In late August 1942, when the knock came on the door of the Schwarzwalds’ hovel in the Lvov ghetto, it was as if the Messiah himself had arrived. Laura Schwarzwald rose wearily to her feet. With time running out, whoever didn’t have the money to buy Christian documents—forged or real baptismal certificates and marriage documents—would almost certainly receive a death sentence instead. Having deported the bulk of Lvov’s remaining Jews from the ghetto, the Nazis were now hunting down the last of its inhabitants. Every Jew still alive in the ghetto was standing on the precipice of death. All they had to do was look down and see everyone who had gone before them.
Laura’s husband, Daniel, who was at his unpaid job as a security guard for the Third Reich’s military engineering organization, had made the arrangements, and here, at last, were the papers that were the family’s only remaining hope. Laura pressed her hand against her breast to feel the wad of money safely hidden in her brassiere and opened the door.
The gaunt man who pushed his way past her had circles under his eyes as dark as a panda bear’s and a shirt so grimy that its original color could only be inferred. His belt, though pulled tightly around his narrow waist, barely kept his soiled pants up. Was this the paperman? she thought. A scrawny, doomed fellow no better off than the rest of them?
“Where is he?” he demanded, scowling.
Bewildered, she asked, “Who?”
“Don’t play dumb. The paperman. I was told to come here to buy the papers. For my wife and child.”
Laura could barely catch her breath. So the Pole had promised the papers to two separate families? What was he trying to do—get paid twice for the same ones? Weren’t the Poles and Ukrainians already making a killing off the Jews’ desperation for new identities? Laura’s heart sank even more quickly than it had risen at the sound of his knocking.
“They belong to us, the papers!” she screamed at him.
“No need to get excited,” the man said arrogantly, looking around the room with its scraps of furniture and its air of death. “I’ll sit and wait.”
She could hardly bear to look at this withered Jew as he sat in the chair, arms folded, with a pathetic sense of entitlement—entitlement, that is, to go on living too, for another day.
“They aren’t your papers,” she said to him.
“We’ll see about that.”
She begged him to leave, not even trying to hold back her tears, but he ignored her and waited in defiant silence as the afternoon dragged on. What had he been just a few months before—a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman like her husband? Who could tell? Now they were like two hungry animals eyeing each other over a meal that hadn’t arrived yet.
If her husband were at home, he wouldn’t stand for it; he would have thrown this other buyer out, no questions asked. However, something better than her husband intervened: fate. As the ghetto curfew for Jews approached, the paperman still hadn’t arrived. The man in her kitchen kept jiggling his leg and checking his wristwatch with increasing anxiety, knowing that to be seen on the street after curfew was to risk being shot like a rabid dog.
“You’d better go,” she said, “or the dogs will be eating your corpse in the street tomorrow morning.”
He said he’d give the paperman five more minutes.
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll leave and come back for them in the morning.”
“They’re not yours. If they were yours, you’d be in your house waiting for him, not mine.”
He consulted his watch yet again. “Goniff!” he spat. Finally he could stand it no more and stood up. “Anybody tell you what a good-looking woman you are?”
“Go,” Laura said.
He jerked his chin at something over Laura’s shoulder, and she turned to see her daughter, Selma, who had wandered in from the other room. She was blond, not yet five.
“Your little girl is pretty too,” the man said. “Very fair. You’re lucky.”
“Not as long as you’re here. Go. Go before you get a bullet in the head.”
He asked her for a piece of bread.
Thankful that he was leaving, she went to the cupboard and broke off a piece of days-old bread.
Twenty minutes after he left, there was another knock on Laura’s door. She hesitated, wondering if the Jew was not giving up that easily. But a different voice was whispering to her through the door. She opened it and a ruddy Pole stumbled in. If history had made the Jews one of the unluckiest people in the world, and now unluckier than ever, Laura was not above solemn gratitude for the fortunate timing of the man’s appearance. The round-faced man was very drunk, the only explanation needed for his late arrival. He slumped in the chair recently vacated by her rival and demanded to see the money. From her blouse Laura removed the agreed-upon amount and asked to see the documents.
The man slid the precious papers out of his inside jacket pocket and flourished them for a second before putting them back. Then he wagged his index finger in her face, like a metronome.
“Not until I have a drink,” he slurred. “I have to drink in order to stand the sight of all you żyds.” He drew a circle in the air to indicate the ghetto. “Then we will close the deal.”
Every chance to live a little longer had to be bargained for. Laura happened to have half a bottle in the room in the cupboard—how much luck could one woman have!—which she put down before him. He sloshed some into the dirty glass she provided, tossed it back, then poured another and drank that, all the while smacking his lips. Nothing would prevent him from just getting up and stumbling out. Laura’s relief turned to anxiety, but her mazel held; the Pole couldn’t hold his vodka. Laura sat and watched him drink himself into semi-consciousness, then pulled the papers from his pocket and replaced them with the money and waited for him to stir. At that point she was able to maneuver him back into the street. For the rest of her life, she would be as grateful for her good fortune as haunted by it—her family saved at another family’s expense.
That night, Laura read the documents over and over again by candlelight. A real Christian birth certificate for Selma and a marriage license for her, both from the same family, with birth dates enough like their own. From that moment, and for the unforeseeable future, Laura and Selma Schwarzwald ceased to exist. Bronislawa Tymejko and her little daughter Zofia Tymejko had taken their place, just as this life in the ghetto—too precarious, really, to be called “life” at all—had replaced the prosperous, cultured existence she and her family had enjoyed until almost exactly three years before.
She’d grown up with her parents, Mina and Josef Litwak, and four siblings in a grand three-story house with French windows, scrollwork, and a courtyard. The home was owned by her wealthy paternal grandfather Moses, who also lived there with his wife, Sarah. In their sprawling apartment, the walls were covered in silk, the parquet floors were lined with Persian rugs, the ceiling dripped with chandeliers, and Laura’s grandmother favored Parisian dresses and stylish sheitels—the wigs worn by Orthodox married women. The crowning achievement of Laura’s parents’ Judaism was the fact that her father, a banker, and grandfather had organized their own synagogue.
Laura and her husband, Daniel Schwarzwald, who worked in his family’s successful timber export business, lived elsewhere in Lvov in a smaller apartment in the Christian section of the city with their two-year-old daughter, Selma. They were all among the highly cultured citizens of Lvov, which until 1918 had been the capital of Galicia, part of the Austrian Empire. Much of the Litwak family spoke German fluently as well as Polish and Yiddish. After the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy in 1918, Lvov became the third largest city in Poland, and its second most important cultural and intellectual center—a city with well over 100,000 Jews—a third of the city’s entire population.
On September 24, 1939, the life that Lvov had known for the past twenty years was shattered as suddenly and easily as one of Moses and Sarah Litwak’s Venetian wineglasses. Just two weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland from the west, Russia invaded from the east, where it overwhelmed Polish resistance and took a quarter of a million Poles as prisoners. The Russians occupied Lvov—whose Jewish population began to swell rapidly as it absorbed Jews fleeing the area occupied by Germany in the west—and soon began to deport the city’s anti-Communists, “bourgeois bloodsuckers,” even Polish Communists, and other “untrustworthy elements” to Siberia. The well-to-do merchants and professionals were relieved of their livelihoods, then retrained as laborers. The Soviets immediately emptied the stores of all food and merchandise and appropriated it for their own use. The citizens of Lvov were ordered to change their zlotys for rubles at the banks, only to be told after standing on line the whole night that there would be no exchange after all. Suddenly the Poles were paupers.
The Soviets had barged into Lvov without much ceremony, and a commissar and his family took over the apartment of Laura’s grandparents—moved right in—and forced them to retreat to a single room. The elderly couple cowered in their bedroom, inmates in the ornate prison of their home. The man who had his own synagogue now had barely two kopeks to rub together. The commissar and his family made themselves comfortable, helping themselves to the Litwaks’ food and possessions while denying Moses his kosher food.
The commissar then announced that Moses, being a bourgeois, would have to leave Lvov and live at least thirty kilometers away to avoid contaminating the new Communist regime. Preferring starvation to eating treif, and death to ceding his home to the intruders, Moses’s heart gave out.
That night his little great-granddaughter Selma happened to glimpse, through a bedroom doorway, Moses laid out on his bed in a black suit. To circumvent the Russian Communists’ prohibition against any kind of religious ceremony, before dawn the next morning everyone in the family walked separately to the Jewish cemetery to meet his casket and give him a Jewish burial. Many from the Litwak and Schwarzwald family who were there that morning would themselves soon be dead, with neither burial nor family around to say good-bye.
For the moment, though, thirty-year-old Laura, her husband, Daniel, and their Selma seemed safe enough. The Russians retrained Daniel as a road worker, then a baker’s apprentice, and, finally, after he hurriedly learned Russian, he was given a job as a timber specialist in a factory. Laura was allowed to remain at home with Selma.
At least on the surface, life in Lvov actually improved for a while. The Russians set about beautifying Lvov, keeping the streets spotless and requiring all tenants to sweep in front of their buildings daily—while wearing white aprons, no less! The Russians quickly organized schools and promoted Russian culture, reopened theaters, and produced ballets the likes of which the Poles had never seen. Moreover, tickets prices were kept low enough so that all workers, including the newly minted laborers, could afford them, the better to expose the locals to Russia’s “superior” culture.
But the citizens of Lvov were getting a taste of the worse terror to come. One evening, the Russians cut off electricity, a trick that forced everyone to stay home while the Soviet secret police—the NKVD—went door to door, selecting Polish Communists—who had their own ideas about socialism—for deportation to forced labor camps in Siberia and the Far East, and in some cases immediate death. The ballet tickets may have been cheap, but the towering portraits of Lenin and Stalin left no doubt that life in Lvov would never be the same. Between February and June 1940, the Soviets deported almost 400,000 people from the newly acquired territories, 200,000 Jews among them.
By June 1941, the Germans and the Russians were no longer merely sharing poor Poland. They were now at war with each other, and the Germans were winning. After less than two years of Soviet occupation, the Germans arrived in Lvov in the summer of 1941, routing their former allies—but not before the Soviet secret police murdered thousands of civilian prisoners they had been holding in Lvov prisons. The Germans compounded the violence by promptly blaming the massacre on the Jews, inciting a pogrom organized by the Ukrainian Nationalists that lasted four days and left more than 2,000 Jews dead in the streets of Lvov while the Germans filmed the atrocities.
The Nazis brought to Poland a killing machine the likes of which the human imagination had not yet been able to conjure. The Einsatzgruppen were special mobile killing squads, the leading edge of the Final Solution that would not be made official until a few months later. As the German army advanced eastward, the job of the Einsatzgruppen, 3,000 executioners divided into four groups, was to follow close behind the Wehrmacht, gathering and disposing of the Jewish people as they went.
Between June 30 and July 3, the Einsatzgruppen murdered at least 4,000 more Jews with help from Ukrainian Nationalists—herding them to secluded killing grounds, where they were relieved of their watches, jewelry, money, and clothes, then shot to death in the back of the skull, one by one, and piled in mass graves, many of which the victims had dug themselves. Others were gassed in groups after being piled into olive green trucks and vans that had been outfitted and sealed airtight for the purpose.
On July 15, all Jews were ordered to wear a yellow Star of David.
On July 25, Ukrainian Nationalists organized another pogrom in which 2,000 more Jews were slaughtered. By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than half a million Jews, more than 3,000 a day. Before it was all over, they would murder well over a million Jews. The work was done mostly by professional men—including doctors, lawyers, even clergymen—men whose work ethic and deep sense of duty to the Third Reich, if not an inherited hatred of the Jewish people, made them excellent executioners. To keep up both their strength and morale for this arduous labor, they were well fed and provided with copious amounts of alcohol, but even some Nazis had their limit, could finally take no more of the daily grind of extermination, and were relieved without prejudice by an understanding Führer. Those with sturdier constitutions just kept at it, learning quickly that, once they had negotiated certain moral obstacles, less stubborn than one would have thought, they became accustomed to almost anything, especially if the music blaring over loudspeakers distracted them from the sounds of their own pistol shots and the begging and shrieking of their victims.
But killing Jews one by one could accomplish only so much. By October 1941, the first Jews were taken as forced labor, and a month later all remaining Jews in Lvov were forced into a ghetto. Laura’s family—her parents and her three remaining siblings (a fourth, Edek, had immigrated to Palestine)—were all German-speaking Polish believers in Teutonic culture, but they too awaited their turn. Before long, a group of storm troopers and German soldiers invaded the apartment, where Laura and her husband had hidden her grandfather’s gold and silver religious objects. The SS men found everything, including the Torah with its magnificent silver crown and pointer. When Laura refused to tell them what the objects were for, one of them smacked her across the face with the back of his hand.
Laura’s brother Manek was soon caught in the street without his Star of David and taken to an SS camp, but at least he was given a pass to return to the apartment at night. One evening he told the adults of watching two German soldiers beat two men for stealing a bar of soap, then bash their skulls against each other until their brains splashed against the wall. Another time, he reported that a soldier took a child by the ankles and swung him as hard as he could against a brick wall. The German was laughing. Atrocities Laura never before imagined had become her daily reality, like the potatoes and cabbage the family now subsisted on.
The Schwarzwalds were told to pack the few belongings that the Soviets and Germans hadn’t already taken, and they joined the rest of the city’s Jews in the Lvov ghetto in the Zamarstynow borough. Their new home was a single room that the family—Laura, her husband and daughter, her parents, her father’s parents, and her aunts and uncles—had to share with another Jew, a total stranger. Not a mile away, the Germans had already established, in a former factory, the Janowska forced labor and concentration camp for Jews destined for Belzec, the extermination camp near Lublin. In fact, Janowska itself became an extermination camp, where killing often took the form of entertainment. The SS officials there organized a prisoner band, instructed them to compose “The Death Tango,” and ordered them to play it during executions.
In a matter of weeks, the family’s comfortable life had been reduced to a meager existence of fear and chaos. Their only hope was to obtain false documents in the bustling market of Poles and Ukrainians who were getting rich selling their identification papers to the doomed.
Daniel started work as a security guard at a hostel for construction workers of the German military engineering group, Organisation Todt. At least it was a job that paid him in increasingly scarce food and work passes for him and Laura, who was permitted to remain in the apartment with their daughter, as his hausfrau. Laura’s two unmarried younger sisters, Adela (whom everyone called Putzi) and Fryda, were given jobs in a factory making military uniforms.
“Selections” continued, now right under their noses. One night Laura heard unfamiliar noises outside and got out of bed to see thousands of Jews, denied transportation, trudging to work on foot before dawn, many near collapse, a column of human despair shuffling along between lines of German soldiers prodding them with their rifles.
After a few weeks, the noise changed to the rumbling sounds of trucks carrying deportees to the concentration camps. The frightened Jews stood tightly packed in the open trucks, staring at the sky, searching for God, hoping for a miracle. Laura heard one man cry out loud, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. . . .” Then a woman took up the words that are supposed to be the last ones uttered by a Jew before death. Then the others joined in, like a demented congregation, their voices rising, unheard, into the gray sky.
In exchange for her diamond ring, Laura temporarily rescued her own parents from the Germans and arranged to hide them at her husband’s place of work. Life was now a lethal game of musical chairs, in which those who couldn’t find one of the diminishing number of places to hide were taken away, almost surely to their deaths.
The Schwarzwalds clung to each other on Janowska Street in the Lvov ghetto as the Germans shot 5,000 Jews who were elderly and sick, and therefore useless to them. In early spring 1942, 15,000 more Jews—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were deported to the extermination camp in Belzec, not far from Lvov. In August, tens of thousands more were sent there. Another thousand orphans and sick Jews were shot dead. By September 1942, of the 100,000 Jews who lived in Lvov before the war, there were approximately 65,000 left, and they could only imagine what was happening elsewhere. Every morning the Jews of Lvov awoke to horrible news—that the nightmare was still real.
Laura learned that in the nearby town of Gorlice, Laura’s great-uncle had been made head of that ghetto’s Judenrat, or Jewish Council, the administrative organization made up of the community leaders, that the Nazis forced the Jews to form in every ghetto, under penalty of death, to facilitate their own deportation and extermination. This policy, used in the camps as well, put the decision of which Jews would live and which would die not in the hands of God, or even the Nazis, but of the Jews themselves. If the Nazis ordered the head of the Judenrat to produce 5,000 Jews at six in the morning to be deported, he had three choices. He could comply, comforting himself with the Nazis’ reassurance that deciding which Jews would live and which would die was preferable to all of them dying. He could refuse and be executed, along with who knows how many others for good measure. Or he could do what Laura’s great-uncle did. In Gorlice, the Nazis asked him to prepare lists of Jews to be “resettled.” He told them such an assignment would require serious thought, so that he could make sure the Jews left would be of the utmost use to them. “Come tomorrow morning,” Laura’s great-uncle said, “and I will have for you exactly what you want.” When the Nazis returned, they found him dead at his desk, a suicide.
Daniel was able to visit his family in the ghetto only occasionally, leaving Laura and Selma alone and at the mercy of the German soldiers, who three times came to their room and ordered them to be deported to the gas chambers at Belzec. Each time, Laura used her fluent German to persuade them to leave her and Selma alone.
On a fourth visit, the soldiers insisted she come with them, then changed their mind and asked for Selma only, saying that the Führer loved little children and would take good care of her. Laura knew full well how much the Führer loved Jewish children. She had heard Manek’s story, and she had already seen the piles of children’s corpses behind the fence at the Janowska camp, their blood having been taken for transfusions for soldiers at the Eastern Front. Incredible—the Nazis committing in reality the atrocity that Christians had been falsely accusing Jews of for centuries. Somehow she prevailed again, shooing Selma away, and the soldier softened. He even returned later, warning her that the roundup of Jews was finished for the time being, and that the next day it would be safe for her to go out and forage for food.
But how many times would she be so lucky? It was already too late for her grandfather Moses and her invalid grandmother Sarah, who had been carried off in a chair, loaded onto a truck, then thrown off it, and shot. A friend reported seeing her tiny corpse, like a dog’s, on the pavement. It was too late for her own parents, who had been discovered and deported to Belzec, where they too would be murdered. When the soldiers had come for them, her father hid, but as soon as he heard the cries of his wife he came out of hiding, saying he didn’t want to be separated, and so he too began the journey to the gas chambers. When Laura and her sister came home to an empty apartment, the building’s concierge told them, “The Nazis came for a cleaning.” Daniel’s family was now also gone. Laura’s family and her siblings were among the last of the clan in the ghetto, now a pitiful city populated mostly by ghosts, both living and dead.
The Schwarzwalds knew it wouldn’t be much longer before the Nazis closed in on them. The SS were clearing one ghetto block at a time—from the window Laura could see them herding Jews, friends and acquaintances among them—and soon it would be their turn. Laura found a platform under the roof of an adjacent house where they could hide at night, packed in like herrings with fifteen others, including an epileptic girl of thirteen who started to howl at the sound of German boots in the empty apartments below and had to be silenced with a pillow. Laura would toss Selma across a ventilation shaft to someone who caught her on the other side, then leap from a top-floor window of their building to the window of the next with a bag of food and a change of clothes for her daughter.
Meanwhile, her husband hid on the roof at work, pressed all night against the drainpipe.
The competition for Christian identification papers that roughly matched the Jews’ ages was intense and the price always climbing, but somehow Daniel succeeded first in purchasing authentic Christian birth certificates for his wife’s two younger sisters, Fryda and Putzi, who would now become Zofia Wolenska and Ksenia Osoba. Then he was able to purchase a marriage certificate for Laura and a birth certificate for Selma from a family named Tymejko.
The papers for her and her daughter were going to be delivered in two days. By now, Laura could barely summon an ounce of hope. She had become like a stone. She felt as if suffering no longer touched her. A human, apparently, could adapt to anything. In late August, while Daniel was at work, the paperman actually came, and the documents were hers—but only after, by sheer luck, she had gotten rid of an unexpected visitor who claimed that he had been promised them as well.
When her husband begged her to leave with Selma, she agreed. He would try his best to follow.
The family’s good fortune had run out, though; on the eve of their escape, Daniel found himself in the right place, but at the wrong time.
On September 1, 1942, the Germans ordered all remaining Jews to consolidate their living quarters in one section of the ghetto, and Daniel went to the Jewish Community House to see one of the Jewish Council members, his friend Dr. Katz, to ask him about finding a new place to live. The game of musical chairs was coming to an end.
Unknown to Daniel, a Jew had killed a drunken German soldier the day before, and the Nazis wasted little time retaliating with their customary brutality. While Daniel conferred with Dr. Katz on the second floor, the Nazis surrounded the council building with MG-42 machine guns, a weapon so effective—it could shoot a fifty-round belt in a matter of a few seconds—that it would still be in use seventy years later. SS men stormed the Jewish Council building and forced dozens of Jews outside, where they were instantly mowed down. The SS men then stomped up the stairs and cornered the members of the Jewish Council and the other Jews with them.
Word of the Aktion spread quickly inside the ghetto. Laura left Selma with her sister Fryda and headed immediately to the Jewish Community House. Laura wouldn’t tell anyone for many, many years what she saw that afternoon, although by then a grisly photograph of it had begun to appear in photographic histories of the Holocaust. There were no signs of life around the building, but six perfectly spaced corpses hung from the second-floor balcony, dangling like a row of marionettes in a toy store.
When Laura saw the dead council members, some of whom she knew, twisting slowly in their nooses, she clutched her stomach and turned away. When she turned back, she didn’t see Dr. Katz or her husband among them, and this gave her hope. But she didn’t dare advance any farther to investigate. To associate herself with any of the dead men would be suicide. The corpses would remain hanging there for weeks.
Before the day was over, she learned that Dr. Katz had managed to jump out of a second-story window and hide in a cobbler’s workshop nearby. He was still alive and reunited with his wife. But Daniel? No one knew for sure.
That night, still hopeful, Laura waited for her husband’s return. By morning, her hope had evaporated. If he were alive, she knew, surely he would have gotten word to her. Unless he had been captured, or was hiding in the forest. But false hope was something she couldn’t afford. She resigned herself to the likelihood that her husband was gone, Daniel, the man about whom Laura had once written her cousin Tonka in Tel Aviv, “Danek is sweet, loving; I love him with all my heart as a husband, a lover, a friend. Everybody at home is very attached to him and he to them. Grandma never takes her eyes from him. They made out fine with such a son-in-law.”
Laura still had her daughter and siblings; the others were gone.
The day after the Aktion, September 2, 1942, was Selma’s fifth birthday, but there was no party, and no presents, unless her mother’s soothing lie counted; she had quickly concocted the fiction that her father was working for the Russians for a while and would return someday.
But Selma wasn’t soothed. After listening to the sound of German boots like gunfire on the cobblestones outside and sometimes on the stairwell, she had felt safe only when her father got home from his job in the evening and she could run to him and hug his legs—even when he still worked in the bakery and would be covered in flour. He was blond and had gray-green eyes, just like she did, and she wanted him back. Now.
Selma curled up on a makeshift cot and sobbed into her pillow as Laura watched, berating herself for saying the Russians had taken him. Had there not been a softer lie to tell her, something that promised her father’s quicker return, something to get the little girl through these days? Did it even matter, anyway, since they would all be dead soon? Laura comforted her daughter as best she could, but who would comfort her? Only her daughter stood between her and serious thoughts of suicide, which would be so much easier than living another day.
Only God knew what was going on in her daughter’s head, but her mother saw how quiet she had become, how she endured each new terror in silence. Every once in a while, bright images of their old life peeked through the darkness to torture Laura—her grandparents’ Shabbos dinners, the sight of Daniel working on timber-export numbers late at night, how Selma reacted to her first taste of orange—but she would shoulder them away. Look, she thought, look what history has done to us. Would her little girl ever know that not far away Jews were digging their own graves and waiting for the bullet to the base of the skull?
Later that night, the night of Selma’s fifth birthday, Laura met with her brother Manek and her two sisters, Putzi and Fryda, and they decided to escape with the false papers that had been Daniel’s last gifts to all of them. They decided that Putzi and Fryda would leave first for Kraków by train, after which Laura and Selma would follow a few days later, and finally Manek. There was nothing to lose.
That Putzi was even still alive to make a run for it was itself a miracle. Group by group, the young Jewish women she worked with making military uniforms for the Germans had been taken away and deported until there was only one group left—Putzi’s. When the SS men came for them, Putzi ducked down behind her machine, slid to the floor, and held her breath. Somehow the Germans didn’t notice. After they marched the other women away, Putzi remained on the floor, alone and trembling, waiting all night for them to come back for her, but they never did. In the morning, she snuck out of the factory and made her way home. For the rest of her life, she would suffer from guilt that she alone had survived.
Even before the papers had arrived, when acquiring Catholic identities looked like it was going to be their only hope, Laura had started reading the catechism to Selma. Before they had been moved to the ghetto, Laura’s Christian landlady, the wife of a university professor who had been taken by the Russians, had given her a Polish Catholic catechism and a New Testament and tried to convince her to leave Lvov as soon as possible. She even suggested the family move to a resort town, a place where people were always coming and going anyway, where the locals were accustomed to strangers. She assured Laura that becoming a Catholic would be relatively effortless. She would have to go to church, but only occasionally, and merely watch what the others were doing. She might even see its many advantages over Judaism.
“My children are not happy with me for wanting to help you,” her landlady had told her. “What can I do? I can’t take a chance that they would report me to the Germans. But, you see, that is what it is like now, Laura. I cannot protect you, but I can give you advice on how to protect yourself. So take this Bible and the catechism”—she made the sign of the cross on Laura’s forehead—“and may Jesus Christ be your savior.”
She had not taken the woman’s advice, but she had taken the books and, thinking ahead, had been quietly preparing her five-year-old daughter for Catholicism. Laura’s greatest fear now, on the eve of their attempted escape, was no longer death—what was death to a stone?—but that Selma would inadvertently betray them all if she raised the slightest suspicion that she was a Jew.
“Tell me the five church commandments,” Laura would whisper to Selma at bedtime in their ghetto room.
“I don’t know, Mama.”
“You do know. The first commandment begins, ‘On Sundays and holy days of obligation . . .’”
“Please, Mama.”
“‘On Sundays and holy days of obligation,’ you must what?”
Her daughter sighed. “Attend Mass and re—and re—”
“Refrain.”
“—refrain from unnecessary work.”
“Good girl. Now the next one: ‘At least once a year’—what?”
“I’m hungry, Mama.”
“Zula,” her mother said, using her pet name.
“At least once a year, the sacrament of penance.”
“Now the third commandment, the one about the Easter season.”
“At least once a year during the Easter season, I must take the Holy Communion.”
Laura kissed her hard on the forehead. “You’re such a good girl! What about the fourth commandment?”
In the last couple of days before the two of them were to set out into the world as Bronislawa and Zofia Tymejko, Laura’s drilling intensified—and that wasn’t all.
“I’m giving you a special name today,” she told her. “To be safe, so that nothing bad happens to me and you, I will call you Zofia. Zofia Tymejko. That is your new name. My new name is Bronislawa Tymejko.”
“That’s not a very nice name.”
“Which one?”
“Yours is not as nice as Laura.”
“That’s all right, Zula, because you call me Mama. You must always call me Mama, do you understand? But if someone asks you my name, what do you say?”
“I say your name is Bronislawa.”
“Very good. Bronislawa what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tymejko. Tymejko.”
“Tymejko.”
“So what is my name now?”
“Bronislawa Tymejko.”
“Very good. Who is Laura Schwarzwald?”
“That’s you too.”
“No!”
Selma flinched.
“That is no longer my name! That person doesn’t exist anymore. You mustn’t ever say that again. When someone asks you who your mother is, or what her name is, what do you say?”
“Bronislawa Tymejko.”
“Bravo! It’s like a game we’re playing, but if we break the rules and you accidentally call me Laura, or say that your name is Selma, then the game is over and people will hurt us, or take us away. You don’t want that to happen, do you, Zofia?” Laura said.
“No, Mama.”
“What’s your name, little girl? What do you say from now on when anybody asks you? What do you say?”
“I’m Zofia.”
“Zofia who?”
“Zofia Tymejko.”
“That’s right. And your birthday is July twenty-seventh.”
“It’s September second, Mama.”
“No, that was Selma’s birthday. Zofia’s birthday is July twenty-seventh. See?” She showed her the birth certificate. “See? And what is my name?”
“I don’t like this game.”
“It doesn’t matter, Zofia.”
“I want to be Selma.”
“We must play it all the time now or something bad will surely happen to us.”
“Why? Why does everyone want to hurt us?”
“That I will explain to you when you are a little older, Zofia. But just now they want to hurt people named Schwarzwald and Litwak, so you are never to say those names. What’s your name, little girl?”
“My name is Zofia Tymejko and I was born on July twenty-seventh and I am five years old.”
“How old will you be next July twenty-seventh?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do, Zofia. You’re five years old, so on your next birthday on July twenty-seventh, you will be how old?”
“Six.”
“Excellent. Now, Zosia, what are the three divine virtues?”
“Faith, hope, and love.”
She kissed Zofia’s forehead again. “You’re so smart, Zosia. And don’t talk to anyone. You understand?”
“Yes, Bronislawa Tymejko.”
Laura smiled. “But to you, it’s still Mama.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Poor Zula, Laura thought. Her daughter was a blessing and a curse. She was the only reason to live, but for her to survive she was going to have to erase her only child’s identity, and destroy who knows what else?
On September 6, 1942, Laura washed and brushed Selma’s blond hair and fixed it with a white bow. They both put on their best clothes. With only one small suitcase each and their false documents, they set out on foot for the train station. Just before they walked out of the ghetto, Laura removed her and her daughter’s armbands with the Star of David. The trick was to look like they’d just been visiting the ghetto, doing business. Once through the gate, they strode into Christian Lvov, trying to look as little like Jews as possible. This meant walking past the German guards as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She had hired a Pole named Julek to have the rest of their luggage shipped ahead to Kraków, to escort them there, and to collect their luggage in Kraków and help them find a room. He joined them at the appointed street corner and walked silently next to them to the train station, smoking a cigarette. Most of the way there, Laura held her breath.
To everyone in the world but themselves, they were now Bronislawa and Zofia Tymejko.
Once they were settled on the horsehair seats and the train was moving, Laura repeated her strict instructions that Zofia not talk to strangers, to let her answer all questions. When it was necessary to speak, she told Zofia to speak only Polish. Her mother sometimes spoke German too, and Zofia knew many German words.
Once out of the ghetto, Laura felt an unfamiliar surge of hope and permitted herself the thought that maybe her daughter might even go on to have children of her own one day to say Kaddish for all of them. But the hope didn’t last long. On the train Julek sat in another row and pretended not to know her and Zofia, and Laura wondered—why not wonder in a world where children could betray their own parents?—if he was planning to turn them in. After all, he already had their money.
The trip ended without incident. Julek didn’t denounce them. However, he disappeared with the tickets for their luggage, and presumably the luggage too, leaving Laura and Zofia to find lodging for themselves. Laura looked around for him frantically. Not wanting to call attention to themselves by looking lost near the German policeman patrolling the Glowny station, mother and daughter, with even fewer possessions to their name, then set off in the rain across the plaza to find a room.
Kraków was the capital of the General Government, the name that Germans had given to the occupied region of what had been eastern Poland, and it was swarming with Germans. To avoid prying eyes, Laura moved Zofia and herself frequently, five times in the first month. Zofia was undernourished and constantly sniffling. Laura worried about her health but worried even more that she would make a mistake answering inquisitive neighbors’ endless questions while she was out looking for work. But Zofia passed the first tests with flying colors.
Laura had attended university and once wanted to be a doctor, but her ambition even before the war had been moot in a country where Jews weren’t allowed to attend Polish medical schools. Her brilliant brother Edek had had to go to engineering school in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in the early 1930s. Now any job at all would have to do; without a job considered “essential” by the Nazis, she couldn’t feed Zofia and they couldn’t remain in Kraków.
Luckily Laura found a job in a German bank, but the pay was too low to improve their condition. Moreover, she now had to somehow provide care for five-year-old Zofia during the day. First, Laura paid a small sum to an old woman to look after her. The obese woman in a babushka put Zofia to work every day collecting cigarette stubs in the streets of their neighborhood. She wore a handwritten cardboard sign on a string around her neck that read, “My name is Zofia Tymejko and I live at . . .” whatever their current address was. Zofia would fill her little play purse with the smattering of discarded butts on the cobblestones, then bring them back. The old woman would dump Zofia’s haul onto a newspaper and separate out the ones long enough to smoke. The useless ones she would hold up for inspection between pinched fingers and say, “And how do you expect me to smoke this, kochanie? With tweezers? Now go and bring babunia some more.”
Laura soon found a better alternative, dropping her off at a Catholic orphanage in the morning before she made her rounds. The terse nuns gave Zofia a plate of soup and a crust of bread at midday. She was shy by nature, and under her mother’s anxious care and ceaseless religious drilling she had grown even more so. Even when she was hungry, and she was hungry almost all the time, she knew how to keep quiet.
Laura managed to establish contact with her sisters, who were both in Kraków as well. Putzi, now living under the name of Ksenia Osoba, was a maid in a German home, and Fryda, under the name of Zofia Wolenska, worked for a Polish family. Neither of them had heard anything from or about their brother Manek.
A few weeks later, Laura ran into Julek in the streets of Kraków. He acted as if he had no idea what had happened to their luggage weeks before, and Laura would have been a fool to provoke him with accusations. What could she do in a country where a shifty Pole held their very lives in his calloused hands?
“Julek,” she said. “Do you know where my brother Manek is?”
The big Pole looked startled. “Oh, there’s bad news there,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“How bad?”
“The Krauts caught him at the Lvov train station and hanged him.”
“Hanged him?!” she cried in disbelief. “Dear God!”
He said the SS wanted to see his papers and he ran. Julek shrugged. “So terrible,” he said without emotion. “I thought you knew.”
She would have predicted that Manek, the toughest of the five Litwak siblings, the one who once came home with a broken jaw after a fight with some anti-Semites, would have been the one to survive. She was brotherless now, having already lost the eldest of her siblings, Edek, who had suddenly died in the Holy Land of typhus, or maybe from water poisoned by the Arabs—the family would never know. What was the God she didn’t believe in anymore—maybe even the same God she had been drilling Zofia to believe in—doing to her family?
Or perhaps God had nothing to do with it. When Laura learned later from friends that it was Julek himself who had escorted Manek to the Lvov station, as he had escorted Zofia and herself, she couldn’t rid herself of the thought that he had betrayed her brother to the Germans.
All that Zofia would remember was moving from one damp, shabby room in someone’s home to another. Surely if her father hadn’t been taken away, there would be money and her poor mother would not have to be pleading with strangers for a bed. They had so few clothes that her mother seemed to be washing them in the sink every night. She would watch her mother, dark-haired and beautiful, coaxing a pair of stockings up her legs and applying lipstick in a chipped mirror before leaving to look for work.
The drilling didn’t stop. Maybe it had to do with Zofia’s father’s disappearance from their lives, and her praying for his return, but Laura tested Zofia continuously on her catechism from a prayer book. Was it Zofia’s imagination, or had her mother actually woken her up in the middle of the night to make sure she knew it?
“Zosia, what are the six principal truths of the faith?”
“‘There is one God,’” Zofia would recite sleepily. “‘He is a righteous judge who rewards good and punishes evil.’ I want to sleep, Mama.”
“Who are the three divine Persons?”
“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Can I go to sleep, Mama?”
“In a minute, Zosia. ‘The Son of God became man . . .’”
“‘. . . died on the cross and rose for our salvation.’”
“Good girl,” her mother said, kissing her hair. “I love you.”
They moved into a better home—a room they rented from a Polish officer and his family.
For Laura, the nightmare simply continued. The officer suspected she was not the Catholic she claimed to be, and tested and baited her mercilessly. When she went off to work at the bank, she feared that he would trick Zofia into a confession that they were Jewish. The officer could report his suspicions to the Nazis anytime he wanted. There were even times when, returning from work, she wondered if she would find Zofia alive. When she went off to work at the bank, her mother reminded her to stay in their room as much as possible and answer as few questions as possible. If the officer or his wife asks where your father is, she told Zofia, say that the Russian soldiers took him away. If they ask why we came to Kraków, say that I came to find a good job. If they ask where we lived in Lvov, tell them in the Christian district.
What else could she do? There was no other world to live in right now but this one. She couldn’t bear to move yet again. She had to work, for without her measly income they would starve.
A few weeks after they moved in, there was loud knocking on the apartment door one evening. Three German SS men burst into the apartment, barking in a mixture of German and Polish, and ordered all of them up against the wall of the living room. Zofia was terrified. She stared at the death head medallions on their SS caps and remained very still. Waving his luger at the officer and his wife, one of the SS men demanded to know where the Polish couple’s son was. Zofia could make out that the son had escaped from a Nazi prison and was hiding with his brother. The Polish officer stammered that he had no idea. Yelling something in German, his spittle flying, the Nazi brought the muzzle of his luger closer to the Polish officer’s face. Then he holstered his pistol and slapped the officer across both sides of his face, using the palm and the back of his gloved hand.
The officer, his eyes watering from the blows, tried to hold back his tears, and the SS man turned to look at Laura.
“Where are they?” he screamed at her. Zofia saw the Polish officer’s eyes on her mother, and somehow she knew that her mother knew the answer. Zofia had never thought of her mother as someone who knew things that the frightening Germans didn’t, and wanted to. What if they realized her mother was lying? They’d hurt her or take her away like the Russians took away her father, and then what would Zofia do? She would have to find the orphanage by herself and she didn’t even remember the name of it. Zofia grew dizzy at the thought that something might happen to her only remaining parent.
Very calmly, considering the terrified officer, his weeping wife, and the general feeling that something quite horrible was about to happen, Zofia’s mother began to explain to them—in perfect German—that none of them had seen any sign of the boys, and that she was very sorry that they were not able to help them.
The effect on the Germans of hearing their own language, especially from a woman as pretty as this one, was immediate; they accepted in German what they had doubted in Polish and departed, but not before sternly warning everyone that they would be back to interrogate them again.
The very next morning, the grateful Polish officer’s wife left a glass of fresh milk outside their room. It would be the only kindness they showed them during their stay. Zofia—who had not tasted fresh milk in months—would never forget how delicious it was.
The next day Laura placed in one of the Kraków newspapers an ad for a job. It said she sought a position outside the city, preferably with room and board, stressing her fluency in German. She figured that, no matter where they landed, it couldn’t be any worse. Of the 15,000 Jews who had been forced into the Kraków ghetto by the Germans a year and a half earlier, only about 6,000 Jews remained. The ghetto contained two forced-labor camps and some businesses where Jews toiled until most of them dropped dead of starvation and fatigue.
Laura passed the ghetto on her way home from work, and she couldn’t help but look into the ghetto through the barbed-wire fence between some of the buildings. One day she found all the houses along the fence on fire and German soldiers shooting the Jews as they jumped from the windows. On another, she witnessed a soldier swinging two small children by the legs and smashing their heads against a brick wall. She came close to vomiting there on the street. The ghetto was like a stockyard of emaciated two-legged creatures, waiting to be slaughtered. Yet she somehow envied them. At least they were still living life, however barely, as Jews, to the very end, while she sought to escape death by posing as a member of another religion. If not for Zofia, she would gladly give up her desperate charade and melt back into the ghetto again as Laura Schwarzwald to await the end.
She wrote to her sisters, both working as domestics in Kraków, of her plan to leave the city and waited for a reply to her ad while continuing to work at the bank, where every time she met the eyes of a colleague, she feared she had been recognized. Finally, a miracle! A response arrived in the post, from an SS man named Leming, who was looking for a bookkeeper and part-time translator with office duties. He was in charge of the Polish agricultural cooperative in the spa resort town of Busko-Zdrój, northeast of Kraków. It was just what her landlady in Lvov had recommended. The offer came with a small salary and the promise of a little food from the cooperative’s canteen.
Laura accepted immediately and Leming set a date, writing that he would pick her up on his return to Kraków from a vacation in Germany and drive her to Busko-Zdrój. Laura gave notice at the bank, told her landlord she was leaving, and gathered her and Zofia’s few possessions. But there was no word from Leming on the appointed day. Frantic, she rushed by bus to the airfield to learn that Leming’s flight had been delayed. She waited hours for the plane to arrive and then had him paged. She hadn’t known what to expect, but still she was startled when a stern-looking and stubbly middle-aged man showed up in a gray SS tunic and an armband bearing a swastika.
The thought that she had been hired by a Nazi was promptly replaced by the fear that he had already decided to fire her. As she introduced herself, he was complaining about the delayed flight and the “wretched Poles.” He promptly informed her that he would have nothing to do with her.
Laura was desperate. She couldn’t return either to her job or to their rented room at the Polish officer’s house.
“Bitte, Herr Leming—” she began.
“Useless people!” he spat at her, saying he should’ve hired a German fräulein in the first place.
She reminded him in German of his promise, saying she’d given up her job and lodging. Her little girl and she would have nowhere to go. Tears filled her eyes.
Leming said that was her problem.
“But I have your letters to me. You state very clearly—”
He turned on his boot heels to go, saying that he was sure she would have no problem finding other employment.
She played the only card left in her hand. She took a deep breath and said, “Herr Leming! I don’t imagine the Gestapo would be very pleased to know that you are not a man of your word.” She could hardly believe the words that were coming out of her mouth.
He could have her arrested; it would be nothing to him. But when he turned back to face her, he looked worried, even frightened. Laura barely knew what to make of his expression. What chance did anyone have against secret police so powerful that an empty threat from a single mother could be instantly effective? Leming looked her up and down, stroked his chin, and said, “Well, well, Frau Tymejko, very good. Your German is excellent and you are obviously not a typical Pole.”
It was the biggest automobile Zofia had ever seen that came to pick them up the next day. The chauffeur stared straight ahead behind the wheel while Leming himself opened the back door and beckoned to them. Zofia would have been truly frightened by her mother’s new employer if her mother didn’t seem so pleased about going to work and eager to get into the car.
Leming had a large, lined face, big for his body, with a pointed, pomaded widow’s peak that made him look like the Count Dracula puppet Zofia had once seen in a department store window. Under his deeply furrowed forehead, which featured one sinister groove that bisected his forehead vertically, were two heavy-lidded eyes. His chin was so deeply cleft that it almost looked like someone’s bottom, but with stubble. Zofia was fascinated by this chin, as she had been by the Totenkopf on the SS hats.
But the part of Leming’s face that she could barely take her eyes off of—that she had to force herself to ignore—was the short smudge of a mustache between his nose and thin upper lip, just like Adolf Hitler’s.
Zofia sat quietly on the soft gray velour seat with her mother. Herr Leming himself hardly said a word during the two-hour journey to Busko-Zdrój. The town was small and no longer full of the well-dressed people who normally flocked to it for its famous natural sulfur springs. No one looked like they even knew a war was going on. The sanatorium was in a large beautiful park with a garden and chestnut trees, but surrounded by a town that looked like a place where nothing much ever happened.
But, in fact, a great deal had just happened. Busko-Zdrój’s little ghetto, which had been created in April 1941, had already been liquidated by the time they arrived. Its two thousand Jews had been transferred to Jedrzejow, joining 4,000 others from the ghettos of Lodz, Wloclawek, and Warsaw on their way to the Treblinka death camp.
Leming offered Laura and Zofia a room in his own apartment, but Laura declined, knowing what that meant.
“As you wish,” he said. “I can see you are not eine Mädchen für alles.” A woman for all to enjoy.
“But I’ll be the best bookkeeper you’ve ever had,” she replied.
Laura and Zofia ended up sharing a room attached to a granary that had only a paraffin stove to warm them. It was early November but so cold it might as well have been January. Zofia, who seemed constantly sick, was sniffling and sneezing more than ever. Her mother wouldn’t leave her alone anymore, so she took her to the local grammar school and told the headmaster that Zofia’s birth certificate had been destroyed in the war, but that she had turned six—not five—in July. The ruse worked. Zofia was both tall and smart for her age, and her reserve made her seem even older. Within a week of their arrival, Zofia joined the first grade class.
By the spring of 1943, mother and daughter moved again, this time to a two-room, first-floor apartment facing a courtyard. It was much nicer than the granary—in fact, the mayor of Busko lived upstairs with his family—but not at all as nice as the homes of some of Zofia’s classmates.
In their new place, Laura and Zofia slept on two single beds in a room with pale green walls. The kitchen, which was painted orange, contained a stove, a table, and three chairs. Zofia started eating better than she had in a long time. There was milk, bread, jam, eggs, butter, potatoes, onions, beets, cucumbers, and even a little meat, and in the nearby woods and fields the two of them picked gooseberries and wild strawberries. Zofia was surprised to learn that her mother was something of an expert on mushrooms who collected wild borowik mushrooms for soups and omelets. Zofia hadn’t eaten so well in a long time.
Zofia made a couple of friends, but she sensed a gulf. Many of the children in her class had two parents, bigger homes, even relatives with farms, which meant a steady supply of the meat and fruit that Zofia seldom saw. But she fit in as best she could, giggling with the others at news of the Jews’ fate. What were the Jews thinking? Her teacher compared the Warsaw ghetto uprising to a mouse trying to stop a locomotive.
One of her friends had quite a lot of toys, which made Zofia so envious that one afternoon she pocketed a small toy horse. That night, after suffering a great deal over her theft, knowing it was wrong, she confessed the crime to her mother, who said she had to return it. Which, being a most obedient girl, she did.
And her mother was different from the other mothers too—prettier, more sophisticated, but also so joyless and demanding. In her anxiety, she occasionally still drilled Zofia.
“Where’s your father? Who is your Savior?” Zofia began to hate her.
“If you don’t stop,” she snapped at her mother one day, “I’m going to report you to the Gestapo!”
Now Laura knew how Leming had felt. It was the only time she ever slapped her daughter.
When Zofia wasn’t cursing her mother, she was trying desperately to please her.
One day she decided to clean the wood floor in the kitchen by pouring a bucketful of water over it. This was apparently not the right method, because when her mother came home and saw the results, she had a fit—which to Zofia seemed wildly out of proportion to the misdeed. She had only a single toy named Halinka to amuse her, a large doll, blond and blue-eyed like Zofia herself, that her mother had bought from a fleeing German family, and so Zofia often resorted to playing in puddles, another activity her mother didn’t find amusing. She arranged for Zofia to stay after school with a Polish woman and her two young sons, but one day the boys took a hot poker out of the fire and convinced Zofia that she should touch it. Laura didn’t find this funny either and stopped the after-school visits.
Zofia returned to being a latchkey child, condemned to spend many more hours than she would have liked with her two favorite books. One was a Scandinavian fable about a bear named Kurol who was king of the forest. The other was called Mr. Thermometer, a poem about a sickly child much like herself. Later her mother would buy her a small walleyed bear with a quizzical expression to keep her and Halinka company, but Zofia barely knew how to play. Tea parties were foreign to her. She knew nothing of nonexistent tea and invisible cakes.
“What do you think of Halinka’s dress, Bear?” she’d ask, wait a few seconds, then say, “Well, that just shows how much you know about girls’ dresses.”
“Halinka thinks you’re handsome, Bear,” she’d say, then pause. “Now you say something nice about her. . . . Yes, go ahead. . . . That’s very nice of you, Bear. Yes, I think she has beautiful hair, too.”
The neighbors made sure Laura knew that their furnished apartment had been occupied by Jews before they were deported. Laura lived not among Jews, but among their things. The furniture in their apartment. The sidewalks on which she walked were paved with gravestones from the Jewish cemetery; the dresses the town’s poor Polish Catholic girls wore were made from Jewish prayer shawls.
Whenever Laura slipped on the icy stone step by the front door, she was convinced that the previous occupants were reprimanding her from their crowded graves.
Occasionally Zofia would walk around town after school, looking in the gift shop window or the ice cream store, wishing she had a few zlotys. Other times, she’d go to the park, sit under a chestnut tree, and read. One day she saw notices posted in the park that a Pole was going to be executed in the town square the next day. She didn’t think she’d like watching a Pole being killed, so she stayed home. On the following day, she did venture into the square to pay her mother a visit at work in the two-story stone agricultural cooperative. Right there, near the front door, at the base of the front of the building, she saw streaks of blood. More blood had pooled, and dried, between the stones of the sidewalk.
Zofia stared, trying to summon a mental picture of the event that had left these stains. Next to her, a man shook his head. He wore a brown overcoat that was too big for him and had probably belonged to a bigger, and now dead, man.
It wasn’t that Zofia had become inured to the apparent cheapness of human life in Poland—she still shuddered at what could happen to her mother or her—but like all children, even in a time of war, little pleasures loomed large, none larger than the treat her mother brought home from work one evening: a Suchard chocolate bar that Herr Leming had given her. Zofia couldn’t recall ever having tasted chocolate, but she must have. Why else would her mouth water at the sight of it? Chocolate, fresh vegetables, and fruit were almost impossible for most ordinary Poles to obtain. When Zofia came down with scurvy from a lack of vitamin C, one of her aunts in Kraków had somehow acquired an orange and sent it to her. But an orange was such a luxury that Laura was able to trade it to a nearby farmer for enough apples to last the entire winter and cure the scurvy. But chocolate? It was in her mother’s hand just inches away, and her eyes grew wide.
Then, just as her mother was about to give her the candy, she suddenly pulled it back.
“Mama!” Zofia protested, but not before the candy had already disappeared into an apron pocket.
Her mother said it might be poisoned.
Zofia was perplexed. “Poisoned?”
“You know Herr Leming, the man I work for?” She explained that she didn’t trust him. He was a German and might try to poison them.
“But why would he poison us?”
She explained that the Germans hated the Poles almost as much as they hated the Jews.
This was disturbing news to Zofia. The Jews were detestable, dirty, and worthless. Her teacher had made that clear. Besides, the evidence was everywhere. Why else would some of the streets of Busko be paved with Jewish gravestones? But why would the Germans hate Zofia herself, a Polish girl who went to church every Sunday, even when her mother’s headaches prevented her from going with her daughter? The figure of God depicted in the fresco on the church’s ceiling, a fatherly-looking man with a flowing white beard, was a great comfort to a girl whose own father had been taken away. She was going to take her First Communion in less than a year. She knew that Jesus Christ was going to be there with her.
“The Germans couldn’t hate us. Not like they hate the Jews,” Zofia protested.
“They hate us too,” her mother explained, “and they have killed plenty of innocent Poles to prove it. Zosia, you must take my word for it. To them, we are slaves and they are the masters. But you must never, ever mention it. Do you understand? When you come to visit me at work, you mustn’t speak to Herr Leming unless spoken to, and then you must say very little.”
It was all beyond a child’s understanding.
“But the Jews killed Christ and they kill Christian children for their blood,” Zofia said, repeating what she’d heard so often at school.
“Well, I’ve known some Jews who were quite nice,” her mother said. “Anyway, my little Zosia, you must never look sad. You must always look happy, Zosia. Then Herr Leming and the others won’t bother us.”
Zofia wished her mother would stop telling her not to speak because she was already an expert at not speaking when not spoken to. She was a master at hiding sadness. She was a genius at not making any noise at all.
After midnight, when her mother was asleep, Zofia slipped out of bed and padded to the kitchen, where she found her mother’s apron hanging over the back of the chair by the stove. She slipped her hand into one pocket, and then the other, but both were empty. She stood on the chair, inspected the shelf and the crockery. Nothing. Zofia returned to bed empty-handed.
In the endless present moment that is childhood, Zofia could no more understand the disappearance of the chocolate bar than she could comprehend the disappearance of her father, or remember leaving the Lvov ghetto, or even of having lived there.
Laura and Zofia were walking in Spa’s Park one day when a hollow-eyed young woman and her little boy passed them, followed by two SS men with German shepherds. It was apparent from the leaves and twigs clinging to the mother’s and son’s torn clothes that they had just been found in the woods. And it was just as clear to Laura that the two Jews were about to be shot. Under the brims of their peaked hats with the death’s head medallions, the SS men wore the smug expressions of men who were doing their job well. The mother had her arm around her son’s tiny shoulder, determined to protect him from the horrible fate she must have known awaited them.
Laura closed her eyes in an equally futile attempt to ignore the situation. The woman was a mother too, trying to shield her child from the truth, but the knowledge that she and Zofia might survive their lie, while the other woman and her child had perhaps only minutes to live, tore at her heart. A wave of guilt and despair passed through her as she tugged Zofia onward. And what made it all even more unbearable was Zofia’s apparent lack of curiosity about the doomed pair. Or was it obliviousness? Either way, her own daughter seemed like a stranger to her, and the more successful Laura was in protecting her, the stranger Zofia became to her.
Still, she continued to test her on the catechism, on the invented fates of loved ones, on what she should say to strangers if she was ever questioned.
“Where’s your father? Who is your Savior? What is the name of your mother’s boss?” She pushed and pushed until Zofia began running away at the sight of her anxious mother approaching. Laura herself was sick of rehearsing the lies because the price of keeping her daughter alive was to lose her affection—even their very relationship.
Yet she envied her daughter’s ignorance. Better to believe you really are a Catholic schoolgirl than to know you’re a Jew hiding behind a mask of deception, without which you cannot survive. Better not to realize that the mother and son emerging from the woods would be shot and killed.
Was there not a point when terror simply took over a psyche like an invading army and annihilated the self? How was it that during the day Laura could function as well as she did, sitting at her desk in the agricultural cooperative, only feet away from Leming, translating Polish documents into German for him?
As the Polish Resistance in the area grew, it increasingly became Laura’s job to translate something far more unpleasant. Young Polish partisans were sabotaging trains carrying supplies to the Eastern Front, and those who were caught in the vicinity of Busko-Zdrój were brought before Herr Leming for interrogation. It was her job to translate Leming’s screaming accusations and denunciations from German to Polish, and then the partisans’ screaming defenses and denunciations from Polish to German. The adversaries kept having to pause and wait for her translations, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been another matter of life and death. Later, she would hear the cries of the partisans being tortured in the cooperative’s basement—the ones, that is, who hadn’t been taken out and shot.
Laura had to believe that one day soon history would regard Leming and his kind as evil, as a once-in-the-history-of-the-world aberration, or else civilization itself surely would have to come to an end. In the meantime, while she appeared to be doing her part voluntarily to facilitate the punishment of the partisans, she took the extraordinary step of tipping them off to the Germans’ military movements she learned about in Leming’s office. The Polish Resistance was becoming more active and Laura wanted to do something to help. It was a terrible gamble for Laura, all the more so since many Poles around her in the cooperative had begun to suspect her of precisely the opposite sympathies, of collaborating.
News that she spoke excellent German had circulated quickly in Busko-Zdrój, and her Polish neighbors were beginning to talk, wondering whose side she was really on. Her neighbors began questioning her and, worse, six-year-old Zofia. Now not only did she live in constant fear of being exposed to the Germans as a Jew, but she was suspected by the Poles of being a German spy! Once, when Zofia visited her mother at work during lunchtime, two Polish women followed them to the outhouse and stood outside eavesdropping, hoping to hear pro-Nazi conversation—with her daughter? What were they thinking? When Laura provided them with no ammunition, she felt that her Polish colleagues began to trust her. Laura detected a more general shift in the sentiments of the local, mostly peasant Poles toward the Jews. With news of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and other acts of heroism, contempt for the Jews was now grudgingly mixed with admiration.
However, Zofia came home from school to tell her that her teacher was laughing at the futility of the uprising. Poor Zofia, Laura thought: she had no idea how many times her mother had gotten off the bus because she thought a man across the way suspected she was a Jew, or because a woman’s stare might mean that she knew her from Lvov or Kraków. Zofia didn’t know how often she had altered her route or slipped down an alley when she thought she was being followed. She wished she could share with Zofia her happiness when the Jewish fighting held the Germans off for a month in Warsaw.
Laura began to care more and more about their appearance, buying a secondhand coal-heated iron. If she couldn’t be the mother to Zofia she would have liked, she at least wanted her daughter to look her best. When a neighbor borrowed the iron and didn’t return it, she marched over to demand it back. When the neighbor told her that a German soldier had swiped it from her, Laura proceeded immediately to SS headquarters and insisted on getting it back, which she did. In a world ruled by atrocities, correcting even the smallest injustice helped keep you sane.
In case of emergency, Laura kept a green velvet bag with wooden handles by the front door. In it were money, clothes, their identification papers, a few family photographs that she’d sewn into the lining, a bit of flour, sausage, some hardboiled eggs, a bottle of vodka to use as barter, and a humble family heirloom, a hand-hammered silver soup spoon. Twice before, at the sound of approaching German planes flying to the Eastern Front, her mother had grabbed the bag and rushed with Zofia to their apartment building’s cellar in Busko-Zdrój.
By the fall of 1944, the tide had turned. Zofia’s mother had overheard at her job that the Nazis were going to go door to door the next day looking for Poles to conscript as laborers in a last desperate attempt to win the war, which was not going well for the Germans. The Germans would have been looking for Jews, had any been left in Busko-Zdrój. The Russians were pushing back into Poland, and Zofia had even seen a broken line of bandaged and limping German soldiers trudging westward, tunics unbuttoned, soles flapping, looking as bedraggled as Jews.
Before dawn, Laura, already holding the velvet bag, woke up Zofia and led her through the empty streets of Busko-Zdrój. In her pocket, Zofia squeezed Bear, the small Steiff she had not yet bothered to name, and carried Halinka under her arm. She followed her mother out of the dark town and into a field dotted with conical haystacks. They saw no one else in the field. Laura marched them to one in the farthest corner, near the woods. Using their hands and a pitchfork she found nearby, they worked on the side that faced the forest, the least likely side to be seen. Within minutes, they had scooped out a cave in the middle of the haystack, just big enough for them to sit in.
As Zofia watched the sunrise with both Halinka and Bear in her lap, she hoped her friends were safe, especially Wacka—it was pronounced Vatska—her good friend from school, whose father was a shoemaker with a shop on the town square, opposite the gift shop, where her mother had recently bought her the bear. It was Wacka’s father who made Zofia’s shoes, the lace-up boots and sandals that her mother made sure were at least two sizes too big so Zofia had plenty of time to grow into them. It was one of the things Zofia looked forward to, when the war was over, that her mother would buy her shoes that fit her now and not at some time far off in the future.
“We’ll be safe here,” Zofia whispered to her two little companions, stroking the big doll’s hair and rubbing her thumb nervously over the bear’s little face with its tiny glass eyes that had been sewn on unevenly.
“Are you two warm enough?” she whispered later that morning, pretending to offer Halinka and Bear bits of hardboiled egg. She sat Bear, who had jointed arms and legs, down between her legs. “Make sure you share with Halinka,” she warned him.
This was an adventure, a rare outing for her these past few months. The sun was shining and her mother was relaxed for once, since even she felt safe sitting inside a haystack in a field of identical haystacks. Overhead, black bombers rumbled west like a formation of gruesome geese.
“Zosia,” her mother said, “someday it will be like before.”
“Like before” meant nothing to Zofia. As far back as she could remember, she and her mother were poor Poles on the move. When Zofia tried to remember things, she couldn’t quite get past some invisible sentry who guarded the first four or five years of her life. A couple of memory fragments slipped through, like the wonderful smells in her grandmother’s kitchen, her father returning from work, and the memory of her great-grandfather lying dead on his bed, dressed in a black suit. She even dimly remembered that they had buried him the next morning, someone pushing a crude coffin through the streets in a wheelbarrow.
It was toward the end of the war, when Laura couldn’t have bought a good night’s sleep with a million zlotys, that an itinerant Catholic priest walked into Busko-Zdrój from who knows where and drew a crowd of faith-hungry Poles to a field outside of town. For reasons Laura herself barely understood, she stood in the chilly spring wind and listened to him.
She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. With his black moth-eaten cassock and sunken dark eyes, he looked as if he had experienced his own share of suffering. He stood in the pasture with his Bible open in one palm and his other hand pointing to the sky. He told the crowd that they would overcome their suffering with hope and prayer, that Jesus had not forgotten them, and that God would punish the evildoers, and so on and so forth. So where’s God been since 1939? she thought.
Laura almost never went to church on Sunday with Zofia and her class, and she couldn’t even remember a single Jewish prayer, but the man’s message struck some forgotten chord in her. When he finally closed the Bible and made some blessing motions and thanked everyone for coming, Laura was overcome with the desire to go right up to him and ask him to hear her confession.
“Prosze pani, I will gladly hear your confession,” the priest said, “but only in a church, if you would be so kind as to show me the way to your house of God.”
She led him back across the field to St. Leonard’s Church, which was empty. She sat in a pew and he took a seat in the row behind her.
“I haven’t said a word to anyone for so long, and although I know I am putting my life in your hands by telling you, Father, I feel I must. I’m not even sure why, but please have mercy on me.”
“Go ahead, my daughter,” came the voice right behind her.
She swallowed and said, “I’m Jewish.”
There was silence behind her, which she broke by explaining that she and her daughter had been living as Catholics since 1942. What am I doing? she thought. Am I sending the two of us to our deaths after all this? After coming so far? A word from this tattered priest to the Gestapo and that would be it.
Still, there was silence, and Laura’s stomach tightened terribly.
She finally heard the priest say in a low voice, “You should not fear anyone or anything except God. Fear God only and you will be helped and he will have mercy on you. Bless you, my daughter.”
The priest mumbled something in Latin and fell silent.
She waited, but the priest said no more. When she finally turned to look at him, he was no longer in the pew. She caught a glimpse of his long coat as he exited the church and turned. She stood up, amazed at what she had done and overcome with the unfamiliar feeling that there was a supernatural being looking out for her and Zofia. Before the war, she had been a nonbeliever, bound only by ethical principles. What sense did it make that only now, after God had abandoned the Jews, she should feel imbued with some fresh hope and renewed strength to survive? And yet she felt a presence.
She really didn’t know what to think. She had been the beneficiary of more than her share of sheer luck, but she didn’t believe she had been chosen. She didn’t believe she had earned it. She and Zofia had escaped deportation several times. Why? Because she was pretty? Because she spoke perfect German? Because her daughter was blond?
She had lived undetected among the Nazis. Why? Because she did the Polish officer and his family a favor? Because her landlady had given her a Christian prayer book and a good piece of advice?
During the bitterly cold winter of 1944 to 1945, some happiness arrived for both of them in the form of Laura’s much younger sister, Putzi, who had against all the odds managed to make her way to Busko in a horse-drawn cart to live with them. She had spent the past two years in Kraków, posing as a Catholic and working under the name Ksenia Osoba as a housekeeper for a German family. Putzi had left her job when her German employers had fled from the advancing Russians back to Germany. Laura introduced her to Zofia by her Catholic nickname, Nusia.
Putzi was shorter than Laura, with a round face and high forehead. It was hard to overestimate the joy Laura felt at this reunion, with her husband, parents, and brothers gone. And Zofia was delighted to have a companion in her twenties, almost as close in age to Zofia as she was to Laura. Where Zofia’s mother was so strict and tense—she was the oldest daughter in her family, after all—Putzi, the youngest, was theatrical and fun-loving. At times Putzi seemed more like a child even than Zofia. Her mere presence lit up their two-room apartment and brought out an expressive side of Zofia that her mother hadn’t seen in years.
Best of all, Putzi brought with her the most wonderful possession—a goose feather comforter. For Zofia, it was the epitome of luxury—soft, fluffy, warm, and white in a world of black boots, fear, and no chocolate—and it was to rest permanently on Zofia’s single bed, which she was to share with the aunt she knew only as Nusia. After just one night, though, Putzi complained to her sister right in front of Zofia that she kicked her legs in her sleep and kept her up all night.
Putzi said that she’d sleep on the floor.
“You will do no such thing, Nusia,” Laura said. To avoid any slips, of course, they addressed each other only by their adopted Christian names.
Listening, Zofia thought that her mother might as well have been Putzi’s mother too.
“But, Bronia,” Putzi said, using Laura’s Catholic nickname, “she kicks like a mule!”
Laura proposed they alternate, one week at a time.
“So instead of getting no sleep,” Putzi replied, “I’ll get half the sleep I need!”
They both laughed—Zofia couldn’t remember hearing her mother’s laughter, ever—and the two sisters hugged each other tightly.
“Now set the table, Nusia. I saved a chicken for you.”
“It’s a miracle I got here,” Putzi wrote her other older sister, Fryda, who was living in Germany, shortly after arriving. “I hope I will manage. I sang Christmas carols, and I just play with little Zosia and make her little things she loves for dinner. I got lucky I came here during the holidays, since everyone treats you with good food. Bronia cooked half a chicken. The little one received some toys and skates. She is a really sweet and good-natured child and very talkative. You cannot stop her! She engages everyone. It’s just that she coughs, the croup, though not to a great degree.”
For the first time that she could remember, Zofia felt like she had a family. Maybe not like the other girls in school, but a family nonetheless. Having Putzi around softened her mother and took the sting out of Laura’s constant anxiety.
“Why does she make me recite the catechism all the time?” Zofia complained to her aunt one day.
“Because she loves you, Zosia my dear. Because she wants you to be a good Christian. Then, if you pray to God for this horrible war to be over, maybe he’ll listen.”
But it was Putzi who did most of the listening—to Zofia, who at last had someone to talk to after school when her mother was at work. Life seemed almost normal. Putzi began discreetly tutoring Polish students, which Laura was already doing—they snuck in and out of their apartment at night—and they were all beginning to feel somewhat like human beings again. Between her mother’s salary and their modest incomes from tutoring there was more food and even the occasional new dress.
Putzi was a talented seamstress who had once bartered her sewing skills for bread with one of her Catholic neighbors back in Lvov. Now, in addition to mending their clothes, she rendered Zofia speechless when she fashioned out of an old blue-striped blouse a little coat for her bear. Zofia was delighted. Putzi’s talents extended to the kitchen as well, where she prepared welcome alternatives to her sister’s repertoire. So consistently good was her cooking that it would become legendary when one of the peasants she tutored brought her as payment a goose, a rare delicacy, and Putzi managed to burn it beyond recognition.
Putzi’s arrival made Laura long all the more for Fryda. All they had was a letter, postmarked Gelsenkirchen, Germany, where she had volunteered for a women’s labor camp after her boss at a pharmacy in Bochnia, near Kraków, threatened to expose her when she wouldn’t sleep with him. Fryda, a fragile beauty in the best of times, said she was slowly being starved to death and pleaded for food parcels. In addition, she wrote, the Allies were bombing the camp daily and she was hiding in a shelter, wanting to die. Laura tearfully put together a package of what she could spare and sent it off.
There were times when Laura could barely sleep, her fear of exposure was so great, and she would lie in bed with the thoughts flying around in her head like bullets. When she did doze off, sleep was like another occupied country, in which her husband and all the dead were alive again. It is amazing how much a human being can suffer, she thought to herself more and more. One is made of steel. You spring back and carry on. But her secrets were growing too big to be contained, and it was worse because she had no one to share them with but Putzi.
“I’ve had no choice, but for months, she’s been running and hiding when she sees me coming,” Laura confided to Putzi, tilting her head in the direction of Zofia’s bed, where only a tiny hand could be seen peeking out from under the eiderdown.
Putzi told her that when the war was over, there would be time to make amends.
“If this is over. And by then, I’m afraid it will be too late.”
Putzi said she’d speak to Zosia. “I’ll make her understand.”
“She’s so hateful,” Laura added. “Do you know what I heard her say to her doll the other day? She told Halinka not to play with Jews. She said, ‘They kill Christian babies, you know.’ Now I understand how easy it is to raise anti-Semites. There’s really nothing to it.”
A letter from Fryda arrived, this time from the Fraxel Fabrik company in Hanau am Main, Germany.
My Dears!
I already wrote you once that I was transferred to a different factory, in which I am already two weeks. I was taken quite arbitrarily, straight from work. I suppose additional workers were needed here. Although others traveled with me, they were assigned to agricultural work while I was selected to sit here by myself. The town is quite large, the factory as well, but the conditions as usual. Maybe this war will finally end and we will happily tell stories about our experiences. Chin up, don’t pick up anything in the street, because there is war going on and one has to be careful. Don’t let anyone take advantage of you.
Kisses, Fryda
Like everyone else, Fryda took the precaution of writing in code, so the truth had to be read between the lines. Phrases like “taken quite arbitrarily,” “the conditions as usual,” and “we will happily tell stories about our experiences” all hid the reality of forced labor and forced optimism in the face of catastrophe. No, they would never tell stories happily, but at least, Laura hoped, they would be able to tell them.
By the end of 1944, there was something in the air in Busko. Even a seven-year-old girl could sense it. Something like confusion and disarray. In Zofia’s school there was much talk that the Germans were really losing the war. Soon, people were saying, the skies would be full of Allied planes and the Polish people would finally be freed from their German occupiers.
Around this time, while Zofia was visiting her mother at the cooperative, there was a commotion in the courtyard behind the building and Zofia joined a group of Polish workers at the window. What she saw was inexplicable.
In the courtyard, six uniformed Nazi officials—Herr Leming among them—circled a long, black Mercedes touring car, festooned with tiny Nazi flags. The men were evenly spaced and moved slowly counterclockwise. As each of them passed one of the tires, he would kick it softly without breaking stride. On a command from one of them, they reversed direction and continued to circle the car clockwise. On another order, each man’s right arm shot up in unison to “Heil Hitler!” Then they all piled into the car and drove off through the courtyard gate.
Laura couldn’t help relishing the sight of German soldiers throwing their weapons away en masse and fleeing just ahead of the Russians. But the killings continued. The retreating Nazis were emptying the camps and forcing the prisoners on death marches westward to relocate them to labor camps for a last-ditch effort to win the unwinnable. As if not enough Jews had already died, hundreds of thousands more would succumb to starvation, illness, and exposure to the cold. And despite Churchill’s promise of their imminent arrival, the Allied forces had not yet come to stop them.
In the spring of 1945, with Germany’s defeat assured, Laura and Putzi were both concerned that they hadn’t heard from Fryda in many weeks. There had been no acknowledgment of the last two food packages. Fryda’s new camp and the factory where she worked were close to a rail line, and when reports of repeated heavy Allied bombing of Germany began circulating, Laura feared the worst. Rail lines were a primary target.
Why, she thought? Why hadn’t the Allies managed to bomb any of the rail lines carrying Jews to their deaths in the last few years, yet they could somehow manage to bomb her sister, poor Fryda, the prettiest of them all?
Laura accepted that it was just the three of them now, plus a cousin Toncia in Israel, and her uncle Max Schaerf, who had left Austria for Cuba and had since settled in New York City—where Laura now dreamed of going. She didn’t allow herself to feel safe even for a moment. The Germans might be on the run, but the Poles in Busko-Zdrój weren’t exactly kind to the Jews. When those who had survived both deportation and the gas chambers came filtering back to reclaim their homes, they found their fellow townspeople ensconced there with no intention of moving, or even letting the Jews reclaim their possessions. Instead the Poles threatened to—and maybe did, as far as Laura knew—shoot their own homeless countrymen. What recourse did the Jews have anyway? Complain to the new Soviet authorities, immersed as they were in setting up a local government, and who despised the Jews even more than they despised the Poles? Every Jew in Poland was doing his or her best to get out of the country.
The Soviets came and were as loud as the Germans. They were peasants. They camped with their horses in courtyards, including Laura’s and Zofia’s, drinking vodka all the time, paring off chunks of black bread from huge round loaves (and offering pieces to Zofia), and biting into raw onions as if they were apples. They relieved themselves wherever they wanted, even in the courtyard—even in an empty office at the agricultural cooperative, where Laura continued to work. They moved into Poles’ apartments. They ate horse meat. Most of the Soviet soldiers seemed to know nothing of modern life. Laura’s daughter stared in amazement one day when a soldier, frightened by a ticking pocket watch, shot it with his service revolver.
But the cloud of fear had lifted for Laura. In the May Day parade, she marched behind her neighbor, the mayor, with a rainbow ribbon across her chest, and with Zofia by her side.
Putzi was a bigger concern for the moment. She was tempting fate with a new boyfriend she’d acquired after starring opposite him in a local play at the cooperative. He was a handsome Polish Catholic named Tadeusz, a member of the Resistance and the brother of one of Laura’s coworkers. The two had fallen in love and were seeing each other regularly, much to Laura’s distress. It would still be dangerous if anyone, even a Resistance fighter, discovered that Putzi and her family were Jewish. The Poles had already proven themselves to be more than capable of murdering Jews without any help at all.
Laura begged Putzi not to fall in love with the boy.
“It’s too late,” Putzi said. “I already have.”
“It can’t end well. Someday we will leave Busko-Zdrój. We can’t stay here forever. And then you’ll have to forget him.”
“Then I’ll stay with him here.”
“No. We must stick together. He’s not right for you.”
“How can you say that? You see me with Tadeusz! You see how in love we are! He wants to marry me!”
“You’ll see. You’ll regret it. How can you put our lives at risk?” Laura said, who was haunted by her own ill-advised confession to the priest. “Haven’t we lost enough family? His brother probably already knows we’re Jewish. I’ve worked alongside him for the last two years and he’s no dummy. You know the Poles are better at identifying Jews than the Germans.”
As it happened, Tadeusz himself soon figured out without much difficulty that Putzi was Jewish. He not only had grown up with a Jewish family—and spoke better Yiddish than Putzi!—but he had been badly treated by the Nazis and sympathized with Jews. The relationship continued—for now.
For Zofia, life was better. The Sunday afternoons she spent with her mother and Putzi in Spa’s Park were more relaxed than before, especially when they weren’t downwind from the rotten-egg smell of the sulfur baths in the grand building at the far end. From the Danish Red Cross came candy and from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association came Spam and Crisco, which Zofia greedily spread on bread that had not seen much butter. The Red Cross arranged a trip for the town’s children to a convent in Rabka, another spa town in the mountains, where Zofia got to kiss a prelate’s relic ring, a moment that transported her.
A few weeks before the first Christmas after the war, Zofia wrote Santa Claus:
I am requesting candy or a small doll or cookies or a sled. I am asking for skis, but most of all I would like a small doll, but dressed in that pretty dress in the gift shop window and wearing shoes. Sometimes I was a good girl and sometimes not. I cannot tell exactly how many times, because I did not count. I do not know if I deserve it all. I beg your forgiveness and Mommy and Auntie, but I would like to ask you not to be angry with me, I will be good.
Zofia
What Laura wanted for Christmas was something else: freedom. She had no address for her uncle Max Schaerf, but in desperation wrote him anyway in care of “New York City, America.” She sent it off in January 1946, and waited week after week for a reply. In the meantime, the past was impossible to escape—both in her mind and in reality. She heard from friends that Julek, the Pole who had escorted them to Kraków and stole their luggage, had accompanied her brother Manek to the Lvov train station two and a half years before on the day he was, or so Julek had told her, hanged. Suspecting him of betraying her brother, Laura had to fight the urge to report him to the Russians as an anti-Communist.
“They’d know what to do with him,” she told Putzi.
“Well, why don’t you?”
Laura sighed. “It won’t bring Manek back. And, anyway, how can I become what I despise?”
Laura and Putzi played along with the Russians. Although neither she nor Putzi could bring themselves to become members of the Communist Party, as long as they didn’t reveal their Judaism they felt safer than before. They didn’t feel so alone and different inside, because more and more Polish people around them had also lost family. Yet not to be able to commiserate with the returning Jews made them feel guilty. Putzi, Zofia, and she were neither real Catholics nor real Jews. The war had taken their relatives’ lives, but it had also taken the survivors’ identities.
Finally, miraculously, on April 12 she heard from her uncle.
My dear niece:
It is the third day since I have received your registered letter of January 14, and still I am shocked about the tragic news contained in it. The Huns have surely done a thorough job, and no one could properly describe or picture their misdeeds because their atrocities were and still are beyond human imagination.
My hands are trembling, and I don’t know how to begin this letter. After you have gone through such torture and sufferings, what consolation can a letter—even from your nearest relative—bring to you? . . . All of you need real help. My wife Clara and I are willing to do all what is humanly possible. . . . Write us immediately whether you intend to join us, and to immigrate into the United States. . . .
Meanwhile we will try to send you a few food packages; your aunt Rosa, married to Emil Hoenig, is living in London. . . . A copy of your letter has been airmailed to her; and you may be sure that she will get in touch with you as soon as possible.
With love and affection
Max, Clara, and Howie Schaerf
It was all very perilous. If the Russians discovered that Laura was trying to get them to the West, the three of them would be thrown in jail, if not worse.
Uncle Max advised them to consult an immigration lawyer, since their birthplace of Lvov was now in the Soviet Union, under whose quota they would come. He told them to apply for a visa at the nearest American Consulate. Quick attention is necessary, he wrote. The best alternative for you would be to join us here in America.
But America’s door was not open very wide and would take only a fraction of Jewish refugees immediately after the war. President Roosevelt seemed far more concerned about not antagonizing the oil-rich Saudi Arabians than helping the remnants of European Jewry. The British were blocking immigration to Palestine.
The remnants of Laura’s family, Putzi and Zofia, would have to bide their time in a country now cleansed of Nazis but not of virulent anti-Semitism. The summer of 1946 suddenly provided ample proof that the war on Poles had hardly ended. The Nazis had come for people at all hours, but the Russians made them disappear quietly at night. One never knew who might be listening to you; Zofia learned to whisper, even among her friends. Anti-Jewish riots erupted in Kraków and spread. Every town had its violent incidents. On July 4, 1946, in Kielce, not far from Busko, Polish townspeople accused Jews of kidnapping a boy who had mysteriously disappeared. A mob proceeded to murder forty-two Jews, including two children and a concentration camp survivor. The boy turned up later, safe and sound; he had been off at a friend’s and afraid to tell his parents the truth. By the end of 1947, more than 2,000 Jews had been murdered after the war in Poland without any help from the Nazis.
The surviving Jews had crossed a great desert against all odds, dragged themselves to what they thought was safety, only to find themselves locked out of their own lives or staring into a newly dug grave.
Zofia remained unaware of the drama around her. The agricultural co-op organized an outing for employees and their families to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a cathedral in the village of that same name. Zofia and the others rode all night in heavy rain in the back of a truck. To make matters worse, the windshield wipers didn’t work and the roads, cratered by bombs, provided endless rude shocks. Despite it all, when they arrived in the early morning and Zofia spotted the peacocks strolling the grounds, she was delighted. The shrine contained “the Black Madonna,” an ancient icon that would work miracles if people prayed hard enough. According to popular belief, prayers induced the Madonna to halt a Swedish invasion of Poland in 1655, and to drive the Russians out of Warsaw in 1920. Hitler took such beliefs seriously enough that, just to be on the safe side, he prohibited pilgrimages during the Nazi occupation. With the Nazis gone, Poles flocked once again to the cathedral to pray for their nation.
When Zofia’s group entered the cathedral to take early morning Mass, the walls were sparkling with silver and gold pieces that they were told represented the parts of pilgrims’ bodies that had been cured. It was magical. Zofia knelt before the famous icon of the Black Madonna holding baby Jesus, which was said to have been painted on a tabletop built by Jesus himself. She was transfixed. The photograph of the icon she bought that day was one of the few things she would one day carry out of Poland with her. She had never felt so safe before, although Czestochowa was just sixty miles from the town of Oswiecim, which the Germans had renamed Auschwitz.
In the fall of 1947, Laura heard there was a small window opening up for emigration—not for Jews, still stymied by strict quotas in America, Canada, and the British occupiers in Palestine—but for non-Jews with job offers abroad. By now Laura had in hand a letter from her mother’s sister Rosa and her husband, Emil Hoenig, in London, promising her and Putzi jobs as domestics. Soon after, she sat in a Polish government office with Putzi and Zofia, watching as the official studied their false identity papers.
“So you, Bronislawa, will work for your aunt and uncle, is that it? And they’ve arranged for you, Ksenia”—he said, reading Putzi’s Christian name off her document—“to work for another family?”
The women nodded.
“But you say that you’re sisters,” he said, tapping the end of his fountain pen against the blotter.
“We are.”
“But your last names are different.”
Laura stiffened. She had to think of something.
“Your last name is Tymejko,” he said, looking at Laura. Then he turned to Putzi. “And yours is Osoba. How can that be?”
“I can explain, sir,” Laura said. She paused, thinking about how Putzi looked so much more Slavic than she did.
“I’m waiting,” the official said.
“Well, Ksenia was an abandoned child,” Laura began. “My mother found her under a tree, in a basket, in Lvov when she was just three months old—and she adopted her. And we grew up as sisters. That’s the reason.” Laura shot Zofia a look that said, Don’t react or change your expression.
Zofia hardly needed the reminder. She sat still while the official quizzed her mother and her aunt, keeping her eyes on her hands, which were folded in her lap. Laura proceeded to tell a story that was impossible to follow.
“I don’t understand,” the man said. “Why didn’t your mother give her your last name?”
“Oh, that. Well, sir, Ksenia went through a rebellious phase when my mother told her she was adopted, she didn’t want to be a Tymejko anymore. You know how teenagers are. She decided her last name would be Osoba, the name of her close friend, and later she changed it legally. Our mother was not happy about it, but what can you do?” She turned to her sister.
“Yes,” Putzi said, nodding.
The official turned again to Putzi. “Your mother, the one who took you in and raised you, she must have been very upset with you.”
“Yes, she was.”
“My sister is very stubborn!” Laura said with a laugh.
Zofia looked up only when the man suddenly addressed her.
“Young lady? Did you know that your aunt was abandoned as a baby?”
Zofia nodded.
“Excuse me?” the official said.
“Yes,” she said softly, although it was all news to her.
She must have done the right thing, because the man looked at all three of them, stamped the papers on his desk, handed them all to her mother, and said, “I don’t like it, but off you go!”
They left the office with precious permission to leave the country. Having jumped that first hurdle, Laura now had to travel to Warsaw to obtain work visas. Uncle Max had told her to see representatives of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society there, who were doing their best to help tens of thousands of displaced Jews to emigrate. For once she wouldn’t have to pretend she was Bronislawa Tymejko, a Catholic. She would only have to prove that she was Jewish, not so easy for someone holding only false papers, but at least she could speak Yiddish. Or could she? While preparing for the trip to Warsaw, she realized to her horror that she couldn’t remember more than a word or two of it. Nor could she recall the names of her two brothers, or of her parents—and not even the name of her own husband! It was as if she had been in shock since 1939 without even knowing it. The war seemed to have leveled her Jewish identity as surely as the Germans had leveled Warsaw. Now that she was about to become a Jew again, she had forgotten what it meant.
“Putzi,” she said, “I can’t remember my husband’s name!”
Her sister looked at her blankly.
“Oh, come on,” Laura said. “You too? What’s happened to us? Can you name our siblings?”
Putzi opened her mouth slightly, as if about to say something, then closed it again.
“I can only come up with Manek,” Laura said.
“Well,” Putzi finally replied, “don’t ask me.”
Laura didn’t think such a thing possible—that the same brain that had dissembled and connived and fought to stay alive could not now produce the most basic information about her own life. While she had used every ounce of energy to endure one horrific hardship after another, she hadn’t been aware of the cost, that her previous life was being amputated. Fortunately, only a few days later in Busko-Zdrój, she ran into a Jew she’d known in Lvov, and the strangest thing happened. The man’s face was like a window through which she could suddenly see her past. Her husband Daniel Schwarzwald and his parents. Her parents, Josef and Mina. Her grandparents Moses and Sarah, and Mina. Her brothers Edek and Manek and sister Fryda. All gone now. She could see Daniel’s parents’ Lvov apartment, where they had lived for a year as newlyweds while waiting for their furniture to be made. Putzi, however—maybe because she was much younger and had less to remember—continued to block much of it out, and for months after Laura would patiently remind her of what had been.
The train to Warsaw was crowded and smelly, and when Laura reached the city she couldn’t find a place to sleep—an unhappy reminder of her arrival in Kraków with Zofia six years before, robbed of their luggage and having to scrounge a bed for the night. Warsaw had been reduced to a pile of rubble by the retreating Germans in 1944, and only a few sections of the city had since been rebuilt. Laura spotted a fellow Jew from the old days in Lvov, but after locking eyes briefly, they both looked away, still afraid to draw attention to themselves even though the Nazis were long gone.
Laura made her way to the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, armed with her most valuable possession, a diamond crescent pin, hidden in the heel of her shoe. It was always a good idea to be prepared with a bribe, but nothing could shorten the lines of people outside the Immigration Aid Society, and eventually, she gave up in despair. Her second trip to Warsaw proved equally unsuccessful. But on the third try, in January 1948, her luck changed. This time she was carrying three visas when she returned to Busko. She and Putzi were registered as “maids” and could remain in England only as long as they earned their living as housekeepers—Laura for her aunt and uncle and Putzi for another Jewish family of the Hoenigs’ acquaintance.
Not two weeks later, a very anxious Zofia had to leave Wacka and her other friends behind and board a train to Warsaw with her mother and aunt, en route to Gdynia, the Baltic Sea port and the waiting M/S Batory, a luxury liner that, like the three of them, had seen better days. The Batory, named after the sixteenth-century king of Poland, was as lucky to have survived the war as Laura, Putzi, and Zofia. The ocean liner started making the run from Gdynia to New York in 1936, but from 1939 till the end of the war she was a troop transport and a hospital ship for the Allies. In the summer of 1940, she secretly carried most of Britain’s gold reserves to Montreal for safekeeping. Two months later, she carried another precious cargo—700 British children—to Australia. She was involved in the evacuation of Dunkirk, the invasions of Oran, Algeria, and Sicily. She was under attack many times from German planes and submarines but escaped with only minor damage. In fact, her nickname after the war was Lucky Ship.
Zofia boarded with a small suitcase in one hand and her three-inch Steiff bear, named Bear, in the other. Halinka, unfortunately, hadn’t made it. She had slowly fallen apart after the war. Much of her hair had fallen out, then one of her eyes refused to open anymore, and soon Halinka was lying awkwardly in the corner. By the time they left for Gdynia, she had disappeared altogether.
On the Batory, Zofia shared a third-class cabin with her mother and aunt in the bottom-most part of the ship, which turned out to be a blessing: the Baltic crossing was very rough, and the rolling of the ship was less severe below the waterline. The waves could get so high that they sometimes crashed onto the deck, and seasickness was rampant among the passengers. Most of them stayed in their cabins for the whole voyage, unable to carry on a conversation, let alone indulge in the copious amounts of food served at the daily buffet. Despite their comparatively unrocky accommodations in steerage, Putzi and Laura were as nauseated as everyone else.
Everyone, that is, except for the seasoned crew—and the eleven-year-old Zofia, who was strangely unaffected by the endless rolling of the huge vessel. The girl, who had last tasted an orange at age six, now had hundreds of them to choose from, along with numerous varieties of bread, cheese, and sausages. Oh, and there were five types of herring and a dozen different desserts. Other than the odd passenger who ventured in during a momentary hiatus from vomiting, Zofia had the dining room all to herself.
This cheered the food staff to no end; they were overjoyed that someone was eating and kept applauding Zofia’s appetite and her hardiness.
It wasn’t just the dining room either. The entire ship became her private playground. Zofia had a grand time exploring every public corner of the immense Batory, and none was more impressive to her than the bathrooms. All she had known in Poland were outhouses; Zofia and her mother had shared one with the mayor of Busko-Zdrój, no less. Between the bountiful food and the sparkling bathrooms with flush toilets, Zofia felt she had died and gone to heaven. A heaven that kept heaving back and forth, but a heaven nonetheless.
In Southampton, Laura disembarked and stood on the pier overcome by emotions that had been bottled up for years. Only now that she was actually free did she begin to register some new measure of the horror she, Zofia, and Putzi had survived, and also the true miracle that her own courage, strength, and luck had somehow carried them through. Laura felt as if some literal, physical weight had just been lifted from her shoulders, and the tears, which she hid from the others, came.
Then the impossible happened. Even though the three of them had finally made it to freedom, disaster loomed again in the form of an immigration official who didn’t seem to want to let all three of them into England together. He scowled at the Christian identification papers that had passed muster with dozens of Nazis. He and dark-eyed, dark-haired Uncle Emil, who had traveled from London to greet his relatives, were shouting at each other in English while Laura and Putzi tried—and failed—to follow the argument. Zofia, frightened by this latest complication, sat very still. Laura suddenly interrupted the men, talking urgently and firmly in German. Uncle Emil tried his best to keep up with her as he translated for the official.
“She says that either all three of them must be admitted to the country, or none of them. Now she’s saying that for any of them to be separated is unthinkable after what they have been through. . . . And if they return to Poland, they will be imprisoned for the crime of trying to escape to a non-Communist country. Do you want to send us back to prison or worse, she’s saying, after everything we’ve been through?”
Once again, Laura had prevailed; after all she’d endured, she was not about to let a British functionary defeat her. They had at last left Poland behind; in five years, if all went well, they would become British citizens.
Emil finally led them through customs, and soon all four of them were on a London-bound train, much nicer than any train Zofia had ever been on before. She caught the attention of an older woman in a tweed suit, who noticed on Zofia’s face the look of a bewildered immigrant—it was, in fact, sheer anxiety—and offered her some unfamiliar coins, while muttering in an equally unfamiliar language. Zofia, who had been told her entire childhood not to talk to strangers, drew back and Uncle Emil had to intervene, first comforting her in German, and then apologizing to the lady in heavily accented English. Laura studied the landscape out the train window, surprised to see spent shells littered among the rubble of burned-out Southampton buildings. It reminded her of some child’s building-block project that had been destroyed by a resentful older brother. It hadn’t sunk in that the war had reached so far beyond Busko.
The journey ended for Zofia and Laura at 109 Belsize Road in Hampstead, where Emil and Zofia’s great-aunt Rosa lived. Rosa welcomed them by serving real English tea and cakes. Their home, one in a line of tidy three-story row houses, had escaped the London blitz, but just barely. While Rosa and Emil were in a shelter during a bombing raid on the railroad tracks behind the house, a German bomb had pierced the roof of their third-floor apartment but failed to explode. The bomb had been defused and removed, but not before the couple had moved to the second floor, where they lived with their dark and heavy Viennese Biedermeier furniture, which matched the mood in the apartment.
Because Emil and Rosa couldn’t get away with claiming to need two domestics, Putzi worked as a domestic for a Jewish family in Hampstead with small children that lived within walking distance from the Hoenigs’. They had barely enough room for Zofia and Laura, anyway; Laura slept on the couch in the living room, while Zofia slept on a foldout armchair in Emil’s study.
“Isn’t it nice,” Rosa said to Zofia that first night as she tucked her in, “that your great-uncle and I can give you such a nice home? I hope you’re a neat child. Do you put your things away?”
Since Zofia, as far as she could remember, had never had enough things to put away to make putting them away any kind of issue, she could answer her aunt with a clear conscience.
“Immer,” Zofia said. Always.
It was not a happy household. Rosa and Emil had left Austria after Kristallnacht in 1938, having lost their only child to tuberculosis, and between that loss and their reduced circumstances—he came from a wealthy Austrian family that owned oil fields in Eastern Poland, and he himself had been the business adviser to the Vienna Boys Choir—the atmosphere at 109 Belsize Road in northwest London was tense and overbearing. Rosa treated Laura more as an employee than as a niece. She was a perfectionist about the housework who demanded that Laura dust, clean, and wash just so, and was never satisfied. Rosa, who had recently broken her leg, kept barking instructions to Laura from an armchair, with her leg up on an ottoman. The thought was grossly small-minded, Laura knew, but she hadn’t endured enslavement by the Nazis only to be enslaved by her dead mother’s sister. For Laura, there were miserable moments when being back in Poland, just the three of them, almost seemed preferable to her new role as Aunt Rosa’s Cinderella.
Rosa repeatedly demanded gratitude for opening her home to them, and no amount of Laura’s and Zofia’s sincere thanks seemed to placate her. It was ironic that the two of them, who had managed to squeeze whatever small happiness they could out of their anxious situation in Busko-Zdrój, had somehow landed with dyspeptic relatives who seemed more joyless than they were.
Of course, the memories of their suffering—it was too weak a word—followed her to England. The sound of SS boots stomping in her dreams ruined her sleep. Her ambiguous religious identity had followed her as well. She had asked Rosa and Emil not to let on to Zofia that they were Jewish—at least not yet. Rosa and Emil, who were not observant Jews and did not attend synagogue, complied. Laura felt no pressure to reclaim her Judaism, but Zofia’s ignorance of her origins weighed on her more and more. Several months after arriving in London, when she wrote her cousin Toncia, who had left for Israel before the war, she was still struggling with the ordeal of survival.
My Dearest Toncia,
I got your letter two weeks ago, but I was so shaken that I didn’t have the strength to answer. I saw before my eyes all I lost. If Danek and Manek had crossed the border in 1939, they would have survived. It was not in the cards. I have changed a great deal since I became dependent only on myself. I am not as healthy as I used to be and I do not trust people like I used to.
I think you got my letter written in the summer, so you know how my life in hiding in Poland was. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to go to England, I would have stayed in Poland and I would have sunk into Christian life. I have to admit that the church can make a charming impression on simpletons like me. I was completely cut off from the life of Jews. For a few years, I even forgot what a Jew looks like.
Zosia, my daughter, looks just like Danek, light blond. Her light skin and light hair rescued me many times from disaster.
I am surprised that after all I have been through that I still look like a human being. I am most depressed by the awareness that I have lost my independence, and who knows for how long. My English is quite weak, but I am making progress. I cannot look for another job because I am registered as a maid. My relatives are good to me, but we live with them and not on our own. Here, we have nothing, that’s why I am somewhat sorry that I left Poland.
Laura wasted no time getting Zofia started on English lessons with a teacher who lived on the first floor named Mrs. Dora Camrass. On Zofia’s way up and down the stairs, she often ran into the occupants of the other apartment on the second floor, an elderly woman named Levinson and her middle-aged daughter, who were Jewish. She practiced her English salutations on the two of them when they met on the landing, but Zofia was otherwise afraid to engage them in a conversation. She saw no reason to despise them just because they were Jews, despite having been taught to do so at school in Busko-Zdrój, but that didn’t mean she had to like them any more than she liked the Jewish refugees she sometimes saw in the neighborhood, with their secondhand clothes and used faces.
For Zofia, life in London was at first full of wonder. Treats that had been impossible to find were now all around her, thanks to her great-uncle’s small candy and tobacco store near Victoria Station. Her mother, having finished her housekeeping by noon, usually brought Emil his lunch and stayed to work there, illegally, during the afternoons. Zofia spent quite a bit of time there as well, where she could help herself to Cadbury chocolate bars and Wall’s ice cream, which Emil did not seem very good at selling, so that she was welcome to all the ice cream that showed early signs of freezer burn. Zofia overheard Rosa complain to her mother that, despite his business expertise back in Vienna, her husband was simply not very good at selling retail.
Just as she had gorged on oranges aboard the Batory to the point where she couldn’t eat another one, now she gorged on Neapolitan ice cream until she couldn’t even bear to look at it. How strange, Zofia thought, that one reality could so quickly be replaced by another.
Given Laura’s own weakened sense of her Jewishness, it crossed her mind to try to avoid the question of Zofia’s Catholic identity. However, now that they had escaped a country where to be a Jew was still a condition often enough punishable by death, she felt a strong ethical compulsion to reunite Zofia with her original faith. Moreover, if Zofia was her life and her salvation, which she was, how could Laura allow her to continue to be a pretend Catholic anti-Semite? It was pretend, wasn’t it? A necessary deception? No, Laura knew that it wasn’t pretend to her daughter. But even if it wasn’t pretend for Zofia, how could Laura go through life with a daughter who believed that Jews drank the blood of Christian babies and whatever other garbage they had filled her with in school? What mattered more—Laura’s own sanity or sparing her daughter the shock of learning, after everything she’d been through, that she was Jewish? To spare Zofia, to sustain the deception on her behalf, was tantamount to handing the Nazis yet another victory. Not that Zofia would understand that now, but she would thank her mother in the long run.
If Zofia didn’t know she was a Jew, how could she ever know her own mother? And if Zofia was truly an anti-Semitic Catholic, how could Laura ever truly love her own daughter?
The only question was how and when to tell her. The rapid approach of Passover just two months after they arrived in London supplied the perfect opportunity.
The neighborhood around the new Swiss Cottage tube stop was full of Jewish refugees, most of them alone, having lost their entire families to Hitler. Rosa and Emil, following the seder tradition, invited a few of these strangers who had nowhere else to go, to share the Feast of the Unleavened Bread.
A few days before the seder, Laura decided she could wait no longer and asked Zofia to accompany her on a neighborhood shopping trip.
Zofia, who was very well attuned to her mother’s moods after so many years of togetherness under stressful situations, noticed that she was unusually silent as they walked; she could feel her mother’s discomfort as they made their way toward the stores.
Was there bad news? Was it something about her father? Zofia and Laura never talked about him—or anyone else from Lvov—but sometimes Zofia was terrified by the thought that her father had been shot and buried alive in a mass grave. At other times, though, she believed that he was alive and had escaped the Russians and would soon track them down.
Had her mother learned his fate? Had she found out what happened to her other aunt, the one also called Zofia, who had visited them once in Busko and taught her the proper way to brush her teeth? Or maybe they were going to have to move again, which wouldn’t surprise her. Rosa and Emil may have opened their home to them, but not so much their hearts.
“I need to ask you something,” her mother finally said, turning.
“What is it, Mama?”
“Zofia, do you remember what your name was before you were five?”
Zofia tilted her head and looked quizzically at her. “What do you mean?” she asked. “My name has always been Zofia.”
“No, darling, it hasn’t.”
Zofia stared anxiously at her mother.
Suddenly Laura saw a whole cascade of consequences. Something inside whispered to her not to go on, since it had been only with a great effort that she had been able to repair some of the damage to their relationship brought on by her anxiety and obsessive need to create an airtight identity for Zofia in Poland. Her heart was breaking already for her clueless eleven-year-old and the new damage she was about to inflict.
She led her daughter to the small park near the shopping district and sat her down on a bench. “Darling, do you remember when the Germans made us move to a much smaller apartment in Lvov?”
“Not really.”
They were sitting close together, but, as always, in different worlds.
“Well, I had to give you a new name when you were about five and Daddy was taken away by the Russians. You remember about Daddy, don’t you?”
Zofia looked down. “Yes,” she said.
“You were five years old when the Russians took him away,” Laura continued, “and after that the Germans wouldn’t let anyone leave the ghetto. That’s when I gave us new names. You were Zofia and I was Bronislawa. We pretended to be different people so we could escape the Germans and get to Kraków. Remember that train ride?”
“But I didn’t know we were pretending. Why did we have to?”
“Because if we didn’t, the Nazis would have killed us. They were going to kill everyone in Lvov. Only a few people in our family escaped—you and me and Aunt Nusia, whose real name is Putzi, and Aunt Fryda.”
“Why did the Germans want to kill us?” Zofia said, and suddenly her eyes widened at a memory. “Herr Leming, you thought, wanted to poison us with the chocolate bar, but he didn’t.”
Laura took her daughter’s hand and held it. “Look at me, Zofia,” she said, drawing her breath. “They wanted to kill us because we were Jewish.”
Zofia pulled her hand away. “Because we were Jewish? That’s silly. We’re Catholic.”
Even though she and Putzi had blocked out so much themselves, Laura was taken aback. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Zofia would have no memory at all of ever being Jewish.
“No, Zofia. Until you were five, you were a Jewish girl named Selma Schwarzwald, and your family was Jewish. Your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles—all Jews. When the Nazis came, there was only one way to stay alive if you were a Jew and that was to pretend you were a Catholic.”
“You’re making this up,” Zofia said.
“No, darling. Daddy and I were Laura and Daniel Schwarzwald, and when you were born, we named you Selma.”
Zofia shook her head violently to make it go away, but her mother wouldn’t stop.
“And Nusia’s real name is Adele, and we call her Putzi. We pretended in order to survive. You were too young then to understand this, to be able to pretend to lie. So I had to make you believe you were Zofia Tymejko. I was Bronislawa and we were Catholic. That was the only way I could keep you—us—alive.”
Zofia kept staring and Laura kept talking.
“In a couple of days, Aunt Rosa and Uncle Emil are having a big dinner. You’ve seen Rosa cooking, yes? They’re preparing a Passover seder. Do you know what that is?”
“That’s when the Jews use the blood of Christian children to make their special bread.”
“No, they don’t. That’s a lie. Passover is a festival, a Jewish holiday. It celebrates the Jewish people’s escape from being slaves in Egypt many thousands of years ago. In Poland, we became slaves again, the victims of Nazis instead of Egyptian kings.”
“They killed Christ!”
“Those are lies, Zosia. People spread all kinds of lies about Jews.”
“How do you know, Mama?”
“Because I’m Jewish.”
“No, you can’t be. Because if you were Jewish, I would be too, and I’m not because I’m Catholic.”
Laura, despairing, took her daughter’s hands in hers and tried again to get through to her. She explained about the papers Zofia’s father, Daniel, bought for them, but then the Russians took Daddy, and Zofia and Laura had to sneak out of the ghetto without him.
But there was only so much truth a person could take in.
“Zofia, do you remember how I drilled you in the catechism? You had to know what any Catholic girl would know or someone might figure out you weren’t who you seemed to be, and if the Germans found out you were a Jew, they would take us both away and kill us.”
“But I’m not a Jew!” Zofia was yelling now. “I’ve been baptized, like Jesus Christ! I’m Catholic.”
“Yes.” Laura sighed. “Perhaps you are by now.”
For a few minutes, no one said anything. To Laura, speaking now seemed futile. Zofia wasn’t even trying to process what her mother was telling her.
Zofia spoke first. “And everyone knew except me?”
“You were only five, Zofia. Too young to understand that your life and mine depended on a lie. If you accidentally told the Germans or even the Poles or Ukrainians, or Russians, the truth, they’d kill us. I had to make you believe you were Catholic. I know all the drilling made you so angry, but I had no choice if I wanted to keep us alive.”
“Well, now I wish I was dead!” snapped Zofia.
Laura recoiled. She felt as if she’d been slapped. But she knew her daughter was experiencing something far worse—a frontal assault on everything she knew to be true. On the one hand, did her daughter have no idea what her mother had endured to keep them alive?
Laura leaned over and kissed the top of Zofia’s head, murmuring, “It’s all right, darling, it’s all right.”
Around them, Londoners were rushing in all directions.
“We are the lucky ones,” her mother whispered.
“I am not lucky!” Zofia cried. “I became what you wanted me to become! And now you want me to become a Jew?”
Zofia shifted on the bench to face her mother squarely. “Who,” she said, breathing hard, “who would want to be a JEW?”
For several days, Zofia was inconsolable. When she wasn’t sobbing beneath the eiderdown quilt on Rosa and Emil’s bed, she stormed around the apartment, breathing loudly through her nose, and refusing to talk or to look any of the adults in the eye. She also refused to continue her English lessons with Mrs. Camrass, who she knew was Jewish.
For Laura, accustomed as she was to a daughter who barely raised her voice and had always done everything expected of her, the transformation was frightening. But somehow Zofia managed to calm down in time for the seder, during which she sat in silence at the table, making a bed out of parsley sprigs for her stuffed bear. After calling him just “Bear” for years, she now bestowed a real name on him: “Refugee,” a word she heard increasingly, applied to her and most of those around her.
At the seder, she refused to pick up the Haggadah, which was written in a language she recognized only from the fragmented inscriptions on the Jewish gravestones that paved some of Busko’s streets. Emil, who conducted the service in Hebrew in his rich baritone, pretended not to notice Zofia’s silence, and twenty-eight-year-old Putzi asked the Four Questions as if she really were the youngest person there. But when the meal was served, Zofia’s attitude suddenly shifted. She wasn’t about to pass up Rosa’s excellent brisket and potato kugel.
A week later, when her friend Wacka’s parents wrote from Busko-Zdrój to ask for Zofia’s help in obtaining antibiotics, she was too ashamed to answer; in fact, she stopped writing Wacka entirely. Zofia hated having deceived everyone she knew in Poland—however unintentionally. She also stopped speaking Polish with strangers. On the rare occasions when her mother tried to talk to her about Judaism, Zofia wouldn’t listen. When Laura made the mistake of asking her daughter whether she now wanted to be called “Selma” again, Zofia yelled, “Go away! My name is Zofia Tymejko and I am a Catholic, not a Jew!” Her habit of curtaining off the past—both the Catholic past she embraced or the Jewish past that was being foisted on her now—prevailed. Zofia was determined to forget everything, to move ahead. She wanted to be English.
Soon after arriving in London, Zofia was placed in primary school. Although still far from fluent in English, she was thrown in the deep end with all the native-born children preparing for the exam that would determine their secondary-school track. Zofia’s English rapidly improved, thanks partly to Helen Ardmore, the girl who was assigned to look after her. Helen was an outsider too—a talented, artistic girl from a poor family. She was the only student who invited Zofia over to play, but even her very modest flat made Rosa and Emil’s apartment seem depressing by comparison.
Helen, who had done well on the exam, was accepted by the highly regarded Paddington and Maida Vale High School. Zofia was, of course, allowed to skip the exam, but she was already showing signs of promise. After a few months in England, she was no longer at the bottom of the class, which the headmistress considered an achievement, even if the ambitious Zofia did not. The headmistress arranged for Zofia to start with Helen at Paddington and Maida Vale on a trial basis. Zofia immediately liked her new headmistress there, Miss Spong, a very attractive, soft-spoken woman in her forties who came from an upper-class background and wore tweed suits. She administered a quiz to Zofia, whose performance on it convinced Miss Spong to let Zofia join Helen’s incoming class for the year, at the end of which they would see if she could continue.
That left one sensitive matter to decide, said Miss Spong: was Zofia Jewish or not? Miss Spong called Zofia and Laura in for a meeting. Paddington and Maida Vale provided its Jewish children with Jewish instruction once a week. For morning prayers Jews went separately to the school library while the Protestants and Roman Catholics went elsewhere before everyone, even the Jews, convened for an Our Father.
Miss Spong reasoned that since Zofia once had been Jewish and, despite her six years as a Catholic, apparently still was, then she was Jewish.
And so a girl who had no idea until recently that she’d ever been Jewish, began spending every weekday morning in the library, praying with her Jewish classmates, a tiny minority—fifteen or twenty in all—of the school’s population. Zofia, to put it mildly, did not feel at home in this group, and not only because its members were Jewish. They were among the brightest girls at Paddington—as well as the most spoiled. They wore pretty dresses and ballet slippers that were all the fashion. They excelled in class, as Zofia had in Busko-Zdrój, and they stuck together. Every morning in the library, she sat with these girls and listened to them pray in two languages, neither of which was her first tongue, one of which—Hebrew—she had been taught to associate with people so vile that they were not quite human. It wasn’t surprising that one of Zofia’s very best friends was a Christian girl named Elphis Christopher.
Was it because Miss Spong was aware of Zofia’s state of religious limbo that she soon appointed her to the important position of Senior Jewess during morning prayers? To ease her reentry into Judaism? Or did Miss Spong thrust the responsibility on her to bolster the young immigrant’s confidence and facilitate her integration into the social life of the school? Whatever the headmistress’s motivation, the title meant that Zofia chose those prayers. But she knew only one, and not that well either. So day after day, the girls under her leadership recited the same words, “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord let His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look kindly upon you and give you peace.”
Meanwhile her mother enrolled Zofia in Hebrew school, which was held every Sunday at a nearby synagogue, and it was Zofia who won a scholarship prize over the other children, all of whom had been Jews their whole lives. Her academic achievement wasn’t the only way in which she stood out there, and the other children didn’t try very hard to make Zofia feel at home. Despite her sudden immersion in Judaism, Zofia avoided making Jewish friends. When a boy in Hebrew school took an interest in her, she rejected him outright.
Zofia still didn’t feel the least bit Jewish—and she didn’t want to either. The only Jews that intrigued her were Israelis. She’d seen Zionist literature for the first time in Hebrew school, and the Jews in the photographs didn’t look Jewish. They were young, tan, and muscular, breaking rocks in the fields, clearing the land. Zofia, who was beginning to realize how much living she had missed in the struggle to have a life at all, and how hard her mother had worked to ensure their survival, felt a bond with these Jews. Zofia knew that many others, including her Uncle Edek, had gone to Israel before and after the war, and now she lamented the fact that she, Laura, and Putzi had ended up in England.
Putzi remained a big part of their lives. She was now working as a domestic for a second Jewish family in Golders Green—still unhappily, as she was constantly underestimated by her more poorly educated employers. Fortunately, the job was only a bus ride away, so all three of them stayed in constant touch, although rarely by the luxury of a telephone. In 1950 Laura, Putzi, and Zofia did manage to take a week’s holiday together on the Isle of Wight, where Putzi, ever the clever seamstress and dressmaker, fashioned a ballerina outfit out of tissue paper so Zofia could enter a costume competition. In Zofia’s view, it was by far the best costume, and she thought she would have won had she not been a foreigner. She was so heartbroken that her mother and aunt, who knew a few things about standing up for themselves and Zofia, complained to the organizers, and she received a prize after all.
At Laura’s insistence, Putzi joined the Polish-Jewish Servicemen’s Club, where she fell in love with a Polish Jew named Kazimierz Rozycki who was working toward an engineering degree. He had served in Anders’ Army, led by the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders, which had fought alongside the Allies toward the end of the war. V-E Day had found him in Casablanca, from which he had been flown to Scotland before making his way to London. Laura and Zofia adored Kazimierz and welcomed him into the family when he and Putzi decided to marry. Putzi’s second employers, initially upset that she was quitting, quickly came to see her in a more appreciative light and gave the couple a generous wedding gift. For Putzi, Laura, and Zofia, the wedding ceremony seemed a miraculous outcome after Putzi’s—and their—long journey to freedom.
However, Laura and Zofia both were devastated when Putzi and Kazik decided to immigrate to Canada in 1951.
Laura hadn’t been so fortunate in meeting men. Her life with the Hoenigs was dreary. She resented Rosa’s resentment of her, felt guilt for imposing on her, and was ashamed at not being able to afford her own place. She was stuck with her obligations to Rosa in an apartment that itself was hopelessly stuck in the past. Rosa and Emil fought constantly. There was no attempt to brighten their home. They rarely had guests over.
Zofia took refuge in her schoolwork. Laura pushed her to excel in every subject, and Zofia’s academic reports reflected both of their ambitions.
“Her conduct is always good,” her teacher had written at the end of her very first term at Paddington. A year later, the same teacher reported that “Zofia works well and her progress has been good.” In the fall of 1949, her new form mistress wrote that “Zofia is a most enthusiastic and helpful member of the class.” At fourteen, in 1951, she “had the makings of a first-class scholar” and had “excellent ability in languages, and works most conscientiously in all subjects.”
By 1953, however, she was no longer listed as Zofia Tymejko, the name she had continued to use in England and that the British found virtually impossible to pronounce. After five years of statelessness, Laura and Zofia qualified for British citizenship and so were free to change their names. Laura chose the name of one of her favorite British painters as their own and became Laura Turner. And by the summer of 1953, Zofia was Sophie Turner.
With her new name, Sophie had completed a torturous journey from Selma Schwarzwald, Jew, to Zofia Tymejko, Catholic, to Sophie Turner, who didn’t quite know who she was.
By now Sophie’s relationship with Laura had largely recovered from the shock of the wartime deception. However, having spent her formative childhood years alone with a mysteriously anxious mother who, among other strict instructions, cautioned Sophie about speaking to strangers, Sophie knew little about boys, even at sixteen. The only friend who ever came to the house was Helen, who now had renounced handstands and somersaults for the opposite sex. Although Helen could easily have gone on to university, she drifted away from Sophie into a world that consisted of roughly equal parts boys, smoking, movie stars, and makeup. Watching Helen’s experiments in love and sex, Sophie felt like a clueless child. In a few years, Helen would already be married to a butcher and raising a couple of kids.
Meanwhile the once fiercely independent and audacious Laura was becoming a passive victim of circumstance. Between her household chores and unofficial job helping Emil in his store, she had no time to socialize or hunt for a new job, and few prospects for a good one. Her Polish credentials wouldn’t get her far, anyway, in Britain’s postwar economy. Some money, however, began to dribble in. First, both Laura and Sophie received monthly pensions from the German government as part of reparations for their losses. In 1951, Sophie and her mother could finally afford to rent their own apartment.
They didn’t go far, moving into the dark street-level apartment just below Emil and Rosa’s. They were hardly beyond Rosa’s reach—she complained constantly that they monopolized the single phone line they shared—but Laura and Sophie bought some modern midcentury furniture and made it as cheery as possible. They each began to invite their few friends over.
University loomed, and Sophie, who by now wanted to choose a career that would allow her to help others, applied to a six-year medical school program. It wasn’t that she was a genius at science—she was a much stronger student in history and languages, and had some noticeable difficulty with physics—but a career in medicine would also provide security, which had been not so much in short supply as utterly missing in their lives so far. A career in medicine had the added benefit of providing Laura, who had studied economics and once set her sights on medicine in a country where even Jewish men were not welcome in the profession, with a vicarious victory. Sophie applied to several schools and was accepted as a scholarship student at two, choosing University College Hospital, which had a strong liberal arts program—and the advantage of having accepted one of Sophie’s best high school friends, Elphis Christopher.
At university one of the first-year students who wanted to be her friend was a Polish woman, but Sophie pretended that she didn’t speak Polish. However little she wanted to be Jewish, she wanted to be Polish even less. She could claim no Jews yet among her friends, and she remained silent in the presence of the occasional anti-Semitic remarks made by friends, on whose casual prejudices the annihilation of the Jews during the war had had little effect. Yet she joined Hillel House, whose members for the most part wore their Judaism very lightly and socially, not like the more observant Jewish students. It bothered her that the Orthodox Jews walked around in yarmulkes. At least, she thought, they should have the decency to confine their kipa-wearing to indoors.
But Hillel soon posed its own difficulties for a girl who had grown up in silent secrecy. There were Israelis at Hillel, argumentative ones who seemed so different from the handsome, hardworking, muscular ones she had envied in the Zionist brochures.
A young English law student named Monty, who was active in Hillel, gradually became Sophie’s first bona fide Jewish friend. He was very smart, very funny, and also very devoted to his younger brother, whom he had taken care of during the war years when their parents had sent them to the safety of the countryside. Nothing serious developed between them, but she had broken the ice; seven years after learning she was Jewish, she could finally let another Jew into her life.
While Sophie made friends, however few, and attended to her own evolving ambitions, her mother was largely alone and increasingly dependent on Sophie’s companionship. Their roles were gradually reversing. There were times her mother wanted to go for a walk, but Sophie now had better things to do. The conflict was growing between what she felt was her duty to her mother and her need for greater independence. There was no conflict, however, over the issue of the importance of Sophie’s achievements. They both felt she had to do well because she had nothing else to fall back on. Her religious conflicts took a backseat to the gospel of success: you had to lead your life constructively and do some good; you had to leave some kind of positive mark, saying that you were here, that you did something and you helped somebody. “My mother pushed me a great deal and was very ambitious for me,” she would recall when she reached her midthirties. “I felt this tremendous pressure to achieve, not to waste time, to bring something to some conclusion. But with time I became convinced of this myself, and I’ve carried it on in a way and I think she was right.”
Medical school represented financial and emotional security. “I would have a profession,” she’d recall, “and in our family it was always considered very important to have a profession in case you had to flee for your life. You’d be able to earn a living somewhere else. Medicine is pretty universal.”
Through a medical school student organization, Sophie traveled to Germany with a group that slept in schools and other people’s modest homes. What made the most impression on her was how well the Germans seemed to be living. When she would think back later on the trip, she couldn’t fathom why on earth she had agreed to go, except that she felt very forgiving at the time. That it might have anything to do with her revulsion at being Jewish seems far-fetched, but she would recall feeling that “whatever had happened during the war had happened.” On her next visit, twenty years later, the numbness had worn off; this time, as she walked down German streets, she looked at men of a certain age and wondered where they had been during the war, and whether one of them had been the man who murdered her father.
Sophie still had trouble accepting the fact that, on the day before her fifth birthday, her father, Daniel Schwarzwald, had been killed by the Germans. During the few years she and her mother shared the Hoenigs’ grim apartment, sometimes she dreamed of her father returning from Russia to save her and her mother, this time from their little ghetto on Belsize Road. Sometimes she could say to herself that the Nazis had killed him; most of the time, though, her father was neither alive nor dead. He just inhabited a different realm—one that was getting farther and farther away, and in which a little girl she used to know, named Zofia Tymejko, awaited his return.
She had only a few possessions from that other world. There was her Christian prayer book, her rosary, and her little bear, Refugee, still wearing the tiny coat that Aunt Putzi—Nusia—had made for him. And there was one other thing that remained from those years in Poland: silence. Time had erected a wall between her and those years, no more passable than the walls of the ghettoes of Lvov or Warsaw or Kraków. She knew that every Jewish refugee she saw in North London had his or her own story, protected by the barbed wire of forgetting, and that for all of them everything was better left unsaid.
The past was their secret. Not once did Sophie talk about the past with her mother. Not once. And they quickly learned to keep it even from themselves.
In 1963, after completing a rotating internship at a couple of suburban London hospitals and falling in love with several specialties, Sophie settled, at least for the time being, on obstetrics and gynecology. With the encouragement of one of her professors, she decided to work in the United States, where there was a shortage of doctors. Her New York cousin-by-marriage Alice Herb (Emil and Rosa’s niece, who had immigrated to America with her family after Kristallnacht) contacted a successful plastic surgeon named Lou Feit, who was able to arrange a permanent visa and get her a job at his hospital, New York Polyclinic Hospital in Manhattan.
Sophie’s mother would have to remain in London where, freed of her original work restrictions, she was hired to teach accounting at a secretarial school. It would be the first time she and Sophie had ever been apart for any length of time. Laura, who had watched most of her own family be destroyed twenty years before, and her sister Putzi move to Canada a dozen years before, would now be separated by an ocean from the little girl, now a twenty-six-year-old doctor, she had single-handedly saved from the fires of the Holocaust. It felt every bit as painful as all the other, and more permanent, losses in her life. But what could she do? Laura knew that Sophie had to leave even this nest.
Shortly before she left London, Sophie was preoccupied with the impending marriage of one of her closest medical school friends, Avril Sillitoe, in an Anglican Church in East Anglia. Sophie was asked to be one of the bridesmaids—the only Jewish one. When told that she would have to kneel during the ceremony, Sophie’s emerging Jewish consciousness surprised her. She told Avril she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had never discussed her split identity with Avril or even discussed her years in Busko-Zdrój—it was simply not a subject that ever came up with anybody—yet kneeling in a church didn’t seem right. Remarkably, Avril didn’t argue, and it was decided that if one of the bridesmaids couldn’t kneel, then none of them would have to kneel.
In May Sophie said her complicated farewell to her mother and flew first to Canada, where she visited Aunt Putzi and her family, who lived comfortably in Montreal. (When Putzi’s last English employers visited the Rozyckis in Montreal on a trip to the United States, they were amazed that their “humble” former domestic now lived in such a lovely home.) On the eve of Sophie’s departure for New York, visa complications arose that kept her in Canada until August. She spent the summer accompanying Putzi, Kazik, and their seven-year-old son, Henry, on trips to Ottawa and Quebec. When her permanent visa finally came through, Sophie arrived at the newly named John F. Kennedy International Airport in a heavy woolen suit, which had been appropriate apparel in chilly Canada, only to be hit by blasts of ninety-degree temperatures the moment she left the terminal and headed to the taxi stand. Since she was long overdue at her new job, she asked the driver to take her directly to the New York Polyclinic in Manhattan, which she had envisioned as a beautiful modern hospital with gorgeous nurses and especially good-looking male doctors. Her heart sank when the cab pulled up on West Fiftieth Street in front of a dilapidated facility that had seen better days, although it still treated the occasional high-profile celebrity patient. In 1926, while in New York promoting Son of the Sheik, Rudolph Valentino had been rushed to Polyclinic for emergency abdominal surgery, only to die soon afterward from peritonitis and pleurisy. And just two summers before Sophie’s arrival, Marilyn Monroe had had gallbladder surgery at Polyclinic while husband Joe DiMaggio paced in the waiting room.
Sophie’s first months were horribly lonely. She did little but work and sleep, commuting to the hospital on West Fiftieth Street from her room in the Belvedere Hotel on West Forty-Eighth by running across an uninviting parking lot next to the old Madison Square Garden.
Back in London, her mother was busy taking courses at Pitman College in typewriting, bookkeeping, secretarial duties, handwriting, and spelling and diction. Before long, she was offered a job as a part-time student-teacher, and then as a part-time teacher of bookkeeping and general commercial studies at six pounds a week. But in her letters to Sophie, she complained that Sophie didn’t write often enough and wasn’t paying her enough attention. She wrote that perhaps she and Sophie would live together again one day.
Her neediness triggered a complex of emotions in Sophie. Although she and her mother had barely mentioned their life in Poland, even to each other, it was dawning on Sophie, now that she was older and had moved away, that her mother had been nothing less than heroic. Sophie still saw herself as a survivor of World War II, not a Jewish survivor of the attempted extermination of her race, a race she was still far from embracing. If Sophie was preoccupied with Jews, it was not with those who had died, but with those who had lived. She understood that no Eastern European Jew had survived the war without a fight, and that her own mother had defied the odds. Others might have been crushed by their losses, paralyzed by their fears, immobilized by shock, but Laura had forged ahead in the midst of ruin. She had stood up more than once to the Nazis who came for them, she had threatened Herr Leming when he tried to take her promised job away from her, and she had insisted on getting her iron back from the Gestapo, but most of all, and despite the lapses into suicidal despair, she had insisted on living.
Whatever resentment Sophie still harbored toward her mother for her necessary part in depriving her of a childhood was now overtaken by an unfamiliar emotion: she felt guilty for all her mother had done for her. Sophie owed her life to her. She wished she could make it up to her mother, who had lost ten years of her life—her thirties—to the war, and then lost several more in servitude to her aunt and uncle. (Sophie’s feelings toward them had been softened by her aunt and uncle’s increasingly affectionate attitude toward her, culminating in their generous, but ghoulish, gift to her on her twenty-first birthday of their dead daughter’s ring.)
Yet in England Sophie had felt increasingly like a ghost floating next to her mother—insubstantial, a vestige of a past she barely understood. However lucky she had been, she was still a casualty of the Final Solution. Her childhood had been erased, her adolescence had been postponed, and adulthood still seemed unattainable. She may have owed her mother her life, but that wasn’t the same thing as having a life. And the painful price of having that, she knew, was to now keep some distance between them.
As lonely as she was, and as much as she knew it would hurt her mother deeply, she sat down one evening in her room at the Belvedere and wrote her to say that things couldn’t be as they had been anymore. She needed to make a clean break. She needed to stand on her own two feet.
By definition, virtually all children who were hidden during the war had been utterly cut off from those hidden elsewhere. There was certainly no mechanism or organization, even by the 1960s, by which these formerly hidden children could learn of one another’s existence. And so Sophie could not know that only a mile south of her new home at the Belvedere Hotel in Manhattan lived Flora Hogman, a year older than Sophie, who had also survived the Holocaust and had also ended up in New York City.
Sophie and Flora wouldn’t meet for another fifteen years, by which time they both would have launched substantial careers that were impressive even for women whose childhoods had not been destroyed by the Nazis. Flora, however, had had to overcome even greater obstacles than Sophie to accomplish anything at all. While Sophie had emerged from the war with at least her mother, Flora had lost everything and everybody.