Ready?” Wolf asks.
They’ve paused on a street corner, a block from the work camp. Halina nods, surveying the camp—a shoddy cement structure confined by a barbed-wire-topped fence. At the entrance, a guard with a German shepherd at his heels. If things don’t go as planned, she realizes, she’ll spend the foreseeable future staring at that fence from the inside. But what other choice does she have? She can’t sit idle any longer. It will destroy her. And perhaps Adam, too, if it hasn’t destroyed him already.
“You’d better go,” Wolf says. “Before they think we’re up to something.”
Halina glances down the street at the tables in front of a café two blocks east of them, their designated meeting place.
“Right,” Halina says. She takes a breath and straightens her posture.
“Are you sure you want to do this alone?” Wolf shakes his head, as if willing her to say no.
Halina turns her attention again to the camp. “Yes. I’m sure.”
Wolf, an acquaintance of Adam’s from the Underground, had insisted on walking with her to the camp from the city center, but Halina was adamant that he hang back once they arrived—at least that way, she reasoned, if her plan failed, he would be able to return to Lvov, recruit some help.
Wolf nods. A Polish couple walks by, arm in arm. He waits for them to pass, then leans in as if to kiss Halina on the cheek. “Good luck,” he whispers, before righting himself and turning toward the café.
Halina swallows. This is madness. She should be en route to Radom, she thinks, the summer’s heat suddenly stifling in her lungs. Her father had sent a truck. There are rumors of another pogrom in Lvov, Sol wrote after hearing of the first one. Come to Radom. You will be better off here with us. Jakob, Bella, and Franka had left that morning. Halina had stayed.
She’d been home seven weeks ago, in early June. She’d brought IDs along with some zloty she’d saved—not that either would do her parents and Mila any good in the ghetto; the black market had all but dried up, and there was no use for an Aryan ID inside Wa?owa’s walls. Halina had thought about staying in Radom, but her job at the hospital provided some income—she’d have been foolish to leave it—and Adam was far too entrenched in Lvov’s Underground efforts for him to move back. And anyway, there wasn’t room for the two of them in the tiny flat in the ghetto. She’d stayed only briefly, returning to Lvov with travel documents approved by her supervisor at the hospital, and with a set of her grandmother’s silver, carefully wrapped in a napkin. “Take it,” Nechuma had insisted before she left. “Maybe you can use it to help get us out of here.” And then Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and unleashed his Einsatzgruppen in Lvov; a massacre ensued, and her father sent the truck to retrieve his family. It had pained her, turning down his plea to return home, and she hates to think about what the truck had cost. She knows the family needs her. But she can’t leave Lvov without Adam. And Adam is missing.
Halina recalls the day, just over two weeks ago, when the fighting let up in Lvov and it was finally safe to come out of hiding. She’d run the half kilometer to her old apartment only to discover it empty. Adam was gone. He’d left in a hurry, it seemed—had taken his suitcase, some clothes, and his false ID from behind the watercolor painting in the kitchen. Halina had searched the apartment for a note, a hint, anything that might reveal where he’d gone, but had found nothing. Over the next three days she visited each of the spots they’d designated as safe places to meet in an emergency, a dozen times—the arched doorway beneath the steps leading up to Saint George’s Cathedral, the stone fountain in front of the university, the back bar of the Scottish café—but Adam was nowhere to be found.
It wasn’t until Wolf knocked on her door that Halina was able to piece together what had happened. Apparently, Wolf said, the Germans had shown up at Adam’s flat one night during the pogrom. He had been taken to a work camp just outside Lvov’s city center—Wolf knew this only because someone in the Underground had managed to bribe a guard in the camp to pass notes through the fence surrounding the property. Adam’s note had shown up in Wolf’s hands the week before: Please check on my wife, it read. He’d signed the note with the name he and Halina used on their false papers—Brzoza. The Underground had been trying to find a way to get him out, but without any luck. Hearing this news was an enormous relief—Adam was alive, at least—but it also made Halina sick, not knowing what the Germans had in store for him. If they knew about his involvement in the Underground, he was a dead man. “I have some silver,” she told Wolf, “a set of cutlery.” Wolf had nodded tentatively. “That could work,” he said. “It’s worth a try.”
Halina wraps her fingers around the leather handles of the purse hanging over her shoulder. You’ll get only one shot at this, she reminds herself. Don’t botch it. Her heart beats in double time as she makes her way toward the guard at the camp’s entrance, feeling as if she’s about to go on stage, to perform in front of an unforgiving audience.
The German shepherd notices her first and barks, straining against his leash, the tan and black fur over his shoulders spiked and angry. Halina doesn’t flinch. She keeps her chin high, trying her best to exude a sense of purpose in her stride. With the leash wrapped firmly around his wrist, the guard stands with his feet spread wide for balance. By the time Halina reaches him, the German shepherd is nearly hysterical. Halina offers the guard a tight smile and then waits for the dog to quiet. When the barking ceases, she rifles through her purse for her ID.
“My name is Halina Brzoza,” she says in German. Like Russian, German had come easily to her; she’d perfected it when the Nazis first invaded Radom. She rarely speaks it, but to her surprise, the words flow naturally off of her tongue.
The guard doesn’t speak.
“I’m afraid you have mistaken my husband for a Jew,” Halina continues, handing the guard her forged ID. “He is inside, and I’m here to collect him.” She hugs her purse to her side, feeling the lump of the cutlery against her ribs. The last time she’d used these knives and forks was around her parents’ dining table. She’d have laughed then if someone had told her that someday they might be worth her husband’s life. She eyes the guard as he examines her ID. Unlike some of the Germans in town, whose necks appear as broad as their skulls, this one is built tall and narrow. Shadows pool in his eye sockets and beneath his cheekbones. Halina wonders if his features have always been this sharp, or if he is as hungry as she. As the rest of Europe.
“And why would I believe you?” the guard finally asks, handing her back her ID.
Sweat has begun to gather on Halina’s upper lip. She thinks quickly. “Please,” she huffs, shaking her head as if the guard has offended her. “Do I look Jewish?” She stares hard at him, her green eyes unblinking, praying that her assertiveness, which she has grown to rely upon, might help her. “Clearly there’s been a mistake,” she says. “And anyway, what would a Jew be doing with silver of this quality?” She slips the silver from her purse and unwraps a corner of the napkin to reveal the handle of a spoon. It glints under the sun. “It’s my husband’s great-great-grandmother’s. Who was German, by the way,” Halina adds. “She was a Berghorst.” She runs her thumb over the engraved B, silently thanking her mother for insisting she take it when she left Radom, and sending up an apology to her deceased grandmother, who grew up a proud Baumblit.