Elzunia sat on the hard wooden bunk, her arms around the shivering children. The chill rose in an icy mist from the cement floor and settled on their clothes. Through the grimy window, the grey sky hung low, and the air had the sharp smell of snow about to fall.
‘My tummy hurts. I’m hungry,’ Zbyszek wailed.
‘Me too,’ Gittel whimpered.
Elzunia looked at them and her heart ached. In the month since they’d been deported to Germany, they’d become skin and bone and there were dark circles around their eyes. She tried to rub some warmth into their arms but every movement of her blistered, raw hands made her wince.
Every day, as she scraped the rust off bits of broken machinery and breathed in the pungent smell of the synthetic oil that the factory produced, she was forced to listen to the insulting comments of the German foreman who gloated over the fate of his Polish workers and reminded them several times a day how lucky they were to be living in a civilised country among cultured people.
‘Your friends, the British, bombed our factories, so now you have to repair the damage,’ he had said, delighted at the divine retribution that had presented him with this workforce of slaves.
Weak from hunger, Elzunia tried to ignore the pain in her hands, the exhaustion, and the misery of her existence, while Gittel and Zbyszek sat on the floor at her feet all day, careful not to draw attention to themselves.
When the local Arbeitsamt office had assigned her to this factory, they ordered her to place the children in a crèche, but the idea of leaving them in a Nazi institution for foreign children was unthinkable. Elzunia had begged them to let the children to stay with her, insisting that they wouldn’t create any disturbance or interfere with her work.
But although they had reluctantly agreed to let the children stay with her on probation, they refused to give them any food. The children didn’t contribute to the German war effort so they didn’t warrant being fed, the foreman explained, his piggy eyes sinking deeper into the folds of his plump face.
Every morning, Elzunia cut her slice of black bread into three pieces, and every evening, as she shared her cabbage and turnip soup, she wondered how long the three of them could survive on this diet. But no matter what happened, she was determined they’d stay together. As she scrubbed machine parts with blackened fingers, she reproached herself for the thousandth time. If only she hadn’t been so impatient, they would now be in a camp for evacuees instead of being worked to death in a German factory.
The long column of refugees leaving Warsaw that sad October day had proceeded at such a slow pace as it made its way over rubble and bomb craters that it scarcely moved. The journey ahead had seemed endless. Even before they’d left the city centre, the children had complained they were tired, and Elzunia could only carry them a few steps at a time.
Looking around for another route to bypass the throng, she had turned into a side street that seemed deserted. She was congratulating herself for being so enterprising when her path was blocked by two SS men, who forced her at gunpoint on to a cattle truck bound for Germany with a group of other frightened Polish women.
Elzunia could still hear the hollow clang of the carriage being bolted from the outside, and could still feel the jolt as the train moved off. A plump girl called Agnieszka was sobbing. ‘We’ll end up in one of those death camps and I’ll never see my mother again.’
Gittel pulled Elzunia’s sleeve. ‘Why’s that lady crying?’
Elzunia felt like crying herself but gritted her teeth.
The train had lurched on for several hours but there was no way of knowing where they were because the tiny window covered by a metal grille was too high up. Banging on the sides and shouting for water, food and toilet stops had been futile. No bucket had been provided in the carriage, so they’d been forced to use one corner as a toilet. Elzunia had shared the last of her bread and water, but the children were thirsty again. ‘We’ll be getting off soon and then you can have a drink,’ she kept telling them.
‘It’s all because of the Jews,’ one of the women was saying. ‘They’ve always caused Poland’s problems.’ Some of the others chimed in with stories to illustrate Jewish vices. Elzunia was on the point of making a cutting remark but stopped herself in time. Revealing that she was Jewish would endanger not only herself but the children as well. She had known she’d have to conceal her identity from the Germans, but knowing that she couldn’t trust her companions made her feel bitter and alone.
Finally the train lurched to a halt. As the guards unhasped the doors, Elzunia could see a group of officials and SS men standing on the platform, surveying them with distaste.
‘Mein Gott, what animals!’ a stout, uniformed woman exclaimed, screwing up her face as she peered into the carriage. She pulled her jacket more tightly around her as though to shrink into it. ‘Look how filthy they are! It’s disgusting.’
The man beside her shrugged. ‘What can one expect from Slav Untermenschen?’
Agnieszka nudged Elzunia. ‘I’d like to see how clean they’d be if they were locked up for days with nowhere to shit,’ she whispered.
A wind as sharp as a butcher’s knife blew across the platform, and, while they shivered, the Arbeitsamt official, wrapped in his greatcoat, began to pontificate about their good fortune.
‘You are fortunate to have been brought here to work for the Vaterland,’ he announced. ‘If you work hard, you will be well treated. But if you steal, sabotage or try to escape, you will be severely punished.’
The lorries that sped them towards their destination passed neat fields and farmhouses as immaculate as illustrations in picture books. Not a speck of paint was missing, not a paling hung crookedly from a fence, not a leaf littered a front path. Despite her anxiety, Elzunia was intrigued by this relentless perfection.
She was still lost in thought about her arrival in Germany, while her fingers kept moving to avoid the foreman’s threats to report her to the Arbeitsamt, when Gittel’s high voice piped up from under the workbench.
‘I need to do wee-wee.’
Elzunia bit her lip. She always made sure the children went to the toilet before she started work.
‘I need to go — badly.’ Gittel squeezed her legs together to emphasise the point.
Agnieszka gave Elzunia a sympathetic glance but the others kept their eyes on their work. No one wanted to antagonise the foreman.
‘I’m sorry but I have to take her to the toilet,’ Elzunia told the foreman.
He placed his beefy hands on his hips. ‘I told you this is not a kindergarten!’ he thundered. ‘You are not permitted to leave the factory and take time off work —’
‘It will only take a minute,’ she pleaded.
‘This is essential work. We can’t have disruptions.’ He waved a threatening finger at her. ‘Tomorrow they will go to the kindergarten to learn German discipline.’
In desperation, Elzunia grabbed his arm. ‘I’ll stay back this evening and work longer to make up the time. Just don’t send them away.’
He studied her for a moment. ‘When you finish here this evening, go and clean the kitchen,’ he snapped. ‘But if this happens again, they go.’
The chef was a gruff German whose bulging stomach nudged his apron. From his lumpy red nose and face veined with broken capillaries, Elzunia guessed that he was fond of the drink and probably had a volatile temperament. Pointing to a wobbling pile of dishes stacked so high that she could hardly see over the top of them, he told her to wash and dry them, then scour the saucepans, wipe down the tables and scrub the floor.
Exhausted after working in the factory for twelve hours, she didn’t think she’d have the strength to get it all done, but driven by the threat of Gittel and Zbyszek being sent away, she didn’t stop until she’d finished everything. Then she sank into a chair and fell asleep.
Someone was shaking her arm and she opened her eyes to see the chef holding out a mug of strong coffee. She breathed it in and felt light-headed. It was real coffee, not the chicory substitute the workers received.
‘For a Pole, you’re not a bad worker,’ the chef was saying. ‘The kitchen maid was taken to hospital today. You can take her place. Be here at five-thirty sharp to make breakfast.’
Elzunia’s tiredness evaporated and she felt like pirouetting around the kitchen. No matter how hard she’d have to work for the chef, it would be better than slaving in the factory, and there was always the possibility of obtaining scraps of food for the children.
The chef was a hard taskmaster. He insisted on everything being done to immaculate, gleaming perfection. Whenever he wasn’t satisfied, he roared so loudly that she jumped, and he often abused her for being a dirty, lazy Pole who didn’t know what work was. By the end of the first day, her hands and feet were so numb that she wished she was back in the factory and she suspected that the previous kitchen maid had collapsed from nervous exhaustion.
But she discovered that when she did exactly what he wanted, he left her alone. And as long as the children sat quietly in the corner and kept out of his way, he didn’t object to them. After spending the day on her feet in the kitchen, she’d stagger back to the dormitory and fall onto her bunk, exhausted. One night, at the end of the first week in the kitchen, she sensed a strained atmosphere in the hut. Some of the women stopped talking when she came in, while others continued whispering as they glanced in her direction.
‘Here’s our privileged princess,’ said the woman with the sharp face.
‘Meaning what?’ Elzunia asked, but with a sarcastic laugh the woman turned away.
Long after the whispers ceased, Elzunia tossed on her hard bunk, unable to sleep. A figure moved quietly towards her in the dark and she sat up, careful not to disturb the sleeping children.
It was Agnieszka. ‘She said she’s going to tell the chef you’re Jewish,’ she whispered. ‘I told her it was a load of crap, and some of the others said we were all in the same boat so we shouldn’t rat on each other, but she’s had it in for you ever since you got that job in the kitchen. She said the kids looked Jewish and it would be easy to tell if the boy was.’
Elzunia couldn’t close her eyes. She lay awake listening to the night. It was quiet, but this wasn’t the quietness of repose. It was the stillness of the antelope twitching in the undergrowth under the lion’s gaze. By the time the grudging winter light appeared in the sky, she knew what she had to do.