The Woman with the Blue Star Read online

  “Kinder, raus!” the police called over and over again now as they patrolled the halls. Children, out. It was not the first time the Germans had come for children during the day, knowing that their parents would be at work.

  But I was no longer a child. I was eighteen and might have joined the work details like others my age and some several years younger. I could see them lining up for roll call each morning before trudging to one of the factories. And I wanted to work, even though I could tell from the slow, painful way my father now walked, stooped like an old man, and how Mama’s hands were split and bleeding that it was hard and awful. Work meant a chance to get out and see and talk to people. My hiding was a subject of much debate between my parents. Papa thought I should work. Labor cards were highly prized in the ghetto. Workers were valued and less likely to be deported to one of the camps. But Mama, who seldom fought my father on anything, had forbidden it. “She doesn’t look her age. The work is too hard. She is safest out of sight.” I wondered as I hid now, about to be discovered at any second, if she would still think she was right.

  The building finally went silent, the last of the awful footsteps receding. Still I didn’t move. That was one of the ways they trapped people who were hiding, by pretending to go away and lying in wait when they came out. I remained motionless, not daring to leave my hiding place. My limbs ached, then went numb. I had no idea how much time had passed. Through the slit, I could see that the room had grown dimmer, as if the sun had lowered a bit.

  Sometime later, there were footsteps again, this time a shuffling sound as the laborers trudged back silent and exhausted from their day. I tried to uncurl myself from the trunk. But my muscles were stiff and sore and my movements slow. Before I could get out, the door to our apartment flung open and someone ran into the room with steps light and fluttering. “Sadie!” It was Mama, sounding hysterical.

  “Jestem tutaj,” I called. I am here. Now that she was home, she could help me untangle myself and get out. But my voice was muffled by the trunk. When I tried to undo the latch, it stuck.

  Mama raced from the room back into the corridor. I could hear her open the door to the attic, then run up the stairs, still searching for me. “Sadie!” she called. Then, “My child, my child,” over and over again as she searched but did not find me, her voice rising to a shriek. She thought I was gone.

  “Mama!” I yelled. She was too far away to hear me, though, and her own cries were too loud. Desperately, I struggled once more to free myself from the trunk without success. Mama raced back into the room, still wailing. I heard the scraping sound of a window opening. At last I threw myself against the lid of the trunk, slamming my shoulder so hard it throbbed. The latch sprang open.

  I broke free and stood up quickly. “Mama?” She was standing in the oddest position, with one foot on the window ledge, her willowy frame silhouetted against the frigid twilight sky. “What are you doing?” For a second, I thought she was looking for me outside. But her face was twisted with grief and pain. I knew then why Mama was on the window ledge. She assumed I had been taken along with the other children. And she didn’t want to live. If I hadn’t freed myself from the trunk in time, Mama would have jumped. I was her only child, her whole world. She was prepared to kill herself before she would go on without me.

  A chill ran through me as I sprinted toward her. “I’m here, I’m here.” She wobbled unsteadily on the window ledge and I grabbed her arm to stop her from falling. Remorse ripped through me. I always wanted to please her, to bring that hard-won smile to her beautiful face. Now I had caused her so much pain she’d almost done the unthinkable.

  “I was so worried,” she said after I’d helped her down and closed the window. As if that explained everything. “You weren’t in the attic.”

  “But, Mama, I hid where you told me to.” I gestured to the trunk. “The other place, remember? Why didn’t you look for me there?”

  Mama looked puzzled. “I didn’t think you would fit anymore.” There was a pause and then we both began laughing, the sound scratchy and out of place in the pitiful room. For a few seconds, it was like we were back in our old apartment on Meiselsa Street and none of this had happened at all. If we could still laugh, surely things would be all right. I clung to this last improbable thought like a life preserver at sea.

  But a cry echoed through the building, then another, silencing our laughter. It was the mothers of the other children who had been taken by the police. There came a thud outside. I started for the window, but my mother blocked me. “Look away,” she ordered. It was too late. I glimpsed Helga Kolberg, who lived down the hall, lying motionless in the coal-tinged snow on the pavement below, her limbs cast at odd angles and skirt splayed around her like a fan. She had realized her children were gone and, like Mama, she didn’t want to live without them. I wondered whether jumping was a shared instinct, or if they had discussed it, a kind of suicide pact in case their worst nightmares came true.

  My father raced into the room then. Neither Mama nor I said a word, but I could tell from his unusually grim expression that he already knew about the aktion and what had happened to the other families. He simply walked over and wrapped his enormous arms around both of us, hugging us tighter than usual.

  As we sat, silent and still, I looked up at my parents. Mama was a striking beauty—thin and graceful, with white-blond hair the color of a Nordic princess’. She looked nothing like the other Jewish women and I had heard whispers more than once that she didn’t come from here. She might have walked away from the ghetto and lived as a non-Jew if it wasn’t for us. But I was built like Papa, with the dark, curly hair and olive skin that made the fact that we were Jews undeniable. My father looked like the laborer the Germans had made him in the ghetto, broad-shouldered and ready to lift great pipes or slabs of concrete. In fact, he was an accountant—or had been until it became illegal for his firm to employ him anymore. I always wanted to please Mama, but it was Papa who was my ally, keeper of secrets and weaver of dreams, who stayed up too late whispering secrets in the dark and had roamed the city with me, hunting for treasure. I moved closer now, trying to lose myself in the safety of his embrace.

  Still, Papa’s arms could offer little shelter from the fact that everything was changing. The ghetto, despite its awful conditions, had once seemed relatively safe. We were living among Jews and the Germans had even appointed a Jewish council, the Judenrat, to run our daily affairs. Perhaps if we laid low and did as we were told, Papa said more than once, the Germans would leave us alone inside these walls until the war was over. That had been the hope. But after today, I wasn’t so sure. I looked around the apartment, seized with equal parts disgust and fear. In the beginning, I had not wanted to be here; now I was terrified we would be forced to leave.

  “We have to do something,” Mama burst out, her voice a pitch higher than usual as it echoed my unspoken thoughts.

  “I’ll take her tomorrow and register her for a work permit,” Papa said. This time Mama did not argue. Before the war, being a child had been a good thing. But now being useful and able to work was the only thing that might save us.

  Mama was talking about more than a work visa, though. “They are going to come again and next time we won’t be so lucky.” She did not bother to hold back her words for my benefit now. I nodded in silent agreement. Things were changing, a voice inside me said. We could not stay here forever.

  “It will be okay, kochana,” Papa soothed. How could he possibly say that? But Mama laid her head on his shoulder, seeming to trust him as she always had. I wanted to believe it, too. “I will think of something. At least,” Papa added as we huddled close, “we are all still together.” The words echoed through the room, equal parts promise and prayer.

  2

  Ella

  Kraków, Poland

  June 1942

  The early-summer evening was warm as I crossed the market square, weaving my way around t
he fragrant flower stalls that stood in the shadow of the Cloth Hall, displaying bright, fresh blooms that few had the money or inclination to buy. The outdoor cafés, not bustling as they once would have been on such a pleasant evening, were still open and doing a brisk business serving beer to German soldiers and the few foolhardy others who dared join them. If one didn’t look too closely, it might seem that nothing had changed at all.

  Of course, everything had changed. Kraków had been a city under occupation for nearly three years. Red flags with black swastikas at the center hung from the Sukiennice, the long yellow cloth hall that ran down the middle of the square, as well as the brick tower of the Ratusz, or town hall. The Rynek had been renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz and the centuries-old Polish street names changed to Reichsstrasse and Wehrmachtstrasse, and so on. Hitler had designated Kraków as the seat of the General Government and the city was choked thick with SS and other German soldiers, jackbooted thugs who walked down the sidewalk three and four wide, forcing all other pedestrians off their path and harassing ordinary Poles at will. At the corner a boy in short pants sold the Krakauer Zeitung, the German propaganda paper that had replaced our own newspaper. “Under the Tail,” people called it in irreverent whispers, implying that it was only useful for wiping one’s backside.

  * * *

  Despite the awfulness of the changes, it still felt good to be out and have the sunshine warm my face and to stretch my legs on such a beautiful evening. I had walked the streets of the Old Town every day I could remember of my nineteen years, first with my father as a child and later on my own. Its features were the topography of my life, from the medieval Barbican fortress and gate at the end of Floriańska Street to Wawel Castle seated high atop a hill overlooking the Wisła River. Walking, it seemed, was the one thing that neither time nor war could take from me.

  I did not stop at the cafés, though. Once I might have sat with my friends, laughing and talking as the sun set and the lights went on for evening, sending pools of yellow cascading against the pavement. But there were no nighttime lights now—everything was dimmed per German decree to disguise the city against a possible air raid. And no one I knew made plans to meet anymore either. People were going out less, I reminded myself often as the invitations that had once been plentiful dwindled to nothing. Few could purchase enough food with ration cards to entertain at home either. Everyone was too caught up in their own survival, and company was a luxury we could ill afford.

  Still, I felt a pang of loneliness. My life was so quiet with Krys away and I would have liked to sit and talk with friends my own age. Brushing the feeling aside, I circled the square once more studying the shop windows, which displayed fashions and other wares almost no one could afford anymore. Anything to delay going back to the house where I lived with my stepmother.

  But it was foolish to stay on the street much longer. The Germans were known to stop people for questioning and inspection with increasing frequency as night fell and the curfew drew closer. I left the square and started down the grand thoroughfare of Grodzka Street toward the house just steps from the city center where I had lived my entire life. Then I turned onto Kanonicza Street, an ancient and winding way paved with cobblestones that had been smoothed by time. Despite the fact that I dreaded encountering my stepmother, Ana Lucia, the wide town house we shared was still a welcome sight. With its bright yellow facade and well-tended flower boxes in the windows, it was nicer than anything the Germans thought a Pole deserved. Under other circumstances it surely would have been confiscated for a Nazi officer.

  As I stood in front of the house, memories of my family danced before my eyes. The visions of my mother, who had died of influenza when I was a toddler, were the least clear. I was the youngest of four children and had been jealous of my siblings, who had so many years with our mother, whom I had scarcely known at all. My sisters were both married, one to an attorney in Warsaw and the other to a boat captain in Gdan´sk.

  It was my brother, Maciej, closest to me in age, whom I missed the most. Though he was eight years older, he had always taken time to play and talk with me. He was different than the others. He had no interest in marriage, nor the career choices my father had wanted for him. So at seventeen, he fled to Paris, where he lived with a man named Phillipe. Of course, Maciej had not escaped the long arm of the Nazis. They controlled Paris now, too, darkening what he had once called the City of Light. But his letters remained upbeat and I hoped that things were at least a bit better there.

  For years after my siblings left, it was just me and my father, whom I had always called Tata. Then he began making trips to Vienna for his printing business more often than he had. One day, he returned with Ana Lucia, whom he had married without telling me. I knew the first time I met Ana Lucia that I would hate her. She was wearing a thick fur coat with the head of the animal still attached around the collar. The poor thing’s eyes stared at me piteously, filled with recrimination. A whiff of her too-heavy jasmine scent filled my nose as she air-kissed my cheek, her breath an almost hiss. I could tell from the cold way she appraised me upon our first meeting that I was not wanted, like furniture that someone else had picked out, which she was stuck with because it came with the house.

  When the war broke out, Tata decided to renew his army commission. At his age, he certainly did not have to go. But he served out of a sense of duty, not just to country but to the young soldiers, barely more than boys, some of whom had not been born the last time Poland went to war.

  The telegram had come swiftly: missing, presumed dead on the Eastern Front. My eyes stung now as I thought of Tata, the pain as fresh as the day we had learned the news. Sometimes I dreamed that he had been captured and would return to us after the war. Other times, I was angry: how could he have gone and left me alone with Ana Lucia? She was like the evil stepmother in some childhood story, only worse because she was real.

  I reached the arched oak doorway of our house, started to turn the brass knob. Then hearing boisterous voices inside, I stopped. Ana Lucia was entertaining again.

  My stepmother’s parties were always loud. “Soirees,” she called them, making them sound grander than they were. They seemed to consist of whatever decent food could be found these days, paired with several bottles of wine from my father’s dwindling cellar and some vodka from the freezer, watered down liberally to make it stretch. Before the war, I might have joined her parties, which were filled with artists and musicians and intellectuals. I loved to listen to their spirited debates, arguing ideas long into the night. But those people were all gone now, having fled to Switzerland or England if they were able, the less lucky ones arrested and sent away. They had been replaced by guests of the worst sort—Germans, the higher ranking, the better. Ana Lucia was nothing if not a pragmatist. She had recognized early on in the war the need to make our captors into friends. The table was filled every weekend now with thick-necked brutes who fouled our house with cigar smoke and soiled our carpets with mud-stained boots they did not bother to wipe at the door.

  At first, Ana Lucia claimed that she was fraternizing with the Germans to get information about my father. That was in the early days, when we still hoped he might be imprisoned or missing in action. But then we received word he had been killed and she continued to socialize with the Germans more than ever before. It was as if, freed from the pretense of marriage, she could be exactly as awful as she wanted to be.

  Of course, I did not dare to confront my stepmother about her shameful actions. Since my father was declared dead and had not prepared a will, the house and all of his money would legally go into her name. She would happily cast me out if I made trouble, replace the furniture she had never wanted in the first place. I would have nothing. So I treaded lightly. Ana Lucia liked to remind me often that it was thanks to her good graces with the Germans that we remained in our fine house with enough food to eat and the proper stamps on our Kennkarten to enable us to move freely about the city.

&n
bsp; I stepped away from the front door. From the pavement, I looked sadly through the front window of our house at the familiar crystal glasses and china. But I did not see the horrid strangers who now enjoyed our things. Instead, the visions in my mind were of my family: me wanting to play dolls with my much older sisters, my mother scolding Maciej that he would break things as he chased me around the table. When you are young, you expect the family you were born into to be yours forever. Time and war had made that not the case.

  Dreading Ana Lucia’s company more than the curfew, I turned away from the house and started walking again. I was not sure where I was headed. It was almost dark and the parks were off-limits to ordinary Poles, as were most of the better cafés, the restaurants and movie theaters, too. My indecision in the moment seemed to reflect my larger life, caught in a kind of no-man’s-land. I had nowhere to go, and no one to go with. Living in occupied Kraków, I felt like a pet bird, able to fly just the tiniest bit, but always mindful of being trapped in a cage.

  It might not have been like this if Krys was still here, I reflected as I started back in the direction of the Rynek. I imagined a different world where the war had not forced him to leave. We would be planning a wedding, maybe even married by now.

  Krys and I had met by happenstance nearly two years before the war broke out when my friends and I had stopped off for a coffee at a courtyard café where he was making a delivery. Tall and broad-shouldered, he cut a dashing figure as he strode through the passageway carrying a large crate. He had rugged features, which appeared to be cut from stone, and a leonine gaze that seemed to hold the entire room. When he passed our table, an onion fell from the crate he was carrying and rolled close to me. He knelt to retrieve it, and looked up at me and smiled. “I’m at your feet.” I sometimes wondered if he had dropped the vegetable deliberately or if it was fate that sent it spinning in my direction.