Пэм Дженофф – Kommandant's Girl (страница 5)
He shoved the coins in his pocket. “Where are you going?”
I hesitated. “To find my parents.”
“Are you going to the ghetto?”
I looked at him in surprise. I had not realized that he understood where his family had been taken. “Yes.”
“You won’t be able to leave,” Jonas said with childlike logic. I hesitated. In my haste, it hadn’t occurred to me that going to the ghetto meant I would be imprisoned, too.
“I have to go. You be careful. Stay out of sight.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll tell your mother you’re okay if I see her.” Not waiting for him to reply, I turned and raced down the stairs.
Outside I paused, looking in both directions down the deserted street. The Nazis must have cleared the entire neighborhood, I realized. I stood motionless, trying to figure out what to do. Jonas was right, of course. If I went to the ghetto, I would not be able to leave again. But what other choice did I have? I could not stay in our apartment. Even standing here on the street was probably not safe. I wished desperately that Jacob was here; he would surely know what to do. Of course, if he was here, I would still be safe in our bedroom in the Baus’ apartment, instead of alone on the street corner with nowhere to go. I wondered how far away he was by now. Would he have left if he realized what would happen to me so soon after he was gone?
I will go to the ghetto, I decided. I had to know if my parents were there, if they were all right. Picking up my bags once more, I began walking swiftly through the empty streets of the Jewish quarter, making my way south toward the river. The scraping of the soles of my shoes and my suitcase against the pavement were the only sounds that broke the early morning silence. My skin grew moist under my clothes and my arms ached as I struggled to carry my overstuffed bags in the thick autumn morning.
Shortly, I reached the edge of the Wisla River, which separated our old world from our new one. I paused at the foot of the railway bridge, looking across to the far bank. Podgorze was a foreign neighborhood to me, commercial and crowded. Scanning the dirty, dilapidated buildings, I could just make out the top edge of the ghetto wall. A shiver ran through me. You will only be a few kilometers away, I told myself. The thought gave me no comfort. The ghetto was not Kazimierz, not our home. It might as well have been another planet.
For a moment, I considered turning around and running away. But where would I go? Taking a deep breath, I started walking across the bridge. My legs felt like lead. As I trudged silently across the railway bridge, I could hear the river rippling gently against the shore from which I had come. The smell of brackish water wafted up through the slats in the bridge. Don’t look back, I thought. But as I reached the far bank, a starling cried out behind me and I turned, almost against my will. On the far shore, high atop an embankment overlooking the river, sat Wawel Castle, its roofs and cathedral spires bathed in sunrise gold. Its grandeur seemed a betrayal. For my entire life, I had worked and played, walked and lived in its shadows. I had felt protected by this fortress, which for centuries had been the seat of the Polish monarchy. Now it seemed I was being cast out. I was walking into a prison, and the castle seemed oblivious to my plight. Kraków, the City of Kings, was no longer mine. I had become a foreigner in the place I had always called home.
CHAPTER 3
From the foot of the bridge, I walked a few hundred meters along the granite wall of the ghetto. The top edge of the wall had been sculpted into arcs, each about two feet wide. Like tombstones, I thought, my stomach twisting. When I reached the entrance, an iron gate, I paused, inhaling deeply before approaching the Nazi guard. “Name?” he asked, before I could speak.
“I—I …” I stammered.
The guard looked up from his clipboard. “Name!” he barked.
“Gershmann, Emma,” I managed to say.
The guard scanned his list. “Not here.”
“No, but I think my parents are, Chaim and Reisa Gershmann.”
He looked again, turned to another page. “Yes. Twenty-one Limanowa Street, apartment six.”
“Then I want to be with them.” A look of surprise flashed across his face and he opened his mouth. He’s going to tell me I cannot come inside, I thought. For a moment, I felt almost relieved. But then, seeming to think better of it, the guard wrote my name beside my parents’ on the list and moved aside to let me enter. I hesitated, looking down the street in both directions before stepping into the ghetto. The gate slammed shut behind me.
Inside, a wall of human stench assaulted me and I had to fight the urge not to gag. Trying to take only shallow breaths through my mouth, I asked directions from a man, who pointed me toward Limanowa Street. As I made my way through the ghetto, I tried not to look at the gaunt, bedraggled passersby who stared at me, a new arrival, with unabashed curiosity. I turned onto Limanowa Street, stopping before the address the guard had given me. The building looked as though it had already been condemned. I opened the front door and climbed the stairs. When I reached the top floor, I hesitated, wiping my sweaty palms on my skirt. Through the rotting wood door of one of the apartments I could hear my mother’s voice. Tears sprang to my eyes. Until now, I hadn’t wanted to believe they were really here. I took a deep breath and knocked.
Behind him, my mother clutched her apron, her eyes dark. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. When my father finally released me, she pulled me into the apartment.
Looking around, I shuddered inwardly: did they really live here? Small and dark and smelling dankly of mold, the single room with its lone cracked window made our modest Kazimierz apartment look like a palace in comparison. I could tell that my mother had tried to make the place habitable, fashioning pale yellow curtains to hang over the cloudy, cracked window and hanging sheets to divide the room into two parts, a makeshift bedroom and a tiny communal living area, barely big enough to hold three chairs and a small table. But it was still horrible.
“I came back to stay with you, but you were gone.” I could hear the accusing tone in my own voice: why hadn’t you told me where you had gone, or at least left a note?
“They gave us thirty minutes to leave,” my father said, pulling out two chairs for me and my mother to sit on. “There was no time to get word to you. Where’s Jacob?”
“His work,” I said simply. They nodded in unison, unsurprised. They were well aware of Jacob’s political activities. Aside from the fact that he was not Orthodox, it was the one thing they did not like about him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” my father fretted, pacing the floor. “We are older people. Probably no one will bother us. But it is the young people …” He did not have to finish the sentence. The young people were the ones being deported from Kraków. Those who received deportation orders in the ghetto were trapped, unable to run.
“I had nowhere else to go,” I replied.
“Well,” my mother said, taking my hand, “at least we are all together. Let’s get you settled.”
The next morning, I reported to the Jewish Administration Building to register with the Judenrat, the group of ghetto inhabitants designated by the Nazis to run the internal affairs of the ghetto. I was assigned to work in the ghetto orphanage. My parents had already received work assignments, and by some luck, they had also been given reasonable jobs, my father to the communal ghetto kitchen, where he could once again bake, my mother to the infirmary as a nurse’s aide. We had all managed to escape the dreaded work details, where Jews were forced to perform heavy manual labor outside the ghetto walls under the eyes of brutal Nazi guards.
I began working that afternoon. The orphanage was a small, two-story facility that the Judenrat had established on Josefinska Street. The inside was dark and overcrowded, but a tiny grass enclosure behind the nursery gave the children, mostly toddlers, a place to play. It housed about thirty children, virtually all of whom had lost their parents since the start of the war. I enjoyed watching them. Aside from being woefully thin from the meager ghetto rations, they were still children, oblivious to the war, their abysmal surroundings and the dire situation of having no parents to care for them in an uncaring world.
Yet despite the small amount of pleasure I took in my job, I thought constantly of Jacob. Surrounded by children, I was often reminded of the family we might have started by then, if not for the war. At night I played back our moments together in my head, our courtship, our wedding, and after. The nights had been few and dear enough that I could remember every single one. Staring up at the low ceiling of our apartment, I thought guiltily, defiantly, of sex, of the silent, unexpected joys that Jacob had fleetingly taught me. Where was Jacob? I worried each night as I lay in bed, and whom he was with? There must be girls in the resistance, yet Jacob had not asked me to join him. I wondered with shame not if Jacob was hurt or warm enough, but whether he was faithful, or if some braver, bolder woman had stolen his heart.