“The rumors were, my dahlink children, that we were all going to be taken to Germany. But we were the lucky ones. We were taken to a town called Tarnopol, maybe six hours away, maybe eight, I don’t remember.
“We were to work in a munitions factory. The work was difficult. The hours were long. We lived in cold barracks and slept on wooden pallets, and I was quite run down. Still, as I say, we were the lucky ones. Already we were hearing stories about what they were doing to children in mental institutions, to the crippled and the Jews and the Gypsies. No one wanted to believe these stories were true—or if they were true, that they would be true for others but not for us.
“I worked there for a long time.
“Then one day on the assembly line, I look up and see the man who’d selected us back in Radom a lifetime ago: Major Rugemer. And I see he is not a Nazi. More like an old strict schoolmaster. But still, he wore their uniform. He held the power to do with each of us exactly as he pleased. I don’t know what I was thinking then, but I panicked.
“Perhaps he came to reprimand me, order me to be taken away, I didn’t know what. But I was terrified, and I fainted.”
Major Rugemer shouted at the foreman, “You there! Foreman! Get her on her feet!”
The foreman motioned to some women, and together they picked up Irena. The foreman slapped her face, and she began to come around.
Major Rugemer looked not at Irena, but at the foreman. “I’m responsible for a certain amount of production. There are munition quotas! Efficiency! Do you understand those words!”
“Ja, ja, Herr Major.”
“I never know what you Poles do or do not understand. ‘Ja, ja, Herr Major’! It could as easily mean you understood everything, something, or nothing at all!”
“I understand. Ja, ja, Herr Major!”
Rugemer looked from the foreman to Irena. He seemed to regard her as one would a pile of refuse that needed to be swept up.
“If she can’t keep up with the work, get rid of her.”
The foreman slapped Irena’s face again several times as Irena tried to focus her eyes.
“Come, come, my girl, wake up,” said Major Rugemer.
Irena struggled to focus on his words.
“She obviously can’t understand German,” said the major. “Get someone else who can speak Polish. Tell her she’s finished here and replace her.”
“Replace her with who?” asked the foreman.
The words “replace her” broke through the dark shroud of fog settling in upon Irena.
She’d almost drowned once as a child. On a dare, she had jumped into the waters of a lake fed by mountain snows, ice floes which had melted on a day when the sun promised the illusion of warmth. It had been a false Spring, with the sun on her face, the lake looking like a summer day in paintings on museum walls, the counterfeit image come true. And so, believing in paintings and the illusion of Spring turned somehow into a Summer’s day, Irena had jumped into its waters on a dare.
It had been like plunging her hand into a water barrel frozen over, except she’d plunged her body, not just her hand beneath the surface. Stabbing pain like ten thousand ice needles spiked through her flesh. She sucked in breath as if the waters all around her were the summer’s air, and as she did the cold released her, and let her sink beneath its surface. She surrendered to it, letting it take her like the morphine shot the woman in the lab coat had stuck into her arm, calling her kitten, little kitten…until she heard the words “replace her.”
Irena gasped for air, saw light breaking through the blue icy water up above, and knew if she did not reach it, she would die. She kicked and pulled against the grave, the watery ice, and broke through the surface sunlit air and gasped, “I speak German, Herr Major!”
He turned toward her as if the miracle of a deaf-mute speaking had occurred.
“I learned in school,” she said, “and…”
At the sound of her excellent German, Major Rugemer turned to her, pleasantly surprised. Perhaps he even remembered her from somewhere, the shy girl, the hint of a mysterious smile.
“Catch your breath, my girl,” he said. “What is your name?”
She was swimming now, not drowning, no longer shrouded in the cold, swimming for the shore.
“Irena Gut, sir.”
Major Rugemer appraised her again with the look of a competent merchant judging bolts of cloth or potatoes stacked against a wall. “You must be of German descent with a name like Gut. And your features are definitely Germanic.”
She was out of the water. Someone had thrown a blanket round her.
“I don’t know,” Irena said. “I never knew my family on my father’s side. I was always simply called Irena Gutowna.” And then she curtsied like a six-year-old at first recital, curtsied in the way young girls do, bringing tears of joy to elders’ eyes.
“I admire your honesty.” Rugemer smiled. “You’d be surprised at how many Poles are trying to pass themselves off as Germans these days. I am Major Rugemer.” He clicked his heels like a gentleman of another era at a Cinderella ball, inclined his head toward her, then looked back into her eyes. “Now, what is the problem? If a worker faints, it endangers the efficiency of the entire plant. I won’t have it!”
Irena straightened up and took the major’s hand. It was a girlish gesture with no hint of seduction. It was the gesture of a schoolgirl welcoming a new headmaster. Or perhaps the gesture of a drowning girl just saved.
He stiffened and pulled his hand away.
“Major, please,” said Irena. “Ask anyone. I am a very good worker, only—”
“Only what?”
“I was interred by the Russians, and there was a little bout of anemia, but nothing serious.” She stood as she’d seen the soldiers stand, at attention. “But I have wasted enough of your time. I must get back to my work. Excuse me, please and thank you, Herr Major.” She moved away slowly and carefully as if she might somehow disappear if she made no sudden movements, the frozen water receding on the shoreline just behind her.
“No,” said the major, “you’re finished here.”
Her heart raced like the bird flapping its wings in the nave of the church, crashing wildly into stained glass windows of the Savior’s heart. Icy waters flooded beneath her, and she was falling through them once again.
“Please, Herr Major.” she said.
“The work is obviously too difficult for you.” He said it as a schoolmaster would, handing out a failing mark. “It’s a waste of time having you on the assembly line. You are finished here. That’s all.”
That’s all.
She would be deported or worse. She was now on a lower rung of hell. Perhaps one froze there instead of being burned. One froze, then burned, and did it all again, forever.
Irena knew she must keep her eyes open, spotting a chance to escape or finding someone who could help avert the evil decree. She had survived the forest and the snow, the brown teeth and white lab coat, she was the bird entrapped crashing into the stained-glass Savior, she was drowning but not yet dead, not yet.
“Your German is excellent,” said the major.
She turned and looked at him.
“You are honest. And we have another job for which you are better suited. How are you at kitchen work and serving food?”
Irena could barely believe what she was hearing. Kitchen work? Serving food? She was out of the forest and the ice lake, seated next to the trough! “Kitchen work and serving food” meant extra rations not only to eat and stave off hunger, but to barter!
Food was the Polish currency of German occupation.
“How am I? Herr Major, even though there were servants at home, my mother prepared me in all aspects of housework, as well as to how to be a good hostess and do laundering work.”
“Good,” said the major, but Irena was on a roll.
“I can also sew and make alterations—”
“All right. Good, good.”
“I can even do fine needlepoint, as well as—”
“Yes, yes, all well and good—”
“—as well as prepare and set a table for formal or informal service, Abendbrot or Abendessen. The fork and spoon above the plate are for dessert with separate glasses for water, white and red wine, and after dinner drink glasses are set out only once the meal’s complete and knife and fork are laid parallel to each other across the right side of the plate with the tips pointing to the ten o’clock position and—”
“Enough!”
“Yes, Herr Major.” She looked down like an obedient servant chastised in an English motion picture comedy.
“At our officers’ quarters, we need someone to bring efficiency to the dining room,” said Major Rugemer, “and into the laundry as well. You’ll start immediately, both in the laundry and serving in the Officer’s Mess. Your supervisor will be Herr Schultze.”
Irena was safe on shore and warming herself once again.