Such Good Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

was now a lethal game of musical chairs, in which those who couldn’t find one of the diminishing number of places to hide were taken away, almost surely to their deaths.
    The Schwarzwalds clung to each other on Janowska Street in the Lvov ghetto as the Germans shot 5,000 Jews who were elderly and sick, and therefore useless to them. In early spring 1942, 15,000 more Jews—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were deported to the extermination camp in Belzec, not far from Lvov. In August, tens of thousands more were sent there. Another thousand orphans and sick Jews were shot dead. By September 1942, of the 100,000 Jews who lived in Lvov before the war, there were approximately 65,000 left, and they could only imagine what was happening elsewhere. Every morning the Jews of Lvov awoke to horrible news—that the nightmare was still real.
    Laura learned that in the nearby town of Gorlice, Laura’s great-uncle had been made head of that ghetto’s Judenrat, or Jewish Council, the administrative organization made up of the community leaders, that the Nazis forced the Jews to form in every ghetto, under penalty of death, to facilitate their own deportation and extermination. This policy, used in the camps as well, put the decision of which Jews would live and which would die not in the hands of God, or even the Nazis, but of the Jews themselves. If the Nazis ordered the head of the Judenrat to produce 5,000 Jews at six in the morning to be deported, he had three choices. He could comply, comforting himself with the Nazis’ reassurance that deciding which Jews would live and which would die was preferable to all of them dying. He could refuse and be executed, along with who knows how many others for good measure. Or he could do what Laura’s great-uncle did. In Gorlice, the Nazis asked him to prepare lists of Jews to be “resettled.” He told them such an assignment would require serious thought, so that he could make sure the Jews left would be of the utmost use to them. “Come tomorrow morning,” Laura’s great-uncle said, “and I will have for you exactly what you want.” When the Nazis returned, they found him dead at his desk, a suicide.
    Daniel was able to visit his family in the ghetto only occasionally, leaving Laura and Selma alone and at the mercy of the German soldiers, who three times came to their room and ordered them to be deported to the gas chambers at Belzec. Each time, Laura used her fluent German to persuade them to leave her and Selma alone.
    On a fourth visit, the soldiers insisted she come with them, then changed their mind and asked for Selma only, saying that the Führer loved little children and would take good care of her. Laura knew full well how much the Führer loved Jewish children. She had heard Manek’s story, and she had already seen the piles of children’s corpses behind the fence at the Janowska camp, their blood having been taken for transfusions for soldiers at the Eastern Front. Incredible—the Nazis committing in reality the atrocity that Christians had been falsely accusing Jews of for centuries. Somehow she prevailed again, shooing Selma away, and the soldier softened. He even returned later, warning her that the roundup of Jews was finished for the time being, and that the next day it would be safe for her to go out and forage for food.
    But how many times would she be so lucky? It was already too late for her grandfather Moses and her invalid grandmother Sarah, who had been carried off in a chair, loaded onto a truck, then thrown off it, and shot. A friend reported seeing her tiny corpse, like a dog’s, on the pavement. It was too late for her own parents, who had been discovered and deported to Belzec, where they too would be murdered. When the soldiers had come for them, her father hid, but as soon as he heard the cries of his wife he came out of hiding, saying he didn’t want to be separated, and so he too began the journey to the gas chambers. When Laura and her