The Girl from Krakow (25 page)

The clerk at the
Hotel Handel
was a wizened spinster, or at any rate, wore no wedding ring. “Yes, we have a room. No luggage? Well, payment in advance, fifteen zloty. No visitors, no Jews; you have to register with the police by tomorrow. Your papers.” She held out her hand.

Rita gestured with her head. “They’re just being issued, at the office up the street. I’ll bring them by at six o’clock. I’ll get my luggage from the station and come back when the papers are ready.”

The woman shrugged. “If there is one thing the
Szkops
can do right, it’s issue papers on time.” It was the first time Rita had heard the word in Warsaw. “
Szkops
” was an abusive Polish term for Germans. This woman evidently had no more love for them than for Jews.

By six o’clock Rita had papers, good anywhere in the Reich until 1948, bearing her photo, endorsed by an eagle gripping a swastika, and registering her in Warsaw. After slapping them on the hotel counter, Rita boarded a streetcar and traveled back across the Vistula to Praga, thinking hard about where she was going to hide the last two gold coins in Krystyna’s apartment. They would be her reserve, and she had a good idea that she would need them.

As Krystyna had promised, no one was in the flat. Rita packed her few things quickly. Then she began to seek a hiding place for the two gold coins.
Somewhere dark where it would be hard to shine an electric torch
, she thought. In the kitchen she dropped down to her knees in front of the large enamel iron sink. It stood beneath a window overlooking the air shaft. Reaching the back of the sink, she pushed her hand up until she could feel the gap between it and the wall it was bolted to. She wrapped each coin in enough cloth that it could be pushed into the space and remain there. Then she stood at the sink, pushing and pulling at its frame to try to dislodge the coins. She could not move it. Satisfied that the coins were held fast, she closed her case and left the apartment, placing the key high enough on the doorframe to be invisible to anyone who was not looking for it. “Thanks, Krystyna,” she whispered.

CHAPTER TWENTY

R
ita lay there in the dark on the narrow, creaking bed, trying to warm the damp sheets and shape the lumpy pillow, unable to cover both shoulders and her feet with the thin, short blanket. The hotel’s small but annoying blue neon sign was flashing through the translucent blinds every seven and a half heartbeats.

Sleep was not coming. Her thoughts kept returning to what she had learned in only a few days since escaping the ghetto. As if Nazis weren’t enough. There were Blue Police, the Home Army, a sea of factions, and add to the mix Jewish thugs preying on Jews, Jewish gangs trying to control the ghetto. Was there no end to the spawning of new predators?

The question started out in her mind as purely rhetorical. But then it turned into something Freddy had said about the Black Death. Don’t think about people as the agents who perpetrate the horrors. Think about us as a fertile environment, a niche that diseases invade, occupy, change. We are the prey, the hosts, the victims that the virus or bacillus, the parasite carrying the disease, feeds on. The infection of Nazism had created breeding grounds that selected for other, different parasites, even infecting Jews and spreading a new parasite among them that made their hosts scavenge on the Germans’ prey.

Then she thought,
Rita, your mind is a breeding ground too. What parasitical idea in your head is surviving by making you survive?

The next morning Rita set out from the hotel to find a room as close to Marszakowska Street as she could get. This street ran from Mirowski Place, where the two parts of the original ghetto had been connected by a wooden trestle pedestrian bridge over the tram tracks, down to Aleje Jerozolimskie, a block from the department store on Baska Street. She didn’t think it would be hard to find a room along Jerozolimskie Street. By now the ghetto was much smaller than it had been at its origin in 1940. So many had been deported to extermination that the Germans had closed the little ghetto that had been connected to the larger one by the pedestrian bridge. Still, Poles probably didn’t want to live near even an empty ghetto, and Jews in hiding certainly didn’t. It would surely be the part of the city where the Germans checked for papers more than anywhere else. Yet the newspapers had no adverts for rooms in the district. And as she walked the street up from the store and back down from the German ghetto administration office, there didn’t seem to be many “for let” signs in the windows. She rang every door with a sign. But evidently something about her was putting off the owners. More than one lady with rooms to rent didn’t like a brand-new
Kennkarte
, and a few others accused her to her face of being a Jew on the run. Others would not rent to a single woman: “Who knows what line of work you are really in, dear?” By late in the afternoon, Rita had given up hope and resigned herself to another night at the
Hotel Handel
, with no chance to look the next day. She had to report for work on Thursday.

She was practically back to Baska Street, where the department store sat. The lady at the last door she tried was at least genuinely regretful with her—“No, nothing.” As Rita turned to descend the stair, she called out, “Wait. A friend told me today that she had lost her lodger. Perhaps you can take the place. Let me give you the address.” She wrote out
Widok 44.
It was a street Rita already knew from wandering through the district. She thanked the lady and turned to leave. As she left, the woman said, “She’ll like you. The last tenant was a man, a Jew she had a lot of trouble getting rid of. Finally she just had to call the police.”

At
Widok 44
Mrs. Kaminski was suspicious, especially since Rita could not remember the name of the lady around the corner who had given her the address. “Sorry, I don’t have any room.”

“But your friend,
Panna
—Mrs.
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Anyway, she said you just lost your lodger
 
.
 
.
 
.” No response. “She said you had to get rid of him. He was a Yid.” How could she break through? “But as you see, I am not a Jewess. I am Aryan,
Volks-Deutsche
. Please, I am new to Warsaw and have no place to stay.” Finally, “I’ll pay in advance! Please.”

The door opened slightly, and now Mrs. Kaminski was reconsidering. “No visitors, no Jews, no noise, do not ask to use the kitchen. Bath only twice a week. Lights off at 10:00 p.m. Twenty zloty a week. Police registration slip
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I have to have it tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes, agreed. Thank you.” Rita pushed the money into her hand and practically barged through the door. “May I see the room?”

“I suppose so, as you have forced me into renting it to you.” Mrs. Kaminski did not even smile at her own unintended joke.

The room wasn’t much better than what Krystyna had provided in Praga. Still, it was where she needed to be if she was ever to find her way into the ghetto and back out again, with her son if she could find him.

Jablkowski Brothers Department Store was still an imposing building, one that must have been a splendid emporium in prewar Warsaw. Now it was living on its past and on what its buyers could scrounge in the wake of German requisitions throughout Europe.

Without even bothering to examine her perfectly valid papers, the floorwalker engaged Rita instantly and led her to the stationery and school supplies. All she had needed was her German and an obsequious air about her. She was handed a brown smock with the lettering “Stationery” embroidered over the heart and sent to the fountain pen desk to learn her duties. The stock was displayed under glass in a long counter, across from the revolving door at the store’s main entrance. To the left were perfumes and cosmetics, stocked with whatever the French had left to export after the German occupation troops had taken their fill. To the right were hats and gloves, scarves and baggage. In each department there were one or two salesladies—in many cases, just girls. All seemed to Rita to be watching her, sizing her up, guessing at her secrets, as she was led across the floor to her station.

The floorwalker was dressed in a cutaway, with a waxed mustache and hair parted in the middle, reminding Rita of a character out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. She almost wanted to stay the night, put on roller skates, and dance them across the wide space between pens and the revolving entrance doors. He led her to her station, more concerned with making an impression on customers, especially German ones. This floorwalker, she could tell, would rarely notice what was really going on among his charges.

Shortages had reduced trade in the store’s main line of business, textiles and clothes. Rita knew why this was so from the inside, so to speak. Almost all of Poland’s textile production was now fashioned into uniforms by slave labor exclusively for the Wehrmacht. But some luxury goods, especially ones from Germany, such as fine fountain pens, were still coming into Warsaw. They were going out again, back to Germany, because here they could be bought for zloty at the exchange rate that made a German corporal better off than a Warsaw lawyer.

The main thing the floorwalker was not noticing was that his staff seemed to be composed of two sorts of people: rabidly anti-Semitic clerks and Jews on false or no identities. This fact about the employees became clear to Rita when she entered the canteen for lunch that first day on the job.

She was motioned over to a table by her counter mate, a young woman named Lotte. Once seated, Rita was invited to participate in a round-robin of abuse and vituperation directed at the Jews of Warsaw, Poland, and Europe. It wasn’t what she was expecting.

One of the few older women employees began. “You just started, right, sister? You should have been here when this place was a Jew-business. Owned by Jews, catering to the Yid trade. Never gave a Christian even a chance to rise above floorwalker. Fired people for the littlest offense—taking home a trinket no one would have missed, cutting out of work early on saints’ day. What did it matter when they were so rich?”

Here Lotte observed, “Every Jew I’ve ever seen is a millionaire. The
szmalcowniks
shake down the same people week after week. The Yids never run dry, and these pests just live off the proceeds, never doing a stitch of honest work and making a lot more out of it than a poor honest shopgirl. I feel like turning some of their targets in myself just to get back at those scroungers.”

A girl from cosmetics wondered aloud, “The Jews were rich, so why were they all soft on the communists and socialists? When the Jablkowskis owned the store, the unions had the run of the place. They made Catholics pay union dues even when the Cardinal Archbishop told us not to have anything to do with the Reds.”

Before she could stop herself, Rita asked a question. “Did the nonunion workers get pay raises when the union people got them?”

Lotte was perceptive enough to catch the drift of a subversive question. “Of course. That was only fair. If the Jews had openly favored their union pets that way, we would have gone on strike. What’s your point? Jew lover? Socialist, Red?”

Rita would have to be careful around this one. She beat a retreat. “No, just curious. I am sure things are much better now that the Jews are gone. I worked for Jews in a shop in Lvov, before the Russians came. Then I had to work for the Soviets.”

“Poor girl. You’ll have to tell us about it.” The older woman rose, and they all went back to work.

The next day just before lunch, Rita saw a large and obviously German car pull up in front of the revolving door at the main entrance across from her fountain pen display. Three men entered, in full-length leather, each a different stereotype of the Gestapo officer. The floorwalker approached, bowed, and
Heil Hitler
-ed. They clicked heels, snapped a slight bow from the waist, turned, and began walking right toward Rita. They reached her display, wheeled left in unison, and came to a halt on either side of the perfume counter across from her. Behind it stood a young woman. She was petite, dark, with large eyes and a clear complexion that went well with her department store smock. Once the three men had deployed themselves at the counter, she slowly unbuttoned her smock, picked up her purse, and came out from behind the counter. Refusing to say anything at all to anyone, she took up a position among them, and all four walked out. The calmness in her movement, the look of acceptance in her eyes, the furrow lifting from her brow, all sent an unambiguous message: “I am glad to stop hiding, living every waking moment in apprehension, wondering when I will be taken. It’s over, and I can surrender at last.”

Who did she remind Rita of? Who did she look like? It came to Rita with a stab that made the girl’s fate suddenly completely personal to Rita: the girl had the coloring, the carriage, even the calm of that girl at the Terakowski factory, back in Karpatyn, the one who was memorizing
Lord Tadeusz
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Yes, Dani.