Irena couldn’t stop thinking about what Rokita had said. Within a few months, there wouldn’t be a Jew left in this sector. More than likely, they’d be dispatched to forced labor camps in the East where conditions would be even worse than the ones here in the munitions factory.
Make a pfenning or two off them, Rokita had said—and that’s what they were going to do!
The Germans had turned on their Stalinist allies and invaded Soviet Russia. They had already taken the Ukraine and were advancing to the gates of Moscow itself before the Soviets appeared to stop them, at least for a while.
That’s probably where they would send the Jews, she thought, or maybe to Siberia.
Irena debated whether to warn her friends in the laundry. What good would it do? If the Germans intended to deport them to labor camps, that’s what they would do. Did it make sense to add to her friends’ worries about something over which they had no control? Besides, if the Soviets really could halt their advance, perhaps German plans would change, and no one would be deported after all.
Be like one of the monkeys, Schultze had advised.
Irena had merely overheard a conversation of a tipsy SS Officer. Nothing more. Just words.
Hear nothing. Speak nothing. Be one of the smart monkeys.
In early autumn, a cold snap turned the trees’ leaves’ colors overnight, and just as quickly the winds came. By mid-morning on the first day of the winds, their branches were bare, and the leaves were dead from the early freeze. They swirled along the alleyway behind the officers’ hotel, dusting the air, watering their eyes, whirlwinds at their feet.
Major Rugemer was in a foul mood. He spoke in a voice so low that Irena could barely hear him against the sound of the wind whipping through the alleyway behind the hotel the Germans used for bachelor officers’ quarters.
Wind whipped through the maple trees running along the other side of the alleyway, blowing their leaves in small cyclones, as if wherever the major walked a miniature tornado followed close behind.
He walked beside Schultze as Irena followed. The mess sergeant had sent soldiers to purchase produce the day before, but instead of bringing the vegetables into the cellar of the hotel, the men had thrown a tarp over them, planning to bring them in the next day.
Then came the early freeze.
Major Rugemer muttered under his breath.
“I beg your pardon, Major?” Irena had not heard what he’d said over the clamor of the wind and the dead leaves scraping against the mud-rutted alleyway.
Schultze shot her a warning look. When Rugemer was under a black cloud, as Schultze called it, it was best not to speak unless directly spoken to.
Schultze was right. Better to be quiet.
“I said it’s garbage! Can’t you smell it? Those idiots! It’s swill! Even before the freeze, these vegetables were wilted! Fit only for swine! And is this what you expect to feed me? I want fresh produce, properly stored, protected from the elements and from vermin. Do you understand? I have a health condition. You want me to be ill—is that what I am to believe?”
“No, Herr Major. Of course not!” said Schultze.
“I want the mess sergeant fined, Schultze, you hear?”
“Ja wohl, Herr Major,” Schultze replied. He took out the stub of a pencil, licked its tip, and made a notation in the black pocket diary kept in his waistcoat pocket.
“And from now on,” said Major Rugemer, turning to Irena, “you are in charge of purchasing all fresh produce. I will hold you personally responsible! You’ll provide a strict accounting to Herr Schultze, and I’ll expect to see the freshest produce available, properly secured and stored.”
“Yes, Herr Major,” Irena said.
Four small streets, not more than arched alleyways, fed into a small square close to the hotel. In the largest of these, local farmers sent their wives and children to set up stalls to sell what produce they’d managed to save from the Germans.
With the onset of the sudden freeze, many fruits and vegetables had been ruined or harvested before their time. But for a price, one could still find fresh eggs and even chickens for the cooking pot. A separate alleyway stunk of livestock, freshly slaughtered, hanging on hooks suspended from makeshift racks. There had been a Jewish-owned butcher shop there, but the Jew had been killed shortly after the Germans had entered the city in July of ’41.
Lazar Haller told Irena that before the war Tarnopol had been known as a lively center of cultural and commercial life for its Jewish population. There was a Jewish hospital and medical center serving the locals. There was a Jewish primary school where Polish was the language of instruction, not Yiddish. There were theaters and cabarets, restaurants, and bakeries. This was a center of what they called the Enlightenment: Jews embracing European culture, its learning, and languages—becoming, as Lazar said, less Jewish and more Polish.
When the Soviets took over Tarnopol in 1939, Jewish political and cultural organizations were banned, private businesses were nationalized, and workers were organized into Soviet cooperatives.
Thousands of Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland to the West flooded the town. Stalin was preferable to Hitler, they’d thought. But when the Germans took the city in July, a pogrom had broken out. The Germans and Ukrainian police killed several thousand Jews.
In September 1939, the German occupying forces set up a ghetto, confiscated all Jewish owned businesses and property and crammed twelve thousand Jews into a slum meant to hold no more than five thousand.
That winter the cold killed at least a thousand more Jews, Lazar said.
And now this year, there had been an early freeze.
A warm coat had been left behind by one of the secretaries returning to Germany to marry a wealthy widower, a merchant from Hamburg. “Your rich old maid friend and colleague is going to glory!” she’d proudly announced. Forthwith, instead of packing, she gave away most of her old wardrobe to whomever wanted it. She was starting afresh, getting everything new from her soon-to-be husband.
Schultze noticed the secretary was not too much larger than Irena and had secured the coat for her. The Jews in the laundry tailored it to Irena’s more petite figure, and Irena now pulled its velveteen collar close around her as the wind blew in across the open fields from the edge of town where public works laborers and soldiers seemed to be gathering for a municipal project, probably putting in new water mains. At least Irena hoped that was what they were doing, as the water pressure in the town was abysmal and made the proper functioning of the laundry even more difficult.
One main road ran from the old hotel to a crossroad. Turning right led to the edge of town. Turning left led to the square in whose alleyways the local farmers sold their goods. She walked along the road, then under an ornate stone archway leading to the square where yellow- and cream-colored apartments formed boundaries. In the square, she turned left into the alleyway where the Polish farmers’ wives shouted out the virtues of their produce.
Irena had frequented the farmer’s market before to pick up this or that delicacy Major Rugemer or Herr Schultze or the Bavarian cook deemed a necessity. The local vendors saw her in her black servant’s dress and knew she worked in the Officer’s Mess.
“Fräulein, why do you pass me by?” one of the women called out. She was an attractive woman nearing fifty. “You work for the major’s man, the old innkeeper, don’t you? Come see what I have! Celeriac, eagle beans, hazel nuts, cabbage, apples picked before the freeze. I have artichokes and rutabaga. I even have some goose stock and carrots. I have potatoes. You could make a soup fit for a king!”
“Major Rugemer complained the produce was wilted.”
“His men bought it from that hag over there! She has more of a mustache than my father. They bought the cheapest produce there was and probably pocketed the difference. But you don’t look like the shifty type. If you want quality, you must buy straight from the farm. My mother and I grow the best vegetables in Tarnopol! Here Fräulein, look at this cabbage! Look at these carrots!”
This woman’s produce did indeed look freshly picked.
“How much do you need? If you’re buying for the whole Officer’s Mess, I can give you a discount that will almost be like giving it away. Any cheaper and I would have to pay you!”
Irena laughed. She loved the banter of the marketplace and relished her new responsibility of purchasing for the entire staff.
“You say you cook for Major Rugemer himself?”
“I’m not the cook, but I’m in charge of...of provisioning all fresh produce,” Irena said, trying not to sound too haughty but still mightily impressed with herself.
“My name is Helen,” the woman said, offering her hand, “and you?”
“Irena,” she said, taking her hand.
“So, Fräulein Irena, how many people do you feed? Make it worth my while and we’ll grow only for you! Whatever you want!”
“Well,” said Irena, “there is the major’s staff and the secretaries. That’s nineteen… twenty people...then eleven in the laundry...that’s thirty-one.”
“The laundry workers?”
“Eleven of them.”
“The laundry workers are Jews, aren’t they?”
Irena looked at her, frightened now.
“You give fresh produce to Jews?”
“Well, I...no, of course not. It’s my first day buying produce so I was confused. No, of course not!”
The woman leaned in closer to Irena and said, “Fräulein, you must be careful in what you say to people. It isn’t safe. Do you understand?”
Irena said nothing. Frozen, not from the cold but from fear, she nodded.
“Be more careful,” whispered the older woman.
Both women heard the thunder of SS motorcycle units crossing the square, then truck gates crashing open, the hobnailed boots quick marching on the cobblestones, their dogs straining against the leashes, barking. A whistle blew.
“Off the streets! Off the streets right now!”
An SS sergeant pushed his way through shoppers who backed against the walls, making way for the soldiers.
“Close your shops! All of you! Off the streets! Off the streets right now!” He and his men pushed Irena, Helen, the mustached crone, and others down an alleyway to another intersection, where more SS soldiers screeched up in a truck. Its gate was thrown open, men jumped down, rifles at the ready, closing off Irena’s view of the street with the truck.
Crates of produce spilled in the alleyway, crushed beneath the soldiers’ boots.
The woman called Helen led Irena down a side street running parallel to the alleyway. The smart monkeys living in the apartments lining the alley and the main square had already closed their shutters.
A boarded-up building on a side street backed up into the lane of vegetable stalls. The boards on a side door hung only by a few nails. Helen looked around, saw no one watching, and said, “It looks empty. Let’s go in here.”
They moved through what was once a Jewish-owned dry goods store, up a small flight of stairs to a shuttered window looking out onto the alleyway.
Irena and Helen watched through the slats of the shutters as SS officers cursed and pushed through the alley women and children, old people and young, many of whom slipped on crushed, rotting vegetables and fruits. A pungent mash was made by terrified Jews and the soldiers herding them toward trucks awaiting at the narrow street’s other end.
“Come on you, Jew pigs! Move! Schnell!” It was Sturmbannfuhrer Rokita. He was in command of the soldiers who were herding the Jews like terrified livestock down toward the trucks.
“Move, Jews!” he shouted. “Move!”
Irena saw him admire his reflection in the window of the dead Jew’s butcher shop. She and Fanka had tailored his Nazi uniform only the week before. He took immense pride in his physical fitness.
A woman holding an infant tripped, losing her footing on the garbage. She broke her fall with one hand and held the baby with the other.
“Move!” a soldier shouted.
The woman turned to Rokita, seeing by his appearance that he was in charge, “Please, sir,” she said, voice breaking, “my baby is only two weeks old!”
The crush of terrorized people behind her stopped.
The soldiers halted too, waiting to see what Rokita would do.
He looked at her quizzically, head at an angle, then seemed to understand her predicament. “Ahh,” he said, kindly, “I’m sorry, Fräulein, or should I say Frau? You’re afraid your baby might be hurt? Is that it?”
“Yes, your Honor,” she meekly answered.
“Yes, your Honor,” Rokita repeated. “Very polite. Very respectful. Two weeks, you say? So sweet! May I?”
She was clearly afraid to hand her baby to Rokita.
“Please,” he said. “I only want to help.”
The woman let him take the baby from her arms, hope in her eyes that she had misjudged the German.
He smiled at the baby, crinkled up his nose, and cooed to the infant, “Can’t I solve the problem? Yessss, you know I can! Yessss, I can!”
The baby giggled, and the woman relaxed.
“I can make it,” said Rokita to the baby, “so Mama won’t ever have to be afraid anymore.” Grabbing the newborn by its feet, he dashed it against the cobblestones, then stomped its skull beneath his boot.
The woman screamed a scream more terrible to Irena than her own screams back in the forest.
Rokita reached across his body with his right hand to his pistol. With his left hand, he unsnapped the clasp holding the holster shut. The woman, crying, ripping out handfuls of her hair, looked in horror at what a moment before had been her smiling newborn.
Rokita pulled back the action on the Luger, chambered a round and fired it into the woman’s head. She crumbled next to what was left of her child.
No more screams.
“Get it out of the way,” Rokita said to the nearest SS soldier, who like a golem, kicked aside the human refuse. “Keep them moving,” Rokita ordered the others in a businesslike tone, and the men herded the human livestock bound for slaughter into the waiting trucks.
In moments it was over.
Good German engineering. Not perfected yet, but nonetheless impressive in its speed and efficiency. Trucks loaded with Jews went down the road to the place where Irena had seen what she thought were public works laborers with their shovels and bulldozers.
Irena sobbed against Helen, who held her still, muffling the younger woman’s cries. From the distance came bursts of machine gun fire.
Irena would later not remember how she broke free and ran down the deserted road of the town whose shutters all were closed, whose streets and stalls and shops were all deserted. She ran to the low wall of a small farmhouse near the pit the Germans had dug.
Men and women stood naked beside their naked children, parents covering their eyes so they would not see the unfolding horror, some praying with them, some telling them it was all going to be all right, and others standing at the edge of the pit before crumbling beneath the machine gun fire. Long bursts were interspersed with single shots—shot here and there at those somehow still alive.
Irena hid behind the wall as Rokita smoked his cigarette and a German soldier with a motion picture camera photographed it all. Some soldiers smiled and waved toward the lens while others simply continued killing.
Bodies piled up inside the pit, the bulldozer pushing mounds of earth to cover them, the killing ground scarred over. The German soldiers left under a setting sun, with a single sentry posted to keep away any not-so-smart monkeys.
Irena crouched behind the wall, looking out through the space where the plaster failed and the bricks were loose, looking until she saw the strange crop pushing up from beneath the earth: fingers clawing at the air.
The sentry bit into the apple he must have snatched from one of the stalls.
Irena didn’t move. She didn’t make a sound.