Genek shakes his head as he makes his way back to his cot. Selim—in Palestine of all places. It’s a good sign, it has to be. He won’t limit his Red Cross search to Poland, Genek decides. He’ll send telegrams to Red Cross offices all over Europe, to the Middle East, and to the Americas. Surely, if the others are alive, they’ll have been in touch with the location services as well.
He climbs back onto his cot and lies down, resting one hand on his heart, the other on his stomach, where, for the moment, the pain has subsided.
APRIL 19–MAY 16, 1943—WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING: In liquidating the Warsaw ghetto, Hitler deports and exterminates some 300,000 Jews. The 50,000 who remain secretly plan an armed retaliation. The uprising begins on the eve of Passover at the outset of a final liquidation operation; ghetto residents refuse to be taken and fight off the Germans for nearly a month until defeated by the Nazis’ systematic destruction and burning of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews die in combat and are burned alive or suffocated; those who survive the uprising are sent to Treblinka and other extermination camps.
SEPTEMBER 1943: Anders’s men stationed in Tel Aviv are mobilized and sent to Europe to fight on the Italian front; wives and children stay behind in Tel Aviv.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Halina
Warsaw, German-Occupied Poland ~ October 1943
Sit,” the officer hisses, pointing to a metal chair opposite his desk in the small railway police office.
Halina presses her lips together into an angry line. She’s more confident when she stands.
“I said, sit.”
Halina obeys. Seated, she’s eye-to-barrel with the pistol holstered to the German’s belt.
It’s only a matter of time, she realizes, before her luck runs out.
Leaving her apartment in Warsaw’s center that morning, she’d kissed Adam good-bye and reminded him she wouldn’t be returning until late. Her plan was to make her way to the train station after work, ride to Wilanów, then walk the four kilometers from the station to the Górskis’ home in the country, where she would see her parents and deliver the Górskis their payment for the month of October. She’d stay for an hour and then return to Warsaw. She’s made the trip to Wilanów three times already, and until now, her false papers, required to purchase tickets and to board and disembark the train, have worked flawlessly.
Today, though, she’d barely made it through ticketing at the Warsaw station. She was waiting by the tracks when a member of the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police, approached her, demanding her papers. “Why do you need to see them?” she asked in Polish (she’s fluent now in German, but the Gestapo, she’s learned, are suspicious of German-speaking Poles).
“Routine check,” he’d replied. He studied her ID and quizzed her on her name and birth date.
“Brzoza,” Halina had recited with conviction. “April 17, 1917.” But the officer shook his head as the train approached. “You’re coming with me,” he said, leading Halina by the arm through the station.
“Who do you work for?” the officer wants to know. He remains standing.
Halina met her new employer, Herr Den, only two weeks earlier. He’d attended a dinner party at the home of her previous boss, where she worked as a maid and kitchen helper. Den is Austrian—a successful banker, in his sixties. Halina recalls the night she first served him dinner, how he’d watched her closely as she worked. Apparently he was impressed, which was no surprise—Halina had grown up in a home with a cook and a maid; she had an appreciation for good service. Later that same night, Den had surprised her. She was at the kitchen sink when he approached; she didn’t realize he was even in the room until he was beside her.
“Chopin?” he’d asked, catching her off guard.
“Excuse me?” she’d said.
“The melody you were just humming, was it Chopin?”
Halina hadn’t even realized she was humming. “Yes,” she’d nodded. “I suppose it was.”
Den had smiled. “You have lovely taste in music,” he said, before turning to go. The next day, she received notice from her placement agency that she would begin working for Den the following week. Whether or not he suspects she is Jewish, Halina has no idea. So far, he seems to like her.
“I work for Herr Gerard Den,” Halina says, sighing as if put off by the question.
“What is his occupation?”
“Head of the Austrian Bank in Warsaw.”
“What sort of work do you do?”
“I am his housemaid.”
“What is his telephone?”
Halina recites the bank’s phone number from memory and waits as the officer dials. Damn these routine checks. Damn the Gestapo. Damn the Poles, who are constantly taking it upon themselves to tip off the Germans, rat out the Jews. For what? A kilo of sugar? Friendship means nothing anymore. She knew it in Radom, the day her school friend Sylvia refused to acknowledge her when she passed by on her way to the beet farm—and she was reminded of it often here in Warsaw, where she’s been accused on several occasions of being Jewish.
It wasn’t just the suspicious landlady. There was the friend of her old boss, a German woman who followed her down the street one day and whispered a spiteful “I know your secret!” as she came shoulder to shoulder with Halina on the sidewalk. Without thinking Halina had pulled her into an alleyway, stuffed a week’s worth of pay into her palm, and told her through clenched teeth to keep her mouth shut—this before she realized it was safer never to confess to anyone. Shortly after, worried that if she didn’t keep bribing her, the woman might reveal her identity to her boss, she found a new job.
There was also the Wehrmacht soldier who recognized Halina from Lvov, from before she’d taken on her new name. She’d opted for a softer approach to feeling him out, and invited him for an espresso at a Nazi-run café on Pi?kna Street. She’d turned up the charm as she chatted for a full hour, at the end of which the soldier seemed more smitten than curious about her previous life; she left him with a kiss on a cheek and an intuitive feeling that even if he did remember her true identity, he’d keep it under wraps.
Of course, there was nothing she could do about the Poles she overheard on Ch?odna Street the day in May when the SS finally razed the city ghetto and liquidated the last of its inhabitants in a last-ditch effort to quell an uprising. “Hey look, the Jews are burning,” one of the Poles had said when Halina passed. “They had it coming,” another professed. It was all Halina could do not to seize the men by the lapels and shake them. She’d nearly forfeited her Aryan identity that day, to fight alongside the Jews in the uprising. To play a part, no matter how doomed the effort was, in standing up to the Germans. She’d reminded herself at the time that she had her parents to think of. Her sister. She had to keep herself safe in order to keep her family safe. And so she’d watched from afar as the ghetto burned, her heart filled with sorrow and hatred but also with pride—never before had she witnessed such a valiant act of self-defense.
The officer holds the receiver to his ear and glares at her. She returns the glare, defiant, outraged. After a minute, someone at the other end answers.
“I wish to speak with a Herr Den, please,” the officer says. There is a long pause, then another voice at the other end of the line. “Herr Den. I apologize for bothering you. I have someone here at the station who claims to work for you—and I have reason to believe she is not who she says she is.” Silence. Halina holds her breath. She focuses on her posture: shoulders down, back straight, knees and feet pressed tightly together. “She claims her name is Brzoza—B-R-Z-O-Z-A.” The line is quiet. Has Den hung up? What’s her backup plan? She hears a murmur, her boss’s voice, but she can’t make out the words. Whatever he’s saying, his tone is angry.