The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

behind. I had heard him follow her up the stairs to her bedroom. He said something low and cajoling, and my stepmother had giggled, a sound too young and unseemly for someone her age. I was repulsed. It was one thing to entertain the Germans, quite another to have one sleep in the bed she had shared with my father. I never hated her more. That morning as I had passed Ana Lucia’s bedroom I could hear from the corridor two sets of snoring, hers thick and bubbling, another unbroken and deep.

Her new friend. I studied the beast. He looked like the rest of them, thick-necked with ruddy cheeks, except that he was taller with a paunchy middle and hands like bear paws. He looked down at me now like a snake about to devour a mouse.

Before I could respond, Ana Lucia appeared from the dining room. “Fritz, I was wondering where you...” Seeing him talking to me, she stopped and frowned. “Ella, what are you doing here?” she asked, as though I had wandered in from the street and not come into my own home. Her dress, this year’s latest fashion from Milan, was too tight on her thick frame. Pearls that had once been my mother’s strained against her neck.

“Your daughter is quite charming,” the German said. “You never mentioned.”

“Stepdaughter,” Ana Lucia corrected, wanting to put as much distance between herself and me as possible. “My late husband’s child. And she’s soaking wet.”

“She should join us for lunch,” he said.

I could see the conflict in Ana Lucia’s eyes, wanting to accede to the wishes of her Nazi guest, yet wanting me gone even more. But Colonel Maust’s tone made clear that my joining them was not a request. “Fine,” she said at last, compliance winning out over spite.

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t,” I said, trying to think of an excuse.

“Ella,” my stepmother said through clenched teeth. “If Oberführer Maust is good enough to invite you to join us, then that is what you will do.” I could tell from her eyes that if I embarrassed her by refusing, the consequences would be severe. “You will change and join us.”

Ten minutes later, I walked into the dining room reluctantly in a fresh blue dress, hair still defiantly wet. There were four other guests, two men in German military uniforms and one in a suit, plus a woman about Ana Lucia’s age whom I did not recognize. They did not look up from their conversations to greet or acknowledge me as I entered. Seeing these strangers sitting around what had once been our family table and using my mother’s wedding china and crystal, I felt physically nauseous. I took the only empty seat, beside Colonel Maust and close to my stepmother. Hanna served me a plate of szarlotka, a warm apple pie grander than any I had seen since the war started. But the thick pastry stuck in my throat.

I set down my fork. “I saw a woman jump off the De˛bnicki Bridge today,” I blurted out. If I was going to have to be here, I might as well make it interesting. The other conversations around the table stopped and all heads swiveled toward me. “The police were trying to arrest her and she jumped with her children.” The lone woman beside Ana Lucia and me covered her mouth with her napkin, looking aghast.

“She must have been a Jew,” Colonel Maust said dismissively. “There was an aktion to try to root out the last few in hiding.” He had known about the very arrests that were taking place while he sat in our dining room, eating cake.

“Hiding?” the other woman at the table asked.

“Yes,” Colonel Maust replied. “There were a few Jews who managed to escape when the ghetto was liquidated, mostly to the neighborhoods along the river.”

“That close to where I live!” the woman gasped. I understood then that her horrified look had not been out of concern for those arrested, but rather her own well-being. “How dangerous!” One would have thought from her voice that she was talking about hardened criminals.

A mother with two children, I wanted to say. A danger to the very existence of our city. Of course, I did not. “What will happen to them?” I asked instead.

“The woman who jumped? I assume that she and her children will feed the fishes.” Colonel Maust laughed at his own cruel joke and the others joined in. I wanted to reach over and slap his fat face.

I swallowed back my anger. “The Jews who are arrested, I mean. The ghetto has been closed. So where will they go?”

Ana Lucia shot me daggers for continuing to raise the subject. But one of the Germans at the far end of the table answered. “The able-bodied may go to Płaszów for a time,” he said between mouthfuls of apple pie. He was a slim, sinewy man, with dark beady eyes and a face like a ferret’s. “It’s a labor camp just outside the city.”

“And the others?”

He paused for a beat. “They will be sent to Auschwitz.”

“What’s that?” I was familiar with the town of Oświęcim, about an hour west of the city. I had heard mention of a camp there called by the Germanic name of the town, whispered references to a place for Jews more awful than the rest. Only no one could confirm the rumors, people said, because no one ever returned from there. I looked the German in the eye, daring him to acknowledge the truth in front of everyone.

He did not hesitate. “Let’s just say they won’t be coming back to dirty your neighborhood again.”

“Even the women and children?” I asked.

He shrugged indifferently. “They are all Jews to us.”

He met my eyes without blinking, and looking into the darkness there, I saw everything that he had not said, of imprisonment and death that awaited the Jews. The woman on the bridge had sooner jumped than abandon herself and her children to such a fate.

Ana