Black Earth(126)

Zelda jumped from the Soviet deportation train, leaving her parents behind, and made for the town of Rawa Ruska, where she hid from Soviet authorities. When the Germans arrived in June 1941, she was already accustomed to living by her wits. She sought to avoid the German shooting campaigns and then, beginning in early 1942, transport to the German death facility at Be??ec. Zelda was concealing not her person but rather her identity, frequenting places where she was not known and presenting herself as a Ukrainian girl. She did not enter the ghetto and did not wear the star by which Jews were supposed to mark themselves. She had certain advantages. As a woman, she carried no physical sign of Jewishness. She was most likely wearing clothes that revealed that she was rural but not that she was Jewish. Like other Jews from the countryside, she could speak Ukrainian well, and could perform certain feats that non-Jews believed that Jews could not, such as saddle and ride a horse. She was never recognized as a Jew by a stranger, but she was, after a time, recognized by people she knew.

Most of the police power, under German as under Soviet occupation, was local. Although Zelda was not from Rawa Ruska, she ran the risk every day that one of the Ukrainian auxiliary policemen would recognize her. One day two of them did. They stopped—teenage boys themselves—and taunted her. “Come with us to Be??ec,” they said, “where you can rest.” A third Ukrainian policeman ran up and joined them; Zelda recognized Pietrek Hroshko, with whom she had attended school before the war. “Don’t take her,” he told his colleagues. “She’s my fiancée from before the war, I’ll keep her.” In Ukrainian, the word “fiancée” has a much broader meaning than in English: more like “girlfriend.” The first two Ukrainian policemen left him to it. Then Pietrek turned to Zelda, and an exchange began that revealed not only the complexity of the death around them, but the sophistication of the young life within them.

P: “I saved your life. Be with me. I’ve wanted you for a long time, since before the war, when you were in sixth grade.”

Z: “Listen, you could only take advantage of me. I’m a Jew and you are a German policeman. So do with me now what you like. Or wait, and later, when the war is over, perhaps we can marry.”

P: “I swear I won’t lay a finger on you. Come home with me.”

Z: “Thank you, no. God will repay you.”

P: “You’ll regret this—I will hide you.”

Z: “I don’t want to make trouble for your career with the Germans. You know that I’m alone, I’m barely sixteen, but I’ll be fine.”

P: “Remember me.”



Later Zelda was denounced by a fellow Jew and deported to Be??ec. She escaped from that train as well, although she was shot and wounded. She was found by a Ukrainian family who took her for a Ukrainian and nursed her back to health. The young man of the family was a policeman in the service of the Germans, and he, too, was attracted to Zelda. “Mom,” he said, “you’ve brought me a fiancée.” Zelda decided to make her way to Lwów and join a cloister. On the way she stole identity documents from a Ukrainian girl who was sitting next to her on the train. As the saying in Lwów went, the passport held body and soul together. Zelda stole the girl’s identity and took on a series of jobs, one of which was falsifying German documents.

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A Jewish woman might be rescued by a new lover—someone she met in hiding, who proposed marriage and so a new home and shelter. Alicja Rottenberg left the Warsaw ghetto to seek shelter on the Aryan side. She and two female cousins hid first with the secretary of her uncle. There they were denounced and had to flee. Next they found a place with a sailor, but had to leave because of unwanted sexual attention. After that they were lodged by a former prostitute, who took a liking to Alicja. The former prostitute was unable to keep the three young women for very long, but she did find them a new refuge with her sister and her sister’s two daughters, who were to be paid by Alicja. The cohabitation of five young women in an unconventional situation brought tensions of the conventional kind.

A friend of the house, a young man called Zdzis?aw Barański, began to pay more attention to Alicja than to the two sisters. When he proposed marriage to Alicja rather than to one of them, they became jealous and denounced Alicja to her suitor as a Jew. Alicja hoped to spare Zdzis?aw the trouble she knew would ensue. “I could see for myself that the situation was unpleasant. I decided to tell Barański that, for our common good, we should break off the relationship. The next evening when Barański came to see me I began to speak in a delicate way about ending our understanding. He responded immediately that he already knew about everything, and that it was all of no significance to him. He promised to take care of me and to help me insofar as he could.”