We pushed through the rear door into the courtyard, which had been dug up to make a garden, though winter had starved it to a barren tangle of skeletal vines and brambles. A strongly built, middle-aged woman in a dark headscarf, plaid overcoat and frumpy woollen slippers was bent over in the far corner, pulling out metal stakes around which clung the withered tendrils of dead sweet peas. Behind her, the remains of tomato plants tortured by the wind and cold crumpled against a rusted trellis. The woman’s torn gloves dangled from the rim of her lopsided wooden barrow, which looked like a relic from the Iron Age.
Today, in my mind, I see her as though she were symbolic of all the women who bear misery with lips sealed to silence.
She looked up at Izzy and me, staring at my armband.
‘We mean no harm,’ I assured her in Polish.
She picked up her spade, but not in a threatening way. She stood with it, her posture rigid, as though she were posing for a portrait. I threw down my armband. ‘We’re not Nazis,’ I told her, opening my hands. ‘We’re in the Resistance and we’re in trouble.’
The woman’s face showed the indifference of stone. After leaning her spade against her barrow, she bent over, pulled out another stake and tossed it with a harsh clang into the pile she’d made.
Izzy and I were still gasping for breath. To be sixty-seven years old in the Polish winter is to know the limits of the body.
‘Thank God we didn’t go far away from Jawicki’s,’ Izzy told me.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘If we’d come back only when we were supposed to, the Mercedes would have been hidden around the corner. We’d have never known that that son-of-a-bitch called the Gestapo until it was too late.’
A brick wall, five feet high, separated us from a second apartment house at the back. A cane-work chair had been put there – for kids to hoist themselves over the wall and take a winter shortcut to the next street, most likely.
‘Come on!’ I told Izzy, pointing to the chair. ‘Let’s try our luck.’
We’d just started forward when the door behind us opened. Out stepped the Gestapo officer who’d been chasing us. He was holding a pistol.
‘Don’t move!’ our assailant ordered in German.
He was no more than twenty years old, with copper-coloured hair shining under his cap and long blond eyelashes. He’s
‘I’m from the Reich Census Bureau,’ I told him, ‘and this man is helping me.’
He looked at my swastika armband on the ground and frowned. ‘I know who you are, so shut up and put up your hands!’
We did as he said, but Izzy gave me a sideways look, as if he was about to pull the cord of some mad plan.
‘Not yet!’ I whispered to him in Polish; I thought I could still talk my way out of this.
‘Shut your snout!’ the German yelled.
Below my frantic heartbeat, I heard the metallic scratch of another stake landing in the woman’s pile. She was still gardening – it might have been comic under other circumstances.
‘Stay still!’ the Nazi ordered Izzy. ‘And you, get on your knees!’ he told me.
‘If you let us get on our way,’ I told him, ‘I’ll give you five hundred złoty.’
‘If you want a bullet in your head, keep talking!’ he growled.
I thought he was going to search me for the pistol that the jeweller must have warned him about, but when I was kneeling he jabbed the muzzle of his gun into my ear. Panic surged through me from my legs up to the top of my head. My bladder opened, and in a trembling voice, I said, ‘You’re too young to want my death on your conscience.’
‘I told you to shut up!’ he shouted. ‘And don’t move!’
‘You!’ he snarled, turning to Izzy, ‘throw down your gun! And do it slowly.’
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy lifting it out.
‘That’s it… Toss it near my feet.’
The pistol landed by the German and made a little hop.
Behind us, a window squealed open. I closed my eyes, and a deep silence opened around me. I imagined I was falling into it, and I wanted to keep falling – for each second to stretch towards the infinite. Who wouldn’t want more time?
‘You!’ the Gestapo man called to the woman behind us. ‘Get over here!’
I opened my eyes to find the Nazi sneering at her. ‘Who gave you permission to dig up this courtyard?’ he demanded.
I realized that boys holding guns were brutalizing women all over Europe.
She made no reply. She clutched her thoughts deep inside her – as though they were children she’d never give up to an enemy.
‘Do you speak a little German?’ the young man demanded of her.
‘
He licked his lips. ‘Go to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street. You understand?’ When she nodded, he added, ‘Tell the Gestapo officer there to come right here. And don’t dawdle. If he’s not here in two minutes, I’ll put a bullet in your friend’s head!’
