Such Good Girls Page 2

  Only later still, well into the writing of this book, did I become conscious of the most obvious reason I felt so strongly drawn to Sophie and her history. At the time of the seder both of my parents, now in their feeble nineties after long, productive, and healthy lives, were suffering through their final months. They weren’t murdered or starved to death, but died at home within a month of each other, surrounded by state-of-the-art end-of-life care. Nonetheless, I was dealing with the loss of my mom and dad, the most important links to my past and my Jewish heritage. The situation—the expensive and hopeful interventions, the shuttling back and forth between Florida and Chicago, the difficulties of coordinating emotional decisions with my siblings—was full of new fears. I was clinging more tightly than ever to the past, lamenting not only unfinished business, but also unasked questions, and trying to take in the vast unexplored landscape of my family and the ultimate unknowableness of those I loved. In the midst of this period of loss and mourning, whom should fate seat across from me at a seder but a combination of surrogate parent and history tutor, someone who could connect me to the very cataclysm that had been at an inescapable remove in my parents’ lives and so conspicuously absent from mine.

  Sophie told me what she could remember about her childhood—with the help of some old photos, documents, and an earlier interview she had done with her cousin Alice Herb—and from these elements I could write a credible version of the story from her childlike point of view of events between 1942 and 1948. But how was I going to tell the story from the viewpoint of her late mother, with whom Sophie spent those years and more? Given the peculiarity of their relationship during those years, I longed to capture the discrepancy between their respective realities.

  The answer came one day when I was sitting with Sophie in her apartment. As usual Sophie was patiently correcting my mistakes and filling in gaps in my latest draft of her story with new bits of information that, since our last meeting, had been jarred loose from the greater mass of her suppressed memories. Suddenly Sophie pulled a sheaf of typescript pages from a box and said, “I don’t know if this will help, but it’s something my mother wrote for a class she was taking late in life.”

  I fanned through the seventeen-page manuscript with a surge of joy. Sophie had just handed me the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone—the means by which I could finally translate Sophie’s speculations about her mother’s state of mind during and after the war into the hard currency of her mother’s own memories. With her mother’s essay, I could at last begin to connect the desperate parallel universes in which the two of them lived.

  The story of Sophie’s bear, her generation, and of the momentous event in 1991 that finally broke the hidden child survivors’ adult silence, starts in 1942 in the city of Lvov, Poland, where a girl named Selma Schwarzwald and her mother, Laura, were about to start living side by side in two utterly different lies.

  PART ONE

  THE CHILDREN

  SOPHIE

  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 drin
k,” 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, a
ll 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.