, say that the Russian soldiers took him away. If they ask why we came to Kraków, say that I came to find a good job. If they ask where we lived in Lvov, tell them in the Christian district.

What else could she do? There was no other world to live in right now but this one. She couldn’t bear to move yet again. She had to work, for without her measly income they would starve.

A few weeks after they moved in, there was loud knocking on the apartment door one evening. Three German SS men burst into the apartment, barking in a mixture of German and Polish, and ordered all of them up against the wall of the living room. Zofia was terrified. She stared at the death head medallions on their SS caps and remained very still. Waving his luger at the officer and his wife, one of the SS men demanded to know where the Polish couple’s son was. Zofia could make out that the son had escaped from a Nazi prison and was hiding with his brother. The Polish officer stammered that he had no idea. Yelling something in German, his spittle flying, the Nazi brought the muzzle of his luger closer to the Polish officer’s face. Then he holstered his pistol and slapped the officer across both sides of his face, using the palm and the back of his gloved hand.

The officer, his eyes watering from the blows, tried to hold back his tears, and the SS man turned to look at Laura.

“Where are they?” he screamed at her. Zofia saw the Polish officer’s eyes on her mother, and somehow she knew that her mother knew the answer. Zofia had never thought of her mother as someone who knew things that the frightening Germans didn’t, and wanted to. What if they realized her mother was lying? They’d hurt her or take her away like the Russians took away her father, and then what would Zofia do? She would have to find the orphanage by herself and she didn’t even remember the name of it. Zofia grew dizzy at the thought that something might happen to her only remaining parent.

Very calmly, considering the terrified officer, his weeping wife, and the general feeling that something quite horrible was about to happen, Zofia’s mother began to explain to them—in perfect German—that none of them had seen any sign of the boys, and that she was very sorry that they were not able to help them.

The effect on the Germans of hearing their own language, especially from a woman as pretty as this one, was immediate; they accepted in German what they had doubted in Polish and departed, but not before sternly warning everyone that they would be back to interrogate them again.

The very next morning, the grateful Polish officer’s wife left a glass of fresh milk outside their room. It would be the only kindness they showed them during their stay. Zofia—who had not tasted fresh milk in months—would never forget how delicious it was.

The next day Laura placed in one of the Kraków newspapers an ad for a job. It said she sought a position outside the city, preferably with room and board, stressing her fluency in German. She figured that, no matter where they landed, it couldn’t be any worse. Of the 15,000 Jews who had been forced into the Kraków ghetto by the Germans a year and a half earlier, only about 6,000 Jews remained. The ghetto contained two forced-labor camps and some businesses where Jews toiled until most of them dropped dead of starvation and fatigue.

Laura passed the ghetto on her way home from work, and she couldn’t help but look into the ghetto through the barbed-wire fence between some of the buildings. One day she found all the houses along the fence on fire and German soldiers shooting the Jews as they jumped from the windows. On another, she witnessed a soldier swinging two small children by the legs and smashing their heads against a brick wall. She came close to vomiting there on the street. The ghetto was like a stockyard of emaciated two-legged creatures, waiting to be slaughtered. Yet she somehow envied them. At least they were still living life, however barely, as Jews, to the very end, while she sought to escape death by posing as a member of another religion. If not for Zofia, she would gladly give up her desperate charade and melt back into the ghetto again as Laura Schwarzwald to await the end.

She wrote to her sisters, both working as domestics in Kraków, of her plan to leave the city and waited for a reply to her ad while continuing to work at the bank, where every time she met the eyes of a colleague, she feared she had been recognized. Finally, a miracle! A response arrived in the post, from an SS man named Leming, who was looking for a bookkeeper and part-time translator with office duties. He was in charge of the Polish agricultural cooperative in the spa resort town of Busko-Zdrój, northeast of Kraków. It was just what her landlady in Lvov had recommended. The offer came with a small salary and the promise of a little food from the cooperative’s canteen.

Laura accepted immediately and Leming set a date, writing that he would pick her up on his return to Kraków from a vacation in Germany and drive her to Busko-Zdrój. Laura gave notice at the bank, told her landlord she was leaving, and gathered her and Zofia’s few possessions. But there was no word from Leming on the appointed day. Frantic, she rushed by bus to the airfield to learn that Leming’s flight had been delayed. She waited hours for the plane to arrive and then had him paged. She hadn’t known what to expect, but still she was startled when a stern-looking and stubbly middle-aged man showed up in a gray SS tunic and an armband bearing a swastika.